Hard Light (36 page)

I thrust my hand into the midden and dragged it through the shells until at last I touched the floor. I leaned into the heap, heedless of the miniature avalanche of whelks that pelted me, inching my fingers across the floor until they brushed against something flat and solid. With a grunt, I dug my hands beneath it.

“What is it? Can I help?” Sam appeared at my side, her face flushed, and began scrabbling at the bottom of the heap.

“Be careful,” I said. “I don't want all this falling on me.”

Soon I was able to wedge both hands beneath the object buried inside the mound. I grasped the edge tightly and slowly pulled it toward me. Shells cascaded around us as I drew it out.

I sank to the floor, catching my breath, and set the object in my lap. A flat stone, the size and shape of a small flagstone. Sam stared at it in disgust.

“It's a fucking rock,” she said.

“No.” I bent to blow across the surface. “It's an anvil.”

Grit from crushed shells stung my eyes as I swiped my sleeve across the stone, then bent my head to inhale deeply. My nostrils flared as I caught the ghostly scent of garlic. I looked up at Sam.

“See if you can find a rock in here. Something small enough to fit in one hand.”

She hopped up and paced the room, examining the floor. After a few minutes I shook my head and pointed at the midden.

“Probably it's buried under there,” I said. “Forget it.”

“Wait—like this?”

She scooped something from the ground and handed it to me. “It's just another rock.”

I turned the fist-sized stone over in my hands. It was oblong, rust-colored. “Yeah, but look here.” I tapped the stone with a finger. “See how it's abraded there? Someone used this to break the shells. And he broke them all at the same place—see?”

I tossed a whelk at her. She caught it and examined it dubiously.

“That's where the dye sac was,” I said. “Someone had a whole little factory operation here, cracking those open and removing the glands.”

Sam inclined her head toward the midden. “That's why I wanted you to see it—all those shells. When you showed me that down by the farm, how the slime changed colors. But what would they use them for?”

I placed the flagstone on the floor and stared at it. I licked the tip of my index finger and pressed it, hard, against the stone, let it remain there for a long moment. I drew my finger to my mouth and touched it to the very tip of my tongue.

It tasted of salt.

“Shit.”

I looked at Sam in amazement, then scrambled to my feet. I turned to face the far end of the chamber, and the rock wall directly across from the window.

A second window appeared to be inset within the granite: a foreshortened square of sunlight, cast from the opening in the opposite wall. The bright square aligned almost perfectly inside a square of pale granite that was finer-grained than the surrounding stones and flecked with glittering mica.

The center of this granite slab appeared to have been smudged with broad bands of ash or charcoal, like a Rothko painting done in shades of gray. There were oddly shaped flaws in this darker substrate.

Very slowly I walked toward the wall, stopping when I was a foot away. I glanced back.

Light from the window formed a horizontal shaft that pierced the dim chamber, ending in that bright square on the granite wall. I angled myself so my shadow wouldn't fall across the sunlit square. My entire body prickled with gooseflesh.

Small luminous impressions were scattered across the granite, so faint I might almost have imagined them. Tiny arrowheads designed to fell a sparrow. A scallop shell. A blade-shaped leaf.

And, in one lower corner of the square, a curving line that might almost have been a flaw in the rock.

Only it wasn't. The line traced part of a human profile: nose and upper lip and chin: the bright shadow of a face. Again I licked my finger and pressed it against the stone, drew it to my mouth and tasted salt. Sam crept up beside me and touched my arm.

“What is it?” she whispered.

I let her lean into me. It was a long time before I answered. When I did, my voice shook.

“That window behind us? It's an aperture. Whoever made this chamber knew exactly what they were doing.” I looked down into Sam's white face. “We're standing inside the world's oldest camera obscura.”

 

41

Sam shook her head. “What kind of camera?”

I rubbed my arms to keep from shivering—not from fear, but awed disbelief. “Camera obscura. Have you ever looked at a total eclipse of the sun?”

“No.”

