Darkroom (15 page)

‘OK, good point,' Jim agreed. ‘It's just that a myth made up by a 1960s TV writer doesn't have the same sociological resonance as a myth that's been passed down by word of mouth since biblical times.'

‘I think Edward's myth about silver is true,' said Pinky. ‘Like, there's so many Indians in those pictures who are covering up their faces or looking away. I mean, why did they do that? Did they know something we've forgotten about?'

Jim was leaving the classroom at the end of the second lesson when Walter the janitor came past, carrying four stacking chairs.

‘Mr Rook … I was just about to brew up a pot of coffee. You want to join me?'

‘I … ah … sure. Let me help you with these chairs.'

They walked out of the main building and across to the college gymnasium. Walter's ‘office' was a lean-to building up against the gymnasium wall, and it was crowded with cleaning materials and brushes and vacuum cleaners and odd pieces of shelving and broken desks. In the center of this disorder was a battered old desk, a swivel chair and a big brown leather couch with half of its orange foam stuffing bulging out.

Walter put down his chairs and Jim stacked his on top of them. ‘Thanks for that,' said Walter. ‘I'm not getting any younger, and I can't tote stuff around the way I used to.'

‘You and me both,' said Jim.

‘You – there's plenty of years in you yet, Mr Rook.'

‘I know. It's not the years I'm worried about, it's the way I'm going to live them.'

Walter opened a blue ceramic coffee jar and spooned three generous helpings of ground coffee into a glass cafetière. ‘I don't believe in no percolation,' he said. ‘Ruins the taste.'

Jim sat on the couch. It made a loud farting noise and he sank down almost two feet.

Walter said, ‘You've been through some difficult times, Mr Rook, from what I hear.'

‘Difficult, yes. Huh! You could call them that.'

‘So how are you making out?'

‘I don't know. Not very well. I get up, I come to college, I go home. I feel like a broken jug, if you want to know the truth. I need some Crazy Glue for the soul.'

Walter poured boiling water into the cafetière. His office was soon filled with the strong aroma of arabica. ‘What you need is other people.'

‘Maybe. The question is, do other people need me? I don't really think I'm such good company, just at the moment.'

Walter opened the top drawer of his desk, and took out a well-creased envelope. ‘You take a look at these, Mr Rook. This is a party that my family held for me, after my Gloria's funeral. You wouldn't think that I'd just buried my wife, the only woman who ever meant anything to me, my life companion. Everybody laughing and singing and having a good time. And the reason for that is, life is a happy thing, despite all its painfulness, and all its losses, and you might as well celebrate what you got, and forget about what you ain't.'

Jim took the photographs and looked through them. Walter was right. It looked more like a birthday party than a wake. A birthday party. An end, but a new beginning.

‘They're good,' he said. ‘They're very … cheerful.'

He was handing the envelope back to Walter when it fell open and a shower of negatives fell out on to the floor. ‘I'm sorry … here, don't worry, I've got them.'

He picked them up and tidied them. He held one of them up to the light, to make sure he had it the right way round. It was a picture of Walter with his arm around one of his sisters. Walter, with a white face and black hair.

He slid the negatives back into the envelope. White face. Black hair. Just like the person who had been seen at the Tubbs' beach house, on the night that Bobby and Sara had been burned to death, except the other way around. Black face. White hair.

‘Are you OK, Mr Rook?' asked Walter. ‘How about a chocolate-chip cookie?'

‘No thanks, Walter. Just the coffee.'

‘You mind what I told you, Mr Rook. Celebrate what you got. Forget what you ain't got. Otherwise, you going to be miserable for the rest of your days.'

It was almost seven thirty in the evening by the time Jim had finished marking work and planning for the next day's lessons. The sky was cloudless and clear except for a pink vapor trail in the shape of a question mark, and a warm wind was blowing from the south-west. He was halfway across the parking lot when a voice called out, ‘Jim!'

