Darkroom

by Graham Masterton

  He led Jim up the wooden stairs to the living room. A uniformed officer was keeping guard on the door, and the beach house was jostling with crime scene specialists and photographers and fingerprint experts, as well as fire officers and people who seemed to have nothing better to do than shout into their cellphones.

  ‘It’s never like this on TV,’ said Jim as a broad-shouldered blonde woman with a digital camera pushed her way past him, and he was unapologetically elbowed by a young black man in a Tyvek suit.

  ‘That’s because the TV production people are always trying to economize on extras. This particular crowd scene, on the other hand, is paid for out of your taxes.’

  Jim looked around him at the nautical decor – the ropes and the anchors and the paintings of four-masted clippers. ‘Jesus. Who lives in a house like this? Long John Silver?’

  Lieutenant Harris led the way through to the bedroom. Jim had been preparing himself to see two burned bodies, and he knew from experience that it was going to be horrifying. He had seen a burned-out Winnebago once, on the San Diego Freeway, with dad and mom still sitting in their seats. The seats had been reduced to their springs, while dad and mom looked like charred stick people. What was worse, the heat had left them grinning, as if they were still having fun.

  Here, however, he couldn’t understand what he was looking at, not at first. The bedroom walls and ceiling were covered all over in a fine film of waxy yellow soot. The carpet was black and crunchy when he walked on it. The bed itself was nothing but smoking layers of incinerated fabric, like a huge burned cake, and it stank of wool and latex and shriveled-up nylon.

  As he approached the bed, Jim saw a tangle of bones lying on it. They were scorched, like barbecued ribs, and they were so mixed up together that it would have been impossible at first glance to tell that they were the remains of two separate people – except that there were two skulls, with their foreheads poignantly touching, staring into each other’s empty eye sockets.

  All around the scattered bones lay heaps of damp gray ashes. A criminalist was scooping up samples with a spoon and dropping them into clear plastic bags.

  ‘Harris!’ A big man with a big Roman nose and silver Roman-emperor curls came barging around the bed to greet them. He was wearing baggy blue coveralls with FORENSICS printed across the back.

  ‘How’s it going, Jack?’ Lieutenant Harris asked him. ‘Jack, this is Jim Rook. Mr Rook, this is Jack Billings, head of the crime scene unit.’

  Jack Billings nodded to Jim and wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his glove. ‘They were cremated,’ he said in a thick, harsh voice, as if he had a cold. ‘In fact, they were more than cremated. Your average crematorium oven burns at two thousand five hundred degrees Fahrenheit for more than four hours to reduce a human body to this condition. I would say that the temperature in this bedroom reached well over five times that, even though it happened over a very short space of time. Possibly in seconds.’

  ‘How the hell did that happen?’ asked Lieutenant Harris.

  ‘I was hoping that you were going to tell me. As I told you before, there’s no evidence of arson … no indication that any kind of accelerant was involved, such as gasoline or kerosene or turpentine. No spent matches, no cigarette lighter. It couldn’t have been a gas explosion, since the house isn’t fitted for natural gas or butane. An arc welding torch can reach twenty thousand degrees Celsius, but the burning would have been concentrated in a very small area – unlike here, where we have soot spread evenly all over the walls, and the carpet evenly charred all over, and the same with the bed.’

  ‘A bomb?’ suggested Lieutenant Harris.

  Jack Billings shook his head. ‘There was plenty of heat, but there was absolutely no explosive force. Look at these remains, these ashes, they’re just lying here in a pile. Any bomb that was capable of generating this much heat would have blasted them over a five-mile radius. We would have been picking up selected bits of them in Anaheim.’

  ‘Lightning?’

  ‘That’s an outside possibility. But it doesn’t seem very likely that lightning could have incinerated two people who were lying on a well-insulated bed. Apart from that, there were no electric storms reported along the coast last night.’

  ‘So that’s it? You don’t have any other ideas?’

  ‘Not so far. But you know me. I’m not defeated yet, not by a long chalk. Oh, but there’s this to consider.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Lieutenant Harris.

