And now, a story

[takmarierah]

Title: Mask People
Rating: ~PG13
Word Count: 4300
Category: Post-apocalyptic, horror, narrative, science fiction/fantasy
Summary: The existence of demons is really only proof of the existence of demons.

Author's Notes: This was the story I wrote a year ago, inspired by a dream I had a year before that, in which I played the role of the main character here. I came up with this ending because I thought that it was all a bit bleak as it stood, and, well, not much changed I guess. This is also the story about which someone commented that they really liked my characterization, but didn't find it believable because my scientist was speaking too much like an ordinary person. I don't think she knew I was a scientist.



Mask People

The outside wall of the study room is taken up entirely by a multitude of glass panels, each the exact same height and width except for the two at the very edges, slightly thinner. The view is one of late fall, perhaps even early spring, before the weeks when the falling of snow becomes truly ridiculous. This is what it looks like outside: indistinct piles of plants destroyed by freezing and thawing, digested by whatever bacteria could survive in a handful of warm days; naked pavement snaking between concrete boxes of foundations, each filled with warped black debris; young trees, once cultured and kept prim, now stark and bewildered at their state of undress. The scene is monochrome, the color of choice an insipid brown with a few sparks of weary yellow donated by generous traffic signs and street paint.

I think they keep us in this room to demoralize us. No escape, the wasteland tells us. Without coats, we could never survive out there, and summer never arrives. Yes, we poor captive students-students for the rest of our lives, ha-don’t require much guarding; the weather keeps us here well enough.

Every religion in the world that ever postulated the existence of demons had been smug to discover that they were, more or less, right. Actually, the existence of demons is really only proof of the existence of demons and not necessarily anything else, but the believers don’t see it that way; maybe it’s better, to believe that there’s something good out there to balance the evil, that there’s some hope.

In any event, being right about this doesn’t do anyone any good. Oh, but they were so righteous, when the Mask People descended on academia, proclaiming that it was high time that those dens of hubris were punished for their extravagance. Of course no one knew then that those big black vultures really only wanted us for our brains: juicy post-Docs, tender physics undergraduates, musical prodigies. It’s actually kind of funny, that the fundies were so proud about the fact that they went nearly untouched for the first few years; I bet you still couldn’t convince them it was because no Mask Person in its right mind can stomach them.

Still, again, there’s no good reason to be smug about being better than one of those happy fools. The human race will take many thousands of years to recover from the systematic devouring of its best intellectuals, if it ever does. If anyone is left by then.

One bittersweet facet to this: I may now be one of the smartest, most educated people on the planet. Yes, me, just an unassuming astrophysicist who was never particularly good at his job. It just goes to show that, sometimes, mediocrity does get you ahead in the world.

The “bitter” part of this is, of course, that my days are numbered. At this particular college, of all the people who’ve been rounded up to have our brains fattened on ideas and facts, I’m among the most senior. As any feedlot manager could tell you, the age of a beef cow and the remaining length of its lifespan are inversely proportional.

Like Dave, for example. Dave was a particularly nice man; he wasn’t especially given to snapping under the stress of impending death (or worse), and he could always manage to talk. We sat next to each other in the study room, feeling the cold draft coming off the windows, trying to guess which wrecked building had once been what, and we slept next to each other on narrow foam pads that looked and smelled like they’d been sliced out of a wrestling mat.

“Creepy-ass fuckers,” he’d whisper in his poetic way, eyes open and glinting in the darkness. The silhouette of a Mask Person had been lingering in the doorway moments before.

“Probably wants a midnight snack,” I’d respond, my words a slender breath sliding over the folded-up sweater that served as my pillow.

There had been a long period of silence; I’d started to drift off, thinking Dave had fallen asleep.

“What do you think is under the mask?” The words were barely comprehensible, but the question was a familiar one.

“Its face, probably,” I answered.

“Don’t you have any imagination?” Dave had asked.

“I try not to.” It was a good strategy, not to have imagination. Made you less noticeable. You had to find a good strategy; learn what they wanted you to so that you were still of some value, but don’t learn it too quickly or you become an ever-more-delicious-looking treat. It’s not as easy as it sounds, though, to not learn something.

