I tried to meet Mom’s flickering, pixellated gaze as it skittered across the screen, and to parse meaning from snippets as her voice shifted in and out of audibility, “Lots of people asked about you… with this fever… won’t let me… bloodwork… don’t know how long I’ll be here… have to come home for high school in September if Dad can’t find you a tutor…”
The trip-planning sites all warned that Myanmar had the worst connectivity in Asia. No lie. We were waiting for delivery of a satellite dish, but in this part of the country, the electrical supply was as much an issue as the signal.
Mom had gone back to Toronto for cancer treatment, leaving me stranded in Mawlamyin with Dad as he carried on converting the old rubber plantation into a museum/hotel–certain that it would attract a steady and lucrative stream of cultural and academic tourists.
Twelve Oaks Estate sat in the center of a pegboard orchard of old and stingy rubber trees – a morning wagon’s ride west of the enclave of colonial mansions known as little England. As far as I knew, there wasn’t an actual oak tree within 1,000 klicks. The house was a vast block of stone that had long since lost most of its balconies and porches and canopies to rot and rust.
The day I met Lawrence, was the first day of the rewiring, so all the electrical power in the house was switched off – no air conditioning, no TV, no computer. The contractor doing the reno didn’t want the boss’ son “underfoot,” so I didn’t have access to most of the house. I couldn’t go outside because the gatherers didn’t want people wandering the grounds of the plantation – outside of organized tours – for fear they would get in the way of the tappers or inadvertently contaminate the cup things they collect the latex in. Even though Dad had let me shadow him one day, he made it clear that I was a big distraction that couldn’t happen often. And he didn’t trust me to go into town on my own.
Dad had augmented the library with books he’d collected for display at the hotel – antiques and early editions to augment the immersive experience of living in a British colonial mansion: Robert Louis Stevenson, Daniel Dafoe, Rudyard Kipling. I read them mostly because there was nothing else to do.
And I slept.
I dreamed of boarding the subway at Museum Station. There were no other passengers except for a young woman at the far end of the train. As I walked toward her, she stood and I saw that she was wearing a deep green Edwardian dress with lace across the décolletage, her long dark hair twirled atop her head with emerald combs. The air around her was a stale, slightly rotten potpourri of disquiet and despair. As beautiful as she was, there was no joy in her demeanor. Sadness clung to her, emanated from her. And need – an unfed hunger that sucked up the light as she put her hand on my shoulder and stared into my eyes. Darkness reached up in tendrils from between the seats, clinging to me, crawling up my arms, caressing my face. My breathing grew shallow.
“I can feel him near, my Henry,” she said, then handed me a coconut shell and sighed. “If you see him, give him this.”
The subway doors opened into jungle, I followed her out onto what should have been the platform, but she almost instantly vanished in the trees. The shell opened like a book. In its cavity, nested an India rubber ball, milky purple shading to amber, like a heart that’s drained of blood. It gave a larval twitch, squirmed, lengthened and dropped to the ground. I turned to get back on the train, but it had vanished and the platform had turned into a churning swamp of translucent worms that sucked me down. I woke up gasping for breath, face buried in a sweaty pillow.
Climbing out of bed, I stumbled through the thick air to the stairs. It grew cooler, almost bearable as I descended, then turned the corner into a kitchen swathed in shadows.
Dad was at the table, and the man across from him stood. “Brent, this is Lawrence Pelham. He comes highly recommended by the Mawlamyine Board of Trade as the best English speaking tutor in the area.”
Rumpled and groggy, I simply grunted as I plodded past them toward the fridge, the door barely open before Dad snapped, “Don’t open it when the power’s off. The food will spoil.” Blah, blah, blah. “There’s bread in the breadbox and fruit on the counter. And our guest brought us some local cheese.”
Hearing that word, I turned with a smile. I hadn’t had cheese in weeks.
