Fire Mask by Charles L. Grant

Author:Charles L. Grant [Grant, Charles L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ya horror, supernatural
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2018-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

There were no dreams that night.

No dreams at all.

Late Monday morning, parents and sister gone, Cliff sat at the kitchen table, staring blindly out the back door as he tried to understand what had happened the night before. The trouble was, aside from chasing someone down the railroad tracks, nothing had happened at all.

There had been no threat, no weapon. The guy had just stood there at the window, watching them, until they’d chased him away.

So why did he run, Sherlock, if he didn’t have anything to hide?

It’s funny how he should be there just then, Cliff thought. Funny how nobody in the place saw him but us. Why do you suppose that is?

He scowled. He hated asking himself questions that had no answers.

As for the man’s face, or lack of it, it was the dim light, moon glow, curious reflections from the rails and the fence and the field. It had to be. Unless the guy was a burglar with some sort of weird taste in masks.

“Nuts,” he said.

He drank a glass of milk without tasting it; he stared at the toaster, the oven, the cabinets, the floor, and didn’t see a thing; he stood up and walked to the back door, looked out at the yard, and wondered if Candy would have kissed him good night if Del and Nora hadn’t been with them.

He couldn’t stop wondering about it until he realized there wasn’t much time left for him to clean up and dress to meet Mrs. Vallence. He had no idea what he was going to say, had no idea if he was getting himself involved more deeply than he ought to. But there wasn’t much he could do about it now.

Besides the fact that he was not looking forward to this lunch date at all, something else began to nag at him as he got undressed to shower.

He knew it was important, but he couldn’t pin it down.

“I am driving you crazy,” he said to his reflection.

And it wasn’t until he was back in his room, towel wrapped around his waist, brush in hand, and hair dripping cold water on his shoulders, that he remembered what he should have remembered before.

“Oh,” he said, as if someone had punched him in the stomach. “Oh, boy, am I in trouble.”

The woman who wrote that note, his father had said.

The woman.

“Oh, boy.”

And suddenly, quite suddenly, he wasn’t hungry anymore.

Stuffy’s, even with all its booths and tables, was crowded, virtually every seat taken because of the loss of the hotel’s restaurant. Cliff sat in the back booth, a barely touched hamburger in front of him, watching Mrs. Vallence attack a salad large enough to feed Del for the rest of his life. She was much younger than he had imagined, considering Mr. Nunn’s age, and not nearly as beautiful as rich women usually are in the movies he’d seen. But she was attractive, and he was glad Candy wasn’t around to see her.

“Incredible,” the woman said, daintily pointing her fork at her plate.

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