Experimental Film

Discovered after Hyatt’s disappearance, the top of the access shaft was left open throughout Mrs. Whitcomb’s subsequent tenure in the bedroom (she moved in a month after Mr. Whitcomb’s departure for Europe, and was never known to sleep anywhere else from then on), only to be sealed up with the rest of the house in 1925. Though it’s clogged now with cobwebs and blocked off at each floor with wire mesh, with a flashlight you can look down all the way to the bare earth, three floors below. The rungs Hyatt used can still be seen, incised into the foot-thick vertical beams, wood worn smooth—possibly slippery—with age.

And if you lean into the shaft and wait for your eyes, and your camera, to adjust, you will see that almost the entirety of its interior has been covered with crude yet recognizable yellow, white, and green chalk scribblings—sketchy parodies of Mrs. Whitcomb’s finished product downstairs.

Stay in the shaft long enough, Moraine told us, and a smell begins to collect in your nostrils: faint but acrid, something hot and rotten that stings the eyes. Not everyone reports this scent, apparently—Safie didn’t smell a thing and says I claimed not to either, though Axel, Max, and Holle said they did—but nobody who has reported it was ever able to identify it, or find any kind of biological or chemical source for the stench. Whatever it was, or is, it drove Holle out of the room in five minutes, loudly exclaiming that she wanted to puke. Axel went back downstairs with her, as did Max, who went outside to join his wife and daughter; this time, Moraine didn’t try to stop them.

Safie says that when I asked Moraine if anybody knew which particular sketch or set of sketches had camouflaged the shaft, she told us they were simply views of the maze garden and the field beyond it, as seen from the dining room’s windows. The chalk drawings Hyatt made while inside, however, obviously served as prototypes or “raw” versions for the processional and shadow figures in the Mural Room, as well as its overhanging central image, suggesting that Mrs. Whitcomb almost certainly deliberately incorporated them into the Murals after her son’s death.

“You can see a lot of crossover, true enough,” Moraine acknowledged on the recording, after I asked her about this. “Probably went both ways—he grew up watching her paint, after all, and she’d been doing that since before he was born. Maybe by way of being a memento, as well, after his death. But there’s a long way between Hyatt’s drawings and those paintings.”

From our own review of the shaft’s artwork—or what our camera captured of it—the image Hyatt repeated most often was definitely the veiled, glaring face his mother painted above the dining room’s main door: a disturbing design, especially when you consider it was drawn by a child of less than eight. I’ve read other people’s accounts of visiting the Vinegar House, and a number of them have asked the question (rhetorically left unanswered, perhaps because it’s unanswerable): of all the works her son produced, why would Iris Whitcomb choose this one above all others to memorialize?

Then again, given their origin, the murals gain further troubling context from the fact that the maze garden they frame, Hyatt Whitcomb’s favourite source of daytime entertainment, is also the place where his parents and nurse eventually found the last trace of him ever discovered: his abandoned nightclothes, partially buried in the earth just beyond the maze’s far edge, bordering that final strip of field between the Vinegar House grounds and the woods.

According to at least one report I turned up, Hyatt’s nightclothes had somehow been pushed so hard into the ground that they became jammed in a cracked chunk of granite and had to be cut free.

When I listen to Moraine reeling off Hyatt’s range of symptoms, even after re-viewing the footage as many times as I already have, I still feel a sick sense of recognition mounting in me, narrowing my throat; I can only think the same thing must’ve happened then, even if I can’t remember it. Which might explain why the next thing I hear myself asking Moraine is—

“So—Hyatt Whitcomb was on the spectrum, right? What I mean is, from the way you describe him, he must’ve been autistic.”

“That’s what they’d call it today, probably, yes. Why?”

Here Safie suddenly decides to pan around the room, maybe trying to avoid my face, though I can see myself start to look down just as her lens switches away. Hear myself start to say, softly: “Well, I . . . that is, my son . . .”

“What about him?” The barest pause here, just a fraction of a breath, as she suddenly realizes what sort of hot button she’s tripped across. “I, oh; oh, I’m very sorry. Is he—”

“Never mind,” I reply after a moment, voice gone quieter yet. And Moraine breaks off as well, switches subjects like the pro she is, hastening to avoid giving any further offence; turns back toward the door, beckoning with a bland, cheerful, empty sort of smile, the kind oncology ward nurses must practise daily. “Well, anyhow,” she says, “let’s go back outside, shall we, since the light’s still with us? I’ll show you two the maze.”

