Death Mask by Graham Masterton

Author:Graham Masterton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Occult, Victims of crimes, Horror, Fiction - Horror, Fiction, Cincinnati (Ohio), Horror - General, Thrillers, Horror fiction, Occult & Supernatural, Murderers
ISBN: 9780843957921
Publisher: Leisure Books
Published: 2009-04-06T18:50:00.953000+00:00

CHAPTER22 - The Hooded Guest

They drove back to Blue Ash in a hailstorm of cicadas that smashed themselves against the windshield like the locusts in Sissy's dream. Molly had to use the washer spray again and again so that she could see where was going.

"These bugs are beginning to get seriously horny," she complained.

"Just goes to show you, doesn't it? Sex is a matter of life or death, even for bugs."

"Especially for bugs. Even if they don't get squished all over my windshield and they manage to find themselves some lady cicadas, they're all going to drop dead anyway, just as soon they've done their reproductive duty."

When they reached home, they discovered that the backyard, too, was teeming with cicadas. Molly picked up an old squash racquet and swung it from side to side, swatting them out of their way. Mr. Boots followed her, jumping up and barking.

The roses were still nodding in the sunlight, even though scores of cicadas were crawling all over the flowerpot. Sissy lit up a Marlboro and stood looking at them, blowing smoke out of her nostrils.

"I still think they're a miracle," she said.

"Yes," Molly agreed. "But that doesn't make them any less scary. It's a pretty fine line between miracle and nightmare, don't you think?"

In one sense these roses are real, Sissy thought. Their thorns had pricked her thumb and drawn real red blood, just as Red Mask's knives had cut real people's flesh open. Yet they weren't real at all. They couldn't be. They had been created out of nothing but pencils and paint.

Maybe they were like ghosts, or the spirits of dead people appearing at a séance. Maybe they were only visiting this reality. But ghosts could be exorcized and the spirits of dead people could be sent back to the world of shadows. Maybe these roses could be sent back to the two-dimensional world of paper, where they truly belonged.

And if the roses could be sent back, maybe the two living drawings of Red Mask could be sent back, too.

Sissy was almost certain now that this was what the DeVane cards had been trying to tell her. Their predictions had been terrifying and strange, but if she and Molly could discover the secret of the roses, maybe they could change the future. Maybe there didn't have to be any more killing. Maybe the two Red Masks who had committed this morning's murders could be returned to the sketch pad on which they had been created, and their likenesses torn out and burned, and their ashes scattered forever.

Molly said, "It's hot. I'm just going inside to change. How about a glass of wine?"

"Why not? It might lubricate the old psychic mojo a little."

Sissy sat down under the vine trellis. Trevor had cut the roses with his pocketknife, but somehow they had managed to reappear here in the flowerpot. He had cut them, but they were only images, after all, not real flowers at all, and images belonged where their creator had imagined them, just as spirits belonged in the world beyond.

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