It Calls to Me
by Catlyn Ladd
COMING SOON
It calls to me. I am powerless to resist. I need to see, to know. But I am afraid.
I don’t like the texture of cardboard, the way it’s gritty and soft at the same time. I draw my nails along the flap where the tape holds it closed. Once I see I can’t go back. Some things can’t be unseen. It had cost half a million dollars and a lot of luck to get my hands on it.
It had started with rumors, whispers in the galleries of wealthy collectors who trade in memorabilia of death. They buy and swap and barter for clown pictures painted by John Wayne Gacy, china with the swastika of the SS, bone fragments uncovered at Fox Hollow Farm, bricks from Treblinka. The closer to gore, the more blood soaked, the more expensive. I deal in the detritus of serial killers and mass murderers.
I’ve never kept anything for myself before. It’s just business and it’s a lucrative one. It keeps me in my posh penthouse with silk sheets and thousand dollar shoes. I don’t care about the items and I don’t care about the people who buy and sell them.
Lots of these items have stories attached to them. People claim they’re haunted, that they imbue the owner with the ability to curse, or that they bring influence and supremacy. It’s all nonsense of course, petty people pursuing power.
But then I’d learned about the mask.
I’d first heard of it over a year ago from a source I consider reputable. I’ve bought from her many times and we loop one another in on tips. What I do is not always strictly legal and it’s good to have friends to watch my back.
She’d heard about it from one of her regular clients, a person willing to pay upwards of a million dollars for the mask made from the preserved skin of the last victim of a very famous serial killer. We’d laughed, she and I, over how gruesome it is. It could fetch a hefty price and I started keeping an eye out for mention of it.
Then I read about the last days of the most recent owner and I got curious. You know what they say about curiosity.
Sean Patrick Green had a reputation as a playboy in the popular press, dating models half his age. In my circles he’s known for something else entirely: collection. The gruesomer the better. He’d acquired the mask from someone in the East. Two weeks later he’d walked naked into traffic wearing only the mask tied over his face. He’d been creamed by a cement mixer. When the police broke into his Central Park South condo they’d found all his furniture smashed, the pieces arranged into glyphs and pictographs. One of the officers described the symbols as “obscene” and told a reporter that looking at them made his “eyeballs ache” but couldn’t describe them.
I leveraged my connections to get access to the police photos of the home. When the images arrived in an encrypted email I projected them on my 76 inch television. They were unlike anything I’d ever seen: tiny shards of wood, glass, and fabric inscribing lines in what looked like the language of some alien species. Looking at them made a buzzing sound that I felt in my teeth. I printed them off on high res glossy and put them up on my website priced at a grand apiece. They sold in half an hour.
Those photos hooked me. I’d been willing to write off Sean’s trek into traffic as a fluke: too many drugs mixed in the wrong combination; whatever. But those photos were something else. I wanted the mask.
The mask, of course, had been taken to the morgue with Green’s body. The question was whether anyone would think to DNA test it and find out that it was human. If they did, I’d never get it; it would be locked in some police vault for perpetuity.
I called my friend Kareem who works in the coroner’s office. City employees can always stand to make some extra money on the side, and Kareem and I had a mutually beneficial relationship: he called me whenever interesting items crossed his desk, and I gave him a commission of thirty percent. He made a tidy sum selling clothes, jewelry, eyeglasses, even the teeth of people who died in notorious ways.
He listened as I made my request to get my hands on the mask Sean Patrick Green had been wearing when he took his stroll into traffic. Then he asked his first and only question: “How much is it worth to you?”
It was a fair question: Green had been a celebrity by wealth and reputation if not talent or natural ability. His final moments had been recorded on a number of security cameras and mobile phones, and that he’d been wearing a mask had made the news big time. I knew people would start calling about it soon. I could make enough to take a year off in style.
I considered Kareem’s question. I could pay a lot and he knew it but I knew he didn’t really know how much capital I had lying around. “Quarter mil,” I said.
“Double it,” he said.
I normally would have haggled but not this time. I could sell it for a mil. “Done.”
He told me to meet him at nine PM at our normal place and hung up the phone without saying goodbye.
Waiting for the meeting time I looked at the photos of Green’s artwork again. This time they didn’t make my brain buzz so much as ache as though on the edge of some great discovery. The sigils spun and twisted before my eyes. I felt I could almost read the messages. They were trying to tell me something. I wondered, if I looked through the mask, I might be able to decipher them.