“That’d be great,” Safie agrees, readily. While at almost the same time, I put in from the side of the frame—

“You know, I’d actually much rather see what’s left of the greenhouse, thanks.”

“Thought you wanted to do that together,” Safie says. I shrug.

“No problem,” I tell her, easily enough. “It’s getting late—might as well split up, get as much as we can, come back tomorrow if we have to. That’ll work, right, Miss Moraine?” She nods. “Yeah, see? That’s why God made iPhones.”

Safie’s notes say Moraine, Safie, and I came out through the dining room doors, picking up Holle and Axel as we went. The LaFreys were already over by the maze, little Aileen kicking a half-bitten crabapple ’round the first corner like a soccer ball then chasing after it. As Moraine led the way toward the glass house, Safie, who’d been itching to get footage of the maze—the memorial plaque set up where Hyatt supposedly disappeared, in particular—parted ways with us, taking some shots of the maze entrance and its interior’s first few paces

with Axel and Holle posing in it, to lend perspective. True to my word, I took out my iPhone and switched it to video, recording two longish clips I saved to memory before starting my final go-round. These aren’t all that interesting, in hindsight; the best part of the second one is when Moraine, who’s showing me around, brushes a dirt-stiff tarp off of what proves to be a stack of flats from Mrs. Whitcomb’s Lady Midday period.

“Didn’t even know those were there!” Moraine’s voice exclaims as I start to flip through, using only the barest edges of my right-hand thumb and ring finger; dust puffs up in clouds, making us both cough. Thus revealed, the artefacts in question are bleached-out and stained—edges nibbled, gummed together with a winning combination of insect by-products and bird crap—but the bottom-most one still shows traces of Mrs. Whitcomb’s trademark hypnagogic design and psychedelic colour scheme. Interestingly, as I thumb through the pile, these tints fade away completely, as though she’s figuring out that using shades of grey with the occasional white highlights will suit her method of shooting far more accurately: almost a negative image of what she wants to achieve, pre-jacked so it registers for maximum impact on silver nitrate stock.

But I don’t have a lot of time to study the mechanics of it all. Because something is about to happen. Is happening already. Couldn’t stop it if I tried, not that I’d know to want to.

So I’m talking through the colour-shift progression—retrogression?—and Moraine’s barely listening, for which I can’t really blame her; she’s looking over to her left, frowning slightly, saying something I can barely hear. “So much glass,” that’s what it sounds like on playback. Like: “Gotta make sure and get that cleaned up, someone could hurt themselves.” That’s nice—always thinking ahead, that Val. In this case, she’s probably got her head stuck in the future, post-exposé, when everyone in Ontario will want to come see where Mrs. Whitcomb used to work her odd, silent, black-and-white magic. And I can’t fault her can I? Because I’m basically doing the same, until—

I pause—stop short, mid-sentence. Say: “Ow,” just like that. Then start over, and stop again. Say: “Ow,” once more, but harder, with a sort of wondering pain. “Oh, oh, OW, shit. Shit, oh shit. Oh shiiiit, my head, fuck meeee . . .”

Moraine snaps around, eyes wide but increasingly framed sidelong, as my iPhone’s screen starts to droop, to wobble. “Miss Cairns—Lois? Lois, are you all right?”

“I dunnoh.”

“What did you say, what? I don’t—”

“Seh, I duh. I doh. I dohntnoh, dohhhhhnnnttt . . . knooohhhhwww . . .”

And then the phone falls, and I fall, right on the aforementioned glass, the dirty mess of broken tile over cracked stone where the greenhouse floor should be: crack, thud, crunch. Visuals cutting out, though sound sticks around slightly longer, picking up Val Moraine as she yells out and lunges to not quite catch me in time, shaking me even as I start to shake. Grabbing me underneath the back of the skull with both hands as I start to outright seize, to thrash and kick up dust, trying like hell to keep me far enough off the ground so I won’t split my scalp open and bleed out all over this little piece of forgotten Canadian cinematic history.

And here, at last, is where I’d love to tell you my memory finally kicks back in—where I begin to filter up once more through layers of nothing much, peeling them away like dead skin to reveal the still-raw burn beneath. Except I can’t tell you that, because I don’t, and it doesn’t, and none of the above happens. Not one bit of it.