Muybridge stood before the oval mirror, combing his beard. Now back in America, he had lost weight again, and the furrows under the white strands looked dark grey, deep rills and valleys in a late, gaunt sliver of moon. He wore his finest shirt, one he had bought in Jermyn Street, at London’s most renowned tailor, the consort’s own shirtmaker. There was a flicker in the peeling glass, tarnished silver curling away from the polished transparency, the shadow of a woman passing. He ignored the unimportant flicker of the past and looked closely at himself, catching the roaming eyes for a moment and holding them out of focus, not wanting to see into their meaning. The glass had warped since the time of his wife, become thin since her fatness had moved away. Perfumed colour and greasy powder no longer wallowed in its gilt frame; now it was only the empty grey of his eyes reflected in its shallows, sphinctered tight against search or understanding.
The doorbell rang: His carriage had arrived. He donned his surtout coat, picked up his cane and his new formal day hat, and hurried for the door, his old bones creaking against the speed. He was on his way to meet the grand dame, and he must not be late.
The carriage rattled as he held tightly to his stick, jittering with excitement and nerves; he had always wanted to meet her. She had sent the request through the Stanfords, inviting him to take tea with her on this bright March day. He was fascinated by her diminutive beauty and gigantic wealth, having seen the former many years before, across a ballroom as he passed through the garden. She was not a classic beauty, like one of the willowy Long Island sirens who fluttered and coiled in the gleaming white of society’s grandest parties. Her attractiveness came from within and radiated her every movement with grace and charisma; not a polished diamond, but an energetic nugget of strength and robust dignity. Since then, she had been overwhelmed with money and grief. The wasting death of her only daughter and untimely demise of her husband left only her loneliness to break her, and her vast inheritance to haunt every hope of an afterlife.
Sarah was the only benefactor of the fortune earned by the enormous success of the Winchester repeating rifle, the gun that “won the West.” It was a greatly evolved version of the clumsier Henri rifle, and a revolutionary design: A tubular magazine sat under the barrel and fed twelve rounds into the breech by means of an underlever, which also acted as a trigger guard. The lever-action carbine could be rapidly fired from horseback. The firepower and speed of delivery made it a weapon superior to all that had gone before it.
It tidied away the few remaining tribes who refused to yield to the white invasion. The gun, and its heavier-calibre brothers, cleared the plains of the buffalo and every other creature with a price on its tail or horn. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Northern army bought the gun in vast quantities, and money gushed and splashed into the Winchester coffers. It shot one bullet per second and possessed a trajectory that wiped out half a generation of neighbours and friends.
Sarah’s tears never really ended. After the first five years, they simply turned inwards, so that her eyes would well and weep inside her lids, hollowing the flesh beneath the fine skin of her cheeks and finding her throat, so that she might swallow down the wet pictures of little Annie wasting at her breast. The child had nothing except ferocious hunger and pain; between its skeleton and its skin, no flesh or fat grew.
Almost fifteen years later, she would swallow her pain with the rotted lungs of her young husband as disease ate him away. He, like his screaming daughter, shrivelled in her arms. It was said that she balanced precariously on the edge of madness at the beginning of the 1880s, but some kind of resilience kept her from stepping over its line. She wasn’t sure where it came from: It certainly wasn’t rooted in the mountain of money that grew behind her grief, for she had no interest in that; there was nothing it could buy, and so it stockpiled, a burgeoning model of her ballooning anguish. There had to be a reason why so much horror had quenched so much joy; when she eventually found it, it was appallingly obvious.
He had come to explain. With his pale smile and his gentle hands, she had no doubt that it was her husband being described, standing at her side, beyond the reach of her untrained eye. He was here to explain their evolution and lay her personal guilt to rest: None of this was her fault.
The medium held a handkerchief to her face as she spoke his words for him, consoling him and encouraging him to speak more clearly. He said, through her, that those who had been slain by the terrible weapon were vengeful and returning, that they followed the dollar line back to those responsible, and that she, by default, was the only one left. They had taken William and Annie (who were happily together on the spirit side), but their anger was not extinguished.
