Issue 23 Preview: My Monster Mask, by Nic Anstett
The following essay is included in Barrelhouse 23.
Jed finished reciting the Edgar Allen Poe poem that he performed every meeting and passed the talking stick to Earl. Earl joined in the clapping even though he really thought that Jed should have stuck to the advice that they all had given him. The Poe poetry was pretty but it was part of Jed’s old mask and shouldn’t be included in the meeting. It was all too easy for Earl to imagine Jed standing in a cloak and holding up a bottle of cheap wine in some graveyard in Baltimore, and even easier to think that he still did it.
“Hi, I’m Earl,” Earl said. The other members said hello. He knew almost all of them at this point. Jed, Frank, Carol, Jenkins, Joan, Bob, and Aaron were all regulars and most came to the meetings more often than he did. There were always new faces. This week it was the two kids in the back with flannel shirts wrapped around their waists and big glasses. It was an unspoken fact that most of the one-timers were curiosity seekers and not genuinely interested in recovery. Either that, or current offenders.
“I used to be the Goatman of PG county. It’s been eight years since I was unmasked,” Earl said. The others nodded. Joan made a warbling sound with her throat that was maybe supposed to sound like a farm animal. Carol punched her in her shoulder.
“How are you feeling? Last time you talked about your daughter,” Frank said.
“Daria is doing fine. I think,” Earl said. He scratched the back of his neck. It felt loose. Daria had just let him move up from the basement and into the spare bedroom in her home. Her boyfriend was now covering the rent and the room had opened up.
“I said thank you for the new room. There’s more space for my stuff there and I feel less like an attic freak,” he said. He lied. He had no stuff. Earl had not said thank you.
The others nodded in appreciation.
“I think she’s really starting to come around. I feel like the new job really did help lower the temperature in the room,” Earl said. He was working as a greeter at a card and book store. The woman who did his interview said that he was the nicest felon she had met. Earl winked back at her after she said this. She laughed, probably more out of awkwardness than anything else.
Frank asked if he had more to say and Earl shook his head. He left out the part about the woman with the squeaky voice who kept leaving him voicemails. Everyone clapped for him like he did something important and Earl smiled and nodded along. He passed the talking stick to Aaron, the Snallygaster of Middletown. Aaron talked about his hang gliding trip in San Diego. Earl left to get a donut but found that they were gone. He ate a carrot. Joan giggled.
Carol had accidentally driven her son to a party that was down one of the roads that she used to haunt as the Pig Lady. She cried and said that she went to a hibachi restaurant to distract herself. Joan touched her on the shoulder. Jenkins had been forced to put down the dog he adopted right after finishing his sentence. This was a great loss. Hyena had been to many meetings and would always rest at Jenkins’s feet. It was a skinny and constantly ailing little thing that always seemed to be missing different patches of fur. Earl wasn’t surprised.
Earl always helped Frank clean up afterwards. Part of him wondered if that was the reason why he kept coming to the meetings. Some part of him really hated the idea of seeing Frank put away chairs by himself. They shared the chapel basement with at least three other support groups. Earl’s father had been an alcoholic. Earl’s mom once took his father out on a date and instead dropped him off at a chapel for an AA meeting. He walked home without stepping inside. It was two months before the two talked again.
“So, what do you think?” asked Frank. He liked to show off and carry four chairs at one time. “The two hipsters in the back. Podcasters or monsters-in-waiting?”
“I was thinking they might be in on the Black Aggie sightings over in Pikesville,” Earl said.
“Two-man team for one ghost that’s already been done five times? Seems about right. You figure the kids these days would find some new material,” Frank said.
Earl shrugged.
“I’m proud of you for opening up about your daughter,” Frank said.
Earl told Frank that he had lied. “I am living in the spare room now, but I haven’t talked to Daria. This new guy that’s living with her. I don’t even know his name. I don’t want to be the weird dad that’s hanging around them all the time, I guess.”
He debated bringing up the calls from the squeaky voiced woman. The constant voicemails. But he stopped himself. Earl didn’t know how Frank would react.
