Séance Infernale

by Jonathan Skariton

  He looked up into Whitman’s inquiring eyes.

  “I did an internship at the Library of Congress. Worked with the Paper Print Collection there.”

  “That’s impressive,” Charlie said. “It’s the only collection of its kind in the world.”

  “So can it be transferred?”

  Nestor crossed the room, stepping over cables, to another desk. On top of it was some kind of machine, covered by a shower curtain. He blew the dust off the cover and unveiled it.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Charlie said.

  “Process optical printer,” Nestor answered. He tapped his nails on the sprockets. “Special projection head with interchangeable sprockets to accommodate paper without mutilating it. I can exchange heads and pins that are necessary to advance the film but won’t tear it to pieces. You see the aperture plate over here?

  “It’s adjustable, so I can frame off-standard lines. Paper prints are produced continuously, without taking into account the different densities of the original negative, so I can use the reflected light to illuminate the parts to be worked on and can calibrate the lighting depending on the scene.”

  “I’ve seen this before, at the Motion Picture Conservation Center in Ohio,” Charlie said.

  “This is a modified version of the one they used. Theirs was equipped with a video tap and frame buffer—but the operator still had to align every frame by hand, leading to a whole lotta jitter.”

  He caressed the gate of the scanner like it was a beautiful woman. “The film path is short and simple; the film wraps around six three-inch particle transfer rollers and over the film gate.”

  Whitman glared at Nestor and tapped on his watch. Nestor ignored him.

  “This paper film has been through a lot over the last century,” Charlie said. “Do you think your printer’s going to do the job?”

  “Check this out,” Nestor said. He spoke quickly when he was excited. “The gate is curved, so that even a warped print like yours will lie flat, with minimal tension on the film. The motor control system uses a patented dancer-arm controller, and the position of the dancer arms is read by a Hall-effect sensor that tracks the position of a magnet mounted at the pivot point of the arm.”

  “Do I look like I understand Martian?” Whitman said.

  “This printer could, in principle, make a negative and then recopy to thirty-five millimeter. And they would look like exact copies of the original paper prints. From there you could create backups on media-player or QuickTime files for a computer, if you’d like something handy to see and easily copy. I could do all this, and I could do it well. But I won’t.” The last few words he spewed with disgust, all the time staring into Whitman’s eyes.

  “We need your help,” Charlie said. He sensed Whitman next to him. “I mean, I need your help.”

  Nestor shook his head. “This is too much, Charlie. I value our friendship, but”—he pointed at Whitman again—“I don’t do favors for lower life-forms.”

  Charlie pleaded with him again, but the Catalan was having none of it. “How could you think that I would ever do this?”

  Whitman spoke then. He pointed to the poster of the man with the beaver hat, the armless knife thrower, the deranged doctor, Lon Chaney in London After Midnight. “How badly do you want this film?”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What would you be willing to do to get your hands on London After Midnight?” Whitman asked.

  Nestor took a while to answer. Whitman was confident now, carrying on. “Would you, say, help out an old acquaintance with some paper-film transfer?”

  Nestor gaped at him, dumbfounded. “Bullshit,” he whispered.

  Whitman shrugged, grinning; it was a winner’s grin.

  “Where did you find it?” Nestor asked.

  “Some film storage facility on the border of Culver City and Inglewood—mid-1980s we’re talking now—at Turner, after their MGM buyout of films.”

  Nestor banged a fist on his right knee. “I’ll be damned. They had it all along, those idiots!”

  “It was labeled as The Hypnotist, one of the U.K. titles. Remarkably good condition. Nobody ever checks the alternative titles.”

  “And they just happened to let you in, I suppose, to take whatever you wanted.”

  Whitman grinned. “Something like that.”

  Nestor whispered an obscenity. “There’s a name for that sort of thing: it’s called a felony.”

  “Sometimes things just fall out of the backs of trucks. It happens. Check the statistics.”

  “And you sold it?”

  “For a hefty sum.”

  “You motherfucker.”

