Mask of Silver

by Rosemary Jones

  “Why are you telling me this?” I said again.

  “Because little more than five years ago, Sydney Fitzmaurice came to one of my shows. He stayed afterward to ask me about some things that I had said. It was patter, the usual mystic mumbo jumbo that most magicians use in the act. Sydney heard something in my speech that caught his attention.”

  Sydney liked magicians. I knew that he often went to shows. Renee used to go with him, but magic acts bored her. Also she disliked the stage magician’s common practice of hiding birds and rabbits in their clothing. She felt it was unfair to the poor creatures to be stuffed up a sleeve or trapped in a hat.

  “Sydney heard me speak some phrases that I learned from a French friend who had died in the War, a man who often spoke of magic as real. So Sydney came backstage with a manuscript that he claimed came from his grandfather. A very odd play, apparently written by the grandfather when he was a young man. But the heroines spoke phrases that were even older than that, phrases very similar to those that I spoke. Sydney thought this was tied to ideas, rituals, that his family had stolen long ago.”

  I had a suspicion that this was Sydney’s manuscript that he kept promising to Eleanor and then hiding from her. It sounded like he’d been doing that particular trick for longer than we’d known.

  Julius shifted so the light spilling out of the windows illuminated his face more fully. He looked very serious and much older than he had appeared in the hallway only moments before. “Sydney was very secretive. He wanted my knowledge and he would give nothing in exchange for my advice. But it intrigued me that he claimed Arkham as home. This town intrigues me. I’ve found the occult library at the University is extensive. A strange thing to discover in a small New England town and enough to bring me back whenever I have engagements nearby. But I understand the dangers. Do you?”

  “I can’t leave,” I said, as troubled as I was by this and the earlier discussion about the Lucinda who had disappeared. Was that the woman who the professor thought Sydney killed? No, she’d spoken of a student. “I have… friends in this company. I cannot leave them.” I had to protect Renee. I could not abandon the rest of the company, not friends like Fred and Betsy.

  “You may need to make a choice,” said Julius. “Lucinda wanted what Sydney offered and failed to take the danger in account.”

  “You mentioned her before,” I said. “Who was Lucinda?”

  There were shouts inside the dining room. Sydney barked out instructions for the coming scene. Time was running out. I had to go to my place, or the scene would not work.

  “Lucinda was more a creature of the air than the earth. She lived between the two,” Julius said. “An aerialist in a small circus. Sydney promised her the moon, stars, and all the rest. He worked as a ringmaster for a season. He tried to create a spectacle with the show. He dressed them all in mirrors. He strung mirrors around the tent, so when Lucinda flew, it seemed a dozen women took flight.”

  I heard Fred calling me, but I needed the end of this story. “What happened? Please, tell me.”

  “Sydney came to me, asking for a magic that I did not have,” Julius said. “I do not know what he did that night. But there was a fire. It destroyed the circus. And no one ever saw Lucinda again.”

  “Did he use a mask? Did he put a mask on her?” I said. Then, in response to Fred’s shout, I called back, “I am coming. Just a minute.”

  I asked Julius again. “Did Sydney ask you for a mask?”

  “No,” said Julius. “He did not ask me for a mask. But I heard that Lucinda had a new costume. One that included a silver mask that reflected the audience, that reflected the flames, when she flew.”

  Time was up. Sydney was shouting again. “Thank you, thank you,” I said as I ran back to the door. Florie, I was thinking, I need to talk to Florie. “You know what to do.”

  Julius waved in acknowledgment and shouted to me as I ran. “So do you.” Then, just as if he was a mind reader as well as a magician, he said, “Go see Florie. She can tell you more.”

  I reached my spot before Sydney exploded. Fred was already behind the camera. The actors were all in place around the table. Renee looked lovely and, as Sydney exclaimed, otherworldly in a pale shimmer of a dress that I had sewn for another film but we had never used. Lulu appeared young and more pretty than beautiful in a lace dress that I had fitted to her earlier that morning. It was cut from one of the dresses that I had found in the attic and well suited to the character of the younger, shyer sister.

