Mask of Silver

by Rosemary Jones

  Sydney and Max reached the kitchen door and plunged through it. It closed with a great bang. The cloud of crows flew straight up in the air, wheeled a few more times around the chimneys, and then settled down on the roof. We could hear their discontented croaks from across the lawn.

  Fred cranked a few more feet of film and then stopped. “That will work,” he said with quiet satisfaction. “We can splice that into the beginning, a great ominous cloud of birds flying around the top of the house.”

  I thought about how it would appear on the screen. “But it could be even better,” I said. “if we splice scenes of the crows throughout the film.”

  “Every time the sisters venture out of doors, we show the crows watching them,” said Fred.

  “And peering through the windows at them,” I said.

  “The audience will be terrified of birds by the time they leave the theater,” Fred chuckled.

  I grinned. It was a great idea, better even than Eleanor’s scenario or one of Renee’s little edits. One of those touches that made a Fitzmaurice film famous. I suddenly felt a bit more charitable about being stuck in the woods. But not enough to stay any longer.

  The crows continued to pace across the rooftop, muttering and watching us.

  “They carry the souls of the dead,” said a voice behind us.

  I gasped and whirled around. Humbert was standing by the gate with a rake over his shoulder.

  “Heard Mr Sydney firing at them,” said Humbert. “He used to do that as a boy. Take the gun into the woods and pester the crows. Then run back into the house. One time, they caught him. Down there in the woods. Pecked him bloody. Had to call the doctor for stitches and all. Bet he remembers that.”

  “He didn’t seem to worry today,” I said, watching the crows finally fly away from the roof and toward town. Off on their own crow business.

  “Crows remember,” said Humbert. “Crows have long memories. Better than bees, says my aunt. Comes from carrying ghosts around in their beaks.”

  “Ghosts in their beaks?” I said. I hadn’t heard that one. Although I recalled Sydney talking often enough about birds being guides to the realms of the dead. “Psychopomps,” I remembered suddenly. “Eagles, cranes, owls, ravens, and crows. Sydney bringing back those weird feather bits and saying they prevent hauntings.”

  “Yeah, Jeany, all those feathers for Death is a Woman,” said Fred.

  “Plumed hats,” I said, remembering how Sydney had wanted us to place different types of feathers in Renee’s hats. He bought a stuffed owl for the set, because it was supposed to represent some goddess. Renee had hated that dead bird. “And we couldn’t find a crane feather, so we used an egret. So Sydney was furious, although nobody would know the difference.”

  Humbert watched us with his usual dour expression, but his tone was mild when he added. “Don’t know nothing about pomp birds. But crows fetch ghosts out of a house, says my aunt. If you let them. Nobody ever let them into that house. That’s why the crows are always so mad at the Fitzmaurices.”

  With that pronouncement, Humbert ambled away, off to do something with the garden.

  I waited for Fred to break apart the camera and tripod, and then took the tripod from him. We started toward the house, discussing Sydney’s odder beliefs when it came to beaks and feathers. We were almost at the house when Fred looked over his shoulder and said, “But where’s Paul?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  We searched for the rest of the evening. It started simply. Walking up to the house, looking casually for Paul, certain that he had slipped by us and returned to his room while we were messing with the crows. But we could not find him.

  After dinner, with still no sign of Paul, everyone grew a little more worried. Except Sydney, who said that Paul must have wandered off somewhere for a smoke and would turn up soon. Max kept looking at Sydney in the strangest way, but mumbling that he must be right. After all, what could happen to a man on a warm summer afternoon in a neighborhood like French Hill?

  The days were getting longer, and it was still very light in the early evening. Fred and I decided to search back in the woods. “Maybe he fell?” I said as we walked, remembering that movie shoot where we broke the actor’s leg and had to ride down the mountain with him. Of course, there we saw him fall. But perhaps it was something like that.

  “Or he walked out at a different place. It can’t be just the one gate at the Fitzmaurice house,” said Fred. “That tramp. The one with the dog. He didn’t come through the gate, he was already in the woods when we got there.”

