Darkroom

by Graham Masterton

  ‘I don’t know if that will do it. Even if you burn it – well, Vane’s spirit could find someplace else to hide. Some other picture, maybe.’

  ‘That’s a risk I’ll have to take, isn’t it?’

  Eleanor came up to him, very close. She licked the tip of her finger and wiped a smudge of smoke from his cheek. It was a startlingly intimate gesture, the kind of thing that mothers do for their children, or women do for their lovers.

  ‘You’re the only one,’ she breathed. ‘You’re the hero, you’re the knight errant who has to slay the dragon. Nobody else can do it.’

  ‘I still don’t understand.’

  ‘You will, I promise you.’

  She kissed him on the lips, very lightly, and then went back to her apartment. As she walked away, he couldn’t help noticing the way her silky black robe slid over her buttocks. He stared very hard at a bronze statuette of Pan, who was dancing on one of the side tables, playing his pipes.

  ‘What do you think about that, Pan? Was that a come-on, or what?’

  Tibbles came back in and stared at him jealously.

  Jim left the windows wide open for the rest of the night. By the time the sun came up, and gilded all the dust on the living-room drapes, the smell of smoke had almost completely faded away. He sat up straight, stretched, and groaned. He had stayed all night in his throne-like chair, right in front of the fireplace, and he felt as if his neck and knees had been held in clamps. He could have slept in the second bedroom, but the big pink comforter was damp and smelled funny. Not only that, he had wanted to keep guard on the painting of Robert H. Vane.

  He shuffled through to the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. The greenish light in the bathroom was less than flattering at the best of times, but today he looked as if he had been floating in a pond for a week. He splashed cold water on his face and wet his hair so that he could brush it into a casually messed-up kind of look.

  ‘You’re the knight errant,’ he said. ‘You’re the hero. Only you can slay the dragon – or, in this case, something halfway between a camera tripod and a human being.’

  His reflection looked back at him, and said, ‘You’re losing it, dude.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ he retorted. ‘Look at your bed. You’re trying to tell me that didn’t happen?’

  ‘No. But that doesn’t mean that you have to get yourself involved, does it? If I were you, I’d look for someplace else to live, and do it today.’

  ‘But I like this apartment. It’s cool. And it’s enormous. And it’s cheap.’

  He left the bathroom and went into the kitchen. He opened the fridge and took out a giant-size Minute Maid orange juice. He gulped it straight from the carton, and managed to pour half of it down his chest. ‘Sorry, Mr Dickens,’ he said, mopping his T-shirt with a wet cloth.

  ‘You’re apologizing to your T-shirt?’

  ‘Karen gave it to me.’

  ‘I see. Is that why you couldn’t keep your eyes off Eleanor’s ass?’

  ‘Eleanor’s attractive. So what?’

  ‘So why is she maneuvering you into this knight errant business? Like, what’s really going on here? Do you really think you ended up in this apartment by chance?’

  ‘What are you talking about? Vinnie’s uncle died and Vinnie wanted somebody to take it over, that’s all. He couldn’t have planned it, could he?’

  ‘But Bobby and Sara … the way they died, cremated in their bed? And your bed, last night? You would have been cremated, too, if you hadn’t woken up. Come on, Jim, wake up!’

  He switched on the kettle to make himself some coffee. He was right. He needed to find out what was really happening here. He would take the painting down to Julia Fox at the auction house, and then he would go talk to Vinnie – and Lieutenant Harris, too. It was time to find out what kind of a vase he was supposed to be re-assembling, and who was giving him the pieces, and why.

  He rang Mr Mariti’s doorbell, down in the basement. There was no reply, but he could hear classical music playing somewhere inside his apartment – Ruslan and Ludmila, by Mikhail Glinka. Good to know he has taste, thought Jim, but I wish he’d answer his goddamned doorbell. He rang it again, and shouted, ‘Mr Mariti!’

  The door opened almost immediately and Mr Mariti appeared. He was wearing a pale-green shirt, a dark-green necktie, socks, but no pants. His pants were folded neatly over his arm.

