by Terry Griggs
“Splendid, my dear. Absolutely marvellous.”
No lie, that. He did marvel as the young thing performed a backflip, and then another, until she had arrived at the window where Avice was standing, looking virginal and even credibly innocent in the lace curtain wedding gown that Roland had also made. The little girl had brains and would prosper, Fenwick predicted, but she did not have what Avice had. Few people did. He had recognized it the moment he discovered her in Collingwood, and that by sheer luck, by the accidental attraction she had created in flashing her husband’s name so liberally around. Very surprised he’d been to see that Mr. T. Griffith Smolders was signed into his hotel. Her drowned husband, Fenwick had thought then, and did still, although Grif was beginning to revive. Blinking causes us to lose twenty-three minutes of every waking day, Fenwick had informed him, implying that Grif might have missed a fair bit during those swift, dark intervals in his troubled day.
She was exquisite, standing by the window, light falling around her, moulding her form, playing up her arms, exposing her neck, haloing her hair (of all things). She belonged to the light, and had spread into it, staking out territory of her own that extended far beyond this interior, or any. Captured on celluloid, then released nightly, he knew she’d radiate this provoking quality, this flame she kept alive in her that shone from her face, this achieved liberty. Luminescent, he thought, she’ll make moths of us all.
The glory of it was that he had not forced her to stay. She had done so because she thought she could outwit him, silly woman. She had something up her little lace sleeve, oh yes. He could read her thoughts easily, for they were written in the same language as his own. She thought that she could protect herself from him and keep what was hers, when what was hers belonged to all men. Today and in the nights to follow, she would wed every one of them. Providing, of course, that her many intended had the price of admission.
As he had explained to Raewyn, one of the WCTU’s star White Ribboners, this too was a mission; they were providing a service, moral and remunerative. Surely no man would return home after a night at the moving pictures and beat his wife senseless. Or would he, Fenwick wondered, once that man saw Avice up there on the screen in all her haunting and inaccessible beauty?
“Rae,” said Avice, “you look more like a Christmas decoration than a bridesmaid.”
“I’m not a bridesmaid,” answered Rae, hopping in and out of the light.
“No?”
“I’m ball lightning.”
“Really? What kind of wedding is this supposed to be?”
“A comic one, I think. With all kinds of funny things happening.”
“I see. And here I thought it was going to be a tragedy.” She touched her chest lightly, where a weapon was concealed, although it might only be venomous, retributive language coiled tightly there. “Where is the groom, have you seen him?”
“Nope. I’m never getting married.”
“Good for you.”
Fenwick slipped his fingers into his waistcoat pocket and retrieved his watch. He enjoyed the sensation of holding it, for it was like a smooth stone that he could skip over the calm temporal surface of the day, but he did not care for what it had to tell him. Late. A flicker of annoyance creased his brow. Surely, he thought, our young man hasn’t himself skipped. How many times can you run out on the same woman, this woman in particular? Grif had no respect for his own skin. Five minutes and he’d have to send the hounds out after him.
Fenwick sighed, slid the watch back into his pocket, and walked over to where Roland had set up the machine and readied it for its alternate role as a camera. A bit of an experiment still. While Fenwick had been pondering the aesthetics of light, Roland had been grappling with the technicalities of it.
“All set, Master Avery?”
“I guess so. I’ve arranged these lamps here, which should help. We really should be doing this in a brighter place.”
“A glass hive?”
“Yes, actually. Some place like a greenhouse. Or outside.”
“Too many bugs.” Also too many props borrowed from the churches in town. “Do you think it will work?”
“It’s worth a try. I’ve figured out that optical trick, by the way. You know, how to introduce the ball lightning.”
“Yes?”
“It’s just a question of stopping the camera. You have Grif freeze in position, bring Rae in, get her to do a cartwheel or a jump, and start the camera again when she is in the middle of it. The previous picture will flow right into it, but suddenly there she’ll be, as if she’d appeared out of thin air.”
“I see, yes. That’s certainly quick on the trigger. How on earth did you figure it out?”
