Darkroom

by Graham Masterton

  They crossed the hallway and Shadow opened the door marked Waiting Room. It was empty, apart from two tilted-over chairs. They tried the room opposite, which must have been a consulting room when the hospital was open, because an old-fashioned examination table stood in one corner, and there were yellowing medical charts still pinned to the walls.

  ‘No daguerrotypes here,’ said Jim. ‘Let’s try upstairs.’

  ‘I didn’t see anything in the room I broke into,’ said Freddy. ‘Only some empty cages.’

  Jim went up the first two flights of stairs and the A-Team followed. He briefly shone his flashlight into the room where Freddy had entered the building, but Freddy was right. All it contained was three tiers of wire cages, with their doors hanging open. He came back across the landing and tried the door opposite. He rattled the doorknob but it was locked.

  ‘Sonny,’ he said to Shadow, ‘you have the biggest feet.’

  ‘And?’ said Shadow defensively. ‘I still got the coolest shoes.’

  ‘I meant, you have the biggest feet so you’re obviously the best person to kick this door open.’

  ‘Oh. OK, sir. Gotcha.’

  Shadow took two paces back. Then he kicked the door hard, right by the handle. There was a splintering crack and part of the architrave split, but the door didn’t budge. He stepped back and kicked it again, and then again. At the third try, it flew wide open, and slammed against the wall.

  They went inside. The room was dark and musty, and lined on three sides with wooden filing cabinets. Jim counted thirteen of them. He went across to the nearest cabinet and shone his torch on the label. Escondido County Fair, September 23–25.

  ‘That was only a week ago,’ said Edward.

  Jim pulled open the top drawer. Inside, carefully stored in brown padded envelopes, he found thirty or forty daguerrotype plates, about 6 x 8 inches, each of them framed in black-painted wood and covered with a protective layer of glass. Each envelope was stenciled with a name, or names. Peter T. Reynolds, Julie Inkster, Dan Forsman, Lanny Peete, Corey Kite, Nancy Lopez.

  ‘Here they are,’ said Jim, carefully drawing one of the plates out of its envelope. ‘The pictures that Robert H. Vane has been taking since Raymond Boschetto died.’

  ‘That’s a daguerrotype?’ asked Freddy, frowning at it. ‘It looks just like a dirty mirror to me.’

  ‘That’s because you have to look at it from an angle, so that the dark areas look light and the light areas look dark.’

  He shone his flashlight obliquely across the plate, and they suddenly saw a serious-looking young man with curly hair and glasses. ‘You’re right, in a way, though, to say that it looks like a mirror. In a daguerrotype, your picture’s always laterally transversed, the same way as it is in a mirror.’

  The drawer below was marked West Grove and Westwood, September 1 – 4. ‘This was the time he must have taken Brad’s picture.’ He opened the drawer, and there it was, Bradley Moorcock, between Elroy Herber and Vince McNally.

  The first filing cabinet was full; but only the top drawer of the second cabinet had any daguerrotypes in it, and all of the remaining cabinets were empty. ‘Still,’ said Jim, ‘he’s taken a hell of a lot of pictures, considering he’s had less than a month to do it.’ He looked around. ‘He must be planning to fill them all up. A repository of evil selves.’

  Randy said, ‘He’s going to go apeshit when he finds out that we’ve smashed them all up.’

  Jim opened the middle drawer, lifted out an envelope marked Daniel John Hausman and carefully took out the glass-framed daguerrotype inside. He checked it with his flashlight, angling it this way and that. Unexpectedly, it appeared to be blank. There was no image on the silver at all, only faint grayish blotches. Maybe it had faded. Daguerrotypes were very sensitive, even after they had been fixed with a salt solution, or washed with gold.

  He picked up another envelope. Philippa Ostlander. This daguerrotype plate was blank, too. He pulled out another, and another. None of the plates in the middle drawer had images on them.

  Edward had been watching him, and he took one of the plates and examined it himself. ‘There’s no picture.’

  ‘They’re not here at the moment, that’s why.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘They’re out there, somewhere, in the city, doing whatever it is that evil selves do. Like Brad Moorcock, getting his revenge on Sara.’ He paused, and then he said, ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Twenty after four.’

