The stairs to Hudson’s basement were a steep descent into a mouth of shadow. Morgan clutched the straps of the mesh bag so tightly her knuckles might have split through her chapped skin.
Hudson reached across her to flip the light switch. At the bottom of the stairs, a lone bulb glowed. She followed him down to a porous concrete floor, past a boxy washer and dryer set, above which hung a clothesline with black socks and undershirts. The walls were old stone with roots poking between. He hadn’t exaggerated when he said his basement was fit for horror films. To her left was a shelf system with jarred pickles, beets, and salsa. Interesting. He didn’t seem the canning type.
At the back of the labyrinthine room, on the opposite end of a storage area housing plastic totes and Christmas decorations, was a sink. Perfect.
Despite still wearing her jacket and hat, Morgan shivered. The dampness of the basement penetrated her layers and took up residence in her bones.
Upstairs, when she’d taken the film canister out of her purse, Hudson had looked sucker-punched. His eyes widened as they read the initials scrawled in black marker. “M.R.,” he said. “Who is M.R.?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Where did you find this?” he asked, and she told him about her scanning project for Eleanor.
“Do you have everything you need?” Hudson asked now, when Morgan set the bag on the counter by the sink. She took out the chemicals, placing them alongside the tape he’d snagged from a drawer upstairs, and asked him for three painter’s trays.
“Three?”
“Yeah.” She ran through the process again in her mind. They would need one tray each for the developer, stop bath, and fixer. None of it meant anything, of course, if the film inside was corroded.
Hudson went to find three clean painter’s trays. Even if they weren’t clean, though, Morgan thought, they would do. She wasn’t aiming for any award-winning prints here, especially with this thing. From her backpack, she removed a crude homemade enlarger. A Frankensteined Lucky Charms box, the contraption was two rectangular pieces that fit together. A square window covered with tracing paper was cut in the end of one, a circle in the other.
Hudson returned with the trays still in the packaging. He tore the plastic off and set the accompanying rollers and brushes on the washer for the time being. Next, Morgan sent him off to fetch a cardboard box to complete her enlarging station, and an extension cord. “What else?” he asked once he procured them.
“Your glasses.”
“My what?”
She paused, midway through extracting a package of photo paper from her backpack, staring at him and his taped-together glasses. “You’re farsighted, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Morgan knew the searching expression he wore now; he was wondering if he’d ever told her that detail. But she could tell by the way his lenses magnified his eyes. “Well, I’m nearsighted. We need a convex lens, i.e., yours, to act as a magnifying glass.”
“For what?”
She set the photo paper down and held up the cereal box enlarger. Her finger tapped at the circular opening. “Ideally, when we shine a light through this contraption, it will travel through the negative and be magnified and sharpened by your lens on the other side, which can then be exposed on the paper.”
Hudson frowned. “Have you done this before?”
“I took a film class in high school, once. But we didn’t do it like this, no.”
“Then how—”
“YouTube. Don’t worry, I don’t need them right this second. We have to process the film first.”
“How long will that take?”
Morgan shrugged. “Five minutes? You got somewhere you need to be?”
Hudson shook his head. “I’m off today. Where’d you get all these chemicals?”
“I know a guy.” She tried not to let her hand shake as she mixed the components for the developer and poured it into the little black tank. Lastly, she pulled the lava lamp from her bag of tricks. It was red and would work as a safe light for when the film was ready to be developed into prints. Unwinding the cord from its aluminum base, she plugged it into the female end of the extension cord and handed the male end to her male counterpart. He should know what to do with it.
“You know a lava lamp guy, too?”
Morgan smiled. “This is from my own private collection. It’s vintage, so don’t break it.”
Hudson disappeared over by the washer for a moment as he connected the cord to an outlet.
They stood back, surveyed their workspace. The little orange canister waited front and center, before an ensemble of painter’s trays, chemicals, scissors, and the enlarging contraption. The trays were empty; they would mix the chemicals later, after the negatives had developed and dried. “I think we’re ready,” said Morgan.
“Ready for what, exactly?”
Morgan reached above her head and tugged on the short, beaded chain. “Lights out.”
It was so dark she couldn’t see her hands in front of her, and deathly quiet. All Morgan heard was the sound of Pip’s nails clacking on the hardwood floor above and Hudson’s shallow breathing next to her. She should be more nervous, in the dark and underground with a man she barely knew. But she did know him, kind of. She knew he was a good cop. That he volunteered at animal shelters. That he worked on cases to rescue kids like her. And perhaps most important of all, while he had a ticket to The Ruins, there was no mark on his neck.
She’d made a mental map of where everything was. Her fingertips closed around the film canister and, using the scissors like a wrench, she twisted off the top. The film was so cool it felt wet as it spilled from its prison.
Blindly, she found the plastic reel and fit the film into its grooves.
“What’s that clicking noise?” Hudson asked.