“Leicester–British cheese–made locally since 1820. You see, I raise dairy cows – on the side. Tutor, rancher, entrepreneur. At any rate, felicitations, young man! Delighted to meet you,” said Lawrence, straightening his curved spine to achieve an impressive height while proffering a handshake that conveyed little of the intended enthusiasm of his words. His long fingered hands were unnaturally slender, arms so long that his bony wrists were entirely visible beyond the cuff of his white suit. He looked like Ebenezer Scrooge on a prison camp regimen – skin fish-belly white, and a long fringe of yellow feather duster hair surrounding his liver-spotted head. But the thing that struck me most was his voice – piping and proper, with a strange, slurpy British accent and a hint of a lisp. “As I understand it, getting you out of the house is our first order of business. And being your local dairy connection, I know a shop just an hour’s drive from here that makes primo Italiano gelato.” He turned back to Dad. “I’ll have him back by seven.”
“A trial run then.” Dad nodded. “Until the weekend.”
I didn’t seem to have any say in the decision. Which was okay I guess. Lawrence’s ancient Mercedes had state-of-the-art AC and despite being creepy looking, the old tutor was like a walking collection of interesting quirks. During the drive, he mostly just got me to talk about myself, but I also learned a bit about him, most surprisingly that he had been born and raised in Mawlamyine and spoke no other language than his peculiar and meticulous English.
He shrugged, the moist corners of his lips curling into a smile. “The street I grew up on was a closed community of old British families. My grandfather was a friend of Rudyard Kipling. My uncle was a counselor when George Orwell was on the local police force.”
“Like, the writer, Orwell?” My English teacher had loaned me Animal Farm and Orwell’s tale had absorbed me.
“Just like that, yes,” Lawrence grinned broadly. “We knew him as Captain Eric Blair. He had blue circles tattooed on his knuckles but he never said what they were all about.”
“You knew him personally?” I asked, trying to calculate how old that would make him. That would have to be like the 1930s!
“Perhaps not.” Lawrence laughed. “But my father’s stories were vivid enough I can almost remember being there.”
After that we talked about books. At least until we saw the giant Buddha reclining on the hillside ahead–at which point the conversation turned to local culture and the eclecticism of the Buddhist way. As we grew closer to the slumbering deity, life sized painted statues of monks carrying alms bowls appeared on the verge of the highway just before we took the turn off for the gelato shop. It was in a tiny cluster of wooden houses, mostly selling different representations of the reclining Buddha, none very well made or expensive. The gelato itself was pretty runny and lumpy with mango, but cold and good just the same.
After that, he took me to the monument that housed the Win-sein-Taw-Ya Shrine. It was filled with colorful dioramas of people being tortured and swimming in lava and turning into animals. “There’s another nearby shrine that’s rather like a carnival – with neon fountains and bowls moving across the landscape that the children can aim at. Doesn’t seem very dignified for a great religion, really. But who am I to judge?”
I admitted to Lawrence that I didn’t understand Christianity or Islam much better than Buddhism and he simply nodded, shrugged and said, “Religion is the opium of the people.”
To which I responded brightly, “Ernest Hemingway,” and enjoyed the admiring way he looked at me while people around us jostled and prayed and filled the many fountains with coins.
He said to me, “Such a relief. Someone of your generation who cares about literary masterworks. We should get along smashingly.”
The next day, he assessed my math skills by setting out a bunch of questions that involved my buying video games in Myanmar currency. All of his lessons were tied to real life – and when I went shopping in Yangon that weekend, I’m sure I saved about $40 buying games. Our attempts to contact Mom were a bit more successful and we talked for hours that weekend, but with that came the bad news that she had several more chemo treatments that would keep her grounded in Canada for months. I gave my new tutor a rave review and she helped convince Dad to keep Lawrence on, at least for the time being.
We got home early Sunday evening, and I excused myself right after dinner to go upstairs and install the new games on my computer. But as my bedroom door closed behind me, I realized it wasn’t eagerness that compelled me up the stairs. The instant the door closed behind me, it was like someone had opened a spigot in my chest and drained out every ounce of energy. I leaned back against the wall and slid toward the floor, and even before sleep had completely claimed me, the dream started pulling me in.
