by Gemma Files
By the time I came back out, things were ready to roll.
“Here we go,” Safie said, slipping in the tape as I sat back down.
It started like every PixelVision film I’ve ever seen—snow on snow, progressively dirtier. Long bars more than individual points, gradients of grey; it’s like watching something on a really old videotape, or a slightly scrambled channel, or a dial-and-antenna TV whose picture tube is giving out. Except here, there wasn’t even a 1920s cartoon version of me to focus on, or the glass house’s broken panes, the background flats I’d been flipping through—no sort of image at all, just an ebb and flow of grain, as if someone had left the camera angled on one of those fly-blown, dust-crusted mirrors Mrs. Whitcomb once set up to maximize the light for shooting.
Back and forth, forth and back, tide-eddying. Up and down and up again like a rusty wave, dark as old iron.
That same bell still tolling, so slow and old and far away. Plus a click and a clatter, gradually mounting—or was that just inside of me, the rattle of my own breath? It sounded like gears grinding, like the handle of a Lumière Brothers chronophotographic motion picture camera being cranked, a portable projector run inside a train compartment as the train itself thundered on, unstoppable. Like a movie being constructed one silver nitrate clip at a time, barely enough footage per clip to even make up a reel—forty seconds snatched here, forty-one seconds there, and forty-nine seconds somewhere else, at the absolute most.
“Maybe we should . . .” Malin began after almost a minute, but Safie shushed her violently, a weird lizard hiss. Because something was taking shape at last, or seeming to—turning, unfurling, fitting itself together. Something unveiling itself, dark lifting away on every side like a parted curtain, to reveal—
—a wavering, inverse form, flipped white on white from grey on grey, slender and stately, candle flame-tall. Mrs. Whitcomb in her veil, glittering with mirror-shards? But then that twisted as well, flapped sidelong, and there was nothing beneath but an open hole—no face at all, just an absence so bright and cruel it made me almost sick to contemplate. And the smell, that smell—
Pareidolia, I thought, admirably calm. You know, that thing where you connect the dots, see faces everywhere, Basic Iconography 101: shoes with their tongues out, light-switch noses, grinning coffee makers. Or when your camera suddenly floods with light as you reach the Vinegar House maze’s centrepiece-heart, blowing out all images, so you let it droop downwards as you play with the lens and it catches a weird image on the path below, all gravel and dust, scudding cloud-shadow; a child’s face looking up at you, submerged and frozen, fossilized in dirt like amber. At least that’s what you think you see, playing it back—
Wait though, that’s not me I’m talking about at all; that’s Safie. And she didn’t show that particular piece of film to me till long after all this was over and done with, or at least the part we both had anything to do with directly. Till it was anything but a surprise, for either of us.
Back in the now, meanwhile, the studio lights flickered off, then on, then off again; the camera, Safie’s almost-irreplaceable artefact, gave a weird sort of fizzle-pop and stopped working. The sound-file image disappeared, unrecorded, never to be seen again.
Like when the film runs out, that little voice in my mind very quietly said. Just there and gone in a flash, literally, with nothing left behind . . .
. . . but a bright, white light.
We sat there a moment more, Malin, Safie, and I, just staring at the monitor. None of us sure what came next.
“I don’t . . . think we should put that in the presentation,” Safie said, finally. To which I nodded.
“Me either,” I agreed.
I’d left knowing that Simon and Mom were taking Clark to a Movie for Mommies screening at the Rainbow Market Square—I don’t recall the title off-hand, but the sound was always routinely adjusted down in such instances, light adjusted up, social standards relaxed enough to allow for screaming kids and semi-public breastfeeding. Plus most selections came with subtitles, making it the perfect outing for our purposes. So I texted him on my way back then sat in our building’s Tim Hortons till he and Clark walked home together, getting all my ducks in a row for tomorrow’s presentation. They slid in across me maybe twenty minutes later.
“How’d it go?” Simon asked.
“Very interesting,” I said, with no real word of a lie. “I think Jan’ll be impressed.”
