PRAISE FOR THE MASK COLLECTORS
“In The Mask Collectors, Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer brilliantly connects traditional Sri Lankan exorcism ceremonies, a sinister pharmaceutical company, mysterious deaths, infertility struggles, and the tensions within a marriage into a sophisticated and utterly unique thriller. I have never read a book quite like this very special one—it kept my heart racing right up until its powerful and satisfying end.”
—Caroline Woods, author of Fräulein M.
“Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer’s The Mask Collectors is a fascinating culture-clashing tale of superstition and human desire, of evil and corporate intrigue. A mind-blowing premise artfully transformed into a veritable feast of suspense.”
—Anjanette Delgado, award-winning author of The Heartbreak Pill and The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho
ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR RUVANEE PIETERSZ VILHAUER
“Mesmerizing, tranquil, and worldly, these stories kept me transfixed. Each is a long, beautiful excursion into the difficulty and suspense of human relationships. One emerges from the book believing life to be more peaceful and more intense than before. A wonderful, masterful work of art.”
—Rebecca Lee, judge, Iowa Short Fiction Award
“With a steady hand, soft heart, and sharp insights, Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer miraculously balances the precarious beam of identity and cultural displacement. The stories in The Water Diviner speak straight to the soul, its universal aches and voids, and we are better for getting to know these characters.”
—Nancy Zafris, author, The Home Jar: Stories
“Full of richly drawn characters and empathetic inquiry . . . The Water Diviner and Other Stories investigates many aspects of Sri Lankan culture, including the long-term effects of colonialism, ethnic and religious differences, caste and class systems, colorism, racism, immigration, and more. A deep humanity drives each story, with the quest for answers always undertaken by inhabiting another’s skin.”
—Foreword (starred review)
OTHER TITLES BY RUVANEE PIETERSZ VILHAUER
The Water Diviner and Other Stories
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, institutions, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Little A, New York
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503903678 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1503903672 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781503903661 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503903664 (paperback)
Cover design and illustration by Philip Pascuzzo
First edition
Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
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39
40
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44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
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53
54
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58
Acknowledgments
Glossary
About the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The representations of thovil and hooniyam in this novel are informed by many, sometimes conflicting, anecdotal accounts, as well as the writings of the anthropologists Nandadeva Wijesekera and Bruce Kapferer. The practice of hooniyam is often shrouded in secrecy, and it encompasses many types of rituals that are intended to cause harm to a selected victim. Yak thovil are healing ceremonies performed to exorcise demons believed to be responsible for causing illness and other unfortunate circumstances. In yak thovil, exorcists wear masks representing particular demons, which are summoned and then banished through symbolic performances. Thovil are enormously elaborate events that include drama, dance, comedy, impersonation, incantation, and music. Costumes, masks, and many symbolic structures and objects are used, which vary according to the specific purpose of the ritual. I have taken liberties in describing these practices, in order to make them more digestible and comprehensible to the general reader, and to serve the purposes of my story. My descriptions in this novel cannot hope to do justice to the complicated cosmology in which the practices are embedded, or the rich historical, social, and religio-spiritual contexts in which they occur. I refer readers interested in learning more to Deities and Demons, Magic and Masks by Nandadeva Wijesekera, and A Celebration of Demons and The Feast of the Sorcerer by Bruce Kapferer.
1
DUNCAN
Saturday
By late afternoon, all the searchers had returned to the camp pavilion. Everyone knew that Angie Osborne’s body had been found, but still no one knew how she had died.
Lunch seemed so long ago, Duncan thought. The food had all been put away. The two long folding tables in the pavilion were bare except for a desolate tin vase of daffodils near a handwritten cardboard sign that said Sorry, no finger bowls! Use tap at back of pavilion. The yellow banner emblazoned with the words HAPPY 23RD REUNION TO THE KANDY INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL CLASS OF 1993! looked incongruously bright above the tables.
Duncan put an arm around Grace’s shoulders, for the familiarity of it. Her body stiffened against his. “Mo and Suki got to her first,” Duncan said, turning away from the flashing lights of the police vehicles beyond the pavilion. “I was right behind them.” He was thankful for the sturdiness of the picnic table on which he was perched. He had been feeling shaky since the discovery of the body. Everything felt dreamlike.
Grace shrugged off his arm and turned to face him. “Are you sure about the blood?” she said, gripping his hand. Her fingers were cold.
“Positive. I looked. We all looked.”
“Poor Mo. Look how hard it’s hit him,” Grace said.
At the time they’d heard the scream, only ghostly blurs of figures and tables had been visible outside the small pavilion, but now the fog, which had been unseasonable for May in New Jersey, had completely dissipated. Duncan looked over to where two of Grace’s old schoolmates were hunched at another picnic table: Mo, with his head in his hands, and Suki, saying something into Mo’s ear.
