Death Mask

CHAPTER EIGHT Giant

Sissy respected Trevor’s wishes that night and left the DeVane cards untouched on her nightstand, although she was strongly tempted to try another reading. She could feel in her bones that the wheels of the world were moving beneath her, and that the next few days were going to see shifts and changes and shadows moving in contradiction to the sun.

She dressed in her long white linen nightgown and sat in front of the dressing table taking the pins and combs out of her hair, and brushing it out.

For a split second, in the shell pink lamplight, she saw herself as she had looked when she had married Frank and was sitting at her dressing table in Connecticut, brushing out her hair for her first night in bed with him. She still had the wide gray eyes and the delicate cheekbones, and that slightly fey, otherworldly look that had led Frank to describe her as a mermaid.

I’m still your mermaid, Frank. The girl you fell in love with, she’s still here. I’m the same girl who ran barefoot through the dunes at Hyannis that July afternoon so long ago.

Then she angled her head a little to the left, and the lamplight suddenly betrayed her. She saw the crow’s feet around her eyes and the lines around her mouth, and a neck that looked like crumpled tissue paper. The cries from the seagulls faded, and the warm ocean breeze died away, and here she was in her stuffy spare room in Trevor’s house, all alone now, growing older with every night that passed.

Molly knocked on her door.

“Sissy? Is there anything you need? How about a glass of warm milk?”

“A time machine would be nice. Look at me. I’ll be seventy-two before I know it. How did that happen? I don’t feel seventy-two.”

Molly came into the room and sat on the end of the bed. “You don’t behave seventy-two, either, thank God.”

“Trevor talked to me this evening. He wants me to stop fortune-telling while I’m here. He says it gives him the heebie-jeebies.”

“You don’t have to stop because of Trevor. You know what he’s like. If it can’t be weighed or measured or calculated, it doesn’t exist. Mind you, he makes a living out of guessing the future, just like you. The only difference is, he tries to guess what isn’t going to happen.”

“He’s frightened that Red Mask is going to find out that you drew his composite, and that he’s going to come after you.”

“I don’t think that’s very likely. It’s only happened once before. Some child molester threatened to throw battery acid at me. But I think I’ve protected myself the best way I know how, which is to draw a really accurate likeness of him, so that he’ll be caught quicker.”

Sissy tied up her hair with a gray silk scarf. “Did you tell Trevor about the flowers?”

Molly looked away, and didn’t answer.

“I said — ”

“No. No I haven’t. Not yet.”

“Are you going to tell Trevor about the flowers?”

“I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I’m in kind of two minds about it. What do you think?”

“They’re a miracle, Molly! Somehow, you performed a miracle! He’s your husband! Don’t you think he ought to know?”

Molly played with her necklace so that it glittered in the lamplight. One of her favorite mascots on it was a tiny golden Egyptian crocodile with dark red garnets for eyes.

“I thought of telling him, honestly. If he had actually noticed them, I’m sure I would. But there they were, right in front of him — fully grown roses and daisies and bellflowers — and he didn’t even realize that they hadn’t been there when he left for work in the morning.”

“Well, Trevor’s the same as most men. They only see what they want to see.”

Molly said, “It’s not only that. I love him because he’s so sensible and so pragmatic. I don’t think I want him to start believing in miracles.”

“All right, then. If that’s what you think is best. Far be it from a wrinkly old motherin-law like me to interfere in my beautiful young daughter-in-law’s affairs.”

Molly wrapped her arms around her and kissed her noisily on her right ear. “You’re not wrinkly and you’re not as old as you think you are, and I always appreciate your opinion. So there.”

With that, they started to sing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” together, in higher and higher harmony, until they were almost shrieking.

“ — and it’s a hard — it’s a hard — it’s a hard —!”

Trevor opened the bedroom door. “For Christ’s sake, you two! You sound like two polecats being strangled!”

Sissy dreamed that she was very young, maybe only six or seven years old, and that she was sitting in the back seat of a large sedan with brown leather seats. She was kneeling up and watching the landscape slide past. The landscape was brown, too, and very flat — miles and miles of cornfields, all the way to the horizon. The clouds were strangely stretched out, as if they were being pulled across the sky like dark brown toffee.

She couldn’t see who was driving the sedan. He was wearing a pale Panama hat with a wide brown band around it. There was a signet ring on his right hand, which occasionally flashed at her, and in the center of the steering wheel there was a diamond-shaped emblem, which flashed at her, too. She recognized the emblem, and now she realized which car she was in and who was driving it. It was her Uncle Henry’s 1954 Hudson Hornet.

