Death Mask

by Graham Masterton

  Sissy thanked Detective Kunzel for calling and then hung up. “Not yet,” she told Trevor. “But Molly should be home soon. Do you want me to make you some supper? How about some fried chicken, with salad and French fries?”

  “No, no. I’m good. I had lunch at Nick & Tony’s with a guy from Brussels. Euro Investments … They’re looking for a foothold here in the States.”

  “Trevor—”

  “Yes?”

  She wanted to tell him how special he was, and how special Molly was, and Victoria, too, but for some reason she couldn’t find the words. She was feeling protective, but she didn’t think that Trevor would appreciate her mothering him, not right now. He was a man, after all. Whatever happened to him or his family, he had to take care of them the way he thought best.

  “Don’t say I’m just like Dad,” said Trevor. “You always say that, but Dad was Dad, and I’m me. Dad took risks. I only calculate them.”

  “I was only going to tell you that I’m proud of you. Is that such a crime?”

  He held her close. It made him aware of how frail and ribby she was. “No, that’s not a crime.”

  Victoria said, “Giants must be real, don’t you think? If they’re not real, who made them up, and why did everybody believe them?”

  “If I knew the answer to that, honey,” said Trevor, “I’d be a very wealthy man.”

  About ten minutes later, Molly arrived home looking pale and distracted. She lifted her fringed satchel over her head and hung it over the back of the kitchen chair.

  “Boy, I am totally pooped. Drawing that Red Mask … For some reason it took so much out of me.”

  “Well, he’s not a very pleasant character to think about, is he?” said Sissy. “Let alone draw.”

  “I don’t know. It was more than that. It was like he was staring at me out of my sketch pad and saying Go on, then, let’s see how much life you can breathe into me.”

  “How about a glass of wine?” asked Sissy.

  “No, I think I’ll take a shower first. I feel kind of tainted, you know, like he’s been pawing me.”

  “He’s only a drawing, hon,” said Trevor. “You shouldn’t let yourself get so upset.”

  “I know… . But while I was drawing him, I kept thinking, ‘Okay, that’s it, I’ve finished.’ But then I felt like I had to shade his eyebrows some more, and thicken his hair, and change the expression in his eyes. By the time I was finished, he looked so much younger—and, like, pleased with himself. And pleased with me, too.”

  Sissy took hold of her hand. “Come on, sweetheart. It was really traumatic, what we saw today, all of those people dead. And in a way, when you were drawing him, it was like you were face-to-face with the man who murdered them, wasn’t it?”

  “I guess so. Yes, it felt like that.”

  Trevor put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “From now on, you stick to drawing fairies, okay?”

  “Okay,” Molly smiled. Then she said, “Victoria—did you finish your homework?”

  “Yes! It was cool. It was all about cicadas. I love cicadas.”

  “I’m glad somebody does. They’re starting to fly already, and when the police officer was driving me home, they kept going splatter-splatter-splatter all over the windshield.”

  Without taking a breath, Victoria said, “Cicadas live underground for seventeen years, feeding on the sap from tree roots. Then they tunnel their way out so that they can reproduce. They have yellow skins, which are very tough. The men cicadas make their mating calls by flexing their stomachs, and some of them are as loud as a hundred decibels.”

  “What about the women cicadas?” asked Sissy.

  “They never make any noise at all.”

  “See?” said Trevor. “The perfect species.”

  “After they mate, the men cicadas drop down dead.”

  “I agree with you,” said Molly. “The perfect species.”

  She turned to leave the kitchen, and it was then that she noticed the vase of roses on the hutch. She gave Sissy a quick, quizzical look and said, “Did you cut these roses?”

  “Trevor did,” said Sissy, as calmly as she could. “Pretty, aren’t they?”

  “Strange thing was,” said Trevor, “I never even noticed them growing.”

  “Really?” asked Molly. “I don’t know how you could have missed them.”

  “Well, I never noticed them, either,” said Victoria.