“He was much worse before. He kept trying to revive her, even though it was obvious she was gone. Suki and I had to pull him off.” Duncan shuddered as the sound of Mo’s sobbing came back to him.
“I just can’t believe it,” Grace said, her knuckles pressed against her lip. Her eyeliner was smudged, accentuating the da
rk sheen of her cheeks. “How could she die just like that? Someone our age?”
Duncan shook his head, running over the scene in his mind’s eye. He was finding it difficult to get over the shock of seeing Angie lying there in the woods. Her arms had been flung wide, and her plaid shirt had been rucked up on one side, exposing a tanned, muscular portion of her belly. The skin under her navel had been marked with a prominent white scar that disappeared into the waistband of her jeans. It had been the flies that had tipped him off. There’d been two small clusters of them settled too close to her eyes. When Mo and Suki rushed forward, the flies had ascended in a buzzing mass and zipped away. Angie’s eyes, blue and empty, had been fixed on the dead leaves scattered by her head.
“I don’t know. She looked almost like she was resting. The only weird thing was . . . well, I don’t know. Maybe I imagined it. Or exaggerated it in my mind. That happens with stress.” Eyewitness accounts were frail. Didn’t witnesses—to bank robberies and car accidents—often misremember what they’d seen? They would think they’d seen someone pointing a gun, or a car speeding, when in fact those things had not really happened. The mind played tricks in traumatic situations.
“Weird how?”
“Well, her tongue,” Duncan said. He ran his fingers over the table surface, feeling the crevices in the weatherworn wood. “When I got there, behind those two, I thought I saw her tongue sticking way out of her mouth.”
“Maybe that’s normal,” Grace said.
Duncan took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. They felt gritty, from fatigue maybe. “I don’t know. Her head was turned sideways like this,” he said, demonstrating the angle. “Her mouth was open. I could have sworn her tongue was lying on the ground. It looked too long to be real. Like a long slice of pink banana.” He rubbed again, wishing the grittiness would subside. He wanted to lie down somewhere and close his eyes. “But we were all so emotional. And then after Mo tried reviving her, shaking her and pulling her up, you couldn’t see the tongue quite as much.” He wished the image of the tongue wouldn’t keep coming back to him. He had only ever seen a tongue that long in a woman who was supposedly possessed, in Sri Lanka. That had been years ago, during an exorcism ceremony he’d been watching.
He saw Grace’s anxious expression and realized how insensitive he was being, going on about the death scene. They may not have been close, but Angie had still been her classmate.
“Are you sure she wasn’t shot?” Grace said.
“Then where was the blood? And anyway, I don’t know if the shots had anything to do with her. Remember how close they sounded, over that way? That’s where we all went initially. We stayed on the trail. That’s why it took so long to find her. She was farther off, due north, and off the trail.” Suki, Mo, and Duncan had trudged along a creeping stream for several hundred yards. They had crossed a rickety wooden bridge before coming to the fallen tree beyond which they’d found Angie, on a patch of flattened grass that was still brown from the harsh winter.
“But why the shots—?” Grace started to say, when a man appeared beside them. He was wearing a navy-blue suit and a gray tie, but Duncan knew he was a policeman because of the way he had been hobnobbing with the uniformed officers.
The officer was easily six or seven inches taller than Duncan, who, being five feet eleven, was not particularly short. He bent his head toward Duncan, the gesture increasing the slight stoop of his shoulders. “You are Duncan McCloud?” he said. His eyes drooped downward a little at the corners, which gave him a melancholy air. His mouth was wide, and a prominent soul patch nestled above his chin, as if to compensate for the close crop of the blond hair on his head. His voice was deferential, and so soft that Duncan had to lean toward him to hear what he was saying. His breath, faintly minty, wafted across Duncan’s cheek.
“Yes,” Duncan said, sliding off the table.
“Mortensen,” the officer said, reaching out his hand to shake theirs. “Detective Washington Mortensen. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it was you who found Ms. Osborne?” he said to Duncan. He slipped a pen and a small spiral-bound notebook out of his jacket pocket. His hands, square palmed and long fingered, dwarfed the notebook further.
“Along with two others. Mo and Suki,” Duncan said, looking around for them.
“Mohammed Hashim and Itsuki Watanabe,” Grace said, her bulky silver watch slipping halfway down to her elbow as she pointed. “They’re over there, by the keg.” Duncan, looking over, saw that Mo and Suki had joined a group of the Kandyans who were huddled by the side of the pavilion in two tight circles, clutching paper cups. Mo had a cup as well. The guy was a teetotaler. An orthodox Muslim. Had grief made him revert to his high school ways?
“I just have a few questions, if I may,” Mortensen said, his eyes cast down at his pad. “What time would you say it was when you found Ms. Osborne?”
