Buzz. Buzz.
I reach into my pocket for my phone. Me and my family were eating dinner, and the rule was that phones weren’t allowed at the dinner table. However, I was curious to see who was calling me. I pull it out and look at it. This girl I was into, Samantha, had called me.
“Put the damn phone away, Isaiah. I already said no phone at the dinner table,” My dad says sternly to me. I put my phone away quickly.
“Sorry,” I mutter, sticking my fork into another slice of chicken. The table is silent for a few seconds, with the only sound being everyone’s forks hitting their plates.
My mom clears her throat before speaking to me. “So, have you been thinking about going to a book club over the summer?” She eyes me. I shrug.
“I mean, books are cool and all, but I don’t want to read for the rest of the summer. That’s for school,” I respond, chewing. I look ahead at my uncle and aunt, who were nodding with me.
“You know, reading is still good for you, whether you like it or not,” My aunt points her fork at me. My uncle looks at her as I stare down at my plate.
“You’re not about to tell a teenager to read, are you?” My uncle starts laughing, with my aunt giving a disapproving look.
My dad looks up from his plate. “We might as well be. The boy needs to do other shit besides goofing off with his friends all the time and playing video games,”
My mom slams her fork down on her plate, which startles me for a moment. “Frank, I thought we agreed on this. No more swearing at the table,”
My dad gazes at me and then my mom. He sighs. “I know, I’m sorry, just… Isaiah, don’t take it the hard way,” He chews on another slice of chicken.
“Yeah, it’s okay, dad…” I manage to say. Family dinners when my uncle and aunt were staying over always ended up being sort of intense, and is just a fabrication of what I thought the entirety of my family was really like.
My uncle begins to chime in. “I think you shouldn’t be so hard on him, you know?” He says silently to my dad. “I know you’re trying to get him ready to be an adult and become one with the family, but we were just the same way as kids before we continued what our parents started.”
I listen to this, starting to get confused. Continue what? I knew most of my family history, but they never mentioned anything about my dad and uncle continuing some line of work. We didn’t own a family business or anything like that.
“He’s too young. It’d be far too much for him,” I hear my dad whisper back to my uncle, turning back to his food and continuing to eat. I noticed that my mom and aunt were looking from them to nervously eyeing me. I started to get a little awkward, but I didn’t question it further as I moved on to my mashed potatoes. (Which were delicious, by the way)
Before I could finish and put my plate away, I felt my mom turn to me and put her hand on my shoulder. “Could you do me a favor real quick, honey?”
I look back at her. “Sure, what do you need?”
“Can you go down to the basement and get the vacuum that’s down there? The carpet’s starting to get dirty, and I’ve put off cleaning it long enough,” She points to a hall beside the dining room, signifying that the basement was around there.
I sigh, getting up from my seat and pushing it in. “Alright, give me a minute,” I hear my mom say thank you as I walk down the hall, moving toward the basement door. I continue hearing my dad and uncle talk to each other at the table. I was still wondering what they meant by continuing what their parents started, because I’ve never been told of them taking after their parents, since to my knowledge, they weren’t too fond of them.
I felt left out of something, but I also didn’t care, as I made it to the basement door at the end of the hall, lifted the latch, and pulled it open. I looked down into our large basement. The light was fortunately on, so I was able to see clearly.
I took a step onto the short ladder provided below and slowly made my way down into the basement, watching the dinner table disappear as I entered the basement, a place that I wasn’t too familiar with. I didn’t actually know where the vacuum was, so I was annoyed that my mom was making me do it. Maybe she did tell me where it was before, and I just forgot.
I stepped farther down into the basement as I felt my phone ring again in my pocket. I let out an annoyed sigh, pulling my phone out and checking who it was. Samantha was calling me again. I immediately got butterflies in my stomach just from reading her name.
I answered as quickly as I could, putting my phone to my ear as I moved throughout the basement, attempting to find the vacuum.
“Finally, you answered,” I hear Samantha talk into the phone. I chuckle.
“Yeah, sorry, I was eating dinner, now I’m in the basement because my mom made me get the vacuum. Anyways, what’s up?” I tried to talk as smoothly as I could.
“Oh, you’re completely fine. I know how your dad is,” I could tell Samantha was smiling as she said that.
