Mask of Silver

by Rosemary Jones

  A third trunk looked more promising for gentlemen’s clothes, but it was locked and had no key. I poked through a few more boxes but nothing caught my eye. Eventually I grabbed a large wicker hamper with broken leather handles. Bundling my finds into it, I dragged the lot to the top of the stairs. With a little pushing and pulling, I thumped my way to the lower floor.

  Fred came trotting up the back stairs as I maneuvered my basket toward my room.

  “I thought you were rolling a body or two down the stairs,” he said. “Or did you stuff it in that hamper?”

  “Ghosts,” I said with satisfaction. “We can dress Betsy and Pola with these pieces.”

  “What about Jim?”

  “There’s a man’s trunk up in the attic. I didn’t see a key but maybe you can get it open.”

  Fred patted his pockets and came up with a pocket knife, a screwdriver, and last night’s corkscrew. “Probably can,” he said. “Lead on, Macduff.”

  “It is ‘Lay on, Macduff’,” I said. We had held this discussion many times before.

  “How should I know?” said Fred, as he always did. “My education ended at age twelve when I became a shoeshine boy.”

  “I thought you ran away to join the army,” I said.

  “I was so good at polishing shoes, the army drafted me later,” said Fred. “To keep the generals all shiny.”

  Whatever his past, or because of it, Fred did know how to break a lock. After a few minutes of tinkering, he popped open the trunk. Inside were a stack of old leather-bound journals and an odd assortment of men’s clothes. By age and style, it looked like the coats and pants of two different men bundled together. Unlike the women’s clothes that I had found, these had been carelessly packed and were heavily creased. I spread them across the boxes, trying to find something that could be made into a uniform jacket for Jim. Nothing looked quite right, although one cutaway coat might work for Hal if we needed him to play a doctor.

  Fred kept burrowing through the boxes behind the trunk. I could track him across the attic by his sneezes and the occasional swear word as he knocked into something hard or sharp. “Hey, Jeany, this might work,” he said, squirming back into the small cleared space where I stood. In his hands was a uniform coat that looked to be of Civil War vintage. It was dark blue and the buttons were all missing. Stray threads hung from the sleeves and shoulders. Still, with braid stolen from a few curtains downstairs and some buttons from the other coats, it might do. I could cut into a woman’s fur tippet that was in one of the other trunks and drape it across the shoulders to match the cape effect of the portrait.

  “We’ll need to hide Jim behind the women,” I said. “It’s a crude match.”

  “If we just show his head and shoulders, it will be fine,” said Fred.

  I looked around the attic. A broken picture frame about the same size as those downstairs leaned against an equally shattered chair. The outside edges of the frame were scorched but still visible were the same type of hieroglyphics as encircled the mirrors in the main hallway. The portrait in the center was hacked away but the oval hole gave me an idea.

  “We could paint this up,” I said, hefting the frame out of the stack of broken furniture where it rested. “And put Jim behind it.”

  “Shoot him through the frame?” said Fred. “Yeah, I like that. The frame is a close match to those downstairs.”

  “In the long shots, show the real painting,” I said.

  “And in close-ups Jim’s head and shoulders,” Fred nodded. “We could even have him move slightly.”

  “Then all the ghosts step off the wall into the room,” I said.

  “I think we film all of them through this,” said Fred, holding the picture frame up and peering through it at my head and shoulders. “Film the paintings in the same spot. And then film them again outside the empty frame. It’s a stop trick, simple enough.”

  Although the stop trick was an old technique, almost nobody could do it as well as Fred. In an earlier film he’d turned Renee into a tree and back again, when Sydney wanted a murderous dryad. By lining up the shot carefully and paying absolute close attention to the light angles and shadows, Fred could make anyone appear, disappear, or transform by altering just one or two elements in the scene.

  “It will give Eleanor the look that she wants,” I said. “But we need another stop trick later, when we film the scene with the mask. To make Renee’s face appear and disappear. Too much of the same thing in one film?”

