by S. T. Joshi
Not in Estes Park, she knew, but somewhere outside it. At the end of an unpaved road knee-deep in snow. Or mud.
Owned by a guy she’d never met.
Way too far from help if he turned out to be dangerous.
Mentally sighing, Jen reached for a notepad. She’d need driving directions.
As it turned out, she had been wrong about the road. What twisted and plunged its way down to the Triple G Cabins office was more of a goat track, and almost a match for her aging Subaru.
Killing the engine at last, Jen drew a deep breath and rested her head on the steering wheel. What was she looking for here? In the handful of days since she’d spoken with Sebastian Gerard, she’d been unable to figure that out, despite her certainty that Leonie’s studio—or its remains—held answers.
At least she and Gerard agreed on that much.
Moments later, the man himself tapped on her window. She lowered it halfway.
“You can’t drive in to the studio. We’ll have to walk from here.”
Leonie’s brother looked even older than he’d sounded, with a short grey ponytail and a lean, weary face. He barely waited for her to lock the car before heading toward a nearby stand of pines.
There was no real path through, but she’d worn boots and there wasn’t all that much snow. Just discouraged grimy patches after a dry winter, with long-range forecasts not much better, and wildfire season looking worse. She’d always imagined it being beautiful up here, but this was—
“I don’t suppose you brought your print with you?”
“Uh, no. “ Her mind flittered back over their phone conversation. “Were you expecting me to?”
The weariness in Gerard’s face deepened. “No, just hoping.”
They walked on in silence through the trees. A lot of them looked unhealthy, with brittle needles and trunks clotted with resin. Not hard to imagine a fire up here, even without darkroom chemicals or amateur wiring.
Not hard to imagine it not being an accident at all.
Even so, Jen wasn’t prepared for the view beyond the pines. Sticking up through the snow like a charred skeleton, the remains of Leonie Gerard’s studio looked as if the tragedy had happened last week—not almost a year ago. Tattered blackout curtains flapped from window frames. Glass shards glinted on the ground. Even the ruined door still hung in place, barely.
Breathe. “Did you ever find out what happened?”
“She died.”
No point in asking what volunteer fire brigade had tried and failed, what EMT had done likewise. What official conclusions came weeks later. The details of that March night were surely burned into Gerard’s mind, but nothing she could say right now would bring them to the surface.
Apologizing, Jen moved closer to the doorway. “May I?”
Gerard nodded. The afternoon air felt suddenly colder, and very silent.
Pale sunlight through breaks in the roof revealed scorched trays, a shattered light table, sodden boxes of files and supplies. A wire drying line had survived, but held only curled strips of black in twisted clips. A much larger tangle of metal and half-burned paper blocked the path to the door.
She squinted. The metal looked like picture frames.
A sharp, improbable drama played through her mind: Leonie, distraught, piling up her work in the first convenient place. Igniting it. Realizing too late she’d blocked her exit— unless she’d never intended to leave in the first place. And all this inside her studio, destroying negatives and contact prints as well.
What had she wanted to burn so badly?
When she turned to ask Gerard, he was already standing beside her.
“She’d been preparing for a group show down in Taos, working nonstop. She was still recovering from her last trip . . . Sierra Leone, good God . . . but Vernal Ascension wouldn’t wait. She said she needed to put the images together right away, while she could still see what they were trying to show her.”
Jen started to ask the obvious question, but he went on.
“Meanwhile, the Taos gallery was getting antsy. Leonie printed the first three and shipped them off, but they kept calling. The night of March nineteenth, she locked herself in her studio to finish the other four—”
Jen held her breath, waiting.
“—at least, that’s what she told me she planned to do.”
Turning away from the ruins, Gerard began walking fast, heading even further into the trees. She scrambled to catch up.
“Ms. Maxwell, how much do you know about my sister’s work methods?”
“She did digital photography for a long time, but switched back to film for the last couple of years—when she started doing photomontage exclusively.”
Scraps of interviews she’d read came back to her. “She wanted the ‘greater reality’ of print over pixels. The tactile experience of fitting images into new wholes. Each image leads to the next, but it’s like a jigsaw puzzle: you’ve got to have all the pieces to know where they fit.”
Gerard swore under his breath.
“Each image leads to the next. You don’t know how often I heard that from her, without understanding what it meant. Or even trying. She was chasing all over the world to get her precious images—South America, Africa, Mexico, places nobody sane goes these days—and all I did was argue with her.”
His voice cracked. “I never asked the right questions.”
When the stone-built chimney and plank walls of another building came into view minutes later, Jen knew without asking that this had been Leonie’s cabin.
And that her brother, too late, had found his answers here.
Fishing a plastic-tagged key from his jacket pocket, he headed for the porch. “We had an agreement about this place. I own it, but I wasn’t supposed to go inside—not even when she was traveling—unless there was an emergency.”
He unlocked the front door and pushed it open for her.
“Depends on your definition.”
