The Mask Read online

  their intent was not to startle but to torment.

  Apparently, the defiant stance she had taken in the doorway had discouraged them. Very likely, they were on their way to another house, seeking a more excitable victim.

  She snapped the lock into place.

  What kind of parents would allow their children to be out playing in an electrical storm like this?

  Shaking her head in dismay at the irresponsibility of some parents, Grace headed back the hail, and with each step she half expected the hammering to start again. But it didn't.

  She had planned to have a light, nutritious dinner of steamed vegetables covered with Cheddar cheese, accompanied by a slice or two of home-baked cornbread, but she wasn't hungry yet. She decided to watch the ABC evening news before preparing dinner-although she knew that, with the world in the state it was, the news might put her off her dinner altogether.

  In the study, before she had a chance to turn on the television set and hear the latest atrocity stories, she found a mess on the seat of her big armchair. For a moment she could do nothing but stare at the ruin in disbelief: hundreds of feathers; shreds of cloth; colorful, unraveled threads that had once constituted a needlework pattern, but which now lay in a bright, meaningless tangle amidst drifts of goosedown. A couple of years ago, Carol Tracy had given her a set of three small, exceedingly lovely, handmade needlework throw pillows. It was one of those gifts that had been clawed to pieces and left on the armchair.

  Aristophanes.

  Ari hadn't ripped up anything important since he was a kitten. An act as destructive as this was quite out of character for him, but he was surely the culprit. There was not really another suspect to be seriously considered.

  "Ari! Where are you hiding, you sneaky Siamese?"

  She went to the kitchen.

  Aristophanes was standing at the yellow bowl, eating his Meow Mix. He glanced up as she entered the room.

  "You fur-footed menace," she said. "What in the world has gotten into you today?"

  Aristophanes blinked, sneezed, rubbed his muzzle with one paw, and returned to his dinner with lofty, catlike indifference to her exasperation and puzzlement.

  Later that night, in her darkened bedroom, Carol Tracy stared at the adumbral ceiling and listened to her husband's soft, steady breathing. He had been asleep for only a few minutes.

  The night was quiet. The rain had stopped, and the sky was no longer shaken by thunder. Occasionally, wind brushed across the shingled roof and sighed wearily at the windows, but the fury had gone out of it.

  Carol teetered pleasantly on the edge of sleep. She was a bit lightheaded from the champagne she had been slowly sipping throughout the evening, and she felt as if she were floating in warm water, with gentle waves lapping at her sides.

  She thought dreamily about the child they would adopt, tried to envision its appearance. A gallery of sweet young faces filled her imagination. If it was an infant, rather than a three- or four-year-old, they would name it themselves: Jason, if a boy; Julia, if a girl. Carol rocked herself on the thin line between wakefulness and dreams by rolling those two names back and forth in her mind: Jason, Julia, Jason, Julia, Jason...

  Falling off the edge, dropping into a well of sleep, she had the ugly, unwelcome thought she had resisted so strenuously earlier in the day: Something's trying to stop us from adopting a baby.

  Then she was in a strange place where there was not much light, where something hissed and murmured sullenly just out of sight, where the purple-amber shadows had substance and crowded close with menacing intent. In that unknown place, the nightmare unrolled with the frantic, nerve-jarring rhythm of player-piano music.

  At first she was running in utter lightlessness, and then she was suddenly running from one room to another in a large house, weaving through a forest of furniture, knocking over a floor lamp, banging one hip against the sharp corner of a credenza, stumbling and nearly falling over the loose edge of an oriental carpet. She plunged through an archway, into a long hall, and turned and looked back into the room from which she had come, but the room wasn't there any longer. The house existed only in front of her; behind, there was perfect, featureless blackness.

  Blackness. . . and then a glimmer of something. A glint. A splinter of light. A silvery, moving object. The thing swung from side to side, vanishing into darkness, reappearing with a gleam a second later, vanishing again, back and forth, back and forth, rather like a pendulum, never visible long enough to be identified. Although she couldn't quite see what the silvery thing was, she could tell that it was moving toward her, and she knew she must get away from it or die. She ran along the hail to the foot of the stairs, climbed quickly to the second floor. She glanced back and down, but the stairs were not there any more. Just an inky pit. And then the brief flash of something swinging back and forth in that pit. . . again. . . again like a ticking metronome. She rushed into the bedroom, slammed the door, grabbed a chair with the intention of bracing it under the knob-and discovered that, while her back was turned, the door had disappeared, as had the wail in which it had been set.

