The Mask

  "We'll have to handle this ourselves," Grace said. "Let's get rolling. I can tell you everything I know on the way. Each minute we waste, I just get sicker and sicker, thinking about what might be happening in the mountains."

  Paul backed the car into the street and drove away from the house, heading for the nearest freeway entrance. When he was on the open highway, he floored the accelerator, and the car rocketed ahead.

  "How long does it usually take to get there?" Grace asked.

  "About two hours and fifteen minutes."

  "Too long."

  "We'll do better than that."

  The speedometer needle touched eighty.

  12

  THEY had brought a lot of food in cardboard cartons and ice chests. They transferred all of those items to the cupboards and refrigerator, agreeing to forgo lunch altogether in order to indulge themselves guiltlessly in a glutton's dinner.

  "All right," Carol said, producing a list from one of the kitchen drawers, "here's what we need to do to make this place livable." She read from the list:

  "Remove plastic drop cloths from furniture; dust everything; scrub the kitchen sink; clean the bathroom; and put sheets and blankets on the beds."

  "You call this a vacation?" Jane asked.

  "What's wrong? Doesn't that sound like a fun agenda to you?"

  "Thrilling."

  "Well, the cabin's not enormous. The two of us will go through the list of chores in an hour or an hour and a half."

  They had barely started when they were interrupted by a knock at the door. It was Vince Gervis, the colony's caretaker. He was a big, barrel-chested man with enormous shoulders, enormous biceps, enormous hands, and a smile to match the rest of him.

  "Just makin' my rounds," he said. "Saw your car. Thought I'd say hello." Carol introduced him to Jane and said she was a niece (a convenient white lie), and there was some polite chitchat, and then Gervis said, "Dr. Tracy, where's the other Dr. Tracy? I'd like to give him my best, too."

  "Oh, he isn't with us right now," Carol said. "He's coming up on Sunday, after he finishes some important work he couldn't just put aside."

  Gervis frowned.

  Carol said, "Is something wrong?"

  "Well. . . me and the missus was plannin' to go into town to do some shoppin', maybe see a movie, eat a restaurant meal. It's what we generally do on Friday afternoons, you see. But there isn't another soul up here besides you and Jane. Will be tomorrow, bein' as it's a Saturday, and seem' as if the weather don't get too bad so that everybody stays to home. But there's no one else so far today except you."

  "Don't worry about us," Carol said. "We'll be fine.

  You and Peg go on into town like you planned."

  "Well.. . I'm not sure I like the idea of you two ladies out here all by your lonesome, twenty miles from other folks. No sir, I don't like it much."

  "Nobody's going to bother us, Vince. The road's gated; you can't even get in without a key card."

  "Anybody can walk in if he's willin' to go overland just a little ways."

  Carol required several minutes and a lot of words to reassure him, but at last he decided that he and his wife would keep to their usual Friday schedule.

  Shortly after Vince left, the rains came. The soft roar of a hundred million droplets striking a hundred million rustling leaves was soothing to Carol.

  But Jane found the noise somewhat unpleasant.

  "I don't know why," she said, "but the sound makes me think of fire. Hissing. . . just like a lot of flames eating up everything in sight. Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle.. ."

  The rain forced Paul to slow down to sixty, which was still too fast for highway conditions, but the situation called for the taking of some risks.

  The windshield wipers thumped metronomically, and the tires sang softly on the wet macadam.

  The day was dark and growing darker. It looked more like twilight than like midday. The wind blew obscuring curtains of rain across the treacherously wet pavement, and the gray-brown road spray flung up by other traffic hung in the air, a thick and dirty mist.

  It seemed almost as if the Pontiac were a tiny vessel sailing through the deep currents of a vast, cold sea, the only pocket of warmth and light within a million miles.

  Grace said, "You probably won't believe what I've got to tell you, and that would be understandable."

  "After what's happened to me today," Paul said, "I'm ready to believe anything."

  And maybe that's what the poltergeist meant to do, he thought. Maybe it meant to prepare me for whatever story Grace has to tell. In fact, if I hadn't been delayed by the poltergeist, I would have left the house before Grace arrived.

  "I'll keep it as simple and straightforward as I can," Grace said. "But it's not a simple and straightforward matter." She cradled her torn left hand in her right hand; the bleeding had stopped, and the cuts were all crusty, clotted. "It starts in 1865, in Shippensburg. The family was named Havenswood."

  Paul glanced her, startled by the name.

  She looked straight ahead, at the rain-sodden land through which they were rushing. "The mother was Willa Havenswood, and the daughter's name was Laura. Those two didn't get along well. Not well at all. The fault was on both sides, and the reasons for their constant bickering aren't really important here. What's important is that one day in the spring of 1865, Willa sent Laura into the cellar to do some spring cleaning, even though she knew perfectly well that the girl was deathly afraid of the cellar. It was punishment, you see. And while Laura was down there in the cellar, a fire broke out upstairs. She was trapped and burned to death. She must have died blaming her mother for putting her in that trap in the first place. Maybe she even blamed Willa for starting the fire- which she didn't. It was accidentally started by Rachael Adams, Laura's aunt. It's even possible that Laura wondered if her mother had started the fire on purpose, just to get rid of her. The child had emotional problems; she was capable of melodramatic notions of that sort. The mother had emotional problems, too; she was capable of inspiring paranoia, for sure. Anyway, Laura died a gruesome death, and we can be pretty certain that her last thought was an ardent wish for revenge. There was no way she could have known that her mother perished in that fire, too!"

