Mask of Flies (17 page)

Needless to say, I
didn’t get much sleep that night.

In the morning, Aart
left on the train to work in Buffalo for the week. I kissed him
goodbye in the kitchen and sat next to Father at the table. “Father,
did you have one of your Quaker friends over last night?”

“No, their church
clerk’s son was married yesterday. Their whole community was
involved in the event.”

I told him about the
top hat I found in my bedroom last night.

“I wouldn’t be so
rude to entertain guests in your private bedchambers without your
permission. Especially with young Joseph resting. Can I see the hat?”

“I think somebody
took it in the middle of the night.” I felt color flush my face.

“Maybe Aart put it away.” He
simply abandoned the conversation, perhaps attributing my behavior to
the bodily imbalances of a mother after the birth of her child.

When I set Joseph
down, I found the top hat sitting atop the rocking chair once again.
I wanted to take it to my father, but he had retired over an hour
ago. I stuffed it into the top drawer of our dresser and heard the
floor creak. I turned and saw the rocking chair moving, like somebody
had just left from sitting in it. I grabbed the armrest to stop the
motion and checked the window for a draft, but it was shut tight. The
heaviness of my eyes won out over the unease over the hat. So I fell
asleep.

A crash jerked me
from slumber. I struck a match and lit a candle and saw the dresser
overturned onto the floor. Then I had to look twice at the next thing
I saw—to ensure my drowsy eyes weren’t playing tricks. An
impression of a face protruded from the wall plaster. It stared out
from inside the wall, like a grotesque painting come to life. The
face appeared gaunt. Its skin wrapped tight around stretched bones;
its cheeks sunken gorges. The eyes bulged, alien and bug-like and
didn’t blink. They were pools of jet in the dark room. The face’s
beak-like nose superseded human length. Then its mouth moved. It
grinned, displaying its most unnerving feature, large blocked teeth
with fangs. I wished it was just a nightmare.

The thing whispered my
name in the old tongue. “Your new blood smells so sweet. He will be
fine by himself. Come to me.”

I ignored it, went to
the bed, and put my head into the pillow. The face continued to goad
me. Then it went silent. I looked up, thinking that the face gave up,
but then I saw the plaster crumble, and two powdered arms folded out
of nothingness. The wall birthed long thin limbs that opened up like
an insect-eating flower. The figure wore tattered black clothing, and
struggled to take a seat in the rocking chair. A black, snake-like
umbilical tethered it to the wall from the back of its head. It
picked up the top hat off the ground and set it on its lap. “Angeni.
Angeni—Angeni—Angeni,Angeni,Angeni.” It persisted for hours
with its raspy voice.

I continued to look
away, never acknowledging it. I remembered being told that malign
spirits are attracted to baby’s sweet smell. Nothing in the world
could get me to talk to the thing in the corner.

The figure gave up when dawn broke.
It got up from the rocking chair, took the top hat, and submerged
itself into the wall. The plaster rippled upon its entry as if the
wall was composed of milk. I sat there shivering, but exhaustion set
in and I fell asleep, only to be awakened minutes later by Joseph.
Strangely, he slept soundly through the intrusion, but the subtle
light was enough to wake him from slumber.

After going through
the motherly motions, I found an old letter from Roger Grasley
amongst the scattered items from the thrown dresser. He had left it
at the general store in early spring. A cart attendant gave the
letter to my mother; and when she came home, she threw the letter at
me and had some choice words for me about keeping open dialogue with
man that
wasn’t
Aart.

The letter mentioned
how Lily Dale began to garner large scale interest. Many wealthy
practitioners and academics had plans pending to build cottages
within the community. “With all the commotion associated with the
new construction, I can’t walk down the street without sneezing
from all the sawdust in the air,” He wrote.

