by Unknown
“Why, it’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of,” sniffed Mrs. Melnick. “Laszlo’s been completely left out! Do you suppose they misplaced his pictures?”
“Maybe,” said Mr. Melnick. “Or someone’s playing a rather elaborate joke on us.” He reached for the phone book. “What was the name of that agency?”
“Celebrity Associates,” said his wife. “Aunt Ida recommended them, remember? She said that since Laszlo had aristocratic blood and all, he was practically a celebrity, and so I thought—” But Mr. Melnick was already dialing the phone.
The man on the other end was soft-spoken and cordial, but the cordiality receded as the nature of Mr. Melnick’s call became clear. “No groom?” he cried. “Impossible! Our guys follow a routine, it’s the same at every wedding: bride with bridesmaid, bride with groom, bride with father and mother, father of bride with groom—”
“There is no groom!” It was hard to keep from screaming. “And I’ll be damned if I pay good money for someone who’s not there. Your man was hired to take wedding pictures—that means pictures of a couple, a pair. If I’d wanted just my daughter I’d have taken them myself.”
“Okay, mister, okay. Maybe there was some kind of screw-up. Do you happen to remember the photographer’s name?”
“Jerry something, I think. I’d like to ask him if—”
But the voice had disappeared, to be replaced by silence.
No, not silence. Echoes—echoes just beyond the edge of comprehension. Mr. Melnick pressed the phone to his ear and strained to make sense of them. He half fancied he heard wails, a hissing, laughter, the chattering of a hundred demons skipping rope amid the phone wires; brigades of ghosts were whispering the names of the condemned, his own doomed name among them...
“Mr. Melnick?”
He jerked back, startled. The voice had returned.
“Listen, I just spoke to Jerry. He says—”
“I’d like to speak to him myself.”
“Uh-uh, we’ve got him down in the darkroom today. He can’t come to the phone. But he told me he remembers the wedding, and that he had a lot of trouble with the groom. He says it was very hard to get the guy to sit still and have his picture taken. You know how it is, some people are just camera shy. Jerry says he got him, though, in all the standard shots. Bride with bridesmaid, bride with groom—”
“He isn’t there, I tell you!”
The man gave an exasperated sigh. “Okay,” he said wearily, “here’s what you do. Send us back the negatives so we can look them over, and I’ll see to it you don’t get charged. Of course—” His voice was all business again. “—if you order extra prints, you’re gonna have to pay for them just like everyone else.”
Mr. Melnick was grumbling as he got off the phone, and continued to do so all evening—especially when, shortly after midnight, with still no sign of Jennifer and Laszlo, he telephoned the airline and learned that their flight was three hours late. “That’s it for me” said his wife. “You can wait up if you want to, but I’m going to bed.” Yawning, she moved toward the stairs. “And for heaven’s sake, stop worrying about Laszlo. If you absolutely have to have his picture, you can take it yourself in just a few hours, when he and Jennifer come home.” She paused at the landing. “And be sure to wake me when they do.”
The house, once she’d gone up, seemed unnaturally empty, a stage set with the props all in place but with the performers yet to appear. Entering the kitchen, Mr. Melnick nearly failed to recognize the face that scowled and peered at him through the windows near the sink; it was his own face reflected in the glossy blackness of the panes, yet subtly altered, imbued now with an almost spectral pallor caused, no doubt, by the glare from the fluorescent bulb. Upstairs he heard the sounds of washing, the snapping off of lights, the creaking of floorboards and bedsprings as his wife made ready for sleep. Pouring himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen (fortified with a shot of Jack Daniels), he returned to the living room and settled back on the couch with a half-completed crossword puzzle from that morning’s Times, which, as usual, his wife had tried and then abandoned. He stared at the puzzle for a moment, thinking of what she’d said earlier. Perhaps, some time tomorrow, he would ask Laszlo to pose for a picture or two. Just for the record, of course; just to have something to include among the wedding photos. He could really use a few of Laszlo...
The air outside was growing colder. Around him, like a sleeper, the old house shifted and groaned, drawing itself closer for the night.
Odd, come to think of it—he didn’t have a single picture of Laszlo. Not a one. Even though he’d always been something of a camera buff, he had never managed to include Laszlo in a shot; the fellow always had some excuse for staying out of range. “Camera shy,” the man at the agency had said.
