Florie whipped by us again, and eyed my uneaten sandwich with disfavor. “You should eat that,” she said to me. “You are going to need your strength.”
“Why?” I said. “What’s happening?” I still didn’t agree with Fred’s assessment and was trying to think of ways to talk him into taking my point of view. Except he was right: nothing had happened that couldn’t be labeled an accident, except the possible disappearance of Paul. And that was so vague, so uncertain. I needed more proof that Sydney was planning to create the accidents. That he had deliberately set out to harm the actors to terrify his audience.
And, if that got out, who would work with Sydney again? Would he risk losing his whole company, I asked myself. I shook my head. Of course, he wouldn’t lose his actors. Hundreds of would-be stars were getting off the train every day, looking to become rich and famous in the movies. Look at Lulu, look at Renee, intelligent women still following Sydney’s directions, even as others were harmed nearby.
Florie slapped down a bill. She looked with greater satisfaction at my plate. I’d managed to eat my entire sandwich while considering how I could prove Sydney such a villain that I could make Renee and all the rest abandon the picture.
“We should talk to Max,” I said to Fred.
“Why Max?” he asked as he dug change out of his pocket to pay Florie.
“Because he’s nervous about what the studio thinks. He’s always nervous about that,” I said. “If we can convince him that the studio heads will be angry about Sydney’s plans, we might get the picture halted.”
Fred tipped up his cap as he scratched the back of his head. “Maybe,” he said. “But if the accidents haven’t upset them yet, there’s not much we can give them.”
“There must be something more,” I said.
Florie brought back the change and thanked Fred when he told her to keep it as a tip. “Have you talked to Professor Krosnowski yet?” she said to me. “She’s a bit worried about you.”
“The professor that was here the other night?” I said. “Mister Claude asked me to talk to her too.”
“Good advice,” said Florie. “You can find her at the University this afternoon. She’s teaching today. Try the English department first. If she’s not there, then she’ll be in the stacks, looking for some dusty old book.”
Fred settled his cap more firmly on his head. “I’m heading to the University for a microphone. You could talk to the professor while I’m picking that up,” he said.
I nodded and asked Florie, “What classes does she teach?”
“The nasty kind that people like,” said Florie. “All about murder, and devils, and curses. Only she calls it poetry and literature. Writes, too. Mostly local history – she just changes the names so nobody recognizes their family in it and calls it fiction to stay out of trouble. If anyone knows what Sydney Fitzmaurice is up to, it’s the professor. She’s got a powerful dislike of that man and his movies. Rants about him every time a Fitzmaurice picture plays at the movie house.”
“But why?” I said, being more than a little tired of vague warnings. “What did Sydney do?”
Florie put down her coffee pot and leaned over the counter to whisper in my ear. “She says that he murdered a girl with magic. On the summer solstice.”
Chapter Twenty
During the drive to the University, Fred and I debated the possibility that Sydney might have killed someone. Fred didn’t believe it. I almost didn’t. Not the way that Florie said. It was Sydney, who I had known for years. He was flamboyant and self-centered and more than a little careless about how his ideas might impact someone else. But murder? Sydney’s style was selfish. He put people at risk and probably didn’t care if people got hurt. But it was stunts that he could justify as risky but worth it. It was pretty common throughout Hollywood. But deliberately murder someone? That was harder to imagine, but this summer, I was starting to imagine it. And then I thought of Renee and groaned. How was I going to convince her that Sydney was so dangerous?
“And what did Florie mean, a murder with magic? A magic trick that went wrong? Like Eleanor’s guillotine?” said Fred.
“I don’t think Eleanor likes to think of it as her guillotine,” I said, remembering the upset woman that we’d left behind at the Fitzmaurice house. “But I could see Sydney setting up a trick and not being too careful or thinking it through. Like that balloon that he wanted to use. Or directing Selby off the mountain.”
Fred nodded. “I cannot see it. Not like shooting or stabbing someone.”
“No,” I said. “But Mister Claude mentioned something. About a circus performer. One that went missing after Sydney set up a new act for her.”
A woman of the air, wearing a mirrored mask, who reflected the flames, as I recalled our conversation. So much like how Sydney described his masked stranger in this movie. Too much like it for my comfort.
“Maybe this professor knew her too,” said Fred. “And that’s why Mister Claude wanted you to talk to her.”
I nodded. That made sense, and apparently both Mister Claude and Professor Christine Krosnowski knew Florie. “I think that all the news in Arkham isn’t in the newspapers,” I said. “I think it all goes through Velma’s Diner.”
“Good diner is hard to beat for gossip,” agreed Fred.
When we got to the University, Fred was sent in one direction to collect his microphone while I went in search of the English department. We agreed to meet back at the car.
I found Professor Christine Krosnowski in a tiny closet-sized office in the English department. I slid through the partly open door and took the one seat in front of the desk. Behind her was a peeling wall calendar and a bucket with a mop.
“The janitor and I share,” said the professor, with a glance at the bucket. “I work days. He works nights. As you can see, I’m highly valued by my colleagues.”