  So that's why the Havenswood identity didn't check out when Carol put the police on to it, Paul thought. They'd have had to go all the way back to the 1800s in order to find the Havenswood family.

  County records for that period probably don't even exist any more.

  A slow-moving truck appeared out of the mists ahead, and Paul passed it. For a moment the filthy spray from the truck's big tires drummed on the side of the Pontiac, and the noise was too loud for Grace to speak above it.

  When they had passed the truck, she said, "Since 1865, Laura has been pursuing revenge through at least two and probably three other lives. Reincarnation, Paul. Can you believe in that? Can you believe that in 1943, Laura Havenswood was a fifteen-year-old girl named Linda Bektermann and that the night before her sixteenth birthday she tried to kill her mother, who was Willa Havenswood reincarnated?

  It's a true case. Linda Bektermann went berserk and tried to ax her mother to death, but her mother turned the tables and killed the girl instead. Laura didn't get her revenge. And can you believe that Willa is now alive again and that she's our Carol this time? And that Laura is alive again, too?"

  "Jane?"

  "Yes."

  Together, Carol and Jane cleaned the cabin in an hour and fifteen minutes. Carol was delighted to see that the girl was an industrious worker who took great pleasure in doing even a menial job well.

  When they were finished, they poured two glasses of Pepsi to reward themselves, and they sat in the two big easy chairs that faced the mammoth fireplace.

  "It's too early to start cooking dinner," Jane said.

  "And it's too wet out there to go for a walk, so what game do you want to play?"

  "Anything that looks good to you is fine with me. You can look over all the stuff i
n our game closet and take your pick. But first, I think we really should get the therapy session out of the way."

  "Are we going to keep that up even on vacation?"

  the girl asked. She was clearly uneasy about it, though she had not been noticeably uneasy before, even on the occasion of the first session, the day before yesterday.

  "Of course we've got to keep on with it," Carol said. "Now that we've made a start, it's best to continue working at it, pushing and probing a little bit every day."

  "Well. . . all right."

  "Good. Let's turn these chairs around to face each other."

  The fire flickered off to one side, creating dancing shadows on the hearth.

  Outside, the rain rattled ceaselessly through the trees and pattered on the roof, and Carol realized that it did sound like even more fire, as Jane had said, so that they seemed to be totally surrounded by the hiss and crackle of flames.

  She needed only a few seconds to put Jane into a trance this time. But as had happened during the first session, the girl needed almost two minutes to regress to a period at which memories existed for her. This time the long silence didn't disturb Carol as it had done before.

  When the girl spoke at last, she used the Laura voice. "Mama? Is that you? Is that you, Mama?"

  "Laura?"

  The girl's eyes were squeezed shut. Her voice was tight, tense. "Is that you? Is it you, Mama? Is it?"

  "Relax," Carol said.

  Instead of relaxing, the girl became visibly more tense. She hunched her shoulders, fisted her hands in her lap. Lines of strain appeared in her forehead and at the corners of her mouth. She leaned away from the back of her chair, toward Carol.

  "I want you to answer some questions," Carol said. "But you must be calm and relaxed first. Now, you will do exactly as I say. You will unclench your fists. You will-"

  "I won't!"

  The girl's eyes popped open. She leapt up out of her chair and stood before Carol, quivering.

  "Sit down, honey."

  "I won't do what you say! I'm sick of doing what you tell me to do, sick of your punishments."

  "Sit down," Carol said softly but forcefully.

  The girl glared at her. "You did it to me," she said in the Laura voice. "You put me down there in that awful place."

  Carol hesitated, then decided to flow with it. "What place do you mean?"

  "You know," the girl said accusingly. "I hate you."

  "Where is this awful place you spoke of?" Carol persisted.

  "The cellar."

  "What's so awful about the cellar?"

  Hatred seethed in the girl's eyes. Her lips were peeled back from her teeth in a feral snarl.

  "Laura? Answer me. What's so awful about the cellar?"

  The girl slapped her across the face.

  The blow stunned Carol. It was sharp, painful, unexpected. For an instant she simply couldn't believe that she actually had been hit.

  Then the girl hit her again. Backhanded.

  And again. Harder than before.

  Carol grabbed her adversary's slender wrists, but the girl wrenched loose. She kicked Carol in the shins, and when Carol cried out and sagged for an instant, the girl went for her throat. Carol fended her off, though not easily, and attempted to get up from the armchair. Jane pushed her down and fell on top of her. She felt the girl bite her shoulder, and suddenly her shock and confusion turned to fear. The chair tipped over, and they both rolled onto the floor, flailing.

  The flat land through which they had been driving began to rise and form itself into gently rolling hills, but the mountains were still a long way off.