Darkroom (25 page)

‘Guys!' Jim shouted. ‘Shadow! Sue-Marie! Edward!'

His A-Team came crowding through the door. ‘What's happened?'

Jim held up the string. ‘Vane got out. Look at this – he's melted all the bells, so that they wouldn't ring. That noise we heard, that was him leaving.'

‘He can't have gotten far,' said Freddy. ‘Come on, if the guy's got a tripod instead of legs …'

‘You haven't seen how fast he can move,' Jim told him. He made a scurrying gesture with his fingers. ‘He's quicker than a spider.'

‘Urgh,' said Sue-Marie. ‘I really have a thing about spiders.'

‘Let's see if we can catch up with him,' Randy suggested. ‘I mean, why not? What else are we going to do?'

‘OK – if you want to go for it.' Jim grabbed his car keys from the table and the six of them bundled out of the apartment, tripping noisily over Raymond Boschetto's shoes. ‘Hey, is this yours, sir?' asked Shadow, picking up a brown and white loafer with white tassels, a real going-to-the-races shoe.

‘Previous tenant's. I've never been that snazzy.'

Shadow lifted up his dark glasses and looked him up and down. ‘Yeah,' he agreed.

They all jogged along the corridor and Freddy pressed the button for the elevator. When it eventually arrived they wedged themselves into it and stared at their multiple reflections as they slowly descended to the lobby. ‘Remember,' said Jim, ‘if we see him, all we're going to do is follow him. I don't want any confrontations. He's far too dangerous for that.'

‘We could use some guns,' said Shadow. ‘Once we catch up with him –
pow!
– all we have to do is put a cap in his head.'

‘That would be first-degree homicide,' said Edward.

‘The guy's been dead for a hundert an' fifty years! How could that be homicide? Besides, he's half-guy and half-Instamatic, ain't he, and nobody never got arrested for Instamaticide.'

Once they had reached the lobby they pushed their way through the revolving doors and out on to the street. Even though it was well past three in the morning, and there was a stiff ocean breeze blowing, the night was unusually cold for this time of year. A sheet of newspaper scuttled across the street and Jim felt a momentary frisson of fear. But he couldn't see any sign of Robert H. Vane.

He coughed and said, ‘Lost him, I'm afraid. I think we'll have to call it a night.'

But Freddy said, ‘Look – that van over there! That's
his
van, ain't it?'

Half-concealed by shadow, a dark-brown van was parked in an archway on the opposite side of the street. Jim could just make out the gilded letters
Old-Time Photography
. The van must have just started up, because smoke was blowing out of its exhaust.

‘You're right,' said Jim, ‘let's get after him.'

He had left his Lincoln at the end of the block, with two wheels up on the curb. They ran toward it and climbed in – Sue-Marie and Edward in the front, and the other three in the back.

‘Ain't no space for my
knees,
man,' Shadow complained.

Jim started the engine and the Lincoln bounced heavily off the curb. In his rear-view mirror he could see that the van was backing slowly out of the archway, and so he waited for a moment to see which direction it would take. It turned west, toward the ocean, so he had to spin the wheel and do a U-turn to follow it, with the Lincoln's suspension bucking and its tires howling on the pavement like cats. Sue-Marie held tightly on to Jim's thigh to stop herself from sliding across the seat, but she still managed to press herself against him, even when they straightened up.

The van drove fast. There was hardly any traffic around, so Jim kept as much distance between them as he could. They passed 10th, 9th and 8th, and then, without making a signal, the van turned northward on 7th.

‘Drives real good for a dead guy,' said Freddy.

Randy sniffed and shook his head. ‘Nah, that woman's driving him, I'll bet. Look – she just ran a red light. And another one. That's just the way my sister drives.'

The van turned left on to Pico, and then right again into Palimpsest, a street of shabby flat-fronted apartment buildings and cheap hotels. It carried on for two hundred yards and then – without making a signal – it drew into the curb and stopped. Jim stopped his Lincoln, too, and immediately killed his lights.

