THE MASKMAKER

© Jane Johnson 2008 
 

Prologue

Snowy wings spread wide, the owl flew whisper-soft through the night. Below it lay the dark expanse of Churnock Woods, the trunks of the beech trees stretching silver towards the moon. Below them, far below, lay the Delving Caves which reached their great hollow roots down into the depths of the earth. The owl lived in the woods; but the one who commanded his loyalty dwelt below in the dark caverns, amongst columns of twisted rock, the sedimentary icicles of age-old limestone.

      On it flew like a phantom, aware of the prey it passed – the vole crouching in the lee of a hedge, the fieldmouse on the edge of the meadow-path; the rat crossing a farmyard – but undistracted from its mission. There would be time to feed later, still many hours before the sun showed its face over the ridge of hills to the east. It ghosted over the Downs, where stone circles and standing stones marked the passage of ancient peoples and their mysterious worship; over copses and valleys, across rivers and streams.

      It flew over Jaggard’s Farm, taking in without interest the machinery left rusting in the paddock, the tangle of empty chicken-coops and the uncut fields. The farmer was in the dark kingdom now; the owl knew, for it had helped to deliver him there. The farmer’s wife slept on, tossing and turning, dreaming of lost teeth and greying hair. She would soon follow her husband. Their son hadn’t slept properly in months: the light was on in one of the downstairs rooms.

      On the edge of the town known as Cawstocke, the owl circled. The built-up areas were always the hardest to negotiate. Usually, it was the cats and the feral dogs which patrolled the town; but the number of cats willing to bear the dangerous burden had dwindled, and the dogs were fully engaged in their own affairs. Dreams floated up towards the owl through the darkness: and the night-bird felt each one as it passed. In a block of flats just beyond the industrial estate, where more of the units were now empty than used, a young man dreamed repeatedly of a car crash in which his legs were trapped and he could not escape the wreckage before fire started to lick at him; in the flat below, a girl ran through a corridor of closed doors pursued by someone intent on harming her. None of the doors would open. Her feet twitched as she slept, as if she could outrun the nightmare.

      Giles Russell dreamt of dog-bites; Janice Horne of drowning. In a cul-de-sac of expensive houses near the park, Douglas Grant paced up and down his front room, woken from restless slumber by a dream so disturbing he dared not go back to sleep. A monster had visited him, of that he was sure; but more than that he did not want to remember. His son, Andy, a few moments later, cried out, as if the nightmare had travelled the few feet down the corridor and visited him as well.

      Next door, Horace Rose, leader of industry, took another sleeping pill and tried to regain oblivion. In the spare room, where his wife now slept, fed up with her husband’s tossing and turning, there came a groan.

      Its mission did not lie here. The owl flew on, over Victoria Gardens, over Porchester Terrace with its smart Edwardian villas with their imposing bow-windows and well-tended gardens, towards the poorer end of town.

      The owl remembered, with its long ancestral memory, when there had been no houses here, none at all, when the whole area had been forested; then when it had been first settled by people who came from the east, driven out of their territory by tribal wars. They had brought their own ways and worship with them: with their sun-dances and their mask-making, their maypoles and stone circles. And the people just kept on coming, wave after wave of them, a great noisy tide of humanity. And with them came the house-building, and then the train, and at last the cars, roaring over the ground at all hours of the day, polluting the air, poisoning everything.

      It was time for it all to stop, for peaceful night to fall forever across Cawstocke and this whole once-lovely area, for the land to return once more to the creatures of darkness.

      The owl, playing its part in the grand scheme, now found what it had been seeking. It noted with satisfaction the way two feral dogs trailed quietly away through the wasteground on the edge of the housing estate, heads down and exhausted. More nightmares successfully delivered.

      It glided over the tallest block and concentrated on the sleeping inhabitants.

      John Jones: builder’s merchant, his debts rising as the demand for new houses dropped away, dreamed of falling into one of his own cement mixers. Round and round he went, crying out soundlessly, like a man trapped in a washing machine. All around people went on with their day without a glance, and as the mixer slowed and then halted the thick grey sludge covered him over and began, second by second, to set into a rock-hard overcoat in which he could move neither finger nor toe.