  “Of course,” I said, very relieved. “There’s probably another gate or break in the hedges, and Paul went out that way. Only…” Only it wouldn’t have been more than a mile in any direction to get back to the Fitzmaurice house. So where had Paul gone?

  Fred pushed open the gate at the end of the garden. We walked through it into the hot, sticky woods. The crows were settled on the branches above us now, and the hideous insect buzzing was louder than before.

  “Only what, Jeany?” said Fred.

  “It’s not a very big woods,” I said as we walked through the green shadows cast by the trees. “Even if he walked all the way to the far end.”

  “Maybe he didn’t feel like coming back to the house,” Fred said, ambling along beside me. His hands were thrust deep in his pockets and his cap was pushed all the way on his head. By the clinking sounds he made, I knew Fred was fidgeting with something in his pockets, probably some bolts and nuts or loose coins. He always did that when he was worried.

  “Nothing has gone right on this shoot,” I said, which was probably what we were both thinking at that moment.

  “No more a disaster than usual,” said Fred. “Stuff happens, Jeany. Nothing ever works as smooth as we like.”

  It was true. And it wasn’t. Effects did go wrong all the time. But we didn’t all wake from screaming nightmares at the same time. People didn’t break legs from props that flew off the wall or get boxed into coffins.

  “It feels like we’re cursed,” I said, and I wasn’t joking.

  We reached the pond. It looked as dismal as it had before. More so with the shadows creeping around the ends as the sun went down. The water was murky brown with dead leaves floating on top of it. The tangle of weeds on the edge was rimmed with a green slime as the roots trailed into the water.

  “Think little Sydney really went fishing here?” said Fred, picking up a pebble and tossing it into the pond. It landed with a deadened plop, and few sullen ripples spread out across the water.

  “What would you do with anything you caught in that?” I said.

  “Knowing Sydney, he stuffed any fish and mounted them on the wall.”

  I smiled. “I’m not sure that you can do that with a fish. Besides, he said all the fish died.”

  Fred poked around the weeds a bit, scuffing at them with his shoe. Neither of us felt like touching any of the plants growing in this dank little wood.

  “There’s another path here,” said Fred as he walked around the bush in which Paul reluctantly hid earlier.

  “Where does it go?” I said.

  “Not back to the house. Looks like it heads to a different part of the woods. Probably where that guy with the dog went.”

  “Ashcan Pete,” I said. “His name was Pete and the dog was Duke.” I circled round the bush to the spot where Fred stood. I saw a thin little path leading through the trees. As we went along it, I started to see paw prints in the damp earth. Pete and his friend had passed this way.

  “How can the woods be so wet?” I said to Fred. “It hasn’t rained for days.”

  “Underground springs?” he suggested. “The water for the pond has to come from somewhere.”

  “But it’s at the top of a hill,” I said. “Doesn’t water run downhill? Why does it collect here?”

  “Jeany, I’m from B
rooklyn. What do I know about nature?”

  “Didn’t you spend time with cowboys out west?”

  “Only long enough to know that I didn’t like cows.” Fred stopped. We’d reached a place where the path widened into almost a circle of trees and a bare patch of ground. A few bare stones poked through the tangle of tree roots and weeds.

  “Wasn’t there supposed to be a house in these woods?” said Fred. “One that burned down.”

  “They have a lot of fires in Arkham,” I said, considering the tales of how the Fitzmaurice house also had burned down and been rebuilt by Sydney’s ancestors.

  “Like anyone from San Francisco can talk about fires.”

  “Oakland. It’s not the same,” I said.

  I wandered around the bare outline of walls that no longer existed.

  “Looks more like a hut to me,” I said as I traced that square. It was tinier than our first apartment in Los Angeles. “Must have been one room only.” A large pile of rough-cut stones lay at one end. “Chimney? Fireplace?”

  Fred shrugged. “Maybe. There’s more paw prints here.”