  “First I made some copies for myself and Chubs over here, of course. You can have my sixteen-millimeter copy, if you want. But you’ll have to do something for me in exchange.”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “Finders keepers. You know those dumbfucks at MGM actually thought there was a reel missing. So not only were they unaware of what they had; its restoration was low-priority. They had it marked as UNKNOWN, on one of those long lists in a kind of film purgatory, where it’s hoped the titles will one day be restored. The print was complete, of course. If I had left it there, by the time someone found it, it would have been toast. At least my way someone gets to see the damn thing. It’s rescued.”

  “So you’re saying the film is better off in the hands of some private collector, who just happens to have no credentials other than being the highest bidder?”

  “I’m saying the film would have been destroyed beyond recognition if I hadn’t gotten to it first.”

  “You don’t know that. Either way, it doesn’t give you the right…”

  “Look, Slick. Those archivists that you hold so much respect for are nothing more than glorified pencil pushers. They have no interest in film unless its preservation benefits the curator or the institution holding it. They’re not looking for film preservation, only self-preservation.”

  Charlie burst between them. “Now’s not the time for this discussion, guys.”

  Nestor exhaled, still taking in the news of the rediscovery of his missing piece of treasure. He said nothing, but he relaxed a little and some color returned to his face.

  “So will you help us?” Whitman asked.

  “It’s going to take some time.”

  “We only have twenty-four hours,” Charlie said.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  They both shook their heads at the same time.

  Nestor sighed, eyeballing the poster. Chaney’s face stared back at him with wide eyes. “I’ll start now. Pull an all-nighter. I’m not promising anything.”

  Charlie smiled. Nestor pointed at Chaney again. “And I want the London cans delivered to my house,” he continued. “You’re going to get me fired over here.”

  “I thought you would like to share it with your co-workers,” Whitman said with a wicked grin. “Maybe send a copy to MGM while you’re at it. Make that a VHS copy—just for the fun of it.”

  “Fuck off, Whitman.”

  “So what happens now?” Charlie asked.

  “What happens now is youse get the fuck out of here and let me work my magic for the night. Have your phone handy. I’ll give you a call early tomorrow and we can look over what I’ve done till then.”

  Whitman nodded, glancing at the collage of pictures on the wall. At the Grand Café in Paris on the 28th of December, 1895, the arrival of a train was observed by a handful of individuals. The first train on film, approaching La Ciotat, steaming toward the audience and into history. The magic at the time was that a train and a group of people were moving on a screen; the magic ever since has been the extraordinary location of where that camera was placed; all the more in capturing the ordinary glimpses of ordinary people’s lives in a long shot, a medium, a close-up. As long as the film survives, those people on the station platform survive,
too, and perhaps remain trapped in time forever.

  “The Lumières were wrong. ‘Invention without a future,’ my ass,” Nestor said. “We’re still here.”

  “Yes,” Whitman said, “but for how long?”

  14

  When Elliot saw what was lurking behind the hole, he knew it was an act of God, and that if God was out there, He was with him.

  Tunnels snaking around sharp bends, darkness and passages to the left and to the right, like a labyrinth beneath the building, beneath the city, shielded by thousands of tons of solid rock.

  A unique hiding place.

  He didn’t know who had made this or whether anyone knew about it. It was only later that he found out about the vaults of South Bridge, that there were hundreds of vaults like his underneath the Old Town of Edinburgh. That hardly mattered; he had his own hidey-hole.

  The whole idea came unexpectedly, a kind of tour de force out of nowhere.

  The biggest problem was noise. There was a fine old wooden frame in the doorway through to the passage, but he needed to fit a door on there. It took a couple of attempts, but he struck gold. It was four-inch plywood embedded with a metal pane in the middle, and that would help with the noises, too. (He later tested this by blasting a battery-powered radio at full volume from inside the vault with the door shut. It was a success, but he still soundproofed the walls—one could never be too cautious.) It was a massive undertaking, but he did it. Then he came up with an ingenious addition to the plan. He made what looked like a set of library shelves and nailed it to the doorway, so that to the casual passerby it seemed it was just a piece of furniture on a wall. He even fitted a mantelpiece to cover the remaining part of the wall pattern. He could push it up, and there it was: his own secret passage. He also fitted a set of bolts on the inner side of the door to ensure his privacy.

