No Worst, There Is None. Eve McBride
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heart leap. He sees it as an opening.
“Why don’t we drive down to the pier and watch the storm? The waves will be fantastic.”
Lizbett doesn’t really want to do that, but she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. He is very nice to give her a ride. She says again, “I’m going to the library to get some books on masks.”
“I’ll drop you there. C’mon,” he says. “It will be an adventure.”
An adventure. Melvyn is always saying, “Wearing a mask is an adventure. Always keep yourself open to adventure.” Her mother says, “Life should be full of adventures.” Besides, it’s Melvyn. She’s seen him all day, every day for two weeks. He works at the museum. She likes him even if it does feel strange to be alone in his car and go to the beach. She says, “Okay.”
“This could be a sort of date,” Melvyn says and reaches over and pats her shoulder. Lizbett has never been on a date, nor really ever imagined what one would be like, but she doesn’t think kids go on dates with their teachers, even ones as nice and friendly as Melvyn. She shrugs.
The pier, a couple of miles southeast of where they are, is in front of an abandoned nineteenth-century knitting mill. The pier extends far out into the lake. Cars can drive out onto it. Since it is so isolated, it is popular with teenagers. Lizbett has been walking there with her parents.
On the way, she chats easily with Melvyn, about making the life mask and how fantastic it was. She also tells him her idea for a mask play. She says how terrible she thinks it is that women weren’t allowed to wear masks.
Melvyn says, “Well, women were supposed to be quiet and invisible. Besides, men didn’t think women were clever or assertive enough to take on the powers of a mask. Masks were a connection to something beyond women’s understanding. Good women didn’t know about magic.”
“But the men wore masks that were women. Women who got them in touch with spirits or who were spirits. Didn’t that show that women were important? That they had powers?”
“The masks showed women as men wanted them to be, not how they were. It was a kind of control. ‘We say how you should look and behave. Or we’ll make you behave in ways we forbid you to behave.’ And you know, they thought women’s bodily functions … the way their bodies worked … made them part of nature and nature was something that needed taming or it would take you over.”
“It wasn’t fair,” says Lizbett. “Men had all the fun.”
“Masks weren’t really about fun. But look in the back,” says Melvyn. The two masks he’d chosen that morning were there: masks created from his face, a male and a female. The female was modelled after a Guatemalan maiden’s ecstasy mask, meant to represent the wearer’s sublime connection to the Divine during mock sacrifices. The male, derived from a Sri Lankan mask, was the lofty lord of the harvest, the supreme overseer, the guarantor of productivity. It was a maniacal face with black-lined eyes, bushy fur eyebrows, and a broad fur mustache that curled at the ends. The mouth was agape in a huge laugh.
“Wow! They’re amazing.”
“Put one on.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Why not? Put on the maiden’s mask.”
“That’s not the one I would have picked,” Lizbett says.
She turns around and picks up the mask and ties it to her face. It is quite heavy.
“Look at yourself in the mirror under the visor.”
Lizbett pulls it down and stares at the face before her, a beautiful white-faced woman with fur eyelashes and full, bright red lips surrounding a mouth that is open in a poignant cry.
“Make the sound,” he says.
Lizbett is startled at the gruff sound in his voice and asks, “What sound?”
“The sound she’s making. That’s how you’ll make the mask come alive; how you’ll feel something.”
Lizbett is feeling very uncomfortable now and says, “I don’t know what sound,” and starts to take the mask off.
“Leave it on,” Melvyn orders.
“I don’t want to.”
“Leave it on!” he yells. But she yanks it off.
There are several cars at the pier and Melvyn drives in well behind the mill. Lizbett now realizes something is not right and asks to go home.
“In a minute, sweetie,” he says. “We have something to do first.” He reaches over into his glove compartment and pulls out latex gloves and puts them on and then gets a roll of duct tape and Lizbett sees all this and reacts instinctively. She opens her mouth and places her teeth on his bare upper arm and bites down as hard as she can, grinding her teeth back and forth.
He tries to pull her off and she clenches harder. He is yelling and knocks her hard on the head with his free hand and she lets go, but she pulls at his hair and starts screaming. In vain. With the wind and the pounding of the waves, no one could possibly hear her. Plus they are all sealed in their own cars.
Melvyn quickly rips off a piece of the duct tape with his teeth and without even thinking he should wipe his blood off her teeth and lips, grabs Lizbett’s chin and holds the tape across her mouth. She is flailing and kicking at him, pulling at his face, his lips. He hadn’t expected her to be a fighter and he’s anxious and angry. This is not his Lizbett, his “Annie,” this monster child.
He slaps her across her face. “Stay still or I’ll kill you!”
She does. He tears off another piece of tape, slips her little purse over her shoulder and grabs her arms and twists them around her back and tapes her hands. Then he tightly tapes her ankles. Her widened eyes are flitting with terror and filled with tears. He cannot stand that and he suddenly remembers her saying she hated blindfolds and he tears off another piece of tape and puts it across her eyes. Now, there is only whimpering, which he also doesn’t like. It reduces her.
He picks up the maiden mask and places it over her face and ties it tightly. Then he puts on the male mask and checks himself in the mirror. He raises his chest, then inhales deeply and exhales making a long, low, forceful roar.
It has stopped raining and he gets out of the car, goes around and opens the door, and picks Lizbett up and carries her with difficulty, as she is thrashing furiously, into one of the side sheds which has a door slightly ajar. He pushes the door and they go in. There is an old mattress at the far end and he goes to it and lays her there. She kicks hard with both feet.
“I’ll kill you, I said. Kick me again and you’re dead!” he says. He peels off the tape from her ankles. He feels panicky now because of his fear of being discovered. He imagines lots of vagrants come here in the summer. Blood is running down his arm from the wound. A couple of drops fall to the mattress. So he moves quickly. He pulls off her panties and shorts, unzips himself, and shaking, puts on a lubricated condom, leans down, pulls her legs apart and penetrates her vagina, feeling it rupture.
This is right! This is what she is for. He is the supreme lord. He is the mask; the mask is him. His persona is primal, all his power, his inhibitions are released. He is part of a sacrifice of the most beautiful. She is before him: a trade-off, innocence and purity for an expunging of excesses. He wishes he had not taped her eyes so he could see her mask live.
But it’s never as he has imagined it. He’s imagined her co-operative, ecstatic. Lizbett stiffens suddenly and then goes limp. Good. She’s fainted. He puts his hands around her neck and tightens until his hands ache. There’ll be no resistance now. He concentrates on the mask, the now beatific mask, whose wail he can hear and pushes into her rectum and finishes. He has kept her from inevitable taint.
Now he has to get out of here. He takes off the condom and sees that it is bloody. He pulls on his pants and finds an old McDonald’s bag nearby and he gets it and drops the condom in. Later he will put