Arcane II (34 page)

He fled.

But when he reached the second floor, his mind’s eye showed him a snapshot of the open door, the tiny scattered pictures like a series of incriminating fingerprints. Grappling with his fear, he inched back down, gathered the prints, and locked the lab door.

Then he took the images to the library, where he sat in his favorite high-backed chair, poring over them until dawn.

***

He found he no longer had any time for lies. The camera lay waiting for him in a private drawer as he worked each day, reminding him of the true reality, how easy it was to peel back the skin. Sunny, who’d had a crush on him, was informed that Marty no longer had any meaningful relationship with his wife. Justin, who’d always liked Sunny, began to receive detailed, unvarnished accounts of Marty’s private meetings, despite the way the big man’s shoulders contracted as he edged to face the enlarger.

The camera kept Marty occupied day and night. He loved to guess what people might become. He had to keep a log of what he’d shot—once, an undistinguished person had transformed into a 37-foot python. He hid in unlikely places, snapping those who thought themselves unobserved, to discover what passed for the soul.

Sunny was Marty’s only distraction. She worked part-time, barely enough for rent on a third-floor attic, and he lived for those days when she was in the office. He had to admire her simple way of life, working only enough to survive, keeping body and spirit pure through exercise, meditation, walks along the beach. With the camera in his hands, he couldn’t help worrying about her. Was she really as pure and beautiful as she seemed? Testing her with the Petietux seemed to imply a loss of faith—one loss he couldn’t afford.

After another night in the darkroom, he crept upstairs through plush, designer carpets. With the camera in his hands, the ambiance of his life suddenly made him nauseous. He halted in the doorway, seeing Gayle’s beautiful, perfect form spread in the moonlight, tangled in covers whose gaps revealed smooth, rounded limbs. He hovered there, caught between loathing and desire, his hands sweating on the camera. A camera that never came up with the same image twice. He’d taken more pictures of Gayle than anyone else, and over the last few weeks she’d grown pale, listless, complacent, oblivious to the signs of his affair. Though he’d seen a growing hatred in her eyes, she hadn’t said a word.

In rising excitement, he brought the camera to his eye, squinted in the dim room... snap! With the flash, Gayle’s eyes popped open, wide as saucers, a child who’s looked the bogeyman in the face. He snapped another. She didn’t call his name, didn’t scream at him for disturbing her sleep, didn’t start out of bed to take the camera. Snap!—this was too easy, he ought to stop now, snap! She was pulling the covers up to her chin, and snap!snap!snap! She shivered so badly she might have caught pneumonia. Snap! With each flash, her skin looked more pallid; now her mouth was opening and closing in fishy gasps, and he thought he heard the faintest strangled sound, like a rabbit mewling. His finger squeezed the button convulsively, while his face contorted and tears ran down his cheeks.

She hung like a ghost on his retinas, pale and thin as a spindle. One final flash, and he was alone.

Trembling, he rushed down to the darkroom, wanting to fix the images before she could wriggle free. He struggled into his gloves, not wanting to touch the pictures.

She was sitting up in bed, eyes wide as a terrified child’s... but the eyes were in a terrified child, a little girl with a bobbed golden haircut. A huge, horned shadow loomed over her bed. The pictures grew progressively cartoonish, till she had frightened balloon-shaped eyes, then appeared as a kitten, then as a stuffed, five-pointed star. Finally there was nothing more than an impression of her features poking out of the pillow, the cloth mouth screaming while the shadow enveloped the bed.

He dropped the last picture with a yell. The pillow’s face was being chomped by the shadow’s accordion fangs.

After a bottle of Jack Daniels, Marty took care of Millicent the same way. Her pictures progressed through stages of adulthood, the last a crippled, blind old woman. Things he had stolen from her. Things the brat would never see.

As his first act in a new life, he took Sunny on a picnic in the museum’s park. They sat on an open hill overlooking the river. The wind furled Sunny’s hair like a flag. Marty toyed with the camera in his lap.

Watching him, Sunny laughed, that bright sound. Something pinched inside him. He felt hollow, a husk. It wasn’t loneliness—he had such a host of images raging through his soul. She plucked the Petietux from his unresisting hands.