His voice was disembodied. Morgan imagined they’d fallen into another dimension, one where people weren’t people; they were just thoughts and souls in a world so deep, light couldn’t get through. The concept was oddly comforting. If she was bodiless, no one could hurt her. And she didn’t have to hurt them in return. “I’m winding the film on the reel so I can put it in the developing tank.”
“You need help?”
“It’s kind of a one-person job.”
“I see.” He sighed and she could feel his breath against her cheek. She startled; she didn’t realize they were so close. He probably didn’t, either. “So, what else was in Mrs. Reynolds’s collection?” he asked. His voice was low, almost a whisper. “Besides the film canister. Were there any other photographs of interest?”
“Pictures of them at the cabin, mostly. Old pictures. Some of Clive and his car.”
Funny how she felt him nod, felt the almost imperceptible movement in the air. “Cabin? They don’t seem the type to rough it in the great outdoors.”
Morgan shrugged, an automatic response. He couldn’t see her. She agreed with him, though; she suspected the Reynoldses’ cabin was more like a mansion with some rustic features. “It’s in some place called Loomis, three or four hours north of here,” she said, recounting what information Bennett had shared with her since the invitation.
“Are the dates printed on them by chance?”
She liked the sound of his voice, she realized. It held a quiet calm, not like one before a storm but the steady, consistent calm of a rainy afternoon. He must be good with talking to child victims, she thought. Not like the abrasive detectives who’d spoken to her during the days after being rescued from the house on Winslow Street. If Hudson had asked her for her name and to tell him what happened to her in that room, she felt sure she would have told him every horrifying detail. Instead, she’d been too scared. Scared the detectives wouldn’t believe her. So she kept it inside, until the monster she’d been unintentionally nurturing reared its ugly head in The Ruins.
Morgan turned the secured container upside down again. “Some,” she said finally, remembering the photo of Clive and Bennett catching fish in front of the pond. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something magnetic about that picture, that place with the beached canoe and the woodshed in the background, an ax leaning against its wall.
Leaving the top secured, she poured the tank into the sink. She felt for the faucet, then, and turned it on, letting the water fill the tank through the aperture in the lid, rinsing the film clean. She repeated the ritual five more times.
Cold water droplets stung her hands as Morgan unscrewed the cap and pulled out the reel. She unraveled the film and wandered to the area of the clothesline. End to end, she clipped the film to the cloth rope. “Moment of truth,” she said, and flipped on the lava lamp. Their immediate area was bathed in a stygian glow. The rest of the basement remained inked in shadow.
Dread twisted Morgan’s stomach into knots. She was afraid to look, to see a strip that had been devoured by time. But she crept closer, and instead, saw blank frame after blank frame after blank frame. Fuck. The film hadn’t even been shot.
Her heart thrummed so hard it echoed in her head. This was it, a story not erased but unwritten.
Beside her, Hudson gasped. “Oh my God.” He went toward one end of the strip and positioned it toward the light. Morgan followed. She clutched his forearm like a child tiptoeing to see out an overlook, and there they were. Ghosts. That’s what they looked like as her brain worked to process the negative’s inverted highlights and shadows. Evergreens were white, their tops spearing an expanse of mercurial sky. A lake was a great blank swath that swallowed an entire frame. Then there was a house—a large, A-frame cabin—perched on a bluff. A woman in a triangle bikini lounging on a lawn chair, a drink and a magazine beside her on a resin table. The invertedness of the negative made her large sunglasses look like headlights. Judging by the clothes and the level of corrosion on some of the photos, the woman could have been the same age as Eleanor, but she wasn’t Eleanor. Her face was too soft, hair too tame and straight. It looked white as snow in the negative, which meant it must have been black.
There was a girl, too. She was young, maybe only three or four. Chin-length hair as silken as the woman’s. The same soft, egg-shaped face. The girl built sandcastles. Ate a snack. Held a phone up to her ear. Morgan squinted at that last one. The girl was in the middle of the woods, it appeared, someone lifting her to the height of a random … pay phone? The whole composition of it looked surreal.
Holding the negatives within inches from her nose, Morgan scrutinized every line, every shadow, every blown-out highlight. It was the eyes she found most unsettling. All white and eerie, it looked as though they’d been intentionally carved out of every photo.
Another character appeared, then, when the woman, the girl, and a man all sat in a canoe. The woman and man faced each other, and the girl sat on the man’s lap. He wore shorts and a T-shirt. Morgan read the strip like a book. In some photos his face was partially obscured by the little girl’s head as he leaned to whisper something in her ear. In others, he cradled her close, his chin resting on her hair, and smiled at the woman seated across from him. Morgan’s breath hitched. She would recognize that golden Hollywood smile anywhere. Clive Reynolds.
And then, looking more closely at the little girl, she saw it. The girl sat next to it during story time, she carried it by its arm as she collected stones from the lakeshore, fished with it by the edge of the dock. Her Bart Simpson doll.
The girl in the negatives was her.