The woman in green was rushing toward me from the far end of the subway train. Leaning over me, she asked, “Did you find Henry?”
I reached into my shopping bag and pulled out a coconut shell like the one she’d given me in the previous dream. Instead of a larva inside, there was a face – Lawrence’s face – waxy and distorted. Red rimmed eyes peered out at me from deep within the sockets. The lips wrapped themselves around words, “Still here, Penelope, my love. Only you can see me, know me, release me. And I, in turn, release you. Can you hear me? Come to me?”
“Tell him, yes,” said the woman urgently, but it wasn’t until I saw my reflection in the wardrobe mirror that I realized it was actually me saying it. In true dream fashion, I had become Penelope. I put my hand to my belly, empty of the child it had once contained. Our child. I shook my head, confused as I heard myself saying, “We will be together again.”
My eyes fluttered open, and I sat staring at the reflection of a fifteen year old boy, sitting on the floor, clinging to a shopping bag. After a brief check to reassure myself it contained no coconut shells, I hung the bag from my chair. Any urge to check out the new games had long since dissipated, so I lay on the bed, listening to the pounding of my heart, until I finally drifted back to sleep. As far as I can remember, it was a totally normal sleep.
On Monday, with the power down again, we went to Lawrence’s house. Being wood frame, it had not survived the ravages of time and typhoon as tidily as Twelve Oaks. The teak interior had remained intact, but it had lost its gleam, fading almost to grey and creaking like a tall ship whenever you walked down a hallway or went up the stairs.
After retrieving some books from his library, we stopped off at a massive wooden wardrobe in the hall, where Lawrence seemed to have a sort of epiphany and threw open the doors with the flair of a game show presenter. The interior was filled with the crisp white suits that Lawrence always wore, each in its own plastic dry-cleaning bag. “They were purchased for the house staff – when we still had a staff. When I still had a family for that matter. Extremely well-tailored. The Burmen are slighter, so there are almost certainly smaller sizes that would fit you if you’re interested.”
Imagining myself in one of these suits, I had to put my hand over my mouth to hide my smile. I smiled so seldom back then that the braces felt weird against my lips and I was aware of them for the first time in a long time. “I’m good, Lawrence. But thanks.”
“All right then,” he declared throwing his hands in the air. “You don’t want a free suit. No accounting for modern tastes.
A few hours later, he said out of the blue, “Do I understand that your pater is trying to restore Twelve Oaks as a working plantation? If so, I have something he might be interested in. It’s called a steam mangle. They’re also called wringers. This one compresses slabs of rubber between rollers. And it’s steam powered. Perhaps even predating the dawn of the 20th century. I have an idea of how much it would sell for through Sotheby’s, so I shan’t let it go for a song. But I’m sure we can work something out, maybe even some manner of rental arrangement. Would you like to see it?”
I shrugged. “He doesn’t exactly confide in me, but he needs this sort of thing for the restoration. So he’d probably be interested.”
“I have a perfectly adequate hand mangle,” he explained, “so I don’t need this monstrosity. Come down for a look-see.”
I trailed him down the basement stairs into the darkness. When he flipped a bank of switches at the bottom of the stairs, I expected a glare like a football stadium, but the few shaded lamps that were still working merely struggled to make certain parts of the room a bit less dark than others. A thick sliver of light sliced into the room from between the big barn doors that opened into the yard.
Lawrence was delivering an enthusiastic sales pitch. “You can let him know what excellent shape it’s in. I bought some fresh thick-slab from a local gatherer and ran a few sheets through.”
As Lawrence stepped into the darkness to retrieve a sheet of rubber from the wire where it hung, I remembered the dream and asked, “Do you know anyone named Henry or Penelope?”
Lawrence stiffened as he reached up to take a slab off the drying line, then said, “So someone has told you the story? Or did you always know?”
“What story?”
“About the ghost at Twelve Oaks. Penelope MacGregor. Nothing like a good ghost story to attract tourists of a certain type? Any type, really.” He shook his head. “Poor Penelope. Always looking, looking, looking for her Henry. More sad than tragic, I suppose. Very romantic.”