Duncan rubbed his head, trying to remember. The chronology of the afternoon was oddly blurred in his mind. They’d tramped around in the foggy woods for God knew how long, barely able to see where they were treading until they got to higher ground. “Not sure about that. The last time I looked at my watch was at 4:05. We were searching for twenty, thirty minutes after that. Maybe four thirty or so?”
Mortensen wrote on his pad in tiny letters that looked impossible to read, his jaw moving, apparently chewing gum. “I don’t want to take too much of your time, Mr. McCloud. But perhaps you could tell me about what exactly occurred.” He turned the pages of his pad, read something on it, and turned to a blank page. “What did you notice about Ms. Osborne when you came upon her?” he said, his eyes still downcast.
“When I first saw her, I thought she was asleep. She was on her back with her head turned sideways. But then I saw her mouth and eyes were open. Her tongue was hanging out.” Duncan wondered if he might be making too much of what he thought he’d seen. But every time he thought back to the moment they’d found Angie, the tongue was what jumped to mind. Almost everything else seemed hazy now.
“Did you see a gun, Mr. McCloud?”
“No, no gun,” Duncan said. After his initial frenzied efforts to revive Angie, Mo had been too distraught to do more than sit by her body, crying, and Suki had just stood there in shock. Only Duncan had scanned the ground for anything unusual among the layers of twigs and decaying leaves. “We all heard shots earlier, but that was before two, maybe around one thirty. And they seemed closer than where she was. Somewhere around there.” He pointed toward the northwest.
2
GRACE
Saturday
Grace’s old school roommate, Marla Muller, was sitting slumped at a picnic table. The side of Marla’s T-shirt was ripped, revealing a sliver of her pregnant belly. Her face was puffy and dusty, streaked with trails of tears. “I just can’t believe it,” Marla said. “I should have felt it last night if she was going to die. But there were no vibes, nothing. All she was doing was typing. Nothing was wrong. How could she have died?”
Grace smoothed Marla’s matted hair, trying to ignore the knot of worry in her own stomach. Should she mention that Angie had called her? But then Marla would wonder why she had not said anything before. Marla would want to know whether Angie had been in touch with her previously, what the missed call had been about. There was no way Grace could answer those questions.
“I should have gone with her,” Marla was saying. “Maybe then she wouldn’t have fallen.”
“You couldn’t have gone hiking in your state. You shouldn’t even have gone searching,” Grace said, rubbing Marla’s back, trying to push Angie’s words out of her mind. She wished more of Angie’s message had been audible. Keep it secret. What had Angie meant by that? An image came to her, of the last time she’d seen Angie, in Palmer Square. Angie’s face had been flushed under the bloodred lamps, her eyes watery and a little bleary. Grace pushed the image away and hugged Marla closer.
“How long has it been since you ate?” she said, when Marla finally stopped crying. “You have to take
care of the baby.” As if she should be talking. She shook off the thought. “I’ll get you something from the kitchen.”
The kitchen building next to the pavilion was a squat structure whose crumbling brick exterior was streaked with ivy vines. Inside was an army-green kitchen smelling of burnt coffee, with an outsize fridge in one corner. Grace took out some leftovers from the buffet lunch they’d had before the day took its ugly turn. As she placed the plate of food in the nearby microwave, a low voice reached her ears. There was such urgency in the tone that she craned to listen. It appeared to be coming through a door that led outside.
A small glass pane was set in the door, and through it she could see dark trees outlined against a dusky-pink sky. She stepped to the door and saw it was slightly ajar.
“Because I’m not a fool.” It was Bent, Grace realized. “This has to stop here . . . Well, the whole thing’s going to blow up.” There was a pause. Bentley Hyland came briefly into view as he walked past the window. “No, that won’t cut it . . . Yeah, there will . . . That isn’t good enough . . . Look, I’m telling you.” He glanced in and saw Grace. She heard him mumble something unintelligible into the phone, and then the door opened.
“Hey,” he said. His clothes, like those of the other searchers, were dirty. His hair had rumpled across its parting, and his widow’s peak was clearly visible.
“Is there a problem?” Grace said, although she already knew. So many years had passed, and he hadn’t changed.
Bent straightened his back and put his phone away. “Work crisis,” he said, his voice hoarser than usual. “It never stops.” He jerked his head at the door. “I have to go out there to call them. The only place I can get phone reception.” Even in the middle of this tragedy, Grace thought. Even though he had known Angie intimately. Even though her death had to be affecting him terribly. Work came first. How ambitious he’d always been. She’d given him a present once, for his nineteenth birthday, to salute his ambitions. It had been a squat little resin figurine with upraised fists that she’d bought from a Hallmark store, with lettering that said WORLD’S GREATEST SALESMAN.
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