The Mask

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.
BLADE
L
O
O
DEATH
O
M
B
    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.
BLADE
KILL
O
O
DEATH
     O
     M
     B
    “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 déjŕ 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 déjŕ 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