Darkroom

by Graham Masterton

  Jim said, ‘This wasn’t anything like that. This was a single blast of intense heat and light, like the magnesium-powder flashguns that old-time photographers used to use.’

  Lieutenant Harris sat and waited, as if he expected him to say more.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Jim.

  ‘That’s it? It was an old-time photographic flashgun? Set off by whom, exactly?’

  ‘Somebody who wanted to show me who was boss.’

  ‘Can you give me a name? Can you explain how he did it? Can you tell me why he did it?’

  Jim coughed, and cleared his throat. ‘I don’t think it would help. In fact, I think it would make things worse. I just wanted you to know that I’m ninety-nine per cent sure how it happened, and who did it. I’m also ninety-nine per cent sure how Bobby Tubbs and Sara Miller were murdered, and why, and who killed them.’

  Lieutenant Harris opened and closed his mouth, like a goldfish. ‘You’re not trying to tell me that it wasn’t Brad Moorcock?’

  ‘No. no. It was Brad Moorcock, in a way. But in another way, it wasn’t. But you’d be better off keeping him locked up, if only for his own safety.’

  ‘I see,’ said Lieutenant Harris, although he patently didn’t. ‘But you’re trying to say that these two cases could be connected? The bus today, and Bobby and Sara last week?’

  ‘Connected, yes. But not the same perpetrator, no.’

  Lieutenant Harris mopped his face again, and then the back of his neck. ‘Is that all you’re going to tell me?’

  ‘For now, yes. I still have to make sense of it myself.’

  Lieutenant Harris stood up. ‘Listen, Mr Rook. Most of my colleagues think that I’m off to the races, talking to you. They don’t believe in the world beyond, and they certainly don’t believe that there’s any way of getting in touch with people who are dead and buried. Me, I keep an open mind about that. But I do think that you have some kind of rare ability and I’m willing to play along with you if it means that I get to the bottom of things.

  ‘However, if I find that you know something that could materially affect my investigations, and that you’re holding out on me for reasons best known to yourself, then I’m going to throw your ass in jail and I’m going to make sure that you stay there for a very, very long time, with nothing to eat but stale Saltines, and nothing to drink but flat root beer. Comprendo?’

  All Jim could do was cough and nod.

  Early that evening, when Jim returned to his apartment, the sun was shining on the wall above the fireplace, and on the portrait of Robert H. Vane. It lit the brushstrokes in lurid orange, as if the painting were on fire.

  Jim stood and looked at it. Tibbles came in from the kitchen, still licking her whiskers from finishing off her bowl of mashed sardines. She climbed up on her hind legs, holding on to the knee of his black funeral pants with her claws.

  ‘Are you satisfied?’ Jim challenged Robert H. Vane.

  Beneath his black cloth, Robert H. Vane remained silent. Jim couldn’t even catch him breathing.

  ‘Pinky and David, what did they ever do to you?’ he demanded. ‘Pinky believed in Paradise and David believed in God, and what did you do? You destroyed them, and you destroyed their beliefs, and all for what? To show me that I couldn’t get rid of you? To show me that you can come sneaking out of that picture whenever you feel like it, day or night, and ruin people’s lives, and that there’s nothing I can do to stop you?’

  He stepped right up to the painting, with his feet in the fireplace. ‘Are you trying to make me feel weak and helpless? Well, congratulations, I do! I feel utterly useless, if you must know! But I’m going to get my revenge for what you did today, believe me, and you’re going to come down from that wall, and I’m going to make sure you never hang up here again.’

  He was still standing in front of the painting when there was a cautious rapping at the door, and Eleanor stepped into the room. She was wearing a long black gauzy dress, with nothing underneath, and very high black sandals with criss-cross straps.

  ‘Mr Mariti? Oh, it’s you, Jim! Sorry … the door was open. I thought you were moving out.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind. I have a score to settle first.’

  ‘Score?’

  ‘Didn’t you see the news today? A bus caught fire at the Rolling Hills cemetery, with over a dozen college students on it. My students. Two of them were burned to death.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Eleanor. She came up to him and took hold of his hand. ‘Oh my God, that’s terrible! You must be devastated.’

