Séance Infernale

by Jonathan Skariton

  He felt relief when the cat took his last breath and closed his eye. He stayed there staring at the charred remains for the rest of the night.

  —

  The fire puffed again from inside the workroom, and the feline intruder jolted.

  Whitman raised his head and saw Charlie come running out and shut the door.

  “It’s out of control.”

  With relief, Whitman saw that he was holding a memory stick.

  Charlie stopped to take a breath, coughing from the smoke. “Give me your cell phone,” he said, his hands on his knees.

  “What for?”

  “Aren’t we calling the police?”

  Whitman put his index finger next to his temple and made a circular motion. “You nuts? With all the blood in here? Our fingerprints are all over the place.”

  “We don’t have anything to be afraid of.”

  “That was before it turned out to be Towering Inferno day in there, Jabba. I’ll be damned if I’m going to get busted for taking back what’s mine.”

  Charlie helped him up. “I don’t know about this, dude. Nestor might be in danger. Besides, we don’t know if the building really is empty. You wouldn’t wish burning on anyone, would you?”

  Whitman nodded and handed him the phone. “Make the call. Anonymously.”

  18

  The unthinkable happened. It was shortly after Elliot constructed his hiding place—1990, it must have been. He came back one day and found that the lock to his door had been forced open. After he established that no one was still inside the flat, he began noticing subtle hints of another person having been there. It wasn’t that anything was missing (he couldn’t care less about the valuable objects in the house), but small deviations from normality surfaced here and there: a vase had been moved; a wardrobe door had not been fully closed; a hair on his bed. But the observation that solidified his suspicions was the rug: one tip had been slightly moved and was curled at an angle to the floor. That meant, in all likelihood, that someone had entered his carefully devised hiding place. In the vault, the ancient projectors and film were still there, in their own hidey-holes. Evidently the burglar had failed to find them.

  Hundreds of scenarios of dread filled his head that night. A burglar had broken in, found the vault, found the burnt remains of the girls (how many of them had there been? Fourteen? Fifteen?), and was in the process of calling the police. All it would take would be an anonymous tip and the flat would be crawling with policemen and crime-scene scientists. He became so paranoid then and there that he didn’t even wait until the morning. He left the flat, rented a place in Carstairs, and then kept changing addresses for a substantial amount of time. But he couldn’t stay away forever—not after he realized no harm had been done: no police, no anonymous tips. The only problem was that there was no more room in the flat’s vault; he would have to find places to dump every new victim from now on. Yet he hardly cared about the risk; the important thing was that he was free again, free to return to the vaults, free to continue. The person who had broken in—for some obscure reason—had not given him up. And that made him a friend.

  19

  It was still dark when they got back to Thirlestane Road. They perched their coats on the hanger in the hall, still thinking of the events at the Archive. The flat smelled musty and cloying, like pear drops. Darts of moonlight filtered through the window grilles of Whitman’s flat, turning the walls to an assortment of shadows, like a macabre Gothic projection.

  “Your house really smells,” Charlie said.

  “Huh?”

  “Has smoking completely killed off your nose?” Charlie said. “It’s that sweet and sickly smell, you know, like the sweat of a diabetic.”

  “I forgot something in the fridge. Just crack open the living room window,” Whitman said. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. It had been a strange night. The Catalan archivist had disappeared. Whitman thought about the blood on the staircase, and the nagging sensation in his gut turned into a terrible sense of foreboding. It reminded him of the familiar faces following him throughout his travels, and also of the mysterious breaking and entering at Elena Genhagger’s house in Switzerland, where the perpetrator had taken Elizabeth Sekuler’s memoirs. Until that time, unlawfulness had been the only danger Whitman had known. Every time he deceived another player in the game, he had remained unmoved, because he was the third man—granted, not as well dressed or as mysterious as Harry Lime, but an impervious, safe third man.

  The events of that night had revealed an unknown, impending danger; a fire had broken out, destroying the Archive. Nestor was missing because of his involvement with the film; that much was clear. Now the paper film was nowhere to be found, its only trace left in Nestor’s memory stick.

  Whitman twisted open a bottle of Grand Marnier and searched for aspirin in his slingbag. Instead, his fingers found a bottle of codeine pills left over from a time he’d had a broken tooth. He stared at the bottle for a second, then opened the cap and placed one in his mouth.

  He checked his phone: three missed calls—U.S. number. By now, Valdano would have realized what was going on. The plane would be at arrivals at LAX, but Whitman wouldn’t be on it. Oh, there would be anger. Failing to track down the film in the first place would have been one thing, but finding it and then letting it be taken from his hands—that meant trouble. Valdano would not be happy with the digital copy. Whitman could picture him tossing the memory stick in his face.

  “Shall we?” Charlie’s voice interrupted his thoughts. Whitman looked up and saw that he had already switched on the laptop and slipped the memory stick into its USB port.

