Across the parking lot of the Chinese restaurant, Stull sat in his Kia and waited for Willis and the woman named Mia to pull onto the highway. They seemed to be taking their sweet time, discussing something behind the steamed-up windshield of the car. Stull wondered if they might start necking, lesbian or not.
Bibby stirred in the back seat.
Stull glanced up at his dead brother’s reflection in the rearview mirror. Robert “Bibby” Stull, forever ten years old. Forever lurking about in the margins of his twin brother Wayne’s consciousness.
In theory, they had been born identical twins. But Stull had seen those early baby photos—the few that Mother kept loose in a highboy drawer in the foyer of the old house on Slaughterhouse Row—and he always knew which infant child was him, which infant child was Bibby. There was never any question.
Stull’s baby face was bisected down the middle, a double cleft lip hoisted like a theater curtain toward each flattened, twisted nostril. An upper gum line like an open clamshell. In the few photos where baby Wayne was laughing, you could see straight through that chasm to the back of his throat. When his baby teeth came in, they protruded forward through the gum line instead of straight down. When his adult teeth came in, they were even worse. He looked like something dropped to the pavement from a great height.
“Bibby,” he’d say, when the twins were learning to talk. Not Bobby, not Robert, but that bastardized, tongue-injected version of his twin brother’s name. Bibby, Bibby, Bibby. And Mother would grow frustrated and grasp at his jaw, her pincer-like thumb and forefinger manipulating young Wayne’s mouth, hard enough so he could feel the palate constrict, the jawbones bending, the jagged kernels of teeth scissoring into one another.
When his tongue would come through the crevasse in his face, Mother would strike him open-handed across the jaw. “No one wants your spittle in their apple pie,” she’d chastise him. “No one wants to see the pink worm poking through that broken hole.” So he worked on his speech, concentrating on the s-words, the th-words, the long and short o sounds that caused him such difficulty and grief.
Robert had no difficulty. Robert had no grief. Robert was a handsome, well-adjusted boy. “He’s the kind of son a father would be proud to have,” Mother had said on more than one occasion to Wayne. “Do you see how Robert articulates? Do you see how he keeps his tongue in his mouth when he speaks?”
Young Wayne saw all of that. The pink worm stayed in its hole. He tried to mimic Robert’s way of speaking, but he just couldn’t. There was a crack in his face, and there was nothing he could do about that.
He’s the kind of son a father would be proud of. Yet there had never been a father in that cold echo chamber of a house on Slaughterhouse Row. As he got older, Wayne Stull grew up to believe that he and Robert had been sired by one of the hulking, blood-streaked slaughterers who worked the killing floors at the abattoir down the road, although he never had any real proof of that. So from birth to age ten, it had just been the three of them in the creaky, rambling ranch house.
Mother had homeschooled them both to a certain point. But then, around the age of eight or nine, Robert had wanted to go to the public school in town. At first, Mother appeared offended that her favorite son would deign to abandon his family for strangers in a classroom. But in the end, Mother had acquiesced.
Robert got new shoes, a backpack, a pencil box with cartoon action heroes on the lid. When young Wayne asked to go along with his brother to that very same school, Mother laughed at him, then shook her head in great pity. “You have a difficulty speaking and your aptitude for following instructions is wanting, Wayne,” she had replied. Then, rather more succinctly: “Besides, you’d scare the other children.”
Every morning Robert filed onto the big yellow school bus, and every afternoon it dropped him off at the end of their long driveway. Young Wayne sat by the window for much of the afternoon, after completing his own schoolwork, waiting for his twin brother to return. At first, Robert would regale him with all sorts of interesting and impossible stories of what it was like to attend an actual school. But then, after a while, Robert got tired of filling young Wayne in on all of these details. They were Robert’s stories, Robert’s experiences, not Wayne’s. Robert stopped wanting to share them with him.
Still, Wayne waited by the window for Robert to come off that big yellow school bus. Robert always came, though he sometimes kicked the chickens out of his way when he headed down the driveway, and he sometimes brought a friend home with him. Robert never brought his friends in the house, though, and Wayne knew it was because Robert was ashamed of Wayne’s face. They stuck to the yard, the cowshed, or chucked rocks at the chickens. Sometimes Robert and his friends played in the woods beyond the farm.
