Darkroom (14 page)

Randy's cheeks flushed. ‘When nobody else said nothing … I thought that maybe I was the only one who had done any work.'

‘And you didn't want the rest of the class to accuse you of ass-licking, is that it?'

Randy nodded, and stared down at his desk in embarrassment. But to Jim's surprise, there was no jeering, not even from Shadow. He looked around the class and suddenly realized that almost all of his students were bright-eyed with bottled-up excitement, as if they were all bursting to tell him something.

‘So … did anybody else look up any facts on Robert H. Vane?' he asked them. ‘Sally, what about you?'

Sally was chewing a large mouthful of her own frizzy hair, and she almost choked. It was a habit of hers: she spent most lessons twisting her hair around her fingers or sucking it.

‘I found out a little bit,' she said, spitting out hair.

‘Even a little bit's better than nothing. Are you going to share it with us?'

She opened her workbook and recited in a sing-song voice. ‘Robert H. Vane toured California between 1852 and 1857, from Yosemite in the north to Mission Viejo in the south, taking dagger-type pictures of scenery and pioneer communities and gold diggings. He sent the pictures back to New York in order to encourage people to come settle out west. His most famous dagger-types, however, were those of the indig—indigans?'

Jim looked over her shoulder. ‘Indigens … it means the people who originally live in a place before anybody else gets there. In this case, rather confusingly, the indigens happened to be the people we used to call Indians. Go on, Sally.'

‘That's it,' she said. ‘Then my brother came in and said it was his turn to use the computer.'

‘OK, Sally,' said Jim. ‘That's very good, as far as it goes. And, by the way, it's pronounced da-gair-oh-types. Anybody else?'

Delilah put her hand up. ‘I found this old story in
True Crimes
magazine about a man who was arrested in San Diego in October of 1857, for murder. His name was spelled different, Robert V-a-i-n, but he was a photographer, too, so I guessed that he was probably the same guy.'

‘That's
very
interesting. Who was he supposed to have killed?'

Delilah read from her computer printout. ‘He was accused of murdering John Philip Stebbings, a wealthy department-store owner from Chicago, and Mr Stebbings' wife, Veronica. They were both burned to death when their house caught fire on the night of September 9th, 1857. Actually, they were almost cremated, because there was nothing left of them except their bones and their engraved wedding rings.'

‘Go on,' said Jim.

He thought
this sounds horribly like the way that Bobby and Sara were killed,
but he didn't say anything. It could be nothing more than coincidence, and in any case the class didn't yet know the full grisly details of Bobby and Sara's incineration. Hardly anybody knew, because they hadn't been released to the media.

Delilah momentarily lost her place, but then she found it again. ‘Oh, yes! Mr Vain was arrested and charged because two stable hands said they had seen him running away from the scene of the fire. Then one of the Stebbings' chambermaids came forward to say that Mr Vain had been “paying calls” on Mrs Stebbings during the summer of 1857, while Mr Stebbings was away on business in Chicago. I guess “paying calls” is 1857-speak for having an affair.'

Jim nodded. ‘They might have been having an affair, yes. But even if they weren't actually going to bed together, it wasn't considered proper in those days for a married woman to receive gentleman callers, not on her own, anyhow.'

‘You hear that, Shadow?' called out Vanilla. ‘So don't you go calling me on my cellphone no more, it ain't proper.'

Delilah hesitated, but then she went back to her reading. ‘The chambermaid said that Mr Stebbings had found out about his wife's friendship with Mr Vain and ordered her to stop seeing him. Mr Vain was very angry about this, and the chambermaid thought that he might have burned the house down, with Mr and Mrs Stebbings in it, out of revenge.'

‘Was Vain ever tried?'

Delilah shook her head. ‘He had witnesses who swore that at the time the fire was started he was playing cards at the home of A. T. Peebles, the hardware millionaire, and two other men. The sheriff decided that because the stable hands were Mexican their evidence was probably unreliable, and that the Stebbings' house had more than likely been struck by a freak bolt of lightning. Their deaths were officially entered in the county records as an act of God.'