“That's good, because it would have blinded you. But you
can
look at it if you poke a tiny hole in a piece of cardboard and hold it up to the sun. The light goes through the hole and projects an image of the sun onto the ground, or another piece of paper—it could be anything. If the paper's been treated with some kind of emulsion, you'll get a permanent image. A photo.”

I gestured at the square opening at the other end of the long chamber. “When the sun's at the right angle, it comes right through that aperture, and it hits this, here.” I slapped the granite wall beside us. “If you had real hard light—no clouds, the right time of day at the right time of year—you'd have a sort of shadow theater in here.

“And then someone figured out that you could make an emulsion from the glands in those snails. They smeared it over the stone wall, then pressed things on it. Like this shell…”

My finger hovered above the scallop's silhouette, then the brighter blade of an arrowhead, like an afterimage left by staring into the sun.

“And this little arrowhead. They were small enough that they'd stick to the rock long enough for an exposure. Sunlight interacted with the dye—the colors are gone, but see how the rock is all gray here, sort of blurred? That's where the dye was. The arrowhead and shell would leave an image on the wall, like a pinhole camera.”

I pointed at the incomplete human profile. “That was the photographer. He stood here at the corner of the frame, only he misjudged the depth of field. So he was cut out of the frame. Probably he pressed his face right against the rock, the way the other stuff was pressed onto it. A kind of contact print. Salt would have been easy to come by this close to the ocean, and if you added salt to it, the emulsion would become permanent. Well, not really permanent.”

I walked to the window and stuck my hand through the gap. It was deep—I couldn't touch the outer lip. “If this window hadn't been blocked off by a rockfall, sunlight would have faded those images a long, long time ago. We wouldn't be able to see them now. So that was a lucky strike.

“Or maybe not so lucky,” I mused, rejoining Sam. “Someone might have blocked off the aperture on purpose, to keep anyone else from finding it. Or someone might have thought it was bad juju and sealed it up.”

“Maybe that was what happened to the skeleton in there!” Sam said, excited. “They buried him because he made this.”

“I'm telling you, kid—whoever built this chamber did not belong to the British Society of Cinematographers. Though they should make him an honorary member.” I cocked a thumb at the entrance to the other chamber. “Our friend in there? He died sometime in the last thirty or forty years. I don't know when the guy who designed this room died, but it was a hell of a lot longer ago than that.”

“How do you know it's a guy? It could've been a girl. It could've been you or me.”

Again my skin prickled.
I think that women made them.

I hesitated, then said, “You know, someone else told me almost the same thing, just a few days ago. These were hers, but I think—I know—she would've wanted you to have one.”

I pulled out the thaumatropes, drew the rawhide cords over my head, and handed one to Sam. The disc with the faces of two women, one old, one young. She took it silently, as I wound my thaumatrope and held it up in the beam of light. Then I snapped the cord taut and watched as an ancient eye winked at me across the millennia.

“Thaumatrope,” Sam said, and twisted her bit of string. “It's like the movie
Thanatrope.
Do you think she knew that, when she named it?”

“Nothing would surprise me.”

The graven eye grew still. I looped the cord back around my neck, tucking the disc beneath my sweater.

Sam pulled her string tight and stared at the carved faces as they blurred into a single image, at once old and young, familiar and inconceivably alien. Like the pictures carved on the disc, she appeared both heartbreakingly young and as withered as Tamsin. I watched as she repeated the process, winding the string again and again, as the light in the chamber diminished to the same periwinkle gray as the whelk shells, and her shadow on the wall behind her faded into nothing.

I felt as I had in the Blackbird in Stepney. Not as though time had stopped, but as if past and present had fused, capturing Sam and me the way a fern is caught in amber. Or the way some unknown artist had captured her own profile on a smooth piece of granite, working her alchemy with salt and stone and snail's blood so that her image endured, hidden for thousands of years.

