The first version of this one ended at what is now the middle, and constituted one afternoon’s reading of pages in a college creative writing class. The short silence that ensued when I finished, followed by some tactfully stated negative feedback from some of the female students told me I had hit a nerve and thus this one was worth further development. Hitting nerves is what this kind of fiction is all about, after all.
It is amazing how often one’s life is changed dramatically by something that initially seems so insignificant. In my case, that profound insignificance was the delivery of a single piece of mail.
I knew Jeff for three years before we married. Although we chose not to live together first, we were practically inseparable from the moment we met. When you are that close to a man, that tied up in and wrapped around all parts of his life, it seems crazy to think he could possibly have any secrets. So, seven months into our marriage, on October the twenty-second, the first day of snow that year, when the letter arrived with the strange writing scrawled on it, I gave it little thought. I simply sorted it out with Jeff’s other private mail and opened the rest.
As I relaxed with a cup of strong coffee, fumbling through the usual mundane assortment of bills and junk mail, my mind was fascinated by the snow falling lightly outside. The snowfall was not heavy enough to stick to the ground, but any snow that early in the year was noteworthy, and being a writer by trade I always took note of such events. Normally such a happenstance would spark the necessary creativity to lead to a day of intense writing. Yet for some unknown reason, I had not written a word that day. Clearing my mind, and allowing the caffeine to work its wonders, I shook off the enchantment of the snowfall and resolved to get some work done. After all, Jeff would be home, like clockwork, in exactly four and a half hours.
I was leaving the kitchen when I saw the letter again, on top of Jeff’s stack of mail, taking note of its curious border. Along the edges of the envelope were bizarre figures and symbols, like some form of hieroglyphics, and as I gazed at the peculiar correspondence, an intense longing welled up within me to open the letter. Jeff had some strange friends from his college days, I knew, so it was easy enough to pass the letter off as some sort of gag, another private joke only he would understand. That explanation was sufficient for me to leave well enough alone and head to my office.
An hour later, I sat in front of an empty computer screen with the worst writer’s block of my life. Finally deciding not to fight it anymore, I shut down my computer and figured this could be my occasional afternoon I allowed myself to relax in front of mindless television or read magazines, just letting the mind go and hopefully the juices would be flowing again the next day. Though I am my own worst critic, I knew this had to happen to anyone once in a while. It never entered my mind that afternoon that perhaps the unexplained letter had caused the block. I was not consciously aware of its presence again until I went into the kitchen for one last cup of coffee.
After that second look at the mysterious envelope, I spent the rest of the afternoon convincing myself that I must have been ill or spaced out from drinking too much coffee on an empty stomach. I had to think of some explanation to dispute what my eyes were positive they saw occur among those hieroglyphics. Every ounce of my sanity told me this had not occurred, that those figures did not move freely about the surface of the paper as though alive. It was simply impossible that, as I stared at them, they reformed and spelled out a discernible word--my name!
The front door opened and Jeff entered our home once more, filling the room with his dominant presence. When he arrived, I instantly transformed from semi-famous and almost financially independent mystery writer to doting wife. I usually enjoyed the dual role, but that day his appearance snapped my mind back to reality and away from the letter, and something within me resented that, for I wanted to solve the mystery at hand. Couldn’t he be even ten minutes late one time? But once again “Rhonda, love, I’m home” was answered by “in here dear,” and I tried to repress the oddities of the day and play out my role as expected.
The enigma of the letter was not diminished by Jeff’s reaction to it. Removing what looked like a card more than a letter from the envelope, he glanced at it slightly and placed it back in the envelope with no recognizable change in facial expression. I causally asked him about it and he simply said it was a brief word from Oscar, one of Jeff’s weirdest friends, a thirty five year old still living with his mother and spending all his spare time playing fantasy role playing games. That explained it well enough.
I decided to write off that day’s preoccupation with the letter as my writer’s imagination gone wild. The next day I was glad I did so, for the agony of writer’s block was lifted. I wrote furiously, in that zone where you never once backtrack, even when you know your lousy typing is making all kinds of errors, because you are simply filled with inspiration and afraid of stopping lest you lose your momentum. All this more than made up for the previous day’s deficiency, and having written more than twice my usual daily amount of pages by just after noon, I decided to reward myself with a long relaxing walk. The crazy fall weather that year had fallen in the opposite direction--October twenty third could have been a day of early midsummer. Light had flooded my study as I wrote those many pages that morning, and I was eager to greet the day, once again assured I would finish my book on time after all.
