Death Mask

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Strange Chorus

That night, Sissy dreamed that she was driving across Iowa again, in her Uncle Henry’s Hudson Hornet. The radio was playing that strange, lumpy, backward-sounding music, and outside the windows the landscape was revolving like a huge turntable.

“Uncle Henry.”

But Uncle Henry didn’t turn around. He just kept on driving, tapping his wedding band on the steering wheel in time to the music.

“I saw you yesterday. You were standing by the wall. I thought I recognized you but I didn’t, not at all.. ”

The clouds were sepia, as if they were driving through an old photograph. Sissy could see a dark shadow on the eastern horizon — a shadow that rose higher and higher, like a swarm of locusts. Locusts, or cicadas.

“I was quite certain that I recognized your face. but when you turned your head around I saw nothing, only space. ”

About a half mile up ahead, she saw a huge figure standing by the side of the road, silhouetted against the last pale wash of daylight. It must have been all of thirty feet tall. She knelt up on her seat and tapped Uncle Henry frantically on the shoulder.

“Uncle Henry. There’s a giant. I’m frightened of giants.”

Uncle Henry didn’t answer.

“Uncle Henry! Please! Can’t we go back?”

Insects started to patter against the windows, leaving brown and yellow splashes and broken wing segments that fluttered in the Hornet’s slipstream.

“Uncle Henry!”

At last Uncle Henry turned his head around. But it wasn’t Uncle Henry. It was Red Mask, with a triumphant shine in his eyes.

“No peace for the wicked, child! No mercy for the innocent, neither! What’s done is done, and can’t be undone!”

The insects pattered against the windows harder and harder, until they sounded like hail. “Uncle Henry” kept on driving, but he didn’t turn back to see where he was going. He just kept grinning at Sissy as if he were daring her to try and stop him.

Sissy let out a piercing scream. She screamed louder and louder and higher and higher, but all “Uncle Henry” did was to roar back at her just as loud, until she was deafened. The song on the radio stopped, and the interior of the car was filled with screeching, high-pitched static.

She opened her eyes. She wasn’t screaming anymore, and “Uncle Henry” was gone, but the static continued, on and on, interspersed with weird swooping sounds.

“My God,” she said to herself. “The cicadas.”

She climbed unsteadily out of bed and opened her blinds, lifting one hand to shield her eyes from the early-morning sunshine.

The yard was crowded with thousands of cicadas, all calling for their mates. Most of them were still clinging to the trees and the bushes, but scores of them were flying around, and some of them were pattering against her windows, as they had in her dream.

Molly came into her room, wearing a pink silk headscarf and a pink nightshirt. “Got your wake-up call, then?” she smiled.

“I never realized they were going to be so goddamned loud. I don’t know how you stand it.”

“At least it happens only once every seventeen years. They have a joke in Cincinnati: two cicadas sitting in a bar, and one says to the other, ‘Seventeen years wasted if we don’t get lucky tonight.’ ”

Sissy said, “How about I make us some coffee? And maybe some eggs. We didn’t eat anything yesterday, did we?”

“Sure, that would be terrific.”

They went through to the kitchen. Mr. Boots was still asleep in his basket. The cicada chorus didn’t seem to bother him at all. Outside, cicadas were clustered all around the window frames. Trevor had sealed up the ventilator above the cooker hob with a circle of cardboard and several layers of duct tape. He had also attached a cardboard flap to the bottom of the back door and duct-taped over the keyhole.

Molly opened the fridge. She took out a carton of cranberry-pomegranate juice and poured a glass for each of them. As she was about to drink it, she said, “What did you do with the roses?”

Sissy turned toward the hutch. The glass vase was still there, but all it contained were two drooping ferns. She shook her head and said, “I haven’t touched them.”

“Neither have I. Maybe Victoria took them. She’s crazy about brides and weddings at the moment. I’ll bet she wanted her Barbie to have a bouquet.”

Sissy spooned coffee into the percolator. “You’re still not going to tell Trevor where they came from?”

