The next morning, the fly’s shape was visible in the parchment-thin skin of the new eyelid, like an insect imbedded in amber. She suffered a nervous tic in that eye all day, fighting against the impulse to rub! rub! Afraid it would be ground forever into her pupil.
On her dressing table were the two masks she always kept there. One was of her sister, Vedette. The other was Reine, her mother. She stared at them every morning. Even when she woke up beautiful, she would gaze at these likenesses and know they were more perfect. And when she was hideous, as she was this morning…
She never wore these masks. They were icons. They were maps of dead goddesses. They were constant reminders.
She stood under the needling spray, soaping herself over and over, and ignored the wisps of bodies on the other side of the frosted shower doors. She pulled her damp hair into a bun, glimpsed a flash of white out of the corner of one skewed eye. There was a whiff of familiar perfume in the hall.
Tombi sighed, mentally ticking off the pandemonium of visages as she first fed Karloff his can of meat, had her own breakfast of toast and an orange, then set to work. She didn’t have a job beyond home. She couldn’t drive a car because she couldn’t get a driver’s license without a reliable face for I.D. She was never able to do theatrical special effects, being unwilling to go to a studio in her condition. But she still made masks and had a thriving mail order business. She had her own website. There were plenty of orders to fill from her on-line catalog.
It was a grim fact that most of the masks people wanted were of horrors. She often even took inspiration from some of her own worst days, pulling from that personal bible of skinless psyche as the late and unlamented Dr. Wymath would have named it. And these were sometimes—and in certain seasons—among her best-sellers for those who wanted something other than the usual vampire, ghoul or shapeshifter. But she did them of famous people, too. Celebrities were popular.
Beauty was always popular.
Presently she was working on a most curious piece for a client who had contacted the website. Interesting, since his given address was in her city—and only about a mile and a half from her house. He’d described what he wanted and asked if she could make it. She’d said yes. It was a full mask which would fit snugly over the head and around the neck, zippers in the back and on both sides to render it easier to get on—considering the unusual nature of its design. She was fussing with it, trying to apply the finishing touches, the little twists here and pats with paint there, trimming bits of extra latex off from around the eyeholes and lips.
A large truck rumbled down the road. Semis weren’t really supposed to come down this residential street, it having been designed only to take the weight of ordinary neighborhood traffic. There were signs posted at the corners showing a big truck silhouette with a diagonal slash through it. But they did it frequently enough as a short cut to the highway near the campus.
Karloff jumped into the big front window to watch. The earth shook with the vibration from the eighteen wheeler. This always caused the wires in the next room to bang together softly, creating an illusion of thunder through wind chimes. That was the biggest room, where she kept all her discards, the Mondays through the Sundays, Januaries through Decembers. Some seven thousand plus of them for twenty years worth. Each was slipped onto a specially designed, padded hanger, ends carefully threaded through the vacant eye holes. They hung together like a vast, disembodied family, strung on aisle after aisle of rack. The truck on the roadway caused the house’s foundation to tremble slightly and the hangers thrummed like plucked harps, murmurs exiting phantom thresholds of longing. It had somehow never surprised Tombi that they didn’t decompose, although the skins did shrivel a bit from losing some of their natural moisture. They just became smaller, as if designed to fit that glass baby mask, if she hadn’t broken it all those years ago.
It had once been two separate rooms but ten years ago Tombi had realized she needed a larger storage space for them. Someone had left a flyer on her front door—advertising remodeling work— and she’d phoned the man to hire him. It had made her very anxious, wondering how she’d explain that the person he would be seeing every day at this house never looked the same way twice?
On the day the work was to commence, Tombi greeted him and showed him the two rooms.
“Basically you want the wall knocked down between them to expand to a single room,” he said.
She wasn’t really at her personal best that day, wearing big sunglasses over what had developed into goggle eyes overnight. She was afraid he would turn out to be some kid—they were always more critical, weren’t they? But he was about thirty, deeply tanned, his hair cut short and bleached, wearing a full beard. He respectfully didn’t look at her twice, but showed only interest in what the job was to be.
“I’ll be here today,” Tombi opened, “but I often have students coming in to work on my masks.”
She chuckled self-consciously and added, “Like the old masters. Rembrandt, for example. Much of his painting was done by his students.”
The contractor nodded. “Yeah, okay.”
“So it will probably be somebody new here every day,” she explained.
“No problem. I’m not here to get under anybody’s artistic feet. Just to put your two rooms together.”
She remembered the last day he worked. Tombi was also finishing up a project, a special mask of actor Al Pacino that someone had requested for a party that night. She’d been working on it for over a week just to get the full head of dark hair on it right.
The television was on, cable news reporting that a leper colony in the Amazon jungle had been been discovered everyone dead, patients and staff alike. Considering how the bodies had been mutilated, it was suggested that one of the more aggressive tribes may had attacked. It had been several days and in the rain forest’s sweltering heat the corpses had been decomposing swiftly. Yet the doctor who examined them thought the wounds might have been done by an animal. But there were too many of them. How could one animal have gone through an entire hospital?
