Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

But: “You got your blood yet, Persia?” was all Miz Farwander asked me, back when I made my first play for the position. “No? Then you’ll just have to wait, my darlin’. ’Cause we won’t take no gal ain’t bled yet.”

“No indeed,” Miz Forza chimed in from her crocheting in the caravan’s corner, nodding right along. “No gal ain’t bled can wear her face, for us, or elsewise.”

“She” was what they both called the Mask, though damn if I knew why — what everyone called it, even the gals who’d put it on, none of whom got to keep it for long. Like I said, they came and went; went faster than came, if I’d stopped to think on it. And the one time I collared one to quiz her on how it felt to be inside, she’d only shook her head, as though there weren’t words enough to answer my question in the short span of time she had ’fore the next show rolled out.

“You just sort of have to be there,” she said, finally. “Be in it. That then. that ’s when you’ll know.”

But being hungry makes a gal apt to stay maiden far longer than if she’s well-fed, as I’d long since found out and hitherto been grateful for, seeing how it meant no matter what-all might occur along the road, I wasn’t too like to catch myself a child from it. So all I could do ’til my courses came was sit there and watch Miz Forza handle the Mask of nights, curing its slack white face like leather with delicate strokes of that awful-stinking salve. Sometimes she’d raise it up so they was eye-to-eye and contemplate it a spell, mouth pursed and sad-set, like she ached to kiss it. Then Miz Farwander might brush by and pat Miz Forza’s dainty-gloved fingers with her own grease-black ones, delicate enough to not even leave a smudge behind.

“Courage, my dear one,” she’d murmur. “Her time will come again, and ours with it.”

And: “I don’t see how,” Lewis said, from the other side of the fire. “That Greek fella of Persia’s did for her way back when, ain’t that so? Took a sword to her, and sawed her neck right through. Cut the head off a snake, what the body does after don’t matter none; it’s dead ’nough from then on, all the same.”

Miz Farwander shot him a dark look. But Miz Forza just give a light little laugh, suitable to polite dining-room conversation.

“Oh, men do like to think that,” she replied, to no one in particular. “But a woman like Her — She’s right hard to kill, just like that serpent with a hundred heads: Strike off one, two grow back out, twice as poisonous. Cut off the head, more monsters just leak out; new monsters, maybe. Maybe even worse.”

Agreed Miz Farwander: “A woman like that can strike every man alive blind, deaf and dumb without even tryin’, root him to the spot and make him stand stock-still forever. That’s why cooch plays so well, in the end; they say all’s we are is pussy, but what comes from pussy, exactly? Blood, and dirt, and salt, and wet. poison like wine, fit to turn both heads on any man ain’t queer. Any man, at all.”

Lewis give a disgusted look, and spit hard.

“You bitches is somethin’ else,” he announced, probably aiming it my way, as much as theirs. But I’d still been following that last thought along, which was why I suddenly heard myself come out with—

“Well. everything does, don’t it? Everything.”

Miz Farwander grinned her too-sharp grin at that, all those metal fangs a-glint in the firelight, like scales on a skittering lizard.

“Reckon you got the right of it there, Persia. So don’t you let no one tell you you ain’t smart enough to keep up, not when it really counts.”

That night Lewis took me up into the midst of a fallow corn-field to show me the gun he’d won in a card-game two nights back, and I let him kiss me ’til I was wet and panting, slip my shirt off my shoulders so’s my titties could feel the night on ’em while up above a storm came rolling in, fast as Noah’s Deluge. Don’t rightly know why myself, but I wanted to, even if it wouldn’t go no further; good enough reason for that night, at the very least.

But then ball-lightning started to roll back and forth ’cross the sky, snapping at the clouds like some big invisible body was riled near to bursting by the idea of what we were doing — and when he pushed his hand down under my skirt it come up dark red, copper-smelling, with proof of my sin come upon me at last smeared all the way up his palm to the wrist.

“Finally!” I blurted out. “Very first chance I get to run Miz Forza down, that damn-almighty Mask is mine!”

Lewis looked at me like I’d grew another head, then, and that made me angry — angry so much, I hardly couldn’t speak.

“Don’t want that for you,” was all he said, shaking his head.

“What should I care what you want , Lewis Boll, ‘for’ me or elsewise? You ain’t my damn Pa.”

His eyes sparked. “That’s ’cause you ain’t got no Pa, Persia Leitner, nor no Ma neither; you did , maybe you wouldn’t be ’spirin’ to flash your trim at every Jack Henry got the fare. 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.