“Why don’t you come down and see for yourself?” He grinned most charmingly at her.
“Maybe,” she said noncommittally. “Anything especially good?”
“Mask-wise?”
She hummed an affirmative.
“Yeah, there are some good ones.”
“Which is your favorite.”
“Elephant is pretty cool. Actually, believe it or not, my favorite is the guy with a mask of a person.”
“Mask of a person?”
“It’s porcelain, I think. Powder white. Very clever, you see, because he has a hat with attached horns. Looks like he’s the devil masquerading as a normal man.”
“That is clever,” Norrah agreed. “Is he the devil?”
“I hope not!” The boy laughed. “I don’t know him, though.”
“I thought you were all classmates. No?”
“Mostly, yes.”
The door opened and another boy stepped outside and asked the smoker if he could bum a smoke. The mouse-man offered his pack of Reds to the boy who was masked as the Phantom of the Opera. He stepped into the wash of the upstairs flood light, and looked up, startled at Norrah’s sight.
“Damn,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Me, I suppose,” she said and grinned.
“You should be down. Down here.”
“Oh yeah?” She thought she was sounding like a coquette, and couldn’t recall the last time she was flirty with anyone. “If I had a good mask I just might have taken you up on that offer,” she said regretfully. “I guess if one of you boys could masquerade as a normal man I could masquerade as a normal girl.”
“Normal man?” The Phantom of the Opera said.
“You know,” said mouse-man, “the dude with a white porcelain man-face.”
“Oh, him. Who is that guy, anyway?”
“I don’t know. We aren’t supposed to ask. That’s a rule.”
“Well I’ll let you boys go,” Norrah said. “Have fun.” She stepped away from the railing.
“Wait,” Phantom said. “Won’t you come down and have a drink? I’m buying.”
“You’re buying? Aren’t the drinks free?”
“No such thing as a free lunch, lady.”
“Ah. An economics major, huh?” She said and giggled.
“Hell no, I hate economics. But yeah I learned that in Econ 101. I brought a bottle of gin and some tonic. I got a glass with your name on it down here.”
She returned to her spot at the rail and said, “Don’t you boys have dates already? How would they take you flirting with the old maid upstairs?”
“He’s got a date,” Phantom of the Opera said, “but I don’t.” His non-masked right eye winked at her.
She laughed out loud, by the image, not his words. “We’ll see. What are your names? I’m Norrah.”
“Phantom,” Phantom said.
“Mouse,” the other said. “We can’t give our names, it’s the rule.”
“Okay, Mouse and Phantom. Maybe I’ll come down for just one drink in a few minutes.”
“Right on,” Phantom said.
She went inside and closed the door, brushed the snow out of her hair. She shivered. It was south of twenty degrees by her best guess. Hardly skirt weather, but she looked hot in it. She heard a song she recognized coming from the stereo downstairs. It was a Stone Temple Pilots song, Plush, one of her favorite songs from that band. It must have been someone else’s favorite song too because the volume was ratcheted up a good deal once it came on.
Deciding against going unmasked, she went upstairs to get the sleep mask. Then downstairs, where she got the scissors from a jar on the counter and got to work cutting eyes out of it. If asked what she was masquerading as, she’d say… well… Sleeping Beauty, of course. Maybe it was the alcohol that made her laugh so hard just then. She put the mask on, pulled her hair out from under the elastic band and draped it over.
The downstairs hatch creaked open. She looked over and saw a boy in a black tux. It was Paul, she decided, though his jester mask served well at disguising him. His strong jaw, slender torso and broad shoulders identified him well enough.
“Hey-hey, Norrah,” he said as he cleared the landing. “I hope you don’t mind if I use your restroom. Mine is occupied.”
“No problem. There’s a guest bathroom just over there,” she said and pointed to the restroom off the den.
“Thanks. I hope this doesn’t offend you, but there’s a couple in my bathroom. I think they’ll be in there for a little while, if you know what I mean.”
She smiled devilishly. “That’s fine.”
