by Mike Carey
I straightened the box with a few well-practiced tugs and tucks. This was the crucial part, so of course I kept my face as bland as school custard. The volunteer held his hand out for the box. Instead, I caught his hand in my own and turned it palm up. “And the other one,” I said. “Make a cup. Verstehen Sie ‘cup’? Like this. Right. Excellent. Good luck, because you never know . . .”
I upended the box over his hands, and a large brown rat smacked right down into the makeshift basket of his fingers. He gurgled like a punctured water bed and jumped back, his hands flying convulsively apart, but I was ready and caught the rat neatly before she could fall.
Then, because I knew her well, I added a small grace note to the trick by stroking her nipples with the ball of my thumb. This made her arch her back and gape her mouth wide open, so that when I brandished her in the faces of the other kids, I got a suitable set of jolts and starts. Of course, it wasn’t a threat display—it was “More, big boy, give me more”—but they couldn’t be expected to know that look at their tender age. Any more than they knew that I’d dropped Rhona into the box when I pretended to straighten it after the trampling.
And bow. And acknowledge the applause. Which would have been fine if there’d been any. But Peter still sat like Patience on a monument, as the volunteer trudged back to his seat with his machismo at half-mast.
Peter’s face said I’d have to do a damn sight more than that to impress him.
So I thought about the Damascus Road again. And, like the bastard I am, I reached for the camera.
This isn’t my idea of how a grown man should go about keeping the wolf from the door, I’d like you to know. It was Pen who put me up to it. Pamela Elisa Bruckner—why that shortens to Pen rather than Pam I’ve never been sure, but she’s an old friend of mine, and incidentally the rightful owner of Rhona the rat. She’s also my landlady, for the moment at least, and since I wouldn’t wish that fate on a rabid dog, I count myself lucky that it’s fallen to someone who’s genuinely fond of me. It lets me get away with a hell of a lot.
I should also tell you that I do have a job—a real job that pays the bills, at least occasionally. But at the time currently under discussion, I was taking an extended holiday, not entirely voluntary, and not without its own attendant problems relating to cash flow, professional credibility, and personal self-esteem. In any case, it left Pen with a vested interest in putting alternative work my way. Since she was still a good Catholic girl (when she wasn’t being a Wicca priestess), she went to Mass every Sunday, lit a candle to the Blessed Virgin, and prayed to this tune: “Please, Madonna, in your wisdom and mercy, intercede for my mother though she died with many carnal sins weighing on her soul; let the troubled nations of Earth find a road to peace and freedom; and make Castor solvent, amen.”
But usually she left it at that, which was a situation we could both live with. So it was an unpleasant surprise to me when she stopped counting on divine intervention and told me about the kids’ party agency she was setting up with her crazy friend Leona—and the slimy sod of a street magician who’d given her an eleventh-hour stab in the back.
“But you could do this so easily, Fix,” she coaxed over coffee laced with cognac in her subterranean sitting room. The smell was making me dizzy—not the smell of the brandy, but the smell of rats and earth and leaf mulch and droppings and Mrs. Amelia Underwood roses—of things growing and things decaying. One of her two ravens—Arthur, I think—was clacking his beak against the top shelf of the bookcase, making it hard for me to stick to a train of thought. This was her den, her center of gravity—the inverted penthouse underneath the three-story monstrosity where her grandmother had lived and died in the days when mammoths still roamed the Earth. She had me at a disadvantage here, which was why she’d asked me in to start with.
“You can do real magic,” Pen pointed out sweetly, “so fake magic ought to be a doddle.”
I blinked a couple of times to clear my eyes, blinded by candles, fuddled by incense. In a lot of ways, the way Pen lives is sort of reminiscent of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations: she only uses the basement, which means that the rest of the house apart from my bedsitter up in the roof space is frozen in the 1950s, never visited, never revised. Pen herself froze a fair bit later than that, but like Miss Havisham, she wears her heart on her mantelpiece. I try not to look at it.