  They moved their seats close to the small screen, sharing conspiratorial glances with each other, two kids fascinated with the magic of moving images, eager to relive the redemption that comes only from becoming one with these curious frames. Within seconds they were watching a film made long before either of them had been born, a film that had been entombed for more than a century and was now waking up from a deep sleep, ready to take its first breath after an eternity.

  Like the rest of Sekuler’s work, the film footage had no title sequence or any other hint of provenance or ownership. The image was jittery, even though everything had been filmed from a stationary camera, positioned as if it were the audience in a play. It wasn’t until D. W. Griffith came along that audiences started seeing close-ups and panoramic long views. But none of this mattered; the image in front of them was marvelous. The quality and care rivaled that of works by Segundo de Chomón, Émile Cohl, and Georges Méliès, who would step in almost a decade later to claim the title of pioneer of early fantasy film.

  It was a one-scene shot, using Edinburgh Castle and the Princes Street Gardens as backdrop. It was nighttime, and the moon was shining from far away. Two people in olden costumes entered the shot. The first was dressed in a robe of white linen, with a girdle embroidered in gold and silver. He was carrying a coffin while the other man looked on from the side. The robed man dropped the coffin on the ground and began to speak to the second man. While they were engaged in conversation, a skeleton rose out of the coffin. Turning around and seeing this, the first man sauntered back and pushed the skeleton back down; he dressed the skeleton in white sheets while continuing to engage in their conversation.

  Whitman’s breath caught in his throat as he realized the man carrying the coffin was Augustin Sekuler. There he was: the inventor, the at-once auteur and actor, pulling the skeleton out of the coffin, performing some kind of magic in theatrical fashion.

  In response to its dress-up, the skeleton began to dance in a playful manner. With a twist and turn of his hands, Sekuler made the skeleton turn into a woman—played by his wife, Elizabeth—then back into a skeleton again. Following this, the skeleton melted, until only its head remained. It then began growing and growing, until it had reached twice the height of the inventor. Finally, a neck sprouted from its head like a flower from the earth and the skeleton retur
ned to normal size.

  Whitman and Charlie stared as the main character tried to grant his wife one final kiss. To the average observer today it would look fake, but the camera tricks were well executed for the time. That last bit was arguably the best: Sekuler attempted to give his skeletal wife a kiss, but something went wrong; as if jolted by the surge of an electrical current, the skeleton danced around wantonly. In collaboration, Sekuler performed an assortment of tricks with the skeleton while the other man watched in awe. It wasn’t clear who the other man was. In all likelihood it was Joseph Whitley, Sekuler’s father-in-law, or Frederick Mason, the wood joiner who had helped the inventor construct the cameras. Whitman couldn’t place the face from the grainy image, but he was certain he had seen the man before.

  The main body of the film looked like an early take on the Frankenstein tale, made at least twenty years before Edison’s official version. The story seemed to be that an Edinburgh man had recently lost his wife, so he hired an alchemist to retrieve her coffin in order to try to bring her back from the dead. But the film was actually about Sekuler, the cinematic magician, making an impossible trick of disappearance on camera.

  Whitman and Charlie watched it again, then a third and fourth time.

  “Well? What do you think? Stop-trick extravaganza?” Whitman said.

  The film was entirely based on the stop trick, which at that time was a complicated thing to do at high speeds. Sekuler, however, had evidently achieved a fluid way of editing that allowed him to use it even when his characters were running and jumping, without the footage looking absurd. The effects of the many disappearances, done in a pure stage-magician style, were still amazing; even more so on that Thursday morning in Edinburgh, inside a flat that smelled of absence, in 2002, more than a hundred years after the footage had been shot. Both as an experiment and as charming entertainment, “Séance Infernale” surely was a successful film, and it offered a glimpse of what the cinemagician had in his bag.

  “There’s something about it.”

  Charlie couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was an element of the footage that he found perplexing. He put it down to its age; innovation at such an early stage in filmmaking, long before proper filming techniques and standardized linear narration, could seem unorthodox. But there was something else. “I think I saw something,” he said, squinting his eyes.

  “What do you mean, ‘saw something’?”

  “Rewind it and play it back.”

  When they reached the point where Sekuler brought out the coffin, Charlie pressed Pause.

  “There it is,” he said.

  “I don’t see anything. Where? What is it?”

  Charlie positioned his index finger on the screen, pointing to the coffin being hauled by the main character. Now Whitman saw it. The inscription on the side of the coffin.

  “Can you make it out?”

  “I think so. It looks Latin.”

  “Cerca Trova,” Charlie whispered, still squinting. “What does that mean?”

  “Seek and you shall find.”

  “What does that have to do with the coffin?” Charlie asked, pushing Play again. The cinemagician continued carrying the coffin.

  “Maybe it doesn’t have to do with the coffin.”

  Onscreen, Sekuler was assembling his equipment, his back turned to the coffin. The skeleton gradually rose from it.

  “What do you mean?”

  The skeleton began to dance and frolic around like a marionette.

  “Nestor mentioned something on the phone ab—”

  On the screen, something had happened. Both of them noticed it simultaneously; something had jumped out at them, a momentary flicker. They gave each other a look.

