Mask of Flies (14 page)

* * *

Elias inserted a
folded napkin, closed the journal, and extinguished the day’s last
cigarette into the blue glass of his ash tray. He looked at the half
empty bottle of Maker’s, deemed it the cause of heavy eyes. Sleep
would come easy tonight; it had been some time since he read himself
into such a state, but it was the dreams he worried about.

The window over the
kitchen sink looked out into the hillside, pitch black. Elias stood
there for a moment, looking out. Never listening to the old stories
of the hillside before, he was comfortable in ignorance. Now the
unsettled truth engulfed him.

Regardless of the
circumstance, Tony hated delivering grievous news to patients’
families, but Oak Leaf Retirement home continued to produce it.
Inertia momentarily kept him from calling Jon Mckinney and telling
him that his father, Tom, had been admitted to the Millard Fillmore
ICU. He attempted to envision how the conversation would play out—the
words to convey he had found his dad shivering in his bed, drenched
in his own urine. And that was only part of it.

When Tony had returned
to Tom McKinney’s room, he rushed over to get the poor man out of
the bed and into a warm shower. Under the wet covers blood soaked
through his tee-shirt, around his chest and abdomen. It emanated from
a pair of large bite marks, perhaps inflicted by a wild animal. Tom
was in bad shape, fading in and out of consciousness. Tony called 911
and then applied pressure with the soaked shirt, one hand for each
wound.

That’s all Tony would
tell the son . . . for now.

Deciding to quit
torturing himself, he picked up the phone and dialed the number on
his computer screen.

Jon McKinney answered
with a mouthful of dinner and Tony told him the news. “What the
hell is biting him? I called yesterday about this and nobody returned
my call.”

“I apologize about
not getting back to you right away. We have been short on resources
the past few days. I don’t know exactly what bit him, but I assure
you that I am personally looking into this—it is my top priority.”

“If I don’t hear
back from you by tomorrow morning, I’m gonna call my lawyer. Got
it?”

“Understood, I will
do everything in my power to find an answer. I will talk to you in
the morning then Mr. McKinney—”

Before Tony could
finish, the son hung up on him.

As the office manager,
the last thing Tony needed was a lawsuit, or the police prying into
business at Oak Leaf. Not that there was anything to hide; his job
was difficult enough without cops rummaging through files, reaching
to uncover some semblance of wrongdoing. From inside his pocket he
pulled an envelope from Blue Cross Blue Shield, addressed to Thomas
McKinney at Oak Leaf’s address. It had another name scribbled on
the back.

What Tony didn’t
mention to the son was Tom had regained consciousness before the
ambulances came. When Tony held his wounds, praying, Tom mouthed,
“Pen and paper,” and took over holding the shirt to his wound.

An envelope and pen sat
on the nightstand. Tony grabbed them and then handed them to Tom. The
trembling man took the pen with a bloody hand. The name he had
scrawled on the envelope:
Will
Sammy
.

It would be best to
talk with Will Samuelson before jumping to conclusions. He lived all
the way over in Summer Hall—not because he was dying, because he
was troublesome. For Will to walk through the foyer, past the main
office, and into Spring Hall, unnoticed, would be some act. The only
feasible explanation was that he went through the storage area, but
the caretakers kept that locked.

Jim Hayne’s head
protruded from behind the door jamb. “I got six temps to fill the
empty caretaker slots. They started about a half hour ago. Put in the
requisitions for three nurses and two caretakers. Already gettin’
hits—gotta love a down economy.” Jim walked inside and fingered
his mustache. “Kaja and Marco are taking Summer Hall. Temps will be
paired with a vet and spread over the rest of the facility. That
should keep our asses out the fire for the time being. Have you
talked to Mr. McKinney’s family yet?”

“I did.”

“And?”

Tony crossed his legs
and leaned back. “Mr. McKinney’s son was adamant about finding
the source of his father’s injuries. He gave us until tomorrow to
produce, or he’ll pursue legal action.”

“First James
Fergusson sticks an empty syringe in his arm, now this. We
must
do what we can to keep this incident under the covers. Send a damn
temp through the vents with a flashlight. Whatever it takes to find
out who or what attacked Tom McKinney.”