‘That's wonderful,' said Jim. ‘That's first-class historical research. We'll have to check if “Mr Vain” was
our
Mr Vane, won't we? but it sounds very likely.' Especially since the Stebbings had been burned to death by ‘a freak bolt of lightning', he thought.

He circled the classroom again. ‘Anybody else have anything?'

David had been jabbing his hand up in the air for the past five minutes. ‘These, sir. Look, sir. Printouts of some of Robert H. Vane's pictures, from the Internet.'

‘Now these I have to see,' said Jim. David handed him four sheets of paper and he held them up in front of the class, so that everybody could see them. ‘
A view of Lake Berryessa, 1851
. Looks mountainous, doesn't it, and bleak? But there are two figures in the foreground here, both of them wearing hoods over their heads, and hats, so they look like a couple of bee-keepers. Any ideas who they could be, anybody?
A portrait of Two Noses, the Dagueno chief with the skull of his dead grandfather, 1852
. You can see why they call him Two Noses, can't you? But he doesn't look too happy, does he? And what's this?
Funeral at Placerville, 1854, of the gold-prospector John Keating
, complete with horse and carriage and brass band. And look at this! A self-portrait, taken in 1856, in his own studio in Los Muertes.'

Now, for the first time, Jim saw the face of the man whose portrait was hanging over his fireplace. Robert H. Vane was standing in the oddly angled corner of a wooden building, with a calico shade drawn halfway down. He was wearing a black frock coat with a long watch chain and his arms were folded. He was thin-faced, almost cadaverous, with eyes that were so deep-set they appeared to be nothing but black holes. He was staring directly at the camera lens as if he were trying to intimidate anybody who ever had the impertinence to look at him, or to wonder who he was, and what he had done.

‘That is one seriously creepy dude,' said George.

And Jim thought:
if ever I saw a man who looked capable of burning people to ashes, this has to be him
.

M
ost of the rest of the class had found out odd bits and pieces about Robert H. Vane, but the more Jim learned about him, the more shadowy Robert H. Vane seemed to become, because no two descriptions of his life and his behavior seemed to tally. Several different accounts had spoken of a ‘chilly demeanored, black-dressed figure, like a mortician' and many people who had met him seemed to have been deeply frightened of him, for no accountable reason. One woman said that ‘the night after meeting him, I had a nightmare in which my mouth was filled with crawling cockroaches.'

He had traveled from one settlement to another, taking pictures of families and weddings and scenery, and any other oddity that took his eye. There were several hints that he might have had a way with women, although he had never taken more than two or three pictures of any one woman in particular, and he always appeared to have traveled alone.

But for all those who found him ‘disturbing' and ‘sinister' there were almost as many who thought he was a shining inspiration. Father Juan Perez, of the Santa Juanita mission near San Diego, had written in his diary that Robert H. Vane seemed to ‘carry with him the power of divine conversion.'

Pinky, of all people, had found out about the Dagueno Tragedy. ‘It's in this website I found on the Internet called
The Native Peoples of Southern California In Pictures
, and it's got, like, photographs of all the Indian tribes that died out. Some of them got extinct even before anybody got the chance to get to know them, because the first explorers were carrying all kinds of diseases that the Indians never had before, like the flu and stuff, and the Indians didn't have no immunity to them. So they died, like, you know,
flies
.

‘Anyhow, this website has pictures of the Dagueno Indians that Robert H. Vane took. It says that the Daguenos were really hostile before he went to visit them, but that afterwards they became one of the friendliest tribes out of all of them. But about a month later they attacked the nearest white settlement by surprise and they killed everybody – sixty-five men, women and children – and cut their ears off and pulled out their intestines and everything. So the white settlers got up a posse and went to the Dagueno village and wiped out the whole tribe. It says the Daguenos didn't even try to fight back, which was weird, wasn't it?'