Frank offered to take him to a bar. That they could talk more over beers. Earl had stopped drinking when he was on parole. It stuck. He didn’t want to break that streak now. He had told Frank this before, but he probably forgot. Besides, Frank was young. Younger than Earl at least. He could still fight off the creep of a beer gut. They made plans to go to a reptile show at the fairgrounds in a week. Frank wanted a pet lizard and Earl liked looking at the big animatronic snake they always rolled out at the entrance. He loved robots.
The Goatman’s legs had been pistons. That’s what gave his hooved feet that extra kick. He had recorded episodes of How It’s Made on the VCR and watched over and over how they put together stilts and springs and prosthetic feet. He spent much of March of ’97 running through bramble and vine and falling on his face and his ass. He got the hang of it, though. Even before he had the fur or the horns or the axe, he was galloping through the woods at night and chasing cars. He was just that guy with the spring feet then. He even let Daria try them once, but her mother took her away and told him, “Never again.”
Daria and the boy were waiting for him when he got home. They sat in the living room downstairs with the TV on. It was a show about gorillas. This child ape kept crawling up a hill and rolling back down. The boy laughed. He was balding already, but it somehow looked good on him. It made him look older, Earl decided.
Daria saw him first. Earl waved and asked what they were watching.
“Just something on NatGeo,” Daria said. “Brent wanted something easy after work. It’s the busy season.”
“Hey, Earl,” Brent said.
“Hey,” said Earl. Earl wondered what the busy season could be. It was April. Brent had large arms that seemed built for carrying bags of mulch.
Earl toasted himself some bread and squirted a tube of honey on it. Daria met him in the kitchen. Brent stayed in the living room with the gorillas. She asked him how the meeting went and he said fine and ate the toast.
“What did you talk about?” Daria asked.
“It’s supposed to stay private,” Earl said and this was the truth. He honored the rules of the meetings. When Bob was having a rough time with his wife and went back to harassing parked teens in his Bunny Man outfit, they kept it in the circle and talked him through it. Bob cried a lot and Earl ordered extra Dominoes, but they worked through it as a group. Jenkins drove Bob to an old quarry and had him throw his Bunny Man things off the edge. Frank thought they should’ve lit it on fire as a group, but in the end, they all took their word for it.
“It was helpful though? You feel stable? You feel seen?” Daria asked. Earl didn’t know what she meant and his mouth was filled with toast so he gave a thumbs up.
“That’s good. I do wish you would tell me before taking the car, though. Brent needed me to pick him up from work and I didn’t have a way to get him. I don’t mind driving you to your meetings or to work or wherever, but you can’t leave without telling me and just strand me at home, Dad,” Daria said.
“It’s my car,” Earl said. It was a 2004 Chevy something. Earl liked the color, which was sort of a blue-green mix. It felt dependable, grounding. It was one of the few things that was the same when he came home.
“Except it’s not, Dad,” Daria said. “I took over payments after you went to jail. I’ve been using it for the last six years.”
Earl said he was sorry and went upstairs. He realized later when lying in bed that he probably looked pitiful. He had taken his toast and a glass of a milk with him. He imagined that Daria thought he looked like a child or, worse, an old man.
There was a voicemail on his landline (the one he kept on the cardboard box he used for a nightstand next to his bed). It was the squeaky voiced woman again, asking to meet with him. Earl deleted the voicemail. Like all nights, he fell asleep staring at the glow-in-the-dark star stuck just above the ceiling fan.
The horns were really the easiest part. One of his high school classmates, Jack Jones, had a large old black ram that’d grown old on his farm. Earl asked several months before the goat’s passing if he could have the horns for an art project. Jack waned thirty dollars in exchange, and Earl thought this was fair. He got the call from Jack on his way to pick up Daria from school. He took her to the farm on the way back home even though it was a two-hour detour. Jack needed his help to saw them off. Earl held the goat head still while Jack hacked away at the curled horns. Daria watched from the car. She called Earl to her bedroom three months later with nightmares about a man trying to carve out her ears.