  Molly lifted up the vase and gently touched the roses’ petals. Sissy could tell that she was upset. These were a miracle, created out of pencil and ink, not just a table decoration.

  Sissy looked at her wryly. Miracles are miracles, Molly. If we knew how they happened, they wouldn’t be miracles. They would only be tricks.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Strange Chorus

  That night, Sissy dreamed that she was driving across Iowa again, in her Uncle Henry’s Hudson Hornet. The radio was playing that strange, lumpy, backward-sounding music, and outside the windows the landscape was revolving like a huge turntable.

  “Uncle Henry.”

  But Uncle Henry didn’t turn around. He just kept on driving, tapping his wedding band on the steering wheel in time to the music.

  “I saw you yesterday… . You were standing by the wall… . I thought I recognized you but I didn’t, not at all. …”

  The clouds were sepia, as if they were driving through an old photograph. Sissy could see a dark shadow on the eastern horizon—a shadow that rose higher and higher, like a swarm of locusts. Locusts, or cicadas.

  “I was quite certain that I recognized your face … but when you turned your head around I saw nothing, only space… .”

  About a half mile up ahead, she saw a huge figure standing by the side of the road, silhouetted against the last pale wash of daylight. It must have been all of thirty feet tall. She knelt up on her seat and tapped Uncle Henry frantically on the shoulder.

  “Uncle Henry. There’s a giant. I’m frightened of giants.”

  Uncle Henry didn’t answer.

  “Uncle Henry! Please! Can’t we go back?”

  Insects started to patter against the windows, leaving brown and yellow splashes and broken wing segments that fluttered in the Hornet’s slipstream.

  “Uncle Henry!”

  At last Uncle Henry turned his head around. But it wasn’t Uncle Henry. It was Red Mask, with a triumphant shine in his eyes.

  “No peace for the wicked, child! No mercy for the innocent, neither! What’s done is done, and can’t be undone!”

  The insects pattered against the windows harder and harder, until they sounded like hail. “Uncle Henry” kept on driving, but he didn’t turn back to see where he was going. He just kept grinning at Sissy as if he were daring her to try and stop him.

  Sissy let out a piercing scream. She screamed louder and louder and higher and higher, but all “Uncle Henry” did was to roar back at her just as loud, until she was deafened. The song on the radio stopped, and the interior of the car was filled with screeching, high-pitched static.

  She opened her eyes. She wasn’t screaming anymore, and “Uncle Henry” was gone, but the static continued, on and on, interspersed with weird swooping sounds.

  “My God,” she said to herself. “The cicadas.”

  She climbed unsteadily out of bed and opened her blinds, lifting one hand to shield her eyes from the early-morning sunshine.

  The yard was crowded with thousands of cicadas, all calling for their mates. Most of them were still clinging to the trees and the bushes, but scores of them were flying around, and some of them were pattering against her windows, as they had in her dream.

  Molly came into her room, wearing a pink silk headscarf and a pink nightshirt. “Got your wake-up call, then?” she smiled.

  “I never realized they were going to be so goddamned loud. I don’t know how you stand it.”

  “At least it happens only once every seventeen years. They have a joke in Cincinnati: two cicadas sitt
ing in a bar, and one says to the other, ‘Seventeen years wasted if we don’t get lucky tonight.’ ”

  Sissy said, “How about I make us some coffee? And maybe some eggs. We didn’t eat anything yesterday, did we?”

  “Sure, that would be terrific.”

  They went through to the kitchen. Mr. Boots was still asleep in his basket. The cicada chorus didn’t seem to bother him at all. Outside, cicadas were clustered all around the window frames. Trevor had sealed up the ventilator above the cooker hob with a circle of cardboard and several layers of duct tape. He had also attached a cardboard flap to the bottom of the back door and duct-taped over the keyhole.

  Molly opened the fridge. She took out a carton of cranberry-pomegranate juice and poured a glass for each of them. As she was about to drink it, she said, “What did you do with the roses?”

