It didn’t take long to figure out the basics of running the Steenbeck. I located the main switch and turned it on. The motor whirred to life, and after a brief warmup settled into a steady drone. The screen went from black to stark white as the projector’s bulb shone through the gate. I began turning the black dial: the film moved quickly through the gate, way too fast for me to get a clear sense of what I was seeing. I played with the dial for a few minutes, running the same loops of film back and forth until I got the hang of it. The apparatus made a low whirring as the turntables spun.
Images flickered across the small screen, out of focus and harshly lit. I adjusted the focus and dialed down the contrast, reversed the film and ran it through the projector again. Now the picture was clear enough for me to discern six or eight people lying on the floor of a large room, with high clerestory windows set into the stone wall behind them. I recognized the setting, and this scene, from Thanatrope—one moment the room was empty, the next it was filled with revelers. A flash cut, amateurish but also spookily effective.
When I watched it again, the people on the floor writhed with a strange languor, moving so slowly that I checked the Steenbeck’s speed to be sure I wasn’t watching something that had been shot in slow motion. Just out of frame, someone held a fill light closer to the action, but he or she wasn’t doing a very good job. Both the lamp and the hand that clutched it juttered in and out of sight.
And the fill light was way too bright. It washed out the actors it was supposed to illuminate, even as it threw an etiolated shadow across the wall behind them—a grotesquely thin form, one long spidery arm gesticulating violently, its elongated head topped with a ragged crown of hair, so monstrously distorted I thought it must be cast by an immense puppet.
But then the camera, too, went crazily awry. For a second it threw a blinding flash onto a tall figure with wild red hair, wearing a long white apron and pants tucked into Wellington boots. The camera swung back to the bodies on the floor. They continued to move with that nightmarish slowness, as though they’d drowned in sluggish water and remained trapped beneath the surface.
I stopped the film. I’d thought I recognized this scene from when I’d watched Thanatrope just a few days before.
Now I wasn’t so sure. Everything seemed familiar—the bodies on the floor, the high windows, the flash cut—even the bad lighting and the disturbing shadow on the wall, and that crazed-seeming figure in the white apron.
But had I seen them earlier? The images were so weirdly oneiric—more nightmarish than dreamlike—that they made me doubt my own memory of the film. They reminded me of the night terrors I’d experienced in the last few months, the fear of some black arachnid nesting in my skull, unraveling the neural web that was my own consciousness.
A dark wave engulfed me. I’d been betrayed by Quinn and was trapped among people who wanted me dead. I felt myself fragmenting, the way a cracked windshield shatters at the impact of some object.
The stink of melted plastic cut through my despair. I’d left the frame in front of the projector too long. I took a deep breath, then advanced the film and switched off the deck’s lamp to check the frames. The acetate had warped, but I’d caught it before it was badly damaged.
The diversion broke the malevolent spell the film had over me. I turned the control knob, and the film slowly wound between the rollers and gears. The screen filled with those same ghostly figures. Light rolled across them like surf as I ran the loop backward to the beginning of the scene, then advanced it very slowly, frame by frame.
Now I could see that the hand holding the fill light was a man’s, large and thick-fingered. The figures on the floor were the same teenagers I’d seen in Thanatrope. Three girls and three boys. One of the boys looked no more than fourteen, and one of the girls appeared even younger than that.
But even watching the film one frame at a time, I still couldn’t tell what those kids were actually doing on the floor. Sex would be the obvious answer. But the interplay of shadow and hard light was so disjointed that, no matter what frame I examined, or what angle I inspected it from, I couldn’t home in on any specific detail. No breast or cock or mouth or limb; only an overwhelming sense that something terrible was going on.
After several more minutes, I had to stop. I felt as though I’d been sucked into an undertow of damage so corrosive it burned: I could taste it in the back of my throat. I switched off the editing deck and got unsteadily to my feet, turned on the overhead light and cracked the door to let in a stream of fresh air. The small room had grown warm, heated by the projector lamp. I inhaled gratefully, hoping the cold would disperse the toxic cloud that had settled in my chest, behind my eyes, inside my skull.
The nausea remained, morphing into that sick horror. Black filaments spun from the corners of my eyes. I tasted copper in the back of my throat, spat into my palm, and saw a smear of blood. In the room behind me came the low whir of the Steenbeck’s motor engaging. I turned, but the deck’s reels and plates were motionless.
I shut the door and sank back into the swivel chair. I wanted to believe that this was the lingering effect of whatever I’d been doped with the night before. But the truth seemed as inexplicable as the fragmented scene I’d now viewed a dozen times. The film footage was making me sick.