“But why do you work here?” I said. It was an odd conversation. It felt like we fell into talking like old friends or at least recent companions. Except we had nothing in common and had only met once, very briefly, at Velma’s Diner. “Couldn’t you teach elsewhere?” I honestly wanted to know, even though it was the least urgent question that I had to ask her.
“One of the Seven Sisters?” the professor said. “Probably. But Miskatonic has its charms. Especially the library. And teaching leaves me plenty of time for writing. For the pulps.” She smiled a particularly wicked smile. “Which does make the old dears on the academic side rather livid. Except they can never prove, never want to prove, that I’m writing about them. So they give me whatever class that they don’t want and the worst office on campus. Not that I care. Not as long as I get paid for my teaching and access to the more… shall we say… off-limits areas of the library.”
“Florie said that you wanted to see me. So did Mister Claude,” I said.
She tapped one finger on the desk. Thinking about what to say next, I guessed. Her face was a little severe but not unfriendly. As a teacher, she must have been one of those with eyes in the back of her head. I met a few nuns like that back in Oakland. The teachers who always gave the impression that they knew exactly what you were thinking and were pondering how best to open your mind to greater possibilities.
“What do you know about magic?” said the professor.
“Stage magic? Like the kind that Mister Claude performs?” I asked.
“No,” she said. Tap, tap went the finger. Pay attention was the message, I guessed. “The real stuff. Magic to open doors. Magic to let things out.”
“Thin spots,” I said, remembering the conversation with Pete in the woods.
The professor tilted her head and pursed her lips. “Deliberate openings, not just natural occurrences. The Macedonians brought it into Egypt with Alexander. Or the Macedonians found it elsewhere and carried it back from further north or further east. It’s not like Napoleon’s savants underst
ood what they found.”
“Napoleon’s followers,” I said. “Like the first Fitzmaurice.”
“Yes, that one,” said the professor. “He went to Egypt, following Napoleon’s orders, with a whole gaggle of men, called savants, to study history, especially the ruins related to Alexander, another military man dedicated to conquering the world. Some say that the savants went seeking magic to make their general stronger. Almost found it too. But Napoleon abandoned them to go back to Europe, and they started bickering among themselves. Eventually Saturnin Fitzmaurice returned to France, but the wrong way round the Mediterranean, going east, going north, following some map of Alexander’s conquests. Picking up items all along the way.”
“Sydney’s grandfather thought everything was taken from an Egyptian tomb,” I said. “At least that’s what Humbert says. And Sydney.”
The professor shook her head. “There’s been a number of people at the University who talked their way into old man Fitzmaurice’s parlor to look at his ‘treasures.’ A hodgepodge of history, one of them called it, a magpie’s picking of loot.”
It seemed the magpie approach was Sydney’s family heritage, I thought, and told the professor about Sydney’s own collecting of strange objects from occult shops and bits of stories from everywhere.
“Too many like that. No scholarship. Just collect to collect. But Saturnin Fitzmaurice finally crossed the wrong people in Europe. He fled all the way to Arkham. With a wife who was a priestess by all accounts. Of a religion far older than even the pyramids.”
I shook my head. “That’s not what Sydney says. He’s descended from French nobility.” I remembered the stories, the quotes given to Darrell the day he came to the house and had his leg crushed under Saturnin’s portrait.
“Descended from a Marseilles wharf rat who deserted the French army and jumped ship for a country as far away as he could get with a stolen bride and artifacts,” the professor said. “You shouldn’t believe what people say about themselves. Always check your facts.” The last sounded like a piece of advice that she gave her students regularly.
“Everyone in the movies invents a new biography,” I said, and I wasn’t trying to excuse Sydney. But I wasn’t sure what she was driving at. What did she really know that wasn’t very ancient history?
“It’s a very American thing to do, reinventing yourself,” said the professor. “But murdering women with magic. That’s a Fitzmaurice trick, and one we need to stop.”
“This is about the circus performer,” I said. “Mister Claude told me about her. But she died in an accident. Or maybe died. Nobody ever found her body.” It could not be murder. It was about taking risks, about causing accidents, about… I was terrified and babbling in my head. Because if Sydney was a murderer, he was in a house with my sister. My sister who was not acting anything like herself when I left her last night.
“Lucinda,” said the professor, mentioning the same name that Mister Claude had. “She came later. She was his second victim. The woman that I knew, my student, died almost exactly ten years ago, performing that atrocious ritual that Saturnin brought to Arkham. The solstice ritual of the masked Camilla, to bring forth the hooded Stranger.”
“But that’s the character that my… that Renee is performing,” I said. And inside my head, I was screaming, and Renee was not with me. Renee was in a house with Sydney. And Sydney, if he believed what the professor said that he believed, was beyond dangerous.
