Masked

by Lou Anders

  The two men turned, and while the hoodlum snarled at my interruption, there glinted in the eyes of the Ridden a dark glimmer of recognition.

  The possessed, or Ridden, can be deterred by running water and by fire, both of which tend to disorient them, but neither is capable of stopping them altogether. Even killing the Ridden’s body is not a permanent solution, since the Otherworldly parasite will continue to move and operate the body even in death. The only way to put a Ridden down is to introduce pure silver into the body, by bullet or by blade, which serves to sever the connection between the parasite and host.

  That’s where my twin Colts come in.

  The hoodlum released his hold on the woman’s arm, letting her slump back onto the pavement, as the Ridden turned to face me, his eyes darting to the silver-plated .45s in my fists. I wondered whether the hoodlum knew that his companion was more than he seemed to the naked eye.

  Typically the Ridden I encounter in Recondito are lackeys of the Guildhall, working as muscle for a political machine whose methods and reach would have eclipsed Tammany Hall in its heyday; the demon parasites from beyond are offered the chance to experience the sensual joys of reality in exchange for their services, while the hosts are most often thugs for hire who have disappointed their employers once too often. That one of the two attackers was Ridden suggested strongly that these two were Guildhall bruisers enjoying a night away from roughing up the machine’s political enemies.

  “Now step away,” I ordered, aiming a pistol at each of them.

  After I recovered Cager’s body from the jungle, I took his Colt M1911 and my own and plated them with silver from the daykeeper’s secret mine, and cast silver bullets to match. I usually carry a pistol in either hand, but make it a habit never to fire more than one at a time. Despite what the pulp magazines would have readers believe, no one can hit the broad side of a barn firing two guns at once. The first time I tried it, honing my skills in the forest above Xibalba, the recoil drove the pistol in my left hand crashing into the one in my right, with my thumb caught in between, the skin scraped off like cheese through a grater. And though the gloves I wear as the Wraith would save me from another such injury, I’ve found that the second Colt is much more useful as a ward against attack—the silver serving to keep any Ridden from venturing too close—and then ready with a full magazine to fire if the seven rounds in the other pistol run out before the job is done.

  The silver of the Colt in my right hand was enough to make the Ridden think twice about rushing me, while the bullets in the Colt in my left were sufficient to give the hoodlum pause—I wouldn’t fire on a man who wasn’t possessed unless it was absolutely necessary, but it was clear that he didn’t know that.

  “Por favor…” the woman said in pleading tones, scuttling back across the pavement from me, seeming as frightened of the Wraith’s silver mask as she’d been of her two attackers’ fists only moments before. “Ayuda me…” I knew it wasn’t me she was asking for help. But then, who? The shadows?

  I intended to end the suffering of the Ridden’s host-body, a single silver bullet driving the parasite back to its home beyond the sky, and to chase the hoodlum into the night with enough fear instilled in him that he wouldn’t soon menace another girl walking alone by night.

  “Now,” I said and Sent, gesturing toward the hoodlum with the Colt in my left hand, “one of you I shall send back to your Guildhall masters with a message…”

  The hoodlum began to turn away, shifting his weight as he prepared to take to his heels and flee.

  I smiled behind my mask, raising the pistol in my right hand and training it between the eyes of the Ridden. “… and the other shall be that message…”

  And then, the arrival of my clowned-up imitator made a hash of all my plans.

  “No, malvado,” came a somewhat muffled voice shouting from the shadows, “you’re not going anywhere!”

  Before the hoodlum knew what had hit him, a blur of silver and black came rushing out of the shadows, tackling him to the ground. Raining a welter of blows down on the hoodlum’s head and shoulders, the newcomer kept his opponent pinned to the ground like a wrestler on a mat. And the impression of a wrestler was only strengthened when he looked up in my direction and I saw the black leather mask he wore—it was of the same type as those worn by the Mexican wrestlers, but this one had a stylized white skull stitched over the face.

