Masquerade: A Nevers and Moon Mystery - Part IV
‘I’m afraid I must arrest you for the murders of Peter Ray and Dr Eliza James.’
Chapter 10
With the morning came the discovery of Peter’s murder. Hawthorne House erupted into chaos yet again. Frank and Cleo, however, had other concerns. The fact of the matter was that neither of them had had any food in 24 hours and they were far too hungry to take any more of Mrs Ray’s wailing. So instead, they went to the kitchen and made themselves toast.
Mrs Ray walked into the kitchen just as they were digging into their breakfast. She wasn’t crying or screaming now. The woman looked like she had become numb to the world. Cleo offered her a piece of toast, which Mrs Ray absent-mindedly nibbled on.
Not a word was spoken between the three of them. Then the silence was broken when Constable Glott entered the kitchen.
‘Mrs Julia Ray,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I must arrest you for the murders of Peter Ray and Dr Eliza James.’
It took Mrs Ray a second to process his statement. When she did, Mrs Ray gave Constable Glott a look of absolute stupefaction and said, 'You can't be serious.'
‘I’m telling you, it’s all there,’ Constable Glott said as he led Frank and Cleo to Peter’s bedroom. Peter’s corpse was still lying in the bed, with a kitchen knife buried in his chest. The sight of the body made Constable Glott queasy. But he bravely fought past it and pointed to the safe. On top of it were the bloody dress and pearls that Peter had sought to hide, which had now become the constable’s key evidence.
‘Clearly, Mrs Ray killed Dr James wearing those things,’ he argued. ‘Then Peter here found them, so she killed him too, to shut him up.’
‘She sounds like a cold-hearted murderer, this Mrs Ray,’ Cleo commented. ‘A regular witch, you might say.’
‘That’s exactly what she is,’ said the constable. ‘An infernal witch come to test us.’
‘Constable Glott,’ Frank said. He had opened the safe and discovered the steel box inside. ‘Did you see this?’
‘No, sir,’ said Glott. ‘I, uh, didn’t notice it.’
‘And yet,’ Frank said. ‘If I’m not wrong, this box holds the key to everything. Would you bring everyone to the basement? Mrs Ray, especially. Oh, and Mr Granger; he should be there too.’
‘Alright,’ Mr Granger said once Frank and Cleo had explained the situation to him. They were in the basement waiting for the rest of their party to arrive.
‘You’ll tell them?’ Cleo asked.
‘Yes, Ms Moon. But not yet, not until the very end. I don’t think I can face them for too long.’
‘I understand,’ said Frank.
There were sounds of footsteps on the stairs. Constable Glott, Mrs Ray, and Mallory filed in one by one. They gathered around the bottom of the stairs, waiting for Frank or Cleo to explain what they were doing there.
‘Yesterday,’ said Frank. ‘We told you that we weren’t going to investigate your affairs. Cleo and I came here with a mission and that’s all we wanted to do. Unfortunately, it looks like your mysteries and ours are all the same, so here we are.’
‘It really started for us when we got here,’ Cleo said. ‘We saw this house, the way it's built, and we said to each other, “This is a terribly designed house”.’
‘I mean, the architecture to start with.’ Frank waved his hands in the air. ‘Gothic windows with cement walls? And the dumbwaiter is in the parlour instead of the kitchen, which is where normal people put it. That’s when it occurred to us: the house doesn’t matter. It’s just a smokescreen, a masquerade. And we’re going to tear all the masks off now.’
‘Last chance, everyone,’ Cleo added. ‘If there’s anything you want to own up to, now is the time. Because when you see what we’re going to show you, there will be no turning back.’
She waited for them to say something. Nobody did. Cleo nodded to Frank, who moved to a spot just beyond the stairs. Tucked away in a corner of the basement, inconspicuous and practically invisible, was a circular hatch, like the kind you see on a submarine. In the centre of the hatch was a camera-like mechanism, with a lens on one end and a lock on the other.
‘That is a retinal scanner,’ said Cleo, pointing out the lens. ‘In case any of you didn’t know, Dr James’s killer-’
‘Mrs Ray,’ said Constable Glott.
‘-cut out her eyeballs.’ Frank handed Cleo the steel box from Peter’s room. ‘Frank found this in Peter’s room,’ she continued. ‘Let’s see what’s inside, shall we?’
Cleo popped open the lid and cold water spilt out. Peter had filled the box with ice cubes to make a makeshift chiller. The ice had melted and bobbing around in the water were two human eyeballs.
Ignoring the gags from the audience, Cleo dangled the eyes above the retinal scanner’s lens. With a click, the lock disengaged, and she pulled the hatch open, revealing an iron ladder going down into the earth.
'Abandon all hope,' Frank said. ‘And all that jazz.’
