In the Shadow of Blackbirds (8 page)

“Gracie—the phonograph!” said Julius.

Gracie fumbled to replace “Stars and Stripes Forever” with a new record. She turned the crank on the phonograph, and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” started up at full volume.

“Why are you blasting the room with patriotic music?” I asked Julius over the commotion.

“The spirits of fallen war heroes appreciate it. It makes them feel they didn’t die in vain.” He steered me by my shoulders, away from my aunt and toward his growing collection of spirit photographs. What must have been a hundred sample photos hung on the longest interior wall, their frames wedged against one another in a fight for space on the walnut panels. The majority of the faceless spirits wore military uniforms and stood behind mortal sitters. Some of the ghosts rested their hands on their loved ones’ shoulders.

I heard breathing near the back of my neck and turned my head with a start. Aunt Eva had followed us like a shadow.

“Eva, please have a seat in the chair back there.” Julius nodded to a chair in the corner by the door—the pesky relative seat, or so it seemed.

“Do you need me to help with Mary Shelley’s hair or—”

“Please have a seat.” Julius gave another nod. “The spirits won’t want a crowd.”

With a wounded look, Aunt Eva retreated, and Julius pressed his fingers around mine again, guiding me across the room. “Let’s take off your mask and get you seated.”

“I’m not taking off my mask,” I said.

“I want to see your whole face in the photograph.”

“Are you off your rocker?” I tensed my legs in a solid stance and shook him off me. “I’ve seen how many people come into this musty, dark room. I’m not risking my life for a photograph.”

“All right, all right.” He took my hand again and chuckled as though he found my fear entertaining. “Good God, I’d forgotten what a stubborn old mule you are.”

“I also have two provisions before I sit for you.”

He lifted his eyebrows and laughed again. “And they are?”

I untangled my fingers from his. “First of all, you need to tell Aunt Eva you lied about the way you found Stephen and me the last time I was here.”

“Mary Shelley, our host is giving you free photographs,” said my aunt from her corner. “Please just sit down for him and stop embarrassing yourself.”

“I won’t sit down until he tells the truth.” I stared at Julius until he could no longer meet my eyes. Over by the phonograph, Gracie scratched at her arm and glanced down at her shoes.

“I may have exaggerated a little.” Julius peered straight at me again. “I’m sorry.”

“We weren’t on the sofa, were we?” I asked.

“No, but you were—” He bit his lip. “My brother said some things to me of a personal, sensitive nature, and—as brothers sometimes fight—I might have added some details about what I saw.” He studied my face for a reaction.

I turned toward my aunt. “Did you hear that, Aunt Eva?”

“The entire island of Coronado heard that, Mary Shelley. Please just put this subject to rest and sit down.” She rubbed her flushed neck and looked like she wanted to disappear inside the walls.

I returned my attention to Julius. “I’d also like to see Stephen’s parcel before I sit.”

“Of course. Gracie, pull out the package Stephen prepared for our guest. It’s in the top drawer of the desk.”

His cousin scuttled over to a small desk topped with three glowing candles, and the flames twitched and danced as she approached. The flickering light made the faces in the nearby photos seem to move.

Gracie squeaked open a drawer and held up a rectangular item wrapped in brown paper. “Is this the one?”

“Yes,” said Julius. “Will you assure Miss Black it’s Stephen’s handwriting on the front?”

“Oh yes, it’s his.” Gracie beamed at the words on the paper. “His penmanship was always so much better than mine.”

That
was
of hers made my blood run cold.

“All right.” I gave Julius a nod. “Those were my conditions. As long as you understand I’m only doing this for my aunt’s sake and not because I believe in your ghosts, I’ll sit for one quick picture.”

He gestured toward a high-backed chair with a plum-colored cushion, positioned in front of a black background curtain. “Please have a seat.”