As he made his way toward the bathroom he said, “Cool, I see you got a mask going. Coming downstairs for a bit?”
“Yeah, for a quick drink. Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Not at all. But if I may make a suggestion…”
“Sure. Please,” she said eagerly.
“Put some nylons on. Wearing a skirt like that, you’ll freeze down there. Not to sound ungrateful, but the insulation down there is poor and I don’t have a heater.”
“You should make a fire.”
“I have a fire going, but it doesn’t put out much heat, and the door has been open at least half the time, from people smoking.”
“Okay, thanks for the heads up. I’ll put some nylons on.”
“I bet you’ll look hot in them,” Paul said, appraising her legs. “Not that you need them to make your legs look hot, it’s just that you have the whitest legs I’ve ever seen.”
She looked down at her legs. “Yeah, that’s for sure.”
He passed her on the way to the restroom. “You have nice legs, Norrah. Very sexy.”
She sensed that little remark could potentially change the dynamic of their tenant-landlord relationship, but decided it didn’t matter. They were ten years apart, nothing would ever happen between them.
Norrah went upstairs, got the nylons out of her top drawer and took a seat on the bed. She could still hear the music, though it was faint from up here. Stone Temple Pilots was now Viva La Vida by Coldplay, another song she enjoyed. She was singing along as she rolled the stockings up her long slender legs. Were they really that sexy? Paul seemed to think so and maybe he was right. They were firm, somewhat defined, a long line separating her quad from hamstring. Going for long walks most evenings on the steep mountain roads tended to do that. She had to admit, she was having a nice evening in spite of herself. Maybe she’d have more than a single drink downstairs. Maybe there would be a boy down there a trifle closer to thirty than twenty. One with the same broad shoulders as Paul. Two drinks will be fine, she decided. But the reality of it was she wouldn’t be having a single drink that night.
Just as she took the first step down from the third-floor landing, there was sudden screaming. Shrieking and screaming, in a register reserved for the most profound of horrors. Ear-splitting feminine screams were blood-curdling. At first it was just one or two females, but soon there were cries from a dozen or more people, boys and girls alike.
She dashed down the stairs.
There was a loud thud against a wall on the bottom floor. She moved faster, breath caught, eyes wide and frantic. She ripped away the sleep mask from her face. The hatch was closed. The screaming continued, interspersed with the unforgettable pleas of the terror-stricken.
She slipped a pair of fingers through the iron ring of the hatch and pulled, but it didn’t budge. It did budge slightly at first, but as if someone was on the other side of it and had a firm grip of the handle and strong muscles to implement his will, it seated flush an instant later.
Norrah shouted at the hatch, “Let me in! Open the door!” She pulled furiously at the iron ring to no avail.
A chill ran the length of her spine when a feminine shriek cut off, not from will but from inability, as though the life was ripped out of her with a cataclysmic blow. Norrah turned and hauled ass to the kitchen, uncradled the phone and dialed nine-one-one with tremulous fingers
. Just then Paul came out of the bathroom off the den and stared pie-eyed at Norrah. By his expression she knew he was just as thunderstruck and stupefied as was she.
“What’s happening down there!” She shouted at him.
“I…” He turned and went to the front door, unlocked it muttering, “Fuck me.” He went through the door and didn’t close it.
“What the hell is happening,” she said inwardly, in full panic-mode.
The emergency operator answered the call. The ensuing dialogue between Norrah and the operator would be played over and over again on the news for days to come. The thing about that recording is you can’t hear the screams in the background. Not that they should have been heard, because the twenty-three were downstairs with a heavily insulated ceiling separating them from Norrah, and the speaker of the phone was practically being eaten by her. That and many of the screams had already subsided by then. But still, you’d think that you’d be able to hear one or two screams at least faintly, wouldn’t you?
“Nine-one-one, please state your emergency,” the woman said apathetically.
“I need help! I need help! Please hurry!”
