The village of Saint-Aubin-de-Pierre clung to the side of the Verdon valley like an afterthought, a cluster of gray stone houses and slate roofs that had been built in the seventeenth century and had not been significantly modified since. It was the kind of place that tourists drove past without noticing, their eyes fixed on the snow-capped peaks ahead, and that the modern world had bypassed entirely, leaving behind only the elderly, the goats, and a single café that opened for three hours in the morning and closed when the owner felt like going home. Korda arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, the fourth day after his visit to Neumann, carrying a single bag and the weight of everything he had learned.
The bus had deposited him at a stop two kilometers down the valley, and he had walked the rest of the way along a winding road flanked by dry-stone walls and the skeletons of last summer's lavender. The air was thin and cold, the sky a pale blue that seemed to have been washed too many times. He passed a church with a Romanesque bell tower, a cemetery where the graves were marked with iron crosses instead of headstones, and a public fountain that had not run with water in living memory. There were no people on the streets, no cars, no signs of life except for a single plume of smoke rising from a chimney at the far end of the village.
The mask maker's workshop stood apart from the other houses, a low stone building with a steeply pitched roof and a sign above the door that read "Matthias & Fils, Artisans de Masques depuis 1647." The sign was faded and cracked, the lettering barely legible, and the shutters on the windows were closed. But the chimney was smoking, and as Korda approached, he heard a sound from within: the steady, rhythmic scrape of a blade against wood.
He knocked. The scraping stopped. A voice, old and dry as the stone walls, called out in the mountain dialect: "I am closed. Come back in the spring."
"Monsieur Matthias," Korda said, pressing his palm against the weathered door. "My name is Elias Korda. I've come from the capital. I need to speak with you about a commission."
There was a long silence. Then footsteps, slow and deliberate, and the sound of a bolt being drawn back. The door opened a few inches, revealing a sliver of darkness and a face that seemed to have been carved from the same wood as the masks: deep-set eyes, a sharp nose, skin lined and weathered by eighty years of mountain winters. The eyes were clouded, the pupils fixed and unmoving, but they were aimed directly at Korda's face with an accuracy that was disconcerting.
"You are not from the Society," Matthias said. It was not a question.
"No. I'm not."
"Then you are either a fool or a policeman, and I have no use for either." He began to close the door.
"I'm the man who was convicted of killing Armand Duvall."
The door stopped. Matthias's blind eyes seemed to search Korda's face, though Korda knew that was impossible. The old man's hand, still gripping the door's edge, was flecked with pale sawdust.
"The prosecutor," Matthias said slowly. "The one who saw the masks."
"Yes."
Another long silence. Then Matthias stepped back and opened the door wider. "Come in. But wipe your feet. I have just swept the floor."
The workshop was a single large room, lit by a fire in a stone hearth and a single oil lamp hanging from a beam. The walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves were crowded with masks: masks in every stage of completion, from rough-hewn blocks of limewood to finished faces painted in colors that glowed in the firelight. There were masks of devils and saints, masks of animals and birds, masks that laughed and masks that wept and masks that expressed emotions for which no words existed in any language. The air smelled of wood shavings and linseed oil and something else, something older and more pungent, like incense that had been burned in a closed room for too long.
Matthias gestured toward a wooden chair beside the hearth. "Sit. I will make coffee. There is little else I can offer you. The village has forgotten I exist, which suits me perfectly."
Korda sat. The chair was hard and unpainted, its arms worn smooth by generations of use. He watched as Matthias moved through the workshop with the unerring precision of a man who had been blind for decades and had memorized every inch of his domain. The old man found the coffee pot, filled it with water from a pitcher, and set it on the hearth without once reaching out to steady himself.
"How long have you been blind?" Korda asked.
"Since 1974. An accident in the workshop. A splinter of limewood, driven into my left eye by a chisel that slipped. The infection spread to the right eye before the doctors could stop it. I was forty-two years old. My father was still alive then, still making masks, though his hands had begun to shake. He said the blindness was a gift. He said that now I would have to see with my hands instead of my eyes, and that the masks would be better for it."
"Were they?"
Matthias smiled, a brief expression that revealed a row of teeth still remarkably intact. "They were different. Whether they were better is for others to judge. The Society seemed to think so. After my father died, they came to me with their first commission. A set of twelve masks, identical, based on a design that had been in their archives since the eighteenth century. The horned masks. You saw them, I am told."
"I saw them."
"What did you think of them?"
Korda hesitated. The question felt like a test, though he could not have said what the right answer was. "I thought they were beautiful. And I thought they were terrifying. And I thought they moved like they were alive."
