Shadows in Summerland

  October, 1860

  It was late, very late, and I stood in my closet.

  An ancient elm that grew out back tattooed its fingers on the roof, while somewhere beyond it a stray dog was barking, bleak and unsure of its meal.

  Cora’s picture had come out.

  Not the one I took with Hannah, where she stands in my rooms in her bathing costume, but rather another, when Cora still lived, a year or so before she didn’t. Stuffed into a frilly dress, she is arranged beside her mother, a Christmas scene behind them both. Cora is making her signature gesture: the hand palm out before the face. Although here—as opposed the ghost photograph, where the gesture seems mystical, pushing Beyond—it is Cora upset at the shot being taken, that she has been made to stand still for so long.

  Some nights I am given to petting this portrait, allowing its secretive shades to flow through me. And tonight with the dog and the tree on the roof, the Sadness between them, was one of those nights

  As though on cue, there came a knock. I stowed away Cora, began for the door.

  Pictures of Wilson and Babbit and Baker were in resplendence on my rack and as I left I locked the door and slipped the key inside my coat. I made the creaky trip downstairs and opened the door to the dark vestibule. Algernon was on the steps, hair ruffling in the breezes.

  “Willy,” he said, leaning into the chill.

  He was, I could see, on a powerful tear. His eyes were scorched with sleeplessness and countless days of brandy waste, and his normally neat accoutre appeared rumpled.

  “You’re drunk.”

  “At ease inside my skin,” said Child.

  I scanned the darkened autumn street.

  “Well aren’t you going to ask me in?”

  But there was someone else outside, attending Willy Mumler’s fortunes.

  A shape was all I saw at first, a hatted head, I think it was, that breach-ed in the light of the narrowing door. I stopped the door from coming closed, and I lunged around Child to the edge of the steps, and I asked of the darkness below me: “Who goes?”

  The head did not respond at first while the foot-sounds attempted to quiet themselves. Child reemerged, leaning over the railing.

  “Deliver thyself from yon darkness,” he yelled.

  “Beg pardon, sirs, it’s only I!” He came out from under the steps. “William Guay!”

  “William,” I said, “come shake Algernon’s hand.”

  Child offered his hand in a slow, wincing way and William Guay grasped it in his, over-zealous.

  “Algernon’s a friend,” I said. “Mr. Guay,” I addressed Algernon, “a consultant.”

  “Consulting the moon in its phases,” said Child.

  “I’m sorry I startled you, sirs,” said Guay. “And now I’ll leave you to your business.”

  “Don’t be absurd, man. Remain, sir, remain.” Child shifted his eyes from me to Guay. “I myself have come here on a technical question.”

  “The ladies are sleeping,” I said. “You’ll be silent?”

  “For those magical ladies,” said Child. “As the snow.”

  And so we ascended with me at the top, Algernon behind me, William Guay at his heels. Though scarcely had Algernon entered my rooms than he barked his shin, hard, on a knobby settee and went stumbling over the carpet, wheeze-howling. This seemed to amuse him to no end. William Guay came to my side and attended to Child while I saw to the door. When I turned from the bolt he was hunched above Child while the drunk man laughed beneath his arm.

  “So,” I said and crossed my own. “What can I do for you gentlemen, quickly?”

  “A drink,” said Child, “would be most welcome.”

  “My instincts say you’ve had enough.”

  “Sanctimoniousness and covertness,” said Child. “Are there no limits to your gifts?”

  We shared an awkward pause at that. But the drunker the better, after all, if he was intent upon snooping around, and I walked to the sideboard set next to the couch to pilfer my best brandy stores as insurance.

  “Well I can’t speak for Mr. Guay.” Algernon nodded at Guay, and then paused. “But if I must, why don’t I start with a fine little phrase that I’ve learned. Listen here: Sir David Brewster’s Ghost,” he said.

  “And what, pray tell, is that?” said I.

  And here his voice turned deadly sober. “A figure in white is introduced to the frame of the shot and as quickly withdrawn. This creates the impression of something phantasmal. The sitter sits still, while the shape is in motion. But I narrate too much, I can see by your face. So let me say it plain,” he said.

