In the Shadow of Blackbirds (35 page)

“Isn’t that where you hear him?” I asked.

“I don’t want you in there.”

“Then there’s no point in trying. That’s where he is. I bet if I called to him right now, he’d make a sound up there …”

“No.” Julius ran over and grabbed my shoulder to stop me from going to the staircase. “Don’t call him.”

“I’d listen to her, Embers,” said Mr. Darning. “She seems to know how to find him. He was already coming to her in my car outside your house.”

Julius turned even paler. “He was?”

Mr. Darning nodded. “I heard him. This is going to be a spectacular photograph. I can feel it.”

Julius gulped like he might throw up. Then he said, “All right. I’ll take the photograph upstairs. But I have conditions, too.”

I tensed. “What are they?”

“You have to take off that mask. No more photographs of you in goggles or gauze or other bizarre accessories. This has to be a professional sitting. You’re here only to pose for the picture and to send him away. No dramatics. No snooping.”

I looked to Mr. Darning, who gave me a comforting nod and said in that gentle tone of his, “You know it’s probably already too late for gauze masks. The judges would appreciate
seeing your face. You don’t want to look like you’re hiding anything.”

I nodded. “I’ll take the mask off, then. May I use your washroom to cool my face before the sitting?”

“I—all right.” Julius rubbed his eyes and swayed for a moment. “Go make yourself presentable. I’ll fetch my equipment and start setting up.” He pointed at Mr. Darning. “You wait right here, Darning. I don’t want you sniffing around his room before I’m up there.” He stumbled back inside his studio, and I half wondered if he’d collapse and pass out.

Mr. Darning set his brown case of photographic plates on a small marble table in the hall and popped open the lid. “Go get yourself comfortable, Miss Black. You’re doing well. I’ve never seen a braver girl.”

“Thank you,” I said, although I didn’t feel brave in the slightest. The vile tastes of poison and blood flowed across my tongue and warned of imminent pain.

I wandered down to the grandfather clock on unsteady legs and stopped for a moment to watch the brass pendulum swing in its hypnotizing rhythm. The second hand journeyed to the bottom of the white moon face, and the gears—those thin cuts of circular metal moving in perfect synchronicity—spun and clicked deep inside the heart of the contraption.

I glanced back at the staircase and longed to hear Stephen ask me again what I saw through my goggles’ lenses. I wanted to tell him a new answer:
I see the future, and I know it can all be changed if you stop yourself from heading off to the
army when you’re still in school. Don’t run away from your home life just yet. The battles will rob you of your mind, and someone will destroy your body. Your photographs will be lost. You’ll never get to grow up.

I clenched my fists and continued through the house, past the humming staircase.

The washroom consisted of a pull-chain toilet, a white shell sink, and more cedar wall panels that smelled of wood and toxic fumes. Only a sliver of natural light came through a small window near the ceiling, so the room felt dark and crowded and uncomfortable. I removed my mask and splashed cool water over my sweating cheeks and nose. The peaked face staring back at me in the mirror above the sink belonged to a petrified kid, not a confident spirit medium. My skin lacked all color, and my hair seemed darker than usual. I already looked like a black-and-white photograph.

I dried my face on a limp yellow towel that reeked of darkroom chemicals. The noxious air inside the house kept me from inhaling deep enough to calm my racing heart. With my throat dry, I twisted the doorknob and walked across the hallway in my double-reinforced Boy Scout boots that could still help me run at a moment’s notice.

I approached the bottom of the staircase, my pulse beating in the side of my neck. I could feel Stephen there, sitting the same way as when I saw him back in April. My left foot slipped on a polished floorboard, but I righted myself, regained my balance, and inched farther. The bottom step of the staircase
came into view, along with a foot in a gray sock. The buzzing of electricity grew so loud my eardrums felt they would burst.

I stepped around the corner and saw him.

Black-red blood still covered his entire face and shirt, so close and clear and grotesque in the daylight. I shut my eyes and gagged.

“Don’t go up there,” he told me. “Get out.”

“You don’t look right.” I braced myself against the wall and tried so hard not to ruin everything by vomiting all over the floor.

“Are you ready?” asked Julius in a voice that buzzed as much as the stairs.

