Mask of Silver

by Rosemary Jones

Max, this time, slid in the last word to Sydney’s little speech, something he didn’t normally do. “The studio is keeping a very close eye on how this goes,” he said to Sydney.

  “Do they doubt my talent?” said Sydney.

  “No, of course not, your last two pictures were smashes,” said Max.

  “Of course,” Sydney said. “There’s never been anything like a Fitzmaurice picture in the history of the human race. I make movies that are the very height of diversion. The audience cannot escape the emotions, the very thoughts, forged in my world of silver shadows.”

  “Nobody’s disputing your artistry, Sydney. But things are changing. The studio wants more control. Being so far away, in Arkham, it’s making them nervous,” Max said.

  “Tell them to take a tonic,” said Sydney. “I was wrong to think I could do this any place but Arkham. This is the place. This is the script. This time it will work.”

  “It’s the expense,” said Max.

  “Dreams cannot be bought cheaply,” retorted Sydney.

  “Actually, Sydney,” said Max, “that is what you promised them.”

  The dry finality of Max’s tone made me wonder again exactly what Sydney was planning this time.

  Chapter Ten

  My mother talked about ghosts. But not as something that inhabited the house that you lived in. Rather ghosts were something far off, and part of the history that she had left behind. But if a light went out suddenly and left us in darkness, she would laugh and say, “the spirits have come to eat.” When we questioned her about that, she said that her grandmother used that phrase whenever a candle blew out.

  The spirits must have been very fat indeed at the Fitzmaurice house, for the lights constantly went on and off. Fred muttered at the fuse box on a daily basis, calling it a deceitful thing of beauty. Max had several long calls with the power company, who denied all malicious intent and inquired when last the wiring had been checked. The rest of the company, myself included, made sure to have candles or lanterns close to our beds with a matchbox conveniently nearby. The days were long, and the nights warm, so the inconvenience of finding a bathroom at midnight by candlelight was more a minor annoyance than anything else.

  Still I found restful sleep increasingly hard to achieve. Every night, I dreamed of masks made of shadows, masks made of snakes, masks made of smoke, and masks made of silk that shredded into the webs of spiders. But when I woke and stared at the painted mask propped on my desk, the empty eyeholes stared back. Next to it was set its fragile paper twin, an equally unsatisfying prop. No matter how close these were to what Sydney described, I felt as if something vital was missing. Some otherworldly force, Sydney would say, except there was no such thing. “Props, just props,” I muttered and pulled out my sketchbook to distract myself.

  I tried to take my mind off the movie, sketching out costume ideas for future projects. Ideas I could present to United Artists and other studios. Ideas that would get me away from Sydney’s horrid stories. Yet every night, I could draw nothing except a cloaked man with no face who nevertheless stared out from behind a masked woman. I threw my pencil across the room more than once, only to feel compelled to pick it up and start sketching the horrid creature all over again.

  Eleanor seemed to have the same problem with her script. She typed page after page on a typewriter that she’d brought from New York. The clatter from her Underwood threatened to drown out Fred’s darling 242 at times. Yet most of Eleanor’s ideas were crumpled up and discarded as Sydney proclaimed that it was not quite what he was looking for or Eleanor herself would re-read what she wrote and sigh, “Not that shadowy masked woman and her cloaked friend again. That’s such a useless idea.”

  By the following Saturday, we had barely filmed another page of the scenario, a slight scene where Pola played a visiting neighbor who gossiped about a magic mask hidden in the house. All the company was a little on edge and complaining about being cooped up indoors. Sydney proposed that we drive to the country. “A Sunday picnic in June,” he said. “Just like my childhood.”

  Renee declined. She’d been suffering from headaches throughout the week and wanted to stay indoors and rest. On Sunday, I went to her room and asked if she wanted me to sit with her.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head with a wince. “It is just a headache. A day of quiet. That’s all I want.”

