Death Mask Read online

  “It’s the Red Mask guy!” Dawn hissed at him, but Marshall still wasn’t giving her his full attention.

  “You want to know what’s going down?” grinned the red-faced man. “More of the same. More of the same! That’s what’s going down.”

  “More of the same frigging what?”

  “You should lock him up!” said one of the girls. “You should lock him up and throw away the key!”

  “Hey—what’s done is done,” the red-faced man interrupted her. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t seek retribution, does it? You make your bed, you gotta lie in it. No rest for the wicked. Not ever. No forgiveness for the innocent, neither.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Marshall challenged him.

  Dawn said, “Please … we don’t want to make any trouble. None of us. Let’s all get out of the elevator and forget it, what do you think?”

  “What do I think?” said the red-faced man. “What do I think? I’ll tell you what I think. Now is the time for a little natural justice. Now is the time and today is the day for the settling of old scores. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” Dawn told him. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t. What justice? What old scores? We don’t even know you!”

  With a sharp squeal, the elevator came to a halt, halfway between the fourth and third floors.

  “Hey!” Marshall protested. “We want to get the hell out of here, that’s all.”

  “Come on, man,” said the boy in the Cincinnati Reds cap. “If this guy is willing to forget it, then we will, okay? Just let us out.”

  The red-faced man said, “Sorry, folks. This is the end of the ride. For you, anyhow.”

  He crossed his arms, reaching inside the left-hand side of his coat with his right hand, and the right-hand side of his coat with his left. There was a moment in which all of time seemed to stand still, and even sound was suspended, too. Marshall suddenly thought, Cross-draw, like an old-time gunslinger.

  With a harsh metallic zhhinnggg! the red-faced man drew out of his coat two huge triangular-bladed knives and held them high above his head.

  “Come on, man,” said Marshall. “This has stopped being amusing, okay?” He took a step toward the red-faced man, with one hand lifted.

  Dawn screamed out, “Marshall! No! He’s the Red Mask guy!”

  But she was a fraction of a second too late. As Marshall turned his head, the red-faced man stabbed him straight through the middle of his upraised palm. Then, without hesitation, he stabbed him in the shoulder.

  The teenagers shouted out, “Whoa!” and “Jesus!” and one of the girls let out such a high-pitched scream that it was almost beyond the range of human hearing. Dawn clung to Marshall’s arm and said “Marshall? Marshall!” but then the right side of her face was suddenly sprayed in blood.

  The red-faced man stabbed Marshall again and again—his hands, his arms, his shoulders. Marshall grunted with every stab, but although he was so badly wounded, he lunged forward with his head down and football-tackled the red-faced man around the hips, hugging him tight.

  The red-faced man didn’t hesitate. He stabbed Marshall in the back of the neck, between the atlas and the axis vertebrae, with an audible chop that severed his spinal cord. Marshall dropped heavily onto the floor, and the red-faced man turned around to face the rest of them, whirling his knives in both hands.

  The teenagers were going mad with panic, shouting and beating on the doors and climbing up onto the handrail. Dawn backed away from the red-faced man, shuddering with fear, until she was pressed up against the window. He stepped over Marshall’s body and approached her, with both knives raised.

  “Don’t hurt me,” she begged him.

  “What? Couldn’t quite hear you, darling, what with all these squealing piglets in here.”

  “Please don’t hurt me. I only came here to choose my wedding band.”

  The boy in the Cincinnati Reds cap was trying to edge his way round behind the red-faced man, but the red-faced man quickly turned and jabbed at him with one of his knives. “Going someplace, kid? Weren’t thinking of jumping me, were you, by any chance?”

  “No! No. We just want to get out of here, sir! We don’t want to die!”

  “Nobody ever does, kid. Nobody ever does. But if you’re brought to life, no matter how, that’s the only destiny that’s open to you, in the end. No wonder folks rail at God, for their existence.”

