When she did not return my call I assumed it was because she was either stuck at work or was preparing for our date.
But when my knocking on her apartment door went unanswered I began to worry. I loitered in the hallway for nearly half an hour before returning to my own apartment. I had to make an effort to not sound annoyed when I left Jeannette a second message, asking her to call me at home.
By nine P.M. my annoyance over being stood up had boiled over into rage. At eleven o’clock I was scared.
I slept in fits that night and tried to remedy my exhaustion by glutting on coffee. I called Jeannette just before lunchtime on Saturday but got her machine yet again. I mentioned that I was concerned, that I only wished to know that she was okay.
That afternoon I ventured out to run unnecessary errands, unable to tolerate the sight of my apartment walls. Crossing the parking lot, I stole a glance toward Jeannette’s floor. The shape in one of the windows startled me. I was reluctant to count the windows to determine that the apartment was Jeannette’s.
The shape was sitting at the large living room window that faced the building’s back lot. The sheer curtains made it appear positively spectral, vague, like a shop window mannequin. Its straight mane, which reached down to the midriff, made me certain it was Jeannette. She did not move. She didn’t even appear to be breathing. On a thoughtless impulse, I waved at her.
The silhouette slid back from the window.
I didn’t bother heading to the laundry mat, or the supermarket. Instead I holed up inside O’Bedlam’s Pub to sulk and sip a pint I didn’t really want. Exactly what was gnawing at me took me some time to figure out, but I eventually realized that it had less to do with Jeannette and a great deal to do with a profound loneliness I hadn’t even been aware I’d been harbouring. Spending time with Jeannette trawled this feeling up to the surface, and now that I’d been made aware of my pain I felt helpless to do anything but wallow in it.
Downtown was smudged with dusk by the time I left O’Bedlam’s. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast but still had no appetite. The crowds were becoming more robust; everyone eager to commence their weekend Bacchanalias. I didn’t want to be out, and although I hardly relished the idea of being home, I knew that I could stew in peace there.
Jeannette was back at her window. I spotted her as soon as I’d veered my car into the back lot. Her apartment was still unlit, but her living room was near enough to one of the lot’s standing lamps that I was able to discern a black human-like form that contrasted the ash-heap gloom of the apartment itself. She was as a statue hammered from black marble. Her face was even less visible than it had been that afternoon; it was now little more than a thumb-mark in kohl.
I entered the building without waving to her, though I doubt Jeannette cared one way or the other.
Once home, I shook out a handful of cereal from its too-bright box and stood in my kitchenette, munching and brooding. Had Jeannette simply been toying with me? Perhaps she was disturbed in some way? Imagining her as some drooling maniac was pettily gratifying, but the theory felt flawed to me. It was only after I’d begun to question whether she might be as lonely as I was that I experienced a ring of truth, as though I’d deciphered some encrypted message from myself to myself.
I resisted re-analyzing Jeannette’s every word and action from last night and instead decided to try one last time speak to her, face to face. Reasoning that I could not damage our relationship—assuming that’s what had been developing between us—any further, I resolved to put my heart on my sleeve: I would go to her apartment and tell her that I understood about isolation and feeling as though the world-bearings of everyone I met always felt to be just a few degrees off from my own. Connections almost
never
happened, but when they did, like last night, it can be a little frightening because one’s cocoon gets rent. It’s about exposure, and if she was hiding from me for fear of being exposed that was okay, but I had to tell her that I was frightened too.
I had my speech well rehearsed by the time I knocked on Jeannette’s door. She did not answer, of course. So, in an act so bold it even shocked me, I turned the doorknob and found it unlocked.
The light from the hall was just strong enough to provide a hint of the woman at the window but was not bright enough to define her. Her straight-parted hair hung like drapes of black wax, melting over the back of her chair.
She muttered something to which I replied, “What?”
“Close the door,” she said. Her voice was muffled, thin.
I heeded her request, regretting it as soon as the darkness closed around me.
“I . . . I came to see if you were okay.” The only sound in the apartment was my own breathing, which seemed to have quickened. “Jeannette?”
She rose and pivoted to face me.
Jeannette was obscured by the mask, which appeared to have grown more vicious since I’d discarded it. That white-red-greenish stew of mock flesh, the hectic rip of a mouth, the crisscrossed incisions of its eyes.
“It reached me instead,” the shrill voice explained. Two facts became horribly apparent to me. One: the voice sounded distant—not merely faint, but very far away. And two: the speaker was not Jeannette.
The figure took a step forward, and the must of wet earth and tooth decay and an acrid scorched scent hit me so palpably I almost choked.
“Take it off,” I said, and the thinness of my voice surprised me. “Take off the mask.”
The thing said, “I already have.”
Then it reached out to me.
“It was left for you. You didn’t let the process finish.”
I fumbled backward, nearly falling over Jeannette’s coffee table.
“It’s not too late,” it trilled, “you can still join me. But we have to go now.”
Those were the last words the mask could manage before its mouth grew too distorted to speak. The gaping hole began to dilate like a birth canal, widening and deepening, exposing the vastness that the Jeannette-thing housed within her head.
I could see an ember-like glimmer, all red and orange and blue. This glowing brightened and became more defined as the mouth expanded to the size of a small cave.
The pyres from my dream now blazed inside Jeannette’s throat, and that forest of dull trees whose bark was the grey of headstones stood there too. Cold stars winked in the night sky that stretched across the roof of her mouth.
