The Gateway Trackers Books 3 & 4

by E. E. Holmes

  “Here, let me show you,” Dan said. He swiveled his chair around and punched a few keys on his keyboard. The largest monitor right in front of us lit up with a camera shot of the first floor. “This camera angle is the widest one we’ve got,” he said, turning and pointing to the furthest corner of the room, up near the ceiling. “We wanted to cover as much area as possible in a single shot. That way, if we catch a sound or a movement on a different camera or recorder, we can pinpoint it on the bigger image.”

  I watched for a few moments. I could see Iggy on one side of the room, Oscar on the other, along with a number of subtle disturbances in the air that I knew were all the others would be able to see of the spirits that wandered the space.

  “Maybe, if you go back through the footage—you know, speed it up, slow it down, whatever—you might see a bigger pattern emerge,” Dan suggested.

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Yeah, that might help. Thanks, Dan.”

  “No problem,” Dan said. “I’m going to take a break, stretch my legs. Are you good manning the table here for a few minutes?”

  “Sure,” I said, barely listening. I was already fiddling with the monitor. After trying a few knobs, I was able to figure out how to rewind the footage back to the beginning of the night. I started watching.

  At first, nothing leapt out at me. I tried speeding the footage up, watching it at double, and then quadruple speed.

  “Wait…” I muttered to myself. I rewound again, and restarted it, playing it as fast as it would go. It was then I realized that the spirits were not randomly wandering the room at all. They were wandering along very clearly defined paths, over and over again.

  And what was more, I realized with a start, Iggy had inadvertently marked out the paths himself, when he put all his taped “X’s” on the floor. I watched for a few more minutes just to be sure that I wasn’t misreading the patterns, but the longer I watched, the clearer it became. I jumped up from the table and jogged over to Iggy, who was conducting a thermal sweep of the staircase.

  “Iggy, can I borrow your roll of tape for a minute?” I asked him in a whisper.

  “Sure kid, knock yourself out,” he said, barely looking up from the screen. He reached down, unhooked the tape from a carabiner clip on his belt, and tossed it to me. I managed to catch it by the tips of my fingers.

  Working quickly, I started in the middle of the room with the first “X” and taped a long, straight line right out to a stretch of wall between two display cases by the front door. Then I repeated the process, taping long lines out to the walls. After a few minutes, I stepped back to admire my handiwork. I had created what looked like a massive spider web that stretched over the entire space, so that we all appeared like insects caught in the threads.

  Dan emerged from the bathroom and stopped dead in his tracks. “What the hell is this, arts and crafts time?” he asked, staring around in bewilderment.

  “Shut up, I’m trying to figure something out here,” I said, shooing him away. He shrugged and shuffled back to his table.

  I stood at the spot in the middle of the room where the threads of the web converged, and stared down along the first tape line. At the end of it, hanging on the wall, were two portraits in small, glass cases. I turned a few degrees and looked down along the next line, and found myself looking at another portrait, similar in size, and also in a glass-fronted case. I turned again. And again. And again. And every time I turned, I followed the tape line to find myself staring at yet another portrait. I spun around again and counted them. There were fifteen of them in all.

  I walked along the first tape line again and stopped right in front of the portraits, shining my flashlight upon them. A grim-faced man stared out from the glass, which made me feel like I was peeking through a window at him. He was dressed in a long black robe, like some kind of judge, and his hands were folded magisterially on his lap. I could see nothing unusual about him at all, until the glint of the flashlight shone upon his eyes.

  His silvery eyes.

  I leapt back from the picture with a gasp.

  “Jess? You okay? You catch something over there?” Oscar asked.

  “No, I… uh… no, it was nothing,” I stammered. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel the beat of it against my ribcage. I took a tentative step back toward the picture, wondering—even hoping—that it had perhaps been a trick of the light. I looked at the portrait from every angle, shining the light at it, then across it, then shutting it off completely to squint at the image in the dull glow of the other equipment.

  There was no doubt. The man in the portrait had silver eyes.

  “Okay,” I whispered under my breath. “Okay. It doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means. This picture is old and faded. Maybe there’s a perfectly ordinary explanation here.”

  I followed the next tape line to the next stretch of wall, where two portraits hung side by side. I examined them quickly. Both men. Both in black robes. Both with silvery eyes. Line by line I followed the threads of my makeshift web and found silver-eyed portraits waiting for me at every turn. By the time I had finished, my breath was coming in sharp, frantic bursts. I felt trapped, caged in, surrounded.

  “Jess? Are you all right?”

  I whirled around to find Iggy standing right behind me. His face was full of concern.

  “I… yeah… I just… I just realized something,” I said between gasps.

  “Do you want to get some air? You look kinda… green,” he said.

  “No, I don’t need… I mean… I need to get out of here,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I just—”

  “No, I mean I need to leave. These portraits… I’ve just realized… I need to show them to Shriya.”

  Iggy frowned. “Shriya? You mean the owner? But isn’t she like, a hundred miles away by now at some auction?”

  “Yeah. It doesn’t matter. This is important. I’ll just… I’m going to drive out there.”

