Lucia's Masks Read online

  She longs to know where Lola plucked the line about the banqueting house and the banner. She wants to know its provenance (another word she is fond of because it sounds like an intellectuals’ palace.) It is not likely a word Lola would know. And Bird Girl’s instinct tells her it is best to let Lola ramble and not to press her with questions, even if her own greedy curiosity makes her squirm.

  She intervenes only when Lola is in her worst fits of incoherence, when she moans piteously or cries out as if she has cut herself on a barbed memory. In these distressed states, Lola can become quite literally blind to the present. She will emerge from the dark of her confusion only with the help of touch as Bird Girl strokes her hand, or caresses her cheek.

  “You’re a regular blessing, little chick,” Lola will say, when she has shaken off whatever bad spell possessed her.

  “A regular blessing,” Bird Girl muses wryly to herself, was certainly not what her mother used to call her. As Lola sleeps, Bird Girl strives to push away punishing thoughts of her final confrontation with Epona. She is sure she still carries the damned words she uttered like razors buried in her flesh. Will her remorse always haunt her, a doleful presence she cannot shake off? Like the pitiable Raskolnikov, his soul racked in Russia’s endless White Nights. Of course, she had committed no physical murder. But words can murder, can they not? Words can murder love.

  Mother, she thinks, please forgive me my murderous words.

  She hears a cry from somewhere outside that carries a searing anguish. Her first thought is Lucia, and a cold sluice of fear numbs her flesh.

  She runs to the window. At first she sees only two of them. Then they seem to multiply so that a mass of dirty-grey fur appears to writhe upon the sparse grass. Within seconds she can make out details she would far rather not see — their huge size, and the flash of their long teeth in prodding snouts, the slit eyes adapted to sewer life, and the wire-like whiskers that pierce the air.

  She pinches the flesh of her forearm. Maybe these disgusting creatures are part of a waking dream, or an ugly projection of the guilt she feels about her mother. She pinches herself hard enough to make her eyes water; blinks away the tears. When she opens her eyes, they are all still there — the Rat-Men she had always assumed were apocryphal. For years, she had dismissed the rumours as just the residue of people’s nightmares, sprung from an instinctive unease about the monstrosities cloning might produce. Who does not fear waking one morning to find a seething, fetid rat on the pillow? And what worse chimera could there be than a man-sized rat, with human hands, legs, and arms?

  These things ought not to exist, and just looking at them makes Bird Girl feel sick and despairing. For the first time in her young life, she sees the future of humankind as irretrievably damned. She pushes her closed fist against her lips as the monsters swarm closer to the house. She can smell them now. There is a taint of sulphur.

  The thoughts that go through her head are these: How do I save myself? How do I protect Lola?

  Later she will wish she had not put herself first, and that she had run downstairs to warn the others before the monsters stormed the house. But in these last moments she has left, she is obsessed with their pitiably few options for escape. Meanwhile, Lola sleeps her blissful sleep as if sated from bouts of robustly satisfying love-making. Very soon Bird Girl will have to rouse the old woman. And then what? Obviously exiting the window with Lola in tow is out of the question unless she wants to reduce the old woman to a literal bag of bones.

  Bird Girl sees no choice but to stand her ground, make a weapon of her body, and fell as many Rat-Men as she can when they force in the door. She always has the advantage of surprise. No one expects the iron in her fists; the kicks that can rupture a man’s spleen or break three ribs at once.

  She begins to smell her own fear — never a pleasant scent — and sets about channelling her adrenalin rush. She paces from the door to the window, judging her distance, looking for possible impediments to the scythe her body must soon become.

  She sees that the Rat-Men have now clustered together. She counts four snouts, four strong wide backs, four sets of shoulders that look as if they could easily repel the blow of an iron bar. She hates the fact that she cannot stop staring at them; that they exert their own perverse fascination.

  As she peers down, hiding herself from view as best she can, one of the Rat-Men lifts his arm to scratch at the back of his neck. The skin of his hand is a deep olive and fully human.

