Death Mask

“That’s right,” said Molly. She lifted the phone off the wall and punched out the number of Anteater Animations.

“But an animator. And what did the cards show us? A puppeteer. Somebody who brings little figures to life.”

Molly said, “Busy,” and punched redial. “Still busy.”

“Why didn’t I make sure that the cards gave me more information?” said Sissy. “You don’t know how guilty I feel.”

“Sissy — there was no way you could have predicted exactly who was going to be killed, was there? Or exactly where? Or exactly when?”

“But there was! If I had only persisted, I probably could have found out that the attack was going to happen in the same place as yesterday’s murder, and what time of day it was going to happen. I turned up the blood card, didn’t I? So I knew that there was going to be more killing, and I knew that it was going to happen very soon. I could have warned the police, couldn’t I? I might have been able to save that young man’s life!”

“Sissy, for God’s sake, you can’t blame yourself.”

“But I can, Molly, and I do! I was blessed with the gift of foresight, and that makes me responsible for using it, and using it wisely, and to protect innocent people from evil, if I see evil coming their way.”

“All right. So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to read the cards again, and if they warn me that there’s going to be even more killing, I’m going to call that detective friend of yours.”

“Mike Kunzel? To be fair, Sissy, I very much doubt if Mike will believe you. You know how skeptical he is.”

“I don’t care if he believes me or not, so long as there’s a chance that I can prevent any more innocent people from being murdered.”

“Well, you do what you feel you have to do. Damn it, still busy. I wonder if I still have his home number.”

While Molly tried to get through to Klaus, Sissy went to her bedroom and came back with her cards. She cleared the table and wrapped their sandwiches in foil. Neither of them had any appetite now.

At last, Molly got through to Klaus’s girlfriend, Anita. She came off the phone looking relieved.

“It wasn’t Klaus. It was a young guy called Jimmy Moulton. That’s all she knows. Apparently this Jimmy was the first person to arrive this morning, so whoever killed him must have been hiding in the building all night, waiting for him.”

Sissy was laying out the cross of Lorraine. She turned over la Blanchisseuse, the Laundress, with her washing tub brimming with blood. Then she turned over l’Avertissement, the Warning. This card showed a party of finely dressed people approaching a wooden bridge — men, women, and children. A man with wild hair and tattered clothes was standing in front of the bridge with his hand raised, as if he were warning the party not to cross. The bridge’s handrails were entwined with what appeared to be red climbing roses, but when Sissy took off her eyeglasses and examined them more closely, she realized that they were severed human hands of varying sizes — some large, some very small — smothered in blood.

In the background, on a hill, stood two crosses in the shape of Xs, with two men nailed to them.

The last card was le Cache-cache, the Game of Hide-and-Go-Seek. A group of hunters were making their way through an oak forest, holding up lanterns. They had dogs, too. But the oaks in the forest all had distorted human faces, and their branches were upraised arms with spidery fingers. One of the oaks looked as if it were about to seize one of the unsuspecting hunters from behind, and many of the trees had human legs dangling from them, as if dozens of previous hunters had been hoisted upward and lynched.

Molly leaned over Sissy’s shoulder. “So you’re going to show these to Mike Kunzel, are you? And what are you going to tell him?”

“I’m going to tell him that the killer hasn’t stopped killing yet, not by a long way, according to these cards. In fact he’s going to kill more and more people every time. I’m also going to tell him that he and his men need to be very careful when they go looking for him. You see this Cache- cache card? This means that the hunters are going to become the hunted. They’re going to suffer a whole lot of casualties before they find Red Mask. That’s if they find him at all.”

“Well, you can try,” said Molly. “But like I say, Mike Kunzel is one of these people who won’t believe that a stove is red-hot until he’s sat on it to make sure.”

Sissy said, “There’s so much detail in these cards. times, dates. There’s a sundial in this picture pointing to quarter after ten o’clock. And there are five magpies sitting on that signpost. That means the fifth month, May.”

“Sissy — I believe that you can predict what’s going to happen. But what I’m trying to tell you is, it’s going to take so much more to convince Mike.”

“I’ll write down everything that I can, and then maybe you could take me to police headquarters.”

“Sissy — ”

“People are going to be killed, Molly! People are going to die! And I’m the only person who can stop it from happening! I have to try, goddammit!”

“Okay,” Molly agreed. “But take my advice, and try to make your predictions sound very straightforward. Don’t tell Mike that five magpies means May. And don’t mention any kind of magic.”

It took Sissy over an hour to study the cards in detail, noting every single nuance, such as distant castles with flocks of rooks around them, and two-headed cats, and peasants sleeping under hayricks. She couldn’t interpret all of them, though, and she began to feel that the cards were deliberately trying to frustrate her.

She sat on the tapestry window seat overlooking the yard. The cicada nymphs were beginning to molt, breaking out of their skins and stickily emerging with red eyes and black bodies and wings. Their discarded remains floated to the ground, so that the soil around the maple tree was littered with hundreds of papery shells.

Molly brought her a glass of wine. “How’s it going?”

Sissy held up her legal pad. On it, she had written, “Red Mask: Predicted Behavior Patterns,” and underlined it seven times.

“Is that all?”

“I can’t do it, Molly. Not logically. I know what the cards are telling me because I know what they’re telling me. But I can’t explain it to anybody else. Why do five magpies mean May? Because they do, that’s all. I can’t tell you why.”

Molly sat down beside her. “All right. But even if you can’t explain how you know what Red Mask is going to do next — what do you think he’s going to do?”

“He wants to kill dozens more people, I’m sure of it. He has the taste for it now. You see this card? You see this man in the background, stuffing himself with tripes? From what the cards are telling me, I’m kind of surprised that Red Mask only killed one person today. He enjoys stabbing people. He relishes the blood and the close physical contact and the power that it gives him over his victims. And for some reason he’s very vengeful, very self-righteous. He believes that he’s totally justified in committing all of these murders.

“The cards are telling me something else, too. Red Mask wants to be recognized. He wants to be notorious. He wants everybody in the city to be frightened of him. I think he’s going to contact the police or the media before too long and start making threats. Look here — this man shouting from the top of a tower.”

“And the roses? These roses are really gruesome, aren’t they? — these ones like bloodstained hands.”

Sissy took out a cigarette and lit it. “I’m not sure about the roses yet. But they show up in practically every card, don’t they? So they must be significant. I get the feeling that the cards are trying to tell me that I’m missing something really obvious, but I can’t for the life of me work out what it is.”