Death Mask Read online

  I’m still your mermaid, Frank. The girl you fell in love with, she’s still here. I’m the same girl who ran barefoot through the dunes at Hyannis that July afternoon so long ago.

  Then she angled her head a little to the left, and the lamplight suddenly betrayed her. She saw the crow’s feet around her eyes and the lines around her mouth, and a neck that looked like crumpled tissue paper. The cries from the seagulls faded, and the warm ocean breeze died away, and here she was in her stuffy spare room in Trevor’s house, all alone now, growing older with every night that passed.

  Molly knocked on her door.

  “Sissy? Is there anything you need? How about a glass of warm milk?”

  “A time machine would be nice. Look at me. I’ll be seventy-two before I know it. How did that happen? I don’t feel seventy-two.”

  Molly came into the room and sat on the end of the bed. “You don’t behave seventy-two, either, thank God.”

  “Trevor talked to me this evening. He wants me to stop fortune-telling while I’m here. He says it gives him the heebie-jeebies.”

  “You don’t have to stop because of Trevor. You know what he’s like. If it can’t be weighed or measured or calculated, it doesn’t exist. Mind you, he makes a living out of guessing the future, just like you. The only difference is, he tries to guess what isn’t going to happen.”

  “He’s frightened that Red Mask is going to find out that you drew his composite, and that he’s going to come after you.”

  “I don’t think that’s very likely. It’s only happened once before. Some child molester threatened to throw battery acid at me. But I think I’ve protected myself the best way I know how, which is to draw a really accurate likeness of him, so that he’ll be caught quicker.”

  Sissy tied up her hair with a gray silk scarf. “Did you tell Trevor about the flowers?”

  Molly looked away, and didn’t answer.

  “I said—”

  “No. No I haven’t. Not yet.”

  “Are you going to tell Trevor about the flowers?”

  “I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I’m in kind of two minds about it. What do you think?”

  “They’re a miracle, Molly! Somehow, you performed a miracle! He’s your husband! Don’t you think he ought to know?”

  Molly played with her necklace so that it glittered in the lamplight. One of her favorite mascots on it was a tiny golden Egyptian crocodile with dark red garnets for eyes.

  “I thought of telling him, honestly. If he had actually noticed them, I’m sure I would. But there they were, right in front of him—fully grown roses and daisies and bellflowers—and he didn’t even realize that they hadn’t been there when he left for work in the morning.”

  “Well, Trevor’s the same as most men. They only see what they want to see.”

  Molly said, “It’s not only that. I love him because he’s so sensible and so pragmatic. I don’t think I want him to start believing in miracles.”

  “All right, then. If that’s what you think is best. Far be it from a wrinkly old mother-in-law like me to interfere in my beautiful young daughter-in-law’s affairs.”

  Molly wrapped her arms around her and kissed her noisily on her right ear. “You’re not wrinkly and you’re not as old as you think you are, and I always appreciate your opinion. So there.”

  With that, they started to sing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” together, in higher and higher harmony, until they were almost shrieking.

  “—and it’s a hard—it’s a hard—it’s a hard—!”

  Trevor opened the bedroom door. “For Christ’s sake, you two! You sound like two polecats being strangled!”

  Sissy dreamed that she was very young, maybe only six or seven years old, and that she was sitting in the back seat of a large sedan with brown leather seats. She was kneeling up and watching the landscape slide past. The landscape was brown, too, and very flat—miles and miles of cornfields, all the way to the horizon. The clouds were strangely stretched out, as if they were being pulled across the sky like dark brown toffee.

  She couldn’t see who was driving the sedan. He was wearing a pale Panama hat with a wide brown band around it. There was a signet ring on his right hand, which occasionally flashed at her, and in the center of the steering wheel there was a diamond-shaped emblem, which flashed at her, too. She recognized the emblem, and now she realized which car she was in and who was driving it. It was her Uncle Henry’s 1954 Hudson Hornet.