  Sissy turned toward the hutch. The glass vase was still there, but all it contained were two drooping ferns. She shook her head and said, “I haven’t touched them.”

  “Neither have I. Maybe Victoria took them. She’s crazy about brides and weddings at the moment. I’ll bet she wanted her Barbie to have a bouquet.”

  Sissy spooned coffee into the percolator. “You’re still not going to tell Trevor where they came from?”

  “I don’t see what good it would do.”

  “I don’t really see what harm it would do.”

  “Oh come on, Sissy. You know Trevor. He needs to be in control of things. That’s why he doesn’t like your fortune-telling cards. They’re not logical, and he doesn’t understand how they work. If I told him that I could create real flowers just by drawing them … it would make him so wary of me. He would feel like there was a part of me that he could never reach, and I don’t want him to feel like that.”

  Sissy switched on the percolator. “I think I’ll brave the bugs and go for a cigarette.”

  “Well, they’re disgusting, and they’re noisy, but they won’t hurt you. Just don’t let them get caught up in your hair.”

  “Don’t! Maybe they’ll do what Frank and Trevor never could, and persuade me to give up smoking.”

  Wrapped up in her green satin bathrobe, and wearing Trevor’s Adidas running shoes in case she trod on any cicadas, Sissy went outside, with Mr. Boots following close behind. Here in the yard, the mating chorus was even harsher and even higher, and the swooping noise sounded even more weird, like a musical saw.

  She flapped a few of the cicadas away with her hand, but one of them persisted in perching on her shoulder, prickling her with its tiny claws and staring at her with its scarlet, wide-apart eyes.

  “My God, look at you,” she said. “You must have been feeding on sap from the ugly tree.”

  She lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the cicada, and it whirred away, flying only an inch away from Mr. Boots’s nose. Mr. Boots snapped at it, but only because it had surprised him. He had tried to eat a wasp once, and ever since then he had treated anything that buzzed or hopped or chirruped with the utmost caution.

  The radio-static noise went on and on, and Sissy couldn’t stop thinking about her dream. She very rarely had recurring dreams, and even when she did, it had been months or even years in between each dreaming. She had to assume that this was more than a dream, it was a warning, or an omen—either from her own subconscious or from somebody else’s spirit. The giant standing by the road could be some kind of a symbol. But a symbol of what? And why did he seem so terrifying?

  A flurry of cicadas flew up in front of her like the locusts in her dream. And it was then that she saw the flowerpots on which they had been feeding. The five roses were standing there, nodding in the morning sunshine along with the hollyhock and the Shasta daisy. They were all intact, as if Trevor had never cut them.

  Sissy felt a tight shrinking sensation in her scalp. These roses couldn’t be real roses, after all. They must be something else altogether. A mirage? A hallucination? She couldn’t understand it.

  “Molly!” she called. “Come out here! What the hell do you make of this?”

  Molly stared at the roses for a long time. “I don’t know. How could that happen?” She took hold of one of the stems and tugged at it. “It’s firmly rooted, just like it was before.”

  Sissy looked around, frowning. “When you painted them, did you imagine them here—in this particular flowerpot?”

  “Yes, I did. Even this first rose, the one I was painting for Fairy Fifi.”

  “Maybe they have to come back here, because this is the only place that they really exist.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Well, neither do I, to be frank. But let’s try something. Let’s cut them again and see if they come back here a second time.”

  Molly looked dubious. “Maybe we should just leave them alone. This whole thing is beginning to give me the willies.”

  “Molly—think of what the cards predicted. Violence, and bloodshed. And you could be involved in it somehow. The sculptor, the artist, the creator of likenesses—that’s almost certainly you.”

  “Maybe Trevor was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that Red Mask composite.”

  “I really don’t know. But I still think that the roses are the key to all this. If we can understand how and why these flowers come to life, it may help us to keep you safe.”

  Mr. Boots was chasing after cicadas, jumping up and down at them as they scattered into the air, but being careful not to catch any in his mouth.

