Unmasked Read online

  “I’d rather she was not talented at all,” Chana snapped, “if it means she isn’t drawing this shit.” She twisted to stare after her cousin. “I don’t get it. She’s been so excited to be here. Now she’s evolving into somebody I don’t recognize.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Chana shook her head. “It’s probably nothing. I’m just tired.”

  “Explain,” Sebastian enunciated slowly. “Please.”

  She groaned. “I don’t want to say anything. But, I mean, sure she probably could have walked into the street herself and got hit by a car at home. But, since that happened here, she’s changed. She’s eating a ton. I don’t think she realizes it, but she finishes her plate, and then she looks at mine. If they bring us fresh bread, and some is left, she inhales it. She’s drinking massive amounts of water all day, then complains she hasn’t had any all day and needs some at home. Plus she’s turned off of alcohol. It’s bad, but I don’t think she even recognizes what she’s doing.”

  He studied her face. “I noticed she’s eating more but not that it was obvious to anyone else.”

  “That’s because you were so busy trying not to always look at her,” Chana said. “The attraction is obvious. And it’s making the working relationship here that much more difficult.”

  “Interesting,” he said, “because there’s no reason for anyone to be upset if there is any attraction. We’re both single adults. She did some drawings that fascinated me. I asked her to do more. But I hadn’t realized,” he tapped the sketch, “this was coming out too.”

  “Too?” she said slowly. “In the same sentence, regarding my cousin, it doesn’t sound like a good thing.”

  He gave her a crooked grin. “Let’s just say that she has a great imagination when it comes to studying these ruins and filling in the details as they would have been back then.”

  “Yes, I can see her maybe doing something like that, but that isn’t this.” She tapped the sketchbook. “Where is that coming from?”

  “It really bothers you, doesn’t it?” He studied Chana. She’d worked for him for almost a year now. She’d always been a steady, stable worker. But superstition was one of those funny things that crept into a person’s life and took hold in the oddest ways.

  “It is scary. I don’t want anything to happen to her. I’d like to have my old cousin back.”

  “You really think she’s different?”

  “Just different enough that it makes me uncertain,” Chana said. “She hardly even sleeps while I’m dead tired. Of course, I’m doing some digging and I’m in the hot sun, but so is she. She sits in front of the laptop for hours sometimes. I’ll wake up at like two or three o’clock in the morning, and she’s still awake. And she still gets up at six-thirty with us. Sometimes before we rise. I just don’t get it.”

  He filed away that information in the back of his mind, but it was worrisome. Excessive hunger and lack of sleep had more repercussions than he was prepared to admit, certainly to Chana. “I’ll keep an eye on her.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she muttered and walked away.

  He opened the sketchbook and placed it on the ground and, with his cell phone in hand, took several photos, getting closer with each one until they filled his viewfinder. As soon as he had a decent photo, he sent it to Bruno and emailed Colin, his partner. He’d kept him in the loop so far but they hadn’t spoken. Then Colin was busy too and likely hadn’t even read the texts. As an afterthought, he sent them to Stefan too. Sebastian had barely put his phone away when it beeped. He checked, seeing Colin’s number. “Hey.”

  “What the fuck is that?” Colin cried out. “Is that from the same girl?”

  “Yes. And she’s horrified. She doesn’t believe she drew that picture.”

  “Did anybody see her?”

  “I don’t think so. She’s been sitting here alone. I brought her the sketchbooks and pencils about an hour ago, maybe an hour and a half ago.”

  “She drew those detailed sketches in that short a time?” Colin questioned, but now his tone was incredulous of her skill, not so much repulsed by the content.

  “And a couple others,” Sebastian said. “Obviously she’s got some kind of entity attachment here.”

  “You think? Ugh you know how I feel about that stuff …” Colin said. “That girl is damn scary.”

  “I’m not arguing that point,” he said, “but, in truth, she doesn’t realize most of what she’s doing.”

  “And that’s even scarier. I mean, I get that it’s a good thing, at least for her sake, that she doesn’t know anything, but we have to sort this out.”

  “I hear you,” Sebastian said. “But this all happened very fast, and she’s not inclined to believe the psychic angles. She’s more into the scientific method—facts, figures, reality. It’s not like I can make a big deal out of this quickly. I’m going slow so I don’t spook her. If she ends up running back home, we’re in trouble.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “Because, right about now, I’m not sure I want her anywhere on the site.”

  “The masks bothered you that much?”

  “Hell yeah. They definitely did.”

  Sebastian hung up after the call ended and stared at the sketch. He wasn’t particularly enthralled with the depiction of his face—especially when covered with that mask—but he wouldn’t react like Colin did. Sebastian studied the two masks, realizing though that they were slightly different, they looked like a matched set. His covered only the lower portion of his face with high sides up the cheeks. It was a unique mask because it left the face mostly visible, just covered Sebastian’s nose and mouth. Hunter’s mask was the same but came slightly higher up on his face.

  As a drawing, it was incredibly detailed, and the artwork itself was amazing. The concept, the actual subject matter, now that was a little out there. But Sebastian could still admire the artistic skill that had gone into this, even if no one else could.