“I’ll do my best,”
Tony sighed, accepting the fact that this shit storm showed no signs
of letting up. “I have to talk to someone.”

Haynes grunted and walked out of the
office.

Rushing patients to
the emergency room occurred regularly at Oak Leaf. In Tony’s
recollection, old age—never violence—being the cause.

At the foot of Summer
Hall, he saw Kaja Borkowski standing in a doorway over a cleaning
cart, the color blanched from her face

“Kaja, what’s
wrong?” Tony asked.

“I just about to come
see you. We have bigger problem on our hands than some bite mark on
Tom McKinney.” She motioned towards the door. “See for yourself.”

The nameplate on the
door read: “Marsha Gillium”. There was an old Polaroid of her and
her family taped to the door. The colors melted together, casting an
opaque orange tint. According to her chart, Marsha was in her mid-80s
and suffered severe dementia; Jim had her moved to Summer Hall upon
the discovery she had stage four colon cancer. She recently started
chemotherapy, which left her bedridden.

Tony entered the room
slowly and saw the bed empty. “Where is Marsha?”

“I was going to ask
you same thing.” The Polish nurse replied.

“She’s missing,”
He pulled at his hair, messing up his neatly prepared hairdo. “The
chart said she was bedridden from the chemo right?”

“That’s what it
says.”

On the bed, the
comforter was peeled to one side, as if Marsha got up and went about
her business; the cancer and cell killing treatment a big
misunderstanding.

“There are others,”
Kaja said.

Tony’s forehead
contracted into a knot of intersecting lines. “What?”

“Don’t blow your
top. There are two others missing: Will Samuelson and Joshua
Reynolds’ room also empty.”

“Any idea where they
could have gone?” He sat down on the edge of Marsha’s empty bed
and put his face in his hands.

“Your guess is as
good as me,” Kaja said.

Tony laughed. “Yeah,
both ain’t worth a shit.”

“Don’t be an
asshole.”

He learned to stop
caring what Kaja thought about him and wished he could play the
occasional asshole role for anybody, when the occasion warranted.
“Couldn’t help myself.”

“Look in Will
Samuelson’s room.”

Down Summer Hall, they
passed rooms of the dying. The energy in this area of the facility
had always depressed Tony. With the day’s events, it took on a new
level of cruelty.

Tony stopped in front
of Will’s door “Marco’s working in the hall now too?”

“He’s been in Ms.
Kingbird’s room for some time—we go inside or just stand here?”

Tony rolled his eyes
and opened the door.

The room was a
disaster. Laundry lay scattered across the floor, like a tornado
formed from within Will’s hamper. An odor of spoiled meat flooded
the air. Then the bed: the sheets stripped, the bare mattress covered
in blots of dried blood. Closer, Tony saw large white flakes
scattered on it. On the far side of the bed, a sheer peeling at first
appeared to be a latex glove pulled inside-out, but upon closer
inspection it appeared to be human epidermis. On the nightstand he
noticed a molar, sunk in a glass of water were a pair of canines. On
the ground, he found most of Will’s remaining 32 teeth.

“What am I supposed
to make of this?” Tony said.

“You ask me? I never
see anything like this.”

His stomach pushed
breakfast up. He felt the acid burn in the back of his throat. “Will
apparently shed his skin, spit out all his teeth, and vanished into
thin air. Why aren’t the rooms of the other missing patients like
this?”

Kaja held her hands on
her boney hips. “I don’t know. You saw Marsha’s room with your
own eye, and Joshua’s room clean too. Only Will’s room have this
mess.”

“We should leave now,
don’t touch anything. Could be some sort of disease . . . Shit.”
Tony hurried out of the door behind Kaja. “I remember hearing Will
had an altercation with an orderly yesterday afternoon. You know
anything about that?”

“He was asleep on
couch in second floor rec room. An orderly found him, asked Will if
he needed help getting back to room—Will refuse, many time, and
punch orderly, broke his nose.” She spun her finger in tight
circles next to her head. “Will claim he couldn’t sleep in room
because Ms. Kingbird curse him, now a man hide in the wall.”

“Will is a handful
but sharp for his age. Seems a bit outlandish, not something he’d
say. He’s healthy overall, light meds . . . who was in charge of
Summer Hall yesterday?” Tony asked.