On this particular occasion, I took refuge in righteous indignation. “I can’t do real magic, Pen, because there’s no such animal. Not the way you mean it, anyway. What do I look like, eh? Just because I can talk to the dead—and whistle up a tune for them—that doesn’t make me Gandalf the bastard Grey. And it doesn’t mean that there are fairies at the bottom of the sodding garden.”
The crude language was a ploy intended to derail the conversation. It didn’t work, though. I got the impression that Pen had worked out her script in advance for this one.
“‘What is now proved was once only imagined,’” she said primly—because she knows that Blake is my main man, and I can’t argue with him. “Okay,” she went on, topping up my cup with about a half-pint of Janneau XO (it was going to be dirty pool on both sides, then), “but you did all that stage-magic stuff when we were in college, didn’t you? You were wonderful back then. I bet you could still do it. I bet you wouldn’t even have to practice. And it’s two hundred quid for a day’s work, so you could pay me a bit off last month’s chunk of what you owe me . . .”
It took a lot more persuasion and a fair bit more brandy—so much brandy, in fact, that I made a pass at her on my unsteady way out the door. She slapped off my right hand, steered my left onto the door handle, and kissed me good night on the cheek without breaking stride.
I was profoundly grateful for that when I woke up in the morning, with my tongue stuck to my soft palate and my head full of unusable fuzz. Sexy, sweet, uninhibited, nineteen-year-old Pen, with her autumn bonfire of hair, her pistachio eyes, and her probably illegal smile would have been one thing; thirty-something Earth Mother Pen in her sibyl’s cave, tended by rats and ravens and Christ only knew what other familiar spirits, and still waiting for her prince to come even though she knew exactly where he was and what he’d turned into—there was too much blood under the bridge now. Leave it at that.
Then I remembered that I’d agreed to do the party just before I made the pass, and I cursed like a longshoreman. Game, set, and match to Pen and Monsieur Janneau. I hadn’t even known we were playing doubles.
So there was a reason, anyway, even if it wasn’t good or sufficient, why I now found myself facing down these arrogant little shits and prostituting my God-given talents for the paltry sum of two hundred quid. There was a reason why I’d put myself in the way of temptation. And there was a reason why I fell.
“Now,” I said, with a smile as wide as a Halloween pumpkin, “for my last and most ambitious trick before you all go off and feed your faces, I need another volunteer from the audience.” I pointed at Sebastian. “You, sir, in the second row. Would you be so good?” Sebastian looked hangdog, intensely reluctant. Stepping into the spotlight meant certain humiliation and possibly much worse. But the older boys were whistling and catcalling, and Peter was telling him to get the hell up there and do it. So he stood up and worked his way along the row, tripping a couple of times over the outstretched feet that were planted in his path.
This was going to be cruel, but not to stepbrother Sebastian. No, my un-birthday gift to him was a loaded gun that he could use in any way he wanted to. And for Peter . . . well, sometimes cruelty is kindness in disguise. Sometimes pain is the best teacher. Sometimes it does you no harm to realize that there’s a limit to what you can get away with.
Sebastian had made his way around to my side of the trestle table now, and he was standing awkwardly next to me. I picked up the Autographic and slipped the hooks on either side, wheeling the bellows out fully into its working position. With its red leather and dark wood, it looked like a pretty impressive piece of kit; when I gave it
to Sebastian to hold, he took it gingerly.
“Please examine the camera,” I told him. “Make sure it’s okay. Fully functional, fully intact.” He glanced at it cursorily, without enthusiasm, nodded, and tried to hand it back to me.
I didn’t take it. “Sorry,” I said, “you’re my cameraman now. You have to do the job properly, because I’m relying on you.”
He looked again, and this time he noticed what was staring him in the face.
“Well—there’s black tape,” he said. “Over the lens.”
I affected to be surprised and took a look for myself. “Gentlemen,” I said to the room at large. “Ladies.” A five-second pause for howls of mocking laughter, nudges, and pointing fingers. “My assistant has just brought something very alarming to my attention. This camera has black masking tape over the lens, and it can’t therefore take photographs”—I let the pause lengthen—“in the normal way. We’re going to have to try to take a spirit photo.”
Peter and Peter’s friends looked pained and scornful at this suggestion; it sounded to them like a pretty lame finale.
