Graham Masterton - Death Mask

“ Le Porte-bonheur . the Charm?”

The card showed a young man walking through a forest, carrying a tall staff with a jeweled eye on top of it. On either side of the path, the wriggling tree roots had become transformed into snakes and were standing erect as if they were about to strike.

“This is your ability to draw things and make them come to life. The cards seem to think that it comes from some kind of talisman, just like this staff.”

“I don’t have anything like that,” said Molly. But then she pressed her hand against her necklace and said, “I mean, there’s this . But it’s nothing special. I only paid fifty-five dollars for it, and she threw in a couple of diamanté barrettes as well.”

“When did you buy it?”

“Two weeks ago, at the Peddlers Market. There was all kinds of great stuff there. I saw this amazing copper fire screen with fairies on it. I nearly bought that, too.”

“Did she know where the necklace came from? It’s not like any necklace I ever saw before.”

Molly lifted it up and peered at it. “Me neither. It looks like something that her grandma must have put together herself, piece by piece. Look at this little face, all carved out of ivory. And this lizard. They’re incredible.”

“It could be that it carries some kind of power,” said Sissy. She held out her right hand and showed Molly the amethyst ring that she wore on her middle finger. “My mother gave me this, and I’ve always been convinced that it helps me to tell if people are telling me the truth. When they lie, the stone grows darker. Sometimes it almost turns from purple to black.

“Mind you, a person can be a good-luck charm, too. Your flowers have only come to life since I’ve been here — have you thought about that? It could be our natural chemistry that’s doing it. Our life force, the two of us together. Our charisma.”

“What are the other cards?” asked Molly.

Sissy turned over the right-hand card. “ Le Marionettiste , the Puppeteer. This is what today is going to bring.”

The card showed a young shabbily dressed man in a tricorn hat sitting on a wooden bench. He was holding the strings of two dancing marionettes — a ballet dancer with an ostrich plume in her hair, and a soldier with a bushy mustache and a bright blue tunic. The room in which he was playing with these marionettes was very gloomy, and they were illuminated only by a single lantern.

Close behind him, in the shadows, a man in a gray hooded cloak was standing, his arms crossed, and holding a large butcher’s boning knife in each hand.

“I don’t understand this one at all,” said Molly.

“I’m not sure I do, either,” Sissy admitted. “I think it’s one of those predictions that we won’t understand until it’s actually happened.”

“A man’s going to stab a puppeteer?”

“Remember that these cards were drawn over two hundred years ago. A puppeteer could represent all kinds of things, like an aerobics instructor, or a human resources manager. Or a politician, maybe. Anybody who controls other people’s lives.”

“Okay. and the last one?”

Sissy was sensitive enough to know already what the last card was, and she was reluctant to turn it over. She could tell Molly a white lie about its meaning, she supposed, but she doubted Molly would believe her — and what was the point? She had laid out the cards in order to find out what was going to happen to them, and the more they knew, the better prepared they would be.

Apart from that, her mother’s amethyst ring would darken, and she always believed that the cards themselves were aware of how truthfully they were being interpreted. Next time she tried to use them, they would stay silent and give her no guidance to the future at all. They would be nothing but brightly colored pasteboard, with incomprehensible pictures on them.

She turned the card over. It was solid scarlet, with no illustration on it. La Carte écarlate . The Scarlet Card.

“And what does that mean?” asked Molly.

“Mostly it means overwhelming rage. You know, like ‘seeing red.’ But it can also mean blood. A whole lot of blood. So much blood that it almost drowns us.”

Molly sat staring at the card, but she didn’t touch it. “Do you know what my question was?” she asked Sissy.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, especially if the cards have answered it for you.”

“I asked if Red Mask was going to murder anybody else.”

The next morning was bright but hazy, and very humid. Jimmy arrived at the Giley Building nearly an hour earlier than usual — so early that Mr. Kraussman, the super, had to unlock the front doors for him. Mr. Kraussman was keg shaped, with a blue bald head and rolls of fat on the back of his neck, and a green checkered shirt so loud that it was deafening.

He took out the goetta sandwich that was stuffed in his mouth and said, “Jimmy! Ach du lieber Gott! You get to work any sooner, you’ll meet yourself leaving last night!”

Jimmy maneuvered his silver Mutant mountain bike into the lobby. “Thanks, Mr. Kraussman. I have to finish this dumb animation. I tried to knock it off last night, but I kept on falling asleep.”

“So what you animating now? Not more of those singing diapers?” He waddled ahead of Jimmy, jingling his keys. “Singing diapers! I’ll tell you something, my kids’ diapers never sang, but they sure did hum!” He laughed raucously at his own joke, and then he gave a deep, swamplike sniff.

“This time it’s pop bottles,” Jimmy told him, as he folded his bike and stowed it into the utility closet amongst the mops and the sweeping brushes and the buckets. “Line-dancing pop bottles.”

“Please?”

“Pop bottles, Mr. Kraussman, that line dance. We have a major presentation at eleven, and that gives me less than three and a half hours to finish about five hours of rendering.”

“It’s a tragedy,” said Mr. Kraussman. “To think that a great artist like you, he can only make his living with — whatever it is, dance-in-the-line pop bottles.”

“Mr. Kraussman, I’m not Leonardo da Vinci. I’m an animator, that’s all.”

“Hey — that picture you drew from my little Willy, you can’t tell me that isn’t great art. I hang it in my living room, pride of place.”

“Well, I’m glad you liked it. He’s a real cute kid, your little Willy.” Jimmy didn’t mention that a huge booger had been protruding from little Willy’s left nostril all the time that he had been drawing him, and that he had been sorely tempted to include it in the finished portrait, in vivid booger green.

Jimmy crossed over to the elevator bank. The elevator in which George Woods and Jane Becker had been attacked was still cordoned off with yellow police tape, and the elevator next to it was labeled “Out of order,” but the third elevator was working. Jimmy pressed the button and waited, while Mr. Kraussman stood uncomfortably close to him, smiling at him for no apparent reason at all and continuing to sniff. Like so many Over-the-Rhine residents, he suffered from Cincinnati sinus.

“Hey — maybe you could draw Mrs. Kraussman, too!”

Jimmy said, “Sure thing, if I can find the time.” And if I can find a sheet of paper wide enough.

The elevator arrived and Jimmy stepped onto it.

“Maybe for our ruby wedding, August twelfth!” Mr. Kraussman suggested, just before the doors juddered shut. “Not for free! I pay you top dollar!”

As the elevator car clanked slowly upward, Jimmy leaned back against the mirrored wall and closed his eyes. He felt exhausted. He had been working on the Sea Island Cranberry Soda animation for over six weeks now, seven days a week, and some nights he had still been hunched over his computer at 2:00 A.M. But it was a critical pitch for the company that employed him, Anteater Animation, and if they landed the account, he knew he was in for a more-than-generous bonus. He might even be able to take his girlfriend Devon to Disney World.