  Jack Billings beckoned them through to the dressing room. There were white louvred closets on the left-hand wall, which backed on to the bedroom, and a built-in dressing table on the right, with bottles of perfume and hand lotion on it. The end wall was mirrored from floor to ceiling, so that their reflections entered the room at the same time as they did. Jim thought he looked crumpled and washed-out. He needed a break. He needed the love of a good woman and three weeks on Oahu.

  ‘OK,’ said Lieutenant Harris. ‘What’s to see in here?’

  Without a word, Jack Billings opened the closet doors. ‘We only found this because we were trying to see if any of the power cables had shorted out.’ All of the clothes that had been hanging on the rail had been pushed right over to one side, so that the back wall of the closet was exposed.

  ‘My God,’ said Jim. He moved closer to the wall and took off his glasses. Lieutenant Harris came and stood close behind him, shaking his head in disbelief.

  Printed directly on to the paint was a life-size black-and-white image of Bobby and Sara. They were lying side by side on the bed, both of them half-naked. Sara had her right arm raised as if she were trying to protect her face, and her hair was on fire, so that a shower of tiny sparks was spraying out of the top of her head. Bobby had his eyes squeezed shut and his teeth clenched. It was difficult to tell, but it looked as if his ears were already burned off.

  ‘This is like a photograph,’ said Jim with undisguised wonder. ‘It is a photograph.’

  Jack Billings coughed and nodded. ‘I’d say that this is an exact image of the moment that Bobby Tubbs and Sara Miller were killed.’

  ‘What’s this wall made of?’ asked Lieutenant Harris, knocking it with his knuckle.

  ‘Seasoned pine – two-and-a half inches thick, painted with regular white emulsion. We’ve taken samples, but it doesn’t appear to have been treated with any kind of photo-sensitive chemicals.’

  Jim stepped back. ‘This is exactly what you would have seen if you had been standing at the foot of the bed when Bobby and Sara were killed. It’s like somebody took a photograph the instant it happened, and then brought it in here, and printed it on to the wall.’

  ‘But who?’ asked Lieutenant Harris.

  Jack Billings shrugged. ‘I don’t personally know of any photographic technique that could have been used to produce an image like this. But here it is in front of our eyes, so there must be some way of doing it, and that’s what we have to find out. If you ask me, Lieutenant, once we know how, it won’t take us long to discover who, or why. This is highly advanced, highly specialized stuff … There can’t be more than a handful of people who have the technology to produce this kind of imaging.’

  Jim couldn’t take his eyes off the picture of Bobby and Sara. They didn’t have the terrified expressions of people who suddenly realize they’re just about to die. They were simply reacting to a devastating blast of light and heat – eyes shut tight, face muscles clenched, hands protectively lifted. When this picture was taken, it was already a split-second too late to save them.

  He went back into the bedroom. The acrid reek of burned bedding made his sinuses run. He discovered a paper napkin from Roy’s Rib Shack in his pocket, and wiped his nose. The napkin smelled strongly of barbecue sauce.

  ‘Sense anything?’ asked Lieutenant Harris hopefully.

  Jim shook his head.

  ‘No spiritual vibes or nothing? No ghostly echoes? No auras?’

  ‘No, nothing like that.’

  ‘You
ever hear of anything like this before? People getting cremated while they’re lying in bed.’

  ‘I’ve heard about spontaneous human combustion – people catching fire for no apparent reason and burning to ashes. Scientists call it SHC or “ultra-rapid holocaust.”’

  ‘Do you think something like that might have happened here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jim. ‘It’s quite a famous phenomenon. Even Charles Dickens wrote about it. There’s a character in Bleak House, a rag-and-bone dealer called Krook, who gets burned to a pile of ashes while he’s sitting in his chair by the fire. But I don’t think there’s a whole lot of serious research to back it up.’

  ‘What about that picture on the closet wall?’ said Lieutenant Harris. ‘Damned if I know what to make of that.’

  ‘Damned if I know, either. Sorry.’

  ‘Well, if you think of anything at all – if you get any hunches, or funny feelings – you know how to get in touch with me. Just don’t talk about any of this to the media, please. Especially that picture. I don’t want to get the lunatic fringe excited. You know the ones I mean – those people who see images of the Virgin Mary reflected in the windows of Toys R Us.’

