Masking the Madness

‘This is ridiculous’ Jonathan thought to himself as he picked up yet another coffee cup off the floor. He knew finding a job as an ex-convict was going to be tough, but he never imagined himself picking up other people's trash for a living. What made matters worse was that the jumpsuit that the convention center made him wear with their name and logo all over it only reminded him of what he had to wear in prison. He pushed these thoughts aside as he continued on with his little utility cart complete with trash can and cleaning supplies. The day was starting to wind down and there were fewer people and vendors around at the moment then during the blistering heat of the late afternoon, but that didn’t stop a few of them from catching Jonathan's eye. One in particular was a rather large chested woman in some sort of animal costume that left little to the imagination, another a bare chested man who was broad enough in the shoulders that he wondered how the man even came in the front doors, let alone carry a hammer twice the size of his body. He had worked a few different conventions in this building since starting, but this one was by far the weirdest one yet.

He had yet to figure out why this many people spent so much time on all of this. Sure a lot of the costumes were done cheaply and by people who didn’t know what they were doing, but some of these were major budget film ready. Did they buy these costumes or did these people have the talent to make them. If so, then why spend their time in a geeky convention like this? Jonathan caught himself mid thought and began scolding himself. Who was he to judge what they did and how they lived, he spent a good part of his life so far in trouble with the law and behind bars. After all, if they could afford to do this, then they must have done something right.

Jonathan was looking down at the floor picking up some random flier when something caught his attention from the corner of his eye. He looked over and saw an intricately carved wooden mask laying on the floor. The mask itself only had a couple slits for the eyes and sunken in cheeks to give the look of a skull. No nose of mouth opening to be found but it had some of the most impressive details carved into it including some tribal type symbols resembling teeth. He looked up to see if he could find the owner of such a mask and saw a thin young woman wearing what he assumed to be some type of forest themed costume walking away from the location of the mask. He reached down to grab the mask and just as he started to call out to the young woman, he looked up and saw that she was nowhere to be found.

‘That's odd, she was just there a second ago’ Jonathan thought to himself as he scanned the room looking for her. After spending more time than he cared looking for her, he had to fight off the urge to pocket the mask to pawn off later. ‘This job was hard enough to find the way it was’ he had to repeat over and over again to himself, so he set the mask on the top shelf of his cart and finished up his area before he took the mask to the lost and found bin at the front desk. As he set the mask in the bin, he couldn’t help but feel like the mask was watching him. He quickly set it down and proceeded to head back to the janitorial room to return his cart and end his shift. It didn’t take him long to change out of his uniform and as he went to drop it off at his cart, he was startled to find the wooden mask on the top shelf once again. He paused for several seconds as he second guessed himself on whether or not he had taken the mask to the reception desk. Either way, he grabbed the mask once again and this time dumped it into the trash can on his cart.

Jonathan made his way out to his car in the parking lot, reaching for the handle only to find that the door didn't open. ‘Dummy’ he thought to himself as he reached into his pockets for the keys. He made quick work of the lock and practically falls into his car, only to be startled once again with the wooden mask in his passenger seat.

“Alright, who is messing with me,” Jonathan said to himself, calming his nerves as he tossed the mask out of his window. After finally getting his junk car started, he made sure to run over the mask for good measure. The drive home is the calmest point of his day, void of any distractions and only good music on the radio. He quickly makes it to his tiny apartment, which is basically a single room minus the separate bathroom. Jonathan made his way to the pantry next to the stove and pulled out the last package of ramen noodles he had and quickly rinsed out the pot he used to cook his ramen in the previous night. ‘Even lousy motels have microwaves in the rooms’ he thought to himself as he dug in the drawer for a clean fork to use. Jonathan plopped down into his lumpy recliner and turned on the television, only to find that the Wi-Fi he had been ‘borrowing’ was now password protected. Frustrated, he turned the television off only to see in the blank screen a reflection of the front door with a glowing eyed version of the mask he had run over staring at him.

