Dean Koontz - The Mask

Good. She had hurt him.

She sagged against the wall, raised the.22 pistol that was stilt in her right hand, and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing.

She had forgotten to switch off the safeties.

The cat hurried through the open door and disappeared into the upstairs hail.

Grace went to the door, closed it, leaned wearily against it. Gasping.

Her left hand was scratched and bleeding, and her back bore half a dozen claw punctures, but she had won the first round. The cat was limping; he was injured, perhaps as badly as she was, and he was the one who had retreated.

No celebration, though. Not yet.

Not until she had gotten out of the house alive. And not until she was certain that Carol was safe, too.

After the unsettling telephone conversation he’d had with the receptionist at Maugham & Crichton, Paul didn’t know what the hell to do.

He couldn’t write. That was for sure. He couldn’t get his mind off Carol long enough to advance the plot of his novel by so much as even one sentence.

He wanted to call Lincoln Werth, at police headquarters, and arrange to have a sheriff’s deputy waiting at the cabin when Carol and Jane arrived up there. He wanted them brought home. But he could imagine the conversation he would have with Detective Werth, and the thought of it daunted him:

“You want a deputy to meet them at the cabin?”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“1 think my wife’s in danger.”

“What kind of danger?”

“1 think the girl, Jane Doe, might be violent. Maybe even homicidal.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because under hypnosis she claimed to be Millie Parker.”

“Who’s that?”

“Millie Parker once tried to kill her mother.”

“She did? When was that?”

“Back in 1905.”

“Then she’d be a little old lady today, for Christ’s sake. The kid’s only fourteen or fifteen.”

“You don’t understand. Millie Parker’s been dead for about seventy-six years and—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute! What the hell are you saying? That your wife might be murdered by some kid who’s been dead for most of the century?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“F. don’t know.”

Werth would think that he had been out boozing all night, or that he had started the morning with a couple of joints of good grass.

Besides, it wasn’t fair to Jane to accuse her publicly of being a potential killer. Perhaps Carol was right. Maybe the kid was just a victim. Except for what she said under hypnosis, she certainly seemed to be incapable of violence.

On the other hand, of all the people she could have claimed to be, why had she said that she was Millicent Parker, the would-be murderess? Where had she heard that name before. Didn’t the use of it indicate latent hostility?

Paul swiveled his typing chair away from the desk and stared out the window at the gray sky. The wind was picking up by the minute. The clouds were racing westward across the sky, as if they were enormous, swift, dark ships with billowing sails the color of thunderstorms.

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

I’ve got to go to the cabin, he thought with sudden decisiveness, and he got to his feet.

Maybe he was overreacting to this Millicent Parker business, but he couldn’t just sit here, wondering….

He went into the master bedroom to throw some things into a suitcase. After only a brief hesitation, he decided to pack his.38 revolver.

The girl said, “How much farther to the cabin?”

“Another twenty minutes,” Carol said. “The whole drive usually takes just about two hours and fifteen minutes, and we’re pretty much on schedule.”

The mountains were cool and green. Some trees had already been touched by the artful hand of autumn, and most — all but the evergreens — would change the color of their leaves during the next few weeks. Today, however, the predominant shade was still green, with a smattering of gold here and there, an occasional touch of red. The edge of the forest— wherever the meadow or the roadway met the trees— was decorated with a few end-of-the-season wildflowers, blue and white and purple.

“It’s beautiful up here,” Jane said as they followed the two-lane county road around a curve. The right-hand bank, which sloped down to the macadam, was covered with vividly green clusters of rhododendron shrubs.

“I love the Pennsylvania mountains,” Carol said. She felt more relaxed now than she had in weeks. “It’s so peaceful here. Wait till you’ve been at the cabin a day or two. You’ll forget the rest of the world exists.”

They came out of the curve onto an ascending straightaway, where the interlocking branches of the trees formed a tunnel over portions of the lane. At those points where the trees parted sufficiently to provide a glimpse of the sky, there was nothing to be seen but massive, gray-black clouds clotted together in surging, ugly, threatening formations.

“I sure hope it doesn’t rain and spoil our first day here,” Jane said.

“Rain won’t spoil anything,” Carol assured her. “If we’re forced to stay inside, we’ll just throw a whole bunch of logs in the big stone fireplace and roast some hot dogs indoors. And we have a closetful of games to help us pass rainy days. Monopoly, Scrabble, Clue, Risk, Battleship, and at least a dozen others. I think we’ll be able to avoid cabin fever.”

“It’s going to be fun,” Jane said enthusiastically.

The canopy of trees parted overhead, and the September sky churned darkly.

GRACE sat on the edge of the bed, holding the.22 pistol, considering her options. She didn’t have many.

In fact, the more she thought about it, the more it seemed to her that the cat had a better chance of winning this duel than she did.

If she attempted to leave the house by way of the bedroom window, she would surely break a leg and probably her neck as well. If she had been only twenty years younger, she might have tried it. But at seventy, with her swollen joints and brittle bones, jumping from a second-floor window onto a concrete patio could only end in misery. Anyway, the point wasn’t just to get out of the house, but to get out in one piece, so she could make it across town to Carol’s and Paul’s place.

She could open the window and start screaming for help. But she was afraid that Aristophanes — or the thing using Aristophanes' body — would attack anyone who showed up and tried to assist her, and she didn’t want a neighbor’s death on her conscience.

This was her battle. No one else’s. She would have to fight it alone.

She considered all the routes by which she might possibly leave the house once she had reached the bottom floor — if she reached the bottom floor — but no particular route seemed less dangerous than any other. The cat could be anywhere. Everywhere. The bedroom was the only safe place in the house. If she ventured out of this sanctuary, the cat would be waiting for her and would attack her, regardless of whether she tried to exit the house by the front door, the kitchen door, or one of the ground-floor windows. It would be crouched in one shadow or another, perhaps perched atop a bookcase or cupboard or hutch, tensed and ready to launch itself down onto her startled, upturned face.

She had the gun, of course. But the cat, stealthy by nature, would always have the advantage of surprise. If it got just a two- or three-second lead on her, if she was only that little bit slower to react than was the cat, it would have ample time to fasten onto her face, tear open her throat, or gouge her eyes out with its quick, stiletto claws.