  And here he came in very close and prodded in between my eyes.

  “You, sir, are a fraud,” he said. “That’s Sir David Brewster’s Ghost. A cheap and fraudulent effect dreamed up by a fraud with a fraud’s ingenuity.”

  “Lower your voice, for God’s sake, man.”

  “I suppose for the ladies,” said Child. “Ladies, pfah! Do I owe them my silence then? Those ladies, so called, they have been instrumental in making Mr. Mumler’s ghost! One stands with her back to the sitter, just so. Her shadow reflects the light indeed! Her shadow conceals a smaller one—the shadow of a young accomplice—yes the shadow of one,” he paused a beat to walk his fingers through the air, “who circles the curtain, obscured from the sitter, and then . . .” he paused to sip his drink.

  Guay said: “Needn’t argue, sirs. You needn’t raise your voices so.”

  “He is the one who must answer,” said Child, “for this mockery of the progress of man.”

  “This boy that you speak of who creeps round the curtain. This boy who makes the ghost,” I said. “I wonder, Mr. Child, this child. Where does he hide when the sitting’s in session?”

  “Any number of places,” said Child, sipping faster, his drink pattering on the carpet like blood. “Behind the curtain, as I said. And if not there then in the bedroom. And if not there, why not the closet?”

  “The closet,” I said, “is not the bedroom. The closet is dark and very small. The closet is filled with breakables. The closet has a creaking door. Why I should expect that the sitter would hear him, this devious, subtle and sure-footed boy.”

  “Why not show me, then?” he said.

  I started to lead Mr. Child toward the closet. The foremost reason being this: I did not have a thing to hide. Guay followed behind and then we were inside, and I motioned for him to attend to the door. He paused a moment, dubious. Then utter darkness took the room.

  “What did you . . .” I cleared my throat. “What were you hoping to see?” I asked Child.

  “Light a lamp, for God’s sake, man.”

  “Of course,” I said, and turned around, fumbling along the sink.

  Something slipped off of the counter and crashed. A gas-flame came up toward the front of the room and William Guay rose from a hunkered position. The flame wavered over his pale, hollow cheeks but I could not make out his eyes.

  “What was that that broke?” Child said.

  “Ought to watch our feet, I reckon.”

  Guay set the lantern on top of the shelf and retreated back into the shadows again.

  Child knelt on the floor and he rooted round. He came up with a shattered plate. It wavered at first in the light of the lamp and then I saw which one it was: a picture of Mr. A. Baker I’d taken in which the man’s son stands in back of his father. How I hadn’t seen it before was outrageous and yet, in a way, it made ludicrous sense, for if my sitters had been duped into seeing their darlings who weren’t in fact there, then why should I have been immune from not seeing someone familiar who was? For looking now at Algernon with that shard of the portrait extended before him, I saw that the man in the picture was him. He was holding a print of himself in his hand.

  And yet it was not really him. For the Algernon Child in the picture was
dead.

  A waifish young man in a worn-looking coat, dark blood running down from the top of his head (recall that Mr. Baker’s son had been killed when his pistol misfired at head-height). Oh belabour my stammering heart at such horrors, I saw it could be no one else—right down to the tangle of hair on Child’s brow, his thin mustache, his thwarted smile!

  Algernon said dreamily: “When have I ever sat for you?”

  He turned in the light of the lamp and said, “I—”

  But that one word was all he said.

  He lurched at me unnaturally as blood ran down into his eyes. He attempted to wipe it away, but fell sideways.

  Guay rose from the dark behind Algernon Child. Algernon bucked forward, groping. And then a single, errant beam reflected off the lantern glass and I saw that the thing in Guay’s hands was my tripod, streaming with bloodshed, unshod at the joint. Already he was leveraging to get against the closet door , still holding the tripod he’d lodged in Child’s head—the back of his head, where his skull met his spine.

  Guay wrenched the killing object free. There was a gentle sucking sound. Child dropped to his hands and his knees on the ground.

