Séance Infernale

by Jonathan Skariton

  She turned, facing Mareth. “Who called it in?”

  The M.E. pointed to a short, bald, stocky man sitting on a ledge on the other side of the close. “Albert Mercy, bin man.”

  McBride walked over to him. “Mr. Mercy, I’m Detective Sergeant McBride. How are you holding up?”

  The man was shaking his head in shock. “I’ve never seen a dead body in my life. I mean, not before they put him in a coffin, you know?”

  “We’re going to make it as easy and straightforward as possible. I just need you to tell me what you saw.”

  His eyes were almost in tears, trying not to look behind the D.S., where the body lay. Johnson approached them, taking note of the conversation.

  “I went through the close and at first I didn’t notice anything wrong,” Albert Mercy said. “I tried working the bin and I smelled something burning. I thought someone had thrown one of those bloody cigarettes in there, but there was nothing. Then I saw the child. Who would do that?”

  McBride nodded.

  “I nearly lost my breakfast,” he added, covering his mouth.

  “Did you see anybody hanging around here?” Johnson asked.

  The bin man shook his head again. “Too cold today,” he said, exhaling puffs of frosted smoke. “Even for the homeless.”

  McBride pointed to his bin cart, which stood unattended at the foot of the close. “We’re going to need all the rubbish that you picked up in the area.”

  He nodded in agreement.

  “You find anything like that before?” Johnson asked.

  The bin man thought for a second, then pointed east, to the hill overlooking the city. “Dead goats, chickens, near Calton Hill. Some weird people in this city.”

  “Mr. Mercy, I’m afraid I’m going to need your boots.”

  The man looked down at his boots, noticing parts of human flesh clinging to them, reduced to ashes from where he’d stood over the body. “Oh, bloody hell…”

  “It’s just so I can eliminate your footprints,” McBride said. “You’ll just have to sign a form and we’ll have them sent back to you.”

  “Are you mad? Throw ’em away. Burn them. I’ll never wear ’em again,” he said, at once untying the shoelaces.

  Behind them, Mareth was asking the SOCOs whether they were finished with photography. The photographer snapped one more picture of the remains, then nodded assent. The preliminary sketches had already been made, the measurements taken. The evidence technician with responsibility for the close had finished his work around the body and had moved on to the periphery of the crime scene. A pair of medics waited in one corner with a stretcher, ready to move forward. What was left of the body was going to be placed in a white body bag to be taken to the city mortuary for autopsy.

  D.S. McBride looked out of the close to the side of the High Street. Tourists would soon be swarming the place, defying the cold and photographing each other next to Mercat Cross, Deacon Brodie’s, and the rest of Edinburgh’s dark-tourism sites, ascending to the castle in flocks or going down Cockburn Street to buy a Ouija board. In the distance, sirens were headed elsewhere.

  “Anything strike you about it?” D.I. Johnson asked her.

  “No.”

  “What was that business about the victim’s possessions, then?”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, when you asked the M.E. whether any possessions had been removed from the body.” He placed a hand on the gray hairs of his beard. “You have an idea about this, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “I think I know who’s responsible for this.”

  7

  The airplane was sparsely populated. They were floating high above lush gold and green farmlands. The azure sky spread out over the flat fields, which soon gave way to verdant hills, and then mountains. From his window seat, Alex Whitman turned to the man next to him and watched the soft, cigar-scented puffs of air erupting from his plump lips. He then lapsed into his thoughts.

  For the past six weeks he had been following trails that might have led him to inventor Augustin Sekuler and his lost film “Séance Infernale.” But the trails had long gone cold. The failure to find a valuable clue spun, moto perpetuo, around his brain as he considered the concrete beginnings of his investigation turning into culs-de-sac and locked doors.

  Although there were many locations of interest to Whitman’s pursuit, he found that clues had long vanished from these places, if they had ever existed. The sixteen-lens camera prototype had been made in Paris, and it was there that the footage for “The Man Walking Around the Corner” had been filmed. Moreover, the building Elizabeth and Adolphe had been staying at in New York had been demolished fifty years earlier, burying beneath solid cement any evidence or secrets.