“Don’t know, it just hit me. I’ve been studying those French pictures, the zany ones, slowing them down, speeding them up. The one where the bald man sprouts hair on his head after drinking the tonic.”
“And on his hands! Hilarious. What about the one where the man pulls a whole room of furnishings out of a trunk and tosses them into place?”
“Including his wife and his dinner.” Roland laughed.
“You know, some of those stunts come right off the stage—like those boots that hop all on their own—but the thing is that the wires aren’t at all visible in the pictures made by this Méliès fellow. What I don’t understand, Master Avery, is why anyone would bother photographing workers leaving a factory, and all the usual humdrum human activities, when like him they could be creating these magnificent illusions instead.”
“Like real magic.”
“As if the supernatural was actually being documented. I wonder what the Church will make of it.”
“They won’t like it.”
“I expect you’re right. Ah, look, the groom has arrived. Another miracle manifests itself.”
While nurturing his reservations about this hare-brained venture, Grif had been more than a little tempted to take to his heels once again. What made him late, though, was not flight but the need to cool those agitated heels of his while waiting at the undertakers for his monkey suit, the morning coat and trousers that he was renting from them. The original owner of the garments had been buried without them, chattels left behind to defray the cost of his wooden suit. The cursed things smelled of death, and there was even a bullet hole in the chest of the coat. Grif fingered it nervously as he entered the Sun’s barroom, where once again, if only fictionally, he was to enter the matrimonial state. His real wife was to become his fantasy wife, which would make him married to her both inside and outside of reality. Was that tying the knot tighter or loosening it so they both might escape? Fenwick had told him that this business, this animated photography, represented a whole new kind of freedom: freedom within the pictures themselves, where the laws of nature did not necessarily have to be obeyed, and without, for those who made the pictures. Grif didn’t believe it, but their play-acting did give him one more chance with Avice. He’d be in the neighbourhood of her flaring attention, if nothing else. His heart, he felt, was worn so heavily on his sleeve it was a wonder he could lift his arm … while in his chest he carried delicately a cluster of flammable materials, straw and husks and twigs. Tinder.
How Fenwick had talked her into it was another question entirely. Grif could only think that the man, although supremely confident, was much mistaken—he did not know Avice at all.
Grif scanned the room, which had been turned more or less convincingly into a chapel. The props were an ecclesiastical hodgepodge, but that was no surprise as he had swiped most of them himself: an altar cloth, a bible, a lectern, a chalice (couldn’t resist), a vase of tiger lilies (Protestant), a statue of the Sacred Heart—and look, He too was exposing that most vulnerable and tender organ. The only wedding guest present in this hybrid church was Norma, the nut-faced doll, slumped in a pew that he and Roland had lifted from Holy Trinity. If Norma was playing the part of Avice’s sisters, he felt she was a perfect choice for the role, being only slightly less sour in aspect than the
originals. As he understood it, the story they were to enact would mend the flaws of the first wedding, the gash he had made in it and through which he had fled. In Fenwick’s rewritten and improved version, Grif was to have second thoughts soon after his precipitous flight, which would return him on a wave of remorse to his abandoned and bereft (and fully clothed) bride, that saintly and forgiving woman, radiant with forbearance and self-denial.
And there she was, standing by the window, a model of Christian and maidenly virtues, who might just wring his neck at any moment without the slightest compunction.
“Ball lightning?” he heard her mutter to herself.
Fenwick took a breath deep as a drink, clapped his hands once, sharply, and exhaled a command. “Cast, take your places, please. Master Avery, the camera. We are about to begin. We are about”—significant pause—“to make history.”
As the officiating cleric Fenwick himself stepped up to the altar, and from the pocket of Reverend Bee’s freshly spruced-up jacket (he had given it a good dunking in the lake) he drew the holy book from which he intended to pluck the matrimonial vows like tiny wire snares out of a box. It didn’t matter what he actually said, unless the audience for his picture were all going to be lip-readers—the last rites would do, or the service for the dead—but he knew that a degree of authenticity would solicit a better performance. Even the right missal was important, and he had searched high and low for this one. Fortunately, he had searched low enough, directly in the gutter, and had discovered it in the filthy paws of that drunk he’d tapped on the skull not so long ago. A religious fanatic the creature was, too, blubbering away about the wages of sin, a currency that Fenwick did not trade in, if he could help it. He felt truly sorry for the lout, and by rights should have whacked him on the bean again—a mercy that might have knocked some sense into him.