  She did look pale. Her restless energy seemed diminished. She often wore herself out during filming, putting so much of herself into the performance that she could barely move by the end of the day. It was one of the reasons that she rarely attended or gave parties. The other, of course, is that we could never be sure when somebody outside our group would spot that she wasn’t quite what she appeared to be. So Renee needing rest, and wanting to stay out of strong sunlight even with a group of friends, was not unusual. But it was rare for her to be this fragile when we’d completed so little.

  “Do you want me to call the doctor?” I said. “I liked her. Doctor Wills seemed a sensible woman.”

  “I’m sure she is,” said Renee, “but I don’t need her. Go to the picnic. Enjoy yourself. I just need a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.”

  She lay back down on the bed with its fussy canopy and piles of lace-edged pillows. Curled up in the center, she looked so small. I’d never thought of my big sister as anything less than ten feet tall, a warrior woman who protected me all my life. This picture did seem to be draining her energy at an alarming rate.

  “Perhaps we should go home,” I said.

  Renee just waved one hand at me without opening her eyes. “We will. When this is done. It will be worth it. You’ll see.”

  I wanted to argue that nothing was worth night after night of frustration, but then took pity on my big sister. I left quietly, shutting the door as gently as possible behind me.

  After collecting a hat and stuffing my sketchbook into a large straw bag, I descended the stairs with some relief. Perhaps out in the country, away from the house, I would finally discover the proper design for the mask.

  The touring car was filled with Sydney, Pola, Betsy, Paul, and Max. Lulu, Eleanor, and the pug named Pumpkin went in Eleanor’s sporty two-seater. Fred had borrowed an old truck from Humbert for the rest of our gear, including two picnic baskets, several blankets, some old bolsters, and a ratty collection of golf clubs in a mildewed canvas bag. The latter had been unearthed from the back of the barn. Sydney thought they belonged to his university days. I squeezed into the front seat of the truck between Fred and Jim. Hal, like Renee, declined to picnic and waved us goodbye from a chair on the veranda.

  Driving through the town, I remarked how pleasant, how ordinary, even quite pretty it was in spots.

  “Yeah,” said Fred. “Pretty as a picture postcard.”

  “Don’t you like it?” I said.

  Fred, the lover of science and all things mechanical, grimaced. “You’re right about the shadows.”

  “The shadows?” I said, not sure what he meant. I didn’t like the shadows at the house, the cold crooked patches of dark, but what did that have to do with driving through this pretty New England town?

  “Noticed it when I was fetching stuff for Max,” said Fred. “Some days, there’s more shadows than there should be.”

  “It’s probably because we are used to California sunshine,” I said, because there was no sensible, rational reason to be worried by shadows. Even though I was.

  “Yeah,” said Fred. “That makes sense.”

  I wished again that this picture was over and we were heading home to Los Angeles.

  Once we passed Arkham’s boundaries, the road meandered pleasantly up and down the rounded hills. Everything was the new green of early summer. It was hard to imagine that redcoats and Colonial soldiers had once marched across these fields and peppered each other with shots. Fred had been reading up on the American Revolution, there being a lack of sc
ientific literature in the Fitzmaurice library, and speculated now on how far we might be from the protests, riots, and other acts of rebellion.

  “Wasn’t that all closer to Boston?” I said. My knowledge of that time period was sketchy at best although I could remember Sister Martha reciting such names as Paul Revere and John Adams, with nearly as much fervor as she named the saints.

  “Maybe,” said Fred, shouting over the rattling of the truck. “Arkham seems to have missed a lot of history. No pilgrims to speak of, no revolutionary shots heard round the world. Nothing much ever seems to have happened here.”

  Jim snored on my right side. The man could, and did, sleep through anything. His ability to lean himself up against a piece of set and snooze until called upon to act was something of a legend.

  “Perhaps that is why the Fitzmaurices settled here,” I said. “Because it was quiet and safe.” Except as I said it, I realized that the town never felt safe to me.

  We climbed a hill, slowly. Fred ground the gears and shifted down. The touring car, although loaded with more people, made better time in front of us. Fred shouted over the engine noise about valves and engine power.

  The road smoothed out and we started to talk about the next week’s filming.

