Lucia's Masks Read online

  This was how the decrepit Lola had managed to sink her fangs into the gullible Bird Girl. Candace is sure of it. She has overheard enough of the woman’s filthy prattle to grasp the prurient subject matter. Sex and nakedness and shameless display. Sex and nakedness and reckless self-indulgence. No wonder Lola is such a dirty, shrivelled, incapacitated hag. One reaps what one sows.

  There is a way to age with dignity and grace, Candace is certain. She has twined this conviction into the goal she had so painstakingly mind-woven before departing (she does not like to use the phrase “running away from”) the City. Her new community will nurture people of all ages. The elderly will be able to radiate their particular warmth and light. She will develop special workshops to draw out the best of their wisdom and experience. Every member, whatever their season of life, will benefit from the teachings of the aged.

  She often pictures her resplendent community from above, as if she were an angelic presence floating over it. From this airy perspective, she sees its individual members quietly thriving, intent on the hour’s set task. She floats over her imagined fellowship at breakfast and at supper, and sees them all joined in contented communion. She surveys her own workshop, a wide, high, spotless room with windows on every side. Here, she will practise her discipline and perfect her gifts, gluing and sealing the fractures and rifts that are inevitable in any group’s interactions. She will map minds, absolve petty wrongs, and illuminate the correct, healthy channels for breathing, being, doing, forgiving, and creating. Her aerial view reveals her as the vibrant pulsing heart of a community she sustained by selfless love and sterling example. She treasures this metaphor which gives her much solace in the current bumpy passage of her life. I am, she tells herself repeatedly, a vibrant, beating heart. My potential to do good is unbounded.

  She is beginning to understand that she has fallen in with a group who fails to appreciate all she has to offer. Of course, she is disappointed. More — she is hurt. From Lucia and the young Bird Girl, the two in the group she encountered first, she had expected much more. She had anticipated, if not full-bodied friendship, then at least respect and willing support of her efforts to help the group bond.

  “Talk to me,” she had encouraged each and every one of them, with the exception of disgusting Old Harry. What was the old adage about not casting your pearls before swine? And swine Old Harry certainly was. “Talk to me,” she invited them. “Open the channels,” she prompted. “Let me be your very heart.” She willed this silent wish to enter their consciousness, and flower there.

  Her beneficent overtures have met with youthful contempt (Bird Girl), indifference and irritation (Lucia), an apparently bemused toleration (the Outpacer), and absolute vacancy (the largely mute Chandelier).

  Candace knows she had undermined herself badly by exposing her own vulnerability the morning Lucia discovered the stone house. She had offered them the binding tool of a group song. Old Harry had mocked her. The Outpacer had usurped her place. And then . . . what happened exactly? She had felt, rather than heard, a whisper creep up the back of her neck like a clammy worm. Or was it a look they seemed to transmit one to the other (although she could not actually see the Outpacer’s expression) so that five cold-eyed beings confronted her?

  Was that the reminder that undid her? Five pairs of eyes (the Outpacer’s admittedly obscured) all empty of fellow-feeling. The glint-hard eyes of beasts intent on her humiliation. Of course, she now sees this viciousness was just illusory, merely a projection of her own irrational anxiety. Her travelling companions had failed to recognize her talents, granted. But sadists they are not. Even the repugnant Old Harry is more cranky than cruel.

  Yes, it was her own lingering fear that transformed her five companions into the beast-people who laid their trap for her in the City. Harry’s contemptuous mockery took her back to her ordeal in the boardroom, a vision so overwhelmingly real that her tormentors’ stink made her gag. She thought she saw again the yellow eyes of Death fixed upon her.

  How could she have known? How could she possibly have seen through their duplicity? She genuinely believed they had hired her as a living medium to help them resolve their differences, and she was elated at the prospect.