  ‘What time does it get light?’

  ‘I don’t know. Around five, I guess. That’s when my older brother always goes jogging.’

  ‘In that case, we have to get out of here, and we have to get out of here now.’

  ‘I thought we were going to break up all of these daguerrotypes.’

  ‘We can come back later and do that. Right now, I think it would be a very sensible precaution if we left.’

  He replaced all of the blank daguerrotypes and closed the drawer. As he did so, however, he thought he heard the sound of a door closing, somewhere downstairs. He lifted his hand to indicate that they should all keep quiet.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Sue-Marie.

  ‘I don’t know … I’m going to take a look.’

  He went to the door and shone his flashlight on to the landing.

  ‘Anything?’ asked Randy.

  ‘I don’t think so. Just the wind, probably, closing one of the doors that we opened downstairs. All the same, I think we need to get out of here before it starts growing light.’

  ‘This is great!’ said Edward excitedly. ‘This is just like being Dr Van Helsing.’

  ‘This is not at all great,’ Sue-Marie retorted. ‘This is totally scary.’

  ‘You seen those vampires on Buffy?’ said Freddy. ‘Like, you go to bean them, right, and they just disappear in a cloud of bats.’

  ‘Come on,’ Jim urged them. ‘We can come back later this morning, when the sun’s up, and all of these shadow-selves are back where they belong.’

  He crossed the landing. As he did so, he saw somebody coming up from the first flight of stairs from the hallway. A young man, dressed in gray. The young man reached the turn in the staircase and stared up at him. His face was silvery-black and his eyes were phosphorescent white and his hair was white, too.

  Another figure came climbing up, and then another, and another, and they were all dressed in varying shades of gray and black, and they all had silvery-black faces and white eyes. There must have been twenty of them, at least, and they crowded on the stairs looking up at Jim and his A-Team and saying nothing at all.

  Jim thought of Bobby’s and Sara’s ashes, lying in heaps, and their barbecue-blackened bones, and their skulls grinning at each other face to face.

  He thought of their photographic images imprinted on the closet wall. Images created by a light so bright that it could penetrate brick.

  ‘We … we haven’t come here to hurt you,’ he announced in a loud, clear voice.

  The silvery-black figures didn’t answer, but continued to look up at them, their black hands holding on to the banisters.

  ‘If you allow us to leave quietly, without any trouble … well, we’ll leave quietly, without any trouble.’

  ‘Mr Rook,’ whispered Sue-Marie, ‘who are these people?’

  ‘You can see them?’

  ‘Of course I can see them! Who are they?’

  ‘They’re the people from the blank daguerrotypes. It’s nearly daylight, so they’re coming back.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Randy. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Take them on,’ said Freddy. ‘Did you ever see my kungfu?’

  ‘You can’t take them on,’ said Jim. ‘They’re made of light, that’s all. They’re photographic images. More than that, they’re completely evil.’

  As he spoke, the young man at the head of the silvery-black people began to climb up the second flight of stairs. The others followed. Although they appeared as
negatives, Jim could recognize women as well as men, and older people as well as young. They made no sound as they came up the stairs apart from the faintest metallic rustling.

  ‘Please!’ Jim appealed to them, raising both hands. ‘These young people have done nothing to you! You can go back into your frames … we promise not to harm you! We’ll just go away and leave you in peace and forget we ever saw you!’

  The silvery-black people didn’t seem to hear him, or else they weren’t interested in what he had to say. They continued to climb the stairs, and as they came nearer, Jim could even smell their evil. It was like dust scorching on a hot electric fire. The pupils of their eyes were expressionless white dots, and Jim could see their black teeth and their seal-gray lips.

  ‘Please!’ he repeated, but the silvery-black people had nearly reached the landing and he knew they weren’t going to stop – and they weren’t going to be merciful. They were incapable of mercy. Any kindness that they possessed was still in their physical bodies, and God alone knew where they were.

  Jim swiveled around to his A-Team. ‘The window!’ he shouted at them. ‘We can get out the way Freddy got in!’

