take photographs”—I let the pause lengthen—“in the normal way. We’re going to have to try to take a
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
“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
“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, cardboard 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.