  Two things he found in one of the vault rooms puzzled him. The first discovery was the skeleton. He knelt next to those crumbling remains. It looked like a grown man. Later he stumbled on a gold watch the man must have been wearing: the initials C.E. were still visible, engraved on the back. Some time after this, someone would break into Elliot’s flat and find the crypt—but that would come later, when a mysterious figure would see the skeletons of the children with its own eyes. They were hardly of interest; in the darkness, the figure could not find what it was looking for. There was no sign of the film. However, there was the skeleton of a grown man, sitting in the farthest corner, crumbling away into obscurity. Of course, Carlyle Eistrowe had been dead long before Sekuler laid a hand on that skull.

  Next to the remains lay Elliot’s second discovery: an ancient projector and a box containing what looked like a reel of ancient film. It was pretty grubby, and some of the frames were stuck together. Elliot soaked the film in water and a wetting agent. Adding the moisture and softening the gelatin worked wonders. After that, a soft cloth took care of the surface matter. Incredibly, the projector still worked, and Elliot had a look through the pictures on the frames. It was all very poetic. It was some story about a man and a skeleton coming to life, and the whole thing looked the way old movies usually looked. But then the story was interrupted by other pictures, pictures of a young girl (this was what got Elliot’s attention) standing in a weird stance on a chair. She was staring at an opening of some sort, in a chamber-filled room. A subsequent image gave him clues to what she was looking at. Elliot found it so beautiful—the harmony, the balance, the rhythm—he wished to re-create it. He lacked the language skills to be able to say why it was so beautiful, but what he did was he studied it time and again, trying to understand what someone had constructed in this movie. It took him months, but Elliot reconstructed the small room; he applied a reflective coating in a thin, sparse layer on the half-silvered glass side of a mirror and fastened it on the wall of the small chamber; light in there, dark outside; a one-way mirror facing into another mirror on the far end of the wall of the small room. He peeked through the glass into the chamber—a tunnel of his own reflections stretching into infinity. Eventually he tried this with a girl he snatched at Morrison Street and with the one he dropped at Covenant Close, but he found the whole setup incomprehensible. With the girl from Morrison Street he had made an exquisite video, which he had mailed to the authorities. What a stroke of genius that was, an elaborate prank at once teasing the police and warning the city that a great man was on the loose. Yet even with his recording, he couldn’t get the light ratio between the inside and the outside of the room to work properly. There was something about that mirror in the film, too, but he couldn’t pinpoint what.

  Elliot had eventually quit his job; he didn’t need access to gasoline anymore. All he needed was nitrate film; it burned beautifully. He decided to find a new job, something enjoyable, something he could combine with pleasure.

  When the sun was out, he would park the van at the Meadows. Some children called him Ice Cream Man, others Cheese Man.

  15

  Night had fallen when they returned to Whitman’s flat sometime around ten. The trees that lined Marchmont Road looked uninviting as the wind rustled their leaves. Whitman and Charlie pulled themselves up the two flights of stairs. There was ample mail waiting, stuffed in the corner of the entrance hall; envelopes had been brushed to the side, unopened. Whitman switched on the lights in the living room. He told Charlie that he should take Ellie’s bed and they called it a night.

  In the bedroom, Whitman dropped his coat on the chair and checked his cell phone. There was a missed call from a U.S. number; Valdano, no doubt. He would be alarmed when he realized Whitman wasn’t on board the plane arriving at LAX in the morning.

  But Whitman still had time. Afterwards, he would make up an excuse as to the discrepancy. Valdano wouldn’t care as long as he eventually had the film in his hands.

  —

  Whitman brushed his teeth in front of the mirror.

