Photographing Fairies: A Novel

by Steve Szilagyi

  Under the hard glare of the constellations in the night sky overhead (and the motes of stellar dust between them) I saw my situation with a rare clarity. I saw the breathtaking folly of my having come to Burkinwell; the comical foolishness of my believing that there were “fairies” to be photographed there. That I had been willing to do so said something about my character, both good and bad. On the good side, it showed that I was open-minded and imaginative; on the bad side, it showed that I was unable to face reality, and would chase after the most incredible delusions rather than do so. I foresaw that my financial ruin was inevitable and unavoidable; and I foresaw the pain it would cause me. But I also saw that I would survive somehow, and that the world with all of us on it would go on spinning.

  The prints I had just developed were packed in my newly returned valise. As I walked along, I swung the valise in carefree vagabond fashion. Soon, I passed out of the “town” portion of Burkinwell. Fences began to lengthen. Gardens became fields, yards became lawns; and lawns shaded into pasture. Through the landscape, I moved in a bubble of reverie. Now the bubble suddenly burst.

  I had been quite alone with the night ever since I had exited the church. Suddenly, outside of town, I heard footsteps charging up behind me. My heart quickened. I turned and looked down the road.

  Nothing.

  But something was coming around the bend. I could hear it getting closer: pat-pat-pat.

  I had the valise, I thought. I could swing it as a weapon. But would it be any good against Paolo and Shorty — or any novel criminals that might be abroad in the night?

  I chose discretion over valor and hid in the bushes.

  The pat-pat-pat grew louder. Holding myself still, I peered out between the leaves. I saw a man in athletic costume, slowly trotting around the corner.

  It was Rev. Drain. Out on one of his runs.

  Indeed, I thought, England’s tradition of eccentric clergymen is well upheld here. But then who could blame the Rev. Drain for being out on such a beautiful night? Not I. I had just been enjoying the night myself. For a moment, I thought about jumping out of the bushes and hailing the running minister. Then I thought better of it. The man would probably be frightened out of his scant britches. His face wore a look of pained self-absorption; and it was not an expression that invited fellowship. So I stayed hidden, and he passed in a puff of sweat smell and body warmth. When he had gone some distance, I came out of the hedge.

  Down the road, I could see his white shorts and singlet bobbing far up ahead. As I followed with my eyes, he made a sudden turn off the road. He leaped over a fence and took off across a field. There, he was swallowed up in the darkness.

  Even as I followed this image with my eyes, another image crept into my mind. I pictured Linda. She was lying in bed — alone. I saw her stretching her limbs beneath the cool sheets, enjoying extra space in bed while her husband was off on his midnight run. I wondered how often this happened. How many nights did she spend stretching and sliding and thinking in the darkness? Perhaps she didn’t wake when he left the bed. Perhaps they didn’t share a bed, or share a room.

  I realized that I knew very little about their relationship. Or anybody’s relationships. Or anybody’s anything. What can we know of another? Only that he is very much like us, but entirely different.

  I continued walking. Dogs barked in the distance. I guessed Drain was passing their farmyards. He certainly seemed to enjoy his running. I wondered if it was a practice I could enjoy. As an experiment, I decided to run some myself. With a hop, skip, and a jump, I was off. The valise was hard to carry, and after only a few yards I staggered to a stop, breathless, weak, and exhilarated.

  It was good to feel exhausted Walking on, I looked forward to a long sleep in the comfortable bed. I imagined how, after a long, dreamless slumber, I would awake upon a plump pillow, with sunlight tunneling into the room through the ivy outside my window. I rounded a bend; and there, up ahead, was Templeton’s cottage, where that very bed and pillow awaited me I could see the silhouette of its rooftop, flanked by tall, pointed locusts making black gashes in the starry sky

  I was going to go into the cottage through the garden door, but before turning off the road, I heard a swish and rustle from off to my right. I stopped and gazed out over the farmer’s field across the road. I saw a running man, who proved, again, to be Rev. Drain He was headed toward the road where I stood, but he did not see me. As I watched, he slowed to a trot. About thirty feet away from where I stood, he crossed the road. Then he disappeared into the cluster of trees beyond the far end of the garden. I could see his white clothing capering like a spark between the trunks. Why would he go back there? I wondered. Surely, the ruined factory was no place to run

  Now I was sorry I hadn’t hailed him, as it would have been awkward to do so at this point. It occurred to me that Rev. Drain might actually appreciate knowing that there was some other mortal abroad in the night. I chuckled as I imagined what we might say to one another: some banal commonplace, like the highly charged civilities of Stanley and Livingstone.

  I decided to go and find him. Walking as quickly as I could with the valise, I followed him into the trees.

  Regarding what I saw next, it is as I stated in court, not a thing I am proud or eager to recount. It gives me no pleasure to tell what I saw of Rev. Drain that night. That I told it at all was only in an attempt to save my own life. And I do it now only as part of this more personal exculpation — made on the eve of the moment when I shall have to answer for all my sins; not in the assizes of men, but in the court of He who knoweth and seeth all; on Whose forgiveness rests my only hope for eternal life — and thus, I hope, forgivable in the eyes of civilized men.