The main room looked more like a crime scene investigation than an artist’s living space, with cork boards mounted on the walls and propped against furniture. Black-and-white photos of various sizes had been pinned to the boards. Most were accompanied by handwritten notes, and each was linked to others with yarn. Red yarn.
As she moved closer, Jen recognized familiar images. A doorway from Chaco Canyon connected to a clump of megaliths swirled in Cornish fog. Which led on to the jaguar god—from Belize, its note explained—which connected to part of a Hindu temple, which led to the shattered obelisk.
By the time she’d traced a strand to the three egg-objects descending through their anonymous sky, sweat trickled inside her collar.
“Where did she take this one?”
“No idea.” Gerard moved closer to the cork boards. “All I know is that she wasn’t setting up shots in her studio. They could be anything.” His brow furrowed. “Or mean anything. The shadows in the largest one don’t help, because—
“—they change.”
Gerard stared at her. Jen swallowed hard. “Or at least the ones in mine do.”
Without commenting, Gerard retraced the red yarn to its starting point.
“This is where it started,” he said, indicating the Chaco doorway. “Her last series. The one that made her career.” His voice dropped. “And ended it.”
Jen nodded for him to go on.
“She had this ratty little travel trailer. Loved to stay at the campground down there. She said the night sky was phenomenal, so dark and clear she could just fall into it. Then one night she stayed up watching until dawn—”
He took a long breath. Jen held hers.
“—and she never stopped working after that. Traveling, shooting rolls and rolls of film, then back to her darkroom. No more digital. All old school. Fitting images together on her light table, doing enough prints to keep some gallery happy, then packing again and taking off.”
He frowned.
“Sometimes she left me an itinerary, sometimes she didn’t. Never when she was going somewhere risky—which was most of the time as the series went on. I never could figure out what she was after. Or why she couldn’t stop.”
Until she did. Jen shivered. While writing her thesis, she’d seen most of Leonie Gerard’s last series, and it hung together in a way she couldn’t explain. The diverse images created weirdly believable landscapes—not dreamscapes, as one reviewer had insisted, but real places a person might walk through.
Never willingly, though. Something about those landscapes— the angles, the light, the juxtapositions of objects— turned them alien.
As if an entirely different aesthetic was at work.
“Vernal Ascension was the worst. The traveling, I mean. She’d started off back at Chaco, and I hoped it would calm her down, but it did just the opposite. Something about that clear dark sky . . . She even set up a camera for long exposures, though she never used those images. Just blew them up—eight by ten, sometimes larger—and hung them around her darkroom.”
He frowned. “She said they showed her how the pieces went together.”
Moving away from the Chaco doorway shot, Gerard returned to the egg-objects—with their enigmatic sky much darker than Jen remembered from her print. And were those faint background flecks of white stars?
She was about to point them out when he directed her attention elsewhere.
A little above the descending eggs, a last small image had been pinned. No yarn linked it to any of the others, no note accompanied it, and it wasn’t a ruin or a sacred site. Instead, an amazingly ugly little statuette stared back at her.
“I do know where this one came from,” he said. “Sierra Leone. Somewhere in the south. The people there call them nomoli, but no one seems sure of much more than that. A few tribes even claim they were left behind by spiritual beings.”
His expression hardened. “Whatever they are, Leonie took some awful risks to photograph them.”
Jen looked closer. The statuette was carved from something like soapstone, which didn’t allow for fine detail. Its exaggerated features and dwarfish body were partly obscured by a reptile (crocodile?) the little figure was grappling with. Or holding.
Or becoming?
She rubbed her eyes and checked again. Not two figures. Definitely one in the process of transforming, and the reptilian aspect was stronger, but vaguer: neither a crocodile nor anything else she recognized. Its scales flowed up the figure’s arms to the shoulders, and—
Gerard pulled her away from the photograph, dragging her to the middle of the room before releasing his grip.
“It did that to me, too.” He sounded more nervous than apologetic. “For a couple of hours, because I was alone and I’d had a few drinks. I was trying to figure out where Leonie fitted it into the picture.”
“She didn’t.” Why was she so certain? “I’ve been over and over my print, and there’s nothing like this in it.”
Without asking for permission, she took out her phone and started photographing the whole sequence, taking closeups of the notes. It was time to quit freaking out. Sebastian Gerard had some seriously weird ideas about his sister’s work, but she couldn’t let them mess with her head, not more than they already had. She’d come up here to gather material for a couple of articles, at least. Maybe even a book. Real Ph.D. stuff.
By the time she finished, she’d nearly convinced herself.
Gerard sat silently in an armchair, watching her—or maybe watching nothing, staring into memory space. He had a big Ziploc bag on his lap. She didn’t remember him leaving to get anything, but she hadn’t exactly been good company these past few minutes.
“One more item for your research.”
The bag held something flat and scorched. Jen took it gingerly.
