Mask of Silver

by Rosemary Jones

  “No more mirrors. I promise you.”

  Our last picture dealt with a cursed circus, which Sydney knew something about, having once been a ringmaster. He read out his own quotes from the newspapers with glee. “‘My time in the circus taught me how spellbinding and terrifying these acts could be. And how an audience can be trained to look where you need them to look. It is a combination of wicked magic and temple ritual, all triggered by the smell of greasepaint and the whistle of the calliope!’” he said. “You know that’s what we should have done for the opening. Had someone blow in the smells of a circus ring. Sawdust, peanuts…”

  “Horse manure,” muttered Fred. “To say nothing of elephants.” He filmed several small circuses as additional footage for the picture. I often went with him for costume and makeup ideas. We’d both been horrified by the poor battered creatures in cages and tiny traveling stalls.

  In our circus picture, which had only one lovely horse on set, Renee played the charming, mysterious performer who rode that white horse round and round the ring, mesmerizing the hapless males in the audience. Mesmerizing was a label that Renee began to despise that year, but it was the way that Sydney wrote her characters, mystery women who lured men to their doom. And, as she often said to me, that was better than being the screaming ingénue victim.

  The doomed circus performer role turned out to be more difficult than usual. Renee hated horses and was furious with me when we found that the mirrors on her costume reflected Sydney directing off camera. That ruined nearly a day’s filming and meant she needed to mount the beautiful but bouncy horse for a second day’s shooting. I smeared all the mirrors with grease before we reshot the entire scene. And then we all suffered through another day of Sydney yelling about Renee’s posture on a horse as the silly creature trotted instead of cantered in all of its scenes, despite being able to do a lovely canter the day before. Which meant even more bouncing about by Renee. And more yelling by Sydney. Perhaps even a little weeping by the trainer who swore that Rex was a wonder horse and should be in pictures. Fred, as always, stayed calm and kept the camera rolling. He even salvaged some of the earlier footage. But afterward, I swore to Renee to never ever let Sydney put her on a horse again.

  The whole crew was glad to be done with horses and circuses. I hoped our next picture would be full of sophisticated party scenes. We’d been talking about another hypnotist picture, with elaborately staged sets.

  Fred rested his head against my chair and traced the lines of the dress in my sketchbook with one stubby scarred finger. The man fiddled with engines and anything else that whizzed or whirred, and his hands bore the traces of his work in a network of tiny scars and freshly healed cuts. If I turned my hands over, I could see every callus, every prick, every mark that costuming left there. People always said that we didn’t work, that we just played, when we were making movies. Our hands told a different story.

  “If I adjust the lights, she’ll look like a silver ghost emerging from the shadows. And that head dress!” Fred said, tapping the page. I had drawn a close-fitting cap set with long silver spikes that formed a star-shaped frame for Renee’s head. “That’s finer than a 5th Avenue getup. Good work, China girl.”

  I slapped his hand away before he smudged my drawing. “Not China girl, just plain Oakland, that’s me.”

  Fred grinned up at me. “Hello, Oakland. I’m Brooklyn. Want to dance?”

  “You just like me because I’m the only woman in the room shorter than you.”

  “Nah,” said Fred. “Adore you for that. And your mean game of croquet. The way you’ll play gin rummy when we get a rainy day. Oh, and your costumes. That one is something. Sydney will love it.”

  “I’ll love what?” said Sydney from across the room. Mention his name and he always heard you.

  “Jeany’s new costume for the mesmerist.”

  “Oh, that tired old idea, I’m not making that. It’s too close to Caligari. Even with Renee as the hypnotist.”

  “Well I’m delighted not to play a hypnotist, but I do love Jeany’s idea for the silver dress. Can we use it in the Mask?” Renee said.

  “Oh course. I’m sure it’s exactly what Camilla should wear on the night that she calls for the stranger. Along with a silver mask,” Sydney put his cigarette holder back in his mouth and waited for everyone to catch up with him. The crowd grew quieter and moved a little closer. This was the boss talking about the next job, the one that we all hoped to be part of. “This is my best idea ever.”