Salvation was possible, and it had a physical form. Her husband told her to build a house, a mansion, for herself and the dead to cohabit; one large enough to accommodate every lost soul, before they came homelessly scratching at her existence. She must never stop work on this ambition, he warned. The house must continuously grow; if its expansion ceased, she would die, and they might never meet again on the other side.
Sarah left the séance that day with hope and a purpose; after years of pain, she finally had something worthwhile to channel her money and energies into. She had been given a first deposit on a new life, a pilgrimage that would divert Leland Stanford’s train lines to the building site of her new home in the West, and she thanked the medium for guiding her in the right direction. She employed an army of workmen day and night to construct a monstrous labyrinth of wood to hide herself in. Llanda Villa multiplied around her, its blind corridors and infatuation with the number thirteen snaking in all directions, plumbing the furious demons and mortally wounded ghosts into blocked passages, insane turrets, and flights of stairs that ascended, essentially, to absolutely nowhere—but always away from the nucleus of her grief.
Muybridge had heard it all, but his memory was selective and grievously affected by his need. Sarah Winchester was a woman of influence and beauty; he admired her purity. She had never remarried and was fiercely loyal to the memory of her deceased family. She would understand him—he was sure of it. She must have heard about the incident with Larkyns. He was certain that she would appreciate his justification and see him as a chivalrous gentleman as well as, he hoped, a significant artist.
The carriage stopped before the garden entrance of the growing house. He stepped down and walked up the path, passing by the fountain and up to the porch. The pillared entrance was cool and elegant, a mechanical glade of craftsmanship. The door opened and a hushed man took him inside.
The house was immaculate and squeakingly new. It smelt of polish and sawdust, both scents sharpened by subtle undertones of varnish. The hand-fitted parquet flooring was perfect and infinite; he seemed to follow the man forever, unable to resist occasionally dropping back for a closer examination of each detail and angle. They entered a hall whose possessions outnumbered those of all the other rooms put together. In the centre stood a piano that dominated the furniture and pictures. These were obviously the occupied parts of the house. The other rooms were token, superfluous, but these rooms had life. He could feel her presence in the next room.
The hushed man left him standing and went ahead, closing the door behind him. His anxiety twitched his hat and cane and he longed to lay them down but dared not risk causing offence. He fretted and looked around the room, said belongings tapping against his leg. Murmured voices could be heard, and then the door opened and his host stepped forward, holding her hand out in greeting.
“Mr. Muybridge, thank you for coming.”
He was shocked by her appearance. The lady of his historical glimpses was utterly changed. She had thickened, become solid, not with fat or ease, but as if the gravitation of the world around her had changed. She had become compressed by her circumstances, by the weight of the house. Her face was lined and hollowed, yet each line was somehow attached to the plumpness of her skin; she was a contradiction of form, almost as if the contours of her expression had been painted over the wrong surface. The layers of makeup, stencilled over her once flawless complexion, gave her face a strange hint of varnish. Only her teeth remained perfect, though her eyes had retained a glimmer of something constant and disconcerting. In the distance, hammering could be heard, but he tried to ignore it. He bowed slightly and gave her his hand.
“Thank you, Mrs. Winchester,” he said, a boyish blush blooming under his pale skin. “I was delighted to receive your invitation.” She smiled graciously and led him through to the smaller sitting room, where tea was already laid out on a small dining table. They sat and spoke politely of weather and acquaintances. After twenty minutes of stiflingly obligatory formalities, the conversation at last began to move towards the purpose of her invitation.
“The Stanfords have been introducing me to your work, Mr. Muybridge. I must say, I am quite impressed.”
“Thank you, ma’am. May I ask which photographs you have seen so far?” he asked.
“Oh, pictures of mountains, a volcanic place, and the primitives dancing in a circle.”
“Ah, the Ghost Dance,” he said with glee. “I am the only person ever to have photographed it.”