“Oh, how cute!” Sunny fondled the camera, smiling up at him beneath the wave of her blonde hair. “You’ve never taken my picture, Marty.”

“I must have taken about a hundred shots for the catalog—”

“I mean just for you.”

He leaned back on his elbows, looked at that pretty face, so innocent, so open... so good. “Some other time, baby. I’d love to take a picture of you, but I want to do it properly.”

She raised the camera to her eyes, the tiny rectangle balanced perfectly between well-manicured fingers. He hadn’t even time to sit up when snap! He shook his head, stunned, and she shot again, laughing, backing up, “No, no, no! Stay right there,” snap! snap! as he got to his knees. He stood, swayed, blinked hard, trying to clear his head of the white patches and fuzziness. He reached out for balance, for the camera, and Sunny placed it in his open hand.

“Okay, baby. Now me.”

He shook his head, still stunned. He turned the camera over in bemusement. “Sorry, Sunny, end of the roll,” he murmured, but stayed hunched over it long enough that she touched his shoulder.

The question was, had those shots been enough to leach out the darkness?

Marty opened the camera and laid the film along the grass to curl and dry.

He could breathe with no trouble at all. Tried a smile, found it was working again.

“That was a bad roll, baby. Let’s go into town and get some new film.”

She looked somewhat doubtful, especially when they left the film lying there on the sun-crisped lawn. But she didn’t hesitate to climb into Marty’s bright red car.

III.

Martin Leroy Gregory lived in a tiny flat, part of a converted three-story mansion. He had a beautiful bike and a smoothly-running girlfriend, or was it the other way round? They’d tried the live-in thing off and on, and right now it was off, but Leroy hoped it would be on again soon, because he really missed her. Especially those wild moonlit rides, feeling her snug against his back, the bike purring beneath them, the hills unraveling on either side. Clouds, skidding past above, never enough to obscure the moon... stopping in a field somewhere, only the stars above... God. Sunny was a beautiful person, too good for him, Leroy thought, and built enough to be anyone’s model. She always had at least ten guys slavering after her, offering to fill his place. Leroy was determined they never would.

He liked to keep his life simple. He worked only enough to support himself, odd hours at the photo lab. When he worked days, he’d mind the counter or do commercial shoots; nights, he’d catch them up on their developing. Their day developer, Justin, was his best friend.

Gus sometimes asked Leroy to test and repair antique cameras. The odd ones always drew him: the one-of-a-kinds; the long obsoletes; the ones with bizarre, irreparable defects that could turn into happy bonuses in the right hands.

On Thursday, Justin brought out a leatherette box camera that Leroy itched to hold. Leroy hunkered down in front of the counter. “Kamaret, 1891,” he breathed.

“Pick her up. You’ll get a lot better acquainted in the next few days.”

When Justin left, Leroy spent the rest of the evening with the box camera, testing it, cleaning it. The guard against double exposure didn’t work, but as he determined how to repair it, a peaceful respect for the centenarian’s quirks descended on him like dust, and he let it be.

When he brought the camera home for further testing, Sunny was sitting on the army chest at the foot of his bed. Leroy arranged the camera on the window-table so that it caught them directly with its lens. He set up a time delay. The streetlight poured through the open window, along with a fresh chill. When he pulled Sunny onto his lap, she squealed, 150 pounds of curve and well-trained muscle.

He held her tight about the waist, the pressure of her hips grinding into his flesh. As the camera stared back at him with its dark and solitary eye, he felt something rising within him, dull and dead as rusted steel, a thickness that filled his mouth. It swelled within his chest, threatening to burst free. Sunny... she dazzled so many men it was hard to believe she’d settle for just one. He grabbed her hips tighter, digging his fingers into her flesh, willing something safe and human-sized to stir, anything to take his mind from this terrible compulsion. Under the dark eye of the camera, he wanted to rend her flesh with his teeth, grind it into meaty strings. He wanted to—

Suddenly his warm cock flared up like a saving beacon; he gasped as the black pressure eased. He pushed Sunny from his lap, jumped up to pull her from the apartment. In the sudden flurry of escape, he heard the tiny click of a shutter as the darkness fell away.

