With a harsh metallic zhhinnggg! the red-faced man drew out of his coat two huge triangular-bladed knives and held them high above his head.
“Come on, man,” said Marshall. “This has stopped being amusing, okay?” He took a step toward the red-faced man, with one hand lifted.
Dawn screamed out, “Marshall! No! He’s the Red Mask guy!”
But she was a fraction of a second too late. As Marshall turned his head, the red-faced man stabbed him straight through the middle of his upraised palm. Then, without hesitation, he stabbed him in the shoulder.
The teenagers shouted out, “Whoa!” and “Jesus!” and one of the girls let out such a high-pitched scream that it was almost beyond the range of human hearing. Dawn clung to Marshall’s arm and said “Marshall? Marshall!” but then the right side of her face was suddenly sprayed in blood.
The red-faced man stabbed Marshall again and again — his hands, his arms, his shoulders. Marshall grunted with every stab, but although he was so badly wounded, he lunged forward with his head down and football-tackled the red-faced man around the hips, hugging him tight.
The red-faced man didn’t hesitate. He stabbed Marshall in the back of the neck, between the atlas and the axis vertebrae, with an audible chop that severed his spinal cord. Marshall dropped heavily onto the floor, and the red-faced man turned around to face the rest of them, whirling his knives in both hands.
The teenagers were going mad with panic, shouting and beating on the doors and climbing up onto the handrail. Dawn backed away from the red-faced man, shuddering with fear, until she was pressed up against the window. He stepped over Marshall’s body and approached her, with both knives raised.
“Don’t hurt me,” she begged him.
“What? Couldn’t quite hear you, darling, what with all these squealing piglets in here.”
“Please don’t hurt me. I only came here to choose my wedding band.”
The boy in the Cincinnati Reds cap was trying to edge his way round behind the red-faced man, but the red-faced man quickly turned and jabbed at him with one of his knives. “Going someplace, kid? Weren’t thinking of jumping me, were you, by any chance?”
“No! No. We just want to get out of here, sir! We don’t want to die!”
“Nobody ever does, kid. Nobody ever does. But if you’re brought to life, no matter how, that’s the only destiny that’s open to you, in the end. No wonder folks rail at God, for their existence.”
“Please don’t hurt me,” said Dawn. Tears were running down her cheeks, streaked with black mascara. “I promise I won’t give evidence against you. I promise. I’ll say that it was all Marshall’s fault. He provoked you. He attacked you. He was like that, always angry. Always setting on people.”
The red-faced man appeared to think for a moment, although his slitted eyes gave nothing away.
“How old are you?” he asked Dawn. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the whimpering, weeping teenagers.
“Eighteen and a half,” said Dawn. She managed a sloping, hopeful smile, as if the red-faced man would let her live if he realized how young she was.
“Eighteen and a half,” the red-faced man repeated. Then he said, “Freak,” and stabbed her in the chest with both knives. Her implants burst, and the right-hand knife penetrated her heart.
She stared at him for a moment as if she couldn’t understand what had happened to her. Then he wrenched out both knives and let her drop to the floor.
Ned Jennings was walking along Seventh Street taking photographs when he looked up and noticed the red glass elevator.
Ned was an art student from Xavier University, curly haired, with thick-rimmed eyeglasses and a fawn corduroy coat. He was compiling a photographic study of Cincinnati’s art-deco architecture. He had already photographed the Union Terminal and the Lazarus Building and several office buildings, and he was trying to make up his mind if he should include pictures of the Four Days Mall, since the architects had deliberately embellished the frontage with art-deco-style brickwork as a tribute to Cincinnati’s architectural glory days.
He looked up and saw that one of the glass elevators that ran up and down the exterior of Four Days Mall was stopped between floors. Not only that, all of its windows were streaked with red, as if somebody inside it were furiously painting them.
He was about to carry on walking when the palms of two white hands appeared through the paint, pressed hard against the glass. Then half of a face appeared, too. A young girl, it looked like, and although Ned couldn’t hear, her mouth was wide open as if she were screaming. She was only visible for two or three seconds, then she disappeared, leaving two smeary handprints and a distorted impression of her right cheek.
Ned hesitated. He couldn’t work out what he had actually seen. Vandals? Some kind of promotional stunt? But who would vandalize a glass elevator in broad daylight? And if it was a promotional stunt, what was it meant to promote?
If he hadn’t seen that girl’s hands and face, he would have walked on. But he entered the mall and approached two security guards who were standing by the Orleans fountain, chatting to three young women.
“I think something weird is happening in one of your elevators.”
One of the security guards cupped his hand to his ear. “You think what?” The mall was echoing with piped music and the footsteps of hundreds of shoppers and the clattering of water in the fountain.
“It looks like somebody’s painting the windows with red paint. And I think there’s a girl trapped inside there who’s in some kind of trouble.”
“Red paint? What do you mean, red paint?”
“Well, I don’t know. It looks like red paint.”
“Okay. Which elevator?”
The security guards walked over to the elevator bank with Ned following close behind them. A small knot of shoppers were gathered outside the right-hand elevator, and as the security guards approached, an elderly man in Bermuda shorts said, “Out of order. Looks like it’s stuck between floors.”
One of the security guards went up to the elevator doors and pressed the button. There was a juddering noise, but nothing happened.
“Better call Wally,” he told his colleague.
“Maybe you should phone the police,” Ned suggested. “I couldn’t exactly see what was happening in there, but this girl looked really upset.”
“George, why don’t you go outside and take a look?” Ned said, “At first I thought it might be some kind of advertising display.”
“Unh-unh. Nobody told me about no advertising display, and if nobody told me about no advertising display, then there ain’t no advertising display.”
One of the security guards walked out into the street, but as he did so, the elevator’s indicator light suddenly blinked three and two and then one.
“George! It’s okay! It’s working now!”
They waited for the doors to open, but after a short pause the elevator continued down to P-1, which was the first parking level. The security guard pushed the button again, however, and the indicator showed it coming back up again.
There was another pause, longer this time, but then the elevator doors opened. Inside, it glowed a dull crimson, like a small hexagonal chapel with red stained-glass windows.
The security guard stepped forward, and then he stopped and said, “Holy Mother of God.” The floor of the elevator car was heaped with bodies. Arms and legs all tangled together, so that it was almost impossible to tell how many people had been killed, except for their faces, which were pale and serious, like medieval saints.