Walking down the driveway with renewed vigor, the subject of Jeff’s mysterious mail was all but forgotten. However, fate intervened when I reached the street to begin my walk. In that moment, I just happened to look at the garbage can Jeff had dragged out for its weekly collection. I was only scanning to my right, but then focused for an instant on the item that was lying atop the heap of that week’s waste—the letter.
In that instant, I felt paralyzed, as though my entire existence was wrapped around this one moment of confusion, enlarged and agonizingly prolonged in time. My heart palpitated and my temples throbbed as the unsolved mystery of that infernal letter weighed down upon me again. As I stared at the curious border once more, those same strange hieroglyphs noted the day before became reanimated, dancing about to an unknown and unhallowed rhythm, and I then heard a voice calling out to me, softly and seductively, as my name formed again upon the envelope.
That whispering and inviting voice caused me to impulsively remove the envelope from the trash. Another voice within me told me not to do this. I was invading Jeff’s privacy. But then the other, more convincing voice, reminded me that if Jeff wanted the envelope’s contents kept private he would not have disposed of it so carelessly. I opened it and inside was an invitation that read:
Masque Profane
Halloween Night
Same Time and Place
Regrets Only Need Respond.
Below that simple message was a strange image that resembled--of all things I can think of to describe it--some kind of Tiki one buys from Hawaii as a gift to that person that already has everything. While that was the first worldly referent that crossed my mind, this figure seemed far more sinister than that as I stared at it, evil even perhaps. Its face was twisted in a grotesque expression, and the longer I looked upon it the more profane and hateful it seemed, as though capable of an intense violation of my being from some hellish place that existed on the other side of that thin piece of cardboard.
As I felt the envelope slip from my hand, I realized it was possible after all to know a person for three years and still not know their deepest secrets. The following week I was preoccupied with discovering what Masque Profane was, but Jeff was no help. The invitation had blown away in the autumn wind, never to be recovered, so I could not just theatrically thrust it on the table that night and go the dramatic route. The first couple days I waited to see if Jeff would mention his plans for Halloween night, to no avail. Was this an event he had always attended as a bachelor and, now that he was married, he had simply sent his regrets to the host? I did not even know who that phantom host was, for another oddity of the envelope was it lacked a return address.
Could Jeff really have slipped away to this unknown event without my knowledge as long as we had been together? I began reflecting back on the Halloweens that had passed while I had known him. The first year that date came around, we both indicated it was not a holiday we cared much about, and it passed as any other work night would, both of us just staying home. So that night, anything was possible. Once our nightly phone call was over, Jeff could have easily gone anywhere. A year later, Jeff was out of town because his mother had taken ill. At the time, of course, there was no reason to doubt the validity of that reason for his absence, but now I was looking for a pattern. This reminiscence became more complicated, however, when I reflected on last year, the Halloween before we were married. We were definitely together that night.
Last Halloween was a Friday night, and by that point in our relationship it was clear that neither one of us wanted to celebrate the night in any elaborate fashion, so we decided to rent a bunch of scary movies and Jeff spent the night at my place. We watched them in our bedroom and broke open a bottle of smooth single malt scotch--a weakness we had in common--and decided to kill the thing and have some fun. I can hold my liquor as well as most adults who drink regularly. Looking back on that night, however, I remembered that after we had a few drinks and were fooling around a little bit, I uncharacteristically fell asleep quite early on. Again, this did not strike me as strange at the time. I could have just been more tired than I realized and the couple of drinks knocked me out. Last year I had still been working a regular job. I did not begin writing full time until the following February after the holiday release of my third novel finally made my ship come in.
So I fell asleep early, and Jeff teased me a little about it, and life went on--nothing mysterious there. But now I suddenly saw a pattern I never realized existed. We had never been together on Halloween. Not really together. I realized now that when I fell asleep Jeff had gone to Masque Profane, whatever that was, and perhaps he had slipped something extra into that scotch to make sure I did not wake up while he was gone. I rarely slept the whole night through unless I was really drunk. My writer’s imagination, coupled with these realizations from the past, caused suspicions to run rampant through my head. How could I have been so blind?
I wanted to assume this annual event was some kind of male bonding-heavy drinking, playing poker, perhaps a little porno thrown in for good measure. Remembering Jeff said the letter from Oscar, that drunken virginal geeky friend of his, lent plenty of credence to that theory. But why on Halloween? They could do all that any time, and there was no need for Jeff to be covert about those kinds of gatherings. I was no prude. No, Masque Profane had to be something more than that. Its name alone signified it was far more sinister than “guy’s night out.”
