Mask of Flies (26 page)

In Lily Dale the
missing pieces of his great grandmother’s story lay buried under a
century. They must have studied her, had ideas on how to stop her.

Climbing the stairs,
two at a time, Elias had already made up his mind. He stopped to pick
up the cipher and key, then headed across the hallway, into his
bedroom. The freezing temperatures had to be taken into
consideration. He disrobed out of his sweats and put on thermal
underwear, then a layer of warm clothes. From the floor of his
closet, he pulled out a duffle bag, filling it with: a pair of jeans,
underwear, high wool socks, and a heavily insulated black and grey
flannel. He opened the drawer of his nightstand, extracting a small,
hammerless revolver nestled in a clip-on holster: a Smith &
Wesson Model 642 Airweight Centennial. With this particular gun,
Elias preferred to clip the holster inside of his pants, hiding it
comfortably on his hip. The hammerless feature allowed a quick draw
from concealment, but, for now, he stowed it inside the front pocket
of the bag.
Almost forgot the
ammo
, he grabbed a box of .38 Special +P rounds and his
hunting knife, for good measure. Better safe than sorry.

He laced up a pair of
worn combat boots and donned a heavy leather bomber—a beanie cap
bulged from its pocket. As he headed downstairs and made his way for
the door, he felt Cody’s tail beating against his jeans. “Sorry
boy, but you’ll have to stay in the barn when I’m gone. I’ll
leave the electric heater on for ya.”

Cody and Elias waded
through a foot of snow, back into the old longhouse. Through the
double doors was the workshop with a packed dirt floor; a single door
on the wall sat below a big shadow board full of his tools, leading
to the spare room. Inside were minimal furnishings. A small cot, a
space heater, and a large cabinet. He took two large metallic salad
bowls from the cabinet, filled one with Kibbles and Bits, Cody’s
favorite, and the other with water in the attached bathroom. The
beagle sat on the ground with a long face, knowing what the big bowls
meant.

“It’ll just be for a few days
boy, promise.” Elias peeled up a cut out piece of carpet from the
spare room floor—uncovering the floor safe. He twisted in the
combination, popped the open, and counted out $500 in twenties,
marking the withdrawal in his ledger before locking up.

Snow frosted the
unpaved road that lead out to Old Spirits Road, and the surrounding
wilderness imbued with desolate eeriness. A cassette of Led
Zeppelin’s
Houses of the Holy
was in the tape deck; Jimmy Page’s guitar haunted the interior as
“The Rain Song” played. Slowly, Elias entered the on ramp to Old
Route 17 west—the road nearly vanished in the white wash. The
constant stream of snow distracted enough during the day, but it
would hypnotize in the black of night, disorienting shifts
illuminated in the backdrop of headlights, the siren song of a winter
road. Elias hoped to arrive in Lily Dale with daylight to spare.

But Elias saw the hour
drive easily doubling, even with the ultra–illegal snow chains on
his tires. The road camouflaged the black ice, caused by temperatures
moving from thaw to freeze, and the Cutlass fishtailed in a few bad
spots. Hidden like landmines in a field, these invisible patches
could be just as deadly while traveling next to a semi. He passed
vehicles careening all over the highway, the expressions of the
panicking drivers struggling to regain control was a spectacle. A
large woman, with no discernible neck, spun out in a tiny subcompact.
The soft tissue on her throat reverberated with each panicked twist
of the wheel. Elias passed her cautiously, but chuckled at the sight
of her in his rear view.

Northbound on State
Road 60, almost to Lily Dale, he passed a few hotels outside of
Cassadaga, the outlying town surrounding Lily Dale, but wanted to
find a room inside the spiritualist community. Lily Dale’s peak
season was during warmer months; hopefully everything wasn’t
boarded up for the winter. Elias almost missed the iced over signage
for county road 48; he had to brake heavily to make the turn. The
snow chains saved him from losing control.

Then the sign for the
community’s Assembly House appeared a few miles to the north— in
front of a nondescript cottage—the American and Canadian flag
danced amongst the wind and snow. Two adjacent porch lights lit up
the doorway; it was only 4 o’clock, but an ashen canopy of clouds
shut out the slightest evidence of the sun’s existence, casting
night prematurely over the white capped town. If there were any
parking spots out front, the snow concealed them; Elias settled for
the side of the road, grabbed his bag, and headed inside.