“Spirit photographs are among the most difficult feats for the magician to encompass,” I told them gravely, paying no attention to the sounds of derision. “Think of an escapologist freeing himself from a mailbag suspended upside down from a hook in a cage that has been dumped out of a jet plane flying about two miles up. Well, this trick is a little like that. Less visually spectacular, but just as flamboyantly pointless.”
I gestured to the birthday boy. “We’re going to take your picture, Peter,” I told him. “So why don’t you go and stand over there, by the wall. A plain background works best for this.”
Peter obeyed with a great show of heavy resignation.
“You have another brother?” I asked Sebastian, quietly.
He glanced up at me, startled. “No,” he said.
“Or a cousin or something—someone your own age who used to live here with you?”
He shook his head.
“You know how to use a camera?”
Sebastian was on firmer ground here, and he looked relieved. “Yeah. I’ve got one upstairs. But it’s just point and shoot, it doesn’t have any . . . focus thing, or . . .”
I dismissed these objections with a shake of the head, giving him a reassuring half smile. “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “This one focuses manually, but we’re not going to bother with that anyway. Because we’re not using either the lens or ordinary light to form the image. But the thing you’re going to be clicking is this.” I gave him the air bulb—sitting at the end of a coil of rubber tubing, it was the only part of the camera that I’d had to replace. “You squeeze it hard, and it opens the shutter. When I say, okay?”
I hadn’t loaded the Autographic for more than a decade, but all the stuff I needed was right there in the box, and my hands knew what to do. I lined up a new plate, peeled away one corner of the waxed cover sheet, then slammed it into place and tore the cover free in one smooth movement. It wasn’t what a professional would have done, partly because there was bound to be some seepage of light if you loaded the camera like that in an ordinarily lit room—but mostly because I was loading print paper rather than negative film. We were cutting out one stage of the normal photographic process. Again, it didn’t matter, but I noticed as I was tightening the screws up again that James and Barbara Dodson had wandered in and were standing at the back of the room. That was going to mean a louder eruption, but by this stage I didn’t really give a monkey’s chuff; Peter had gotten quite seriously under my skin.
I got Sebastian into position, steering him with my hand on his shoulders. Peter was getting bored and restive, but we were almost done. I could have ratcheted up the tension a bit more, but since the outcome was still in doubt, I thought I might as well just suck it and see. Either it would work or it wouldn’t. “Okay, on my mark. Peter—smile. Nice try, but no. Kids in the front row, show Peter what a smile is. Sebastian—three, two, one, now!”
Sebastian pressed the bulb, and the shutter made a slow, arthritic whuck-chunk sound. Good. I’d been half afraid that nothing would happen at all.
“Now, we don’t have any fixative,” I announced as my memory started to kick in again, piecemeal. “So the image won’t last for long. But we can make it clearer with a stop bath. Lemon juice will do, or vinegar, if you . . . ?” I looked hopefully at the two grown-ups, and Barbara slipped out of the room again.
“What about developing fluid?” James asked, looking at me with vague but definite mistrust.
I shook my head. “We’re not using light,” I said again. “We’re photographing the spirit world, not the visible one, so the film doesn’t have to develop; it has to translate.”
James’s face showed very clearly what he thought of this explanation. There was an awkward silence, broken by Barbara as she came back in with a bottle of white-wine vinegar, a plastic bowl, and an apologetic smile. “This is going to stink,” she warned me as she retreated again to the back of the room.
She was right. The sweet-sour tang of the vinegar hit and held as I poured out about two-thirds of the bottle, which covered the bowl to half an inch or so deep. Then, with Sebastian still standing next to me, I slipped the plate out of the camera, very deliberately blocking with my body the audience’s line of sight. “Sebastian,” I said, “you’re still the cameraman here. That means you’re the medium through which the spirits are working. Please, dip the print paper in the vinegar, and slosh it around so that it’s completely soaked. An image should form on the paper as you do this. Do you see an image, Sebastian?”
Peter hadn’t even bothered to move from his place over by the wall. In fact, he was leaning against it now, looking more sullen and bored than ever. Sebastian stared first in consternation and then in amazement at the paper as he sluiced it round and round in the bowl.