  “You want a mask with this dress?” I said. I liked making masks and had built a couple for past pictures. I thought about how the material could be applied to the form. “How much of the face should it hide?”

  Sydney thought for a moment and then slid into his storytelling voice. “I see a woman emerging from the shadows. Her face is covered in a silver mask, so highly polished that she appears to be wearing a mirror or liquid mercury, a mask that reflects our world and distorts it. She pauses on the threshold of light and shadow. The audience grows uncertain. Is she a beauty or a grotesque hiding behind the mask? The audience will be both attracted and repelled. Slowly the mask of silver reflections becomes transparent, revealing the face of a lovely woman, our gorgeous Renee, but then her face in turn changes. She becomes a creature of glamorous horror, a siren both alien and familiar. And the audience will know that is the face of truth.”

  I was scribbling as fast as I could on the corners of my sketchbook page. A full mask, with the barest slits for eyes, to give Sydney the blank form that he wanted? Polished silver to make it reflective? But that would create the same problem that any mirrors on a set created. Perhaps a metallic paint that mimicked metal but would not create reflections? With the right lighting, it would give off a luminous shimmer like the dress itself. Fred could film that, stop the filming, Renee would remove the mask, and then Fred could resume filming. We had done a similar dissolve two pictures back, when Sydney turned Renee from a withered ancient corpse to an enchantress who lured the hero to his final doom.

  Fred, like me, was obviously working through the sequence in his head. “So will the siren be a second mask or something else? Makeup like Chaney is doing for his hunchback?”

  “Oh something else entirely,” smirked Sydney. “Something that hasn’t been seen before.”

  Fred and I both sighed. That line normally meant that Sydney hadn’t decided what he wanted and we’d be doing trial after trial of possible combinations of costume and makeup. When we had to make the witch woman turn into a werewolf to avenge her dead husband, Sydney had ranted for days on the combination of furs, wigs, and makeup because everything made Renee look too hideous. We ended up creating the shadow of a wolf on the wall with one of the crew manipulating a puppet head that I built. Then Fred filmed Renee stepping out of the doorway and wiping the blood from her lips with the white cravat of her husband’s supposed killer.

  “So we’re not filming the hypnotist story? But, Sydney, the studio has started on the sets,” said Max. Three lines appeared on his forehead. You can take the guy out of accounting, but you can never quite erase the bookkeeper from the guy. Fred called him “Brooks Brothers down to his second pair of pants.” I told Fred he was just jealous that Max owned a suit that fit him. Also, the girls liked the Harold Lloyd tall and skinny type. Fred tended toward tweed jackets and canvas pants, stuff that was constantly being pulled out of shape by the gadgets stuffed in his pockets. Fred was a Brooklyn tough, who powdered out of Brooklyn as soon as he could talk the army into taking him. He drifted to California after he was invalided home for losing a toe in France. At least, that was Fred’s story. We all had stories that were a little bit true and much more what we wanted people to believe.

  “Call them in the morning. Tell the studio that I don’t want their tacky interpretation of a historic haunted house. I’m taking you all to Arkham, Massachusetts. We’ll film where Puritans mixed with witch
es and Colonial ghosts still ride the lanes.”

  That set up a storm of comments and questions. Sydney sat grinning like the Cheshire Cat in the middle of it all until we stopped. Then, having gained everyone’s attention, he started to tell us his latest, greatest idea. He would make a movie, a wonderful, terrible, frightening movie set in an ordinary little New England town that none of us had ever heard of.

  “But what’s the story?” said Max.

  “Later, Max, just arrange all the necessary bits and bobs for travel,” said Sydney, who could be maddeningly Continental when he felt it made him sound important. “Jeany can start by designing the mask now. That’s key. The rest we can do when we get to Arkham.”