The robotic snake wasn’t out front of the fairgrounds. Frank asked when they got inside and they were told that it had broken down in Milwaukee and wasn’t shipped to this stop. Frank bought Earl a corn dog to make up for it, even though Earl insisted that it really wasn’t a big deal and that he just wanted an excuse to get out of the house for a few hours.
The reptile show overall was a bust. Apparently they had been cleaned out of most of the good stock the night before. Earl and Frank took turns holding a large python which kept trying to circle its way around Earl’s neck. He mimicked gagging and choking on the coils one time, but Frank frowned and left to look at a newt display.
“I really wish they had something besides fucking anoles,” Frank said as they wandered their way down a hallway of terrarium booths.
“They have geckos too,” Earl pointed out, but Frank shook his head and insisted that geckos weren’t real lizards. Earl didn’t know if this was true, but he decided not to fight him on it.
Afterwards, they stood outside the fairgrounds with their left hands in their pockets and passing a cigarette back and forth with their right. Earl had picked up smoking in prison.
“Hey, you want to see something cool?” Frank asked.
“I guess,” said Earl. He passed Frank the cigarette. He finished the rest with a single long puff, blew out the smoke in a long burst, and then shook himself like a dog.
“No, Earl. It’s really neat. It’s at my place, though. I can drive you home after. Come on. I think you’ll really like it,” Frank said. Earl rarely saw Frank get this excited about anything and he’d never offered to show Earl his home before.
They took the backwoods on the way home. Frank apparently lived well off the beaten path. They went about fifteen minutes without passing a single home and that had a large totem pole in the front yard. It looked like chainsaw art.
Frank pulled into his driveway. It was a smaller house than Earl had expected. It wasn’t quite a trailer, but Earl couldn’t call it a traditional home either.
”It’s a tiny house,” Frank said. Earl didn’t know what a tiny house was, but it seemed to fit whatever it was.
“Sorry, I was confused,” Earl said. Frank touched him on the shoulder and said no problem and smiled. There was a boy that Earl used to sleep with in college. He was an anthropologist now. Earl hadn’t spoken to him in years. Frank and he had the same ears.
The tiny house was impressively large on the inside. Earl had expected to feel like the walls were closing in on him like in that Star Wars movie that Daria’s mother used to insist that they watch together. Frank poured him a glass of water with no ice and told him to take a seat on the couch. There was a fake leopard skin blanket draped across it. Frank disappeared behind a curtain to what Earl assumed was the restroom.
Earl looked at his phone. He had a text from Daria asking where he was. He sent her a thumbs up emoji back.
The curtains to the bathroom rustled and a furred hand emerged. The drapes fell away and revealed a hunched black wolf standing upright. Its toes didn’t reach the floor but stuck outwards and upwards like sharp shoelaces. The arms dangled at its side like a chimpanzee. The jaw hung loose and open, perpetually yawning.
“What do you think?” Frank asked, his voice muffled by layers of fur, latex, and harvested dog teeth.
“What is that?” Earl asked. He knew already, but he wanted confirmation. He needed to know just what mix of disappointment and excitement was appropriate.
“It’s the original Dwayyo suit, buddy,” Frank said. The wolfthing reached its hands up to the back of its neck, twisted, hoisted, and spilled Frank’s head loose.
“I mean, close to it. I had to patch up some things and I needed some new teeth for the jaw, but it’s the original base,” Frank said. He held out his arm for Earl to touch. Without thinking much of it, Earl ran his hand across it. It felt like the black, shaggy dog that his father had brought home one Christmas. The one that growled when hugged and ran away two years later.
“How did you even manage?” Earl asked. “I thought the state always confiscated these as like evidence or something.”
“They are,” Frank said. He reached one of his paws behind his neck and fumbled around for the zipper. He turned around and asked if Earl could help. Earl stood and reached through the matted fur for the little metallic slider. He eventually found it under his ring finger and pinched. He skinned Frank of the Dwayyo, peeling away layers of body to reveal the pink, hairless flesh beneath. Earl felt comforted to know that Frank was always naked under his mask too, that it wasn’t just a weird thing that he did.
