Choose your masques
The ranks are forming
Choose your masques
The day is dawning.
Hawkwind, "Choose Your Masques."
Chapter I - Into The Night
(TIME: THE PRESENT. NEW YORK CITY.)
She didn't really like to think about it, but there were times that Kirsty couldn't help but dwell upon the various links in the chain of events that had led her up to her present condition. It had been all too easy at first to block certain things out after the fact, after the police had finally all gone away, and the bodies of her husband, his friend and co-conspirator, and his three sluts had been lowered into the ground.
However, it seemed that there were some things that just refused to stay buried. One second she'd be going throughout her day as if nothing had happened - and it would all come crashing back. She'd find herself ruminating over how she'd gotten to be where she was, and just when she'd gotten accustomed to the Taint of the Box, and of Hell, as it had continued to seep into her soul.
In other words, the moment she'd become a monster...and the moment at which she'd decided that she was okay with that fact.
The thing was, there were times when she really wasn't okay with it, and the sheer level of how much she was really, really, not okay with it at all would hit her at the most inconvenient and inopportune moments. At work. On the train to the bus stop. On the bus on the way home from the train station. At 3:00AM in the morning when she woke up in a cold sweat, and looked into the mirror after staggering in the bathroom, certain that she could not only feel him – Hell's Black Pope, the Leader of the Cenobites - staring back at her from some dark place behind the mirror. Five souls, she'd promised him, and she'd kept her word. The funny thing was, there had been a point after it was all over and done with that she'd suddenly realized that her soul was now his more than ever.
And yet, there were times she remembered the rage she'd felt, watching all of those videos of Trevor and his conquests - and those were the moments when she didn't regret her decision, or her actions, at all. He'd been a lying, cheating, would-be murdering bastard - and when her anger, and all of her feelings of hurt and betrayal flared back up again, she figured that he and all of his cohorts had deserved what they'd gotten – even if it was death, and an eternity in Hell.
There were days when things were completely normal, nights when she was able to sleep without any of the bad dreams that sometimes plagued her. Yet there were just as many times that she wandered the city in a daze, riding the trains until the night became morning, when she'd completely blank out at her desk at work. Her acquaintances and her co-workers did their best to be understanding, which of course just made everything worse. Your husband was planning to kill you. And then there's the other four people that he murdered, his friend, those women...horrible, horrible. Of course we understand that you're having a hard time right now, we understand that you're depressed. Why don't you take a few weeks off?
So that was what she'd done. "A few weeks" had nearly stretched into a month. And here she was, wandering again. The city itself was a Labyrinth, and there were times that she felt that she could not stop moving though it, as if she were compelled to navigate its myriad byways as though they held some answer to her plight - or more likely, as if in preparation for her entry into the Labyrinth she knew awaited her when he came for her again.
There was also the Box, still in her apartment. She'd never been able to get rid of it for any length of time. It always made its way back to her again, without fail. She didn't even like to be in the same room with it. The city, with all of its noise and its pollution and its dangers, seemed less threatening. And the part of Kirsty that housed the dark, cynical humor that she'd developed over the years chucked inwardly at the thought of falling to a random mugger after all that she'd already been through, and the horrors that she knew still awaited her in Hell.
At other times in her life, she'd found that walking through Coney Island, especially at this time of year, always seemed to bring her out of whatever funk she'd managed to get herself into. When she was a child, her father had sometimes skipped out of work early on particularly nice days, and they'd both absconded to one of the Coney Island amusement parks. Somehow she'd made her way there that very eveing, as if in subconscious memory of happier, bygone times. The sudden memories of her father were like a blow to the gut. She briefly considered fleeing the place, before a sudden call yanked her out of her reverie;
"Hey...sister."
Whirling around to confront the source of the call, her mind took in aspects of the people who approached her separately, as if her mind could not take everything about them in at once. She saw what looked like dreadlocks, and a torn poet shirt, on a lean, rangy man who was accompanied by a smaller figure wearing appeared to be a made-over Duke University Blue Devils' football letterjacket, and a rather large man in what looked to be a loud hawaiian shirt that was open to the waist.
Then her vision snapped into focus, and her heart skipped into her throat.
How do the monsters keep finding me? This was what crossed her mind as she looked around for the quickest and best route of escape, as Dreadlocks continued,
"Hey, it's okay, I don't think there's anyone else around here right now but us." He looked around quickly to be sure, and then continued,
"I haven't seen you around before." His low, baritone voice seemed to rumble up out of a throat that was more reptilian than human, just like his scaled, rust-red skin. The reptile-man's piercing, bright-blue eyes were the most human-seeming thing about him.
"Don't mind Peloquin. He's like this with every girl he meets. I guess you could say it's his mission in life," said the fat man with...what were those, fanged eels that sprung up out of his belly, to coil lovingly around his neck?
"Fuck off, Leroy," said the Lizard-man...Peloquin?
"Hi there," said the third one, who resembled nothing less than a traditional fanged, horned, stereotypical Demon, standing right there in front of her - but with the simple, guileless eyes of a child. And after her initial shock, Kirsty also remembered that she'd seen Demons - real ones And they'd looked nothing like the creature who stood before her in a T-shirt, torn jeans, sneakers, and the football jacket. It was his eyes that finally caused her curiosity to overcome her terror. No demon, no Cenobite in her experience, had ever possessed such innocence.
"I'm Lude," the Blue Devil continued. "We were gonna go ride the ferris wheel before Peloquin saw you. Wanna come along?"
"Can you give us a goddamn minute, Lude?" Peloquin asked, reminding Kirsty of nothing so much as a guy trying to pick a girl up while trying to fend off an uncool kid brother at the same time.
But Lude, it seemed, was in no mood to wait. He took off running towards the object of his desire, calling out over his shoulder,
"Last one there is a penis pump!"
"Goddammit, Lude!" Peloquin shouted after him, snarling. "Wait here," he snapped at Kirsty, before taking off after Lude.
And all Kirsty could do, for several seconds, was gape.
TO BE CONTINUED...