      Philippa Gough watched her daughter Gillie going down for the third time in a wide black lake she had never seen before, just out of reach of the hand she held out to save her. She reached forward an inch more, and found herself falling, falling, towards the black water.

      The owl found its target and let go at last of its heavy but invisible burden...

      Cadence Wave turned over beneath her duvet, and a moment later was kissing a boy, though only in her sleep. He was tall and handsome and had the blackest, wickedest eyes she’d ever seen. She didn’t know his name: it didn’t seem to matter. He was good at kissing, and she was sixteen, and they were dancing with their arms around each other. After an unknowable time in which the music changed, drawing her slowly into its dark rhythms, she pulled back to look at him and found herself embracing a monster with fire in its mouth and eyes…

      Troubled, the owl turned its flat white face back towards the window of the flat. It had failed. In the room next to the silently screaming girl, her younger brother lay untroubled, his sleep as sweet and peaceful as ever, a smile twitching his lips as if someone had just told him a joke.

      Its wide wings beating the night air soundlessly, the owl turned for the distant woods. It had been looking forward to a night of carefree hunting, of small, warm creatures struggling in its talons; of their blood running down its beak. Instead, its thoughts were mired in dread as it returned to the shadow of its employer. 
 
 
 

Lions 
 
 

“Knock knock.”

      There was a long, heavy silence on the other side of his sister’s bedroom door. Jamie Wave leaned in closer, resting his cheek against the wood panelling.

      “Cadence?”

      Still nothing. He opened the door a crack and repeated, “Knock knock…”

      There was a weary sigh, then his sister responded dutifully, “Who’s there?”

      Jamie grinned. “Police.”

      A pause.

      “Police who?”

      “Police let me in, it’s cold out here.”

      Cadence groaned. “Lame, lame, lame, little bro. What a horrible way to wake up. What time is it, anyway?”

      “Gone eight.”

      “Urrgh. Why didn’t you wake me earlier?”

      There was a flurry of movement, the rustle of a duvet, feet hitting the floor, and then the door was flung open. Cadence Wave stood there, her blonde hair like a haystack, her face all creased from the pillow, mascara smudged beneath her eyes.

      Jamie regarded her critically. “You look like a panda.”

      Cadence sighed theatrically and pushed him out of the way. “What on earth would you know about it? What would you know about anything?”

      The bathroom door slammed, which elicited a shout from the room next to it. Their mother had a tendency to be grouchy first thing in the morning. In fact, she wasn’t in best of moods most of the time nowadays, not since Dad had left. Jamie decided to make a swift and diplomatic exit.

      In the kitchen he searched for something to eat for breakfast, opening cupboard doors, the bread-bin, the fridge. The cornflakes box was empty, and there was no bread. Nor was there any milk or juice. In the end he discovered two rather old Rich Tea biscuits in a stale-smelling tin, a can of drink and an apple with a soft, ripe bruise on one side. Carefully, he carved the rotten bit out of the apple, cored it and put it on a plate beside the biscuits. There were no clean glasses, so he rinsed one of the ones piled up in the sink and filled it from the can. The soda sparkled, lurid and red, like a witch’s potion. It was hardly the world’s most nutritious breakfast (Jamie Oliver would surely have a fit at the sight of it) but it could have been worse.

      Cadence stomped in, her hair all wet from the shower, and huffed around the kitchen, opening and closing the cupboards and the fridge on the same vain quest as Jamie. In the end, she ran the hot tap for a minute, stuck a mug under it and made herself a cup of instant black coffee.

      Jamie watched this process with some interest, then offered, “Knock knock.”

      His sister slumped down beside him on the bench. “Not again. Who’s there?”

      “Buddha.”

      “Buddha who?”

      Jamie grinned from ear to ear. “Buddha me some toast.”

      “Ohhhhh.” Cadence put her head in her hands. “They get worse. Hard to believe, but it’s impossible to deny the evidence of my ears.”

      Clean now, Cadence’s face revealed that the darkness around her eyes was from shadows beneath the skin, not from smeared make-up after all. Jamie pushed his plate towards her. “Here, you can share my breakfast if you like.”