  So much of her work in those bleak days in the City had left her drained and upset. Under her grief containment contract with the EYE, she sat in the drab kitchens of the newly bereaved, explaining the advantages of the regime’s hygiene procedures for disposing of their dear ones’ remains. No, they would not be able to look at their loved one for a last time. They might, in any case, find such a sight upsetting. They would receive a commemorative photograph (she knew these images were doctored, and in some cases bore little resemblance to the deceased, other than sex and hair colour). No, there would be no grave to visit, or urn containing ashes. These old-fashioned practices were unhealthy in the extreme, and ran counter to the economic imperative. The EYE appreciated that family and friends’ pre-eminent task must be the working through of their grief and the gathering up of precious memories. The regime’s sensitive and respectful procedures made it possible for the bereaved to focus on this crucial work, unencumbered by practical concerns.

  Directly behind her chair had stood an EYE official whose threatening presence helped quash any objections or questions. She had on occasion made the mistake of veering off-script and felt in the small of her back the uncomfortable pressure of the official’s blunt-nosed baton. At least, she assumed it was his baton.

  She had detested this contract work, not least for the turbid untruths she sensed lurked beneath the rationale she spouted — only sensed; of course she had no evidence. Nonetheless, by the end of the day she would feel tainted and often had to wrestle with an invasive self-disgust. She comforted herself at night with fantasies of a love so fiercely hot and all-encompassing that it would blot out her sin, if sin it was. Her lover would lick her clean and in his mighty embrace, she would feel innocent as a child. But by morning, with the fantasies long faded, she would feel grubby and dispirited again.

  This new job, though, with its tremendous promise of using her talents well, had roused her from bed extra early that day. She was ready and charged with the crackling energy that a new task and new faces inspire. She had primed herself by focusing on one of her favourite images. Her mind was like the hand of God smoothing out the nubs and crinkles in the fabric of life. She pictured the final length of snowy linen, unmarked and shining in the sun.

  They tore it, stained it, smeared it. They dirtied her.

  And how was she to know? That sumptuous boardroom, and the six of them so elegant in their expensive suits. The women too, which is perhaps what still torments her most. How could she have known what was to come? Their exquisite grooming and striking attractiveness beguiled her, as their setting beguiled her.

  They ushered her into the circular room with its carpeting so thick and soft, she longed to take off her shoes and wriggle her toes in the plush. That wish was to mock her cruelly later, when she sat half-naked and bound before them, with the iron taste of blood in her mouth.

  How could she have known? They invited her into a room whose walls gleamed. Real wood panelling, the colour of fine sherry decanted into crystal. In the centre was a polished table, as round as the room. The soft lighting cast a golden glow on their faces and hands, and on the wide watch bands of the three men. Neither of the women wore timepieces of any kind. Why had she noted that? Because she had been so besotted with their damned impeccable elegance, their finely tailored suits and silk shirts, that she had fed hungrily on the smallest detail.

  She’d had an instant of self-doubt, as she settled herself at their invitation into an armchair covered in mauve brocade. Against her grain, against all her training, she had succumbed for some minutes to a perilous self-denigration, contrasting her own ample hips with the slim figures of the two women sitting opposite her. This negative self-appraisal soon fattened on itself, as such appraisals will. She fixed on the coarse weave in the slee
ve of her suit jacket, the tawny down visible on her wrist. The skin of the two women, by contrast, seemed everywhere as smooth as porcelain.

  It was at this point she came to her senses, and saw this reckless, irrational run of thought for the sham it was. She took a cleansing breath. She sat erect. Her self-esteem flowed warmly through her veins. She thought of the long-ago proud heritage from which her own blood flowed. A low land strongly diked against the sea. A land watered and fed by canals, a testament to both genius and honest toil. A civilization built on order and cleanliness, where proud housewives sluiced the door stoops each morning and did battle with dirt as if it were the devil himself.