“The Ghost Dance?” she said, her attention caught in exactly the way he had hoped. “What is that?”
“It was a belief held by many native tribes that they could summon their dead to help them stand against the settlers who were moving west. They imagined an uprising and a joining of clans, dead and alive, to hold what they regarded as their sacred lands.”
Sarah shifted forward slightly in her hard-backed chair. “When exactly did these dances occur?” she asked.
He gave her the dates of his prints and she fell silent, her mind quickly calculating their significance. A staccato quietness filled the room and she looked at the floor, the corner of her mouth twitching softly, as if something was working in her throat. It seemed wise to change the landscape and the subject.
“My other experimental work is progressing excellently,” he interjected. “I have captured the movement of many animals in my cameras, even humans!” His attempt to raise the energies of his host met with a heavy silence.
She raised her forlorn eyes to look into his, and he had to look away.
“I am inventing new cameras,” he continued awkwardly, “with faster shutters. Triggers that work repeatedly to grab an image. A bit like your wonderful rifle, ma’am, which I once used in Arizona; a superb mechanism. I aim to develop something similar in my cameras, that same speed and accuracy, dividing time…” Her expression silenced him.
She held one hand to the nape of her neck and blinked, clearing her throat as her voice prepared to be used.
“Can you…” She paused again, seeming unsure of how to phrase her query. “Have you ever…photographed the dead?” she asked.
“I’m not sure I understand, ma’am,” he said carefully.
“I am told that certain European photographers are able to capture images of those who have passed over to the spirit world,” she stated sternly, burying a wave of emotion beneath her severe exterior. “I am looking for such an artist. According to the Stanfords, you are the best there is. If anyone might be capable of catching such likenesses, I am told it would be you.”
Muybridge was appalled, but he stiffened himself towards an answer.
“I have never made such pictures,” he replied, trying not to betray his inner wave of disgust.
“Would you be willing to try?” she asked, hope piercing her eyes and his internal complexes. He paused before answering, enthusiasm eluding his disenchanted artistic streak.
“For you, Mrs. Winchester, I will try.”
It was with a heavy heart that he carried his cameras, tripods, and other equipment through the polished tunnels of the expanding house two days later. The séances were held in a room designed for the purpose, a circular table at its centre and small, high windows at its edges, which opened onto the interior of the house. There was no direct light; the room was located at the core of the twisted architecture, a long way in every direction from an external wall or the scent of the outside. Not that it mattered: His photographs would all be taken in the dark.
He had seen the “spirit” images she had spoken of. All were conspicuous fakes: double exposures and ridiculous montages, executed without any subtlety or skill. His opinion of Sarah Winchester had collapsed in that moment. How could anybody be taken in by such manipulated lies? It reeked of the worst excesses of affluent, puerile fiction, dressed up as truth. But the fact remained that he needed her patronage, her circle of friends, her wealth. And, with that in mind, one could forgive the beliefs and sad fantasies of a grief-ridden old woman who never left her home. Perhaps when she understood the qualities of his work and the accuracy of his scientific objectiveness, her fanciful commission might lead to more serious work offers.
He positioned his cameras in the far corner of the room and set his face in the great seriousness of an Old Testament patriarch: It was his best posture.
Sarah brought three other people into the room—all devout spiritualists, he guessed. Today’s medium was to be Madam Grezach, a striking woman of Polish origin. She had a smouldering attractiveness that hid beneath a face that melted uncontrollably between the ages of eight and sixty-five. She sat at the table, flanked by her sitters. Elder Thomas sat close to Sarah, to the left of the medium. On her right sat a large, horse-faced woman, whose name Muybridge instantly forgot.
A prayer was said. Soon after its finish, Madam Grezach started to sway and softly moan, her eyes rolling beneath their closed lids. It could all be clearly seen by the light of the dim lamp that hung above. Unlike many larger circles, they did not hold hands, but placed their palms down on the table, fingers evenly splayed. Muybridge was vividly reminded of a photograph he had never stopped to take: Mexico; a row of freshly caught deep-sea spider crabs, laid out to dry in the bleaching sun, their salmon-pink shells vacuous and surrendered on the sand. He shook the thought and its attendant smile out of his head without moving a muscle. Madam Grezach groaned again, in a deeper, more masculine tone. She said her spirit guide was called Wang Chi, that he was here now, to help them and guide those who had passed over to the table.