Not that Laszlo had anything to be ashamed of. He was a decent-looking young man with what Jennifer liked to call “dark, European good looks,” albeit a bit sallow of complexion. But then, what could you expect from someone who kept such ridiculous hours? “I guess I am just—how you say?—a ‘night person,’ ” he’d explained, with an apologetic smile.
Well, habits like that were easy to break; Jennifer would soon set him right. She was a trifle on the heavy side, perhaps (she took after her mother), but she’d always been a strong, healthy girl of formidable enthusiasm and energy. Some of this was bound to rub off on Laszlo. No doubt their honeymoon together had put a little color in his cheeks.
Yet what if, in fact, the opposite had occurred? What if Laszlo and his ways had proved the stronger? The Old World, he knew, had a certain allure, especially to an impressionable young woman seeing it for the first time. He remembered that last, hurried postcard of Jennifer’s, written just after meeting Laszlo’s family. “Dear Mom and Dad,” it had said. “Laszlo has shown me a whole new way of life. Can’t wait to let you both in on it.”
Somewhere deep in his stomach he felt a tiny, hard knot of unease. The feeling seemed distinctly inappropriate so near to his daughter’s return. He got up to make himself another drink, this time omitting the coffee.
Outside, there was movement. A chill October wind had risen from the east, scattering the dead leaves in the yard and stripping the branches of the trees. The old house stirred. In the kitchen, with a terrible suddenness, the refrigerator fell silent. Its noisy little motor had been churning steadily all evening, but until this moment he hadn’t really been aware of it. Now the sound was, as in the old expression, conspicuous by its absence...
Just like Laszlo. The thought had come unbidden to his mind. Setting down his drink, he opened the manila envelope and looked once again at the photos.
They still made no sense. Here young Laszlo should have been beside him, son-in-law and father-in-law standing arm in arm. Here his daughter, in the dance, appeared to have her arms around a phantom, yet one that she apparently could see. Even Pamela—poor Pamela!—was staring, it seemed, in Laszlo’s direction.
Holding the photos to the light, studying the faces of the wedding guests, Mr. Melnick frowned. Laszlo, for all his nonappearance, seemed curiously present in scene after scene, visible to all but the camera—as if the very chemicals in the film had balked at recording his visual image.
The notion, of course, was absurd. It contradicted all the laws of physics; though on a fairy-tale level it seemed reasonable enough—like that legend, half-remembered from his childhood, about vampires casting no reflections. Dimly he recalled a scene from a long-ago Sunday matinee: Lugosi lunging for someone’s pocket mirror and smashing it to the floor, preserving till another hour his dreadful secret.
Perhaps the same process was operating here. If vampires passed unseen before the silver in a looking glass, wouldn’t they have the same problem with—what was it again?—the silver nitrate in a roll of film?
He forced himself to stop. One didn’t apply logic to patently illogical concerns. Laying aside the photographs, he turned back to the puzzle. Seventeen across, Rhode Island river; twenty-two
down, author of “Casting the Runes”...
But illogical concerns kept crowding at his mind. His wandering gaze, in search of other puzzles, settled on the topmost picture in the stack: the photo of his wife and daughter standing beside Pamela Lebow. Poor Pamela! he thought automatically. To die so young! He remembered her funeral and, before that, her illness, and—
And before that, her brief romance with Laszlo...
Feeling inexplicably more nervous, he scrutinized the image of her face. She looked drawn, pallid—drained of life. Was she pining away for Laszlo? Or merely ill?
Or was she, in fact—
Outside, the night-breeze moaned softly. Dead leaves sprang into the air as if on tiny wings and hurled themselves against the windows. His thoughts, like driven things, rushed on ahead. What if—just for the sake of argument, of course—what if Laszlo were some sort of vampire? And Pamela, in fact, his first victim?
This late at night, with the house creaking and shuddering around him, the idea didn’t seem so outlandish. Maybe it was just the Jack Daniels, but it seemed to make a queer, uneasy kind of sense.
Still absorbed in Pamela’s picture, his gaze dropped to her neck. He half imagined he could make out, concealed behind the collar, two telltale reddish marks...
If Pamela were the first victim, it suddenly occurred to him, then his daughter would be next.
