Masked

by Lou Anders

  “I thought you despised this translation,” Charlotte said, without looking up from the pages.

  “I do,” I answered, draping my suitcoat over a chair and coming to stand beside her. “But I knew you’d love the Xenophon Brade illustrations. Besides, once you take it home I won’t have to look at Lovelock’s execrable translation anymore, so it hardly matters.”

  Snapping the book shut, Charlotte looked up at me with eyes widening. “This is for me ? But, Alter, it must have cost a fortune.”

  Charlotte is the only person who calls me Alter. But then, she’s one of only two people still living who know that it was Alistair Micjah “Cager” Freeman who died in the Yucatan back in ’25 and not his former squadmate and traveling companion, Alter Friedman. But then, “Alter” wasn’t my name either, not really. My parents had already lost two previous babies when I was born on the ship en route from Romania, with my sister Mindel being their only child to survive to that point. I was sickly and small, and my mother insisted that my given name never be spoken aloud for fear that it would alert the nit-gute to my presence. Instead, they’d call me Alter, as if calling me “old man” would foil whatever plans the malekhamoves had for me. How surprised my mother would have been to learn that her little baby had grown up to be the Angel of Death himself, in a sense.

  “It wasn’t cheap,” I answered, putting my arm around her shoulders, “but my girl is worth it.”

  Charlotte leapt to her feet and planted a kiss on my lips, and then spun away with a laugh. “Wait right here, I’ve got something for you, too.”

  “What, did Mother McKee knit me another pair of socks?”

  She came back with a oversized portfolio in hand and slugged me playfully in the shoulder. “You should be so lucky. It took Ma years to knit that last pair.”

  Untying the stays on the portfolio, Charlotte slid onto the table’s surface a canvas mounted on wooden stretchers, twenty-two inches by thirty, and covered in oils.

  “It’s the cover for The Hydra Falls,” she said, eyes searching my expression for approval. “What do you think?”

  The painting depicts the Wraith on a rooftop with a crescent moon high overhead, muzzle flare lighting up the barrels of both Colt .45s as he fires on a massive nine-headed dragon that is rearing up over the skyline of Recondito.

  “It’s perfect, Red.” And it was… even though the real Mr. Hydra stood no taller than six foot three and looked more like George Raft than St. George’s Dragon. But the reading public didn’t need to know the reality. What mattered to them was the illusion. “And I know that Julie will be glad to have it. Another day and he was going to have to run a stock image, instead.”

  “Oh, phooey,” Charlotte said, waving a hand dismissively. “Bernhardt can go hang. I told him I’d finish it when I was away, didn’t I?”

  I wasn’t in any mood to argue about our mutual editor, and let the matter lie, ending the discussion with another kiss.

  As Charlotte carefully repackaged the painting, I poured us a pair of coffees. Do any of the faithful readers of The Wraith Magazine suspect that the “Chas. A. McKee” who provides the macabre and otherworldly covers and illustrations for the magazine is “Charlotte McKee”? Would they enjoy her work any less if they did?

  But if they don’t suspect that the illustrator is a Vassar grad and a knockout, they don’t even dream that the Wraith of the stories might be anything other than a nameless spirit of vengeance, or that there is a living man behind that skull of silver steel.

  “I made dinner reservations at that place in Little Canton,” I called from the kitchen, and Charlotte replied with a short yelp of delight. Never come between a woman and her dumplings, I have found.

  I glanced at a recent issue of The Wraith lying on the side table, showing my silver-skulled alter ego in close combat with a brace of demons. Like so many of the other paintings Charlotte had done over the years, this one was drawn from life. She was one of those rare people born with the Sight, able to peer beyond the everyday and see the things that lurk unnoticed in the shadows. That’s what brought us together in the first place, years ago, and it’s what makes her perfect to illustrate my stories. Even when she exercises a bit of artistic license, as when she imagines Jacob Hydra as an oversized dragon, she draws on her own experiences with invaders from the Otherworld as a model.

  “I missed you, Red,” I told her as I carried the coffees from the kitchen. She’d only been gone a week, and it had felt like an eternity.

