“What do you mean you’re going to burn it?” Massarsky asked. “It’s a lot of money to shell out for something you’re planning to set on fire.”
The younger man, Timothy Ridley, perched on the edge of the worn, burgundy leather sofa as if he might make a run for it. He swirled the ice in his glass of pomegranate juice but never seemed to take so much as a sip.
“You know the story behind the mask?” Ridley asked.
Massarsky leaned back in his chair, its matching leather crinkling loudly. “You think I’d have bought the thing if I didn’t know the story? Its ‘provenance,’ as collectors say?”
Ridley nodded. “I’ve heard about your collection.”
“You say that like you’ve got something sour in your mouth, Mr. Ridley. You come here and tell me you want to buy an item from my collection, tell me you intend to burn it, and then you talk to me like you feel dirty even being in my house.”
This last part troubled him most deeply. James Massarsky had worked tirelessly with designers and contractors to get this house built. He had spent decades in the film business, first kissing ass and then making sure everyone else had to kiss his, and goddamn if he didn’t deserve this house. A man’s home was his castle and he had built one worthy of its king. Seven bedrooms, sprawling lawns, central house with two wings and two cottages on the property. Now here comes Ridley, wanting to buy the mask from Chapel of Darkness but acting like Massarsky is somehow beneath him.
“I’m sorry,” Ridley said. “I just…this isn’t a pleasant errand for me.”
Massarsky wanted to punch him in the throat. “I’ve tried to make you comfortable because you’re a guest in my home. If you find it so unpleasant--”
“No, wait,” Ridley said, as Massarsky began to rise. “I’m not explaining this well.”
“That’s for sure.” Massarsky settled back into his chair. “Tell me again how you ended up calling me. How did you even know I owned the mask?”
“A friend of my family’s came to your Christmas party last year--”
“This friend have a name?”
“I’d rather not say. Particularly as you don’t seem very happy about it,” Ridley admitted. “But apparently she told my mother that the mask was in your collection, and that you said it gave you the creeps and you were thinking you might sell it one day. My mother asked me to track down your number. I called you, and here I am.”
Massarsky sipped his scotch. “You an actor? Writer?”
“I’m a history teacher in San Diego,” Ridley said. “My mother was an actress. Her name is Athena Ridley.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
This was a lie. Massarsky had a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, both the great films and the trash, but Ridley had been rude, and so he wasn’t going to give the guy the satisfaction.
Over his career as a studio executive and then as a producer, Massarsky had been involved in dozens of hugely successful films, including several that had earned Oscar nominations and one that had won Best Picture. The walls of his home were festooned with framed photos of himself with some of the great actors and directors of the past forty years, everyone from Robert DeNiro to Denzel Washington to Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence. In most of those photos, he had cropped out everyone who wasn’t either famous or his own family. His collection of Hollywood memorabilia--Hollywood ephemera--was a motley selection of rarities and one of a kind items, many with particular significance to him. Chapel of Darkness was neither. The film had never been completed, but he knew the name Athena Ridley.
“You’ve seen the unfinished reels of the film, I assume,” Ridley said.
Massarsky sipped his scotch. “Of course. They showed up on YouTube years ago.”
“My mother is the woman strapped to the table in the ritual scene at the end of act two. I was born the same night. They hired her because she was nearly full-term in her pregnancy and they wouldn’t have to use makeup effects to make her look pregnant. I guess they didn’t expect her to go into labor in the middle of shooting, three weeks early.”
“No. I guess they didn’t.” Massarsky hesitated. “Did they really try to kill her on camera?”
Ridley had been warned about Massarsky. His legend painted him as a ruthless snake, drunk on power he hadn’t yet realized had begun to fade. Ridley didn’t care--all he knew was that he couldn’t leave here without the mask, and that meant pretending the question hadn’t made him want to knock Massarsky on his ass.
“This stuff is all fairly personal, Mr. Massarsky--”
“Call me ‘James.’”
“James. You can imagine that it’s painful to talk about,” Ridley went on. “I’ve never really known my mother, not the woman she was before she gave birth to me. The woman who filmed Chapel of Darkness. She’s been in and out of mental health facilities since 1961, the year they shot the film. All I know about the original Athena Ridley are things I’ve learned from relatives and family friends.”
He paused. How much could he share? How much, without making a man like Massarsky decide to double the price for the mask? Ridley saw a strange glint in the other man’s eyes and wondered how much he might already know.
