The Dark Page 8

  Connie’s song was there, too, surprising me, the old schoolyard refrain about meeting yourself. That’s what I’d been doing. Cued by the words, I turned, swung round in my chair. There I was on every side: flickering, faltering selves out in what was left of the vast, fading starwheel.

  They trapped my eye, drew me image by image out into the regress. They were holding me there, fading, darkening. Be easy now, easy. Be with us. Let it come.

  I felt a rush of dread, sudden and utter panic. The chime ball clanged against the floor; my clipboard clattered as I rushed for the switch, fumbled with it, brought up warm yellow light, saved us all.

  Not tonight. No darkness tonight. I couldn’t bear it. It was the jet lag, whatever. I’d do a burn-down at some other sitting. We would.

  When Paul arrived at 8:53, he found me under the porch outside the bricked-up front door, sheltering from the rain.

  NEITHER OF US had managed a burn-down, it turned out. Perhaps it had to do with the room itself, the circumstances of Janss’s disappearance, the unseasonal weather, even Connie’s song. We agreed that it might be something best done together.

  I did a nine-till-noon sitting the next day, taking dozens of photos and more video footage, this time using a tripod and automatic timer for PR shots, and adding a sporadic commentary, anything to keep me from pondering why I hadn’t let the candle burn away. It had been a crazy thing last night; it was irrational now, but I couldn’t help it.

  When Paul arrived for his five-hour afternoon session, he brought a lunch invitation from Connie. There was a twinkle in his eye as he handed me the car keys and gave me directions. He knew how on-again, off-again my relationship with Pamela was back home. This would get me out of the loop, he said. It was good for me.

  I felt trapped but pleased. didn’t try to consider motives. I’d keep it easy, light and professional, and with luck, get more of Connie’s enthusiasm.

  We met at a café in a rainy village court in Putney. Connie had her hair out and wore a shiny black raincoat too blatant to be calculated.

  “I looked up the mancy words,” she said as I sat across from her. Her smile utterly transformed her face.

  “The what? Oh, the mancy words. Right.”

  “I never realized people took it so seriously. Lithomancy: scrying by the reflection of candlelight off precious stones. Macharomancy, for heaven’s sake: reading swords, daggers, and knives. Imagine specializing in that. Clouds: nephelomancy. Things accidentally heard: transataumancy.” She pronounced the word so carefully, as if relishing it. “It’s like people made them up for the fun of it. Came up with wacky names like those collective nouns you get: a murder of crows, a parliament of owls.”

  “A loony of researchers!” I said. I wanted to see her laugh.

  We ordered the lasagne with salad and coffee, then sat watching cars go by in the rain. I let Connie bring us back to it.

  “Andy, if it’s a natural like you say, Janss had probably never heard of catoptromancy. Never knew the word, never knew any variants.”

  “So the room is a psychomantium, and all he was trying to do was reach his family. Maybe voices told him to do it; maybe he went quietly nuts.”

  “Surrounded by ordinary households and normal lives,” she said. “Sat there while candles burned down. Did it again and again. Then probably sat in darkness, for who knows how long, without the reflections.”

  I couldn’t help myself; I’d had a bad scare the night before. “Without reflections, but with the sense of all those rooms still there, those avenues filled with night. You can’t help it.”

  Connie gave a shudder. “That’s a chilling thought.”

  “It’s part of the effect. Both Paul and I have let candles burn away.” Not this time, I didn’t add, and wondered why I didn’t, why it mattered. “You feel the … pressure … of the rooms still out there, going on and on. You know there’s nothing there, that reflections need light—”

  “But the brain registers images for so long it can’t give them up,” she said, going to the heart of it. “A retinal afterimage thing. Like a ghost arm effect.”

  “And you can restore it all so easily. The little switch is right there, and your torch and your Bic lighter and matches. But the feeling is that they’re still there.”

  “That’s creepy, Andy. You’re the master of all those rooms. They exist because of you,”

  “And the mirrors.”