I walked over to the chair and lowered myself to the cushion with a shiver. The room felt like a northern basement at the peak of winter, musty odor included. Stephen’s words from my last visit entered my mind:
He also runs a fan over ice blocks in between sittings to cool the air in there. He tries to make everyone feel like phantoms are hovering around the studio.

Julius knelt to position me as he desired and guided my knees to the left in a way that tickled, but I clamped my teeth together to keep from flinching or laughing. He tilted my gauze-covered chin to the right.

“How badly did you injure him that day?” I asked in a voice too quiet for Aunt Eva to hear.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I mean. My aunt dragged me out of here so quickly, I never got to ask if those thuds were the sounds of you slamming his head against the wall.”

He kept my chin in his hand. “Brothers fight when we upset each other. That’s just how we are.”

“Is everything all right?” asked Aunt Eva. Uneasiness tinged her voice.

“Everything’s fine.” Julius got to his feet.

I swallowed. “Has Stephen written? Do you know if—”

An airplane growled overhead and drowned out the music and my question. The thunder of its engine shook the photos on the walls and vibrated in the pit of my stomach.

More thumps and bangs emerged from the floor above. Julius and I both looked at the ceiling.

“What’s happening up there?” I asked.

Julius tore his eyes away from the beams overhead. “My studio causes everyone’s imaginations to mistake normal house sounds for mischievous ghosts.” He strode over to his stepfather’s beautiful black camera and ducked his head under a dark cloth behind it. “It’s probably just my mother cleaning. She’s become a little obsessive. Keeps her from worrying about Stephen.”

My eyes drifted back up to the ceiling while he brought me into focus and finished the camera’s preparations. I would have felt much better if I could have seen Mrs. Embers myself.

“All right.” His head reemerged from beneath the cloth. “Let’s get started. Stay still now, and keep looking this way.” He leaned his lips toward the camera’s outstretched leather bellows and whispered something to the machinery—a ritual I’d seen him perform the last time I posed for him. From the few words I could hear, I gathered he was making some sort of plea to the other side. He then straightened his posture and cried out, “Spirits, we summon you. I bring you Mary Shelley
Black, named after an author of dark tales who believed in the mysterious powers of electrical currents—”

Something dropped to the floor upstairs. Julius flinched and raised his voice: “She’s drawn hundreds of mourners to me with her angelic image. Send us another spirit to stand beside her. Bring her a loved one she wants to see.” He held up his tray of flash powder. “Mary Shelley Black—summon the dead!”

He opened the cap of a round lens that gaped like the eye of a Cyclops.

The flash exploded with a blinding burst of flames and smoke.

Inside the camera, a chemically treated plate was imprinted with a miniature version of my body.

“There.” Julius coughed on a dense white cloud that drifted around his head. “It’s done.” He screwed the lens cap back into place and inserted the glass plate’s protective dark slide inside the rear of the camera.

My eyes watered so much from the scorching air that I had to wipe them with my sleeve. The blast made me remember the Christmas when Stephen’s father burned off his eyebrows with a particularly volatile flash explosion.

“Shall I give the package to her now, Julius?” asked Gracie.

“Yes.”

Another thump from above caused dust from the ceiling’s beams to shower upon us. Footsteps pounded throughout the house, far louder than the phonograph’s music. I blinked
through the smoke and saw Julius’s face go as pale as his cousin’s.

The pocket doors to the front hall crashed open. Mrs. Embers stumbled into the studio, strands of dark hair falling across her eyes. “I need your help, Julius. I’m hurt.” She clutched her stomach.

“Christ!” Julius put down the flashlamp. “Get them out of here, Gracie.” He charged across the room and grabbed his mother by the arm to escort her away.

“You need to go immediately.” Gracie handed me Stephen’s parcel and pushed on my back to get me to move faster.

I looked over my shoulder. “What happened to Mrs. Embers?”

“Please, just go.”

“When should we come back for the photograph?” asked Aunt Eva.