He stopped and turned, shielding his eyes against the sun. Karen came toward him, carrying her books in her arms. She was wearing a flowery blouse and a trim blue skirt and she looked the same as she did all those years ago, when he had first realized he was in love with her.

‘You've been avoiding me.' She smiled.

‘Of course not. I've had so much catching-up to do, that's all.'

‘Sure,' she said sarcastically. ‘So, tell me … is it good to be back?'

He pulled a face to show her that he hadn't really decided yet. She kept her eyes on him, still smiling.

‘Vinnie tells me that you're living in his uncle's apartment.'

‘That's right. The Benandanti Building, in Venice. Jesus – it's like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.
The Fall of the House of Usher,
only spookier. You must call by and pay me a visit sometime.'

‘And Tibbles? You still have Tibbles?'

‘Yes, I still have Tibbles. “That darned cat.”'

There was a lengthy silence. Jim realized he was tugging at his left earlobe, which was always a sign that he was tense. He stopped doing it immediately, and flapped his arm as if to say, oh well, that's life, what can you do?

Karen said, ‘I heard what happened in Washington. Well, some of it.'

‘Yes. It was … tragic.' He didn't want to say any more. Sometimes it was better to leave things alone for a while, let them settle. In his mind, he heard a split-second blurt of screaming, and saw blood spraying like an action painting.

‘You're coming to the funeral?' Karen asked him. ‘Bobby Tubbs and Sara Miller?'

He nodded.

‘Maybe we could go together, if that's OK with you.'

‘That would be good. Are you … what about Perry?'

‘Perry?' She looked genuinely bewildered. ‘You mean Perry Ritts? What about him?'

‘You're not … seeing him or anything?'

Karen laughed, that bright, sharp laugh like a window pane breaking. ‘I hope you think I have better taste than that!'

‘Oh, well, sure. Of course I did. I was only kidding. I saw you together yesterday, you know, and he looked kind of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, so I just thought …'

Karen brushed her hair away from her face. ‘I know what you thought, Jim. You don't have to find the words for it.'

He stayed where he was, his hand still raised against the sun. L
IGHT
S
NARETH THE
S
OUL
. Karen came up to him, stood on tippy-toe, and kissed him on the cheek.

‘What was that poem you were always quoting me?' she asked him.

He knew which poem she meant, but he didn't say anything. He wanted to see if she could remember it.

‘“O who can be, both moth and flame?”' she whispered.

‘“Whom can we love?”' Jim continued. ‘“I thought I knew the truth. Of grief I died, but no one knew my death.”'

Karen looked at him seriously. ‘You're not dead yet, Jim. Of grief, or anything else. And sometimes there's no shame in coming back. Sometimes we need to come back, to remember who we are, and why people loved us.'

He made himself spaghetti Bolognese for supper. He considered himself to be an expert at spaghetti Bolognese – he always splashed in plenty of Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco sauce and stirred in spoonfuls of mixed herbs and fifty-five grindings of fresh black pepper, before simmering it for forty-five minutes with two glasses of strong red Italian wine. Apart from hating garlic, Tibbles didn't think much of Tabasco sauce, either, so he gave her a bowlful of raw ground beef with cat biscuits mixed into it. She was already starting to sprout some bristly patches of fur, but they made her look scruffier than ever.

When he had finished eating he went into the living room and switched on the television. He didn't feel like watching
CSI
or
Law and Order
or
The Dead Zone,
and in the end he found himself looking at an old Discovery program about a man who had traveled across America in the 1900s, visiting fairgrounds, and compiling a catalog of all the freaks he had could find.

‘He found Hairy Mary the Baboon Woman, and Kaliban the Human Toad, as well as the Boy With No Brain, who could shine a strong light through his skull and show that his head was empty. One of the strangest was the Negative Man, who was touring with Forepaugh and Sells through Illinois and Idaho and other mid-Western states. The Negative Man had to keep his head covered with a cloth during the day, because he was so sensitive to sunlight; and his show tent was lit only by a red lamp, like a photographer's darkroom. When he removed the cloth from his head, which he would do for the entrance fee of two bits, his face appeared utterly black, while his eyes were white, like a photographic negative. The Negative Man was arrested in 1909 after a series of arson attacks in Indiana, in which seven people died. He escaped from custody in Crawfordsville and was never seen or heard of again.'

