The Mystery of the Mask: Part 3

Lionel jumped off his horse and grabbed hold of the pale man, who struggled to flee from his lack of balance. Lionel faced him around and saw his face slowly unwarping from the hideousness it was before; his teeth were beginning to dull and his eyes were growing.

“Do you know this man?” Karmen asked Lionel concernedly.

“Not quite,” Lionel replied as the pale man quivered and spoke quickly and ineloquently. “You said the mask had you for years?” Lionel repeated to the pale man.

“I saw the horrors, all of it,” he began. “I was there when they came!”

“When what came?”

“They did.”

“Who is they?” Lionel asked aggressively.

“The twins!” the pale man shouted. “Jynx and Onyx! The Monehemoth – what you called the meteor!”

“The meteor fell… centuries ago.” As Lionel spoke the words he realized that the pale man was morphing into a terrifying mummy of himself; his skin shrunk and aged liked burnt leather. His strength was fading. “You have to tell us what’s going on.”

“I’m dying…” the pale man said with terrifying realization. He was hundreds of years old and the mask had seemingly preserved his flesh as it possessed him.

“Listen,” Lionel said taking him by the shoulders. “You have to help us stop this.”

“I don’t have much time,” the pale man confessed.

“So talk.”

The pale man’s mouth was beginning to dry, his voice was roughing and his breaths were heavier. “The twins came on the Monehemoth. I was in the forest when they crashed and… and I found the crash. I saw a giant beast, a monster without a head, sitting in the crater. Beside him were two boys… they each wore a mask that…” The pale man took a sharp breath, quickly losing his strength to inhale. “…masks that gave them their gifts. Jynx wanted to be worshipped by us. But Onyx wanted to make peace with Earth. I watched them argue… Onyx…” The pale man’s eyes began to close.

Lionel shook him awake, “Come on, not yet!”

The pale man shot up and gathered his thoughts, panting horribly as he coughed throughout his sentence. The skin around his face was twisting and rotting away. “Onyx feared Jynx would use the Monehemoth to rule over us… so he cast a spell over it, putting it to slumber, and buried it...”

“Buried it? Where?”

“He used the power of the mask to move the earth over him, behind the forest. Jynx hated him… he said they could be gods… and Jynx killed Onyx.” The pale man wheezed awfully, nearing the end of his life in rapid aging. “Jynx went to awaken the Monehemoth but… he couldn’t… without… Onyx’s mask. That's when he found me watching them… and he offered me Onyx’s mask… but I was afraid. The mask was… too powerful…”

“You took it?”

“Yes… but I could not handle it… and I fled. Jynx has hunted me for centuries… I would come to try and give the mask away but only a little at a time in fear he’d find me…”

“Why did he hunt you?” Karmen chimed in.

“Because I did not help awaken the Monehemoth. But the mask was too strong, and it began to… twist my mind… my body…” The pale man’s voice was soft and weak, breaths away from dying. “I had to get rid of it… I had to give it to someone… I’m sorry…”

“You gave the mask to a child,” Lionel accused him.

“I’m sorry… I couldn’t handle it… after hundreds of years…”

“That boy isn’t nearly as strong as you were – the mask will completely take him!”

“I know… I don’t care…” The pale man took a slow inhale. “I’m free now… Jynx is coming… we’ll all die…” He exhaled and died, shriveling into a worm-like corpse.

Lionel tried shaking the pale man awake, refusing to accept his death. “No! What do we do? How do we stop it! Come on!”

The ground began shaking beneath Lionel and Karmen, traveling from the forest. Lionel continued to deny the pale man’s death as Karmen looked at her feet and felt the tremors grow more violent. She looked out of the forest and saw the strange hills that they had crossed and watched a tree slide off on of the hills. Then another. The hill began to rise from the earth as the lush green exploded from the ground into a mass of dark mud. The hill stood up, standing from the ground, and the ground fell off the beast. The strange hill was the burial of the Monehemoth, which stood enormously tall, headless, and long arms that scraped against the ground; it had dirty, wooden skin and seven fingers on each hand though it had one large mass for each of its feet. The Monehemoth bent back in the sky and called out from an unknown voice, which sounded like speech spoken in reverse.

The Monehemoth took a large step towards Karmen and shook the earth so hard beside her that she fell over; their horses tried running away but Karmen and Lionel managed to hold them tight. The second stride passed over them and destroyed clumps of trees in its wake as it headed towards Crater Town.

Lionel watched the towering beast walk over him in fear. “I thought he said it couldn’t be awoken without both masks.”

“He did,” Karmen agreed. “Which means Jynx is there. He’s with the boy.” She jumped on her horse and cracked the reins, Lionel right behind her, riding between the tall legs of the Monehemoth as they raced it to Crater Town.