The bird had disappeared into a thick stand of ancient yew trees, which seemed as good a place as any for me to sit and absorb what had just happened. I trudged toward it, passing a group of weary demonstrators dragging their battered placards in the mud. They tossed them into a waist-high pile of discarded signs and kept going.
Here, near the outskirts of the park, several groups had set up makeshift information booths. Defenders of Albion, Mothers Against Fascism, Free Speech Legal Defense Council, England First! I searched for Svarlight’s telltale red oak leaf with no luck. I’d long since given up on looking for Tindra or Tommy, along with any hope of finding a stolen book in the wreckage of a nationalist rally. I might be wasted, but I wasn’t that wasted.
I had a camera again. It seemed like a good time to cut my losses.
I sank onto the cold dirt beneath the yews. A huge limb hung so close to the ground that its branches formed an impenetrable curtain of black-green dotted with crimson berries. I crawled till I was out of sight of any passersby and shut my eyes, counting my heartbeats until they seemed normal for someone wired on crank and a flood of adrenaline. Minutes passed before I opened my eyes, exhaled, and allowed myself to relax. My back ached, my head. The split on my lower lip felt hot, skin stretched like that of an overripe plum. I found some Kleenex in my bag and did my best to clean my face.
From outside the park echoed the thrum of traffic, louder than it had been earlier. It must have been rush hour. Two young boys walked past, kicking at the gravel path and laughing, shadow puppets behind the yew’s green-and-black scrim. When they were gone, I reached beneath my jacket and pulled out the camera.
It was an older Nikon F2, late 1970s, with a bayonet-mount lens, its frayed leather strap wound with electrical tape. A white label on the back bore a printed name and address in Barnes: a professional photog’s rig. The lens cap hung from an elastic band secured behind the focus ring. I checked to make sure the lens hadn’t been damaged in the fall. It was heavier than my old Konica, a more expensive camera than I ever would have bought for myself.
I carefully peeled off the address label, took off the lens cap again, stared through the viewfinder, then wound the exposed film onto the take-up spool. I popped open the back of the camera and removed the film roll. I stuck the address label back on the protective casing, wiped it all off with another piece of tissue so there’d be no fingerprints, and tossed it into the shadows. If someone ever found it, maybe they’d return it to its owner. I’d have to wait until I had access to a closet before I could load the camera with my own black-and-white Tri-X.
I looked through the viewfinder again, playing with the focus, gently touched the shutter release waiting to be triggered. I felt as I had lying beside Quinn, not exactly safe but suspended, the city beyond the curtain of yew branches as distant and unreal as the images I’d glimpsed in The Book of Lamps and Banners. The grief that had infected me since giving away my Konica faded, replaced by a familiar sense of urgency and yearning.
I recalled when I’d seen that raven arrow above the police van, the woman followed by two white-clad figures, the line of cops staring at something on the ground in front of them. A body. I could have shot it. I might even have been able to capture the moment when it was transformed from a man or woman into something beautiful and terrifying, eyes reflecting a sky no longer seen, mouth open to gasp or cry out or whisper a secret never to be told. I ran my fingers across the focus ring, pressed and released the shutter release, then carefully placed the Nikon in my bag.
I knelt to gaze out through the branches at the park. Afternoon had waned to early evening. The air smelled acrid, but I didn’t catch any whiff of tear gas. The helicopters were gone, also the Metro Police van. The demonstration might as well have happened a thousand miles away. It was as if the city had fought to suppress the sudden outbreak of a virus, and won. London was vast: it could seemingly swallow hundreds of rioters, leaving no trace save footprints in the mud and a few bloody faces. The rest would be dealt with in courts and prison cells and, perhaps, the morgue.
My shadowy refuge grew darker as the temperature dropped. My headache had become a solid brick of pain. I was badly dehydrated, sweating despite being chilled. The speed still sparked in my brain like a fistful of firecrackers, but it had been hours since I’d had a drink.
To ease the craving, I got out the copy of Dead Girls and opened to the leaf from The Book of Lamps and Banners. I was wary of touching it, of even looking at it for too long—whenever I did, it seemed as though the images had rearranged themselves. I knew this wasn’t the case, but there was something about the brilliant pigments and grotesque figures that defied any attempt to impose order upon them.
In the Bolt, I’d been absorbed by the tiny illustrations—the monstrous tentacled woman, the severed head that turned into a moon. Now what seized my attention was the way the images were arranged on the page, a pattern that reminded me of the intricate arrangement of frames in a graphic novel, or the schematic in a set of blueprints that showed where the wiring would be in a high-rise.
I could make no sense of it. Yet there was undeniably order on the page. The same colors and motifs repeated themselves in varied combinations. The sinuous appendages no longer resembled tentacles, but letters. What I had taken for random stipples of scarlet or indigo were in fact a kind of punctuation.
Dizzy, I raised my head, and in the shifting world of branches and sky read the same grammar. There was meaning in the yew’s needles; meaning in a contrail’s scrawl, in the tattoos on a passing girl’s arm, and the logo on a jogger’s sweatpants.
Tindra was right. The Book of Lamps and Banners was a code, a secret language composed of colors and shadows and chimerical creatures. The page was an attempt to capture the transient beauty and strangeness of the world around me. Like Tindra’s app, the images had the subliminal power to change the way one saw the world.
I felt a rush as potent as a line of uncut cocaine, followed by a wave of nausea. The scene in front of me shivered into an unintelligible mass: I had a flash of the raw terror I’d experienced when I looked at Ludus Mentis. Gasping, I lashed out at an unseen attacker.
My fist struck the tree, hard enough that the pain brought me back. I caught my breath and recalled Tindra’s avid expression when she first told me about her app.
A mirror…When he looked into it, he couldn’t look away…You see how it all ties in? The way we’re all sucked in by this?
Yet what happens when the mirror doesn’t reflect your own face, but the void behind it? I looked down at the page from The Book of Lamps and Banners.
It’s all there, not a line missing. I’ll be able to complete writing a code that was begun thousands of years ago.
But the book wasn’t intact, so neither was Ludus Mentis. The app’s incomplete code was worse than meaningless: it provoked a neurological response that unraveled one’s consciousness, reducing the world to a primal soup of fear and rage.
I quickly closed Dead Girls, entombing the papyrus sheet inside it, and stared at the book’s cover, my night shot of a bunch of kids staring at something that lurked in the darkness, just out of sight. A moment in time, ephemeral as the cigarette smoke rising above the kids’ heads.
And yet I had captured it on a piece of cellulose coated with gelatin and silver. Human figures, most of them now dead, immortalized through an alchemy of light, silver, salt.
Ludus Mentis wasn’t the only portal to the past. Whatever meaning that fleeting moment on the Bowery had held, I had put it there.