  “Please don’t hurt me,” said Dawn. Tears were running down her cheeks, streaked with black mascara. “I promise I won’t give evidence against you. I promise. I’ll say that it was all Marshall’s fault. He provoked you. He attacked you. He was like that, always angry. Always setting on people.”

  The red-faced man appeared to think for a moment, although his slitted eyes gave nothing away.

  “How old are you?” he asked Dawn. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the whimpering, weeping teenagers.

  “Eighteen and a half,” said Dawn. She managed a sloping, hopeful smile, as if the red-faced man would let her live if he realized how young she was.

  “Eighteen and a half,” the red-faced man repeated. Then he said, “Freak,” and stabbed her in the chest with both knives. Her implants burst, and the right-hand knife penetrated her heart.

  She stared at him for a moment as if she couldn’t understand what had happened to her. Then he wrenched out both knives and let her drop to the floor.

  Ned Jennings was walking along Seventh Street taking photographs when he looked up and noticed the red glass elevator.

  Ned was an art student from Xavier University, curly haired, with thick-rimmed eyeglasses and a fawn corduroy coat. He was compiling a photographic study of Cincinnati’s art-deco architecture. He had already photographed the Union Terminal and the Lazarus Building and several office buildings, and he was trying to make up his mind if he should include pictures of the Four Days Mall, since the architects had deliberately embellished the frontage with art-deco-style brickwork as a tribute to Cincinnati’s architectural glory days.

  He looked up and saw that one of the glass elevators that ran up and down the exterior of Four Days Mall was stopped between floors. Not only that, all of its windows were streaked with red, as if somebody inside it were furiously painting them.

  He was about to carry on walking when the palms of two white hands appeared through the paint, pressed hard against the glass. Then half of a face appeared, too. A young girl, it looked like, and although Ned couldn’t hear, her mouth was wide open as if she were screaming. She was only visible for two or three seconds, then she disappeared, leaving two smeary handprints and a distorted impression of her right cheek.

  Ned hesitated. He couldn’t work out what he had actually seen. Vandals? Some kind of promotional stunt? But who would vandalize a glass elevator in broad daylight? And if it was a promotional stunt, what was it meant to promote?

  If he hadn’t seen that girl’s hands and face, he would have walked on. But he entered the mall and approached two security guards who were standing by the Orleans fountain, chatting to three young women.

  “I think something weird is happening in one of your elevators.”

  One of the security guards cupped his hand to his ear. “You think what?” The mall was echoing with piped music and the footsteps of hundreds of shoppers and the clattering of water in the fountain.

  “It looks like somebody’s painting the windows with red paint. And I think there’s a girl trapped inside there who’s in some kind of trouble.”

  “Red paint? What do you mean, red paint?”

  “Well, I don’t know. It looks like red paint.”

  “Okay. Which elevator?”

  The security guards walked over to the elevator bank with Ned following close behind them. A small knot of shoppers were gathered outside the right-hand elevator, and as the security guards approached, an elderly man in Bermuda shorts said, “Out of order. Looks like it’s stuck between flo
ors.”

  One of the security guards went up to the elevator doors and pressed the button. There was a juddering noise, but nothing happened.

  “Better call Wally,” he told his colleague.

  “Maybe you should phone the police,” Ned suggested. “I couldn’t exactly see what was happening in there, but this girl looked really upset.”

  “George, why don’t you go outside and take a look?” Ned said, “At first I thought it might be some kind of advertising display.”

  “Unh-unh. Nobody told me about no advertising display, and if nobody told me about no advertising display, then there ain’t no advertising display.”

  One of the security guards walked out into the street, but as he did so, the elevator’s indicator light suddenly blinked three and two and then one.

  “George! It’s okay! It’s working now!”

  They waited for the doors to open, but after a short pause the elevator continued down to P-1, which was the first parking level. The security guard pushed the button again, however, and the indicator showed it coming back up again.

