Chapter Six
"Masque of the Red Death"

Medoc, are you here?
I've been sleepwalking again, my dear.
It's the inhuman monsters that I fear.

The Shining

I don't know how long I stood there staring at the outfit. I was in a sort of a daze, maybe even what a writer calls "the zone", only instead of being suddenly graced by a muse, I was swimming in my memories. This is not to say I was reminiscing about Mary, because I can't really say it was exactly like that. It was more like my mind was being bombarded with images, but in a haphazard and random fashion. My mind could not keep up with them, and therefore none of them stuck with me, none of them made an impression. I gained no understanding from the experience. My memories of the past three years were always shrouded in fog, maybe even more than the town was right now. What I could recall was only in the most broad fashion. I could recall doing things I would always do, things that were part of my life and daily routine. By that very nature, were they even really memories? Nothing of any substance stood out in my mind, nothing except a long, drawn-out period of loneliness and pain. Had it always been like this? I couldn't remember, and it scared me.

The only thing I really did get from the fugue was the vague impression that I was on the right track. In fact, that very message rang clear in my mind, but it felt as though it came from the outside, and not as a thought that my own mind created.

Past all that, I placed the flashlight in my breast pocket, and the radio in another, it still emanating a light, dull hiss of static. The department store reject from Hell still lie motionless on the floor, in a pool of its own inhuman blood. Not until I laid eyes upon it did my nose report to my brain the rotten stench of the thing. I hurried out of the room, desperate to be away from it.

The hallway was still empty, a fact I was happy to discover, although it was only a temporary thing. It did nothing to change the fact that I had no idea where to go next, and the idea of wandering randomly wasn't exactly attractive to me.

There was a short extension of the hall to the right, but all three of the rooms were inaccessible, with the same busted doorknobs I found earlier. No go.

I looked at the map again. There was still one more hallway on this floor. Upon reaching it, I started trying the doors again. The first two were broken. I reached the third, but before I entered it, I noticed that the rest of the hallway was blocked off. Someone had erected a very crude set of iron bars here, for what reason I couldn't even begin to guess. Crude though they may have been, they were also planted quite solidly in the ground and ceiling, so they did their job effectively.

The third door was locked, with a working lock. I would have ignored it like the others, except from within I heard noise. A very soft light seeped out from beneath the door, much softer than the light cast by my flashlight in room 205. I also thought I heard something, and when I pressed my ear to the door, I actually did hear something, a low, harsh hissing sound that could only be television snow.

I knocked on the door three times, feeling silly even as I was doing it, but I had to try. No one answered, and it was foolish to expect anyone would. I didn't feel like forcing the door open, but I was intrigued. I decided to try searching the third floor, but I marked 208 on the map with a pen. Even something as simple as television static was a sign of life, right?

So was the flashlight. Remember what that got you?

Nevertheless… If there's another one of those things in there, I was able to kill the first one.

And what if there are three or four of them in there? My mind would not leave me alone. The old caution instinct was still working as well as ever, it seemed. So what if there were? If the third floor doesn't pan out, I'll worry about it then.

I turned back around and exited the hallway, then turned up the stairs. I had seen nothing so far, but the momentary surge of confidence I felt earlier deflated once I reached the third floor. Instead of the mechanical thrumming I heard on the second floor, up here it sounded a lot like something large and heavy was breathing. It was more unnerving for how non-mechanical it sounded, and it gave me pause for a few seconds, but once I caught how regular it was, I couldn't believe it was anything but mechanical. It was an old building, after all. I entered the third floor hallway, only half-convinced of that.

The hall ran in two directions. I shone my light to the left side first. The hallway didn't run very far in this direction, maybe twenty-five or thirty feet. I could see clear across to the door, and the hallway was pleasingly empty. To the right the hallway extended down quite a bit farther, but I wouldn't be able to tell just how far because some wet end placed bars here too. For the life of me I couldn't understand the logic of bars being placed across hallways of an apartment complex, but understanding the reason wasn't going to make them disappear. And yet…

On the other side of the bars, the flashlight's beam caught on something small but shiny, a flash of reflected light drawing my attention. It was a key, and it had a label attached to the ring, presumably with a location written upon it. It was pretty far on the other side, but just possibly within arm's reach.

