Death Mask (10 page)
"Really?" asked Molly. "I don't know how you could have missed them."
"Well, I never noticed them, either," said Victoria.
Molly lifted up the vase and gently touched the roses' petals. Sissy could tell that she was upset. These were a miracle, created out of pencil and ink, not just a table decoration.
Sissy looked at her wryly. Miracles are miracles, Molly. If we knew how they happened, they wouldn't be miracles. They would only be tricks.
That night, Sissy dreamed that she was driving across Iowa again, in her Uncle Henry's Hudson Hornet. The radio was playing that strange, lumpy, backward-sounding music, and outside the windows the landscape was revolving like a huge turntable.
"Uncle Henry."
But Uncle Henry didn't turn around. He just kept on driving, tapping his wedding band on the steering wheel in time to the music.
"I saw you yesterday… You were standing by the wall… I thought I recognized you but I didn't, not at all…"
The clouds were sepia, as if they were driving through an old photograph. Sissy could see a dark shadow on the eastern horizon-a shadow that rose higher and higher, like a swarm of locusts. Locusts, or cicadas.
"I was quite certain that I recognized your face…but when you turned your head around I saw nothing, only space…"
About a half mile up ahead, she saw a huge figure standing by the side of the road, silhouetted against the last pale wash of daylight. It must have been all of thirty feet tall. She knelt up on her seat and tapped Uncle Henry frantically on the shoulder.
"Uncle Henry. There's a giant. I'm frightened of giants."
Uncle Henry didn't answer.
"Uncle Henry! Please! Can't we go back?"
Insects started to patter against the windows, leaving brown and yellow splashes and broken wing segments that fluttered in the Hornet's slipstream.
"Uncle Henry!"
At last Uncle Henry turned his head around. But it wasn't Uncle Henry. It was Red Mask, with a triumphant shine in his eyes.
"No peace for the wicked, child! No mercy for the innocent, neither! What's done is done, and can't be undone!"
The insects pattered against the windows harder and harder, until they sounded like hail. "Uncle Henry" kept on driving, but he didn't turn back to see where he was going. He just kept grinning at Sissy as if he were daring her to try and stop him.
Sissy let out a piercing scream. She screamed louder and louder and higher and higher, but all "Uncle Henry" did was to roar back at her just as loud, until she was deafened. The song on the radio stopped, and the interior of the car was filled with screeching, high-pitched static.
She opened her eyes. She wasn't screaming anymore, and "Uncle Henry" was gone, but the static continued, on and on, interspersed with weird swooping sounds.
"My God," she said to herself. "The cicadas."
She climbed unsteadily out of bed and opened her blinds, lifting one hand to shield her eyes from the early-morning sunshine.
The yard was crowded with thousands of cicadas, all calling for their mates. Most of them were still clinging to the trees and the bushes, but scores of them were flying around, and some of them were pattering against her windows, as they had in her dream.
Molly came into her room, wearing a pink silk head-scarf and a pink nightshirt. "Got your wake-up call, then?" she smiled.
"I never realized they were going to be so goddamned loud. I don't know how you stand it."
"At least it happens only once every seventeen years. They have a joke in Cincinnati: two cicadas sitting in a bar, and one says to the other, 'Seventeen years wasted if we don't get lucky tonight.'"
Sissy said, "How about I make us some coffee? And maybe some eggs. We didn't eat anything yesterday, did we?"
"Sure, that would be terrific."
They went through to the kitchen. Mr. Boots was still asleep in his basket. The cicada chorus didn't seem to bother him at all. Outside, cicadas were clustered all around the window frames. Trevor had sealed up the ventilator above the cooker hob with a circle of cardboard and several layers of duct tape. He had also attached a cardboard flap to the bottom of the back door and duct-taped over the keyhole.
Molly opened the fridge. She took out a carton of cranberry-pomegranate juice and poured a glass for each of them. As she was about to drink it, she said, "What did you do with the roses?"
Sissy turned toward the hutch. The glass vase was still there, but all it contained were two drooping ferns. She shook her head and said, "I haven't touched them."
"Neither have I. Maybe Victoria took them. She's crazy about brides and weddings at the moment. I'll bet she wanted her Barbie to have a bouquet."
Sissy spooned coffee into the percolator. "You're still not going to tell Trevor where they came from?"
"I don't see what good it would do."
"I don't really see what harm it would do."
"Oh come on, Sissy. You know Trevor. He needs to be in control of things. That's why he doesn't like your fortune-telling cards. They're not logical, and he doesn't understand how they work. If I told him that I could create real flowers just by drawing them…it would make him so wary of me. He would feel like there was a part of me that he could never reach, and I don't want him to feel like that."
Sissy switched on the percolator. "I think I'll brave the bugs and go for a cigarette."
