Empty Masks

Eddie Miel discovered a new world while walking down the road on a sunless day.

His gait would be better described as a slither, hardly leaving the ground, scraping along it in a whisper of worn sole on grass. He didn’t like walking on sidewalks and concrete. It felt artificial. There was enough of that in his life.

The weight of a recent break-up kept his eyes pointed at the ground. Where they belonged. If you looked where you were going, you wouldn’t get tripped up. Lifting your eyes to the horizon caused issues. There were plenty of treasures to find near at hand, passed up by all the forward looking people excited for the future. Or for some nonsense discovery in the sky, like seeing a black hole for the first time. But that had been her interest. They were over.

This was the direction of his mind when he stumbled over it.

He missed the tattered paper bag with his eyes. His feet didn’t. The ground leapt at his face, stopped when his arms slapped against it, halting the descent. After regaining his feet, Eddie looked behind at the bag. Frowning, he nudged it with the worn leather toes of his boots. There was something inside, peeking pale and smooth through a ragged rip of stained paper.

Wood? He wondered.

A buffet of debris and detritus was arrayed before him and behind on the opposite side of the street. A new wave of biodegradable containers and utensils had opened the gates for a renewed love of littering. The city’s contribution was to use the limited cleanup resources on those materials less environmentally sound, leaving these patches of moldering compost in the less appealing parts of town.

Like here, where he lived.

Eddie lifted his eyes from the discarded curiosity. The house was not far away, he could see the faded and chipped maroon paint of the siding from there. But light was fading fast. His neighborhood wasn’t as dangerous compared to other areas, but those other areas were not far away. It wasn’t smart to be out after night, if possible.

Bending his knees, reaching out with trembling hands, Eddie hooked a finger under a twitching flap and tugged the crumpled mouth open. He looked inside. It was indeed very curious.

He pinched the mouth closed between his fingers and made his way home, keeping his arm out, wincing when it swayed. Months ago Eddie had encountered a similar discarded bag. Thinking he’d spotted the curled dirty green of money winking at the sky, he grabbed it in excitement then yelped as discarded hypodermic needles pierced his palm. This led to a panicked rush to the nearest free clinic. They did what tests they could. All came back clean.

As clean as he ever was, anyway.

For weeks following, he’d been convinced there was something wrong, something they’d missed lurking in his blood. Waiting to rear its head when it was too late to do anything about it. The worry faded as time marched on, never disappearing but finding a tidy corner to curl up in and shout its damaged calls in the dark hours before sleep.

Full dark settled as he reached the end of his block. The sun fell fast in recent days, faster than normal in Eddie’s opinion. No one talked about it, so neither did he.

As he bounded up his porch steps, those that haunted the night exited the surrounding homes. Cloaked in hoodies and shadow, they cast around fluttering, suspicious glances, trying to fade away without leaving the light. He appreciated how they watched their feet and looked up only to scan for danger.

The door clacked shut behind him. When the deadbolt slid home, Eddie released his caged breath, expelling his fear. It wasn’t new. The fear had been built over months and years, brick by anxious brick, an insistent pressure that lessened only when he wasn’t alone. The comfort of presence softened the harsh edges, made it tolerable. When they inevitably left, the relentless pressure returned to mock him.

A growl ripped through his stomach. Tucking the paper bag to his chest, he went to the kitchen and retrieved a half loaf of white bread. Wincing at the mold spotted heel, he tossed it in the trash, stuffing a clean slice in his mouth while stomping toward the bathroom. The only mirror in the dilapidated house hung above the sink.

Dry coughing up chunks of bread, Eddie spat what was left in his hand. He twisted the faucet handle for the cold water and pressed his lips to the spigot. Lukewarm water flooded his mouth and cascaded down his cheek. The hint of old copper wasn’t from the dirty spout.

Satiated, he cut the water and stuffed the half chewed glob of bread back in his mouth. With horse-like wide jaw chewing, he shifted the paper bag to hold it in front of him. In the cold blue light of the bathroom, the soft shape was clear, outlined by the thin paper. He wiped the crumb soaked hand on his shirt before pulling out the Mask.