  “Come here,” she said, taking the cups and setting them on the table next to the book and portfolio, careful not to spill. Then, with the coffee safely out of the way, she grabbed hold of my shirt front and pulled me close, her breath hot on my neck. “ Here’s what you missed, I’ll bet.”

  I’ll draw a curtain across the remainder of the day, but suffice it to say that the coffee cooled untouched on the table, and we never did make it to the restaurant for dinner.

  Charlotte’s asleep now across my bed, and her slight snores are like music to me—will we ever give up the pretense and move her out of her apartment altogether? The moon is rising over the city, and Don Mateo is waiting for me at the crypt. I’ll let her sleep. Perhaps tomorrow she and I can discuss our future together for once, instead of always fleeing headlong from our pasts.

  “You’ve worked your employees to their deaths,” hissed THE WRAITH, looming over the factory owner who quavered in flickering firelight. The ring of salt the masked avenger had cast on the floor would keep at bay any of the villain’s unearthly minions who had not already been driven beyond reality’s veil by the flames, leaving their corpulent master defenseless. Black-gloved hands reached out in claws toward the wretch’s plump neck. “Now you shall sample a taste of their pain…”

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1942.

  Don Mateo and I found another frozen victim last night, a woman of middle age, this time closer to home at the boundary between the Oceanview and the Ross Village. But we weren’t rewarded with another glimpse of the cold demon itself. Five victims so far, at least, and we’re no closer to driving the fiend back to the Otherworld.

  I slept little after returning home, but well, wrapped in Charlotte’s arms, and dozed long after she’d risen in the morning to go deliver the cover painting to Julie. When I finally came to full wakefulness, I remembered that I owed him a delivery, too, and, dressing quickly, set out with the latest Wraith manuscript bound up in brown twine under my arm.

  Julius Bernhardt looked like a cartoon sitting across the desk, chewing on an unlit cigar with his shirtsleeves rolled up over hairy forearms, already sweating despite the cool November morning. He thumbed through the top few pages of the manuscript, his bushy brows knitted.

  “It’s another winner, Freeman,” he said, slamming his open palm down on the stack of paper. “As soon as that dizzy girlfriend of yours comes through with the next cover, we’re set to go. God forbid we have another delay.”

  I failed to mention that my “dizzy” girl hadn’t missed a deadline yet, and that the only delays in The Wraith ’s publication schedule in years had been when Julie had mismanaged the accounts and left us without the funds to cover the printing costs. If I hadn’t stepped in and become a silent partner, Bernhardt would probably have given up shares of the company to the printer and distributor to cover the debts, and the outfit would have ended up a “captive publisher,” never able to earn its way out.

  There’s hardly enough Xibalba silver left to cast bullets these days, though, so I won’t be investing in any new publishing schemes anytime soon—not that Julie ever guessed where my funds came from. He’s always taken at face value that I’m the heir to the Freeman fortune—and that there is a Freeman fortune left to speak of, come to that. When I met Cager, he scarcely had a pot to piss in. The scion of the Freemans, son of one of the oldest and most well-established families in Recondito society, he’d been as dirt poor as me. But while my family never had any fortune to lose, Cager Freeman’s fortune i
n shipping and mining concerns had all been lost after the Guildhall had ruined his father’s name and seized his family assets.

  “But there’s just one thing,” Julie said, pulling the soggy stogie from his mouth and gesturing punctuation in the air. “Do you have to keep writing stories with crooked cops and politicians as the black hats? Can’t you truck out everyday gangsters now and again?”

  In the trenches of France, Cager had confided to me the strange truth about his father’s death, and the unearthly creatures he’d glimpsed that night. It was only later that we made the connection and realized that a secret cabal in Recondito was in league with dark powers, but of course by then it was all too late. Too late for Cager and his family, at least, but not too late for vengeance. That was half the reason I came to Recondito, and my motivation for taking my friend’s identity, to knock the Guildhall off their pins with the thought that the son of their rival had returned from exile to haunt them. The fact that the Guildhall was mixed up in so much of the Otherworldly incursion in the city, in one way or another, just meant that my sacred mission as a daykeeper of Xibalba and my quest to avenge the Freeman family could march together hand-in-hand.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I told Julie, lying through my smile.