  Betsy and Jim whisked around the table, very smart in servant costumes that we had brought from California. Hal and Pola both wore their usual dress-up clothes, a little more formal than they had for earlier scenes, but easy modifications had turned them into a country judge and his wife, out for a dinner with a pair of young ladies.

  Eleanor was not watching. I remembered what she had said about her dislike of loud bangs. No doubt she was in her room for rewrites.

  “Places,” shouted Sydney.

  The actors sank into chairs or, in the case of Betsy and Jim, began leaning over the “guests” as if they were serving the nonexistent food in their dishes. A few minutes of meaningless chatter was made to fool the lip readers: “How was the weather? Did it seem too cool tonight? Can I have soup? Thank you for the soup.”

  After enough of this for Fred to get his establishing shot, Renee spoke the one line that would appear on the title card: “I am waiting for the stranger.”

  Bang! Julius lit the flash powder. The bright light flooded into the room. I threw the switch that doused all the lights.

  As the room plunged into darkness, there was a second arc of blue light, an arc of electricity sparking across the table. A man cried out. There was the terrible thud of a body falling.

  I flipped the switch on and flooded the room with light again as everyone began shouting over each other.

  Hal was flat on the floor. Pola was on her knees beside him.

  “Oh, my God, my God,” she said. “Is he dead?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Hal was alive, but barely. Max calmly called the operator and asked for Doctor Wills to be sent out to the house. Then he sat in a corner, taking notes and talking quietly with Sydney while the rest of us moaned about what a bad luck picture this was turning out to be. When the doctor arrived, she took one look at Hal and called for an ambulance.

  “What happened?” I asked Fred after the ambulance came and went.

  “I think he was shocked,” said Fred, who promptly crawled under the dining room table. I crawled after him as quickly as I could.

  “Shocked? How?” This couldn’t have happened. We’d checked everything. Fred had checked everything. Hal couldn’t be heading to hospital.

  Fred pulled up a cable that had run under the table, leading to one of the big lights that we’d brought with us for night scenes. “I don’t know how,” Fred said, running his hand along the length of cable. “There’s nothing wrong here. An arc of electricity like that, it should have fried these cables. And the fuses should be destroyed.”

  “What do you mean? The lights came on.”

  “Yes,” said Fred. “The lights came on. The fuses worked. After a huge arc of electricity, like a bolt of lightning, strikes Hal. Jeany, that’s not normal.”

  We crawled back out. Fred checked each of the lights in turn. Then he went to the kitchen to look at the fuse box. He found nothing.

  We spent the rest of the night going over and over the scene. Nothing made any sense. It should have been as safe as safe could be. It was like the picture that had fallen off the wall or the coffin that closed on Lulu. Simple tricks, the type that we always used, that kept going wrong in this film.

  Neither of us dared to speak of Paul. Of blood in the woods or the feeling of something truly wrong.

  Well past midnight, we gave up. I dragged myself upstairs, almost too tired
to sleep. As I walked past Renee’s door, she called out to me. She was sitting by the window, peering out in the darkness. As I came up to her, I could hear the scratch of claws up on the roof.

  “Those crows,” said Renee. “Still out there.”

  I pressed my face to the cool glass and let my eyes adjust to the faint moonlight. Dark shapes were visible along the edge of the roof. They bobbed and weaved about, and I could hear the faint mutter of birds waking briefly and then returning to sleep.

  “They are not doing anything,” I said to Renee.

  “No,” she said with a shudder, turning away from the window. “They never do anything. They’re just there. Like sentinels. Watching us. Waiting for another disaster to happen and somebody to die this time.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to speak of Paul. He was in California. Max told us that Paul was in California. I couldn’t bring myself to speak of the pool of blood in the woods or the terror it woke in me.

  I’d never heard my sister sound so depressed. Usually I was the one who worried. Who was sure that something we’d done wouldn’t work out. Renee just knew she would succeed, that she would become a star, that we would find a place to accept us even though we weren’t everything that we said we were.