  “Humbert is good with tools. As good as Paul,” said Fred. “He’s helping us build that box for Sydney’s next big scene.”

  “Oh, the one that Eleanor was talking about at dinner?” I said. “The bed that becomes a coffin in the sisters’ dreams. Did Sydney decide to do that next?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s grim.” I hadn’t liked the sound of it when we had discussed it a couple of nights ago. It reminded me too much of my recent nightmares. There’d been a lot of talk about who would be trapped in the coffin and, after much discussion, it was decided that this would be Lulu’s first big solo scene. Renee as the older sister had been the focus so far with the haunted pictures and even the major character for the minor scene of gossiping with the neighbor.

  Eleanor proposed the bed sequence, because it was similar to something that they’d done on stage in New York and had gotten a lot of press at the time. Sydney liked the idea as it established that this was the Lulu, the screamer and scandalous darling of the New York stage. Renee expressed herself delighted to give the scene to Lulu and not have to sleep in a coffin.

  “It will be a good trick when we’re done. I’m taking a real bed and fixing up the coffin sides and a lid to slide up around Lulu. We should be ready by Monday. It will be a great scene.”

  “Well, let’s make Lulu look amazing,” and as I said it, I suddenly realized how to fix Lulu’s hair and makeup so she appeared to be halfway between a sleeping beauty and a beautifully preserved corpse. I knew it would be gorgeous but terrifying, and Sydney would love it.

  “You’ll make it amazing,” said Fred. “You always do, Jeany.”

  Fred’s confidence cheered me considerably. Ahead of us, Eleanor tooted the horn of her car and turned onto a narrow lane after Sydney’s group. We followed them to a meadow where the long grasses were intertwined with wildflowers. Butterflies and small birds darted about. Far off in the distance, the Miskatonic River glittered silver in the sun as it ran east toward the ocean.

  Fred pulled the truck behind the cars. With a snort, Jim woke up and amiably lugged picnic baskets, blankets, and bolsters into place. Most of us collapsed around the largest basket, unearthing various sandwiches, cakes, cookies, cheese, crackers, cold chicken, and three jars of pickles packed earlier by Mrs Mayhew. Pola, as usual, drew out a bag of knitting as soon as she settled herself on a bolster.

  After eating everything but one jar of pickles, we all sprawled in splendid post-feast repose. Fred grabbed Jim, Paul, and the bag of golf clubs. They wandered a little ways away and used the rejected pickles in place of the missing golf balls. Soon small bits of green were streaking across the meadow with a wet thwack.

  I pulled out my sketchbook and began to doodle. Flowers and butterflies intertwined in geometric and angular shapes. I thought about how they could be printed as a border of a gown or beaded onto a scarf and sketched some more. As I turned the page to shade in a long stem of grass, I saw how other shapes formed between an outstretched wing and curling petals. Shapes that looked like angular skulls and rounded creatures of a vaguely aquatic nature. The shadows growing behind them turned into the shape of a woman, oddly blurred and masked, with a shadow that stretched in all the wrong directions. Behind her stood a cloaked man. I slammed the sketchbook shut and stuffed it into my bag, determined not to work any more that day. I truly hated the hooded man in that moment and never wanted to draw him or his mysterious companion again.

  With a giggle, Betsy pulled Max off his blanket and persuaded him to walk with her down the hill to find a better view of the river. Pola shook her head at them and then took a finer wool out of her bag. She cast it on her needles and began to knit a pattern of interlocking circles.

  “That’s beautiful,” I said.

  “A shawl fine enough to pull through a ring,” answered Pola. “In my hometown, every bride had one in her trousseau.”

  The others were asking how Sydney knew about this idyllic spot.

  The meadow was part of the Mayhew farm, according to Sydney.

  “We always came here for picnics,” he continued, waving one hand in a lazy circle much as a king might describe his kingdom with a wave of a scepter. “I used to chase butterflies with a net.”

  “And stick them in a killing jar,” guessed Eleanor. She lay back on a blanket, her face tipped up to the sun. Lulu nestled at her side, a large hat shading her face.