They sat and waited. The van had parked outside a three-story 1920s building with large metal-framed studio windows. The white distemper on the front of the building was flaking like dead skin and the windows were all covered with black paint. Faintly visible above the doorway was the inscription
DELANCEY ANIMAL HOSPITAL, FOUNDED
1922.

‘What do we now, sir?' whispered Sue-Marie. Even if she had screamed it at the top of her voice, nobody in the van could have heard her, but they all felt subdued and conspiratorial.

‘We wait, I guess.'

‘Maybe we should go back to your apartment and smash up that painting now,' Edward suggested. ‘If we did that, Vane wouldn't have any place to come back to, would he? I mean, Dr Van Helsing used to put garlic in vampires' coffins, didn't he, while they were out sucking blood, so they wouldn't have any place to hide when the sun came up.'

‘Good thinking,' Jim acknowledged, ‘but somehow I don't think it would work. From what I've read, Vane's painting can't be destroyed and it can't be thrown away.'

‘Hold up,' said Freddy. ‘The door's opening.'

The driver's door of the van opened halfway, hesitated, and then opened wide. A figure climbed out, wearing a black windbreaker with a hood, black jeans and black boots. The figure made its way to the back of the van, and from the way it walked, Jim could see that it was a woman.

She opened the rear doors. The interior of the van was lit by a single red bulb, like a photographic darkroom. All that Jim could see at first was folded bundles of black cloth, and what looked like an old-style photographic enlarger, complete with bellows. But then something stirred, and heaved itself up. A stilt-like mahogany leg stuck out, and then another. Very slowly and awkwardly, Robert H. Vane climbed out of the back of the van, and stood for a moment on the pavement, tugging his black cloth over him, so that his head and his body were completely concealed.

‘There – that's him!' said Jim.

Freddy looked at Edward, and Edward looked at Sue-Marie.

‘Who?' asked Randy.

‘Robert H. Vane! He's right there, standing by the back of the van! Can't you see him?'

‘You're serious?' asked Shadow.

Jim turned to them. ‘I swear to you that he's really there. Right now, he's standing in the street right by the back of the van. Three legs, like a tripod, and a black cloth hung over him.'

Randy circled his fingers around his eyes and peered through them like make-believe binoculars. ‘I don't see him, sir. All I can see is that woman.'

‘Me too,' said Sue-Marie.

‘In that case, I'll just have to ask you to make a leap of faith. He's there. He seems to be finding his balance. OK … now he's making his way toward the steps … he's climbing the steps … he's waiting for the woman to close the van doors.'

‘This is
so-o-o
weird,' said Sue-Marie. ‘I feel like we're in a dream or something.'

‘We are,' said Jim. ‘There's more to life than what we can see, after all.'

He watched as the woman in black climbed the steps and unlocked the front doors of the one-time animal hospital. Robert H. Vane went inside, and she followed him and closed the doors behind her.

‘What do we now?' asked Edward.

‘We wait some more.'

‘But they could be here for hours.'

‘In that case, we wait for hours. Bobby and Sara and Pinky and David, they don't deserve anything less. For their sakes, we're going to nail this bastard for good and all.'

Shadow clenched his fist and said, ‘Yeah.' But then he thought for a while, and added, ‘We could still use some guns. Glock nine millimeter.
Pow!
'

Jim turned around in his seat. ‘You can't see him, Sonny. What are you going to shoot at?'

‘All right, then. Uzi fully automatic. Spray the room,
ba-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
You've got to hit him then.'

‘We'll see,' said Jim. ‘You may be right, and that's the only way to kill him.'

‘Yeah,' said Shadow. ‘I know a guy in West Hollywood, he can get us anything we need. Glocks, Uzis, Ingrams. He does a great line in Rolex watches, too.'

They only had to wait for fifteen minutes before the front doors of the animal hospital opened up again and the woman looked out, checking the street. They ducked their heads down but they were too far away for her to see them.

She went back in, and came out a few seconds later carrying two flat wooden cases.

‘Daguerrotype plates,' said Edward immediately. ‘That's how they used to carry them around. I saw it on the Internet.'

The woman stowed the cases in the back of the van. As she was doing so, Robert H. Vane appeared in the doorway and began to make his way clumsily down the steps.