Chapter 11
They climbed down in silence, and when they reached the bottom of the ladder, they found a web of floor-to-ceiling partitions that created winding paths as long as the eye could see. It was unlit, except for a warm blue glow that seemed to emanate from somewhere further away.
They followed the light, stumbling through the dark as it got brighter and brighter. Before they knew it, they were in the centre of the labyrinth, faced with an assortment of scientific equipment, computers, and one very strange machine.
It was a large cylindrical object with many moving parts that clicked and whirred like clockwork. At its centre was a pulsating orb of blue light.
‘It’s a time machine, of course,’ said Cleo. ‘Well, more of a time door. The rules are still a bit unclear, but we know that’s what it is.’
‘But that’s impossible,’ Mrs Ray said. ‘Isn’t it?’
Frank said, ‘Let’s start at the beginning.’
It was 1975. Renfield Ray spat out a glob of blood and asked, ‘Val, do you remember when you told me it was perfectly safe in Vietnam now that the war’s over?’
‘Yes, Ray, I remember,’ LaGrange sighed wearily.
‘Then explain to me why we've been captured and tied against this tree.’
‘Look, the war is over,’ LaGrange insisted. ‘Those soldiers aren't even Vietnamese. I think they're French.’
‘Great, do you speak French?’
‘I can order an omelette with cheese.’
'Somehow, I don't think that will help.'
The ropes were digging into their arms rather hard, which made continuing the argument a struggle.
The soldiers were, in fact, French. To be specific, they were soldiers of the French Third Republic, about forty years out of their natural era. Now they were just as lost as their prisoners. After some recreational roughing-up, the soldiers left Valentine and Renfield more or less alone while they tried to figure out their location.
‘LaGrange, listen,’ Renfield said after a while. ‘I just remembered I have a lighter in my back pocket. If you can reach in and get it, maybe we could burn these ropes off.’
‘Ray, please shut up.’ LaGrange shook his head. ‘While you’ve been thinking up cockamamie schemes involving your back pocket, I’ve been trying to come to terms with the fact that this could be the day I die.’
‘And?’
‘And it's not going well.’
Surprisingly, Valentine LaGrange did not die that day. His life was saved by something far beyond his ability to understand. In the biopic that he eventually made about himself, LaGrange is saved by a band of highly skilled and superbly patriotic American soldiers. In reality, the soldiers would come later, and they were deserters who had run away from the army just days before the end of the war. Here’s what actually saved LaGrange and Ray:
It began with a blue light. Valentine felt as if his eyes would melt in their sockets. As he watched, the light grew into a ball of cracking electricity, like a miniature star hovering in the middle of the camp.
The energy began to coalesce down to a point, a powerful black hole whose inescapable gravity pulled the soldiers off their feet, consuming them whole. Not even their screams escaped.
Being tied to a tree, LaGrange and Ray were spared, but they still spent the whole time screaming themselves hoarse. And then it was over, just like that. The light turned red, and the singularity disappeared, replaced by an odd cylindrical object.
The Machine had arrived on Earth.
‘Wait,’ said Frank. ‘Hello?’ he called out. ‘Cat? Are you here?’
There was silence, and everyone looked at him as if he had gone mad. Then, with a ‘Meow!’ and a shower of blue sparks, the Infinite Cat materialised before their very eyes.
‘Mr LaGrange and Mr Ray found the Machine in Vietnam, while filming their movie, “Ninjas of the Saigon”,’ said Cleo. ‘They hired Dr James for her expertise in quantum mechanics. They built this lab, and the house above it as a cover, and the doctor started experimenting.’
‘Mostly with cats,’ Frank said. ‘Like this little guy.’ He scratched the cat behind its ears, and it gave a satisfied purr, its body shimmering in and out of existence.
‘Things took a turn for the worse as the three of them went a little mad with power,’ Cleo continued. ‘And it reached a breaking point when Mr LaGrange disappeared into the timestream. We think Mr Ray wanted to shut down the project, and there was no way Dr James could allow that. So, she killed him.’
‘But there’s no body,’ Constable Glott insisted. ‘How can you know he’s dead?’
‘There is a body, constable,’ Frank said. ‘It turned up in a bog two years before he was killed. It’s a time machine, keep up. Dr James killed Mr Ray, then dumped his body in a prehistoric bog, along with the dead cats from her experiment. Nobody finds a million-year-old mummy and thinks to open a murder investigation.’
‘She had help though,’ Cleo joined in. ‘Dr James had an accomplice, someone else who benefitted. And that’s the person who killed Peter.’
‘Mrs Ray,’ said Frank. ‘You’re being awfully quiet. Anything you’d like to share?’
‘Me? No. I’m just… it’s difficult to keep up with all this… outlandishness.’
