The Mask

dark knowledge within her, long-forgotten memories waiting to be tapped. She was afraid to tap them, but she knew she must do precisely that, for Carol’s sake, and perhaps for her own sake as well.
    Suddenly, the air in the kitchen, though still quite clear, reeked of wood and tar smoke. Grace could hear the crackle of fire, although there were no flames here, now, in this place and time.
    Her heart pounded frantically, and her mouth turned dry and sour.
    She closed her eyes and could see the burning house as vividly as she had seen it in the dream. She could see the cellar doors, and she could hear herself screaming, calling Laura.
    She knew it hadn’t been only a dream. It had been a memory, lost for ages, surfacing now, reminding her that, indeed, she was not only Grace Mitowski.
    She opened her eyes.
    The kitchen was hot, stifling.
    She felt herself being pulled along by forces she could not comprehend, and she thought: Is this what I want? Do I really want to flow with this and discover the truth and turn my little world upside down? Can I handle it?
    The stench of nonexistent smoke grew stronger.
    The roar of nonexistent flames grew louder.
    I guess there’s no turning back now, she thought.
    She held her hands up in front of her face and stared at them, amazed. Her flesh had been miraculously disfigured by stigmata. Her hands were bruised, abraded, bloody. There were splinters of wood embedded in her palms, splinters from the cellar doors on which she had pounded such a long, long time ago.
     
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    At ten o’clock, when the phone rang, Paul had been at his desk, writing, for almost an hour. The work had just begun to flow smoothly. He snatched up the receiver and said, a bit impatiently, “Yes?”
    An unfamiliar female voice said, “Could I speak to Dr. Tracy, please?”
    “Speaking.”
    “Oh. Uh… no… the Dr. Tracy I’m looking for is a woman.”
    “It’s my wife you want,” he said. “She’s out of town for a few days. Can I take a message?”
    “Yes, please. Would you tell her that Polly called from Maugham & Crichton?”
    He jotted the name down on a note pad. “And what’s this in reference to?”
    “Dr. Tracy was here yesterday afternoon with a young girl who’s suffering from amnesia…”
    “Yes,” Paul said, suddenly more interested than he had been. “I know the case.”
    “Dr. Tracy was asking if we’d ever heard of anyone named Millicent Parker.”
    “That’s right. She told me about it last evening. It was another dead end, I gather.”
    “It seemed to be a dead end yesterday,” Polly said, “but now it turns out that one of our doctors is familiar with the name. Dr. Maugham himself, in fact.”
    “Listen, rather than waiting for my wife to call you back, why don’t you just tell me what you’ve come up with, and I can pass the information along to her.”
    “Well, sure, why not? See, Dr. Maugham is the senior partner in the practice. He bought this property eighteen years ago and personally oversaw the restoration of the outside and the renovation of the interior. He’s a history bug, so it was natural for him to want to know the history of the building he purchased. He says this place was built in 1902 by a man named Randolph Parker. Parker had a daughter named Millicent.”
    “1902?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Interesting.”
    “You haven’t heard the best part,” Polly said, the eagerness of a gossip-monger in her voice. “Seems that back in 1905, the night before Millie’s sixteenth birthday party, Mrs. Parker was in the kitchen, decorating a big cake for the girl. Millie snuck in behind her and stabbed her in the back four times.”
    Unthinking, Paul snapped the pencil he’d been holding ever since he’d written Polly’s name on the note pad. One broken piece popped out of his hand, spun across the top of the desk, and fell to the floor.
    “She stabbed her own mother?” he asked, hoping that he had not heard correctly.
    “Isn’t that something?”
    “Kill her?” he asked numbly.
    “No. Dr. Maugham says that according to the newspaper accounts at that time, the girl used a short bladed knife. It didn’t sink in far enough to do really major damage. No vital organs or blood vessels were affected. Louise Parker—that was the mother’s flame—managed to grab a meat cleaver from a kitchen rack. She tried to hold the girl off with that. But I guess Millie must have been completely off her rocker, ‘cause she charged straight at Mrs. Parker again, and Mrs. Parker had to use that