  “It’s just crows,” I said. “They can’t hurt us.”

  “I hate this house,” said Renee. “It wants something from me.”

  “Renee!” I said, although I had felt the same for days. “It’s a house. It doesn’t have feelings.”

  “Are you sure?” said Renee, her voice barely above a whisper, her body slumped in defeat in front of her mirror. “Ever since we went into those woods, I’ve felt something terrible has happened. Something horrible will happen. Then the house will eat us up. Keep us trapped here forever.”

  “Renee!” I said again. This was too close to my nightmares. The house engulfed in smoke and flames while I wandered forever through its interminable hallways and was forever caught in the endless reflections of the mirrors downstairs. “We can walk out the door right now. Call a cab and go to the train station like Paul. We don’t have to stay.”

  Renee looked shocked. As shocked as I felt as soon as I said it. But there wasn’t any reason to stay. Let Sydney finish the picture without us. We could go back to Los Angeles. There were always more pictures, other directors, and nothing, nothing, was keeping us here.

  “I cannot leave Sydney,” said Renee. “We have to finish this picture.”

  “Why?” I said. “We’ve done enough for Sydney. You’ve made him famous.”

  “No,” said Renee. “He made me famous.”

  “No he didn’t,” I said, suddenly as furious as I’d ever been with my brilliant, beautiful, genius of a sister. “You’re the one who thought up the best tricks, the best way to fool the audience into thinking one thing and showing them another. You came up with all the twists, like that empty room. You made Sydney’s ideas better and bigger and more amazing than anyone else ever could.”

  “More than you, with your clever costumes? More than Fred, with all his camera tricks?” said Renee. “More than Pola, Hal, Jim, Paul, and Betsy, with all the characters that they’ve created? More than Max with his notes and constant calls to keep the studio happy?”

  “Yes,” I said. “There’s dozens like us in Los Angeles. Hundreds more every day, getting off the train and dreaming of work in the movies. But you are the star. You are the one that makes each picture unforgettable.”

  Renee grabbed my hands and squeezed them, that clasp of an older sister to a younger, the way that she had on the first night in the orphanage, and on the night that we decided to run away.

  “Sydney gave me that chance, he let me be the leading lady. Not the treacherous fortune teller screaming curses or the wicked harem girl plotting to knife her master. The only roles that a half-Chinese girl from Oakland would be allowed to play. But Sydney didn’t care who I was, what I was, he made me a star.”

  I shook my head. “You would have been a star without him.”

  “No,” said Renee. “He got us all here, he made us the best at what we do. Scaring the audience, making them dream a nightmare, giving them a memory of something that never was and never could be.”

  “You sound just like him,” I said. “Quoting bits and pieces that don’t mean much if you stop and think about it. Renee, there’s something wrong here. We should go home.”

  “No,” said my implacable sister. She sat down at the mirror and peered into it, much as she had looked into the night-dark window earlier. What she saw in her reflected eyes seemed to satisfy her. “There is a way forward. We can finish. There’s just the final scene with the mask.”

  I thought of the silver mask and its paper twin lying in my room. There was something about it that continued to bother me. The more that I stared at it, the more I could see the shadow of a face behind it. But not the face of an ordinary woman. The face of a monster, something both organic and metallic, something both hideously of nature and created by an alien science that I didn’t want to understand.

  But I couldn’t tell that to Renee. That was a thought generated by nightmares and not an idea that I wanted to discuss in a house that creaked and groaned around us as dozens of crows slept, muttering crow dreams on the roof.

  “I need the mask,” said Renee. Her voice sounded peculiar now, an echo of her normal decisive tones.

  “Not yet,” I said. “We aren’t filming that scene yet.”

  Renee kept staring at her reflection. A shadow stirred in the mirror. I looked over my shoulder at the bed curtains. That impossible canopied bed that she’d claimed from the very first night. No drafts moved the draperies. Renee continued to gaze into the mirror and the shifting reflections, which looked like a creature underwater rising to the surface.

