Back and forth, forth and back, tide-eddying. Up and down and up again like a rusty wave, dark as old iron.
That same bell still tolling, so slow and old and far away. Plus a click and a clatter, gradually mounting—or was that just inside of me, the rattle of my own breath? It sounded like gears grinding, like the handle of a Lumière Brothers chronophotographic motion picture camera being cranked, a portable projector run inside a train compartment as the train itself thundered on, unstoppable. Like a movie being constructed one silver nitrate clip at a time, barely enough footage per clip to even make up a reel—forty seconds snatched here, forty-one seconds there, and forty-nine seconds somewhere else, at the absolute most.
“Maybe we should . . .” Malin began after almost a minute, but Safie shushed her violently, a weird lizard hiss. Because something was taking shape at last, or seeming to—turning, unfurling, fitting itself together. Something unveiling itself, dark lifting away on every side like a parted curtain, to reveal—
—a wavering, inverse form, flipped white on white from grey on grey, slender and stately, candle flame-tall. Mrs. Whitcomb in her veil, glittering with mirror-shards? But then that twisted as well, flapped sidelong, and there was nothing beneath but an open hole—no face at all, just an absence so bright and cruel it made me almost sick to contemplate. And the smell, that smell—
Pareidolia, I thought, admirably calm. You know, that thing where you connect the dots, see faces everywhere, Basic Iconography 101: shoes with their tongues out, light-switch noses, grinning coffee makers. Or when your camera suddenly floods with light as you reach the Vinegar House maze’s centrepiece-heart, blowing out all images, so you let it droop downwards as you play with the lens and it catches a weird image on the path below, all gravel and dust, scudding cloud-shadow; a child’s face looking up at you, submerged and frozen, fossilized in dirt like amber. At least that’s what you think you see, playing it back—
Wait though, that’s not me I’m talking about at all; that’s Safie. And she didn’t show that particular piece of film to me till long after all this was over and done with, or at least the part we both had anything to do with directly. Till it was anything but a surprise, for either of us.
Back in the now, meanwhile, the studio lights flickered off, then on, then off again; the camera, Safie’s almost-irreplaceable artefact, gave a weird sort of fizzle-pop and stopped working. The sound-file image disappeared, unrecorded, never to be seen again.
Like when the film runs out, that little voice in my mind very quietly said. Just there and gone in a flash, literally, with nothing left behind . . .
. . . but a bright, white light.
We sat there a moment more, Malin, Safie, and I, just staring at the monitor. None of us sure what came next.
“I don’t . . . think we should put that in the presentation,” Safie said, finally. To which I nodded.
“Me either,” I agreed.
I’d left knowing that Simon and Mom were taking Clark to a Movie for Mommies screening at the Rainbow Market Square—I don’t recall the title off-hand, but the sound was always routinely adjusted down in such instances, light adjusted up, social standards relaxed enough to allow for screaming kids and semi-public breastfeeding. Plus most selections came with subtitles, making it the perfect outing for our purposes. So I texted him on my way back then sat in our building’s Tim Hortons till he and Clark walked home together, getting all my ducks in a row for tomorrow’s presentation. They slid in across me maybe twenty minutes later.
“How’d it go?” Simon asked.
“Very interesting,” I said, with no real word of a lie. “I think Jan’ll be impressed.”
“Can’t see that he wouldn’t be, given the work you and Safie have put in on everything.” I shrugged, but smiled.
As we stepped out of the elevator and came around the corner, however—Clark singing and spinning as ever, pirouetting frantically while doing his best Oogie Boogie from The Nightmare Before Christmas—Simon stopped dead, one hand grabbing Clark by his shoulder, the other braced across my chest. “What—?” I started to ask, but he shook his head.
“Keep him back,” he ordered, nodding at our apartment door, which I only now realized was slightly open. Granted, Simon himself left it that way on occasion, usually absentmindedly forgetting to close it hard enough to catch—but only when we were already home, when he was coming in late and laden, and even then he’d usually still put on the latch-lock we’d attached to the door’s interior once Clark first started walking.
It took maybe three minutes for Simon to emerge. I distracted Clark by alternately singing along and acting out snippets of dialogue, playing Sally, Santa Claus, or Jack Skellington to his Oogie. “Nobody’s there,” he said, phone in hand. “Not too sure if we should call the police, either; place looks like it did when I left, and nothing’s been taken that I can see.”
“You’re sure you just didn’t forget to lock it somehow?”
“Almost sure. I mean—” He sighed. “Look, we both know I’m forgetful, but I’d like to think not this much. Was there maintenance scheduled?”
“No, I don’t . . . wait a sec.” I strode in, Clark babbling along behind, already pulling off his pants, headed for his bedroom. It only took a few minutes’ searching through our bedroom to ascertain my vague presentiment had been correct: the only thing missing was that file box from Quarry Argent, minus the portions of its contents I still had in my backpack.
“You think Wrob Barney did this?” Simon asked, once I’d explained what was making me laugh so hard. I nodded, still grinning. The idea that Wrob might’ve actually paid somebody to break into our place only to end up with nothing more than a bunch of silver mining-related business correspondence cut with Arthur Whitcomb’s fanboy ravings was utterly hilarious to me, considering how easily I could string together a composite example of the latter: dear [whoever,] I allow myself a great admirer of your portraiture, and wonder if you may be similarly familiar with the art of my wife, who—though female—is brilliant indeed! If your journeying ever takes you to Northern Ontario, therefore, feel very free to come to dinner at our house, even uninvited. . . .
“What amazes me is that this is all stuff he could’ve just gotten his own copies of, at the museum,” I said as I put the kettle on. “I mean, he was right there just yesterday, and that’s where the originals live—we didn’t even have to pay to get ours done. It doesn’t make any sense.” I popped a teabag in Simon’s cup, pausing. “Then again, maybe he got so mad after I talked to him he just . . . flounced out, and didn’t come back. That kinda sounds like him, now I come to think.”
“What would be the point of stealing your copies, though?”
“At this late date? Man, I don’t know; could be simply to slow me down, derail tomorrow’s meet with Jan.”
“Seriously? Is he that petty?”
“From what I’ve seen? Yeah, I kinda think he is.”
The kettle screeched. I thumbed it off and poured, setting it to steep; Simon folded his arms, frowning. “I don’t like it,” he said. “He was in here, or somebody he sent was—what’s to stop them
coming back? It’s creepy.”