He gestured for the reluctant couple to come and stand before him, which they did—reluctantly—and then he gave the go-ahead, a quick nod, to Roland.
Grif stole a glance at the bride. She seemed so strangely calm, settled in herself, her anger in abeyance, that he was confused. She returned his look, not indignantly or fiercely, but with an openness that was entirely new, her expression gentle, her usually tenebrous and unreadable eyes fond. Fond? Adoring, even. Blood rushed to his face.
“I’m only acting, stupid,” she growled.
“Oh,” he said, “right.”
“What is this?” said Fenwick, who had opened the journal at the Cormany forgery. “My my.” He flipped to an earlier section of the book, to its very entrails, and dug in. “But … how interesting,” he murmured, unexpectedly caught like a fly in the web of the text.
Grif and Avice stared at one another. They had not been this close physically since the day of their marriage.
Roland was humming Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” as he cranked the camera.
Raewyn was idling, fidgeting, waiting for her cue to enter the scene.
Avice reached out a hand to Grif, an offering, it seemed, a peaceable enough gesture, a bridge to span the hurting distance between them. Cautiously, he extended his own hand to her … he could hardly credit this. She ignored his hand, however, brushing it aside, and placed hers flat on his chest. He felt the warmth of it sliding into him. She might brand him with her very touch. She started to move her hand over his chest, assuringly, feelingly, as if she had found a way to return him to himself, to fill him up with all he had lost during his long, fruitless journey. Then, deftly, with practised fingers, she unbuttoned his shirt, his collar. She reached up with both hands and, more roughly, yanked his coat off his shoulders. She unsnapped his suspenders and his pants slid to his ankles. She dug into the bodice of her dress and pulled out a small scaling knife. She studied his body, coolly, for a few seconds, then a bit more energetically began to saw the buttons off his long johns. Buttons zinged this way and that like loose teeth flying out of a smashed mouth. This done, she reached down into the opened gap in his underwear, slid her hand right in, and with it cradled his clenching privates. None too gently, either.
Grif thought she was going to gut him like a fish, and he wore the expression of one, freshly caught and pulled from the lake, shocked and gasping.
To her the act was certainly more surgical than erotic. There was a blackened and tumorous bond still joining them that had to be severed. She’d cut him loose, free him for good. Not that she was enjoying the prospect, or any of this. His mortification had not trumped and cancelled hers, as she had expected, only oddly compounded it. And odder still, he was hardening in her grip, the astonishing sight of which had at least cured Raewyn of her fidgets. The young girl stood transfixed in her fiery costume, chewing her lip, eyes wide, watching them. Roland kept cranking the camera, although he had stopped humming.
Fenwick glanced up from the journal, gave a little snort of surprise and barked, “Cut.”
“No,” said Grif, but he was speaking to the wavering air above Avice’s head, the turbid space just beyond her shoulder, where he thought he saw something—or someone—move.
Raewyn screamed. A grinning goblin’s face was pressed up against the window, peering in at them.
Grif lurched out of Avice’s grasp and shouted, “Roland, stop. The hotel, it’s on fire!”
“Why,” Fenwick sniffed, “so it is.” He snapped the journal shut.
Huh, thought Hugh, he’d washed his face that morning, and combed his hair (with his fingers)—he didn’t look that bad. Here he figured Raewyn for a sweet kid, too, a kind-hearted girl, but they were all alike, females, all whores. If she was going to scream about something, she should scream about that sap with his mug hanging out as far as his cullions. Shit, Hugh had seen more impressive balls on a poodle. Avice preferred him, did she? A very bad woman, he understood that now. She couldn’t even wait to get this guy alone in the hotel room.
