Creeping Jenny

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Nyquist thought at first that his eyes were blinking, the room appearing to him intermittently, but even when he opened his eyes wide and kept them so, the flickering stayed on, lingering, as though the cards of the Mutoscope were still clicking past one by one inside his head, one blank image at a time. Low level after-effects.

He was lying on the floor of the storage room. He groaned and tried to move and felt he was climbing upwards from a dream that held onto him, that wrapped around his wrists and ankles and chest, trying its best to drag him back.

He broke loose. He broke loose by banging his fist down on the bare floorboards, again and again until the skin cracked on his knuckles and the pain woke him completely from the spell, and he sat up and rubbed at his eyes and massaged his head at the temples and dragged his tongue across his teeth feeling the dirt and the dust.

He got to his feet and looked around. The room was dark. Or darker than before. And when he looked out of the window, he saw that dusk had fallen. He’d been out for a long time, far too long. Hours had passed. What the hell had happened? He stared at the Tolly Man machine. It looked entirely innocent, a relic from another age.

He heard a noise from downstairs and he moved to the stairhead, peering down. All was silent. He placed a foot on the top stair. There it was again, a banging sound, louder this time. His skin prickled. Had someone else broken in? Or was it the Dunnes, returning home?

The noise sounded like someone trying to escape a wooden box, a tiny confined space of some kind.

The sound was continuous, coming from the rear of the building, from the kitchen.

The bird was sitting on the kitchen table, casting a wary eye on Nyquist. And when he approached, it took off, flying around the room in a panic, its wings beating against the walls every so often. This was the noise he’d heard while upstairs. It suddenly flew at his head and then away, fluttering madly. For a moment it headed for the open window but then changed its mind, landing on the table once more.

Nyquist stood where he was. There was a small metal tube attached to the creature’s leg. It was a carrier pigeon, like the one that had greeted him on first arriving in the valley. It might even be the same bird, for all he knew; gray mottled with brown, a ring of white around its neck. He reached out a hand and made what he hoped was a pigeon-like call. The bird shook its head and hopped away, leaving tiny claw-prints in the dust of the tabletop.

Nyquist moved gently, slowly. He expected the bird to leap away again, or even to peck at him. But instead it made a surprise action, melting into his hands, surrendering, its warm body perfectly lodged in his curved palms.

They both fell into calm at the same moment, and the bird allowed itself to be picked up. It made a cooing sound. Nyquist pulled the metal tube free of its leg and placed the bird back on the table. Immediately it took off and flew away through the open window.

The tube was easily opened. Inside was a rolled-up piece of paper, which, flattened out, revealed a few lines of neat italic script.

My dear Agnes. I can’t stop thinking about you. Please meet me at the Mocking Gate, tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. I shall wait there for you.

Your loving friend, Leonard.

Nyquist felt cheap, like he’d walked in on a scene of intimate lovemaking. What the Private Eye Saw. This whole affair was turning into a series of puzzles or riddles, but the questions were never asked correctly, which meant that the solutions could never be worked out.

He remembered that he’d left the red light on in the darkroom. He went to turn it off, and saw that the moth was still fluttering about. Its flightpath always brought it back to the lamp and then away, and back: like an obsession. But then it landed on the wall and settled and he had a chance to gaze upon its colors, its wings marked with two ovals of red, the eyes of a demon. The eyes opened and closed as the moth flexed its wings, before it took off once more. But this time it made a mistake, burning itself on the lamp. A wing sizzled, and the poor insect fell into one of the metal trays on the worktop. This was the tray that held the submerged photograph, the black image. Nyquist went over to see if he could help the moth. Something odd was happening: the silver particles in the fluid sparkled as though activated. The moth tried to stay afloat, but its wings were drenched. It was dying. But the process of development had already begun, the chemicals released from slumber. The photographic image lightened, just slightly, and then more so, the black ground fading to patches of gray, and then to areas of almost white. Slowly, slowly, one detail at a time, an image was forming. It showed a road, a house at the end of a row, and a view of open land beyond that, all a little blurred as yet. But Nyquist could not look away. He waited, hoping the image would develop further. For he could only believe that this was another photograph meant for him. He shook the tray gently with his hands, helping the process along.