Experimental Film

Vasek Sidlo pressing his mind against the unexposed silver nitrate film, only to leave his lovely patron’s—Mrs. Whitcomb’s—mental fingerprints behind.

Too painful to look up now, so I looked down instead. Back at my hand. Wanting to lie down in the dark, a wet cloth across my eyes. Wanting to be anywhere but here—stumbling around blind through some unfamiliar house, bruising myself on the furniture to escape what trailed behind with its skirts in the dust, train rattling like snakeskin—

my poor blind child, poor Vasek

yet I was grateful he need never see what I sought to birth back into this world

invisible made visible, lost once more found

—then breaking out through the door into daylight, the black behind my eyes suddenly turned red, straight into a spiky clutch of close-pruned hedge twigs. Feeling my way handful by handful, gravel underfoot, ’round one corner then another, another, another . . .

Further in and faster. Still blind, staggering, too quick to catch myself as I went down, knee popping. The swish of cloth like tearing paper, icy air on my nape.

There is no one who wants you here, sister. Not even yourself. Yet still you come, over and over.

What will I have to do, to drive you away at last?

So bright, so hot. I knew that voice, and desperately wanted not to. Everything hurting just as badly, especially my fingers on the pen I held, wrist bent as though I’d swapped right hand for left. Two completely different sorts of writing, neither anything like my own, trading back and forth like question versus answer, a conversation. Minutes from a meeting I’d never had.

Will it work?

YES

Should I try?

NO

Why not?

NO GOOD WILL COME OF IT

And if I do so anyhow?

WHAT WILL BE WILL BE

Automatic writing, maybe, from one of Kate-Mary des Esseintes’ meetings . . . Spiritualists swore by it, if I remembered correctly. I could almost see Mrs. Whitcomb sitting there in the dark, watching Kate-Mary write these lines out: advice from Beyond, dictated by ghosts, or angels. It was her final enterprise she spoke of, I knew in my bones, the one she’d needed Sidlo’s help to complete—the train film, burnt up on projection, her only true work. The answer to Lady Midday’s fatal enquiry at last, posed under the lit sword’s glare, in the field’s terrible heat; that awful smell, and that voice. That voice Mrs. Whitcomb had only ever heard once, but had never forgotten.

dare the sword and be spared, then, with Hyatt regained if I do right

(if he still can be)

Down at the very bottom then, this final set of notations, in tinier letters even than the smudge-hidden message I’d plucked from that first entry:

I must, then. It will be as God wills.

As She . . .

Later, looking for proof this phantom conversation ever existed, I’d find only a section of Mrs. Whitcomb’s notebook, torn away years—decades—before, all brown and ragged along its edges. But for now, as I snapped awake, I felt nothing but a sense of relief so strong it verged on nausea as my incandescent migraine pain peeled away on contact, leaving me chilled and shaking but otherwise fine; just part of the same dream and nothing more. My skull felt light and dim, empty; I bent forward, panting, palms braced on knees, almost letting the notebook fall unheeded to the floor before I caught it and laid it carefully to one side. Simon must’ve felt me move, because he turned on his side, groaning—he flopped a hand my way, patting me absently on the thigh, like he thought that’d give me some sort of comfort.

“Y’okay?” he asked, muffled. “Sounded . . . not good.”

“Yeah, I just—fell asleep working, I guess. Had a bad dream.”

“Thass never nice.”

I sighed. “Nope.”

Nearby, somebody made a miserable little noise. I looked over to see Clark standing there, almost close enough to touch; his hair stood straight up, sweat-spiked. His wandering eyes were big and glazed, bruisey both underneath and around their edges, while a big blue vein I didn’t think I’d ever seen before ran the length of one temple, pulsing slightly. “Oh my God, bunny,” I exclaimed, staring, as Simon—spurred by the note in my voice—managed to heave himself upright. “You scared the crap out of me, seriously. Are . . . are you okay?”