Mask of Silver

by Rosemary Jones

  “By the time Sydney starts talking about the scenario, I’m usually too busy writing down figures to listen to his lectures,” said Max.

  Betsy giggled. “Nobody can listen to Sydney all the way through. Remember the time that he started to lecture us about the daily torture of mediocrity and the lure of mutability. Nobody understood him.”

  “He got that from his grandpa,” said Florie. “I remember him, toward the end. Old Mister Fitzmaurice used to rent a lecture hall and talk about his days in the theater. About how he knew the Booth brothers when he was young and how they were going to change the world. He’d go on and on about some play even greater than Julius Caesar, about something in Egypt.”

  I asked: “Antony and Cleopatra?”

  Florie stood up and shook her head. “That doesn’t sound right. It was two women’s names. You’ll have to ask Professor Krosnowski sometime. She’d remember. It’s the same play that Sydney directed, his last year at the University.”

  “The one that caused a fire,” I said, remembering the woman’s strange comments to me earlier that evening.

  “That’s it,” said Florie, grinding out the last of her cigarette in an abandoned saucer. “Back to work!” She collected all our dishes in a teetering pile. The bell over the door rang, and a young man walked in. Florie shrugged a shoulder at him, her hands being full of dirty plates. “Darrell, it’s been awhile,” she said. “These folks are working on that movie that you were talking about.”

  Darrell came up to us. “Are you with the Fitzmaurice production? Do you know Renee Love?”

  I blinked at his enthusiasm as he pumped the hands of Max and Fred.

  “Darrell Simmons, Arkham Advertiser,” he said. “I’d be thrilled to take a few pictures for our paper. Especially Miss Love. She’s a favorite.” He blushed a little. “Um, I mean she’s a favorite with our readers. Everyone knows that Sydney Fitzmaurice is from Arkham. They always show his movies at the theater. And, of course, Miss Love is a great star. I saw The Net of the Siren seven times. I hear that Nightmare at the Circus is even better.”

  Betsy smiled and pumped his hand right back. “It’s a doozy,” she said. “I played Miss Love’s dresser. There’s this scene where she rides a white horse round and round. Then the hero dreams that his death is riding for him. Everyone comments on that.”

  Fred and I exchanged glances. Besides the mishap of the mirrored costume, the actor playing the hero had been terrified of horses. Sydney kept making Renee ride straight at him until the poor man, shaking and sweating in his seat, finally yelled and ran away. None of us had been happy with how Sydney treated poor Rodolfo.

  Once Darrell learned that Betsy was an actress, he ignored the rest of us and peppered her with questions. It was a relief. I never knew quite how to talk about Renee to a stranger like that, and always was afraid that I’d say too much. Or not enough. Betsy loved to “play the baloney card” as she called bantering with reporters. She spun fantastic tales of highly unlikely adventures. Betsy might have been just a bit player in 1923, but she had ambition and she could turn on a glowing smile when it was her turn to shine.

  Betsy agreed to being photographed at the diner so Darrell could have a picture of the movie stars stepping out in Arkham. She beamed and twirled on one of the counter stools while Max, Fred, and I stayed in the background. Darrell even put her behind the counter with Florie, pretending to pour cups of coffee for a bewildered pair of old men trying to eat their dinner. Florie was very pleased with all the attention and reminded Darrell twice to send over copies for her and Velma.

  As we walked out into the cooling night air, Florie had one last snap at Suzie. “See, told you that they’d be good for business,” she said. “Next time, be polite when strangers come through the door. You’ll get better tips, too.”

  Darrell held the car doors for Betsy and me, hanging through the open window to ask if he could take pictures at the Fitzmaurice house. Max told him to come by in a day or so, and he’d see what could be done.

  “Oh, that would be swell,” said Darrell. “My editor is going to love this. She’s always after me for more society pages stuff.”

  “What do you usually do?” I said.

  He paused, an odd look crossing his face that made him suddenly seem much older. “Well, there’s stories in Arkham that not everyone likes to hear.” He lifted his camera up. “Or see. I try to be honest. I think that helps anyone who runs into something that they don’t understand. But my editor keeps saying folks want happy stories too.”