“I didn’t know there was a story,” I said. “I’ve just been having dreams about her.”
He raised a brow. “You must have heard the story, even unconsciously. To remember the names like that.”
“Nope,” I shook my head. “It’s all in the dream. She’s always asking about Henry. Sure that I’ve seen him. Giving me messages and gifts to pass along.”
Even though he stood just a few steps away, Lawrence’s face seemed as featureless as the rectangular slabs hanging from the racks like meat in an abattoir. “What kind of gifts?” he asked. “Physical objects? Books or letters?”
I told him about the coconut shells in the dream, the larva and the face. “But nothing real. In the dream, you were Henry, only younger.”
“At least that’s how you remember it. Dreams are curious that way. Always changing.”
“The face spoke to me, but I don’t remember what it said.”
“You don’t seem as spooked about the prospect of a ghost as one might expect.”
“They’re just dreams,” I shrugged. “If I saw an actual ghost, I’d probably be more freaked out. But it might be pretty cool.”
Lawrence stepped out into the light, carrying a sheet of rubber the size of a bathmat. “Let’s take this sample to show your da how well the machine works.”
I took the rubber from him, surprised at its weight, given that it wasn’t much thicker than a cotton blanket. I draped it over my arm, but as I followed Lawrence back upstairs, I felt overwhelmed with curiosity about what would happen if I draped the sheet of rubber over my head – wondering if it would conform to my features.
As I came out of the doorway at the top of the stairs, I was shocked by Lawrence’s outburst as he shouted, “Take it off.”
As I spun it to look out through the gap, Lawrence grabbed the edge of the sheet and angrily pulled it off, nearly ripping my head off with it. The force slammed me into the wall and I stood there rubbing my shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” said Lawrence immediately, “About the unintentional roughhousing. I didn’t mean to do that. Rubber attracts mold spores. No telling what kind of jungle fever it may give you.”
I grimaced at his silhouette in the light funneling in from the far end of the narrow hall.
After a while, he said, quietly, “I do apologize. I did ask you to remove it. Are you… quite alright?”
I glared at him – surprised how strong he was for an old man. “Maybe you should take me home. We could do the math lesson there.”
“There’s not enough light at your house. Perhaps when the power comes back on.”
“It’s bright in my room.”
Lawrence smiled and said, “Wise tutors avoid going into their students’ bedrooms. Why don’t we just go into town? The Martaban Museum is displaying some newly acquired Mon relics. We can have curry for lunch at the Khit Thit and I might even buy you a beer as long as you don’t tell your dear da.”
As he spoke, the sheet of rubber dangled from his forearm like a big awkward wing. Within its flaps and drapes and jiggles, I saw the contours of a face looking out at me from the pliant surface–not my face, but Penelope’s.
It vanished into the folds as Lawrence turned away from me. I followed him out the front door and as he locked it behind me, I said, “On the way into town you can tell me the story.”
He gave me a blank, wordless look, so I went on. “You can’t just drop the bomb that there’s a ghost in my house and then not tell me the story.”
“I suppose I did open that can of worms.”
As we pulled the Mercedes out onto the highway, Lawrence said, “I’d have told you earlier, but didn’t want to frighten you unnecessarily. The locals call them preta, which translates to hungry ghost. Spirits that desire things they can never have. Twelve Oaks has its very own preta. Simply put, Penelope MacGregor died under mysterious circumstances after receiving news of the demise of her betrothed, my great-uncle, Major Henry Pelham. And she’s been waiting for him ever since.”
“That’s the whole story? I mean, Henry’s your uncle. Have you done any ghost-hunting? Has she ever come looking for him at your estate?”
“Why would she do that?”
I shrugged, “maybe her ghost tracked down his ghost.”
Lawrence shook his head. “Henry is long gone.”
“How can we be sure?” I said. “There has to be more you can tell me.”
