Death Mask Read online

  “When did you buy it?”

  “Two weeks ago, at the Peddlers Market. There was all kinds of great stuff there. I saw this amazing copper fire screen with fairies on it. I nearly bought that, too.”

  “Did she know where the necklace came from? It’s not like any necklace I ever saw before.”

  Molly lifted it up and peered at it. “Me neither. It looks like something that her grandma must have put together herself, piece by piece. Look at this little face, all carved out of ivory. And this lizard. They’re incredible.”

  “It could be that it carries some kind of power,” said Sissy. She held out her right hand and showed Molly the amethyst ring that she wore on her middle finger. “My mother gave me this, and I’ve always been convinced that it helps me to tell if people are telling me the truth. When they lie, the stone grows darker. Sometimes it almost turns from purple to black.

  “Mind you, a person can be a good-luck charm, too. Your flowers have only come to life since I’ve been here—have you thought about that? It could be our natural chemistry that’s doing it. Our life force, the two of us together. Our charisma.”

  “What are the other cards?” asked Molly.

  Sissy turned over the right-hand card. “Le Marionettiste , the Puppeteer. This is what today is going to bring.”

  The card showed a young shabbily dressed man in a tricorn hat sitting on a wooden bench. He was holding the strings of two dancing marionettes—a ballet dancer with an ostrich plume in her hair, and a soldier with a bushy mustache and a bright blue tunic. The room in which he was playing with these marionettes was very gloomy, and they were illuminated only by a single lantern.

  Close behind him, in the shadows, a man in a gray hooded cloak was standing, his arms crossed, and holding a large butcher’s boning knife in each hand.

  “I don’t understand this one at all,” said Molly.

  “I’m not sure I do, either,” Sissy admitted. “I think it’s one of those predictions that we won’t understand until it’s actually happened.”

  “A man’s going to stab a puppeteer?”

  “Remember that these cards were drawn over two hundred years ago. A puppeteer could represent all kinds of things, like an aerobics instructor, or a human resources manager. Or a politician, maybe. Anybody who controls other people’s lives.”

  “Okay … and the last one?”

  Sissy was sensitive enough to know already what the last card was, and she was reluctant to turn it over. She could tell Molly a white lie about its meaning, she supposed, but she doubted Molly would believe her—and what was the point? She had laid out the cards in order to find out what was going to happen to them, and the more they knew, the better prepared they would be.

  Apart from that, her mother’s amethyst ring would darken, and she always believed that the cards themselves were aware of how truthfully they were being interpreted. Next time she tried to use them, they would stay silent and give her no guidance to the future at all. They would be nothing but brightly colored pasteboard, with incomprehensible pictures on them.

  She turned the card over. It was solid scarlet, with no illustration on it. La Carte écarlate. The Scarlet Card.

  “And what does that mean?” asked Molly.

  “Mostly it means overwhelming rage. You know, like ‘seeing red.’ But it can also mean blood. A whole lot of blood. So much blood that it almost drowns us.”

  Molly sat staring at the card, but she didn’t touch it. “Do you know what my question was?” she asked Sissy.

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, especially if the cards have answered it for you.”

  “I asked if Red Mask was going to murder anybody else.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Seventeenth Floor

  The next morning was bright but hazy, and very humid. Jimmy arrived at the Giley Building nearly an hour earlier than usual—so early that Mr. Kraussman, the super, had to unlock the front doors for him. Mr. Kraussman was keg shaped, with a blue bald head and rolls of fat on the back of his neck, and a green checkered shirt so loud that it was deafening.

  He took out the goetta sandwich that was stuffed in his mouth and said, “Jimmy! Ach du lieber Gott! You get to work any sooner, you’ll meet yourself leaving last night!”

  Jimmy maneuvered his silver Mutant mountain bike into the lobby. “Thanks, Mr. Kraussman. I have to finish this dumb animation. I tried to knock it off last night, but I kept on falling asleep.”

  “So what you animating now? Not more of those singing diapers?” He waddled ahead of Jimmy, jingling his keys. “Singing diapers! I’ll tell you something, my kids’ diapers never sang, but they sure did hum!” He laughed raucously at his own joke, and then he gave a deep, swamplike sniff.