"Well, they're disgusting, and they're noisy, but they won't hurt you. Just don't let them get caught up in your hair."
"Don't! Maybe they'll do what Frank and Trevor never could, and persuade me to give up smoking."
Wrapped up in her green satin bathrobe, and wearing Trevor's Adidas running shoes in case she trod on any cicadas, Sissy went outside, with Mr. Boots following close behind. Here in the yard, the mating chorus was even harsher and even higher, and the swooping noise sounded even more weird, like a musical saw.
She flapped a few of the cicadas away with her hand, but one of them persisted in perching on her shoulder, prickling her with its tiny claws and staring at her with its scarlet, wide-apart eyes.
"My God, look at you," she said. "You must have been feeding on sap from the ugly tree."
She lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the cicada, and it whirred away, flying only an inch away from Mr. Boots's nose. Mr. Boots snapped at it, but only because it had surprised him. He had tried to eat a wasp once, and ever since then he had treated anything that buzzed or hopped or chirruped with the utmost caution.
The radio-static noise went on and on, and Sissy couldn't stop thinking about her dream. She very rarely had recurring dreams, and even when she did, it had been months or even years in between each dreaming. She had to assume that this was more than a dream, it was a warning, or an omen-either from her own subconscious or from somebody else's spirit. The giant standing by the road could be some kind of a symbol. But a symbol of what? And why did he seem so terrifying?
A flurry of cicadas flew up in front of her like the locusts in her dream. And it was then that she saw the flowerpots on which they had been feeding. The five roses were standing there, nodding in the morning sunshine along with the hollyhock and the Shasta daisy. They were all intact, as if Trevor had never cut them.
Sissy felt a tight shrinking sensation in her scalp. These roses couldn't be real roses, after all. They must be something else altogether. A mirage? A hallucination? She couldn't understand it.
"Molly!" she called. "Come out here! What the hell do you make of this?"
Molly stared at the roses for a long time. "I don't know. How could that happen?" She took hold of one of the stems and tugged at it. "It's firmly rooted, just like it was before."
Sissy looked around, frowning. "When you painted them, did you imagine them here-in this particular flowerpot?"
"Yes, I did. Even this first rose, the one I was painting for Fairy Fifi."
"Maybe they have to come back here, because this is the only place that they really exist."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Well, neither do I, to be frank. But let's try something. Let's cut them again and see if they come back here a second time."
Molly looked dubious. "Maybe we should just leave them alone. This whole thing is beginning to give me the willies."
"Molly-think of what the cards predicted. Violence, and bloodshed. And you could be involved in it somehow. The sculptor, the artist, the creator of likenesses-that's almost certainly you."
"Maybe Trevor was right. Maybe I shouldn't have done that Red Mask composite."
"I really don't know. But I still think that the roses are the key to all this. If we can understand how and why these flowers come to life, it may help us to keep you safe."
Mr. Boots was chasing after cicadas, jumping up and down at them as they scattered into the air, but being careful not to catch any in his mouth.
"Okay," said Molly. "I'll bring some scissors."
Sissy smoked while Molly cut the roses again. They took them back inside and arranged them in the vase in the same way that they had been arranged before. They had just put them back on the hutch when Trevor came in, his black hair tousled, yawning.
"First chance I get for a couple of hours' extra sleep, and what do I get? Ten thousand horny cicadas singing outside my window."
"Your mom's making eggs. Do you want some?"
"Coffee first. Black. I need to jump-start my heart."
Chrissie Wells climbed out of the back of the taxi and caught her purse on the door handle. As she struggled to disentangle it, she dropped her cell phone and the folder of papers that she was carrying under her arm. The morning breeze caught them and blew them across the sidewalk.
When she had managed to untwist her purse and pick up her cell phone, she frantically gathered up her scattered papers, bending over again and again like a dipping bird until she split the seam at the back of her red cotton skirt. The taxi driver waited for her with an expression on his face like St. Sebastian, martyred with a hundred arrows.
Chrissie fumbled in her purse, took out a twenty, and accidentally dropped a shower of loose coins onto the taxi's front seat. The taxi driver gave her a ten and said, "Don't worry about a tip, miss. I'll pick it up later, off the floor."
As usual, Chrissie was running late. She always seemed to be running late, no matter how early she set her alarm. She felt that she had been born out of sync with the rest of the planet-fated to miss every bus she wanted to catch and every appointment she was supposed to keep. She never arrived at concerts on time and had to wait in the foyer until the interval. She was always hurrying, always hot, always out of breath, and still she couldn't catch up.
She bustled up the steps of the Giley Building, but she was stopped in the entrance by two police officers.
"Morning, ma'am. Need some ID, if that's okay."
"ID?"
"Driver's license. Anything like that."
