The Mask Page 28

  Her sweetly uptilted, bare breasts glistened with blood.

  And she knew instantly that it wasn't her own. She had not been slashed or stabbed. She was the one who had done the slashing, the stabbing.

  Oh God.

  She stared at her gruesome reflection, morbidly fascinated by the sight of her blood-moistened lips.

  What have I done?

  She slowly lowered her gaze along her crimsoned neck, looked down at the reflection of her right nipple, on which hung a very fat, carmine droplet of gore.

  The gleaming pearl of blood quivered for an instant on the tip of her erect nipple; then it succumbed to gravity and fell away from her.

  She pulled her gaze from the mirror, lowered her head to see where the droplet had struck the floor.

  There was no blood.

  When she looked directly at herself, rather than at her reflection, she discovered that her body was not covered with blood after all. She touched her bare breasts. They were damp because she had been scrubbing them with the washcloth, but the dampness was nothing more than water. Her arms weren't spattered with blood, either.

  She squeezed the washcloth. Clear water dripped from it; the cloth bore no grisly stains.

  Confused, she raised her eyes to the mirror once more and saw the blood, as before.

  She held out her hand. In reality it was not bloody, but in the mirror it was sheathed in a glove of gore.

  A vision, she thought. A weird illusion. That's all. I didn't hurt anyone. I didn't spill anyone's blood.

  As she struggled to understand what was happening. her mirror image faded, and the glass in front of her turned black. It seemed to have been transformed into a window that looked out onto another dimension, for it reflected nothing that was in the bathroom.

  This is a dream, she thought. I'm really snug in bed, where I belong. I'm only dreaming that I'm in the bathroom I can put a stop to this just by waking up.

  On the other hand, if it was a dream, would she be able to feel the cold ceramic floor beneath her bare feet as vividly as she could fuel it now? If it was really only a dream, would she be aware of the cold water on her bare breasts?

  She shivered.

  In the lightless void on the other side of the mirror, something flickered far off in the darkness.

  Wake up!

  Something silvery. It flashed again and again, back and forth, the image growing steadily larger.

  For God's sake, wake up!

  She wanted to run. Couldn't.

  She wanted to scream. Didn't.

  In seconds the flickering object filled the mirror, pushing back the darkness out of which it had come, and then somehow it burst out of the mirror without shattering the glass, exploded out of the void and into the bathroom with one final, murderous swing, and she saw that it was an ax, bearing down on her face, the steel blade gleaming like the finest silver under the fluorescent lights. As the wickedly sharp edge of the ax swept inexorably toward her head, her knees buckled, and she fainted.

  ***

  Near dawn, Jane woke again.

  She was in bed. She was nude.

  She threw the covers back, sat up, and saw her 1-shirt, panties, and knee socks on the floor beside the bed. She dressed quickly.

  The house was silent. The Tracys weren't up yet.

  Jane hurried quietly down the hallway to the guest bathroom, hesitated on the threshold, then stepped inside and snapped on the lights.

  There was no blood, and the mirror above the sink was only an ordinary mirror, reflecting her worried face but contributing no bizarre images of its own.

  Okay, she thought, maybe I was sleepwalking. And maybe I was actually here without any clothes on, trying to scrub nonexistent blood off my body. But the rest of it was just part of the nightmare. It didn't happen. It couldn't. Impossible. The mirror couldn't really change like that.

  She stared into her own blue eyes. She wasn't sure what she saw in them.

  "Who am I?" she asked softly.

  All week, Grace's sleep-what little she had managed to get between bouts of insomnia-had been dreamless. But tonight she thrashed for hours in the sheets, trying to fight her way out of a nightmare that seemed to last an eternity.

  In the dream, a house was on fire. A big, beautifully ornamented Victorian house. She was standing outside the blazing structure, pounding on a pair of slant-set cellar doors and calling a name over and over again. "Laura! Laura!" She knew that Laura was trapped in the cellar of the burning house and that these doors were the only way out, but the doors were latched on the inside. She hammered on the wood with her bare hands until each blow sent a cruel bolt of pain the length of her arms, through her shoulders, and up the back of her neck. She wished desperately that she had an ax or a pry-bar or some other tool with which she could smash through the cellar doors, but she had nothing other than her fists, so she pounded and pounded until her flesh bruised and split and bled, and she kept on pounding even then, all the while screaming for Laura. Windows exploded on the second floor, showering glass down over her, but she didn't turn away from the slant-set cellar doors; she didn't run. She continued to slam her bloodied fists into the wood, praying that the girl would answer at any moment. She ignored the sparks that showered down on her and threatened to set her gingham dress afire. She wept, and she coughed when the wind blew the acrid smoke in her direction, and she cursed the wood that so easily resisted her fierce but ineffectual attack.