“My mother had a psychotic break while filming that scene,” he went on. “You must know part of this. An actor named George Sumner was one of the masked cultists in the ritual scene. My mother went into labor, probably set a world record, gave birth to me in just over an hour. They kept shooting while she was screaming, sweating. Filming as if it was all part of the ritual. Later, she said they were really going to sacrifice her. That the ritual had been real, that the cult of Belial was real.”
“But George Sumner interfered,” Massarsky said.
Ridley paused. How much did he really know? He said he had investigated the provenance of the mask, and it seemed he really had.
“Yes, Sumner interfered. He fled the set and called the police. A camera operator named Olmos helped him get away and he was stabbed to death on set for his trouble. With Sumner gone, they didn’t have enough people to complete the ritual--the requisite number, according to my mother’s ravings, is thirteen. By the time the police arrived, the whole set was in flames. Several people died in the fire, including the director, but most escaped, my mother among them. Sumner did not die in the fire, but several months later he was struck by a car on Pico Boulevard and killed instantly.”
Massarsky tapped a finger against his chin in contemplation. “This is all fascinating, Tim. You mind me calling you ‘Tim?’”
“Of course not.”
“Good. Tim. It’s all fascinating, but it doesn’t tell me why your mother wants the mask.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it? I heard you were interested in selling.”
“Oh, I am. The thing gives me the fucking creeps. At first, I liked that, but I’ve owned it for eighteen months and every week it gets under my skin a little more. But satisfy my curiosity, if you don’t mind.”
“I told you--”
“Your mother wants to burn it. Yes. Now tell me why.”
Massarsky tossed back the rest of his scotch. Ridley’s mouth felt parched but he didn’t want to drink any more of this asshole’s pomegranate juice. He could taste only resentment now.
“You know all the other masks were destroyed in the fire.”
“Yes. That’s what makes this one valuable. According to police reports, it was the one George Sumner had been wearing.”
Ridley nodded. “So I’ve been told. Blythewood was a small U.K. company. They financed a ton of these trashy B-movies in those days, but they worked on a lean budget. Shutting down Chapel of Darkness and never releasing it caused a financial burden that nearly ruined them. Some of the footage was used in other films, but most of it vanished into the vaults until the company was sold to Warner Brothers in 1992. Nobody knows what became of the surviving reels of Chapel of Darkness after that. I can’t show my mother any of that film, nothing to convince her that--”
“Convince her what? That it wasn’t real?” Massarsky asked.
“She’s an old woman. Forgotten by everyone but her family and diagnosed with schizophrenia. She wanted me to bring her the mask but she wouldn’t say why. I guess she thinks somehow it’ll prove to everyone she’s not as unstable as she seems. Athena’s not the one who wants to burn it, Mr. Massarsky. That’s my idea. I figure if I burn it in front of her maybe she’ll finally be able to put some of those old fears behind her. Even if the cult of Belial was real, they can’t hurt her anymore.”
Massarsky sat back in his chair, nodding slowly. “Wow. That’s just…Tim, that’s really sad. I’m honestly sorry.”
Ridley blinked in surprise. “Thank you. I do appreciate that. And I appreciate you letting me come here.”
They sat together in silence until Massarsky seemed to remember that the next move belonged to him.
“Right. Okay, well, let’s have a look at it,” he said, lumbering his awkward bulk up from the chair and ambling toward the door. “I should warn you, though, that there’s part of the story you don’t seem to know.”
Ridley followed him into the hall and down the corridor. “What do you mean?”
Massarsky stopped at a thick wooden door and tugged a key ring out of his pocket. “I’ll explain in a minute.”
He selected a key and slid it into the lock.
As they walked into the vast room, motion sensitive lights flickered on. The illumination had a softness to it that could not have been accidental, and as Ridley glanced around, he realized just how seriously Massarsky took his collection. There were museum quality displays inside clear cubes and behind locked glass cabinets. Some items were individually lit from within. Ridley spotted the rare poster for Revenge of the Jedi, the original name for the third Star Wars film, but based on what he saw displayed, he figured that was the least unique item in Massarsky’s collection.
“This is impressive,” he said, barely aware he’d spoken aloud.
“It’s my passion. Almost as much as making films. Sometimes even more so.”
Ridley glanced around, spotting a red balloon floating atop its string inside one case and a blood-encrusted sword inside another. He saw a car steering wheel mounted beside a photo of James Dean and didn’t dare ask. Rumor suggested Massarsky’s collection tended toward the morbid, and Ridley preferred not to know.
“Would you like a tour?” Massarsky asked.
“Maybe another time. For now, I’d just like to see the mask.”
“I understand. You must be anxious to try this experiment with your mother.”
“I think of it as therapy.”