“I know more details, background sort of thing. Major Henry Pelham was appointed to head up the front line garrison in Mandalay and tasked with quelling the latest round of unrest–both real and rumored – within the Raj. Family legend has it that my namesake, Lawrence Pelham, went out of his way to look in on and look after his elder brother’s fiancée while Henry was away. The young Lawrence adored her, her kindness, her beauty, even her faithfulness to his brother and knew there was nothing he could do to win her favor or her romantic interest.
She made it abundantly clear that she could hardly wait until Henry either returned from his post or called her to Rangoon to live with him. Then Henry died on the front. Suffocated in a burning barrack after an attack by insurgents. But even after he died–after his funeral–Penelope kept waiting for him and him alone, and is waiting still they say. She was delusional, hysterical, eventually institutionalized.”
“Is it possible that Henry wasn’t really dead?”
“The army couldn’t ship his body back for burial, but I’ve seen the casting that they made–a death-mask that’s entombed in his crypt.”
“If it was entombed, how did you see it?”
After a long silence, he said, “The crypt was damaged in a storm. It’s been resealed.”
“Did you know that he sent her letters, after he had supposedly died,” I asked.
Lawrence shook his head. “Do you have any of these actual letters, or did you just learn about them in a dream?”
I shrugged, unable to explain how I knew about the letters in the first place. But I remembered their neat script, their luminous words, Even in death, you consume me. How can I pass unto that cold land without us ever consummating our bond that made each day on Earth worth living? At the mercy of the seraphims who believe in love above all else, I have been given human form in which to come to you.
“Even in death, you consume me,” I said. “That’s how the first one began. He sent them after he died.”
“Ahhh, ghost letters! There’s a new theory.”
“She couldn’t tell anyone,” I explained. “The letter said that if their union became known to any mortal soul, it would become no more than a memory. The letter bid her to burn his letters so that he could climb the ladder of ash to her room.”
Lawrence’s voice croaked a bit as he said, “I’m not sure it’s safe for you to stay in that room. What if she draws you into her dementia?”
“Where else am I going to stay?” I put to him, realizing as I did so that the prospect of communicating with the ghost excited more than terrified me.
The next day, my dad sent a truck and three men to pick up the mangler. While everyone else was outside, hoisting the machine onto the truck, I explored the cellar. In an unlit corner, I found a cabinet that was nowhere near as dusty as everything around it. As I reached out, I was startled by a noise a hissing and slithering through the darkness. The ground seemed to squirm at my feet and I jumped back.
“It’s Henry,” the snakes hissed and slithered. “He’ssss here. Henry? Henry? Henry? Sssssssssssssssso near.”
A hand clamped over my shoulder and I just about jumped out of my skin as Lawrence said, “So we’re all done here.”
“Do you have snakes down here?”
He laughed. “There are probably snakes living under most of the houses in Burma. Did you see one?”
“It spoke to me,” I almost told him, but instead I said nothing.
That night on the dream train, Penelope sat down beside me.
“I don’t think I truly believed Henry would come back to me until the night he came knocking at my door,” Penelope whispered. Through her eyes, I saw his face perched upon the pillow. With her fingertips, I traced the curve of his jaw. Although all the features were Lawrence’s features, this was not him. It was Henry. Of course it was Henry, who had declared his immortal love, who had broached the greatest chasm to be with her for one beautiful night. It was Henry who had entered her and spilled his angelic seed inside her–completing their bond. It was Henry–right up until that awful moment when it wasn’t.
She handed me a book instead of a coconut shell. I awakened, certain I had seen a copy of that book, Pride and Prejudice, somewhere in the house. I got out of bed and started searching through the bookshelves, finding it in the living room. When I opened it, two envelopes, along with a yellowed, scallop-edged photograph slid out from behind the vellum frontispiece. It was a picture of a man in uniform – of Lawrence to be precise. On the back was inscribed, “Counting the heartbeats until you are back in my arms. All my love, Henry.”
“Look in his cellar,” an urgent whisper awakened me from the dream. The first thing I saw upon opening my eyes was Penelope’s face, inches from my own – locking her gaze with me, as she repeated, “the cellar.”