‘It’s funny,’ he pressed. ‘You were unfazed when your father went missing. You barely seemed to notice when your husband was gone. But the second you found out Dr James was dead…’
‘That’s different,’ said Mrs Ray. ‘I was in shock.’
Frank turned to Cleo and asked, ‘Should I mention the love bite? I think I should mention it.’
‘Oh, alright,’ Mrs Ray wailed. ‘I was in love with Ellie. We’ve been having an affair for years. But I never wanted Renfield dead, and I would have stopped her if I knew.’
‘You were in love with her?!’ Mallory asked with immense shock.
‘Yes, I was. I wanted to leave your father, but Ellie always said we had to play it safe. I thought it was to protect me but… oh God, she framed me!’
‘It’s okay, Mrs Ray,’ Cleo said, patting her on the shoulder.
‘We don’t actually think you were the accomplice,’ Frank admitted. ‘It had to be someone who would gain from both you and Mr Ray being out of the picture.’
‘At first, we thought it was Peter,’ said Cleo. ‘That moody way he was acting. Then when we found the eyes and the evidence in his safe, the picture got just a little clearer. See, what Dr James’ accomplice didn’t factor in was the fact that the doctor only cared about one thing, and that was her work. So, she reneged on the plan and tried to blackmail Peter into helping her continue.’
‘Unfortunately,’ Frank pointed out. ‘For a once-in-a-generation genius, Dr James really goofed up on that decision. Peter decided it was much simpler to just kill the doctor and destroy the evidence. He had to keep her eyes to get into this place but I’m sure he thought he could find a more permanent solution before long.’
‘My son can’t be a murderer, Mr Nevers,’ Mrs Ray said. ‘He just… can’t.’
‘It didn’t come naturally to him; I’ll give you that. It ate him up inside.’
‘He needed to confess,’ Cleo explained. ‘His mistake was choosing the wrong person to make that confession to. Isn’t that right, Mallory?’
In stunned silence, Mrs Ray turned to her daughter. Mallory’s eyes held a look that her mother had never seen before, like that of a caged animal. It was like looking at a stranger.
‘Mallory?’ she asked. ‘It’s not true, is it?’
She didn’t say anything. Her whole body was tense. For a moment, Cleo wondered if she might attack her mother. Then she scoffed and said, ‘Fine, I’ll admit it. I killed Peter. Before you ask, Mom, I wasn’t in love with Eliza. But she was going to help me get out of this house, and I would do anything to make that happen. But hey, he didn’t suffer.’
She took a few steps back from her mother, waving her hands animatedly as she talked. ‘I put some sleeping pills in his hot chocolate and stabbed him while he slept. I don’t think he even felt it.’
‘Oh, darling,’ Mrs Ray whimpered. ‘Oh, my poor girl.’
Cleo turned to Mr Granger. He had stayed silent the whole time, watching Julia and Mallory with a tear in his eye. His hunch seemed more pronounced, as if the weight on his shoulders had been doubled.
‘Vincent,’ she said. ‘I think this has gone far enough, don’t you?’
Chapter 12
‘Julia,’ said Mr Granger. ‘There’s something I must tell you.’
‘Uh, yes, Mr Granger?’
‘Well,’ the old man shifted his weight. ‘There’s no easy way to say this. I’m your father.’
‘What?’ Mrs Ray looked as if she might have a heart attack, having been subjected to more emotional upheaval in the last twenty-four hours than most people do in a lifetime.
‘I know this is strange,’ Mr Granger told her. ‘But it’s the truth. I’m Valentine LaGrange. My birth name was Vincent Granger, but I changed it when I moved to LA. Never told anyone about it.’
‘How is this possible?’ Mrs Ray demanded to know. ‘Oh, God, I see it now! How didn’t I see it before? Daddy?!’
‘It’s okay, pumpkin,’ the old man assured her. ‘It was the Machine. Mr Nevers and Ms Moon are bang on the money. You see, when you go back in your own timeline, you’re temporarily both here and there. Do you understand?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Ray.
‘Yes,’ said Cleo.
‘Well, it’s a short window,’ he continued. ‘And the last time I did it I… stayed behind.’
‘Wait, wait,’ Mrs Ray said, holding up her hands to quiet them down. ‘Let’s say this is true. Let’s say it’s really… you. That means you know how to use the Machine, right?’
Mr Granger, or rather Mr LaGrange, hesitated for a moment. Then he nodded, and a desperate hope lit up his daughter’s face.
‘You can go back,’ she said. ‘You can stop all of this from happening! Please, Dad, you have to do this. Please!’
‘Oh, Pumpkin,’ her father sighed. ‘Don’t you understand? I already did.’