“Ma’am, what is—”
“Hurry! Something’s happening downstairs, I… I don’t know what! Just send help right now!”
“Calm down, ma’am, I’m sending you help right now. What is the nature of your emergency?”
“Fuck if I know! People are getting killed I think!” Norrah heard more screams come to a fatal stop and knew that she was right in saying people were getting killed. She dropped the phone on the counter and instead of checking the hatch, she went to the front door not to go around the house and help those below, but to close and lock it. She couldn’t help those downstairs, that was pretty evident. If twenty-something people couldn’t stop whatever or whoever was attacking them, how could she? She owned a handgun, an old Beretta that her father had bought her many years ago. He didn’t like the idea of his daughter living alone, especially in a neighborhood as remote as hers. He had bought it for her and gave it to her with a full magazine of bullets. She had never fired the gun but considered she might be firing it tonight. But at what? At whom?
She ran for the stairs and took them two at a time. She slid to her knees before her bed and fished around blindly, felt a shoe-box and slid it out. She pried the lid off and took hold of the gun, got up and walked into the hall with the gun pointed down before her. She noticed the screaming had stopped. Had it just stopped or had she just now noticed? She couldn’t say. There was Viva la Vida coming to an end on the stereo, and nothing more. When the song ended, a new song replaced it. In the two seconds bridging the songs was utter silence. She stopped at the top of the stairs, gun now aiming down. She had ideas, dark ones. A man or men would come up through the hatch looking for her. The gun in her hand was light-years away from being steady. She swallowed dryly. She wished the damn music would stop so she could listen.
It was the longest fifteen minutes of her life, spent between the top two steps of the stairs. She nearly cried with relief when she heard the distant sirens. When they stopped just outside her house, she descended the stairs, gun still at the ready. The hatch remained closed. She furtively made her way across the living room into the kitchen, gun pointing in the direction of her every glance. The front door tried to open, but it was locked. There was a loud knock and a “Police!”
She lowered the gun and unlocked the door, opened it. The cop was a large chubby man with a gun in hand. He stared down at the gun in Norrah’s hand, then met her eyes.
She stammered at him, tried to tell him what she all but knew, that a couple dozen people were just brutally murdered downstairs, but couldn’t get herself to say it. Perhaps he gleaned it from her wide glazed eyes, unhinged jaw, and palsy. He brushed by her, led with his gun.
“Call for m-more cops,” she said desperately as she closed the door. She hurried after the man. He began ascending the stairs.
“Not up there,” Norrah said. “Downstairs. Downstairs!”
He turned around and stopped at the hatch, stooped over and pulled the iron ring, opened the carpeted portal door with a grating of its hinges.
“Careful!” Norrah said. “Be careful!”
Norrah went to the stairs and stopped, awaited news from the cop who was now invisible below. When she heard the front door open she aimed her gun in that direction. Another cop was now inside, and that cop was myself.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, “lower your gun. What’s going on here?”
She lowered the gun. I can’t accurately enough describe how shitty Norrah looked. It was a palpable dread, the kind that only comes from witnessing death, particularly first-degree murder. I’ve seen similar looks, but none more profound than Norrah’s just then.
“I don’t know,” she said half-frenzied.
“Is that you, Davis?” Fred shouted from down below.
“Yeah!” I walked past Norrah and descended the steps into the basement. Norrah followed close at my heels.
Downstairs was kind of a studio apartment, as I had mentioned. On a dresser was a stereo that I turned off. Silence engulfed the sizeable room. There was a large bed, some night-stands, a long dresser, a small circular table with three chairs, a TV on a stand, and not much else. There were windows with drinks on the sills. Plastic cups that had alcohol in them, ice still shapely inside. The table had several cups on it, drinks ranging from full to empty, ice still shapely there as well. The place was vacant.
Fred was the first to ask the question, though I was a second away from asking the same thing. “Ma’am, what’s the emergency?”
