Mask of Silver

by Rosemary Jones

  As she sat on the stool next to the dressing table, I widened her eyes and drew shadows along her cheekbones. Over Renee’s shoulder, I watched us both in the mirror. The reflections looked murky despite the clear summer sunshine streaming through the lace-curtained windows.

  “Are you sure about this scene?” I said. My lingering unease bothered me. It was just a failed prop. Horrid for Lulu, but nothing supernatural.

  “Of course,” Renee said. “More screen time is always good. Sydney and I were talking last night about the relationship of the two sisters, how the audience should see them as two halves of one personality.”

  “Why?”

  “We make it unclear who the monster is until the end. It’s all part of this grander plot.”

  “Have you seen this manuscript? Eleanor keeps complaining that Sydney won’t show her the end.”

  “He hasn’t told me everything yet,” Renee admitted as I drew the line of her eyebrows to match the arch we gave Lulu. “But it’s all about how a very human woman can be transformed into a goddess of shadows, a divine and terrifying creature, that opens the door into another world.”

  “And what happens to the sister that isn’t transformed?”

  “She’s destroyed,” said Renee, turning around on the stool to examine her face and plucking the brush from my hand to add a little more shadow along the line of her left brow.

  “But would a sister do that?” I said. “Allow the other to be destroyed.” Because sisters protected each other. That was what they do, I wanted to say to her.

  “It’s just a story.” Renee smiled into the mirror. The curtain stirred in the breeze, and the shadows in the mirror moved with it. For a moment, it looked as if someone was peering over her shoulder, looking back at me. But just the two of us were in the room and it was too warm.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “I want to finish this scene today.” I wanted done with the horrid scene and all the rest to come.

  Lace shadows draped across Renee’s face as she turned away from the mirror. I considered a lace mask, a pattern rather than the pale smooth oval that Sydney described. Black lace, like a widow’s hat veil, that dissolved to something more eerie. And I would lock the masks in my room back in a trunk in the attic. For some reason, I was starting to hate them, even though the pair, metal and paper, matched Sydney’s vision so exactly.

  As we descended the stairs, I discussed the possibilities with Renee. If she liked the idea, she could easily sway Sydney into changing his plan for the masked woman. He knew that she had a better eye for the small detail and what suited her characters best.

  “Black lace,” she mused. “That might work. But, Jeany, it seems so clichéd for one of Sydney’s films. A dangerous woman in black lace. I’m sure we can find something more unusual.”

  “But isn’t it all about the glamor?” I said. “Look how Lulu fusses over her lace trimmings. I thought that it should be a half mask, something that leaves your mouth free and visible. Something human that the audience can focus on. That’s more intriguing.”

  “I don’t know. Sydney has been so sure that it needs to be a full-face mask. Something about that was what a priestess would wear.”

  “Are you a priestess? I didn’t know that about your character.”

  Renee half turned on the stairs to look back at me. “Perhaps. You know Sydney. Vague, always so vague. But he said something last night about Camilla being descended from an ancient line of priestesses. Something about the real Saturnin’s wife coming from Egypt and bringing that legacy to Arkham.”

  “That seems unusual,” I said and wondered if Florie or Humbert knew about that. They seemed full of gossip about the early history of the Fitzmaurice family. If the wife had been Egyptian rather than French, surely someone would have mentioned it.

  “Yes, something about Saturnin finding her in a temple along with a bunch of treasures. That’s why he left France for America. As a French Hussar, descendent of nobility, he didn’t have a choice. Nobody would have let him come home with such a wife.”

  “I cannot think he would have been that welcome in New England, either.”

  Renee descended the staircase with a laugh. “Oh, he probably just told everyone that she was French like him when he got here. Isn’t that what America is for? Making up new stories about yourself? It’s been going on a lot longer than Hollywood. However, I doubt Sydney got it right. You know him. Probably half the tale is from some Haggard novel that he read and forgot he had.”

