Sam shook her head. “What kind of camera?”
I rubbed my arms to keep from shivering—not from fear, but awed disbelief. “Camera obscura. Have you ever looked at a total eclipse of the sun?”
“No.”
“That’s good, because it would have blinded you. But you can look at it if you poke a tiny hole in a piece of cardboard and hold it up to the sun. The light goes through the hole and projects an image of the sun onto the ground, or another piece of paper—it could be anything. If the paper’s been treated with some kind of emulsion, you’ll get a permanent image. A photo.”
I gestured at the square opening at the other end of the long chamber. “When the sun’s at the right angle, it comes right through that aperture, and it hits this, here.” I slapped the granite wall beside us. “If you had real hard light—no clouds, the right time of day at the right time of year—you’d have a sort of shadow theater in here.
“And then someone figured out that you could make an emulsion from the glands in those snails. They smeared it over the stone wall, then pressed things on it. Like this shell…”
My finger hovered above the scallop’s silhouette, then the brighter blade of an arrowhead, like an afterimage left by staring into the sun.
“And this little arrowhead. They were small enough that they’d stick to the rock long enough for an exposure. Sunlight interacted with the dye—the colors are gone, but see how the rock is all gray here, sort of blurred? That’s where the dye was. The arrowhead and shell would leave an image on the wall, like a pinhole camera.”
I pointed at the incomplete human profile. “That was the photographer. He stood here at the corner of the frame, only he misjudged the depth of field. So he was cut out of the frame. Probably he pressed his face right against the rock, the way the other stuff was pressed onto it. A kind of contact print. Salt would have been easy to come by this close to the ocean, and if you added salt to it, the emulsion would become permanent. Well, not really permanent.”
I walked to the window and stuck my hand through the gap. It was deep—I couldn’t touch the outer lip. “If this window hadn’t been blocked off by a rockfall, sunlight would have faded those images a long, long time ago. We wouldn’t be able to see them now. So that was a lucky strike.
“Or maybe not so lucky,” I mused, rejoining Sam. “Someone might have blocked off the aperture on purpose, to keep anyone else from finding it. Or someone might have thought it was bad juju and sealed it up.”
“Maybe that was what happened to the skeleton in there!” Sam said, excited. “They buried him because he made this.”
“I’m telling you, kid—whoever built this chamber did not belong to the British Society of Cinematographers. Though they should make him an honorary member.” I cocked a thumb at the entrance to the other chamber. “Our friend in there? He died sometime in the last thirty or forty years. I don’t know when the guy who designed this room died, but it was a hell of a lot longer ago than that.”
“How do you know it’s a guy? It could’ve been a girl. It could’ve been you or me.”
Again my skin prickled. I think that women made them.
I hesitated, then said, “You know, someone else told me almost the same thing, just a few days ago. These were hers, but I think—I know—she would’ve wanted you to have one.”
I pulled out the thaumatropes, drew the rawhide cords over my head, and handed one to Sam. The disc with the faces of two women, one old, one young. She took it silently, as I wound my thaumatrope and held it up in the beam of light. Then I snapped the cord taut and watched as an ancient eye winked at me across the millennia.
“Thaumatrope,” Sam said, and twisted her bit of string. “It’s like the movie Thanatrope. Do you think she knew that, when she named it?”
“Nothing would surprise me.”
The graven eye grew still. I looped the cord back around my neck, tucking the disc beneath my sweater.
Sam pulled her string tight and stared at the carved faces as they blurred into a single image, at once old and young, familiar and inconceivably alien. Like the pictures carved on the disc, she appeared both heartbreakingly young and as withered as Tamsin. I watched as she repeated the process, winding the string again and again, as the light in the chamber diminished to the same periwinkle gray as the whelk shells, and her shadow on the wall behind her faded into nothing.
I felt as I had in the Blackbird in Stepney. Not as though time had stopped, but as if past and present had fused, capturing Sam and me the way a fern is caught in amber. Or the way some unknown artist had captured her own profile on a smooth piece of granite, working her alchemy with salt and stone and snail’s blood so that her image endured, hidden for thousands of years.