It was dry, warm like skin, rough but smooth like old worn wood gets when it has been protected from the ravaging elements. Tilting it toward the light, he ran his hand over the delicate cheekbones, feeling ripples that ran horizontally from cheek to cheek. Woodgrain he told himself, but deep in the back of his mind, a trembling voice insisted the pattern was too regular, too straight. Tilting it for better light, he brought it close. He couldn’t see the ripples. Only feel them. Empty eyes stared back. It was hard to see light through it. The tips of his fingers poked shyly from velvety dark pools.

“What the hell are you?” A whisper, irreverent and cautious. He ignored the tickling in the back of his skull by his ear.

The color was hard to pin down. Somewhere between grey, blue, and an off white color jaundiced egg-shell. It’s just the light his thoughts lied. That insistent, deep voice said the confusion wouldn’t be dispelled in the burning truth of the sun. There was a slight bump over where the mouth should be. Maybe lips. Fingertips caressing them, he realized they didn’t line up with the rest of the face. And the eyes weren’t aligned, sitting crooked. As he turned it, the light shifted and the perception vanished. It was a featureless mask of wood or bone.

“Bone,” he said, and shivered. Maybe the light was bad, but he saw no seams. It looked like a single piece. “Bone from what?”

He held the mask up, regarding it face to face. Beyond it rested the streaked mirror. His head tilted, a slight shift, lining up the eyes. Yes, they were crooked. Eddie’s eyes reflected back from the silvered glass beyond the shadow ridden holes.

Everything changed yet nothing did.

His blood beat a frantic rhythm through his veins as the Mask seethed. The world twisted until the Mask aligned with Eddie’s face. His eyes stared back with wide eyed terror. With trembling hands locked in a rigor mortis grip around the mask, Eddie moved it to away, and looked into the mirror.

At himself.

For the first time.

Nothing was different. It was recognizably Eddie Miel. He had not changed. But the looking had. Now he saw. And so felt seen. The emotional tsunami that crashed forward buckled his knees. He let out a cry that ravaged his throat, venting the anguish and regret that ruptured through him and giving voice to the elation he had never known.

Never had he looked through the cracks of his own facade so deeply and really seen what was underneath.

He would have collapsed, but the tremors rolling through his arms from the Mask wouldn’t let him. It upheld him.

Eddie turned it, the only command his hands or any part of his body would obey. He knew this and had no desire to do elsewise. The inside curves felt intimate under his thumbs, familiar. It held the shape of his face. He could see it clearly, truly. The mask would fit the face it fell upon. That was its nature. This fact shuddered through his fingers into his skull, knowledge birthed through resonance. The animal part of his brain sputtered, an angry electric sparking of a frayed wire, wanting to pull away. But the shape of his face was already inside it. Calling. A holy relic made for him, made of him. Eddie Miel would not resist.

Eagerness drowned reverence. He slammed the mask against his face, hard enough to bleed, though he couldn’t tell from where and didn’t care. The smooth contours prickled like static against his skin. When his hands pulled away, the mask remained.

The light falling from above the mirror hummed, trembling against the smooth face. Shadows wept from contours and ridges he did not see and couldn’t feel, giving features to the face he now wore. The sight of it sent the animal part of him into fits of inarticulate screaming, desperate to rip it off. The voice was a muffled murmur through a thick wall of wood. Or bone.
Shadows played across the surface of the mask. It was seeing. And being seen, But not all the way.

That’s what it wants, he thought. To see and be seen.

And having been seen, Eddie wept with the joy of it.

Observing and being observed changes us. It changes everything. Both alter, however subtly, the thoughts and actions of the Looker and the Seen.

Morning came on a cloud veiled sky. Eddie left his home, leaving the front door open. The mask rippled against his skin but did not change on its surface. People cast shocked looks at him as passed. On the train. And the bus. A man wearing a mask wasn’t unheard of and far from the strangest thing they would see. But of course, it wasn’t just a mask. They were seeing It.