  “Well don’t just stand there. Finish it,” I think I said to Guay, who startled.

  Child’s shoulder blades beneath his shirt were flexing like a pair of wings, his forearms shaking with the strain of holding his upper-torso upright. He was muttering also some manner of gibberish—something like: “Mmmrrrepee peeeze”—but I was too busy just grasping the basics to figure out what thing he meant. Guay scrambled around on the floor for a moment, got ahold of the rest of the shattered glass plate and embraced Algernon with the serrated edge. But there was no need.

  He collapsed to the floor.

  Absently I pawed the shelf and came up with a ratty towel that I placed near the body. I think I did it daintily, as if the pool of gore were hot.

  “Right,” I said. “All right,” I said. “First things first, let’s get him covered.”

  And when he didn’t seem to hear: “Your coat, Mr. Guay, would be ideal.”

  There was no time to clean the room. So I swaddled Child’s head from the back with Guay’s coat—a dowdy rag but dark enough.

  And then it came to me “Our shoes.”

  “Our shoes, Mr. Mumler?”

  “They’re covered in blood.”

  So the burden of caution must fall, then, to me. I made an island near the door and here we sat to clean our feet. Guay went about his with comical focus, the tip of his tongue sticking out through his teeth.

  Q

  The cab-ride downtown furnished us with a lull. Both of us took trembling breaths.

  I kept one of my eyes always on the driver, who didn’t seem much taken with us.

  We were covered in muck. We were young men in shirtsleeves. We were racing the final fatigue of first light.

  Child sat between us, uncanny and swaying, Guay’s waistcoat encircling his head like a turban. We had closed up his eyes and arranged his mouth open, like the face of a man stupefacted with drink, even going so far as to give him a bottle that the rigours of death anchored there in his hands.

  Guay was saying, “Mr. Mumler.” His voice had a note of repeating itself.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Are we going somewhere?”

  “To a man who can help us with our problem.”

  He lowered his voice. “If you don’t mind my asking . . .”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” I said.

  He glanced at me fixedly, then turned away. And I watched him watch Boston slur past in the windows, its darkened streets gone sleek with rain and we both of us wondered, I think, at that rain, how it had come without our knowing. And then I saw beyond the glass and past the droplets there: my face. At first I’d thought that it was me reflected in the window-pane, and though it was—was me, I mean—it wasn’t the me that sat there in that cab. An illustration of my face, warping and blurring, caught up with the night, again and again and again down the storefronts, pasted there by Bill and Guay to draw foot traffic toward our doors. The contract drawn up between Fanny and I, I had copied in full at the base of each sign where removed from its context it was an avowal—the Fanny Conant Guarantee.

  I even caught a couple of words: “. . . photographic portraitist of eminence and licence.”

  The hansom swung onto a wide boulevard and soon was ascending from out of downtown.

  Q

  “What in the hell was you thinking?” said Bill. “Come here with a dead white man.”

  Guay and I held up Algernon, each to an arm, standing there upon Bill’s porch.

  Arms crossed, Bill stood, inside the door. I saw, past the after-hours bulk of him, things—a velvet-ish hump of a couch; a cane chair; a whitewood dinner table with a ring of rattan seats; a woodstove hunkered in the hearth, showing us its glowing grin. We had caught him in the middle of his after-dinner—something. I don’t think he was glad to see us. His shift at Fisk’s had probably finished no more than an hour before, which meant that three at most remained in which to accomplish our purpose.

  Bill Christian gently cocked his ear to somewhere deeper in the house. He was listening to something I couldn’t make out; his face in profile, turned from me.

  Then he said, “Ain’t nothing now. All right, just go on back. Go on.”

  Bill’s undertaker father, I could only assume, shuffled back from the door and away through the house as Bill faced us again.

  Foreseeably, there was unease. For all we were on bosom terms, I’d never been inside Bill’s home. And now I had perused the place I wondered at its storied purpose. There was no sign in Gothic script announcing the address as Christian & Son; no coffins a-gleam in the foyer beyond, nor bulbs of preservative fluid aswirl. Just telltales of a modest life and the sweetly anonymous voice of Bill’s father, anxious for his only son in a world that had never not shown him its worst.