  I nodded, not really listening, because I had an idea. I drew a nearly perfect oval over the face I sketched. Shading it lightly with the pencil, I then extended the shadow behind the woman on the page so another, stranger being stood behind her. The spikes on the crowned headdress took on a more fluid, twisted shape in this shadow image. The points of the shadow’s sleeves also flowed down, like the strangely delicate tentacles of jellyfish, dwindling away. Then, further behind both figures, I drew the hooded man. The last was Sydney’s signature creature, a man dressed in a hooded cape. The character never appeared more than once in a film and never in the same type of scene twice, played by whoever wasn’t already in the scene. Also, oddly, the hooded man never did anything. Never spoke or interacted with any character. He was just there. Watching. Often it was so subtle that many people missed it, but the critics had taken to looking for those appearances and speculating what Sydney meant by it. None of us knew. Sydney liked to say to the reporters that it would all be revealed later. But that movie had not been made yet, despite the topic being raised frequently by Max since he joined our company. Apparently the studio felt a hooded man picture would be the biggest seller yet. Sydney tended to go sly during those discussions, telling Max to mollify the studio for a little while longer. Poor Max, he was stuck between two difficult and very different bosses: the unseen and, for the rest of us, unknown studio heads and Sydney, the driving force in our daily lives.

  “That’s clever,” said Fred as I sketched out the two figures behind the woman in the mask. “We could create the second shape behind her by backlighting a screen. Does it need to move?”

  I looked at my drawing. “I think so,” I said slowly, the idea sparked by Sydney’s words growing inside of me. A terrible, wonderful idea, quite unlike anything we’d done before. “Can we make the shadow reach out from the wall and engulf her? Like ink, or blood, running dark over the mask and revealing the woman beneath for just a second or two. Then they both disappear.”

  Fred nodded. “Good idea, Oakland. I predict half the audience faints and the other half leaps out of their seats with a yell.”

  This was why we worked with Sydney. Because with just a few words, he could set a mood that inspired all of us. I knew Fred was right, that we would weave the shadows and reflections into something just as terrifying as anything Chaney could create with a hump and a limp. But Chaney’s specialty was grotesque makeup. Our terrible monster was beautiful, always chillingly beautiful, that glamorous horror that Sydney talked about.

  I added a few more lines to my sketch and then stopped. Too much and it would disappear into a mess of charcoal on the page. Restraint was the most important lesson that I’d learned from Sydney, the most flamboyant showman. The suggestion of a shadow cast by a man in a hood, the merest glimpse of the monster in the mirror, a pallid mask of silvery shadows, those were the things that would terrify the audience. Why we should we want to evoke terror, that was the question that I failed to ask myself that night as Fred and I sat up long after the rest had left.

  Finally Renee came over to our corner. “Go home,” she said to Fred. He rented a tiny house all the way out in Santa Monica and had borrowed a friend’s car to avoid being stranded by the Los Angeles streetcars shutting down in the early hours. With a friendly grumble, he unfolded himself from the floor and wandered out the garden doors into the predawn pallid gloom. I wondered if he’d sleep in the car or drive himself home. Either was possible with Fred.

  “Are you done?” Renee asked me. “Can you get home all right?”

  “I only have an elevator ride of one floor,” I said, as if my only sister didn’t know that. Of course she did, but everyone else only knew that I lived in the building. Our relationship was a closely guarded secret, from the press, from our friends, and, most especially, from the studio where we had been working for the last five years. Because while everyone knew that I was a Chinese-American from Oakland, nobody knew Renee’s true heritage. If the studio knew, she would not be a leading lady. And if Renee was not a star, the rest of us might not work. So while we knew exactly what lies we were telling, the rest didn’t have much reason to ask uncomfortable questions. Everyone understood Renee and I had always worked together in Hollywood, and left it at that.

  I eyed Sydney stretched out on Renee’s chaise, still leafing through the magazines and newspapers that Max had brought. At this point in the night, he was past the reviews and reading about others’ triumphs and failures. He knew how to turn such knowledge to his advantage. He could, and often did, stay up for hours after the rest of us had collapsed. One disgruntled extra conjectured that Sydney didn’t sleep, just rested lightly in a coffin like some creature from one of his films. It wasn’t true. Sydney slept very soundly when he did sleep and not, as some speculated, at Renee’s apartment. He had his own a floor above. She always threw him out before she went to bed herself. Sometimes she used as an excuse the need to put up someone at the party who had too long a journey or had too much to drink. Then that unfortunate soul, quite often me if she had no other sacrifice to avoid Sydney’s snores, slept on her wildly uncomfortable chaise lounge.

