Dean Koontz - The Mask

“No,” Carol said.

“No?”

“When you do get to the mountains, I want you to be able to put the book completely out of your mind. I want us to take long walks in the forest. I want us to go boating on the lake and do some fishing and read a couple of books and act like bums who never even heard the word ‘work.’ if you don’t finish that scene before you go, you’ll just brood about it during the entire vacation. You won’t have a moment's real peace, which means I won’t have a moment's peace, either. And don’t tell me I’m wrong. I know you better than I know myself, buster: You

stay here, write the end of that scene, and then join us on Sunday.”

She kissed him goodnight, fluffed her pillows, and settled down to sleep.

He lay in the dark, thinking about the words in yesterday’s Scrabble game.

BLADE

KILL

O

O

DEATH

O

M

B

And the one word he had refused to reveal:

CAROL…

He still didn’t think anything would be gained by telling her what the last of those six words had been. What could she do about it other than worry? Nothing. She could do nothing, and he could do nothing. Except wait and see. A threat — if one actually arose — could come from any of ten thousand or a hundred thousand sources. It could come anytime, anywhere. At home or in the mountains. One place was as safe — or as dangerous — as the other.

Anyway, maybe the appearance of those six words had been merely coincidence. An incredible but meaningless coincidence.

He stared into the darkness, trying hard to convince himself that there were no such things as spirit messages, omens, and clairvoyant prophecies. Only a week ago, he wouldn’t have needed convincing.

***

Blood.

Get it off, scrub it off, every sticky drop of it, wash it off, quickly, quickly, down the drain, every incriminating drop of it, off, before someone finds out, before someone sees and knows what’s been done, wash it off, off…

The girl woke in the bathroom, in a fluorescent glare. She had been sleepwalking again.

She was surprised to find that she was nude. Her knee socks, panties, and T-shirt were scattered on the floor around her.

She was standing in front of the sink, scrubbing herself with a wet washcloth. When she looked at her reflection in the mirror, she was briefly paralyzed by what she saw.

Her face was smeared with blood.

Her arms were spattered with blood.

Her sweetly uptilted, bare breasts glistened with blood.

And she knew instantly that it wasn’t her own. She had not been slashed or stabbed. She was the one who had done the slashing, the stabbing.

Oh God.

She stared at her gruesome reflection, morbidly fascinated by the sight of her blood-moistened lips.

What have I done?

She slowly lowered her gaze along her crimsoned neck, looked down at the reflection of her right nipple, on which hung a very fat, carmine droplet of gore.

The gleaming pearl of blood quivered for an instant on the tip of her erect nipple; then it succumbed to gravity and fell away from her.

She pulled her gaze from the mirror, lowered her head to see where the droplet had struck the floor.

There was no blood.

When she looked directly at herself, rather than at her reflection, she discovered that her body was not covered with blood after all. She touched her bare breasts. They were damp because she had been scrubbing them with the washcloth, but the dampness was nothing more than water. Her arms weren’t spattered with blood, either.

She squeezed the washcloth. Clear water dripped from it; the cloth bore no grisly stains.

Confused, she raised her eyes to the mirror once more and saw the blood, as before.

She held out her hand. In reality it was not bloody, but in the mirror it was sheathed in a glove of gore.

A vision, she thought. A weird illusion. That’s all. I didn’t hurt anyone. I didn’t spill anyone’s blood.

As she struggled to understand what was happening. her mirror image faded, and the glass in front of her turned black. It seemed to have been transformed into a window that looked out onto another dimension, for it reflected nothing that was in the bathroom.

This is a dream, she thought. I’m really snug in bed, where I belong. I’m only dreaming that I’m in the bathroom I can put a stop to this just by waking up.

On the other hand, if it was a dream, would she be able to feel the cold ceramic floor beneath her bare feet as vividly as she could fuel it now? If it was really only a dream, would she be aware of the cold water on her bare breasts?

She shivered.

In the lightless void on the other side of the mirror, something flickered far off in the darkness.

Wake up!

Something silvery. It flashed again and again, back and forth, the image growing steadily larger.

For God’s sake, wake up!

She wanted to run. Couldn’t.

She wanted to scream. Didn’t.

In seconds the flickering object filled the mirror, pushing back the darkness out of which it had come, and then somehow it burst out of the mirror without shattering the glass, exploded out of the void and into the bathroom with one final, murderous swing, and she saw that it was an ax, bearing down on her face, the steel blade gleaming like the finest silver under the fluorescent lights. As the wickedly sharp edge of the ax swept inexorably toward her head, her knees buckled, and she fainted.

***

Near dawn, Jane woke again.

She was in bed. She was nude.

She threw the covers back, sat up, and saw her 1-shirt, panties, and knee socks on the floor beside the bed. She dressed quickly.

The house was silent. The Tracys weren’t up yet.

Jane hurried quietly down the hallway to the guest bathroom, hesitated on the threshold, then stepped

inside and snapped on the lights.

There was no blood, and the mirror above the sink was only an ordinary mirror, reflecting her worried face but contributing no bizarre images of its own.

Okay, she thought, maybe I was sleepwalking. And maybe I was actually here without any clothes on, trying to scrub nonexistent blood off my body. But the rest of it was just part of the nightmare. It didn’t happen. It couldn’t. Impossible. The mirror couldn’t really change like that.

She stared into her own blue eyes. She wasn’t sure what she saw in them.

“Who am I?” she asked softly.

All week, Grace’s sleep — what little she had managed to get between bouts of insomnia — had been dreamless. But tonight she thrashed for hours in the sheets, trying to fight her way out of a nightmare that seemed to last an eternity.

In the dream, a house was on fire. A big, beautifully ornamented Victorian house. She was standing outside the blazing structure, pounding on a pair of slant-set cellar doors and calling a name over and over again. “Laura! Laura!” She knew that Laura was trapped in the cellar of the burning house and that these doors were the only way out, but the doors were latched on the inside. She hammered on the wood with her bare hands until each blow sent a cruel bolt of pain the length of her arms, through her shoulders, and up the back of her neck. She wished desperately that she had an ax or a pry-bar or some other tool with which she could smash through the cellar doors, but she had nothing other than her fists, so she pounded and pounded until her flesh bruised and split and bled, and she kept on pounding even then, all the while screaming for Laura. Windows exploded on the second floor, showering glass down over her, but she didn’t turn away from the slant-set cellar doors; she didn’t run. She continued to slam her bloodied fists into the wood, praying that the girl would answer at any moment. She ignored the sparks that showered down on her and threatened to set her gingham dress afire. She wept, and she coughed when the wind blew the acrid smoke in her direction, and she cursed the wood that so easily resisted her fierce but ineffectual attack.