  ‘You got it,’ Jim agreed. ‘But you’ll keep me up to speed, won’t you? If any new evidence comes up … well, it might help me to get a handle on how those poor kids were killed.’

  He walked back across the beach and climbed into his Lincoln. The reporters and the cameramen immediately surrounded him, pushing microphones close to his face.

  ‘Did you see the bodies, Jim? How do you think they died? Will you be talking to Bobby’s and Sara’s parents? How are their classmates taking it? Pretty badly, I’ll bet.’

  Jim started the engine, jammed his foot down on the gas, and immediately the Lincoln’s rear wheels buried themselves in the sand. He tried revving the car forward, and then back, and then forward again, but the wheels spun deeper and deeper. In the end he had to turn around to the reporters and cameramen and give them a look of utter defeat.

  ‘OK, OK. I give in. If you people help to push me out of this sand, I’ll give you a quote.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? How do we know we can trust you?’ challenged Roger Frick from CNN. ‘We might push you out of the sand, and then you might just drive off.’

  ‘I’m a college teacher. If you can’t trust a college teacher, who can you trust?’

  Six or seven reporters gathered around the front of his car, as well as two cops. They all leaned forward, and when Jim shouted, ‘Push!’, they pushed. He revved the engine, spraying everybody with twin fountains of sand, but suddenly the Lincoln surged backward and bounced up on to the concrete ramp.

  ‘Thanks!’ said Jim. ‘Thanks, you’re terrific! Thank you!’

  Nancy Broward came up to him and held out her microphone. ‘OK, Jim. How about that quote?’

  ‘Of course. Never let it be said that I didn’t keep my side of the bargain.’ He waited until all of the reporters were gathered around him, and then he said, ‘“Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.” Dion Boucicault, 1820 to 1890.’

  ‘Huh?’ said Roger Frick.

  ‘I promised you a quote … that’s a quote.’ With that, Jim backed the Lincoln up the ramp, slewed it around, and drove back on to the Pacific Coast Highway.

  He walked into Special Class II five minutes late for their last session of the day, which was supposed to be creative writing. All of them were busy, although not one of them had a book open. Shadow was bouncing his basketball from the bridge of his nose to the top of his head and back again, while Brenda Malone was hunched in front of a magnifying mirror, squeezing out her blackheads, and Randy Bullock was eating his way through the largest submarine sandwich that Jim had ever seen. Jim almost expected to see cows’ legs hanging out of the side of it.

  The classroom was filled with the chikkity-chikkity sound of dance music, coming from half a dozen headsets. It sounded like a cornfield full of crickets.

  Jim dropped his books on to his desk and then stepped forward to the front of the class. ‘Everyone – I need your attention, please.’

  Shadow went on bouncing his ball and Randy Bullock went on chewing and Ruby Montes went on swaying and miming the salsa music she was listening to.

  Jim waited for a while with his head lowered. Edward Truscott was giving him a dutiful frown, but George Graves had his back turned, and Vanilla King had almost disappeared inside her huge woven bag, rummaging for something critically important, like a lost eyebrow pencil probably.

  After almost half a minute, Jim went up to the chalkboard. In large, clear letters he wrote BOBBY TUBBS AND SARA MILLER ARE DEAD.

  The class fell silent almost immediately. CD players were switched off. Shadow scooped up his ball and gripped it between his knees. Jim turned back to face the class, dusting his hands. ‘The power of the written word,’ he told them. ‘“Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.”’

  ‘Is it true?’ asked Pinky Perdido in her squeaky little voice. ‘Bobby and Sara – they’re dead?’

  Jim nodded. ‘They died together sometime last night at the beach house belonging to Bobby’s parents. I’m very sorry. I never had the chance to get to know them, but Dr Ehrlichman tells me that they were very well liked, both of them.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Freddy Price, and it was obvious that he was worried. ‘They didn’t OD or nothing, did they?’

  ‘So far as we can tell, their deaths were not directly caused by drugs or alcohol. There was a very fierce fire. The police don’t yet know how it started, but they didn’t stand a chance. They were probably overcome by fumes before the flames got to them.’