“Camilla isn’t a name,” said the professor, lecturing me as if we were in a classroom instead of a closet and she wasn’t discussing murders happening to real people. “The Camilla is, as far as I can tell, a title. The title of the head priestess. The Cassilda is the secondary priestess, the one that opens the ritual with a bird-like scream, according to the notes that I’ve seen. But that old man, Sydney’s grandfather, turned the whole ritual into a play back in the 1850s. A couple of French savants did that in Paris as well. Ended badly there too. Fitzmaurice tried to peddle his version to the Booth brothers before the Civil War, but they never produced it. The brothers fell out. Fitzmaurice moved back to Arkham, where he kept trying to sell various members of the University on performing his ritual.”
“The professors here? But didn’t they think that was dangerous?”
Christine Krosnowski snorted. “That wouldn’t worry my Miskatonic colleagues then or now. They tried at various times to get hold of the manuscript for the University library. Orphaned young, Sydney became his grandfather’s pet. A more spoiled brat of a rich man’s son…” She sighed. “And handsome too. Still is, I hear.”
“Some people think so.”
The professor nodded. “I had a student, a young woman who wanted to be a writer and an actress. Violet had so much talent. Sydney talked her into adapting the old play that he found in his grandfather’s papers. She brought it to me, in bits and pieces. Asking my advice. And, to my regret, I encouraged her to work on it. It was all about masks and strangers, a woman calling forth a hooded man. Bringing the stranger to our world through a doorway in a mirror. Every time I read what she had written, I’d have terrible nightmares. The dreams lingered for days.”
“That’s what we’ve been filming,” I said, not that I wanted to confirm her fears. Why hadn’t the professor stopped Sydney then? Why was I going to have to do something now? “A movie about two sisters, waiting for a stranger. Only there are mirrors that explode and a silver mask.”
Christine Krosnowski sighed. “Then he’s still at it. Just like his ancestors. They’ve tried before. Several times. Always on the summer solstice, always between the thirteenth and twenty-eighth year of a century, in five-year intervals. In Sydney’s case, 1913 with my student Violet, 1918 with the circus performer Lucinda, and now 1923.”
“With our film,” I said.
“If this attempt fails, he might be able to make one attempt in 1928,” she replied. “After that, he’ll need to wait for another eighty-five years. And a grandson to carry out his wishes.”
“Why those dates?”
“Comets. A pair of twin comets, Camilla and Cassilda. Tiny little things, barely visible to the better telescopes. Predicted in 1801 by a French astronomer who had been left behind in Egypt and based on some texts that he discovered in a temple. Texts later stolen by Saturnin Fitzmaurice. It wasn’t until 1828 that somebody actually spotted both comets and confirmed their existence. Then they disappeared for eighty-five years, reappearing in 1913. And every five years since.”
Rituals, comets, magic. I shook my head. It made horrible sense and it was complete nonsense. “It’s all like a fairy tale or a bad Haggard novel.”
“Never doubt that there’s fact behind fiction,” said the professor. “Poets and other writers often use the metaphor of nightmares quite effectively to explain phenomena that scientists cannot. I don’t know how or why these comets appear in such a strange pattern. One of my… odder… colleagues here has suggested that they come and go from our universe.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Nobody ever said that Neely Chambers made sense, but he’s been teaching at Miskatonic since the 1890s. He was a friend of Sydney’s grandfather and tried more than once to liberate the Fitzmaurice manuscripts for his own collection. Neely, in his more lucid moments, has suggested that there are comets and other space phenomena that slide between two universes. He also claims that alien entities once colonized the South Pole.” She looked a little embarrassed by the last statement. “Some days I think Neely should be writing for the pulps too.”
“But what happens?” I said. “What will Sydney do?”
“I don’t know,” the professor admitted. She shuffled some papers on her desk, not looking directly at me. “I wasn’t there when Violet disappeared. I should have been. I had enough doubts about the project. There was a fire. Everyone remembers that. The theater burned down and had to be rebuilt. The audience got out, mostly
through sheer luck, as did the cast. But Violet was never found. I tried to push the police to investigate, but they claimed she ran off with Sydney. He took a train out of town that night.”
“But that’s not what happened?” I wasn’t going to panic, I told myself. I was going to leave this closet and this crazy story, and I was going straight back to the house and make everyone leave. Everyone. Nobody was safe if Sydney believed he could open doors between universes with killing rituals.
“Nobody ever heard from Violet again. When Sydney reappeared as the ringmaster of a small Midwestern circus in spring of 1918, I read about it in the Arkham Advertiser and asked a friend to investigate.”
“Mister Claude.” Based on the conversation that I just had with him.
“An intelligent man. We met at an auction, both bidding on occult texts. I won,” she smiled. “But we kept up a correspondence after that. He’s visited a few times, to explore the stacks. Five years ago, I asked him to look into the circus and see if Sydney and Violet were a couple there.”
“And no Violet?”
“No sign of her at all. But Violet had no family in Arkham. She was an orphan and at the University on a scholarship. So nobody cared.” The professor straightened the pile of papers to her satisfaction and finally looked directly at me. “Julius made the same mistakes I did. He couldn’t believe that Sydney would go so far. And there was so little real proof. Just a woman who disappeared. Strange talk about mirrors and doors. Then Lucinda disappeared, during the summer solstice performance. There was a fire, and confusion, and although nobody saw her get out, no body was found either.”
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