by Tim Weaver
‘That’s what I need to find out,’ I said.
He handed me back the phone, and I went to the picture of the Post-it note I’d discovered at Korin’s house. The original was gone – Egan had burned it while I’d been out at the scrapyard – but he hadn’t got around to deleting the digital copy from my phone. I needed to figure out what the letters meant, but I also needed to get a fix on the timecode too.
‘Does this mean anything to you?’ I asked, holding up the screen.
Walker leaned in and took the phone again. ‘The two lines of letters? No.’
‘What about under that?’
‘Is that a Kill! timecode?’
‘I think so. Do you know what it might be referring to specifically?’
He pressed his lips together. It clearly meant nothing to him, but his eyes continued to switch between me and the phone display, as if he was thinking.
‘No,’ he said after a while.
‘You’ve no idea what the timecode means?’
‘No,’ he repeated. ‘But there might be a way of finding out.’
50
He got up, gestured for me to follow him, and led me into the kitchen. In the corner, out of sight, was a set of five oak drawers.
He pulled at the middle one.
Except they weren’t drawers at all. The whole thing was a single oak panel, made to look like a series of drawers. Immediately inside, filling the entire space, was a dark grey steel safe. It had a number pad on it and a turning wheel.
Walker put in a code.
The safe made a short buzz and then he spun the wheel until the door bumped away from its frame. Wisps of smoke escaped through the gap – and then I realized it wasn’t smoke at all, but tendrils of freezing-cold air.
The safe was a refrigerator.
Inside were two big metal drawers, stacked on top of each other. Each had a handle. Walker grabbed the top one and pulled, and the drawer slid smoothly out from the space it had occupied on a set of runners.
‘These things were originally built to hold six 2,000-foot reels of 35mm film,’ he said, turning to me. He seemed nervous, as if I might be about to push him aside and start tearing into them. ‘They were transportation cases. I bought them in auction – I don’t know, six, seven years ago. At work, we’ve got a vault that stores master material at a constant temperature of minus five, but as I haven’t got one of those and won’t be getting one any time soon, I’ve made do.’
‘You built this yourself?’
‘The cases came as is. Everything else, yes.’
The top case had a latch on its flank, which he flipped, and then he hoisted the lid up. I stepped closer and looked inside. There was a row of five silver film canisters, each one slotted into a moulded foam base, end up. ‘I’ve got all eleven of the films that Robert Hosterlitz made between 1979 and 1984,’ he said. He ran a hand along the canisters. ‘There’s five here and six down there.’
I glanced at the case below.
‘These aren’t the dubbed versions either. They’re the original negatives, in English. The only one of these films you can buy now in English is Axe Maniac, and that DVD version is made from a distribution print. Same deal with the other DVD releases that have been dubbed into Spanish and Italian. All are distribution prints, not originals. I know, because I’ve had the original negatives since 1987.’
‘How?’
He pushed the top case in slightly and pulled the bottom one out, opening it to reveal the other six canisters. ‘I was born in Madrid,’ he said. ‘My father was a film projectionist at a cinema in Salamanca that used to show English-language films. My mother was a doctor, so she worked a lot of nights, which meant I usually tagged along with Dad. That was how I fell in love with cinema – and where my interest in Hosterlitz started. I used to watch his movies, even though I must have only been ten or eleven, and every time they showed, my father would try to shield my eyes from them. “These are junk,” he used to say to me. “But his early films, now they were good.” Most people watch Hosterlitz’s noirs and work forward, losing interest in his movies after The Ghost of the Plains. I started at the end and worked back – and if anything, it only made me more interested in him.’
Walker looked at me, then down at the canisters again. ‘Mano Águila, the production company Hosterlitz worked for between 1979 and 1984, they didn’t close in ’86 because they weren’t making money. They closed because they were. The guy who was running it, Pedro Silva – he owed about seventeen million pesetas in unpaid tax. So when the taxman closed in, he shuttered the premises and fled to Argentina. A couple of months after that, I got inside the Mano Águila building.’
‘You stole these?’
He nodded. ‘They’d just been left there. So I grabbed them, chucked them into the car, and I never mentioned it to anyone. My father was English, although he’d lived in Spain for years, and he used to call petty thieves “toerags”. That’s what I was, I suppose – but I’ve never regretted it.’
He leaned down and removed a canister from the bottom case.
‘This is Kill!,’ he said.
There was no writing on the canister, just a number 6 on the side. Kill! had been the sixth film that Hosterlitz had made for Pedro Silva.
I looked around the room. ‘Have you got a projector?’
He pointed towards the bedroom and led me there. It was semi-lit, a blind at the window keeping the sun out. Walker opened up all the doors on a row of built-in wardrobes. Filling the space was a huge 35mm projector, facing out at the white wall above Walker’s bed, on the opposite side of the room.
He was projecting across to there.
‘This was my father’s,’ he said, laying a hand briefly on the machine. ‘It’s the 35mm projector he used at the Royale in Salamanca. They let him keep it when the place went belly up in the early nineties. I took it on after he died.’