“Leonie kept travel journals, always. Mostly work notes, but sometimes details about a location she’d visited, or a place she’d stayed. After the fire, I went looking for them. I don’t know what I hoped to find. Maybe some explanation for all this—”
His voice faltered.
“—but it turned out she’d burned them, or tried to. The whole pile. In her darkroom, along with everything else. I only managed to recover part of her last one.”
Jen slipped the ruined object out. It looked like a book cover plus a very few pages, much the worse for smoke and water. If there’d been any entries on those pages, they weren’t—
Wait a minute.
On the final page, partially protected by the cover, was a list of five names. They’d all been written in ink, then crossed out in pencil.
“Make any sense to you?”
Jen read them through. One or two looked familiar from her thesis work.
“Other photographers, maybe. At least a couple of them are—but I’m not sure how Leonie would have known them. They’re foreign.” Something else gnawed her memory. “And I think at least one of them is dead.”
Tipping everything back into the bag, she zipped it with unsteady fingers and tried to hand it back to Gerard.
“Keep it. Maybe you’ll figure out something I haven’t been able to.”
With a last glance at the boards with their red yarn and cryptic notes, he headed for the door. “And call me when you’re ready to sell your print, OK?”
Jen hurried past him onto the porch.
Then away from Leonie’s cabin, willing herself not to run.
Researching the names on that list hadn’t been the hard part. There were only five, after all, and she’d had plenty of experience. Internet, academic databases, people who knew people: questions in, information out. Repeat. Compile.
And wish that compiled information made a little more realworld sense.
Or at least that it ruined less sleep.
Jen rubbed stinging eyes and reached for her coffee, carefully swiveling away from her laptop before taking a sip. She’d had some close calls lately—gee, I wonder why—and she couldn’t afford to replace the thing. Not after clocking in late at work for the third time last week.
One more time, from the top.
Only three of the names on Leonie’s list had been photographers. The other two were muralists whose fragmented styles resembled photomontage. All the photographers had used film rather than digital media. The muralists had worked directly on their walls. And all had traveled extensively to snap or sketch their images on-site.
The same images. On the same sites, minus the mysterious eggs.
It hadn’t been quite that obvious: the sites had been visited at different times of year, captured with wildly varied approaches. One of the muralists had Picasso envy, and a couple of the photographers loved their filters. Fortunately, most of them had done more interviews than Leonie had—though not all were in English. She’d been able to piece together the rest from personal sites and gallery images. From what she could tell, they’d even visited each place in the same order Leonie had.
Glancing over the top of her mug at Vernal Ascension, she felt her stomach clench. Oh, yes, it was all one world.
And not her world.
Less so every day, though she tried to ignore the not-quite-green of formerly monochrome leaves. The mutating contours of those Cornish megaliths. The jaguar god’s tongue reaching to the ground, starting to split into writhing, coiling—
Jen swiveled back to her desk and set the coffee mug down. Hard. Way too much caffeine, girl. Still, there was no arguing with that haunted landscape. The names of its ghosts now mocked from her laptop screen, annotated with the details of five disturbing deaths spaced one year apart: none of them natural, most of them violent.
All on the same date: tomorrow’s date. Almost today’s.
She wondered how Leonie (number six?) had found out about the others, though she suspected she wouldn’t like the answer. Maybe those stars above Cha
co Canyon had held more than a blueprint for the shared world she’d been creating. Maybe she’d seen herself there—the latest link in a chain it was too late to break.
Jen sighed. In the days and weeks since acquiring Leonie’s last image, she’d almost gotten used to thoughts like that. Random acts of neurological chaos, she suspected, brought on by living with art she had no hope of understanding. There weren’t going to be articles from this one, after all.
Some impulse made her stand and head back over to Vernal Ascension. Her rumpled futon couch—where she’d been collapsing most nights for the past week or so—creaked as she stepped onto it.
Descending through their deepening patch of twilight, the three egg-objects hadn’t appeared in any of the others’ images, yet they’d been the centerpiece of Leonie’s. She’d given up trying to figure out why. Or where they’d come from. Nose to nose with the largest one, now, she watched shadows crawl across its surface like a storm seen from space.
Something new curled beneath that surface. Spectral, fetal, it clutched itself with curiously mottled limbs.
No, not mottled. Scaled—
Stumbling backwards off the futon, she landed hard and felt one ankle twist under her. Sierra Leone. The words throbbed in her mind as she dragged herself back to her desk chair. Nomoli. Leonie’s last trip, her last shoot, her last big risk.
You’ve got to have all the pieces to know where they fit.
Each image leads to the next.
It cost breathless minutes to find the number on her phone, but Sebastian Gerard picked up right away. Or she thought he had. The connection hissed and popped and faded at random, garbling his words no matter how loudly he spoke them.
“. . . hatching. It’s what eggs do, right? World eggs . . . half the origin myths on the planet . . . ours just raw material for the next . . .”
This wasn’t helping. Raking a hand through her hair, she tried again.
“Are your prints doing this, too? The crawling shadows? The—”