  Where the wall had been, there was subterranean gloom. And a silvery flicker. Very close now. Closer still. She screamed but made no sound, and the mysteriously gleaming object arced over her head and- (Thunk!)

  -This is more than just a dream, she thought desperately. Much more than that. This is a memory, a prophecy, a warning. This is a- (Thunk!)

  -She was running in another house that was altogether different from the first. This place was smaller, the furnishings less grand. She did not know where she was, yet she knew she had been here before. The house was familiar, just as the first place had been. She hurried through a doorway, into a kitchen.

  Two bloody, severed heads were on the kitchen table. One of them was a man's head, and the other was a woman's. She recognized them, felt that she knew them well, but was unable to think of their names.

  The four dead eyes were wide but sightless; the two mouths gaped, the swollen tongues protruding over the purple lips. As Carol stood transfixed by that grisly sight, the dead eyes rolled in their sockets and focused on her. The cold lips twisted into icy smiles. Carol turned, intending to flee, but there was only a void behind her and a glint of light off the hard surface of something silvery and then- (Thunk!)

  -She was running through a mountain meadow in reddish, late-afternoon light. The grass was knee-high, and the trees loomed ahead of her. When she looked over her shoulder, the meadow was no longer back there. Only blackness, as before. And the rhythmically swinging, shimmering, steadily approaching thing to which she was unable to fix a name. Gasping, her heart racing, she ran faster, reached the trees, glanced back once more, saw that she had not run nearly fast enough to escape, cried out and- (Thunk!)

  For a long time the nightmare shifted from one of those three dreamscapes to the other-from the first house to the meadow to the second house to the meadow to the first house again-until at last she woke with an unvoiced scream caught in her throat.

  She sat straight up, shuddering. She was cold and yet slick with sweat; she slept in just a T-shirt and panties, and both garments clung to her skin, unpleasantly sticky. The frightening sound from the nightmare continued to echo in her mind-thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk-and she realized that her subconscious had borrowed. that noise from reality, from the wind-loosened shutter that had startled her and Paul earlier.

  Gradually, the pounding noise faded and blended with the thumping of her heart.

  She drew back the covers and swung her bare legs out of bed. She sat on the edge of the mattress, hugging herself.

  Dawn had come. Gray light seeped in around the drapes; it was too dim to reveal the details of the furniture, but it was just bright enough to deepen the shadows and distort the shapes of everything, so that the room seemed like an alien place.

  The rain had stopped a couple of hours before she'd gone to bed, but the storm had returned while she'd been sleeping. Rain pattered on the
roof and gurgled through the gutters and the downspouts. Low thunder rumbled like a distant cannonade.

  Paul was still asleep, snoring softly.

  Carol knew she wouldn't be able to get back to sleep. Like it or not, rested or not, she was up for the day.

  Without turning on a light, she went into the master bathroom. In the weak glow of dawn, she stripped out of her damp T-shirt and panties. While soaping herself in the shower, she thought about the nightmare, which had been considerably more vivid than any dream she'd ever had before.

  That strange, jarring sound-thunk, :hunk-had been the most frightening thing in the dream, and the memory of it still nagged her. It wasn't just an ordinary hammering noise; there was an odd echo to it, a hardness and sharpness she couldn't quite define. She decided it was not only a case of her subconscious mind borrowing the noise the shutter had made earlier. The terrifying sound in the dream was caused by something considerably more disturbing than the mere banging of an unmoored shutter. Furthermore, she was sure she had heard precisely that sound on another occasion, too. Not in the nightmare. In real life. In another place. . . a long time ago...

  As she let the hot water stream over her, sluicing away the soap, she tried to recall where and when she had heard exactly that same unsettling sound, for it suddenly seemed important for her to identify it. Without understanding why, she felt vaguely threatened as long as she could not recall the source of the sound. But remembrance hung tantalizingly beyond the limits of her reach, like the title of a hauntingly familiar but unnamable piece of music.

