Free Death Mask by Graham Masterton

thirty-five steps outside the Immaculata church on Mount Adams and say, "Thank you, Lord," on every single step.
    He went up close to the mirrored wall and peered at himself. He thought he looked surprisingly unruffled, considering how scared he had been. But he would have to decide what he was going to do next. He would have to call the police and tell them that Red Mask was hiding out on the seventeenth floor. And then what? Go back to his line-dancing pop bottles, as if nothing had happened?
    The elevator went bing! and stopped on the sixteenth floor. The doors slid back, revealing another abandoned reception area, with a sign saying KINGS COMMUNICATIONS, INC. This floor was much gloomier than the floor above, because all of the blinds were drawn. There were stacks of plywood chairs all the way along the corridor.
    "Come on, for Christ's sake," said Jimmy, and prodded the button for the lobby.
    The doors began to close, but as they did so, he heard a rushing noise, like somebody running. He prodded the button again, but he was too late. The red-faced man came hurtling through the gap between the doors with both arms raised high above his head. In each hand he was holding a large triangular butcher knife.
    Jimmy ducked to one side and lifted his left elbow to protect himself. But the red-faced man attacked him with unstoppable fury. He stabbed him in the elbow, and then the forearm, and then his other knife slashed Jimmy's right cheek.
    To his surprise, Jimmy didn't feel that he was being stabbed, only struck, and he reached up and tried to twist the knives out of the red-faced man's hands. But the red-faced man kept on stabbing and stabbing, and the knife-blades sliced right through Jimmy's fingers and the heel of his hand, and blood was spraying everywhere.
    The tendons in Jimmy's wrists were cut through, and his hands helplessly flapped like red rubber gloves. The red-faced man stabbed him in the forehead, and in the nose, and took a slice out of his chin. Then he stabbed him simultaneously in both eyes, and blinded him.
    Jimmy fell sideways to the floor. All he could hear was the pounding of his own blood as it rushed through his ear drums, and the faintest of chopping noises. He didn't feel any pain, only a vague discomfort at being jostled so often and a deep coldness in his stomach.
    "Where am I?" he whispered, through bloodied lips.
    A voice very close to his ear said, "Hell, son. Where you belong."

CHAPTER 11 - Signs and Wonders
    They heard about it on the TV news as Sissy was making lunch: a Swiss cheese and ciabatta sandwich with plum tomatoes.
    "This just in," announced Marcia LaBelle on WLWT. "A twenty-eight-year-old man has been found stabbed to death in an elevator car in the Giley Building in downtown Cincinnati-less than twenty-four hours after the knife attack in the same building that left one man dead and a young woman seriously injured."
    "Molly! Did you hear that?" Sissy called out. She picked up the remote and turned up the volume.
    "A police spokesperson said that it is still too early for investigators to determine if the murder was committed by the same assailant. However she admitted that the attacks bore 'several distinct similarities.'
    "The victim will not be named until next of kin have been informed, but Channel Five news has learned that he was an animator who worked for the computer-graphics company Anteater Animations on the twenty-third floor of the Giley Building."
    Molly was standing in the kitchen door now, still holding her paintbrush. "Oh God. I know a couple of artists who work for Anteater. Klaus and Sheila. I hope it wasn't Klaus. I'd better call."
    Marcia LaBelle said, "Still wanted by police in connection with yesterday's stabbings is this man," and Molly's composite picture of Red Mask suddenly filled the TV screen. "Detectives have dubbed him Red Mask, because of his florid or sunburned or possibly grease-painted face. They warn anybody who sees him not to approach him, but to