Listening, Tombi had turned to see if there was some fragment of horror that she could use for her work. Using an X-acto knife to smooth away a tiny flaw on the mask, the blade slipped, deeply slicing her palm.
“Shit,” she muttered, dropping the knife. “Anywhere but the hands, please!”
Any artist needed their hands, above everything else. What would she do if it didn’t heal right? If it infected? No box of Band-Aids would be enough to patch this. She was going to need stitches.
She heard the sound of the hammer falling beyond the door. She had no car to take herself to the hospital. And Tombi would be damned if she’d summon an ambulance for a cut hand, no matter how many stitches were required.
She wrapped a rag around the hand and stuffed the mask into one of the huge front pockets on her smock. She left her studio and approached the contractor. She cleared her throat meekly as she came up behind him.
He swung around, startled, gloved hands up in the air.
“What happened to you, Miss?” he asked, seeing the rag turning red.
She smiled, thanking her lucky stars this was a day she happened to be reasonably pretty. Should she bat her lashes, open the eyes wider, pout? What?
“I’m afraid I’ve just given myself a rather nasty cut. I hate to ask because I know you have work to do, but do you think you could take me to the Emergency Room?”
“Sure!”
He put a work-gloved hand under her arm to give her support, helping her into his pickup truck. Then he raced across town to get her there, tires squealing. She was afraid the police would stop them, he was driving so fast.
Once there, he helped her out, as if she were pregnant and popping. He guided her inside, got her a seat in the waiting room, then went up to the desk explain what had happened.
“They say they’re pretty busy so it’ll be a little while. Is that okay? Are you dizzy or anything? They gave me this clean towel to wrap your h
and in for the meantime. I’m sorry you’ve got to wait,” he said.
He unwrapped the bloodied rag and discarded it, tenderly wrapping the clean cloth around the cut. Tombi sighed and settled back.
“Want a magazine?” he offered.
“No thanks,” she replied.
“Glass of water? Coffee if I can find it?”
“No. I’m okay.”
It was the last day of October and several of the children were dressed up. There was a boy dressed as Zorro who had a screw through his hand. A girl with a bloody nose was costumed as some mutant alien. Another girl had fingers curled into her lap, three of them having had the nails yanked partway off, hanging like pieces of cherry pie crust. She was done up as some generic bloodsucker. It was obvious they had cried some earlier. But they must have become resigned to waiting because now they were chatting to each other about the coming night’s festivities.
There was a second boy sitting by himself in a corner, his hairless head bowed. His face was a mass of burn scars. His mother had brought him in but then had disappeared into the ladies room. It wasn’t clear which of them, parent or child, was there needing to see a doctor. The boy’s burns weren’t new.
Then he sneezed, sniffling, and Tombi guessed he was probably at the E.R. with a bug. The sneeze made Zorro look across the room at him for the first time.
He shouted, “Hey! Great costume, Frankenstein!”
At first Tombi thought he was being mean. She was so angry she wanted to go slap him. But the kid’s open, friendly expression indicated that he really believed the other boy was simply wearing a mask. After all, it was Halloween.
The burned boy cringed, wanting to fade back into the wall. Tombi felt a pang of sorrow for him. At least when she was grotesque, it only lasted a day, with the promise of beauty or at least anonymity on the day after.
Tombi went over and sat beside him. She asked, “Can you say trick or treat?”
He tilted his head and stammered, “ T-t-trick or t-t-treat.”
She reached her uninjured hand into the pocket of the smock and brought out the mask. It had seemed strange to her on the drive to the E.R. that she’d put it into her smock at all, instead of leaving it on the work table. But she wasn’t one to question why things happened, hadn’t done that in a long time.
“This is for you,” she told him.
He examined it, recognizing the features of the man who was at turns in the movies either a godfather or a hero.
“Cooooooooool,” the burned boy whispered and slipped it on. He put his hand up to touch the smooth latex, to ruffle the full head of black hair.
“Wow. Lookit…” the other three children murmured. “That really looks like Pacino.”
Tombi glanced over at the contractor. He was trying to pretend he hadn’t been watching this. As she’d looked his way, he quickly brought a magazine up across his face. But she’d seen the sympathy in his eyes for the burned kid.
Wow, and…tears?
She thought, What a shame I’m not going to get to know this man. There’s something about him I find very appealing. But I can’t. I mustn’t get close to anyone.
The burned boy lowered his voice to a rasp and said, “You broke my heart, Fredo.”
“Blood of my blood,” Tombi said softly.
Then she realized it might have been a mistake to give the mask to this boy. Eventually he would have to remove it, owning up to the grim reality beneath. It would hurt him, as it did Tombi every time she shed a favorite visage. Only it would hurt him much more.
As if reading her mind somehow, he told her, “I’m never going to take it off. I hate the way I look. This is the last face I want to have.”
Tombi sighed, thinking sadly, I hope not, darling. The last face is always death.
««—»»
Tombi lightly touched her fingertips to the outermost layer of the design for this special customer. She gingerly gestured around it, as if measuring mentally, as if sizing up a bizarre coiffure she was afraid to mess up with too much direct attention.