  “This time it’s pop bottles,” Jimmy told him, as he folded his bike and stowed it into the utility closet amongst the mops and the sweeping brushes and the buckets. “Line-dancing pop bottles.”

  “Please?”

  “Pop bottles, Mr. Kraussman, that line dance. We have a major presentation at eleven, and that gives me less than three and a half hours to finish about five hours of rendering.”

  “It’s a tragedy,” said Mr. Kraussman. “To think that a great artist like you, he can only make his living with—whatever it is, dance-in-the-line pop bottles.”

  “Mr. Kraussman, I’m not Leonardo da Vinci. I’m an animator, that’s all.”

  “Hey—that picture you drew from my little Willy, you can’t tell me that isn’t great art. I hang it in my living room, pride of place.”

  “Well, I’m glad you liked it. He’s a real cute kid, your little Willy.” Jimmy didn’t mention that a huge booger had been protruding from little Willy’s left nostril all the time that he had been drawing him, and that he had been sorely tempted to include it in the finished portrait, in vivid booger green.

  Jimmy crossed over to the elevator bank. The elevator in which George Woods and Jane Becker had been attacked was still cordoned off with yellow police tape, and the elevator next to it was labeled “Out of order,” but the third elevator was working. Jimmy pressed the button and waited, while Mr. Kraussman stood uncomfortably close to him, smiling at him for no apparent reason at all and continuing to sniff. Like so many Over-the-Rhine residents, he suffered from Cincinnati sinus.

  “Hey—maybe you could draw Mrs. Kraussman, too!”

  Jimmy said, “Sure thing, if I can find the time.” And if I can find a sheet of paper wide enough.

  The elevator arrived and Jimmy stepped onto it.

  “Maybe for our ruby wedding, August twelfth!” Mr. Kraussman suggested, just before the doors juddered shut. “Not for free! I pay you top dollar!”

  As the elevator car clanked slowly upward, Jimmy leaned back against the mirrored wall and closed his eyes. He felt exhausted. He had been working on the Sea Island Cranberry Soda animation for over six weeks now, seven days a week, and some nights he had still been hunched over his computer at 2:00 A.M. But it was a critical pitch for the company that employed him, Anteater Animation, and if they landed the account, he knew he was in for a more-than-generous bonus. He might even be able to take his girlfriend Devon to Disney World.

  Jimmy was skinny and slight, two months shy of his twenty-ninth birthday, with curly black hair, a very pale face, and a beaky nose. Devon said he reminded her of a heron. He didn’t mind, because Devon was just as skinny as he was, if not skinnier, and even though she was pretty, she had a beaky nose, too.

  This morning Jimmy was wearing his Cincinnati Reds cap (peak sideways) and a white T-shirt with “2007 Cornhole Champions” printed on the back in red, as well as baggy red shorts and big silver Nike TN8 running shoes.

  The elevator shuddered to a stop, and he opened his eyes. He was just about to step out when he realized that he had reached only as far as the seventeenth floor. The corridor in front of him was blue carpeted, unlit, and strewn with crumpled-up paper. The corporate signboard on the opposite wall had not
hing on it but empty screw holes.

  Jimmy stuck his head out of the elevator to see if there was anybody there. But the corridor was empty, and the entire floor was silent, except for a faint tapping sound, like a faucet dripping. Tap—pause—tap. Then—tap.

  He pushed the button for the twenty-third floor. The elevator doors started to close, but then they jolted open again with a loud bang, which made Jimmy jump. He could hear a harsh squealing noise from the elevator’s winding mechanism, and the entire car started to shudder violently, as if the gears were jammed. He could smell overheated oil, and scorched dust, too.

  He stepped quickly out of the elevator car and into the corridor. He had seen too many movies in which elevators dropped all the way down to the basement, full of screaming people, and he had heard that when they hit the bottom, their shinbones came bursting right out of their knees.

