Stay a While: The Lineage of the Mask

The deepest dark does not hide the hidden; it hides the family we once trusted.

There were no main roads here. Far down, there was darkness, a stream and a fallen tree; a dragon was carved into the bark. No signature marked the wood. Its length. Its width. If the light hit the grain, it would reveal a wood that was dead yet grand.

Slippers squelched from the water. A branch snapped. Something nameless plopped into the silt. The sound stopped when they did. Necks and eyes moved like the lighthouse beams, fueled only by the dim glow of their phones.

A ball rolled and pounced in front of the group. Brandi: blond, bold, daring. A bartender for hire, she made a subconscious check of her watch, but time was moving slow. Brent Sterling: flashy, blunt and funny, a businessman with many businesses. He stood with a slight chin lift as if he could make the leaves turn to cash. Bobo, the rastaman, masculine thinker. No one knew what he worked for.

Sadie was the first to bend, the first to be left, but she was the last to be loved and the last to be coddled. She inspected the ball. It was a tennis ball dipped in something mucilaginous. The texture was something she found on her mothers bed after her father had left. It pounced, bounced and rolled. It stopped as if something had plopped it down. Sadie remained bent, her arms pulled tight to her chest in a reflexive posture. She pressed a palm over her lips as she stared at the ball, frightened but curious.

Before one could speak, a random sound trailed. Closer, The shoes came. Brandi gripped Brent Sterling. She shouldn’t have done that. Their faces creased. Heat and reliance moved between them. Bobo should have reached for Sadie. The group stepped back.

Sadie stood. She wore a ballerina black dress and knee high boots with leggings. The source of the skittering feet: four children. One held a phone to his ear, and the boy beside him had nothing in his hands. He spoke toward the group.

“Ring me later and I will meet you. I will buy you something sweet,” said the boy. His eyes were wide. His expression was inscrutable.

“A little too young aren’t you?” Sadie asked. The boy didn’t move. “Are you all staying with Brandi's uncle?” The boy smiled. “Is that sweet thing with Brandis’ uncle, is that why you didn’t bring it?” The boy's smile faded.

The children avoided the need to scurry and a coldness came from behind them. The children walked without a human need. They lifted their legs in unison. The boy with the phone kept it to his ear as they passed the carved dragon. Sadie and Brandi blinked. The dark thickened. The boy who spoke lagged behind, eventually vanishing into the airless tomb: the path the group had left behind; putting them into a sandwich of no escape. A scream echoed in the distance. The group felt a surge of concern, not yet fear.

“You have a lot of nerve Little Blade,” Brent said. His arms were wide and wrist opened, taking up the space around him, looking right at her as if he had employed her. “ I don’t think these children respond to flattery.”

“It wasn’t flattery, they were kids. You can try to call me an idiot all you want, but I did a lot better than you would’ve done.”

Brent and Bodo traded glances. Bobo looked impatient and Brent shook his head. Without a word, they pulled away from the girls and moved into the shadows where the children came.

“Not sure what this commemorates. Two men reading. Their faces are too close to the paper,” Bobo said. His tone was brusque. He stared at the wood pulp newspaper. His hands couldn’t stay still; his fingers began absentmindedly tearing at the edges, methodically shredding the paper into tiny, uniform strips until the shadows pooled on the tattered ear of the page. He noticed this more than the closeness of the figures. To Bobo, they weren’t reading. They were kneeling at his table of white dust, as if they knew him.

They were still under the phone's beam, but they were moving in the amygdala.

He felt a tenacious itch in his nose. He pinched the bridge firmly between his thumb and forefinger, squeezing the bone as if trying to shut off the signal to his brain before he rubbed the skin quickly.

“I’m done with that life. It’s finished. I just think the setup is strange, all right? Just strange,” added Bobo. He glanced back at the girls, realising he had revealed too much to a woman who wasn’t looking his way anymore. The break was supposed to be a break, not freedom; but watching Brandi hold onto Brent when she got scared made it feel like he wasn’t there. His own arms weren’t strong enough for her anymore.

Brent caught the look and turned back to Bobo.