A moment of sadness flickered in his face as he talked about his father, and then he held up the canister with Kill! in it: ‘The film is made up of six different reels, because all Silva’s movies were shot on “short ends” – the ends of rolls of raw negative stock left over from bigger productions. Because of that, and because I don’t have a platter to make the switch between reels easy, if you want to see the whole thing, start to finish, I’m going to have to load it all in manually, one reel at a time. That means there’ll be five breaks as I do.’
‘How long’s the film?’
‘About eighty-five minutes – and that includes the credits.’
The timecode on the Post-it was one hour and nineteen minutes, which put it very near the end of the movie.
‘Just go straight to the last reel,’ I said.
‘You don’t want to see the whole film?’
I shook my head. ‘Just how it ends.’
51
‘Before 1951,’ Walker was saying, leaning over the projector, ‘the industry standard stock was nitrate.’ He was inching the reel through some sort of roller. ‘My Evil Heart and Connor O’Hare would have been shot on nitrate. That stuff was lethal. It would catch light at the drop of a hat, go off like a box of fireworks, and it was near impossible to put out. But after 1951, everything was shot on safety stock. That’ll burn – but not like nitrate.’ He paused, struggling with something. ‘This reel is Eastmancolor,’ he said, teeth gritted, still struggling. ‘It’s safety stock, so it won’t go up in flames as easily, but it suffers from something called magenta bias. That means, over time, colours fade, leaving only the red hues, especially if it’s not stored properly.’ Something snapped into place. ‘Finally,’ he muttered, and then straightened, wiping his hands against his shirt, trying to rid them of sweat. ‘My point is, I’ve done my best to preserve these, but they’re not pristine.’
‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘Honestly.’
The projector hummed and then rattled into life, a cone of light erupting from its lens, an image immediately cast on to the far wall. The reel made a soft, familiar chatt
er as the sprockets fed it through the machine, and I was taken back to my childhood, to the cinema I’d gone to as a boy. There was a pop from the audio and then the film’s sound launched from the speakers.
‘How far in are we?’ I asked Walker.
‘This is the seventy-first minute of eighty-five,’ he said.
As the movie began playing, I set the timer going on my watch so I’d have a rough idea of when we got to seventy-nine minutes, and – impatient now – considered getting Walker to wind the reel on quicker. But then a female actor I instantly recognized as Veronica Mae appeared onscreen, and I held off.
Without the benefit of a decent speaker system, because the audio levels hadn’t been properly balanced at the time of production, and because the acting was so bad, it was sometimes hard to follow the dialogue. Onscreen, Mae was joined by two male actors, even worse performers than her, as they sought shelter in an abandoned shop. I listened hard to their exchange and managed to figure out that they were, predictably, escaping the clutches of a deranged killer who had already killed at least three of their friends. The male actors spoke in awful American accents, and the shop had been set-dressed with an American flag.
Eventually, the killer managed to catch up with them as they tried to find an exit at the back of the shop. Dressed in a long hooded raincoat, he sliced one man’s neck, decapitated the other, then chased Veronica Mae into a large upstairs room filled with storage shelves and bric-a-brac. The film was chaotic and badly lit, and backed by a horrible, screeching soundtrack. When I glanced at my watch, I saw we were sixty seconds away from the seventy-ninth minute.
I took a step closer to the projection on the wall, watching as Mae tried, in vain, to show the terror her character was feeling – and then the camera lurched up to the right to show the killer beside her, knife in his hand. But that was when the twist came: as the hood fell away, the killer was finally revealed – and it wasn’t a man at all. It was a woman.
It was Lynda Korin.
I glanced at my watch. The twist had happened at the start of the seventy-ninth minute – so was that what the timecode on the Post-it had been referring to? As I considered that, the two women briefly fought some more in a nearby office, and then Korin threw Mae against a wall, where she was impaled on a large shard of glass. After that, something more familiar took hold: the action cut to a wide shot, Korin the central focus, and the soundtrack dropped out.
It was the start of the ninety-second end sequence.
The slow dolly towards Korin began. I couldn’t hear Hosterlitz’s voice-over this time – not because it wasn’t there, but because the quality of the projected sound wasn’t good enough. After sixty seconds, just like all the movies I’d already seen, the camera inched past Korin and moved towards a walnut-cased television sitting in the corner. In this film the TV was off to start with, just a black screen, but then it popped into life and the same footage kicked in: the same video, shot from inside the same car, of the same street.
Ten seconds later, the credits rolled.
I looked back at Walker. ‘Did you see anything?’
His eyes were still on the wall. ‘What if the timecode you have for Kill! is a reference to the film’s reveal?’ he said. ‘What if it’s pointing to the fact that the killer is a woman, not a man?’
His thoughts were echoing my earlier ones.
‘Maybe,’ I said, and thought about the VO again. ‘There’s something else I wanted to ask you about. When the heartbeat and breathing come in, there’s –’
‘ “You don’t know who you are.” ’
I nodded. ‘You’ve definitely heard it, then.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know what it means?’
