Sam knocked on my door not long after I finished the previous entry. "Food's on." Breakfast was subdued, any conversation expressed in grunts or terse words. Sam's hat did a poor job of hiding red-rimmed eyes. Tears? A sleepless night? An allergy to the hay-stuffed mattresses? I didn't ask.
Oar's face haunted me. Anthony was nothing more than a pile of limbs, meat stacked in piles like haunches of livestock waiting to be cut into prime sections. A boy when I went to sleep, dead meat when I woke up. Oar, though... I remember the wet sound of his head being crushed like an overripe fruit. His body lying atop that hill. I hear his voice like an echo reverberating around my head. His screams.
"Good morning." The familiar voice resonated in my bones and settled into the back of my skull. I rose from my chair, turning to stare up into the simple mask of another Bone Man. It nodded to us, perhaps the most human gesture any of the stern guardians had made since my arrival. "I am Viceroy. I will be your guide today." In a higher register his bland statements might have seemed cordial, but if there was any type of inflection it was beyond my ability to perceive.
We left the small in and started to follow Viceroy into the center of town. I glanced up at the cold white sun-face-and could not quite control the shiver that crawled down my spine. Those long fingers like bleached bone curling around his skull.
"One thinks you would like to see how a Bone Man is made." Viceroy informed us. "There is an individual who has been selected for advancement." The few people out at this early air moved out of Viceroy's path.
Our destination turned out to be a marketplace with stalls of hanging meat and boxes of wan vegetables. All around us, vendors unpacked their wares. Once they caught sight of us, they would freeze like startled deer. When they caught my eye they would quickly resume their work, though now their movements were stilted and sharp.
Viceroy halted in front of a stall. The vendor of this stall stood with her back to us, stretching up to hang a string of garlic. She had light blonde hair pulled into a bun and wore a paisley dress colored with light greys and blues. She turned and like all the other vendors, froze upon spotting us. She wore a full-face mask, the eyes rimmed in navy blue that drifted off on one side to form intricate curliques all the way down her cheek to merge with the bow of her lips. Wisps of light blonde hair curled around the side of her mask. Our guide extended a hand to her, a mask resting on his long and narrow palm.
"No," the woman whimpered, backing away from us. "Please, no, I have children. Thomas isn't even weaned yet." Viceroy had to bend low to fit under the roof of the stall. He reached for her mask with his other hand, tearing it free. She wailed, a high-pitched sound that tore at my eardrums. In taking the mask off, the Bone Man had removed more than the mask, he had taken the skin from her face. Muscles and tendons scrunched into a wail that was quickly cut off as Viceroy pushed the other mask onto her face.
A small thought budded in the recesses of my mind, growing into a sickening horror as I began to realize... I saw Sam's eyes widen, presumably for the same reason. Almost in unison, we reached up to the masks still on our faces. The masks we had forgotten about; the ones that conformed so perfectly to our faces that we had lived in them for the past 24 hours.
We reached up in almost near perfect unison and began prying the mask off our faces. It hurt. It felt like I was tearing off a newly formed scab. By the time I finally ripped myself free, I was panting from the effort. Or from hysteria. Sam's face was raw, abraded and bleeding in several places. I felt a warm wet trickle begin to trace its way down my cheek. I could see pieces of flesh from my face stuck in the domino. A drop of blood hit the mask, trickling down into the valley of the nose before falling softly to the ground.
I looked around, wiping at my face with the back of my hand. The world had stilled around us, the vendors and consumers silent witnesses to our frenetic actions. I turned back to Viceroy and the woman. Twin silent faces filled my vision, pale imitations of a white sun that was the face of a monster. I scrambled backward, grabbing at Sam's arm and dragging her with me out of the suddenly overcrowded marketplace. We stopped on the street corner where Sam watched as I tried to regain my composure. Wind rushed harshly through my lungs, burning the passages of my throat.
"Kid..." Sam pulled me into a rough hug, arms like a vice. "In for three, out for three. Just count. Don't think about anything, just count." I buried my forehead in the rough fabric of Sam's shirt and my whole world became three numbers and warmth of another human body.
"One wonders why you are currently experiencing a state of duress."
I pulled away from Sam. Viceroy had caught up with us and stood far enough away that I did not have to strain my neck to see his plain mask. The mask that was now his face. In an instant, the panic and fear turned to anger. "Duress? Your King wonders why I am under duress? Does he really not understand the fundamental concept of humanity, that we might actually be distressed if someone we knew were suddenly and violently killed? Your King ripped apart a boy because he wandered into the wrong house! He crushed a man who only wanted to share his beliefs! He shatters a family because he wants another Bone Man, when there are enough of you to fill the clearing in the middle of that forsaken forest." Propelled by the impetus of my emotional outburst, I threw my mask onto the ground and stepped on it, grinding my heel on it over and over until it lay in pieces on the street.
Viceroy was silent for a while, staring at the shattered mask before my feet. Finally, it raised that blank face to me and when it spoke all traces of humanity, all imitations of human behavior were gone. "The mechanical abomination was given sufficient warning and chose his fate. The Michaelman infected several citizens before he was caught. Many had to be put down to keep the poison from spreading. Realize this, visitor. You are all ants but those citizens were the One's ants, not the Angel's."
My thoughts went back to the woman in the ochre mask, the one who was escorted away by the Bone Men. I replayed yesterday afternoon's events in my head, trying to count how many people had listened to him speak. Had Oar Ellis been aware of the effect his words would have? Was everyone who listened to him automatically given a sentence of death? His message had seemed fairly innocuous so why had it driven that woman to such acts of self-violence?
Like a sudden blow knocking the wind from my lungs, I was frozen, waiting for my brain to catch up with the rest of the world. Sam's vitrol made more sense, had she forseen something like this happening? Was it only my naivety that kept me from predicting this would occur? "I..."
"You are leaving tomorrow." Viceroy did not ask, he stated. "You may travel through the forest, if you can bear to travel a path you consider 'forsaken.'"
I nodded. Viceroy turned and strode away, his long legs taking him out of sight in a matter of seconds. I finally noticed the crowd that had gathered around us. My face burned with embarassement; despite my short time with a mask, I felt unnervingly vulnerable without it. I ducked my head and headed back to the hotel, Sam at my heels.
The trunks I had abandoned days before were waiting for me in my room, leaving barely enough space to open the door. I stared at them as the rush of adrenaline finally left me. "I'm just... I need to rest for a bit."
Sam's expression bore something akin to pity. She pushed her mask into my hands then gave my shoulder a brief squeeze. "Don't break this one. You'll probably want a souvenir or something."
By the time I made my way over and around all the luggage cluttering up my room, all of my energy was gone. I pulled a pillow over my head in futile attempt to smother my thoughts, but only succeeded in breathing in must and the smell of moldy feathers.
I won't bore you with the hours of self-torment I forced upon myself while lying in that small, cold room. Suffice it to say that eventually I realized this journey will not get easier. No doubt I will see others die in cruel, terrible ways. All I can do is record the mistakes made and hopefully keep others from making the same ones.
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