Man In a Mask

I still see Tommy Wilkes. Hell, I can't unsee him. We grew up together, but we never spoke. He was the weird kid in school. His mother told him when he was younger that he had the face "only a mother could love." She convinced him that he was too hideous for the rest of the world to see, so he wore a mask. The mask was plain white and oval shaped, with slits cut out for the eyes and mouth. When teachers would ask him to remove said mask, he would just shake his head, never speaking a word.

Rumors went around about why he never spoke. Even when he was getting beat down after school, he wouldn't even yell for help. Some say, he wouldn't even whimper when he'd be left bloody and shaking behind the school. The prevailing rumor was that his father had cut out his vocal cords when he was younger in a drunken rage. Obviously, as kids we believed this. His father was not a surgeon and there would've been no way to do that without killing his son, but as kids, we knew no better.

Out of pity, I asked him to the prom. When he nodded yes, I was actually surprised. I didn't mean it as anything insidious but part of me also did not really expect him to agree. I was a popular girl, asking the guy that no one ever talked to, to the most important event of our high school careers. At prom is where things went wrong.

We were slow dancing to some R&B song I had never heard of, when one of the jocks, Billy Haskins, came up behind him. Billy had the hots for me but I didn't date jackasses so it was out of the question. Billy grabbed Tommy's mask while he was distracted and ripped it off of his face. That was the first time I ever heard him make a sound. A scream that cut through the entire gymnasium. The pitch was high, and uncomfortable. His voice cracked and tumbled around in pitch, he had never made this sound before. Even Billy and his goons weren't laughing like they normally did when they beat him behind the school. Their eyes were a look of shock and disgust when they saw Tommy's face.

The scars were deep, very deep. As much as he tried to cover his face, they were unavoidable. They looked like slash marks from a knife. Trenches that had formed into his skin, soldiers could've marched down them. I didn't say a word, my body felt like ice had been placed on my muscles. I wanted to hide him, protect him from this world and all that was wrong with it. But I couldn't, I just stood there, and he looked at me through bloodshot green eyes. They started off pleading, begging for my help, then they turned to anger, and then they settled on depression. When he finally stopped screaming, Billy had the good sense to give him his mask back. That's when I realized the music had stopped, everyone was looking at the boy with the mask.

He slowly slid it back onto his face. Billy offered some half hearted apology that I know he didn't mean. Tommy only nodded, and walked out of the gymnasium. That was the last I saw of him, until this week.

It has been ten or so years since that night. Tommy's parents found him the next day hanging in the barn. I got married to an accountant and moved to Seattle. Life moved on, even though he never could. The school didn't hold a memorial for him, and his parents had him cremated and never held a celebration of life service. He was forgotten in death as he was in life.

Me and my husband moved into our new house this week. He had to go to an office get together Monday night to celebrate his new position. I was home alone. There are windows surrounding our living room. It created an open flow that I was really into when we first moved in. Bushes covered the center of the windows, we were planning on removing them although, I'm not sure I can now.

I sat down with a glass of red wine and prepared to catch up on one of my favorite shows when something through the window caught my eye. Bright green, bloodshot eyes, sticking out of the bushes. I panicked and called 911, but even as I screamed from the living room that I was calling the police, the eyes didn't flinch. They didn't even blink. I recognized the emotion in them too well, they were stuck on pure hatred.

When police arrived they found no one, as I kind of expected. I tried to convince myself it had been a trick of the light. The next night I came home from my shift at the hospital. We have a nice balcony sitting above our living room. There was a rope hanging from it with a noose tied at the end. I turned around to search the bushes, and there they were again. Hate - filled green eyes, staring at me. They didn't move, only when I would. They followed me.

I showed my husband the rope. He wrote it off as neighborhood punks playing a prank on me. I told him the story of the boy in the mask, he held me and told me it was okay and that it was likely trauma left over from it that was still haunting me. He said that I might be seeing things that aren't there out of guilt. It's always nice to be psychoanalyzed by your husband and told that you're basically crazy.

Tonight, tonight was the last straw. That's why I'm writing in this journal, so you, whoever you are, will know what is probably going to happen. My husband is out having dinner with his folks, something I'm glad to miss. I came home and found the rope again. Strung up the same way, but attached to it, clipped on, was Tommy's mask. I touched it to make sure it's all real, it is. I looked out of the window again, those damn green eyes still staring at me. I yelled to him that I was sorry, that I wish I could've fixed everything that went wrong, that I had nothing to do with that night but that I was sorry I stood motionless. They eyes never moved. I haven't looked up since I started writing this, but I can feel him glaring holes into me. I just looked up, he wasn't there. Someone's in the house. Save me.