And, despite the encroaching darkness, despite the knowledge that someone had tried to kill me, and a near certainty that Quinn was dead—in spite of all that, I felt no sense of damage here. Whatever virulent obsession had claimed Leith and Poppy and Adrian, Mallo and Morven and perhaps Krishna, too, it had missed Sam—so far, anyway. Perhaps she was immune to it; perhaps Tamsin really had glimpsed something otherworldly in her husband’s granddaughter.
Because what were the odds that Sam would stumble upon this chamber, and me, at the precise moment that the setting sun struck the granite wall to reveal its secret? Adrian had said that Poppy didn’t believe in coincidences. I was starting to feel that way, too.
“Cass?” Sam gasped as a shadow moved across the floor toward us. I spun around to see Adrian enter the chamber, flashlight in hand.
“Sam! Are you all right?”
“Go away!” she yelled. Swift as a bat, she darted past her father, into the darkness of the first chamber. Adrian tried fruitlessly to catch her, then stared at me, furious.
“What the hell are you doing here?” He turned to shine his light into the adjoining chamber. “Sam, tell me you’re all right!”
“I’m fine!” she shouted angrily. “Leave us alone, you cunt!”
Adrian spun to grab me. “If you hurt her—”
I kicked him and he doubled over, clutching his shin as I scrambled after Sam. I was almost through the doorway when Adrian grabbed the leather hood of Bruno’s too-big coat. I went crashing to the floor, my flashlight skidding out of my grip.
“Dad, stop!” Sam ran to help me to my feet, and I saw the telltale bit of rawhide dangling safe beneath her T-shirt. “I was just showing her the fogou. How did you even find us?”
“You were the only two things moving across the moor,” Adrian snapped, and limped toward me. “Let go of her.”
“I’m not touching her,” I retorted.
He stared at me, fists clenched. “Like you didn’t touch Tamsin?”
“She held me at gunpoint. Self-defense.” Sam edged closer to me, but I saw a flicker of unease cross her face. “When I left her she was sleeping it off.”
“You might have killed her!”
“Like you might have killed me, doping that bottle of Scotch.”
“Scotch?” Adrian’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“Last night. Sam found me in the attic, out like a light. Someone slipped a roofie in that whiskey. Just like they did to Morven and Mallo’s wine. One hundred fifty milligrams of Midazolam, right? That would just about do it, if you chased it with half a bottle of Scotch.”
Adrian paled. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
I took a deep breath, trying to sound calm. “Adrian, listen to me. All I want is to get the hell out of here. I don’t care about this shit, or anything else that came down. You’re pissed at me, you think I’m—Christ, I don’t know what you think. Just let me walk out of here, okay?”
I gestured at the skeletal remains on the floor. “You and Tamsin can seal this back up, reset the Wayback Machine to Stonehenge, and no one will ever know. I’m not going to the cops. Got it? Five minutes, and you’ll never hear from me again.”
For the first time, Adrian seemed to register there was a skeleton in the chamber. “What … is that?”
I hesitated. “Your father.”
“Leith?”
Sam trained her torch on the floor, as Adrian sank to his knees beside the skull. “My god,” he said. “She really did it. The crazy bitch.”
Sam wisely chose to keep her mouth shut. I edged closer to the chamber’s crescent-shaped entry, but froze when Adrian lifted his head. His tormented gaze fixed on me.
He whispered, “I never knew—how could I have known? Were there others?” I nodded. “How many?”
“I’m not sure. But those corpses in the movie—they weren’t special effects.”
Adrian stumbled to his feet and looked at me imploringly.
“How did it all get so fucked up?” he asked in a child’s voice. “When we were little … they all told us there was magic. There weren’t any rules, because we were all going to make magic here.”
All I could do was shake my head and say, “You were misinformed.”
From the passage came the sound of footsteps. An instant later, Krishna crouched in the low entryway. Sam shone the torch at her, and Krishna shielded her face.
“The fuck’s that?” she demanded, then crawled through with alarming speed, her arms and legs throwing spidery shadows across the walls. When she straightened, I saw that she held a pistol, the kind of pretty little gat Brigid O’Shaughnessy might brandish when things stopped going her way.
I stared at her, incredulous. “Tell me that’s not another damned gun.”
“Oh, fuck off.” Krishna pushed away the folds of her hoodie. As she did, something fell from her pocket, striking the floor with a soft clink. Sam ran to grab it, and she stared at it wonderingly before I took it from her hand: a tiny bronze figurine of a mouse blowing a horn. I turned from Krishna to Adrian.