Muybridge took his first picture on a wide-open lens and silently wondered why any butler would help in this way. Outside, on the streets, the Chinese were little more than slave labour, treated like dogs, their ancient culture spat on. Sixty miles from here, he had witnessed a “chink hunt”; four of the best local pistoleros had placed wagers to see how many Chinese they could shoot from horseback. Their targets were the immigrant labourers, recently dismissed after building a stretch of the new railway line. The distressed men had fled in panic, dropping their few possessions to gain more speed. Sixteen fell that day, under a laughing hail of bullets. Nine died. One of the sportsmen was using a Winchester ’73. It was unclear who had won the wager, but Wang Chi had gained either great benevolence or vast ignorance on the other side, for he was apparently bringing Sarah’s lost child to the table.
The medium’s voice tightened into falsetto and Muybridge took his second picture, this time in a blaze of flash powder. All—including the spirits—had been warned about the potential intrusion, so that most closed their eyes when he said “Now!” and fired the light.
Afterblurs danced in their heads and added to the sense of aura, the smell of nitrate and magnesium stinging the closed air of the wooden chamber. Amid choked sobs and watery sighs, a child expressed her innocent love for her mother.
Muybridge was preparing to take his third picture when the medium announced that another presence had joined them. As he squeezed the bulb to slice out another long exposure, something moved in the corner of his vision. He jolted to see it, but there was nothing there. The sitters seemed oblivious to his change of attention.
“Who are you?” asked Madam Grezach, in long, drawn-out, saggy words.
She brought her hand to her face and made a few passes over her eyes.
“Someone is here for you!” she said in operatic surprise. “For you, Mr. Muggeridge, for you!”
He flinched to hear his real name being spoken, especially in front of the Winchester heiress. He moved to correct Madam Grezach when she spoke again.
“A poor woman is here. She asks why you made the gins which hurt her so terribly?”
The medium’s voice was changing again, and now a slippery Cockney accent emanated from the same mouth, where the child and the butler had so recently been.
“Why did the sun’s shadow cut me so?” it wailed. “The face that finished me was white, all white and looking in at the sides of me; inside me.”
The other sitters were agitated by the change of direction; their lashes twitched with desire, longing to examine his expression. Muybridge fumbled with the plates and pretended not to hear the tone of these questions and comments. Even though he knew it was all nonsense, he still felt the dread of this charade raking up his troubled past. He half expected the ghost of his idiot wife to waltz into the room and tell stories of his cruelty and lack of manhood, to gabble his secrets aloud from the yapping mouth of this charlatan Pole.
“The lights crawled inside; I had to find the shadows and get ’em out!”
He fired another magnesium flash to banish the vulgar words from their company. White smoke flared from his camera and the voice disappeared. The medium sank into heavy groans and placed one hand drunkenly on her head, dislodging one of the tortoiseshell combs that kept a curly torrent of unruly auburn hair in place. It spilled onto the table unreasonably, covering her face and the groans beneath, giving the now slumped figure a grotesque, simian quality. Just for a moment, he heard a distant flock of birds sing from her dripping and distorted mouth.
Sarah said something to Elder Thomas, who stood up and shuffled to the door. Moments later, the lamp glowed brightly and the room’s shadows receded to other parts of the house. The sitters stood up and fussed around Madam Grezach to regain her posture and her hair. Muybridge met the eyes of Elder Thomas, communicating with the slightest of expressions his disdain of this frantic, hysterical woman and the whole façade of music hall nonsense. He expected to see his subtle glance of cynicism mirrored in the elder, to gain a nod of support and agreement. Instead, he saw the opposite: total belief in the procedures and disapproval of his own expression. Worse still, he saw blame and distrust glinted against him. The elder helped the old woman and the medium leave the room, turning his stiff back on the upstart who had contaminated their tabernacle with his past lives and his present bewilderment of irritant equipment.