I threw on a light coat and stepped out into the misty evening to meet Kareem. My driver had an umbrella ready, and I slipped into the warm interior of the town car. It kept the city muted and far away through tinted windows.
Kareem waited for me just where he said he’d be, a cardboard box tucked under his arm. It wasn’t big. I handed him a briefcase and he handed me the box. We didn’t say anything; he only tipped me a little salute and I responded with a small smile. No need for words with business like ours.
I resist the urge to open the box in the car, making myself wait until safely ensconced back in my high rise, the door locked, the security system set. The photos of Green’s body flick by on the television, each one set to show for ten seconds in a loop.
I pull open the box with a grimace at the texture of the cardboard. Kareem has wrapped the mask in a length of white fabric and I unwrap it carefully. It is velveteen smooth, the color of walnut.
The body had been too badly decomposed for the police to know that the face had been removed. Hardly any skin remained so it never occurred to anyone that anything had been taken. The killer didn’t keep trophies, at least not of the grisly sort. He’d emptied wallets and taken jewelry to pawn but he used them and left them, uninterested in the bodies once he’d had his way.
So who had cut off her face? How had the mask gotten into different hands? Too many unanswered questions.
I hold it up. The skin had been peeled along the jaw, in front of the ears, along the forehead below the hairline. It had to have been draped on a form to cure because it holds its shape. The inside is knobby and shiny. Small rivets have been pushed through the skin in front of each ear and a chord hangs from each one.
I turn it over and bring it so that I’m face to face, looking into the vacant eyes. I inhale and realize that it has a scent, musky and almost sweet. Still holding it facing me I look through the eye holes at the TV.
A monstrous bolt of pain slices through my head, and I cry out. I think I must be dying it’s so huge. My vision greys out, and I am aware of slumping sideways. The mask drops from my nerveless fingers onto the floor. Jezebel the Siamese wanders over to give it a sniff and I try to shoo her away but all that comes out is a low snuffle. Jezebel stretches her nose out toward it and then hisses, arching into a Halloween cat. Her ruff stands up along her spine, tail bushing out. With a snarl she bolts away, down the hall into the shadows.
The darkness pulls me under and I don’t even notice when I tumble off the couch onto the floor.
When I awaken it takes me a moment to remember why I’m looking up through the glass coffee table. Then I remember and bolt upright. My head gives a warning thump but nothing like the previous wallop of agony.
The mask lies near my foot and I pull away from the deadflesh reflexively. I glance at the TV but it has gone dark, the clock screensaver ticking off seconds.
Moving slowly, I pull myself back onto the couch. I feel my heartbeat in my chest, but it’s slow and my head does not pound again. I feel almost…good.
I look down at the mask, but do not reach for it. Not yet. I’m scared but more than that, I’m excited. I’ve never encountered anything that leads me to believe in more than the tangible world. I figured out early that she who dies with the most toys wins because this is it, this is all we get. May as well enjoy it with designer handbags and trips to Bali.
But this is something more. What had Sean Patrick Green seen? What had he communicated with in the secret language of the mask? Before I lose my nerve I pick it up and set it on the glass table, looking away from the eyeholes.
I need a drink. I pour myself a stiff one, no ice, from the teak bar behind the couch, and take a deep swig. The vodka hits my empty stomach with a burst of warm courage.
“Why did I get this thing, anyway?” I ask the empty apartment.
I’d gotten it because Sean Patrick Green had destroyed his townhome to make weird glyphs before walking into traffic. I’d gotten it because it was the first hint that anything might actually be going on in this world of ours, something beyond us. I’d gotten it because I was so desperately tired of selling Schutzstaffel uniforms to bored millionaires getting their kinks off playing dress-up with high-end escorts paid to act like Jewish prisoners.
“Put up or shut up,” I say, and walk back to the couch. Taking a second fortifying gulp of vodka, I pick up the mask and put it over my face.
The light in the room darkens as though the sun has passed behind a cloud. I become aware of how quiet it is; no traffic noise, no refrigerator hum, not even the soft burble of the water feature in the corner.
I look at the television, still spinning the screensaver. Letting go of the mask with one hand, I pick up the remote and press a button. The screen jumps to life. I look at the photos of the strange symbols Sean Patrick Green left behind.