“Look, that’s between you and Brandi. I only lent her an arm, I didn’t sign over my life. If you want her, go get her,” Brent Sterling replied, distracted. He turned back toward the bend where the kids had gone, his voice dropping to a secret whisper. “My thing is, I’ve never seen a ball like that move out of the dark with sticky stuff on it. Those kids better…”

Bobo didn’t answer. He remained transfixed by the statue, his finger now hooked into his belt loop.

“The party isn’t much further, let’s go, it’s getting weird,” Brandi called out. She pointed past the men, toward the bend the children had just rounded, in the same direction as the distant glow of the uncle's house.

Sadie stood perfectly still. The air grew wings, then the cold grew sharp, and then irretrievably, the dark grew wrong. The arms of the dark and memory of the ball seemed to lean towards her.

“Brandi. Brent. Someone is watching. I can feel them, ” she said tremulously. She shielded her neck, her hands covering the v of her throat protecting herself from a gaze she couldn’t see.

Brandi turned to face her, her expression curt. “I don’t see anyone,”

Bobo suddenly stepped away from the statue and raised his voice, shouting towards the uncle's house to mask his own growing craving.

“Is there no hospitality left? If you aren’t going to tell us why you trusted your mom to come here, when you two can’t even stand the sight of each other, then we might as well go back. We’ve seen enough. We’ve got alcohol back home. We didn’t need to come all this way,” Bobo barked.

Brent looked at Brandi, his eyes derisive. He took a moment to adjust his cuffs, aligning the fabric over his wrists, revealing the watch he’d bought for making yet another successful trade.

There was a thwack. Then a chock. Then a thuck.

The sound didn’t come from the house ahead. The group spun. The man emerged from the path they had just trodden, stepping out of the shadows they had carelessly passed. His mask was coarse, burlap, soot-blotched, blind. Thick twine was stitched directly into the fabric: four vertical bars crossed by a jagged diagonal.

Beneath the coarse burlap mask, the figure's hands were buried deep in the front pockets of an oversized canvas jacket. The shoulders were forced upward into a masculine square, the burlap man clenched a fist in his pocket.

“He don’t belong here,” Bobo whispered.

The man opened the box. Yeast, tallow glaze, and the cloying sweetness hit them all at once.

Bobo looked at the sticky residue on his fingers from the tennis ball. If the uncle had done this to his own niece then—

The man’s hands were glistening with the same translucent sheen that coated the ball Bobo was holding. He held the box steady. Brandi reached in. Brandi pinched a donut. Brandi unfolded the slip of paper. Her face went pale.

“I don’t know who this is from,” her voice was strained, her eyes lingered on the looping, elegant writing, a handwriting so familiar that if she didn’t look back at the donut she would’ve recognised it wasn’t her uncle's writing.

Bobo watched Brent take a bite from a tallow-glazed ring. He ate the starry starry sugars. He ate the fat. He ate scopolamine. Bobo felt an inveterate shiver. He recognised that chemical sting on the back of the tongue. It wasn’t his usual white dust, but it was a relative.

“Don’t eat that,” Bobo hissed, but his own voice sounded far away, as if he were speaking through peanut butter.

The woods spun.

Gulp and swallow.

A stringy-armed child emerged from the obscurity carrying the heavy axe. The child’s arm didn’t jitter; the weight didn’t pull. It looked practiced.

The masked man took the weapon. He didn’t swing it at them yet. Instead, he held it, waiting for the scopolamine to turn the group docile.

The head tilted towards Brent, lingering specifically on his watch and his ironed sleeves.

Sadie’s eyes weren’t focusing. Her feet weren’t stable. Her heart was beating. She turned toward the path without a word; she was hollow.

Bobo fought the haze and the air, swatting towards the masked man, but he bit his tongue and tasted nothing but the sting of pain. He saw the love of his life leave him the day he had taken his last drag. Dragging his hands down his face his vision became fixed again at the masked man. He was the only one with mind and mind now. Brent followed Sadie with a glib stride, his head lolling like a broken leg.

The man gestured with the axe, pointing towards the path.

The group began the sheep and butchers march. The children led the way, their stringy arms swinging in eerie synchronisation. Behind them, Sadie and Brent walked a step at a time. Bobo followed, his heart a persistent hammer against his ribs. Every step felt viscous, as if the air had been brushed with the same stickiness that was coating the ball in his pocket.