      She gave him a wan smile. “No thanks, not hungry.” She reached across the table and snagged the packet of cigarettes their mother had left there the night before. “Model’s breakfast,” she declared, lighting up.

      Jamie wrinkled his nose. “Knock knock.”

      “Oh, not again. Who’s there?”

      “Mrs Rosberg.”

      Mrs Rosberg was their neighbour, a stick-thin woman in her late forties who boasted that she’d been a model in the 80s, but who now had skin like a corpse’s – pale, loose, dry and deeply incised with wrinkles, especially around her mouth. Jamie leant his elbow on the table in an eerily exact image of their neighbour, puckered his lips as if smoking a cigarette and regarded his sister with crossed eyes.

      Cadence laughed, despite herself. “OK, point taken.” She put the cigarette down.

      “She’s got a mouth like a cat’s bum.”

      “Gross!” Cadence shrieked. “But she’s ancient. I’ve got no intention of living that long. Not around here, anyhow. There’s nothing for anyone round here. No wonder everyone leaves: it’s so depressing.”

      Jamie looked at her, alarmed. “You won’t leave, will you, Cadence?”

      She looked away. “There has to be something better than Cawstocke. Sometimes, I dream…” The sentence faded away. Then Cadence laughed. “Who am I kidding?” She pushed herself away from the table. 
 

That day in the Art lesson they were going to decorate the masks they had started the day before. The masks were all lined up on the windowsill on their foam pillows where they’d left them the day before. Jamie didn’t have to look at the name on the back of his lion-mask to know it immediately. There was something about it, something alive, as if it had been sitting there in the darkness all night taking on a character all its own as the air set it rock-hard. What would it be like?

      “It looks very fierce,” his friend Jinny said, turning it over in her hands, a bit gingerly, as if it might bite her. “What are we going to do with it now?”

      Jamie had brought a length of fake fur with him that his mum had let him cut off one of her old scarves. “Your dad gave it me for a birthday, but I never liked it much anyway,” she’d lied. Then she had gone to her room for a lie-down. She did that a lot nowadays. “This is its mane,” he said. “And these are for its whiskers—” Some fuse-wire which he had cut into whisker-sized lengths. Or at least the sort of lengths he thought lions’ whiskers might be: he’d never got close enough to one for a good look. Probably if you did get that close, its whiskers would be the last thing you saw…

      They painted the lion’s face in shades of yellow and tawny brown. They coloured its nose a dusky pink, and Jamie drew in between its black lips the tips of sharp white teeth. Then they stuck the wires into its muzzle and glued the fringe of fake fur around its head. Jinny cut out from cardboard a pair of little round ears and add those amidst the fur; and there it was, gazing up at them blankly.

      “Try it on,” Jamie suggested. He dearly wanted to put the mask on himself, but it seemed more polite to let Jinny try it first, since she had done so much of the work. Besides, if she wore it, he could see what it looked like: there were no mirrors in the Art room.

      Jinny looked nervously at the mask: she wasn’t keen on lions. They were scary and savage: she preferred ordinary domestic cats. She shook her head. “No, honest,” she told him. “It’s your mask: you should try it first.”

      “It’s said that masks make a special bond with their first wearer,” their teacher, Miss Lambent, said softly, appearing beside them. She beamed at Jamie, as if this was the most normal thing in the world to say.

      Jamie picked up his lion-mask and it seemed to tingle in his hands. He looked around the classroom. Tessa McIntosh was wearing her moon-mask, gliding around the room like a ballerina and giggling loudly. Alan Giles had on his pirate mask and was yo-ho-ho-ing all over the place before setting about Wayne Hunt in a mock sword-fight. They all looked as if they were having great fun.

      Jamie Wave put on his mask.

      All at once, it was as if the classroom rushed away from him, as if he was suddenly seeing it through the wrong end of a telescope, making it tiny and distant. A scorching heat seared the hairs in his nostrils: he let his mouth hang open to pant for air, and abruptly the smells of paint and glue were replaced by the scents of grass and earth and a powerfully sweet iron-tang that made him feel ravenously hungry, more hungry than he had ever been in his life. And there in front of him was something…

      In the back of his mind an old joke whispered away. What’s black and white, and red all over? To which, of course, the answer was ‘a newspaper’.