  He pushed Sue-Marie toward the room where the empty cages were. Randy, Shadow, Freddy and Edward came scrambling close behind them. Jim just managed to drag Randy through the door by his arm when there was a flash of light on the landing as bright as an atom bomb.

  ‘Jesus!’ said Freddy, blinking like an owl.

  There was another flash, and another, and then there was a flickering storm of flashes. Jim slammed the door shut and twisted the key. He could hear the paint crackling on the other side.

  Freddy was first out of the broken window, then Sue-Marie. The barrage of flashes continued, and even though the door was closed they created a jerky strobe effect, as if Jim and his students were in a Keystone Kops movie, desperately trying to escape from a speeding locomotive.

  Shadow was the last out before Jim. As he climbed out of the window, he said, ‘You don’t have to worry about being snazzy, Mr Rook. You the man.’

  ‘And you don’t have to worry about sucking up to me. Just move your ass or I’ll fail you on twentieth-century poetry.’

  Jim maneuvered one leg through the window and found his footing on the ledge outside. At that instant, the door burst open, and there was a million-kilowatt burst of light that dazzled him completely. He blindly threw himself sideways, toward the top of the porch, and Shadow managed to grab his sleeve to stop him from falling down to the sidewalk. For a moment he clung on to the guttering, his legs dangling, grunting with effort. Then Edward reached up and guided his feet down on to Randy’s shoulders.

  Randy said, ‘Ow! Watch the ears, OK?’

  Shadow swung down and dropped on to the steps. Then the six of them stood on the sidewalk outside the animal hospital and looked up at the window. They saw two or three more glimmers of light, but then nothing. The sky was turning pale, with a swirl of strawberry-colored clouds in it, and a cleansing truck was making its way toward them on Palimpsest Street, spraying the gutters. Jim hadn’t smoked in years, but he really could have used a cigarette.

  ‘Are we still coming back here?’ asked Edward. There were dark circles under his eyes and his hair was all messed up.

  Jim nodded. ‘I don’t think we have any choice. Who knows what those shadow people have done tonight? If they’re anything like Brad, they’ve been cremating anybody they don’t like. And who knows what they’re planning to do tomorrow night, and the night after that?’

  ‘I freely confess, I was crapping myself,’ said Freddy. ‘I don’t think I’m ever going to be scared of anything ever again. Those shadow people – jeez. They’re worse than ghosts.’

  ‘“I am half-sick of shadows,” Jim quoted. ‘Come on, let’s see if we can find someplace open for breakfast. I’m buying.’

  They went to the Truck Stop on Santa Monica Boulevard, a cheerful 1950s-style diner with red-and-white Formica tabletops and a jukebox. Randy, Freddy and Edward ordered scrambled eggs with bacon and grilled tomatoes and links, but Shadow stuck to maracuya-flavored bio yogurt because ‘my body is a sacred place of worship,’ and Sue-Marie could only prod a pancake around her plate because she was still feeling trembly. Jim drank two cups of intensely black coffee, and then he ate the rest of Sue-Marie’s pancakes, drowning in maple syrup, for the energy.

  ‘We’ll go back to Palimpsest Street around one o’clock,’ said Jim. ‘I’ll bring hammers and sulfuric acid from the college laboratory, and protective gloves. We’ll take out all the daguerrotype plates, smash the frames and pour acid on to the images. Vane probably has unused plates stored in that building, and mercury, and all his fixing salts. We’ll destroy those, too.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to the people in the pictures? I mean the real people, like Brad?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jim admitted. ‘But I don’t think we’ll be destroying the evil part of their personalities. We’ll be releasing them, that’s all, setting them free. With luck, they’ll find their way back to the bodies in which they belong.’ The waitress came past with the coffee jug and he held up his cup for her. ‘Let’s hope so, anyhow.’

  ‘That still doesn’t solve the problem of what we’re going to do about Vane the Pain himself,’ said Edward.

  ‘No, it doesn’t. But I think that Vane really needs these evil images. I think they give him strength. If we destroy them, I believe that will make him very much weaker. I just have to find a way to finish him off, for good and all.’

  ‘Maybe you should try to keep him trapped inside the painting, the same way that Raymond what’s-his-name did.’