Jim said, ‘Yes it was. Very weird.'

Even weirder – why had Robert H. Vane covered his head in a black cloth, in mourning for the Daguenos? Had he somehow felt responsible for what had happened to them? And what exactly
had
happened to them? Why hadn't they fought back?

Mysteriouser and mysteriouser, as Alice might have said.

Philip had found out what sort of camera Robert H. Vane had used – two wooden boxes with one sliding inside of the other – but of course it was Edward who had researched all the technical details about daguerrotypes.

‘It was 1833,' he announced dramatically. ‘It was in France.'

‘OK,' said Jim. ‘It was 1833, and it was in France.'

‘I was just setting the scene,' Edward explained. ‘There, in 1833, in France, in his shabby studio, the highly-talented, little-known artist Louis Daguerre made a discovery that was going to change the world.'

‘Who are you?' Shadow complained. ‘His publicist?'

Edward ignored him. ‘Louis Daguerre discovered that if he coated a copper plate with silver, and then exposed the silver surface to iodine vapor, it became sensitive to light. So he put the plate inside a totally dark box, right, and then he let the sunlight shine into the box for a few minutes, through a tiny hole. After that, he fumed the plate with mercury vapor, so that the mercury amalgamated with the silver, and what do you think he had managed to do?'

‘Choke himself?' Randy suggested.

‘No … he had made himself a visible picture. A photograph! All he had to do then was stop the picture from fading away by fixing it with a strong salt solution. In a very short time, this method of taking pictures swept the world, and photographers were still taking daguerrotypes until 1885 when George Eastman invented the roll film and the Kodak camera.'

Brenda said, ‘I didn't understand any of that.'

‘Well, it isn't all that difficult,' Jim put in. ‘Imagine a mirror inside a closed box, but then you make a small hole in the box so that the light can shine in. The mirror would show you a reflection of what was outside, wouldn't it? Louis Daguerre simply found a way of fixing the reflection on to the silver so that it stayed there. In fact, in the early days, cameras were called “mirrors with memory.”'

‘That's why a lot of people didn't like having their pictures taken,' said Edward.

‘How's that?' Jim asked him.

‘I looked up all this cool occult stuff about daguerrotypes. Some superstitious people refused to have their pictures taken because daguerrotype plates were coated with silver, and silver is so pure that it reflects all of the evil inside of you.'

‘Evil, man?' said Roosevelt. ‘Speak for yourself. I am so damn good I have a different halo for every day of the week.'

‘
Everybody
has evil inside of them,' Edward insisted. ‘Otherwise, we wouldn't know the difference between good and bad, would we? Every time you look in a mirror or a shiny silver tray, you can see your evil self looking back at you. The thing is, though, once you stop looking in a mirror or a shiny silver tray, your evil self vanishes back inside your good self. Now you see it, now you don't. But if your evil image got
fixed,
like it does in a daguerrotype, all of your badness would stay trapped in the silver, for ever.'

‘Why wouldn't people want that to happen to them?' asked Brenda. ‘I mean, it would be good, wouldn't it, to have all the evil taken out of you?'

Edward shook his head. ‘You wouldn't survive for five minutes, would you, without some evil in you? If somebody mugged you, you'd never fight back, in case you hurt them. Or if somebody killed your kid brother, you'd forgive them, and nobody would ever get punished.'

He looked around at the class, and he sounded almost evangelical. ‘Silver is so pure that it can capture the blackest part of your soul … like, Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. And werewolves can be killed with silver bullets, because the bullet absorbs all the hairy evil in them, and just leaves the good, non-hairy bit.'

Jim looked at him with one eyebrow raised. ‘And where, exactly, did you find out all of that baloney?'

‘
The Twilight Zone
,' said Edward, unabashed. ‘It was an episode called
Silver Lining
.'

‘And you think that
The Twilight Zone
is a reliable source of mythological information?'

‘I don't know, sir. But all myths are made up, aren't they?'