I picked up the hammer. It felt solid and so right in my hand. I walked up to the parlor window. Through the glass I could see the smirking smile of that Fitzmaurice portrait, the one that Sydney’s ancestor felt was more important than saving his children or his wife. I grinned back at Saturnin Fitzmaurice and swung the hammer hard against the window glass.
It took three strikes, but the windows shattered under my blows. I reached inside, careless of the broken glass, and unlocked the window. I shoved up the sash and crawled in, still clutching the hammer in my hand. Blood dripped from my hands, but I ignored the cuts as I crossed the room. After the crows, after Max’s betrayal, nothing stung as much as my anger.
The parlor door, like all the rest, was locked. I used the claw head of the hammer to pry open the lock with a satisfying splintering of wood and screaming metal.
As I stepped into the hallway, I stepped into the hell of my worst nightmares.
Flames lit all the mirrors. But the flames were inside the glass, not outside, an impossibility that belonged to dreams. The smoke flowed out of the mirrors, overwhelming the vague light of the candles as the nebulous figures moved in it, some human, some not.
I did not care. I plunged into the smoke, crying out for Renee, screaming for my sister. I brushed against a long veil and the figure of a woman. It was Betsy. I tore the veil and my second paper mask off her face. She stared blankly at me until I grabbed her and squeezed her hand so hard that my nails dug into her skin and drew her blood to mingle with my own.
With a gasp, Betsy blinked and stared around her. “What is it?” she said.
“Fire,” I yelled back, barely able to speak with the smoke choking me. “Hold on to me. We need to get out.”
Betsy grabbed my shoulder and we stumbled forward in the smoke. The click, click of the camera turning led me to Fred, bent over the viewfinder, oblivious to the smoke that billowed through a hallway now ten times longer than it ever was before.
I smacked the back of his head and knocked his silly cap forward on his nose. Fred straightened up with a cry. “Jeany?” he said, looking around him with puzzled eyes.
“Fire!” I yelled. “Hold on to Betsy. We need to get out.”
Fred fumbled for his camera and hissed. He pulled his hand away from the metal body of 242 with blistered fingers.
“How? What?” he said. “How can that be burning?”
“Get away!” I said, pulling again on his arm.
Fred grabbed Betsy’s arm with his unburned hand, and we went forward.
A hooded figure stood before us.
“Jim!” we all shouted, but the figure that turned toward us wasn’t Jim. It wasn’t like anything that I’d ever seen before. It might have been a man, but a man so impossibly beautiful that he seemed alien, with pallid skin and looking-glass eyes that reflected the flames now springing out of the mirrors. I froze, caught between awe and terror, and then my anger surged up again. This was the figure that had haunted my dreams. This was the creature that was trying to steal my sister.
With a shout, I flung the hammer at him. I swear that the Hooded Man didn’t move but a mirror shattered behind him. Then the glass of the mirror ran in liquid drops, melting together until the mirror reformed on the wall.
We stumbled backward, an ungainly trio of three very ordinary humans trying to find their way and not lose their grip on each other.
And we smacked into Sydney. He stood entranced by his own spell, a burning manuscript in his hands. His skin was beginning to smoke, but he showed no sign of pain. He took no notice of the flames at all. But he looked directly at me when I tried to swat the burning paper out of his hands.
“What are you doing?” he cried.
“Leaving,” I said. And then, because Renee had loved him, still loved him for all that I knew, “Hold on to us. Help us.”
But Sydney turned away into the smoke, walking toward the stranger reflected in the mirrors. “My king, my king, I have found your way into the world. We will capture men’s minds and control their simplest thoughts.” Sydney’s clothes smoked and began to burn, cloaking him in flame.
Horrified, I pushed the others away from Sydney, lost in his delusion, his final scenario, the end of his terror picture.
“Hold on to me,” I said to Fred and Betsy. In the mirrors, a masked woman stood behind the Hooded Man. I turned away from the reflection and walked into the center of the smoke.