  ‘Oh, man,’ said Philip Genio. He was thin and Latin-looking, with a high shiny pompadour and a pale-pink silk shirt. ‘I was messing around with Bobby only last night.’

  ‘Sara was my best friend,’ wept Sue-Marie, with mascara running down her cheeks. ‘We’ve been best friends ever since grade school. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t text me this morning, when she didn’t show up.’

  Jim cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry I had to bring you such bad news. You can all leave college early today. I guess you don’t feel like remedial English, just at the moment.’

  ‘They weren’t trapped, were they?’ asked Sally Broxman breathlessly.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Jim. ‘It looked as if it happened very quickly.’

  ‘You saw them?’

  Jim nodded. ‘The police wanted me to visit the scene of the fire, just in case I could shed some light on what happened. But … I don’t know. I couldn’t really tell them anything very helpful.’

  ‘Was it really gross?’ asked Randy Bullock. ‘I mean, were they all, like, roasted and everything?’

  Jim shook his head.

  ‘Did they look peaceful?’ asked Sue-Marie. ‘They didn’t suffer, did they?’

  Jim thought of Bobby and Sara’s skulls, staring into each other’s sightless sockets. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I guess you could say they looked peaceful.’

  For a long moment, nobody spoke, but nobody stood up to leave, either. Sue-Marie mewed quietly into her handkerchief, like a lost kitten, and there was a chorus of emotional sniffs from most of the other students. David Robinson had his eyes tightly closed, and his hands pressed together, and he was rapidly mumbling in prayer.

  Jim said, ‘It’s always a terrible shock when somebody dies so young, and so suddenly. You ask yourself, don’t you, what kind of a world can this be, when people with so much promise can have their lives snuffed out, just like that. This is what we were talking about this morning, wasn’t it? Time. Bobby and Sara had the greatest gift of all taken away from them. Time to grow up, time to fall in love, time to enjoy all the pleasures this life has to offer. For Bobby and Sara, time has stopped forever, while all the rest of us go rushing on – minute by minute, day by day, week by week, and every second that passes leaves them further and further behind.’

&nb
sp; He went to the chalkboard again, and underneath BOBBY TUBBS AND SARA MILLER ARE DEAD, he wrote: So WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

  ‘Since none of you seem to feel like leaving early, and this is a writing class, I suggest that we try some creative therapy. Try to express what you feel about Bobby and Sara on paper. You can write anything you like – an essay, a poem, a song lyric, if you want to.’ He tapped the chalkboard with his ruler. ‘All I expect you to do is to answer this question.’

  ‘Maybe they’re ghosts,’ said Edward Truscott.

  ‘There’s only one spook in this class and that’s you,’ retorted Shadow.

  Jim sat down. ‘If you think they’re ghosts, say so. Write whatever you like … so long as it’s thoughtful, and honest, and it comes from the heart.’

  Vanilla King put up her hand. ‘Mr Rook, sir. Do you believe in ghosts?’

  Jim looked at Vanilla for a long time, with his hand partly covering his mouth, saying nothing. She was just about to ask the question again when he gave her an almost imperceptible nod.

  Four

  ‘You are going to so love this place,’ said Vinnie as he parked his bright-red Pontiac GTO and switched off Nessun Dorma, which he had been playing at full volume all the way from West Grove to Venice.

  Jim climbed out of the car and looked up at the gloomy 1930s apartment building which took up the entire block between Willard and Divine. When he had lived on Electric Avenue he had driven past this way almost every day, but he couldn’t remember having noticed this building before, in spite of its monstrous bulk. It seemed to keep itself aloof from the busy, brightly colored neighborhood around it. It was five stories high, built of dark reddish-brown brick, with tiny diamond-leaded windows and twisted barley-sugar pillars. When he looked up, Jim saw dozens of gargoyles leaning over the parapets, and the chimneys bristling with elaborate lightning rods, as if the residents were trying to protect themselves from the wrath of God.

  A discolored bronze plaque over the main entrance announced Benandanti Building, 1935.