The Mask

An act as destructive as this was quite out of character for him, but he was surely the culprit. There was not really another suspect to be seriously considered.
    “Ari! Where are you hiding, you sneaky Siamese?”
    She went to the kitchen.
    Aristophanes was standing at the yellow bowl, eating his Meow Mix. He glanced up as she entered the room.
    “You fur-footed menace,” she said. “What in the world has gotten into you today?”
    Aristophanes blinked, sneezed, rubbed his muzzle with one paw, and returned to his dinner with lofty, catlike indifference to her exasperation and puzzlement.
     
    Later that night, in her darkened bedroom, Carol Tracy stared at the adumbral ceiling and listened to her husband’s soft, steady breathing. He had been asleep for only a few minutes.
    The night was quiet. The rain had stopped, and the sky was no longer shaken by thunder. Occasionally, wind brushed across the shingled roof and sighed wearily at the windows, but the fury had gone out of it.
    Carol teetered pleasantly on the edge of sleep. She was a bit lightheaded from the champagne she had been slowly sipping throughout the evening, and she felt as if she were floating in warm water, with gentle waves lapping at her sides.
    She thought dreamily about the child they would adopt, tried to envision its appearance. A gallery of sweet young faces filled her imagination. If it was an infant, rather than a three- or four-year-old, they would name it themselves: Jason, if a boy; Julia, if a girl. Carol rocked herself on the thin line between wakefulness and dreams by rolling those two names back and forth in her mind: Jason, Julia, Jason, Julia, Jason…
    Falling off the edge, dropping into a well of sleep, she had the ugly, unwelcome thought she had resisted so strenuously earlier in the day: Something’s trying to stop us from adopting a baby.
    Then she was in a strange place where there was not much light, where something hissed and murmured sullenly just out of sight, where the purple-amber shadows had substance and crowded close with menacing intent. In that unknown place, the nightmare unrolled with the frantic, nerve-jarring rhythm of player-piano music.
    At first she was running in utter lightlessness, and then she was suddenly running from one room to another in a large house, weaving through a forest of furniture, knocking over a floor lamp, banging one hip against the sharp corner of a credenza, stumbling and nearly falling over the loose edge of an oriental carpet. She plunged through an archway, into a long hall, and turned and looked back into the room from which she had come, but the room wasn’t there any longer. The house existed only in front of her; behind, there was perfect, featureless blackness.
    Blackness… and then a glimmer of something. A glint. A splinter of light. A silvery, moving object. The thing swung from side to side, vanishing into darkness, reappearing with a gleam a second later, vanishing again, back and forth, back and forth, rather like a pendulum, never visible long enough to be identified. Although she couldn’t quite see what the silvery thing was, she could tell that it was moving toward her, and she knew she must get away from it or die. She ran along the hall to the foot of the stairs, climbed quickly to the second floor. She glanced back and down, but the stairs were not there any more. Just an inky pit. And then the brief flash of something swinging back and forth in that pit… again… again like a ticking metronome. She rushed into the bedroom, slammed the door, grabbed a chair with the intention of bracing it under the knob—and discovered that, while her back was turned, the door had disappeared, as had the wall in which it had been set.
    Where the wall had been, there was subterranean gloom. And a silvery flicker. Very close now. Closer still. She screamed but made no sound, and the mysteriously gleaming object arced over her head and— (Thunk!)
    —This is more than just a dream, she thought desperately. Much more than that. This is a memory, a prophecy, a warning. This is a— (Thunk!)
    —She was running in another house that was altogether different from the first. This place was smaller, the furnishings less grand. She did not know where she was, yet she knew she had been here before. The house was familiar, just as the first place had been. She hurried through a doorway, into a kitchen.
    Two bloody, severed heads were on the kitchen table. One of them was a man’s head, and the other