I peeled one eye open and couldn’t see Stephen anymore.

Julius thumped down the staircase in his huge brown shoes. “Mr. Darning just observed me placing his own plates in the camera upstairs. The equipment and lighting are ready.”

“I’m ready, too,” I said in a voice that sounded as if my vocal cords had turned to sandpaper. My head pulsated with pain to the beat of the blood churning through my veins. My body wouldn’t last much longer—if the flu didn’t overtake me, my nerves would. The need to reach Stephen’s bedroom fueled my strength to endure the walk up that staircase.

I’d read about pilots describing a change in air pressure when their planes ascended into the sky. That’s how it felt climbing up to the Emberses’ second story. My stomach rose into my chest the way it did on a Ferris wheel, and the blood vessels in my temples seemed poised to pop. My throat
burned hotter. I gripped the rail for support, as my legs melted beneath me.

At the top of the staircase, Julius turned right, toward a bedroom. The broiling air gusting out the opened doorway blew against my face like heat from an oven. The sound of a thousand lightbulbs, restless with electricity, droned within.

“Do you hear the buzzing?” I asked Julius.

“What buzzing?”

I eyed a wooden bed across from the door, below one of three windows that washed the room in an eerie sunlight I’d seen in photographs of empty barns and graveyards.

Mr. Darning waited for us just inside the door, offering me another nod of encouragement. “It’s all right, Miss Black. I’m here.”

Julius entered ahead of me, and I noticed the unsteadiness of his legs, the hesitancy with which he approached his camera. The leather bellows stretched toward the mattress, which was covered in nothing more than a dusty brown blanket. A chill spread from the nape of my neck to the small of my back. That ratty old cloth was probably hiding Stephen’s blood. There was no longer a pillow.

“Well?” Julius steadied himself by holding on to the black box of his camera’s body. “Aren’t you coming in?” His voice squeaked an octave higher than usual. He kept his neck stiff and his eyes alert, searching for something over his shoulder.

I stepped across the threshold of Stephen’s bedroom, which smelled rancid and stale. My legs might as well have
been wading through a pool of molasses. The air pushed me backward as if it were alive, forcing me away from that buzzing and angry bed, breathing hot fumes against my face.

I staggered forward and reached my hand out to the brown blanket, the same way I’d try to grab a log if I were drowning in a river. Static stung my palm. I knew touching that mattress would give me a shock as potent as the lightning bolt’s, but I bent forward, pushed through the molasses air, and climbed onto that bed.

A jolt of electricity whacked me in the back. I fell and shut my eyes through spine-rattling pain that shuddered through my teeth and made me bite my tongue. The room went black.

When I opened my eyes, I found the world dark and my wrists bound to a bed by coarse ropes that burned through the layers of my skin. I was on my back, and there was whispering near the door.

“Wait until I put on the mask. I don’t want him recognizing me.”

“Who cares if he recognizes you?”

“I don’t want anything in his eyes slowing me down, all right? I didn’t smoke enough dope tonight. I’m losing my nerve.”

“I told you, too much dope might slow us down. What a waste it would be to forget to photograph him.”

“Are you sure something’s going to show up?”

“We’ve got to try, right?”

I struggled against my ropes. Dark figures shuffled around
me, guided by the dull light of a single candle. They wore black clothing and kept the flame far enough from their faces for me to see anything but pure-white surgical masks and the glint of their watchful eyes. One of them positioned a camera near the bed. I heard the turning of the tripod’s handle and smelled the firework scent of magnesium powder poured across a flashlamp’s tray. Scuttling noises emanated from everywhere, as if rats were scurrying around the room. Every sound was magnified.

One of the figures turned toward me, and his mask mutated into an enormous white beak. I sucked in my breath and blinked my eyes, but he wouldn’t change—the creature looked like an ungodly bird with the body of a man.

A light flashed, and I was deep in the belly of a trench in France, cradling my rifle, waiting for the sound of artillery fire alongside other panting men. The mixed stink of rotting flesh, cigarettes, sweat, rum, urine, and stagnant mud turned my stomach into mush. I huddled on the ground at the far end of the line, and not more than six feet down from me lay the body of a soldier with reddish-brown hair, his flesh soft and pale, the blood on his face still drying.

