Death Mask

“What? Couldn’t quite hear you, darling, what with all these squealing piglets in here.”

“Please don’t hurt me. I only came here to choose my wedding band.”

The boy in the Cincinnati Reds cap was trying to edge his way round behind the red-faced man, but the red- faced man quickly turned and jabbed at him with one of his knives. “Going someplace, kid? Weren’t thinking of jumping me, were you, by any chance?”

“No! No. We just want to get out of here, sir! We don’t want to die!”

“Nobody ever does, kid. Nobody ever does. But if you’re brought to life, no matter how, that’s the only destiny that’s open to you, in the end. No wonder folks rail at God, for their existence.”

“Please don’t hurt me,” said Dawn. Tears were running down her cheeks, streaked with black mascara. “I promise I won’t give evidence against you. I promise. I’ll say that it was all Marshall’s fault. He provoked you. He attacked you. He was like that, always angry. Always setting on people.”

The red-faced man appeared to think for a moment, although his slitted eyes gave nothing away.

“How old are you?” he asked Dawn. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the whimpering, weeping teenagers.

“Eighteen and a half,” said Dawn. She managed a sloping, hopeful smile, as if the red-faced man would let her live if he realized how young she was.

“Eighteen and a half,” the red-faced man repeated. Then he said, “Freak,” and stabbed her in the chest with both knives. Her implants burst, and the right-hand knife penetrated her heart.

She stared at him for a moment as if she couldn’t understand what had happened to her. Then he wrenched out both knives and let her drop to the floor.

Ned Jennings was walking along Seventh Street taking photographs when he looked up and noticed the red glass elevator.

Ned was an art student from Xavier University, curly haired, with thick-rimmed eyeglasses and a fawn corduroy coat. He was compiling a photographic study of Cincinnati’s art-deco architecture. He had already photographed the Union Terminal and the Lazarus Building and several office buildings, and he was trying to make up his mind if he should include pictures of the Four Days Mall, since the architects had deliberately embellished the frontage with art-deco-style brickwork as a tribute to Cincinnati’s architectural glory days.

He looked up and saw that one of the glass elevators that ran up and down the exterior of Four Days Mall was stopped between floors. Not only that, all of its windows were streaked with red, as if somebody inside it were furiously painting them.

He was about to carry on walking when the palms of two white hands appeared through the paint, pressed hard against the glass. Then half of a face appeared, too. A young girl, it looked like, and although Ned couldn’t hear, her mouth was wide open as if she were screaming. She was only visible for two or three seconds, then she disappeared, leaving two smeary handprints and a distorted impression of her right cheek.

Ned hesitated. He couldn’t work out what he had actually seen. Vandals? Some kind of promotional stunt? But who would vandalize a glass elevator in broad daylight? And if it was a promotional stunt, what was it meant to promote?

If he hadn’t seen that girl’s hands and face, he would have walked on. But he entered the mall and approached two security guards who were standing by the Orleans fountain, chatting to three young women.

“I think something weird is happening in one of your elevators.”

One of the security guards cupped his hand to his ear. “You think what?” The mall was echoing with piped music and the footsteps of hundreds of shoppers and the clattering of water in the fountain.

“It looks like somebody’s painting the windows with red paint. And I think there’s a girl trapped inside there who’s in some kind of trouble.”

“Red paint? What do you mean, red paint?”

“Well, I don’t know. It looks like red paint.”

“Okay. Which elevator?”

The security guards walked over to the elevator bank with Ned following close behind them. A small knot of shoppers were gathered outside the right-hand elevator, and as the security guards approached, an elderly man in Bermuda shorts said, “Out of order. Looks like it’s stuck between floors.”

One of the security guards went up to the elevator doors and pressed the button. There was a juddering noise, but nothing happened.

“Better call Wally,” he told his colleague.

“Maybe you should phone the police,” Ned suggested. “I couldn’t exactly see what was happening in there, but this girl looked really upset.”

“George, why don’t you go outside and take a look?” Ned said, “At first I thought it might be some kind of advertising display.”

“Unh-unh. Nobody told me about no advertising display, and if nobody told me about no advertising display, then there ain’t no advertising display.”

One of the security guards walked out into the street, but as he did so, the elevator’s indicator light suddenly blinked three and two and then one.

“George! It’s okay! It’s working now!”

They waited for the doors to open, but after a short pause the elevator continued down to P-1, which was the first parking level. The security guard pushed the button again, however, and the indicator showed it coming back up again.

There was another pause, longer this time, but then the elevator doors opened. Inside, it glowed a dull crimson, like a small hexagonal chapel with red stained-glass windows.

The security guard stepped forward, and then he stopped and said, “Holy Mother of God.” The floor of the elevator car was heaped with bodies. Arms and legs all tangled together, so that it was almost impossible to tell how many people had been killed, except for their faces, which were pale and serious, like medieval saints.

CHAPTER NINETEEN Behind the Mirror

A little after 11:00 A.M., a heavy bank of charcoal gray clouds passed over Cincinnati from the southwest, very low, and a warm rain started to fall.

“At least it keeps the bugs from flying,” said Molly, as they drove along I-71 toward the Avondale turnoff. All the same, when she turned on the wipers, there were enough splattered cicadas on the windshield to smear it with two semicircles of brown and yellow viscera.

Sissy said, “I wish I could shake off this feeling.”

“What feeling?”

“I don’t know. It’s not what you’d call a premonition. It’s more like ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’ — as if there’s something out of place, and it’s right in front of my nose, but I can’t see it for looking.”

Molly was wearing a black silk headscarf tied around her head pirate fashion, with small silver coins dangling from it. Sissy thought that she looked more like the young Mia Farrow than ever. Sissy herself had dressed in a long-sleeved crimson dress with large red chrysanthemums all over it. She wore long dangly earrings, which Frank had always called her “chandeliers.”

Molly said, “Don’t tell me. You read the cards again before we came out?”

“I was just wanted an update.”

“Okay. And?”

“They’re still saying the same. The warning, the game of hide-and-go-seek. And the blood card, too.”

“No new clues?”

Sissy shook her head. “I’ve never known the cards be so unhelpful. It’s like somebody saying to you,