She’d had some unusual orders in her career. Like the woman who wanted a thick porcelain mask, completely etched in sigils from “The Lesser Key Of Solomon”, the letters and numericals daubed in as-pure-as-possible gold leaf. Tombi had needed to fire the thing seven times to get it right because it kept shattering in the kiln. And the woman had paid a phenomenal sum. Tombi had asked no questions and stayed indoors with all the shades drawn and curtains shut tight during the next equinox when there was, coincidentally, a full lunar eclipse.
And there had been the fellow who ordered the full head mask with the enormous erect phallus studded with stiff boar’s hair bristles (placed in the forehead’s center) and the rest beneath fashioned as buttocks, the anus at mouth ground zero.
She couldn’t help but wonder, of course, why anyone would request this arrangement she was just finishing. The face depicted a screaming man, eyes bulging, lips stretched rictal. No big deal. Except that the entire head was then wrapped in genuine barbed wire, the wire attached at one heavily padded spot at the back of the head and then intricately surrounding the rest in about a dozen loops at a hair trigger’s half-inch from contact with the latex. This placed the head as the center in a solar system of impending pain.
Was this a catharsis or communion for the customer? And was it his innermost psyche after all the onion layers of complication had been peeled away—glimpsed in what murky reflecting image out of a dream? Or was it the outermost covering, glazed into unbreakable hardness after every nightmare artifice and imitation of self had been explored and cast aside?
It made her tingle to consider she was meet this person today. One very screwed-up individual, not so different from herself perhaps. It was, surely, an involuntary reflex in search of suitable effigy, caught in a gulag of unreliable familiarity. I think (I am hideous), but therefore am I? Descartes without the self-esteem.
The television was on. She almost always had the TV on. It wasn’t that she enjoyed the endless nonsense, the maudlin delirium of soap operas and talk shows and sitcoms. It was the faces which gave her inspiration for drama and comedy.
It was the sound of human voices to someone who almost never left the walls of this house.
(She sometimes heard a voice, of course. Whispering against her ear when she was less than fully conscious. “Tombi? Look…”)
She preferred the cable news to anything else. Horrible things were depicted there every day. And horror was the largest percentage of her business.
Right now there was a report about a murders down in Mexico. A cult of crazies who called themselves the New Aztecs. Tourists had been disappearing. The American Embassy had protested. Bodies were being dug out of mass graves.
One of the prisoners was interviewed briefly. “We mostly used flint knives. But we had a priest who became a jaguar god and used his claws.”
Eyes round, dark, stoned.
There was a knock at the door. The delivery man for HUGO’S ART SUPPLIES had arrived, as scheduled, bring Tombi her weekly list. This same guy had been driving the truck for the last six months—ever since the previous driver was a victim of a messy hit and run in front of his own house.
“Hi.” He grinned boyishly, shyly, as she opened the door.
The cat rubbed against his shins and he bent to massage the cat’s back.
“Well, Karloff seems to be adjusting nicely, isn’t he?” the deliveryman said.
Tombi smiled back at the fortyish man, hardly a hint of a gut for his age, gray-haired, face creased from having spent a lot of time in the sun, no doubt. The tag sewn into his uniform read GEORGE WHEEL, but she never called him by name. He was the closest thing she had to a friend—being someone she saw on a semi-regular basis. And he never had that squint in his eyes, like he was managing not to stare at her face.
Hell, he knew she was the owner and craftsperson for FALL OF NIGHT MASKS. Tombeedelanuit.com. He probably just assumed she was wearing one of her own
designs every time he saw her.
“Yes, poor baby never shakes his head anymore, trying to get it off,” Tombi replied.
George had been there, delivering supplies, the day the starving stray cat came to the door. Its face had been badly cut but was partially healed. Part of the scalp and flesh down across the nose and jaw on the right side had been torn away, leaving a very tender area. When it saw Tombi it cringed, as if expecting to be chased away (you ugly thing!). Apparently even animals knew when they were horrible. It had shivered and started to run away.
“Oh, sweetheart, come here to Mama.” She’d cooed and cajoled, getting it to come inside. She’d made the cat a special cat mask which kept insects from tormenting the deeper places and prevented dust and acid rain from stinging. She’d given it a home.
George made a point a showing Karloff kindness every time he visited, bringing cat treats stuffed in his pockets, or some insignificant fluff-toy. Karloff liked to have the fur along his backbone ruffled by the leather on the man’s work gloves.
Tombi just continued with the mask, not uncomfortable around George. Even as ugly as she was today, she’d learned—like the cat—not to be afraid of this man.
There was a flash of white just to her left, pale as a long skirt. A little breeze slightly moved her hair at the ear on that side.
(Tombi? Look, look…)
She packed the mask into a box, careful not to snarl the wire, then put on a parka with a hood she could pull low over her face. She had to walk to the client’s house to deliver the assignment—cabbies showing a real reluctance to come to this address since the word got around that the fare here was often monstrous. She dreaded the trip. She knew she might wear one of her own masks, something pretty, so that most people wouldn’t notice so much. But the truth persisted that—even as lifelike as her work was—it remained evident upon even casual inspection that it was a mask. Those immaculate Mission Impossible creations were not the reality.
Guises Page 32