      But what he was looking at was not the black and white print of a newspaper, but the striped hide of a zebra, and the red was the blood that spilled from it. Part of him recoiled: had he done that, torn apart the haunch of this lovely animal and left it dying on the ground? But another part of him swelled with pride and triumph and the knowledge that soon he would have eaten his fill and would share his kill with his family… 
 

      “Jamie!”

      He lifted his head from the tantalizing scent of the dead zebra. He could smell something else now. Somewhere close by were some of the pale apes that walked upright; the two-legs: human beings.

      The lion-who-was-Jamie twitched his nostrils. Human beings were not usually dangerous; but sometimes they carried fire-sticks that could blow a lion off its feet, even fell an elephant. He shook his mane and backed away; their presence would keep the hyenas and the vultures at a distance, and he would lope back to the shelter of the trees and return for the zebra when they had gone. They always went away: this was not their land.

      Now one of them had stepped close to him: too close, reaching out. The cerulean sky over the African plain tilted sharply as the mask slipped sideways, and all of a sudden his sense of power and confidence fell away with it. The smells of the savannah were replaced, abruptly, by the smells of the classroom, though for two or three hallucinatory seconds, they seemed far more pungent and distinct than usual. He could make out the paints and the clay and the glue, the rolls of paper in the cupboard, even the water in the sink at the back of the room. Now he became aware of Jinny’s peach shampoo, a mixture of sweetness and chemicals; the washing powder her mother had washed her jumper in; the apple she had eaten at break still on her breath. Further away, he could smell the tang of Alan Giles’s sweat; the rank cheesiness of Pete Flynn’s trainers; but closest of all he could smell Miss Lambent’s perfume, musky and floral all at once, a scent his fading lion-self recognized instinctively. Then the mask fell from him and suddenly he was Jamie Wave again.

      He looked around and found that he was standing in the middle of the art room with everyone staring at him.

      “Are you all right, Jamie?” Miss Lambent asked. She held the lion mask in her hands, painted side down so that it looked like the harmless piece of plaster and fake fur it really was. Though it looked as if some of the paint had run from the other side through the hole for the mouth and stained the white plaster a bright red.

      Miss Lambent’s eyes were very bright, Jamie noticed, and her cheeks were pinker than usual. She looked … odd, excited even.

      He nodded slowly. Beside the teacher, Jinny Briggs was watching him warily, rocking on the balls her feet as if getting ready to run in case he leapt at her. The other members of his class stood a fair distance away, also looking wary. What could have happened to make them look like that? Most of the time they hardly even noticed him: he was the new boy, not too stupid and not too bright, not bad at sports, but nothing special; and definitely in no way scary.

      “I think you must have bitten your tongue, Jamie dear,” Miss Lambent went on. She took a small white cotton handkerchief out of her pocket and gave it to him to hold up against his bleeding mouth. “Come with me,” she said, taking him by the arm, “and we’ll get you cleaned up.” Then she led Jamie out of the classroom, down the corridor, to the sick bay.

      There, she sat him down on the couch, wet some paper towels at the sink and blotted them around his mouth. “Dear me,” she said brightly. “What a lot of blood. Does it hurt?”

      Jamie thought about this and it dawned on him slowly that actually his mouth didn’t hurt at all. Could you bite your tongue so hard that it bled and it not hurt? It seemed unlikely. He shook his head. “No, miss.”

      Miss Lambent frowned. “Let me have a look.”

      Obediently, he tilted his head back and opened his mouth and Miss Lambent shone the little torch Nurse Bradley used to examine the throats of children foolish enough to pretend to have such a terrible sore throat that they would have to go home sick. “That’s very strange,” she said. “I can’t see anything wrong with you at all.”

      She clicked off the torch and Jamie shut his mouth.

      “Tell me what happened when you put on the mask, Jamie,” she said softly. “Because I don’t think this is your blood. I’m not even sure it’s human.”