Massarsky nodded as he led Ridley up one aisle and then turned into a short, wide hallway that housed part of the collection. Overhead lights flickered on in this little annex. There were masks, pieces of costume wardrobe, and even a full-size head of the actor who had played a cyborg in the first Alien film. Oh, what was his name? Ridley couldn’t bring it to mind.
“Here it is,” Massarsky said, gesturing toward a glass case about waist-high. Inside, stretched over a plastic mannequin head, George Sumner’s cult of Belial mask gazed out at them, eyeless but still somehow ominous.
For a second, Ridley thought it had seen him, and he shuddered.
“You’re sure this is it?” he asked.
Massarsky scowled as he used another key to open the glass case. “I can show you the paperwork. It’s been verified by the top Blythewood Studios scholar. More than that, it matches some of the still photos I’ve acquired from the shoot.”
The thing seemed dreadfully ordinary, reminiscent of one of those Carnival masks sold in Venice, but with a lovely simplicity. Its bone white hue had been inscribed with black and red symbols that might have been runes or some kind of occult sigils.
“It doesn’t look like much.”
“And yet,” Massarsky said, “it’s what you came for. Now, please, Tim, I have work to do. If you don’t want a tour, that’s fine, but let’s wrap this up.”
Ridley approached the case. His breath froze in his chest as he reached out with both hands to retrieve the mask.
“The price we discussed?” he asked.
“Yes. Let’s just get it done,” Massarsky said, practically barking the words.
Ridley narrowed his eyes and studied the man. For the first time he realized that Massarsky hadn’t been lying. The mask really did unsettle him.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “What the hell are you afraid of?”
Massarsky smiled thinly. “Just don’t put it on. I’ve let several people put it on, and it’s been a mistake every time. They’ve ended up with nightmares.”
“From a mask?” Ridley asked. “That’s ridiculous.”
But as he drew the mask from its case and felt the rough, dry leather texture of the thing, he felt his pulse quicken. His heart thumped a bit harder. Unbidden, his hands lifted the mask toward his face and he bent his neck slightly.
“Ridley, wait,” Massarsky said, reaching for his arm. “I know how it sounds, but several people have had odd experiences. Said they’d seen--”
Somehow, Ridley managed to pause with the mask only inches from his face. He could see through the eyeholes, could make out a display case containing the derby hat Peter Lorre had worn as Moriarty in the ill-fated, never-completed 1933 German language version of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The hat had caught Ridley’s attention in the instant before Massarsky had shown him the mask.
“What did they see?” Ridley asked.
“I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.”
“Have you ever put the mask on?”
“Once,” Massarsky admitted.
“And what did you see?”
“Nothing,” he said, but Ridley thought he might be lying.
The urge to don the mask felt so strong that his hands trembled until he surrendered. With a breath of relief, Ridley placed the mask over his face, tying its silk ribbons at the back of his head.
Massarsky and his collection were gone.
Ridley’s hands fell to his sides. His breathing sounded impossibly loud behind the mask. He felt the urge to turn and run, but his body would not obey. Instead he froze, a whispered profanity slithering inside the mask, and slowly scanned the darkened space around him. He had never been on the set of a movie before, but he saw the camera operator and the people swinging microphone booms around and adjusting lighting rigs and knew this couldn’t be anything but that.
Not just any movie, either.
The world seemed to tilt beneath him. Ridley nearly collapsed when he allowed his gaze to focus on the stone altar. A much younger version of his mother lay there, head thrown back in a silent cry of agony. A hooded man knelt between her splayed legs as a woman stood over her, an officiant with her arms lifted in mock ecstasy, chanting some guttural gibberish. The woman wore the mask of the cult of Belial, as did the robed extras gathered around the set. The young and beautiful Athena Ridley let out a roar, a kind of battle cry, and her face turned bright red beneath her cinema makeup. She was an actress, but this could not be a performance.
The whole cast took up the chant.
Even Ridley found himself chanting, his mouth moving of its own volition. His mind did not know these words or this language, yet he spoke all the same. A rare exultation soared in his heart, his skin felt flush, and if there had been any doubt that this ritual must be genuine, that joy erased it. The camera kept rolling.
The hooded man received the infant into his arms. Timothy Ridley stared at the newborn, its pink skin smeared with blood and birth fluids. When the hooded man turned, Ridley saw his
mask, and the glint of silver from the blade of the ceremonial dagger in his hand. He wanted to scream.
Thoughts collided, fear battling reason. Here he stood, impossibly and yet inarguably viewing the past through the mask of a dead man.
The blade severed the umbilical cord. Robed figures moved into a circle around mother and child. Ridley found himself moving, too. From the corner of his eye, he saw the camera operator shift position--saw the director signaling with his hands, saw the boom microphone swing lower.