Dave had sighed quietly. Too much curiosity-that had been Dave’s downfall. “What if the mask is its face?”

“Unlikely. It never moves.”

“Oh, so a demon face has to move?”

“You can see their eyes sometimes,” I offered instead.

I don’t know why I was so resistant to the idea that a Mask Person’s mask wasn’t also its face; there was no reason they couldn’t just have very deep eye sockets. Knowing what I know now it might be better, if that were the case. In any event I suppose Dave knows all about Mask People faces now.

Now it’s someone else who sits next to me during study time: a blonde teenage girl with uncertain gray eyes and a habit of chewing her pencils down to the graphite. I adjust the plastic bag holding my books so that the bits of wood won’t get all over my things.

I feel a jolt of desire as she bends over to pick up a crinkled green candy wrapper that had moments earlier fallen from her lap, her shirt sliding up to reveal the curved pale skin at the join of buttocks and back. I look outside to remind myself what three years without summer or winter looks like, hug a textbook about meteorology to my chest. Other people choose to live the remainder of their lives in short bursts, grabbing at whatever is offered to them. I suppose I feel obligated to spend the rest of my time as an ascetic.

I hear wheezing breaths; I can feel the girl next to me shrink back into her seat. The air seems suddenly too close, all thoughts of romance are forgotten, and I’m suffocating on a sickly-sweet smell like half-rotted muffins. I look up.

Of course, I’ve seen Mask People plenty of times, walking in the hallways, standing in stairwells, even hanging out in bathrooms. They don’t exactly take a hands-off approach to cultivating victims, and they stop by pretty often to check on the progress of their makeshift students, usually accompanied by one or two of the complacent handlers who do the dirty but relatively safe work of keeping their fellow humans in line. If you listened closely, you could probably hear the sound of drool sliding down the backs of their masks.

It’s uncommon for a Mask Person to take interest in a specific human, but despite the rarity of the occurrence it’s well accepted as a negative thing. This one is tall, as they all are, and looms over me in a long black Grim Reaper robe, more out of place and unnerving in the ordinary setting of a university building than it ever would have been in a graveyard. Its mask is roughly molded bronze with lumpy features that resemble in some ways a simplified human face, with rounded cheeks, deep round eyeholes, and thick smiling lips. The expression on this one is a little more jovial-looking than most Mask People wear.

“Ahhhh,” it sighs. The mask tilts and smiles; always smiles. It must weigh five pounds at least. “Such lovely potential in you.”

I look around slowly, right and left; no one is facing my way. Except, of course, for the Mask Person. “Thanks,” I reply. I feel it’s always best to be cordial.

“You are learning much?” it asks, its voice like a hyena’s uneven chitter. Rather like a child’s voice, actually. “You are getting… Destiny?”

“Yeah,” I reply. I stare at the title of the textbook, Meteorology and Geological Factors, but can still see the front of the creature’s robes over the tops of the pages. They like to use the word “destiny,” but I don’t think that it means the same thing when they say it; clearly in a Mask Person’s ideal world all of our destinies would be to end up dead, which wouldn’t require half as much reading.

“It is good,” the Mask Person says, seemingly to itself. “It is progressing nicely. Your destiny will progress us nicely. Good.” Its attention drifts elsewhere and I scrutinize the sliver of skin I can see behind the mask and hood, trying to find something recognizable there, but it moves on just as quickly as it had arrived, slipping between chairs and leaving a fine coating of barely-concealed panic over everything in its wake.

The girl next to me looks up, is startled into a smile for the briefest of flickers, and then studiously concentrates on one single page from her book for ten minutes.

Unfortunately, these days I know what’s behind the mask.

---o---

Once, long ago, I had a place I called home. The house was tiny, but because I had lived in an apartment building before that, I considered it to be huge. In many ways I would have rather had the apartment building; apartments carried memories of safety, of being at ease surrounded by a crowd.

Now nobody liked to live all in one place. More people seemed to attract more fire bugs, and after a while it became tiresome, having your shelter erupt into flame around you when you were trying to sleep.

