City of Masks

30

It was close to midnight by the time she turned off the lights and locked the storage room door. She headed down the hall, trying to loosen joints that had grown stiff with immobility and tension. The adrenaline high she'd maintained since her epiphany on Decatur Street had kept her tense enough to scream for more than three hours.

She'd made it all the way to the kitchen before she realized there was a sound in the house.

A voice, whimpering. Not weeping, but beyond weeping: the convulsive, involuntary utterances of an injured person. A woman's voice.

Lila! Cree ran down the dark central hall, following the sound, and stopped to listen again from the entry hail. It was clearer there, the sound of devastation. From upstairs.

Cree took the steps two at a time, turned at the landing, and came into the central room.

"Lila?" she called. She groped until she found the light switch and flipped it. The big room filled with the dull yellow of the chandelier, the doorways dark rectangles all around. "Lila, it's Cree. You shouldn't have come here. This isn't safe. We've got to get you out of here."

There was no answer, just the continuing squelched exclamations of misery. It was a wet sound of breathy exhalations and throaty vocalizations, ragged grunts and sobs, arrhythmic, constricted, forced. Hard to tell where it was coming from. Cree stopped to listen, and suddenly the awful quality of the whimpering suddenly made sense. Not an injured person. A person being injured, right now.

A woman being raped.

"Lila, where are you?" Cree shouted. She moved to the head of the hallway and thought the sound was louder here. Lila had to be in one of the rooms down the hall, the master bedroom or maybe the room she'd occupied as a child.

She ran down to the master bedroom, turned into it, slapped the light switch. No one. Now the whimpering seemed to come from behind: the other bedroom! She raced across the hall, flung open the door, and looked in. Nothing. No one.

The noise stopped.

Cree stood still again just outside the room, looking up and down the hall, confused. "Lila?"

The ceiling light in the central room went out, leaving it a cavern at the end of the hall.

"Lila?" she called toward the dark rectangle.

(‹ Lila?" an echo came back.

The voice sickened her. It was a parody of her voice, a man's voice straining to reach a woman's range. It was mocking her fear and concern, ridiculing her, taunting her.

At the end of the hall, thirty feet away, just where the lighted corridor met the shadow of the big room, down on the floor: two brown shoe tips.

Suddenly Cree felt him, all around, the gnarled malevolent affect lit with manic glee and lust. His mental weather closed around her suddenly and completely, suffocatingly close. It was a trap, she knew instantly, a reprise of a long-ago game of predation and terror. Without knowing it, she'd fallen into Lila's role.

And the anguished, injured whimpering – that had been a ghastly parody, too, the monster mimicking and belittling the sounds of his victim's suffering.

(‹ Lila?" the parody voice jeered again. u Lila?" Taunting her, savoring her terror.

Still frozen with horror, Cree could see now that there was something above the shoe tips: yes, the edge of coarse fabric, rising and falling with his breathing. And above that, at head height, something else. Glistening skin beneath coarse bristles. The side of his face.

The awful cheek moved. ^(‹ Lila?" The voice had changed subtly, not so much a sadistic parody any more. "Lila?" Now he seemed to be just calling the name of his victim, twisting the nuance so the implicit threat was clear.

Cree heard the name as if it were her own, and maybe it was, maybe she had become Lila to a sufficient degree that she could draw him as Lila did.

The bristles moved as he turned his head. And there was the snout, just visible around the corner, and then the snout inched forward until the mouth and then the eyes came around. The mouth was wet and red, and the eyes were bright and small and gleeful as they fixed her. The nostrils hissed with his excited breathing.

Fear seared her. She broke and ran down the hallway toward the back stairs. Her body fled instinctively, by simple animal reflex, but her thoughts persisted, trying to find reasons, explanations, precedent, anything that would give her the slightest control. But she'd never experienced anything like this: the intentionality, the malevolent interactivity. His physical solidity. His one-dimensionality: no conscience, no dying man's regrets to appeal to. She heard heavy footsteps charging behind her as she plunged into the smaller back stairwell and flung herself down into the pitch dark. But before she reached the landing, he was there, in front of her, boiling up out of the stairwell. His shape congealed out of darkness: two legs, two arms, a man's torso with a boar's humped, muscular shoulders, an impossibly thick neck, bristled jowls, and pointed ears.

"Lila?" he sneered.

Cree stumbled and grabbed the bannister, almost pitching onto him as she stopped her downward tumble. He lunged at her, and she could smell the rank stink of him, male sweat and something chemical.

She hurtled up the stairs again, tripped, heard him right behind her, felt his hands flail at her heels as she got her footing and leapt upward. She broke out into the upstairs hall, dimly realized that the lights had gone out here, too, and began to run down the dark hallway, to the front stairs and down. But just ahead of her, at the doorway to the master bedroom, she saw his shoulder and snout emerge, his arms reach to grapple her. She twisted as she burst past him, felt his clawing fingers scrape her stomach and rip her jacket.

Into the central room. He was so close behind her she couldn't slow down to turn into the stairway. But through the doorways ahead, the windows of the front rooms were rectangles of streetlight glow and foliage shadow, and they struck her as beautiful, salvation, proof there was an outer world, a normal world, and she wanted to fling herself at them and through them, anything to get away from the tangled evil of the boar-headed man. But a shape broke from the shadows of the room on the left, the mirror-tunnel room, and darted at her, and without thinking she shied the other way, a reflexive action so strong it was as if some force field had repelled her. The thick-necked silhouette lunged and her legs kicked her backward. Her thigh hit the railing at the top of the stairs, and she pitched out into the open black chasm of the stairwell.

Something broke loudly, and her arms flailed in midair, hands grasping at nothing. In the instant of fear and vertigo she felt a tiny explosion of gladness, that she'd fall and die and not have to endure what the shadowed thing rushing to the railing intended for her.