Chrissie opened her purse and dropped her file of papers again. One of the officers bent down and picked it up for her. She rooted through every compartment inside her purse and finally managed to pull out her Cincinnati public library card.
"Okay, that'll do it," said the officer. "You don't look much like a serial killer anyhow."
"You haven't found him yet? I didn't have time to catch the news this morning."
"No, ma'am. But we will. You can be damn sure of that."
Chrissie pushed her way through the revolving doors. All three elevators were working now, and the left-hand elevator still had its doors open. Chrissie called out, "Hold it, please! Hold it!" and click-clacked her way across the lobby. By the time she had reached the elevator, however, more than a dozen people had crowded into it, and there was no more room, especially for a size 14.
The occupants of the elevator stared at her balefully, as if to say, Don't even think about trying to squeeze your way in. Then the doors closed, and they were gone.
Chrissie pressed the button for another elevator. As she did so, she was joined by five more office workers, secretaries, and junior executives, two of them carrying cappuccinos and one of them holding a brown paper bag which smelled strongly of hot pastrami.
"I'm not too happy about this," said one of the cappuccino carriers.
"You're not too happy about what, for Christ's sake?" his friend gibed him.
"You know-" and the cappuccino carrier nodded toward the elevator doors and made a stabbing gesture in the air.
"Oh, come on," said his friend. "The cops went through this entire building with a fine-tooth comb. The guy's probably three states away by now."
To her horror, Chrissie saw her boss coming in through the revolving doors. Elaine Vickers, dark and sleek and black suited and highly unforgiving. By now, Chrissie was supposed to be up in the conference room with all of her paperwork prepared and the page proofs for next season's catalog all laid out. And herbal tea on the table, too, with Elaine's favorite wafer-thin almond biscuits.
She pushed the elevator button again and again. The elevator indicator read four, three, two, and then stopped.
Please, God, hurry, Chrissie prayed. She could see that Elaine had stopped to talk to two women in the middle of the lobby. If the elevator arrived now, Elaine might just miss it, and Chrissie could get to the conference room with seconds to spare.
The elevator doors opened. Inside, there were two technicians from the elevator company, with part of an electric motor on a trolley. They maneuvered it around slowly and awkwardly, while one of them held the doors open.
Please, God, hurry. Elaine had finished her conversation now and was walking toward the elevator bank with her usual fashion-runway prowl, one stiletto shoe in front of the other.
The technicians managed to trundle their trolley out of the elevator, and Chrissie immediately stepped on, followed by the other five office workers. Elaine was less than thirty feet away now. "Twenty-one, please," she told the man with the brown paper bag.
Elaine raised her hand, and the man with brown paper bag kept his finger on the "open doors" button. Chrissie stared at the back of his neck and thought, You are going to die for this. You are going to die for this and go to hell.
"Twenty-one, please," said Elaine, as she stepped inside. The doors closed, and the elevator began to rise. Chrissie stayed right at the back of the car, trying to keep herself concealed behind one of the cappuccino carriers. But when she turned sideways, she realized that Elaine could clearly see her in one of the mirrors.
Positive action. Don't show Elaine that you're intimidated. She excused herself and jostled her way around the cappuccino carrier.
"Good morning, Elaine."
Elaine's scarlet lips puckered up until they looked like a poisonous rosebud. One eyebrow arched.
"How was your traffic this morning?" Chrissie asked her, trying hard to sound nonchalant. "The I-75 bridge-what a nightmare. My taxi didn't move for over twenty minutes."
"I live in Mount Adams, if you remember," said Elaine. "I don't use bridges."
"Oh, so you do. Right next door to Vidal Sassoon. And Mrs. Vidal Sassoon."
"How long will it take you to get the presentation ready?" asked Elaine.
"Fifteen minutes, tops. It's shaping up so well. The cardigan range…I have three fabulous new colors to show you."
Elaine turned to stare at her directly. Her eyes were unblinking. Very quietly, so that nobody else in the elevator could hear her, she said, "This can't go on, Chrissie. You know that as well as I do."
"Elaine-"
"Every time you're late, Chrissie, every time you miss a meeting, that's an act of disrespect to everybody you work with. We respect you. Why don't you respect us?"
Chrissie's mouth opened and closed. "It's time," she said. "I don't know. No matter what I do, it refuses to behave itself."
"Time won't behave itself?" Elaine repeated.
"The clock jumps when I'm not looking. It's three-thirty. I look up five minutes later, and it's almost five. And I'm sure my watch goes faster than anybody else's."
Elaine was about to say something, when the elevator came to a stop and the doors slid open. The corridor outside looked dark and deserted.
"Fourteenth floor, anybody?" asked the man with the brown paper bag.
"Nineteenth, I want," said a tall black man.