  Here is a most diabolic combination, she thinks, as she watches human fingers prodding matted rat’s fur, slick with sewer slime. Then she sees something extremely odd, a visual illusion she initially attributes to her own agitated state. It looks as if the fur at which the Rat-Man scratches is lifting. Suddenly the whole monstrous head falls away. What Bird Girl sees next astonishes her as much as would a veritable miracle.

  A god, from whose hand dangles a huge rat’s mask looks up at her in the window where she stands in full view now, gap-mouthed in amazement.

  The man smiling up at her belongs in one of the Italian Renaissance paintings she’s seen in books. A muscular young Mars maybe, or Mercury, the messenger with the winged sandals and the caduceus wand that works wonders.

  “You have to leave,” the god-man shouts up at her. “There’s a cloud of nerve gas drifting your way.

  “We are doctors,” he tells her. “Trust us, please. There is little time.”

  He points west. Bird Girl sees a fist-shaped orange mass grow larger even as she watches.

  “How long have we got?” she asks, trying to work out how she can get Lola safely and speedily down the stairs, let alone out of the house and away.

  “Less than an hour,” he says firmly. “You must head north. How many are you?”

  “Seven,” she tells him. “We are seven.”

  “We have masks,” he says, taking from his rat’s pocket a filmy transparent disk. “You must put these on immediately if the air starts to take on an orange or yellow tinge.

  “Don’t risk coming back here” he warns, with a sternness that makes clear how grave their situation is. “The gas will permeate the ground around the house.

  “There is a complication,” he adds in a rush, “a meteorological complication. But I want to explain this to everyone at once. Are your companions all here?” he asks urgently.

  She nods, although actually she is not at all sure where they are. Then she closes her eyes for a moment to try to absorb the full weight of his warnings, and to make the shuddering orange fist in the sky disappear, however briefly. It is ludicrous, she knows. But there are still times she indulges in the childish wish that she can obliterate the degenerate and besmirched things of the world simply by shutting her eyes.

  When she opens them again, the Rat-Men have gone. She hears Candace’s shrill squeal that tells her the doctors in their nightmare garb have entered the house.

  Lola wakes with a panicked cry. “What was that?” she asks Bird Girl, who goes to her immediately and takes her hand.

  “He’s not back, is he?” Her frail spotted hand grips Bird Girl’s so tightly, the young woman has to make an effort not to wince.

  “Who, Lola?”

  “The one with the stone eye.” The old woman trembles and points to her right eye.

  “Ouch! You’re hurting me, little chick.” Bird Girl removes her hand from Lola’s in alarm.

  “It’s not him, is it? Tell me, little chick. Tell me.”

  “No,” Bird Girl says. I must stay calm, she tells herself. “It’s some men who are doctors, who are warning us we have to leave. There is a poison in the air coming our way.”

  Lola barely considers this remark before she begins shaking her head.

  “Can’t go,” she declares.

  “You have to, Lola. You’ll die if you stay. I can’t let you stay.”

  “Can’t leave Charlie.”

  “Who is Charlie, Lola?” Is the old lady in one of her wandering states, Bird Girl wonders. And
if this is the case, the man with the stone eye might be just a coincidence, a nightmare figure that has clung to Lola’s waking consciousness.

  Lola looks at Bird Girl as if she is being deliberately obtuse. “Charlie was my helpmeet. He was my lover once, little chick, but that was long ago. Haven’t I told you about Charlie?”

  “But where is he, Lola? Why haven’t we seen him?”

  Lola screws up her eyes. Her mouth twists round the words: “Dead . . . dead and buried. Behind the house. We had a garden there once, little chick, with green beans and hollyhocks. I buried him there. As best I could. Took my last strength from me.”

  Lola sinks back into her pillow as if newly exhausted from the effort of burying Charlie.

  Bird Girl was beginning to feel frantic. Surely this couldn’t all be happening at once — like a melodrama run amok, disaster piled on disaster, revelation on revelation.

  Grimoire here. She shudders. And Charlie. And doctors masquerading as rats. Poison gas balls. I am spinning, she thinks. I must try to focus. I must speak with Lucia. She will help me make Lola see she must leave. But all the while, Bird Girl’s mind is wincing away from the question she knows she must ask.