  Perhaps she was right, my clever sister who never forgot anything that she read. Perhaps Sydney had fooled himself into thinking some Haggard story was his family history. As for changing your history to suit your vision of yourself, well, nobody knew more about that than Renee.

  Downstairs, we arranged Renee on the bed surrounded by the wreckage of the fake coffin. She was an even more beautiful corpse than Lulu. Suddenly struck by an unreasonable feeling of horror, I wanted to pull her out of the coffin. It was too deathlike. Once again, I nearly made the unpardonable mistake of walking into the shot and ruining the take.

  Fred adjusted his beloved camera and peered through the sidefinder. “That shadow is falling all wrong,” he complained to Sydney. “I can’t see her face at all. It looks like a mess of black snakes.”

  Sydney also bent to the camera and then straightened up. “No, it’s perfect,” he said. “She looks as if she is covered in a mask of shadows. Just what I want.”

  Fred grumbled as he cranked, and every click sounded like a gunshot to me.

  “Jeany,” he said, and I nearly jumped to the ceiling, so concentrated was I on the strange attitude revealed by Renee’s pose. “Jeany, would you move that pillow just a little to the left. I still don’t think that her face is visible. Sydney, are you sure about this shadow?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said Sydney.

  I readjusted the pillow under Renee’s head as she smiled up at me. There was something about that smile, with her makeup so heavy upon her cheeks and brow, that made her look even stranger. I tried not to shudder as I fluffed her hair across the pillow in the same manner as Lulu.

  Sydney caught a glimpse of her smile and told Renee to hold her face just so.

  “That’s my Camilla,” he cried. “My lady of the shadows and doorways, my key.”

  The sun sank lower, and longer shadows crept into the room. For June, it felt ice cold. Even Renee began to shiver a bit between takes, despite being nearly buried under silk sheets and lacy pillows.

  But Sydney was right. There was something mysterious and enthralling about her pale face surrounded by the ruins of the fake coffin. The black wood, white lace, and Renee’s own elegant features blended in the shadows cast by Fred’s cleverly placed lights. She appeared as much a ghost, or more, than Betsy and Pola from the first scene. While there was not a suggestion of blood, the entire scene reeked of violent death and resurrection. The fact that it was unclear whether it was a bed or coffin just added to the aura of sin.

  This scene alone would earn Sydney his usual title of “king of terror.”

  Max certainly noted it. After the fifth take, he pulled Sydney aside to ask how long he intended to film Renee in bed and how much time that would take up on the screen in the finished film. “The ladies in Peoria won’t like it,” said Max.

  “But everyone else will,” said Sydney. “They don’t pay for pictures that are sweet and safe. They pay to be enthralled. To have their emotions twisted about. A lovely lady, dressed for bed and surrounded by death, that sells. You know that, Max. The studio will tell Hays that everyone is clothed and we’re really teaching morality to the kiddies by equating sex with destruction.”

  For the last three years, various church groups protested any theater that allowed young children to watch movies, especially those that were immoral – and what suggested immorality to those critics seemed to b
e everything that occurred in films, especially films like we made. There’d been testimony in Washington, DC, before Congress when one preacher had professed to watching hundreds of hours of films, documenting carefully each time a suggestive look or flash of skin occurred. The result had been a stunning stack of paper, thumped on the legislative desks. Now William Hays was out in Hollywood, promising to help the studios keep their pictures clean, but nobody quite knew what that meant. And everyone in the business knew that the movie producers and theater owners, not Congress or some church group, paid Hays a handsome salary.

  Max muttered that if we kept on filming a girl on a bed, wearing nothing but her negligee, we’d get banned by at least one bishop.

  “Banned by the bishop,” Sydney chortled. “That’s money in the bank, guaranteed.”

  Renee spoke up from the bed, “If you don’t want me to really fall asleep, let’s finish this scene. I’ve done horror, delight, desire, and panic. What next, Sydney?”

