A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  She had so close a sense of death that she looked into the shiny blade to make sure she was not grey. But no, there she was, young, beautiful, alive, alive, alive.

  Results; ghosts; preparations for a party

  “YOUR MOTHER DIDN’T POISON your father. He died of cholera.”

  Reisden had got Eddie Becker’s report from Paris. In the evening he went to see André. André was gluing bits of film together; lengths of film were clipped to strings, like laundry dry-ing, and more bits were spread on the table, which was covered in clean white paper. André was wearing white gloves. He laid the film down and stripped the gloves off, took the paper, and read it through.

  His face didn’t change. Ever since the news about Sabine, he had had a stare when no one was looking at him, a stare partly angry, partly afraid: a man trapped.

  “She,” André said. “My wife. She did try to poison me.”

  “But your mother didn’t poison your father.”

  André drew the gloves on again. He held up a piece of film against the light for Reisden to see. It was a close-up of Sabine. Krauss had backlit her and lit her face with a mirror; she glowed. “I don’t like to touch her,” André said. “Not even with these.” He spread his fingers in the gloves.

  Reisden nodded, not reacting, letting André know he was heard.

  After a while, “Am I—different?” André asked.

  Oh, André. “Than what?”

  “Different. Like they say Jules is different...”

  “Are you?”

  André thought, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. Perhaps I’m nothing.” André did this as Necrosar, pulling his lips away from his teeth. “Nothing.”

  The two men sat together for a while, not speaking.

  “I love my son more than anyone else in the world,” Reisden said finally. “More simply than I thought anyone could love anyone. That may happen to you.”

  “With her?” André turned his face away like a man flinching.

  ***

  “Sabine tells me my fortune is below,” Reisden said dryly to Ruthie and Jules.

  “Where? In the cellars?” Ruthie said. “We haven’t gone there.”

  By now Ruthie, Jules, and he had searched everywhere they could think of but for one place, the lower cellars of Montfort. The uppermost cellar was in use, but the two levels below it were supposed to be dangerous and were locked and forbidden.

  Don’t do it, Jules scribbled.

  “We haven’t anything else.”

  She forces her cards.

  “I spotted that. Message from Cyron, do you think?”

  Jules looked startled.

  “Which means he has some idea what Gehazy’s looking for.”

  Who knew the secret of Montfort? Perhaps Jules, who had been there often; or Reisden, who’d been there a couple of times; or André.

  But Maurice Cyron, who’d been restoring the place for more than thirty years, knew it if anyone did.

  And if Cyron were giving them clues, he meant them to find something and pass it on to Gehazy. And that was very interesting. I want you to be the one he blackmails next, Cyron had said to Reisden. One could think of many reasons why, each one more disquieting than the last.

  Be CAREFUL! Jules scribbled.

  “I’ve always wanted to see the Holy Well. André can get us into the cellars.”

  “I can do better than that. We’ll go with everybody else,” Ruthie said. “We’ll put on a party.”

  ***

  Until about halfway through its length, Citizen Mabet is about revolutionaries taking power. But after that it is about the death of a family, the struggle between a father and a son. Mabet quarrels with his son; Méduc flees to Paris, leaving his wife and son behind, counting on his father to protect them. He is wrong. Mabet makes a terrible, tragic mistake, ordering the arrest of his son’s family. A mob goes to the Méduc chateau.

  On Wednesday the twelfth, in the cool, early morning with the mist still rising from the water, Krauss filmed Méduc’s wife and son fleeing from the mob and drowning in the moat at Olhain.

  The rest of the film would all be big, difficult scenes. In the Ball of the Dead scene, Mabet and his wife would receive the news of the deaths. Ghosts would come to join them. Madame Mabet would go mad. In the “He has no children” scene, Méduc would get the news, curse his father, and offer to lead an army to defeat Mabet. In the big battle scene, Méduc’s army would defeat Mabet. And finally, Mabet and Madame Mabet would be guillotined at Arras.