When all had left, Muybridge stood adrift in the empty room, unable to make sense out of all that had occurred. There was no meaning in any of it, and he felt foolish and mistaken. God knew what he would find on his glass negative. He suspected there would be nothing but blurs and shadows and he would be proved right.
In the red cave of his private darkroom, blood-warm fluids made his hands puffy and succulent. He peered into the night trays and saw patches of light rise against the settling blacks. He moved them to a fixing tray and rocked them to and fro, simmering them into permanence.
He turned on the light to view the first picture. The image showed the whole group leaning towards the medium, whose out-of-focus head and body had been moving during the exposures. Her edges were undefined in relation to the sharp, delineated forms of the others in the weird room, but it was, in all other respects, a perfectly ordinary image.
The second picture was quite different. All the sitters had been caught in the flash powder like victims in a blast. All showed agitation; the old woman and the horse-faced one stared directly at the camera, responding to his call of “Now!” Their eyes were blurred on the inside, and their whites gave off a disturbed incandescence as their faces gawped. Elder Thomas was caught staring stiffly away, looking straight at the medium. Madam Grezach herself was stock-still and in focus. She had been speaking at the time and her expression was held in the vise of a twisted smile. He shivered as he recalled her hocus-pocus about the dead child, suddenly noticing a difference in her face, a change of shape, as if a smaller face was being born through it, not violently, but with a rippled plumping. He was horrified by the notion but could not deny the effect the flash had caught.
He dragged his eyes to the third print, another open shutter that held a room of blurs. He couldn’t recall any accidental movement, but he must have juddered the tripod or rattled the lens. The sitters and the table were smooth and softened, as if diluted and coming apart at their edges. He laid the print to one side, relief creeping in to cover his initial misgivings.
Then he looked at the last image. The light had not startled the party this time, but they had been upset by something else; he recalled the pitiful voice of the London street woman. They stared at the medium in distaste, the flash catching the repugnance in their postures and on their exposed faces. Madam Grezach looked straight through him, and her expression made his blood run cold: It was no longer life and theatre that illuminated the medium’s face; her features and nuances of gesture had been stolen and replaced with facsimiles from another time. The magnesium burn had dredged out a decoy of rank terror, which in turn aimed its shivering wet sinews and pitiless hunger towards him.
He stepped back from the table of rectangular dishes in dismay. Had he really made a genuine psychic photograph? Had he achieved what others had only faked? With shaking hands, he lifted the wet papers out of the fluids and pinned them up to dry. They had already changed. The significant, unique transformations in the medium’s face had diminished; now it was only conjecture, a matter of interpretation and not fact. The images of Madam Grezach had become normal, blurred pictures of a normal, blurred woman. What had he seen before? Was he imagining things?
He collected the negatives and set them on a glass table with a light beneath them. Their reversed faces seemed skeletal and goatlike, but without any obvious signs of distortion. He became more perplexed: He had obviously been wrongly influenced by a desire to achieve the images that Sarah Winchester had wanted; her perception must have clouded his defined eye for a brief moment. Indeed, that influence was probably the very heart of the whole meaningless business. The next day loomed in his confused mind; the presentation of the prints worried him. There was nothing to show, and his anxiety at that knowledge forced him to see the inconsistencies in the chemical waters, as if the solutions he sought lay at the bottom of a glass or in the centre of a spinning mirror. He switched off the lights and turned his back on the darkened room, making his way to bed with a desperate sense of having been undervalued again and, in some inexplicable way, tricked.
He slept badly, in a dream of being continuously awake. The pillows aggravated his rest; the sheets clung or slipped; his bladder was the only fact that ruled and divided the short night.
He rose far too early and snatched the dried prints from their stringy line, bustling them into an envelope and a leather satchel. He had not even fully dressed yet, and he roamed about with his lower half naked and ultimately flaccid. By nine o’clock, he was exhausted but did not dare sleep. The outside world was working, and it was time he joined it.