“I know, sometimes he’s annoying. But he’s my dad, so I love him anyway,” I start checking behind cabinets, still not being able to find the vacuum.
“He also seems worried whenever I come over. Remember last week when I came by and he thought we were gonna-“
“Yup, I remember, no need to finish the sentence,” I cut her off, immediately regretting it but moving on.
“I guess you do,” Samantha laughs into the phone. “I don’t view you that way anyway. You’re just a really great friend to me,”
My heart sinks. It felt like I took a powerful punch straight to the heart. I just got friend zoned without even asking her out. “I don’t either. I’d much rather be friends too…” I say, almost mumbling into the phone. I move to the far back of the basement, getting frustrated with my lack of progress in tracking the vacuum.
“Have you even found that vacuum you’re supposed to get, anyway?” Samantha says after a moment. I start moving multiple things out of the way.
“Nope, I’m taking way too long now. Shit is getting annoying- What the?”
I move a vintage chair to the side, revealing an open box full of multiple masks. It freaked me out, maybe even scaring me a little bit upon seeing it but I eventually kneeled down to get a better look into it.
“What happened? Are you okay?” Samantha says worryingly into the phone. I did stop talking abruptly, so I understood her worry.
“Don’t worry, I’m fine. I just found a box full of… Masks and I’m just…” I look around me. The basement was still the same, and I was still alone.
“That’s… Weird. Why are there masks in your basement? Do you collect masks?” Samantha jokes into the phone. I continued getting butterflies in my stomach just talking to her, but I was also still hurt by what she said, basically telling me that she wasn’t interested in me romantically but I respected her.
“Come on now, you know I don’t collect masks,” I laugh, to which Samantha laughs back. I see writing on the front of the box though, so I squint to take a better look at it. It read ‘The Jessi Family.’
I continued talking upon reading this. “Apparently it’s my family’s mask collection?” I say confused into the phone. Why would my family have a box full of masks? What was the purpose?
“Oh,” Samantha stays silent on the line for a minute. I continued examining the box full of masks, waiting for Samantha to say something else. She continues talking after another minute. “Well, I do know a lot about masks and what they symbolize, so maybe I can help you figure it out..?”
“You know everything about masks? Seriously?” I joke into the phone.
Samantha giggles a little bit. “Well, it depends on what kind they are,”
I put my hand into the masks and checked out all of the different masks. There were masks in different sizes and colors, but however, there were 2 masks that there were easily the most of; purple face masks and hannya masks. The hannya masks alarmed me a solid amount.
“Do you know anything about purple masks?” I ask Samantha.
“Hmmm… Purple masks are generally associated with something heavily spiritual, but that you’re also very expressive. It’s a fun one, I think,” Samantha says in a matter-of-fact tone.
I pull out a demon mask from the box and hold it in my hand, shaking just from the sight of it. It looked like an abomination. “Um… What about Hannya masks?”
“Demon masks?” Samantha asks, followed by silence for a moment. She explains it a few seconds later. “Hannya masks most of the time symbolize female rage, mixed in with their pain,”
I look down at the mask, shivering at the explanation. Why did my family have these? I was getting curious- but also felt that these were just collectibles at some antique shop.
“Isaiah, I don’t know if you’ve told me or not but is your family religious?” Samantha says. I was starting to zone out so much that I didn’t even notice she was talking.
“Oh, um, kind of. My dad’s parents were religious so we do believe that there is a god,” I answer truthfully. I hear Samantha click her tongue on the other end. I put the mask back in the box and stand back up.
“Did your dad and uncle have any sisters?” Samantha asks. I realize shortly that she’s asking me seriously. I clear my throat.
“No,” I reply. “My mom and aunt also don’t have any brothers,”
Samantha is silent for a while, almost as if she was thinking of what to say next. I wait patiently until she talks into the phone again. “If those are the main masks in the box, I think it symbolizes two sides of the family. Your dad’s side reflects the purple masks but your mom’s side reflects the Hannya-“
I start to hear footsteps coming down into the basement.
