Mask of Evil

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2

Henry gets a job working at the Golden Spoon Cafe. He has to serve tea and coffee to customers, as well as prepare breakfast in the kitchen.

There are three other people working in the Cafe with Henry.

Two of the staff members Alicia and Sandy agree with Henry and show him the ropes of working in the Cafe. It is the Cafe Manager Jake who seems to have an issue with Henry.

"Hey Henry" says Jake the Manager who is stocking the fridge with soft drinks, "would you take the garbage bags out from the kitchen, they have been there for the last hour?"

"Yes, Jake, I'll do it now."

"Then you need to clean the windows, which are really looking filthy after the rain and storm we had here last week," said Jake gruffly.

"But, Jake, I wiped all the windows last evening," said Sandy.

"Yes you did and that does not change the fact that it rained again last night and more dirt has stuck to the glass," said Jake in an angry tone of voice.

"I'll do that Jake," said Henry taking out the trash bags through the large blue door in the kitchen leading out to the back of the cafe, where the garbage vats were lined up.

After disposing of the five large bags, Henry took up a bucket and filled it with water and started to clean the windows of the old place.

The windows were wiped the previous evening by Sandy, Jake thought to himself and here he was re-cleaning the windows, maybe Jake wanted the windows to become sunlight reflectors or perhaps he did not like the fact that Alicia and Sandy got on so well with him.

Then yet again, according to what Alicia had told him, it seemed that Jake and Eva were an item a couple of years ago and he did not like it when she broke up with him, due to his alcoholism.

Jake was a violent man and he had also been in prison for six months for assaulting a customer who questioned him about an item on the day's menu. It seemed that the customer told him that the breakfast served that morning was stale and the two fried eggs were cold.

No one wanted to get on the wrong side of Jake. He was a stocky man about six feet four inches and looked like a lumberjack, with his broad chest and large hands. The man would have been more comfortable chopping wood than serving breakfast at the Cafe.

No one wanted to annoy Jake, especially when Jake did not like you or when he was jealous of the man he had just employed who was living with his ex-girlfriend. Jake was now having an affair with Sandy but he never got over Eva.

On his way to work one morning Henry saw a poster of a missing person. A person was abducted and the posters can be seen all around the town. "Man carried away by Raven," was the title of the poster, with a photo of the man, whose name was Brad Fergus. Brad was a slim bespectacled man, who must have been feather-weight to get carried off by a bird, even a large one.

Eyewitnesses say that they saw a large raven carry away the person.

It was not a hoax as Alicia, the forty something woman, who worked at the Cafe, knew the man's sister Julie who worked at the hairdresser on Brite street.

"Brad worked in the Post Office," said Alicia, he was walking back home on Saturday evening, when Margery saw him being attacked by two large raven looking birds and one of the birds carried poor Brad off, as he screamed for help."

"Wasn't there anyone else around who could have helped him?" asked Sandy.

"Everyone must have been enjoying Saturday evening at the local club," said Jake gruffly, as he walked into the room.

The world was a strange place thought Henry to himself. Nothing could be stranger than the fact that he suddenly appeared on the highway and he was lucky that Eva was driving back home after work and spotted him and came to his aid.

Henry was cleaning the windows of the cafe, when suddenly everything blacked out and he could not move. This was now becoming a frequent occurrence.

Henry cannot work as he seems to suddenly go into a trance-like state without any warning signs when it is about to occur.

The trance states come and go quite frequently.

Jake did not like this and he started complaining to Eva when she reached Henry at work the next morning.

"Our man Henry here, goes into a daze and watches the planets," said Jake, "He will have to leave if this continues, Eva. I only gave this Joker a job because I know you."

"Just keep him for a few more days, till I get him another job. I am sure that he has been through a lot and his mind needs to heal. His body healed but his mind needs more time," said Eva forcefully, as she dropped Henry off at the Cafe and carried on to her job at the hospital.

It is now three months since Henry has been living in this quiet Town of Quakenville with Eva and working at the local Cafe.

Henry does work, but not all the time. It seems that he gets distracted and is lost in his own world. This has been an issue with Jake the owner of the place. Eva is always given an earful, when she comes to reach Henry to work every morning.

A lady keeps watching Henry as he sits in a trance looking at the skies. She watches from her black car. She is a pretty looking woman, with her long flowing black hair and penetrating gaze. She seems to know something about Henry as she watches him intently. The lady in the car does not notice a policeman walk up to the car.

"Miss would you move your car please, this is not a spot to park."

"Sorry, Officer," says the young woman as she drives her car away.

As the car passes the Cafe, she cannot help but look once more at Henry with concern.