"Nothing here, anyhow," said one of the cappuccino carriers, peering out. "This used to be Atlas Carriers, before they moved out."
The man with the brown paper bag pressed the button for nineteen. The doors closed again, and the elevator continued to rise. But this time it didn't stop at all.
"Hey, I said the nineteenth!" the black man protested.
"I pressed it for the nineteenth. It should have stopped."
The black man pushed his way forward and jabbed the button. No matter how hard he jabbed it, however, the elevator continued to rise smoothly upward-twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four-all the way up to the twenty-fifth floor, where it stopped. The doors, however, didn't open.
"This goddamned building," said one of the cappuccino carriers. "We should sue the managers, you know that? They must have broken every safety regulation in the book."
"Use the emergency phone," said Elaine.
The black man opened the hatch and took out the red receiver. He held it up to show her. The wire was cut.
One of the cappuccino carriers handed his cup to his friend and took out his cell phone. "These building managers…When I take them court, they're going to go bankrupt, I'm telling you. I'm going to sue them for everything. Criminal negligence, false imprisonment, you name it."
He prodded at his cell phone and held it to his ear. "No goddamned signal. Anybody else got a signal?"
They all took out their cell phones, but none of them showed any reception.
"Isn't that just great! We're stuck here until somebody realizes that we haven't shown up for work! And knowing my secretary, that will take till lunchtime!"
Elaine said, "Isn't there a way to force these doors open?"
"With what, exactly?"
"Well, let's bang on them and shout. Somebody has to hear us."
"Okay. Let's bang on them and shout."
The tall black man clenched his fists and hammered on the doors. "Help!" he bellowed. "Help! We're trapped in the elevator! Help!"
The rest of them joined in, although they were embarrassed by the different pitches in their voices.
"Christ," said the man with the brown bag. "We sound like a crateful of frightened chickens."
"Wait," said the black man, lifting up his hand. They waited, and listened, but there was no response. Only the moaning of the wind down the hoistway, and the sad, distracted singing of the elevator cables. A distant echo of elevator doors, opening and closing, and hum-mmmm.
"Okay-let's try it again."
He hammered on the doors with even more fury. "Help! We're trapped in the elevator! Help!"
They listened again, but still nobody answered.
"This is ridiculous!" snapped Elaine, but she sounded more frightened than angry.
At that moment, the elevator gave a violent jerk and dropped downward two or three feet, then stopped. All of them cried out in alarm, and one of the secretaries burst into tears. "Let me out! Let me out! I have to get out!"
"It's okay," the black man reassured her. "All elevators have emergency brakes. They can never drop all the way down."
"Well, that makes me feel a whole lot better-not," said one of the cappuccino carriers.
The elevator gave another jerk and dropped another two feet, and then another, and another. With each jerk, they all shouted out, in a terrible off-key chorus.
Chrissie had wanted to go to the bathroom even before she had arrived at the Giley Building, and now she wet herself. Only a little, but enough to make her feel even more terrified and out of control.
"We need to shout again and go on shouting," said Elaine.
The black man yelled out, "Get us out of here! Get us out of here!" and thumped on the doors with both fists, denting the metal.
The elevator dropped at least fifteen feet, and then stopped with a sickening thump, sending them all sprawling and splashing hot coffee all over them. Before they could manage to stand up, it dropped again, and stopped; and then again. They had no choice but to crouch on the floor on their hands and knees while the elevator took them down and down in a series of staccato jolts-sometimes six inches and sometimes as much as twenty feet. By the time they were down to the ninth floor, they had stopped shouting and moaning and crying for help. They simply knelt on the floor, grim-faced, each of them silently praying that the elevator would reach ground level without dropping too fast.
They passed eight-seven-six-five. Just past five, they dropped over thirty feet, all the way down to the third story, and when the elevator came bang! to a halt, Chrissie was flung against one of the junior executives and knocked her forehead against his teeth. Blood ran into her eyes, so that she could hardly see.
The elevator fell past three-two-one, but as it did so it slowed down to a shuddering crawl. When it reached basement level it was sinking so gradually that they hardly felt it come to a standstill.
"We've stopped," said the black man. "Thank God, we've stopped."
They clambered to their feet. One of the junior executives pressed the button for the doors to open, but they stayed firmly closed.
"Now we should shout," said the black man. "They must be able to hear us down here."
"Help!" shrilled out one of the secretaries. "Help, let us out of here!"
But then, quite unexpectedly, the doors slid open. There was a split-second hesitation, and then a figure in red rushed into the elevator with two butcher knives in his upraised hands, chopping and stabbing at them in a frenzy. They staggered back, screaming, tumbling over each other in confusion. But the figure kept on stabbing and hacking until blood was flying everywhere, like a dark red rainstorm.