Syndrome E

by Franck Thilliez

  “They’re lighting up on and off,” Lucie noticed. “Is that the subliminal imagery?”

  “Yes. I timed their appearances. A hidden image always corresponds to when those areas light up. For the moment, it’s just the pleasure centers. You can easily guess why. The actress, nude, in risqué postures. Those gloved hands stroking her.”

  Lucie felt embarrassed at penetrating, to some degree, her hierarchical superior’s deepest intimacy. The captain had no idea he was seeing, at that very moment, subliminal images of the actress in his simpler device. He had even less idea that his brain was getting off on them and risked setting off an embarrassing physical reaction.

  The digitized film continued to advance. Lucie recalled what Claude Poignet had shown her on the viewer. They were getting close to the other kind of image: the actress’s mangled body on the grass with the large eye sliced into her belly. Beckers moved his finger on the screen.

  “This is it. Activation of the median prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortex, as well as of the temporoparietal junction. The really shocking images have just started occurring, hidden behind apparently tranquil scenes. Up until now, everything is coherent. But hang on a bit…”

  The black-and-white film was three-quarters of the way through. The little girl was petting a cat, sitting in the grass, still framed by that strange, drooling fog and a black sky. A neutral scene, which in principle should elicit no emotion.

  “Here we go…The signals in the brain get excited, even independent of the precise moments when the subliminal images occur. Same thing for the amygdala and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex. The organism is steeling itself for a violent reaction. You must have felt the same disturbance when you watched the film—a desire to run away, perhaps, or turn it off.”

  It was well before the scene with the bull that the colors exploded in Kashmareck’s brain. They were lighting up on all sides. A few moments later, his brain activity returned to more normal levels. Beckers shook his notes.

  “At precisely eleven minutes, three seconds you see the brain activity reacting to violent images, which lasts for a minute. But this part of the film contains none of the subliminal images that were inserted in the original. Not the naked woman, not the mutilations. Not a thing.”

  “So what is it, then?”

  “A complicated process of hidden imagery, using superimposition, contrast, and light. I believe both the subliminal images and that white circle at the upper right are just red herrings. They’re the visible element that allowed the film to mask the real hidden message. Unconsciously, the eye is constantly drawn by that distracting spot, which keeps you from concentrating too much on other parts of the image and noticing what’s really going on. The filmmaker took care to thwart even the most observant viewers.”

  Lucie could no longer keep still. The film was drawing her in; it possessed her.

  “Show me those hidden images.”

  “Let’s first let your captain join us.”

  Lucie couldn’t help watching the scene with the bull once again, while Beckers sat down at another computer. It gave her gooseflesh, especially when the camera zoomed in on the girl’s eyes: cold and devoid of all feeling. The eyes of an ancient statue.

  A few minutes later, Kashmareck returned. He was as white as the shell of the scanner.

  “Weird goddamn movie” were his only words. He too had been turned inside out, manipulated, shocked, and was trying to figure out why he felt so strange. Beckers briefly recapped what he’d just said to Lucie, tapping on his keyboard. Video processing software came up. The scientist opened the digitized film and moved the progress bar to eleven minutes and three seconds. Nearly identical images appeared one behind the other, as if on a filmstrip viewed under a lightbulb. With his mouse, Beckers pointed out an area in the first image, at lower left.

  “It’s always in the low-contrast areas that this happens. In fog, the black sky, very dark zones, omnipresent at this point in the film. Visual tricks that allowed our filmmaker to express his secret language.”

  With his mouse, he rolled the cursor rapidly over the screen, using it to underscore his explanations.

  “If you look at this image just as it is, what do you see? A girl sitting in the grass and petting a cat. Around her there’s this fog, and these large dark flat areas, on the sides and in the sky. If you don’t know there’s anything to find, you’ll pass right by it. That’s what happened to Claude, who was concentrating entirely on the subliminal images, which were straightforward and clearly distinct from the rest of the film.”

  Lucie came closer, her brows knit.

  “Now that I’m looking, I’d almost say there were…faces, lost in the fog. And…and in all those dark patches around the image.”

  “Faces, that’s right. A crowd of children’s faces.”

  The scene was odd; barely perceptible faces surrounded the little girl, like malevolent succubae. The more Lucie’s eye became acclimated, the more details she made out. Small feet shoved into socks; matching outfits, like hospital pajamas; a uniform floor that looked like linoleum. A parallel, latent world slowly took shape. Lucie thought of optical illusions—the image of a vase, for instance, that turns into a couple making love after you’ve stared at it for a moment.

  In the drop-down menu, Beckers selected the brightness and contrast option and opened a dialogue box on which he could play with the settings.

  “Let’s suppose it’s 1955 and we’re in a movie theater. And we add a filter over the lens of the projector. A filter that heightens contrast. Then we also increase the brightness. I’m re-creating these manipulations by applying different values, which I’ve already tested. Now watch…”

  He hit APPLY, and something strange happened to the image. What was initially invisible came to the fore, while the more obvious scene bleached into white light.

  “Because of the increased brightness, the main image—the girl petting the cat—becomes overexposed and fades out. But the image in the darker areas, which at first was underexposed, now emerges fully.”

  The two combined images produced a bizarre effect, but this time one could clearly make out a group of children, all standing, and rabbits huddled in a corner.

  Lucie swallowed hard. This was it: the rabbits and the children. On the phone, the Canadian had said everything started from there.