  Pass up the chance to cast as fictional villains the kind of fiends who are really behind so much of the city’s evil? Not on your life.

  Promising to turn in the next Wraith novel in a fortnight, and not a moment later, I left Julie’s office and headed up to Little Canton to meet Charlotte for lunch. The dumplings were every bit as good as she’d promised. Leaving the restaurant, we ambled back through the city in no particular hurry rather than hailing a cab: stopping in at the antiquarian bookstore in the Ross Village to rummage for treasures; getting ice cream at the soda fountain in the drugstore on Odessa Avenue, ignoring the youngsters flapping their garishly colored comic books at one another while arguing the relative merits of one tights-wearing buffoon over another. The newsstands are filled with such poorly written and wretchedly illustrated tripe, crowding out the respectable pulps, and seeing the crude cover illustration of a figure in hood and tights swinging on a rope high over a skyline—and swinging from what ?—I couldn’t help but be reminded of my copycat.

  But all in all it was a lazy Monday afternoon and a perfect stroll, marred only by a scuffle we encountered outside the bars on Hauser, a fight having broken out between zoot-suiters and a group of servicemen on leave. Charlotte gripped my arm, whispering that I shouldn’t get involved, but the police had already arrived to arrest the pachucos, so there wasn’t any reason for me to interfere. For a stretch of a few blocks, with the soldiers and policemen out in full force, rounding up the delinquents, it felt for a moment like Recondito was a city under siege, invaded by outside forces. And considering the demons and the zoot-suiters, I suppose it is, in a way.

  When we got back to my place, Charlotte couldn’t stay, having plans to meet her girlfriends for bridge this afternoon. I’m alone for the moment, the sunlight streaming in through the open window. It’s days like this when I wish that my life was simply a daydream, and that I was no more and no less than what I pretend to be. A lazy afternoon of dumplings and bookstores and ice-cream sundaes with a pretty girl on my arm? Who wouldn’t want that life?

  Later.

  It’s late night—or perhaps already early morning—and I’ve barely the strength to lift my pen, but I feel it necessary to record my thoughts on the evening’s events while they’re still fresh in my mind.

  I have been wrong about so many things.

  The cemetery was crowded with families concluding the Dia de los Muertos celebrations, and I was forced to Send distractions into the minds of more than a few to cover my approach to the crypt. No one took any notice of the hearse as Don Mateo steered out of the garage and onto the thoroughfare, though I sat back in the shadows of the passenger seat and tilted down the brim of my slouch hat to conceal the glinting silver of my mask.

  Down on Bayfront Drive, Don Mateo noticed the metallic taste and buzzing sound of a demon incarnating before my Sight even caught a glimpse, the foul impression left on mundane senses when a tiny portion of the Otherworld’s alien physics intrudes on our world. As I shadowed out of the moving hearse, one hand filled with salt crystals and the other with a loaded .45, I thought for certain that we’d located the elusive cold demon at last. But the creature I found on the dock was only a minor shade, a mindless moving patch of darkness, nothing at all like the demon I’d briefly glimpsed on Saturday night.

  I pinned the shade in a ring of salt, the bare handful I carried more than enough for the task. And though Don Mateo had the acetylene torch ready in the hearse, the flame of my Zippo lighter was sufficient to drive the creature back to the Otherworld.

  There was no chance that so insignificant a demon could have been responsible for the gruesome freezing deaths of recent days. It was only as we pulled away from the docks, and the foul impressions of the incursion faded, that I recalled that my previous brief encounter with the cold demon had not been accompanied by any such sensations.