  ‘Sir? Your apartment isn’t on fire again?’ Jim looked down at his legs and then he looked down at his legs, too. ‘Oh. Scusi. I press my pants.’

  ‘I just want to say sorry for all the disturbance last night,’ said Jim. He handed Mr Mariti two fifty-dollar bills. ‘I hope that should cover any damage.’

  The bills disappeared like a conjuring trick. ‘No problem, sir. If there is anything else …’

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes, there is. I was wondering if you could help me to carry a painting downstairs. It’s a little too heavy for me to manage on my own.’

  ‘Of course, sir. Give me two minutes.’

  When he saw the painting, however, Mr Mariti looked very dubious. ‘Mr Boschetto say this painting must always hang here,’ he said.

  ‘Mr Boschetto is no longer with us.’

  ‘Of course, but he was very insistent. He ask me one time: “Guido, what do you think of this painting?” and I say to him, “Mr Boschetto, you want my frank opinion, it gives me the willies.”’

  ‘That’s the reason I want to get rid of it. It gives me the willies, too.’

  ‘But Mr Boschetto, he say, this painting must always hang here, so that whoever lives in this apartment can watch it.’

  ‘He said “watch it” – not “look at it”?’

  Mr Mariti nodded emphatically. ‘He say “watch it”.’

  Jim thought about that for a moment. Then he said, ‘Mr Mariti, do you want to know what really happened here last night?’

  Mr Mariti took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Right, then. Let’s just get this damn thing down, shall we? I’ll be glad to see the back of it.’

  Julia Fox wasn’t very impressed by the painting, either. When two of her assistants lifted it out of Jim’s car and carried it into her shiny, brightly lit display room on Rodeo Drive, she stood back and made seven different expressions of bewilderment.

  ‘I don’t have any doubt at all that this was painted by Gordon Welkin,’ she said. ‘Look in the corner – you can see his initials G.S.W. Gordon Shelby Welkin.’

  ‘Is that good?’

  ‘It’s good as far as it goes. Welkin was one of the finest West Coast portrait painters of the mid-nineteenth century. But I ask myself why.’

  Jim stood very close to her, trying to see the painting the way she saw it. She was very tall, nearly six feet, with her blonde hair swept into a French pleat, and she wore a classic light-gray suit and very high heels. Jim’s nose only came up to her shoulder pad.

  ‘You ask yourself why,’ he said after a while. ‘Do you mind if I ask you why you ask yourself why?’

  ‘Why should a portrait painter want to paint a man with a black cloth covering his head?’

  ‘Well, it says on the label that Robert H. Vane was in mourning for the Dagueno tribe, after they were all massacred in … what was it? 1853.’

  ‘All the same, it’s so strange, quite unlike Welkin. He would have wanted to show the man’s grief in his face. His fellow artists said that he could capture a person’s soul.’

  ‘Maybe he did capture his soul. But maybe he didn’t like the way it looked.’

  Julia stepped closer. ‘I can’t understand it. The painting tells us nothing at all. It’s like a closed book. Yet look at the way he’s handled the drapery! Look at the man’s hand! You can almost see him breathing, under his cloth.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jim, uneasily. ‘I felt that, too.’

  ‘I can auction it for you,’ said Julia. ‘However, I doubt if it will raise as much as a conventional Gordon Welkin. A local ga
llery may be interested, for its historical value. But this is not really the kind of picture that anybody would want to hang over their fireplace, is it?’

  ‘You don’t know how right you are, Julia. Please, just take it off my hands. If you get a hundred for it, I’ll be happy. At least I won’t be out of pocket.’

  When he arrived at college, he found that a lime-green Volkswagen Beetle was parked in the vice-principal’s space, so in the end he had to leave his Lincoln right around the back, next to the overflowing dumpsters. Walking back to the main building, he came across Walter, carrying his box of tools.

  ‘Some usurper has parked in my space,’ he complained.

  ‘The new vice-principal,’ said Walter. ‘She started this morning.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Dr Washington. You’ll like her.’

  Jim stopped, and turned around. ‘Do I detect just the teensiest hint of sarcasm, Walter?’

