The Mask (23 page)

“I guess you’ll be stuck with me for a while.”

Carol sighed and pretended weariness. “Looks that way. Oh, you’re such a terrible, terrible, terrible burden. You’re just too much to bear.” She took one hand off the steering wheel long enough to clutch her heart in a melodramatic gesture that made Jane giggle. “Too much! Oh, oh!”

“You know what?” the girl asked.

“What?”

“I like you, too.”

They looked at each other and grinned.

At the next red light, Jane said, “I’ve got a feeling about the mountains.”

“What’s that?”

“I have this strong feeling that it’s going to be a lot of fun up there. Really exciting. Something special. A real adventure.” Her blue eyes were even brighter than usual.

After dinner, Paul suggested they play Scrabble. He set up the board on the game table in the family room, while Carol explained the rules to Jane, who couldn’t remember whether or not she had ever played it before.

After winning the starting lottery, Jane went first with a twenty-two-point word that took advantage of a double-count square and the automatic double score for the first word of the game.

“Not a bad start,” Paul said. He hoped the girl would win, because she got such a kick out of little things like that. The smallest compliment, the most modest triumph delighted her. But he wasn’t going to throw the game just to please her; she would have to earn it, by God. He was incapable of giving the match away to anyone; regardless of the kind of game he was playing, he always put as much effort and commitment into it as he put into his work. He didn’t
indulge
in leisure activities; he
attacked
them. To Jane, he said, “I have a hunch you’re the kind of kid who says she’s never played poker before—and quickly proceeds to win every pot in the game.”

“Can you bet on Scrabble?” Jane asked.

“You can, but we won’t,” Paul said.

“Scared?”

“Terrified. You’d wind up with the house.”

“I’d let you stay.”

“How decent of you.”

“For very low rent.”

“Ah, this child truly has a heart of gold!”

While he bantered with Jane, Carol studied her own group of letters. “Hey,” she said, “I’ve got a word that ties right in with Jane’s.” She added LOOD to the B in BLADE, forming BLOOD.

“Judging from your words,” Paul said, “I guess you two intend to play a cutthroat game.”

Carol and Jane groaned dutifully at his bad joke and refilled their letter trays from the stock in the lid of the game box.

To Paul’s surprise, when he looked at his own seven letters, he saw that he had a word with which to continue the morbid theme that had been established. He added EATH to the D at the end of BLOOD, creating DEATH.

“Weird,” Carol said.

“Here’s something weirder still,” Jane said, taking her second turn by adding OMB to the T in DEATH.

Paul stared at the board. He was suddenly uneasy. What were the odds that the first four words in a
game would be so closely related in theme? Ten thousand to one? No. It had to be much higher than that. A hundred thousand to one? A million to one?

Carol looked up from her unusual letters. “You aren’t going to
believe
this.” She added three letters to the board.

“‘Kill’?” Paul said. “Oh, come on. Enough’s enough. Take it away and make another word.”

“I can’t,” Carol said. “That’s all I have. The rest of my letters are useless.”

“But you could have put ‘lik’ above the ‘e’ in ‘blade,’” Paul said. “You could have spelled ‘like’ instead of ‘kill.’”

“Sure, I could have done that, but I’d have gotten fewer points if I had. You see? There’s no square with a double-letter score up there.”

As he listened to Carol’s explanation, Paul felt strange. Bitterly cold inside. Hollow. As if he were balancing on a tightrope and knew he was going to fall and fall and fall…

He was gripped by déjà vu, by such a strikingly powerful awareness of having lived through this scene before that, for a moment, his heart seemed to stop beating. Yet nothing like this had ever happened in
any other Scrabble game he’d ever played. So why was he so certain he had witnessed this very thing on a previous occasion? Even as he asked himself that question, he realized what the answer was. The seizure of déjà vu wasn’t in reference to the words on the Scrabble board; not directly anyway. The thing that was so frighteningly familiar to him was the unusual, soul-shaking
feeling
that the coincidental appearance of those words aroused in him; the iciness that came from within rather than from without; the awful hollowness deep in his guts; the sickening sensation of teetering on a high wire, with only infinite darkness below. He had felt exactly the same way in the attic last week, when the mysterious hammering sound had seemed to issue out of the thin air in front of his face, when each
thunk!
had sounded as if it were coming from a sledge and anvil in another dimension of time and space. That was how he felt now, at the Scrabble board: as if he were confronted with something extraordinary, unnatural, perhaps even supernatural.