Norrah walked to the bathroom and opened the door: empty. “What… I… I don’t understand.” She faced me and said, “I was upstairs when I heard people screaming down here. There was a party, twenty or so people here, just fifteen minutes ago. I heard things… bad things. I don’t get it… where did they go?”
Fred and I stepped out the back door together. I went back in and flipped a switch, illuminating a single low-watt light just outside the door. Norrah came out with us. There was no snow due to the patio being under the upstairs deck, but where the deck ended there was a bank of snow two feet tall, packed down in places from where Phantom of the Opera and Mouse had conversed with Norrah just recently. Fred took his Maglite out of his utility belt and shone it there. There were footsteps leading away from the house; Norrah had no idea who made them.
“Hello?” Fred said down the path the footsteps made.
“This is crazy,” Norrah said from behind me. I looked back at her. “Twenty people don’t just up and disappear.”
I gave her a skeptical look. I considered that she might be on medication or perhaps needed to be on some.
“How long since you last saw them?” I asked her.
“Like I said, fifteen minutes or so.”
Fred followed the steps in the snow. I stayed behind and looked around, went to both ends of the patio, unsure of what I was looking for. It was evident nobody was here but the three of us. It was as quiet as hell—snow has that effect.
Norrah returned inside.
Please keep in mind what I said about Norrah being an honest woman. I’ll admit I didn’t believe what she said in the ensuing moment, but I’ve come to believe she did see what she claimed to have. I truly do.
Norrah shrieked.
I hurried inside, gun holstered. I thought the need to be readily armed had come to an end, and I was right. Norrah was covering her face.
“What’s up?” I asked.
When she uncovered her face to meet eyes with me, my breath caught. It caught because this woman looked like she just saw something pretty fucking terrifying. Here is how she described it to me four days later over a cup of coffee at Starbucks:
“Jay, I’ll only tell you if you swear to God you won’t think I’m making it up. You either promise to believe me or I won’t tell you. Swear it.”
I did swear it, and I meant it. Cops
grow an intuition keener than most others. We can tell if someone is full of shit or being honest, most of the time. I suppose some people believe the bullshit stories they’re telling, making them appear credible, but this wasn’t a case of that. She was sane and she wasn’t blowing smoke up my ass.
“And don’t tell anyone else about what I’m about to say. I don’t want anyone thinking I’m nuts.”
“If it could aid in the investigation, I’m afraid I can’t promise that. I’ll do what’s best for you and those missing twenty-three, that I promise you. Tell me, Norrah, tell me what you saw.”
She took a deep breath and looked away. A tear rolled down her cheek. “When I went back inside I saw… I saw…” She shook her head and closed her eyes, displacing tears. “I can’t get myself to say it.”
I reached across the table and took her right hand between mine and squeezed. I thought it might be inappropriate, but she looked like she could use the comfort, slight as it was. And I really did want her to get this off her chest.
“Tell me, I won’t judge you,” I said. “I believe you, Norrah. I know you aren’t bullshitting me. Do you believe me when I say that?”
She nodded once. “I saw them. I saw them, Jay, I saw them. I don’t know if I saw all of them, it didn’t last long, but there were many people. And… and they were… dead.”
I grasped for understanding, squeezed her hand harder. “You saw the missing people? And they were dead? What do you mean?”
“I saw them, like they had been invisible but for a moment they weren’t. Blood everywhere, bodies everywhere. The blinds on the far window, the cord to lower and raise them… it was tied around someone’s neck. There was a man lying face-down on the bed, his back opened up; I could see his insides. I saw… a headless body in a red dress. There was a guy in a tux on the floor with his arms gone, like they were ripped out.”
“How long did this last?”
“Just a couple seconds, then they blinked away. It looked like I imagined it might look when I heard them screaming from upstairs. It… it’s like it confirmed what I knew, that those people didn’t run away, they were murdered.”
I gave her a nod and stared down at our joined hands.
“You don’t believe me, do you,” she said softly.
“I do. I honestly do.”
“How? How could you believe that? I wouldn’t even believe it if I didn’t see it for myself.”