2. The Shadow in the Steel Mask
Chapter 2
The Shadow in the Steel Mask
It was warmer inside, at least, and less damp. I kept my hand on the knob as the door creaked on its hinge, and my eyes took in all they could of the place: a windowless parlor with a fire burning low in a small black stove, the candles on the round table in the center of the room melted nearly through their wax and onto the black velvet of the tablecloth. There were cards on the table, a crystal ball, and a well-worn board inscribed with symbols and a faded alphabet.
But there was no one to be seen, nor heard. I pushed the door closed behind me, too slowly to sound the old bell again, listening to the latch click into place.
A blackened log cracked in the stove fire with a sudden burst of embers.
I watched the heavy curtain behind the table for some sign of life, some shuffling of the sequined stars and frowning moons embroidered on the time-worn draperies, but the strange stillness became almost stifling, and I retreated to the long bookshelf that nearly covered one of the walls. White skulls, animal and human, considered me with empty eyes as I drew a familiar book from the shelf and blew the dust from its edge.
A Discovery of Minor Artifacts of the Egyptians , the gold printing on the spine read as I rubbed it clean with my thumb, by S.R. Buckingham .
How strange to find, in this place, a copy of my husband’s book.
Yet how much stranger it would have been to find none of him at all.
I would have shared his life’s research with him—the dusty bones and the languages lost, the towering idols and monuments, the mysteries of the sand-swept tombs far away—had he not forbidden me from knowledge of his work for the mere fact of my female sex. If you want answers, Elizabeth , he told me once in utter exasperation when I pressed him about the purpose of his work in the tombs, speaking in that smug, dismissive tone I had come to know so well and resent so deeply, you might as well try the spiritualist at Witch’s Corner, because you will never receive such answers from me! I asked him why—a simple why , pregnant of meaning, heavy with bitter indignation at his insistence on keeping me in the dark—and in reply, he evaded me again: Why? Because the one at the corner’s a real one. Real magic. The rest are mostly parlor tricks, you know. Go see for yourself at the witching hour, since you fancy yourself so bold.
I had taken a chance tonight, a year since his strange death—his disappearance, as the records call it—that perhaps, buried in his sand-drift of petty disdain, he had left me a grain of truth. A clue to follow, if I dared.
He had no idea what I dared to do.
To come to this place at midnight, the spiritualist at Witch’s Corner , was to be only the beginning. I had come ready, with the old Egyptian amulet he lent me on the afternoon before his death, one of the Minor Artifacts of his book, worn on a golden chain against my skin, hidden under my chemise, as if some part of me wanted to believe it was worth keeping secret. And yet as the moments passed, and the candles burnt down and the fire dimmed, I began to doubt. I wondered how much longer I should wait, and whether I should call out that I was there, or whether I should rather keep quiet, and take the loneliness of the place as a sign to turn back after all.
I set the book back on the shelf, wondering who had lighted the candles and the fire and then left both to burn. But soon the candles on the table extinguished themselves in their own pools of wax, at the ends of their wicks at last, and I turned back while I still had what was left of the fire for light. The sight of the thin wisps of candle smoke drifting over the crystal ball, I thought to myself, would be my last look at that place. I would return, foolish amulet and all, to the smothering fog, to the black and dripping streets, to the cabman and his nervous horse. It could not have been an hour, but I had too much pride to ask for any part of my bag of coins back, no matter that they were my last. There was bread left at my husband’s house, and a bed, for as long as the law would allow me to occupy it.
Only when the bread ran out would I beg again. And then?—
My mind distracted, I tripped in the dark over the curled edge of a fringed carpet and caught myself against the door, sending the bell clanging and clattering against the wood.
Then came the footsteps, somewhere in the darkness: the firm falls, quick and decisive despite their heaviness, of what could only be a man’s boots.
I froze.
I was no longer alone.
A creeping terror came over me, though nothing had changed but the sounding of the old doorbell and those first few footsteps. Wasn’t this why I had waited? Hadn’t I nearly left for the emptiness of this dark, lonesome place? I was no kind of mentalist, but I knew in my chest and my viscera this sense of danger, like the unsettled darkness of a bleak patch of shadow in the deep woods. I had only to turn the knob, pull in the door, escape this place into the black fog and never look back.
But I had come this far.