Renee stood like a glistening pillar of ice, a woman all in white, masked and crowned in silver, not in the costume that I had made but in the one that I had dreamed, the one that I had drawn on page after page of my sketchbook. An extraterrestrial garment summoned by dreams and magic to clothe this goddess, a stranger herself…
Until I reached out and grabbed her hand. I gripped her fingers hard, the way that a little sister will when she wants to lead her big sister to safety.
At first her hand lay cold and lifeless in mine. Then she stirred, and clasped my hand as she always had, a squeeze of comfort, an intertwining of our fingers, that universal language that Sydney sought, the language of love.
I looked into the mask of silver and saw nothing but a reflection of myself. So that I was mirrored and twinned and paired in the smoke and darkness. Dark hair, dark eyes, half Chinese, half Swedish, all American, two sisters lost in a world that called them names and knocked them down. Two women who dared to overcome that. Two sisters who loved each other even when they forgot to say it.
“Renee,” I called out, using the name that she gave herself on a train hurtling toward a future that she made happen by sheer force of will, my brave, my beautiful, my wonderful big sister.
“Jeany,” she said in so soft a whisper that I could barely hear it over the crackle of flames burning in the mirrors. Then louder, and in the language of our mother, the musical and well-remembered words for “little sister.”
I pulled her toward the door, or at least where I thought the door should be. We walked forward through the smoke. My sister holding my hand, my friends with their hands on my shoulders, moving together past the nightmares.
Then, just as we reached the door, there was Max. Still immaculately turned out, still looking more like a bookkeeper than a villain. Not at all what I expected to find in the final reel of a Sydney Fitzmaurice film.
“What are you doing?” he echoed Sydney.
“Getting out,” I said, reaching around him for the door.
“You can’t,” he shouted, pulling at me, trying to shove Renee away from me. “We need this picture. This is for the studio.” He cried it as Sydney had cried for his king. “I’ll be rich. They’ve promised me so much money. The Hooded Man filmed for real. Pictures around the world to make his commands into our commands. I will never be poor again.”
“Let me go, Max,” I said, struggling to get by him. “We have to get out.” The house was actually burning now. The smoke was bitter and real and stinging in my throat. The flames hissed, eating through the walls and the floor. This time nobody would try to save the mirrors and a portrait. Because there were more important people to save.
Max grabbed me, shoving me hard against the others, fighting to keep us from leaving.
“Get away from her,” said my sister, my defender, who had always knocked down the bullies who challenged us. My Renee, suddenly speaking with all the strength she contained. She lifted her free hand and tore the mask from her face.
Max looked at her and screamed. I looked back over my shoulder and shuddered. For the mask had heated, burning part of her face, creating an unnatural scar of silver dripping from forehead to chin. She looked like a monster. But she also looked like my sister.
“We are done,” I said, and pulled past Max. I felt the doorknob under my hand and the metal was still blessedly cool. I turned the knob and pushed with all my remaining strength. The door swung open. We staggered out of th
e smoke and onto the porch, all of us together.
Except for Max. Betsy tried to grab him as she passed. He reached out for her as if to draw her back into that inferno. Then the Hooded Man appeared directly behind Max, placing a pallid hand on Max’s shoulder. Max gave a shout. With one great push he shoved Betsy through the door, sending her flying after us onto the porch.
The door slammed shut. I don’t know if it was Max again or the house itself that locked us out.
But we were out.
Smoke poured from all the windows. The crackle of flames was louder than our harsh breathing. We ran together down the long drive to the gate, only to be met by a clamor of bells. A firetruck went swinging by, followed by Doctor Wills’ rattletrap car and Mrs Mayhew’s old farm truck. The professor climbed out of the doctor’s car. Then Florie slid from the passenger side of Mrs Mayhew’s truck.
I collapsed into my sister’s arms, trying to hug her, Betsy, Fred, everyone all at once, unable to breathe for the happiest of reasons as I gathered them to me. We were alive.
Doctor Wills took us to the hospital to be treated for what she called smoke inhalation.