He went on to say that
he had begun a new role in the community, on a multifunctional
committee that included top psychologists from the government. “The
group’s purpose is to develop criteria to furthering the potential
of gifted individuals. So far, we’ve standardized a test to
determine the validity of one’s psychic powers, and it has been
adopted by the community leaders. It will be used to determine which
of the residents qualify to render services to the public. I think
the committee would be very impressed by your abilities.” His
closing could have been the catalyst for Mother’s anger: “Forever
your admirer, Roger A. Grasley.”

I wondered if he would
have any answers about the visitor from the bedroom wall, any insight
on how to keep it away. I never did respond to the letter and felt
Roger’s presence in town less frequently since spring. Perhaps he
gave up on me. I simply did not want to complicate things further by
playing into temptation. But now I needed his guidance, needed advice
on how to shut the gift off.

May 27, 1905

I had been driven
beyond exhaustion. Thoughts reduced to absurdities where the only
conclusion was that life was not worth living.

The man in the wall
came for me every night. He droned incessantly, pleading for
conversation. I looked away, as terrified as the first time I saw it
emerge. Sleep evaded me despite my starved state.

I could no longer
fulfill my motherly obligation to Joseph—Mother had to take care of
him. I reached a breaking point, no choice but to reach out to my
family for help. Mother had always been skeptical about spirit
manifestations and the visionaries that claim to channel them, so I
was apprehensive about going to her.

Mother had lived to see
unscrupulous sachem chiefs sell off the Seneca land, piece by piece.
These sachems would always say that they received a blessing from the
Great Spirit to go through with a large land sale, or the
implementation of an easement that would give a foreign interest
access to Seneca property. They always said it was for the benefit of
our people, but in time, when further details of business dealings
were disclosed, more often than not, the largest benefactor was the
sachem and their clan. These agreements provided little economic
compensation given to the people as a whole. Needless to say, my
Mother had always been incredulous about any communication exchanged
between man and spirit; she attributed my “gift” to an overactive
imagination, but now that overactive imagination tore apart my life.

Desperate, I told her
about the watcher in the corner.

After hearing it she
held a blank expression. “I know you have always claimed to be
sensitive to such things, since you were little . . . The stories
you’d tell. I don’t know about ghosts in the walls, but I do know
something has gotten to you.” Mother walked over to me and embraced
me. “I’ll talk to the sachem about getting a healer here. P’raps
a False Face.”

The False Face Society’s sole
purpose was to ward evil spirits away from afflicted tribe members.
They donned hand carved wooden masks and perform a ritual dance. The
members are a tight knit group that aimed to preserve the traditional
religious practices of the Seneca people. Avid believers in
Sagojowehgowa
, the
great defender spirit. I thought there was hope through a cleansing.

The next day, a woman
in her later years knocked on the door. She introduced herself as
Dancing Meadow, a healer, and visited on behalf of the False Face
Society. “It has been brought to my attention that a malign spirit
is interrupting your sleep, dear.” The woman sat at the table
gracefully. “Help me understand.”

I told her the details.

“You have recently
given birth to your son?”

I asked: “Does that
have something to do with this manifestation?”

“Not directly, but It
sounds like he is leveraging against you.” Dancing Meadow’s tone
sweetened, perhaps to honey bad news. “After a mother gives birth,
her chemistry may become imbalanced. This presents an opportunity for
malign spirits to play their games—the spirit is addressing you
directly.”

“So what now?”

“I’ll arrange the cleansing for
the weekend. It will be good to have your husband there.”

The weekend came. I
waited for Aart at the train station with Joseph. When he arrived, he
didn’t look at me, and instantly went to Joseph. I couldn’t help
to feel jealous. I told Aart about the visitor and the scheduled
cleansing. He didn’t say a word. He must have been stressed from
work. Aart had mentioned the construction company noticed that the
Seneca men were at ease working higher heights than the others, and
assigned them to the dangerous jobs. The project began to creep
behind schedule, and the foreman pushed the builders harder. The work
took on a danger of a new kind.

Aart finally broke his
silence. “My cousin, Tala, had an accident. He was working on an
upper level when some of the structure gave way. He broke his arm and
most of his ribs. There is internal bleeding. He is at the hospital
in Buffalo.”