Dumping the last of his ramen all over his lap and the floor, Jonathan spun around only to find that the doorway was empty. A quick glance back at the television proved that there was nothing there. Cursing himself, Jonathan quickly cleaned up his mess and decided it was time to call it a night, stripping down to nothing but the essentials and making his way to the bathroom. The light in the bathroom was dim, but it was a pretty small room, both things he was accustomed to in prison and usually paid little attention to. This night, however, had him on his toes. After quickly scanning the room, he jumped right into his normal nightly routine and after a quick shave he started to brush his teeth. The comfort of his nightly routine gave him a brief time of solace as he flipped through his social media while brushing his teeth, but as soon as he looked back up at the mirror, he once again saw the creepy wooden mask with its hollow eyes floating in the doorway once again, staring at him from the bathroom door. Spitting toothpaste all over the mirror on his way down to the floor after losing his footing, he spun quickly around with his back to the vanity only to find that once again, he was alone. Had his heart been beating any harder, it would have rocketed right out of his chest. Jonathan was visibly shaking at this point and was ironically unable to move from his current position.

Jonathan finally reached up for his phone without leaving the floor, only to discover that an hour had passed and that he had several notifications that he never heard. How had he been here that long when it only felt like five minutes? Unwilling to look back into the mirror, Jonathan picked himself up and forced himself back out of the bathroom and into bed where he hoped a good night's sleep would solve whatever it was that was messing with his head. Never had he been more wrong in his life. Not only did he toss and turn all night trying to get the mental image of the wooden mask out of his head, but the few times he did sleep, the mask haunted his dreams. Once during the night, he woke up unable to move a single muscle and could vaguely pick out the silhouette of a figure sitting on his chest, making him unable to sit up. Slowly the figure spun around and revealed the cursed mask staring back at him.

As quickly as the figure appeared on top of him, it was gone and Jonathan was able to move once more. He quickly bolted up out of his bed, praying that what he had just witnessed had not actually happened. With no proof that what he had just seen was real, he reluctantly layed back down and slowly went back to sleep. The rest of the night was fits of restless sleep followed by wisps of dark figures moving in the corner of the shadows. What should have been a quick night turned into an eternity as he waited for the sunrise to peek through his crusty windows and drive the shadows away. His wish was finally granted as the sun barely poked up above the horizon and the alarm on his phone started chirping. Jonathan thought long and hard about calling in sick to work today, but a very large part of him did not want to be here in his apartment any longer. Mustering up the strength to get up and move, he got himself somewhat presentable and made his way out the door towards the convention center.

He managed to find his way back to work, unable to describe the drive there as he just didn’t remember it. Exhausted, he pulled his uniform on once again, grabbed his cleaning cart and made his way to the convention floor. It was still pretty early in the morning and few vendors were there setting up for the day, so his morning routine was quick and simple. He pushed through the morning as best as he could, even accepting a coffee offered to him from a young gal in one of the vendor booths that he had talked to several times over the show. He gladly took the coffee, thanking her profusely as he quickly chugged the boiling hot liquid without a second thought. The coffee gave him the quick boost he was looking for, but it wasn’t without consequence. Soon after he started seeing brief glimpses of the wooden mask out of the corner of his eyes. Jonathan could be walking past a random booth and catch a glimpse of the wooden mask in the backdrop only to have it disappear as soon as he turned to face it. Slowly he started to see it in more and more places; a reflection off a vendor's mirror, a spilled soda mess on the floor that he was cleaning up, or even within the very merchandise that the vendors were selling.

His erratic behavior had apparently gotten the attention of a few of his coworkers as they had all come up to him and asked him if everything was going alright. He gave them all the same answer, shooing them along with a generic story of how he was just a little tired. He continued to do his job as more and more people flooded the conventions center for the last day of the show, trying his best to ignore the wooden masks that kept popping up in his peripherals. ‘They are not real’ he continued to tell himself as he emptied trash cans, ‘they are not real.’

