Gladys walked a long ways up the rolling green hill before she realized she didn’t remember how she had gotten there. She had come far enough to see that it, along with six of its similar siblings, rounded each other to form a bowl, the bottom of which she was walking up from. This was fine, she decided, and sat down in the grass, happy to stare up at the blue sky and watch clouds roll by.
It did seem strange, she decided, that such a lovely place was devoid of people. Or perhaps it was lovely because it was devoid of people. She stretched out across the ground, content to allow that curiosity to drift away as well.
That lasted until she heard the first call, a sound like a hunting horn, a prolonged note that widened out at the end, as if flattening against the sky. The long, lonely blast pulled Gladys up from her prone position to look across the hills, searching for the source. It only took a moment. She saw below her, where she had just risen from, the lone gray figure.
Gladys pulled her legs under her as she saw the figure move toward her. Whatever it was didn’t look friendly. It’s face certainly wasn’t – it was dark and rough, as if it had been carved from bark, bent to resemble human features. Vertical lines had been cruelly dug out of the sinuous face. Those lines only bent to make room for the square mouth, which Gladys imagined splitting to reveal its many sharp teeth. Above this were it’s protruding, globular eyes, circles that bugged out to stare at Gladys from its alien countenance. Between the eyes was a crest that rose to the top of its head, to form something like a shark’s dorsal fin.
Perhaps worst of all, though, was the incongruity of the creature’s body. This appeared human with two arms and two legs, its slight frame draped with a striped and puckered suit that moved lightly in the wind. With the ghastly, bulbous head, it reminded Gladys of stories she had heard at cocktail parties about linen-suited jungle missionaries that had undergone monstrous transformations at the hands of uncivilized and cruel tribes.
It moved up the hill towards her and, not knowing what else to do, Gladys called out a hello. The only response was the awful high note sounding again, making the creature moving towards her the unmistakeable source. Gladys’s breath caught in her throat and she felt her legs leaden.
Both fear and common sense told her to run, but she found her legs stiff with paralysis like that of a dream. She watched its implacable advance until she was bursting to move, but when she turned away from the creature, she found her retreat blocked by the hill’s edge, nothing in front of her but a drop into a cold, blue river below.
Gladys spun, coming face-to-face with the creature, it’s bulging eyes no more than a foot from her own. It held up a hand in greeting, an oddly normal gesture completed by the bright shine of paint on its nails. It’s proximity caused Gladys to catch her breath, nearly falling backward off the cliff.
“How long have you been screaming?” Asked a hollow-voice from behind the mask.
“What?”
“You’ve been wailing since you saw me. It’s been a good three minutes. Doesn’t that seem impossible to you?” The bulky, fibrous head titled questioningly, like a bug-eyed pet that had arrived at Gladys’s feet.
“I – ” Gladys started then stopped, realizing her mouth had been hanging open. She closed it, then opened it to speak again. “I most certainly have not been screaming.”
“Yes, you have.”
“No I haven’t. You’ve been making that awful noise.” She stopped, suddenly upset that she had let this masquerade frighten her so. “Are you mad? Is that why you’re in a park chasing people around?”
Monster or not, the creature was very articulate, enunciating each of its words carefully, as if speaking from the bottom of a well. “Did you know there’s a pandemic on?”
Gladys blinked. “What do you mean? Has the Spanish Flu come back?”
Gladys could almost see the creature’s smile in the short expulsion of breath her question caused. Instead of immediately answering, it looked out onto the river behind her. In doing so, it revealed the pale human flesh between the collar of its grey suit and the seam of the mask. “We haven’t had the Spanish Flu in about a century,” it replied.
“What?” Gladys blinked, the statement disorienting her. Instead she focused on, “You’re wearing a mask. Did you do that to frighten me?”
“Not at all. It’s a Kifwebe Death Mask. You wouldn’t be able to see me without it.”
“Why not?”
“Well, as the name implies, because you’re dead.”
“That’s preposterous.”
“Is it?” The creature stood straight and took a breath as if preparing for a litany. “You died on this spot in 1918. Your name is Gladys Parker, you were a member of an acting troupe that was stranded in the city by the Spanish Flu when it shut down train services. It also shut down theaters, so you were out of work. I imagine it was very boring for you.” The creature turned its eyes to Gladys, their blankness less frightening. “So you spent a lot of times in parks like this one.” The creature spread its arms towards the river, and from their apex Gladys could now see that the collection of hills was the center of an island, bordered by rivers. Beyond those, high-rise buildings faced the lovely green on which she now stood.
“If it makes you feel better,” the creature continued, “you’re famous now. You’re the only ghost in town that walks by day.”
Reminded again of her supposed demise, Gladys looked around. For the first time in what felt like a long time, she saw the skyscrapers of the city beyond the park. They were taller, and more of them, then she had ever noticed before. After a time she said, “If I’m dead, how can you see me? How are we speaking?”