I had come this far, and I could not leave and forever wonder. I turned away from the door, from the sight of my knuckles whitening through the black lace of my gloves, and looked to the heavy draperies behind the table as a strong hand threw them apart.
There was a burst of light—only a single candle carried in from behind the curtains, but in its suddenness it seemed almost like lightning splitting the dark—and with it a vast new shadow, eclipsing the moons and stars of the shabby drapes: the curtains fell back into place behind the massive form of towering man all in black, looming like a solid incarnation of the night itself, the long black cloak that hung from his great shoulders settling around his black robes.
My breath caught. My heart quickened; my eyes searched the impenetrable shade of his deep hood for a face—for anything to make him human, while the uncanny darkness that spread from him like a midnight tide felt for all the world as if he were Death come to take me—but all I saw was the flame of the candle in his hand, and inside his hood the red, reflected flash of metal in the dark.
His eyes—if he had eyes—were upon me; I did not need to see a face to feel almost fixed in place by the gravity of a grim, considering regard.
“You,” the looming shadow breathed. His voice was a low rumble in the room, half-hollow, almost muffled. “How did you get in here?”
I fought to keep my voice even, to hold myself together, even as I felt the disquieting darkness of the stranger’s presence unfurl through the small parlor until it seemed nearly to fill it and ripple in again from the close walls—a stifling, drowning feeling that made me struggle to quell a shiver as it threatened nearly to engulf me, to stop my heart. “The door was unlocked,” I managed, both of us standing still as we faced each other across the room, “sir.”
“Unlocked,” he replied, and in the tension twisting in his deep, hard voice I imagined a restraint stretched to its limit, “was it? Is this a place for mourning after midnight?”
“I don’t know, sir. I thought to find out.”
“Brave,” he grunted. “Sit down then. You’re here.” He allowed a heavy, bitter sigh as he pulled two chairs out from the table, each facing the other across the crystal ball and the alphabet board, and sat down with his back to the drapes. Setting his candle in its holder on the black velvet before him, he started to shuffle the cards; he had muscular hands with dark olive skin, so nearly as I could tell by the shifting candlelight, and a hint of an accent I could not quite place. “You want your cards read? Future descried? Seance for your departed husband?”
It required no psychic powers to notice my mourning weeds, complete with cap and veil, and correctly guess my loss, and I found myself at once disappointed and relieved: perhaps this was after all a mere charlatan’s den, and this figure of incarnate midnight no more than a costumed actor well-cast for the role, and the deep disturbance that I thought I felt nearly in my very blood no more than the fancy of a mind dearly willing it to be so. I held my black skirts and stepped to the table, sitting down in the carved wooden chair across from his.
Up close, his strong hands were ridged with scars. As he manipulated the cards, I risked allowing my eyes to travel up the dark fabric of his robes and his great cloak, as if despite my reassurances to myself the instinct remained to seek some semblance of a human face. The candle revealed his eyes at last, fiery and dark in the shadows of his hood, but little more: his nose and mouth were covered by a metal half-mask, slotted vertically across the front, something like the lower piece of an old knight’s helmet.
My gaze darted back to his hands. He was cautious to show his face, I told myself, in case anyone might recognize him by day and spoil the mystery of his act.
I could not help but think, uncomfortably, of the mouth of a skull.
“Well?” He fanned the deck into a perfect arc on the table before me. There was a sense of frustrated exasperation in his voice, even though to judge by the deftness of his movements he must have done this a thousand times. “Take a card.”
I kept my voice to a calm whisper, my eyes to the cards, my hands in their black lace gloves folded in my lap. “That’s not why I’m here.”
Behind his steel mask he made a sound like a dismissive grunt. I imagined I could feel his eyes burn into me.
“You know that as well as do I,” I said, dignifying myself to dare this small defiance. It amused me then to indulge him in his performance, to play along with his psychic’s act, but I let none of it creep into my voice. There was still a chance, slim though now it was, that on this anniversary of my husband’s death I was not wasting my time. “They say this is the place to come for real magic.”
“Real magic? And what do you suppose this is?”
“Real magic, sir,” I replied quietly, leaving him to imagine whether I meant to answer his second question or his first. “I want to learn magic. I am quite serious.”
“Learn magic? Why?”
“To understand my husband’s death.” To understand would be the beginning, after all, but not the end.
My end was revenge.