  Jim didn’t take his eyes off the painting. Eleanor looked up at it, too. ‘You don’t think that …’

  ‘I don’t think, Eleanor. I know. I can see, remember, and I saw him there. Robert H. Vane. Nobody else saw him, but that doesn’t matter. You can’t arrest an evil spirit. You can’t arraign a painting for homicide. I don’t like to admit it, but you were right. The only person who can bring him to justice is me.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to have to find out how Raymond Boschetto kept him trapped inside the painting. Whatever he did, it only worked so long as Raymond was alive. I’ll have to go a stage further and work out how to keep him in there forever … or how to destroy the painting so that it can’t come back.’

  ‘Raymond didn’t even give me the slightest hint. He said the less I knew about Robert H. Vane, the safer I would be.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jim, ‘I have all of Raymond’s books here, and all of his notes. It looks like I’ve got some homework to do.’

  ‘Have you eaten?’ asked Eleanor. ‘I have some chicken and basil casserole, if you’d like some.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Jim. ‘I’ll open a bottle of wine, too.’ He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. They were still sore from the smoke. ‘I don’t think I could sleep tonight, anyhow.’

  Eleanor gently touched his cheek with her fingertips, almost as if she were intrigued to discover that he was real. ‘I’ll stay up with you.’

  ‘OK then,’ he said. The last of the sunlight faded from the painting. ‘Let’s see if we can trap this monster before the sun comes up again.’

  Fourteen

  They cleared a space on the dining-room table, and ate their supper with Raymond Boschetto’s books and diaries stacked all around them. Jim found over thirty books on early photography, as well as books on precious metals, and how silver had been used since the times of the Ancient Greeks for magic rituals and mysticism.

  ‘Silver is a moon metal, associated with the occult, with darkness, and the unconscious. It is in opposition to the gold of the sun, which is symbolic of light and life. The purity of silver and its connection to the moon made it the perfect metal for the making of talismans and amulets, and Mohammed himself forbade the use of any other substance.’

  Jim reached across the table and took hold of the medallion that Eleanor wore around her neck. ‘Is this silver?’

  She nodded. ‘The Benandanti gave it to me when I agreed to move in here. It warns me if evil is approaching. It tingles, that’s the best way I can describe it.’

  ‘Does it work?’

  ‘It goes crazy whenever I get close to that portrait. Fizzes, almost. So yes, I guess it does. You see that face on it? That’s a fool. Fools are supposed to be highly sensitive to evil, like dogs and cats.’

  ‘I see. I guess that explains why I’m so sensitive to evil.’

  Eleanor took hold of his hand. ‘You’re not a fool, Jim. You’re incredibly brave. You put other people first.’

  ‘Oh, well. Maybe you’re right. As Blake said, “if a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.”’ He poured them both another glass of Barolo. ‘But don’t get me wrong; I’m not doing this because I want to, believe me. I’m only doing it because nobody else can.’

  Eleanor cleared the dishes and stacked them in the dishwasher, while Jim started to read Raymond Boschetto’s diaries. There were forty-one of them altogether, bound in b
rown leather. Jim had to put on his reading glasses, because Raymond’s writing was tiny and crabbed, and he had crammed every single square inch of every page, even if it meant writing vertically up the margin.

  Most of the diaries were nothing but a daily record of what Raymond had eaten (fresh figs and prosciutto with scamorza cheese) or the books he had read (The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, Discourse of the Damned Arts, Faustbuch). But in some passages, he ranted on furiously about the Benandanti and Robert H. Vane and how his whole life was being taken up by this ‘impossible and dangerous commission.’

  Little by little, however, Jim began to understand why the painting of Robert H. Vane was hanging here, in this apartment, and why the Benandanti had been unable to get rid of it. Raymond used the words ‘shadow-self’ to describe the dark side of Robert H. Vane’s personality.

