The Mask

food. Besides, if she didn’t get out of here in the next few minutes, she might be too late to be of any help to Carol.
    If Carol is killed simply because I lack the courage to face that damned cat, she thought, then I might as well be dead anyway.
    She switched off the two safeties on the pistol.
    She got up and went to the door.
    For nearly a minute she stood with one ear pressed to the door, listening for scratching noises or other indications that Aristophanes was nearby. She heard nothing.
    Holding the pistol in her right hand, she used her bloody, claw-torn left hand to turn the knob. She opened the door with the utmost caution, half an inch at a time, expecting the cat to dart through the opening the instant it was wide enough to admit him. But he didn’t.
    Finally, reluctantly, she poked her head out into the hall. Looked left. Right.
    The cat wasn’t anywhere in sight.
    She stepped into the hall and paused, afraid to move away from the bedroom door.
    Go! she told herself angrily. Move your ass, Gracie!
    She took a step toward the head of the stairs. Then another step. Trying to be quiet.
    The stairs appeared to be a mile away.
    She looked behind her.
    Still no Aristophanes.
    Another step.
    This was going to be the longest walk she had ever taken.
     
    Paul latched his suitcase, picked it up, turned away from the bed—and jumped, startled, when the entire house shook as if a wrecker’s ball had struck the side of it.
    THUNK!
    He looked up at the ceiling.
    THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!
    During the past five days there had been no hammering to disturb the peace. He hadn’t entirely forgotten about it, of course; he still occasionally wondered where that mysterious sound had come from. For the most part, however, he had put it out of his mind; there had been other things to worry about. But now— THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!
    The nerve-fraying noise reverberated in the windows and bounced off the walls. It seemed to vibrate in Paul’s teeth and bones, too.
    THUNK!
    After spending days trying to identify the source of that sound, understanding came to him unexpectedly, in a flash. It was an ax. It was not a hammering, which was how he had been thinking of it. No. There was a sharp edge to it, a brittle, cracking quality at the end of each blow. It was a chopping sound.
    THUNK!
    Being able to identify the noise did absolutely nothing to help him understand where it was coming from.
    So it was an ax instead of a hammer. So what? He still couldn’t make sense of it. Why were the blows shaking the entire house? It would have to be the mythical Paul Bunyan’s ax to have such a tremendous impact. And regardless of whether it was a hammer or an ax or even, for Christ’s sake, a salami, how could the sound of it issue from thin air?
    Suddenly, inexplicably, he thought of the meat cleaver that Louise Parker had buried in the throat of her maniacal daughter back in 1905. He thought about the freakish lightning strikes at Alfred O’Brian’s office ; the strange intruder he had seen on the rear lawn during the thunderstorm that evening; the Scrabble game two nights ago (BLADE, BLOOD, DEATH, TOMB, KILL, CAROL); Grace’s two prophetic dreams. And he knew beyond doubt—without understanding how he knew—that the sound of the ax was the thread that sewed together all these recent extraordinary events. Intuitively, he knew that an ax would be the instrument by which Carol’s life would be endangered. He didn’t know how. He didn’t know why. But he knew.
    THUNK! THUNK!
    A painting popped off its wall hook and clattered to the floor.
    The river of blood in Paul’s veins turned winter-cold.
    He had to get to the cabin. Fast.
    He started toward the bedroom door, and it slammed shut in front of him. No one had touched it. There had been no sudden draft that might have moved it. One moment the door was standing wide Open, and the next instant it was flung shut as if it had been shoved hard by an invisible hand.
    Out of the corner of his eye, Paul saw something move. Heart banging, breath trapped in his constricted throat, he twisted around toward the movement and instinctively raised his suitcase to partially shield himself.
    One of the two heavy, mirrored closet doors was sliding open. He expected someone to step out of the closet, but when the door was all the way open, he could see nothing in there except clothes on hangers.
    Then it slid shut, and the other door slid open. Then both of them started sliding at the same time, one crossing behind