At the end of fourth grade, Robert received school photos. He brought them home on a shiny bit of cardstock, columns of tiny rectangular pictures of Robert grinning for the camera. Mother did not keep these photos hidden away in the highboy like she did Wayne’s baby pictures; she cut them out and mailed them to distant relatives, and even had one framed for over the fireplace. A similarly framed photo found a place on the nightstand beside Mother’s bed. Sometimes, when Wayne was feeling audacious, he would pretend the boy in the photos was him.
The boys had shared a room for as long as Wayne Stull could remember, but after a year of public school, Robert relocated to the spare bedroom at the end of the hall. Mother bought him brand-new bed sheets and pillows and decorations for the room. When Wayne asked if he, too, could have new bed sheets, Mother shook her head and gave him that pitying look that, by now, Wayne found all too familiar. “You’ll gum them all up in the night,” was Mother’s response, which meant he’d drool uncontrollably on them until they grew crusty and stank like old dinner plates.
It wasn’t on purpose, but he started wetting the bed. He started suffering terrible nightmares, where Robert—Bibby—would pick pieces of Wayne’s face apart, and use the pieces as he saw fit on his own face. An eyeball here, a cheekbone there. My handsome, handsome boy. Sometimes in these nightmares, men from the slaughterhouse would arrive and collect whatever was left of poor Wayne in a cattle wagon, and drive him straight out to the abattoir. They’d show him the killing floor, which looked like an ice rink of shiny red blood, and they’d show him the giant sledgehammers they used to open bovine skulls. They’d whisper to him, One good, solid, reliable whack, Wayne Lee, and I can wipe that horrible face clean off you, once and for all.
When he started getting erections in the bath at the age of nine, Mother would reprimand him for his impure thoughts. Robert never got maladjusted, as Mother would call it, so why should his twin brother Wayne get maladjusted? Was this just more evidence that Wayne was a broken child? Wayne couldn’t help it; Wayne didn’t know.
After several occasions of this ridicule, Mother brought out the elastrator. It was a thick and unforgiving rubber band that she used to castrate bulls on the farm. She tied it around young Wayne’s testicles until his maladjustment corrected itself. It was painful and it made Wayne cry, though he learned to take this punishment without argument. Sometimes he even went to bed with that merciless band of rubber wrapped around his scrotum.
“We do this now so we don’t have to do this later,” Mother explained. “It’s a teaching lesson, just like they do at Robert’s school in town.” And she looked him up and down as he squirmed uncomfortably in the tub and tried not to cry. “They’re a couple of pert grapes at the moment, but it will hurt much more once you grow up and they become hangdowns.”
And he went to bed every night, thinking, This is all because of my face. She thinks I’m the devil and Bibby’s the angel. She hates me.
Not until Wayne Lee Stull was an adult did he come to find out that something could have been done about his cranial condition back when he was still an infant. A rather simple cosmetic procedure, actually. It was too late for that now, of course—by adulthood, the window for fixing his face had closed—but that didn’t stop him from asking Mother why she had neglected to correct his appearance when he was a child.
“That’s how God sent you to me, Wayne, and I’m not one to suggest God’s ever made a mistake.” She had told him this one afternoon as he came by the old house on Slaughterhouse Row for a visit. They’d been sitting in the kitchen, each enjoying a plate of his mother’s homemade cherry cobbler. Mother sat in a block of sunlight that shone through the window over the sink, casting her in a golden halo of light. “Child comes to you with black eyes, you praise God,” she said. She sounded like she was quoting scripture, although it was none Wayne had ever heard before. “Child comes to you with black skin, you praise God. Child comes to you with black mouth—”
“Enough.” He’d said this quietly but firmly, a fist on the tabletop beside his half-eaten cherry cobbler.
Mother leaned back in her chair, her chin cocked loftily in the glow of sunlight coming through the window. “Have you lost your faith, Wayne? Is that what you’re telling me?”
Wayne Stull was twenty-two years old at the time of this conversation. He had already killed four people—the first of whom was Bibby, back when they were both ten years old—and there was very little left in this world that gave him pause. Mother, however, was the exception.
Still, he felt something overtake him in that moment. Some power that he believed came to him after this most recent murder, only just a few weeks back and still fresh in his mind, in his body—a prostitute he’d picked up in Carmel, a woman whose face he’d taken great pleasure in demolishing with a hammer. He still had her teeth in his apartment, in a plastic cup on his bathroom sink next to his collection of plastic combs and hairbrushes.