To Carol, he said, “Listen, why don’t you just take those last three letters off the board, put them back in the box, choose three brand-new letters, and make some other word besides ‘kill.’”

He could see that his suggestion startled her.

She said, “Why should I do that?”

Paul frowned. “Blade, blood, death, tomb, kill—what kind of words are they for a nice, friendly, peaceable game of Scrabble?”

She stared at him for a moment, and her piercing eyes made him a bit uncomfortable. “It’s only coincidence,” she said, clearly puzzled by his tenseness

“I
know
it’s only coincidence,” he said, though he didn’t know anything of the sort. He was simply unable
to explain rationally the eerie feeling that the words on the board were the work of some force far stronger than mere coincidence, something worse. “It still gives me the creeps,” he said lamely. He turned to Jane, seeking an ally. “Doesn’t it give you the creeps?”

“Yeah. It does. A little,” the girl agreed. “But it’s also kind of fascinating. I wonder how long we can keep going with words that fit this pattern.”

“I wonder, too,” Carol said. Playfully, she slapped Paul’s shoulder. “You know what your trouble is, babe? You don’t have any scientific curiosity. Now come on It’s your turn.”

After putting DEATH on the board, he hadn’t replenished his supply of letter tiles. He drew four of the small wooden squares from the lid of the game box, put them on the rack in front of him.

And froze.

Oh God
.

He was on that tightrope again, teetering over a great abyss.

“Well?” Carol asked.

Coincidence. It
had
to be just coincidence.

“Well?”

He looked up at her.

“What have you got?” she asked.

Numb, he shifted his eyes to the girl.

She was hunched over the table, as eager as Carol to hear his response, anxious to see if the macabre pattern would continue.

Paul lowered his eyes to the row of letters on the wooden rack. The word was still there. Impossible. But it was there anyway, possible or not.

“Paul?”

He moved so quickly and unexpectedly that Carol and Jane jumped. He scooped up the letters on his rack and nearly flung them back into the lid of the box. He swept the five offensive words off the board before anyone could protest, and he returned those nineteen tiles to the box with all the others.

“Paul, for heaven’s sake!”

“We’ll start a new game,” he said. “Maybe those words didn’t bother you, but they bothered me. I’m here to relax. If I want to hear about blood and death and killing, I can switch on the news.”

Carol said, “What word did you have?”

“I don’t know,” he lied. “I didn’t work with the letters to see. Come on. Let’s start all over.”

“You
did
have a word,” she said.

“No.”

“It looked to me like you did,” Jane said.

“Open up,” Carol said.

“All right, all right. I had a word. It was obscene. Not something a gentleman like me would use in a refined game of Scrabble, with ladies present.”

Jane’s eyes sparkled mischievously. “Really? Tell us. Don’t be stuffy.”

“Stuffy? Have you no manners, young lady?”

“None!”

“Have you no modesty?”

“Nope.”

“Are you just a common
broad
?”

“Common,” she said, nodding rapidly. “Common to the core. So tell us what word you had.”

“Shame, shame, shame,” he said. Gradually, he cajoled them into dropping their inquiry. They started a new game. This time all the words were ordinary, and they did not come in any unsettling, related order.

Later, in bed, he made love to Carol. He wasn’t particularly horny. He just wanted to be as close to her as he could get.

Afterwards, when the murmured love talk finally faded into a companionable silence, she said, “What
was
your word?”

“Hmmmm?” he said, pretending not to know what she meant.

“Your obscene word in the Scrabble game. Don’t try to tell me you’ve forgotten what it was.”

“Nothing important.”

She laughed. “After everything we just did in this bed, surely you don’t think I need to be sheltered!”

“I didn’t have an obscene word.” Which was the truth. “I didn’t really have any word at all.” Which was a lie. “It’s just that…I thought those first five words on the board were bad for Jane.”

“Bad for her?”

“Yes. I mean, you told me it’s quite possible she lost one or both of her parents in a fire. She might be on the brink of learning about or remembering a terrible tragedy in her recent past. Tonight she just needed to relax, to laugh a bit. How could the game have been fun for her if the words on the board started to remind her that her parents might be dead?”

Carol turned on her side, raised herself up a bit, leaned over him, her bare breasts grazing his chest, and stared into his eyes. “Is that really the only reason you were so upset?”

“Don’t you think I was right? Did I overreact?”

“Maybe you did. Maybe you didn’t. It
was
creepy.” She kissed his nose. “You know why I love you so much?”