  Still, I must pause. I must struggle against my unwillingness to unveil a moment cherished by a fellow creature in the dark privacy of a wooded night. Never, never would Rev. Drain have dreamed that his pleasures would be observed by even one other living being, much less known to the millions of London newspaper readers who smacked their lips over it during the trial.

  It is indeed . . . Let me gather myself and go on.

  I will describe the ruined factory. It was a long, shedlike building. Brick. It had mostly fallen down. Charred timbers angled into the interior. Saplings grew up between them. Shards of broken glass hung from tall, empty window frames. Piles of bricks and mortar lay in weedy piles under the stumps of fallen chimneys. It looked like a paradise of rats.

  I saw Drain up ahead of me. He had stopped in front of an empty doorway leading into the factory’s main building. As I watched, he looked about him. He seemed to be making sure he was not observed. I froze where I stood, enshadowed by trees. He did not see me. Satisfied that no one was watching, he ducked into the dark factory.

  I realized that Rev. Drain would probably not be happy to meet me at that particular moment, but I was consumed with curiosity. So I took a few steps forward. Again I froze. Drain had reappeared. I saw him framed in the doorway. He was stark naked.

  I dared not breathe as he picked his barefoot way past me (it was a warm night). Each muscle in his body stood out in tense articulation. His eyes glowed like a hunter astalk.

  Time to go, I thought to myself. Whatever Drain was going to do, I didn’t want to see it. A man’s own business is a man’s own business. Whom among us would care to be judged by what we have done under no one’s eyes but the Lord’s?

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how I was going to get away. I had to get back to Templeton’s. But the garden stood between the factory and the cottage; and Drain was headed for the garden. There was no way of slipping around him: all routes involved the possibility of discovery, either by noisy traversal of thickets or passage through open spaces. I decided the best thing to do would be to follow him at an inaudible distance. He was choosing his path carefully; I could wait until we got nearer to the cottage before I made my move.

  Silently, I
crept from tree to tree. I could see Drain’s pale shoulders up ahead. I stopped when he reached Old Splendor, the thick, gnarled tree presiding like a wise eminence over the far end of the garden.

  Drain stood on one of Old Splendor’s mighty roots. He folded his arms and gazed down into the garden. Stepping out from beneath the tree, he lowered himself to his haunches. His posture was attentive. He seemed to be waiting for something — for the right moment. After a few minutes, he got down on all fours. Had the right moment come? He began creeping along the grassy strip beside the garden path. Then he got down on his elbows and started to crawl on his belly, like a Red Indian. His fingers dug into the sod and his toes pushed against the grass. Finally, he reached the spot he apparently wanted, beneath a bush of the variety known as bleeding heart, whose branches hung low, freighted with underslung blossoms like tiny crimson bells. Drain raised his arms and rolled over onto his back. Starlight sparkled in his eyes.

  With slow, silent footsteps, I had made my way to Old Splendor. Now, I hid behind its roots. As I watched Drain’s strange behavior, I was desperate to escape. But I was also transfixed.

  The man is playing. That’s all I could think. Just like a little boy, he’s playing out some very detailed fantasy.

  I almost envied him the ability. What other man of his age and station — Then I had another thought: Perhaps the man is having an epileptic fit, or at least the early stages of one. For though his face was calm and his jaw slack, his fingertips shook ever so slightly. And as I watched, a distinct spasm traveled up his leg and into his torso, where it caused his arm and shoulder to tremble. On his other side, his knee twitched. A pectoral rolled. Suddenly, he let out a loud gasp. His back arched, and he rose onto his elbows. A shudder passed down his frame, like a mild electric shock.

  I started from my hiding place; I thought perhaps I should restrain him, or place something between his teeth to keep him from biting off his tongue. Then I stopped. There was something fishy about Drain’s “fit.” His convulsions seemed too — delicate. His body twisted and bent, but he seemed to be decidedly relishing the experience.

  I moved back behind the root. Peering over it, I saw that Drain was indeed in control of his movements. His hands stroked his torso, then moved down toward his groin There, they hovered, and he seemed to be gathering some invisible substance in the air. He did not touch his member, but as he made his gathering movement around it, it achieved a condition of straining engorgement. I turned away, sick with disgust.

  So this was the nature of Drain’s “play.” I tried to block the image of what I had seen from my mind’s eye, but I could hear the clergyman’s breathing: It followed a pattern, rising to stertorous peaks then catching ecstatically and collapsing into little gasps.

  I crawled deeper into the shadows behind the tree. A deep melancholy overcame me Why was I so sad? I tried to understand my feelings, as perhaps a psycho-analyst might.

  Perhaps, I thought, I was being too narrow-minded — probably because of my New England up-bringing. My family was of old Puritan stock. It was the pinched, censorious ways of my ancestors that had made the name Boston a byword for prudery among progressive people. It was my sort of sexual small-mindedness, I reflected, that destroyed the sensitive young cleric in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, as well as countless other New Englanders who, in real life, were guilty of no greater sin than that of expressing their own natural instincts and desires And, heaven knew, I had lived in London long enough to become worldly in such matters. I knew of the stream of filth running beneath the surface of respectable life What Drain’s behavior deserved from me was an urbane chuckle, not pursed-lipped disapproval.