  Betsy reached through the car window. “Well Sydney’s films aren’t always happy, but they do have glamour. Wait until you see us in Jeany’s costumes. We look swell.”

  Darrell blinked at Betsy’s informality and then nodded. “Photos of Miss Love in her new costumes. That will be something.”

  “He better take a few of Lulu too,” said Betsy as we pulled away. “Or we’ll hear shrieking.”

  “I’ll make sure that both of them are wearing something wonderful,” I said. “And, Max, you better let Sydney know. He’ll want his picture to be in the paper too.”

  We arrived back at the house to find it plunged into darkness. Going through the door, only a single candle lit the downstairs hallway. The multiple narrow mirrors lining the hall reflected the faint light and made our shadows overlap into a bulbous shape with elongated tentacles.

  A shout from Sydney roused us from where we had paused in the doorway. “Fred!” he bellowed. “Is that you? Did you call the power plant?”

  Fred led the way into the living room where the crew was gathered around a number of oil lamps. In the grate, a smoking fire, lit more for light than warmth, added to the flickering shadows around the wall.

  “What happened?” I asked Renee.

  “Sydney was talking about the script and all the lights went out,” she answered. “We staggered about and found some candles. Paul tried to fix the fuse but failed. Then Hal went upstairs and fetched the oil lamps out of the bedrooms. After that, he, Paul, and Jim went out for a walk. I think they took a flask with them and some cigarettes.”

  “Sounds like those guys,” I said. When things got chaotic, the actors were good at sliding out the door for a long smoke and quick nip. They’d return when things calmed down.

  “Yes,” said Eleanor, from her chair. “All very effective drama, that blackout. But we still haven’t finished the scenario for tomorrow’s filming.”

  “Are we moving past the entrance to the house?” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” Renee answered. “That’s done.”

  I refrained from saying anything more, like, “Thank heavens.” In the kitchen, I could hear Sydney, Fred, and Max mumbling something about fuses. Drawers clashed open and shut. Sydney yelled, “When am I going to have light again? I need light. Eleanor and I need to write. We cannot write in the darkness.”

  “I thought he liked the candles,” I whispered to Renee, who rolled her eyes.

  “Not after he stubbed a toe trying to walk across the room,” she whispered back.

  Lulu looked immensely bored. She teased her pug with the end of her scarf. “Filming seems so slow to me,” she said. “Imagine taking a whole day to walk up a set of stairs.”

  “And there weren’t even very many stairs,” Renee murmured. I pinched her shoulder. Last thing we needed was to start a row again. She shrugged me off.

  Eleanor spread out some notes on the table, shifting the lamp so she could see the pages more clearly. “Now that the doomed sisters Camilla and Cassilda have returned to their ancestral home…” she began.

  “Are they doomed?” said Lulu. “Isn’t one going to escape? The audience does like a happy ending.”

  “According to Sydney’s notes, they are fated to disrupt the cosmos with their doom. That does not sound like a happy ending to me, dear.” Eleanor squinted a bit more at Sydney’s scra
wl. “Although it’s not clear that anyone dies.”

  Renee offered “Sydney doesn’t necessarily spell out what happens after. He loved The Turn of the Screw. He thinks all endings should fire the imagination the way that James did.”

  “Oh, yes,” Eleanor said. “I saw a copy of Two Magics in the library room. I always thought the governess was the most dreary of creatures. If it had been me, I would have locked both the brats in their room and left the house immediately.”

  “Perhaps she had nowhere else to go,” I said.

  “Any woman of intelligence can find some place else to go,” said Eleanor. “By the time I was seventeen, I had learned enough to pack my bags and take the train to New York. Which must have been a great relief to Leiper’s Fork. My family never knew what to do with me. Of course, they didn’t approve of me reading Henry James or the Brontës. Indecent reading according to my mother. But then I’m sure that there were parts of the Bible that would have widened her eyes if she had ever read them.”