  Sydney looked down at her. The shadows created by Fred’s rearrangement of the curtains and lamps fell in stripes across her face. Some window left slightly ajar created a draft, and shadows stirred like snakes crawling across the bed.

  “Utter stillness,” said Sydney. “Eyes wide open but staring into the nothing that comes from the end of dreams. That moment when the dreamer begins to fall forward into the abyss.”

  Fred cranked the camera. The ordinary, simple sound of the whirring click of the film advancing echoed through the room like the beat of a funeral drum.

  Suddenly I hated this scene more than anything that we had done. It reminded me of those horrible days after our mother died, when people came and went in our rooms, discussing how to organize our lives without giving us any voice in the matter. I clasped my hands around my arms and shook in my corner. I shivered so violently from the sudden invasion of memories that it was all I could do to keep from running forward and pulling my sister from that horrid bed. With each turn of the camera’s crank, the cold increased, and my dread roared through my body like a fever.

  I almost moaned with relief when Sydney finally called a halt for the day.

  “Now for the woods,” Sydney declared with satisfaction.

  “What happens in the woods?” I asked Eleanor later that night.

  She was scribbling on the scenario, sitting at the small table at the back of the parlor, while the others played cards and argued about their bets. As usual, Betsy was intent on winning all their spare cash.

  “Dog bites man,” said Eleanor.

  “What?” I was distracted by watching Betsy flirt with Max and take the pot from Paul.

  “I was reading one of Sydney’s occult books, Anubis and all that. I had the clearest vision of a dog-headed creature carrying off a man at the command of a priestess. Only we will make it more vague, more horrifying than that.”

  I turned back to Eleanor. “We haven’t made any costumes for a dog man. Would Jim play that role?” We had made a wolf’s head once. Sydney hadn’t liked it.

  “No, it will be more subtle than that. The dog man will be a creature of shadow, never fully seen.” Eleanor wrote this down as she said it. “Besides, I cannot wait to be out of this house.”

  “It can be harder, filming outdoors,” I said, thinking of the problems that we had with seagulls during the Siren picture.

  “Better than in this house,” said Eleanor. “It’s always so cold. I know many people don’t like New York in the summer, but I love the heat. Even the smell. It just feels like life. This place is cold as…”

  “As a tomb,” I said. Eleanor stared at me and then nodded.

  I looked through the door of the parlor. It shouldn’t have been possible, but I saw Eleanor and myself reflected in a mirror. We both looked pale, with exaggerated eyes and mouth, like ghouls or ghosts.

  I turned away, arguing with myself that this was just a trick of reflections, the flickering electric light.

  When I looked again, there was nothing there. No mirrors were visible from this angle. None at all.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Two days later, we lugged all the equipment across the lawn and into the woods. Finally Paul Kopp had a part to play, a hobo who surprised the sisters as they walked on a wooded path. As Eleanor explained it, this character would at first be menacing as he begs for work upon the sisters’ estate and then menaced by an unseen threat. Later the sisters would chance upon the hobo’s bloodied and shredded coat blocking the garden gate.

  Of course, that scenario meant we needed two coats. One for Paul to wear and one that was probably destroyed. The night before I asked Eleanor how the destroyed coat should look.

  “Oh, like a wild animal attack,” she said as she scribbled more details on the scenario for Sydney. “Something large and vicious with claws that snatch and teeth that bite. It’s my jabberwock of a scene.”

  A search through one of the downstairs closets had turned up a number of dark men’s coats of an age to have belonged to Sydney’s grandfather. Men’s coats being men’s coats, there were two black coats of a similar cut. One I roughed up with an old metal file that I found amid Humbert’s tools in the barn. That made it look like our tramp had been sleeping rough. As for the other, I stared at it for a long time, thinking about how an animal might attack a man. Would it come from behind, catching at his back and shoulders? Would it attack him from the front, ripping down a lapel and biting through the coat to his heart? How would the blood seep through the coat? Could I even make the blood show on the dark cloth?

