Darkroom

by Graham Masterton

  Delilah shook her head. ‘He had witnesses who swore that at the time the fire was started he was playing cards at the home of A. T. Peebles, the hardware millionaire, and two other men. The sheriff decided that because the stable hands were Mexican their evidence was probably unreliable, and that the Stebbings’ house had more than likely been struck by a freak bolt of lightning. Their deaths were officially entered in the county records as an act of God.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ said Jim. ‘That’s first-class historical research. We’ll have to check if “Mr Vain” was our Mr Vane, won’t we? but it sounds very likely.’ Especially since the Stebbings had been burned to death by ‘a freak bolt of lightning’, he thought.

  He circled the classroom again. ‘Anybody else have anything?’

  David had been jabbing his hand up in the air for the past five minutes. ‘These, sir. Look, sir. Printouts of some of Robert H. Vane’s pictures, from the Internet.’

  ‘Now these I have to see,’ said Jim. David handed him four sheets of paper and he held them up in front of the class, so that everybody could see them. ‘A view of Lake Berryessa, 1851. Looks mountainous, doesn’t it, and bleak? But there are two figures in the foreground here, both of them wearing hoods over their heads, and hats, so they look like a couple of bee-keepers. Any ideas who they could be, anybody? A portrait of Two Noses, the Dagueno chief with the skull of his dead grandfather, 1852. You can see why they call him Two Noses, can’t you? But he doesn’t look too happy, does he? And what’s this? Funeral at Placerville, 1854, of the gold-prospector John Keating, complete with horse and carriage and brass band. And look at this! A self-portrait, taken in 1856, in his own studio in Los Muertes.’

  Now, for the first time, Jim saw the face of the man whose portrait was hanging over his fireplace. Robert H. Vane was standing in the oddly angled corner of a wooden building, with a calico shade drawn halfway down. He was wearing a black frock coat with a long watch chain and his arms were folded. He was thin-faced, almost cadaverous, with eyes that were so deep-set they appeared to be nothing but black holes. He was staring directly at the camera lens as if he were trying to intimidate anybody who ever had the impertinence to look at him, or to wonder who he was, and what he had done.

  ‘That is one seriously creepy dude,’ said George.

  And Jim thought: if ever I saw a man who looked capable of burning people to ashes, this has to be him.

  Nine

  Most of the rest of the class had found out odd bits and pieces about Robert H. Vane, but the more Jim learned about him, the more shadowy Robert H. Vane seemed to become, because no two descriptions of his life and his behavior seemed to tally. Several different accounts had spoken of a ‘chilly demeanored, black-dressed figure, like a mortician’ and many people who had met him seemed to have been deeply frightened of him, for no accountable reason. One woman said that ‘the night after meeting him, I had a nightmare in which my mouth was filled with crawling cockroaches.’

  He had traveled from one settlement to another, taking pictures of families and weddings and scenery, and any other oddity that took his eye. There were several hints that he might have had a way with women, although he had never taken more than two or three pictures of any one woman in particular, and he always appeared to have traveled alone.

  But for all those who found him ‘disturbing’ and ‘sinister’ there were almost as many who thought he was a shining inspiration. Father Juan Perez, of the Santa Juanita mission near San Diego, had written in his diary that Robert H. Vane seemed to ‘carry with him the power of divine conversion.’

  Mr Vane visited and made daguerrotypes of many of our local families and settlers, and I observed that after his visits those who had posed for his pictures seemed to be almost saintly in their goodness and their generosity, and that many remarked how greatly their temperament had improved, as if all the badness had been taken out of them.

  Pinky, of all people, had found out about the Dagueno Tragedy. ‘It’s in this website I found on the Internet called The Native Peoples of Southern California In Pictures, and it’s got, like, photographs of all the Indian tribes that died out. Some of them got extinct even before anybody got the chance to get to know them, because the first explorers were carrying all kinds of diseases that the Indians never had before, like the flu and stuff, and the Indians didn’t have no immunity to them. So they died, like, you know, flies.

