Death Mask

“He’s only a drawing, hon,” said Trevor. “You shouldn’t let yourself get so upset.”

“I know. But while I was drawing him, I kept thinking, ‘Okay, that’s it, I’ve finished.’ But then I felt like I had to shade his eyebrows some more, and thicken his hair, and change the expression in his eyes. By the time I was finished, he looked so much younger — and, like, pleased with himself. And pleased with me, too.”

Sissy took hold of her hand. “Come on, sweetheart. It was really traumatic, what we saw today, all of those people dead. And in a way, when you were drawing him, it was like you were face-to-face with the man who murdered them, wasn’t it?”

“I guess so. Yes, it felt like that.”

Trevor put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “From now on, you stick to drawing fairies, okay?”

“Okay,” Molly smiled. Then she said, “Victoria — did you finish your homework?”

“Yes! It was cool. It was all about cicadas. I love cicadas.”

“I’m glad somebody does. They’re starting to fly already, and when the police officer was driving me home, they kept going splatter-splatter-splatter all over the windshield.”

Without taking a breath, Victoria said, “Cicadas live underground for seventeen years, feeding on the sap from tree roots. Then they tunnel their way out so that they can reproduce. They have yellow skins, which are very tough. The men cicadas make their mating calls by flexing their stomachs, and some of them are as loud as a hundred decibels.”

“What about the women cicadas?” asked Sissy.

“They never make any noise at all.”

“See?” said Trevor. “The perfect species.”

“After they mate, the men cicadas drop down dead.”

“I agree with you,” said Molly. “The perfect species.”

She turned to leave the kitchen, and it was then that she noticed the vase of roses on the hutch. She gave Sissy a quick, quizzical look and said, “Did you cut these roses?”

“Trevor did,” said Sissy, as calmly as she could. “Pretty, aren’t they?”

“Strange thing was,” said Trevor, “I never even noticed them growing.”

“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.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Strange Chorus

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 headscarf 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