  “We figured a dead man should be undertaken.”

  But Bill refused to take my bait.

  “Undertake y’all to the coppers,” he said. “Dead white man in my front room.” He studied Child from toe to crown, swirling his cordial and clucking his tongue. “And he couldn’t be any more deader, could he? Why you a pair of blood-drenched fools . . .”

  Here he made to close the door, but I planted my foot against the jamb.

  Bill followed through anyway on my toes.

  “Move your damn fool foot,” he said.

  “Bill,” I entreated.

  “Or I slam it for real.”

  “So slam it, then,” I told Bill calmly. “I can just as well as wait here on one foot as two.”

  His eyes rested flatly on mine through the crack. He was still exerting pressure on the door and it trembled. But then he let go, made a sound of disgust. The door creaked back upon its hinge.

  The door ajar, he turned around and started to hunt about the room. He muttered and cursed and we heard objects clatter.

  I urged Guay to join me beneath the porch eaves.

  Bill emerged wearing his coat, his stovepipe swinging in his hand and scanned the darkened sitting room before he gently shut the door.

  Then he stood on the steps, peering at us, distracted. “How much green you got?” he said.

  I inventoried what I had. “Thirty dollars, give or take.”

  “Have to do, I guess,” said Bill.

  “Have to do,” I said. “So much?”

  “Ain’t so much what you’re about. Even black folk have their price. You wait here a spell,” he said. “And keep that dead man where he stands. I come back around and you gentlemen moved, forwards, backwards, side to side—”

  “—we’re statues in an ice storm, Bill. Aren’t we, Mr. Guay?” I said.

  And then he was off through the dark, down
the steps, turning the corner beneath the far lamp, and Guay and I were left there on the undertaker’s porch to hold the murdered man upright. In the wake of Bill’s footsteps a hush settled in, then a sort of muted dripping. Naturally I figured it for runoff from the storm, dripping from the house’s eves, but I soon realized it was Algernon’s blood, gathering and falling from the channels of his clothing.

  “Shouldn’t we move him again, Mr. Mumler?”

  After a pause, I replied: “What’s the use.”

  We listened to the blood a while, tolling on the hardwood like the cosmos through its cycles. That, and the shrieking of thousands of rats that even in darkness we saw from Bill’s porch, tides of them thronging the rubbish-choked gutters.

  “I suppose I should thank you,” I told William Guay. “He would’ve ruined me, you know.”

  “He would’ve ruined us,” said Guay.

  “Yes.” I peered into his face. “So he would.”

  A rather lugubrious pause overtook us.

  William Guay said, “You don’t owe me a thing.”

  Q

  The coming of the hackney cab caught William Guay and me off-guard.

  It was a tattered, lurching thing, and it pressed up the hill underneath the dim lamps like something from a fever dream. Supposing this to be our cue, I took up my end of the corpse and went toward it.

  Yet it wasn’t Bill who leapt down from the bench and came to meet us at the curb, but rather a tall, light-skinned Negro in black. He did not speak a word to us; in fact, he hardly looked us over but went forthwith about the business of fitting the corpse in the train of the cab. In a matter of moments he had it secured and ushered us into the seat of the cab. Passing in front of the dark, sway-backed mare, long and stringy in the mane, I stared into a ruined eye, yellow and stippled with fly-bites.

  The trap started up. Still the man didn’t speak.

  “Where are we going?” I asked him.

  No answer.

  “Where is Bill Christian?”

  No answer again.

  “What do you mean by not answering, man?” I asked the driver, leaning forward.

  We’d been travelling faster than I thought for the streetlamps were brighter and shorter between, and now we halted under one that shone full strength into the cab. The hackney’s driver whipped around. His face in the lamplight was spotted and swirled, like a botched figure study left out in the rain. His features underneath the blight were softly made, girlish—indeed they were pretty. He did not speak, nor did he frown, but smiled without showing his teeth, almost sweetly, and nodded at me businesslike before turning back to the reins.