When I tried to explain what truly happened, she shook her head. “Only so much I can note on a chart,” she said. “Smoke inhalation works better than saying that you were poisoned by the atmosphere of an alien world. A world that collided briefly with ours through ambition, greed, and magic stolen out of a lost temple.”
After looking at the silver scar that ran down my sister’s face, Doctor Wills recorded that as the result of burns, burning film to be precise. I stopped protesting to the doctor. Later, Florie, who had followed us to the hospital, leaned over to me and said, “Those who need to know will know. We’ll do our best to keep everyone safe.”
After the doctor bandaged Renee’s face and the nurses gave her something to make her sleep, I sat on the edge of her bed, still holding tight to her hand.
Florie eventually gave way to the professor that night. The two paced outside our room like sentinels, guarding us from who knows what, and rotating in and out of the room to check on us. The professor gripped my shoulder tightly for a moment. “You did well,” she said. “You got them out.”
“Not everyone,” I said. Although I could not mourn Sydney, I saw Betsy’s tears when she realized that Max was lost. Nobody could remember seeing Jim at the start of the fire, but he was supposed to have been in the scene. If he was, then I feared that he had joined Paul elsewhere.
“You did your best,” said the professor. “Sometimes that is all we can do.”
Epilogue
Santa Monica, 1926
The wind blows through this little house by the ocean, cleansing it with the smell of salt sea air. The sun shines in every corner. There are no shadows. There are no mirrors to reflect ghosts or strangers. This house is as different as possible from Sydney’s strange home in Arkham. It’s also as different as possible from Renee’s Alhambra apartments. There were, we found, too many reminders of Sydney in those rooms. Gifts that he had given Renee, the flower vases that used to be filled with roses, and even the coffee table Max piled high with newspapers so Sydney could read the reviews out loud. How Sydney would have loved all the press after his death, all the speculation on what had actually happened.
After the fire was put out, the Arkham firemen found Sydney’s body. Unlike his ancestor, it was intact. A few months later, the studio claimed to have found a will in their files. It appeared to be signed by Sydney and left everything to Renee, as the muse of his heart. Did he write that? Or did the studio think that if they gave her an inheritance and a love story, she would ask fewer questions and let the verdict stand? I vacillated between the two explanations until Fred said, “What does it matter?”
The studio needn’t have worried about Renee. She had no wish to reveal what had happened in those final days before Sydney’s death. In fact, she stopped talking about him after we left Arkham. I was more than willing to let Sydney Fitzmaurice fade into a Hollywood legend. But I mourned Max, despite his equal villainy. For at the end, at the very end, I am sure that he pushed Betsy out the door to save her.
“The studio killed Max,” I said. “Making him work for Sydney, exposing him to that evil.”
“Is he dead?” Betsy asked me again and again. “They never found his body.”
We disappeared for a time, so Renee could heal, but her silver scars never faded. Despite my suggestions for makeup and costumes, she shook her head and claimed that she was done. She had no wish to act.
Then Sydney’s wife brought the lawsuit. The reporters hunted us down at our apartment, and newspaper stories started about the final, unfinished film and all the accidents surrounding it. The articles confused Renee with her characters, filling their pages with a woman who was more siren, more vampire, than ordinary mortal. Only the Arkham Advertiser printed other stories, all illustrated with photos taken by Darrell, about the beautiful Renee Love and her tender relationship with Sydney Fitzmaurice. Darrell’s influence, clearly, and Renee sent him a long letter of thanks with an autographed photo from her unscarred days.
Some of the press dealt with the disappearances of those final moments, about the people never found: Max, Jim, and Paul. But Arkham’s police refused to investigate, suggesting that Paul had gone back to California for another job, Jim had followed him, and Max had left town with some of the studio’s money. I suspect it was someone at the studio that named Max an embezzler because they didn’t want to explain why they had given him the money in the first place. Their plan, however outlandish and improbable, to control the world through films created with magic – that might be hard to explain to their shareholders or to a Congress that increasingly liked to hold hearings on the morality of the film industry.
“Movie people,” the police and the press finally said, as if this explained the sudden and total disappearances, and left the mysteries at that.