  ‘Sarcasm, Mr Rook? I think you got the wrong man. I haven’t been sarcastic since Dr Ehrlichman wanted me to paint blue dolphins on the bottom of the pool.’

  Jim went to the staffroom first. He needed to tell Vinnie about the fire, and that he had taken the painting of Robert H. Vane down to the auction room.

  He couldn’t decide if he ought to tell Vinnie about the camera creature. It would probably be better if he didn’t – not yet, anyhow. Vinnie would probably think he was drinking too much, or having a breakdown, and ask him to find someplace else to live. In spite of what had happened last night, he didn’t want to start looking for a new apartment, especially now that the painting had gone. Where would he find anywhere so grand, and so inexpensive? If Eleanor was right, and the painting really contained the soul of Robert H. Vane, then presumably the apartment had now been exorcized, and there would be no more flashes of light or spontaneous fires or tripod-legged beasts crawling into his bedroom.

  He found Karen in the staffroom, trying to force too many books into her embroidered denim shoulder bag, but there was no sign of Vinnie.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How about a coffee?’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t have time, and neither do you. You can probably hear Special Class II from half a mile away. But later, maybe.’

  ‘You seen Vinnie?’

  ‘Vinnie? He’s away at a three-day history seminar. Portland, I think.’

  ‘Oh, OK. He didn’t say anything to me.’

  ‘Everything all right? You look a little … flushed. Have you been overdoing the sunbed?’

  He touched his cheek, where the flash had scorched it. ‘No. I was making cheese on toast and I stood too close to the grill, that’s all.’

  She looked at him narrowly. ‘You’re lying to me, aren’t you?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I can always tell when you’re lying to me, but the funny thing is that I can never tell why. Cheese on toast, I ask you!’

  ‘I guess I don’t want to over-complicate things, that’s all.’

  She slung her bag over her shoulder. ‘I’m not one of your students, Jim. I found out a long time ago how complicated life can be, and how inexplicable, and why lying isn’t worth it.’

  She walked out of the staffroom and left him standing there. She always made him feel as if he were trying to patronize her, and that he underestimated her intelligence. But how could he tell her that his face had been scorched by a hunched half-human creature on stilted legs? She would think he was ready for a straitjacket; and maybe she’d be right.

  Eleven

  On his way to Special Class II, he stopped by the lockers and called Lieutenant Harris on his cellphone.

  Lieutenant Harris sounded harassed. ‘Before you ask, Mr Rook, we haven’t yet identified our suspect. Between you and me, we’re trying to find a more credible witness than Mr Hayward Mitchell. Somebody who wasn’t so inebriated.’

  ‘That’s why I called you, Lieutenant. Something occurred to me. Call it intuition, if you like.’

  ‘Fire away. That’s what I want from you, intuition.’

  ‘Well … it’s about your computer image. Why don’t you try reversing it, so that the suspect’s face is white and his hair is black?’

  There was short pause. Then Lieutenant Harris said, ‘Are you trying to be politically correct or something?’

  ‘No, of course not. It’s just a hunch.’

  ‘Mitchell was pretty damn sure that the suspect was Afro-American.’

  ‘I know. But just try it.’

  ‘OK, why not? I’ll get back to you.’

  Special Class II were in their usual state of exuberance when he walked in the door. Ruby, Vanilla and Sue-Marie were standing together on top of Sue-Marie’s desk, singing ‘The First Cut is the Deepest’ in close harmony, while Shadow was practicing one-handed press-ups and Randy was tossing caramel popcorn at Edward so that it stuck in his hair.

  Jim hung up his coat. Then he went to the chalkboard and wrote LIES.

  Almost at once, the class quietened down. Ruby, Vanilla and Sue-Marie wound up their singing with a high-pitched caterwauling of ‘oh yeeaaahhhh!’ and clambered down from their stage; while Brenda took out her earphones, Delilah put away her copy of Cosmo and George quickly thumbed out one last text message on his cellphone. They didn’t exactly show Jim that they were paying attention. That wouldn’t have been cool. But even though they were all lolling around, they were at least lolling at their own desks, and when they talked to each other, they kept their voices reasonably low, and there was hardly any of that hyena-like laughing, or swearing, or the endless banter that was only one step away from being out-and-out aggression.