  The young woman still huddled at the edge of the streetlamp’s light, looking in wide-eyed shock at the strange figure dispensing a beating on her erstwhile attacker. She whispered, “Sepultura,” and I wondered why she spoke of the grave.

  “Don’t worry, señorita,” the masked man said, leaping to his feet and striking a faintly ridiculous pose, hands on his hips and arms akimbo. “Sepultura is here to help!”

  The masked man—this Sepultura—wore a gray boilersuit, black leather paratrooper boots, and black leather gloves, with an army officer’s web belt cinched at his waist with pouches all around. He stood perhaps a few inches shorter than me, and while he was clearly in fighting trim—the moaning hoodlum on the pavement a testament to the strength of his blows—the ill-fitting boilersuit made him look somewhat paunchy.

  “Depart, interloper!” I took a half-step forward and waved him away with the barrel of the Colt in my left fist. “This is none of your concern…”

  In the confusion created by the arrival of this so-called Sepultura, the Ridden saw the opportunity to escape. And while I warned the masked fool away, the tattooed Ridden spun on his heel and started to run off in the opposite direction.

  “Don’t worry, Señor Wraith,” Sepultura said with a jaunty wave, lunging after the fleeing Ridden. “I’ll stop him…”

  The Ridden looked back and glared at the pursuing Sepultura, and the phantasm that clung to the Ridden’s shoulders flared bright with hatred, feeding off the emotions of its host body.

  At that precise moment Sepultura stumbled, throwing his hands up before him protectively, his eyes widening in surprise visibly behind the eye-slits of his mask.

  The Ridden was already several strides away and increasing the distance between us with every footfall. But Sepultura was now directly in my way, and any shot fired might strike him by mistake. Fool that he clearly was, I wasn’t about to shoot him down, but at the same time I wasn’t going to let the Ridden escape back into the city.

  “Fiend!” I shouted, Sending out waves of anger to disorient the parasite’s senses. I took two steps forward, and before colliding with Sepultura I shadowed, ghosting right through him and only returning fully to reality when I was clear on the other side. “Give my regards to hell!”

  I fired a single round from the .45 in my right fist, the silver slug catching the Ridden just above his left shoulder blade, driving through his heart, and exiting out the front. As the host body shouted a quick bark of pain, I could See the parasite’s tendrils recoiling in aversion to the silver, retreating back beyond the walls of reality. By the time the tattooed form collapsed to the pavement, life slipping away, the parasite was already gone.

  I turned, ready to render aid to the young woman, and to Sepultura an admonishment to keep out of my business. But there was no sign of either of them, the moaning form of the hoodlum all that remained in the streetlamp’s pool of light.

  I rejoined Don Mateo in the hearse and we resumed our rounds of the city’s streets, though I didn’t catch the slightest glimpse of the cold demon again tonight. It was not until relating to Don Mateo the encounter with the young woman, her attackers, and the masked meddler that I realized that the white skull emblazoned on Sepultura’s leather mask must have been inspired by my own silver skull.

  Bad enough that I have imitators in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, but now I have to contend with one right here in Recondito?

  The crooked police officer turned, a still-smoking revolver in his hands, and froze at the sight of a black-shrouded silver skull emerging from the darkness. “The last innocent has s
uffered at your hands, recreant,” grimly intoned THE WRAITH.

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 1942.

  I awoke well before dawn this morning, my shuttered bedroom drenched in inky darkness. As so often happens when I find myself in dark silence so complete, I fancied that I was still an initiate in the Dark House, learning to expand my senses beyond the mundane five. Could the dozen years since have been one long dream, and at any moment Don Javier might bring a lantern and lead me out into the daylight once more? Or perhaps even Xibalba was a dream, and I am still a child in the Lower East Side, racked with fever and lying in my parents’ bed, all alone in our rooms as mother, father, and sister are away at work. If my whole life since then were a fever dream, it would explain a great deal. Wartime adventures, European wandering, jungle expeditions, hidden temples, secret orders, invaders from beyond—easily the stuff of a child’s fevered imagination.

