‘Solar flares?’ said Jim.
‘It could have been “shadow-selves,”’ said Detective Mead. He looked as if somebody had just told him that his mother had died.
Lieutenant Harris said, ‘Pending further investigation … Well, Mr Rook, you and your students are free to go.’
He drove the A-Team back to West Grove first. It was evening now, and most of the college building was in darkness. They stood together in the parking lot, all of them exhausted, all of them numb from what had happened to them, and clutching themselves as if they were feeling the cold, but all of them strangely reluctant to leave. In the end, Jim had to say, ‘See you tomorrow, right? We can talk this out in class. Share it with everybody else.’
Sue-Marie said, ‘Nobody will ever know what we did, will they?’
Jim put his arm around her shoulders. ‘That’s the fate of all really good people, Sue-Marie. They don’t get prizes. They don’t get interviewed on TV. They just get the satisfaction of knowing that they’ve made the world a safer place to live in.’
Freddy came up to Jim and gave him a low five. ‘Thanks, Mr Rook. I think you taught me some kind of lesson today, even though I’m not exactly sure what it is. I just believe that I’m going to be a better person from now on, that’s all.’
Edward shook Jim’s hand as well. ‘I learned something, too. The more you find out, the more you don’t know.’
Randy said, ‘Shows you, doesn’t it? What you see in the mirror, that’s not what you necessarily are.’
Jim smiled and said, ‘Too right. “Man’s mind is a mirror of heavenly sights.”’
He watched them all leave. He was still standing by his car when Karen appeared with Perry Ritts. Karen came over while Perry stood a few feet away, looking impatient.
‘Oh, Jim – we heard about Vinnie and Sonny. It’s terrible! Are you OK?’
‘Sure, I’m fine. A little burned at the edges, but otherwise OK.’
‘What actually happened, Jim?’ Perry asked loudly. ‘They didn’t say too much on the TV news.’
‘Sorry, I’m not at liberty to tell anybody – not yet. But the police are ninety-nine per cent sure that it was an accident.’
‘An accident? Jesus! Vinnie got burned to ashes and what’s-his-name jumped out of a second-storey window – that sounds like a pretty bizarre accident to me. Come on, Jim. You were there. What really happened?’
‘There was a clash between reality and illusion, Perry, that’s all. A conflict between the way things look, and the way they really are.’
Perry waved his hand dismissively. ‘You know your trouble, Jim? You talk like you’re deep but you’re so shallow you don’t even come to my ankles.’
Jim took hold of Karen’s hand and squeezed it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re probably right.’
Jim let himself into his apartment and tripped over Raymond Boschetto’s shoes. Tibbles had been asleep on the couch but now she opened her eyes and yawned at him.
He went over to stroke her, but he had only taken two steps across the room when his eye was caught by the painting. The black cloth had disappeared. There – half-smiling, with a fine, prominent nose and long, shining hair – was the face of Robert H. Vane, daguerrotypist, as he must have appeared before he took his self-portrait. His eyes looked intelligent and kindly.
Jim approached the painting and felt it with his fingertips. It hadn’t been retouched. The paint on the face was dry and cracked, just like the rest of it.
‘So,’ Jim said under his breath. ‘Nothing is permanent. Things can be put right.’
He looked around the living room. There was no doubt about it, the atmosphere had subtly changed. There was almost a feeling of relief.
After he had fed Tibbles, though, he picked up the brown envelope that he had salvaged from the animal hospital – the one marked with the name he had recognized – and went across the corridor to press the buzzer at Eleanor Shine’s door. He waited for a while and then pressed it again.
Eventually, Eleanor opened it. She was wearing a long black satin wrap, and her hair was tied severely back in a glossy French plait. ‘Jim!’ she said, sounding almost surprised.
‘Do you mind if I come in?’
‘Of course not. I was just about to take a bath.’
He walked into her apartment. It was identical to his, except that the door to the kitchen was on the left, instead of the right. It was decorated much more severely, with black drapes and a gray carpet and white walls, and modern German furniture made of black leather and chrome. There was a bookcase, filled with identical black-bound books, and a Bang & Olufsen CD unit. On top of it stood a white statuette of a naked woman dancing, and a white Wedgwood urn, but there were no flowers, no pictures on the walls, and no mirrors.
‘You haven’t seen the news, then?’ Jim asked her.
‘The news? Why? What’s happened?’
‘There was an incident at the old DeLancey Animal Hospital on Palimpsest Street. A college teacher was burned to death and a young student threw himself out of a window.’
Eleanor sat down on the black leather couch. Her wrap slid back, revealing her white leg, right up to her hip. ‘That’s tragic,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Jim, ‘it was.’ He circled the room, swinging the brown envelope from side to side. Eleanor watched him, her eyes hooded.
‘Do you want a drink?’ she asked him at last. ‘You look as if you could use one.’
‘No, thanks. I can’t stay for long.’
‘Did they say how it happened … this incident?’
Jim came around the end of the couch and sat down so that he was facing her. ‘No, they didn’t, and they never will. Not publicly, anyhow. There are some things even a nation that believes in UFOs won’t swallow.’
He laid the envelope down on the glass coffee table beside him. Eleanor didn’t look at it. She kept her eyes fixed on Jim, as if she were afraid he was going to jump at her without warning.