The car radio sounded as if it were playing backward — lumpy, intermittent rhythms with garbled words.

“You only saw me through a half-open door. I don’t know what you thought that you were looking for. ”

“Uncle Henry,” she said, although her voice sounded fudgy and blurred.

Uncle Henry didn’t turn around, but he said, “Not far now, Sissy. Seventy miles, no more than that.”

“Where are we?” asked Sissy.

“West of the east and east of the west.”

At almost the same time, they passed a sign saying ENTERING BORROWSVILLE, POP. 789.

“Was it for answers? Was it for love? Was it for forgiveness from the angels up above?”

They drove on and on, and the brown fields continued to slide past them, mile after mile. The clouds were stretched out into long fantastical shapes, before they slowly broke apart and drifted away.

I don’t like this dream, thought Sissy. Something bad is going to happen in this dream.

They passed another sign. LEAVING BORROWSVILLE. And it was only a few minutes later that Sissy saw a tall figure standing by the highway up ahead. At first she thought it was a water tower. But as they came closer and she frowned at it more intently, she began to realize that it was the figure of a man. But how could it be a man? He must be a giant, over thirty feet tall.

“Uncle Henry.”

“What is it, Sissy?”

“There’s a giant.”

Uncle Henry didn’t answer.

“Uncle Henry, I’m frightened of giants.”

Still Uncle Henry didn’t answer.

Sissy tugged at the shoulder of his sport coat and said, much more desperately, “I’m frightened of giants! I don’t want to go past that giant! Please, Uncle Henry! Can’t we go back?”

Uncle Henry slowly turned his head around. He seemed to be able to do it without moving the rest of his body. Sissy stared at him in shock. He wasn’t Uncle Henry at all — not the Uncle Henry she remembered, with the circular gold-rimmed eyeglasses and the Teddy Roosevelt mustache.

This “Uncle Henry” had a bright-red face, like an enameled papier-mâché mask, with thin black slits for eyes and a wider black slit for a mouth. He had angular cheekbones and a huge chin with a deep cleft in the middle of it, as if he had been struck with an ax.

“Can’t go back now, Sissy,” he said, in the same backward-sounding voice as the songs on the radio. “Too late now for one and all.”

Sissy started to hyperventilate. She seized the door handle and tried to open the back door, but it was locked.

“Can’t go back now, Sissy. What’s done is done. And now it has to be done again, and again, and again. No rest for the wicked, Sissy!”

Sissy shook the door handle again, as hard as she could, and it was then that the whole door flew off, with Sissy still clinging on to it, and bounced away over the fields, bursting through the cornstalks, tumbling over and over. Sissy landed on her back in a furrow, and the door landed on top of her with a bang.

She struggled to push the door off her, punching and kicking.

But then she realized that it wasn’t a door at all. It was heavy, but it was very soft and billowy. It was her patchwork comforter, and she was lying in her bed in Trevor and Molly’s house.

She eased herself up into a sitting position and coughed. It was intensely dark, and outside her bedroom window she could hear that it was raining. Her bedside clock told her it was 2:11 A.M.

“You ridiculous old cow,” she admonished herself. She groped for the toggle of her bedside lamp and switched it on. No cornfields, no attenuated clouds, no giants. Only a chintz-decorated bedroom with Currier & Ives prints on the wall. “Maybe Trevor’s right. Maybe you’re always reading things into things when there isn’t anything there to be read into them.”

She swallowed one of her angina pills and three large gulps of water. She remembered to hang the little beaded cover over her water glass. The first night she had stayed here, she had woken up in the middle of the night and swallowed a struggling moth along with her water.

She lay back on her pillow and thought about her dream. Or had it been more of a memory? She had visited Uncle Henry and Aunt Mattie on their farm in Iowa once, when she was about seven, but she didn’t remember driving there. She recalled her mother meeting her at Penn Station, when she was on her way home, so she must have traveled at least part of the way by train.

But why had she dreamed about it now? And why had Uncle Henry looked like Red Mask? And what did the giant mean? Even now that she was awake, she thought about the giant and she found it frightening.

She looked over at the DeVane cards — but no, she had promised Trevor that she wouldn’t, and so she wouldn’t. She switched off the light and lay there in the darkness for over an hour, trying not to think about that backward-sounding song.