I realize I can read them.
behind this world…lies in wait…all you have to do…
The lines are cut off in the picture; it’s been taken too close for me to see the whole message. Frantically, I flip forward through the photos, looking for one taken from a wider angle. As I scroll, words leap into focus: depths … calling for … misery … reborn…
I finally find a photo taken from above, as though the photographer stood on a piece of furniture. And I see the entire message.
Beyond this world the true lies in wait
All you have to do to access the depths calling for redemption
Is release your misery and be reborn
“What the hell does that mean?” I’ve been hoping for some revelation, some answer. But this is poetic nonsense!
I take the mask away from my face and set it back on the table. Its musky aroma lingers in my nose and I wash it away with a smaller sip of vodka. The excitement and booze has left me exhausted. I put the glass in the sink and pad down the hall to my bedroom. Jezebel looks up at me from the pillows. She licks my nose as I crawl into the cool sheets, and I fall asleep with her small warmth curled against my shoulder.
I awake in darkness. When I sit up, the room spins woozily, and I grasp for my phone on the bedside table. There’s an app that makes the blackout shutters on the windows trundle noisily up, letting in the morning sun. I stretch and the dizziness dissipates.
When I swing my legs off the bed I notice tiny drops of red on the white sheets. Has my period started? When I look between my thighs my eyes land on my hands and I see more red crusted under my fingernails. They are tender.
“What on earth…?”
When I put my feet on the floor something crunches underneath. I lean over and see tiny bits of wood and paper. They form lines, circles, and shapes, the same sigils from Green’s apartment.
The room goes grey. I put my head between my knees, take three deep breaths and the faintness subsides. I look around the room.
In the bright light I see it immediately: splinters have been gouged from the wainscoting. The wood is marred and torn. I see the screwdriver from the toolkit in the kitchen discarded on the carpet next to a torn paperback, the copy of Middlesex I’d been rereading.
Otherworldly ciphers in wood and paper. I get up and examine the damage to the wainscoting more closely. Some of the slivers have drops of red. I’d done this in my sleep.
My first impulse is to scatter the unknown letters, vacuum them up, put the mask down the garbage disposal, and never think of this again.
“Coward,” I mutter.
Instead of doing any of that, I go get the mask.
This time I use the cords and tie it on before looking at what I’d done in my sleep. I read:
From me are dreams made.
I am your eternal innerself.
Call and release me.
More nonsensical poetry, I think. But there’s definitely something here and I can almost make some sense of it. I reach down and pick up the screwdriver.
I jerk awake – conscious? – leaning against the wall. The sun is at a much different angle, lighting the room with late afternoon golden glow. The wainscoting is destroyed and a whole pile of book covers lie discarded in the hall. I see glowing eyes in the gloom beyond the books and start up before realizing that it’s Jezebel, tapetum lucidum catching the light. She hisses at me and darts away.
Slowly I get to my feet, head swimming from low blood sugar. Alien letters line the room from one side to the other. The mask lies facedown on the floor.
I need to pee badly and that’s the only thing that prevents me from putting the mask on. Instead, I stumble across to the bathroom, pins and needles shooting up my legs. Hunger twists in my belly.
After washing my hands, I resist the mask and go to the kitchen. As I cross the living room, Jezebel looks at me doubtfully and runs under an end table. I’m too famished to deal with her and I pull open the refrigerator, grabbing a jar of mayo and a package of cheese. I stand in the open door, dipping slices into the jar, stuffing them into my mouth, washing it down with cold chai I slurp from the carton. I polish off the cheese and dip my fingers directly into the creamy dressing, licking it off my fingers with little moans of pleasure. Finished, I burp mightily. My hands are greasy and I take a moment to wash them. I should feed Jezebel.
She tiptoes out from under the table and twines around my legs as I dump a can of cat food in her dish. I even hear a purr.
Awake and fed, reason returns a bit. “What the fuck?” I ask the apartment. Either something is coming through the mask or it has unleased part of my unconscious mind. Either way, it’s something powerful that suggests…what? The existence of the supernatural? I pull myself up to sit on the kitchen counter, scratching Jezebel absently as she eats her dinner.
My phone is in the pocket of the loose trousers I’m wearing and I pull it out. But what do I even search for? After a moment, I dial Kareem.