  His next stop had been London: the Science Museum on Exhibition Road, a paradise of steam engines, lunar modules, and robots. He breathed against the glass, staring at Sekuler’s cameras. The first was a sixteen-lens camera that took a series of pictures on film with a paper base using sixteen independent shutters fired in sequence. Two viewfinders were above it. In operation, each spool of film moved alternately and was positioned behind one of the two sets of eight lenses, shooting around sixteen images per second.

  Whitman was particularly interested in the second camera, which was single-lens. It was believed that this was the camera that had been used to shoot “Princes Street Gardens Scene” and “Traffic on South Bridge” in 1888. Maybe it was the camera Sekuler had used to record whatever came to be known as “Séance Infernale.” The technical file next to the exhibition glass said the camera had been made in Edinburgh in 1888 and it was close to the technology used today. The camera body had been constructed by Frederick Mason, a local joiner. The woodwork was unscarred; the light Honduras mahogany of the camera body, its red glow, the dovetail joints, and the applewood of the feet—everything fit like lock and key. The camera used two three-eighths-inch-wide sets of unperforated film wound past the lens via a pair of spools. The film was held fast for exposure by a flat brass plate, the exposure controlled by way of a circular slotted brass shutter that revolved behind the lens in the same way as a modern shutter.

  Clickety-clut, open/shut, now you see it, now you can’t.

  The camera also served as a projector, for which an arc-light source was fitted to the back.

  Whitman asked the man in charge whether there were any files in some dusty corner that might have been overlooked. The man was reluctant at first, but once his palm had been pressed with money, there was little of that. The assistant curator accompanied Whitman to the back rooms.

  There he found correspondence in the form of a telegram dating back to 1953. It was from Sekuler’s grandson, Albrecht Genhagger, who had moved to Switzerland, and asked if his nephew, visiting London at the time, could be shown the cameras by the museum’s keeper of photography. It was a residue of information that seemed solid, an imminent hope for making contact. The letter was postmarked Lausanne. It was, at least, something tangible; if the nephew or his family still lived there, maybe they could provide background information on the mysterious father of cinema. The information office in Lausanne did not yield anything to go by; the address was listed under the name Albrecht Genhagger, but there was no telephone number. This was Whitman’s last chance; he’d decided to fly to Switzerland and pursue it.

  On his way to the airport, he made a stop at the xxx (illegible) xxx, and two streets down, he pressed the buzzer of a terraced flat. He came back out holding the Frankenstein poster in a protective black plastic tube. After ten years, he had finally mustered the courage to pick it up from the unwitting collector in London. He wound across the empty lanes of a district he didn’t know the name of, holding the poster he and Valdano had been determined to find on the day of Ellie’s disappearance.

  Finally, Whitman stopped inside a dark, deserted alley lined with garbage bins and filth. Rats scuttled across the wet concrete. He tucked himself behind a stone wall, took the poster out of its tube, and place
d it inside an empty metal bin lying abandoned in the alley. He fished out a lighter from his pocket and lit the poster, his face an expressionless blank, even though terror was welling up behind his eyes. That was what a hundred thousand dollars on fire looked like. He just stood there, watching the poster crumble into the flames.

  The plane crossed part of Lac Léman and the river Rhône before the captain announced their descent into the city of Geneva. Circularly and with yaws and dips, the plane drew closer to the lakeside city proper.

  For Whitman, an interesting point about Sekuler was that the original negatives had been lost. The surviving footage was the result of the printing of the frames on photographic paper and their mounting on numbered card strips. Each card strip was four vertical, sequentially numbered frames. Perhaps the original film had been cut to save the footage, although this was just a guess. Who made the card strips was also unknown.

