Death Mask

people! They’re killing them!”

Trevor was rummaging through his pockets for his cell. “Ssh!” he told her. “Don’t you move! Don’t you make a sound!”

“But they’re killing them!” she protested. She tried to sit up, but Trevor pulled her back down again, under the coats.

“What are we going to do?” said Victoria. “Supposing they come looking for us?”

Trevor punched out 911. “Police? There’s another stabbing attack in progress. Right now, yes! The skywalk bridge over Race Street, between Saks and Tower Place Mall. Send somebody fast as you can!”

“May I have your name, sir?” asked the police operator.

Trevor snapped his cell phone shut, and then climbed up onto his hands and knees. “You ready to make a run for it?” he asked Victoria.

Victoria, half hidden under a pink flowery coat, gave him a nod.

“Okay, then, let’s make a run for it.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX The Summoning

Molly gave Victoria half a Versed tablet to calm her down, and put her to bed. Trevor chose a double Jack Daniel’s instead of a sedative, and Sissy joined him.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he said, as he hunched in his armchair in the living room. “It was like a horror movie. There was so much — blood.”

They had already seen on the news that seventeen men, women, and children had been fatally injured on the Race Street skywalk. The attack had lasted a little less than three and a half minutes, but between them, the victims had been stabbed three hundred and twenty-four times.

The two men who had perpetrated the attacks fitted the descriptions of Red Mask — or at least two out of the three Red Masks. Witnesses at both ends of the bridge had seen them rushing toward the skywalk before the attack took place, but nobody had seen how or where they had gone afterward.

“We are urgently appealing to anybody who might have seen these men leaving the scene of the stabbings,” said Lieutenant Kenneth Moynihan of the homicide unit on the news. “So far, we have no idea how they managed to make their escape without a single person noticing them. We don’t know if they went through the mall or out through one of the department stores, or made their way along the skywalk. They could have had a getaway vehicle parked in the Fountain Square Garage, but none of the attendants there saw anybody who matches their description.”

Trevor switched the sound off. “Do you have any idea?” he asked Sissy.

“I do. But do you really want me to tell you?”

“Momma, for better or for worse, I saw those two Red Masks today. I saw them with my own eyes, and I saw what they can do. My God, if I hadn’t had a run-in with the girl in the denim department, Victoria and I could easily have been on that skywalk, too.”

“Well, I thank whatever fates there are for that.”

“So? How do you think they got away?”

Sissy sipped her whiskey. “You saw those roses yesterday evening. One minute they were three-dimensional, and real. The next, they were only two-dimensional — nothing but drawings.”

“And what does that tell me?”

“Roses are roses. Roses don’t have intelligence, or choice. Roses can’t make decisions. But men can. I’m beginning to think that those two Red Masks have the ability to choose when they want to be real and when they want to be drawings. A man can be traced, but a drawing can hide anywhere — on a wall, on a sheet of paper — just waiting for the time when he wants to turn himself back into a man again.”

Trevor said, “I find it so goddamned hard to get my head around all of this. Surely there must be some other explanation.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“Maybe it’s some kind of a conjuring trick. You know, like Harry Houdini. He could make himself disappear, couldn’t he? And he wasn’t a drawing.”

Sissy laid a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all in the cards, Trevor. The cards show an image that comes to life. It’s just like those killings that happened this morning. The cards predicted them, but I didn’t understand what they were trying to say to me.”

She took out l’Avertissement and handed it to him. “Look here. A bridge, with a man warning people not to walk across it. Red roses, entwined on the railings. but they’re not red roses at all, they’re hands, covered in blood. Seventeen of them, if you count. Adult hands, children’s hands. One for every person who was killed today.”

Trevor said, “That could be a coincidence.”

“It could be, yes. Except for the five magpies, which stand for the month of May, and for the two crosses on the hill. Diagonal crosses, two Xs. And what’s the date today? May twentieth. Roman numerals, XX for twenty. Not only that. look at the two men nailed to the crosses. They both have red hair and red faces.”

Trevor finished his whiskey and put down his glass.

“Do you want another?” Molly asked him.

“I’d like to, but I need a clear head for this.”

Molly said, “Whatever decision you make, honey, you know that I’ll respect it.”

“I know. But I don’t have a choice, do I? Not after seeing all those people butchered.”

“So you agree we should do it?” Sissy asked him.

“On one condition. That Dad really wants to help us. If it distresses him too much — or if anything else goes wrong — then we send him back to wherever he came from, and that’s an end to it. We leave him in peace.”

“Of course,” said Sissy.

Now that Trevor had actually agreed to them resurrecting Frank, she herself was less than sure that she wanted to go through with it. It had been one thing to fantasize about it, but to do it for real.

“I think I need a cigarette,” she said.

“Dad’s not going to like it when he finds out that you’re still smoking.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t need a cigarette.” She hesitated, and then she said, “Goddamn it. Yes, I do.”

She went out into the yard, where the cicadas were chirping more raucously than ever. She lit a cigarette and deeply inhaled.

It had been nearly twenty-five years since two young troopers had come to her door with their hats in their hands, telling her that Frank had been killed. She had said, softly, “Oh, dear God,” but she hadn’t cried. She hadn’t even cried at his funeral.

The first time she had sobbed, it had come upon her quite unexpectedly, when she was sitting with her friend in Aurora’s Cafe drinking coffee and they had played “Pretty Woman” on the jukebox. Frank had always sung it to her — not that Frank could sing in key. He had always found it difficult to pay her compliments, and so he let Roy Orbison do it for him.

She sang it now, under her breath. “Pretty woman. walking down the street. ”

Molly came out, carrying a leather-bound photo album. “I found plenty of reference,” she said. “That’s if you still want to go ahead with it.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t see the warning in the cards,” said Sissy. “The twentieth of May, at a quarter after ten, on a bridge. It was all there, if only I could have read it. I could have saved all of those people’s lives.”

“Sissy, you tell fortunes. You talk to dead people in mirrors. You’re the most amazing sensitive I’ve ever known. But you’re not infallible. Nobody is.”

Sissy turned around to face her. “I used to be. I used to be infallible. But — well — maybe Trevor’s right.