Caroleen picked up the rock. It was some sort of quartz crystal.
“When…” she began in a croak. She cleared her throat and went on more steadily, “When did you get that second-to-last message? About the bank accounts and the hairbrush?”
“That one? Uh, just a minute before I knocked on your door.”
Caroleen nodded, wondering bleakly if BeeVee had even known that she was leaving her with carbon copies-multiple, echoing carbon copies-of the messages.
She put the crystal back down on the cardboard and picked up the hairbrush. Amber opened her mouth as if to object, then subsided.
There were indeed a number of white hairs tangled in the bristles.
Caroleen tucked the brush into her purse.
“I need that,” said Amber quickly, leaning forward across the board. “She says I need it.”
“Oh, of course, I’m sorry.” Caroleen forced what must have been a ghastly smile, and then pulled her own hairbrush instead out of the purse and handed it to the girl. It was identical to BeeVee’s, right down to the white hairs.
Amber took it and glanced at it, then laid it on the pillow, out of Caroleen’s reach.
“I don’t want,” said Caroleen, “to interrupt…you two.” She sighed, emptying her lungs, and dug the car keys out of her purse. “Here,” she said, tossing them onto the bed. “I’ll be next door if you…need any help.”
“Fine, okay.” Amber seemed relieved at the prospect of her leaving.
CAROLEEN WAS AWAKENED THE next morning by the pain of her sore right hand flexing, but she rolled over and slept for ten more minutes before the telephone by her head conclusively jarred her out of the monotonous dream that had occupied her mind for the last hour or so.
She sat up, wrinkling her nose at the scorched smell from the fireplace and wishing she had a cup of coffee, and still half-saw the Ouija board she’d been dreaming about.
She picked up the phone, wincing. “Hello?”
“Caroleen,” said Amber’s voice, “nothing happened at the cemetery last night, and BeeVee isn’t answering my questions. She spelled stuff out, but it’s not for what I’m writing to her. All she’s written so far this morning is-just a sec-she wrote, uh, ‘You win-you’ll do-we’ve always been a team, right-’ Is she talking to you?”
Caroleen glanced toward the fireplace, where last night she had burned-or charred, at least-BeeVee’s toothbrush, razor, dentures, curlers, and several other things, including the hairbrush. And today she would call the headstone company and cancel the order. BeeVee ought not to have an easily locatable grave.
“Me?” Caroleen made a painful fist of her right hand. “Why would she talk to me?”
“You’re her twin sister, she might be-”
“BeeVee is dead, Amber, she died nine weeks ago.”
“But she’s coming back. She’s going to make me beautiful! She said-”
“She can’t do anything, child. We’re better off without her.”
Amber was talking then, protesting, but Caroleen’s thoughts were of the brothers she couldn’t even picture anymore, the nieces she’d never met and who probably had children of their own somewhere, and her mother who was almost certainly dead by now. And there was everybody else, too, and not a lot of time.
Caroleen was resolved to learn to write with her left hand, and, even though it would hurt, she hoped her right hand would go on and on writing uselessly in the air.
At last she stood up, still holding the phone, and she interrupted Amber: “Could you bring back my car keys? I have some errands to do.”
Al Sarrantonio. THE CULT OF THE NOSE
FIRST MENTION OF THE CULT in the literature is found in a tract of the Germanic heretic Jacobus Mesmus, which I have dated to somewhere near 1349 A.D.; it mentions, amidst an account of an outbreak of plague in the town of Breece, that “a band of townsfolk had spied this day two figures, a man and a woman, prancing gaily on the outskirts of the village, wearing the feared Nose. They were driven out with fire clubs and a hail of stones.” Mesmus goes on to say that the appearance of figures wearing the Nose continues-sometimes there are two figures mentioned, sometimes three: a man, woman and small child; the text is partly destroyed and confusing-throughout the reign of the plague, abruptly terminating with the last case of the disease, although there is one cloudy passage toward the end of the treatise (which, as a sidelight, deals mainly with weather) mentioning that a “nosed person” was spotted in the church bell tower intermittently for some time afterward.
There is, actually, a case for the Cult’s being traced to well before this time; scant evidence and brief mentions exist that might date it to the Egyptian dynastic era. There is a legend that one of the noses itself was found in the burial chamber of Ramses II, though there is no surviving physical evidence or corroborating testimony to support this.
After Jacobus Mesmus, accounts of the Cult become more frequent. A figure wearing the Nose appears in one of Brueghel’s triptychs; there are several appearances of Cult members in the work of Bosch, as might be expected. There is also, curiously, an appearance of a figure bearing the Nose in a little-known (and by reason of the appearance of the adornment, thought to be spurious) painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir: a tiny grinning figure, peeking out from behind a child holding a red parasol, is seen wearing a Nose utilizing a strap to keep it upon its face. The story is that the young girl in the painting was the daughter of M. Ebrezy, a prominent minister, and that the girl died mysteriously soon after posing for the artist.
There are mentions of the Nose in the works of Maupassant; Emily and Charlotte Brontë and, in the Americas, Hawthorne and, quite often, in the later works of Twain.
There is a false, and dangerously misleading, conception that the Nose is a modern concoction, that it was not only invented for the foolish pleasure of children and childlike adults, but that it was promoted for this use alone, and for the further and more arcane uses to which it is currently being put by the modern Cult. It must be understood that the Nose is not only an ancient instrument, but that its use can be traced back nearly to the dawn of recorded history (see my opening remarks). The Nose has doubtless gone through periods-it might be hypothesized that these periods were ones of relative calm and social and religious stability-where it has been relegated to the position of toy. It has been determined, though, that these times of tranquility have always been rather brief, and, further, that the Nose has always regained its position of mysterious authority-and of feared nebulosity.
Such a period is, of course, where we find ourselves at the moment.
I might add at this point that my interest in the Cult is not a recently flowering one; I have been gathering references to it and carefully formulating my theories for many years.
FOR THE RECORD, MY interest was sparked during the waning months of the free world’s involvement in the Vietnam War. At that time I was a special attaché aligned with a covert arm of American intelligence, checking black-and-white photographs taken by spies and insurgents behind Communist lines-these were photos smuggled out of prisoner-of-war camps and such. I might also add that this was a period in which I was seeking to forget an unfortunate incident in my personal life: my young spouse, understandably lonely due to my lengthy absence, took up with another man and had a child by him. I sought solace by immersing myself in my work.
I began to notice in some of the photos I handled a recurring and curious phenomenon. Here and there, tucked in a corner or peering out from behind a barracks, was a peculiar figure wearing what seemed to be a false nose upon its face. Often the figure was identifiably male; at other times it appeared to be a female, or even a child. Many prisoners of war at that time, due to malnutrition and concurrent emaciation, were barely identifiable by their gender-or their age-so it must be remembered that any sort of positive identification was difficult. Many of the nose-wearing figures appeared beside, or within (though they were apparently not dead) mass graves.