He scraped the snow his
boots on the doormat and approached a long wooden counter—a warren
of empty cubbyholes stood behind it. Elias coughed and rang the
service bell on the counter; canned laughter erupted from a door
behind to the rear, followed by grumbling and shuffling. A tall man
maybe in his seventies emerged.

“You rang?” the
tall man furrowed his eyebrows that looked like two furry white
caterpillars kissing on his forehead.

“Lookin’ for two
things: a warm place to spend the night and somebody that’d tell me
a little about this area’s history,” Elias said.

The tall man extended a
mitt of a hand, said his name was Miles. Elias shook and introduced
himself.

“Well Elias, as you
can see, the town shuts down for the winter, only a few of the
residents ride it out. These old cottages don’t hold heat very well
. . . ” Miles flipped through a few pages of the large book on the
countertop. “I don’t have any standalone cottages available, but
the Leolyn Hotel should take ya in. The widow, Mary Bandish, keeps it
running through the winter—I don’t know her reasoning behind it,
but it’s open. She should give you a good rate too, being the off
season and all.” Miles closed the book and stroked the scruff on
his chin. “As for your town historian, if you told me a little
about you research, then I might be able to point you in the right
direction.”

Elias had come up with
a pretty good story. “The research is for a college class, Intro to
Humanities. I’ve fallen behind a bit. You could say the subject
doesn’t interest me: I’m a Criminology Major. The course’s
final involves traveling to a place we have never been to before and
reporting on the human aspect of the area. I need an A on it to
pass.”

“Not to be rude, but
aren’t you a little old to be going to school?” Miles asked.

“Probably— I worked
for Atlus Steel until the economy took a crap. Got a partial pension
out of the mess, but I’m looking to round it out: get on as a
Trooper, then call it quits fat and happy.” Elias seasoned his lies
with truth, and Miles ate it up.

The white haired man
rested his long face on his hand, not bored, but not thoroughly
entertained either. Perhaps perturbed about being taken away from
whatever show he was watching in his little room in the back. “Not
a bad plan at all, son. So what of Lily Dale would you write about?”

“When this town was
just getting started. I was gravitating towards making the report
more of a historical take on the spiritualist movement, as a
religion, gaining momentum during the dawn of electricity and
industrialization of the surrounding area. You know anybody that
knows the town’s history during this time period well?”

“The proprietor of
the Black Quill bookstore, Dorina Petulengro, is extremely
knowledgeable about the town’s history. Her ancestors were gypsies
and among the first to settle here. Be warned, she’s a spitfire
and’ll be reluctant to talk if the meeting doesn’t benefit her in
some way. But don’t worry, I’ll sweet talk her for ya.” Miles
held his finger on a line in the big book, took the phone off the
wall, and dialed. “Dorina, listen, I have a visitor here, looking
to set up an appointment for a card reading . . . He also wants to
ask you a few questions about the history of the town . . . Yes, like
an interview . . . He’s a student from . . . ” Miles cupped his
hand over the phone and looked at Elias. “Where’d you say you go
to school?”

“Jamestown Community
College.”

Miles repeated it into
the phone. A minute of listening intently to the receiver, he hung
up. “She’ll see you around eight o’clock; the card reading will
cost
fifty dollars
,
but I got her to do the interview free—I told you I was a
sweet-talker .”

“Never said anything
about wanting a card reading, but I’ll have her money—for the
interview.” Elias looked at the grandfather clock against the wall:
it read five o’clock, three hours to kill. “Is there any place to
eat around here?”

Miles slid a printout of a town map;
the town small enough to fit on a note card. He marked landmarks with
the feather pen. “The Leolyn Hotel is behind us on Cottage Row,
adjacent is the Lily Dale general store and delicatessen, for food,
and Dorina’s here, across town.”

After leaving the
Assembly House, Elias opted to walk on a shoveled path onto cottage
row in hopes of finding the deli. The snow screen limited his
visibility, and, to add insult to injury, one in every three
buildings had lights on. He found a white cottage with a sign in the
yard: “Leolyn Hotel, Vacancy”. According to the map, next door
would be the deli. Elias walked over and didn’t see any signage on
the squat brick building until he stood a few feet from the entrance.