  “No, you. It’s your perception. Your conviction that they’re still there. You’re the activating factor.”

  The food arrived, but we let it sit a moment. “It gets stranger, Connie. Paul and I have confirmed it. When the candle finally does go out and you’re in total darkness, it’s as if your reflections, all the mirror versions you’ve been watching for hours, are pressing up against the glass. You even think you hear them moving in.”

  “That has to be hyperaesthesia. Anomalous perception. That’s—”

  “A mind thing, I know. It’s exactly what it is. But it feels real.”

  We began eating, looking through the big window, again watching the cars in the rain.

  “What if it’s sciamancy?” she said between mouthfuls.

  “It’s what?”

  “Sciamancy. What if it’s a sciamantium: a place for making shadows, for reading shadows?”

  I must have grinned in wonder, for she smiled back. “Andy, what?”

  “You’ve been busy.”

  “I mean it. What if Janss made a shadow place? Not to contact spirits or read reflections—”

  “To scry the darkness.” It was so close to my own catoptromancy fixations that I felt alarm, genuine delight, true fascination. It was so good to share this. “Connie, maybe it is a … sciamantium.”

  “Night has to be psychoactive for us, doesn’t it? You reach a point where a perception, even a misperception, triggers something in the psyche. You haunt yourselves. Janss, Paul, all of us. Everyone who tries it.”

  “I hope so. I hope that’s what it is.” All it is, I didn’t add, didn’t need to.

  We finished eating. The plates were cleared, second coffees brought.

  “It does have to do with light, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “Darkness.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “It’s an important distinction. Light running out, darkness being restored, what you were saying. We’ve always feared night, responded to it dynamically. We made use of that fear, and did pretty well, considering, but the primal response was to endure it, wait it out, worship and appease it.”

  “But mostly separate ourselves from it in sleep.”

  “Right. When we developed enough tribally, socially, to sleep safely. Then we modified the relationship over centuries, generations. Gas and electric light changed it, let night become romantic, a time for leisure and shift-work.”

  “The brain does learn.”

  “It has to. But only to a point. It’s a dual thing: the adjustment and the remembering. My relationship with darkness was probably determined by how it was presented to me as a kid. Maybe Janss sussed it out, was taking the appropriate next step of embracing the night for all it is, revisiting it as a conditioned mind liberated from fearing it.”

  “The throwback fear thing hardwired in, but the framing culture telling us it’s okay. Maybe the energy behind that fear can be directed differently. We don’t do an ordinary lunch do we, Andy?”

  “We didn’t want one.”

  Connie smiled. “So Janss is a creature of his time, one more solitary watcher responding to what night has become for us. What else it has become. Something to inhabit and colonize, something to avoid. Have you ever tried infrared cameras?”

  There she was, blindsiding me again. “What, and night-vision goggles?”

  “Why not? It might give something.”

  “We’ve never been set up that way. We’re more your boutique operation.” Then it came out. “Connie, we haven’t let candles burn down in the Janss room yet. Nei
ther of us has.”

  There was kindness, instant understanding in her eyes. “So it might be sciamancy. The room could be a place for reading the form and nature of shadows, for creating intricate shadows, and both you and Paul sensed it.”

  It occurred to me then that if Connie was a natural, too, I should let her be one. “Make an argument.”

  “What?”

  “Make an argument. It’s a sciamantium. Convince me.”

  “All right. It’s what we said. Janss was calling up the night. Humans have that ancient … an atavistic connection with darkness, and with the subtleties.”

  Subtleties. One word glossed it all. “He was creating an effect of night,” I said, daring to believe it again.

  “An effect of shadows and night that only the mirrors bring.”

  “Trying to reach his wife and son.”

  “You don’t believe that any more than I do. It was accentuation. No, intensification. It mightn’t even be related to the deaths.”

  “Go own.

  I expected her to say that she should accompany me.