  “Okay,” said Molly. “I’ll bring some scissors.”

  Sissy smoked while Molly cut the roses again. They took them back inside and arranged them in the vase in the same way that they had been arranged before. They had just put them back on the hutch when Trevor came in, his black hair tousled, yawning.

  “First chance I get for a couple of hours’ extra sleep, and what do I get? Ten thousand horny cicadas singing outside my window.”

  “Your mom’s making eggs. Do you want some?”

  “Coffee first. Black. I need to jump-start my heart.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Killing Time

  Chrissie Wells climbed out of the back of the taxi and caught her purse on the door handle. As she struggled to disentangle it, she dropped her cell phone and the folder of papers that she was carrying under her arm. The morning breeze caught them and blew them across the sidewalk.

  When she had managed to untwist her purse and pick up her cell phone, she frantically gathered up her scattered papers, bending over again and again like a dipping bird until she split the seam at the back of her red cotton skirt. The taxi driver waited for her with an expression on his face like St. Sebastian, martyred with a hundred arrows.

  Chrissie fumbled in her purse, took out a twenty, and accidentally dropped a shower of loose coins onto the taxi’s front seat. The taxi driver gave her a ten and said, “Don’t worry about a tip, miss. I’ll pick it up later, off the floor.”

  As usual, Chrissie was running late. She always seemed to be running late, no matter how early she set her alarm. She felt that she had been born out of sync with the rest of the planet—fated to miss every bus she wanted to catch and every appointment she was supposed to keep. She never arrived at concerts on time and had to wait in the foyer until the interval. She was always hurrying, always hot, always out of breath, and still she couldn’t catch up.

  She bustled up the steps of the Giley Building, but she was stopped in the entrance by two police officers.

  “Morning, ma’am. Need some ID, if that’s okay.”

  “ID?”

  “Driver’s license. Anything like that.”

  Chrissie opened her purse and dropped her file of papers again. One of the officers bent down and picked it up for her. She rooted through every compartment inside her purse and finally managed to pull out her Cincinnati public library card.

  “Okay, that’ll do it,” said the officer. “You don’t look much like a serial killer anyhow.”

  “You haven’t foun
d him yet? I didn’t have time to catch the news this morning.”

  “No, ma’am. But we will. You can be damn sure of that.”

  Chrissie pushed her way through the revolving doors. All three elevators were working now, and the left-hand elevator still had its doors open. Chrissie called out, “Hold it, please! Hold it!” and click-clacked her way across the lobby. By the time she had reached the elevator, however, more than a dozen people had crowded into it, and there was no more room, especially for a size 14.

  The occupants of the elevator stared at her balefully, as if to say, Don’t even think about trying to squeeze your way in. Then the doors closed, and they were gone.

  Chrissie pressed the button for another elevator. As she did so, she was joined by five more office workers, secretaries, and junior executives, two of them carrying cappuccinos and one of them holding a brown paper bag which smelled strongly of hot pastrami.

  “I’m not too happy about this,” said one of the cappuccino carriers.

  “You’re not too happy about what, for Christ’s sake?” his friend gibed him.

  “You know—” and the cappuccino carrier nodded toward the elevator doors and made a stabbing gesture in the air.

  “Oh, come on,” said his friend. “The cops went through this entire building with a fine-tooth comb. The guy’s probably three states away by now.”

  To her horror, Chrissie saw her boss coming in through the revolving doors. Elaine Vickers, dark and sleek and black suited and highly unforgiving. By now, Chrissie was supposed to be up in the conference room with all of her paperwork prepared and the page proofs for next season’s catalog all laid out. And herbal tea on the table, too, with Elaine’s favorite wafer-thin almond biscuits.

  She pushed the elevator button again and again. The elevator indicator read four, three, two, and then stopped.

  Please, God, hurry, Chrissie prayed. She could see that Elaine had stopped to talk to two women in the middle of the lobby. If the elevator arrived now, Elaine might just miss it, and Chrissie could get to the conference room with seconds to spare.