In the end, the court ruled that as Sydney was legally divorced, the first Mrs Fitzmaurice had no more claim on his estate. They gave everything to Renee, including what was left of the Fitzmaurice house in Arkham.
Renee ordered the burnt and ruined house boarded up. A year later, we bought this little house here on the Pacific Ocean, not too far from where Fred lives. It’s a short walk to the Pleasure Pier. Some nights Fred and I go dancing at the La Monica Ballroom.
Fred is working more and more on inventions. He has ideas, wonderful ideas, and there’s always someone in Hollywood who wants to do the next thing bigger and better than the way it was done before. But Fred cannot run a camera anymore. His beloved 242 was destroyed in the fire and the burns on his right hand made his fingers stiff. Besides, Fred’s hands tremble. Not too much, not so most people would notice, but I notice. When his hands start to quiver, I hold them between mine and wait for the shaking to stop. But we both know that he will never crank a camera as smoothly as before. So, being Fred, he is working on a motor and a way to turn the film without using his hands. I draw the plans and help with patent applications. It is one small way that we battle the curse that Sydney brought upon us. It is a battle that we will win.
Eleanor and Lulu write frequently. Ashcan Pete and Duke found Pumpkin wandering by the river the day after the fire. Eleanor wanted to give Pete a reward, but he refused.
After Arkham, Eleanor and Lulu discovered that New York was too much for them. Eleanor found it impossible to write plays. Even with the return of her voice, Lulu disliked the darkness of backstage in their theater. They’ve gone to Seattle to teach drama at a college there. It’s all very Bohemian, says Eleanor in her latest letter, with dancers, musicians, and artists mingling in the classrooms. There’s hours of debate about the meaning of art, but nobody thinks they can change the world. At least not the way that Sydney and Max planned to do it. Inspired by Renee, Lulu has bought a cabin on a beach and they motor out to it every weekend. Pumpkin, sa
ys Eleanor, would be positively sleek except that the founder of the college, a woman with a pug of her own, insists on feeding pancakes to all small dogs.
I write back as often as possible. I tell Eleanor and Lulu about Hal and Pola and their chicken farm in Anaheim, as well as all our other news.
Betsy is in pictures again and doing very well. Sennett cast her in some comedies. Then she became the “flapper detective” in a popular series. Betsy now leaps from galloping horses or runaway cars. She flashes a silverplated gun in the shadows as she takes down the villain. All her stunts she does herself, seeking out people to train her on more and more difficult tasks.
Fred and I take her dancing and keep introducing her to other young men. Betsy speaks less and less of Max to us, but she keeps up a correspondence with the professor after meeting her at the Arkham hospital. She talks of going back. More and more after last winter, when Jim was found wandering down a road near Kingsport. He’s in an asylum now, mostly because he never sleeps, just sits looking in mirrors or other reflective surfaces.
I hear from those we met in Arkham. Mister Claude mails me tickets for when he’s playing a theater near Los Angeles. The professor sends me packages of pulp magazines and challenges me to find her stories in their pages. Florie writes the most. Her letters are funny cheerful scribbles, all about the gossip served with pie and coffee at Velma’s. She sends clippings from the Arkham Advertiser, so I know what Darrell is doing.
Her feet hurt more and more, says Florie, and she’s almost ready to give up the tips in return for a long sit someplace warm. Suzie has left Velma’s for the brighter lights of Boston, says Florie. There’s a new waitress, Agnes, who is a good gal, says Florie again.
If Betsy returns to Arkham, I think she should look up this Agnes. I read between the lines and know Florie means that this Agnes understands that not all doors and paths in Arkham lead to the places that we know. That some ways twist oddly and lead you out of this world. If Betsy does decide to go back, I will tell her to stop at Velma’s first, before she tries to open the Fitzmaurice house. To talk to Darrell, whose newspaper stories hint at things unseen except by those who know how to look. To seek out Ashcan Pete and his faithful hound Duke. There are heroes in Arkham, and she will need them.
Mask of Silver Page 26