“Fucking A,” I said. “It wasn’t you. It was her. And you knew—you were protecting her.”
I might have been talking to the stones: Adrian’s gaze never wavered from his daughter.
“Krish. Put it down. Everything will be all right. We’ll work it out—”
“Nothing will be all right, ever!” She looked at me, the pistol trembling in her hand. “Don’t make me. Cass, please don’t make me.”
Adrian pushed me aside. “Krish, no one’s making you do anything, all right? Just set that down.”
She whirled to face him, her face a mask of loathing. “You fucking bastard. She was your mother. How could you? How could you?”
She leveled the gun at Adrian’s face. Sam screamed. Krishna’s attention broke for a fraction of a second, long enough for me to lunge at her, lock my hand around her wrist, and twist the gun from her hand.
Krishna started sobbing as I backed toward the doorway. I trained the pistol on Adrian.
“You knew it was Krishna,” I said. “Back in Mallo’s flat when I said the mouse was missing—that’s why you wanted to get her out of London. That’s why the Midazolam was in your bag. You knew she killed them.” I looked at Krishna. “Why?”
“Because you all lied to me!” Her voice rose to a shriek and Sam cringed, frightened. “Morven was so fucking wasted after her birthday, she told me then. I’d asked her for years, who was my real mum, and she finally told me. But she wouldn’t say about my dad. Just Poppy. I didn’t believe her—she gave me Poppy’s address and said, ‘See for yourself.’”
“But why the hell would you kill Poppy?” I asked, bewildered.
“She asked me to.” Krishna’s voice grew pleading. “She told me who my real father was—that’s why she couldn’t bear to keep the baby. She said she was so sorry and sang me that song about the golden city and asked, would I take her there? She said she’d been waiting for me, she knew I’d come and now it was time. It was her kit, her spike and all the rest.”
“She wouldn’t!” cried Adrian. “She’d never do that…”
“But she did.” Krishna’s tone held a twisted pride. “She said it was a sign that I knocked on her door. She said there are no coincidences. She’d saved a hit she’d gotten from the NHS in her freezer. I made a mess of it.” Her voice broke. “I’ve never done it before to someone else.”
I whistled softly. “Mallo and Morven?”
“Because I fucking hated them. She was the one who got me fixed up with smack ’cause she didn’t want to do it alone. She said she’d help me with my singing, help me get gigs. She never did shite. I hate her. If I could kill her again, I would.”
“But why me?”
“Because you were with him.” She pointed at her father. “And you’re a liar, just like all of them.”
I cocked a thumb at Adrian. “Did he ever mess with you?”
“If he had, he’d be fucking dead, too.” Krishna gave a low wail and sank to the floor. “I wish I was.”
I watched her impassively. I didn’t feel revulsion or anger: only an echo of the grief and despair that had swept me when I took my leave of Poppy back in Stepney.
“Get up,” I said at last. I prodded Adrian with the pistol. “Help her. She’s your daughter.”
Throughout all this, Sam had stared at her father in shock that now gave way to fury. She took a swing at him, and I grabbed her arm.
“Sam, you’re coming with me,” I said.
Adrian looked up, horrified, from beside Krishna. “No! Sam’s not done anything—”
“I’m not going to hurt her. But I need your Land Rover, and I need you to not call the cops. Once I’m out of here, she’s yours.”
Sam shook her head. “I don’t want to be theirs! I want to go with you!”
Ignoring her, I gestured at Adrian and Krishna. “Go. We’ll be right behind you. Sam, get my flashlight.”
She did, returning to my side as Krishna and Adrian ducked through the narrow opening and into the outer passage. Sam went next, and me last of all.
Halfway through the tunnel I paused and gazed back.
The entrance to Leith Carlisle’s resting place had been swallowed by the darkness, and with it the hidden chamber that Sam had stumbled upon, millennia after some unknown artist had left her—or his—mark upon it.
None of us wants to be forgotten. I’ve always known that, better than most people.
But maybe even more than that, none of us wants to forget. For an instant I shut my eyes, saw again those fragile images glowing in a shaft of late-winter light. I saw Quinn walking down a long corridor, his black-clad form gradually diminishing until he was lost in shadow. Finally I turned and followed the others out of the passage.