  One of the things that kept the audiences guessing was never to repeat ourselves. It’s why Sydney never did the same type of plot twice in a row, even in his sequels. If we had ghosts in one film, then it was sure to be mythological monsters in the next. Similarly, we tried not to use too many of the same scares. Shadows, stop tricks, a bloody hand, they were all good. But show them too often and the audience grew to expect it and even laugh at the effect. Fred and I joked one time that we should deliberately do some grotesque trick repeatedly, just to make the audience laugh. “I’m not sure that the world is ready for horror comedy,” said Renee. But she would have been brilliant at it, with her ability to evoke laughter as well as gasps. It was something that Sydney never quite understood, as he believed that his terror pictures should be serious and evoke a breathless reaction in his audience.

  Fred hitched the picture frame over his shoulder. “I’ll take this out to the barn to paint,” he said. “And think about the mask. Have you made it yet?”

  “No,” I said. “I have so many sketches, but nothing looks right.”

  “Something simple,” Fred said. “That always works best.” He was right. The more elaborate the prop, the more it could and often did look poorly made. Simple objects often photographed better.

  I knelt before the trunk that Fred had forced open, rooting under the clothes and journals to see if there was anything else I could use. Something cold and metallic shifted under my hand. I reached in and pulled out a dull black mask. “Fred, look at this. It looks like an old tragedy mask. It must have belonged to Sydney’s actor grandfather.” It was so heavy that I couldn’t imagine anyone wearing it, but it could have hung on a wall as a decoration.

  Fred squinted at the mask in my hand. “It’s not silver.”

  “Paint,” I said. “Light colors. If the title card says it is a silver mask, that’s what the audience will believe.”

  Fred nodded.

  “We can make this look like silver,” I insisted. “And make a second one out of silver paper that’s transparent enough that a shadow of Renee’s face can be seen through it. Especially with the right backlighting.” With the light behind Renee but pointing towards the camera, the material should appear to glow around the edges. Twist the light a little to the side and a suggestion of Renee’s face should be visible.

  “Two masks,” said Fred. “That’s a good idea.”

  I stashed the basket full of old clothes in my room, intending to work on them later, and followed Fred out of the house to the small barn that currently stored our touring automobile and an old-fashioned lawn mowing machine. I’d seen the hired man, Humbert Welles, leading a mule up the drive two days ago to pull the creaky contraption and reduce the grass to a neatly trimmed length, suitable for playing croquet.

  After mowing, Humbert led the mule away, back to the farm that housed it, but came by each day to see if “Mr Sydney” had any more work for him.

  Humbert made the unlikely claim that his mother had named him for a prince. If she had hoped for something charming, she’d failed. He was, as Eleanor put it, “the most dolorous sort, who looked as if he spent his life sucking lemons and eating prunes.” Tall too, topping both Fred and me by nearly two feet, and so skinny that Pola declared that he disappeared when he turned sideways. He had exceptionally knobby wrists and ankles, clearly visible with his too-short sleeves and trousers. Fred kept telling me that we could use him
for a rendition of Frankenstein’s monster if Sydney ever decided to film that story.

  We found Humbert in the barn. He reluctantly agreed that there might be some white paint stored in the back that could be used for what we wanted. But why we wanted to paint up that fire-blackened frame and old mask baffled him. “Nothing but rubbish,” Humbert rumbled above our heads.

  “Props,” I explained.

  Humbert took the frame from Fred. Squinting at it, he shook his head slowly. “That went around the portrait of Mrs Fitzmaurice, the one that died in the fire.”

  “Sydney’s mother?” I said. I hadn’t heard that, but I was beginning to realize for all that Sydney talked about himself, he never said much about his family’s long history in Arkham.

  “Nah,” said Humbert. “The first one. The one that died when the house burned down.”

  “We heard about that,” I said. “The 1823 fire?”

  “Yup. Nearly one hundred years ago exactly. The solstice fire.”

  “The solstice fire?” I hadn’t heard that before.