Wayne stood up from the table, undid his pants, and let them drop to the kitchen floor. Mother balked in horror, and held her hands up in front of her face to block out this violation. Very calmly, Wayne said, “No, Mother. I want you to look.”
She would not look.
“You’ll look or I’ll pick up my fork and dig both of your eyes out of your skull.” Still very calm.
Trembling, his mother lowered her hands. She stared first at his face—the nightmare that was his face—but then she looked down to his mangled, castrated groin.
“Child comes to you with testicles,” he said to her. “Where’s the praise God in that?”
She did not give him the satisfaction of weeping. Instead, she extended some explanatory platitudes about how things were done for Wayne’s own good back then. Everything had always been with good intention. She was only human, and prone to foibles. She had been a single parent and had worked hard. She had lost a son, for the love of God. Couldn’t he forgive her?
“What good have you done here, to me, Mother?”
She straightened up in her chair. When she spoke, her voice was membrane-thin and shaky, and Wayne could tell she struggled to remain prideful. “So’s you’d never sire a child with your same face. That’s what I’ve done for you here, son.”
Still very calm, Wayne pulled his pants up, buttoned the fly, fastened his belt. “Mother,” he said. “Three nights ago, I picked up a prostitute. I drove her in my car to a back alley then beat her to death with a hammer. When I was done, I found a tidy place to dispose of her—most of her. I did this, Mother, because even in the weakest, most pitiful dregs of society, there is some power to be siphoned from them in the act of taking their lives. It’s like breathing in a certain magic.”
He planted both hands on the table, one on either side of his unfinished plate of cherry cobbler, and leaned closer toward his mother. She was trembling quite visibly now and sitting about as far back in her chair from him as she could get.
“Except for you, Mother,” he said. “There’s nothing good I could ever siphon from you. In that regard, consider yourself lucky.”
And then, much to his own surprise, a curious thing happened: Wayne Lee Stull began to cry. He went over to where his mother sat shaking in her chair. He sat on the floor at her feet, resting his disfigured face in her lap, and wept. She cursed him, told him to get out, but he didn’t move. He just stayed that way for a long time.
“Comfort me,” he said at one point, and she ran a shaky hand through his hair. He sat bolt upright and quickly pulled a plastic comb from the breast pocket of his shirt, fixing his hair. Making that part perfect. Always perfect. When he’d finished, he laid his head back in her lap and said, “Rub my shoulder, Mother.”
Mother massaged his shoulder with one hand. Her fingers felt like lug nuts poking into his flesh. Her lap smelled dirty, her housedress tacky with old cooking grease.
“Call me a good boy, Mother.”
She called him a good boy.
“Say I’m your favorite.”
She said he was her favorite.
“Tell me you’re sorry.”
She told him she was sorry.
After a while, all was forgiven.
When he left the house later that afternoon, there was peace between them once more. She came out onto the porch to hug him goodbye, and their embrace lasted longer than it ever had. When they pulled away from each other, Wayne caressed Mother’s cheek. There was a tear in his eye and, arguably, a smile on his face.
“You ever speak a word of what I’ve told you today,” he said to her, “and I’ll come back here and open you up from throat to cunt.”
Then he kissed her cheek, leaving a glister of spittle behind.
He did not get in his car right away, but instead walked around to the rear of the property, past the barn and the empty cowshed, the chicken coops where the feed had rotted and the feathers on the ground had turned gray, the farming equipment that had fossilized in the fields. A special thing had happened back here, deep in the woods, back when he and his brother had been ten years old. A bit of magic had come into their lives, you might say. Wayne crept through the overgrown forest, searching for the exact spot where he and Robert had met the Magic Man all those years ago. At some point during the trek, Wayne noticed that Robert—Bibby—was in step right alongside him. Still ten years old, and still as handsome as ever. Even in death.
He eventually found the clearing where he and Robert had met the Magic Man. It was also the clearing where Robert’s body had been found after his murder. It wasn’t much of a clearing anymore, what with the dense foliage having encroached on this previously bald patch of forest, but Wayne could sense the power in the soil and so he knew it was the right spot. Wayne sat on a rock and absently traced a circle in the dirt as he fell backward into his memories.