The next week went by without the slightest change in Jeff’s demeanor. He was as attentive as ever and we made love often, as most happy newlywed couples will. On the surface I had nothing to complain about, yet my thoughts and especially my dreams seemed fixated on where my husband went on Halloween nights and what it had to do with that grotesque figure that haunted my dreams, grinning sardonically and calling out my name.
Then, on the night of October thirtieth, Jeff suddenly brought up the subject of Halloween. This year’s story was that his office was throwing a costume party. He was compelled to go, but he assumed I would abstain. He had me there. Our past had already established the lack of interest in Halloween, especially in costume parties which we both loathed. Also, Jeff knew my opinion of most of his coworkers. Though his own demeanor escaped the clichés one expects of car salesmen, most of the men he worked with fit the stereotype perfectly. Jeff knew this was the perfect excuse. When I asked why he waited so long to tell me he said the party was thrown together at the last minute. He obviously wanted to go to Masque Profane again alone and I let him, saying I would visit my mother and help her with the trick-or-treaters that flooded her suburban neighborhood.
Of course my alleged plans were a cover also, for I had decided to follow Jeff and find out what his annual social occasion was all about. While he was at work I rented a car since he would certainly find it odd if a black BMW was behind him on his clandestine journey. I wore all black clothing and bought a big black hat that drooped over my face, so when Jeff glanced in his rear view mirror recognition would be doubtful. I followed him into the country, nearly fifteen miles out of town. His destination was a huge and elegant house, set off the road in its own small grove of oak trees. Standing three stories tall, it was elaborately designed with six steep gables, the kind of place that would have been fashionable about a hundred or more years earlier. Night was falling as Jeff arrived, and the dark gray house dissolved into the darkness. Whatever Masque Profane was, it was certainly held in seclusion.
After Jeff pulled into the private driveway I drove a half-mile or so forward, then turned around and pulled off the side of the road a few hundred feet from the house. I walked stealthily through the trees and found a spot where I was still hidden in the grove but could still get a good view of the house. Several more cars arrived and the people pouring out of them, some already well on their way to a good drunk, were not Jeff’s coworkers at all. I did not recognize one of them.
That was the extent of my detective work in the grove of trees that night. I was only there for a couple of minutes when I heard some twigs snapping behind me, signaling I was not alone. Though it seemed I whirled around immediately in reaction to that sound, I did not see the face of the person who knocked me out cold with a swift and viscous blow to the head. All that transpired next was a blur. I was lost in that inexplicable region between dreams and reality. All around me, exotically clad dancers were writhing in some savage litany. A hypnotic monotonous rhythm sounded on tight skinned drums. If I was awake, someone had drugged me, for my mind was in a haze. Trying to move, I realized I was bound to a bed or cot of some kind by ropes that dug into my flesh, and when I struggled to break free I could sense I was naked. The performers of this arcane dance were moving in a circle and I was its center. The dance came to a sudden end but the dancers remained in a circle and began to engage in some well rehearsed but infernal chanting. I tried to scream, or call out for Jeff, but my throat was paralyzed--no sound came from it no matter how hard I strained, another clue this may have been a dream. Or perhaps the drug I sensed within me was causing the paralysis, for my body was gradually going limp as well.
An image formed in my mind as my body began to fail and all I could hear was that hellish chanting, growing in volume and intensity. It was a face, not human, or if it was human it wore a mask. This grotesque and profane feature materialized in my mind’s eye, enormous and grinning with disdain and malice and drooling profusely. I recognized it as the face of that Tiki-thing on Jeff’s invitation, only now it was life-size and far more sinister, hovering right above my face. I felt another silent scream well up within me as I lost consciousness.
I awoke in the forest, panicked and confused, my head throbbing in pain. I was dressed again and my clothes were moist with dew, as though I had never moved. Shivering from the night air, I cursed myself for botching this chance to know the truth. My watch read 2:30--hours had passed. The house was dark and silent, nearly invisible. What could I do now? Direct confrontation with Jeff was now my only alternative, but how could I describe this experience as anything but a bad dream without sounding like a lunatic? If I did confront Jeff, and he denied everything, what proof did I have? Vertigo whirled through me as I stood there in the forest, freezing, greatly nauseated and furious with myself. I felt a sudden inexplicable pain in my abdomen that brought to my knees. Losing control, I vomited for what seemed like minutes and then I broke out in a cold sweat. I laid down in the grove and sobbed uncontrollably for a long time.