Not for love—there was little loss of that—but for all his sudden death took from me: for a quirk of his miswritten will and a lawyer’s loophole I was left with a house that soon would not be mine, debts and bills mounting as the last of the money to pay them slipped away, a dim and uncertain future yet too much pride to marry again for mere security. Revenge would give me purpose. Moor me to the world. I was set adrift, already nearly a ghost.
“This is a spiritualist establishment. If you don’t want a seance, there’s a private investigator several doors down.”
“I’ve had my fill of private investigators. The circumstances of my husband’s disappearance have already confounded three of them. I don’t have the patience nor the means for a fourth.”
“And I don’t have all night,” I heard him mumble as he swept a coarse hand across the cards and restored them into a deck, straightening as if to push back his chair.
“Please, sir. Is there a school of magic here? Is there anything more than this?”
“Come back tomorrow, by daylight,” he replied as he stood up from the table, the folds of his great black cloak concealing him utterly but for the same flash of his metal mask by candlelight. “I am not the one to ask.”
But I stood as did he—a woman of no impressive stature before that impossible mountain of a man, both of us all in black; he was masked in steel, and I in my crepe veil—and the motion of my hand reaching into the neckline of my dress caught his eye before he could turn away. I saw his right hand drift into his cloak at the level of what must have been his thigh, and I wondered if he was armed. “I wish to ask you one more question, sir. Before I go.”
He said nothing, but I could feel him watch me. The candle flame and the last of the firelight moved differently than they should.
I unclasped the chain behind my neck, drew out the gold amulet, and dropped it onto the black velvet of the tablecloth between us, beside the crystal ball and the wax of the melted candles. “Do you recognize this?”
Despite even the darkness and his shadowy cloak I could see his powerful body tense, and his strong hands gripped the back of the wooden chair with such force I expected him to break it apart.
“My name is Elizabeth Buckingham,” I said quietly, watching the ominous rise and fall of his massive shoulders in the flickering light, “widow to Simon Ronald Buckingham, A Discovery of Minor Artifacts of ?—”
“Enough!” his deep voice erupted as he rounded the table and thundered past me, dark cloak flying, skulls shuddering on the shelves for the storm of his passing. He locked the door with an old key; I listened to the firm, final clank of metal and wood as I grabbed the amulet from the table, squeezing it in my fist as if it had any power to save me from whatever he meant to do.
“Take it and get behind me,” he commanded, cloak brushing against me as he stalked back past me again, and he took the burning candle from the table and parted the stars and moons of the heavy curtains from whence he had come. “Stay with me, don’t lag, don’t get lost, don’t drop it and don’t touch anything!”
It is difficult to imagine, perhaps, why a woman in my place would do as he ordered out of her own free will, and all too natural to presume that I acted only under the duress of capture. Truly, I had little choice—the door to the outside world was locked behind me, and while I did have a particular skill in the opening of locks, I would not have had time to solve it and escape before being caught fast in those scarred, powerful hands—yet but for that one fleeting thought, the consideration of escape did not enter my mind. Nor did I consider whether I was brave, or foolish, or desperate, nor to what degree I cared to follow the command of a stranger, no matter how tempestuous he had suddenly become. I thought in that moment only of the desperate hope that I might have got my wish—that I was right after all to be unsettled by his strange enveloping darkness, by the eeriness of the midnight parlor—and that beyond those tawdry celestial curtains lay the magic I sought, for good or for ill.
“I should like your name,” I said as I walked past him, through the arch in the curtains he held open for me and into a thick blackness broken only by his candle flame, “in case I fall behind.”
“Victor,” he replied, his deep voice tense and clipped through his mask as he let the drapes fall behind my back, his dark looming shape and the light of his candle moving ahead of me and blocking the sight of what I thought had been an old door carved from heavy wood.
“Mr. Victor,” I replied for confirmation, supposing it no surprise that so gruff and abrupt a man should offer me only his bare surname, “if I?—”
“Don’t fall behind,” he grunted, and said no more.
It was difficult to see around him in close quarters, but I heard the sound of a key turned hard and fast into its lock and the unearthly groan of an old hinge as he thrust in the door. I followed him into the rush of cold damp air, only far enough behind to allow for his great rippling cloak; the door slammed shut heavily behind us, and I listened to the sound and close echo of his footsteps on stone and mine following faster, faster.