A distant police siren wailed as he entered the office building for their local news website. Her workplace.

“I want to see Emily,” he said, voice husky through the mask.

Astrid, the lady behind the front desk, cocked her head to the side and smirked. “Is that you, Eddie?”

He didn’t speak.

Her eyes twitched, trying to take in the Mask, then fluttered. She got up and went through the double glass doors separating the business end with the visitor’s foyer. Past the open workstations. The same ones that left him feeling so exposed he hadn’t lasted a week after Emily got him the job. To the corner office.

All the offices had glass walls, a symbol for the supposed transparency of their reporting. He watched as Astrid leaned over the desk, spoke to a head hooded of luscious black hair, and pointed his direction.

She stood, lithe frame hugged by a fitted suit, and marched toward him from the corner office. Curls of black hair danced about her shoulders in the draft of her movement. “What the fuck?” Emily barked, her strong voice unrestrained by the glass door separating them. She threw it open and the full thunder of her presence entered the room.

Eddie smiled. The Mask writhed. “Hey.”

Emily’s steps faltered. It was the first time he’d seen anything throw off her momentum. “What are you wearing?”

He shrugged.

“Why are you here?”

“I wanted to see you.”

She took a step closer, face frozen in an anger that rapidly bled from her eyes. A glossy sheen shuttered over them. “I don’t want to see. You.”

How different the world was through the Mask. Same but different. Like him. The longer he gazed through its lens, the more his perception changed. Now he was seeing everything. And her. She was beautiful and strong. Everything he’d ever wanted in his old life. In that old life, in her life, Emily Looked. She was less affected by being seen.

That was the old Eddie. Her goals no longer seemed so solid. Stability, economic freedom, work/life balance, travel goals. They were so small. I can see them for the shallow vomit of empty nonsense they are. He chuckled. It came out deep and empty. Not his.

Emily stepped back. Her hands picked at the seams of her jacket. “You should. Go.”

“Okay.”

“And don’t come back.” The strength had left her voice, but conviction was still there. The steel that had drawn him to her to begin with. “Please.”

“Okay.”

He left.

Outside, there were more sirens, less distant now. The smell of smoke. A reddish orange glow reflected off the clouds. He watched a bustle of activity down the street with passing interest. A gathered crowd watching some activity. Guns went off. Some of the people scattered, but not all. He saw this.

Eddie lifted his head to the sky. He saw it, and so being seen, it changed. The sun was actually a muted black orb haloed in the beautifully violent expiration of life. He screamed. Why, though? It was beautiful, if you looked at it a certain way. Wet warmth trickled down his chin to drape over his chest. It smelled sharply of copper.

People on the street had changed. He had. They looked different to him now, anyway. And he to them. Eddie wandered with no idea for how long. The sun went away but it always came back. One day it wouldn’t and that was okay.

A thought whispered through his mind; there are other stars than these in his voice. His new voice. And other stars to see.

Looking away from those distant sparks, wondering how they might look if he were closer, he saw shapes surrounding him. The old Eddie snapped into focus enough to recognize a back alley, one of the bad ones that he’d haunted, but only in the light of day to buy pills that made life a little more bearable. There were sirens everywhere and the smell of smoke was inescapable.

“The fuck’s wrong with his face?” One of them asked.

The Shapes held things in their hands. He could see the power they believed they had because of these. But they were just tools. Hunks of manipulated alloys. One of the Shapes grabbed his old arm and fell away, a scratchy sound coming from their open mouth. The sound was familiar. Screaming maybe. It looked different now, an ululation to a power deep in another plane. It would have a turn to gaze on this world.

They used some of the tools. Alloy pierced his flesh or barked with flash and ripped through him. His left hand was torn off at the wrist. That was okay. It made room for him and the Mask to fill the gaps. To grow. While they worked their tools on his body, he turned his head to the sky, instinctively, like a mewling babe to a breast. Scanning. Searching.

He found it. It.

It

The Consuming Eye was turned this way already. It had been seen.