  “You didn’t like Jane Eyre either, darling,” said Lulu. “And you were positively vituperative about Heathcliff. How can anyone not adore Heathcliff?”

  I tried not to show my surprise that Lulu knew English literature or could use “vituperative” in a sentence. With her wavy blonde curls and feathery scarves, I assumed that the Argos was as heavy reading as she ever did. Then I decided that I was no Sherlock Holmes, able to judge people correctly at a glance. I’d need to know more about Lulu to guess at her tastes in literature.

  “I prefer Brontë to James,” said Eleanor to her lover, “but you are right. Give me Louisa May Alcott any day, even though those March girls were damn Yankees.”

  “Little Women,” I said with a smile. “But not as good as Anne of Green Gables.”

  “Interesting choice,” said Eleanor looking at me. “Did you want to be Anne, red hair and all?”

  “No,” I said. “I like my hair. And my eyes.” More than once in the orphanage, I’d been asked if I wanted to look different. Truth is, I never did. I knew who I was when I looked into the mirror, my mother’s daughter.

  Eleanor nodded. “Good for you. Too many women try to batter themselves into a shape that they can never have.”

  More crashing came from the kitchen and then a shout of triumph from Sydney. Someone must have found the fuses.

  “So,” said Eleanor, “Sydney wants a shocking scene that suggests the mansion hides many secrets.”

  “They could be forced to sit in darkness, waiting for the lights to come on,” suggested Renee.

  “That lacks a certain amount of suspense,” said Eleanor. “How about family portraits coming to life? A suggestion of ancient history haunting them?”

  I looked up to the shadowy portrait of the first Fitzmaurice. His face was mostly bare. Jim sported luxuriant mustaches as the chauffeur. With his false whiskers removed and some shadowing on his cheekbones and around his eyes, we could make him into a fair match for the picture. An old coat could be dressed up with some braid and buttons to appear like the uniform jacket.

  “I wonder if there’s an attic,” I said. “And trunks of old family clothes. We could use that to mimic the portraits. There’s a couple of women in the other room.”

  “Sydney’s mother and grandmother, I think,” said Eleanor. “I noticed them too. We could move this gentleman into that room. Easier to have all three together.”

  “Betsy can be the younger woman and Pola the older,” I agreed.

  “Now how do we make them ghosts?” Eleanor mused, jotting notes on a blank page.

  “Makeup. Cheesecloth. We stop the film and restart it. Fred can splice it together afterward. We sell the audience on the impression that they’ve seen more than we have shown. Sydney will have Fred concentrate on the reactions of Renee and Lulu,” I said. Nothing new in these techniques but all of it reliable for building a mood of unease in the opening scenes.

  “Yes,” said Renee. “Lulu can scream.”

  “I can faint too,” said Lulu, perking up and looking interested. “That slow crumple that I did for His Bloody Hands. Do you remember, Eleanor?”

  “It made the audience gasp,” said Eleanor. Seeing our skepticism, she added. “It did. Lulu can faint.”

  “Oh, good,” said Betsy. “Our regular fainter Maggie stayed behind.”

  Suddenly it seemed like we could all work together. Even Pola, carefully counting her stitches by the fire, looked interested and cheerful.

  Then the side brackets snapped on and we saw the dead bird.

  Chapter Six

  A crow lay on the windowsill. When the lights were out, the black feathers blended into shadows. Pola stowed away her knitting. She walked over to it and looked down. “The neck is broken,” she said. “It must have flown into the window.”

  “From the inside?” said Renee. She didn’t get up. She never liked dead animals or birds. It was one of the reasons that we never kept any pets. We had a kitten once. Finding it dead on the back porch of Mrs Ryan’s boarding house made Renee weep for a week.

  “It probably flew in and then became confused. I’m surprised it didn’t brain itself on one of the mirrors,” said Eleanor.

  Sydney, Fred, and Max returned from the kitchen carrying a triumphal bottle of wine and several glasses. The wine bottles had come up out of the cellar when we’d first arrived. Despite Sydney’s assurances that his grandfather’s stash was drinkable, the average was two bottles of vinegar to one bottle of mediocre red or slightly bitter white. At the rate we were progressing through it, we needed to find the local bootlegger soon.