  Iggy was protesting, but I wasn’t listening. I was staring around for a box. My eyes fell on a stack of them sticking out of a shelf in the back room. I seized one and circled the room, carefully unhooking every silver-eyed portrait from the picture wire on the walls and laying them gingerly inside the box. As soon as I closed the lid I felt an almost seismic shift in the spirit energy in the room, like the twanging of the world’s largest elastic band.

  “What are you doing with those?” Iggy asked, utterly bewildered now.

  I took a deep breath and faced him, trying to look and sound completely in control of the situation. “Shriya really wanted to know what was causing the hauntings. It’s these portraits, I know it. So, I’m going to bring them to her so she can tell me everything she can about them.”

  “And you need to do that right now? In the middle of the night?” Iggy asked. “Why don’t you just call her? Or wait until morning?”

  “I… can’t,” I finished lamely. “It’s, uh… a sensitive thing. I’m just picking up really bad vibes from these portraits. I want to get them out of here. You guys can hold down the fort for a couple more hours, right?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, of course we can, but…” Iggy began, looking rather helpless.

  “Great. I’ll call you guys in a little bit,” I said, pulling my jacket from the hook on the wall and tucking it under my arm with the box. “Have fun!”

  And, leaving them all staring after me like I’d suddenly announced I was going to the moon, I shut the door behind me.

  “Ouch!”

  I looked up and realized with another jolt of surprise that I had walked right into Catriona.

  “Catriona! What are you doing here?” I squeaked.

  “Getting hip-checked into a wall, apparently,” she replied dryly, rubbing at her shoulder. “Where the hell are you running off to?”

  “I asked you first.”

  She sighed heavily. “I was in the city working a lead on Phoebe’s attack, and I remembered this… uh… little project was going down tonight.
Thought I’d stop by and see what it is that these cute little ghost hunters do.”

  “The cute ghost hunters are inside, but this little project has just turned into a full-blown, five-alarm emergency,” I told her.

  Her smirk slid off her face. “What do you mean? What’s wrong?”

  “If you want me to explain, I’ll have to do it on the way,” I said, fumbling with my cell phone. “I’ve got to convince a cab to drive me out into the middle of nowhere, so if you want to hear the story, you’ll have to come along.”

  “But what story are you—” she began.

  “Necromancers.”

  She stared at me, the color draining from her face. “Forget the cab,” she said bluntly. “I’m driving.”

  42

  A Familiar Face

  CATRIONA GUIDED ME through a short, slightly hysterical explanation of what I’d found. Her methodical questions seemed to bring some order to the chaos of my thoughts. I calmed down enough to text Hannah and update her on where I was going. After that, neither of us spoke much during the four-hour drive. I didn’t mind the silence. I was too intent on getting where we needed to go. I clutched the shoebox full of photos tightly in my lap, as though it were a living creature that might, at any moment, make an attempt at a wild escape. Meanwhile, my mind was swimming, trying to make sense of what I had just discovered.

  There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that the portraits were somehow linked to what had happened to Flavia and Phoebe. The men in the images had the exact same eyes—the same eyes, in fact, that I had seen on the Necromancers when they attacked us four years ago. The same eyes that taunted and haunted me out of Neil Caddigan’s face. I knew that I was not making a mistake—I could not look into the faces of these portraits without feeling the same cold, creeping sense of dread. The men in these portraits were Necromancers. I knew it.

  What I couldn’t understand was how these portraits came to be in Pickwick’s History of Photography, and how they could be connected to what was happening now. I had always known, from the moment I saw what had happened to Flavia, that there was a chance that the Necromancers were involved in her attack. The threat deepened, became more real, with Phoebe’s attack and Bertie’s death. But never, until this moment had I felt such tangible, physical fear.

  What was the connection? What did Pickwick’s, and these old photographs, and the recent spate of attacks have in common and what did it all mean?

  Catriona’s cool, unruffled voice broke into my thoughts. She may as well have been the voice of the GPS, so neutral was her tone. “Your museum owner may very well still be asleep. It’s just barely seven o’clock. Do you know which building she’s in?” she asked as we pulled into the parking lot of a quaint country bed and breakfast, which consisted of a farm house, several cottages, and a converted barn.

  I squinted through the window and frowned. “No. But we might be able to… wait, I see her car right over there!”

  I pointed frantically at a large blue van that was always parked in the narrow alleyway behind the museum. As Catriona swung the car around and drove toward it, Shriya appeared beside it, shifting a small cardboard box onto her hip so that she could pull the back door open.

  Catriona steered our car smoothly into a spot between two trees, and I had the door open before she’d even thrown the thing into park.

  “Shriya!” I called over to her. She pulled her head out of the back of the van, looked around curiously for a moment, and then spotted me jogging toward her. Her mouth fell open.

  “Jess! What are you doing here? Did something… is everything all right at the museum?” Shriya asked, her voice sounding more panicked by the second.

  “Don’t worry, the museum is fine,” I told her, crunching to a stop beside her on the gravel and trying to smile. “Sorry to surprise you like this. The investigation went great. Better than great, in fact: I think I’ve found the source of your haunting.”

