The Mask

these chairs around to face each other.”
    The fire flickered off to one side, creating dancing shadows on the hearth.
    Outside, the rain rattled ceaselessly through the trees and pattered on the roof, and Carol realized that it did sound like even more fire, as Jane had said, so that they seemed to be totally surrounded by the hiss and crackle of flames.
    She needed only a few seconds to put Jane into a trance this time. But as had happened during the first session, the girl needed almost two minutes to regress to a period at which memories existed for her. This time the long silence didn’t disturb Carol as it had done before.
    When the girl spoke at last, she used the Laura voice. “Mama? Is that you? Is that you, Mama?”
    “Laura?”
    The girl’s eyes were squeezed shut. Her voice was tight, tense. “Is that you? Is it you, Mama? Is it?”
    “Relax,” Carol said.
    Instead of relaxing, the girl became visibly more tense. She hunched her shoulders, fisted her hands in her lap. Lines of strain appeared in her forehead and at the corners of her mouth. She leaned away from the back of her chair, toward Carol.
    “I want you to answer some questions,” Carol said. “But you must be calm and relaxed first. Now, you will do exactly as I say. You will unclench your fists. You will—”
    “I won’t!”
    The girl’s eyes popped open. She leapt up out of her chair and stood before Carol, quivering.
    “Sit down, honey.”
    “I won’t do what you say! I’m sick of doing what you tell me to do, sick of your punishments.”
    “Sit down,” Carol said softly but forcefully.
    The girl glared at her. “You did it to me,” she said in the Laura voice. “You put me down there in that awful place.”
    Carol hesitated, then decided to flow with it. “What place do you mean?”
    “You know,” the girl said accusingly. “I hate you.”
    “Where is this awful place you spoke of?” Carol persisted.
    “The cellar.”
    “What’s so awful about the cellar?”
    Hatred seethed in the girl’s eyes. Her lips were peeled back from her teeth in a feral snarl.
    “Laura? Answer me. What’s so awful about the cellar?”
    The girl slapped her across the face.
    The blow stunned Carol. It was sharp, painful, unexpected. For an instant she simply couldn’t believe that she actually had been hit.
    Then the girl hit her again. Backhanded.
    And again. Harder than before.
    Carol grabbed her adversary’s slender wrists, but the girl wrenched loose. She kicked Carol in the shins, and when Carol cried out and sagged for an instant, the girl went for her throat. Carol fended her off, though not easily, and attempted to get up from the armchair. Jane pushed her down and fell on top of her. She felt the girl bite her shoulder, and suddenly her shock and confusion turned to fear. The chair tipped over, and they both rolled onto the floor, flailing.
     
    The flat land through which they had been driving began to rise and form itself into gently rolling hills, but the mountains were still a long way off.
    If there had been any change in the weather during the last half hour, it had been for the worse. Rain was falling harder than ever; the hard, fat pellets of water shattered like glass on the roadway, and the amorphous fragments bounced high. Paul kept the speedometer needle at eighty.
    “Reincarnation,” he said thoughtfully. “Just a few minutes ago, I told you that I could believe anything today, but that’s wild. Reincarnation? Where in the devil did you come by this theory?”
    As the windshield wipers continued to thump, and as the tires sang a shrill dirge on the rain-puddled pavement, Grace told him about the telephone calls from Leonard, the visit from the long-dead reporter, the prophetic dreams; she told him about the grim battle with Aristophanes. “I am Rachael Adams, Paul. That other life had been revealed to me so that I can stop this murderous cycle. Willa did not start the fire. I started it accidentally. There is no reason for the girl to seek revenge. It’s all a mistake, a dark misunderstanding. If I can talk to the girl, Jane, while she’s regressed to her Laura phase, I can persuade her of the truth. I know I can. I can stop all of this here, now, once and forever. Do you think I’m babbling? Senile? I don’t believe I am. In fact, I know I’m not. And I suspect you’ve had some strange experiences recently that confirm what I’m telling you.”
    “You hit that one on the head, all right,” he told her.
    Nevertheless, reincarnation—being born again in a new