The next morning. Lawrence drove up and honked for me rather than coming in as usual.
“Did you dream of Penelope again last night?”
“She gave me something to show you.”
“Another coconut shell?”
“Something real this time. She told me where to find it.”
I refused to show it to him until we sat down in his living room. He read the inscription on the back then flipped it over and stared into his own eyes. “The resemblance is uncanny, I’ll give you that. He shrugged, smirked. “Genetics I suppose.”
I shook my head. “She told me to look in your basement.”
“Look for what?”
“Hell if I know.” I said, “But do you mind if we go down and look. Our personal ghost adventure awaits, right down these stairs.”
I grasped the knob, opened the door and stepped down. The surfeit of creaking behind me made me turn my head in time to see Lawrence coming up behind me, swinging a fireplace poker down toward my head, but I stepped aside and his downward arc carried him off balance and he tumbled past me down the stairs.
At the bottom of the stairs, I flicked on the bank of feeble lights to find Lawrence sprawled, face down on the concrete floor. One leg had snapped and was bent sideways. In the fall, he had dropped something that was now lying just beyond his outstretched fingertips – looking like the pupae from my dream. I nudged it with my shoe, and it unfolded as it rolled over.
It was Lawrence’s face, or rather, a rubber mask of his face – distorted and hollow eyed. I picked it up and stared into the empty eye sockets. Behind me, the man moaned and lifted his head. What was left of the features on his skull stood out like inflamed scabs on stretched white parchment. The creature gestured toward the mask, imploring me to give it back, which made me grip it tighter.
As I tried to step around him to get to the stairs, a strong hand clamped around my ankle. I didn’t fall, but as I struggled to free myself, he grabbed the mask, tearing it from my grip so violently that I was left clinging to a rubber ear and part of a jaw.
He toppled me onto my back. As he pulled what was left of the mask tightly over his skull, I could see his body begin to instantly repair itself, the broken leg bending and straightening back into shape as he climbed to his feet and took a clumsy step toward me.
I watched his rubber lips move, his eyes blink, almost normal again. “You found my masks, didn’t you? Yesterday? You better not have done anything to them or I’ll make a death-mask of you.” Blood poured down his neck from the missing ear and I glanced down at the bloody bit of cartilage in my hand.
He backed me to the corner where I had heard “the snake.” On the upper shelf was a plaster mask – the deathmask, I assumed. On the bottom shelf were rubber castings, a dozen masks at least – all with Henry’s features.
He pulled off the one he was wearing and threw it to the floor with a bloody splat. While he was replacing it with a fresh mask, smoothing it into place, I took advantage of the distraction, running past him, unbolting the swinging door and bursting out. As I glanced over my shoulder, it was not the elderly tutor my father had hired who I saw standing there, but rather the young colonial soldier whose face had supplied the mould. Lawrence had somehow become 40 years younger.
I ran through the rubber grove, screaming for help from anyone who might be out there, but seeing no one, no gatherers, no construction workers, or cowherds. As I paused, disorientated, the creature that was Lawrence caught up to me, hauling me down and straddling me. But coming up through the well of panic inside me, I felt a presence, and like in the dreams where I became Penelope, she stepped into my head.
I don’t know what Lawrence saw when I spoke in her voice, “Henry, you’re back.”
He stared back down and said, “You can’t possibly still be waiting?”
“And why wouldn’t I be?” said Penelope. “You have always been everything to me.”
He seemed paralyzed with shock and disbelief. Frozen enough at least that I was able to squirm out of his grasp and buck him off me. He jumped to his feet, but instead of attacking me again, he ran back into the house, slamming the basement door behind him. A moment later, I saw motion though an upstairs window, in the trophy room near Henry’s crypt. Penelope imagined him loading an antique rifle and since she was inside of me, I shared that supposition. I stood swaying in the hot morning sun, trying to convince myself to turn and flee, but she clung to me, refusing to let go.