  The car radio sounded as if it were playing backward—lumpy, intermittent rhythms with garbled words.

  “You only saw me through a half-open door… . I don’t know what you thought that you were looking for… .”

  “Uncle Henry,” she said, although her voice sounded fudgy and blurred.

  Uncle Henry didn’t turn around, but he said, “Not far now, Sissy. Seventy miles, no more than that.”

  “Where are we?” asked Sissy.

  “West of the east and east of the west.”

  At almost the same time, they passed a sign saying ENTERING BORROWSVILLE, POP. 789.

  “Was it for answers? Was it for love? Was it for forgiveness from the angels up above?”

  They drove on and on, and the brown fields continued to slide past them, mile after mile. The clouds were stretched out into long fantastical shapes, before they slowly broke apart and drifted away.

  I don’t like this dream, thought Sissy. Something bad is going to happen in this dream.

  They passed another sign. LEAVING BORROWSVILLE. And it was only a few minutes later that Sissy saw a tall figure standing by the highway up ahead. At first she thought it was a water tower. But as they came closer and she frowned at it more intently, she began to realize that it was the figure of a man. But how could it be a man? He must be a giant, over thirty feet tall.

  “Uncle Henry.”

  “What is it, Sissy?”

  “There’s a giant.”

  Uncle Henry didn’t answer.

  “Uncle Henry, I’m frightened of giants.”

  Still Uncle Henry didn’t answer.

  Sissy tugged at the shoulder of his sport coat and said, much more desperately, “I’m frightened of giants! I don’t want to go past that giant! Please, Uncle Henry! Can’t we go back?”

  Uncle Henry slowly turned his head around. He seemed to be able to do it without moving the rest of his body. Sissy stared at him in shock. He wasn’t Uncle Henry at all—not the Uncle Henry she remembered, with the circular gold-rimmed eyeglasses and the Teddy Roosevelt mustache.

  This “Uncle Henry” had a bright-red face, like an enameled papier-mâché mask, with thin black slits for eyes and a wider black slit for a mouth. He had angular cheekbones and a huge chin with a deep cleft in the middle of it, as if he had been struck with an ax.

  “Can’t go back now, Sissy,” he said, in the same backward-sounding voice as the songs on the radio. “Too late now for one and all.”

  Sissy started to hyperventilate. She seized the door handle and tried to open the back door, but it was locked.

  “Can’t go back now, Sissy. What’s done is done. And now it has to be done again, and again, and again. No rest for the wicked, Sissy!”

  Sissy shook the door handle again, as hard as she could, and it was then that the whole door flew off, with Sissy still clinging on to it, and bounced away over the fields, bursting through the cornstalks, tumbling over and over. Sissy landed on her back in a furrow, and the door landed on top of her with a bang.

  She struggled to push the door off her, punching and kicking.

  But then she realized that it wasn’t a door at all. It was heavy, but it was very soft and billowy. It was her patchwork comforter, and she was lying in her bed in Trevor and Molly’s house.

  She eased herself up into a sitting position and coughed. It was intensely dark, and outside her bedroom window she could hear that it was raining. Her bedside clock told her it was 2:11 A.M.

  “You ridiculous old cow,” she admo
nished herself. She groped for the toggle of her bedside lamp and switched it on. No cornfields, no attenuated clouds, no giants. Only a chintz-decorated bedroom with Currier & Ives prints on the wall. “Maybe Trevor’s right. Maybe you’re always reading things into things when there isn’t anything there to be read into them.”

  She swallowed one of her angina pills and three large gulps of water. She remembered to hang the little beaded cover over her water glass. The first night she had stayed here, she had woken up in the middle of the night and swallowed a struggling moth along with her water.

  She lay back on her pillow and thought about her dream. Or had it been more of a memory? She had visited Uncle Henry and Aunt Mattie on their farm in Iowa once, when she was about seven, but she didn’t remember driving there. She recalled her mother meeting her at Penn Station, when she was on her way home, so she must have traveled at least part of the way by train.