Fire bugs were one of the many aptly-named horrors to be presented as gifts to humanity: energy sources that could last for eternity, small enough to crawl up your nostril if you weren’t paying attention. They were endlessly bemusing to those of us in the scientific community, and hotly researched, to no avail. An individual fire bug seemed to be nothing more that a glowing mote of light, not all that dissimilar to a firefly, and quite easy to contain; sadly, fire bugs almost never come in mere ones and twos anymore, and when they get together… Well, let’s just say that their name is perhaps somewhat more literal than the firefly’s.

I shared the house with an ex-girlfriend, Melissa. I had been very surprised to run into her again; I’d figured she would be among the first to be captured, but perhaps she was even more cunning than I gave her credit for. Still, one day when I was rummaging through the ruins of a burned house for whatever still-usable wood might be left, I looked up and hey, there she was; slightly worse for wear, yes, and I could barely recognize her for all the ash smeared onto her face, but it was definitely her.

“Oh,” she’d remarked. “It’s you.”

Well, better the enemy you know than the friend you don’t, I suppose, or something like that.

Several nights later we were still acting like mature adults, sitting in a pool of warmth generated by a space heater, each of us with our own tattered blanket pulled around our shoulders. I idly wondered if perhaps capes would become fashionable again soon.

“So much for global warming,” I joked, feebly quoting every old-world climate denialist who fancied himself witty.

Melissa awarded me with an appropriately dirty look; she had, after all, been a climatologist before all of this had happened. Before people in funny masks showed up, and other people besides; before politicians even dreamed that they may one day argue about whether the newcomers should be welcomed or vilified.

“In all seriousness,” she’d replied, “I wonder why it’s so cold.”

“You wouldn’t be the first,” I pointed out, helpfully.

Another dirty look. I was acquiring a real talent for summoning it-a regular snake charmer, that’s me. “They had to come from somewhere,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Maybe it’s cold there. There are always more Mask People, more fire bugs; I bet there are little cracks all over the place where they creep out.”

Ah, the “Somebody Close the Door, It’s Freezing in Here” theory of climate change. “Good luck testing that,” I told her.

Melissa looked at me again, apparently doubting my sincerity, and got up, moving to the black shape of a window. After several minutes, she spoke. “There are lights in the streets.”

I perked up immediately. “Fire bugs?”

She shrugged, continuing to stare out into the night, watching. “Probably. Not enough of them to risk leaving right now, but…”

“…But enough that we should leave soon,” I concluded, and then winced. I hated that, even after four years, I could still sometimes finish her sentences.

In the morning, Melissa left to look for a new place to stay, while I decided to stay in and attempt to ward off the cold I thought I might be coming down with. I don’t know if she ever came back; by the time she would have, I had already been clubbed across the back of my head and tied into my blanket.

---o---

It goes without saying that we all have a special place in our hearts for the handlers. We say all kinds of things when they’re not around, like a dog gnawing viciously on his bone because he couldn’t catch the rabbit. Few of them are actually mean-this isn’t jail, even if it is a prison-and I suspect that if any of them actually were violent they’d be lunch meat, but none of that changes the fact that they’re all stupidly complacent and content in their jobs. If one of them had ever said that he or she were sorry, I’d be more inclined to not despise them en masse.

They might not be violent, but that doesn’t mean we can fight back. Or, well, we can, but as I said, lunch meat. I don’t know how it became common knowledge that some people who get taken away are simply eaten, or even if there’s anything to that belief other than sheer unrelenting pessimism, but I must say I find the idea pretty credible myself. Maybe that’s part of the characteristic Mask Person stench; maybe we can instinctually recognize the smell of our own species’ flesh. Weirder things have happened.

I’m in a meeting now with two handlers and two students. I bet that there are Human Resources positions among the handlers; some of the terminology they insist on around here is about on that level of peppy insincerity. We certainly didn’t start calling ourselves “students.”

