Lowe had focused on nothing but the climb, steady and slow, and his need to kill. He was ready to tear people apart, ready to butt and kick, punch, rend.
And a man in a business suit was asking him if he was okay.
For a moment, Lowe couldn’t speak. He was tired, his lung was punctured, his ears were swimming.
The suited man’s words were dull and broken, barely audible through Lowe’s shattered ears.
Lowe’s rage, his loathing for himself, was towering. Suddenly, he was disarmed by an entirely ordinary man, who was simply voicing his concern.
Lowe tried to speak, tried to remember why he had climbed so many stairs with his blood filling him in places blood should not be.
I killed my wife, he thought.
He remembered that. Nothing else.
Lowe was shutting down. He was nearly done.
He’d killed his wife. He’d seen her blood, her bones, her viscera. He’d lain in it.
“Call the police,” he said. As he spoke, flecks of blood came from his mouth. He was standing still, his hand on the rail in the stairwell, but he stumbled and put a knee down on a riser, his other leg shaking.
Lowe’s head was down. He wasn’t looking at Harmon.
Harmon put his finger on the mask in his suit pocket.
It felt rough, eager.
Slip me on him. Now. While he’s down…
Harmon stepped forward.
“Let me help you,” said Harmon, and took the mask from his pocket.
* * *
The mask didn’t make mistakes. Harmon, though…Harmon was mortal. Like the man with the gun. Like Otaku.
People always make mistakes.
The world is full of them.
Idiocy, karma, a lucky streak.
The world is chaos. People are chaotic. You can’t, ever, know which way a man or woman will turn.
Now, said the mask.
Harmon reached. Lowe’s head was down. He was broken. He wasn’t looking.
Harmon pulled the mask over Lowe’s head.
* * *
The mask sealed itself around Lowe’s head like a plastic bag when all the air’s gone. Like cellophane around a murder victim’s face. Tight, pushing in against him, taking his soul and his person with every breath.
Lowe was broken. He couldn’t fight.
But he wasn’t Harmon.
He wasn’t a little kid, confused, malleable, like Play-Doh, Plasticene, Semtex.
Harmon never stood a chance against the mask when he was just a boy.
Lowe did.
He had something Harmon never had, something no one, in all the years the mask had skipped from man to man, been bathed in blood, had.
Lowe had Freya. He had her right there in his eye, a piece of her that he’d always carry within, and something the mask couldn’t touch, couldn’t ever take away. Lowe had power and rage, a broken heart and guilt. He had memories of pain, of beatings, of betrayal. He had endurance, superhuman strength and a touch of insanity. The mask pulsed around Lowe’s face, feeling these things, feeding on the untouchable energy of emotions within Lowe, draining him, growing stronger.
Lowe’s mind, starved of oxygen, cried out to the thing to let him go. Cried out silently, because the thing, the murderer’s mask, was in him, taking him over, and while the mask rode the man, the man did not exist.
The mask’s awful purpose slid into David Lowe’s fibers, his being, his soul, overwriting what he was and becoming more powerful than the man or mask would ever be alone.
And yet there was something it couldn’t touch. A shard within that pricked it, so sharp it couldn’t touch it for fear of unravelling and losing the battle against the monster. That shard grew larger. It grew longer.
Like a dagger, or a palisade of sharpened wooden poles. Barbed wire around a core part of the man. Something unbelievably jagged and deadly that the mask, with its memories of murder, the blood that infused it, the wicked kind of sentience and solidarity of purpose that it contained, could not break.
That shard of bone couldn’t be touched, because it wasn’t David Lowe’s. It was a rider, a passenger, a stowaway, like the mask itself.
And from a place deep within David Lowe’s mind, Freya Lowe spoke.
“No,” she said.
Her voice came from below consciousness, below subconscious. Inside the man’s soul, maybe, or even within the fluid of time itself, or the pool of souls from which all people came from. Some long plateau high above the sea, the frozen and ancient tundra. Heaven.
The mask recoiled, but only for a moment. Then, it renewed its assault.
* * *
Lowe could no longer breath, nor see anything but that which the mask showed him.
Untold murders, misery, pain. A man’s face, a hood, lowered on a murderer’s head. The noose, cinched tight and the agony, sudden, of a broken neck. A child taking a sackcloth hood from a condemned man’s purple and crooked face. The child’s glee as he chased his friends through mud-filled streets, the child’s horror when he removed the mask and found his sister dead beneath his hands, the child’s father, speaking to the mask, asking it why, why, why, while he choked his own son dead and then his wife and the mask passed on, through the ages…through hands, through blood.
Always, though, the mask chose. Not the monkey beneath. Not the killer it used up. They had no choice, no free will. Nothing left of themselves from the moment it wore them.
David Lowe understood this simple fact as a catalogue of horrors unfolded before him, their sights, sounds.
The sound of a gunshot, the smell of gunpowder. The feel of a heavy axe, a knife, the warmth of blood flowing freely.
