What the Dead Want (3 page)

T
HE DRIVER PUT HER BAGS ON THE PORCH
AND SHE
tipped him with some of the money Janine had given her. An enormous black bird landed on the overgrown lawn and stared at the two of them, pecking occasionally at something in the high grass.

The driver eyed the house again warily. “Lemme give you my number—just in case.” He handed her his card, then quickly got back in the car, pulling out and spewing dust and gravel behind him.

The bird did not fly off but looked after him, cocked its head, then went back to pecking. She stood with her bag on the weathered boards of the porch. She took out
her cell and texted Simon:
OMG you wouldn't believe this. It's like Grey Gardens times one million.
But there was no reception. She experienced a momentary flash of panic. The driver was gone, she couldn't call out, and how would she communicate with Simon?

She hadn't gone more than a day without talking to him in years. She'd even been there when he finally came out to his parents. A moment so comically anticlimactic they decided to make up a more dramatic story to tell their friends at Gramercy Arts.

Simon had solemnly asked his parents to come into the living room because they needed to talk. He and Gretchen had stood together in front of them holding hands. Then Simon took a deep breath and . . . was not able to say anything. Gretchen squeezed his hand.

“Oh! Hey, champ,” his dad said, looking at the two of them. When Simon still didn't say anything, his dad said, “Are you going to tell us you're gay?”

His mother smiled and punched his dad playfully on the arm. “Would you let him do it himself? Honestly. Go ahead, sweetheart.”

Simon and Gretchen looked at each other. “Uh . . . I'm gay,” Simon said.

“Mmmhm,” his mom said. “Do you want us to say queer or gay?”

“Uncles Lou and Swaraj prefer we call them queer,” his dad said, explaining.

“Well, Simon is his own person,” his mother said. “And I'm asking him which
he
prefers, would you settle down?”

“But it's exciting,” his dad said, grinning proudly.

Then he looked suddenly very grave. “Wait, there isn't something
wrong
, is there? The way you guys came in all somber-looking . . . is there something
serious
you had to tell us? I'm sorry I interrupted you, champ, I just got carried away.”

“Well,
I
think it's pretty
serious
that I want to sleep with boys!” Simon shouted dramatically.

This cracked his parents up. “If it's serious instead of fun, you might be doing it wrong,” his dad said, and his mom snorted.

Simon rolled his eyes.

“Aw, c'mere, punkin',” his mom said. She kissed him on the head and put her arms around him. Then she looked over at Simon's dad. “Our guy is growing up,” she said, wiping a happy tear from her eye. Simon just groaned.

“What do you and Gretchen want for dinner?” his dad asked, pulling out a takeout menu for the sushi place up the street. And that was it.

Gretchen tried to send the text again, feeling the well of unease rising up her spine, and then suddenly the door creaked open and a thin but strong old woman with bright white hair and nearly black eyes came out, squinting into the daylight as if she'd been in a dark room for days.

THE
CAPTURED
SOUL
:
A
P
HOTOGRAPHIC
E
XHIBIT

BY
M
ONA
A
XTON

In 2002, while appraising the photographs of a deceased collector in Mayville, NY, I came upon a box of cartes de visite dating from the year 1865. I knew right away that I had a most unusual find. These images bore the studio imprint of a Mr. Fritz von Shenck. In my three decades of photography appraisal and collection, I had never encountered the name of Mr. Shenck, nor was I able to ascertain the methods by which he had captured and developed the impressions on these cards.

It is well known that the period of early photographic experiments was one of great excitement. Given the newness of the medium, it was unclear what its boundaries might be. If the exact likeness of a living being could be secured to a piece of silver-plated copper, what else might the magical apparatus of the camera capture?

Mr. Shenck was clearly experimenting with the possibilities. I have consulted many experts, and they, like myself, do not believe these impressions to be either tintype or any wet- or dry-plate negatives with which we are familiar. For this reason, the use of double exposure is not possible. This is not to assert that there are not “tricks” involved in these remarkable photographs.
However, these images appear to capture more than what can be seen with the naked, human eye.

It is my belief that this is an as yet insufficiently explored realm of photographic potential—that the boundary between the supernatural and the material world may well be traversed with the miraculous invention of the camera.

G
RETCHEN
'
S FIRST INSTINCT WAS TO TAKE
THE WOMAN
'
S
picture. But she made herself be polite and kept the camera hanging around her neck. Esther looked like she could be one hundred years old, maybe older.

“Aunt Esther?”

“None other,” the woman said. “Go ahead, sweets. Get it over with.”