“I don’t know on
top of head.”

Tony laughed darkly.

Kaja’s normal scowl
tightened into a wounded rictus “Caretakers have makeshift rotation
after your friend, Mr. Soblinski’s, departure. They scared of Ms.
Kingbird. If you make this an all nurse hall, like I recommend, none
of this would happen.”

“You don’t know
that this could have been prevented—does Marco know who was working
this hallway yesterday?”

“We wait until he
finish in Ms. Kingbirds room to ask . . . I rather not go in there.”

Tony shook his head,
but shared her apprehension.

They waited in
silence—the awkwardness eclipsed by the implications of their
findings. Summer Hall was never a happy place, perpetually encased in
finality, the end place for its residents. Everything took on new
meaning in the hallway: the floral pattern on the wallpaper, which
lightened the air of the other hallways, became a pitiful facade; the
view from the resident’s room, a cruel joke, a picture of the world
that left them behind. Now, this something else seemed to linger, a
hanging paradox—motion of the unmovable. Tony saw that he wasn’t
alone in this unease by the raised hair on Kaja’s arm.

Then the door at the
end of the hallway opened. Marco emerged; his face a bloodless
caricature.

“You okay?” asked
Kaja.

“No . . . ” Marco
gazed at the ground. “I talked to Rick.”

Tony grabbed his arm
“Soblinski—where is he?”

“Yes Soblinski . . .
inside the woman.”

The sunlight washed
over Russell as he pulled himself along the shoreline. He looked to
the horizon, towards the big bridge—wincing in remembrance of the
big slap of water that separated him from host. The end was
inevitable without nourishment. But what was the end truly?
How
did this happen?

Russell had failed
controlling Rick the first time, and it resulted in a mess. Rick
smashed the second seed’s face in, painting the walls red with her
blood. Russell’s recovery plan proved ineffective, taking Rick at
the falls ended in disaster. On the bridge he flanked his target . .
. tasted the sweet spot behind Rick’s ear.

The mastoid process—a
part of the temporal bone, in the back of the skull— is soft and
full of tiny air pockets. Russell loved it: the loud
POP
it produced
when
pierced, and how it contained so many dimensions of pain. Encasing
Rick’s inner ear, it served as an attachment point for tendons
connecting to his neck muscles and supported an artery that pumped
vast quantities of blood to his head. Once Russell had sunk his teeth
here, Rick experienced an explosion of sound, followed by
overwhelming dizziness—nausea—pain. Inside Rick’s head, Russell
had laughed.

Until the car hit
water.

Am
I losing my touch? The sweet spot has never served me wrong. As soon
as I bit down, everyone drops like bird shit. The crunch, pop turns
their world upside-down, and they can’t think straight, except this
asshole that slams his car off the bridge.

Everything was much
simpler when alive. Cause and effect—if Russell bit somebody, they
felt tangible pain. Now, as Russell the infection, the idea, he had
to sell the pain. He missed the visceral rush of inflicting actual
harm. Although a certain sense of satisfaction came from making them
believe, from creeping inside their heads and implanting the
experience—with all the accoutrements.

Russell’s life had
made him an expert on the subject of pain: being born broken, without
legs, he felt obligated to reciprocate his agony. Ladies of the night
were his favorite prey type, due to their accessibility.

Reminiscence of these
girls’ deaths soothed him when he still breathed. It gave him
purpose, but proved worthless in his current shape. Now, he craved
the inner darkness, remembering the poison womb that cradled him. He
thirsted for Rick’s shade.

* * *

Prying into Rick’s
mind—through the old woman in the home—had proved simple as
picking a lock on an abandoned hovel. Once inside, the lights had
come on, and all of Rick’s guilt presented itself like grotesque
crystal figurines in a display case. Russell had attempted to access
these memories unobtrusively, but it stirred something in Rick’s
subconscious.

When peeling into the
memories of his host, Russell took quick glimpses of all the
supporting factors: the people involved, the location, and the
chronological ordering of events. He jumped along the network of
conjoining memories, gaining details to frame the memory of interest
in proper context. Then he played it out in entirety, reliving it
himself.