As they cleared the final thicket, the obscurity of the woods split. The masked man remained stolid, his posture unchanging as he swung the flat of the axe steel. He thucked the ax head against the outer curve of their thigh bones. Marrow opened; rain spilled on plastic. Brent and Sadie didn’t scream, but the sensation fled from their legs, leaving them to collapse onto the ground.

The masked man let the ax dangle by his side, the weight of the steel seemingly anchored to his waist by a leather loop. Then he pushed. His dried palm landed on Bobo and Brandi's shoulder blades, shoving them towards the stairs, herding the remaining two pieces of fillet flesh away from their fallen friends and into the artificial glow of the porch. Brent and Sadie remained behind, draining into the soil of the dark woods.

Uncle-Unc didn’t move. He just watched the cheer from his cigarette die against the side of the 1940’s radio as he pressed it there. No music played, but the silence was insouciant and sweet. The swishing of the woods was masked even by the quiet of Uncle-Unc’s personage. Smothered by the quiet dark, a total and absolute nothing pushed against the house like the force of the wind; all stood still.

“You can’t do to Brandi what you did to these children,” Bobo hissed, his voice a dried rasp against the firm hum of the silence.

Uncle-Unc finally looked up, he gave a frivolous wave of his hand towards the door, as if dismissing a crime as the death of a bug. His expression remained placid, without passion worn. “Brandi was in my control before she left. Her and her mother. The whole lineage. They were mine by blood, law, habit.” He put the radio next to his feet.

“Any minute now, you will die. You think you won’t?” Bobo stepped forward, his vision narrowed his focus. “Not as quick as Sadie. Brent. Your life already went with them. Her blood won’t mend you. Her presence.”

He leaned into the light; the madness of a dark soul crept out towards Bobo. “Blood and presence? My Brandi? She’s already weak. Wherever she goes, she always comes back.”

The uncle turned, the radio tucked under his arm for no other reason other than Brandi would notice it. He led them into the foyer, the artificial glow replaced by an even brighter light as if they had all already died. It smelled like paint and old paper.

Brandi stopped. Bobo felt her hand go cold.

The hallway was a gallery of faces. Frames of silver, frames of wood, frames of time. No wallpaper softened the white; only the vitreous sheen of photographs remained.

Brandi saw her mother, eyes wide and vacant. She saw her cousins, their eyes frozen in a lacrymose gaze that she had only imagined. Then she saw herself. A younger version, unaware of the tenacious shadow that had been following her since she left.

The masked man stood at the end of the hall, the axe dripping a rhythmic thuck-thuck onto the paint splattered floor.

“You like the collection?” the uncle asked, his voice glib. “It’s the only way to keep the family together. Blood is so messy when it keeps pouring out of the house, out of the ceiling, moving through the throat of the woods… it’s much better when it’s fixed.”

Brandi stopped. Her eyes skipped past the old photos of her cousins until they snagged on a fresh silver frame. It wasn’t a memory; it was a mirror. In the photo, her mother stood in the foyer, her face half-hidden by a coarse, soot -blotched burlap mask.

Brandi's scream dried in her throat. She looked from the frame to the figure at the end of the hall. The masked man stood still, the axe dripping that thuck-thuck sound onto the paint splattered floor. The man’s frame was no more. In the glow the soot-blotched burlap didn’t hide the way the monster stood with her mother’s poise.

The hallway went silent. The figure stood in a breath-hold, a stillness so still, it felt like the house had stopped knowing them. Then a thin hiss of air escaped from behind the burlap. It was high and too controlled to belong to a man.

“Mom?” Brandi whispered, her word didn’t echo, and the owl hooted then.

The masked figure tilted its head and took the coarse burlap fully off. The swishing of the woods heightened.

“She had to pay for the room,” the uncle whispered, his tone hollow.

Her mother swung with inveterate hunger. Outside, Brent and Sadie drained into the soil, their life force moving through the throat of the woods just as the uncle had ordered.

Bobo tried to move, but his mind was fixed on a lie of purity. He saw the axe rise. He saw his mother-in-law's eyes that were behind the burlap: vacant of hope, hollow of spirit and entirely owned by her debt.

The uncle looked one last time at the frames. The silence was sweet and final.

“Together. At last. Stay A while.” the uncle mused, his voice fixed with the pride of a collector who had finally found the missing pieces.