The Mask Read online

  She added three letters to the board.

  BLADE

  KILL

  O

  O

  DEATH

  O

  M

  B

  "Kill'?" Paul said.. "Oh, come on. Enough's enough. Take it away and make another word."

  "I can't," Carol said. "That's all I have. The rest of my letters are useless."

  "But you could have put 'lik' above the 'e' in

  'blade," Paul said. "You could have spelled 'like' instead of 'kill."

  "Sure, I could have done that, but I'd have gotten fewer points if! had. You see? There's no square with a double-letter score up there."

  As he listened to Carol's explanation, Paul felt strange. Bitterly cold inside. Hollow. As if he were balancing on a tightrope and knew he was going to fall and fall and fall...

  He was gripped by déjà vu, by such a strikingly powerful awareness of having lived through this scene before that, for a moment, his heart seemed to stop beating. Yet nothing like this had ever happened in any other Scrabble game he'd ever played. So why was he so certain he had witnessed this very thing on a previous occasion? Even as he asked himself that question, he realized what the answer was. The seizure of déjà vu wasn't in reference to the words on the Scrabble board; not directly anyway. The thing that was so frighteningly familiar to him was the unusual, soul-shaking feeling that the coincidental appearance of those words aroused in him; the iciness that came from within rather than from without; the awful hollowness deep in his guts; the sickening sensation of teetering on a high wire, with only infinite darkness below. He had felt exactly the same way in the attic last week, when the mysterious hammering sound had seemed to issue out of the thin air in front of his face, when each thunk! had sounded as if it were coming from a sledge and anvil in another dimension of time and space. That was how he felt now, at the Scrabble board: as if he were confronted with something extraordinary, unnatural, perhaps even supernatural.

  To Carol, he said, "Listen, why don't you just take those last three letters off the board, put them back in the box, choose three brand-new letters, and make some other word besides 'kill."

  He could see that his suggestion startled her.

  She said, "Why should I do that?"

  Paul frowned. "Blade, blood, death, tomb, kill- what kind of words are they for a nice, friendly, peaceable game of Scrabble?"

  She stared at him for a moment, and her piercing eyes made him a bit uncomfortable. "It's only coincidence," she said, clearly puzzled by his tenseness.

  "I know it's only coincidence," he said, though he didn't know anything of the sort. He was simply unable to explain rationally the eerie feeling that the words on the board were the work of some force far stronger than mere coincidence, something worse. "It still gives me the creeps," he said lamely. He turned to Jane, seeking an ally. "Doesn't it give you the creeps?'

  "Yeah. It does. A little," the girl agreed. "But it's also kind of fascinating. I wonder how long we can keep going with words that fit this pattern."

  "I wonder, too," Carol said. Playfully, she slapped Paul's shoulder. "You know what your trouble is, babe? You don't have any scientific curiosity. Now come on. It's your turn."

  After putting DEATH on the board, he hadn't replenished his supply of letter tiles. He drew four of the small wooden squares from the lid of the game box, put them on the rack in front of him.

  And froze.

  Oh God.

  He was on that tightrope again, teetering over a great abyss.

  "Well?" Carol asked.

  Coincidence. It had to be just coincidence.

  "Well?"

  He looked up at her.

  "What have you got?" she asked.

  Numb, he shifted his eyes to the girl.

  She was hunched over the table, as eager as Carol to hear his response, anxious to see if the macabre pattern would continue.

  Paul lowered his eyes to the row of letters on the wooden rack. The word was still there. Impossible. But it was there anyway, possible or not.

  "Paul?"

  He moved so quickly and unexpectedly that Carol and Jane jumped. He scooped up the letters on his rack and nearly flung them back into the lid of the box. He swept the five offensive words off the board before anyone could protest, and he returned those nineteen tiles to the box with all the others.

  "Paul, for heaven's sake!"

  "We'll start a new game," he said. "Maybe those words didn't bother you, but they bothered me. I'm here to relax. If I want to hear about blood and death and killing, I can switch on the news."

  Carol said, "What word did you have?"

  "I don't know," he lied. "I didn't work with the letters to see. Come on. Let's start all over."

  "You did have a word," she said.

  "No."

  "It looked to me like you did," Jane said.

  "Open up," Carol said.

  "All right, all right. I had a word. It was obscene. Not something a gentleman like me would use in a refined game of Scrabble, with ladies present."