  ‘Anyhow, this website has pictures of the Dagueno Indians that Robert H. Vane took. It says that the Daguenos were really hostile before he went to visit them, but that afterwards they became one of the friendliest tribes out of all of them. But about a month later they attacked the nearest white settlement by surprise and they killed everybody – sixty-five men, women and children – and cut their ears off and pulled out their intestines and everything. So the white settlers got up a posse and went to the Dagueno village and wiped out the whole tribe. It says the Daguenos didn’t even try to fight back, which was weird, wasn’t it?’

  Jim said, ‘Yes it was. Very weird.’

  Even weirder – why had Robert H. Vane covered his head in a black cloth, in mourning for the Daguenos? Had he somehow felt responsible for what had happened to them? And what exactly had happened to them? Why hadn’t they fought back?

  Mysteriouser and mysteriouser, as Alice might have said.

  Philip had found out what sort of camera Robert H. Vane had used – two wooden boxes with one sliding inside of the other – but of course it was Edward who had researched all the technical details about daguerrotypes.

  ‘It was 1833,’ he announced dramatically. ‘It was in France.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jim. ‘It was 1833, and it was in France.’

  ‘I was just setting the scene,’ Edward explained. ‘There, in 1833, in France, in his shabby studio, the highly-talented, little-known artist Louis Daguerre made a discovery that was going to change the world.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Shadow complained. ‘His publicist?’

  Edward ignored him. ‘Louis Daguerre discovered that if he coated a copper plate with silver, and then exposed the silver surface to iodine vapor, it became sensitive to light. So he put the plate inside a totally dark box, right, and then he let the sunlight shine into the box for a few minutes, through a tiny hole. After that, he fumed the plate with mercury vapor, so that the mercury amalgamated with the silver, and what do you think he had managed to do?’

  ‘Choke himself?’ Randy suggested.

  ‘No … he had made himself a visible picture. A photograph! All he had to do then was stop the picture from fading away by fixing it with a strong salt solution. In a very short time, this method of taking pictures swept the world, and photographers were still taking daguerrotypes until 1885 when George Eastman invented the roll film and the Kodak camera.’

  Brenda said, ‘I didn’t understand any of that.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t all that difficult,’ Jim put in. ‘Imagine a mirror inside a closed box, but then you make a small hole in the box so that the light can shine in. The mirror would show you a reflection of what was outside, wouldn’t it? Louis Daguerre simply found a way of fixing the reflection on to the silver so that it stayed there. In fact, in the early days, cameras were called “mirrors with memory.”’

  ‘That’s why a lot of people didn’t like having their pictures taken,’ said Edward.

  ‘How’s that?’ Jim asked him.

  ‘I looked up all this cool occult stuff about daguerrotypes. Some superstitious people refused to have their pictures taken because daguerrotype plates were coated with silver, and silver is so pure that it reflects all of the evil inside of you.’

  ‘Evil, man?’ said Roosevelt. ‘Speak for yourself. I am so damn good I have a different halo for every day of the week.’

  ‘Everybody has evil inside of them,’ Edward insisted. ‘Otherwise, we wouldn’t know the difference between good and bad, would we? Every time you look in a mirror or a shiny silver tray, you can see yo
ur evil self looking back at you. The thing is, though, once you stop looking in a mirror or a shiny silver tray, your evil self vanishes back inside your good self. Now you see it, now you don’t. But if your evil image got fixed, like it does in a daguerrotype, all of your badness would stay trapped in the silver, for ever.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t people want that to happen to them?’ asked Brenda. ‘I mean, it would be good, wouldn’t it, to have all the evil taken out of you?’

  Edward shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t survive for five minutes, would you, without some evil in you? If somebody mugged you, you’d never fight back, in case you hurt them. Or if somebody killed your kid brother, you’d forgive them, and nobody would ever get punished.’

  He looked around at the class, and he sounded almost evangelical. ‘Silver is so pure that it can capture the blackest part of your soul … like, Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. And werewolves can be killed with silver bullets, because the bullet absorbs all the hairy evil in them, and just leaves the good, non-hairy bit.’

  Jim looked at him with one eyebrow raised. ‘And where, exactly, did you find out all of that baloney?’

  ‘The Twilight Zone,’ said Edward, unabashed. ‘It was an episode called Silver Lining.’

  ‘And you think that The Twilight Zone is a reliable source of mythological information?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. But all myths are made up, aren’t they?’