Matthias nodded slowly. He poured the coffee into two clay cups and handed one to Korda. The coffee was strong and bitter, the way mountain people had been drinking it for centuries. "The horned mask is one of the oldest designs in the Valdorian tradition. It represents the wild man, the spirit of the mountains, the thing that lives in the forest and comes down to the villages on Carnival night to remind people that civilization is a thin coat of paint on a very old and very dark wall. My family has been making that mask for three hundred years. But the ones you saw, the ones the Society commissioned, were not traditional. They were modified."
"Modified how?"
"The horns, for one thing. In the traditional mask, the horns curve outward, toward the world. In the Society's mask, they curve inward, toward the wearer. And the eyes—the traditional mask has round eyes, open, seeing. The Society's mask has narrow eyes, slitted, like a cat's or a snake's. The mouth is different too. The traditional mask has a mouth that laughs. The Society's mask has a mouth that is open in what might be a scream or might be a song. My father would not have approved. But my father was dead, and the Society paid well, and I told myself that I was preserving a tradition even as I was perverting it."
He sat down in a second chair on the opposite side of the hearth, his blind eyes fixed on the fire. The flames danced in their milky surfaces, giving him an expression that was almost animated, almost seeing.
"Why are you here, Monsieur Korda? You did not come all this way to discuss the aesthetics of mask design."
"I came for your ledger. The record of your commissions. I need to know who ordered the fifteen masks that were used to kill Armand Duvall."
Matthias was silent for a long time. The fire crackled and popped, sending sparks spiraling up the chimney. Outside, the wind had begun to rise, rattling the shutters and carrying with it the first few flakes of snow.
"You are asking me to betray my patrons," Matthias said. "My only patrons. Without the Society, I would have no work. The tourists do not come to Saint-Aubin-de-Pierre. The museums are not interested in a blind old man's masks. The Society is all I have left. If I give you what you want, they will abandon me. Or worse."
"They've already abandoned you," Korda said. "You told me yourself: they haven't commissioned anything in three years. They've found someone else. Someone younger, with eyes that still work. You're not protecting your livelihood. You're protecting people who have already discarded you."
"You don't understand the Society."
"Then help me understand."
Matthias set down his coffee cup and folded his hands in his lap. When he spoke again, his voice was different: quieter, more measured, the voice of a man who had spent many years alone with his thoughts and had learned to be careful with words.
"The Society came to me for the first time in 1975, a year after I lost my sight. They were not called the Society then. They called themselves the Friends of Traditional Carnival, and they wore suits and carried briefcases and looked like civil servants, which they were. They wanted twelve horned masks, and they were very specific about the modifications they required. I asked why. They said the masks were for a private celebration, a historical pageant that recreated the Carnival rituals of the early Valdorian settlements. I believed them. I wanted to believe them. The commission was more money than my father had earned in ten years."
"And after that?"
"After that, there were more commissions. The modified designs became more extreme. The horns grew longer and sharper. The eyes narrowed to slits. The mouths opened wider, until they were no longer laughing or screaming or singing but something else entirely, something I had never seen on a human face but which my hands recognized as if they had been waiting all my life to give it form. The Society's representatives stopped wearing suits and started wearing their own masks when they came to pick up the commissions. They stopped speaking. They would simply arrive, leave the payment on the table, take the crate of masks, and leave. It was as if the masks were consuming them, or consuming something in them, something I could not name."
"And you never asked what the masks were being used for?"
"I asked. Once. The man who had been my contact for fifteen years, a man who had always been courteous and professional, turned on me. He did not shout. He did not threaten. He simply said, very quietly, that I should be grateful for the Society's patronage and that questions were not part of our arrangement. Then he left, and the next commission came with a new contact, a younger man with a colder voice, and I never asked again."
The wind rattled the shutters more forcefully now, and snow had begun to accumulate on the windowsill. Korda leaned forward in his chair. "The man who threatened you. Was his name Steiner?"
"No. His name was Holt. Cassian Holt."
Korda felt the name land in his chest like a stone. Cassian Holt. The third name on Steiner's list, after Duvall and Korda himself. The man who had been Lena Voss's father's source inside the Society. The man who had disappeared three days before Voss's father drove off a mountain road.
"Holt is dead," Korda said. "Or missing. He disappeared in 2007."
"I know." Matthias's voice was very quiet now, barely audible above the wind. "He came to see me, two days before he disappeared. He was different from the other Society members I had known. He was troubled. He said he had seen things, done things, that he could no longer live with. He asked me the same question you are asking now. He asked me for the ledger. I refused him. I was afraid. Two days later, he was gone, and I have been waiting ever since for the Society to decide that I know too much to be allowed to live."
"But they didn't kill you."
"No. They did something worse. They stopped coming. They stopped commissioning masks. They left me here, alone, with my memories and my hands and the knowledge that I had been complicit in something monstrous. That is the Society's way, Monsieur Korda. They do not always kill their enemies. Sometimes they simply forget them into oblivion."
