HALLOWEEN ROMANTASY | The Masque Pt 1: Nobody Unmasks Until Midnight

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Hello and welcome to A Halloween Romanticy. Episode 1. Masks on. Masks on. People think a mask is for hiding. That is the amateur's mistake and I have built an entire career on it. A mask is not for hiding. A mask is a promise. It tells the room exactly what you have decided they are allowed to see and it dares them to go looking for anything underneath. I have made more than 400 of them.

0:58 I have worn one to every event I have attended in nine years. And in all that time, not one single person has seen my actual face which is the way I like it, which is the entire point, which is a thing I believed completely right up until the night the host handed me an invitation and a problem no mask could solve. My name is June, and I make faces for a living. Theatrical masks, restoration mostly, the delicate old ones that museums are afraid to touch and collectors are afraid to clean. I am very good and very expensive and very alone, in that order, and I had made my peace with all three. So when a letter arrived on paper so heavy it felt like a slap, commissioning me to restore a complete antique set, 44 masks, for something called the Morning Mask, with a fee that made me sit down, I did not ask the questions a less lonely woman might have asked. I asked when, and how many, and who was paying, and the answers were all immaculate. The masks themselves should have told me.

2:07 I have handled old work before, but these were older than old, carved from something that was not quite wood and not quite bone, and when I cleaned them, they warmed under my hands like they were glad to be touched. Each one was an animal, a stag, a hare, a wolf with its mouth a little too open. I told myself the warmth was friction and the craftsmanship was simply beyond me and I did the finest work of my life on them because that is who I am. I do the finest work even when, especially when, something at the back of my neck is telling me to put the thing down and go home. I delivered them to the estate on the last day of October and the host met me himself. He was tall and silver and beautiful in the way a knife is beautiful. All edge and no warmth. and he took my hands in both of his and thanked me as if I had saved his life. You have no idea, he said, what you have given us. Forty-four years I have wanted this set restored, and no one living had the hands for it, no one, until you. His eyes went over my own mask, the plain black one I wear, the one nobody is meant to look past. You will stay, of course. a guest, it would be an insult to send the artist home before the unveiling. I should have said no. I had a car and a long drive and a cat who

3:38 tolerates me, but the estate behind him was blazing with light and the sound coming out of it was the sound of the best party I would ever be invited to. And I am, under the mask, a person who has spent nine years being very carefully not invited to things. So I said yes. Of course I said yes. The one rule, he told me, pressing a mask into my hands, mine for the night, a thing of silver filigree that fit like it had been made for me. The one rule of the morning mask is that no one speaks a name until midnight. We take the masks off at the stroke of twelve, he said smiling. Everyone, all at once.

4:19 It is the oldest tradition we have. Until then, you are no one. You are only what you choose to show. He said it like a gift. I heard it like a gift. Write that down. It matters later. Inside, the party was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and I say that as a person who makes beautiful things for the beautiful. Hundreds of guests in masks I half-recognized as my own restored work, moving through candlelight, and every single one of them was a little too much, too graceful, too still, and then too fast. Teeth a half shade too long behind the lips of a fox mask.

5:02 A woman in a swan mask whose neck, I swear, when she turned, went on a beat longer than a neck should. I told myself it was the wine, which I had not drunk, and the lighting, which I had, in a professional capacity, to admire. I am a person who explains things. It is a gift, and it is a disease. and that night it nearly killed me. I made myself useful, the way I always do, which is to look. A maker looks. I moved through the room with a glass I did not drink, and I catalogued it the way I catalogue a collection, and the catalogue kept coming back wrong. A man in a boar mask laughed, and the sound arrived a half second before his shoulders moved.

5:54 as if the laugh and the body were two separate performances someone had failed to sync. A girl in a wren mask had not touched the floor in several minutes, I was fairly sure, though she was dancing. And the candles, hundreds of them, did not gutter when the great doors opened onto the cold night, did not so much as lean, which is not a thing candlelight does. I know light. I have spent nine years learning exactly how light moves across a face. so that I can carve a face that moves it the same way. The light in that house did not obey the rules. Light obeys. I noted it, and I explained it to myself, badly, and I kept moving, because the alternative to explaining a thing is being afraid of it, and I had decided a long time ago to be a woman who explains. Then I saw the stag.

6:47 He was across the room, and he was wearing my favourite... The antlered mask, the one I had spent three nights on, the one whose eyes I had set just slightly wrong on purpose because perfect symmetry reads as dead and a tiny wrongness reads as alive. On him it read as very alive. He was tall and still in a room of two fast people, and he was already looking at me. And when a man looks at you from behind a mask you made, there is a particular feeling, like he is wearing a piece of your own hands. That's my work, I said, when I had crossed the room, because I am smooth. The mask, I restored it. I know, he said.

7:29 His voice was low and had an accent I could not place, under all the other accents I could not place. I asked for this one specifically. The maker set the eyes wrong. A pause. It is the only honest thing in this house. I wanted to be near it. They're not wrong, I said. They're alive. Symmetry is for the dead. He went very still. The kind of still that in a normal person means you have surprised them. And in him, I would later understand, meant something closer to recognition. Yes, he said. That is exactly right. Who are you? No names until midnight, I said. House rules. Then I will have to make do with knowing you, he said, which is harder and better now. I am a woman who has not let anyone know her in nine years. I make a mask for every room. And this stranger in a face I had carved with my own hands had just told me he would rather know me than name me.