  Jane's eyes sparkled mischievously. "Really? Tell us. Don't be stuffy."

  "Stuffy? Have you no manners, young lady?"

  "None!"

  "Have you no modesty?"

  "Nope."

  "Are you just a common broad?"

  "Common," she said, nodding rapidly. "Common to the core. So tell us what word you had."

  "Shame, shame, shame," he said. Gradually, he cajoled them into dropping their inquiry. They started a new game. This time all the words were ordinary, and they did not come in any unsettling, related order.

  Later, in bed, he made love to Carol. He wasn't particularly horny. He just wanted to be as close to her as he could get.

  Afterwards, when the murmured love talk finally faded into a companionable silence, she said, "What was your word?"

  "Hmmmm?" he said, pretending not to know what she meant.

  "Your obscene word in the Scrabble game. Don't try to tell me you've forgotten what it was."

  "Nothing important."

  She laughed. "After everything we just did in this bed, surely you don't think I need to be sheltered!"

  "I didn't have an obscene word." Which was the truth. "I didn't really have any word at all." Which was a lie. "It's just that.. .I thought those first five words on the board were bad for Jane."

  "Bad for her?"

  "Yes. I mean, you told me it's quite possible she lost one or both of her parents in a fire. She might be on the brink of learning about or remembering a terrible tragedy in her recent past. Tonight she just needed to relax, to laugh a bit. How could the game have been fun for her if the words on the board started to remind her that her parents might be dead?"

  Carol turned on her side, raised herself up a bit, leaned over him, her bare breasts grazing his chest, and stared into his eyes. "is that really the only reason you were so upset?"

  "Don't you think I was right? Did I overreact?"

  "Maybe you did. Maybe you didn't. It was Creepy." She kissed his nose. "You know why I love you so much?"

  "Because I'm such a great lover?"

  "You are, but that's not why I love you." "Because I have tight buns?"

  "Not that."

  "Because I keep my fingernails so neat and clean?"

  "Not that."

  "I give up."

  "You're so damned sensitive, so caring about other people. How typical of my Paul to worry about the Scrabble game being fun for Jane. That's why I love you."

  "I thought it was my hazel eyes."

  "Nah."

  "My classic profile."

  "Are you kidding?"

  "Or the way my third toe on my left foot lays half under the second toe."

  "Oh, I'd forgotten about that. Hmmmmmmmm. You're right. That's why I love you. Not because you're sensitive. It's your toes that drive me wild."

  Their teasing led to cuddling, and the cuddling led to kissing, and the kissing led to passio
n again. She reached her peak only a few seconds before he spurted deep within her, and when they finally parted for the night, he felt pleasantly wrung out.

  Nevertheless, she was asleep before he was. He stared at the dark ceiling of the dark bedroom and thought about the Scrabble game.

  BLADE, BLOOD, DEATH, TOMB, KILL...

  He thought about the word he had hidden from Carol and Jane, the word that had compelled him to end the game and start another. After adding EATH to the D in BLOOD, he'd been left with just three letter tiles on his rack: X, U, and C. The X and the U had played no part in what was to follow. But when he had drawn four new letters, they had gone disconcertingly well with the C. First he'd picked up an A, then an R. And he had known what was going to happen. He hadn't wanted to continue; he'd considered throwing all the tiles back into the box at that moment, for he dreaded seeing the word that he knew the last two letters would spell. But he hadn't ended it there. He had been too curious to stop when he should have stopped. He had drawn a third tile, which had been an 0, and then a fourth, L.

  C...A. ..R...O...L...

  BLADE, BLOOD, DEATH, TOMB, KILL, CAROL.

  Of course, even if he was able to fit it in, he couldn't put CAROL on the board, for it was a proper name, and the rules didn't allow the use of proper names. But that was a moot point. The important thing was that her name had been spelled out so neatly, so boldly on his rack of letters that it was uncanny. He had drawn the letters in their proper order, for God's sake! What were the odds against that?

  It seemed to be an omen. A warning that something was going to happen to Carol. Just as Grace Mitowski's two nightmares had turned out to be prophetic.

  He thought about the other strange events that had transpired recently: the unnaturally violent lightning strikes at Alfred O'Brian's office; the hammering sound that had shaken the house; the intruder on the rear lawn during the thunderstorm. He sensed that all of it was tied together. But for Christ's sake, how?

  BLADE, BLOOD.

  DEATH, TOMB.

  KILL, CAROL.