When I finally made it back to the car and drove home, most of the night’s experience seemed to fade away the further I got from that house. The only image that haunted me the whole way home was that smiling, drooling, grotesque mask levitated above my face.
What did I do next? I did what anyone would do to avoid looking crazy. I repressed it all. What else could I do? I would simply let Jeff have his Halloweens as long as he remained a loyal husband in every other way. I found out I was pregnant and that we must have conceived, ironically, toward the end of October. This elated Jeff and he began to dote over me greatly. Suddenly, we found ourselves in the happiest days of our marriage, and the repression of my memories of Masque Profane became easier with each passing day. First, the memories only haunted my dreams and then eventually they faded entirely from my unconscious mind as well.
Life was normal again until the day of my son’s birth, and the beginning of my final madness. Later, in her testimony, the nurse that attended me that day said that while she had seen many emotional responses in new mothers over the years upon the birth of their long awaited children, she had never seen anything like the violence that erupted within me moments after my son’s birth. In the moment I looked upon my son’s face, I turned chalk white. I do remember the piercing screams that filled the birthing room--first, great exclamations of horror from me, and then the wails from the frightened infant.
The doctor testified that I was in some sudden and intense state of hysteria, and when he tried to restrain me I struggled with almost preternatural strength. Jeff was suddenly nowhere around and the nurse took my son away, leaving me in the doctor’s care. I know now why I reacted that way. In that moment of horror, nine months of repression came crashing back upon my psyche, for as I looked on my son’s face my mind witnessed an image--a face in front of his own--no, a mask, that profane mask, grinning derisively like some grotesque figure of death--a figure from my nightmares months earlier now vivid again before me and linked to my progeny.
Though all present in that room found my behavior extremely odd, since I returned to my “normal” repressed state within about a half an hour, all was forgotten and forgiven. Their final diagnosis was I had experienced some inexplicable reaction to the epidural administered me. I stayed only one extra day in the hospital and they sent mother, father and son home together.
For a while, I bonded with my newborn son as almost all mothers do and found myself once again in full control of my faculties. Shortly after the infant reached one year of age, however, our relationship changed drastically. The first Halloween after he was born I was still very much the happy and attendant mother and barely noticed that Jeff had once more disappeared that night. The following year, however, I found myself highly agitated by Jeff’s absence.
It was exactly midnight on that Halloween night, two years after my violation, when the nightmares returned. All of the events of Masque Profane were replayed in my dreams in a fashion so real I swore I was there again. I woke in my bed, thinking it was my own screaming I heard, but then realized I was trying to scream in vain--I was as mute as I had been two years earlier. The screams that woke me were those of my son lying next to me. I turned on a lamp and woke the child from his own nightmare, realizing I was soaked in sweat.
Then came another moment burned into my memory. When I shook my son lightly to rouse him from his sleep, he stopped screaming almost immediately. He was facing away from me, and when he turned toward me his eyes suddenly opened very wide, his face void of expression. Then, a voice came from his mouth, a voice not his own, that said: “we’ve missed you Rhonda. Why aren’t you here?” and then he began to laugh loudly in an adult male voice. I was still unable to speak or scream, and as that evil laughter resounded throughout the room from my son’s mouth one thought entered my mind, something that had never occurred to me before: this was not Jeff’s son at all. And again, as I had two years earlier, I passed out.
I awoke the next morning, hours later, with my son sleeping peacefully at my side. The boy arose and went about his toddler life as though nothing had happened. Now, for the first time, I began to doubt my own sanity. Perhaps I was spending too much time at home. My life was a hermitage of writing and motherhood. I was going stir crazy, but I was not actually crazy. And this child was an average normal human child, mine and Jeff’s child. The safest choice for me at the time was to write the previous night’s experience off as just a dream.
Denial took charge again for a while, but I also began noticing my son’s behavior was changing more drastically. In small incremental stages, ever since his second Halloween, he became much more distant from me and quite aggressive. He suddenly had a mind of his own and would rarely do as I asked him the first time, if at all. Being the youngest member of my family, and never prone towards babysitting, my own son was the first child I had spent significant time with, so initially I thought perhaps this rebelliousness was normal enough, but over time there seemed to be something abnormal at work. It was as if he were attaining an entirely new personality.