  Most of the actors would be leaving on Thursday to spend the fourteenth of July, Bastille Day, with their families. But before they did, Cyron had them rehearse the Ball of the Dead.

  He gathered all the extras in the Great Hall.

  “I don’t want you coming back hungover on Monday afternoon,” he announced to the extras. “I want you here Sunday night, begging to work.”

  Groans and cynical laughter.

  André took over, standing on the platform at the top of the Great Hall, focused and in control as he always was in the theatre. “This will be our most technically difficult scene, and we have actors from the Necro here to help us learn it. Two things to remember.” André held up long fingers: “Marks and timing. Keep exactly to your marks because you’ll be working with ghosts that you can’t see. Timing has to be exact. You’ll rehearse to music. When we film, the same music will be playing. Think that you’re dancing your part.—I’ve put together a demonstration. Cazenove, come here.”

  The shutters were closed and a stagehand set up the projector behind a sheet. While other stagehands set up the demonstration, the projector showed bits from Méliès films to warm the audience up. Seven ghostly Mélièses played in a band, then took off their own heads and threw them up onto a stave of music.

  Meanwhile, onstage, two stagehands wearing gloves brought out a tall sheet of plate glass and set it up at an angle to the audience. Another arranged a black folding screen. Casanova stood in front of the black screen, reflected in the glass. Krauss the photographer set out Arnaud lights, bright focused spotlights to strengthen the reflection, and some of the extras, recognizing the illusion, began to laugh and applaud.

  “Yes, Pepper’s Ghost, of course,” André said.

  André stood in the center of the stage, in front of the glass. From the audience, it looked as though André were standing next to Cazenove’s ghost. André “saw” the ghost and gestured to it like Necrosar. The ghost recoiled in fright.

  On the sheet behind André and Cazenove, the films were still going on. A woman was turning into flowers; a man’s head floated in midair. With perfect timing, André turned and batted at the onscreen head; it drifted away.

  Two stagehands pulled a length of muslin like a curtain over the glass.

  “We will throw special effects at them,” André said, turning back to the audience. “We’ll do Pepper’s Ghost and filming through glass and double printing. We’ve done the special effects already at the Necro. And they won’t catch what we’re doing because,” André dropped into Necro-voice, “they’ll be scared to death. Lights.”

  The lights went on and André twitched the muslin away. Half the actors screamed.

  The dead were standing behind him in a row, grey-faced, swathed in shrouds or dusty pre-Revolutionary dress. Méduc’s dead wife curtsied and her head jerked forward sickeningly. A man offered her his severed skull like a bunch of flowers. The royal tax collector tried to hold his head on with his hands; a collar of blood circled his neck and his eyes were upturned, white and staring.

  “We’ll scare them all. This afternoon we’ll block the scene. Before dinner, ghosts get their makeup and costumes. I want you to practice the head-jerk; Boufils will teach you.” He clapped his hands for attention. “And this evening, after the end of practice, we’ll have a party. We’ll go down into the cellars and the ghosts will try to scare us.”

  Cyron and Sabine were sitting together near the platform. Reisden went over to tal
k to them. “I don’t think you should be at the party tonight,” he said to Sabine.

  Sabine sulked resentfully and crossed her arms.

  “I’ll take you to a nice dinner in Arras,” Cyron said. “We’ll talk about your role.”

  Which got rid of both of them and opened the way to the cellars.

  The Ball of the Dead

  FOR THE BALL OF the Dead party, all the electric lights were turned off at Montfort. In the kitchen, candlelight flickered off barely visible crescents of saucepans and plates. A black-veiled figure stood by the entrance to the cellar, handing out flickering candles and brown, obscure maps.

  “What scares you?” André murmured, in full Necrosar, paint and all. “What really scares you? Come to the cellars of Montfort, and find it.”

  Extras hung back, giggled, made faces; the younger ones poked each other in the ribs. “Merde! Paris folks get scared at nothing.”

  “Nothing?” André said and laughed.

  From deep in the cellars came groans and, very faintly and far away, the planging of a ghostly harpsichord.