  There was another pause, longer this time, but then the elevator doors opened. Inside, it glowed a dull crimson, like a small hexagonal chapel with red stained-glass windows.

  The security guard stepped forward, and then he stopped and said, “Holy Mother of God.” The floor of the elevator car was heaped with bodies. Arms and legs all tangled together, so that it was almost impossible to tell how many people had been killed, except for their faces, which were pale and serious, like medieval saints.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Behind the Mirror

  A little after 11:00 A.M., a heavy bank of charcoal gray clouds passed over Cincinnati from the southwest, very low, and a warm rain started to fall.

  “At least it keeps the bugs from flying,” said Molly, as they drove along I-71 toward the Avondale turnoff. All the same, when she turned on the wipers, there were enough splattered cicadas on the windshield to smear it with two semicircles of brown and yellow viscera.

  Sissy said, “I wish I could shake off this feeling.”

  “What feeling?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not what you’d call a premonition. It’s more like ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’—as if there’s something out of place, and it’s right in front of my nose, but I can’t see it for looking.”

  Molly was wearing a black silk headscarf tied around her head pirate fashion, with small silver coins dangling from it. Sissy thought that she looked more like the young Mia Farrow than ever. Sissy herself had dressed in a long-sleeved crimson dress with large red chrysanthemums all over it. She wore long dangly earrings, which Frank had always called her “chandeliers.”

  Molly said, “Don’t tell me. You read the cards again before we came out?”

  “I was just wanted an update.”

  “Okay. And?”

  “They’re still saying the same. The warning, the game of hide-and-go-seek. And the blood card, too.”

  “No new clues?”

  Sissy shook her head. “I’ve never known the cards be so unhelpful. It’s like somebody saying to you, Don’t go out tomorrow, whatever you do, you’ll regret it, but refusing to tell you why.”

  They turned off I-71 and made their way toward Riddle Road. It rained harder and harder, with misty spray drifting across the street in front of them. The windshield wipers were flapping furiously from side to side, but they could barely keep up.

  As they reached the Woods house, however, the rain abruptly stopped, and by the time Molly had parked her Civic in the driveway, the sun was beginning to shine through the clouds and sparkle on the cedar trees that sheltered the house on either side.

  Avondale was a quiet, old-style neighborhood, and 1445 Riddle Road was a solid, old-style house, with three stories and a long veranda that ran all the way across the front. Molly and Sissy climbed the steps to the front door. It was painted dark purple, and there was a brass knocker on it in the shape of a grinning face—a clown, maybe, or a joker.

  Molly knocked and the door was opened almost immediately. They were greeted by a thin, nervous-looking woman with a blond bob and short-sleeved black dress, and a young girl clutching a black toy rabbit.

  “Mrs. Woods?” Sissy smiled. “I’m Sissy Sawyer. This is my daughter-in-law, Molly.”

  “Come on in,” said Mrs. Woods. “And, please, call me Darlene.”

  She led the way into a large living room furnished with two antique sofas and four spoon-back chairs. On the left-hand side of the room there was a handsome antique fireplace with fluted columns and a wide gilt-framed mirror hanging above it. On the right-hand side there was a dark mahogany sideboard with a collection of nineteenth-century silver—jugs and candle-sticks and decorated tankards.

  Between the sofas there was a low glass-topped table with magazines and antique crystal paperweights on it, as well as a bronze statuette of a leaping horse. But it was a small pedestal underneath the window that caught Sissy’s attention. It was draped in a black velvet cloth, and on it stood a photograph in a silver frame of a smiling, broad-featured man with a lick of brown hair across his forehead.

  All around the photograph tiny seashells had been arranged in flower patterns, as well as multicolored candies and glass beads—the tributes paid by two small girls to their murdered father.

  “I don’t really know how much I can help you,” said Darlene.