And having been seen, it sees.

But not him. He was too small. Nothing to see. Yet.

He smiled. The surface of the Mask rippled. He felt it, like it was his skin. They stopped using their tools and ran. Most got away. Eddie pinned one of them down with his gaze, enlightened by the Consuming Eye, and saw that shape. Saw and moved each piece, pulled them apart and examined close, until he understood.

But everyone is different. That’s what they said, right? Eddie would find out.

Alone in the alley he turned heavenward to the Consuming Eye. Saw his own thoughts and so changed them. He could watch everything from Outside now to understand all parts.

His body moved away from the pulpy smear on the dirty concrete that had been the mugger. Blood poured from under the Mask which remained immaculate and unblemished. There was a mouth, but not one the human perception could grasp. It was new. It had always been there. Eyes burned with deep glittering pinpricks that rolled in an endless cascade.

The sun went through cycles. His body wandered. Pieces fell off. Missing parts were replaced, gaps filled in to keep it moving. The Mask experimented with how and what to fill those spaces with. His original skin blistered, bubbled, running like waxy liquid through runnels of ravaged flesh. It plopped on the ground to hiss or scurry away. They didn’t belong here. Existing was uncomfortable. They sought more comfortable burrows. People shapes that saw him turned and fled or fell on each other like rabid animals.

Not yet the voice whispered.

They searched for him for a time. Groups of a dozen or more at a time. They’d see him. And he’d see them. That would be that. Sometimes there would be people left and they would leave.

Little was left of his original body when he reached the mining town. Tucked in the deep embrace of a sprawling forest, It showed signs of life though no one was in sight. They had been warned what was coming, and chose not to bear witness. That was fine. They’d have no choice, in the end.

There was a tickle on the back of his neck. His head was all mask now, so when he reached back with his left hand, the dozens of many jointed digits rippled along the exposed spinal column. It pulsed and thrummed like a cello cord, flowing light peeking from between the vertebrae.

What was this sensation?

It was new. The tickle of being watched. Of being seen without seeing.

The Mask mouth curled. As a human mouth, it would have been a smile. It was not a human mouth.

Ribs poking through the tumorous mass of his chest stretched open like pincers. They twitched like insect antennae. He turned in slow circles. When facing the larger of the twin mountains that dominated the skyline, they shuddered like dowsing rods. It was there, the source of this new feeling. He gurgled and cooed and walked.

It took a long time to scale the mountain. Many amendments were made to his shape to aid in the travel, with climbing and cleaving. So many that when at last he reached the cave mouth his form had to be folded and cracked to enter.

In his new sight the walls were threaded with blue electric veins terminating in bulbous extrusions that were not nature made. They had the stink of sulfur and ozone. An animal instinct of the old Eddie throbbed in the shriveled prune that remained of his brain, stuck snotlike against the back of the Mask. The withered follicle of a vein trailed between it and the indigo wreathed spinal cord, insufficient to bring the full panic or the fragmented recognition of the explosives. It itched, but little else. His body continued forward.

Deeper into the caves, sliding and slurping, removed from the sight of the black sun and the distant stars. His mewlings grew lethargic without their pulsations.

The twitching ribs were a compass, guiding him deep. To the mountain root vein where at last he met the source.

It was another.

Another.

An Other.

An Other Mask.

His senses had peeled back, looking deeper and deeper until it could no longer see the surface things that his original self had found so mundane. Had it not, he would have seen the runes, effigies and carvings on the cave walls. The reverence which it had been so lovingly buried and contained. His sight was turned Outward. To the Consuming Eye.

And this Other belonged to something else. Something that also had its gaze cast in this direction.

Another gurgle issued from his twisted features. The bone of the Mask was almost flesh, though not what the old him would have recognized as it.

He drew closer, wanting to see.

Wanting to be seen.

The Empty Masks saw each other.

They did not hear the distant boom like overlapping thunder. Did not feel the shudder of the stone around them as explosions ripped through the bowels of stone. No other sense mattered.

As mountain caves collapsed around them, they never looked away.