But enough of my grievances toward language. Words didn’t pull anyone out of their house in the middle of the night; words never stood by, aloof, as their fellow humans begged on impromptu knees for one second of inattentiveness to facilitate a blameless escape from a holding camp. And, especially, words never sided with these demonic bastards, looking up to their chunky metal faces with awe, scorning their fellow humans.

Yes, we’d love to show them a thing or two about what we know. Sadly, we are restricted to the literal interpretation of this.

“Pay attention, Chad,” the male handler says in exactly the bored tone he uses to lecture. Even these disinterested people know my name without asking for it-not reassuring.

I straighten my back a little, a minor token in a game ruled by grudge.

“Now, human languages can be organized roughly along two spectrums. Firstly, they can tend to rely on word order or be inflectional. Secondly, morphemes can be isolated, or they can be agglutinated. In languages highly dependent on word order…”

On and on like that. No wonder I was feeling a bit cranky toward language.

I have to wonder if this guy, a pasty-faced man with a bulbous nose and hair just about as neat and prime as if he just got out of bed, even understands what he’s talking about. Certainly handlers didn’t start their careers as professors, despite these rooms they now teach in; no, professors are a breed just as extinct as dodos, and sometimes it seems like it must have been almost as long since the last of them roamed the earth. It must take an impressive insularity to teach and not learn.

For me, each sentence is loaded with tiny flechettes.

Class ends, and another handler arrives to take us-myself, the blonde girl who chews her pencils, and a guy named Casey-back to the study room. I bend to pick up my books, but the lecturer catches my eye with a gesture. The guard leaves me behind and the door closes.

“According to our recent tests, you’ve been doing quite well,” he says. The other handler, a young woman with thick makeup and piggish eyes, leans in closer, steepling long greedy fingernails.

“I’ve been hearing that,” I acknowledge, my voice nonchalant. Dead bugs clog the lights overhead, I notice not for the first time.

“Now, you perform to the best of your ability on them, don’t you, Chad?” Ah, the name again.

“Of course,” I reassure them.

“You’ve been around for a long time,” the lady handler reminds me, twirling her dull blonde hair between two fingers. The guy looks at her like she’s an idiot, which is probably a fair assumption to make.

“Anyways, Chad, the point is, we want to take you aside some time for a little extra testing. Just to, you know, see where we’re at and all that.” He smiles.

“Oh, and Chad?” I look at the lady handler; she’s holding out a battered hardcover. “Take this. It’s very proactive of you to read so much.”

I take the book from her, handling the tattered thing delicately.

“Thank you,” I say, and tuck it into my bag.

The beef cow is just about grown up, it seems.

---o---

There was a time where I went to the bathroom and when I tried to go out again, I found that a pair of Mask People had taken up residence by the sinks.

Actually, I did hear them come in. I was in a stall, done and flushed for several minutes already, putting off the moment until I had to return to that goddamned study room. Just me and my books, together, sharing a moment of camaraderie. The door to the room had creaked open and I hadn’t thought anything about the silence that accompanied it, even though I’d been listening. Silly. People always make noise.

Then they’d started talking, and I knew. I couldn’t hear anything distinct; when Mask People talk to each other, they do so quietly, like best friends sharing secrets. All you can make out is a sort of endless breathy giggling as you catch the edges of their consonants, but this time it seemed more than ever that they actually were laughing.

“Your new body!” I heard suddenly, and without the muffled quality most Mask People voices possess. There had been more laughter, from both of them.

“Press on the under-mask,” another cackling voice suggested. “It is so pudgy!”

It was like overhearing a pair of kindergartners comparing formerly unknown parts of their bodies, parts which their adult versions already knew to the point of boredom: bemusing and kind of gross.

“And the destiny, it is good?” the first said.

“It is nourishing,” the second admitted. “It is not sating.”

“The best must be saved,” was the reply.

“Yes, must be saved.”

They’d continued speaking like that for a full minute before I’d realized that the Mask People might, well, not be wearing masks.

It was agony; for all that Dave had commented that I lacked imagination, I had wondered what was behind the masks: if the demons actually looked like demons or if they were some strange creature previously undreamt of. The specifics of what they were talking about were irrelevant compared to this mystery, and anyway whatever nefarious plans Mask People had could only ever be another flavor of “screwed.”