“I don’t see what good it would do.”

“I don’t really see what harm it would do.”

“Oh come on, Sissy. You know Trevor. He needs to be in control of things. That’s why he doesn’t like your fortune-telling cards. They’re not logical, and he doesn’t understand how they work. If I told him that I could create real flowers just by drawing them. it would make him so wary of me. He would feel like there was a part of me that he could never reach, and I don’t want him to feel like that.”

Sissy switched on the percolator. “I think I’ll brave the bugs and go for a cigarette.”

“Well, they’re disgusting, and they’re noisy, but they won’t hurt you. Just don’t let them get caught up in your hair.”

“Don’t! Maybe they’ll do what Frank and Trevor never could, and persuade me to give up smoking.”

Wrapped up in her green satin bathrobe, and wearing Trevor’s Adidas running shoes in case she trod on any cicadas, Sissy went outside, with Mr. Boots following close behind. Here in the yard, the mating chorus was even harsher and even higher, and the swooping noise sounded even more weird, like a musical saw.

She flapped a few of the cicadas away with her hand, but one of them persisted in perching on her shoulder, prickling her with its tiny claws and staring at her with its scarlet, wide-apart eyes.

“My God, look at you,” she said. “You must have been feeding on sap from the ugly tree.”

She lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the cicada, and it whirred away, flying only an inch away from Mr. Boots’s nose. Mr. Boots snapped at it, but only because it had surprised him. He had tried to eat a wasp once, and ever since then he had treated anything that buzzed or hopped or chirruped with the utmost caution.

The radio-static noise went on and on, and Sissy couldn’t stop thinking about her dream. She very rarely had recurring dreams, and even when she did, it had been months or even years in between each dreaming. She had to assume that this was more than a dream, it was a warning, or an omen — either from her own subconscious or from somebody else’s spirit. The giant standing by the road could be some kind of a symbol. But a symbol of what? And why did he seem so terrifying?

A flurry of cicadas flew up in front of her like the locusts in her dream. And it was then that she saw the flowerpots on which they had been feeding. The five roses were standing there, nodding in the morning sunshine along with the hollyhock and the Shasta daisy. They were all intact, as if Trevor had never cut them.

Sissy felt a tight shrinking sensation in her scalp. These roses couldn’t be real roses, after all. They must be something else altogether. A mirage? A hallucination? She couldn’t understand it.

“Molly!” she called. “Come out here! What the hell do you make of this?”

Molly stared at the roses for a long time. “I don’t know. How could that happen?” She took hold of one of the stems and tugged at it. “It’s firmly rooted, just like it was before.”

Sissy looked around, frowning. “When you painted them, did you imagine them here — in this particular flowerpot?”

“Yes, I did. Even this first rose, the one I was painting for Fairy Fifi.”

“Maybe they have to come back here, because this is the only place that they really exist.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, neither do I, to be frank. But let’s try something. Let’s cut them again and see if they come back here a second time.”

Molly looked dubious. “Maybe we should just leave them alone. This whole thing is beginning to give me the willies.”

“Molly — think of what the cards predicted. Violence, and bloodshed. And you could be involved in it somehow. The sculptor, the artist, the creator of likenesses — that’s almost certainly you.”

“Maybe Trevor was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that Red Mask composite.”

“I really don’t know. But I still think that the roses are the key to all this. If we can understand how and why these flowers come to life, it may help us to keep you safe.”

Mr. Boots was chasing after cicadas, jumping up and down at them as they scattered into the air, but being careful not to catch any in his mouth.

“Okay,” said Molly. “I’ll bring some scissors.”

Sissy smoked while Molly cut the roses again. They took them back inside and arranged them in the vase in the same way that they had been arranged before. They had just put them back on the hutch when Trevor came in, his black hair tousled, yawning.

“First chance I get for a couple of hours’ extra sleep, and what do I get? Ten thousand horny cicadas singing outside my window.”

“Your mom’s making eggs. Do you want some?”

“Coffee first. Black. I need to jump-start my heart.”