House of Masques Read Online Free Page A

with hair the color of gold, Josiah warming his hands at the fire, Josiah peering into her eyes.
    And just before sleep finally came she remembered her last meeting with Michael, her face taut, eyes beseeching, the memory long shut away, and she whispered to herself, “It never happened. A dream, a nightmare,” and she sealed the memory away and she slept…
    The sun shone from directly overhead. The sky was cloudless. A single railroad track stretched infinitely ahead, aimed arrow-straight at a distant, hazy horizon. Bitter smoke choked her and she saw a small sod house standing alone. On all sides knee-high prairie grass bent and rippled in the breeze. The smoke curled from the charred timbers of the house’s roof.
    A clock lay shattered on the path to the door. Tick, tick, tick. When the clock stopped, she knew, she would die. She wanted to run, yet her legs were heavy and she could not.
    The door of the house swung open and the sunlight leaped inside. Two crude nails pierced Josiah’s wrists and impaled him on the wall, his arms out-flung. His eyes were open and stared at her, and his mouth had frozen in a silent, perpetual scream. Blood oozed from where the shaft of an arrow protruded from his chest.
    Smoke eddied about her feet. A bed, the mattress charred and black. On the mattress Clarissa lay spread-eagled with thongs binding her hands and feet to the bedposts. She was naked. A red gelatinous slit extended from between her legs to her throat. On both sides of the slit the flesh hung moist and flaccid. As Kathleen approached, a fly buzzed away from the wound. Clarissa’s beautiful face was rigid, fixed. Where her hair should have been Kathleen saw a red smear, nothing more.
    The taste of bile rose in Kathleen’s throat and she fled from the house into the yard behind. A mound of fresh earth marked the tomb. Kneeling she spread her hands on the dry and crumbling soil. She heard a scratching and leaned forward until her hair touched the earth. The scratching came again, faint, from within the earth itself, the sound like fingernails clawing into rotted wood.
    â€œMichael,” she cried, her hands burrowing gopher-like into the ground.
    The sun. Where had the sun gone? A shadow lay across her body and her hands clenched. The earth squeezed between her fingers. She looked up. The Indian was naked except for a loincloth, his knife pointed at her breast. Kathleen twisted and felt the pebbles jabbing into her back. His face was angular and brown and his body was smeared a dull red, the same color as the blood on his knife.
    She scrambled to her feet and ran. After a few paces her feet caught as though entangled in marsh grass. She reached down and pulled the sticky, entwining strands loose and tried to throw them aside, but they clung to her fingers and she looked and saw the blood and matted hair. The hair glistened in the sunlight. The color of gold.
    She screamed, one long, hopeless scream. The Indian’s bronze face bent close to hers and his hand grasped the neckline of her dress and she looked into his eyes and the panic ripped and tore at her.
    One of his eyes was green, the other blue.
    She woke gasping, sobbing. The window was a pale rectangle on the far wall. Her heart throbbed. “Michael?” she whispered, and she saw her brother run toward her across a green field of rippling grass, a bouquet of daisies in his hand, laughing, calling to her, “Kathy, Kathy.” His voice seemed to echo in the empty bedroom.
    Kathleen shook the vision from her mind. She was weary. As tired as though she had never slept. The water from the basin felt tepid on her face and as she dressed her underclothes clung to her body. She drew on the gray dress.
    The hall still held the shadows of the night and Kathleen groped ahead with one hand on the wall. How had she and Clarissa come the night before? She found the stairs and descended the two flights, hurried along the corridor, tried a door