Post by Deleted on Feb 3, 2014 17:50:10 GMT -6
There is a small town in the Eastern Rural part of the United States of America, by the name of Lenoresfield. Inside this small town, there is a strange building, and while most of the city appeared to be out of touch with the times, this building was particularly old. It was wooden, like most are in Lenoresfield, and it was a squat building with a weather-worn sign outside. The sign once proclaimed in golden letters the name of the building, Os Immortalis. It was a mask shop once, and if one peered beyond the time stained thick glass, one could see two or three masks still hanging on the walls. My grandfather told me the story about the man who owned the shop.
He spent hours working on the masks that hung around the walls of his shop. That the love of his work was undeniable, and many referred to his shop as his second wife. They would not be too far off in this assumption, considering he had thrown himself into his shop after his first wife had died in a carriage accident. The worst part of this tragic tale is that a couple of nights after she had been buried, body snatchers stole her body away. After that, the mask maker was never the same.
He would often be seen up late in his work shop, painting and fitting masks, and he always had this haggard look on his face as if he was too tired of this world and didn't want to live in it for much longer. Or at least that was his face when he wasn't at his work bench. When he was there working, his beady little eyes were focused on the mask. The mask seemed to come to life beneath his fingers, almost as if he was working with real flesh. The paint dripped from the end of his brush like dew from the end of blade of grass, and as it spread across weaving strange shapes, the mask maker's frown would slowly turn into a smile.
One night, many months after the passing of his wife, the mask maker shut his shop down for three whole weeks. Naturally, this came as a surprise to most of the townsfolk, as none could recall the last time he had closed his shop for so long a time. A few months later, he finally reopened the shop with his face drooped lower than ever. If anything, it seemed to sadden him even more. He started barring entrance to those who got too curious about his workshop and those three weeks that he had shut himself in.
In the months that followed, he often was seen muttering to himself as he worked, a new habit he had picked up, and among the words heard were "Demons," and, "I should of never tried it." My grandfather himself witnessed firsthand the owner's mutterings when he went to pick up a mask for his sister. The old man was not aware of my grandfather, and spoke aloud the name Ba'alzamon. My grandfather did not recognize the name, so he assumed that Ba'alzamon was simply a foreigner. My grandfather told me that the mask maker was bent over on something he could not see, though it was clearly not a mask, and he was quite certain if he hadn't knocked one of the masks off of its place on the counter by accident. The old mask maker would of continued working on his project.
As it were, the mask fell and bounced off of the floor, taking several solid objects with it, all of which made a rather loud ruckus. The old man's visage when he turned around was frightful, it left my grandfather, a wee child at the time, in hysterics for weeks, so much so that he refuses to this day to even go near Os Immortalis. The face my grandfather described was only one of madness, of a man who has lost something precious and he only knew it after he lost it, and desperately wants it back, and would do anything to get it back.
As my grandfather was fleeing the workshop, he swore that out of the corner of his eye, he saw the mask maker's dead wife sitting on the stool, smiling at her husband as he worked.