  In a bizarre twist, the larger part of the printed photographic frames was missing. The last recorded frame number of “Traffic on South Bridge” was 129. This would mean that the footage encompassed at least 129 frames. Yet the footage provided by the museum consisted of a mere twenty frames: from 110 to 129. In a similar manner, the footage from the “Princes Street Gardens Scene” comprised twenty frames. The animation sequences released to the public, therefore, constituted less than twenty percent of the originally recorded footage. Valdano was right: there was something odd about this observed discrepancy. The remaining frames could have been destroyed, lost. Or they might still be out there.

  It was Edinburgh that Whitman was counting on the most; both the presence of available information on Sekuler’s work and the fact that he’d perfected his invention there suggested it was an important location. The exact location of Sekuler’s Edinburgh workshop was known; it had been somewhere on Princes Street, the handsome wide thoroughfare that separated the Old and New Towns of the city. Visiting there, Whitman had discovered that the former workshop was under renovation; someone high up in the chain was developing the space as a department store. Whitman had found the construction worker in charge. After bribing the man, Whitman was told he would be notified if “anything interesting came up.”

  In addition, the first Edinburgh home of the Sekuler and Whitley families on Ramsay Gardens was documented. However, when Elizabeth and Adolphe, Sekuler’s wife and son, relocated to the United States, Augustin stayed behind in Edinburgh and moved to another house, presumably for financial reasons; the Sekulers were losing money every day that he delayed the announcement of his invention. It was in the new house that he perfected the cameras. The exact address of this last residence, though, was unknown.

  There was a bump, the screech of brakes, and they were on the runway at Geneva airport. The door was opened and the few passengers filed out.

  8

  A few minutes remained before the departure of the train to Lausanne. Whitman rolled another cigarette. Next to him, a teenage girl struck a match to light one of her Marlboro Lights. He moved away from her. He rested his backpack on top of a garbage bin. As the flames of his lighter caressed the cigarette, he caught something out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head.

  Golden yellow eyes slithered in the distance.

  “Pluto,” he whispered.

  The slender figure of the cat stood next to a girl’s suitcase, on the other side of the platform. He froze, an amalgam of memories wrapping around his mind’s eye. At first he thought the cat belonged to the girl. But then it trotted to a nearby bench, beneath the seats and through the feet of oblivious passengers, and crept out the other side. With its tail lashing from side to side, it darted ahead, up to the yellow line, as if waiting for the train.

  The sight was absurd. Stray animals in a Swiss city. In a train station, of all places. Ludicrous. Impossible, even had the animal not seemed identical to…

  No, it was ridiculous, it couldn’t be. They all look alike.

  A train worker crossed the platform, spoke into an official-looking phone on the wall, slammed it down, threw a switch, and raced for the door. Time was short. The train idled, doors open.

  Whitman finally climbed the steps, boarding the train as the whistle blew. The conductor slid the door behind him. From the window on the other side, he caught a faint glimpse of the cat’s silhouette as it scurried into a corridor and lost itself in the shadows. The station’s platform flickered past with accumulating momentum and the carriage rattled and bumped in cadence.

  Whitman advanced through the aisle seats to his designated carriage. After repeated body motions and efforts to maintain his balance in the narrow corridor, he finally found his seat. He threw his overcoat on the hanger and sat down. Still staring outside, baffled, he fiddled with his backpack and fished out Valdano’s folder.

  He gazed out the window; he could not concentrate. He opened Valdano’s folder and read through the remaining timeline of Augustin Sekuler’s disappearance after boarding a train heading to Paris on September 16, 1890:

  1891—Edison applied for his first moving-picture patents.

  1894—First cinematograph parlors opened in New York.

  December 1895—The Lumière brothers staged the first commercially projected film show in Paris. Elizabeth and the Sekuler family immediately suspected foul play, especially as they saw the Lumières and the Edison Company take credit for what the family considered Sekuler’s invention.

  United States federal law signified a person as dead only seven years after they had gone missing, which prevented Sekuler’s family from taking court action against Edison and his contemporaries. It didn’t matter if Sekuler had achieved the recording and projection of moving pictures before everybody else; his adversaries would profit considerably more from a missing inventor than from a dead one.

