The child peered through the window. It was dirty, coated with years of unwashed grime, and when he shone his flashlight through, its beam died almost instantly. The floor was a clotted black mass, and it was impossible to gauge the drop. Maybe he'd sink three feet and land, lightly as a cat, or maybe he'd tumble for just a few moments too long and his legs would crumple and snap beneath his weight. Still, he couldn't go back empty-handed—they were waiting for him just across the meadow.
He scoped the light to the left, found nothing but darkness. Waited. Then he turned it to the right and was met with a wall full of faces.
Dozens of masks, some hard leather stitched together with fraying string, some angelic and weeping from teardrop eyes, lined the wall like weird trophies, rows upon rows retreating back into the shadows beyond the reach of his flashlight.
It seemed that every mask was watching him.
He took a measured breath, willing his racing heart to calm. They were only masks, made of wood and paint and lacquer. They couldn't see him, they couldn't hurt him—that's what he told himself. He gripped the rock in his hand so tightly the edges cut into his palms and steeled himself. After tonight, if he did this one thing, they would never mock him again. They would never steal his lunch money or bury their fists in his gut after school. They would never follow him home, throwing insults and pebbles. They'd stop calling him Skull Kid, the nickname he hated, the only name they used for him. It'd been so long since he'd heard his real name, he'd almost forgotten what it was—his father only addressed him as "boy" and his mother pretended he didn't exist. But he still remembered. Somewhere deep inside, he was still him.
He raised an arm, brought down the rock, and the window shattered.
For a moment, every muscle in his body tensed and quivered. He doubted everything—Mr. Moony, the mask salesman, wasn't out of town after all. Link, his adopted son, wasn't staying with friends. They would both hear and come running down. It was another nasty prank devised to make him look stupid and weak, and he'd fallen for it.
But no one thundered down the stairs. The shards of glass settled against the floor and the big house fell silent. The faces of the masks watched him expectantly, daring him to make the next move.
Skull Kid cleared the windowsill of broken glass, slid his thin body through, dangled for a moment, and let himself drop. His stomach lurched, but the floor came quickly, wonderfully solid beneath his worn sneakers. Glass crunched underfoot as he landed. The masks watched him with their empty sockets.
No one had told him which one to steal, so he wandered along the aisles, examining the delicate curves or sharp angles of each. The agony etched into some, the ecstasy in others. Demons and saints, warriors and priests, children and monsters—Mr. Moony was undiscriminating when it came to subject matter. His range was part of what had earned him such high acclaim in the art world.
And as the still night continued to be still and he remained undiscovered, Skull Kid's initial anxiety bloomed into dull excitement. He felt invincible, which he knew was dangerous, but he let himself be arrogant anyway. He perused the masks, chatted with them, mocked the deformed ones the way the other children at school mocked him. It gave him a certain kind of power. It made him feel strong. He walked among the masks as king, the invisible people behind the wood his subjects, pondering which to steal.
He'd almost decided on thick-lipped oriental mask ornamented with sludgy red paint when he noticed the chest.
It was buried in a corner behind scrolls of parchment, blocks of half-formed wood, awards, and buckets coated in rivulets of dried, waxy paint. He cleared the rubbish away and, his curiosity having gotten the better of him, gave the lid of the chest a shove. It opened easily, revealing the most beautiful mask he'd seen yet.
Cushioned in lush red velvet, the mask stared up at him with luminous red and yellow eyes. Intricately painted patterns of purple and green, red and yellow wound around those great, lambent eyes, dancing across the surface like the Northern Lights he'd heard about only in stories. It was bordered with dagger-like barbs that protruded from all sides, burnished and bright. When Skull Kid tried to pick it up, he sliced his finger on them—even though they didn't look it, they were deadly sharp. And its eyes, the color of amber, glowed so beautifully, so hypnotically.
More carefully this time, he lifted the mask and held it above his head. Blood dribbled from his cut and ran along the face of the mask, trailing down over those great eyes and into the small, drilled holes that served as the mask's mouth. He moved to wipe it away with his sleeve, but found that the blood had already disappeared, as if the mask had thirstily swallowed it up.
Only slightly disconcerted, he felt the urge to try the mask on, to feel it cool and firm against his cheeks, to let it refract his hot breath. He wanted to look out through the golden eyes, so brilliant and lurid as to almost be devilishly alive. He raised the mask to his face, smiling, anticipatory.
He hadn't a moment to react before tentacles, abyssal and black and curling, burst from the mask's insides and dove into his arms like needles, wrapped around his neck, choked him and burrowed down his throat. Skull Kid's limbs went limp. He sank to his knees as the groping, serpentine tentacles enveloped him.
Moments passed. The mask's undulating limbs coiled around the child's body, some of them crawling below the skin like glossy new veins.
The mask itself, finally finished with its grisly work, slithered up onto Skull Kid's face. It blinked with its lovely eyes. Then it turned, sniffing out the moonlight, the smells of dewy grass and soft night it had yearned for during its many long years of waiting for someone to wander too close.
It lifted itself out the broken window, careless of the broken glass that littered the floor, and set itself firmly on the ground outside. Smiling, anticipatory, it sought out the two warm bodies it sensed amidst the trees, just on the far edge of the meadow.
It had been so long since the mask had tasted fresh blood.