  “How did Charlie die, Lola?”

  Tears begin to course down Lola’s face. “Tortured,” she says. “By the barbarian with the stone eye and the orange hair. Out in the barn. Tortured.

  “Couldn’t save him. Couldn’t.”

  Bird Girl embraces the old lady tenderly. She feels Lola’s tears wet her own cheeks and chin.

  “He said he was looking for a little whore. Wouldn’t believe we hadn’t seen her.

  “I hope he never found her,” Lola adds. “I hope he’s sitting in Hell right now, with a burning ember up his ass.

  “We tried to keep him out of the house with the hay, little chick. It was Charlie’s idea. He noticed the brute’s one good eye streaming and how he was fighting for breath whenever he was near the old hay bales we kept outside. So we brought them right into the front room.

  “After a couple of days, we thought he’d gone. So Charlie went out to check. I had to listen to his screams, little chick.

  “Poor Charlie. Oh my poor, poor Charlie. But how could I help him? How, little chick?”

  Lola rocks on the bed and begins plucking at the little hair she has.

  “Oh, Lola, Lola. There was nothing you could do. Nothing. He was an evil, evil man.” Bird Girl strokes the old lady’s fingers in the soothing way that usually brings her comfort.

  “Don’t think about it, Lola. Think about the day you wore your apricot sheath instead.”

  “Apricot,” Lola repeats, smiling. She lies back like a good child, and closes her eyes.

  Bird Girl speeds down the stairs just in time to hear the god-man deliver the same information he had given her. She observes her companions’ successive states of disbelief, wariness, and final capitulation as they all observe the evidence — the blood-orange gas ball which now looks to her denser, and far more deadly.

  “And something else,” the doctor adds sternly, “it seems there is a new kind of red rain, which is not only more caustic but also highly flammable. Given the right conditions — and we are not entirely sure what these are, but certainly dry air and acid soil — the red rain will combust. In the worst cases, and this has already happened, the burning rain creates a gigantic fireball. These have the impact of an exploding meteor. They consume everything in their path, including human flesh and bone.

  “If the red rain begins,” he continues, “take cover immediately. The area through which you will be travelling most fortunately has a network of caves. Keep watch for these openings in case you need to take shelter. Inside the rock, you will be protected.”

  No one says a word. We are all too stunned to speak, thinks Bird Girl. Poison gas. Potential fireballs. How meagre are their chances for survival?

  “Oh, we surely don’t have to leave our little haven?” Candace wails.

  “If you stay, you’ll be a vegetable before nightfall,” one of the masked Rat-Men informs her. His voice is muffled under his snout, but Bird Girl is sure she detects a note of pleasure in his baleful utterance. She wonders why three of the doctors have kept their masks on. It occurs to her that the reason is vanity; that they might not be as striking as their leader.

  Chandelier is examining the rat mask which the god-man has put on the kitchen table. “Like the old plague doctors,” he says. Chandelier speaks so rarely, Bird Girl always listens carefully when he does. This observation, however, is lost on her.

  “That’s right, kid,” responds the doctor. “Except that the medieval plague doctors’ masks were made to look like birds, with protruding beaks. Who knows birds these days? But we all know rats.

  “See?” he says, showing them all the inside of his mask. “The snout’s the right shape for a built-in gas mask. And so far, we’re safe from the EYE because the regime’s controllers don’t believe we exist. They think we’re nightmare figures; figments of the imagination; manifestations of people’s dread.”

  He slips off his wide belt, and unrolls it. On the inner band are minuscule pockets, each containing tiny vials and packages of disposable syringes.

  “We carry antidotes for specific plague and gas attacks,” he explains, buckling his saviour-belt back in place. “But we have nothing for this nerve gas coming your way, crude as it is.

  “We do know that the gas originated at one of the EYE’s own plants. Whether it was released in error or deliberately, we are in the dark.”

  He frowns. “The EYE has developed a particular interest in the profit-making potential of the so-called cleansing sciences as a new focus of their ‘innovative industries.’ My colleagues and I do what we can to help those unfortunate enough to get in the way of their inhumane experiments.