Eva collects Henry in the evening on her way back home. Eva is tired after her day at work and does not notice an animal cross her path. As Eva hits hard on the brakes at the last minute, the car skids and moves to the side of the road.

"Eva, are you okay?," asks Henry who is sitting in the front seat.

"I'm fine," says Eva, "Just a bit shaken. I did not see that fox cross my path earlier, until the last second. I definitely need a cup of coffee."

Eva gets the car back on the road and drives back home. In the distance the car can be seen.

The mysterious lady follows them back home in her car. She parks her car behind bushes and sits in the car for awhile.

Later that evening after Eva has gone to bed. The lady with the dark hair and an air of mystery about her walks to the window of the house. She looks in and she observes Henry sketching images on sheets of paper. He seems to be doing it all while he is in a trance. The lady goes to the side of the house, where there is an open window.

The room is in darkness only lit by the light of the moon. She sees a desk near the window, with a number of papers of sketches done by Henry. She crawls into the room through the window and picks up a stack of these sketches.

She climbs out of the window just in time, before Henry walks into the room and switches on the lights and places his fresh stack of paper with sketches on the desk, closes the open window and goes up to the bedroom. He snuggles into bed with Eva who is already asleep. Eva wakes up and they make love before cuddling up together and falling into a deep sleep together.

The next morning as Eva goes to the desk to pick up her file for work, she notices a pile of sketches done by Henry the previous night.

"Henry you did some more sketches last night," asked Eva.

"I really don’t remember, are they any good?" asks Henry.

Henry has no memory of all the sketches which he has created.

"Yes, some of them look good, they are filled with a lot of signs and symbols. These ones here have illustrations of swords and winged bats. I wonder what all these strange designs symbolise? Perhaps we could also have an exhibition of your sketches someday" asks Eva.

"My drawings aren't that good. I've no idea what they all mean darling. Maybe we should show it to an expert."

"Yes, I could do that, we have a consultant Psychologist, Doctor Charles Hawes who visits the hospital twice a month. I will take a few of these and show it to him," says Eva, putting the ten or twelve drawings into her work folder. They drive off to work.

A few days later Henry loses his job at the Diner. Henry is depressed and confused with his life. Eva is worried about him.

One day Eva comes back home from shopping to find that he is not at home. Henry walked out of the house that day. Eva takes the car and asks one of the neighbours an old lady called Rose if she saw him leave as she did her gardening.

"Yes, I did see Henry walking by, he seemed to be in his own world and did not notice me. He could have gone to the beach," said Rose. Eva goes to the harbour and finds Henry sitting at the edge of the jetty, with no memory as to how he got there.

Henry keeps getting more and more depressed. Henry starts getting irritable and angry just staying at home. He tells Eva that he somehow feels imprisoned and that he needs to find his purpose. He feels that he is wasting his life.

Eva is worried that something has happened to Henry. She has fallen in love with him and wants to help him to discover his identity. Eva decides that it is about time, that she gets a detective to find out who Henry is and where he has come from.

Eva had checked the news reports and the web to find out if Henry was in any photographs as a missing person. She was unsuccessful.

Henry took the dog out for a walk on a Saturday afternoon. The dog returned home, still on his leash, but without Henry.

Later that day Henry is dropped off at Eva's door. She hears a knock on the door and sees Henry standing at the doorway with a blank expression on his face. She sees a black car drive away. Eva wonders to herself why the stranger who brought Henry back home did not wait to be thanked. She was getting worried and was about to take the car out again and check the park and the cafes near the beach.

Henry takes the dog out for a walk when it is just turning to dusk. On his way back home, he suddenly hears a growl behind him. A wolf-like animal starts to chase Henry down the road.

The wolf is hot on their heels.

Henry and the cocker spaniel run for their lives.

Henry and Benji just run into the gates leading into the house and shut the door, both shaking and scared from the experience.

Henry looks around and he is surprised to see that there is no one behind him. There is no wolf, there is no such animal or was it just his vivid imagination?

"Benji, did you see the animal chasing us?" asks Henry, "Of course you can't tell me, you are just a dog," says Henry with a smile.

As Henry shuts the door and walks into the room he gets a horrible smell in the air.

He moves to where the scent is coming from and is shocked to find three dead rabbits, butchered and bloodied at the center of the living room.

He has to clean up the mess before Eva returns from work.

He does not want to scare Eva about all these strange and scary occurrences he has been experiencing.

He may need to leave the house and stay somewhere else.

Henry does not want to put Eva in any danger, from anything coming after him from his past.

He only wishes he knew who he was and who was coming after him?