  Almost immediately, though, the elevator doors closed behind him. He pushed the button again, but they refused to open. He jabbed and jabbed, but then he heard a smooth whining sound, and the indicator showed that the elevator was continuing its upward journey without him.

  “Shit,” he said. He jabbed the button a few more times, but the elevator didn’t respond. He waited until it went all the way up to the twenty-fifth floor, but even when he called it again, it stayed there.

  “Shit, man. This is total shit.”

  He had no choice: he would have to take the stairs. He just hoped the doors hadn’t been locked to keep out squatters.

  He walked along the corridor toward the main office area. The floor was divided into nearly a hundred cubicles with built-in desks. In some cubicles, graphs and sales charts and Post-it notes were still stuck to the walls. Some of them even had family photographs. Smiling boyfriends, children sitting in wading pools, dogs.

  Jimmy negotiated his way between the cubicles, his satchel slapping against his thigh. He held one hand up in front of his face, because the early-morning sun was shining on the buildings on the opposite side of Race Street and dazzling him. He began to cough, as he always did when he was stressed.

  He reached the double doors that led to the staircase. He pulled the handles, but as he had feared, they were locked.

  “Shit.” He peered through the wired-glass windows and he could actually see the staircase.

  He rattled the doors violently. He tried barging them with his shoulder, and then he kicked them as hard as he could. But they were solid oak, with strong locks, and he knew that he didn’t have a chance of breaking them open.

  He took out his cell phone. No signal. Double shit. But maybe this was a dead zone, here by the staircase. He crossed over to the window. He looked down, and he could see the early-morning traffic and the side-walks crowded with hurrying office workers. They looked tiny and insignificant, but at least they weren’t trapped in here on the seventeenth floor, like a fly in a jelly jar. He tried his cell phone again, but there was still no reception.

  He circled slowly around the office, but wherever he went he still couldn’t pick up a signal. He even went into one of the cubicles and picked up the phone from the desk, but of course that was dead. Dead like the withered potted plant that stood beside it, abandoned and unwatered.

  He would have to go back to the elevator. Maybe he could bang on the doors, and Mr. Kraussman would hear him.

  But when he was only halfway across the office, he heard a quick, rattling noise somewhere off to his left. He stopped and listened, and then he heard it again. Trrrrrrrttt! like a giant cicada, flexing its tymbal. He was very short of breath now, and he couldn’t stop himself from coughing again.

  Trrrrrrrttt! Now the rattle was off to his right. He turned around, and around, but there was nobody there—nobody that he could see, anyhow.

  Trrrrrrrtttt! Trrrrrrrttt! Trrrtt-trrrtt-trrrtt!

  Jimmy turned around again, and then he said, “Jesus!”

  Only twenty feet away from him, a man was standing in one of the cubicles, so that he was visible only from the chest upward. He was tall and heavily built, but because of the sunlight that shone through the windows behind him, Jimmy couldn’t see his face.

  “Hey,” Jimmy wheezed. “You scared the shit out of me, dude.”

  The man stayed where he was and said nothing.

  Jimmy pointed back along the corridor. “Stupid elevator’s stuck. I keep pushing the button, but it won’t come back down. And the doors to the stairs are locked.”

  Still the man said nothing; and still he didn’t move.

  “Like—how did you get here, dude?” Jimmy asked him. “Is there another way out? Another staircase or something?”

  Silence.

  “Come on, dude, I really need to get out of here! I have all of this work to finish… . That’s the whole reason I came in so early!”

  Jimmy coughed once, and then again, and then he went into a spasm and had to rummage inside his satchel for his inhaler. He took two deep squirts of albuterol, and then he closed his eyes and counted to five. But when he opened them again, the man had disappeared. He looked around, his eyes still watering, trying to suppress any more coughs.

  “Excuse me? Excuse me, sir? Are you still here?”

  A pause, and then trrrrrrtttt! on the opposite side of the office.

  “Excuse me, sir, I seriously need to find a way out of here! I could lose my job if I don’t get up to my office!”

  Trrrrrrrtttt!