  André had outdone himself. Perdita had spent the afternoon being turned into something rotted and cobwebbed, and had only just drifted down the stairs; the caterer’s men and the cooks had been disappearing toward Makeup, Wardrobe, and the cellars. The extras had got into the spirit of the thing; half of them were whey-faced and dripping with blood, trying on their makeup for the big scene. Even Lucien Pétiot, here to consult with Cyron about something, had been persuaded to stay and to sport a fatal gash across his forehead.

  Reisden had spent the afternoon at Arras, in the heat of the Municipal Library. In 1804 a Danish traveler, Flores Rosenkranz, had visited Montfort, which was then deserted. He had explored “the dungeons” and copied his map of them for a local antiquary, whose papers had found their way into the fonds municipal. Reisden had copied the map this afternoon.

  So, properly gashed and cobwebbed himself, he joined the party.

  ***

  The stairs to the first cellar were wide and whitewashed. The cellar was squared-off, classical, with flat Corinthian columns carved into the walls. Ranks of candles lit the gloom. Cadaverous waiters were serving, from cobwebbed tables, wine and punch with “witch’s herbs.” In some of the empty wine bins, Props had stacked false wooden cannons and hollow piles of cannonballs for the big battle scene. A few ghostly soldiers guarded them.

  Reisden looked at the wine bins critically, but saw no secrets.

  Food, drink, and dancing would take place on the top level of the cellars. On the second level, open for this evening only, were the Torture Chamber, the Mysterious Tunnels, and the Haunted Crypt. Reisden found these on Rosenkranz’s map: prison, subterranean passages, and storeroom.

  On the third level, still off limits even tonight, was the Holy Well.

  Jules and Ruthie met him at the Ghostly Harpsichordist. Perdita was at the back of the first level, near the stairs, working happily through something of Vivaldi’s. “Hello, love.”

  She stood up to kiss him. He kissed her carefully on grey lips, ducking the cotton cobwebs in her hair. The makeup had worn off her finger-ends, leaving them pink. He kissed each one.

  “I’m off in an hour,” she said. “Come for dinner, Alexander; let’s have dinner together.”

  “I’m doing something for a bit. Wait for me.”

  Jules and Ruthie arrived, Jules still limping but making his way with his cane over the uneven floor, Ruthie with a knitting bag full of supplies.

  With them was André.

  “So, Reisden, you’re finally going with me into the cellar.” André was still in full Necrosar; his ice-blue eyes glittered from his skull makeup. “And it’s dark,” he murmured gleefully.

  Reisden moved them away from oblivious Perdita.

  “You have things to do,” Reisden said firmly.

  “I have the keys to the third level.” André held them up.

  “You could be very helpful, Count André,” Ruthie said, “if you would be, and not simply try to scare us.” She took out of her bag an electric torch and a ball of string. The men looked at her in amusement. “We might get lost,” Ruthie said.

  The barred gate to the second cellar was past the wine cellars. They went down a narrow, dark set of stairs. There were no lights except at the bottom of the stairs.

  Medieval arches extended far into the distance; Ruthie tried a tentative hello? and got back echoes.

  “Look at this.” André led them away from the lights and shone his torch down a narrow corridor. André went first; the Aborjailys followed, Jules limping; Reisden, who disliked dark narrow places, took a deep breath and followed. The tunnel narrowed, then opened into an echoing blackness.

  “Are there bats?” Ruthie said nervously.

  “No,” said André, taking the torch and shining it into the dark: and out of the dark sprang a heap of black eye sockets and ivory grins. “Skulls.”

  Ruthie screamed. But the skulls were ancient, half-crumbling, piled in a mound next to a broken paving of leg bones; it was the remains of an ossuary, which had escaped even the Revolution. They must be under the ruins of the abbey. Reisden felt the weight of towers over their heads.

  “My house,” André hissed. “Do you wonder my mind is a little odd, Hamlet?”

  “Could you apply your mind toward helping us find this secret?” Reisden said.

  “Yes, Count André,” Ruthie said sternly, “or you might as well go back.”