8:31 And something in my chest that I keep very carefully masked turned over and showed its belly. We talked for three hours. I know because I watched the clock, which I will get to. Behind a mask, it turns out, you can say anything. which is the thing I have always sold to other people, and never once used myself. I told him things I have not told my own cat. I told him about the nine years, a little, sideways, the way you touch a bruise to check it is still there. He listened, like listening was a thing he had been starved of, and he told me, I realize now, almost nothing, and did it so beautifully that I did not notice. deflecting every question into another question about me, which is the oldest trick and I fell for it because I wanted to, because being wanted is a drug and being known is the needle. We traded the way strangers trade when the mask has made them brave. Tell me a true thing, he said, since we have no names to lie with. So I told him I had not shown my own face in nine years, and I watched him not flinch, which no one does. Everyone flinches.

9:45 Everyone says something kind and frightened and changes the subject. He only nodded, as if I had confirmed something he had already suspected and happened to like. Your turn, I said. A true thing. I am very old, he said, and very tired of parties, and I came to this one the way you come to a thing you have always come to, out of a habit so old it has stopped feeling like a choice. And then I stopped being bored at precisely, and here he tilted the antlered head. considering, 9.41 this evening, which is the hour a woman crossed a room to tell me my eyes were set alive instead of wrong. That is not a true thing, I said.

10:31 That is a line. It is both, he said. The best ones always are. You of all people should know a thing can be a true face and a made one at the same time. He took me out of the crush at one point, onto a stone balcony over a garden gone to beautiful ruin. and the cold was clean after the hot press of the room. And we stood close, and not touching, and the whole sky was doing something theatrical with the moon. We stood there a while, and did not feel the silence, which is its own kind of intimacy, and a rarer one than talking. I was aware of him, the way you are aware of a fire in a cold room. The heat of him along my side, though we were not touching... The antlered shadow laid over the two of us like a strange blessing or a stranger warning. I have built a career out of the narrow space between a face and the thing it hides, and standing on that balcony, I understood that I had never once in my life been on this side of it, had never been the one leaning toward the mystery instead of carving it to sell. I wanted to take his face in my hands, not the mask, the face. I did not yet understand what I was asking for. Can I tell you something? I said that I have never told anyone. No, he said gently, and I laughed, startled. Not because I do not want it, because you should keep it. Keep one true thing back tonight.

12:04 You may need it before the night is over, and you will not have it to spend if you give it to me now on a balcony, because I asked nicely. His voice had gone strange on it, frayed at the edge, and that is when he said it. You should not be here, he said, quietly, not looking at me. I want you to know that I have been trying, all night, in the only ways I am allowed, to tell you to leave. Before midnight. Please, be a woman who leaves a party early. Be that, tonight, of all nights. Is that a line? I said. because it's a strange one.

12:45 It is the opposite of a line. He turned, and the antlers threw a shadow across the garden like a crown, like branches, like something out of the oldest part of the forest. A line is meant to keep you. I am trying to send you away, and it is the hardest thing I have done in a very long life, so please, do not make it charming, do not make it a reason to stay. Go, and I, who leave every party early, who has an exit strategy for every room, who has never once in nine years not had her car keys within reach, looked at this man in my own mask, asking me to save myself, and did the thing I have never done. I said, make me. He looked at me for a long moment, and then he laughed, soft and wrecked, like a man watching a door close that he had held open as long as he could.

13:37 I was afraid you would say that, he said. People like you never run. That is what he counts on. And before I could ask who he was or who he counted on, a bell began to ring somewhere in the great house, deep and bronze and far too pleased with itself. And every beautiful, too much person in that party turned toward the sound with a hunger. I finally, finally let myself see. I am a maker of masks. I know what a mask does. And standing on that balcony with the bell tolling, I finally let myself know what mine had done. What all 44 of them had done. What my finest work had been for. The warmth under my hands. The way they fit like they were glad.

14:24 I had not restored decorations. I had restored a binding. The masks were not hiding these faces. The masks were holding something in. keeping 400 monsters mannered and smiling and human for one night. And the oldest tradition in the house, the midnight unmasking, the thing the host had handed me like a gift, was the moment it all came off at once. Every warm gladness those masks had shown, my hands re-read itself in a single awful instant. They had not been glad to be touched. They had been glad to be used, to be going back to work. I had sat for three weeks in my quiet workshop, doing the finest, most loving restoration of my life, on the locks of a cage, humming to myself, proud. And the terrible thing about being a maker is that the care you pour in is real, no matter what it builds.

15:21 I had made the binding beautiful. I had made it fit like it was meant to. That is the part I have had to live with since. The host appeared in the balcony doorway, silver and smiling, and he lifted his glass to me across the cold air. The finest binding we have ever worn, he called, warm with gratitude, with appetite. Forty-four years I waited for hands like yours. You have made this the best hunt in a century. Thank you, June. He had my name. No one had my name until midnight. Unless they had never intended me to reach it, The bell tolled again. 11.40, said the great clock in the hall. 20 minutes. The stag's hand closed around my wrist, and it was too strong and too hot. And when I looked at him, I understood at last that the one person who had spent all night trying to save me was one of the things I had spent all night building the cage for. Now, he said, will you run?