  Robert H. Vane did many good and charitable works in the last years of his life, but he was physically weak and prone to frequent bouts of ill-health. I have no hesitation in ascribing this sickliness to the taking-away of his shadow-self, and its entrapment on a silver photographic plate, which happened when he posed for his own daguerrotype self-portrait. A man with no evil in him whatsoever may be saintly, but he will always be vulnerable to any kind of attack, be it a virus or another man with wicked intent.

  Vane died of pneumonia in the spring of 1861. His remains were first buried in a private plot on the Rancho Nuestra Senora, which belonged to a friend of his, a farmer named John Wakeman, but after three months his body was exhumed and moved to an unmarked plot. Mr Wakeman complained that Vane was ‘not at rest’ and that after his interment his daughters and his fruit-pickers had several times seen him in the distance, walking through the orchards as if lost.

  So Vane’s good self, while dead, remained restless, and it was plain from the multiplicity of arsons and murders by fire in the Los Angeles area that his shadow-self was also still at large. He was still taking portraits and still collecting on his silver plates the evil selves of those who unwittingly consented to pose for him – and there were many.

  However, the daguerrotype is a very cumbersome process, and a great deal of heavy equipment is required to take each picture. By the latter part of the century, plate cameras were out of date for everything except for formal groups, and Vane was finding it increasingly difficult to take pictures without attracting attention. He would gatecrash weddings and sporting events and take crowd scenes in the streets, in order to garner as many souls as possible, but he knew that the Benandanti were always looking for him, and he had to be more and more careful.

  In 1909, after years of persistent and diligent investigation, the agents of the Benandanti at last discovered that Vane’s shadow-self was using an outbuilding at Long Beach as his hiding place and storehouse for his daguerrotype plates. The agents broke in and destroyed every daguerrotype plate that they could find, including a daguerrotype of Vane himself.

  But over the next two and a half years, the burnings and the murders continued unabated, and the agents realized that Vane’s shadow-self must be hiding elsewhere. After a spate of arson attacks in Malibu, they discovered more daguerrotype plates and – at last – the painted portrait of Vane. They destroyed the plates, but they found that the painting was indestructible. It simply couldn’t be disposed of, not by any earthly means. They incinerated it. They broke it to pieces, and separated the pieces by many miles. Once they took it as far as Mexico, and buried it, but each time the painting turned up intact, in the very place where it had been before.

  For that reason, the Benandanti had to concede that they could do nothing more than watch over it, while they tried to discover how to break the spell that protected it. I say ‘spell’ because I can think of no other word to describe the extraordinary supernatural force which Vane had used to safeguard his painted image.

  The Benandanti agents destroyed Vane’s camera equipment, and from 1912 onwards, one Benandanti after another volunteered to keep a watch on the portrait, to make sure that Vane was unable to climb out of it and collect more evil souls.

  In 1935, when the Benandanti Building was erected, this particular apartment was set aside for Robert H. Vane’s portrait and whoever had elected to watch it. The Benandanti believed that even if they had not yet succeeded in destroying the painting, they had successfully protected generations of Southern Californians from this merciless scavenger of souls.

  But early in 1965, the Benandanti began to receive disturbing reports from the Mid-West of people being mysteriously burned to ashes, and farms being razed. Their agents undertook investigations in Iowa and Nebraska and soon discovered that somebody had been on the road taking ‘old-time photographs’. Not just recently, but for twenty or thirty years – traveling all the way from Maine to Miami.

  Eventually they found a picture taken just outside Cedar Rapids, Iowa, of a white Ford van bearing the legend Robert H. Vane, Old-Style Family Photographs. The picture was dated October, 1964. All the years that the Benandanti had believed that his shadow-self was hiding inside his portrait, Vane had been touring the country, gathering evil selves by the score.

  He could easily leave and return to the painting, without being seen. He was, after all, dead (although he hadn’t yet passed over to the world beyond) and so he was capable of appearing and disappearing at will.

  Jim sat back. ‘This is why the Benandanti wanted me to have this apartment.’ He passed over the diary and watched Eleanor as she read it. ‘Vane is invisible, when he wants to be. Nobody can see him, except me and people like me. If there are any people like me.’