  There were. Circles of overlapping prints, huge and splayed broader than my outstretched hand, with deep gouges in the dirt as if the dog had dug around the base of these ruins. Huge gouges really.

  “How big was Pete’s dog?” I said.

  Fred was poking around the other end of the clearing. “Huh? Dog-sized. Not a little thing like that pug of Lulu’s.”

  The paw prints, the claw marks, looked bigger to me than any normal-sized dog. Almost the size of a man’s foot or hands. Some of the gouges in the dirt seemed different. Those looked like the mark of a man’s hands, a man who had been digging his fingers deep into the muddy earth to try to avoid being dragged by something. I remembered in one of Sydney’s movies that we made marks like that in the dirt, to indicate that the hero had been carried off by the ghoul that stalked him.

  “Fred,” I said, backing away from the edge of the house. My palms felt sweaty and my voice sounded harsher than normal. “Did you come down here today?”

  He walked back to where I stood. “No. I don’t think anyone went further than the pond.”

  “Sydney didn’t ask Paul to set something else up for filming. Like a man being dragged away by dogs?” Sydney had that habit of asking anyone who was nearby to do a task, whether or not they usually did that. He might have drafted Paul into setting a scene for later shooting. I hoped he had done that.

  Fred shook his head. “Eleanor talked about showing the tramp being dragged off by a giant dog. It was in one of her scenarios. Sydney liked it but Max said that it would be too expensive to hire a dog. You’d need a trained animal to do that. Something like Duncan’s Rin Tin Tin.”

  I’d heard Warner Brothers was filming a movie with Lee Duncan’s big German Shepherd as the star. Sydney had been very dismissive of it. “Why would people want to watch a dog run around in a film?” he had asked. “It’s only interesting if the dog attacks people. That might be worth it. Friendly family dog turns mad wolf and terrorizes town.”

  “So no faking up some dog paw prints?” I asked Fred. “So Sydney could have his dog bites man to death scene?” I pointed out the prints that I’d spotted. Fred frowned at the marks, also measuring them against his hands. When he straightened up, he looked as green as I felt.

  “Sydney liked the whole idea with the sisters just discovering the bloody coat,” Fred repeated, but I couldn’t tell if he was trying to reassure me or himself. “He thought it worked better.”

  “Sydney kept talking about a blood sacrifice too,” I pointed out, even though I wished I hadn’t remembered that.

  Stepping gingerly around the pawprints, we found where the path continued to spiral amid the trees. By then we should have reached the far edge of the woods, but the path twisted and turned so much that I could not tell where we were. I knew that the other houses of French Hill were only moments away, just hidden by the heavy growth. Hemlock, Sydney had said, the woods were full of hemlock. Full of poison.

  “What’s that?” said Fred.

  Something was hanging from a tree branch high above our heads. It looked familiar. Getting closer I could see it was a man’s coat, shredded and torn and draped across a high branch. A coat very much like its twin, the coat that I had left behind us with Fred’s camera equipment. This one, this coat, would be the one that Paul had been wearing when he disappeared. The base of the tree seemed deeply gouged with claw marks.

  I clutched Fred’s arm. “Do you think?”

  He looked wide-eyed at me. “Can’t be. It’s broad daylight. There’s houses all around. A man won’t be eaten by a mad dog in the middle of a neighborhood wood. A dog could never drag him into a tree. That’s something cats do. Like lions in that film.”

  I remembered that film. I’d gone with Fred because a woman had shot much of the footage with her husband and, besides, I wanted to see a real lion in Africa. Not some sad old circus cat stuffed and mounted in Sydney’s study. Fred had gone because the filmmakers had their camera eaten by bugs and that, according to Fred, had led to the invention of his beloved metal monster.

  “No, of course not, there’s nothing in New England that would drag a man into the trees,” I said. “Except Eleanor said it would be a dog man who would kill the tramp.”