The zipper stopped just above Frank’s ass. He shimmed out and left it discarded on the floor and stepped into the bathroom. Earl looked to the floor. He didn’t want to see Frank as a thing to want. It felt wrong. Like some sort of violation of trust.
“I know this guy that does night security for the university,” Frank called from the bathroom. “They’ve been buying up old suits for some big criminology study. I slipped him a couple hundred for him to sneak this one out for me.” The Dwayyo mask looked up at Earl. Its eyes poked out diagonally. It looked tired and confused.
“Don’t you think this is kind of a bad idea?” Earl asked.
Frank reemerged wearing a bathrobe. Earl thought he looked older than he did before.
“What, you mean with taking up the mask again or like with breaking the law?”
“Either, really,” Earl said. He picked up the mask again and turned it over in his hands. He slipped his fingers underneath the eyes. They were softer than he expected.
“Nah. The way I look at it, they took it from me to begin with. We both know that it was pretty bull. I mean, throwing me away for a few months for stalking my ex’s new guy around through the woods. That makes sense. But this was my property, right? It’s not illegal to make or own Dwayyo costumes, and I figure as long as I’m in here by myself, I’m not really harming anyone, right? Not breaking any of the tenants of the healing process. It’s just mine to have. It feels right,” Frank said. Earl didn’t have another argument.
“Can I try it on?” Earl asked.
It took several minutes of squeezing and twisting. Earl had a larger gut than Frank and the Dwayyo’s emaciated form struggled to fit around him. The zipper reached up to his shoulders, but Earl decided that that was good enough. Frank lowered the mask onto his head and helped twist it into place.
“It’s hard to see out of, isn’t it?” Frank asked. “I didn’t really plan for visibility. I was mostly just thinking I would stand around and be creepy for a few days a week and that would do the trick. When those hippy kids and that damn dog started chasing me through the woods, I knew I was pretty much done for.”
Earl tried to walk around inside the tiny house, but his shoulders kept crashing into cabinets or bumping into the stove. He dangled his arms low like he’d seen Frank do, but they felt like balloons filled with marbles. He hunched himself down and closed his eyes and tried to smell the trees and the bark and the rusted metal bridges and the taste of his bloody lip from the falls and scrapes.
Frank took off the mask and said that Earl had been panting and was worried he couldn’t breathe. Earl asked to be driven home.
There had been an art to haunting cars. In the early days, Earl would hide in the underbrush by areas he remembered parking in when he was a teen. Make-out spots were a secret that somehow got passed down between generations. He always waited for the headlights to fade, the voices to die down, and for the car to shake before making himself known. Sometimes all it took was dragging his hatchet along the exterior. The scraping noise was mostly enough to send teens screaming. They would return home to find slash marks and hoof prints on their trunk. If they stayed, he threw in a moaning baa. He practiced that in the car every morning on the way to work. It was a high-pitched, throaty noise that took perfecting. Finally, for the bravest teens, he revealed himself, arching his back and puffing his chest outwards like a swan. He measured himself once. From artificial hoof to the tip of Jack’s ram’s horns, he stood almost seven feet. He sometimes barked out a final baa for good measure. This always did the trick. When he was feeling up to it, he would chase after them, letting the pistons in his feet carry him forward. One time, for a boy that reminded him too much of Devin from high school gym class, he hurled his hatchet as well. It shattered the rearview mirror and for a moment Earl worried that he had hurt someone. He checked the paper the next morning and saw no reported murders. He felt better, but stopped bringing an axe. He was caught three weeks later.
The woman with the squeaky voice on Earl’s voicemail was waiting for him when he returned from work the following Wednesday. He found her sitting in the living room with Daria drinking coffee. The woman was in the middle of telling some story that Daria found very funny when Earl walked in.
“Dad! I’m glad you’re back. I tried calling you, but couldn’t reach you,” Daria said. She walked up and hugged him. Earl knew that she was putting on a show for her guest, but he gripped her hard all the same. Daria eventually pushed off and Earl apologized.
“Dad, this is—” Daria started.
The woman walked forward and extended her hand.
“I’m sure he remembers. Mr. Rhodes, it is good to see you again,” the woman said.