Jim said, ‘What happened was that somebody wasn’t what they appeared to be. Somebody betrayed somebody, so that when somebody arrived at the animal hospital, somebody was waiting.’
‘Am I supposed to understand that?’
Jim picked up the envelope. ‘You know what’s in here, don’t you? It has your name on it, after all. Eleanor Shine, Benandanti Building. And it’s dated the day after Raymond Boschetto died.
He opened the envelope and drew out a black-varnished wooden frame, containing a silvery-gray daguerrotype plate.
‘See? Blank. No image. Because the image is sitting right here, right in front of me.’
‘I still don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
‘Yes, you do. When Raymond Boschetto died and Robert H. Vane realized that he was no longer trapped in his portrait, he came climbing out to look for somebody to help him … somebody to set up his old-time photographic business. Somebody to drive him around, and take care of him.
‘The nearest person he could find was you. You lived right across the corridor. He might have been a monster, but there was nobody to disturb him while he prepared himself, and Raymond Boschetto had all the daguerrotype plates and all the chemicals that he needed.
‘What happened? Did he knock at your door and take a picture before you knew what was happening? Or did he blind you with one of his flashes, drag you in here, and then take it? And what happened to the good Eleanor, the real Eleanor? Did he kill her?’
He stood up, walked across to the bookcase, and picked up the Wedgwood urn. He opened the lid and there were brownish-gray ashes inside. ‘This is the real Eleanor, isn’t it? The good Eleanor? You – you’re nothing but Eleanor’s shadow-self. Her evil side. I’ll bet you never open those drapes in the daytime.’
‘You’re demented,’ said Eleanor, turning her face away.
‘Am I?’ said Jim. He went right up to her and wiped his finger across her cheek. He left a black mark all the way from her nose to her ear. ‘Make-up, to hide the fac
t that your face isn’t white at all, it’s black, like a negative. Hair dye, because your hair isn’t black, it’s dead white. Contact lenses, to conceal your eyes, and white enamel, to conceal your black teeth. You’ve been lying and scheming ever since I moved in here, haven’t you?’
Eleanor furiously rubbed the make-up on her cheek. ‘You stupid little man! You should have been grateful to the Benandanti for giving you such an apartment and kept out of things that were none of your concern!’
‘That’s right,’ said Jim. ‘Vane thought that I wasn’t going to be any trouble at first, didn’t he, and that I couldn’t stop him from climbing in and out of that painting whenever he wanted to. Then he realized that maybe I wasn’t such a patsy after all, and he tried to frighten me by setting fire to my students’ bus. Well … he underestimated me, my dear, and most of all, he underestimated my students.’
Eleanor waited until he had finished and then she gave him a slow hand-clap. ‘Well done,’ she said. ‘So what are you going to do now?’
He held up the daguerrotype. ‘I’m going to give you a choice. You can either return to this plate, and stay there, or else I’ll destroy it, and you’ll never have any place to hide. Now that Vane’s gone, the Benandanti won’t continue to pay for you to stay here, and sooner or later you’ll have to leave – and go out into the daylight.’
‘You are evil,’ Eleanor spat.
‘The decision is yours. I’ll give you twenty-four hours to think about it.’
He took the daguerrotype and walked out. Eleanor stalked after him and slammed the door behind him.
Back in Special Class II the next day, they bowed their heads in two minutes’ silence for Shadow, and there were tears.
Jim said, ‘Sonny was brave and selfless, and if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be standing here today – and neither would Sue-Marie or Roosevelt or Edward or Randy or Philip. We owe him our lives, and it’s a debt we’ll never forget.
‘Only you in this class know what a great evil we fought against, and how we beat it, and only you in this class know how much it cost us. Here’s a poem by John Forbes White to remember Sonny by. “Set Against the Wind.”
‘And with his window wide he faced the storm
Blinded by lightning-strikes and deafened by the scream
Of winds that had been raised for his discouragement.
Yet even when the rain assailed his soul
Cascading cold through every crevice of his doubt and fear
He sang of clearing clouds, and turning west
To see his friends returning by the shore.’
Later, as he unlocked his apartment door, he heard somebody calling, ‘Mr Rook! Mr Rook!’
He turned to see Mr Mariti shuffling along the corridor as fast as he could.
‘Mr Rook, you don’t see Ms Shine today?’
‘No, I haven’t. Why?’
‘The plumber, he has to fix a washer in her bathroom. But she is not there. But all of her clothes are there, everything. And lights on. And TV on. But no Ms Shine.’
Jim hesitated, and then he said, ‘Let me take a look.’
Mr Mariti opened Eleanor’s apartment door with his pass key, and Jim followed him in. He was right: the apartment looked exactly as it had last night. They walked from room to room, but there was no sign of Eleanor anywhere.
It was only when they came to the bedroom that Jim realized what had happened. The black drapes were still drawn across, and he saw that their hems were actually tacked to the floor. But they had been slashed six or seven times with a kitchen knife, so that the sunlight flooded in. The kitchen knife was lying on the carpet, and next to it was a black satin wrap, as fluid as a puddle of oil. He picked it up, and pressed it to his nose, and breathed in. It smelled of lilies and vertigo.
‘Ms Shine?’ asked Mr Mariti. At that moment Tibbles walked in, looked around, and sniffed.
‘I think she decided to leave,’ said Jim, hanging the wrap on the end of her bed.
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