  “It is little enough,” he adds quietly, as if admitting a complex truth to himself.

  “You have fifty minutes,” he presses them. “Please make haste.”

  “Due north?” asks the Outpacer.

  “Due north,” the lovely doctor confirms.

  Already Bird Girl is imagining Lola’s weight on her back, preparing herself for the burden she must carry. Surely she and Lucia can together persuade the old woman to co-operate? “Where is Lucia?” she asks.

  “Here,” comes the answer. Bird Girl is surprised to see Lucia emerge from the cramped space between the sink and the pantry. Had she been crouching down? Was she ill?

  The Rat-Man’s leader moves toward Lucia, who wards him off with a gesture that strikes Bird Girl as discourteous.

  “You’ve warned us, and we thank you,” Lucia tells him. “Now save yourselves.”

  The doctor nods curtly before donning his mask. Then he and his companions are gone.

  “We must hurry,” the Outpacer urges them.

  “What if they’re lying?” Candace whines. “What if they want the house for themselves?”

  They all ignore her. And for once, she keeps silent.

  Lucia begins filling their water containers from the pump. Harry makes himself ready by stretching one limb at a time, while Chandelier helps him to balance.

  “How will we transport the old woman?” the Outpacer asks.

  “I will carry her on my back,” Bird Girl says. The Outpacer nods, and Bird Girl is close enough to hear him sigh. They both know why he cannot offer to help; that if he carries her, Lola will try to unmask him and so undo his dignity and her own.

  “I will spell you off,” says the generous Lucia.

  Candace is already at the door, straw hat on her head. “You’re both fools,” she declares. “She will slow you terribly.”

  Bird Girl promptly turns around, and sticks out her tongue at Candace, before running up the stairs with Lucia to get Lola ready. When she tells Lucia Lola’s story about Charlie and Grimoire, Lucia responds with a composure and strength on which Bird Girl feeds greedily.

  “We will walk on together with courage,” Lucia
says, “and watch out for each other.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Cry

  DESPITE THE DANGERS WE FACE, I am so relieved to have left that squalid house. Relieved too, not to have to look out each day at the little wood where I did the most despicable thing I have ever done.

  Did any of the others hear my cry, I wonder. The sound I made was born of a remorse that eats me to the bone. I ache to tell someone exactly what happened and so ease my burden in some small way. Bird Girl is too young to hear. Old Harry has cares enough of his own. As for the Outpacer, I cannot confess my sin to a person whose face is hidden from me.

  If only Candace were more empathetic, or less judgmental, I might consider telling her. But Candace, alas, is Candace. I would probably fare better speaking to a tin can.

  I will walk strongly. I will help Bird Girl carry Lola. I will think only of the haste we must make if we are to survive.

  Chapter Ten

  Candace Sees a Bird Fall

  CANDACE IS IN A FURY. HER anger is like boiling fat. She can feel its searing-hot bubbles erupting under her skin, making her itch intolerably. She clomps rather than walks, the last in the line. She glowers at every back and bottom ahead of her in the procession.

  Most especially, she glowers at ancient Lola’s buttocks, their bony protrusions all too obvious through the taut cloth of her thin calico skirt. The way Lola clings to Bird Girl’s back reminds Candace of some disgusting antediluvian spider. She shudders at the thought of this spider’s bite.

  Lola is just a parasite feeding on Bird Girl’s innocent host. Surely it was obvious the old woman had more resources than she was choosing to reveal? How else had she survived before they stumbled upon the stone house? Candace had seen this kind of manipulation before. The old fastened on the young, feeding off their energy and life force. They had many cunning ways to keep firm hold on their youthful prey. Deliberately eliciting pity was a standard device — pity for their wobbling chins and slobber; for their palsied hands and buckling knees; for their failing faculties and apparently constant pain. Some of the old used tale-telling to keep the young in thrall: fantastic concoctions of times past when political monsters were slain before they could thrive and multiply, when the act of physical love was free and safe and transporting, and beauteous youth lay down together amidst flowers and wafting incense.