Jim looked up at the painting of Robert H. Vane. Maybe, after all, he wasn't in mourning. Maybe he was hiding his face, for one reason or another. Maybe he hadn't been able to show it in daylight.

He switched off the television. He had made his mind up: he would take the painting down again, first thing tomorrow morning, and drive it to the auction house. If it had belonged to him, he would have carted it out to the nearest patch of waste ground and burned it.

How could Bobby's and Sara's deaths have had any connection with his moving into the Benandanti Building? Yet the prime suspect in Bobby and Sara's killing was a man with a black face and white hair, like a living negative. And here in this apartment was a painting of Robert H. Vane, who had spent his life working with negatives, and who had once been accused of burning people to ashes, just like Bobby and Sara had been burned to ashes.

And what about the brilliant flash of light, and the photographic image of Bobby and Sara on the wall, and the way that Tibbles had been burned? What about the daguerrotypes that Robert H. Vane had taken, and the Dagueno tribe, and the Negative Man? What about the misshapen shadow that had lurched across his curtains?

There didn't seem to be any logical reason why any of these occurrences should be related. Robert H. Vane had lived more than a hundred and fifty years ago, and so he was long dead. The Negative Man had escaped justice, but that was nearly a hundred years ago, and so he was long gone, too.

Half of what Jim had discovered was history, and half of it was psychic claptrap, and all of it seemed like coincidence. Yet he couldn't help feeling that it all fitted. It was like sitting in a darkened room, with somebody handing him the pieces of a broken vase, one by one, and expecting him to stick them all back together. The question was: who was giving them to him, and why? And why
him
?

He showered and put on a pair of shorts with a faded sepia T-shirt that had a picture of Charles Dickens on it, which Karen had given him more years ago than he cared to recall. Wearing it tonight, after meeting her again, seemed especially appropriate.

He sat up in bed and read for a while – a travel book about North Africa. He had never managed to get beyond the second chapter, because the writing was so soothing and hypnotic, but that was part of the reason he read it. Under the dark blue skies of the Sudan he could forget all about Special Class II, and what had happened to him in Washington, and the painting of Robert H. Vane.

He began to doze, and the book gradually slipped from his hand. After less than ten minutes, however, something woke him up. He looked around, blinking. Tibbles had settled herself close beside him, and she was rattling loudly. The clock on his nightstand said 12:03
A.M
.

He lay back and listened for a few minutes, but all he could hear was the soft teeth-chattering of the air-conditioning unit, and the low thunder of planes taking off from LAX. A woman was shouting in the street. ‘You're crazy, do you know that? You're out of your mind!'

He switched off his bedside light and closed his eyes. The shimmering grasslands whispered all around him, and the wind blew south toward the forest. He could almost hear the cattle as they tore at the grass all around him.

Suddenly he was jerked awake again. He heard a noise in the living room, a heavy thump, and then a clatter. There was silence for a moment, but then he heard a tapping noise, like somebody trying to negotiate their way around the room with walking sticks.

He sat up. The tapping continued, but then it was accompanied by a clicking sound, and then a complicated bumping.

‘OK!' Jim called out, switching on his bedside lamp. ‘Whoever you are, you'd better get the hell out of here, quick!'

He swung his legs out from under the covers and scrabbled under the bed for his baseball bat. He just hoped his intruder didn't have a gun. He didn't want to be too confrontational. After all, nothing in this apartment was his, and a few pieces of somebody else's second-hand china weren't worth getting himself killed for.

He stood up, slapping the baseball bat into the palm of his hand. But as he walked around the bed, the bedroom door slammed open, so violently that it shuddered on its hinges. Into the room stalked a creature like nothing else Jim had ever seen or imagined, and he let out a shriek of terror.