  “Oh, I’m sure you can,” Sissy told her. “And we can help you.” She looked around the living room, trying to sense any presence of the late George Woods. It wasn’t easy, because she could feel all of the hundreds of people who had lived here since the house was built. She could almost hear them shouting and laughing and singing as the years had flickered by—birthdays, Thanksgivings, Christmases, and weddings. She could also feel the stillness of death.

  “Amanda,” said Darlene. “Why don’t you take Floppy upstairs to your room? I have to talk to these ladies for a while.”

  “May I have a cookie?” asked Amanda.

  “Sure you can, sweetie. But just one.”

  “May Floppy have a cookie, too?”

  Darlene shook her head. “Floppy can share yours. It’s going to be lunchtime soon.”

  When Amanda had gone, Darlene said, “Please … do sit down. I have to tell you that I was kind of knocked off balance when you called me. You know—what you said to me about talking to George.”

  “I’m not a con artist, Darlene,” Sissy told her. “I’ve been holding séances ever since I first discovered that I could contact people who have gone beyond. I’ve never asked for money or any kind of recompense, and I never will.”

  “You said that you and—Molly, is it?—you said that you were working with the Cincinnati police.”

  “I’m a forensic sketch artist,” Molly told her. “After a crime’s been committed, I interview witnesses, and then I try to draw a likeness of the person who committed it.”

  “I understand,” Darlene nodded. “I’ve seen people doing that on CSI. But why do you need to talk to George?”

  Molly said, “There was only one witness to George’s murder, and that was a young girl who was also stabbed, so she was in pretty deep shock. Red Mask struck a second time—at least we believe it was him. But again there was only one witness, and this witness had already seen my picture of Red Mask on TV, so his recollection could well have been compromised. Witnesses bend over backward to be helpful, but sometimes they’re too helpful, if you see what I mean. They try to tell you what they think you want to hear, instead of what they actually saw.”

  “The more witnesses we can talk to, the more accurate Molly’s picture will be,” said Sissy. “That’s why we need to contact George.”

  “Is it really possible?” asked Darlene. “My mother used to go to a medium to talk to her older sister. She said she had long conversations with her, but I can’t say that I ever completely believed her. I thought it was no more than wishful thinking.
”

  Sissy took hold of Darlene’s hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “It is possible, for sure. But let me say this: if it upsets you in any way at all, Molly and I will just get up and go, and you won’t have to see us ever again.”

  “Will I be able to hear him?”

  Sissy nodded. “More than likely. But you have to realize that not all gone-beyonders want to talk to the people that they’ve left behind—not directly. They’re usually anxious to spare them any more grief. It’s not exactly an easy experience for them, either, to see everything they lost when they passed over, and to talk to a loved one they’ll never be able to hold in their arms again.”

  Darlene looked across at the photograph of her late husband on the pedestal by the window. “All right,” she said, at last. “What do we have to do? Hold hands or something?”

  Sissy said, “You can, if you think that it will help you to concentrate. But it isn’t necessary. If George is here, if he’s able and willing to talk to us, then he will. All you need to do is to think of him—how you best remember him. Try to remember what he looked like. Try to remember what he felt like. Imagine he’s still with you. Imagine he’s still alive.”

  Sissy opened her floppy tapestry bag and took out four small pouches, which she set down on the glass-topped table. “Bloodroot, celandine, chicory, and pennyroyal,” she explained. “I don’t know whether they really work or not, but they’re supposed to help the gone-beyonders to find their way through.”

  She took out a red candle, too, in a round stone holder, and lit it with her cigarette lighter. The candle had a strong, cloying scent, like rotting peaches.

  “Now, you’re thinking about George, aren’t you?” she asked Darlene.

  Darlene nodded.

  “Close your eyes if it makes it easier. Try to imagine that he’s here, standing in this room, watching you.”

  Darlene closed her eyes. She was silent for a short while, and it was obvious from her tightly clenched fists that she was concentrating deeply.