Outside, the weather was dismal, but the avenue bustled with the usual crowds of carriages and pedestrians. Clerks and scriveners scurried past Lowell en route to their respective offices while paperboys shouted the day’s headlines from every corner, their voices ringing shrilly above the rattle of wheels on cobble.
A pair of young women proceeded down the pavement in his direction — sisters, evidently, their good humour unaffected by the wind and imminent snow. The two walked arm-in-arm, laughing, even as their guardian gasped and panted behind them, burdened by a picnic basket and a pair of canvas shopping bags.
One of the sisters smiled at Lowell. The other tittered and tightened her grip on her sister’s elbow. Their treatment of their guardian showed them to be callous, even cruel, but Lowell grinned back at them all the same. He could hardly do otherwise: they were simply too young, too beautiful, too alive.
He crossed the street to the next block and passed Saint Andrew’s church, where he had begun attending mass. Every Sunday morning, he knelt before the altar and prayed, rocked by yearning though he dared not take the Host. That morning, walking past, he let his fingers trail along the rough stones and sighed as the great bell struck the half-hour.
At the post office, he composed a brief message to be wired to Patrick’s studio in New York.
He asked the clerk to contact him in the event of any delays and then hurried home to keep his first appointment, smiling first at the sisters, whom he passed once more, and then at the paperboy, unable to contain his elation, even in that late season, even as the first flakes of snow drifted down and settled in his hair.
Mrs Lavinia Perkins was Lowell’s most reliable client, a middle-aged teetotaller of extraordinary vanity and peculiar habit — to wit, her insistence on having a new photograph of herself taken on the first of every month. She used these to chart the course and extent of her ageing, scouring each monochrome image for signs of greying hair. This was, of course, an impossible task, but perhaps this was why she preferred the photographer’s lens to that more ordinary (and less expensive) instrument: the mirror.
On that morning she breezed into the room with the haughty assurance of a beloved monarch. She did not even wish Lowell good morning but instead assumed her usual pose against her favourite backdrop: a canvas sheet painted with a classical motif, three ruined columns like a row of broken teeth.
Lowell had already positioned Patrick’s camera on the tripod and focused the lens. The plate was loaded, the flash box readied, and he wasted no time in going beneath the hood.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
Her pose spoke for itself. She stood perfectly erect, one arm draped over the Brady stand, and turned her face from the camera so that she appeared in profile.
He lifted the flash box with one hand and sighted the widow through the viewfinder. He steadied his fingers over the triggers for flash and shutter and began to count down, whispering the numbers to himself in the blackness of the hood.
The widow changed.
Her brown curls turned wiry and grey even as her cheekbones sloped inward and stretched the mottled skin to breaking. From beneath her sallow flesh there emerged the outline of a skull, which threatened to burst from the tattered sinews of her once-beautiful face. Even her teeth, usually white, had become brown and stained by the corruptions of the grave.
Lowell wanted to close his eyes but in the manner of a nightmare found that he could not — not even when the tail of a worm thrust out from behind her ear, puncturing the skin so that a shower of corpse dust drifted to the ground.
“Well?” the widow inquired. Her voice, at least, was unaltered, but the coolness of her tone did nothing to dispel the image in the viewfinder. “Is something wrong?”
“Ah — um?”
Sweat poured from Lowell’s brow.
“What is the delay?”
The widow turned to face him. Her eyes were gone: the sockets empty, rimmed with pitted bone. A mass of white worms writhed within the hollow of her skull.
He released the trigger on the flash box. The magnesium ignited and a wave of cleansing light flooded the room. Somehow he possessed the presence of mind to open and close the shutter, capturing the widow in a blast of white lightning.
He wrenched his head from the hood and dashed to the side cabinet. There he found the brandy bottle, untouched in the days since his conversion. His heart galloped, fuelling his panic, and his lungs heaved in his chest — faster and faster, refusing to slow.
He poured himself a glass. He gulped it down.
“Whatever is the matter?” Mrs Perkins asked. “You’re acting most peculiarly.”
The room shimmered, retreating from Lowell as the alcohol took hold. He clenched his eyes shut. He shook his head but could not speak.
“Open your eyes,” she snapped. “Look at me!”
It required all of his courage for Lowell to lift his head and address the widow. Her appearance had returned — mercifully — to normal. She peered at him through the lenses of her silver lorgnette, her magnified eyes more hawk-like than ever.
“I’m — quite well,” Lowell gasped. “It’s the — weather. My gout—”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I’m glad it’s nothing serious,” she said. “Did you get the picture?”
He shivered. He poured another glass and drained it in a swallow. Tears leapt to his eyes as the familiar ache spread through his chest. Mrs Perkins sniffed in disapproval, but at that moment, he scarcely cared. Even the thought of that photograph chilled him to the marrow.
“Well?” she demanded. “Shall we take another?”
“No,” he said quickly. “There’s — no need.”
“Good.” She cast a scornful glance at the glass in his hand. “I shall come by later this week to collect it. Good day.”
She proceeded to the door and let herself out.
The catch slammed behind her.
Lowell gulped down another drink. The alcohol steadied his hands somewhat but could not drive out the images that crowded about him. When he shut his eyes, he saw the widow as she had appeared through the viewfinder: gaping eye-sockets, the skull that surfaced from beneath her thinning skin. Other images too. Blue eyes, bruises. A palm-print on white skin.
He poured a fourth glass and contemplated the liquid for a full minute before returning it to the bottle. Already he regretted this return to his old habits. Guilt rose like a tumour in his throat, an ever-familiar gorge he could not spit out or swallow.
He mopped the sweat from his brow. Turning his attention to more material concerns, he replaced the bottle in the side cabinet and went into the darkroom to ready the developer.
In the years since his conversion, Lowell had come to see the development process as a kind of miracle. While he was familiar with the various chemical principles at work, he could not but marvel at the thing itself, which he understood as a singular indicator of God’s grace. To watch a human face form on albumen paper, to see it slowly assume shape, its fine lines betraying either hope, or grief, or pain—
In those moments, Lowell admitted, his very soul ached, and he imagined the birth of the planet from the void, the first word of light like the flash of torched magnesium.
But that morning he found no joy in developing the plate. His hands shook with fright, and his fingers kneaded the flesh of his palms, his nails drawing blood as the positive image formed on the albumen.
His fears proved baseless. The widow Perkins appeared looking much as she always did. While her pose was slightly different — for here she looked directly into the camera, confusion playing on her features — the photograph closely resembled the three dozen he had already taken of the widow. In no way did it hint at the horror he had