“Can’t see that he wouldn’t be, given the work you and Safie have put in on everything.” I shrugged, but smiled.
As we stepped out of the elevator and came around the corner, however—Clark singing and spinning as ever, pirouetting frantically while doing his best Oogie Boogie from The Nightmare Before Christmas—Simon stopped dead, one hand grabbing Clark by his shoulder, the other braced across my chest. “What—?” I started to ask, but he shook his head.
“Keep him back,” he ordered, nodding at our apartment door, which I only now realized was slightly open. Granted, Simon himself left it that way on occasion, usually absentmindedly forgetting to close it hard enough to catch—but only when we were already home, when he was coming in late and laden, and even then he’d usually still put on the latch-lock we’d attached to the door’s interior once Clark first started walking.
It took maybe three minutes for Simon to emerge. I distracted Clark by alternately singing along and acting out snippets of dialogue, playing Sally, Santa Claus, or Jack Skellington to his Oogie. “Nobody’s there,” he said, phone in hand. “Not too sure if we should call the police, either; place looks like it did when I left, and nothing’s been taken that I can see.”
“You’re sure you just didn’t forget to lock it somehow?”
“Almost sure. I mean—” He sighed. “Look, we both know I’m forgetful, but I’d like to think not this much. Was there maintenance scheduled?”
“No, I don’t . . . wait a sec.” I strode in, Clark babbling along behind, already pulling off his pants, headed for his bedroom. It only took a few minutes’ searching through our bedroom to ascertain my vague presentiment had been correct: the only thing missing was that file box from Quarry Argent, minus the portions of its contents I still had in my backpack.
“You think Wrob Barney did this?” Simon asked, once I’d explained what was making me laugh so hard. I nodded, still grinning. The idea that Wrob might’ve actually paid somebody to break into our place only to end up with nothing more than a bunch of silver mining-related business correspondence cut with Arthur Whitcomb’s fanboy ravings was utterly hilarious to me, considering how easily I could string together a composite example of the latter: dear [whoever,] I allow myself a great admirer of your portraiture, and wonder if you may be similarly familiar with the art of my wife, who—though female—is brilliant indeed! If your journeying ever takes you to Northern Ontario, therefore, feel very free to come to dinner at our house, even uninvited. . . .
“What amazes me is that this is all stuff he could’ve just gotten his own copies of, at the museum,” I said as I put the kettle on. “I mean, he was right there just yesterday, and that’s where the originals live—we didn’t even have to pay to get ours done. It doesn’t make any sense.” I popped a teabag in Simon’s cup, pausing. “Then again, maybe he got so mad after I talked to him he just . . . flounced out, and didn’t come back. That kinda sounds like him, now I come to think.”
“What would be the point of stealing your copies, though?”
“At this late date? Man, I don’t know; could be simply to slow me down, derail tomorrow’s meet with Jan.”
“Seriously? Is he that petty?”
“From what I’ve seen? Yeah, I kinda think he is.”
The kettle screeched. I thumbed it off and poured, setting it to steep; Simon folded his arms, frowning. “I don’t like it,” he said. “He was in here, or somebody he sent was—what’s to stop them
coming back? It’s creepy.”
“I agree, no argument there. But I can’t see Wrob doing, like, a home invasion. He waited till we were out, right? That tells you something.”
“Yeah, like he has us under surveillance.”
“Well, we already knew that,” I pointed out.
“No, we suspected. Now we know.” Simon pulled the door open, pointing. “And look—the lock isn’t broken. That means somebody let him in, somebody with a key: not security, even; the concierge, the building manager, someone on the maintenance staff. Hell, he probably bribed them to.”
“Makes sense. So?”
“So?” Simon flung up his hands, voice rising. “So, if we’ve established our home is now a place any random rich asshole can walk in off the street and take stuff from, I don’t like the idea of our son sleeping here anymore! Or you, for that matter. Or me.”
I scoffed. “He’s not gonna do it again, Simon. There’s nothing left to take.”
