Death Mask (15 page)
"Excuse me? When we go looking for them?"
"The police will go on hunting for the first Red Mask, won't they? The real one? But how are the police going to find two living drawings? And even if they can, how are they to arrest two men who don't really exist?"
"I don't know, Sissy. But when it comes to that, how on earth are we going to find him, or them? And supposing we do, what then?"
"Like I told you," said Sissy. "It's the roses." She opened her purse and took out her deck of DeVane cards. "The roses are the key to all of this. They have been, right from the start."
"I don't understand."
"In every single card that I turned up since you painted that Mr. Lincoln rose, there are roses. They're like a code. If we can work out what the cards are telling us, then I think that we'll find out how to find Red Mask. Or Red Masks, plural."
"Sissy-I don't think that we should even think about finding them. Honestly, it would be way too dangerous."
"If we don't do it, who will? Who's going to believe us? Can you imagine Mike Kunzel's face if we told him that he has to go looking for two living sketches?"
As if on cue, Detective Kunzel came back into the studio with his mouth full of Whatchamacallit. "Those composites ready?" he asked. Then he coughed and waved his hand from side to side. "What the hell have you been doing in here? Building a campfire?"
"Sorry," said Sissy. "Slight accident."
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.
Molly had created them, so Molly was the only one who could make them vanish.
Mr. Boots made one of those mewling noises in the back of his throat. He was hot and tired, and the cicadas were beginning to annoy him. Sissy ruffled his ears and said, "Never mind, Mister. They'll soon be gone."
Molly came back out, wearing a tight pink T-shirt and white shorts and carrying two large glasses of chilled Zinfandel. "So, have you managed to break the code yet?"
"Not really. But I'm beginning to think that you have to cut the roses. You, personally, because you painted them. And I also think that when you cut them, you have to use the painting of a knife, rather than a real one."
"The painting of a knife?"
"Trevor used a real knife, but real knives exist only in this reality-not 'painting reality.' He could imagine the roses being cut, and so they were, for as long as he kept his attention on them. But as soon as he turned his attention to something else, the illusion ended, and the roses returned here, to this flowerpot, just as you had first painted them."
"Well, I'm not sure what the hell you're talking about, but I'll give it a try."
"It's simple. If an artist painted a picture of us sitting together in this yard, and then he stabbed the picture with a knife, neither of us would be hurt, would we, either in this reality or the painting's reality? But if the artist took his paints and altered the picture so that you were stabbing me, and I was bleeding, then my image would be injured, wouldn't it, even if the real me wasn't?"
Molly shook her head. "Sometimes, Sissy, you leave me way, way behind. You know that?"
"No-it's not difficult to understand. Think of the The Picture of Dorian Gray. The real Dorian Gray stayed young and handsome, didn't he, while his portrait grew old and ugly? There are two different realities-real reality and painting reality. I know Dorian Gray is only a story, but Oscar Wilde is supposed to have borrowed it from a famous incident that happened in Paris in the eighteen hundreds. A cardinal had a secret passion for a prostitute, so he had her portrait painted, and then he blessed it. She stayed beautiful and unblemished for over thirty years, until she died. But when they found her portrait, hidden in her attic, it was supposed to have looked so hideous that men actually vomited when they looked at it.
"There are other stories, too, of real people getting lost inside paintings, and I don't think they're all hokum, either. If you go to the Whitney Museum in Stamford, in Connecticut, they have this huge painting of a family of colonists saying grace. I've seen it for myself. It was painted in 1785, but there's a man sitting at the head of the table wearing a nineteen-forties suit and a wristwatch. They've had dozens of experts testing that painting, but there's no question about it. The man with the wristwatch was painted at the same time as everybody else in the picture."
"Ok-a-y," said Molly, although she still didn't sound convinced. "I guess that makes some cockeyed kind of sense. I'll see if I can paint a knife."
They went back inside the house. Molly took one of her steak knives from the wooden block on the kitchen counter, and then she went through to her studio and pinned a clean sheet of art paper to her drawing board. Sissy stood beside her as she deftly drew a pencil sketch of the steak knife and painted it with watercolors.
They stood and watched the painting for almost ten minutes, but even when it had dried, it refused to disappear.
"Maybe I've lost the magic touch," said Molly. "Maybe it only works with living things, not inanimate objects."
Sissy looked around the room. "What's different?"
"Nothing's different."
"Those are the same paints you used before?"
"Same paints, same brushes. Same paper."
"I don't know what it is. Yes, I do. You're not wearing your necklace."
"No, I took it off when I changed."
"Last time you were wearing your necklace. And you were wearing it when you drew those pictures of Red Mask, too. The cards showed you with a talisman, remember, something to make your drawings come to life. Put it on, and try painting that knife again."
Molly went to her bedroom and came out with her necklace. It looked dull and cheap when she was carrying it-nothing but a jingling collection of glass beads and tarnished mascots-but when Sissy helped her to fasten it around her neck, it started to sparkle.