  He looked into the mirror and downward; Ellie was standing next to him. She was wearing her pink pajamas, the image of a teddy bear stamped across her upper jammy. She was brushing her teeth, too. Her movements were strong, methodical.

  Whitman stopped brushing, smiled into the mirror.

  “What is it, Daddy?” she said, a glowing, smiling mouth behind the toothbrush.

  Whitman turned around, facing the room outside the mirror. No one was there.

  —

  He took off his shoes and sat down on the bed. Its springs made a metallic rustling as they took his weight. God, he was tired. The events leading to the finding of “Séance Infernale”—Valdano, the incident at the parking lot, the pink bicycle, Pluto—had cut straight through the defenses he had built after the loss of his daughter and subsequently his wife. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, fatigue catching up with him. It had been a long day.

  And you’re not finished yet.

  Something glowed next to the bed. After almost ten years, Kate’s wedding ring still lay on the nightstand. He picked up the ring and perched his glasses back on his nose, as if he didn’t remember every fine-grained detail.

  He was going to marry her. He went to one of the best jewelry design places in the city and asked them to make a ring shaped like a sparrow; she was his little sparrow. In the end, doubt won him over and he brought Kate in to help with the design. Together they picked out a stone. She loved wearing it. When they got divorced, she gave it back to him. He’d spent money on it, sure, but the materials themselves weren’t worth a great deal. The blue emerald and the topaz from a ring of his grandmother’s didn’t amount to much. The real value was the time that they and the craftsmen put into carving it, the time when they were happy together. He thought about giving it back to her as a present for what would have been their fifteenth anniversary, but later dismissed the idea as silly and misleading. They hadn’t talked in a while. She tried to call him on his birthday; he never answered the phone.

  In the months that followed their daughter’s disappearance, a grieving Kate had followe
d Whitman’s aberration as it had grown from austere grief to an idée fixe. He would spend his days and nights hunting down rare pieces; travels became more frequent, usually in different countries, away from the woman who reminded him of his missing flesh and blood, away from the woman who shouted at him that he had put Ellie behind him. Yet it was this same woman who began arrangements for the divorce papers a few years later, marrying a real estate broker and starting a new family and a new life. Last he had heard, she had two kids, both in kindergarten. Surely their father would never lose sight of his children.

  The times Whitman wasn’t traveling in some faraway place, he rarely stayed at home. He found himself returning to the Meadows, placidly sitting on a bench and smoking away, hoping to catch a glimpse, amid the fog, of a little girl with freckles and a doll.

  Equipped with a couple of photographs and a piece of paper with a list of names and addresses, he had set out every morning before the break of day. He showed the photographs—two stills of Ellie, a close-up and a full-body—to anyone he could divert from their daily routine. He started in that fateful part of the Meadows.

  During the desperate times, when no one would stop to listen, he would wave the photos in the face of anyone he could catch, like a lunatic holding a sign warning about the apocalypse. Their faces often made it worse; they couldn’t bring themselves to look him in the eyes. They stared at the pavement or nervously around themselves, feeling the crisp sensation of the morning paper and savoring the rich taste of their takeaway coffee. People passed by him with a warning signal in their eyes. Whatever happened to you had better stay with you, and away from me, it said.

  The list of names had been particularly unsuccessful. He had assembled it from Edinburgh newspapers over the past fifteen years; they consisted of the names of parents whose children had been kidnapped or murdered or had gone missing. He visited their houses and saw how most people’s lives had plunged into a dark pit. The parents were sometimes baffled, other times confrontational. One mother called him “a sick man.” He lingered by the phone booth he had called Valdano from that day. He hovered around the photography shop across the street and browsed its shelves. He dawdled farther, taking in the Links and Tollcross on one side and Sciennes and most of Newington on the other, expanding the circular area of his investigation in the scale of miles. This analgesic kept him going, almost as effectively as the film pursuits. It also caused a small stir in the papers—the man still looking for his missing daughter—but it was hardly encouraging. The same story was repeated every time, like a broken record, leading yet again to his dazed escapades in the Meadows.