  In that boardroom in the sky, the spirit of Dutch Purity touched Candace on the brow, speaking in the low tones only she could hear: “Be proud of your cleanliness and your rosy flesh and your powers for dissolving discontent.” Candace listened and raised up the imagined dikes against the unruly sea of self-doubt. She had her tools ready: her powers of persuasion, her optimism, her conviction, her smile, her readiness to listen. She laid her briefcase on the deep carpet beside the brocade-covered chair. She folded her hands neatly in her lap. She raised her chin just a little, titled her head to the left and smiled widely at the two seated women, and the three men standing behind them.

  “How can I help you?” she asked.

  One of the women sniggered. Both women crossed their legs, and there was the unsettling sound of silk rubbing on silk. The man on Candace’s far right raised one eyebrow quizzically. “Help?”

  The sniggering woman sniggered again; then threw back her head and laughed. It was, Candace registered in fear, a remarkably fiendish laugh.

  The savage laugh spread from one to another. Candace was finding it hard to breathe. On every face, she saw the same arched eyebrows, the same bold appraising stare, the same sneering upper lip pulled back over the teeth. An image flashed on her of horses rearing, their long white incisors caught in a bit. Was it then she realized these were beast-people and that she was in gravest danger?

  Silently, she began praying that her life and her honour might be spared. And honour mattered to her intensely. In her sexuality, as in all elements of her life, she strove for a scrupulous cleanliness and a chasteness that set her apart. Only one man had enjoyed her body, a young man to whom she had been engaged. She was never entirely sure why he had called it off. She was optimistic (“Optimism is my spirit’s food and drink,” she liked to say), that she would one day meet a man worthy of her body and soul.

  “Please spare my honour and my life,” she prayed very hard indeed, so hard she unwittingly spoke aloud. Five malevolent laughs joined in a sound that cut at her ears like a stinging lash. They circled her, their dark shadows momentarily blinding her. One of the men took off his silk tie and used it to gag her. Another used his tie to bind her wrists. The women had lifted her skirt, and removed her underwear.

  There was much jeering. Their faces were brutish. Their eyes were wild. Naked fear made Candace dizzy, nauseous, and cold. She saw her own grave, and her body laid in earth.

  It was her victory that she did not show them her terror. She did not tremble or plead for mercy. Even when they brought the spray can and spread foam thickly between her legs and shaved her, she did not cry out. Inwardly, her panic was a live, writhing thing. Death, she saw, had yellow eyes.

  What saved her? What held her up through their wicked game?

  The long-ago world of her forebears saved her, for the most uplifting images came to her, so lifelike they carried her away into the sanctuary of the past. She saw women in white caps and tidy gowns folding freshly laundered sheets, corner to corner, edge to edge. She saw immaculate towers of starched linen inside cupboards scented with cedar and lavender. She felt the cooling touch of snow, and a froth of ice fly up from under a skate-blade and settle on her skin.

  Cleanliness, she chanted to herself. Sobriety. Moderation. Thrift. Comfort. The lacy touch of imagined frost cooled her flesh where otherwise she might have burned with shame. Her heritage held her up, kept her unsoiled and immune from the evil of the beast-people. Had she pleaded or wept, she really believed they would have killed her. But she did not give them that satisfaction, and so they tired of their filthy game.

  She found herself thrust roughly out the boardroom door. She fell on her knees. Someone wrenched off the ties that gagged and bound her. Candace gasped. She heard the door slam behind her. She turned her head too swiftly, and nearly fainted. She was alone in the oval waiting room. She found she was unable to walk. She had to crawl to the door leading to the hallway and the elevator that would afford her escape. She grasped the door handle with both hands and used it as a lever to pull herself up. The door sprang open so that she was propelled forward, stumbling into the hall. It was also empty, except for the hidden cameras. Yes, she thought, the EYE was doubtless documenting her frantic pressing of the elevator button, her brave attempts to subdue her disarray, smoothing down her skirt, examining her legs to see that she was not spattered with either shaving foam or with blood, for they had nicked her flesh several times.