  Eleanor said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What’s the point in being sorry? Four young people are dead and being sorry isn’t going to bring them back to life.’

  Eleanor picked up another diary and riffled through the pages. ‘Does Raymond say how he trapped Vane here?’

  Jim opened the diary for 1965 and turned to September. ‘Here – this is when he first agreed to move in here.’

  ‘“I was asked today by X to take over the guardianship of Robert H. Vane’s portrait, despite what the Benandanti now know about his invisible comings and goings. I declined. I knew what a thankless and tedious task it would be, and unquestionably dangerous, if I attempted to thwart him in his gathering of souls.”

  The following week, however, Raymond had written the following:

  Out of curiosity, I undertook some research into the matter of portraits and paintings, and how they have been used down the centuries as places of concealment for people’s spirits. I discovered that Urbain Grandier, the priest who had been accused of inducing the Satanic possession of nuns in Loudun in 1634, had asked for his portrait to be painted in the days before his execution. For years afterward, a figure answering Grandier’s description was seen around the streets of Loudun, and nine of those who had tortured Grandier, or who had tried him or testified against him, all died horribly of strangulation in their beds.

  A cardinal from the Vatican was sent to investigate these murders: Cardinal Vaudrey. He questioned the artist who had painted Grandier’s portrait, and the artist told him that Grandier had insisted that he mix powdered silver oxide into his paints, as well as the ground-up dust from ‘a dry cap of skin’, which is likely to have been Grandier’s caul.

  Cardinal Vaudrey attempted to have the painting burned, but it refused to ignite, even when soaked in oil. He threw it off a bridge into the river Vienne, but the next day it was leaning against the wall in the house where it had been stored before.

  The cardinal was now convinced that he was dealing with the works of Satan, so he decided that he would have to imprison Grandier inside his portrait so that he could never escape. The only way in which he could do this was to reverse the ritual of exorcism. In other words, he would have to make sure that the evil spirit stayed inside the portrait, instead of forcing it out, as he would have done if he were exorcizing it.

  But the cardinal’s dilemma was that he would
be obliged to perform this ritual every single day, twice a day, for as long as he lived (and then pass on the duty to another exorcist, and so on, ad infinitum). It was the moon that made this necessary. Every time it circles around the earth, the moon’s gravitational force acts on silver to draw out any evil that might be stored in it – in the same way that it pulls the oceans, and causes the tides to rise.

  So, if I were to accept the duty of keeping Robert H. Vane trapped inside his portrait, I would have to perform the same ritual of exorcism, day after day, night after night, for the rest of my life. I would be fighting a never-ending battle with the moon.

  The next entry was very short.

  This is the choice that I am faced with. I have sought guidance in prayer. I have argued with myself. I know what I will have to sacrifice: my freedom, my life, my happiness. In the end, however, I know that I have no option. If I refuse to guard the portrait, hundreds of people will die – thousands. Every night, the country will be swarming with shadow-selves, carrying out whatever acts of evil they want to, and the fires that burn across America will burn more fiercely than the fires of hell.

  ‘Well,’ said Jim. ‘Now we know what we’re really up against. Raymond died, and when Raymond died, the exorcisms stopped, and Vane was free to climb out of his portrait. He’s started taking pictures again, too. He must have taken a picture of Brad Moorcock, because that was who that wino saw, breaking into the Tubbs’ beach house. Not the real flesh and blood Brad Moorcock, of course, but Brad Moorcock’s evil self, taking his revenge on Sara Miller for dumping him.’

  He stood up. ‘It all fits. Raymond died just over three weeks ago, and it was three weeks ago that Brad’s fellow students began to notice that he was acting out of character. He was so nice all of a sudden that they couldn’t believe it. And, of course, the reason was that he had no evil in him any more – none. He was one hundred per cent Good Brad. All of his evil self had been caught on a photographic plate, by Robert H. Vane. But that evil self is just like a vampire now, hiding inside a daguerrotype instead of a coffin, and just like a vampire he can only come out at night, when the moon draws his evil out of the silver.’