  When Fred wandered into the barn in search of a screwdriver or a wrench from some adjustment to the camera’s tripod, I posed the questions to him. Being Fred, he gave it serious and careful consideration.

  “Paul’s a large man,” he said. “So it would have to be a brave beast to attack from the front. Or one that was trapped and had no way out. I saw a bear maul a man because it could not escape.”

  “They had bears in Brooklyn?”

  “Montana. I stopped on my way west, working on a ranch before I decided that cows were dumber than a kid from Flatbush.”

  “Your rail-hopping days?”

  “Yes. Thought I’d take a peek or two at how the cowboys live. Didn’t like it and kept going west.”

  “So, back to the bear mauling,” I said, thinking that might be the size of creature that Eleanor had in mind. “How did the cowboy look after it was done?”

  “Like a mess.”

  “And his clothes?”

  “Not good. Not that anybody noticed. You tend to look at the blood and body bits.”

  I gagged slightly, but persisted. “If the coat is crumpled on the ground, could the camera pick up that it is torn?”

  Fred squinted at the coat. “Not really. Maybe we should drape it over a bush?”

  “Would a bear leave a man’s coat draped over a bush?”

  “Sydney’s pictures aren’t always realistic,” Fred pointed out.

  “It doesn’t seem like a torn coat would scare the audience.” I circled round and round the coat, throwing it in different heaps about the ground and then picking it up and shaking it out.

  “Maybe that’s what they could do?” said Fred. “Perhaps we could shred the coat and tumble it in a heap on the ground in front of the gate. The ladies can pick it up, revealing that it’s been cut into pieces.”

  “A look of horror on their faces,” I said, slowly because I was thinking it through. “Then Renee holds out her hand and we see blood dripping off it. Blood from the coat. That works and will be easier to show than stains upon the cloth itself.”

  Fred nodded. “What will you use for the blood?”

  “There’s syrup and lard in the pantry. I can mix something together that looks thick and drips slowly. Renee will hate getting it all over her hand.”

  “We all suffer for art, according to
Sydney,” said Fred. Rummaging through the tools, he pulled out the head of an old garden rake. “You can use this for claws.”

  We draped the coat over a couple of crates that we found in the back of the barn. With file and rake, we attacked the coat, mimicking the catching of claws and the chewing of teeth. By the time we were done, the front of the coat hung in long shreds. We agreed that any tramp wearing it would be dead.

  “Of course, it doesn’t really explain why the coat ended up in one place and the tramp’s body disappeared,” said Fred.

  “Let’s hope the audience doesn’t think that hard,” I said. “Maybe we’ll show Paul’s body later on.”

  Humbert came into the barn to collect some clippers for trimming the hedge. He shook his head at my two coats and muttered about the waste of good clothing. “It’s art,” I said, but Humbert muttered all the more.

  Fred made the adjustments that he wanted to the tripod. We hauled all the gear down to the far end of the garden, where a wooded gate opened into a small copse. The path was badly overgrown. When Lulu and Renee arrived, they both eyed the walk with trepidation.

  “That will be murder on my stockings,” said Lulu, pointing out with one toe and displaying an ankle nicely draped in silk.

  “Could we film the scene upon the lawn?” Renee asked. “The tramp could lean over the gate and call to the sisters.”

  “No,” said Sydney. He looked down at the pages clutched in his hand. “Eleanor’s scene takes place in the woods. To the woods we go.”

  Eleanor frowned. “The setting isn’t all that important. They could be standing at the gate.”

  “You wrote that they encounter a mysterious man upon a wooded path,” said Sydney. “That is what we are going to do.”

  “Sydney,” said Max. “Is it that important?”

  “I think it must be,” said Sydney. “Max, things are stirring. But not enough. We need more now. Especially if we are to make the studio happy.”

  Max nodded. “Very well. Ladies, if you would.” He swung open the gate and gestured to the path. “Let’s let Sydney direct as he wishes.”