“I’ve finally found him,” she told me. “I need you now.”
My eyes fluttered shut and I struggled to escape the waking dream, but she remained in front of me. “It’s not really Henry.” I said. “He’s Lawrence, he was….”
“I know.”
Her stark words hung in the air. “I know what he really is. There’s one honest thing he told me. If a mortal learns the truth it comes undone. Now that you know about him, he will come for you. If you run away, there’s no telling what he would do to silence you. He’d kill your father, I’m sure. But right now, we have the upper hand. We can destroy him.”
“But what is it I know?” I said to the ghost. “I’m so confused.”
“Come with me.”
My shock and terror was finally beginning to ebb, as Penelope’s outrage and hunger for vengeance filled me. I ducked down into a crouch and began running through the grove, not towards Twelve Oaks, but rather, circling back toward Lawrence’s house. Of course all the doors were locked. I was leaning back against the basement wall wondering how to proceed, when the door swung open. Thinking that he’d caught us and half-expecting a bullet through the chest, I staggered back, but the figure in the doorway cocked a sly brow at me as she turned to smoke. As I felt her flow back into me, I thought (or at least felt her thinking), there are some advantages to being a ghost.
I could hear Lawrence stomping and shuffling across the floor above me, walking as though he hadn’t just broken his leg. My breath caught in my throat as he moved back toward the stairs. The cabinet door was open and the shelves were empty. There on the floor, looking up at me, was the mask that Lawrence had discarded – the torn face that I had gotten to know as Lawrence.
I picked it up.
“Put it on,” said Penelope’s voice in my head.
She held it out to me, a layer of raw, bleeding flesh dimming its translucence.
I felt like puking on the floor or shouting what the hell do you want from me lady? Or just curling into a ball. But I knew what she wanted, and required me to turn the mask over, and lower my face into the bloody mess as though it was a hot towel.
Henry’s final memories flooded into me, of being dragged by his wrists out of a fire that was enveloping the barracks at the camp where he was stationed. He had regained consciousness, opening his bleary eyes to find himself lying in a box. The smell of plaster was overwhelming, the last face he saw before the viscous fluid flowed over his forehead filling his eyes was his younger brother’s long gaunt face. Henry opened his mouth to scream and the substance filled him, choked him, drowned him–trapping his soul in that living deathmask.
Inside me, Penelope writhed, her hunger for the truth undermined by its bitterness. In the same way that a part of Henry’s soul had been captured in the deathmask and transferred to the rubber copies, the thoughts and recollections now racing through my mind were from Lawrence’s perspective – far fresher, more fervid than Henry’s comparatively petrified memories. The whole story was laid out before her now, a banquet of poisons.
Through my senses, she experienced Lawrence’s nightly vigil while he watched, in a rapture of adoration and devotion, as Penelope prayed and got ready for bed.
We accompanied Lawrence on his journey to the shrine of the demon, Kama-Mara, in a huge hollow baobab bole in the jungle, vividly recalling the moment he pushed aside a great curtain of moss, to be enveloped in a haze of earthy incense that reeked like dung and mud and fungus. Unlike Buddha, who never greets you personally at the door, Kama-Mara was waiting cross legged in his thorny robes and grateful for their visit. When he took Lawrence’s hands in his, the young man staggered back and the demon laughed companionably. “You must let me feel your need. The better I understand it, the better I can help with your problem. Show me the depth of your desire.”
Lawrence had wanted his brother’s life. He had wanted Penelope. And so, the deal was struck, the steps were taken: the kidnapping from the battlefield, the making of the mold while Henry’s lungs filled with plaster, and the letter to Penelope in a very good approximation of his dead brother’s hand, (for Lawrence had practiced many years) declaring that death had not freed him from her love, the ink running where his tears spilled onto the page.
Putting his plan into action had been a gradual thing. There had been many letters, growing bolder each time. Explaining how difficult it was to cross between the realms, convincing her that she was pulling him inexorably into the mortal world by following his instructions – going out onto her balcony, touching herself in certain ways so he could watch. Henry’s dress uniform had hung large on him the first time he stepped out into the faint light that permeated the gardens of the estate, making sure she glimpsed him before stepping back into the shadows.