  Come, oh come. Did the EYE see her lips moving as she implored the elevator platform to rise up the glass funnel? She kept turning to check on the hateful office door. Her tormentors might still appear and pull her back for the kill. Come, oh come, she whispered to the glass tube, pressing her lips to its chill surface, willing what bodily warmth she had in reserve to spark the elevator into life.

  She felt she was choking. She feared her heart would stop. She kept glancing back at the closed office door which might at any moment burst open. She, who had always regarded time as a friend (Every hour with its bounteous gifts. Let us honour each minute like a cherished guest) now saw its slow passing as odious. She squirmed inside its heartless grip. Finally, she heard the purr of the rising platform. She peered down into the depths of the funnel and saw the gloomy disk grow infinitesimally larger. At last, the funnel opened and she got in, managing to speak the word “ground” sufficiently clearly and loudly to activate the invisible mechanism. And down she went, her knees wobbling and chest heaving. She longed for a metal bar to grip, or a solid wall against which she could collapse. But there was nothing. This was a machine stripped to its function.

  She succeeded in keeping her dignity and composure when she at last entered the lobby’s pyramid of glass. She concentrated on the bath she would pour herself, the scented soap she would use to wash away their stink. Their breath and their flesh had smelled sickly when they came close to taunt her. She kept focusing on the ways she would make herself clean, and she raised up, again and again in her mind, the dike that preserved her from their pollution.

  She was fortunate that her trip home was uneventful. No howling beggars exposing real or manufactured sores, no couples copulating amidst filth under subway stairs. Only when she closed her apartment door behind her and set its deadbolt fast, did she finally allow herself to give way. She hugged and rocked herself and cried scalding tears that seemed as much punishment as release. “I will mother poor suffering Candace,” she told herself firmly as she rose up from this bout of weeping. “I will soothe and heal myself,” she murmured as she filled her bath tub full and poured in oils of eucalyptus and chamomile.

  It was while she lay immersed in water just a little too hot, soaping herself head to foot, that the vision came to her. A gemeenschap, a little community with its own dear soul, flowering from the values she had recited in her hour of deepest need: Thrift. Cleanliness. Order. She could, and would, preside over such a community. Far from the putrid abscess the City had become, she would help to build a new world of which her forebears would be proud. Like them, she would root out the wastrels and the evil-doers, the parasites and the sluggards. And she would cast them out.

  She pictured the sign over the door to her community — for indeed, it would have a stout door and a wall to deflect corruption — “Only the cleanly may enter here.” She was not entirely sure that “cleanly�
�� was a word. But if it were not, she was happy enough to invent it. Clean in thought and in deed, she mused, and those who transgressed would be sacrificed. This last thought set off a trembling of her hands; her entire body shook as she tried clumsily to wrap herself in a towel.

  “Honesty, Candace,” she chided herself. “Honesty is the purest note in the sterling character. Open the floodgates of emotion,” she counselled herself, as she had so often counselled her clients.

  She had shocked herself, as she followed her own advice to the letter. The floodgates opened. They could go no wider. Twenty minutes later, she stood aghast amidst wreckage so total she had to push away the debris with her foot in order to clear a place to sit. Except for the damp towel, she was still naked from her bath. Her chest heaved. The air she forced into her lungs felt like tarred rope. She slumped down, with her back against the wall. Slowly she unlatched the fingers of her left hand, loosening her grip on the handle of her largest, sharpest kitchen knife. This was the weapon she had seized in blind obedience to her own instinctual urging that the floodgates be opened. Here was the hand, and she studied closely the trimmed cuticles of each pearly pink nail, that had wreaked such destruction.

  She surveyed the chaos, amazed at the extent of her fury. She had slit and gutted all her upholstered furniture, including a new day bed covered in a sprig print, of which she had been particularly fond. Her mattress had suffered the most from her frenzied cuts. The cover was a ruin of deep scores and hatchings. Through the gapes, she saw the cruel, taut springs revealed. She was both appalled and elated at the chaos wrought by her furious knife hand. She had murdered each and every one of her tormentors symbolically, and knew it was well done.