Korda stood and walked to one of the shelves. He picked up a mask at random, a half-finished face of pale limewood, its features only beginning to emerge from the grain. "You said Holt asked for the ledger. Does that mean it still exists?"
Matthias was silent for a long moment. Then he rose from his chair and crossed to a heavy oak chest in the corner of the workshop. He knelt, his old joints protesting, and lifted the lid. From within, he withdrew a large book bound in cracked black leather, its pages yellowed with age. He held it for a moment, his blind eyes fixed on something only he could see, and then he carried it to the table beside Korda's chair.
"This is the ledger," he said. "Every commission, every mask, every client, since 1647. My father kept it before me, and his father before him. It is the only record of my family's work. It is the only thing of value I possess. And it contains, as you suspect, the names of everyone who ordered a mask for the 2009 Carnival."
He opened the book. The pages were covered in handwriting that spanned four centuries, the ink fading from black to brown to sepia, the scripts evolving from elaborate copperplate to the cramped cursive of Matthias's own hand. He turned to the final pages and pointed with a finger that did not shake.
"There. Commission number 1,247. Ordered by the Carnaval Society, through their representative, Rolf Steiner. Fifteen horned masks, modified according to the Society's standard specifications. Delivery date: February 15, 2009. Payment: received in full, in cash." He paused. "There is an annotation. Added later, in my own hand. I wrote it the day after I heard about Duvall's murder. It says: 'These masks were used to kill a man. God forgive me.'"
Korda stared at the entry. The ink was black and precise, the handwriting that of a man who had learned to write without seeing the words he was forming. The annotation at the bottom was smaller, shakier, the letters pressing deep into the paper as if Matthias had been trying to carve his guilt into the page.
"I need to take this," Korda said. "I need to show it to someone who can use it."
"No. You cannot take the ledger. It is the only thing I have left. But you can photograph the page. And I will write a statement, if you wish, confirming that the masks used to kill Duvall were commissioned by the Carnaval Society and delivered to Rolf Steiner. It will not be enough to convict anyone, but it may be enough to open a door that has been closed for ten years."
Korda nodded. He took out his phone and photographed the page, making sure the entry and the annotation were clearly visible. Matthias produced a sheet of paper from a drawer and wrote his statement in the same precise, sightless script, then signed it with a flourish that was the only remnant of the young artisan he had been before the splinter of limewood took his eyes.
"Thank you," Korda said, folding the statement and placing it in his jacket pocket. "I know what this costs you."
"No, you don't. But you will." Matthias closed the ledger and returned it to the chest. "The Society will know you have been here. They have watchers in every village, informants in every café. By tomorrow morning, they will know that Elias Korda came to Saint-Aubin-de-Pierre and spoke with the blind mask maker. And they will come to the same conclusion I have: that the ledger exists, and that I have shown it to you."
"Then come with me. Leave the village. I can protect you."
Matthias laughed, a dry, brittle sound. "Protect me? You cannot even protect yourself, Monsieur Korda. You are a disgraced prosecutor with a criminal record and no friends in high places. The Society will crush you the moment you become a serious threat. No, I will stay here, in my workshop, with my masks. This is my place. These are my ghosts. If the Society decides to silence me, they will find me here, and I will not resist. I have been waiting for death for a long time. It will be almost a relief."
Korda wanted to argue, but the old man's face was set in an expression that admitted no debate. He had made his peace with whatever was coming, and Korda's arguments would not move him.
"One more thing," Matthias said as Korda reached the door. "The ledger contains more than just the 2009 commission. It contains records of every mask the Society has ordered since 1975. Dozens of commissions, hundreds of masks. If you look carefully at the dates, you will notice a pattern. The Society always orders masks shortly before Carnival. And shortly after every Carnival for which they have ordered masks, someone dies. A politician. A journalist. A witness. The deaths are always ruled accidental or attributed to random violence. But the pattern is there, in the ledger, for anyone who knows how to read it."
"Will you show me the pattern?"
"I have already shown you enough. The rest is for you to discover." Matthias opened the door, and the cold air rushed in, bringing with it a flurry of snowflakes that settled on the old man's white hair like a benediction. "Go now. Go quickly. And do not look back. The road to the village is being watched, and the watchers will not wait forever."
Korda stepped out into the snow. The village was still silent, still empty, but now the silence felt different: heavier, more watchful. He pulled his coat tighter and began the long walk back to the bus stop, the photographs of the ledger page burning in his pocket like a live coal. Behind him, the door of the workshop closed with a soft click, and the smoke from Matthias's chimney continued to rise into the whitening sky, a signal that the mask maker was still alive, still waiting, still tending his ghosts.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!