  But why had she dreamed about it now? And why had Uncle Henry looked like Red Mask? And what did the giant mean? Even now that she was awake, she thought about the giant and she found it frightening.

  She looked over at the DeVane cards—but no, she had promised Trevor that she wouldn’t, and so she wouldn’t. She switched off the light and lay there in the darkness for over an hour, trying not to think about that backward-sounding song.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Plague

  Molly drew up her blind for her and said, “Good morning, Sissy! Our visitors have arrived!”

  Sissy sat up and blinked at her. Molly set a glass of orange juice on the nightstand beside her and gave her a kiss on her head scarf.

  “Who’s arrived?”

  “The cicadas! I thought they would, when it started to rain last night. You should see the crab-apple tree!”

  Sissy climbed out of bed and went to the window. From here, she could see the curving flower bed that ran along the left-hand side of Trevor and Molly’s yard. The soil around the old crab-apple tree was peppered with countless little chimneys made of mud, and the trunk and lower branches were clustered with hundreds of glittering yellow cicada nymphs. There were even cicadas clinging to the roses and the lilies that Molly had painted.

  “My God! There are so many of them!”

  Trevor knocked on the door and came in. He was tying up his yellow necktie ready for work. “ ‘Predator satiation,’ that’s what the entomologists call it. Everything eats cicadas—birds, bats, cats—even humans. They ran a recipe in last week’s Post for cicada stir-fry. So the cicadas make sure that their species survives by reproducing themselves by the million.”

  “I thought you said they flew,” said Sissy.

  “Oh, they fly all right. They’re going to break out of that skin before you know it and turn into adult cicadas with wings and red eyes. They’ll stay in that tree for about a week, while they dry out and their skin grows harder, and then they’ll be buzzing around everywhere, and you’ll be mightily sick of them. You can’t even play tennis without getting four or five cicadas stuck in your racket every time you play a stroke.”

  Trevor left for work, taking Victoria with him so that he could drop her off at Sycamore Community School. Although the cicadas hadn’t molted yet, Sissy decided to have her breakfast indoors, in the kitchen. Molly made her some buckwheat pancakes with rose-hip syrup.

  “I had the strangest dream last night,” said Sissy, after she had finished eating. “I dreamed I was driving across Iowa with my Uncle Henry, but it wasn’t my Uncle Henry at all. It was that Red Mask man.”

  “You’re kidding me!”

  “No … it was him all right, just the way you drew him. And he talked to me. He said what was done was done, but it had to be done again.”

  “But, Sissy—I dreamed about him, too!”

  Sissy had an odd, disorienting feeling, as if the sun had gone in and then come out again, and the clock had suddenly jumped five minutes without her knowing where the time had gone. “He wasn’t driving a car, was he? Don’t tell me he was driving a car.”

  “No. He was standing in the middle of the yard, in the rain, and he was covered all over in cicadas. Like he was almost wearing them, like a cloak.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Unh-unh. He just stood there, not moving. But the whole dream seemed so real. When I woke up, I had to go to the window to make sure that he wasn’t actually there.”

  Sissy said, “How about some more coffee? You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”

  “No, go ahead.”

  Sissy sat on the tapestry window seat beside the open window so that her smoke would blow out in the yard. Molly brought her a mug of fresh coffee and then sat down beside her.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” said Molly, after a while.

  “So … you’re a mind reader, too?”

  “No, but as it happens, I agree with you. Especially since we both had those dreams.”

  “I promised Trevor that I wouldn’t.”

  “I know. But Trevor’s not here, is he? And what Trevor doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Whereas something that we don’t know might very well hurt us.”

  Sissy crushed out her cigarette in a blue earthenware ashtray. “All right,” she said. “But please don’t tell Trevor. I don’t want him to think that I don’t respect him, because I do.”