  “That’s all. I just know that you have to be alone in there, Andy, like Janss was. It won’t work with the two of you. It can’t work. If it’s psychoactive, it has to be just the individual enabling what happens with the mirrors, your mind reacting to the shadows. And keep Paul out of there. You should keep him out. He has a family.”

  “I’ll do a burn-down tonight.”

  Despite what she’d said about being alone, I truly expected her to ask if she could be there. Part of me hoped.

  “Just be careful,” was all she said, and we returned to watching cars in the rain.

  I NAPPED FROM three till five. After enduring Cindy’s jibes about going on a date with Connie, I relieved Paul just after five. We sat in the warm calm of the Janss room for a half hour or so, discussing everything but what Connie had suggested about sciamancy. One of us had to stay unbiased, and he didn’t need to be burdened with additional labels and characteristics yet. That’s what I told myself.

  He finally left me to my evening shift, hurried out to the car and drove off through the bleak, wet evening. This time we’d agreed to leave our mobiles on. We didn’t need to say why.

  I filmed, I photographed, I did more commentary into the pocket recorder. I reached 7:00 P.M. without dropping my chime ball once. Everything was the same. Everything was different. Just the names: sciamantium and sciamancy took it from a familiar candlelight vigil to something new and unsettling: a night watch for shadowforms out in the marshes, the shadowlands, a warding off of unproven enemies in the backwaters of forever.

  By 8:10 P.M. I was exhausted, ready to call it quits. It was all too still, too constant, too laden with immanence. No, not constant, I kept reminding myself. Now and then the hot blade of the candle did stir, perhaps from something as simple and immediate as my breathing or a microzephyr sneaking around the cracks and doorsills, finding a way in, and the lines of flames trembled, wavered, shook their points of light as if to catch my attention, as if to test me. Did you notice? Did you notice?

  But mostly it was still, we were still, all of us in our articulated, nautilus chambers, our adjoining rooms.

  The notion of a sciamantium kept me there, kept me resolved as the candle burned away, knowing that Janss had done this again and again, sat beside solitary flames made legion, watching himself parceled off into mirror chambers that gradually sank into night. He hadn’t just been alone in a bricked-up suburban house, not merely in a fabulous mirror world, but at the focus of rooms destined for darkness. He’d made waiting rooms, filled them with light, then watched them empty out.

  Waiting rooms, yes, where you waited for darkness to come, infinite, replicated darkness, growing, settling across all these real, unreal spaces. There could be no reflection, no possibility of rooms and boulevards when the flame died and the nautilus rooms emptied and slowly ceased to exist. Yet what if the opposite was true—if only in the mind? It was the old question of whether a tree falling in a forest made a sound if there was no one to hear it.

  I kept wondering about defaults in the brain. How was mine dealing with the idea of all those darkening rooms out there, the prospect of what might use those boulevards when the light was snatched away? What was it devising even now to protect Andy Galt from inconceivable, unprecedented threat?

  Minutes felt like hours. I’d look at my watch to find the hands had barely moved. It was like being on detention at school, time cruelly stretched and distended. The thought sent Connie’s schoolyard rhyme running through my mind. But I’d already turned, faced where I’d been, met as much of myself as I could, my selves, going this way, that way, mocking me, taunting shadowforms in the infinite regress. The song’s words were an incantation, a maddening litany. What had Janss been doing?

  Then something caught my attention.

  Did I imagine it, or was there a shadowing off in the distance—the false distance at two o’clock, where the images blurred into uncertainty? I blinked, took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. There did seem to be something, a dimming, a shadowing out there.

  I quickly looked about me. Behind and to the sides, the infinite rooms were as bright as ever, star chambers arcing off like settings for outdoor recitals. Carols by Candlelight. Madrigals by Mirrorlight. A Cappella, in the Waiting Rooms. Nothing had changed. It was only ahead, in the mirror wall at two, that there seemed to be a darkening, like a storm at the edge of the world, spilling a little to the sides, but only a little, and way out in those real, unreal, never-real distances.