Earl shook her hand and said that he was also happy to see her. He didn’t know who this woman was, but he didn’t want to appear stupid.
“I know it’s been a few years since we’ve seen each other,” the woman said.
“Probably since the trial, right?” Daria asked.
Earl remembered now. She was one of them. One of the hippy kids. The ones who had trapped him with rope and knots and dangled him from a tree.
“I was wondering if we could sit down and chat for a few minutes, Mr. Rhodes,” the woman said. She fixed her glasses. Her sweater looked too warm for April. “Your daughter was kind enough to let me in. I’ve been trying to reach you by phone for a few weeks now and I figured I might as well stop by.”
Earl turned around to check with Daria that what the woman was saying was true, but she was already gone. He heard noises in the kitchen.
“I’m doing a story for the radio,” the woman said.
“A podcast,” Earl replied.
“Yes, exactly. We’re doing a series about people such as yourself. It won’t take long, I just had a few questions to ask about your experience. It would be recorded of course,” the woman said.
Earl asked if it would be paid and the woman said no. He agreed all the same. He wanted to go to bed and forget the woman with the squeaky voice, but Daria seemed so giddy and starstruck.
They sat down across from each other in the living room. Earl pulled up the lazyboy and the woman settled onto the couch. She placed her phone between them.
“Can you say your name for the record?” the woman said, adjusting her glasses again. They seemed snug and maybe too tight for her head.
“Earl Rhodes,” Earl said.
“And what is your occupation?” the woman said.
“I’m a greeter at a bookstore, but I used to be the Goatman of PG County,” Earl said.
The woman thanked him but said that she was actually looking for his job that he held before he was incarcerated. Earl had had many jobs before he started haunting cars. None of them would really qualify as an occupation. He told her that he helped plant trees. He only held that job for five months in ’96, but it was his favorite. It felt like he was doing good work.
The squeaky voiced woman asked him what made him start haunting. Earl never had a good answer for this. The prosecution had tried to pin it on some murdered banker’s lost fortune buried deep in the Patuxent Research Refuge, but Earl had never heard of that story before trial. Sure, there were those in the support group that were after some sort of revenge or treasure, but Earl had just started making the Goatman costume as a hobby and later as an outlet for his frustration with Daria’s mother. There was a thrill in being a legend.
“I just liked doing it,” Earl replied.
The squeaky voiced woman frowned and asked if he wanted to elaborate. Earl told her no.
“Are you with that University study?” Earl asked as the conversation dragged. The woman had been trying to steer questions into his time in prison, but those years bored Earl and he really didn’t feel like talking about them.
“No, like I said, I’m doing a podcast,” the woman said.
“Yes, but isn’t the university doing some kind of study about us? About us monster people? Is it true that they just have all of our old suits lying around in there?” Earl asked.
“I’m not really sure,” the woman said. Earl could tell she was a bad liar. She squirmed in her skirt when she was uncomfortable.
“Well, when you find out for sure, let me know. Maybe we can work something out. I’d love to walk through the suit with you in person. I bet that would be good. For radio that is,” Earl said.
Earl had scared off more than his fair share of teen “Goatman Parties” during his haunting days. They usually were nothing more than a couple of drunk young men on Halloween wandering the woods looking for a good story. There was a sort of innocence to it that Earl kind of liked. He normally would just wait for a lull in the conversation before stepping into the glow of the flashlight and letting out a loud baa. The chase was difficult and more than once he stumbled and twisted an ankle, but he found himself laughing during these moments more than most other haunts. When he was chasing a particularly scrawny teen through the underbrush one October, Earl figured it was just more of the same. That was until he felt the ropes tighten around his legs and he was hoisted into the air. For a second, he had assumed that he had been caught in some kind of trap for deer and rabbits, but the cheering of the teens said otherwise. They let him dangle like that until sunrise. He felt like an overturned hourglass and was sure his feet would never work again. One of the women unmasked him and explained to some bored looking cop who he was. She got his name wrong. In the photos his face is red and swollen and his hair dangles loose and black like a dead plant. In two of the photos plastered in The Sun he’s out of focus, the attention on a large, spotted dog in the background.
