Dean Koontz - The Mask

“Well?”

He looked up at her.

“What have you got?” she asked.

Numb, he shifted his eyes to the girl.

She was hunched over the table, as eager as Carol to hear his response, anxious to see if the macabre pattern would continue.

Paul lowered his eyes to the row of letters on the wooden rack. The word was still there. Impossible. But it was there anyway, possible or not.

“Paul?”

He moved so quickly and unexpectedly that Carol and Jane jumped. He scooped up the letters on his rack and nearly flung them back into the lid of the box. He swept the five offensive words off the board before anyone could protest, and he returned those nineteen tiles to the box with all the others.

“Paul, for heaven’s sake!”

“We’ll start a new game,” he said. “Maybe those words didn’t bother you, but they bothered me. I’m here to relax. If I want to hear about blood and death and killing, I can switch on the news.”

Carol said, “What word did you have?”

“I don’t know,” he lied. “I didn’t work with the letters to see. Come on. Let’s start all over.”

“You did have a word,” she said.

“No.”

“It looked to me like you did,” Jane said.

“Open up,” Carol said.

“All right, all right. I had a word. It was obscene. Not something a gentleman like me would use in a refined game of Scrabble, with ladies present.”

Jane’s eyes sparkled mischievously. “Really? Tell us. Don’t be stuffy.”

“Stuffy? Have you no manners, young lady?”

“None!”

“Have you no modesty?”

“Nope.”

“Are you just a common broad?”

“Common,” she said, nodding rapidly. “Common to the core. So tell us what word you had.”

“Shame, shame, shame,” he said. Gradually, he cajoled them into dropping their inquiry. They started a new game. This time all the words were ordinary, and they did not come in any unsettling, related order.

Later, in bed, he made love to Carol. He wasn’t particularly horny. He just wanted to be as close to her as he could get.

Afterwards, when the murmured love talk finally faded into a companionable silence, she said, “What was your word?”

“Hmmmm?” he said, pretending not to know what she meant.

“Your obscene word in the Scrabble game. Don’t try to tell me you’ve forgotten what it was.”

“Nothing important.”

She laughed. “After everything we just did in this bed, surely you don’t think I need to be sheltered!”

“I didn’t have an obscene word.” Which was the truth. “I didn’t really have any word at all.” Which was a lie. “It’s just that.. I thought those first five words on the board were bad for Jane.”

“Bad for her?”

“Yes. I mean, you told me it’s quite possible she lost one or both of her parents in a fire. She might be on the brink of learning about or remembering a terrible tragedy in her recent past. Tonight she just needed to relax, to laugh a bit. How could the game have been fun for her if the words on the board started to remind her that her parents might be dead?”

Carol turned on her side, raised herself up a bit, leaned over him, her bare breasts grazing his chest, and stared into his eyes. “is that really the only reason you were so upset?”

“Don’t you think I was right? Did I overreact?”

“Maybe you did. Maybe you didn’t. It was Creepy.” She kissed his nose. “You know why I love you so much?”

“Because I’m such a great lover?”

“You are, but that’s not why I love you.” “Because I have tight buns?”

“Not that.”

“Because I keep my fingernails so neat and clean?”

“Not that.”

“I give up.”

“You’re so damned sensitive, so caring about other people. How typical of my Paul to worry about the Scrabble game being fun for Jane. That’s why I love you.”

“I thought it was my hazel eyes.”

“Nah.”

“My classic profile.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Or the way my third toe on my left foot lays half under the second toe.”

“Oh, I’d forgotten about that. Hmmmmmmmm. You’re right. That’s why I love you. Not because you’re sensitive. It’s your toes that drive me wild.”

Their teasing led to cuddling, and the cuddling led to kissing, and the kissing led to passion again. She reached her peak only a few seconds before he spurted deep within her, and when they finally parted for the night, he felt pleasantly wrung out.

Nevertheless, she was asleep before he was. He stared at the dark ceiling of the dark bedroom and thought about the Scrabble game.

BLADE, BLOOD, DEATH, TOMB, KILL…

He thought about the word he had hidden from Carol and Jane, the word that had compelled him to end the game and start another. After adding EATH to the D in BLOOD, he’d been left with just three letter tiles on his rack: X, U, and C. The X and the

U had played no part in what was to follow. But when he had drawn four new letters, they had gone disconcertingly well with the C. First he’d picked up an A, then an R. And he had known what was going to happen. He hadn’t wanted to continue; he’d considered throwing all the tiles back into the box at that moment, for he dreaded seeing the word that he knew the last two letters would spell. But he hadn’t ended it there. He had been too curious to stop when he should have stopped. He had drawn a third tile, which had been an 0, and then a fourth, L.

C…A..R…O…L…

BLADE, BLOOD, DEATH, TOMB, KILL, CAROL.

Of course, even if he was able to fit it in, he couldn’t put CAROL on the board, for it was a proper name, and the rules didn’t allow the use of proper names. But that was a moot point. The important thing was that her name had been spelled out so neatly, so boldly on his rack of letters that it was uncanny. He had drawn the letters in their proper order, for God’s sake! What were the odds against that?

It seemed to be an omen. A warning that something was going to happen to Carol. Just as Grace Mitowski’s two nightmares had turned out to be prophetic.

He thought about the other strange events that had transpired recently: the unnaturally violent lightning strikes at Alfred O’Brian’s office; the hammering sound that had shaken the house; the intruder on the rear lawn during the thunderstorm. He sensed that all of it was tied together. But for Christ’s sake, how?

BLADE, BLOOD.

DEATH, TOMB.

KILL, CAROL.

If the series of words on the Scrabble tiles had constituted a prophetic warning, what was he supposed to do about it? The omen, if it was an omen, was too vague to have any value. There was nothing specific to guard against. He couldn’t protect Carol until he knew from which direction the danger was coming. A car wreck? A plane crash. A mugger? Cancer? It could be anything. He could see nothing to be gained by telling Carol that her name had turned up on his rack of Scrabble tiles; there was nothing she could do, either, nothing except worry about it.

He didn’t want to worry her.

Instead, lying in the darkness, feeling icy even under the covers, he worried for her.

At two o’clock in the morning, Grace was still reading in the study. There wasn’t any point in going to bed for at least another hour or two. The events of the last week had turned her into an insomniac.

The day just past had been relatively uneventful.

Aristophanes was still behaving oddly — hiding from her, sneaking about, watching her when he thought she didn’t know he was there — but he hadn’t torn up any more pillows or furniture, and he had used his litter box as he was supposed to do, which were encouraging signs. She hadn’t received any more telephone calls from the man who had pretended to be Leonard, and for that she was grateful. Yes, it had been pretty much an ordinary day.