Jonathan kept his head down and focused on his work, hoping it would bring some sort of relief to his ongoing crisis. It seemed to be working for a while until he managed to bump into someone. He heard something fall to the floor and figured that whomever he had bumped into had dropped something. Unwilling to look up he apologized quickly and tried moving on.

“Excuse me sir, but you seemed to have dropped something,” said the young woman he had bumped into. Jonathan looked up just far enough to see where she was pointing and followed her finger to the wooden mask on the floor. Freaking out, Jonathan looks up to the woman he bumped into in an attempt to look away from the mask only to find that she is wearing a mask identical to it. In a panic, Jonathan backs away from the woman, pushing his cart abruptly and knocking a broom loose from its holder which Jonathan promptly trips over. Coming down hard on his hip and head, Jonathan finds himself dizzy and in a great deal of pain. Rubbing his head he attempts to get back up, only to have a slim arm push him back down to the ground.

“Are you ok? Please stay where you are, paramedics are on the way,” is what everybody else heard.

“Are you still alive? Stay there and die like a good boy,” was what Jonathan heard coming from the thin forest girl he had seen the previous day. This time however, she had the mask on as well as all the other people who were standing around to watch. Some hovered in the background, whispering their evil intentions to one another, others jumped around with their hands in the air as if praying for his death.

Jonathan tried to get back up again only to have a shooting pain run through his chest and down his left arm. Through the pain he managed to lift his head up off the floor only to see just what was happening to him. Where the forest girl held her hand to his chest was the beginning of bark and wood that were taking over and slowly spreading. He was slowly beginning to lose control and feeling in his left side as the wood slowly started taking over his body. He tried to struggle against the woman but was unable to free himself from her grasp. She quickly changed her hold on him to include both hands on his chest and drove her powers into him in rhythmic beats. Every push into his chest sent pain down his spine as he could feel the wood that had replaced his chest cracking a little more with every thrust. Quickly his body was being taken over by wood and bark as he fought against her powers to no avail, her expressionless mask mocking him the entire time.

Jonathan desperately wanted to scream out for help, but little more than a gargle escaped his mouth as his killer persistently drove her hands into his chest. It was becoming more difficult for him to breathe as he fought desperately to free himself from her grasp. More and more people started showing up in his peripherals to watch what was going on, all of which were wearing the same mask. Some of the masked people sought to save him while others championed the forest girl to finish him off. He tried his best to fight off his attacker as the wood quickly took over more and more of his body until he was all but unable to lift even a single finger. Jonathan panicked as the wood started forming around his throat, cutting his breathing to short gasps as the color started fading from his vision and the shouts from all around him faded into nothingness. A brief calm settled over him as he could no longer feel anything happening to his body and his thoughts became heavy as he slowly trailed off until there was nothing left.

*****

Paramedics arrived on scene too late to do anything for the man they found laying on the floor, despite the efforts of a young woman doing CPR while the man lay on the floor panicking from what was happening. They quickly concluded from what they could see and eye witness accounts that the man had most likely died from a heart attack while either under the influence or suffering a mental breakdown. Multiple people told the paramedics and the police that it looked as though the man was afraid for his life. One of the responding officers whom just so happened to be the first one one the scene was less than happy to be around a crowd of people such as this and had pulled the young woman dressed in what looked to be some forest type costume aside for questioning since she had been the the first one to respond to the victim.

She told the officer that he seemed to have an adverse reaction to the mask she was wearing as part of her costume and even handed it over to the officer to inspect. Taking barely a glance at it, the officer handed it back to her and dismissed her. With no clear motive for anything suspicious, the police handed the scene over to the paramedics and left the building to control the flow of people. Once outside, the officer went to section off a part of the entrance to clear a path, only to find that the same wooden mask the young woman had shown him was laying in front of the door he was trying to block off.