  We headed down Prospect Avenue, past the Guildhall that looms like a medieval fortress over the surrounding buildings, and I could sense the lingering etheric disturbance of every summoning and incarnation, every binding and compact, that the grim masters of the political machine have performed over the years. Generations of Guildhall leaders have made deals with devils, literally and figuratively, to maintain their grip on Recondito, and so far as I’m concerned everyone in the organization has blood on their hands. And while I’ve been able to curtail their activities to a large extent since taking up the mantle of the Wraith, I am only one man, and have yet to put an end to their dark deeds altogether. Some day, I know, I’ll lose my patience, tire of the long game, and storm that castle with guns blazing—and though such an open assault would doubtless mean my life, I’d at least be able to take with me as many of those overfed bastards as possible. But that would leave Recondito unprotected in my absence, and so I marshal my reserves of patience, and continue to take the Guildhall’s pieces off the board one pawn at a time.

  We made our way through the Financial District, up through Northside, and down through Hyde Park and Ross Village, all without any sign of the cold demon. We skirted Ross University and turned onto Mission Avenue to cut through Oceanview on our way south, and that’s when I saw him. Not the demon of cold we’d been seeking, but that imitator who calls himself Sepultura.

  He was lurking in an alleyway, his gray boilersuit and black gloves and boots rendering him almost invisible in the shadows, but the stark white skull sewn onto his mask shone in the dim light like the full moon.

  Perhaps it was my mounting frustration over my inability to locate the cold demon, or perhaps I was simply annoyed to be reminded that a copycat was skulking around the streets of my city, but as soon as I saw Sepultura in the alley I shadowed through the side of the hearse and dove for him, hands out and grasping. Did I intend to throttle him? To knock some sense into his masked head and drive him out of Recondito? I’m not sure, in retrospect, and now I’ll never know.

  I regained solidity as soon as I passed through the closed door of the hearse, and was less than an eyeblink away from tackling Sepultura to the ground. But to my astonishment he reacted immediately to my sudden appearance before him, diving to one side as I approached. I sailed past, only narrowly avoiding crashing to the rough pavement of the alleyway, and tucked and rolled my way into a crouch. When I spun around, I saw that Sepultura had dropped into a defensive posture, shoulder to me and hands held loosely before him like a wrestler waiting for his opponent to make the next move.

  “You’ve trained,” I said in faint admiration. “Not bad.” Then I added an undertone of Sent thought to my spoken words, “But you’re no match for the Wraith .”

  I surged forward, my greatcoat swirling around me to conceal my arm motions, and my right fist lashed out like a striking cobra at
his head.

  Sepultura managed to duck to the side and block the blow with his forearm, but just barely, and the force of the impact sent him sidestepping to retain his balance.

  “Órale!” he said, and I could almost hear him grinning behind his mask. “You’re fast.” Lightning quick, he jabbed straight at my neck with his left. “Always talk about yourself in the third person, though?”

  I snapped back in time to avoid the jab, and then swept a leg out in a sidekick, catching him with a glancing blow to the hip. “I’ve heard you do the same, ‘Sepultura.’”

  He staggered back, gripping his hip and hissing in pain through the mouth-slit of his mask. But he kept on his feet, and after a split second was back in a defensive posture. “Touché.”

  He’d managed to shrug off the disorienting effects of my Sending, and was holding his own in hand-to-hand. It was clear that my copycat was not to be dismissed lightly.

  “Why did you come to my city?” I demanded.

  “ Come here?” Sepultura snarled. “ Pendejo, I was born here.”

  I was wearying of this game, and eager to get back to the hunt. Bracing myself, I readied to leap forward and shadow straight through Sepultura, intending to solidify as soon as I was past him and then strike a blow from behind before he knew what had happened. But before I could move he suddenly straightened, his gaze trained past my shoulder at something farther up the alleyway.

  “Sarah?” he said, arms falling to his sides and shoulders slumping.

  I turned, and there before me hovered the demon of cold.

  Only it wasn’t any demon, whether of cold or any other sort. It was a girl, or rather the ethereal and not-entirely-present specter of a girl. I recognized the murder victim from the front pages of the Clarion —Sarah Pennington.

  I could feel the waves of cold radiating from her, and my breath fogged in the frigid air as it passed through my skull-mask.