I’d pressed myself against the wall of the toilet stall and chewed on my lip, staring at graffiti in hope of inspiration-to peek, to not peek-but all it said was “Marcus sucks balls,” doing nothing to solve my feline curiosity dilemma.

Well… I already knew I wasn’t going to be around much longer, right? So finally I had crouched down and peered out from the stall door, inevitably as debris collecting in Jupiter’s Lagrange points. I think now that even then I had guessed what I would see.

It looked roughly as if someone had taken his face and put it into a blender, and then halfway through realized their grievous mistake and apologetically attempted to mold it back into something resembling its original shape. Dave’s face, that is; it was lumpier now, and broader, and his eyes bulged a little like those of a skinned animal’s, but I could still recognize Dave in the puffy lips and pink skin. I had certainly sat next to him often enough.

Dave’s lips had smiled, his expression exactly like a little kid’s delight at discovering a new toy, and because I could see his face I had been able to hear, “much better than the last.”

---o---

Sometimes it seems like summer was a happy dream. I mean, I know that it was real; it’s in the books, not just our memories.

All that’s really left of the wildlife around here are the crows. I don’t know how they survive; the same way crows always have I suppose. They’re opportunists. I know that the first year, when I still huddled in front of the space heater in the comfort of my own home, there were a lot of animal corpses. Winter has forever been a race between weather and life. It goes without saying who’s won this round.

None of us have coats, and that keeps us inside just as easily as any fence. The temperature is rarely far below freezing, but that’s more than enough when all you have is a thin sweater and you’re renting your body fat. It doesn’t stop some people from trying to run anyway, but oftentimes if they’re not caught, they come back on their own when they find that anyplace worth hiding’s been long since burnt down.

There are few guards on the ground floor, and most of them sit inside and play poker next to their coffee machines and microwaves. Complacent. No one is around to see when I duck into an empty computer lab-computers optional-and quietly close the door behind me.

My bag full of books is heavy; I’ve been collecting them for a long time now, almost since I was brought here. The handlers like that I keep my books, that I read them; not a one of them would dream of taking them away.

It is true that I’ve learned a lot in the years since I graduated with my BS degree, but most of it hasn’t been what I’ve been taught. Still, each page that I rip out sounds like a cry to my ears. I’m slaughtering innocents by the hundreds; words jump out at me like a multitude of waving hands. These books have been instruments of death, but surely they never deserved this!

I rip out pages in handfuls, but I try to be careful and rip them so that I get nearly a full page each time. I have to be quick, and I have a lot of books to destroy. I ignore the fact that, even if this works, it may never again for anyone else.

It seems like it takes hours, and maybe it does, but finally every cover, hard and soft, lies on the ground like the husk of a dried fish, disemboweled. The pile of crumpled-up pages is huge, now that they no longer sit flat against each other. I wonder what it’d be like to set them on fire.

Instead, I lean down and extract my socks from beneath my pants; reverse the order so that now my pants are beneath my socks. My jeans don’t fit as well now, so I have plenty of room to stuff the paper into, until my legs look like lumpy intestines. Then I zip up my sweater, tuck it and my shirt into my pants and belt them tightly. The edges of the paper dig into my flesh. I stuff the crazily folded lumps into my sweater, too, working the pages down into my sleeves.

I heard that this is what some homeless people will do to stay warm in the winter. Or used to do. The paper has to be crumpled, not shredded, to trap in the heat. I hope that they really do know a thing or two, and that this is actually right, because I’m counting on all that desperate innovation to save my life.

I’m not quiet at all as I leave by the door that, if my sense of direction is correct, is on the side of the building that doesn’t have so many windows. All this paper, rustling with dead voices, their whispers like the secrets of Mask People.

There’s not a lot of cover out here, but I can duck behind the skeletons of bushes, the foundations of ruined houses, when I reach them. Dark blue’s not a bad color, but I’m not exactly wearing camouflage either and the clouds are bright overhead. As I bunch my shoulders around my ears, wishing I had thought to grow longer hair, all I can hope is that no one wants to admire the view.