“Excuse me?”

“Take the damn picture, don't just stand there with your finger on the trigger. Shoot. If it was a good shot you shoulda taken it already. Too late now.”

Gretchen gave a startled laugh. She had indeed missed
the shot she wanted. Esther on the porch of the sloping house, framed by the wild bramble of roses and thorns, her eyes as black as coal, her wise, tenacious face heavily lined.

Instead she took her hand off the camera and reached out to Aunt Esther, who shook it heartily with her own strong, knobby hand, then drew her in for a hug, Gretchen's camera pressed clumsily between them. Esther smelled like cigarettes and juniper berries. She patted Gretchen on the back a few times, seemed genuinely happy and relieved that she was there.

When they took a step back and looked at each other, Gretchen had that same feeling she'd had when she'd first heard Esther's voice, like an eerie echo of Mona. The woman looked like her mother. The familiar bone structure was there—the high forehead, the dark eyes and wide mouth, a long straight nose. Gretchen shared these features too. There was no doubt they were related.

“Welcome, sweets! And thank you for coming. You have no
idea
how badly you're needed here.”

“It's my pleasure,” Gretchen said, smiling.

“That's a nice shade of lipstick you've got,” Esther said. She looked down at Gretchen's Doc Martens, and then gave the girl's foot a little tap with her own; when Gretchen looked down, she saw her aunt was wearing a weathered pair of combat boots. She was also wearing
loose-fitting linen pants, a gray shirt, and a necklace with an antique magnifying glass on it.

“I like your necklace,” Gretchen said.

Her aunt looked at her like she was a complete idiot. “It's not a necklace. I need this to see.” She held it up and it magnified her dark, intelligent eyes in a way that was ominous and also ridiculous.

Gretchen laughed, but she didn't hesitate this time. She snapped the picture quickly while Esther still had a look of wily reproach on her face.

This made Esther laugh loudly. “Oh, this is gonna be fun!” she said.

Gretchen nodded and smiled. It felt like she was meeting some future version of her mother, if her mother hadn't disappeared at forty-three.

“Come in, come in,” her aunt said, turning toward the door of the once-illustrious Axton mansion. As she opened it, Gretchen got the first glimpse of just how much work was ahead of her. Even in the front hall, the place was piled with papers and books, and the vibration from opening the thick front door caused a sheaf of old documents to flutter to the floor. It looked as though nothing had been thrown out in hundreds of years.

“Well, here it is,” Esther said. “Your new home.”

N
OVEMBER
10, 1855

F
ROM:
AXTON
AND
SONS
COTTON
EXPORTERS
,
I
NC.

44 N
ORTH
W
OODS
L
ANE

M
AYVILLE,
N
EW
Y
ORK
USA

T
O:
MANCHESTER
TEXTILES

714 R
EDHILL
S
TREET

M
ANCHESTER,
E
NGLAND

Sirs,

It is with great pleasure that we acquire your account. We do assure you the unfortunate political climate of animosity between our respective states will in no way affect our business relationship.

In answer to your inquiry, we are indeed capable of shipping 160 bales of cotton per month, and far more should you require it. AXTON oversees all ground shipments to the port in Manhattan as well as loading and unloading at Manchester and Lancashire. We guarantee delivery of the finest raw materials. And can obtain them at the best possible prices for you.

Yours,

G. C. Axton

T
HE PLACE SMELLED LIKE A USED BOOKSTORE OR VINTAGE
clothes shop—not the good, fancy kind but the weird kind where there was so much stuff not even the shop owners knew what was there. Once they got past the detritus of the front room, the rest of the house seemed filled with dried flowers, musty rugs, dusty curtains, and moldering knickknacky treasures.

“That's the parlor,” Esther said, pointing at a dark room as she creaked down the hall. “That's where we'll have a drink later. Right in there. You play piano?”

“A little, actually,” Gretchen said.

“Thought so.”

“You drink?”

“Uh . . . not really?”

“Pity,” said Esther. It was clear that the woman was looking forward to this drink.

How long, Gretchen wondered, had her aunt lived in this place without company? She returned her aunt's smile, and then looked over her shoulder toward the half-closed door of the parlor, where she managed to glimpse a couple of stiff-backed chairs pushed up against a dark-purple wall. There was what looked like a worn Persian rug on the floor, and an antique piano in the corner. Heavy curtains on the window parted, letting in a narrow slip of sunlight.

She followed Esther to the longest, darkest stairwell she had ever seen.

“So how do you like the Leica X2?” her aunt asked as they walked. “It's pretty fancy, huh?”