His wife’s suggestion came back to him again. “If you absolutely have to have his picture, you can take it yourself.” Well, yes, perhaps he would. Just to put his mind at ease.
Rising, with an effort, to his feet, he moved unsteadily to the closet and hauled down the small black Polaroid she’d bought him last winter. Carefully he loaded the film pack and attached the flash, then returned to the couch and settled back to wait, the camera in his lap. Jennifer and Laszlo would be along soon. Right now they’d be nearing the airport, perhaps, their jet circling somewhere overhead. He could almost see it in the sky, a great predatory birdlike thing, pale against the night. It was spiraling inexorably toward him, ravenous for life, and the darkness echoed with its roaring...
He awoke with the camera still cradled in his lap. The roaring was the sound of a taxi pulling up before the house.
Hurriedly he jumped to his feet and switched off the table lamp beside him. Clutching the camera like a weapon, he retreated into the shadows behind the stairs. From outside he could hear the sound of voices, the slamming of a car door and a trunk. With a rumble of its engine the taxi pulled away, disappearing somewhere up the block, and in the returning silence he heard footsteps advance across the porch, the jingle of a keyring, the click of a key in the lock. Why am I doing this? he wondered, but it was too late to change his mind; the front door was already opening, and a hand was groping for the hall light.
He burst into the hall, camera raised, just as the light snapped on. Two figures were standing in the doorway, their baggage at their side. Behind them, past the little square of porch, yawned the night. His thumb found the button; the flash went off in their startled faces. “Surprise!” he said. He brought the camera down, the photograph already emerging from its base.
The two regarded him in silence.
“Welcome home,” he added nervously. He forced a smile. “Forgive my little experiment, I just—”
“You shouldn’t have done that, Mr. Melnick,” said Laszlo. He stared down at the camera, shaking his head. “You shouldn’t have wasted good film on us.”
“I think he deserves a kiss,” said Jennifer. She stepped into the light. He saw, as she came toward him, that she had lost weight. Her face looked very pale. “Come on, Daddy. Let me give you a kiss.”
Laszlo was still staring at the camera. There was a kind of sadness in his eyes. Glancing down, Mr. Melnick saw the photograph and drew it forth. Somehow it hadn’t yet developed; the hallway was an empty pool of light, with a black sky stretching endlessly behind it.
Jennifer was by his side now; he bent down for her kiss, but his gaze remained fixed on the photograph. As he felt his daughter’s lips brush his cheek and move gently to his throat, he watched the pool of light, waiting in vain for the figures to appear.
Ladder
(from The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror - Fourth Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling)
“When asked to identify the mood of our times, she answered, ‘A desperate search for a pattern.’”
—Prof. Huston Smith on Rebecca West
Birth, I see now, was merely a rung on the ladder. Rather deflating, when you think about it; you live, you struggle, you learn and grow and suffer, and you realize, after nearly seventy years of searching, that your life has been nothing but a metaphor. It’s not the sort of thing you see while you’re living it, of course. It’s like that Greek said, the one they used to teach in school: you can’t judge whether your life is a success or a failure until its final moments. Though my memory’s not so keen as it once was, I remember that remark; I suppose it must have stuck in my mind because, even as a very young boy, I was consumed with curiosity. How would my own life turn out? What would I judge it to be, as I lay dying? But now the question of its success or failure seems sadly beside the point—less important, anyhow, than the one raised by Dame Rebecca. The answer to that, too, has to wait until the end; you can’t see the pattern while you’re living it. And you certainly can’t see it while you’re busy being born, dragging that first chilly air into your lungs, already exiled, forlorn in the sunlight of a winter’s morning, the damnable game already begun. Though I have no memory of the time, the first thing my eyes beheld was probably the heath, with the icy waters shimmering behind it... And it will likely be the last.