I picked up my bag and removed the Mortensen book that Poppy had given me. I flipped to the last section, Grotesques. The kitsch factor was high by modern standards, but the pictures still had the power to disturb. These are the images that pop up when you Google Mortensen: a nubile, naked woman preparing for the witch’s sabbath; a terror-stricken man facing the blade in “The Pit and the Pendulum”; a man gouging out his own eyes. The fact that he used live models only makes the photos more unsettling.
In The Command to Look, Mortensen gave step-by-step instructions for creating an image that will compel viewers to gaze on it, even as they strain to look away. His photos came under fire for the same imagery that has become so ingrained in our visual cortices that we no longer register them as horrific, a viral stream of crime photos and videos of beheadings, bomb victims, maimed soldiers, plane crashes.
Thanatrope’s director seemed to have taken Mortensen’s lesson to heart. As neuroelectrical impulses, the footage wormed its way through retina, optic nerve, occipital lobe, to make a direct strike on that part of the human brain that registers pure existential horror—all while compelling the viewer to keep watching.
I could see why the movie had been pulled upon its initial release. It was more like a virus than a film. My reputation as a photographer had rested on the fact that I never flinched, no matter what awful thing I shot. Now I broke into a cold sweat at the thought of what I’d seen on the Steenbeck’s screen.
I closed the book and returned it to my bag. The overhead light stung my eyes, but without the projector lamp, the room had quickly grown cold again. I stared at the strip of film in the guillotine splicer. Eleven frames. I didn’t see a loupe or magnifier, but there was a small panel on the Steenbeck where you could place film to view it—a miniature light table built into the console. I found the button to turn this on, and placed the film strip on top of it.
Even without a magnifying lens, I knew what I was looking at: naked human corpses strewn across a patch of moor. I counted four—not infants but adults. One appeared slender enough to be a teenager. Each lay, face up, atop a large flat stone or pile of stones. Their placement seemed less ritualistic than functional, as though they’d been arrayed carelessly and then forgotten. Outtakes from one of the time-lapsed scenes in Thanatrope.
Or maybe they weren’t outtakes, but material to be added to some ghoulish director’s cut as a means of intensifying the film’s malign impact. If Scotland Yard really had interviewed Leith Carlisle, as he’d claimed, they’d done so without access to this crucial bit of evidence.
I stared at the strip of acetate on that glowing white screen. Finally I reached beneath my sweater for one of the rawhide cords and pulled it over my head to hold in front of me. The bone disc turned lazily, revealing one face then another. Girl or old woman, both nearly indistinguishable. I flicked it with my finger so it spun.
With a deafening crash, the lighting rig fell to the floor behind me. The leather cord flew from my hand as someone kicked my chair: Tamsin Carlisle. Before I could move, she snatched up the bone disc, cradling it in her palm. When she looked at me, the nacreous blue eyes no longer seemed impaired by cataracts, but piercingly acute.
“Where did you find this?”
I swallowed. She stepped beside the door and thrust her hand between the light poles and microphones leaning against the wall. When she turned back, she held a shotgun, the thaumatrope dangling between her fingers.
“I’ll ask you again. Where did you get it?”
I measured the distance between myself and the door. No chance. I took a deep breath. “Poppy Teasel.”
“Who?”
“Poppy Teasel.” I spoke quickly, as if that might make her forget she was holding a gun. “I saw her in Stepney before she died, she—”
“Wait—” Tamsin stepped over to me, lowered the shotgun’s barrel, and peered into my face. “What did you say?”
“Poppy, she—”
“You said she was dead. Is she dead?”
I nodded. Tamsin’s milky blue gaze wavered between me and the thaumatrope she clutched like a rosary. At last she lowered the gun to her side. With one hand, she expertly threaded the rawhide cord between her fingers, until the disc rested in her palm. The lines etched on the bone surface showed a face with uptilted eyes and mouth, a crosshatch of hair.
“This is the one that girl gave to her in France,” she said. “How do you have it?”
“I told you, she gave it to me. I was—I was at her flat.” I paused, wary of mentioning the gift Morven had me deliver. “She told me she was sick. Brain cancer.”
“Brain cancer,” murmured Tamsin. “I always thought it would be the drugs.”
“It was. She OD’d a few days ago. Smack.”
“You mean heroin?”
“Yeah. The needle hit an artery. She bled out.”
“I can’t believe it.” Tamsin shook her head. “I haven’t seen her for years—decades—but I understood she’d gotten treatment a long time ago. Are you sure?”
Like Adrian’s, her shock seemed genuine. I shrugged. “Why would I lie?”
