Death Mask

CHAPTER NINE Plague

Molly drew up her blind for her and said, “Good morning, Sissy! Our visitors have arrived!”

Sissy sat up and blinked at her. Molly set a glass of orange juice on the nightstand beside her and gave her a kiss on her head scarf.

“Who’s arrived?”

“The cicadas! I thought they would, when it started to rain last night. You should see the crab-apple tree!”

Sissy climbed out of bed and went to the window. From here, she could see the curving flower bed that ran along the left-hand side of Trevor and Molly’s yard. The soil around the old crab-apple tree was peppered with countless little chimneys made of mud, and the trunk and lower branches were clustered with hundreds of glittering yellow cicada nymphs. There were even cicadas clinging to the roses and the lilies that Molly had painted.

“My God! There are so many of them!”

Trevor knocked on the door and came in. He was tying up his yellow necktie ready for work. “ ‘Predator satiation,’ that’s what the entomologists call it. Everything eats cicadas — birds, bats, cats — even humans. They ran a recipe in last week’s Post for cicada stir-fry. So the cicadas make sure that their species survives by reproducing themselves by the million.”

“I thought you said they flew,” said Sissy.

“Oh, they fly all right. They’re going to break out of that skin before you know it and turn into adult cicadas with wings and red eyes. They’ll stay in that tree for about a week, while they dry out and their skin grows harder, and then they’ll be buzzing around everywhere, and you’ll be mightily sick of them. You can’t even play tennis without getting four or five cicadas stuck in your racket every time you play a stroke.”

Trevor left for work, taking Victoria with him so that he could drop her off at Sycamore Community School. Although the cicadas hadn’t molted yet, Sissy decided to have her breakfast indoors, in the kitchen. Molly made her some buckwheat pancakes with rose-hip syrup.

“I had the strangest dream last night,” said Sissy, after she had finished eating. “I dreamed I was driving across Iowa with my Uncle Henry, but it wasn’t my Uncle Henry at all. It was that Red Mask man.”

“You’re kidding me!”

“No. it was him all right, just the way you drew him. And he talked to me. He said what was done was done, but it had to be done again.”

“But, Sissy — I dreamed about him, too!”

Sissy had an odd, disorienting feeling, as if the sun had gone in and then come out again, and the clock had suddenly jumped five minutes without her knowing where the time had gone. “He wasn’t driving a car, was he? Don’t tell me he was driving a car.”

“No. He was standing in the middle of the yard, in the rain, and he was covered all over in cicadas. Like he was almost wearing them, like a cloak.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Unh-unh. He just stood there, not moving. But the whole dream seemed so real. When I woke up, I had to go to the window to make sure that he wasn’t actually there.”

Sissy said, “How about some more coffee? You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”

“No, go ahead.”

Sissy sat on the tapestry window seat beside the open window so that her smoke would blow out in the yard. Molly brought her a mug of fresh coffee and then sat down beside her.

“I know what you’re going to say,” said Molly, after a while.

“So. you’re a mind reader, too?”

“No, but as it happens, I agree with you. Especially since we both had those dreams.”

“I promised Trevor that I wouldn’t.”

“I know. But Trevor’s not here, is he? And what Trevor doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Whereas something that we don’t know might very well hurt us.”

Sissy crushed out her cigarette in a blue earthenware ashtray. “All right,” she said. “But please don’t tell Trevor. I don’t want him to think that I don’t respect him, because I do.”

She went to her bedroom and brought in the DeVane cards. They sat down together at the kitchen table, and Sissy laid the cards out in the cross-of-Lorraine pattern. She was telling Molly’s fortune, so she chose la Fleuriste for her Predictor card, the Florist. The card showed a bare-breasted young woman in a diaphanous Empire-line dress and a huge bonnet laden with flowers and apples and bunches of grapes. She was walking in between two lines of red chrysanthemums, sprinkling them with a golden watering can.

In the background, a young man dressed in fool’s motley of yellow and blue was pushing a wheelbarrow, and on closer inspection Molly could see that the wheelbarrow was heaped up with human body parts — arms and legs and decapitated torsos, all spattered with blood. In the distance, on a hillside, she could just make out the crosses and monuments of a cemetery.

The young man himself appeared to be wearing a spiky hat, or maybe his hair had been waxed up into points. But again — when she examined the card more closely — Molly realized that it wasn’t a hat, and it wasn’t his hair, either. He had ten or eleven large kitchen knives embedded in the top of his head.

On the far side of the gardens, beyond the chrysanthemum beds, there were rows of beehives. They were being tended by monks, whose faces were concealed under bell-shaped muslin nets.

As she dealt out the cards, Sissy said, “Lay your hand on top of your card and ask it a specific question. Don’t tell me what the question is. The cards will answer for you, not me.”

When she had finished, she picked up three cards and arranged them in a fan shape in front of her, facedown, so that all Molly could see was the blandly smiling face of la Lune, the Moon, on the reverse side of each of them. She touched each card, one after the other.

After almost half a minute of silence, Molly said, “Well?”

Sissy looked across the table at her, and the sun reflected in the lenses of her spectacles, so that she looked as if she were blind. “Are you sure you want me to give you this reading?”

“Why? What’s wrong? Nobody’s going to die or anything, are they?”

“I don’t know. The cards are being very evasive. Maybe such and such a thing is going to happen, or maybe it isn’t. It always makes me very uneasy when they come up like this.”

“Well, tell me anyhow, Sissy. Come on, they’re only cards.”

Sissy picked up la Fleuriste. “I see some warnings. I’m not entirely sure what all of them are. But just take a look at your Predictor card. Here’s a pretty young woman who can bring flowers to life — that’s you. But there’s pain and death in her garden, too — chopped-up bodies, all being carted off to the cemetery.”

“This young man with knives in his head — what does that mean?”

“He’s le Pitre, the Clown. He represents laughter and happiness and friendship. But somebody has stabbed him in the head. Whoever he is, his attacker is deliberately trying to spread fear and suspicion and to make people mistrust each other. A killjoy, in the very worst sense of the word.”

“And these beekeepers?”

“There’s no doubt what they mean. The cards may not be ready to tell us what’s going to happen. But they’re pretty darn sure about when. The beehives are an indication of a swarm of insects, and you only have to look out of the window to see what’s happening in your own backyard. So whatever’s going to happen, I think it’s going to happen pretty soon — if not today.”

Molly nodded toward the three cards laid out in a fan shape. “And these cards? What do they say?”

Sissy turned over the card on the left. “This tells you why your future is going to turn out the way it is. This is something you’ve done already, so there’s no changing it, and no going back.”

“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.”