“Sorry Samantha, I gotta go, bye,” I say quickly into the phone, putting it away from my ear. I hear Samantha start telling me to call her tomorrow, but I don’t let her finish as I hang up. I look to the basement stairs and see my mom coming down. I remembered about the vacuum. “Shit,” I think to myself, watching my mom looking at me, getting closer.
“You’re taking forever down here. Did you get the vacuum or not?” My mom says with a bit of agitation in her voice.
I grit my teeth. “I can’t find it, I forgot where it’s at, but…” I lean down and pick up the box of masks. I show them to my mom. “What are these?”
My mom looks at them and gets a shook expression on her face, like I had just found something that I wasn’t supposed to. She takes the box from me and sets it down on the floor neatly. She looks back at me, then turns around, facing her back towards me.
“It’s best that you don’t know,” My mom doesn’t have an expression in her voice. She just sounded hurt, like she was in pain after seeing the masks. I looked back down at the box, then back at my mom, who was now walking away from me, going back up the basement steps.
I still needed to know though, or I guess wanted to know. “Whose masks are they though?” I shout up to her.
I get no response as my mom ignores me, climbing out of the basement, leaving me with no answer.
I went to bed a couple of hours later, confused, disappointed, but somewhat content with my lack of answers from my mom. I kept thinking about what Samantha had said, about how the different masks reflected a different side of my family. I didn’t think much of it though, because I didn’t think she’d actually know that much. At the time, I thought she was just spewing out bullshit.
Still, the image of the purple masks, how freaky and almost realistic they looked, just about haunted me for the rest of that night. The Hannya masks though, were far worst. The masks told a story on their own. They looked like they were in pain. Not just in pain, but also in sorrow.
If what Samantha said was true and they symbolized female rage and pain, then were they meant for my mom and my aunt? I didn’t know. I just wanted a peaceful sleep, and I would forget about it in the morning.
I only got 3 hours worth, though.
I woke up in the middle of the night, in the darkness of my room. The dark wasn’t what woke me up, though. I heard what sounded like humming coming from downstairs. I listened closely. It sounded like a distant chant, but also had a melody to it, but I couldn’t quite tell. All I knew was that it woke me up, and it was distracting me from falling back asleep.
I sat up in my bed, rubbed my eyes, and got up. I went towards my door and opened it. Once my door was open, I could hear the humming much better. It sounded like it was coming from the living room. At first, I got scared because I thought there were intruders in the house, but I ruled this out when I went into my parent’s bedroom and saw that they weren’t in there.
I moved towards the stairs, taking slow and steady steps down them, basically tip-toeing. The further I went down the stairs, the more clear the humming became. It sounded like multiple people were humming, and they were all weirdly in sync. It sounded really good, but it also sounded immensely sinister. It just had that tone to it.
As I made it farther down the stairs, I started getting more and more creeped out, and I started getting scared. What the fuck was the humming for? I still wasn’t down the stairs completely, and the wall connected to the stairs was still blocking my view, but I was fearing for the worst. My heart was beating hard and fast. I was terrified. I wanted to go back to bed, but my curiosity got the best of me.
Once I made it down the stairs, I turned towards the living room and saw my parents with my uncle and aunt, standing in a circle, holding hands and humming.
I immediately was more terrified than I already was. This was a completely strange and oddly creepy sight. I also quickly noticed that they were all wearing… Masks. The same masks I was checking out in the basement earlier.
I noticed a pattern though. My dad and uncle, the men, were wearing the purple masks, and my mom and aunt, the woman, were wearing the Hannya masks. I put two and two together. Purple masks were associated with spirituality, and my dad’s parents were religious. Hannya masks express female rage and pain…
That’s when something started creeping in slowly. Had something happened to my mom and aunt before?
I was so caught up in watching them all hum, just standing together, staring ahead and staying still, doing absolutely nothing else but hum, that I didn’t even realize what they were standing around.
On the floor in the middle of them, was Samantha tied up to the ground, with duct tape covering her mouth. She was trying to scream, but no noise was coming out.
I watched her eyes move on me, and she was moving around desperately. I glanced up at my family in disgust, but with fear still present. I didn’t know what to think or do, I was just in complete shock.
“What the hell is going on here???” I say loudly, my voice cracking in the middle of my sentence. My family stops humming instantly, and I watch as their hands lift up from each other, and they all start to stare directly at me. The eye holes in every mask they were wearing had nothing but darkness in them. I deeply regretted doing anything, because I felt as if I was in serious danger now.