“What, are you planning to just tell him that? And he’ll believe you, of course. . . .” He flipped open his own phone, began to type something into a search engine, then stopped and shoved it back in his pocket. “You know what? Forget that shit. I’m going downstairs—email me a picture of Wrob, if you’ve got one. Any good face shot will do.”
“If you’re still thinking of the police . . .”
“No, we don’t have enough proof for that yet, like you said. But if I report this in-house, maybe somebody’ll recognize his face, and then we will have something to take to the police. Or we can at least get him banned.”
“All right, fine. If it means that much to you.”
“Would’ve thought it’d piss you off just as much, frankly. If not more.”
“I’m—sorry, I guess?—if I can’t take Wrob as seriously as all that, not compared to . . .” But here I caught myself, not ready to say what really came to mind: a ghost, a god, legends, and fables. A flickering face on a freezing screen, bright enough to burn out a whole camera. “. . . other stuff,” I concluded, at last.
Taking a few shots of every interview subject was second nature for me, even now, so I found the brightest-lit one of Wrob and passed it on without difficulty, accompanied by the typical “swoosh!” of a sent email; Simon heard the chime, nodded in thanks and then left, yanking the door closed behind him, hard enough to rattle it in the frame. The sound drew Clark, who stuck his head out of his room, wide-eyed.
“Oh, you don’t have to bang!” he scolded, giving his own door a couple of swats, before ducking back inside. “No banging, Mommy!”
I laughed, despite myself. “No banging,” I agreed, and went to make some bacon.
Simon returned looking unexpectedly frazzled some forty-five minutes later. Things had resolved more quickly than he’d expected, he said; the concierge recognized Wrob from the photo, remembered seeing him talking to one of the maintenance staff, and called our building manager Janice at home. Janice told them said staffer—who also happened to be a resident—had just that day settled up some outstanding financial issues with the building, in cash, and rang off to check up on her. Within twenty minutes, Janice called back to fill both Simon and the concierge in: the staffer had broken down when confronted, admitting having let Wrob into our unit; he’d given her the same story he tried on Val Moraine, that he was working on a project with me, and I’d supposedly given him permission to pick up material. “Janice fired her right then and there, on the spot,” Simon added, voice subdued.
“And you’re feeling guilty, is that it?”
“I was angry at Wrob, not some janitor lady trying to make ends meet who made a mistake.”
I nodded, hugging him, holding on till I felt him begin to relax. “I get it . . . but that was her choice, man, not yours; she knew the stakes. Not to mention how Wrob’s still the one to blame.”
“I guess so, yes.”
“I know so.”
He nodded again and went off to say goodnight to Clark. While I thought, at the same time: Yeah, Lois, that’s the way. Just say it loud enough; it might even become true, eventually.
I started to make dinner.
That night, while Simon snored beside me, I returned to Mrs. Whitcomb’s notebook, determined to read it all the way to the back if I could, in order to answer any extra questions Jan might have for me tomorrow. Much like my own adolescent flirtations with diary-keeping, she mainly seemed to return to her memorandum book under stress, so its pages read like a litany of loss: Hyatt first, then “poor Art,” then (debatably) her own mind.
He is gone, my sweet fool of a boy. And everything I did, all I tried to do, to draw Her gaze away—useless, from the very beginning, seeing Her hand was laid upon him even before the start. I knew it when we drew those papers away above his crib, revealing the hole he had somehow scratched for himself in our walls—that tiny church, barely fit to crouch in, within which he crawled on bended knee to worship at Her shrine and sketch out Her blazing face, again, again, again. . . .