And, despite the encroaching darkness, despite the knowledge that someone had tried to kill me, and a near certainty that Quinn was dead—in spite of all that, I felt no sense of damage here. Whatever virulent obsession had claimed Leith and Poppy and Adrian, Mallo and Morven and perhaps Krishna, too, it had missed Sam—so far, anyway. Perhaps she was immune to it; perhaps Tamsin really had glimpsed something otherworldly in her husband's granddaughter.

Because what were the odds that Sam would stumble upon this chamber, and me, at the precise moment that the setting sun struck the granite wall to reveal its secret? Adrian had said that Poppy didn't believe in coincidences. I was starting to feel that way, too.

“Cass?” Sam gasped as a shadow moved across the floor toward us. I spun around to see Adrian enter the chamber, flashlight in hand.

“Sam! Are you all right?”

“Go away!” she yelled. Swift as a bat, she darted past her father, into the darkness of the first chamber. Adrian tried fruitlessly to catch her, then stared at me, furious.

“What the hell are you doing here?” He turned to shine his light into the adjoining chamber. “Sam, tell me you're all right!”

“I'm fine!” she shouted angrily. “Leave us alone, you cunt!”

Adrian spun to grab me. “If you hurt her—”

I kicked him and he doubled over, clutching his shin as I scrambled after Sam. I was almost through the doorway when Adrian grabbed the leather hood of Bruno's too-big coat. I went crashing to the floor, my flashlight skidding out of my grip.

“Dad, stop!” Sam ran to help me to my feet, and I saw the telltale bit of rawhide dangling safe beneath her T-shirt. “I was just showing her the fogou. How did you even find us?”

“You were the only two things moving across the moor,” Adrian snapped, and limped toward me. “Let go of her.”

“I'm not touching her,” I retorted.

He stared at me, fists clenched. “Like you didn't touch Tamsin?”

“She held me at gunpoint. Self-defense.” Sam edged closer to me, but I saw a flicker of unease cross her face. “When I left her she was sleeping it off.”

“You might have killed her!”

“Like you might have killed me, doping that bottle of Scotch.”

“Scotch?” Adrian's eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“Last night. Sam found me in the attic, out like a light. Someone slipped a roofie in that whiskey. Just like they did to Morven and Mallo's wine. One hundred fifty milligrams of Midazolam, right? That would just about do it, if you chased it with half a bottle of Scotch.”

Adrian paled. “I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.”

I took a deep breath, trying to sound calm. “Adrian, listen to me. All I want is to get the hell out of here. I don't care about this shit, or anything else that came down. You're pissed at me, you think I'm—Christ, I don't know what you think. Just let me walk out of here, okay?”

I gestured at the skeletal remains on the floor. “You and Tamsin can seal this back up, reset the Wayback Machine to Stonehenge, and no one will ever know. I'm not going to the cops. Got it? Five minutes, and you'll never hear from me again.”

For the first time, Adrian seemed to register there was a skeleton in the chamber. “What … is that?”

I hesitated. “Your father.”

“Leith?”

Sam trained her torch on the floor, as Adrian sank to his knees beside the skull. “My god,” he said. “She really did it. The crazy bitch.”

Sam wisely chose to keep her mouth shut. I edged closer to the chamber's crescent-shaped entry, but froze when Adrian lifted his head. His tormented gaze fixed on me.

He whispered, “I never knew—how could I have known? Were there others?” I nodded. “How many?”

“I'm not sure. But those corpses in the movie—they weren't special effects.”

Adrian stumbled to his feet and looked at me imploringly.

“How did it all get so fucked up?” he asked in a child's voice. “When we were little … they all told us there was magic. There weren't any rules, because we were all going to make magic here.”

All I could do was shake my head and say, “You were misinformed.”

From the passage came the sound of footsteps. An instant later, Krishna crouched in the low entryway. Sam shone the torch at her, and Krishna shielded her face.

“The fuck's that?” she demanded, then crawled through with alarming speed, her arms and legs throwing spidery shadows across the walls. When she straightened, I saw that she held a pistol, the kind of pretty little gat Brigid O'Shaughnessy might brandish when things stopped going her way.