  Sydney laughed. “Well you can’t catch and release them. The net breaks their wings. I wonder what happened to my old butterfly collection. I used to have a hundred or so, all pinned on cards with the Latin names written underneath. Papilio polyxenes or the black swallowtail. The painted lady or Vanessa cardui. How very long ago that was.”

  “How very ordinary. To chase butterflies with a net,” said Eleanor.

  “I found them endlessly fascinating,” admitted Sydney. “As a boy I believed all manner of stories about butterflies. That they were the souls aflutter from a cooling body, the psyche that emerges from the dead man’s mouth.”

  “So this obsession with death began at an early age?” Eleanor gave him a doubtful look. “Or is that a story that you made up to impress the press?”

  Sydney shook his head. “I was a precocious child and quite my grandfather’s shining hope. The Fitzmaurices have always had a fascination with ancient mythology. Particularly Egyptian. My grandfather collected an extensive number of books on the subject. I devoured every tale that I could find in his library. Especially the ones about psychopomps.”

  “Pumps? Lunatic pumps?” murmured Lulu, but something about her smile said that she knew very well what Sydney was talking about.

  “Lulu, don’t tease,” said Eleanor. “We had discussions with the most darling little professor from Bryn Mawr about the creatures that escort newly deceased souls from Earth and where exactly they escort those spirits to.”

  “The horrors of research for one of Eleanor’s plays,” said Lulu. “You thought the professor was darling. I thought she drank too much of our gin.”

  Sydney looked a little put out to be upstaged and plunged back into his explanation of how ancient civilizations had lists full of creatures that led souls, both dead and living, to a place somewhere outside the cosmos that we knew.

  “A liminal space,” said Sydney, staring hard at Lulu.

  “Oh, one of those places,” said Lulu, “where we are in space between one point in time and the next. A doorway, just on the verge of being open or closed or that moment in a dream when you take a step and haven’t started falling yet.”

  “Well, yes,” said Sydney, a little disconcerted.

  “I don’
t know how she does it,” Eleanor said to me, not without some pride. “As far as I know, she had no formal education, grew up in the back of vaudeville theaters, and her mother actually did put her in a lion’s cage in a melodrama at the age of three.”

  “She most certainly did,” said Lulu. “I remember it clearly.”

  “And you never read anything but the most dreadful romances and the stage papers,” Eleanor said to Lulu.

  “Now, that is not true,” said Lulu. “I often read your dull reference books when I want to go to sleep quickly. How about that New England history tome with the impossibly convoluted sentences right beside my pillow back at the house? Pumpkin has chewed the cover twice and declared it virtually inedible.”

  Sydney tipped his hat further over his face to shade himself from the sun. “I gave my best occult histories to Eleanor for her work. Not for the pug’s supper.”

  “Very tiny nibble,” said Lulu. “Barely a scratch.” Eleanor swatted her with her hat and mouthed “Behave” .

  To Sydney, Eleanor said, “Your grandfather was an actor. Quite famous, I hear.”

  “In his younger days,” said Sydney. “It was all glories of the past by the time I was old enough to be interested. It was hard to imagine. That he actually knew the Booth brothers and saw them all play together at the Winter Garden. About how they had power, but didn’t understand it. How John was a fool who thought he could change history with a gun when he could have done so much more.”

  “I would argue shooting Lincoln did change history,” said Eleanor. “The death of the great man will do.”

  “So crude,” said Sydney. “And, I don’t believe a single shot, no matter where it happens or to who, really changes the world. It may bend history for a decade or a generation, but things do slide back. Same old problems crop up again.”

  “How very cynical of you,” said Eleanor.

  “How very noble of me,” said Sydney with a flash of a smile. “After all, I’m the first to say that violence is useless. Shoot a man, and another takes his place. Win a war and another war is just waiting around the corner to begin. A war to end all wars will never happen. Change, true change, must come from outside. A radical change driven by a new consciousness. Or the return of a very old one.”