He answers on the third ring.
“Do you know anything about this mask?” I ask. “Was there anything else on Green’s body?”
He hesitates. I listen to him breathe. “He’d carved more of those symbols into his skin,” he says finally.
I shiver. “Do you have photos?” I ask.
“A hundred thousand,” Kareem says immediately.
“That’s a lot.”
“You’re asking for police photos of a dead body,” he retorts. “A famous dead body.”
I only hesitate another second. “Fine. I’ll send you the money. Same account?”
“You know it,” he says and hangs up.
I power up my laptop and transfer the money. While I wait for the photos I return to my bedroom and use my phone to document all of the sigils with both still photographs and video. I transfer these to my laptop and embed them in a new document where I also fill in brief descriptions of my experiences. If I take a jaunt into traffic I want there to be a record. At the very least, it will be worth a lot of money to some collector.
My email pings and I open the file from Kareem. The photos have been taken closeup and that’s a blessing. I can almost forget that what I’m looking at was carved into living flesh.
Looking at the symbols no longer produces that buzzing in my head. Instead, a tingle works through my groin and my mouth floods with saliva. I resist the urge to lick the computer screen.
“We are not in Kansas anymore,” I say and carry the laptop to the bedroom. Setting it on my bed I pick up the mask and put it on.
Everything leaps into technicolor focus. The light seems to shimmer, shadows writhing in the corners and beneath the bed. The glyphs twist and twine, dancing into meaning. I read:
I am the daughter of air.
I am the son of wind.
I am the god of high places.
Come to me, daughter, and I will give you the world.
I will lay it out beneath your feet
that you may drink deep of all you desire.
So that you may feed on the bloody entrails of the Earth.
I look at the computer screen, at the letters carved into the meat of Sean Patrick Green’s flesh. I read:
The open road is the call.
Come to me. Find me there.
It seems a wind blows through the room though all the windows are closed. I feel it ruffle my hair and tug at my clothes. I turn my face into it and smell some sweet aroma, like elderflowers and honeysuckle. I cannot resist.
The wind takes me out of my apartment and up the service stairs to the roof. It seems that shades and ghosts accompany me; I see them from the corners of my eyes but when I turn to look, nothing is there.
I step out into cool evening air. The sun glares at me from the west, a giant, red eye that casts everything in molten fire. I look out across the city but the city is not what I see. Wraiths are everywhere and they leap from the corners of my eyes to the forefront, close enough to touch. There is a little girl in a lacy ruffled dress, her face torn away as though by dogs. She looks up at me through one perfect brown eye; the rest of her face is ripped away. I can see bloodless veins and tendons.
There is a young couple holding hands, bodies marred by bullet holes. They stand close together, their blood mingling, gazes locked. Though the back of the girl’s head is missing and the boy has lost most of one arm, they have eyes only for each other.
There is a grey-haired woman, dress torn around her waist, panties stained, blood streaking her thighs. Her face contorts into soundless rage, her lips pulling back until all of her teeth are exposed. I flinch in the face of such fury as she sprints in a tight circle, pulling at her hair, howling at the sky. The sound of her wrath reaches me as though from a long distance.
Then comes the shadow.
I see it screaming toward me, all the colors sucked into a giant vortex of pain that races toward me at the speed of murder, an enormous wall of black swirled with caustic color, a dizzying, blinding force. Every cell sparks with adrenaline; I feel as though my atoms will rebel and split asunder.
The storm is full of enormous eyes. The eyes of God, the eyes of the damned, huge, swirling with sick color, they see into my veins, fingerprints on my bones. I am aware of thoughts that are not mine as my mind blends with the shades. It is a sick, intimate sensation and I would vomit if I could find my stomach.
My sanity slips. I scream with every aspect of myself, past, present, future, and possibility. The sound sends me reeling. I cannot find my eyes. I smell sight and hear touch. The dark washes over me, pulls me under. I feel the call of the wind.
I am aware of the wall at the edge of the roof pressing against my belly and I climb up, the bricks rough under my fingers. I curl my toes over the lip of the void.
Come daughter. I will lead you.
I hear the voice in my bones. I reach out with both arms, into the shades that cluster all around. I feel them lift me, feel my feet leave the solidity of the roof.
As I fall I see Jezebel looking out the window, her small face tracking me as I pass. The shadow catches me. I become nothing.