These things and more…always more. Years, maybe more than a century, of murder remembered by a simple cloth hood worn once by a man condemned to hang, infused, perhaps, with his last vindictive breath, maybe something else even before the act. Lowe didn’t know. Didn’t care.
The people it wore were victims, too. They were not responsible.
You’re not responsible, said the mask within Lowe’s mind. You don’t own this. Kill the man. Harmon. Kill him. Kill him.
He was fucking your wife.
Inside Lowe’s mind, Lowe’s father sat at the edge of the child Lowe’s bed.
Tucked away his strap, and kept his fists on his lap.
“You don’t own this, son,” said his father. “It was just an accident. You’re just a kid. Don’t sweat it, son. All right?”
David Lowe didn’t cry, but something inside broke down. He didn’t own it. It wasn’t his fault. It was the mask. The mask rode him. Anything, anything at all, from here on out, it would be the mask. Not him.
The mask was old. Very old. Worn by murderers and victims, it had seen many ages of man, and the depravity and horror that came with it. It knew despair. It was sly. It was winning Lowe’s mind, and with it, his body would follow…
But it knew nothing of love in straight lines. It only knew love that twisted.
It did not know Freya.
* * *
Freya. A woman who took a wrong turn, and stood, watching a man full of passion and rage and fire.
Freya, a younger woman, standing in an iron church.
A monster of a man, dedicated. Setting himself as he rose up. Took the weight down. Beat it, again. Time and time again.
She watched, she knew his passion and she wanted it.
And from within the mask, David Lowe finally saw himself not through his eyes, nor through the mask’s skewed vision of humanity. He saw himself as Freya had seen him.
It didn’t take away the pain.
It sharpened it. It perfected it.
* * *
Lowe tore at the thing on his face.
As the giant tore it loose, skin and hair came too.
With a roar, something prehistoric, he tore the mask in two.
Maggots squirmed, straw came loose and tumbled from the hessian sack.
The blood of a thousand murdered
women and men and children ran from the sack down the hard stone of the stairs in a flood and in the torrent, Lowe screamed and shouted out his agony, his rage, like some kind of monster in a cage…breaking it down.
XVI. Owned
Harmon was pale, horrified, and finally free for the first time since he’d been a five-year-old, thrust into a life that belonged not to him, but the will of a hanged man’s cloth sack.
His legs simply buckled beneath him, like an empty sack himself. He didn’t even get his hands out to break his fall. He didn’t need to, because Lowe caught him.
Then picked him up, one massive hand halfway round Harmon’s throat, and held him dangling above the stairwell.
* * *
David’s arm hurt, and he figured something was broken somewhere in his back. He didn’t care. He wanted to drop the man.
He’d seen through the mask. Seen it in its many guises.
This man had spoken to the mask while he dined with Freya. Considered murdering her. Considered murdering him.
This man, this piteous man hanging from his fist. He was nothing. He owned the mask, the mask owned him…it did not matter.
He needed to die.
Lowe looked at his huge, heavy hand. Felt the strength there, choking the man in the suit while he held him above a drop that would kill the man without any doubt and leave little behind.
I’ve got my father’s hands, he thought. They look just like his.
You own this, his father told him. A man’s responsible for his own actions.
But who judges? thought David.
His hand was steady. His shoulder, burning.
Who’s responsible? Where does it end? Where?
Had his father made him? Had Freya, or all the people he’d met along the way? His God, a god implacable and made of iron?
If he was responsible, not his father, if he really owned his own actions…should he be the one to die, not this thin, clean man?
The mask was dead, gone. If this man needed to die, then so, too, did David Lowe.
He understood this, somewhere deep inside.
I killed my wife. Not the man with the gun. Not Otaku. Not this monkey in a suit.
I killed her. Not my father. Me.
If he dropped the man, telling him he owned it, would he be any more or any less a murderer himself?
He owned it. He was responsible for Freya’s death…her murder. His rage, his jealously, his insecurity, had blown her to pieces as surely as though he’d set the bomb himself.
David owned his faults, his blame. He was the man responsible.
But this man? The man the mask wore for so long?
David looked into the man’s fluttering eyes, into his darkening, purpling face.
What do you think you’re going to see there, David?
Freya. Freya would know what to do. Would’ve known what to do.
David?
David didn’t know, and that was good enough.
* * *
David Lowe dumped the man named Harmon at his feet.
He looked at the back of the man’s head. He could crush the man, throw him down the stairwell, choke him.
David Lowe looked at the sackcloth mask, inert, torn, on the stairs. Looked at the torrent of blood running down those stairs.
“I was five,” said the gasping man on the concrete.
David shook his head, though the man, staring down at the blood-soaked concrete, would not be able to see.
“I’m not a judge,” said David Lowe. “Not yours. Not mine.”
He wanted to sit, now his rage was spent. He hurt all over. Might, he figured, even be dying. He wasn’t sure.
He wasn’t even sure he cared.
The man said something, muffled through David’s ears and the man’s own sobbing.