  “Yup. June 22, 1823. That’s the fire where they found the first Mr Fitzmaurice’s hand. And this picture frame, with the picture all burned up. She was supposed to have been a pretty little lady, all dark hair and wide eyes, like your Miss Renee.”

  “Ah,” said Fred. “So they found this after the fire along with the old man’s hand.”

  “And the sword,” said Humbert. “That’s still up at the house. And his picture too. That Mr Fitzmaurice made the maid take that out. But her picture was lost.”

  It was the story that Florie told. Apparently everyone in Arkham knew about the maid rescuing the Fitzmaurice portrait.

  “Odd the frame survived the fire,” I said, turning it over again to see why the wood hadn’t burned. The feel of it, hard and cold, gave me a clue. “I don’t think this is wood,” I said to Fred.

  “It was heavy,” he agreed, taking it back from me and scraping a little at the charred edges. With an application of his pocketknife, he was able to lift enough paint off it to show the dull green metal beneath.

  “Copper?”

  Fred shook his head. “Maybe. Or an old bronze. It’s strange, not like any metal I’ve seen before.”

  Humbert also took a closer look. “One of the first Mr Fitzmaurice’s finds. Unlucky things he dug out of that grave in Egypt. Mr Sydney’s granddaddy made quite a fuss about them. Went round and round the house collecting them up when I was a boy. Made me polish a few, too.”

  Fred took his knife to the mask, chipping off what appeared to be more soot than paint to reveal the same type of greenish brown metal.

  “Humbert, how long have you been here?” I said.

  “Well, now,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck, “I’ve been working round the house since I could toddle. My auntie cleaned for Mr Sydney’s mother and so did my other auntie. And my sister for a time, until she married that Innsmouth fellow. My cousin Florie never liked cleaning. She went to high school and got an education. Now she waits tables at Velma’s.”

  “So there’s artifacts from Egypt in that old house,” I said.

  “Yeah, quite a few. Couple times some professors came out with their students from Miskatonic University to take a look. Mr Fitzmaurice, the one that was Mr Sydney’s grandfather, liked that. Sitting and talking to them about what an important man that first Mr Fitzmaurice had been and how he’d brought those treasures to Essex County.”

  “I wonder if this mask was part of the Egyptian find?” I said to Fred. “It doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen called Egyptian.”

  Humbert shook his head at it. “Mr Fitzmaurice used to keep that in a drawer in his study. Said he had to hide it from the crows.”

  It sounded like Sydney’s grandfather was stranger than his grandson. Neither Fred nor I could think of any response to that comment.

  I said finally, “Do you think Sydney would be all right with us painting family heirlooms?”

  Fred shrugged. “I doubt these are valuable or even from Egypt. The mask is probably an old stage prop. And even if the picture frame is old, it was pretty badly burned. Just junk. Sydney said to use what was in the attic. Besides, we can always clean the paint off later.”

  “Unlucky things in that house,” said Humbert with one of his big sighs, looking at the objects that we had handed him. “Bad luck that rubs off on everyone, my aunties used to say. One of the students who came the most often went out to sea and never came back. During the War that was.”

  “Lots of men lost at sea during the War,” said Fred.

  “Anyone else?” I asked, beginning to feel very uneasy about the mask that I had just handed Humbert.

  “Nothing’s happened to other students, at least nothing too bad,” admitted Humbert. “They all came back from the War. Couple even went to Boston to set up a medical practice. Hear others are trying to raise funds to explore Antarctica. They had a talk about that down at the library. Exploring the South Pole or some such thing.”

  “That’s a long way from Egypt and New England,” said Fred.

  “Yup,” said Humbert. “Can’t see the appeal myself. Wouldn’t mind going to Boston. But the rest is all too far away for me.”

  After leaving Humbert with the picture frame and the mask that he promised to paint before the end of the day, we walked back up to the house.

  “They’re a strange lot,” I said.

  “Who?” said Fred.

  “The Fitzmaurices and the rest of this town.”