  “Rewind it.”

  Charlie pressed the Rewind button and paused the footage about ten seconds before the flash came on. He used the arrow keys to play the film frame by frame. Their eyes locked on the screen.

  The inventor was carrying the coffin on every frame, with turtle steps, while the other actor looked at him in awe. Then the screen went black for three frames. The frame after looked like static, from which bizarre shapes seemed to be displayed to the viewer: a wooden board with slightly raised metal bits, as if different pieces from a game of dominoes had been stuck together, then more static. Charlie pressed the right arrow to proceed to the following frame.

  It was a girl. She had curly hair in pigtails and wide, piercing eyes. She was inside a darkish room, in a seated position, seen en profil from the camera’s view. In front of her lay some kind of chamber.

  “What the hell is this?”

  The girl was staring blankly before her, into a rectangular structure that could have been a window or a painting on the chamber’s wall.

  “What is she looking at?”

  In the frozen frame, the girl kept her vigil, staring, entranced. More black frames, followed by another image. The same girl. Eyes staring into the structure. The camera had moved slightly to the side, bringing into view what she was seeing.

  What the rectangular structure on the chamber wall was remained unclear, but it became evident that one could see through it, as if it was a window. Through it, the girl was looking at a peculiar alcove or staircase, stretching deep inside the chamber.

  “Are those stairs?”

  Whitman shook his head. “No.” It became clear. Embedded on the staircase were multiple, consecutive images—reflections—of the girl in a seated position, stretching into infinity.

  “It’s a mirror.” Whitman pressed the left arrow a few times, culminating with the initial hidden frame. “Okay, she’s located inside a basement. We see her en profil for now, staring into something—we don’t know what it is, but we know it’s some kind of steel structure, a room within the basement.”

  He pressed the arrow forward, until the camera view had changed. The camera angle was such that the observer assumed the point of view of the girl. “There is a rectangular feature fastened to the room. We’re looking straight into it—through it, in fact. At first glance, the rectangular feature seems like it’s a window.”

  “But it’s not?”

  Whitman shook his head. “What do you see through the window?”

  “The girl. And behind her, there’s a staircase going up?”

  “That’s not the girl. That’s her reflection. When we look through the rectangle, what we see is the far end of its inside.”

  “And at the far end there is a mirror.”

  Whitman ran his fingers through his beard. “Exactly. But here’s the clincher: the rectangle through which we see the mirror is another mirror—a one-way mirror.”

  “So the image of the girl is reflected in the second mirror—the one inside the chamber…and then that reflection is reflected once again, on the other side of the one-way mirror?”

  Whitman nodded. “Back and forth. Continuously. And this is what we get: a tunnel.” He couldn’t understand exactly how it worked, but the visual outcome was identical to the effect produced when you place an object between two facing mirrors: if the mirrors are parallel, the observer can see a weird tunnel created by a progression of smaller reflected images of the object, sinking endlessly into infinity. Children have been trying this for years inside elevators with mirrors on either side.

  It was completely out of place; the image had nothing to do with the rest of the film. They were frames inserted among the others, undetectable to a casual observer. Sekuler had weaved hidden images through the frames of his movie.

  They rewound the footage and watched it again.

  “What—” Charlie began, but midsentence he realized Whitman had not spoken in minutes. He turned to his friend. Saw his face, his eyes locked on the girl. He saw the yearning and finally understood. “Alex.”

  Whitman wasn’t listening. His eyes had turned misty.

  “It’s not her, Alex,” Charlie said.

  “She…she looks…”

  “I know. I’m sorry. She looks like her. But she’
s not.”

  “Who is she?”

  20

  D.S. Georgina McBride eyed her desk. It had become a murder scene. Photos of loci, pictures of victims in life and death, crime scenes and locations. Around her, the soft clack-clack of computer keyboards; officers were using the SCRO computer or the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, HOLMES. The steadfast detectives typed in data and checked, cross-referenced and examined. Names, witnesses, locations—anything that could help ongoing investigations. Another girl had been reported missing: Amanda Pearson, fourteen years old, last seen at the Ocean Terminal shopping complex in Leith.

  McBride was standing over D.I. Johnson’s desk. There were empty coffee cups everywhere. Johnson had popped to the watercooler, and two uniforms were perched on his chairs: Police Constables Elwood and Dowd, breathing proof of yin and yang. Elwood was slim and lean as a knife; Dowd flirted with 250 pounds of fat beneath his belt buckle. Johnson had joked that Dowd’s wasn’t a beer belly anymore: it was a beer factory. Elwood was shy and reserved; Dowd couldn’t control his mouth, blurting whatever remark popped into his head. Although they were both in their early twenties, almost fresh out of the academy, this was evident only in Dowd; Elwood looked older, with a constant fatigue evident in the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes.

  “How does someone not see or hear a little girl being abducted?” McBride said.

  “Sometimes the bad guy gets the advantage,” Dowd said.