“I’m sorry, I had
no idea—”

“It’s fine. Let’s take care of
this visitor.” He began walking towards the house leaving Joseph
and I behind.

We met them in the
road; three masked figures with affixed black hair, each dressed in
doe skin dyed tar black with bright red accents around the trim. Two
wore red masks. The taller figure’s mask had a long nose that
extended a foot from its origin and became crooked at the midpoint.
The deep-set eyes of the mask looked like twin caverns. The smaller
red mask had more subtle malformations, but its broad smile made it
the more disturbing of the two. The third figure had a female’s
frame, lithe and graceful, and she donned a black polished mask. Her
mask had ridges that resembled inner muscular latticework, but this
face was pinched and pulled into an expression of pain.

The one with the black
mask stepped forward. “Shall we begin?”

I led them inside to
the bedroom, showed the wall where the apparition is borne each
night. The crooked nosed mask wordlessly reached in his leather
satchel and produced a large stone bowl. He laid it on the ground
next to the wall. Then, each of the three healers removed small
pouches wound around the hair of their masks, and emptied the
contents into the bowl. The woman lit a wooden strip and ignited the
multicolored powder. A flash flame burst from the bowl, and acrid
smoke filled the room.

Aart jumped, startled
by the flame. He sat next to me on the bed. Neither of us knew what
to expect. The aroma from the blaze smelled of tobacco, but there was
something else that lingered: the smell of an oncoming storm. The
blue gray smoke danced, and quickly filled the confines of our
bedroom.

The black mask pulled
three turtle shell rattles from her satchel and handed them to her
partners. The False Faces shook them in unison and sporadically
shouted in the old tongue.

“Give us strength,
Sagojowehgowa
, to
close the dark passage,” The smiling mask said.

A moment of silence
passed, then the crooked nosed mask shouted: “Show yourself,
wandering spirit. It is time to rest again.”

The dancers stomped and
writhed in a singular rhythmic convulsion, which was grotesque, but
at the same time awe inspiring. Smoke migrated to the corner and
transmuted from iron grey into ribbons of bright-red. The red smoke
hung there, growing more prominent. I looked over to Aart and his
face was frozen in terror. I looked back at the wall and saw the
outline of the incongruous face inside.

The chanting and
rhythmic stomping was accompanied by a dense echo. Around the face in
the wall, the red smoke turned black. The smell of charred rotten
meat choked the air. The face shrieked in pain. Bright embers clung
to it, turning its flesh to ash. Joseph began to bawl from the
kitchen. The smoke continued to billow out of the wall and became so
thick that I could barely see Aart next to me. The halo of embers was
the only reference point. It shrunk tight into a burning orange clot,
and the visitor’s shriek seemed farther away.

One of the dancers must
have opened a window, because the smoke slowly dissipated out of the
room. The burning face was no longer visible in the wall.

The False Faces knelt
around the smoking stone dish as the contents smoldered and the flame
died. The charnel pit smell left abruptly as it came, and the simple
aroma of tobacco lingered.

After a moment of
prayer, the black mask stood. “You will rest easy tonight. With the
Defender’s grace, we have closed the visitor’s passageway.”

“I have never seen a
spirit of such magnitude before.” The smiling False Face ran his
hand over the wall where the ember had burned. “Be grateful it was
confined to the corner—”

“Most of the spirits
we encounter are lost souls of the dead.” Black mask cut in. “They
grow frustrated and assert their will on the living. But the spirit
seen in this wall was not of human origin.”

“How did it get in
here?” I asked her.

“There are thin spots
between existences all over. Sometimes they are perpetuated through
our own doing. The spirit in the wall found a vulnerability inside
this space and inside you.”

Aart snapped out of his
daze and stood up. “So what now? Will this thing come back?”

The masked woman turned
to face him. “The defender lives here now, and will keep it away.”
She turned to me “Now the spirit is gone, there is the matter of
initiation.”