“Not hungry, Momma?” Trevor asked her. “Don’t worry about it. Mr. Boots loves five-way chili.”
“You’re not going to give it to Mr. Boots, are you?” asked Victoria. “He always makes such horrible smells.”
“Actually, I think that’s Daddy,” said Molly. “He just blames it on Mr. Boots, that’s all, and poor Mr. Boots can’t say, ‘Hey — it wasn’t me!’ can he?”
She started to collect up the plates, but then the phone rang. She answered it and said, “Sawyer residence.”
Somebody must have answered, because she frowned, and said, “Who is this?”
Trevor stood up. “What is it, honey? Give it to me.”
Molly covered the mouthpiece with her hand and stared at them wide-eyed. “I think it’s Red Mask.”
Trevor said, “Give it to me!”
But Sissy said, “No! This could be important! Switch on the speaker and let’s hear what he has to say! Victoria — can you do something for me? I want you to take Mr. Boots outside and give him this chili, okay?”
“But — ”
“Victoria, this is something you don’t need to hear, okay? Now be a good girl and feed Mr. Boots for me.”
Molly said, “How did you get my number?”
She listened, and said, “I see.” But she waited until Victoria had left the kitchen before she switched on the speaker.
“You’re trying to track me down, aren’t you, Molly?” said Red Mask. “You created me, so you think you have the divine right to hunt me down and destroy me.”
“You’re a mass murderer,” Molly retorted. “What do you expect me to do?”
“I expect you to take the responsibility for your own creation, Molly. Is it my fault if I’m so driven by revenge? I have to have justice, Molly — it’s in my blood, or what passes for blood when you’re nothing but paper and pencils and paints.”
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough justice? Why don’t you stop, and show some mercy?”
“I can’t, Molly. It’s not the way I was painted. I thought I might be able to stop, but now I know that I can’t. You killed me today, burned me. But I didn’t feel nothing. It wasn’t cathartic. I didn’t feel purged. What I felt was even more vengeful. I felt like killing even more people, scores of people, hundreds of people! I wanted to see their blood spraying like warm summer rain!”
“You have to stop,” Molly told him. “If you don’t stop yourself, then I’ll stop you, and that’s a promise.”
There was a long pause, during which they could hear Red Mask breathing, almost like a single cicada clicking. Eventually he said, “Making a promise like that, Molly, that was a serious error of judgment. If you make a promise to come after me, then by God I’ll make you a promise to come after you.”
“Hang up!” hissed Trevor. But Sissy raised her hand. She wanted to hear everything that Red Mask had to say.
“You’d better keep looking behind you,” he breathed. “You’d better watch out for every shadow on every wall. And you’d better keep your loved ones close to you, too. Yours was the very first face I saw when I was created, Molly. Make sure that the very last face you see in your life isn’t mine.”
Trevor snatched the phone, and snapped, “You listen to me, you SOB —!” But there was a clattering sound, and Red Mask hung up.
Trevor said, “That’s it! That’s it! I’m not having my family threatened! We’re going to go after this psycho first thing tomorrow! We’re going to find him and we’re going to burn him, the same as we did today!”
Sissy said, “I need a drink. Not only that, I need a cigarette.”
She went outside into the backyard. Victoria was sitting on the kitchen steps, watching Mr. Boots as he wolfed down his five-way chili.
“Mr. Boots likes spaghetti, doesn’t he?”
Sissy lit her Marlboro. “Mr. Boots likes everything, except for tuna.”
She sat down next to Victoria and blew smoke into the warm evening air.
“Why do you do that, Grandma? It’s really, really dangerous.”
“I know. I’m a fool. I’ve tried to give it up more times than I can count. But, you know, every time I light a cigarette, I hear your grandpa’s voice saying, ‘When are you going to stop smoking, Sissy?’ And I guess that hearing him say that is better than not hearing him at all.”
“I love him,” said Victoria.
“Yes. Me too.”
At that moment, however, Mr. Boots finished his chili and came trotting up to them, messily licking his lips. He tried to nuzzle Victoria, but she screamed out, “Get away! Get away! These jeans are clean!”
Trevor poked his head out of the kitchen window. “Something wrong?”
Sissy smiled. “Nothing that a wet cloth can’t fix.”
Sissy opened her eyes. It was daylight. Her cheek was sticky where she had been lying against the leather seat of her Uncle Henry’s Hudson Hornet. She lay there for a while, listening to the monotonous whine of the automobile’s transmission and feeling the bumping and jiggling of the Hornet’s suspension.
She couldn’t think what she was doing here. It had been so long since she had visited Uncle Henry and Aunt Mattie that she wasn’t even sure that they were still alive. Yet they must be, if this was Uncle Henry’s car and Uncle Henry was driving it.
After a while she sat up. Sure enough, that was the back of Uncle Henry’s head in the driver’s seat, with his sunburned, prickly neck. That was Uncle Henry’s straw hat, with the red snakeskin band around it, and those were Uncle Henry’s red suspenders.
She looked out of the window. The prairie was gloomy and seemed to stretch for ever. In the far distance, she could see a farmhouse, and a white-painted Dutch barn. The sky was overcast and heavy with smudgy brown clouds. Or maybe they weren’t clouds at all. Maybe they were swarms of cicadas.
A strange song was playing on the car radio. It had an odd, irregular rhythm, as if it were being played backward.
“I saw you in the garden. I saw you turn away. I saw you smile and asked you why. but while you smiled I knew you lied. ”
“Where are we, Uncle Henry?” Her voice sounded as if she were speaking into a cardboard tube.
“West of the east and east of the west.”
“Yes, but where are we going?”
“Don’t you remember? It’s the stormy season. We have to run ahead of the storm, don’t we?”
She knelt up on her seat and looked up ahead, through the windshield. The sky was growing darker and darker, even though the clock on the instrument panel told her that it was only two in the afternoon. She could smell rain in the air.
They passed a sign that read ENTERING BORROWSVILLE, POP. 789, and at the same time, she caught sight of the huge figure of a man standing by the side of the road. He was still over a half mile away, so he must have been at least thirty feet tall.
She gave an involuntary jerk, like she did when she was falling asleep, but this was a jerk of sheer terror.
“Can we turn round? I don’t like giants.”
“Not this time, Sissy.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. This time we have to take a closer look at him. You can’t put it off any longer, no matter how frightened you are.”