Death Mask

When they reached home, they discovered that the backyard, too, was teeming with cicadas. Molly picked up an old squash racquet and swung it from side to side, swatting them out of their way. Mr. Boots followed her, jumping up and barking.

The roses were still nodding in the sunlight, even though scores of cicadas were crawling all over the flowerpot. Sissy lit up a Marlboro and stood looking at them, blowing smoke out of her nostrils.

“I still think they’re a miracle,” she said.

“Yes,” Molly agreed. “But that doesn’t make them any less scary. It’s a pretty fine line between miracle and nightmare, don’t you think?”

In one sense these roses are real, Sissy thought. Their thorns had pricked her thumb and drawn real red blood, just as Red Mask’s knives had cut real people’s flesh open. Yet they weren’t real at all. They couldn’t be. They had been created out of nothing but pencils and paint.

Maybe they were like ghosts, or the spirits of dead people appearing at a seance. Maybe they were only visiting this reality. But ghosts could be exorcized and the spirits of dead people could be sent back to the world of shadows. Maybe these roses could be sent back to the two-dimensional world of paper, where they truly belonged.

And if the roses could be sent back, maybe the two living drawings of Red Mask could be sent back, too.

Sissy was almost certain now that this was what the DeVane cards had been trying to tell her. Their predictions had been terrifying and strange, but if she and Molly could discover the secret of the roses, maybe they could change the future. Maybe there didn’t have to be any more killing. Maybe the two Red Masks who had committed this morning’s murders could be returned to the sketch pad on which they had been created, and their likenesses torn out and burned, and their ashes scattered forever.

Molly said, “It’s hot. I’m just going inside to change. How about a glass of wine?”

“Why not? It might lubricate the old psychic mojo a little.”

Sissy sat down under the vine trellis. Trevor had cut the roses with his pocketknife, but somehow they had managed to reappear here in the flowerpot. He had cut them, but they were only images, after all, not real flowers at all, and images belonged where their creator had imagined them, just as spirits belonged in the world beyond.

Molly had created them, so Molly was the only one who could make them vanish.

Mr. Boots made one of those mewling noises in the back of his throat. He was hot and tired, and the cicadas were beginning to annoy him. Sissy ruffled his ears and said, “Never mind, Mister. They’ll soon be gone.”

Molly came back out, wearing a tight pink T-shirt and white shorts and carrying two large glasses of chilled Zinfandel. “So, have you managed to break the code yet?”

“Not really. But I’m beginning to think that you have to cut the roses. You, personally, because you painted them. And I also think that when you cut them, you have to use the painting of a knife, rather than a real one.”

“The painting of a knife?”

“Trevor used a real knife, but real knives exist only in this reality — not ‘painting reality.’ He could imagine the roses being cut, and so they were, for as long as he kept his attention on them. But as soon as he turned his attention to something else, the illusion ended, and the roses returned here, to this flowerpot, just as you had first painted them.”

“Well, I’m not sure what the hell you’re talking about, but I’ll give it a try.”

“It’s simple. If an artist painted a picture of us sitting together in this yard, and then he stabbed the picture with a knife, neither of us would be hurt, would we, either in this reality or the painting’s reality? But if the artist took his paints and altered the picture so that you were stabbing me, and I was bleeding, then my image would be injured, wouldn’t it, even if the real me wasn’t?”

Molly shook her head. “Sometimes, Sissy, you leave me way, way behind. You know that?”

“No — it’s not difficult to understand. Think of the The Picture of Dorian Gray. The real Dorian Gray stayed young and handsome, didn’t he, while his portrait grew old and ugly? There are two different realities — real reality and painting reality. I know Dorian Gray is only a story, but Oscar Wilde is supposed to have borrowed it from a famous incident that happened in Paris in the eighteen hundreds. A cardinal had a secret passion for a prostitute, so he had her portrait painted, and then he blessed it. She stayed beautiful and unblemished for over thirty years, until she died. But when they found her portrait, hidden in her attic, it was supposed to have looked so hideous that men actually vomited when they looked at it.

“There are other stories, too, of real people getting lost inside paintings, and I don’t think they’re all hokum, either. If you go to the Whitney Museum in Stamford, in Connecticut, they have this huge painting of a family of colonists saying grace. I’ve seen it for myself. It was painted in 1785, but there’s a man sitting at the head of the table wearing a nineteen-forties suit and a wristwatch. They’ve had dozens of experts testing that painting, but there’s no question about it. The man with the wristwatch was painted at the same time as everybody else in the picture.”

“Ok-a-y,” said Molly, although she still didn’t sound convinced. “I guess that makes some cockeyed kind of sense. I’ll see if I can paint a knife.”

They went back inside the house. Molly took one of her steak knives from the wooden block on the kitchen counter, and then she went through to her studio and pinned a clean sheet of art paper to her drawing board. Sissy stood beside her as she deftly drew a pencil sketch of the steak knife and painted it with watercolors.

They stood and watched the painting for almost ten minutes, but even when it had dried, it refused to disappear.

“Maybe I’ve lost the magic touch,” said Molly. “Maybe it only works with living things, not inanimate objects.”

Sissy looked around the room. “What’s different?”

“Nothing’s different.”

“Those are the same paints you used before?”

“Same paints, same brushes. Same paper.”

“I don’t know what it is. Yes, I do. You’re not wearing your necklace.”

“No, I took it off when I changed.”

“Last time you were wearing your necklace. And you were wearing it when you drew those pictures of Red Mask, too. The cards showed you with a talisman, remember, something to make your drawings come to life. Put it on, and try painting that knife again.”

Molly went to her bedroom and came out with her necklace. It looked dull and cheap when she was carrying it — nothing but a jingling collection of glass beads and tarnished mascots — but when Sissy helped her to fasten it around her neck, it started to sparkle.

“I said it had power, didn’t I? And you’re definitely the person who makes it come to life.”

Molly sketched and painted the steak knife a second time. While she watched her, Sissy was strongly tempted to light another cigarette, but she didn’t want to smoke in the house, though Molly was relaxed about it. Trevor could smell cigarettes, even if she had smoked them days ago, just the way that Frank had been able to.

They waited. The air-conditioning rattled and the cicadas ceaselessly chirruped. Five minutes passed and the steak knife remained on the paper, without a hint of its fading.

“Maybe you’re right, and it doesn’t work with inanimate objects.”

“No — look!”

As the seventh minute passed, the steak knife’s handle gradually began to fade. After eight minutes, there was nothing left but the faint outline of the blade. After nine, that was gone, too, and the paper was blank.

Sissy touched the paper with her fingertips. She felt nothing at all, not even the inherent sharpness that a real knife would have left behind it. The paper was completely empty, in the same way that Red Mask was empty. No knife. Not even an absence of knife.

The two of them went back outside. The yard was teeming with cicadas, all glistening in the early-afternoon sun, but there was one distinctive shine that they both saw at once. It was the steak knife, lying on the table.

“You did it,” said Sissy.