So he gave the kid a fright, eh? What about that gal standing right behind Avice? Now she was scary, if a tad indistinct, wringing her hands like that, rubbing them together like sticks until they caught on fire. She might be a circus act, or a witch, the way she was waving her burning hands around like torches. And even though she was soaked to the skin, hair plastered to her head, it didn’t do her a speck of good. When she buried her face in those hands, it caught on fire too. Her face, her hair, her clothes. Body in flames, yep, she was a hot one, headed straight for hell like the rest of them. That’s why he had locked all the doors behind him after he’d decorated the hotel with the kerosene-soaked rags, which had been easy enough, them all so busy. That’s why he had a shotgun, in case any of them tried to break through the window. There was a lesson here he was trying to convey: a sinner cannot escape hell. Hugh wasn’t so addle-brained, or so struck with the Lord’s dazzling regard, that he couldn’t himself see clearly what was going on in there. It was diabolical. Mock-church, mock-priest, mock-sacrament. And to top it off, that vaudeville clown had stolen his book, wrenched it right out of his hand when Hugh was feeling indisposed, having a little snooze alongside the horse trough. Thou shalt not steal, eh? A straightforward enough commandment, to which Hugh felt bold enough to tack on an additional clause: and thou shalt not spit (arseface) on the poor drunken wretch thou’re stealing from, neither.
YOU, C’MERE, he heard the Lord say, and expecting to receive confirmation of his editorial amendment, or congratulations on his current initiative, he stepped out into the street at the very same and unfortunate moment that one of the water barrels, which Roland had installed in case of fire, came loose, rapidly gained momentum, and began its rumbling, bouncing trajectory down the slope of the roof.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
vulcanic love
Fire, a delinquent guest, more consuming than consummate, loved the little hotel. It toured all the rooms, ran up the walls, blistered the paper, jumped on the beds, cracked the mirrors with one scorching look. It was as wild and torrid as a visiting stage celebrity. It had the melting gaze of a Barrymore, the sultry m
ien of a Bernhardt. And the temper. It was a sizzling hothead, a hotshot, too hot to hold. Fierce, rampageous, incandescent, it tossed its flaming orange hair and snapped its white-hot fingers. It smoked everywhere. It belched, its manner explosive. It autographed the register, then devoured it, along with rugs, chairs, shoes, a doll (alas!), and a peculiar machine festooned with cranks and reels. Inflamed, it shattered the one bottle of whisky, collapsed the bar, folded the stairs like an accordion, went through the roof, blew out the windows, tossed blazing timbers like swirling cabers down into the street. It drank gallons of lake water supplied by the sweating, scurrying locals. The rest of the town it found simply too banal to kindle even a spark of interest, and it finally checked out with a long, satiated hissss, leaving behind quite the mess, a charred and gutted ruin, proof that a real ball was had.
The antic spirit that enlivens the films of Georges Méliès, the pandemonium let loose in his Montreuil Studios in Paris, was an artful anarchy, precisely choreographed and controlled. Even the imp of unpredictability, the afflatus that breathes life into so much art, danced to his tune. Fenwick Nashe had not anticipated the arrival of that imp on his own set, or the disruption that ensued, but he made the best of it, as he always did. The visitation was, in fact, serendipitous.
When Grif, déshabillé in mind as much as in dress, spotted the smoking, sputtering approach of trouble, the uninvited extra and show-stealer, Fenwick was himself suddenly possessed of an inspired notion. His unerring instinct for talent had been doubly confirmed in his choice of Avice as leading lady, for not only could the woman act, but she had with her own ungloved and cold, unsentimental hand found the perfect instrument of revenge. When the saucy thing seized her man (what divesting work, what rude improvisational rooting!), she had also opened Fenwick’s eyes, sealed and innocent as a newborn’s, to the further potential of this marvellous invention. Surely it was not an idle mistake that photography and pornography were such close etymological cousins, promiscuously entwined if not exactly married in meaning. Give a man a new technology, Fenwick thought cheerfully, conceived with whatever noble, uplifting intention, and that man will instantly use it to plumb the depths of human depravity. It was only human nature. Imagine making moving pictures in which the portrayal of sin was limited only by the imagination itself. Despite the growing heat in the room, the clamour, the cries of dismay, the director of the fracas shivered with delight.