The Magic Man had come into their lives in the fall of his and Robert’s tenth year. Truth be told, he had come into Wayne’s life first, but really, that was splitting hairs. The Magic Man was just there one day in the woods behind the ranch on Slaughterhouse Row, his long arms folded across his chest as he leaned against a tree, his filthy red suspenders hanging in loops straight down to his knees. Wayne had been playing back there by himself and didn’t see the man at first, so when the man spoke to him, Wayne froze and looked around, startled by the sound of his voice.
“Where’s your mask, my young friend?” the man said. Wayne saw that he was wearing an eye patch and a black top hat cocked jauntily to one side of his head.
“What mask?” Wayne asked, confused.
“The grinning pumpkin head,” said the man, and just like that, Wayne understood.
There had been a carnival in town all week, and Mother had taken both boys one afternoon to play the games and ride the rides. She’d made Wayne wear a cheap dime-store Halloween mask—a sneering orange jack-o’-lantern face—to hide his disfigurement. When the mask blew off on the whirling teacups, the other children stared at him in shocked horror, and a few of the younger children began to cry. Mother found the mask in the dirt and quickly strapped it over his face, but the damage was already done. He stood wearing that mask by Mother’s side for the rest of the afternoon, while Robert whirled on the teacups, cheered on the Scrambler, hooted and hollered as the rollercoaster jounced across its rickety tracks.
This man must have seen him that day at the carnival.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Wayne Lee Stull.”
“Where’s your brother, Mr. Stull? The one who was with you that day at the carnival?”
“Playing with his friends.”
“Don’t you have friends?”
Wayne shook his head. He felt a trickle of saliva spilling down the crack in his upper jaw, and he dug around in his pockets for a Kleenex or a napkin.
“Let me help you there, Mr. Stull.” The man raised one arm—he was wearing what looked like a fancy white shirt, but some of the buttons were missing and there were streaks of grime across it—and reached into his sleeve. What came out was a never-ending parade of colored silk scarves, each one more beautiful than the last.
Wayne Lee Stull laughed, and the Magic Man took a bow.
“If you like that trick,” the Magic Man said, “then I’ve got many more to show you…”
The next day, Robert came down to the woods with him. The Magic Man spoke of grand and magical things, including a mystical well where real magic could be siphoned and carried back; Robert was only mildly intrigued, but Wayne was downright ravenous to learn more. When Wayne asked the Magic Man where he had come from, the man had said, “Everywhere,” and then he’d sketched a rough circle in the dirt at his feet. It made Wayne think of a hole in the ground. “Now tell me, Brothers Stull—do you want to see a magic trick?”
In reality, it was Wayne who had become infatuated with the Magic Man. It was Wayne who had ferried him food and learned his magic tricks and promised to do everything the Magic Man told him to do. Robert was curious at first, but he had school friends and was playing sports and had many other interests, so he soon stopped coming around the woods to learn simple card tricks and palming coins from the Magic Man. At first, it upset Wayne that Robert no longer found the Magic Man interesting, but soon thereafter, Wayne found he was happy that Robert had stopped coming down to the woods. Wayne didn’t want to share the Magic Man with anyone, he realized. Particularly Robert.
“He hasn’t told anyone about me, has he?” the Magic Man would sometimes ask, and Wayne would assure him that Robert hadn’t said a word.
The Magic Man promised to fix Wayne’s face if Wayne brought Robert down to the woods one last time. Wayne wanted nothing more than to have his face fixed, but he was struck with disappointment at the Magic Man’s insistence that Robert return. When he asked the Magic Man what was so special about Robert, the Magic Man had laughed…and had actually rubbed a hand through Wayne’s hair, messing it up.
“Do you know what an apprenticeship is, Wayne?”
Wayne admitted that he did not.
So the Magic Man told him how both Wayne and Robert had started out as apprentices, but that Robert had gone astray. The Magic Man needed reassurance that Robert wouldn’t speak of him to anyone. And then he told Wayne what he wanted him to do.
It was a cool autumn evening, and there were storm clouds rolling in from the north, when Wayne convinced Robert to come back down to the woods with him. Robert hadn’t wanted to go, but Wayne assured him he’d want to see the Magic Man’s latest trick. It was not to be believed.
So Robert followed Wayne into the woods, smoking a cigarette that he’d found on the street. The Magic Man wasn’t there, and Robert became angry. Wayne just said, “Wait, wait, wait—I’ll show you the trick myself!” To which Robert laughed and called him an ugly fucktard.