  The nightmare had no climax, no peak of terror. It simply went on all night long at a continuously breathless pace until, a few minutes after dawn, Grace finally wrenched herself out of the hot, clutching arms of sleep and woke with a wordless cry, flailing at the mattress.

  She sat up on the edge of the bed and held her throbbing head in her hands.

  Her mouth was filled with the taste of ashes and bile.

  The dream had been so vivid that she had even felt the high-necked, long-sleeved, blue and white gingham dress binding at her shoulders and across her bust as she had hammered on the cellar doors. Now, wide awake, she could still feel the dress binding her, even though she was wearing a loose nightgown, and even though she had never worn such a dress in her entire life.

  Worse, she could smell the house burning.

  The smoke odor lingered so long after she had awakened that she became convinced that her own house was ablaze. Quickly, she pulled on a robe, stepped into her slippers, and went from one room to another, searching for the fire.

  There was no fire.

  Yet for almost an hour, the stench of burning wood and tar stayed with her.

  10

  FRIDAY morning at nine o'clock, Paul sat down at his writing desk, picked up the phone, and called Lincoln Werth, the police detective in charge of the Jane Doe case. He told Werth that Carol was taking the girl out of town for a few days of rest and recreation.

  "Might as well," Werth said. "We don't have any leads, and I sure don't think this is going to break wide open anytime soon. We keep expanding the search area, of course. At first we just put the kid's photo and description out to authorities in the surrounding counties. When that didn't do us any good, we put it on the wire to police agencies all over the State. Yesterday morning we took another step and Wired the same data to seven neighboring states. But I'll tell you something, just between you and me. Even if we expand the search area all the way to Hong

  Kong, I got a feeling we ain't never going to find anyone who knows the kid. I just have a hunch. We're going to keep coming up empty-handed."

  After talking to Werth, Paul went down to the garage, where Carol and Jane were putting their gear in the trunk of the Volkswagen. To spare the girl grief, Paul didn't pass along Werth's pessimistic assessment of the situation. "He said it's all right to leave town for a few days. The court didn't restrict you to Harrisburg. I told him where the cabin is, so if anyone turns up to claim our girl here, the Harrisburg police will contact the county sheriff out that way, and he or one of his deputies w
ill drop by the cabin and let you know you've got to come back."

  Carol kissed him goodbye. Jane kissed him, too; hers was a shy, chaste kiss, lightly planted on his cheek, and when she got into the car, she was blushing brightly.

  He stood in front of the house and watched them drive away until the red Volkswagen Rabbit was out of sight.

  After almost a week of blue skies, clouds had drifted in again. They were flat, slate gray. They matched Paul's mood.

  ***

  When the kitchen phone rang, Grace steeled herself for the sound of Leonard's voice. She sat down in the chair at the small built-in desk, reached up, put her hand on the receiver that hung on the wall, let it ring once more, then picked it up. To her relief, it was Ross Quincy, the managing editor of the Morning

  News, returning the call she'd made late yesterday afternoon.

  "You were inquiring about one of our reporters, Dr. Mitowski?"

  "Yes. Palmer Wainwright."

  Quincy was silent.

  "He does work for you, doesn't he?" Grace asked.

  "Uh.. Palmer Wainwnght has been an employee of the Morning News, yes."

  "I believe he nearly won a Pulitzer Prize."

  "Yes. But of course. . . that was quite a while back."

  "Oh?"

  "Well, if you know about the Pulitzer nomination, you must know it was for the series he did on the Bektermann murders."

  "Yes."

  "Which was back in 1943."

  "That long ago?"

  "Uh. . . Dr. Mitowski, exactly what is it you wanted to know about Palmer Wainwright?"

  "I'd like to talk with him," she said. "We've met, and we have some unfinished business that I'm rather anxious to take care of. It's a.. . personal matter."

  Quincy hesitated. Then: "Are you a long-lost relative?"

  "Of Mr. Wainwright's? Oh, no."

  "A long-lost friend?"

  "No. Not that either."

  "Well, then, I guess I don't have to be delicate about this. Dr. Mitowski, I'm afraid that Palmer Wainwright is dead."

  "Dead!" she said, astounded.

  "Well, surely you realized there was that possibility. He was never a well man, downright sickly. And you've obviously been out of touch with him for a long time."

  "Not all that long," she said.

  "Must be at least thirty-five years," Quincy said. "He died back in 1946."

  The air at Grace's back seemed suddenly colder than it had been an instant ago, as if a dead man had expelled his icy breath against the nape of her neck.

  "Thirty-one years," she said numbly. "You must be wrong."

  "Not a chance. I was just a green kid back then, a copyboy. Palmer Wainwright was one of my heroes. I took it pretty hard when he went."

  "Are we talking about the same man?" Grace asked. "He was quite thin, with sharp features, pale brown eyes, and a rather sallow complexion. His voice was several notes deeper than you'd expect from just looking at him."

  "That was Palmer, all right."

  "About fifty-five?"