The officiant behind the altar reached into her robe and produced a dagger identical to the first. One by one, the cultists drew their blades and raised them high. Ridley’s own fingers slithered inside the folds of his robe and found a sheathed dagger. He felt the unaccountably icy cold of its handle, and he drew the blade out, against his will.
His eyes welled with tears.
“No,” he managed to whisper, even as this body stepped toward the altar. Toward his mother, and toward the newborn that already had his brown eyes, already had the little furrow of the brow that would mark his every adult expression.
Within the vault of his thoughts, Ridley fought back. Mustering his will, he forced his eyes closed. For a moment he felt torn between worlds, times, realities. He could hear, as if from the bottom of a well, Massarsky’s voice speaking his name. “Mr. Ridley. Mr. Ridley, are you all right?” Even the temperature of the room shifted, turning into the cool of Massarsky’s air-conditioned palace in the Hollywood hills instead of the warm, close, nearly suffocating air on that long forgotten film set, with its choreographed spotlights and strategic shadows.
Wake up, he thought, even though he knew this was no dream.
Steeling himself, he forced his hands to rise. If he could untie the mask, tear it from his face, he could step away from this. George Sumner had been the actor wearing this mask, all those years ago, and he’d found the courage and strength to break away from the scene, to flee the ritual. Ridley had to do the same. Then Olmos, the man behind the camera, would step in to protect the infant.
His left hand touched the silk ribbons tied behind his head, but then he felt a sharp pain on the right side of his neck…the tip of the ceremonial dagger puncturing the skin, drawing his blood. His hand clenched around the hilt and he opened his eyes.
Opened George Sumner’s eyes.
“No!” he shouted again, but his time he stumbled forward, and his heartbeat was his own. It thrummed, the wings of a caged bird, and he shoved two of the cultists aside.
A woman pointed her dagger at his sternum and he knocked her hand away, then tore off her mask. Beneath the painted sigils of the cult of Belial was a familiar face, some starlet or other, but with her identity bared she drew away from him--from the altar--as if she could not proceed with what came next without the mask.
By this time, in reality--in history--George Sumner had run. What did it mean that Ridley wore George Sumner’s mask, wore his body, and had not run?
“Cut!” the director barked.
In the scrum of people, Ridley saw and felt everything at once.
The infant in the arms of the hooded man--the bloody, smeared infant with his brow furrowed, about to launch his first plaintive wail in this world.
The strange, sickly glint of light in the eyes of the crew all around them in the dark, beyond the booms and the camera, their silhouettes strangely misshapen, hunched and crooked and waiting like predators full of anticipation.
The actors in their masks, these actors who were not acting, closing in around the altar ever tighter, suffocating.
The hooded man who had delivered baby Timothy Ridley, the man who now held him up as an offering.
The raised daggers.
“Cut!” the director shouted again.
The officiant chanted louder to drown the director out, and the others followed suit.
But it was Ridley’s own mother, the young ingenue, half-naked and draped in silk, belly partly deflated, who raised her head and sneered across the set at the director.
“Don’t you fucking dare stop shooting,” Athena Ridley snarled.
The first dagger swept down, but it did not plunge into her flesh. Instead, the officiant dragged the blade across Athena’s belly, splitting the skin so that blood began to seep and run and stain white silk.
“The blood of the mother!” the officiant cried.
The chant was echoed from behind a dozen masks…including Ridley’s own. He was himself, but he was also George Sumner. A George Sumner whose moment to flee had passed.
Another blade rose, and Ridley could not let it fall. He bent low and drove his shoulder into a cultist, knocked the actor aside, and threw himself to the stone floor beside the altar. On his knees, he found himself eye to eye with Athena.
“Mom, please,” he said quietly. “What do I do?”
“Speak the words,” his mother said. “Summon him.”
The circle erupted with chanting. Ridley joined them. He felt the name Belial on his lips but could not understand the rest, only watch as the hooded man set the infant back between its mother’s legs, still smeared in blood and birth fluids. Again voices called out to Belial.
Ridley couldn’t breathe. The room darkened, as if the whole world had dimmed. The film crew were truly only shadows now, shadows and gleaming eyes. Time had frozen between one heartbeat and the next. He felt a loss that cut to the bone, grief pouring into him. Another dagger swept down, this one in the grip of the hooded man, and sliced across the infant’s chest, just above his heart, only deep enough to draw blood.
The burn of that cut sliced across Ridley’s own chest. He could feel the wicked bite of the blade and the trickle of blood down his skin, though no blade had touched him.
