The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

That stuff leaves a stain, gal, deep and deeper. Just ’cause it don’t show on the face —”

“Oh, go on and shout it, preacher’s boy! I’ll have Her head to hide me, you fool; won’t no one know me from Adam’s house-cat, once that thing’s fit on.”

“‘That ‘thing’ is right. Horrible goddamned. ”

“It’s a mask, is all. All of it! All of this. It’s just a damn mask.”

A mask. The Mask. Both, and neither.

I guess he thought we’d made promises to each other; he’d made ’em to me, anyways, that was true enough. But I never said a thing of the same sort back to him, and that’s the fact, ’cause going by my Ma’s experience alone I already knew better than to trust some snake-in-pants with my one and only future, no matter how much I liked him or how good his lips felt on mine. Any man made me shiver or want to bow down, that wasn’t exactly a recommendation; quite the opposite.

So I left him there with his pecker out and I walked away stiff-backed, buttoning up my front again as I went, straight to the two Mizes’ caravan. And when I made ’em my offer again, this time—

— they took it.

* * *

I remembered what my Ma said about that old hag-woman, Medusa. How she’d been young and pretty once, and her sisters alongside of her. How she’d been took up and played rough with by yet one more of them horny old god-Devils — the one who ruled the seas, might be? Him with his trident? And because he’d made sport of her in the temple of some goddess she served, it was her who had to bear the brunt of things when the goddess got angry, though only on her own behalf. Medusa who ended up getting cursed to monsterhood while the one who’d stole her virtue swum free, and the goddess she’d vowed her life to left her to weep in the ashes.

It was her sisters who stood by her then, and them only — they who were immortal, while she could be killed. They who took on the same monstrous form, and spun a spell so’s that she could protect herself by turning any man fool enough to try and approach her to lifeless rock with her naked eyes alone, a human statue fit only to crack and crumble into dust.

But that one Greek fella who cut her down, he used a trick to ’scape her wrath — taught to him by the same goddess who’d took against her for all time, back when the sea-god had his way. He was a god’s son himself, the cause of much unhappiness on his Ma’s part, when her Pa saw what’d come to pass. And his name, his name.

damn if his name wasn’t almost same as mine, now I come to think.

But it took me a long time to recall that, afterwards. And by the time I did, at last. it truly didn’t matter none.

No God but the one, down here where I was raised. And not too much of Him, neither, when things really counted.

Skinless Jenny helped me fit the Mask of Fear on that very night while the two Mizes watched, holding hands, and Half-Face Joe extolled my charms out front, racking up the take. I hadn’t seen Lewis Boll all day, though the tent sure got itself up on time; thought maybe he’d finally run off to find himself a bank to knock over, and told myself I didn’t much care.

I’d worried over my state, too, knowing what-all I was going to have to do in order to earn my money that night. But Miz Forza simply smiled, and called that last gal over — she gave me her Dutch Cap, all fresh-boiled and cleanly, to cram up inside myself. “Works just as well t’keep things in as it does t’keep ’em out,” she confided, and I chose to believe her.

I barely recognised my own body in the dim bronze mirror hung up at the back, to make the tent seem bigger — so smoothed and plucked and powdered, legs shaved and wild half-whatever hair tamed to a fare-thee-well, pinned up under the Mask’s slippery cap. I was a creature of myth, of legend, and where I moved I cast a net far wider than my gauze and crinolines alone could swing. My high heels clicked onto the stage like talons.

“Oh, you’re a demigoddess like that, my sweet Persia,” Miz Forza told me, admiring. “I always knew it, always. Didn’t we, dear?”

“Yes indeed,” Miz Farwander chimed back, nodding her head, her grin curling up on either side to show even more teeth than was usual. “Always. Right from when she told us what they called her.”

And I saw her tongue poke out to touch her bottom lip, a bit too quick to notice, ’less you were looking at her straight-on — so long and red, so thin, a flickering spear. Almost as though it’d been sharpened.

Up above, the dregs of last night’s storm still roiled, and the Mask felt hot and heavy against my sweating face. Behind one curtain, Skinless Jenny struck up on her dulcimer, hammers flying, skittering out trails of extra music while the gramophone ground on: Some mean old moanin’ blues tune I half-remembered from earlier days when I’d heard my Ma humming it, leant up ’gainst the sill in some lousy little coal-town hostel—

Black mountain people, bad as they can be
I said black mountain people, they bad as they can be
They even uses gunpowder. to sweeten they tea.

While out from behind the other, meanwhile, my fellow cooch-gal handmaidens come trooping heel-to-toe, white arms waving languid as twister-shucked branches after the real wind’s already blown by. Their palms were stained with henna and lip-rouge, a kiss pressed full-on at the centre of every one right where those lines that are supposed to map out love and marriage split apart — like they split apart now, so’s the rubes (who were standing ass-to-elbow by that point) could catch their first glimpse of me in full regalia, with everything I had ’neath my jaw- line hanging out on display.

Oh, and I heard ’em make that single almighty gasp, too, as they did; Jesus, if it wasn’t enough to make my own head swim same’s if I’d been punched, under the Mask’s brutal weight. Like a shot of that same rot-gut I’d been proud to never touch a drop of, sped straight through ’tween my breasts and into my beating heart.

I let my own arms drift up, slow as parting black water. Let my own hot hands cup together ’neath Her face and made with a vampish pose, like I was Theda Bara. There in the spot’s single bright column, I shook back both our heads together, and let them snaky locks fall where they may — up, down, to either side, so’s my nipples rose up and peeped out like two new red eyes through a dreadful forest’s wall of vines. Took my cue from Miz Farwander and stuck my tongue through Her slack mouth — far as it’d go and farther still, ’til it ached right to root — to lick Her bluish-purple lips.

And as I thrust the Mask open ’round me, forcing myself inside, it was as though I felt myself crack open too, somehow. Felt Her enter into me, through every pore, at the very same time.

Which, of course, was right about the moment I finally noticed Lewis Boll standing in the third row back, with that gun of his already drawn and cocked the Two Mizes’ raptly attendant way.

They can’t see him, I thought. Light’s in their eyes — no way, no-how. Oh, goddamn him and goddamn me too. He’s gonna go ’head and ruin every damn thing.

“Gun!” one of the rubes yelled out, which let loose with a general back-stumble, a crash and rip and the racket of thirty men with two feet apiece set off running flat-out, not caring who they might plough into, so long’s they ended up out of range. The gals did much the same, scattering like mice when the kitchen door slams open. I saw Joe grab Jenny by the arm and haul her clear in mid hammer-fall, putting paid to the music half; one kick did for the other, as the gramophone needle skipped and tore ’cross the whole of the record at once.

An empty tent with the back half tore down and rain falling in — just me, Lewis and the Mizes, with me froze in place mother-naked and masked, sweat drying on my goose-pimpled everything. As he looked me right in the eye, or close enough, with his finger never straying from the trigger — stood there with his hat-brim dripping into his collar and told me, like it was some sorta damn foregone conclusion—

“Persia. you’re comin’ with me now, gal. Gonna leaves these two witches to their own damnation. We’ll git married, have us some young’uns, live high; Law won’t never catch us, not if we start out runnin’ fast enough. Won’t that be fine?”