  1901—The Sekuler family was eventually forced to ally itself with Mutoscope during that company’s patent wars versus Edison. Adolphe Sekuler worked enthusiastically, assembling evidence from his father’s workshop, which—in a mysterious twist—had been broken into following Sekuler’s disappearance. The predatory lawyers of Mutoscope, however, had a plan of their own, maneuvering Adolphe Sekuler to serve their own purpose. To this effect, Edison’s legal representatives tried to undermine Adolphe’s findings absolutely, whereas Mutoscope’s lawyers handled his testimony only insofar as it attenuated Edison’s claims. Adolphe’s most important exhibit, his father’s cameras, was never produced by Mutoscope, since that would have obliterated both Edison’s and their own claims to the invention of the new medium. To Adolphe’s dismay, the cameras were left in the car outside the courthouse, even though the attorneys had made him believe that they would eventually be presented.

  1902—During the case appeal, when the court ruled that Edison was not the first inventor of the motion picture, Adolphe Sekuler was not there to hear the verdict. In July of the previous year, he had been found dead, with his duck-hunting rifle beside his lifeless body. The official ruling was that it had been an accident, but the Sekuler family—what remained of it—was adamant: it was the product of foul play. They believed competitors—especially Thomas Edison—had forcefully and illegally taken Augustin and Adolphe out of the way.

  1999—French police archives revealed a photograph of a drowned man who may have been Sekuler.

  2001—Cinema, an industry enjoyed by audiences of all ages, reached the $40 billion mark.

  2002—The mystery remained: What happened to the French inventor? What happened to “Séance Infernale”?

  —

  Whitman took the black-and-white picture out of the folder and glanced again at the lost inventor. Gentle, considerate eyes, a well-built in-proportion man who stood at six foot three or four. An unparalleled genius who had been seven years ahead of the Lumière brothers, seven years ahead of Thomas Edison.

  Seven years.

  During his investigation, Whitman had formed a bizarre bond with the muttonchopped inventor. They were trying to communicate through spa
ce and time, the clues from the man’s life and work, scattered pieces on a film called “Séance Infernale.”

  There was another reason why Whitman’s interest in Sekuler was growing. This was a fact rarely documented in film books, and it had escaped him until he’d found it in Valdano’s folder. It had occurred two years before Sekuler’s disappearance, when the inventor and his wife and two children were still based in Edinburgh. As with most macabre incidents taking place in Edinburgh, Scottish publishers such as Robert Chambers had documented the event. Accounts disagreed on what exactly happened that night, and documentations included dramatic pieces of description constructed to add flair to the written reports.

  Although the sources failed to indicate Sekuler’s exact Edinburgh address, they stated that the family lived in a perilous region, full of seedy businesses, dark alleys, and run-down tenements, a place “where wickedness loses its seductive appeal by manifesting in all its depravity.” Sekuler was working late in his workshop on Princes Street while the rest of the family was at home, preparing dinner. His wife, Elizabeth, wanted to run some errands at the linen draper’s and hosier’s shop and tried to convince the children to come with her. Although Adolphe complied, Zoe wanted to nap. Elizabeth let her go back to sleep and told Adolphe to stay and watch over his little sister; she would go run the errands.

  As she opened the front door, she saw the figure of a man framed in the light. She thought nothing of it; the man seemed to pay no attention to her, and the entire area was usually busy after hours. She went off on her errand. The shop was closed for the night. She had been away from home for no more than twenty minutes, she later reported. It was just enough time to save her from the fate that befell those inside.

  When Elizabeth returned, she found the house windows sunken in darkness. The door was locked. This was atypical, but incidental: she could have mistakenly locked it on her way out. She rapped on the door; there was no answer. She listened to the silence, and could hear footsteps on the stairs. She thought Adolphe was coming down to let her in. But nobody came.