  A man savaged by a dog-headed man, a beast that could climb a tree like a lion. Except that was just a silly idea of Eleanor’s. Just an idea to scare the audiences after we turned it into silver light and shadows on the screens of their movie theaters. It wasn’t real. But the mound of black cloth hanging off that tree branch looked exactly like Paul’s coat.

  “It was probably thrown up there by children. Someone playing pirates,” I said, even though I remembered what Sydney said about all the other houses locking their gates into the woods and forbidding their children to play here. I walked forward to check closer. To prove that it was not the coat that I had refitted to Paul’s broader frame just a few hours earlier.

  That’s when I stepped into the pool of blood.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I knew it was blood as soon as it soaked into my shoe. The thick, sticky quality of the liquid, not like water, and how it stained the leather. We went to a slaughterhouse once, Fred and I, just to see how blood spattered and pooled in dirt. We went because Sydney said that the blood we were splashing around on a set didn’t look real enough. So we looked at real blood in a variety of places. We went to a morgue and talked to a coroner about how blood looked at a crime scene. We knew a lot about blood, probably too much.

  I screamed and backed out of the pool. Fred came running to me.

  “Jeany, what is it?” he said.

  I scraped my shoe against a stone, again and again, trying to wipe it clean. “It’s blood,” I whispered, not willing to say it too loudly. I don’t know why. Maybe because I was afraid of attracting the attention of whatever spilled that blood in the first place.

  “Can’t be,” said Fred. But he leaned over the pool of liquid and tapped it with one finger. He recoiled. Pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket, he wiped the liquid off his finger. It left the rusty brown stain of congealing blood on the cloth.

  Fred looked at me. I stared back at him. Neither of us willing to say what we were thinking.

  Finally I said, “It’s probably an animal.” Although I did not believe that.

  Fred said, “Dog, maybe? Dog fight, couple of pets that ran off home afterward.”

  Neither of us sounded convinced.

  Then a bark sounded, the bark of a big dog, and a man’s whistle answered. Fred and I stepped closer together and turned to face whatever was coming.

  Duke charged into the clearing only to stop at the sight of us. He put his nose down and started sniffing along the ground, imitating a bloodhound that we once filmed. That hound, the one in the movie,
had been sent to hunt for a man falsely accused of murder. I couldn’t guess what Duke was looking for.

  The dog circled around us until he got to the base of the tree with the deep claw marks going up its side. Duke whined a little and backed away. Another sniff took the dog nearer to the pool of blood that I had disturbed. That earned another whine, louder and more distressed.

  A man’s whistle sounded again. The tramp, Ashcan Pete, strode up the path toward us. “Duke,” he called. “Get away from there.”

  On spotting us, Pete tipped his hat. “Sorry, folks, still working on Sydney’s project? Didn’t mean to disturb you again. Duke just turned tail on me and came back here again. He gets agitated like that sometimes. Goes looking for trouble. Bad habit for a dog. Or anyone.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “We’re looking for a friend, one of the men that we were with earlier. Have you seen him? He’s about your size and was dressed like a…” I stopped, not sure how to say bum or tramp to a man who obviously slept rough himself, to judge by the condition of his coat and trousers.

  “Dressed like a gentleman of the road?” said Pete with a bit of a smile. “Saw that one of you was playing at that. Dangerous thing to do in these woods.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Pete tapped his leg, and Duke ran over to lean against his master. The man ruffled the dog’s ears. I had the impression that he was thinking carefully about his next words.

  “There’s spots here in New England, odd places,” Pete said. “Where you can go off the road and end up where you don’t want to be. Works the other way round too. Some things come creeping out that shouldn’t be here at all.”

  Fred shook his head. “It’s a small wood in the middle of a grand old neighborhood,” he said. “How can something happen here and nobody notice?”

  “Didn’t say that they don’t notice. Don’t talk about it. Nobody in Arkham talks about it. But Arkham, Kingsport, and a bunch of other places, there’s thin spots. Duke’s got a nose for that. Nose for trouble.” Pete patted the dog with a loving thump and was answered by an enthusiastic tail wag.