***

The next morning Leroy sat on his bike in the gray predawn. Sunny still slept, and he paused a moment, gloved hands on the handlebars, staring up at the glint of pink light on the windows. During the night, he could have sworn he’d taken at least a hundred shots, startling, strange, surreal. Some of them had shown him a new vision, a beauty like the smooth matrix of cathedral arches that made him tremble as the cold prints rested in his hand. He’d woken with swollen fingers, as though he’d been working for hours; woken and cried in surprise, because everything had been so real he’d never expected sleep’s layer to peel away.

A quick stop at the museum secured his old position. Jacques was glad to see him; his replacement had never worked out, and the staff had forgotten the flare of temper that caused him to walk out. They needed a new darkroom tech as well, and Leroy convinced Justin to take the job. Leroy drew them close around him, the perfect combination, people he knew and trusted, the equipment and access he’d need to birth whispering dreams in the waking world, the burning stream of images that hit him with the camera in his hands.

He came in early, worked late, fingers tingling with energy. It wasn’t long before the mystery photos began to arrive in sturdy cardboard sleeves. Odd shots, with a surreal clarity in the starkness of the shadows, the long focal range—good enough that Jacques laughingly suggested that Leroy might be out of a job. When Claire placed the photographs over his fingers, he closed his eyes, knees weak with the sudden surge of electricity, of recognition... the feel of that heavy black box in his hands, smooth and cold and charged.

The pictures arrived once a week. Their dreamlike oddity began to frighten Claire. Justin watched him surreptitiously with furrowed brow, saying nothing till the week the Armageddon photos arrived, double-exposed with twisted images of Sunny’s face.

Then Justin cornered him in the darkroom, his heavy grip pressing Leroy’s shoulder. “Are you all right? You might be able to fool them, but not me.”

“Leave it be, Justin,” Leroy murmured.

Leroy was a big man, but Justin was a bear. He grabbed Leroy by the shoulders, propelled him in front of the vat, forced his nose down until the chemical smell seared his throat closed. Only inches from his eyes, one of his latest prints looked up at him blankly. A corpse’s face. The most beautiful girl in the world, cast in plaster, mold-perfect, the smooth arc of her nose bound by an iceberg crushing a helpless ship. The mouth was the worst, car wreck on a lonely highway, high-beams lighting the dead.

Leroy leaned farther, entranced by the evolving image.

Justin pulled him away as the picture darkened, wrestled him into to a chair as Leroy felt his limbs give way. He fought for breath, eyes rolling with terrible vertigo, sleep washing over him like waves of nausea—

Clutching for sanity, Leroy gasped, “Give me my camera.”

“You’re going to a hospital. Want me to call Sunny?”

Leroy shook his head frantically, feeling his swollen brain mashing in his skull, the images merging, incredibly dense, with a meaning that he screamed to understand.

***

Sunny came to see him once while he was laid up. Justin stopped by often, with news and mail, and once with Leroy’s cat. Though he didn’t mention it, Leroy knew Justin was taking care of things at work, at the apartment. He even brought the most recent batch of prints.

Leroy fought back pillows to grab the envelope as Justin dropped it on the table. “These prints—seem vaguely familiar.”

Justin snatched them from his hands.

“You can’t think I’d shoot something like that?”

“Leroy, I’m no longer certain what you might do.”

“But those were little girls—”

“You having trouble with Sunny?”

“Have you seen her?”

“She’s not at the apartment.”

Leroy plucked at the covers, stared out the window, his mussed brown hair sticking out at the temples. “You’re a good friend,” he said slowly, as though his lips were just learning the words. “Probably better than I deserve. Do me a favor, would you? Bring me my camera?”

***

They found no cause for his fever. Too little food and zero sleep, he told them. Because he’d been eating, they agreed to release him. Faced with this confirmation, he lay in the darkness staring at the ceiling, realizing what a fool he’d been. How he had taken those photographs, he did not waste his time imagining; why he had taken them, he strove with all his might to understand.

Justin met him in the lobby. His shades hid his reaction as he passed over the camera. The black leatherette looked worn, comforting.

“Come on,” Justin said brusquely, rattling car keys, smoothing balding hair. In the parking lot, sunlight speared off glossy red paint.