  “The mirror is key,” she said. “Terror is key.”

  “Renee,” I said, laying my hand on her shoulder and resolutely not looking into the mirror. “What are you talking about?”

  She started a little under my hand. Renee blinked like someone waking up. “Finishing the picture. I saw Sydney’s manuscript finally. He showed me it tonight.”

  “Oh, so you know how it will end?” I said. “What happens to the sisters?”

  Renee was looking back into the mirror. “What? The sisters? I guess so. It’s so much more than that.” Her voice drifted off. If her eyes hadn’t been wide open and staring so intently at her reflection, I would have thought she’d fallen asleep where she was sitting.

  “But what is Sydney trying to do?” I resisted the urge to shake her. Or at least spin her around on her chair so she was no longer looking at those fluctuating shadows in the mirror. It had to be the curtains, or perhaps the crows outside the window, that were causing those agitating shapes. I refused to see a dog-headed man crouching in the corner of the reflected room. When I looked back over my shoulder, it was just Renee’s enormous traveling truck occupying that part of the room. When I looked back to the mirror, it looked as if three creatures stared out at us, or a three-headed dog man with snarling mouths.

  “What was in Sydney’s manuscript?” I asked.

  “An ending,” said the now sleepy sounding Renee. “An ending of everything normal.”

  “That sounds horrible,” I said as firmly as I could. I liked normal. I liked simple days with friends, chatting over coffee, pinning up hems, sketching ideas in my book, or eating breakfast. I liked Fred being incapable of passing anything mechanized without wanting to tear it apart. Or Betsy counting cards in her head and gleefully pulling in the pot. Or Pola knitting blankets for all the babies of her acquaintance and Hal trying to decide if chickens and eggs would be the best strategy for early retirement. “I like normal,” I said out loud. “I don’t want it to end.”

  Renee swung away from her mirror with a yawn. “I’m so tired. I think I’ll sleep until noon
. Only a few more days until we finish the picture.” Her voice shifted again. It was as if she was playing every possible version of my sister, of the persona that she had created for herself when we ran away so long ago. Now she was the daring Renee again. “We should do something amazing, darling. Maybe take the train to New York and shop our way through the city. How would you like that?”

  “But, Renee,” I said. “What about Sydney’s manuscript? What was the end?”

  She climbed into the bed, shaking her head. “Don’t worry. It is good. Very good. Sydney’s right. It will make us famous. Max says the studio is going to be so happy with this picture that we’ll be able to do whatever we want.”

  “And what do you want, Renee?” What do I want, I asked myself. I had no answers.

  As I turned off the lamp by Renee’s bed, she stirred and said, “Jeany, can you cover the mirror? Please. Just throw a towel over it.”

  I picked up a shawl from her chair and dropped it over the dressing table mirror so it was covered completely.

  Renee gave a sigh of satisfaction and rolled on her side, presenting her back to the mirror. “Thank you,” she murmured. “I hate waking up and seeing those reflections. They watch me. I wish they wouldn’t.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The next morning, after checking on Renee who was still heavily asleep with her back to the covered mirror, I found everyone gathered in the parlor. In one corner, Eleanor sat on the sofa with Pumpkin on her lap, looking very wan, leaning against Lulu’s shoulder and muttering in her ear.

  Lulu finally shook her head and snapped, “Darling, don’t be silly. It was an accident. Nobody knew poor Hal would be hurt.”

  “But it is exactly…” Eleanor started, but Lulu shushed her with far more force than I had ever seen her use.

  “It’s nothing,” she insisted. Then she spotted me and waved me to her. “Jeany, did you see a bolt of lightning come through the window last night?”

  “No, of course not,” I said. “There was the flash. Mister Claude set that off.” I closed my eyes, trying to picture the scene exactly as it happened. “I turned off the lights and then there was a flash across the table. Fred thinks it was one of the cables. That something sparked or there was an electric arc.”