David didn’t hear, didn’t care.
All he cared about was coming right up the stairs toward him. The police. Someone to judge, someone to take all this away, to make things clear again.
He held up his hands as the policemen ran up the blood-soaked stairs.
XVII. Bone Eye
David Lowe was carried down the long stairs by four men. He was unconscious before he reached the bottom, and didn’t wake until six days later, chained to the bars in a hospital bed with thin steel. He could have broken the steel, or the bar.
But why bother?
He turned his head sideways, relishing the minor pain it caused in his neck as the damaged bones grated. He looked at the man in the bed beside him, broken, like him. Then he closed his eyes and went to sleep again.
* * *
He woke in the night, aware of the need to get to the toilet. He looked around and saw a policeman sitting in the low light at the end of the ward, reading a magazine.
He was in a hospital. Anything more than that, Lowe didn’t care.
Lowe guessed they hadn’t figured his part in the massacre at the hotel, or his role in the bloody mess of his wife. If they had, the policeman wouldn’t be reading a magazine twenty feet away, and Lowe wouldn’t be in a general ward.
He didn’t want to talk though. Not yet.
* * *
Two days later, a policeman took his statement.
Lowe told them everything he could. He didn’t tell them anything they’d find hard to believe.
“The other man…Mr. Harmon…he said…” The policeman coughed, like he was embarrassed. Lowe didn’t know what he was embarrassed about. Lowe was a killer. They could do anything they wanted to him. He was done fighting.
He’d been polite, as detailed as he could be. But he wouldn’t go into a mental hospital. He’d serve his time right. Pay his debts as best he could, though he knew his slate would never be clean.
“I barely spoke to the other man,” said Lowe, honestly enough. “Don’t really know who he was, or what he did…”
“He was…well…never mind that. He said he had a mask. Like a sack. Said lots of crazy things. Said you’d know…”
The policeman wasn’t, like David expected, hostile in the slightest. It was just like having a chat, really. Like chatting with the executioner, while the man smiled and placed a sackcloth mask and a noose around your neck.
“Any last words?” he’d say, and you’d damn yourself, and a door would open beneath your feet.
But David hoped it would. He wanted nothing more than to go to jail, spend his life alone. He deserved misery. He deserved the pain, both physical and mental, that he felt right now.
But he wouldn’t take the easy way out.
“Don’t know anything about a mask,” said Lowe, shaking his head a little.
The policeman nodded, like it was what he wanted to hear. Happy enough, he turned off the tape recorder, a small handheld thing, and his partner, silent throughout, flipped her notebook closed.
* * *
A while before David was removed to a holding cell to wait on a trial, a doctor stood beside his bed. The doctor looked uncomfortable, even though David was chained. A policeman, a thickset man with a shaved head, stood at the foot of David Lowe’s bed.
“Mr. Lowe…it’s against my better judgement, to discharge you. You’ve sustained massive injuries…”
“I’m discharging myself into police custody, Doctor. You, the hospital, you’ve done everything you can. I’m ready to go to jail now.”
“Mr. Lowe, if we don’t operate on the bone fragment above your right eye, it could shift. I can’t…Mr. Lowe, I’m not sure you understand the gravity of—”
“I might die?”
“Simply put? Yes. If it shifts, if it enters the brain, it could rupture the membrane, cause the cerebrospinal fluid surrounding your brain to…leak. You’re already blind in the eye, but any further damage, with the shard’s placement inside the cavity…it could cause swelling on the brain, strokes. Death, even. Yes.”
“Good,” said David, and nodded to the policeman. “I’m ready to go.”
* * *
When David left the hospital,
his chest was covered in thick bandages. A rib was broken, another chipped. His scapula, fractured. Numerous burns, contusions. Thick bandages around his torn hands, a large, new scar on his chest where the surgeons had removed seven small fragments of a bullet. Stitches, too, which felt tight and itched.
Mostly bald, scarred badly, burned skin raised and tender. Partially deaf, half blind.
He was a wreck of a man, but he walked tall all the way. He didn’t ask for help, or pain medication. He sat calmly, alone, in his holding cell, and waited for the trial.
XVIII. The Death Sentence
The cell changed, and the wait was long. The trial, in the end, was nearly a year coming, and a further three months of deliberation.
Harmon wasn’t present.
After psychiatric investigation, Harmon was remanded to a secure mental facility to await his own trial. He didn’t make it that far.
He obtained a lighter on the pretense of being a smoker, which was allowed in one common room.
The man, a nurse, loaned Harmon his lighter. The nurse was busy, had many duties, and forgot all about his lighter until the fire alarm sounded throughout the facility. He remembered then, and many nights afterward.
Harmon went to the laundry room—it was a secure facility, but the residents, the prisoners, the patients, were often allowed to roam within the confines of the building, if not outside. Harmon, it seemed, despite his insistence that he was responsible for killing untold people at the behest of a sackcloth mask, was largely harmless. His claims had no basis in fact.
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