I became depressed and began to let him do as he pleased. Strangely enough, Jeff did not seem angry at all with that decision. He also let our son get away with anything short of doing any of us physical harm. Jeff and I drifted apart as well and by the time our son was five I no longer cared that Jeff’s disappearances were now no longer limited to Halloween nights. We were no longer a family by then, but simply three empty husks coexisting in one house, moving about like zombies. I could never sleep more than a couple hours at a time, for every night my unconscious mind brought back that which was repressed while awake. The Masque flooded my dream life again and would not let go. This all led up to last Halloween night, six years since that night in the woods.
I sat catatonically in front of the television, eating popcorn and drinking scotch. Jeff was gone again, but I no longer knew if he still went to the Masque or if he was simply with his new girlfriend. It no longer mattered. I was trapped here raising a monster. My son was nothing short of that by the time he was five. He no longer required my assistance, for he had developed into a little adult. He fed, bathed and clothed himself. I had long ago given up trying to be his mother for he wanted and needed nothing from me any longer. He had been born about five years ago, and his body was that age, but somehow his mind was developing irrationally faster. He stayed up half the night reading books that are assigned in high school. This sounds crazy now as I write it down, but it all happened so gradually, day by day, the little monster gaining control and me fading away into a world where all I thought of was my violation that Halloween night and the infernal fruition of that experience always before me. I was drowning all this in alcohol to make it temporarily go away for brief intervals of time.
It all happened again at midnight that last Halloween. This had become a routine now. Midnight must have been the hour all the festivities began in the house not fifteen miles away, because every year my son turned wild at that exact moment. That first time there had just been the laughter and the other voice, but over the years he began to dance and rant and rave and chant and oh!--the horror of it!--I would drink more and more, but on that night somehow it was never enough to ease the pain. I was forced to see this manchild turning more savage every year.
That last Halloween night, there was tremendous noise coming from my son’s room. In my delirium I was sure there were other people in there with him for I heard many voices. Stumbling to his room, I found it predictably locked, but forced the door open to find him writhing around in a perfect imitation of that dance I had experienced years earlier while bound naked to a bed. He was alone but a legion of voices came from his mouth. The little monster was acting out Masque Profane. My head felt on fire and as if it might explode.
Either my suspicions were correct and this child before me was the spawn of something evil--or I was completely insane.
There were no longer any other choices.
If the insanity of that night had ended with merely this portentous behavior from the child, even as wild and evil as it was, and far more intense than the previous years, I could have just drowned it all in scotch and repressed it once more. It was the next phenomenon that occurred which drove me past all reason. For once he knew I was there, he suddenly stopped all his gyrations, stood completely still and silent, and turned to face me directly. Staring straight into my eyes, the child smiled a broad and wicked grin and then it appeared once more--a flawless replica of that which had haunted and tortured me for so long--the profane mask that I now knew without a doubt was the face of this monster’s father. The child’s face transformed into that very grinning malicious visage that was the one image I refused to absorb into myself and repress any longer.
Then I was the one who went wild, and like so much that I am trying to write down here now, it is hard to remember the details. I was in that zone of madness that can only be understood fully by another who has been there. I only know I kept screaming at him over and over --”I will be free of it! I will be free of the mask!” I remember a great struggle--yes, he was much stronger than a five year old should have been as well. But I would not be denied. The child cried out to me in his innocent five year old voice “Mommy, please” but I was resolved to let all feelings of maternity flow out of me for this was truly not my son. With my bare hands I purged myself of the horror and freed myself of the burden of the mask. And then, ironically, upon his last breath, I felt of sound mind for the first time in six years.
I am not sure how it is possible, but Jeff must have known what happened, since I never saw him again until my trial. Of course there was a trial, with lots of publicity. Though I have told this same story to everyone who has interrogated me, and they refuse to believe it, I was never offered a plea of insanity nor was I interested in one. I only felt crazy when I was denying the truth. I know that in my son’s murder I have done the world a favor despite what anyone else may say. All they see is an evil woman capable of slaughtering her own child.
That night’s confrontation must have been louder than I imagined for someone called the police and they arrived not long after it was all over. Though they entered the room with guns drawn and shouted loudly at me, I simply sat on the floor motionless, smiling and saying, over and over, “I am free,” with the child’s body in my lap. Their eyes were wide with horror and one of them vomited as they saw the one detail of the murder that has been mentioned repeatedly in the many articles written about me since that night. This is the detail that keeps them from sympathizing with me or believing my tale. So many times, they have said: “Lady, you just didn’t kill that poor child you--” and then they don’t finish the obvious statement, but I know what they mean. This is the gory detail that labels me evil, but it was also the only way for me to be free of that hideous mask forever.
The child that lay lifeless before me had no face.