  From far away they could hear the actors, hollow voices echoing among the arches. The voices faded as André led the way through low-ceilinged chalk rooms toward another barred door.

  Worn stairs led downward. A smell was seeping up from below, something unidentifiable and unpleasant. Jules mimed sniffing and fanned his hand in front of his nose.

  “Count André, if you are trying to scare us with a smell, that is not proper.” Competent Ruthie looked a little pale.

  André laughed under his breath. “That’s not mine, Ruthie. It’s drains.”

  “Finest medieval engineering,” Reisden said. “Ruthie, stay up here if you like.”

  Ruthie shook her head; no, she would come.

  Grown men are not afraid of the dark, Reisden thought. He went down the stairs toward the chill blackness of the lowest cellar, ducking his head. His candle guttered and marked the ceiling with smoke. Jules, with the electric torch, negotiated the stairs painfully behind him.

  Whatever was down here, it stank, and not of drains. They moved forward into the cellar. It smelled of cemeteries, a powdery putrid sweetness, the smell that comes with something staining the wall or blocking the chimney.

  Jules tugged at André’s sleeve, then Reisden’s. He rolled up his eyes and let his mouth go lax, looking dead. He was a Necro actor and even with his neck brace it was dreadfully convincing.

  “Dead animal,” said André. “In the spring we fish them out of the pond.”

  It smelled the size of a dead elephant, but that was only the dark—

  It was not only the smell that bothered them; it was the dark itself, lurking at the corners of their eyes. The third cellar was not a single level at all, but a set of tunnels. Stairs went up and down; thick pillars supported the weight of the castle above it. Reisden lifted his candle and saw arches, thick white bony tree trunks, looming out of the dark.

  Ruthie unfolded the map prosaically, holding it up to check their way, but her hands were trembling. “Here, Count André, tell us where the Well is—”

  They were to count eighteen of the primitive columns, turn right, count sixteen, and they would be near the Holy Well. But the columns were not in straight rows, nor at equal distances.

  Jules shone the torch beam on three columns that seemed grown together. He held up fingers in the torchlight: one or three? The space in front of them suddenly had no columns at all; Jules limped forward into the dark, scything the beam to find where they were. The smell had got stronger. Reisden took out h
is handkerchief and gave it to Ruthie, wishing for camphorated vaseline. Where was the well?

  Jules stumbled and dropped the torch.

  It hit with a clink and went out. Reisden knelt to look for it, holding the candle. The candle flame trembled; the flame was balancing at the very end of the wick. Jules got to his feet, pale as wax; the stumble must have hurt. Reisden found his torch and clicked it to make sure it still worked, then handed it to Ruthie.

  The smell was too bad; Jules began to cough, which was obviously painful for him. Ruthie took him by the shoulders and pushed him back toward the stairs.

  “Go with him.”

  That left Reisden and André to continue alone.

  In the guttering light, in the dimness, the columns wavered, mov-ing, blue-shadowed. The well was supposed to be straight ahead, but nothing was straight. In the dark, past the columns, shadows seemed to be moving.

  “It’s not an animal,” André said, and grinned.

  “Don’t do Necro,” Reisden said sharply.

  They saw the bars by running into them, parallel darknesses in the dark. The candle was burning blue, a wavering near-lightless vertical line. André turned on his torch. They could see nothing but bars, and behind them a man-high wooden box and some pipes going up the wall.

  The Holy Well.

  André moved the beam of the light. In the darkness it showed a circle of chalk floor behind the bars, and the edge of the box; and behind that, a shadow.

  Not a shadow.

  It was long and thin and humped on the ground, not recognizable, but at the end of it, moldy and twisted, was lying one of the pointed-toed boots that American cowboys wear.

  If this is another of his effects, Reisden thought. André shone the torchlight between the bars on the terrible thing, then put his hand with the torch through the bars and leaned his forehead on them to look at it better. The light spilled back onto André’s white face haloed by his untidy light hair. His mouth was wide open, the corners pulled away from the teeth.