Earl met the woman in the university basement the next week. There were other people with her that he didn’t recognize. Mostly men and women holding microphones and cameras. The two skinny hipsters from the meeting were there, though. Frank was right, they weren’t Black Aggie. Earl felt overdressed in a sea of flannel and sweaters. Daria had insisted that he buy a sport coat and tie.
The woman came up to him and shook his hand. Earl worried for a moment that she might try to hug him.
“Thank you so much for coming, Mr. Rhodes,” she said and clasped both her hands around his. She was still wearing the sweater.
She guided Earl to the bottom levels of the university. Daria’s mother had been in theater. She spent much of her time in college, when they first met, trying to be an actress but found that she was really only skilled at sewing the costumes together. Earl would spend hours with her in the basements of the theater in plastic-wrapped period clothes, reading while she pricked her hands and cursed under her breath. Sometimes he held her hand. The suits were kept in a similar room. Rows of faux fur and alligator skin tied together with wire boning and at home mechanics replaced the usual theater wear of colonial dresses and paperboy hats.
Aaron’s Snallygaster rig hung from the ceiling. Its tentacles had lost their skin and looked like oily pool noodles and its bird-like beak missed its upper half. The zipper that Aaron would crawl into laid exposed underneath. Earl couldn’t help but imagine the other man sliding into the beast’s stomach in a reverse birth. He still had no idea how Aaron made it fly.
One of the hipster boys with the flannel around his hips found the Goatman. It was tucked away between what appeared to be an inflatable manatee. The woman got to hold it first. She turned it over in her hands several times and held the hooves real close to her face. Earl worried that there might still be dirt in them. He always cleaned up after a haunt.
“Here you go, Mr. Rhodes,” the woman said. She passed the bag to him.
Earl remembered the Goatman being whiter. It may have just been the years in captivity, but the fur had lost its ghostly pale appearance and now looked covered in ash and soot. A man with a video camera handed him the mask a few minutes later. Earl realized suddenly that he had made the Goatman’s eyes wrong. The black horizontal rectangles of a goat’s eyes were missing. These were blue orbs with black pupils.
“Did you want a place to change? I don’t think there’s really room in the bathroom, but we can vacate the area while you step into your suit,” the woman said.
Earl felt the eyes of the crew on him and eased his head into the Goatman’s skull. The horns weighed less than he remembered.
“I can change here,” he said. The woman and her crew stepped outside but he doubted they actually heard him. The mask tended to muffle his voice beyond recognition.
Earl let out a soft baa and giggled. Slipping into the piston legs was easier than he imagined. His feet were the one part of his body that hadn’t begun to swell and sag with age. He hopped twice on them and slipped, catching himself on a hanging rack. There was a stiffness to the skin as he cocooned himself, his gut barely contained in the now gray fur. He could feel the fabric stretching even if the latex was still doing its job to contain him. He felt mobile and fluid all the same. His arms flexed with an extra set of muscle and tendon. He wiggled his ears and recalled the cold autumn wind.
The woman returned, smiled, gasped, and jump-turned to her crew. Earl did not like to think of himself as a violent man, but in that moment, as the others approached with their equipment held up and scurrying towards him like a children’s birthday party, he wished he had his hatchet to swing. When he was done with their butchering, he would buck his way out, scattering grad students and research assistants with his horns and stamping them beneath with his hooves. He would chase the police into their cars and send them squealing away to their homes and their cells. He would sprint his way back into the woods and the lands of deer and discarded cars and horny teens and tiny houses and watch for years from a distance as Daria and her new man who was not Brent raised a child who only knew him as the welcoming specter that stood outside her window at night.
The woman and her men got closer. She raised a microphone and asked Earl to speak in a way she could understand.
Nic Anstett is a writer from Annapolis, MD who loves the bizarre, spectacular, and queer. She is a graduate from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, University of Oregon’s MFA program, and the Tin House Summer Workshop where she was a 2021 Scholar. Her work is published and forthcoming in Witness Magazine, Passages North, North American Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.