  I sometimes wonder whether the situation isn’t even more prosaic than that. How easy it would be to believe that I, a Jew posing as a Gentile, became dissatisfied with too ordinary a life and simply created one more worth the living. Rather than a masked avenger who passes his activities off as fiction, I could be a writer of cheap fictions who imagines himself the heroic figure about whom he writes.

  But all too quickly my idle musings in the night can turn darker. I remembered the chill of the Rattling House, and Don Javier’s lessons about shadowing and shifting. And though I mastered the art of shadowing through solid objects, my one attempt to shift away from reality entirely ended in disaster, with only the beacon of Don Javier’s Sent thoughts to guide me back to the here and now. But for a brief instant I was lost in the Unreal, adrift in that space that is no space, a realm which the mundane senses are completely incapable of perceiving—the only impression I have of unreality is that of unending cold and darkness.

  Don Javier had taught me about those who get lost in the midst of shifting, unable ever to return. Some are initiates like I had been, trained in the use of their Talents, but others are merely ordinary men and women who don’t realize the skills they possess until it is too late. Most who have the Sight but not the training are driven mad by the voices in the end, and those who shadow without first learning the art can return to the Real with their hearts on the wrong sides of their bodies, or with their internal organs on the outside and their skin and hair buried within.

  All over Mexico the story is told of La Llorona, the Wailing Woman, but only in Xibalba is it understood that she was an untrained shifter unable to realign with reality, stuck forever between the Real and the Unreal, invisible to all except those who possess the Sight.

  When I refused to continue studying the art of shifting, I never admitted that it was because I feared following in the ghostly footsteps of La Llorona, feared becoming an insubstantial figure belonging neither to this world nor the next. But considering that Don Javier could peer right into my thoughts, I imagine I didn’t have to say a thing.

  The latest Wraith novel complete, and Charlotte not due to return until later in the day, I rose early, shaved and bathed, and, having dressed in a freshly laundered suit, made my way to the cemetery. Even at that early hour, there were any number of Mexican families already gathering at the gravesides of their loved ones, preparing for Dia de los Muertos.

  When I shadowed unseen through the rear wall of the crypt, Don Mateo had breakfast waiting for me—hot coffee laced with cinnamon, fresh thick corn tortillas, and meat jerky broiled on an open flame.

  The old daykeeper was in a sentimental mood, perhaps inspired by the Day of the Dead celebrations only now getting under way outside, and fell to talking about the Yucatan jungle as we sipped our steaming cups of coffee.

  I asked him if he ever regrets coming with me to Recondito, leaving behind the only life and home he’d ever known.

  Don Mateo was philosophical about the whole matter. “When the doors to the Unreal began to close in Mexico, the daykeepers gradually lost their purpose. Recondito is now the most active of the true places. Where else should my duty take me but here?”

  I realized today that I am now almost as old as Mateo was when he and Don Javier first found me in the jungle, close to death after the attack of the camazotz. Don Mateo had already seemed so old, to be only in his middle forties. But then, when my father was forty-three years old, he’d already been an old man, as well, or had seemed like one in the eyes of his young son. I don’t feel old—at least, not until a full night’s patrol, when my joints ache from the chill of shadowing and my muscles grow as taut as steel knots—but there are lines around the eyes that stare back from my mirror, and the streak of white that’s been in my hair since Cager’s death is growing steadily larger. I’ll eventually have a full head of white hair with a single streak of black, assuming I should live so long.

  I stayed and chatted idly with Don Mateo as the morning wore on, as we serviced my tools, casting new bullets out of the lumps of silver ore we’d brought from Xibalba, honing the edges on the silver blades I carry up my sleeves.

  When a glance at my wristwatch showed me that noon was approaching, I made my farewells to Don Mateo and arranged to meet him back at the crypt that evening for another patrol. For the moment, though, I intended to head over to Charlotte’s place and welcome her home in style.

