Death Mask

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Dying in the Dark

“What?” she said, turning around. But there was nobody within twenty feet of her.

“Please?” said Detective Kunzel.

“I distinctly heard somebody speak. A woman, I think. She said, ‘We’re here.’ ”

“An echo, I guess. You go with this officer and he’ll take good care of you.”

Don’t leave us. We’re here.

Sissy lifted one hand and said, “Ssh! There she was again! She just said, ‘Don’t leave us.’ ”

Detective Kunzel looked around. “There’s no woman here, Mrs. Sawyer. I think your ears are playing tricks on you.”

But Sissy could sense the woman now. She could almost feel her breath against the side of her neck. The woman was black, and she was middle-aged, and she wore upswept eyeglasses. Her name began with an M or an N.

And she was here.

Sissy began to circle around the lobby, her hand still lifted, listening.

Don’t leave us. For pity’s sake, please don’t leave us.

Molly said, “Sissy, what is it? Are you okay?”

“She’s very close,” said Sissy, distractedly. “She’s trying to tell me where she is.”

There was a sharp clatter as two crime-scene investigators adjusted the tripods that supported their floodlights. Sissy said, “Ssh!” and Detective Bellman called out, “Hey, people! Can we have a little quiet in here for a moment?”

We’re here, the woman whispered.

“Where?” Sissy coaxed her.

Please don’t leave us. It’s dark and it’s cold and I can’t see nothing. The others I think they both dead, Ronnie and Lindy, or else they real close to it.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” Sissy asked her. Detective Kunzel looked at Molly and raised his left eyebrow.

Mary. Mary Clay.

“Well, you just hang on there, Mary, because I can hear you and I’m going to find you.”

“Mary?” said Detective Kunzel. “Who the hell is Mary?”

“What’s the last thing you remember, Mary?”

We is all finished up cleaning on the twenty-second floor. We is waiting to go up to Mr. Radcliffe’s. The doors opened up. “I didn’t know this one was working,” says Ronnie.

“The elevator. you’re talking about the elevator?”

Detective Kunzel turned to Molly. “Does she always talk to herself like this?”

But Molly said, “Ssh. I’ve seen her do this before. Whoever she’s talking to, she can hear them and they can hear her, even if we can’t. Astral conversation, that’s what she calls it.”

“You mean like Patricia Arquette, in Medium? Talking to dead people, and people who aren’t even there?”

“Well, something like that. More like broadband, only psychic.”

Sissy stopped circling around now and stayed where she was, in the center of the lobby. “You’re close, Mary, I can feel you.”

Lindy says it looks like it’s working now. So in we step and the doors close.

“What then, Mary?”

Elevator gives a kind of a bang and it scares the daylights out of us. Now it starts to move, but jerky. And it ain’t going up like we want it to. It’s going down. And now there’s another bang, and it’s stopped. Why’s it stopped? Don’t tell me we’re going to be trapped in here. I can’t stand being all closed in like this. I even get the claustrophobia when the church is crowded, and I have to step outside and take in some air.

Mary was breathing hard now, and her voice began to rise in panic.

The doors is opening up. Which floor we on? I don’t know which floor we on. But we don’t even get a chance because he comes rushing in like a mad person and he’s stabbing at us with two big knives and Ronnie drops down to his knees with blood spraying out of his neck and Lindy falls backward and then he’s stabbing at me and I can feel the knives chopping into my shoulders and into my arms and then it’s all black.

Sissy closed her eyes again. She could sense that Mary was very badly hurt, and that she was dying. That was the reason she could hear her. Her spirit was already leaving her — floating away from her material body in skeins of light.

“Mary?” she said. “Mary, can you hear me?”

Please come find us, Mary whispered. Don’t let me die in the dark. My kids. My mother.

Sissy walked slowly toward the center elevator, the one with the OUT OF ORDER sign. She pressed both hands against the doors and took a deep breath, and held it, and then another. She heard somebody say, Mary? Is that you, Mary? A different woman, older. Without turning around, she called out, “Mike!”

Detective Kunzel hurried up to her and jabbed at the elevator button. The doors refused to open, but he shouted out, “Kraussman! Hey, Kraussman! Somebody get that goddamned super for me!”

Mr. Kraussman came out of his office, blinking.

“Get these elevator doors open, and get them open now!”

“Okay, for sure. I got a key.”

He came hurrying across with his bunch of keys jingling, knelt down in front of the elevator. He unlocked the hoistway doors and wound them open, but the doors to the elevator car were still firmly closed.

“You wait, I bring crowbar!”

He returned to his office and came back with a crowbar and a tire iron. He handed the tire iron to the burliest of the uniformed officers, and between them, inch by inch, they forced the elevator doors apart.

As they were opened wider and wider, the doors gave out intermittent groans, as if they were in pain. A little at a time, the floodlights began to illuminate the interior of the elevator car. It was wall-to-wall red.

Three people were huddled on the floor — two women and a man. All three of them were wearing pale blue coveralls, but they were soaked and spattered in so much blood that they looked as if they had been attacked by an action painter with a bucket of scarlet paint.

“Gott im Himmel,” coughed Mr. Kraussman. “It’s the cleaning crew.”

“Paramedics!” bellowed Detective Kunzel. “Paramedics, and quick!”

Mr. Kraussman swayed and stumbled as if somebody had pushed him. “I thought they finish up hours ago. Most nights, they’re all through by two. I thought they went home. I swear it.”

“Hey, steady,” said Detective Bellman. “This wasn’t your fault.”

Detective Kunzel hunkered down beside the elevator and pressed his fingertips against the victims’ carotid arteries, one after the other.

“That’s Mary,” said Sissy, trying to stop her voice from trembling. “The one in the middle, with the eyeglasses. Is she still alive?”

Detective Kunzel felt for Mary’s pulse a second time, but then he shook his head. “They’re all deceased, all three of them. I’m sorry.”

“Just before she passed over, do you know what Mary told me? She said that she didn’t want to die in the dark.”

Molly put her arm around Sissy’s shoulders and gave her a sympathetic squeeze. “At least you found them.”

Detective Kunzel stood up. “I don’t know how you did that, Mrs. Sawyer, but I have to admit that I’m impressed.”

“If only I’d heard her sooner.”

“By the look of her injuries, Mrs. Sawyer, I don’t think she could have survived, even if you had.”

Detective Bellman was clearly upset and kept blowing out his cheeks. “Guy’s a total maniac. I never saw anybody with so many stab wounds, ever.”

“You know what nice people these were?” said Mr. Kraussman. “Always smiling. Always got time for laughing. What kind of person would want to hurt them so bad?”

“You were right about one thing, Mrs. Sawyer,” said Detective Kunzel. “Red Mask did kill more people this time. Molly — how about you take that composite over to headquarters pronto? The sooner we get it out to the media the better. We have to nail this bastard before he attacks anybody else.”

“I just wish I could sense where he went,” said Sissy. “I’ve tried and I’ve tried — but nothing.”

“Come on, Sissy,” Molly told her. “You’re in shock. We all are. Why don’t you let the officer drive you home? Make yourself some of that chamomile tea.”

Sissy nodded. She was more frustrated than distressed. Usually, she could feel where somebody had gone, because everybody left a psychic wake behind them — a shivering in the air, a refraction in the daylight — in the same way that everybody left their scent or their footprints behind them. Sometimes, if a person was very angry, or agitated, they left a trembling in the air that could persist for hours.

But Red Mask had vanished without a trace, as if he had stepped out of the world altogether and closed the door behind him. No emotion, no afterimage, no distortion in the daylight. Not even the faintest of distant echoes.