  ‘OK, good point,’ Jim agreed. ‘It’s just that a myth made up by a 1960s TV writer doesn’t have the same sociological resonance as a myth that’s been passed down by word of mouth since biblical times.’

  ‘I think Edward’s myth about silver is true,’ said Pinky. ‘Like, there’s so many Indians in those pictures who are covering up their faces or looking away. I mean, why did they do that? Did they know something we’ve forgotten about?’

  Jim was leaving the classroom at the end of the second lesson when Walter the janitor came past, carrying four stacking chairs.

  ‘Mr Rook … I was just about to brew up a pot of coffee. You want to join me?’

  ‘I … ah … sure. Let me help you with these chairs.’

  They walked out of the main building and across to the college gymnasium. Walter’s ‘office’ was a lean-to building up against the gymnasium wall, and it was crowded with cleaning materials and brushes and vacuum cleaners and odd pieces of shelving and broken desks. In the center of this disorder was a battered old desk, a swivel chair and a big brown leather couch with half of its orange foam stuffing bulging out.

  Walter put down his chairs and Jim stacked his on top of them. ‘Thanks for that,’ said Walter. ‘I’m not getting any younger, and I can’t tote stuff around the way I used to.’

  ‘You and me both,’ said Jim.

  ‘You – there’s plenty of years in you yet, Mr Rook.’

  ‘I know. It’s not the years I’m worried about, it’s the way I’m going to live them.’

  Walter opened a blue ceramic coffee jar and spooned three generous helpings of ground coffee into a glass cafetière. ‘I don’t believe in no percolation,’ he said. ‘Ruins the taste.’

  Jim sat on the couch. It made a loud farting noise and he sank down almost two feet.

  Walter said, ‘You’ve been through some difficult times, Mr Rook, from what I hear.’

  ‘Difficult, yes. Huh! You could call them that.’

  ‘So how are you making out?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not very well. I get up, I come to college, I go home. I feel like a broken jug, if you want to know the truth. I need some Crazy Glue for the soul.’

  Walter poured boiling water into the cafetière. His office was soon filled with the strong aroma of arabica. ‘What you need is other people.’

  ‘Maybe. The question is, do other people need me? I don’t really think I’m such good company, just at the moment.’

  Walter opened the top drawer of his desk, and took out a well-creased envelope. ‘You take a look at these, Mr Rook. This is a party that my family held for me, after my Gloria’s funeral. You wouldn’t think that I’d just buried my wife, the only woman who ever meant anything to me, my life companion. Everybody laughing and singing and having a good time. And the reason for that is, life is a happy thing, despite all its painfulness, and all its losses, and you might as well celebrate what you got, and forget about what you ain’t.’

  Jim took the photographs and looked through them. Walter was right. It looked more like a birthday party than a wake. A birthday party. An end, but a new beginning.

  ‘They’re good,’ he said. ‘They’re very … cheerful.’

  He was handing the envelope back to Walter when it fell open and a shower of negatives fell out on to the floor. ‘I’m sorry … here, don’t worry, I’ve got them.’

  He picked them up and tidied them. He held one of them up to the light, to make sure he had it the right way round. It was a picture of Walter with his arm around one of his sisters. Walter, with a white face and black hair.

  He slid the negatives back into the envelope. White face. Black hair. Just like the person who had been seen at the Tubbs’ beach house, on the night that Bobby and Sara had been burned to death, except the other way around. Black face. White hair.

  ‘Are you OK, Mr Rook?’ asked Walter. ‘How about a chocolate-chip cookie?’

  ‘No thanks, Walter. Just the coffee.’

  ‘You mind what I told you, Mr Rook. Celebrate what you got. Forget what you ain’t got. Otherwise, you going to be miserable for the rest of your days.’

  It was almost seven thirty in the evening by the time Jim had finished marking work and planning for the next day’s lessons. The sky was cloudless and clear except for a pink vapor trail in the shape of a question mark, and a warm wind was blowing from the south-west. He was halfway across the parking lot when a voice called out, ‘Jim!’

  He stopped and turned, shielding his eyes against the sun. Karen came toward him, carrying her books in her arms. She was wearing a flowery blouse and a trim blue skirt and she looked the same as she did all those years ago, when he had first realized he was in love with her.