  Jim shook his head. ‘I thought of that. But that means I would have to hold a reverse exorcism, twice a day, for the rest of my life. For starters, I don’t even know how to hold a forward exorcism – and so far I haven’t found any description of it in Raymond Boschetto’s diaries.’

  ‘What about this woman who drives him around?’ asked Sue-Marie. ‘If you could find out who she is, and stop her from doing it, Vane wouldn’t be able to go out and take any more pictures, would he?’

  Jim said, ‘You’re right. I’ve been thinking a whole lot about her. I can’t understand how he found her, or how he persuaded her to help him. He’s a monster, after all. What kind of a woman is going to help a creature like that?’

  Freddy wiped tomato catsup from his chin. ‘Next time, Mr Rook, we should follow her, and put her out of business. We should wreck his van. Like, without a van to get around in, and somebody to drive it, what can Vane do?’

  ‘He’s still very dangerous,’ Jim replied. ‘I didn’t see any sign of his van when he came to the cemetery and set fire to the college bus. He can get around, believe me, even without a van. He’s quick – and to most people, of course, he’s invisible.’

  ‘No harm in boosting his wheels, though,’ Randy suggested, his mouth full of sausage.

  ‘You’re right. But it’s time you all got yourselves home. You can take a shower and sleep for a couple of hours. I’ll meet you back in college at twelve thirty.’

  Jim went back to the Benandanti Building. Mr Mariti nodded to him as he crossed the hallway and said, ‘You look like ten miles of bad road, Mr Rook.’

  ‘Thanks, Mr Mariti.’

  Tibbles was waiting for him right behind the front door, and she stayed two or three inches behind him wherever he went, so that he kept tripping over her.

  He walked across to the fireplace and looked up at the painting. He knew that Robert H. Vane was back inside it now, or at least his spirit was, or whatever it was that Robert H. Vane had turned into.

  ‘What are you, Robert H. Vane?’ Jim asked him out loud. ‘What do you really want?’

  Tibbles rubbed his ankles and purred. She knew what she wanted: cut-price tuna, squashed with the back of a spoon.

  After he had fed her, Jim stripped off and took a shower, turning the faucet marked ‘Torrent’. The noise from the plumbing was dea
fening, like a subway train hurtling down a tunnel at high speed, and the water pressure was so powerful that he had to lean against the shower cabinet to stop himself from being beaten down to the floor.

  When he had finished, he climbed out, wrapped a large blue towel around his waist and went into the kitchen to make himself some more coffee. He switched on the portable television on the kitchen counter.

  ‘… Nine people died last night in eleven unconnected fires in the Santa Monica and West Hollywood districts. In one, TV actress Kathy Mulholland was burned to death in her automobile as she stopped at a traffic signal on the Pacific Coast Highway. In another, the head of Cellcorp mobile phone systems was found dead in a seven-hundred-dollars-a-night suite at the Palms Marina Hotel, along with an unnamed woman …’

  Jim stood with the kettle in his hand watching the news as fire after fire was reported, and in each case the victims had been burned ‘almost beyond recognition.’ He was still standing there when a slight movement made him glance toward the doorway. Eleanor was standing there, staring at him, white-faced. She was wearing a short black dress and black pantyhose, with very high black patent shoes. He was so startled that he almost dropped the kettle in the sink.

  ‘Eleanor! Jesus! You frightened me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. I heard noises, that’s all, so I came in to make sure that everything was OK.’

  Jim switched on the kettle and defensively tightened his towel. ‘You probably heard the shower. It’s like Niagara.’

  Eleanor came into the kitchen and circled around him. ‘So, how did it go last night?’

  She stood very close to him. In her black patent shoes she was almost two inches taller than him, which he found strangely disturbing.

  ‘Well, we almost got ourselves killed, but we found out where Vane is storing all of his stuff.’

  Her green eyes widened. ‘You’re not hurt, are you?’

  ‘No, thank God. But it was close. We were still searching through the daguerrotypes when their images returned – their shadow-selves. And their shadow-selves can do what Vane can do. They can set off flashes of intensely bright light, and incinerate anything that happens to be in the way.’