“I don’t know. Monday morning, maybe.” Gracie opened the door and gave me another shove. “A family emergency has arisen,” she called to the line of customers, which now spilled over onto the front sidewalk. “The spirits are letting us know they need their rest. Come back another day.” She propelled Aunt Eva outside behind me and slammed the door closed on all of us.

Cries of unrest came from the black-clothed grievers.

“What did you do in there, you little hussy?” asked the same heavyset woman who had pushed Aunt Eva off the steps. “Why’d you ruin it for the rest of us?”

“That’s Mary Shelley Black,” said a young brunette behind her. “You can’t talk to her like that.”

“I don’t care if she’s Mary, Queen of Scots. I’ve been waiting four hours to get a picture taken with my poor Harold, and she just ruined it all.”

“I didn’t ruin anything—”

Aunt Eva grabbed my hand. “Let’s run.”

“That’ll only make us look guilty,” I said.

“Run!”

Two hefty men from the back of the line were now headed our way with murder in their eyes, so I did as she said—I used my Boy Scout boots’ double soles of reinforced solid oak leather and bolted across the grass and down the coastal neighborhood’s sidewalks, until Ocean Boulevard disappeared behind us.

We didn’t stop running until we jumped onto the streetcar, and even then my heart kept racing. I sat beside my aunt on the wooden seat and clutched Stephen’s parcel to my chest.

“What was all of that about?” I asked while trying to catch my breath. “What happened to Mrs. Embers upstairs?”

Aunt Eva gasped for air and rubbed a stitch in her side. “I don’t know. But I’m sure meeting mourners on a constant basis … and worrying about a loved one overseas … can destroy one’s nerves.”

“Poor cousin Gracie seemed as anxious as a frightened mouse.”

“Poor cousin Gracie is a flu survivor. Her hair went white
and fell out from the fever. That’s why she wears a wig.”

“That was a wig?”

My aunt nodded.

I gulped. “It almost seemed to me, with all the spirit activity in that house, the family believes they’re being haunted.”

Aunt Eva fidgeted in her seat, but she didn’t admit the Emberses’ house disturbed her. It certainly disturbed me. I could almost understand why Stephen was in such a hurry to get out of there.

I lowered the package to my lap and trailed my fingers over my own name, penned in handwriting I adored—handwriting that mirrored the writer’s artistic nature. The
S
in
Shelley
resembled a treble clef. The
B
in
Black
could have been called voluptuous. My odd, dark name always transformed into something lyrical and beautiful through Stephen’s pen.

I noticed the string tying the parcel paper together hung loose on one end, as though someone had already slid the string aside to inspect the contents of the package. A small tear also marred the paper. “I think someone’s already opened this. Do you suppose Julius—?”

“Mary Shelley.” My name passed over my aunt’s lips as a tired groan.

I peeled back the tampered end of the paper and slid out a framed photograph. My labored breath caught in my throat. Warmth flushed throughout my face and chest and spread to the tips of my fingers and toes. The strings of my mask tightened with a grin the size of Alaska.

As his last gift to me before leaving for the war, Stephen—fully aware of my love of electricity—had given me a photograph of a jagged lightning bolt striking a sepia nighttime sea.

I HADN’T PLANNED TO HANG ANY DECORATIONS ON THE
walls of my bedroom in Aunt Eva’s house. Doing so would have been an admission that San Diego was to become my home for a long while.

However, on Sunday, the day after we visited the Emberses, I couldn’t help but mount Stephen’s lightning bolt on a strip of gilded wallpaper just beyond the foot of my bed. I asked Aunt Eva’s permission to pound two nails into her wall and hung both of his photographs side by side, the butterfly and the electricity. I never found any note in his parcel and was certain Julius had taken it. But the picture had finally reached my hands.

I discovered Stephen had crossed out some words in the
lower right-hand corner, perhaps a rejected title, and between gold and white ripples in the ocean, he had written one of his anagrams:

I DO LOSE INK