The Magic Man had left his bone-handled hunting knife planted blade-first into the trunk of a tree. Wayne pried it out, then carried it over to Robert.
Robert’s eyes gleamed with greed. “That’s some knife,” he said. “I want it.”
“You can have it,” said Wayne, and then he plunged the steel blade of the bone-handled knife into Robert’s belly.
Sometime later, after Wayne had not only unzipped Robert’s belly, but had bashed his brother’s skull—
(my handsome, handsome boy)
—to smithereens with a large rock, the Magic Man returned. Wayne hadn’t seen him approach, and he assumed he had materialized there by magic.
“Well done,” the Magic Man said, and then he extended his hand. Wayne placed the bloodied knife in the man’s open palm, then watched as his impossibly long, impossibly pale fingers closed around it. Swallowing it up. “Do you feel all that magic inside you now, Mr. Stull?”
He did. Whatever power that had, moments ago, resided in his brother was now in him. The confidence, the charm, the intelligence. The handsomeness.
All of it.
“You can fix my face now,” Wayne said. He’d already thought it all out—that he’d return home with his face fixed pretending to be Robert so that Mother wouldn’t think anything unusual had taken place. Later, if anyone ever discovered Robert’s body back here in these woods, they would assume it was Wayne. It would all work out.
“That magic is up to you, Mr. Stull,” the Magic Man explained. “That power you felt leave your brother’s body and enter yours after you’d taken his life? That’s the magic that will fix you. Even now, in this very moment, I can see the gap in your face has shrunk just the slightest bit.”
Wayne shook his head. “But…but you thed…said…you would fuh-fix me if I…if I…” The words were gushing out of him, sloppy and wet and uncontrollable. He felt his hair was in disarray and furiously combed it back into place with his bloodstained fingers.
The Magic Man knelt down before him. For a split second, his singular eye flickered with an unnatural firelight. “Only you can fix your face, Mr. Stull. Only you can harvest real magic and make it work for you.”
And with that, the Magic Man tucked the bone-handled knife—bloody blade and all—into his boot. Slipping his hands into his pockets, he turned and began wandering deeper into the woods. He even began whistling a song that Wayne recognized as the Happy Horace jingle from the carnival.
He thought about chasing after the man, but in the end, he didn’t. He just stood there, trembling and sweating despite the autumn chill in the air, and watched him go.
The rest had played out pretty much exactly as he’d relayed to Willis and his lesbian girlfriend back at the restaurant. When Robert never returned home that evening, their mother called the police. Robert’s mutilated body was soon discovered in the woods behind their house. When the police questioned Wayne, he told them how Robert had been hanging around with a one-eyed homeless man living among the trees. A manhunt commenced, but it never amounted to anything, and all these years later, Robert “Bibby” Stull’s murder was still officially unsolved.
There was a power that had come from killing Bibby. The Magic Man had been right about that. Stull had literally felt the magic come swirling out of the opening he’d carved in Bibby’s belly—a magic that had transferred straight into ten-year-old Wayne Lee Stull himself. And had he felt the cleft in his face stitch together just the slightest bit? Almost imperceptibly, but yes, he had. In the years that followed, he attempted to recreate that transfer of power by taking the lives of others—prostitutes, mostly, because those were the easiest to dispatch. Yet while there was certainly a spark of something that would transmit from them to him as he slashed their throats, opened their bellies, demolished and removed their faces, it was never quite the same as it had been with Bibby. Was this because Bibby had been his brother—his twin, no less—and there was an inherent magic that ran through their blood? He assumed this was the case, but then Bibby came to him one evening and explained the real reason to him.
The difference, Bibby said, was that those prostitutes hadn’t been apprentices. The magic in them hadn’t been cultivated; it was weak and pitiful. Moreover, Wayne had stripped them of their lives himself, a crude act to say the least, while the Magic Man had allowed for one apprentice to take the life of the other. It was ceremonial, Bibby explained. The power was in the coercion of another, not in the act itself. Much like how Mother had always said the devil will tempt, so Wayne Lee Stull was told that the strongest power came from that very act of temptation. The symbolic ceremony of it. After all, the Magic Man never actually took anyone’s life, and he was without a doubt the most powerful person Stull had ever met.
“How do you know this?” he asked Bibby.
The Magic Man told me so, said Bibby. I live in the well with him now.
