FICTION BY LISA MORTON
Photo by Seth Ryan
Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels and 200 short stories, and a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert. Her recent releases include the novella Placerita (co-written with John Palisano) and the Rondo Hatton Award-winning The Art of the Zombie Movie. She also hosts the popular weekly “Ghost Report” podcast. Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com.
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THE MASK BEHIND THE FACE
by Lisa Morton
Lizzie stopped on her way to the open front door of the two-story house, standing in the middle of the manicured lawn as she plucked nervously at her costume. She was beginning to regret purchasing “Sexy Little Demon,” which she thought probably made her look more like “Nervous Little Twerp,” with the cleavage-busting sleeveless top and the short crimson skirt. Red plastic horns perched atop her dyed scarlet hair completed the look.
Clutching her fake trident, she took a deep breath and strode into the house. Music blasted over speakers, a throbbing bass line and sampled drum track overriding every other sound. Around her, costumed Halloween revelers gyrated; the smell of pot hung thick in the air.
She’d promised to meet Jenn here; she’d never been to the house, not even sure who it belonged to. Jenn had texted her an invitation: Get a costume & get your ass here on Halloween night, along with an address, but now Lizzie couldn’t even find her friend in this crowd. Pushing her way through, she spotted a folding table set with bottles and cups; she poured herself a cheap white wine, hoping it would smooth out her anxiety.
“Heeeyyy…”
She turned only to find a Plague Doctor behind her, its long beak almost touching her head. When she involuntarily backed away, a voice from inside the black mask said, “Jess, it’s Nolan.” A hand rose to lift the mask, revealing a face Lizzie didn’t know. Nolan was apparently still sober enough to see her features beneath the horns. “Oh, sorry, my bad! I thought you were someone else.”
“No worries,” she said, as Nolan turned away, absorbed back into the crowd.
Lizzie continued to forge her way through the party. She figured she’d stay just long enough to say hi to Jenn before fleeing back home to get out of the costume and take in a Netflix horror movie with Mom. She walked out onto a spacious back patio, where she spotted Jenn and a few others seated around a table, a Ouija board placed in the center, four index fingers positioned atop the gliding planchette. Lizzie stood behind her friend, who was dressed as a witch complete with black hat and green complexion, and said, “Hey.”
Jenn craned her neck, looking up and behind. She laughed when she saw the horns and costume. “Holy hell, Liz, is that you?”
As her friend eyed her head to toe, Lizzie stifled the urge to pull the costume’s short cape tight around herself. “It’s me.”
“You look totally hot, girlfriend.”
Lizzie saw an empty cup before Jenn, knew her friend was already drunk. On the table, the planchette flew past a series of letters as the others around the table called them out. “P…O…R…T…A…L…” They all looked at each other with wide eyes before a girl Lizzie didn’t know (and who was dressed as Fortnite character) called out, “Are you saying a portal will open tonight?”
The planchette shot to “YES.” The group around the table whooped. Jenn said, “Well, why not? It is Samhain.”
A young man who Lizzie vaguely recognized from her Psychology 101 class (Dan? Dave?) and who was dressed in a black cape with a greasepaint-smeared face and plastic fangs said, “What’s Samhain?”
Jenn answered, “The old Celtic name for Halloween. The night when the veil between worlds is thinnest, and all sorts of things might cross over into our realm.”
“Oh,” the vampire said, before laughing and adding, “that is sick.”
Jenn shifted to the left and patted a space on a bench beside her. “This is my friend Lizzie,” she called out to everyone around the table, “she’s a sensitive.”
Lizzie sat, although she was uncomfortable with the introduction. She knew she’d been different her whole life – that she’d really seen her childhood imaginary friends, and later had realized she knew about the history of places in a way that others didn’t. But she’d also spent her life denying her gifts because it was so often easier than explaining something they’d likely scoff at.
Looking at her with intoxicated and undisguised lust, the vampire asked, “What’s sensitive about her?”
“Don’t be a dick,” Jenn said, sneering at the boy before adding, “she sees ghosts.”
The vampire muttered, “Oh,” before returning his attention to the contents of his red plastic cup.
A woman on Jenn’s right, who was dressed as a pirate queen, said, “So, Lizzie, what can you do?”
She froze, hating the idea of being put on display like some sideshow attraction. Shrugging, Lizzie said, “I just kind of… know things sometimes.”
“Put your finger on the planchette,” ordered the pirate.
Trying to affect a smile (and knowing she was failing), Lizzie reached out and added her finger to the planchette, which immediately began to glide rapidly across the board.
“Whoa,” someone nearby muttered.
Jenn called out the letters: “O-P-E-N-T-H-E-P-O-R-T-A-L. Open the portal.” She looked around at the suddenly quiet group before turning her attention to the Ouija board. “How?”
This time the planchette spelled out, “L-I-Z-Z-I-E.”
The vampire boy belched and laughed. “She’s doing it!”
“I swear I’m not,” Lizzie protested.
Jenn looked at her friend. “How do you open a portal?”
Lizzie felt an urge to laugh hysterically, tamped it down. “I have no idea. That’s crazy.”
Three fingers still remained on the planchette, which now spelled out, “A-S-K.”
All fingers were lifted now. The vampire staggered up from the table, nearly knocking it over. “This is bullshit. I’m outta here.” He walked off, leaving four remaining around the table, all eyes turned on Lizzie.
“You heard it,” Jenn said, speaking softly to Lizzie. “Ask.”
“I don’t – ”
She was drowned out by the others, urging her on. “Oh, c’mon, just do it…”
“Okay, okay.” All voices fell to silence as Lizzie inhaled deeply, feeling simultaneously stupid, powerful, and deeply wrong; the air tonight, in this place, was charged, the vibes heavy with sex and magic. She tried to figure out how to walk away, but maybe it was easier to just give in. After a few seconds, she lifted her face and called out: “Open the portal.”