  “Problems solved,” Sydney said. “Fred found the fuses. Max found the corkscrew.”

  “And we found a dead crow,” said Renee, pointing at the cold mound of feathers on the windowsill.

  Sydney went over to take a closer look. Unlike Renee, he adored dead things. His apartment was full of bits of taxidermy, some of it game that he claimed to have shot, as well as creatures turned into occult objects. Sydney even showed us a lion’s head once, claiming he bagged it on a safari, but on closer questioning admitted that it was an old circus beast that he had stuffed and mounted

  I had expected similar objects in the Fitzmaurice house. But other than a wistful grouping of poker-playing frogs under glass that had belonged to Sydney’s grandmother, the place was remarkably free of dead things and occult relics. Perhaps Sydney’s obsession with such objects had been picked up during his travels.

  “Ah, a winged harbinger of death,” said Sydney.

  “A dead crow,” repeated Renee. “You take it out.”

  He left the glasses on the table. Cradling the crow in his hands, Sydney seemed fascinated by the dead bird.

  “Sydney,” said Renee. “Eleanor suggested ghosts for the next scene.”

  “Excellent,” said Sydney, still staring at the crow. “It is a good time to start haunting, with ways opening into the house. Max, I told you this picture would work better in Arkham.”

  We all looked at Max, who frowned at Sydney. “You said you could do this anywhere.”

  Sydney looked up from the crow. “Of course, I’m Sydney Fitzmaurice, I can make pictures wherever I am. But this will work, Max.”

  “We need more costumes,” said Renee.

  “Something for Pola, Betsy, and Jim to turn them into ghosts,” I said.

  “Oh there’s piles of old clothes in the attic,” said Sydney. “Use whatever you find. Grandfather was an actor and never could throw away a costume. I stored a few things up there from my theater days at the University too.”

  “Wonderful,” said Renee. “Now let’s discuss how to make the library properly haunted. I like Eleanor’s portrait idea.”

  Sydney opened a window and dropped the crow outside. “Humbert will clean it up in the morning,” he said.

  We poured the wine and fou
nd it drinkable, and spent the rest of the evening talking about how to haunt the Fitzmaurice house.

  Chapter Seven

  The next morning I sorted through the extra set of keys kept hanging by the back door and found some room keys. Two or three looked promising and I eased them off the ring. Then I climbed to the top of the house. The locked door at the end of the corridor, near where Pola and Betsy slept, did not lead to another room. Instead, opening when I tried the second key, it revealed a narrow little staircase leading upwards. “Attics,” I said to myself with satisfaction. While playing croquet the previous day, I had spotted a small round window at the top of one roof peak. I had been certain that it marked an attic window.

  Indeed it did. The attic stretched the length of the house, but only the one window gave it any light. The splintery boards of the floor were almost completely hidden beneath piles of boxes and broken furniture.

  Remembering what Sydney said about old clothes and costumes, I looked for trunks. Shoving aside a crate of mismatched teapots, pitchers, and cracked saucers, I found a large old-fashioned steamer trunk. Although it was locked, someone had thoughtfully tied the key to a handle with a bit of string. I pulled it free and released a cloud of dust when I dragged the heavy lid open. Inside were a number of dresses and hats, all neatly sheathed in muslin. I set the cloth to one side, as it might be used in any number of ways, and pulled out the dresses. These were a near match to the style worn by Sydney’s mother in her portrait. I picked one or two that could be easily altered to fit Betsy.

  Worming my way through the boxes and broken chairs, I found a bulbous trunk, strapped closed rather than locked. It provided the skirts and blouses necessary for making the grandmother’s ghost. The full petticoats that would have held the skirts wide were missing. But I could rig up something for Pola that would suffice for a short scene. Considering the grey and purple mourning colors of these skirts, I thought about draping the muslin over them to achieve a lighter, more ghostly effect.