I dropped to my knees and stuck my right arm through the bars. My fingers groped near the key but were just about a half-inch too short. I turned my head away and leaned into the bars, trying to stretch and fit my shoulder in just enough to give me the extra reach. I slapped my hand down, trying to at least be able to get enough of it in my grip to pull it. Finally I felt the touch of cold metal under the tip of my middle finger, and I started to press down and pull it closer.

I didn't hear anything coming, and my head wasn't aimed in the right direction to have seen anything coming, so when it happened, I felt it before any other sense could register. Something hard and heavy slammed down on my outstretched right hand. I jerked my hand back and yelled in surprise, certain that a straight-jacket monster or mannequin, or maybe even something worse, had snuck up on the other side and was ready to try something even worse against me.

But what I saw was nothing monstrous at all, if anything, it was perhaps the least-threatening thing I'd seen since I parked the car earlier.

A little girl stood behind the bars, staring at me with her hands on her hips, as though she were about to chastise me for being a naughty child. She had plain-looking clothes and hair the color of summer wheat, but her eyes, her large and shining eyes, they pierced me when I looked into them. I don't think I saw hate in those eyes, at least I hoped I didn't, but there was something there that didn't belong in the eyes of a little girl. Accusation, maybe?

We both stood still for a hanging moment, doing nothing but staring at each other, neither of us saying a word. Suddenly, a mischievous smile flashed across her features, and she kicked the key. It flew up the hall, striking the paneling and bouncing up the hall. I didn't see where it stopped, but it was now most certainly out of my reach. She looked back at me, her face this time glowing with amusement over stomping my hand and kicking the key, and also challenge, as if she dared me to try and do something about it.

"Hey!" I yelled at her, "Why on earth did you do that? Who are you?"

She answered me with a laugh and ran away, down the hall and out of sight, her light, childish mirth following her and fading with her as she disappeared.

I just sat there on my ass, my hands propping me up, feeling a little dumbstruck. Only after she left did it occur to me that I finally found another human being in this otherwise-dead town, and that made me feel just an inch better about the whole mess. Her attitude didn't seem to be right though, considering everything I had seen outside. The town, at the very least this part of it, was in complete shambles, and almost completely deserted, yet to look at her, you'd think she was just outdoors to play, or having a nice, casual summer stroll and just happened to find a hand to step on. And as for why she did that, I couldn't guess. Even when a shade of something normal appeared, it only seemed to pose a dozen more questions for every answer given.

I stood and squinted through the bars. I saw what might have been the key sitting a considerable distance away, but I couldn't tell for sure, and it didn't matter either way. If that really was it, even using the plank wouldn't allow me enough reach. I turned away from the bars and walked down the hall towards the two new rooms ahead, trying to ignore the thought in my mind that that key might have actually been something important. Crazy. For all I know, it could have opened a broom closet. No sense in worrying about it now.

Room 301 had a working, non-locked door, and I pushed it open. The living room of the apartment was pretty empty of furniture, but there were two very odd things that immediately caught my attention. A shopping cart sat all alone in the middle of the floor, bright and red as a fire-engine. On the side was stenciled "Shop N' Save". Much stranger and considerably more disturbing were the walls of the apartment. Looking at them, you would have thought World War III had taken place right here in this very room. The walls were pocked and stitched with bullet holes, and not just a few. It seemed like every square inch of surface was blasted. There must have been literally thousands of them, and that wasn't counting the larger holes where the bullets had simply torn gouges out of the drywall. Someone really had some nasty kind of fun here. I would almost call it thorough, but I have trouble using that word to describe something that seemed so maddeningly chaotic.

I stepped into the room, and I quickly found a third piece of the room's oddity by almost tripping and breaking my neck. When I shined my light on the floor, it glittered with spent cartridges. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny brass jackets littered the floor, stretching from wall to wall, which made a sick kind of sense, all things considered. Those bullets had to come from somewhere.

The shopping cart, by comparison, seemed like a bright beacon of normalcy in this little sea of madness, but when I looked inside, I found that even it had something to offer. Sitting in the child's seat of the basket was something so blatantly ironic I almost laughed.