Inside the store,
devoid of any customers, a “closed” sign sat on the two
registers. The lack of food and supplies filling the aisles made
Elias wonder if the residents anticipated some kind of natural
disaster. He walked down the cereal aisle, to the back; his wet steps
squeaking on the olive and white checkered floor. Across the back
stretched the deli counter; the meat on display was scarce, but the
deli looked clean enough to feed a starved man. A girl sat on stool
and read from a tablet. With deep red hair tied in a bun, the color
more a stain, spilt merlot over a cotton white face. She startled and
looked up at Elias like a doe in her private nook of the forest, then
afforded him a thin smile.

Elias simply ordered
the special: a French dip, to go. The girl prepared the order,
stuffed it in a paper bag, and, took payment—happy to get back to
her reading.

He took his lunch next
door to the Leolyn. Through the big red door, the foyer was adorned
with the same sense of antiquity as the Assembly house: worn wooden
floors, the grandfather clock, and that certain airlessness that
accompanied the dust of age. A staircase with a crimson runner led
upward. Suddenly a grey woman, worn like the hotel, appeared from the
top.

“Looking for a room?”
She asked from above and introduced herself as Mary; the widow
Bandish from Miles’s description.

“For a few nights,
preferably with some privacy—doin’ some writing, and I don’t
work well with distractions.”

“Well, you’ve come
to the right place; we don’t get many visitors during the winter.”
Mary descended the steps and gestured Elias to follow her over to a
heavy pedestal desk when a hooded figure followed her down the steps.

The man under the hood
regarded the woman—the hard lines on his face made it difficult to
determine his expression: smile of sneer—and gave a little wave as
he moved out the door.

She noticed Elias’s
attention shift. “That’s Mr. Johns he’s staying the winter,
apparently here on government business.” Mary flipped open the Dell
laptop on the desk. It looked strange—technology beyond the
entombed era of the hotel—after going through the red door, walking
back a century.

“Government, here?”
He hoped she would bite.

“That one doesn’t
talk much, but they say his car travels north of here . . . ” Mary
donned her reading glasses and eyed the screen. “The entire third
floor is empty. It’s a little drafty up there, but you requested
privacy: $40 a night, or $70 for two; it’s the offseason rate.”

Elias paid for the two
nights and took the key to room 301. And his wallet still felt
bloated in his pocket, so far, the trip to the vacant town turned out
to be much cheaper than expected.

Up the stairs, on the
third floor, the silence was piercing, but it was better this way:
out of sight out of mind. The Victorian wallpaper, depicting some
sort of floral pattern, looked like crowned pineapples. The absurdity
echoed in the emptiness, rang out inside Elias. Room 301 stood at the
end of the hall.

Elias shut the door behind him,
unpacked his duffel bag, and hung up his packed clothes in the
closet. The revolver, box of bullets, and hunting knife, he laid on
the queen sized bed. He looked around and saw that the room didn’t
have a safe. So he holstered his gun on his hip for safe keeping.

At quarter to eight,
Elias drove up the north side of Lily Dale, past the boarded up
eateries and boutiques, stopping at his destination. The Black Quill
was an all brick, octagon mode structure, painted tar black to match
the store’s title. It looked severe amongst the delicately stylized
cottages in the neighborhood. As Elias entered through the front, a
cacophony of bells jingled on the inside face of the door.

Inside was more like a
library than bookstore: rows of wooden bookshelves lined the
parameter, just as Elias thought he registered them all, he saw a set
of steps that led up to an outer partition, stacked with more books.
Ahead, a flickering orange light bounced shadows; the only real light
source besides the grey glow from the windows; Elias found he
couldn’t see any of the titles on the books. Walking towards the
light, he found three figures sitting around table; large, dripping
candles burned around them. A middle aged woman, dark-haired and
heavy breasted, pointed to cards on the table. Across from her sat a
leggy young man, maybe 20, with chestnut hair that fell down to his
shoulders. On his shoulder, a sweet little thing rested her head and
yawned, apparently bored with the spectacle. Closer, Elias saw that
the two women resembled each other.