“Do you see an image?” I repeated, knowing damn well that he did.
“Yeah!” he blurted. Everyone in the room was picking up on his tension and astonishment now; I didn’t need to go for any verbal buildup.
“And what is that image?”
“A boy. It’s—I think it’s—!”
“Of course you can see a boy,” I interrupted. “We just took a photo of your brother, Peter. Is that who you can see, Sebastian?”
He shook his head, his wide eyes still staring down at the muddy photograph. “No. Well, I mean, yeah, but—there’s somebody else, too. It’s—”
I cut across him again. Everything in its place. “Somebody you recognize?”
Sebastian nodded emphatically. “Yeah.”
I like to see what I was doing here as siding with the underdog, but if there had been no element of sadism in it, I wouldn’t have been looking at Peter as I said the next few words. “And does he have a name, this other boy? What dark wonders from the spirit world have we captured and pinned to the wall, Sebastian? Tell us his name.”
Sebastian swallowed hard. It was genuine nerves rather than showmanship, but the strained pause was better than anything I could have choreographed myself.
“Davey Simmons,” Sebastian said, his voice a little too high.
The effect on Peter was electrifying. He yelled in what sounded like honest, naked terror, coming away from the wall with a jerk and then lurching across to the bowl in three staccato strides. But I was too quick for him. “Thank you, Sebastian,” I said, whipping the print out of the bowl and waving it in the air as though to dry it—and as though keeping it out of Peter’s reach was only accidental.
It had come out pretty well. In black and white, of course, and darkened around the edges where the light had got in at the paper, but nice and clear where it needed to be. It showed Peter as a sort of grainy blur, only recognizable by his posture and by the darker splodge of his hair. By contrast, the figure that stood at his elbow was very distinct indeed—sad, washed out, beaten down by time and loneliness and the fact of his own death, but not to be mistaken for marsh gas, ca
rdboard cutout, or misapplied imagination.
“Davey Simmons,” I mused. “Did you know him well, Peter?”
“I never fucking heard of him!” Peter yelled, throwing himself at me with desperate fury. “Give me that!” I’m not hefty by any means, but for all his solidity, Peter was just a kid; holding him off while I showed the print to his friends wasn’t hard at all. They were all staring at it with expressions that ran the gamut from sick horror to bowel-loosening panic.
“And yet,” I mused, “he stands beside you as you eat, and work, and sleep. In his death, he watches you living, night into day into night. Why do you suppose that is?”
“I don’t know,” Peter squealed, “I don’t know! Give it to me!”
Most of the audience were on their feet now, some surging forward to look at the print, but most pulling back as if they wanted to get some distance from it. James Dodson waded through them like a battleship through shrimp boats, and it was he who took the print out of my hands. Peter immediately turned his attentions to his father and tried again to snatch the photo, but James pushed him back roughly. He stared down at the print in perplexity, shaking his head slowly from side to side. Then, with his face flushing deep red, he tore it up, very deliberately, into two pieces, then four, then eight. Peter gave a whimper, caught somewhere between misery and the illusion of relief, but from where I was standing, it looked like he’d be living with this for a while to come.
Dodson was working on thirty-two pieces when I turned to Sebastian and solemnly shook his hand.
“You’ve got a gift,” I said. He met my gaze, and understanding passed between us. What he had was a lever. Peter wasn’t going to be as free in the future with his elbows, or his fists, or his feet—not now that everyone had seen his guilt and his weakness. There wasn’t any extra charge for this; I work on a fixed rate.
I’d noticed the miserable little ghost hovering around Peter as soon as he’d come into the room. They’re harder to spot in daylight, but I’ve got a lot of experience on top of a lot of natural sensitivity, and I know what to expect in a house where they don’t keep their rowan sprigs up to date. I didn’t know what the connection was, but unless Davey Simmons had no family at all, there had to be a damn good reason why he was haunting this house rather than his own. He couldn’t get away from Peter; his soul was tangled up in him like a bird in a briar patch. You could read that in any number of ways, but Peter’s violent reaction had ruled out some of them, changed the odds on others.