Oh Christ, why did I ever let Arthur persuade me? I should have
Another massive smear engulfed the rest, much like in Mr. Whitcomb’s honeymoon account. I studied it closely, trying to see if there was anything inside the mess of greyscale that gave some hint what she’d been trying to cover up. It was like deciphering one of those 3D optical illusion puzzles—unfocus your eyes, shift slightly in your seat, move the paper at an angle. What emerged was a sprawl of half-sized letters, so close-cramped they bled together, reading—
(but perhaps it would have been better to not be born at all, for him and me both)
I felt a cold thread curl up between my shoulder blades then shook myself slightly, dispelling it. Listened to Simon snort and growl on my one hand, while simultaneously straining to make out Clark’s similarly raucous throat music as it filtered down toward us from behind his bedroom door.
Remembering how, on those few occasions when he fell so deeply asleep he went silent, I sometimes stood in his room with the flap on his fire engine bed thrown back, watching him till I saw his chest rise and fall slightly, to reassure myself he was still alive.
Though life with Clark was hard—full stop, no negotiation—I knew that life without him would be impossible. I couldn’t even contemplate it.
Back to the document then. The matter at hand.
Arthur will never accept Kate-Mary, the next page began, whom he calls the Witch of Endor, and that within her hearing. I understand his misgivings, which come mainly from frustrated grief, though I am sure some business instinct as well. Yet I must admit my own assumption to have been that if she truly were the fraud he wishes to brand her, it would be far more efficacious on her part to pass me “messages” from Hyatt without regard to their plausibility, rather than doing what she has at our last three meetings: emerge slowly from her trance’s toils, sadly shake her head and apologize, telling me she will accept no payment because she has once more failed to deliver on her part of the bargain.
Seemingly against all evidence, she maintains she cannot contact our son, our dear lost creature, and that the reason remains unaltered, if baffling . . . for according to her, she simply cannot find him, neither in our waking world nor in the realm beyond.
Not here, but not there, in other words. Somewhere else. Elsewhere.
“You must make your own methods,” she tells me, offering no advice, allowing no coin to change hands between us. If this be the connivance of a charlatan, therefore, in my opinion it is ineffective, to say the least.
“Pretty sure Mr. Whitcomb disagreed with you on that one,” I muttered out loud, and paused to shut my eyes for what I thought was a moment before scanning further down. My lids were getting heavy, a dull ache outlining the sockets; sparks had already begun to fizzle at the corners of my gaze, slow-mounting. I needed a break.
The subsequent transition from reading to dreaming
was almost instantaneous. I found myself in a long, dim room, vaguely familiar—its atmosphere crisp and sere, paper-parched, lit mainly by a series of upright display cases full of spread books, plus an angled lamp on the desk I sat at. This last part was what tipped me off: the Toronto Public Reference Library’s restricted stacks area, a place I hadn’t been physically since the age of nineteen, probably, researching something for one of my Ryerson University journalism program electives. Augustans and Romantics, maybe; Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Byron and Shelley and Keats (oh my).
But when I looked down, of course, what I was actually reading was probably Mrs. Whitcomb’s next entry, framed through half-shut lashes. It wavered in and out like heat haze, age-browned ink semi-visible at best, and I had to squint to make much sense of it: something more about Kate-Mary, about Lake of the North’s very own Spiritualist circle? Yes, but other stuff too, sentences popping out at me like automatic writing in constant revision, shaping and re-shaping themselves before my eyes.
How I do miss Arthur, his vast presence, one sighed, almost audible, even in the dream library’s desiccated air. He sends news of his European doings whenever the post allows, almost monthly, along with his love, and various diversions. This last packet came accompanied by a very new item indeed, one of M. et M. Lumière’s cameras, designed for the capture of images in motion. I may use it at Kate-Mary’s, with her permission, for those events should be chronicled, if they can be.
Spring again, with Hyatt gone two years. We are almost at Her time. In Dzéngast—
No, I will not think of that.
I could see my own hand taking notes, skin like bluish cheese, mould touched; see it, not feel it. The air full of orbs. A sudden empty pain all through my head, nostrils freeze dried, the white-gowned librarian leaning over my shoulder, face inverted and head on fire, to murmur: We have to keep it dim in here, you see, so the paper doesn’t degrade . . . these old documents are so fragile, you understand. Like—mummified skin.