The Mask

nice safe place for my own good. At best, they’d laugh at me.”
    He thought about the poltergeist—the sound of the ax, the splintering door, the airborne ceramic figurines, the toppling chairs—and he said, “Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.”
    “We’ll have to handle this ourselves,” Grace said. “Let’s get rolling. I can tell you everything I know on the way. Each minute we waste, I just get sicker and sicker, thinking about what might be happening in the mountains.”
    Paul backed the car into the street and drove away from the house, heading for the nearest freeway entrance. When he was on the open highway, he floored the accelerator, and the car rocketed ahead.
    “How long does it usually take to get there?” Grace asked.
    “About two hours and fifteen minutes.”
    “Too long.”
    “We’ll do better than that.”
    The speedometer needle touched eighty.

12
    THEY had brought a lot of food in cardboard cartons and ice chests. They transferred all of those items to the cupboards and refrigerator, agreeing to forgo lunch altogether in order to indulge themselves guiltlessly in a glutton’s dinner.
    “All right,” Carol said, producing a list from one of the kitchen drawers, “here’s what we need to do to make this place livable.” She read from the list:
    “Remove plastic dropcloths from furniture; dust everything; scrub the kitchen sink; clean the bathroom; and put sheets and blankets on the beds.”
    “You call this a vacation?” Jane asked.
    “What’s wrong? Doesn’t that sound like a fun agenda to you?”
    “Thrilling.”
    “Well, the cabin’s not enormous. The two of us will go through the list of chores in an hour or an hour and a half.”
    They had barely started when they were interrupted by a knock at the door. It was Vince Gervis, the colony’s caretaker. He was a big, barrel-chested man with enormous shoulders, enormous biceps, enormous hands, and a smile to match the rest of him.
    “Just makin’ my rounds,” he said. “Saw your car. Thought I’d say hello.” Carol introduced him to Jane and said she was a niece (a convenient white lie), and there was some polite chitchat, and then Gervis said, “Dr. Tracy, where’s the other Dr. Tracy? I’d like to give him my best, too.”
    “Oh, he isn’t with us right now,” Carol said. “He’s coming up on Sunday, after he finishes some important work he couldn’t just put aside.”
    Gervis frowned.
    Carol said, “Is something wrong?”
    “Well… me and the missus was plannin’ to go into town to do some shoppin’, maybe see a movie, eat a restaurant meal. It’s what we generally do on Friday afternoons, you see. But there isn’t another soul up here besides you and Jane. Will be tomorrow, bein’ as it’s a Saturday, and seem’ as if the weather don’t get too bad so that everybody stays to home. But there’s no one else so far today except you.”
    “Don’t worry about us,” Carol said. “We’ll be fine. You and Peg go on into town like you planned.”
    “Well… I’m not sure I like the idea of you two ladies out here all by your lonesome, twenty miles from other folks. No sir, I don’t like it much.”
    “Nobody’s going to bother us, Vince. The road’s gated; you can’t even get in without a key card.”
    “Anybody can walk in if he’s willin’ to go overland just a little ways.”
    Carol required several minutes and a lot of words to reassure him, but at last he decided that he and his wife would keep to their usual Friday schedule.
    Shortly after Vince left, the rains came. The soft roar of a hundred million droplets striking a hundred million rustling leaves was soothing to Carol.
    But Jane found the noise somewhat unpleasant.
    “I don’t know why,” she said, “but the sound makes me think of fire. Hissing… just like a lot of flames eating up everything in sight. Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle…”
     
    The rain forced Paul to slow down to sixty, which was still too fast for highway conditions, but the situation called for the taking of some risks.
    The windshield wipers thumped metronomically, and the tires sang softly on the wet macadam.
    The day was dark and growing darker. It looked more like twilight than like midday. The wind blew obscuring curtains of rain across the treacherously wet pavement, and the gray-brown road spray flung up by other traffic hung in the air, a thick and dirty mist.
    It seemed almost as if the Pontiac were a tiny vessel sailing through the deep currents of a vast, cold sea, the only pocket of warmth and light within a million miles.
    Grace said,