  It was no use. The man was either some kind of nutjob or else he was deaf and dumb, or maybe he was one of those street people who refused to talk to anyone but their own kind. Jimmy started to walk back along the corridor, glancing behind him now and again to make sure that the man wasn’t following him. Maybe the elevator was working now—or even if it wasn’t, maybe he could make enough noise to attract Mr. Kraussman’s attention.

  He reached the elevator. The indicator was still pointing at the twenty-fifth floor. He pressed the button and held his finger there.

  Please, God, come down and get me out of here.

  At first nothing happened. He took his finger off the button, and then he pressed it again. There was a moment’s pause, and then he heard the elevator mechanism whining, and the indicator crept down to the twenty-fourth floor.

  Jimmy coughed and took another puff from his inhaler. The indicator came down to the twenty-third floor, and then the twenty-second.

  “Leaving so soon?” said a thick voice close behind him.

  Jimmy jerked sideways, almost losing his balance. The man was standing less than five feet away from him. He was even bulkier than he had appeared when he was standing in the cubicle, and much more threatening. It was the way he was standing, tilted slightly forward as if he were straining at a leash, his head lowered between his shoulders, his arms crossed over his chest.

  He was wearing a red shirt, but his face was even redder. It was tight skinned, like a mask, with slits for eyes and a slit for a mouth. It had a sheen to it, too, as if it were varnished. But, strangely, it looked blurred, as if he were staring out through a smeary window.

  Jimmy opened his mouth and then closed it again. He almost blurted out, You’re him, aren’t you? Red Mask? The guy who stabbed those people in the elevator? But the words got tangled up in his throat, and all he could manage was a cough.

  The elevator indicator went bing! Jimmy glanced upward and saw that it had come down as far as the nineteenth floor.

  “Do I scare you?” asked the red-faced man. “You look for some reason like you’re gravely alarmed.”

  Jimmy said, “I’m just—I just want to get out of here, is all.” He could hear his own voice, and it didn’t even sound like him. More like a frightened twelve-year-old. “I have all of this work to do, you know? All of this animation. If I don’t get it finished on time—”

  “Animation, eh? Bringing things to life?”

  Jimmy nodded. The elevator indicator went bing! as it reached the eighteenth floor.

  “No going back, is there, once you
’ve brought something to life? What’s created is created. What’s done is done. Like genies, released from their lamps. Or cats, let out of their bags.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Jimmy. “I’m really not too sure what you’re trying to say to me, sir. But it looks like the elevator’s finally decided to behave itself, and I’m going to have to say ciao. And very interesting to meet you. And, you know, hasta luego.”

  The elevator indicator went bing! and to his supreme relief, the doors slid open smoothly.

  “What’s done is done, son,” said the red-faced man. He was tilting forward even more aggressively, even though his feet hadn’t moved. “And once it’s been done, it has to be done again and again. No rest for the wicked—that’s what they say, isn’t it? No peace for the innocent, neither.”

  Jimmy stepped backward onto the elevator. “I really don’t know what they say, sir. But it’s been very enlightening. Or something like that. So long.”

  He pressed the button for the lobby, and the elevator doors began to close.

  Don’t jam this time, please. Just close, and close tight, and let me be carried safely up to my office.

  The doors closed. The elevator sank. Jimmy had never said a prayer of thanks before, but he said one now. Dear God, thank you for fixing the elevator and saving my ass. I shall never doubt thee again, ever. In fact, I shall walk up every one of the two hundred thirty-five steps outside the Immaculata church on Mount Adams and say, “Thank you, Lord,” on every single step.

  He went up close to the mirrored wall and peered at himself. He thought he looked surprisingly unruffled, considering how scared he had been. But he would have to decide what he was going to do next. He would have to call the police and tell them that Red Mask was hiding out on the seventeenth floor. And then what? Go back to his line-dancing pop bottles, as if nothing had happened?

  The elevator went bing! and stopped on the sixteenth floor. The doors slid back, revealing another abandoned reception area, with a sign saying KINGS COMMUNICATIONS, INC. This floor was much gloomier than the floor above, because all of the blinds were drawn. There were stacks of plywood chairs all the way along the corridor.