  ‘You’ve been avoiding me.’ She smiled.

  ‘Of course not. I’ve had so much catching-up to do, that’s all.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said sarcastically. ‘So, tell me … is it good to be back?’

  He pulled a face to show her that he hadn’t really decided yet. She kept her eyes on him, still smiling.

  ‘Vinnie tells me that you’re living in his uncle’s apartment.’

  ‘That’s right. The Benandanti Building, in Venice. Jesus – it’s like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. The Fall of the House of Usher, only spookier. You must call by and pay me a visit sometime.’

  ‘And Tibbles? You still have Tibbles?’

  ‘Yes, I still have Tibbles. “That darned cat.”’

  There was a lengthy silence. Jim realized he was tugging at his left earlobe, which was always a sign that he was tense. He stopped doing it immediately, and flapped his arm as if to say, oh well, that’s life, what can you do?

  Karen said, ‘I heard what happened in Washington. Well, some of it.’

  ‘Yes. It was … tragic.’ He didn’t want to say any more. Sometimes it was better to leave things alone for a while, let them settle. In his mind, he heard a split-second blurt of screaming, and saw blood spraying like an action painting.

  ‘You’re coming to the funeral?’ Karen asked him. ‘Bobby Tubbs and Sara Miller?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Maybe we could go together, if that’s OK with you.’

  ‘That would be good. Are you … what about Perry?’

  ‘Perry?’ She looked genuinely bewildered. ‘You mean Perry Ritts? What about him?’

  ‘You’re not … seeing him or anything?’

  Karen laughed, that bright, sharp laugh like a window pane breaking. ‘I hope you think I have better taste than that!’

  ‘Oh, w
ell, sure. Of course I did. I was only kidding. I saw you together yesterday, you know, and he looked kind of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, so I just thought …’

  Karen brushed her hair away from her face. ‘I know what you thought, Jim. You don’t have to find the words for it.’

  He stayed where he was, his hand still raised against the sun. LIGHT SNARETH THE SOUL. Karen came up to him, stood on tippy-toe, and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘What was that poem you were always quoting me?’ she asked him.

  He knew which poem she meant, but he didn’t say anything. He wanted to see if she could remember it.

  ‘“O who can be, both moth and flame?”’ she whispered.

  ‘“Whom can we love?”’ Jim continued. ‘“I thought I knew the truth. Of grief I died, but no one knew my death.”’

  Karen looked at him seriously. ‘You’re not dead yet, Jim. Of grief, or anything else. And sometimes there’s no shame in coming back. Sometimes we need to come back, to remember who we are, and why people loved us.’

  He made himself spaghetti Bolognese for supper. He considered himself to be an expert at spaghetti Bolognese – he always splashed in plenty of Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco sauce and stirred in spoonfuls of mixed herbs and fifty-five grindings of fresh black pepper, before simmering it for forty-five minutes with two glasses of strong red Italian wine. Apart from hating garlic, Tibbles didn’t think much of Tabasco sauce, either, so he gave her a bowlful of raw ground beef with cat biscuits mixed into it. She was already starting to sprout some bristly patches of fur, but they made her look scruffier than ever.

  When he had finished eating he went into the living room and switched on the television. He didn’t feel like watching CSI or Law and Order or The Dead Zone, and in the end he found himself looking at an old Discovery program about a man who had traveled across America in the 1900s, visiting fairgrounds, and compiling a catalog of all the freaks he had could find.

  ‘He found Hairy Mary the Baboon Woman, and Kaliban the Human Toad, as well as the Boy With No Brain, who could shine a strong light through his skull and show that his head was empty. One of the strangest was the Negative Man, who was touring with Forepaugh and Sells through Illinois and Idaho and other mid-Western states. The Negative Man had to keep his head covered with a cloth during the day, because he was so sensitive to sunlight; and his show tent was lit only by a red lamp, like a photographer’s darkroom. When he removed the cloth from his head, which he would do for the entrance fee of two bits, his face appeared utterly black, while his eyes were white, like a photographic negative. The Negative Man was arrested in 1909 after a series of arson attacks in Indiana, in which seven people died. He escaped from custody in Crawfordsville and was never seen or heard of again.’