It was a handgun, a Glock 19. I picked it up, felt the weight of it in my hand. It was a reassuring weight, a safe weight, at least until my fingers touched the barrel.

It was hot. Hot as if it had been fired very recently.

I almost dropped it right then, but I didn't. Creepy though this whole room was, and even if the gun in my hand had been used to create this disgusting piece of abstract art, it was still a gun, and upon checking the magazine, it was fully loaded, ten rounds. It was a gun and a gun meant a little extra safety for me. And what was that in the bottom of the shopping cart?

Three clips of ammo, that's what. They sat, arranged neatly in a row, the dull charcoal color offering a muted counterpoint to the flashy color of the basket they lay in. I felt as though someone above finally loved me enough to help me out in the form of gift-wrapped firepower, though the wrapping itself was interesting, to say the least.

I placed the ammo clips in my pockets and holstered the gun in my belt. Though it was nice to pack a little heat (oh thank you Uncle Steve for teaching me enough not to blast my foot off), the plank had served well thus far and I wasn't willing to part with just yet. I had no idea how long I might be stuck in this nightmare. I didn't know how long forty rounds might last me, or if I would ever find more. Best to conserve them in case I really found myself in trouble.

I exited the room, careful not to trip and fall on the expended cartridges on the floor (and noting the absence of spent magazines… odd), and continued down the hall. 302 was a bust, and the door at the end of the hall was boarded over. Nowhere to go but back downstairs, I thought. At least it wasn't a total waste coming up here. I had a gun now, and if I wanted to, I could shoot the lock to room 208. I held no illusions as to how safe doing that was, but if I were forced to, at least I now possessed the means.

I hurried back to the second floor, anxious to pursue the only lead I had left. And I hadn't gotten even five steps into the hallway when I heard a scream, one that was unmistakably human (or at least, it didn't sound like the screams I had heard from the monsters), and it sounded like it was quite thick with fear. I knew I sure was.

When I reached the section of the hall that led to 208, the rush and bravado had completely evacuated me. I had the plank under the crook of my arm and the Glock gripped tightly in my sweating hands, going step by step, scanning for threats, but not seeing any that made themselves obvious.

I saw room 208's door, it was now open slightly. The sound and shine of the television still emanated from within. I gripped the door handle, ready to enter, when suddenly, a different kind of static scratched at my ears, louder and much closer. It was the radio in my pocket. I had been forming a theory of why it sounded the way it did, and I wheeled around.

There. Through the bars. I didn't see it a minute ago, but now I could have even without the flashlight. It was red, and it was glowing softly.

It looked like a man, somewhat, but on its head was a strange sort of headgear, at least, that's what it looked like. It was a darker red than the rest of him, and it was enormous. It was shaped like a four-sided pyramid with skewed dimensions, and it ended in a point above his head that made it look a good seven feet tall. It wore what looked like a butcher's apron, like a butcher's because it was stained dark and light with what could only be blood, blood as bright as its own glow. It stood there, and I could feel it watching me, observing me, even though there weren't any eyes that I could see. It was watching me, and it gave off waves of terrible feeling, of hate and anger and fear. I could feel how much it hated me, and its very presence terrified me in a more primal way than either the straight-jacket monsters and mannequin had. Those were abominations, but whatever this was, this pyramid-headed monstrosity in human form, it was pure hate, hate and vengeance and all of mankind's worst emotions and thoughts distilled. Just its eyeless gaze made my skin turned to ice. My spine was an icicle and my hair stood on end, as if I had walked into some sort of static bubble. The pyramid-head made no move, it just stood there, staring black hate and thinking vile, damning thoughts at me. I couldn't take it any longer, I felt such chronic, mortal fear that I felt sure I was going to piss myself.

I ran inside of room 208 and slammed the door behind me, completely unmindful of whatever dangers might await me inside. I didn't care one bit, none of them could be worse, nothing in the world could be worse than the buffeting evil aura of that pyramid-headed thing. I leaned against the door and closed my eyes, trying to force myself back to normal while choking back sobs from the object horror of the encounter.