The Mask

down.
    “What’s your father’s name?”
    Randolph Parker.
    “What’s your mother’s name?”
    The pen made a meaningless squiggle on the notebook page.
    “What’s your mother’s name?” Carol repeated.
    The girl surrendered to a new series of spasmic tremors. She retched soundlessly and put her hands to her throat once more. The felt-tipped pen made a black mark on the underside of her chin.
    Apparently, the mere mention of her mother frightened her. That was territory that would have to be explored, though not right now.
    Carol talked her down, calmed her, and asked a new question. “How old are you, Millie?”
    Tomorrow’s my birthday.
    “Is it really? How old will you be?”
    I won’t make it.
    “What won’t you make?”
    Sixteen.
    “Are you fifteen now?”
    Yes.
    “And you think you won’t live to be sixteen? Is that it?”
    Won’t live.
    “Why not?”
    The sheen of sweat had nearly evaporated from the girl’s face, but again perspiration popped out along her hairline.
    “Why won’t you live to see your birthday?” Carol persisted.
    As before, the girl used the felt-tipped pen to slash angrily at the notebook.
    “Stop that,” Carol said firmly. “Relax and be calm and answer my question.” She tore the ruined page out of the book and tossed it aside, then said, “Why won’t you live to see your sixteenth birthday, Millie?”
    Head.
    So we’re back to this, Carol thought. She said, “What about your head? What’s wrong with it?”
    Cut off.
    Carol stared at those two words for a moment, then looked up at the girl’s face.
    Millie-Jane was struggling to remain calm, as Carol had told her she must. But her eyes jiggled nervously, and there was horror in them. Her lips were utterly colorless, tremulous. Beneath the rivulets of sweat that coursed down her forehead, her skin was waxy and mealy white.
    She continued to scribble frantically in the note-book, but all she wrote was the same thing over and over again: Cut cut off, cut off cut off… She was bearing down on the page with such great pressure that the head of the felt-tipped pen was squashed into shapeless mush.
    My God, Carol thought, this is like a live report from the bottom of Hell.
    Laura Havenswood. Millicent Parker. One girl screaming in pain as fire consumed her, the other a victim of decapitation. What did either of those girls have to do with Jane Doe? She couldn’t be both of them. Perhaps she wasn’t either of them. Were they people she had known? Or were they only figments of her imagination?
    What in Christ’s name is happening here? Carol wondered.
    She put her own hand over the girl’s writing hand and stilled the squeaking pen. Speaking gently, rhythmically, she told Millie-Jane that everything was all right, that she was perfectly safe, and that she must relax.
    The girl’s eyes stopped jiggling. She sagged back in her chair.
    “All right,” Carol said. “I think that’s enough for today, honey.”
    Employing the imaginary wristwatch, she brought the girl forward in time.
    For a few seconds everything went well, but then, without warning, the girl erupted from her chair, knocking the notebook off her lap and flinging the pen across the room. Her pale face flushed red, and her placid expression gave way to a look of pure rage.
    Carol rose from beside the girl’s chair and stepped in front of her. “Honey, what’s wrong?”
    The girl’s eyes were wild. She began to shout with such force that she sprayed Carol with spittle. “Shit! The bitch did it! The rotten, goddamn bitch!”
    The voice wasn’t Jane’s.
    It wasn’t Laura’s either.
    It was a new voice, a third one, with its own special character, and Carol had a hunch it didn’t belong to Millicent Parker, the mute. She suspected that an entirely new identity had surfaced.
    The girl stood very stiff and straight, her hands fisted at her sides, staring off into infinity. Her face was distorted by anger. “The stinking bitch did it! She did it to me again!”
    The girl continued to shout at the top of her voice, and half of the words she blurted out were obscene. Carol tried to soothe her, but this time it wasn’t easy. For at least a minute the girl continued to wail and curse. At last, however, at Carol’s urging, she got control of herself. She stopped shouting, but there was still anger in her face.
    Holding the girl by the shoulders, face to face with her, Carol said, “What’s your name?”
    “Linda.”
    “What’s your last name?”
    “Bektermann.”
    It was yet another identity, as Carol had thought. She