“Because you stole this.”
I laughed. “Why would I steal it? It’s not worth anything to me. I don’t even know what it is.”
For the first time, she noticed the Mortensen book on the Steenbeck. With that same strange quicksilver grace, she strode past me and picked it up. “Where did you get this?’
“Poppy.”
Tamsin opened the book to the frontispiece, read what was written there. Her face grew dead white.
“This was my book,” she said. “He stole it from me, like he stole everything else.”
She dropped the book and lay her hand atop the Steenbeck’s picture gate, peering at the take-up reel. “This is warm. You’ve been playing with my film. If you know how to operate a Steenbeck, you probably know what this is.”
She drew her hand back and lashed me across the face with the thaumatrope. I cried out as the bone disc bit into the skin beside my eye, pressed my fingers to the barely healed wound there and felt them grow slick with blood.
I stared at Tamsin, too stunned to speak. The thaumatrope turned in her grasp, one of its ivory faces now red-streaked. Tamsin’s hair stuck out wildly, and when I lowered my gaze I saw her battered Wellingtons. The rubber had cracked with age, but they were recognizably the same boots worn by the tall red-haired figure in Thanatrope.
“Who are you?” She raised the shotgun and pressed the barrel’s cold mouth to my cheek, just below where she’d struck me. Pain flared through my skull. “Tell me. No one here will think twice about an old woman killing an intruder.”
“Cassandra Neary. A photographer—” I gasped as she ground the gun’s barrel against my cheekbone. “Christ! I’m telling you the truth—that’s how I know about the Steenbeck. And your movie—I just wanted to see how you did it.”
Regarding me coldly, she lowered the shotgun, and I wiped the blood from my face.
“It’s even better than I remembered it.” I knew I sounded desperate. “So much darker and—”
“Do you think I don’t know my own work?” She looked at me with disdain, then stretched out her hand to rest it upon the editing deck. “You knew I did it.”
It wasn’t a question. “Yeah, I did. Not always, but I figured it out.” I nodded in the direction of the Steenbeck. “I just wanted to see for myself, you know? I knew Leith Carlisle wasn’t the real director. But I wanted proof.”
“Leith could barely hold a camera. Once upon a time, when he had someone there to steady his hand, maybe. Nic Roeg was good at that. But on his own, Leith was incapable of shooting a minute’s worth of film worth saving. A useless, witless parasite.” Her milky gaze curdled into pure hatred. “Destroying my family’s home was the least of it. He did unspeakable things. Terrible things. He poisoned everyone he touched. All of them. His blood was poison…”
I recoiled as she leaned closer to me. “His breath was poison. Like the night-blooming heartsease. Do you know what that is? A beautiful trumpet flower that grows on a vine like the morning glory, with roots like invisible hairs that go deep into the soil and send up shoots a mile away. Its blossoms open only on a warm rainy night in spring. It has the most rapturous scent, like jasmine and lime blossom.
“But if you breathe deeply of it, the scent causes nerve paralysis, and within a few hours, death. There’s no treatment and no cure. That’s what Leith was like: a beautiful man, so seductive—you just wanted to inhale him. And when you did…”
Her hand whipped through the air, the thaumatrope trailing it like a comet. “The poison got into your lungs, and you could never expel it. Never.”
“The movie.” I pointed at the blank screen. “You’re editing it, after all these years. How come?”
She hesitated. “There are scenes that don’t belong, and other scenes that do. It should never have been released back then. It was a mistake. It didn’t have the impact it should have.”
“Yeah, but the movie’s online now—you know that, right? People have seen it. Maybe not a lot of people, but some. They—”
“No one should have seen that version. I should have burned it. My technique has improved: I know what I’m doing now. You saw some of it?” I nodded reluctantly. “And what did you think?”
“It made me … queasy.”
A flicker in her eyes, triumph or malice or amusement. Probably all three.
“Queasy?” she said. “You have a strong constitution, Cassandra. Most people can only sit through a minute or two. Sam’s like you—she’s watched it any number of times—but I started her young.”
“What about Adrian? Didn’t he inherit your constitution?”
“Adrian?” Tamsin shook her head, perplexed. “Why would Adrian have my constitution?”
“Because—”
I fell silent. Tamsin stared at me with those opaline eyes, and for a fraction of a second, pity won out over spite.
“You thought Adrian was my son?” she asked softly. “Did he tell you that? You see what I mean—he’s just like his father. Though he has good reasons, Adrian. I’m not surprised he’d lie to you or anyone else. I’m not his mother. Poppy is.”