  “That’s brilliant, but… why did you have to come all this way out here just to tell me? I’d have been back tomorrow night. I hear these are pretty handy inventions as well,” Shriya said, pulling the phone from her pocket and giving it a little shake.

  Catriona arrived beside me just in time to chuckle at Shriya’s joke. I opened my mouth to introduce her, casting around wildly for a false identity, when she stepped forward smoothly, putting out a hand and smiling in a much friendlier way than I’d ever seen her manage before.

  “Hi, there,” she said, in a perfect Boston accent. “Nice to meet you, my name is Susan Proctor. I’m one of Jess’s producers. I help out with the narrating and the editing for the web series.”

  Shriya swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, thrusting out a hand and shaking Catriona’s without a moment’s hesitation. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

  “And you,” Catriona replied. “That’s a great little museum you’ve got there. Should make for a fascinating episode.”

  “Thanks,” Shriya said with a smile, before turning back to me. “So, what’s this then, about finding the source of the haunting?”

  “Can we find someplace to sit down?” I asked. “This will probably take a few minutes.”

  “Sure, let’s head back to my room. We can talk there,” Shriya said. She pushed the box she had been carrying further into the back of the van. I spotted a large framed portrait and a black metal contraption that looked like a movie camera.

  “Good auction so far?” I asked her as we trudged up a walkway toward a small guest cottage with a blue door.

  “Excellent,” Shriya said. “My grandfather tried for years to get his hands on a portrait by Julia Margaret Cameron, but was always outbid. I won one in the first auction of the day today, so I’m chuffed. It was the whole reason I wanted to come. It will be a really important addition to the collection. It’s likely people will visit the museum just to see it.”

  “That’s great,” I said, as enthusiastically as I could with my heart still pounding in my chest. I felt like every silvery pair of eyes in the box I was carrying was staring up at me like sentient things.

  Shriya fumbled for a moment with the key in the lock, then opened the door and ushered us inside and over to a little sitting room. The place had all the charm of a classic English cottage, which on any other day I might have appreciated, but which now I ignored as I put the box down on the coffee table and took a seat.

  “So, what’s all this about, then?” Shriya asked, and she looked serious again. “What couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”

  “Do you remember me telling you, when we first discussed the possibility of ghosts, that the building itself could be the cause of the haunting?” I asked her.

  “How could I forget?” Shriya half-laughed. “I thought I was going to have to burn the place to the ground, or else sell it.”

  “Well, the good news is that the building itself has nothing to do with it,” I said.

  Shriya raised her eyebrows, looking from me to Catriona and back again. “You’re kidding! That’s brilliant, then! Unless…” her eyes grew wide. “Oh bollocks, it’s not me, is it? Did some ghost walk up to one of your microphones and tell you he was stalking me from the grave, or something like that?”

  Catriona laughed, shaking her head. “We don’t often get evidence like that,” she said.

  “No, don’t worry, it’s not you either,” I told Shriya quickly. “Actually, after extensive… uh… analysis of the evidence, we were able to determine that the spirits were attracted to these.”

  I pushed the little box toward her and she opened it. She looked up, eyes wide. “The daguerreotypes?”

  “The what?” The word sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  “Daguerreotypes. That’s what these are.”

  “Oh. Well, yeah,” I said. “You had them hung up all over the museum. For some reason, the spirits were drawn right to them, and were wandering all over the museum.”

  “You’re joking!” Shriya whispered, looking down
at the little portraits with a renewed curiosity. “How odd! What do you suppose they find so interesting about them?”

  “I was hoping you would know the answer to that,” I said. “What can you tell me about them?”

  “Daguerreotypes were, for all intents and purposes, the earliest form of commercially available photography,” Shriya said, holding one up and examining it. “Named for Louis Daguerre, the bloke who invented it. You see, photography wasn’t done on paper, the way we think of photographs nowadays. It was a very delicate and complicated chemical process.”

  “What did they use then, if it’s not paper?” I asked. “It looks like metal of some kind.”

  “It is metal,” Shriya said, handing the little portrait to me and pointing out the features as she spoke. “Copper, to be more precise. You can see a bit of the copper color here at the edges of this one, where it’s aged. It’s a copper plate, coated in silver, and polished like hell until it was as smooth and reflective as a mirror. Then, the plate would be exposed to iodine or bromine fumes in a darkened room, which would make it light-sensitive. Then the plate was placed into a camera obscura—”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “It was the first camera,” Shriya said. “We’ve got an original one back at the museum. Well, not an actual original one—not one of Daguerre’s. But it’s still a very early example, used by one of the first Englishmen to adopt the process. It’s much less impressive-looking than you’d think—little more than a wooden box with a lens cap on it.”

  “That’s right,” I said, nodding. “I remember seeing it now.”

  “Anyway, the plate would be protected from the light until it was placed inside the camera obscura, see? Then, when the subject was ready, the photographer would remove the lens cap and expose the plate to the light. This could take a few seconds, or many minutes, depending on the brightness of the light. There would still be no image visible on the plate yet,” Shriya said, her enthusiasm for the subject becoming clearer with every word, “until it was developed by exposing the plate to mercury fumes inside a specially made developing box.”