We should talk about the cat. As Frank and Cleo surmised from the evidence, he was, in fact, the sole survivor of Dr James’ early experiments with the Machine. While the cat was luckier than his fellow felines, the experiment left him in a constant state of quantum superposition.
What this means is that the cat is simultaneously connected to every other point in the universe. A human mind would crumble under such stress, but cats are surprisingly flexible. The condition doesn’t bother him.
Interestingly enough, the cat held no ill will towards Dr James for his treatment at her hands. He did, however, like Frank a lot more.
‘What does that mean?’ Mrs Ray asked.
‘I saw what the Machine was doing to us,’ LaGrange explained. ‘Each of us, twisted by it. Eliza was obsessed with pushing further and further back. She wanted to see the birth of the universe, tear the veil from the face of God and all that. Renfield, he was just nostalgic, I think.’
‘And what did you do?’ Frank inquired. ‘What did you use the Machine for?’
‘Business mostly,’ LaGrange said with a small smile. ‘How do you think I came up with “The Godfather”, “Apocalypse Now”, and “Jaws”?’
‘And “Ninjas of the Saigon”?’
‘That one was an original,’ the old man admitted. ‘But I went back and changed things, so we never made that movie. It doesn’t exist anymore, and that means we never found the Machine.’
‘But it’s right there,’ Constable Glott pointed at the glowing alien contraption.
‘Time is a little more complicated than that,’ said LaGrange. ‘Things don’t just disappear; it takes time for time to do its work.’
‘It’s already started though,’ said Cleo. ‘The movie’s gone. So is most of your documentation from the last four years. It’s like none of it ever existed.’
‘You see what this means though, don’t you?’ LaGrange said to Julia. ‘I’ve already fixed this. My Julia is happily separated from Renfield and living in New York. He’s still making movies and our Mallory is about to make her debut in his latest. And Peter, sweet Peter; he’s a successful artist, can you believe it? It’s all okay, sweetheart. It’s all already okay.’
Mrs Ray attempted to make some argument but even as she thought up the words, she could feel a change coming over her.
‘Mom,’ Mallory said, a note of fear in her voice. ‘Something’s happening.’
Julia looked at her father. ‘Dad? What is this?’
‘It’s “goodbye”, Pumpkin,’ he said, tears streaming down his face. ‘It’s “goodbye” and “see you soon”.’
And with that, he broke down sobbing as his daughter and granddaughter faded out of existence.
The house was the next to go. It was a strange experience for Frank and Cleo, seeing the whole building and everything in it vanish around them. Soon it was just them, Mr LaGrange, Constable Glott, and the cat, all standing around the Machine. With the house gone, they were now standing on a beautiful green hill, the storm and the snow nowhere to be seen.
‘You lot should be okay,’ Mr LaGrange said, wiping the tears from his face. ‘You’re not part of our story; you never really were. You’ll probably forget all about this after a while.’
‘About that,’ said Cleo. She and Frank looked at each other. ‘We have some ideas.’
The Machine powered up. There was a brilliant flash of blue light, and then Frank, Cleo, and the Infinite Cat were gone.
‘We probably still have a few minutes before the Machine disappears,’ Valentine told Constable Glott, who was picking up the handcuffs that had fallen off Mallory when she vanished. ‘Do you want to give it a go?’ he asked him.
‘Oh, no, thank you,’ Glott said. ‘I’ve got to get back to the missus, you know. She’ll be hopping mad I didn’t make it home last night.’
‘That doesn’t sound like something to look forward to,’ the old man chuckled.
‘No, no,’ the policeman assured him. ‘It’s not like that. Sure, she can be a terror, but it comes from love. She’s got a big heart, my girl. And… I’m happy where I am.’
‘Good man,’ said Valentine.
The old man leaned against the constable and, together, they began the long walk back to the village.
‘There’s more than one way to be happy,’ said Cleo. ‘I’m not denying it. To each his own, right? All I’m saying is, those three? LaGrange, Ray, and James? They were silly.’
Frank, Cleo, and the cat were floating in an infinite blue waiting room. They guessed this must be the temporary window that LaGrange talked about; the place between where you were and where you’re going. They didn’t have anything else to do, so they talked.
‘I don’t think it was silly,’ Frank argued. ‘They were just… trying to make a life worth living.'
‘But the way they went about it was silly,’ she said. ‘They had a time machine, Frank! And all they did was look to yesterday. It never even occurred to them to see what tomorrow is like.’
The waiting room began to pulse with a steady vibration, becoming less and less real.
‘It’s happening,’ Cleo said. She took Frank’s hand in hers and asked, ‘Are you ready for an adventure?’
Frank smiled. ‘With you? Always.’
THE END.
This was tons of fun! Great job on this, i really enjoyed it! A very interesting mystery, i didnt even know what to expect.