Which was curious, because for a moment during their conversation, Wayne felt as though he’d actually been talking to the Magic Man himself.
Regardless of who had actually been speaking out of dead Bibby’s throat, Wayne Lee Stull now understood what he was supposed to do.
Tonight would be different, however. These people were no mere children; there would be no coercing them. Crass as it was, he would just have to accomplish the deed himself. His only hope was that his knife was powerful enough and that they themselves were powerful enough for him to take from them whatever he could.
The four of them.
When the Toyota’s headlights came on and the car pulled out of the parking lot and onto the highway, Stull followed.
He tailed them all the way back from the Chinese restaurant to the very same shithole motel out by the highway where he himself was staying. Not so much a coincidence than it was the only motel in proximity to the town, but it gave Stull a satisfied sense of symmetry nonetheless. He liked it when things felt nice and pat. STAY AT THE QUAY the big billboard read, but Stull drove right past it as the Toyota turned into the motel’s parking lot. There was a deserted strip mall across the highway, so Stull drove there and parked with the Kia’s headlights off right beside a liquor store. He had a perfect view of the motel and of Willis’s car parked out front. Were all four of them holed up like rats in that dump?
Stull felt hot and itchy. He opened the Kia’s glove compartment and was comforted by the sight of the hunting knife. The one made of true ribs. He could feel Bibby’s hot breath coursing down the nape of his neck as he, too, stared at the knife from over Stull’s shoulder.
Sometime later, Willis and the lesbian came out of the room, followed by two other men. One guy looked just like your average schlub, but the fellow bringing up the rear looked like a walking cement truck. There was a bland, lackluster look to his face, too, that Stull could see from clear across the roadway.
They all piled into Willis’s Toyota, then pulled onto the highway.
Stull waited a couple of seconds, then followed. When they took an exit, he took an exit. The road was dark and seemed to cut through an expanse of dense black forest.
Then, out of nowhere, the lights of the carnival filled his windshield.
This unsettled Stull. He wondered briefly if this was a setup—if Willis and that lesbian had lured him here as some sort of trap—but then he wondered how that could be. Trap him how? Trap him for what? Could it all just be an amazing coincidence?
In the back seat, Bibby whispered that there were no coincidences, and that these people had also figured out that the Magic Man traveled with the carnival, just as Stull had all those years ago, when the Magic Man had asked him where his pumpkin-head mask was. These people must have figured it out along the way, too. Were they actually here looking for him?
Bibby began jabbering nonsensically. The little bastard was either excited or frightened; Stull didn’t have the patience to figure out which.
“Shut the fuck up,” Stull told him, and parked several cars away from theirs.
He watched them all get out of the Toyota and walk down the slope toward the carnival entrance. Stull rolled down his window, and he could hear the cheering and laughter coming from the carnival, the game booths buzzing and the heavy metal music echoing across the roadway.
There was a Members Only jacket folded on the passenger seat. Stull undid his seatbelt then crawled into the jacket. Fortunately, the night had cooled in anticipation of the storm, so maybe he wouldn’t stand out as much wearing this jacket as he’d initially feared.
Next, he reached into the back seat, trying desperately to ignore Bibby, and grasped the handle of his briefcase. He set the briefcase on the passenger seat, thumbed the combination, then popped the clasps.
The faces were arranged on plastic panels inside the briefcase, two to a panel, five panels and ten faces in all. They were all fairly similar—he rarely strayed from his favorite latex mould, once he’d perfected it—but some were in better condition than others.
He selected face six on panel three. Good, solid, reliable. There was a tub of liquid adhesive and a brush in the case as well, and he removed them now, and unscrewed the adhesive’s cap. The chemical aroma caused his eyes to water, but it wasn’t altogether unpleasant. In fact, that smell was the closest thing to arousal that Wayne Lee Stull could achieve.
He applied the adhesive to the interior of the mask, then placed the mask over his own face. Forty-five seconds was all it took for the glue to adhere, and then he was in business.
The next part rankled him immensely, but it was a necessary evil. He dug a baseball cap from the glove compartment and slipped it over his head, no doubt mussing up his painstakingly combed hair. Without the hat, the mask looked too much like a mask; the hat was an indispensable subterfuge.
The last thing he did was strip the bone-handled hunting knife from the glove compartment and slip it into the inner pocket of his Members Only jacket before heading down into the spectacle of the carnival.