He shook his head. ‘No. It’s so difficult to even hear him. I only really found it by accident, through repeated viewings of this sequence.’
I’d done the same with the DVD versions.
‘Can you play it over again?’ I asked.
Walker leaned over the projector and began reversing the reel. It kicked into life about a minute prior to the twist. I took a couple more steps towards the wall and then, as we got closer to Korin’s appearance, Walker began slowing the whole thing down, feeding the reel through the projector at half-speed. We moved past the point of the reveal and into the struggle between Korin and Mae, and nothing caught my eye – not about the construction of the scene, not about the women involved. Once Mae was dead, the repeated sequence began.
This time, I noticed something.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Wait a second. Can you take it back to the moment when Mae is killed by Korin?’
He did as I asked.
‘That’s it. Pause it there.’
Again, he followed my lead.
‘How long between Mae’s death and the start of the end sequence?’
Walker shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Five seconds maybe.’
‘Can you play the film frame by frame from here?’
He looked dubious, and I understood why: the film had been shot at the standard twenty-four frames per second, so even five seconds of the film equated to one hundred and twenty separate frames. But he did as I asked and I waited, quietly, while he set it up. Pretty soon, the film began again.
I was watching the scene so closely now, analysing every frame – even when one was almost identical to the next – that, after a while, I began to feel the pressure of it building behind my eyes. My head thumped and my vision blurred. It was a bizarre, unnatural way to view the movie, like watching the pages of a flick book shift at an infinitesimally low speed.
In these final few moments before the switch to the end sequence, the movie seemed darker than ever, as badly lit as anything Hosterlitz had ever put on to film.
Except maybe it wasn’t badly lit at all.
It had taken three viewings – once at normal speed, once at half-speed and once frame by frame – for it even to click. At first, the poor lighting had just seemed like a by-product of the way the movies were made – quick and on the cheap. But now, slowing it right down, everything became clearer.
When Hosterlitz started the end sequence, when Korin became the sole focus for him, he got his act together and the scene was shot impeccably. But, before that, in the preceding seconds, the frames were so poorly lit and inadequately photographed that they were reduced to near black.
‘Because he’s doing it on purpose.’
Walker frowned, looked at me. ‘What?’
‘He’s poorly lighting these final moments before the repeated sequence on purpose. This last second is so dark it’s almost impossible to see what’s going on.’ I paused, thinking. ‘What if he’s hiding something?’
‘Hiding something? Where?’
‘Can you rewind it?’
Walker’s gaze lingered on me, as if he feared once again that I was losing it, but then his curiosity got the better of him and he changed the direction of the reel. He took it back two seconds. Korin, having killed Mae, played out a series of minor actions in reverse, and then – with a snap of a switch – Walker began moving forwards again, frame by frame.
Two seconds of film comprised forty-eight individual frames. The closer to the forty-eighth we got, the harder it became to see anything, as if Hosterlitz had deliberately and rapidly faded out the lighting. In real time, the two seconds passed so quickly that the change in light would barely register as anything other than an amateurish moment in a movie littered with them – but slowed down to this pace, it felt completely deliberate. In the forty-sixth and forty-seventh frame, there was hardly any light at all. In the forty-eighth and final frame – before the switch to the wide shot that marked the start of the end sequence – Hosterlitz went even further than that: there was no hint of the scene at all.
The frame was just black.
‘Why has he done this?’ Walker said quietly.
‘You’ve never noticed this before?’
‘No,’ Walker said. ‘I’ve watched all these films c
ountless times, but I’ve never watched them frame by frame like this. How have I never seen this?’
He sounded frustrated, understandably, but the answer seemed obvious. The finale of Kill! was so badly lit, in fact the entire film was so badly lit, that it would have been impossible to pick out a single frame of black. But, as I stepped away from the wall in an attempt to see things clearly, I started to realize something: the frame wasn’t entirely black.
There was some grey in it.
‘You see that?’ I asked, tracing a series of vague swirls with my fingers.
‘Yes. What are those?’
I squinted, willing myself to see better.
‘They’re words.’
Walker glanced at me. ‘Words?’
‘The same three words, repeated over and over.’
He just continued looking at me, like I might be joking. ‘I haven’t got my glasses,’ he said, turning his attention back to the wall. ‘What do they say?’
‘They say, “Ring of Roses”.’
52
The two of us were silent for a moment, our eyes on Walker’s bedroom wall, on the black frame filled with the same three words, repeated over and over again. I was caught halfway between elation and horror, buzzing from having followed the rabbit hole this deep, anxious and alarmed about what it might mean.
‘We need to do the same thing for the end sequence,’ I said.
Walker tore his eyes away from the wall. ‘What?’
‘We need to go frame by frame.’
‘You’re talking well over two thousand frames.’
‘I know.’
We stared at each other for a moment, Walker looking like he wanted to protest, but then his interest in Hosterlitz won out. The frustrated author in him, the man who had spent so many years trying to understand the director, trying to finish his book, was never going to be able to let this one go. He set it up and we began.
Forty minutes in, we found something.