He washed and dressed for his meeting with the Winchester woman, preening disconsolately before his looking glass: If he must present his failure, at least he would do so with some dignity. It had been her idea, he mused in the endless carriage ride, to make these pictures in the first place; he had tried to explain to her from the beginning that it was not his usual subject. By the time he arrived, he had an entire speech prepared, about the true nature of photography and its urgent importance as a scientific instrument. He did not want to insult the old woman or her puerile beliefs; it might still be possible to get her to fund a real project, one worthy of his talents and skills.
He was ushered through the gloomy polished rooms, which seeped resin from all the fresh wood but refused to shine, and into another reception room, where she waited for him. To his horror, she was not alone: Elder Thomas stood by her side, his lank, dark seriousness absorbing the little brightness the room possessed. He looked at Muybridge with a polite indifference, which the photographer suspected covered his seething contempt. Sarah’s eyes drifted from his nervous face to the satchel in his nervous hands.
“Thank you for being so prompt, Mr. Muybridge,” she said, generously ignoring the fact that he was forty minutes early. “I do hope your journey over here was not too tiresome.”
“It is always a pleasure to call on you, ma’am; the distance is of no importance,” he said.
“As you can see, Elder Thomas is joining us today; he is as excited as I to see what you have achieved.”
This time, everybody present looked at the satchel. It was time for the speech.
“Photography is seen by some to be an art and by others to be a science,” he began. “I believe its future lies somewhere in between. With new cameras and developing processes, it will become possible to catch many of the wonders of nature and hold them for examination forever.”
“Excellent,” she interrupted. “I am so pleased to see that we are of such similar minds on the subject, that we can envisage the wonders of both worlds being brought together so.” She flushed with an infant joy and he wilted in the blindness of it. “Please, may we now see the pictures you made?”
She extended her hand towards him. He had no choice and no more words, so he opened his satchel and brought out the envelope. Elder Thomas retrieved it from him and brought it swiftly to her side. She opened it and fetched the prints out, laying the images in her lap.
“It’s not always possible…he began to mutter, but he was halted by the look on her face.
She turned the print over to see the next, and her expression deepened.
The elder peered over her shoulder, his countenance beginning to reflect the same intensity.
“The third print was more difficult to expose,” said Muybridge to deaf ears.
As she looked from image to image, he was lost. He had no idea what she thought. It looked as though her face was shifting through amazement and shock, but certainly not into the disappointment he had expected. Her eyes were moist, and small sighs fluttered under her moving lips. Could this be rage? he wondered. She set the prints down in her lap and lifted her head.
“Mr. Muybridge, I had no idea,” she gently said. “I had hoped something might be possible, but this! I thought at first you seemed a little reticent, a little surprised by my request. Yet these!” she said, touching the prints and leaving both hands folded over them. “These are beyond my wildest hopes. You are obviously a man of significant talents.”
Emotion swept over her again, and the elder touched her sleeve. She rose and turned to leave the room, the prints pressed hard against her bosom. Muybridge rose with her, watching as she tottered slightly, robustly supported by the anxious elder. At the door, she turned to look at Muybridge once more, to thank him silently before leaving him alone in the cavernous space of her departure.
He stood awkwardly in the odd room at the centre of the winding, empty mansion, in a state of total bewilderment, awash with flows of contradiction. He glowed at her words but turned to ash at their meaning. There was nothing there, just a few blurred, underexposed fools sitting at a table. Could she have seen what he did before? Had she shared in the same dim delusion, or had she seen more?
He closed his empty satchel and made his way out to the hallway; he was met by the butler, who conducted him to the street. The door shut firmly behind him. A breeze had picked up and rattled the new buds on the trees. Spring was early, and the old energy of the land flowed back into the newly made streets. The green scent of optimism roamed abroad, and he stood on the porch, seeing it with a magnificent clarity. In his heart, another autumn was stirring.