By now the jaws of the leathery mask were pressing against the living room walls and were pressing into the plaster in a struggle to grow larger still.
I had managed to reach the apartment door, but still felt compelled to stare in dumb awe at the mutation before me.
Featureless figures stepped out from behind the trees and began the uphill climb upon Jeannette’s tongue, which was now as mangled and coarse as a great mandrake root.
The drab forms trudged up toward the mouth’s rim. Their ropy white arms were extended. I heard one of them step onto the living room with a slight thump. I wrenched the doorknob and stumbled out into the hall.
My last memory of Jeannette was seeing her fumbling to reach her hand over the top of her masked face as one of the pale things clutched her and began to pull her into the world within her.
I slammed the apartment door shut and fled.
I suppose the child never really escapes us; at least mine stayed within me somewhere, like the acorn from which the oak grew. The timid boy in me kept me cowering inside my apartment until the light came back to the world. Then and only then did I creep back down to Jeannette’s apartment. My steps were slow and hesitant.
I’m not sure what I was expecting to find when I finally pushed the door back from its frame. Probably I was hoping for evidence of the miracle, some clue that would make it all undeniable. But, aside from some scoring in the plaster of the living room walls, the only incongruity was the mask lying face-down on the carpet.
It took me the better part of an hour to muster courage enough to touch it, to grip it, to turn it over and witness the change to its features.
The mouth had vanished. Its passage to the otherworld was sealed with the same whitish X as the eyes. I sat cross-legged on Jeannette’s floor and held the mask and wondered if I should cry for her. But after a while I simply left. I took the mask with me.
I have it still. I kept it after I moved out of that building, which I did only after the investigation into Jeannette’s disappearance went cold. Her apartment was voided of its furniture and eventually rented out to a new couple.
By then I had already put in the winning bid on a townhouse downtown. Over the years I had nothing to do but work, so I put in more energy and devotion to my job and received two decent promotions. The spike in income allowed me to buy comfort.
I kept the mask on a shelf in my bedroom closet, wrapped in a plastic trash bag. I would take it out and study it, sometimes even put it on and wait for the cold fire to come, but it never did. I did this quite often right after Jeannette vanished, but less so as time wore on.
My life was sedate, rote, almost flatline. The only exception was Halloween, which I celebrated with a vague hopefulness that somehow something might shift. I don’t know if I thought Jeannette would return to me, or if I would find another clue as to what I had squandered by not letting the mask finish its task. All I knew was that an invitation that had been intended for me, but that Jeannette had accepted.
Tonight brought another round of trick-or-treaters to my door. I tossed fistfuls of candy into their open pillowcases, told them corny knock-knock jokes involving monsters. But in the end it was a hollow ritual.
Then came the last trick-or-treater; a plump boy of about ten. He stood on my stoop, dressed as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One side of his face was kempt and clean, the other was marred by ghastly makeup. His plastic tuxedo smock was shredded on the Hyde half. His furry hand clutched a plastic test tube.
But it wasn’t his costume that impacted me, it was his eyes. If windows to the soul they were, then what shone through this child’s was a sadness so profound I could feel it pushing into me, squeezing my heart until it ached. The boy looked at me for only a second before his gaze dropped back down to his perforated canvas runners.
“Trick-or-treat,” he mumbled.
I cleared my throat. “You look awesome,” I said. The boy did not react.
“HURRY THE HELL UP, DANNY! I’M SURE THE MAN’S GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN TALK TO YOU.”
The man who shouted this was standing on the sidewalk. He took a pull from the beer can he was clutching, then spat on my lawn.
“That your dad?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Did he help you with your costume?”
The boy shook his head. “He thinks I’m too old for Halloween. I made it myself.”
“C’MON, DAMMIT!”
I raised my hand to the hand to the man as politely as possible, indicating that everything was fine.
“Well, you did a great job. I used to make my own costumes when I was a kid. You like monsters?”
This raised the boy’s face. “I love them.”
“So do I. That’s what I always liked best about tonight; you got to
be
the monster for a little while, you know what I mean?”
The child half-smiled.
I dumped all the candy I had left into his grocery bag.
“That’s a pretty cool decoration there,” he said. He was pointing over my shoulder.
“Which?” I asked, craning my head back.
The mask was hanging from the stair-head in my foyer, dangling as though I had placed it there to frighten the children with its cross-lash eyes.
The strange thing is that I was not shocked to see it there, not even slightly. Just as I was not surprised to see that its mouth had been restored to the hungry gash that it had the night it had been left for me.
“You like it?”
“Yeah, it’s creepy.” There was an enthusiasm in the boy’s voice that my gut told me was probably very rare for this child.
“Would you like to keep it?”
“Sure! Thanks!”
“LET’S GO, DANNY! THE LAST THING YOU NEED IS MORE CANDY!”
I lifted the mask from my banister and held it out to the boy. “Enjoy.”
He grinned and took it and bade me a Happy Halloween before he turned and walked away.
Perhaps it was some protective instinct, but the boy was wise enough to stash the mask in his bag before his father spotted it.
I stood and watched as the boy shuffled off down the otherwise vacant street. The gourd lamps on the porches had been extinguished, all the doors were shut; all but the one I had given to the child.
I felt good about what I’d done. Jeannette had taught me a lot about myself, about all the Outsider kids. I had given the finest gift one can offer an Outsider—passage out of the world.