“I love it,” Gretchen said, surprised her aunt knew anything about digital cameras. It was fancy. Her father had gotten it for her for a birthday present, before they moved out of the East Village. Some of the first pictures she had taken with it were of the East Village, Tompkins Square Park, an old white-haired guy who played “Over the Rainbow” on the saxophone, a lady with tattoos of the solar system on her face and arms, and little kids playing soccer
beneath the massive trees that grew in the center of the park.

Gretchen loved her camera, but she was not the kind of photographer who thought that equipment made the difference between a good photo or a bad one. A camera was an eye, her mother had taught her. And an image was made out of nothing but darkness and light. What made the difference was the photographer's vision.

“I never used a camera like that,” Esther said. Gretchen pictured the woman doing portraits of children in a department store, or taking landscape shots around Mayville. She tried to imagine what kind of weird old camera Esther had, given the lost-in-time nature of the house.

“So you're moving?” Gretchen asked politely. “Where are you moving to?”

“Moving on!” Esther said cheerily. “Moving on! Time for the next generation to make decisions about this place. I've been here forty years. But we gotta get it cleaned up first.”

Gretchen made a small involuntary noise in her throat.

“I know, I know,” Esther said. “It's gonna be a bitch. The place is a little ramshackle. The last person who tried to help me with this was your mother.”

Gretchen felt the hair on her neck rise. She didn't know her mother had come back to the Axton house—Mona had never talked about it. It seemed unusual that she
would have left out something as interesting as trying to help clean up Axton mansion.

Esther's description of the house as “a little ramshackle” was more than an understatement. Gretchen took in the cobwebs, the peeling wallpaper, the water-stained ceiling, the chipped plaster. The sloping floors. Mold might be providing some of the only structural integrity to the place. She had no idea how anyone had lived in there for so long.

“We could just hire someone,” Gretchen suggested and then thought,
like a wrecking crew.

Esther waved her suggestion away without comment.

Gretchen took out her phone again to check for reception—this time there were two bars. Thank God. She'd text Simon as soon as it didn't seem too rude.

When they reached the top of the stairwell, Aunt Esther pointed to the left and Gretchen walked into a hallway that was dark and narrow and lined with at least eight closed doors. The wallpaper was peeling—some of it coming down in great flat sheets that they had to step over.

The smell of dust and plaster and mold was certainly going to make it impossible to stay there for any length of time. Her eyes were already beginning to itch. She di
dn't know how the old lady could look so strong. She must not have any allergies.

Gretchen snapped photos as they walked. On the walls, there were at least half a dozen framed and sepia-tinted portraits of what were likely long-dead members of the Axton tribe. The combination of perfect preservation and total neglect was amazing. She felt it had some profound meaning but didn't know quite what. The house was literally in a kind of slow-motion tumble, floors creaking, layers of dust thick enough to leave footprints in. But the ostentatious wealth of the family—the portraits, the rugs, the furniture, the millions of little objects—had never been sold or taken or simply thrown out.

She stopped walking abruptly when she saw that farther along the hall, an enormous gray wasp nest sat precariously atop a vase that stood on a corner table. She could hear the wasps buzzing inside, and the vase, which was decorated with images of Greek soldiers, was shaking ever so slightly.

“Don't mind that,” Esther said. “I haven't been stung once.”

Gretchen snapped a picture of the wasp nest, then turned around and startled. At the end of the hallway was an ornate mirror that had gone dark and mottled with age. Deep inside it she thought she saw something peering out intently at her, then dart suddenly and flicker away.

T
HE
T
ROUBLING
D
ISAPPEARANCE OF
M
ONA
A
XTON

B
Y
H
EIDI
N
ORTON

Mona Axton, a firebrand in lower Manhattan's art scene and one of the most important figures in American spiritualist photography, has gone missing, opening a torrent of speculation.

Ms. Axton's interest in the occult began in the 1980s when she lost many friends to AIDS. A photographer herself, she documented the disease's impact on the art world, and then created “ghost images” of her friends walking in the city after their deaths. Her work from this period hangs in MoMA. Ms. Axton's gallery also holds the rights to a majority of Victorian spiritualist photographs and ephemera. She had long been a subject of controversy in the art world, and her disappearance has been no less divisive, some calling it a tragedy, others a publicity stunt. Still others believe she has finally “crossed over” in order to document the lives of the undead.

Ms. Axton had been traveling on business. She was expected home three weeks ago and failed to return. Anyone with information on her whereabouts is urged to contact the police.