The creature placed its hands with their bright, nails on either side of its fibrous face. “When the complaints started, I did a lot of research into you. I found out you were part Congolese. The Luba are a Congo tribe that make thesemasks. It’s what allows you to see me.” The creature raised her hands, lifting the mask, and all of it disappeared. The mask, the creature, it’s suit. A moment later it reappeared, the monstrous face back in place. “See?”
Gladys blinked, struggling to understand how this ugly stranger had learned so much about her. Light-skinned enough to pass for white in a world that cared more about that than her talent, Gladys had learned to hide her ancestry better than most, and had lived as such. Unable to face it even now, she asked, “So the people know my background.”
The creature gave a long pause. Then, “Not really.”
“Then why are there complaints about me?”
“There’s a new pandemic on, Gladys. It’s different than the old one, but a lots the same. Curfews, bans on public gatherings, that sort of thing. Things have gotten so bad here people have been told to stay in their houses.”
A faint memory of being trapped in a hotel room with nothing to do came to Gladys. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“That’s good. Because by being out here, Gladys, on Park Island like you are where everyone can see you walking around, it’s reminding everyone of what they can’t have. It’s hurting them.”
“I –” Gladys stopped, unsure how to respond. “I just thought I was out watching clouds.”
“Well, now you know you aren’t.” The giant eyes and earth-dug face turned to her. “You need to go away.”
“Excuse me?”
“Gladys, you’ve been hanging out here for over 100 years. It’s time to move on.”
“To where?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to leave to find out.”
Gladys tried to imagine leaving the park and found the idea clouded her mind like so many from the sky she had been watching. Unable to pierce that, no matter how she tried, Gladys answered, “I don’t think I want to do that.”
“Gladys, did you not hear me? You’re hurting people. A lot of people. They look out their windows and they see you sitting in the sun and doing everything they can’t do.” Gladys could see the funeral rites of the mask march across the creature’s face. “The living shouldn’t envy the dead.”
Gladys blinked, wrestling with thoughts of hours, days, weeks, of boredom, unemployment, anxiety about the future and the pointlessness of acting, artistic expression. Existence. But then she thought about leaving the island through the wall of fog around it. The unknown clawed at her heart.
Gladys waved this away with a, “Being inside isn’t so bad.”
“That’s true. Or it was for awhile. But people have been locked in for months now.”
Gladys found her anger. “Well, they’ll just have to manage it. The plague will end. All plagues do. They can last till then.”
The bark of the mask grew darker as a cloud passed over and Gladys could almost feel the passage of time as the creature was slow to respond. It did with a, “Do you know what you did when you were asked to be isolated for that long?”
For the first time in her amnesiac memory, Gladys felt a touch of cold as the cloud’s shadow continued to linger. “No.”
A gentle touch from the creature turned Gladys back around to face the steep descent to the river. “You jumped from this very spot.” It swept a gray-suited arm across the deep blue of the river’s waters. “Everybody has their breaking point and you reached yours. And watching you out here is pushing everyone else closer to theirs.”
Gladys stared down the gray cliff face. The shadow of the cloud blocking the sun grew deeper around her, as did the cold. In a moment, she stepped away from that, saying, “No, I don’t want to do that.”
“Again.”
“What?”
“You wouldn’t do that again. You’ve already done it before.”
Those words stung and Gladys replied hotly, “Please leave. I’d like to be alone now.”
“So knowing how you’re hurting other people who suffer like you suffered, you just want me to leave? You’d do that to them? Everyone?”
“Yes.” Gladys felt something like hate root her to the spot.
In a grotesquely human gesture, the creature crossed its arms, pausing in reflection. Then, “Normally, I’d offer you some time to think this over. Consider what it means. But time works differently for you, so it wouldn’t matter if I give you a day or a century to decide. It’d be the same to you.”
Gladys stepped away from the creature, preferring the company of the cliffside wind. “Don’t bother coming back. I won’t change my mind.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Why? Those people have never done anything for me. I don’t owe them anything.”
“No. I’m sorry because the mask doesn’t just let you see me.”
Gladys turned back to the creature and raised her chin, exerting her desire for it to leave. “What do you mean?”
The globular eyes lowered to the ground for a moment, breath coming from it in a different kind of expulsion. But then it raised itself up again and said, “It also let’s me touch you.”
If Gladys hadn’t been close to the cliff, the touch might have been slight, almost gentle, no more than a stranger passing by in a subway car, or a fellow theater-goer sliding by between rows. Here, though, Gladys felt herself fall back, into the embrace of gravity that had been a stranger for too long, the damp of the river reaching up to wrap itself around her like the clouds above. There was a descent, then nothing.
Alone in a park that hadn’t been without a ghost in over a century, Aggie McPherson took the death mask off, stowing it under her arm. She ran a hand through her bobbed hair, stuck to her scalp from the sweat of being under the mask, the wind from the river turning it cold. Looking down, she saw nothing but the ripples in the river as it moved around Park Island, heading out to sea.
A duck, perhaps wary of Aggie after the park’s lengthy vacancy, sat near the cliff’s edge and eyed her. It continued to stare, transfixing Aggie, until the exorcist returned its gaze.
“What?”
See author’s published work here.
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