  He closed the sketchbook, tucked it under his arm and headed to the main part of the dig. He felt oddly protective of her sketches. She’d put so much of herself into them that it was hard for him to not see them as a part of who she truly was. She might not appreciate that insight, but it was hard to let go of. There was something very special about her work. He didn’t know why or how, but it was as if it were already alive.

  Or maybe …

  His head filled in the answer.

  Or maybe she was bringing something back to life.

  Chapter 11

  The next few days went by in a relatively normal pattern. There were no accidents, no injuries. Lacey enjoyed the change of relative calm. She was no longer hurting or aching. That had been a surprisingly fast recovery, as Sebastian had said. She had no more visions, if that was what they were. She refused to put pencil to paper, so that cut out most of the problems with her drawings, should they be of the scarier kind. And Sebastian not showing her any untoward attention seemed to help with the discontent among the rest of the team. She was so sorry it had happened in the first place. She hadn’t meant it to.

  She settled into a rhythm, taking photos, wandering around and keeping to the superficial areas on a geographical level. She switched out lenses, tried different shots, different looks. She brought her laptop one day, downloading and sifting through the photos, discarding what she could, deliberately avoiding the ones that had the controversial 3-D architecture in them, putting them all into a folder with a question mark as the label.

  When she was done, she stared at that folder on her laptop and wondered. Unable to help herself, she double-clicked on it and looked at the images. For her, even today, the 3-D buildings were as clear as they were when she first took these photos. She knew nobody else could see them in her pictures, and that made it even more astounding. She wondered, if she printed these out, would she see the buildings still? And yet, nobody else would again?

  It was a fascinating subject, and she had to admit she’d spent more than a few day
s sorting through research online to find something, anything that would help piece this together, help to explain it somehow. But instead she had found nothing. As far as she could confirm, nobody had ever had visions like this. And she wasn’t even sure that was what she should call it. It was just too bizarre.

  She closed the folder when she heard footsteps approach. She put down her laptop and looked up. And there was Sebastian. He studied her for a long moment. She frowned. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just checking to make sure you’re okay. You’ve been sitting here very still for quite a while.”

  She beamed a smile at him. “Oh, I was sorting through the thousands of photographs I’ve taken already. Finding ones that might work for the story of what you and others are doing here. Some are really nice shots. Plus some of the ones I took in the beginning weren’t as good for identification purposes, so I was tossing those.”

  He nodded. “And the others?”

  She winced. “I was trying to forget they exist. But I have to admit that I just opened them up to look for myself again.”

  “And?”

  “And what?” she asked. “I still have no explanation as to how they came to be. I still see the 3-D images in my photos that you still don’t see. I still have no clue as to what my sketches are about or why I drew them.”

  “And the ones with the masks?”

  “I don’t have a photo of that sketch,” she said quietly. “And I’m not sure I want to.”

  “I’m pretty sure those are even more important than the others.”

  She studied him carefully. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  He squatted in front of her, picked up a twig that lay on the path and casually scraped the ground in front of him as if thinking about what to say and how to say it. “Everybody has some sort of a symbol,” he said, “for want of another word. When I saw you drawing the buildings, I thought maybe it was the architecture you were attracted to.”

  “Well, I am,” she said, “but I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”

  “Then you drew the masks. And that’s a whole different thing altogether.”

  “I know,” she whispered. She stared at his hand, mesmerized as it drifted back and forth across the dirt-covered stones aimlessly. When he didn’t speak again, she lifted her head and caught his gaze. “What do you think the masks mean?”

  “I’m not sure. I think they’re the answer to this mystery. I did send a photograph of it to Bruno, and he was fascinated. He said there is some evidence of similar masks being used way back in the Mayan days. He’s seen something similar to the one that you put on my face. He’s going to look into it further.”

  “You can look into it all you want,” she said. “It won’t help us much with everything that has gone on here earlier.”

  “Maybe not. We found explanations very thin down in Peru as well.”

  “You never did explain anything about that.” And she’d love to know more. He was a fascinating man with lots of secrets of his own. Like seeing auras. Something else he didn’t talk about.

  “We had an unexplainable series of incidents when we were at a big ruin ten years ago. It was my first big dig. I was excited to be there and to follow along with all the big cheese. My partners, Jeremiah and Callum were both there. All of us were ecstatic. It was a turning point in our careers. It was what we’d worked so hard to get, and we couldn’t wait to deal with everything happening. We were excited by it all. But then things went wrong—odd incidents, odd accidents with no explanation. People getting hurt, weird noises in the night, tools broken, tools stolen.”

  At that, she gasped. “Just like here?”

  He nodded. “Just like here. The thing is, it got much worse. We had one man lose an arm in a completely freak accident. A stone came down, crushing his arm, and we had to cut him free. And eventually, of course, after things got so bad, you know what happened.”

  “Someone died,” she whispered in horror.

  He nodded. “Exactly, somebody died. But someone else had died before him, and then a couple more died.”

  She reached out a shaky hand. “I’m so sorry.”