  ‘You so ugly, every time you get in the bath, the water jump out.’

  ‘That’s nothing. You so ugly, when you was born, the midwife slap your mother.’

  ‘Today,’ said Jim, as the hubbub died down, ‘today, I want you to teach me how to tell lies.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ said Shadow. ‘You come to college to find out what’s true, don’t you?’

  ‘Maybe you do. But how do you know for sure if something’s true?’

  ‘You don’t,’ said Sue-Marie. ‘You just have to trust people.’

  Jim nodded, and then walked slowly up the aisle. ‘So you believe, for instance, that men have walked on the moon? Just because NASA tells you so?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Edward. ‘All of that moon-landing stuff was done at Universal Studios. A friend of mine knows a guy who knows a guy who made all the moon rocks.’

  ‘So you think it was a lie?’

  ‘Of course it was. We didn’t even have the technology to go to the moon back then.’

  ‘But you can’t prove that it was a lie, any more than Sue-Marie can prove that it was the truth.’

  ‘That’s not the point, is it? Sue-Marie thinks it’s true; I think it was all a hoax. But it really doesn’t matter if it was true or not, just so long as people wanted to believe it.’

  ‘What are you talking about, man?’ asked Roosevelt. ‘You talking in complete riddles.’

  ‘Think about it, dummy! We made the Russians believe that we won the space race, didn’t we, even though we didn’t go no further than Pasadena! We saved ourselves a shitload of money, and nobody had to risk getting killed. In fact, I respect the government a whole lot more for making it up, instead of being dumb enough to try it for real. I mean, what was the point of going to the moon, anyhow? Who gives a shit what it’s made of?’

  Jim smiled. ‘So, when we say something – even if it isn’t true – all that really matters is the effect that it has on other people? And if the effect is generally good, that makes it justifiable?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘What I’m asking you is this: can there be good lies, as well as bad ones?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Edward. ‘Absolutely. I mean, what’s the point of telling the truth if it just gives people grief?’

  ‘OK, then,’ said Jim. ‘I want you all to write down three good
lies – and I want you to be able to tell me why they’re good.’

  Roosevelt put up his hand. ‘I’d really like to do that, sir, but I’m suffering from repetitive strain disorder and I can’t write.’

  ‘You’ve been spanking the monkey too much, that’s your trouble,’ put in Philip.

  ‘Roosevelt, you’re telling me a lie,’ Jim told him. ‘Not only that, it’s a bad lie, not a good one.’

  ‘It’s a good lie for me, sir, if I don’t have to write nothing.’

  ‘I don’t think so. If I believed for one moment that you were genuinely suffering from repetitive strain disorder – which I don’t – I’d send you out to find Walter the janitor so that you could do something useful instead. I understand he’s on his way to unblock the toilets in the girls’ changing rooms. By thrusting his entire arm down the U-bend.’

  Roosevelt waved his right hand, flapping it one way, and then the other. ‘It’s cured! Would you believe that? It’s cured! It’s a miracle!’

  While the class frowned at their notebooks, and then at the ceiling, and then at each other, trying to think of three good lies, Jim looked out of the window at Tom Mix’s cedar tree. Supposing we hadn’t been to the moon, would it have made any difference? Would we be any less superstitious? Would we be any worse off? Maybe we should have explored our souls, he thought, instead of space.

  At lunchtime, Jim sat on the shady knoll overlooking the tennis courts, so that he could eat his salami-and-tomato sandwiches and read a book. Making sandwiches that stuck together had never been one of his greatest talents, and slices of tomato kept dropping out on to the grass. Two California quail bobbed around nearby, obviously hoping that he was going to leave them there.

  He had been sitting there for less than ten minutes when he saw Lieutenant Harris’s car speeding up the driveway between the trees, followed closely by a black-and-white squad car. Lieutenant Harris caught sight of him and pulled into the curb. He came hurrying over in his shiny bronze suit, holding up a large Manila envelope.

  ‘Mr Rook, I don’t know what kind of a hunch that was, but I sure wish that I could have hunches like that.’