‘He's coming out,' said Jim. ‘He's going to the van. He's waiting for her to open the other door. That's it, he's climbing inside.'

‘How does she know he's there?' asked Randy. ‘Like, if we can't see him, how can she?'

‘Maybe she has the same ability as I do,' said Jim. ‘I know it's pretty rare, but I can't be the only one.'

The woman closed the van doors, locked them, and walked back to the driving seat. It was 3:59
A.M
. She started the van and drove away, turning right at the end of Palimpsest Street, and heading east.

‘Aren't you going to follow him?' asked Freddy.

‘No,' said Jim. ‘No point. If we follow him tonight, we might be able to stop him from taking a few more pictures, but we need to find out how to stop him forever. Let's go inside.' He opened his glove box and fumbled around for his flashlight.

‘Inside? You mean … inside that building?'

‘Where else?'

‘Supposing somebody sees us and calls the cops?'

‘Then we'll tell them that we're on a college field trip. Landmark buildings of Venice.'

‘Of course! At four o'clock in the morning, all dressed like terrorists.'

They walked along the street until they reached the DeLancey Animal Hospital. Freddy looked up at it apprehensively. ‘This has to be the scariest building I've ever seen. You couldn't make a building look scarier than this, could you? Blacked-out windows, flaking paint. And it
smells,
too. Can you smell it? Like sewers or something.'

‘It's a building, that's all,' Edward reassured him.

‘Yeah, but what's in it?' asked Shadow. ‘The evil dead, right? Or the dead evil. One of those two.'

‘Let's just see if we can get the doors open,' said Jim.

He climbed the steps to the front doors. They had originally been painted olive green, but years of weathering had made them as scaly and fissured as alligator skin. There was a corroded brass knocker hanging on the left-hand door, in the shape of a snarling coyote. It looked to Jim like the coyotes he had seen in Native American carvings. They were always positioned to face toward the east, where evil spirits come from. There was something unsettling about this knocker. When he turned away from it, he thought that it quickly moved its head, as if it were alive.

He checked the locks. Three five-lever mortise locks. No chance of breaking in with a Visa card. There was no access to the back of the building, either. He stepped back and looked up at the facade. It might be possible for somebody with baboon-like agility to climb up on the porch and break one of the windows. He turned around to his A-Team and said, ‘Does anybody have a head for heights?'

Freddy came forward, smacking his hands together. ‘You're thinking of gaining entrance through that window, sir? Absolutely no
problemo
. I was always getting locked out when I was a kid, and we lived four storeys up. Here, Randy, give me a boost, will you?'

Randy linked his hands together, and Freddy clambered up him as easily if he were a stepladder. Randy said, ‘Ow!' when Freddy stood on top of his head, but in a matter of seconds Freddy had swung himself up on to the top of the porch. He reached across to the studio window and tapped at a large rectangular pane at the bottom.

‘Tire-iron!' he called down in a stage whisper.

Jim loped back to his Lincoln and took out his tire-iron. He threw it up to Freddy, and without any hesitation Freddy smashed the window pane and knocked out the jagged shards of glass. He climbed across to the window ledge, and within seconds he had disappeared inside the building.

‘That guy should be a professional burglar,' said Edward admiringly.

They waited for a short while, and then they heard the locks being turned. The front doors opened, and Freddy beckoned them inside.

I
nside the animal hospital it was gloomy and airless, and the odor was even stronger. It wasn't sewers, even though it smelled equally unhealthy. It was more like rotting fur coats, and vinegary red wine and chemicals. Although the windows were all painted black, a faint orange illumination filtered down the staircase from a skylight in the roof. The bare-boarded floors were gritty with dust and broken glass.

Jim shone his flashlight right and left. The old reception desk was still standing in one corner, a large walnut affair as big as a grand-piano. On the wall hung a faded picture of a German shepherd with its tongue hanging out, and the slogan
Happy Again!

They crossed the hallway and Shadow opened the door marked Waiting Room. It was empty, apart from two tilted-over chairs. They tried the room opposite, which must have been a consulting room when the hospital was open, because an old-fashioned examination table stood in one corner, and there were yellowing medical charts still pinned to the walls.