I watch as my mom, in the hannya mask, stepped forward to me and stared at me, not saying anything. I repeat myself and yell “What the hell are you guys doing?? Why is Samantha here, I…” I couldn’t finish my sentence without getting overwhelmed by all the confusion and fear that was going through me.
“Oh, honey…” I hear my mom say through the mask. She reaches her hand up to the hannya mask and takes it off, tears starting to stream down her cheek. “We didn’t want you to find out…”
“Find out what?” I say back. “Find out that you’re torturing my friend? You guys are sick, are you guys even my family?” I start to feel myself begin to cry. My mom puts both of her hands on my shoulders, her eyes still watering.
“We’re not exactly torturing your friend Samantha here. We’re having our own little… Ritual.” She smiles before continuing. “We know you were talking to Samantha on the phone in the basement earlier. It seems that she’s getting in the way of your future and your tasks,”
I don’t say anything as I stayed appalled. My future?
“W-What do you mean. What future?” I fearfully take a small step back.
“You see, when I met your father, I found out about what his family had started after we got married and after everything… Everything I had to go through in my childhood with my sister, I thought it was a wonderful idea. I could unleash my pain and trauma onto people after the system that my father had set up against me,” My mom starts to get more and more tears in her eyes.
I tried to speak up loud, but I couldn’t. “What did dad’s parents start?” My voice quivers. I tried to keep my composure.
“We take people that are sheep to us, and we have sacrificial events behind the identities of these masks,” My mom shows me her hannya mask. The hannya mask I had seen in the box earlier in the basement. “They started it for their spiritual beliefs. I joined your father to join that spirituality, but because of the pain, the suffering that I had to go through. I’ve tried giving you the childhood that I always wanted, but it seems that you have to start this so, so young,” My mom’s voice starts to raise as I began to get tears in my eyes.
I looked back down at Samantha, who was looking at me with pleading eyes. I felt the rest of my family’s eyes on me. They weren’t saying anything. I looked back up at my mom, who continued. “I didn’t have a mom, and throughout my years, I had to go through so much shit. My ‘dad’ adopted your aunt and I just to put us through a human trafficking system, and every single person we ended up being with, they took advantage of us and assaulted us. Every. Single. Person. We were just young girls…”
My mom starts nearly breaking down as I feel myself start to cry. The truth was unfolding but it was the truth that I never wanted to hear.
My mom keeps going. “We couldn’t fight back, and that was basically all we had to live through. No one was there to help us until we were finally able to break out of it and finally have our own lives,” My mom wipes tears off her face. I watch as she puts her mask back on to hide her tears.
“Mom, I… I didn’t know…” I choke up, a stream of tears falling from my eyes. My mom walks away from me and goes to the couch. I watch as she picks something up from it and walks back to me. I see what was in her hand. A purple mask.
“Please, my son…” My mom softly says to me. “Take the mask. Join us in our prophecy, in our fight against our ugly society, and help me with my pain. Please, Isaiah,”
I look at my uncle, who leans down to the glass table in the living room and grabs a machete. I looked down at Samantha again, who was continuing to try to scream and cry, looking at me with disbelief. I didn’t know how she got here, but I didn’t want to find out.
I slowly look at mom in the hannya mask, waiting for me to take my mask. I look down at it and stare into it. The purple mask. The lifeless eyes. It’s meaning. I thought of what it would mean for me if I decided to join my family. If I decided to take this mask and make it a part of my identity.
And I took it.
I grabbed the mask from my mom’s hands, and she nods in approval, walking back to join the rest of my family. I spent more time looking at the mask, processing what I was doing. The fear that was in me from what was taking place right now in my living room, was now gone.
I walked forward and joined the circle around Samantha. I looked down and saw her try to move out of the rope tying her down, but she was unsuccessful. She continued looking at me with the same pleading eyes. She was my crush, one of my best friends. It hurt knowing that I was going to be the last thing that she saw.
I peek at my dad, who was giving me a nod of approval. A nod that he had not given me in a while.
I took one last look at Samantha before I put the mask over my face, letting it obscure me in darkness.