He screamed and lunged for the baby, but an enormous man struck him in the temple and hurled him against the stone base of the altar. A booted foot crunched down on his throat, pinning him to the floor. Inside George Sumner’s mask, Ridley began to suffocate.
He still clutched Sumner’s dagger, but as he raised his hand, another cultist dropped upon him, a blonde woman whose mask seemed partly askew. He glimpsed the corner of her smile under the mask as she trapped his arm against the floor with her knees.
Her dagger was the first to cut him. She lifted it with both hands and rammed it through the meat of his shoulder, cleaving muscle. Blood sprayed and he screamed with the voices of two men, decades apart. Another blade bit into his thigh. The third plunged into his abdomen, the fourth into his side, the fifth into his right arm, scraping bone as it jammed between ulna and radius. After that, Ridley could no longer scream. Numbness flooded into his veins to replace the blood that spilled out. The blade that thrust into the side of his face, shattering teeth, might have been the tenth or eleventh. He felt that one, though he was no longer capable of screaming. He could weep, though, and he did.
When they were finished, there had been twelve wounds. Twelve daggers. Twelve murderers in their Belial masks on the set of Chapel of Darkness, every moment preserved on celluloid.
His mother, Athena, slipped off the altar. Had the afterbirth come? He wasn’t sure, but she was there beside him nevertheless, kneeling with the infant Timothy in her arms, still smeared with their shared fluids. The baby suckled at her breast in quiet contentment as Ridley’s blood pooled on the stone floor. The officiant raised her arms and began a prayer to gods of pain and cruelty.
Athena bent to whisper in his ear. “He is close. So near to us now. But only you can complete the ritual. Only you can bring him into our midst.”
One hand cradling the babe, she reached the other to touch his arm. She took his right wrist and lifted it, and his fingers began to open but she clasped hers around them, making sure he kept his grip on the dagger. The last dagger. The thirteenth.
As the baby nursed quietly, she helped him bring the dagger to his own throat and she kissed his temple.
“This part must be yours,” she said.
Ridley would have laughed if he could have. Lunacy. It was lunacy. He would never…
But in the shadows overhead, something breathed. The shadows themselves had form and awareness and they waited impatiently, urgent with desire. The chanting rose into a sensual crescendo and it seemed to caress him. This body knew what it had to do.
He drew the blade across his throat and a wave of blissful relief swept over him. It lasted only a moment before a chill seized him, icy needles of pain. Ridley inhaled sharply and his eyes went wide. The shadows roiled and coalesced around him, enveloping him, and as he sipped his last breath, he drew the shadows into George Sumner’s lungs.
As his life ebbed, he heard the baby crying, and the voice was his own.
Massarsky felt the room go cold. He always had the air-conditioning up too high, but this was something else. A rime of frost settled on Ridley’s skin. At one point the man had been talking behind the mask, a quiet chant in some language Massarsky could not make out. He’d even reached up to untie the mask, but something had stopped him. Ridley had dropped his hands to his sides again and hadn’t moved since. Massarsky had moved, though, backing first a few steps and then a good eight or nine feet away. He hadn’t lied about the three people he had allowed to try on the mask before. All of them had seen something when they’d put the mask on, something that had given them hideous dreams, but none had reacted the way Ridley had.
“Jesus,” he muttered. He could see his own breath. With a shiver, he crossed his arms, trying to keep warm.
Frost had formed on the mask now, and somehow it no longer really looked like a mask. Instead, Ridley appeared to have a caul over his face, a thin membrane with blue veins just below the surface, veins whose patterns matched the symbols that had been drawn there before.
Ridley turned to look at him, the movement so abrupt that Massarsky let out a tiny squeak of fear. Behind that mask, that caul, Ridley’s eyes glittered with flecks like embers, as if they reflected some celestial hell.
“The circle is complete,” a woman’s voice said, making Massarsky squeak once more.
He exhaled, watching his breath mist in front of him. Massarsky did not turn around. He did not know how she had gotten into the room, though he had known she would come. She had promised, after all, that she would be there.
“You brought payment?” he asked.
Athena Ridley, aged and riddled with cancer, had a rough, rasping laugh. “You are bold,” she said. “I’ve always liked that in a man. And yes, of course. I’ve left the money on your pillow, the way men like you have always done for whores.”
She walked to her son. Or whatever now lived behind that mask, inside those glittering eyes.
“Come, my love,” the dying woman whispered, taking the silent thing by its hand. “At last, we may begin.”
When they’d left, Massarsky locked the door behind them.
Then he wept.
And then he counted his money.