  She went to her bedroom and brought in the DeVane cards. They sat down together at the kitchen table, and Sissy laid the cards out in the cross-of-Lorraine pattern. She was telling Molly’s fortune, so she chose la Fleuriste for her Predictor card, the Florist. The card showed a bare-breasted young woman in a diaphanous Empire-line dress and a huge bonnet laden with flowers and apples and bunches of grapes. She was walking in between two lines of red chrysanthemums, sprinkling them with a golden watering can.

  In the background, a young man dressed in fool’s motley of yellow and blue was pushing a wheelbarrow, and on closer inspection Molly could see that the wheelbarrow was heaped up with human body parts—arms and legs and decapitated torsos, all spattered with blood. In the distance, on a hillside, she could just make out the crosses and monuments of a cemetery.

  The young man himself appeared to be wearing a spiky hat, or maybe his hair had been waxed up into points. But again—when she examined the card more closely—Molly realized that it wasn’t a hat, and it wasn’t his hair, either. He had ten or eleven large kitchen knives embedded in the top of his head.

  On the far side of the gardens, beyond the chrysanthemum beds, there were rows of beehives. They were being tended by monks, whose faces were concealed under bell-shaped muslin nets.

  As she dealt out the cards, Sissy said, “Lay your hand on top of your card and ask it a specific question. Don’t tell me what the question is. The cards will answer for you, not me.”

  When she had finished, she picked up three cards and arranged them in a fan shape in front of her, facedown, so that all Molly could see was the blandly smiling face of la Lune, the Moon, on the reverse side of each of them. She touched each card, one after the other.

  After almost half a minute of silence, Molly said, “Well?”

  Sissy looked across the table at her, and the sun reflected in the lenses of her spectacles, so that she looked as if she were blind. “Are you sure you want me to give you this reading?”

  “Why? What’s wrong? Nobody’s going to die or anything, are they?”

  “I don’t know. The cards are being very evasive. Maybe such and such a thing is going to happen, or maybe it isn’t. It always makes me very uneasy when they come up like this.”

  “Well, tell me anyhow, Sissy. Come on, they’re only cards.”

  Sissy picked up la Fleuriste. “I see some warnings. I’m not entirely sure what all of them are. But just take a look at your Predictor card. Here’s a pretty young woman who can bring flowers to life—that’s you. But there’s pain and death in her garden, too—chopped-up bodies, all being carted off to the cemetery.”

  “This young man with
knives in his head—what does that mean?”

  “He’s le Pitre, the Clown. He represents laughter and happiness and friendship. But somebody has stabbed him in the head. Whoever he is, his attacker is deliberately trying to spread fear and suspicion and to make people mistrust each other. A killjoy, in the very worst sense of the word.”

  “And these beekeepers?”

  “There’s no doubt what they mean. The cards may not be ready to tell us what’s going to happen. But they’re pretty darn sure about when. The beehives are an indication of a swarm of insects, and you only have to look out of the window to see what’s happening in your own backyard. So whatever’s going to happen, I think it’s going to happen pretty soon—if not today.”

  Molly nodded toward the three cards laid out in a fan shape. “And these cards? What do they say?”

  Sissy turned over the card on the left. “This tells you why your future is going to turn out the way it is. This is something you’ve done already, so there’s no changing it, and no going back.”

  “Le Porte-bonheur … the Charm?”

  The card showed a young man walking through a forest, carrying a tall staff with a jeweled eye on top of it. On either side of the path, the wriggling tree roots had become transformed into snakes and were standing erect as if they were about to strike.

  “This is your ability to draw things and make them come to life. The cards seem to think that it comes from some kind of talisman, just like this staff.”

  “I don’t have anything like that,” said Molly. But then she pressed her hand against her necklace and said, “I mean, there’s this. But it’s nothing special. I only paid fifty-five dollars for it, and she threw in a couple of diamanté barrettes as well.”