  “Isn’t that what they think of us?” said Fred.

  I stopped, looking at the lawn mowed so neatly by a machine that was twice my age, and down to the hedges that surrounded the property. Over the hedge top, I could see the occasional peak or gable of a fine mansion, houses that had been sitting on French Hill for one hundred years or more. But I couldn’t see more than that. And certainly nobody could see us. It was as if we were all alone on an island, far away from other people, even though we were in Arkham. “It’s all so old,” I said.

  “In Paris they’d laugh to hear you call this little town old,” said Fred. “I went out for a walk one night, just a ramble because I figured this boy from Brooklyn ought to see what made everyone claim that we wouldn’t want to go home again after we saw Paris.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “It’s old. Real old. True old. What Sydney would call ancient. And for once, he would be right. There’s parts of New York that I thought were there forever. But you walk through Paris and you realize that everything we’ve built since George Washington crossed the Delaware is brand spanking new compared to the streets of Paris.”

  “So what?” I said. “That’s Europe. It’s supposed to be old. It’s like my mother’s stories of China, where you could visit your village’s graveyard and find a hundred generations.”

  “Now wouldn’t that be something?” said Fred.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. My mother didn’t want to stay there. And her family were happy to sell her to a bride merchant who was smuggling girls to Chinese men who couldn’t get married here.” They did not call it selling to my mother, but she saw her parents receive money from the man. When she talked to the other girls on the ship, she realized that they’d all been promised the same thing: a young, rich, handsome man from their village who would marry them and let them live like an empress. Being of a skeptical turn of mind, my mother doubted that many rich young Chinese men lived in America and wondered who they’d really have for her to marry. Instead she decided to run off with the tall Swedish sailor who made her laugh when he helped her practice her English on the voyage. She’d been happy to slip away from the bride merchant and make her way to Oakland. But she never dared write to her parents back in China or even visit San Francisco across the bay where there was a proper Chinese groom waiting for her. As far as I know, my father
never wrote to his family in Filipstad either, to tell them that he’d settled in California with a Chinese bride and made his living working on the small ships that carried goods up and down the coast.

  “That’s it,” I said to Fred as if he could hear me thinking through all my family history, the very small bit that I knew well. Being Fred, he waited for me to explain and maybe did understand, a little. “That’s what’s so odd about Arkham. Where we come from, Brooklyn or Oakland, nobody knows a hundred years of family history. Oh, they might know a parent’s or a grandparent’s tales coming from somewhere else. But they don’t know their history back to when Benjamin Franklin tied a key to a kite and flew it through a thunderstorm. They don’t have the kite sitting in a box in their attic, just waiting for somebody to talk about how crazy old Ben was.”

  “I don’t remember seeing a kite in the attic,” said Fred, trying to kid me out of my mood.

  “Doesn’t mean that it isn’t there,” I replied, remembering all the boxes and bags that we’d left behind. “But it gives me the shivers, how they all talk about these people long dead. Humbert, and Florie, and even Sydney. Talking about things that happened almost a hundred years ago as if it just happened. As if the first Fitzmaurice sat down with them and told them about losing his hand in that solstice day fire.”

  “Bit like being haunted,” said Fred.

  I looked around again at the garden enclosed by high hedges, and the tops of mansions like old-fashioned tombs looming in the distance. “More like living in the graveyard all the time,” I said. “And the Fitzmaurices and other Arkham families never leave. They never want to go anywhere else.” It really was like being trapped on an island, one where the past never let a person go.

  “Sydney’s grandfather left. Acted in New York, according to Florie,” Fred protested.

  “For a few years, she said. Then he came back and spent his time in that house looking at unlucky objects dug out of a tomb.”

  “According to Humbert. Who takes a pretty dim view of everything. And Sydney left too. For ten years. Now he’s back,” said Fred. “But he’s only back to make this film. Then he’s off to the next one. You know Sydney. As soon as it’s in the can, he’ll be dreaming up vampire ladies or ungodly doings in a crypt.”