  It was impossible, of course. Physically impossible. Any shadowing had to be replicated, shared, made part of all the reflection corridors and boulevards on every side. It was basic catoptrics.

  Or selective self-delusion. Something served up by fatigue and an overstimulated mind.

  My adrenaline rush was real. I went into automatic observer routines, questioning everything. If the candle flame had been down at the rim, close to guttering, I’d have accepted it more easily, but two centimeters of candle stood well clear of the cup.

  It was me. It had to be. Some optical trickery, some effect of jet lag. I’d been sitting and staring too long. My bored brain was entertaining itself. Finding things. Making things.

  Or it was the room!

  I reminded myself that the imperfections of an average wall mirror enlarged to the size of the Gulf of Mexico became waves twenty meters high. Could it be the mirrors? Part of Janss’s intended effect?

  He had to have seen this, had to have been in this exact situation. That was why the chair was angled so. Checking the anomaly at two o’clock.

  And he hadn’t survived it.

  Or he had simply gone away, seen something that drove him off.

  Again I removed my glasses, rubbed my eyes. Again I checked the image field. It was there, definitely there, something was, something like swelling, burgeoning night, or perceptual trickery in the glass or in the vision centers of the brain. Defaults, yes, that was the word. What were the defaults set there?

  Enough. I’d give it up for tonight.

  As a way of withdrawing, anchoring myself in the reality of 67 Ferry Street once more, I located the tiniest black dot of the light switch where it sat in the join at eleven o’clock, looked over my right shoulder to confirm the barest hairline of the door in the mirror wall at six.

  One more glimpse, one more try, I decided, as Janss must have.

  The shadowing was there—the spreading “darklands,” whatever they were. I smiled at the fancy, a hopeless victim of autosuggestion now. It was crazy. Too much peering off into distances, making eyes track vistas rarely, if ever, seen in nature, never meant for eyes with a such a highly developed, reactive brain behind them. I simply wasn’t sure what I was seeing.

  I had my mobile. Now was the time to call Paul, to have him join me and verify what was happening.

  Connie’s words stopped me. I had to be alone with this, had to allow that the e
ye-brain link was overwhelmed, set to doing the only thing it could: imposing order, treating this as something real, even as crisis, but rigorously dealing with it. Of course there were shadows, optical tricks. Of course there was fear, feelings of disquiet and alarm. What we’d said about the night related to eyes and mirrors, too. Just as we were completing our connection with night, so too we were changing what eyes, what brains, needed to do.

  The darklands seemed to be growing, pushing from the two-o‘clock focus into the mirror rooms at one and three. Behind, everything remained as bright and steady as ever. It was in that two-o’clock spread that it was happening.

  “Let it come!” I spoke the words to hear myself say them, aware of what an ominous line they would make on the audio track. I took more video footage, more photographs. I filled the time with deeds, filled with the dying of the light.

  The flame sank closer to the rim.

  My mobile rang. Thank God! Paul offering a reprieve!

  But it was Connie.

  “Andy, do you know what sciamachy is?”

  Not now, not now, I wanted to tell her, but the word held me.

  “Say again, Connie. What what is?”

  “Sciamachy. Not mancy, machy!”

  “Not offhand. Something to do with shadows.”

  “Fighting shadows, Andy. The act of fighting shadows. Imagined enemies.”

  “Okay. Look, I’m nearly done—”

  “Andy, what if it’s a sciamachium?”

  “Hey, look, thanks.” I wanted her to go. I didn’t want her to go. “Connie?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks. I mean it. I’m doing it. Alone. I’m doing it.”

  “I know. I know, Andy. But a sciamachium. just call me when you’re done, okay?”

  “Promise.”

  She had known, I realized as I put the phone away. She was a natural and she had known.

  The shadowing beckoned, teased at two, flexed dark fingers. Look at me, look at me! Everywhere else the rooms were bright and constant, seemed to be. I sat watching the darklands, wondering how they could exist, finally convinced myself that they spread only when I glanced away. It was using my mind, my eyes, to build itself.