  By the time I left the crypt, Mass had ended at Saint Anthony’s, and the Mexican families who’d been just beginning to gather in the early morning were now settling in, decorating the graves of their loved ones with ofrendas —golden marigolds to attract the souls of the dead, toys atop the tiny graves of the dearly departed angelitos, and bottles of tequila or mezcal for their full-grown relations. Everywhere could be seen confite, calvera, pan de muerto, and calacas —or candy, sugar skulls, “bread of the dead,” and miniature figurines of skeletons dressed in the clothes of the living.

  In the stories Cager told me of Recondito, the Oceanview neighborhood was described as the home of Irish sailors and seamstresses who worked hard, drank their fill, and prayed for forgiveness come Sunday morning. When I first moved to the city, having taken my friend’s name and identity as my own, I quickly settled on a townhouse in Oceanview, close by the cemetery where Don Mateo had found employment. But while my new Irish neighbors were always quick to complain about the growing number of Mexicans moving into the area, I found that the oldest headstones in the cemetery were inscribed with Spanish surnames, dating back to the time when a Franciscan mission had stood on the ground Saint Anthony’s now occupied, back when this part of Recondito was little more than a collection of rude huts housing the new city’s principal workforce. Though there are increasing numbers of newcomers immigrating from Mexico to Recondito every day—bringing the zoot-suiter gangs and their violence with them—the Irish didn’t make their way to the Hidden City until the turn of the current century, after generations of their Hispanic neighbors had been born, christened in the Church of the Holy Saint Anthony, and buried in old age in the adjacent cemetery.

  As I made my way out of the cemetery this morning, I passed a heated argument underway in the shadow of one of the largest and oldest of the headstones, a family marker inscribed simply with the name aguilar, with smaller stones placed in front marking individual burial plots. The two men shouting at each other might have been father and son. The older was dressed soberly, having likely just walked out of the morning’s church service, but the younger was a pachuco in high-waisted baggy pants held up by suspenders, the legs cuffed over double-soled Florsheim shoes, his hair slicked back with pomade in a ducktail comb.

  In a mix of Spanish and English, switching back and forth sometimes in the span of a single sentence, the two men were heatedly discussing the Sarah Pennington murder trial, the young man apparently taking the position that the defendants had been unfairly accused, the older arguing that the two simply had to be mixed up with gangs and violence, or else why would they dress as they did. This led to the young man demanding to know whether the older man was acc
using him of being in a gang, simply because of his manner of dress, and the older man replying that if the double-soled shoe fit…

  All of this shot back and forth between the pair before I’d taken six steps past them, when the older man suddenly ended the discussion and my forward motion with a single word: “Sepultura.”

  I was brought up short, and glanced back over my shoulder at them. It took me a moment to parse out the last sentence I’d heard. The older man had said something like, “Why can’t you be more like that Sepultura?”

  I wondered for a moment if the older man had simply switched from English to Spanish in mid-sentence again, and had been referring to a “grave” instead of saying the nom de guerre of my latest imitator.

  But then he went on, saying, “ Sepultura saved your cousin last night from violadores. He is a hero to our people. What are you but un delincuente juvenil ?”

  The young man seemed to deflate, like the fight had gone out of him, and instead of shouting back he covered his mouth, as if concealing his expression. I noted a cross tattooed inexpertly on the fleshy part of his right hand between thumb and forefinger. Most likely a gang sign of some kind, I reasoned.

  The older man noticed me looking their way, no doubt seeing the expression of annoyance on my face, and I hastened to look away, continuing out of the cemetery and onto the street. It was several blocks before my fists unclenched at my sides.

  How long has this Sepultura clown been skulking about the shadows of Recondito without my noticing? Or has he, like the zoot-suiters, come to my city from elsewhere, perhaps arriving from Mexico with the wrestling exhibition? It would explain the leather mask, if so.

  I’d forgotten to bring the present I picked up last week for Charlotte, so stopped by my place to get it before heading over to her apartment. But when I got home, I found Charlotte waiting for me there, brewing a fresh pot of coffee and idly paging through a book bound in green leather. In gilt letters on the front cover was the title, Myths and Legends of Varadeaux.