  4

  AT 8:45, after breakfast, Carol left for work, and Paul went upstairs to the rear bedroom that he had converted into an office. He had created a Spartan atmosphere in which to write without distraction. The off-white walls were bare, unadorned by even a single painting. The room contained only an inexpensive desk, a typist's chair, an electric typewriter, a jar bristling with pens and pencils, a deep letter tray that now contained nearly two hundred manuscript pages of the novel he had started at the beginning of his sabbatical, a telephone, a three-shelf bookcase filled with reference works, a bottled-water dispenser in one corner, and a small table upon which stood a Mr. Coffee machine.

  This morning, as usual, he prepared a pot of coffee first thing. Just as he pressed the switch labeled BREWER and poured water into the top of the Mr.

  Coffee, the telephone rang. He sat on the edge of the desk, picked up the receiver. "Hello."

  "Paul? Grace Mitowski."

  "Good morning, love. How are you?"

  "Well, these old bones don't like rainy weather, but otherwise I'm coping."

  Paul smiled. "Listen, I know you can still run circles around me any time."

  "Nonsense. You're a compulsive worker with a guilt complex about leisure. Not even a nuclear reactor has your energy."

  He laughed. "Don't psychoanalyze me, Grace. I get enough of that from my wife."

  "Speaking of whom. .

  "Sorry, but you just missed her. You ought to be able to catch her at the office in half an hour."

  Grace hesitated.

  Hot coffee began to drizzle into the Pyrex pot, and the aroma of it swiftly filled the room.

  Sensing tension in Grace's hesitation, Paul said, "What's wrong?"

  "Well. . ." She cleared her throat nervously. "Paul, how is she? She's not ill or anything?"

  "Carol? Oh, no. Of course not."

  "You're sure? I mean, you know that girl's like a daughter to me. if anything was wrong, I'd want to know."

  "She's fine. Really. In fact she had a physical exam last week. The adoption agency required it. Both of us passed with flying colors."

  Grace was silent again.

  Frowning, Paul said, "Why are you worried all of a sudden?"

  "Well. . . you'll think old Gracie is losing her marbles, but I've had two disturbing dreams, one during a nap yesterday, the other last night, and Carol was in both. I seldom dream, so when I have two nightmares and wake up both times feeling I've got to warn Carol. .

  "Warn her about what?"

  "I don't know. All I remember about the dreams is that Carol was in them. I woke up thinking: it's coming. I've got to warn Carol that it's coming. I know that sounds silly. And don't ask me what 'it' might be. I can't remember. But I feel Carol's in danger. Now Lord knows, I don't believe in dream prophecies and garbage like that. I think I don't believe in them-yet here I am calling you about this."

  The coffee was ready. Paul leaned over, turned off the brewer. "The strange thing is-Carol and I were nearly hurt in a freak accident yesterday." He told her about the damage at O'Brian's office.

  "Good God," she said, "I saw that lightning when I woke up from my nap, but it never occurred to me that you and Carol.. . that the lightning might be the very thing I was. . . the very thing my dream oh, hell! I'm afraid to say it because I might sound like a superstitious old fool, but here goes anyway:

  Was there actually something prophetic about that dream? Did I foresee the lightning strike a few minutes before it happened?"

  "If nothing else," Paul said uneasily, "it's at least a remarkable coincidence."

  They were silent for a moment, wondering, and then she said, "Listen, Paul, I don't recall that we've ever discussed this subject much before, but tell me- do you believe in dream prophecies, clairvoyance, things of that nature?"

  "I don't believe, and I don't disbelieve. I've never really made up my mind."

  "I've always been so smug about it. Always considered it a pack of lies, delusions, or just plain nonsense. But after this-"

  "You're reconsidering."

  "Let's just say a tiny doubt has cropped up. And now I'm more worried about Carol than I was when I called you."

  "Why? I told you she wasn't even scratched."

  "She escaped once," Grace said, "but I had two dreams, and one of them came to me hours after the lightning. So maybe the 'it' is something else. I mean, if the first dream had some truth in it, then maybe the second does, too. God, isn't this crazy? If you start believing in just a little bit of this nonsense, you get carried away with it real fast. But I can't help it. I'm still concerned about her."

  "Even if your first dream was prophetic," Paul said, "the second one was probably just a repeat of it, an echo, not a whole new dream."