"I said it had power, didn't I? And you're definitely the person who makes it come to life."
Molly sketched and painted the steak knife a second time. While she watched her, Sissy was strongly tempted to light another cigarette, but she didn't want to smoke in the house, though Molly was relaxed about it. Trevor could smell cigarettes, even if she had smoked them days ago, just the way that Frank had been able to.
They waited. The air-conditioning rattled and the cicadas ceaselessly chirruped. Five minutes passed and the steak knife remained on the paper, without a hint of its fading.
"Maybe you're right, and it doesn't work with inanimate objects."
"No-look!"
As the seventh minute passed, the steak knife's handle gradually began to fade. After eight minutes, there was nothing left but the faint outline of the blade. After nine, that was gone, too, and the paper was blank.
Sissy touched the paper with her fingertips. She felt nothing at all, not even the inherent sharpness that a real knife would have left behind it. The paper was completely empty, in the same way that Red Mask was empty. No knife. Not even an absence of knife.
The two of them went back outside. The yard was teeming with cicadas, all glistening in the early-afternoon sun, but there was one distinctive shine that they both saw at once. It was the steak knife, lying on the table.
"You did it," said Sissy.
"The necklace did it, not me."
"I'm sure you did it together, the necklace and you. Just like my mother's ring won't go dark on its own, the necklace doesn't work unless you're wearing it. You're an artist. You're a brilliant artist, and the necklace knows that you are."
Molly reached out and picked up the steak knife. She ran her fingertip down the blade, and said, "Ouch. Just like the real thing."
"Well, let's see how it cuts these roses."
Molly knelt down on one knee and cut the roses as close to the soil as she could. She smelled them, and then offered them to Sissy, so that she could smell them, too.
"Nothing," said Sissy. "No fragrance at all. If anything, they smell like paper."
Molly took the roses into her studio and laid them on her desk.
Sissy said, "Let's see what happens now. If they stay cut, then we'll we know that we can have an actual physical effect on things that are painted, even if they're not really real."
"Like Red Mask, you mean?"
"Let's hope so."
That afternoon, while Molly was making a vegetable potpie for supper, Sissy went over the DeVane cards again and again, trying to decode the symbolism of the roses.
Now and again she glanced across at the flowers that were still lying on Molly's desk, but so far they were showing no sign of changing back into paintings. They reminded her of the day she had married Frank. He had heaped their honeymoon bed with dozens and dozens of roses, crimson and white.
Molly had borrowed four library books on roses, which she was using for reference for her Fairy Fifi story. "Roses are a symbol of beauty and love," declared The Illustrated Rose. "But at the same time they are a sad reminder that beauty and love always fade away and die.
"Roses are also a symbol of great secrecy. There is a myth that Cupid offered a rose to Harpocrates, the god of silence, to bribe him not to disclose the sexual indiscretions of the goddess Venus.
"In ancient Rome and Greece, a host who suspended an upside-down rose over a table would expect the guests who were gathered underneath it to keep their discussions confidential-hence the term sub rosa."
Sissy frowned. An upside-down rose, suspended over a table?
She shuffled through the DeVane cards until she found les Amis de la table, the first card she had turned up after Molly had painted the roses and they had come to life. Here they sat, four people eating a lavish dinner together, two young people and an older woman, and a mysterious man whose face was hidden under a gray hood. And there it was, hanging above their heads: an upside-down rose, tied to the candelabrum with a ribbon.
Unlike some of the other cards, there was no writing on les Amis de la table apart from its title, so the presence of the rose could mean only one thing. The picture itself must hold a secret. But what?
She tucked the card back into the deck and shuffled it. But when she tried to pick out another card, it was the same one, les Amis de la table. She tried again, shuffling even more thoroughly this time. But again, when she drew out a card, there it was, les Amis de la table. She did it again and again, and every time, les Amis de la table reappeared.
She took the card into the kitchen, where Molly was cutting up carrots. "You see this card? The first time I picked it, I thought it meant that I was welcome to stay here another week."
"Well, you are," said Molly.
"Yes, but now the same damn card has come up four times in a row. I shuffle the deck, I pick a card, and it's always the same one. The cards only repeat themselves when they're trying to tell you that you've missed the point. It's like they're saying, Hello, stupid!"
"So what is the point?"
"I'm not sure. But this upside-down rose means that the card has a secret hidden in it someplace."
Molly looked at the card and shrugged. "I don't see any secret. Except…well, you can't see this hooded guy's face, can you? So you can't tell why this old woman is looking so worried about him."
"Maybe that's it. Maybe he's somebody famous. Or somebody who was famous, back in the eighteenth century. An artist, you know? Or a politician. Or maybe he's a saint. Maybe, if we knew who he was, we could begin to understand how to turn murderers back into drawings of murderers."
Molly examined the card more intently. "Look…you can see his face reflected in that dish cover, can't you?"
"Yes. But it's so distorted. He's all nose."