  “I’d rather sleep in my own bed tonight,” I said, uncurling from the leather seat that I had claimed earlier.

  “Come to lunch,” Renee answered. “I’d like to talk about this costume.” She pointed to my sketch, set aside on the table as Fred and I had gone over possible ways to trick the audience’s eyes into seeing what did not, could not, exist. She glanced at Sydney. “He’ll be gone in a few hours and I want some sleep too. But we’ll order something splendid for lunch, just the two of us.”

  I nodded. When a picture was done, Renee tended to withdraw into luxurious comfort. She tipped generously and had a dozen restaurants nearby ready to deliver whatever she felt like eating. Renee adored her slender candlestick phone and welded it like a fairy godmother’s magic wand to deliver the bounties of the Los Angeles shops and restaurants to us. She called it her “cocoon before the butterfly time.”

  Sydney called it “hiding,” but he was the exact opposite. After a picture was done, he would drive all over town, even up the coast to San Francisco, to talk to people about everything and anything that interested him. With Sydney that could mean visiting the latest airplane demonstration or a strange occult shop hidden down a back alley. The occult was a particular obsession that we all knew about. We even joked that his forays were Sydney researching terrors for his next picture. Séances weren’t quite as popular as they had been a few years before but there were still plenty held around Hollywood. Sydney knew all the tricks and liked to reveal frauds to his friends. Sydney was never fooled by slate writing, spirit pictures, table tipping, or rapping. But he collected odd “safekeeps,” as he called the items that he picked up from people who did not like to tell where their treasures came from. Renee called these artworks ghastly and refused to have any in her apartment.

  “Thank you very much,” Renee said when she clapped the lid on some box or other that Sydney had handed her as a gift. “But it still looks like a bunch of bird bones and feathers to me. Put it in your apartment, please.”

  “But, dearest muse,” Sydney would reply. “What if the spirits take you from me too soon?” For Sy
dney, spirits were less ghosts of dead ancestors than emissaries from a world that we could not see except out of the corner of our eyes or in the reflections of a mirror. In his best scripts, the ones that he wrote for Renee’s villainesses, Sydney turned hauntings into an “invasion from beyond,” where spirits or supernatural creatures lured humans, usually males, out of the world as we know it and into a twisted landscape besides and beyond our world. The “safekeeps” acted as locks, according to Sydney, to keep shut doors that should not be open. Anything could be a door, even a mirror upon the wall or the reflection in a silver mask.

  “It’s casting the right reflection, at the right moment,” Sydney said that night as he discussed the script with Renee and me, while we struggled to stay awake. “The right reflection allows us to control the door and the spirits beyond. The right reflection, at the right time, in the right place. While the mask protects the priestess or the Muse.”

  “But it has to be a silver mask, a reflective mask,” I said, thinking once again about the problems with the mirrors in the last picture.

  “Oh, yes,” said Sydney, “a mask to cast its own reflection back into the mirror.” I shuddered considering all the issues that would cause for Fred in filming such a scene.

  Renee yawned and punched Sydney’s shoulder lightly. “Go work on your script and let us sleep. If we’re going to someplace on the East Coast, we’ll have days of travel to work this all out.”

  That night, when I reached my bedroom, Sydney’s idea of the silver mask consumed me. Even after I climbed into my bed, I continued to sketch variations on my first idea, often surrounded by a circle of mirrors casting reflections back and forth until endless repetitions appeared. In the glow of the electric lamp, the images on the page turned into a chorus of featureless faces, watching me with the empty eye sockets of a drama mask. These fanciful thoughts slid into nightmares, and I woke with an aching head atop the crumpled pages of my notebook.