  He smiled. “You would say that. Everybody else would be freaked out, wanting to know the details, but you’re more concerned about how traumatizing the experience would have been for me.”

  “Well, you were young,” she said, “and living through that couldn’t have been easy.”

  “It wasn’t easy,” he agreed. “But, more than that, we were left with this horrible feeling of something well beyond us, something we couldn’t explain, something we didn’t understand and something we couldn’t stop. I think that was the worst part. I felt so helpless. No matter what I did—no matter what we did—we couldn’t seem to make all the bad things go away. You know how it feels when you have no control over the stuff going on around you?”

  She thought about her mother dying and all the treatments, the pain and the agony her mom went through, trying everything to save her life, and Lacey nodded. “Exactly. I have experienced that. I don’t think there is anything worse.”

  His gaze deepened with understanding. “Then add in the fear and the shock and the horror of what you’re going through right now only to find it just builds for days and days.”

  “How did you get out of it?”

  “After our last man died, it was as if the tension snapped, and whatever was around had died with him. We buried him where he was, which was unfortunate for his family, but we didn’t feel we had any choice. We couldn’t take a risk of bringing him back. We took the opportunity to pack up and leave.”

  “I probably would have buried him with all his gear too.”

  “And that’s exactly what we did. We didn’t know if it was an infection. We didn’t know if it was a curse,” he admitted. “Something I would never have given credence to before this. But now it’s like it couldn’t have been anything but.”

  “Lots of people don’t believe in the existence of true evil,” she said.

  “No,” he said, “they don’t. And that’s more foolish of them because, once you’ve seen it, the existence of evil is never to be doubted again.”

  *

  Sebastian hadn’t wanted to get into this topic with her. She seemed more pensive now, not as upset, as if she’d had time to assimilate some of the issues, which was pretty amazing, considering how shocking so much of it was. For himself, once he’d realized what was happening here, it was the masks that worried him most.

  “What do you think is happening? At this dig site?” she asked softly. “Do you think I’m tapping into a dead person’s thoughts? Am I possessed by a spirit? Am I reliving a past life?”

  She had been doing a lot of thinking about this. “It could be any and all of the above,” he said. “Personally I much prefer the third one.”

  She gave a trill of laughter. “Right. Isn’t it a whole lot easier to think you’re tapping into a previous lifetime’s worth of memories versus somebody else getting their claws into you? But I also read that, once you do energy work or you tap into that kind of stuff, it leaves you open to other spirits.”

  He fell silent at that, wondering if she had made the connection he’d made.

  She said, “So, if that is what’s happening, do we think the masks are connected to a person? And, if they are, what could that spirit hope to do with them?”

  He had to admit she had guts. She went for the gold on a very difficult question. He grabbed her hand and said, “I don’t know. Bruno doesn’t know. There is somebody who might be able to help us. But I don’t really know myself.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “The locals from the neighboring area of the Mayan ruins believe it was the god of death, Kisin, who was responsible for all the ills in the world. If it’s connected to an old energy like that there’s no way to know what he’s after … and yes that takes us into the twilight zone.” He sighed. “The only way we got out of
the Mayan ruins was with a special guide. All the others had left us. The scientist had called in somebody he knew who called somebody he knew. That got us out safe and sound,” he admitted. “He got us out, and we never looked back.”

  “And you already contacted him about what’s going on here too, didn’t you?”

  Sebastian nodded. “As soon as I heard about the accidents.”

  “And his response?”

  “To let him know if it got any weirder.”

  “What do you think now? Is it any weirder?”

  “He’s already here at the site.”

  She studied Sebastian carefully. “He is?”

  He smiled and nodded. “He got in a few days ago.”

  “Hunter?”

  Sebastian nodded. “He’s coming to talk to us now.” She straightened and looked at the team member she’d seen earlier but had thought was known to the others. “The others acted like they already knew him.”

  “Hunter has an ability to do that.”

  She frowned at him. “Now that is unnerving.”

  Sebastian nodded. “It is. But he’s very good at what he does, and he’s really honest. He could be incredibly dishonest and get away with a lot of stuff, but the fact remains. He is honest.”

  She shrugged. “Okay, and now what?”

  “He wants to ask us some questions.”

  She gave an eye roll as Hunter walked over and plunked down beside them. He took one look at her and said, “Hi. I hear you’re having fun these days.”

  She glared at him. Something about his tone of voice set her nerves on edge. “Maybe for you it’s fun.”

  “Why would you think it’s fun for me?” he asked.

  “Because you look like you enjoy the hunt, but I’d say you are more like a ghost hunter, vampire hunter, a hunter of some kind of supernatural otherworldly prey.”

  His gaze narrowed. “That’s very interesting. Maybe I am.” His voice was soft and humorous. “And why would you say that?”

  “You’re different.”

  Sebastian watched her shift, become warier, uncertain. Defensive. He wondered at the change, why she should react like that toward Hunter at this point. He could tell from Hunter’s expression he was wondering the same thing. Then he saw things others didn’t as Hunter’s next actions proved.