The Firth of Lorne, that was the waters’ name; can you think of a starting place more fitting? It was fit, at least, for me, who have never married, never fathered children, never stayed in one place long enough to make a lasting friend (except the holy man), never owned any property but the tiny bungalow where, lying on my cot, an old Navy pillow propped up behind my back, I’m now scratching out this memoir. The Lords of Lorne once owned a third of Scotland; now the estuary that bears their name borders a region of deserted forts, ruined castles, and roofless crofts, their stone portals tumbled down and half concealed by meadow grass, the families that built them long since scattered to England or America or the other side of the world. Any of these houses, in their years of habitation, might have passed for the one where I was born, near the coast between Kilbride and Kilninver. Its low ceiling, heavy beams, and whitewashed plaster walls afforded barely space enough for the three of us, but as the beloved only child of two elderly parents, I was happy there. My father was a minister’s son from Glasgow, my mother a MacDougall, of the clan whose ancient stronghold, now little more than rubble, stands on the island of Kerrera in Oban Bay. From the Esplanade at Oban, the region’s largest port, you can still make out the ruins; as a child I liked to think of them as my ancestral castle. Beyond Kerrera lay the headwaters of the firth and, looming in the distance, the mountains of Mull. Steamers—they were called “puffers” in those days—plied among the islands, from Mull to Lismore, Colonsay, Coll, and the Outer Hebrides. Other boys dreamed of sailing on them, to see more of the world before they died; I was content where I was. I planned, in fact, to continue sheep raising like my father; we had a flock of black-faced Argyllshires whose regular comings and goings from pasture to fold, daybreak to dusk, season to season, filled me with a sense of peace. Though we owned a car, our lives, by the standards of today, seem almost medieval in their simplicity. I remember doing schoolwork by lantern light, a single lantern for all three of us, and how we’d try to keep one coal glowing all night in the stove to light the fire again the next morning. It never occurred to me that the sight of glowing coals could ever be anything but precious... I loved the way the heath would change from green in spring to purple and gold in the fall, and how it gleamed like crystal in winter. I would gaze across it every day as the rattling old bus
, its windows leaking draughts of icy air, drove us children to Church School in Kilninver. Over the doorway, I recall, carved into the granite, were foot-high letters spelling out the opening line of Saint John: In the Beginning Was the Word. I wasn’t a clever student-I had trouble seeing the connections between things, even then-but I worked hard at pleasing my teachers. My parents were pious people, and I believed in a strict but fair Creator who, as they did, hid His kindly intentions behind a stern exterior. I remember how comforting it was to think of the Lord as a shepherd, and we His sheep... But then, one rainy night on the very eve of my graduation, just as my parents were returning from Oban in their car after buying me a new wool coat, a suit, and a bound set of Youth’s Companions, they were swept off the road by a freak storm; or perhaps it was the fault of a rainsmeared windscreen. The car, with their bodies, was discovered at the bottom of a glen. The coroner described it as “an act of God.” Immediately my world changed forever. I was alone now. My father, I discovered, had not been as prudent as I’d thought; he’d borrowed over the years from a neighboring family of landowners and had left me in debt. I had to sell the farm to them-the house, the flock, the pastures. They offered to let me stay on, but I knew it was time for me to go. God, I told myself, had done this for a reason; He had plans for me. Sensing that I’d been thrust out into the world like a sheep from the fold, I packed my things, ready to submit to His will.
Forth I went, my new suit in a satchel beneath my arm, to seek what I thought was my destiny. I had already sold my coat. My Youth’s Companions lay unopened amid the pile of books I was leaving behind; my youth was over. I would have to make my own way now, settle in a town, and learn a trade. I did know something about wool; I knew its grades, how to unkink it, how to make it take the dye. I was not, I told myself, entirely unprepared. Unlike my fellows, who dreamt of America, I had an idea that the course of my life-the pattern, if you will-lay toward the east; something, I see now, was calling me in that direction, toward my eventual encounter with the holy man and the secret he revealed. Into the Lorne flows the River Awe, cutting through the Pass of Brander from the Falls of Cruachan, and it was toward these magical names that I turned my steps. The heath was swimming in wildflowers, like foam on a choppy sea, as I walked to the highway and waited for a ride, wondering if I’d ever be coming back. Glen Mor, the Great Glen, lay ahead of me, sixty miles of waterway cutting across the highlands, from the Lynn of Lorne beside me in the west to Inverness in the east, where Loch Ness meets the Moray Firth and flows into the North Sea. The region that I passed through was as picturesque as I’d once been told, with menacing crags and pine-shadowed valleys, ghostly waterfalls and scenes of ancient slaughter. The land here had seen its share of blood; but beyond it, I knew, lay the wide world.