Then finally putting on the mask, on the night of the winter dance at the Anglican Church when he had convinced her to stay home alone. The love and longing in her eyes, the most powerful thing Lawrence had ever felt. As they kissed, all his worries were washed away in a tide of fulfillment and desire. She gave herself to him again and again and again, as they both forgot that the rest of the world existed.
Until a knock came at her bedroom door.
“We heard noises. Are you alright my dear?” came her father’s voice.
Lawrence whispered to her, “If they see me, then I will never be able to come back.”
“I’ll keep them away, my love.”
As he hid, he began to sweat and the mask no longer adhered to his skin. He tried desperately to put the disguise back on. When it didn’t work, he dressed quickly.
“What is going on in here?” her father demanded, bursting into the room. The mask slipped from Lawrence’s fingers, and with it, all pretense.
“Lawrence?” came the father’s voice. “What are you doing here?”
Penelope gazed at him with widening eyes as he fastened his belt. “Why are you wearing his clothes? Where is Henry?”
“Listen here young man! What are you doing in my daughter’s room?”
Wordlessly, Lawrence fled, leaving behind a crowd of open-mouthed onlookers and a wailing and very confused and grief-stricken young woman.
In the aftermath, she denied ever letting Lawrence into her bedroom and refused to believe that Henry was dead. She had seen him, made love with him…and as it turned out, was carrying his child. The family confined her to the house, ashamed of both her pregnancy and her growing madness. And Lawrence, having once tasted her, was both sated and banned from Twelve Oaks.
One moment I knew none of this, the next the memories were part of me. I even shared in the feeling of relief he’d felt upon hearing the news that Penelope had hanged herself following her return from the asylum.
Her screams of anguish and fury erupted from inside me. Her treasured memories of her final tryst with the man she loved now fully exposed.
I opened my eyes to see Lawrence coming down the stairs, holding an elephant gun he had shown off to me earlier in the week.
“What’s that on your face?” Lawrence demanded. “That’s not yours. That’s mine! Take it off!”
He pulled the trigger–and I’m not at all sure what followed.
There were curtains of rubber between us, which the bullets couldn’t seem to penetrate. They hit the barriers, unearthly and inviolable, and simply dropped out of the air, mingling with the shell casings on the floor.
As Lawrence stared stupidly at the empty gun, his face grew longer, mouth gaping stupidly, eye-sockets emptying of all sensibility as the final lies fell away.
“I know everything about you now,” I said. “And so does Penelope.”
As her name escaped my lips, her spirit seemed to billow out from my chest – her long arms reaching, her cold hands grasping his ankles as she pulled him back down the stairs, his enfeebled hands clawing, fingers snapping off, fingertips crumbling to dust. It screamed as she reached into him and tore out his life-force like gutting a fish.
Now knowing where Lawrence had put the masks, I ran up the stairs, opened the vault beneath the Henry’s monument and pulled them out. When I smashed the plaster deathmask onto the flagstones, I felt Henry’s spirit, pouring from the rents, rising up between the pieces. Penelope was there to gather them, And I left the two of them there, spirits swirling as I went back down to the basement to prepare an acid bath for the rubber faces–which were now no more than faces, with Henry’s spirit having escaped at last.
You might think I’d have been covered in his blood, but Lawrence had apparently lived a bloodless life. There was nothing left of him beyond the ash smeared white suit crumpled on the floor. The police investigation was over in a heartbeat. For all of his unnatural years, it seems that Lawrence did not make much of an impression upon the world.
Since The Colored Lens published “Along Dominion Road” in 2015, Dale L. Sproule has sold a few stories to micro-markets like Three Minute Plastic, Strange Mysteries Magazines and Stories from the Near Future. He also has a story coming in the Unbound II anthology, which brings his published story total to over 50. Dale L. Sproule is working mostly on novels these days and hopes to have one on the market before summer.