Nothing happened. There was no mystical flash, no drop in temperature, no scream from someone in the house. They all waited a few seconds before all but Jenn and Lizzie got bored and went off in search of more entertaining corners of the party. Jenn watched them go and then turned to Lizzie, crooking her fingers and laughing in imitation of Margaret Hamilton. “Well, my pretty, that was …” She lowered her hands and returned her voice to its normal register. “…anticlimactic, to put it mildly.”
Lizzie didn’t answer; she couldn’t. She was speechless as she stared at Jenn’s yellow eyes, the irises glowing in a sea of bloodshot white.
Jenn saw her reaction, leaned forward in concern. “Hey, what’s wrong? You okay?”
The skin on Jenn’s face, painted green, began to dry and cake, drawing into fleshy gray mounds. Lizzie leapt backward, up, away from the table. Her friend watched, perplexed. “What...?”
Lizzie, panicked, spun, only to find herself face to face with a demon incongruously dressed as a cowboy, Stetson hat pierced by growing horns, clawed hands clutching the plastic holsters. The monster grunted something she couldn’t understand, a rough tongue rimming its glistening lips, and Lizzie stifled a scream.
She fled to a far corner of the fenced yard, near a stand of tall cactus, as far away from the party as she could get to find a quiet place where she could think for a few seconds. When she looked back, she no longer saw a sea of partying college kids. The horde before her was utterly demonic.
Drugged…someone had drugged her. That had to be it.
She’d had only the small cup of white wine, which she’d left unfinished at the patio table. The wine bottle – that had to be it; or maybe someone had coated the cups with something, a hallucinogen. Lizzie had never done any drug more powerful than grass, so she had nothing to compare this reaction to. Was this what LSD did, or heroin, or meth?
She didn’t think so somehow. Everything but the people – the plants, the house, the sky – looked and sounded normal. She could even smell the perfume of blooming jasmine somewhere close by, the earthy odors of fertilizer and cut grass; she could hear the music and taste the wine on her tongue and feel the sleek, cheap fabric of her Sexy Little Demon costume.
Demon…a portal…her…
Was it possible this was real, and she was the cause?
Lizzie flashed back to when she was six, and had an imaginary friend named Zelda, only Zelda wasn’t especially imaginary because Lizzie saw her perfectly well. She’d come home from school every day and Zelda would be waiting. They’d play Candyland and read stories together, and Lizzie would ask Zelda about her funny clothes and Zelda would say it was Lizzie’s clothes that were funny. And then Mom would come into the room and Zelda would disappear. One day when Gramma Teresa was visiting, she saw Zelda, too, and she told Zelda it was time to move on, and Lizzie never saw her friend again. Gramma Teresa told Lizzie that the power to talk to spirits ran in the family, and she taught Lizzie some tricks, like how to protect herself from bad spirits and how to ask the good ones to go to the light.
But Gramma Teresa had never said anything about portals. No, this had to be a drug, a hallucination, a Halloween prank…
A prank. Or maybe a party game no one had told her about.
A figure lumbered toward her then, as if the legs beneath its black robe weren’t quite working. The conical black hat on its head was askew, its sulfur-hued eyes fixed on Lizzie…
It was Jenn. “You,” the Jenn-thing said, leering at her, “you did this. You opened the way for us to come through, and you must be rewarded.” The demon-witch stank of decay and burned flesh as it raised a hand with inches-long black talons, ready to strike.
Lizzie dodged beneath the blow and ran. This was no hoax, no trick.
She pushed her way blindly through the inhuman throng, sure she’d be cut down any second. She had some idea of finding a side gate, a way out to the street. Just when she spotted something at the end of a dark side yard, the world tilted under her.
Her ears filled with rumbling and terrible shrieks, Lizzie was thrown to the ground. Everything shook for a few seconds as she closed her eyes tight, convinced the earth would open up and swallow her…
Everything stopped.
Lizzie kept her eyes shut for a few more seconds, waiting to find out if it would all start again any second, but when it remained quiet – completely quiet – she decided to risk a look.
She was alone in a narrow, dimly-lit walk beside the house. The earth hadn’t cracked around her. No one, either human or otherwise, was after her. She heard no wails, no obscene cackling.
Getting unsteadily to her feet, she stumbled toward what she’d thought was a gate only to find a solid wall. It meant she’d have to go back through the main backyard to get out, either through the house or a real gate. Taking a deep breath, she made her way to the corner and peered cautiously around.
She saw them, the revelers…but they were human again. The demon cowboy was just a boy; Jenn was a friend in Halloween make-up. They all stood unmoving, stunned.
Relief flooding her but still wary, Lizzie walked by them; they remained frozen. She was almost to the house before she really looked into one of their faces and had the inexplicable sense that she wasn’t looking at human features. The skin seemed too smooth, too shiny, the hair too straight.
Moving more slowly, she went from figure to figure. They looked human on the surface…but something was wrong about it all. That inner sense that had always served her so well sounded an alarm, her nerves jangling.
She had to get out of this house, away, before whatever paralysis held them gave way.
Lizzie was able to pick her way through them inside the house, thankful they remained unmoving but knowing it would wear off at some point. She’d almost reached the front door and freedom when a flash of movement caught her eye. As panic jolted her, she turned – and calmed when she saw it was only a mirror, reflecting her own motion.
She was about to exit when something stopped her, something in the mirror. She stopped, backed up until she was centered in the long oval. There she was, still wearing the ludicrous demon costume, sporting the plastic horns…
Her face didn’t look real…or at least, no more real than any of the others.
A mask, Lizzie thought, it looks like a mask.
She didn’t dare try to lift it to see what was beneath.