A group of cawing carrion crows descended over the poor soul and pecked at his glassy brown eyes with their scissor-sharp beaks jabbing, jabbing, jabbing—fattening themselves on the ruins of war, gorging on a dead nineteen-year-old boy. One of the birds raised its head and stared at me with its beak smeared red and hunger brightening its ravenous eyes. I’d woken
with one of its kind pressed against my rib cage before, digging at my uniform, smelling the blood in the fibers until I fought it off me to prove I was still alive.

I aimed my rifle at the crows on the boy and shot the largest bird dead, which sent a flurry of black wings flying past my face and a spray of machine-gun fire raining down upon us.

Then I was back on the bed in the unlit room, and one of the birdmen propped up my head on a pillow and forced the narrow tube of a copper funnel between my teeth. I gagged and struggled to free my wrists and ankles from the ropes. There was so little light; all I saw were those luminous beaks. I heard a bottle uncork and smelled the sting of darkroom chemicals in the air. Panic charged through me. I tried pushing the funnel out of my mouth with my tongue, but the figure shoved the tube farther inside, making me gag all the more.

“I’ll try to keep his head up,” said one of the birdmen in a strained whisper. “Unless … do we want to drown him with the acid? Maybe he’ll look more like a flu victim in the photograph if he’s choking.”

“I don’t know. I just want to get it over with.”

The creature tilted a bottle, and then he poured.

Liquid fire careened down my throat and scorched my insides, burning all the way down to my stomach. I choked and coughed and spit out a substance that seared my face with the pain of a thousand pinpricks.

A light exploded, white and fiery like a bomb. I was back in the trench in France, running through the mud with a rifle in
my hands, bullets whizzing overhead, a gas mask covering my head and magnifying my wheezing breaths. The man in front of me went down, collapsing in a spray of blood and muck that splattered across my mask. A green mist settled over me, as poisonous as that liquid the dark birds poured inside me.

I was back on the bed again, and the creatures were arguing over whether a picture had just been taken.

“Was I in that picture?”

“No.”

“Are you sure about that?”

They shoved the copper funnel back in my mouth, and the volcanic river again sloshed down my throat. I turned my head and coughed out the poison into my pillow, burning my own flesh a second time. I cried out in horror.

The figure jumped out of the way. Another flash of light and smoke erupted five feet away, momentarily illuminating the dark human halves of the birds, who watched me from by the camera.

They were photographing me.

“Why are you poisoning me?” I tried to yell, but my larynx had been so burned by chemicals it made my voice coarse and weak. “Don’t peck out my eyes.”

“How long is it going to take?” asked one of the creatures in a deep and whispery voice.

“I have no idea. Have patience. Take some more pictures. He really does look like he’s dying from the flu. I think the choking helps.”

“What about the ropes? Dying flu patients aren’t tied to beds.”

“Damn it. I didn’t think of that. Get those off him.”

The creatures surrounded me again, studying me as I writhed and hacked out the stinging poison.

“He looks like he’ll still fight. He’s strong when he’s delirious.”

“I thought you were sticking him with morphine.”

“Why the hell did I let you talk me into this?”

“Think of the huge impact on the world of psychical research if we capture his soul as it’s leaving!”

“You only think that because you’re more of a doper than I am, and he’s not your brother.”

“He’s hardly a human being anymore. He’s as good as dead, right?”

“Why did he say we were going to peck out his eyes?”

“Because he’s a lunatic.”

“I’m getting my gun.”

“No! His spirit will leave too quickly. We won’t have time to photograph it.”

“I can’t stand this. He’s looking at me. I’m getting my gun and putting him out of his misery.”

“No!” I cried in a voice that didn’t sound human anymore. “Don’t shoot me. Get me out of here. Don’t kill me.”

A flurry of action surrounded me—the rush of feathers, the scuttling of feet, voices arguing whether or not they should speed up the process. One of the creatures released my wrists
from the ropes, but the deep-voiced one wrestled him to the ground and cussed him out. The room spun as if I were on a carnival ride. My throat and belly raged with fire. I turned on my side to curl up in pain and saw the silver metal of a gun shining on the bedside table.