  Now it was myself I condemned. But at the moment that my self-condemnation grew most severe, another image popped into my mind: Anna and Clara.

  Drain was lying in the very spot where Anna and Clara would be playing only a few hours hence. It was the spot where the two girls enjoyed their richest childhood fancies; the place where they imagined fairies, racing and tumbling between walls of flowers, singing and shouting with their angel voices.

  I peered back at Drain. He was stretched on a rack of pleasure. His eyes opened and closed. His body writhed. But his hands — they were strangely inactive. I couldn’t help thinking that Drain was not actually doing anything to himself; but that he was, in fact, having something done to him. It was eerie. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like any of it.

  I grabbed a stone.

  Drain’s breath started beating like a pulse. His whole body strained toward the obvious climax.

  You bastard, I thought; and as he reached his jetting goal, I hurled the stone at his head. Not waiting to see if I’d hit him, I dived around to the other side of a tree.

  Drain gasped and hopped to his feet. He passed where I was hiding as a kind of blur, making fleet passage for the factory. For my part, I grabbed my valise and took off through the garden, headed for the house.

  It was a moment of total confusion. But thinking back on my run through the garden, I now recall a peculiar sensation that perhaps I didn’t make enough of at the time. It was this: As I bounded through the place where Drain had been lying, I felt a kind of soft patting against my face. The feeling was like that of running through a flock of weightless birds. As I could see nothing, I presumed it was a cloud of midges or mayflies; reflexively, I closed my lips so I wouldn’t breathe them in.

  The sensation passed quickly. And before I had time to give it much thought, I got another shock. Bounding up the steps of the cottage, I ran smack dab into Brian Templeton.

  He screamed and clutched his chest.

  I shouted and stumbled backward. “What are you doing out here?” I asked, as I saw who it was.

  “What are you doing out here?” he wheezed. He looked even sallower and more sickly by the wan starlight.

  “Why, I was — running,” I said, no doubt looking guilty and confused.

  “From what?”

  “I was running here to — to show you these.” I held up the valise.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s the prints from the pictures I took this morning,” I said. “I’ve been developing them all evening and I wanted you to see them.”

  Templeton’s eyes lit up. “You’ve found something? The pictures — do they show . . . ?”

  I tried to give a smile that hinted at something wonderful. At the same time, I looked back toward the factory. What had happened to Drain? Did he get away? Was he hiding someplace, listening to Templeton and I talking? Or had he hightailed it off in the opposite direction without waiting to learn who had observed him?

  “Are you being followed?” Templeton asked. “Have you brought someone here?”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” I said. “I’m just — well, we can look at these pictures inside. Shall we? After you.”

  Templeton led the way into his library. I had never been in this room. Not that anyone had forbidden me; but it was a filthy, disorderly room that did not encourage a visit. I had to step around small tables piled with yellowing newspapers, mold-encrusted teacups, and old pipes with wads of gray ash spilling out of them. A desk, piled high with litter, stood in one corner. Templeton turned on a small lamp and cleared a space on the blotter.

  “Well,” he said, challengingly. “Let’s see them.”

  “All right now.” I balanced the valise on my knee and removed the stack of prints. “I’ll hand them to you one at a time and you can — ”

  “Just give me the lot,” he said. “If there’s anything to see . . .”

  I handed him the pile. He lay it on the blotter and began turning over the prints.

  I coughed nervously.

  “They’re nice studies of Anna and Clara,” I lied; actually the girls looked sad and uncomfortable.

  “But no fairies,” said Templeton, peering down at a shot.

  “They’re much b
etter than studio shots of the girls would be. Studio shots can be very forced and unnatural. I get so tired of that.”

  “But no fairies,” Templeton went on.

  “I think the natural light does particularly well in bringing out the clearness of the girls’ complexions the highlights in their hair.”

  “But no fairies,” Templeton concluded.

  “No,” I said. “No fairies. I didn’t really expect — ”

  “What’s this spot here?” he asked, pointing down at one of the prints.

  “That’s a speck of dust,” I said; for that’s what it unmistakably was.

  “And this spot over here, on this one.”

  “Another speck of dust.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” I said. “These spots don’t look at all like the specks that were on the photographs Walsmear first brought me. The ones Anna and Clara took. The ones you — I think — have here in your desk.”

  “I do have them here in my desk,” Templeton said, opening a drawer and pulling out an envelope. From this envelope, he removed the prints Walsmear had brought to me in London two weeks (and to me an eternity) ago.

  We compared that morning’s pictures with the earlier shots. The dust specks on the newer pictures were nothing like the glowing splotches on the originals.

  Templeton made a noise of disgust something along the lines of “Bah!”

  “Hmmm,” I responded. “I suppose we have to take stock of where we stand now, and plan our next course of action.”

  Templeton folded his arms and shook his head. “There will be no next course of action,” he said. “This charade is finished.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m tired of this silliness. I’ve only gone along with it for the sake of my old friend — not that I owe him any such consideration, but that’s friendship for you. In any case, it’s over. I’m out of the game. And so are you.”