  Kashmareck mopped his brow.

  “This is incredible. How did the filmmaker pull off something like that?”

  “Hard for me to explain the precise technical procedure, but I think he mainly played with double exposures, using a series of adjustable masks over the camera lens. There’s one basic characteristic of film—photo or movie—which is that it remains impressionable as long as you haven’t run it through fixative in a darkroom. Basically, you could shoot several movies on the same roll of film; you just have to rewind without opening the magazine. If you do it randomly, it just becomes a jumble and you won’t see a thing. But with a lot of technical know-how and a good knowledge of lighting, composition, and framing, you can get remarkable results. Claude Poignet admired Méliès. He once told me Méliès had used up to nine successive superimpositions to build certain special effects. The work of a magician and a fine jeweler all at once. I have no doubt this film here is of the same caliber, and that your director could easily rival Méliès.”

  Lucie cautiously analyzed the faces onscreen. Little girls of seven or eight, with severe expressions and pinched mouths. None of them was laughing—on the contrary, they seemed to be prey to sheer terror. What were they afraid of?

  Her heart leaped. She pointed her finger at the screen.

  “That one, a bit in front. She looks like the girl on the swing.”

  “That’s right.”

  The room the girls were in appeared cramped, windowless. Beckers rubbed his thick lips with a sigh.

  “Our filmmaker didn’t simply want to hide weird images in his film, he wanted to conceal a whole other film, a parallel film, c
ompletely insane. A monstrosity.”

  “A film within a film that no eye could see?”

  “Yes. Directly injected into the brain, without the slightest conscious censorship. Without the possibility of turning away. Look carefully.”

  He made the next fifty frames go by slowly, which in reality constituted only a second of film time.

  “The superimposed images appear only every ten frames. Which means that for every second of projection time, you get five superimposed frames, each spaced two-tenths of a second apart. It’s too little, in the midst of all those images, for the eye to notice anything, but almost enough to give the sense of movement. Movement that gets imprinted on the brain…It’s your brain that sees the film, not your eyes.”

  Lucie struggled to understand. This was probably what had determined the choice of fifty images per second. He wanted to slip in the maximum number of hidden images without the viewer’s eye noticing them.

  “Now you’re going to imagine something else,” Beckers continued. “So here we have our movie projector, with its filter and strong light that lets the invisible images be seen.”

  With a click, he opened a window to adjust the settings for film projection.

  “Now imagine that you regulated the projector’s shutter at the rate of five frames a second, as most of those old machines could do, while your reel was still running at fifty frames a second. That means that the only images being projected onscreen are the ones we’re interested in; the others are blocked by the baffle.”

  Beckers got up and turned off the lights. All that remained were the flickering screens on which danced various sectional views of the brain.

  “The film we’re about to see will be jumpy, since it’s being shown at five frames a second, whereas the illusion of continuous movement doesn’t really kick in until around ten or twelve. But it’s still enough”—his voice was toneless—“to get the picture. I think your man understood things about the brain well before the rest of the world.”

  He halted his hand over the mouse and looked his visitors in the eye. His face was serious.

  “Do me a favor, please. If someday you get to the bottom of all this, be sure to tell me. I wouldn’t want these images rattling around in my head with no explanation for the rest of my life.”

  The film began.

  Camera. Action.

  24

  Sharko was climbing painfully out of the tub as one of Cairo’s three thousand muezzins called the faithful to dawn prayer. The powerful, mysterious voice seemed to descend from the heavens like an oracle. The cop remembered the loudspeakers that were omnipresent in the streets. The sun hadn’t yet risen, and already the entire city vibrated beneath the teachings of the Koran.

  The inspector stretched backward, his spine stiff. A probable compression of vertebras L1 and L2, the doctor had once told him. He was getting older, for God’s sake, and sleeping for several hours folded in two in a bathtub was not exactly age appropriate. As for the mosquito bites, they irritated his skin to the point where he wanted to peel it off with a knife. He slathered his entire body with a thick coating of lotion, heaving a sigh of relief.

  He swallowed his Zyprexa tablet, which was spectacularly ineffective in such a hot and stressful climate, then packed his bags. The flight to Paris was scheduled for about 5:00 p.m. Not yet really here, already gone. And in a hell of a rush to get back to the “cool” of Paris, with its mere eighty-something degrees.

  After buying some bean fritters on the street corner, Sharko hailed the first cab he saw and asked to be taken to the Saladin Citadel.

  The Nasr dropped him off fifteen minutes later in front of the impressive fortification, perched above the city. The first rays of sunlight, off to the horizon, enflamed the plains around Heliopolis, and in the background stretched the slopes of the Mokattam Mountains, the mythic City of the Dead spread out at their feet. While crunching on his fritter, Sharko took in an eyeful. The tombs devoted to the three dynasties of caliphs and sultans who’d governed Egypt for over a thousand years were haloed in the colors of dawn. Reds, yellows, and blues paid homage to the vast necropolis, now inhabited by the wretched poor. Sitting on the base of one of the minarets as if he ruled the world, Sharko realized just how fractured Egypt was becoming with each passing year: on the one hand, the majestic, untouchable past, with its pharaohs, mosques, and madrassas; and on the other, the much less resplendent future, devoured by chaos and the poverty of a population growing out of bounds.

  A car suddenly pulled up at the edge of the small road, about twenty yards away. Sharko walked toward it as Atef got out and opened the trunk of his well-manufactured 4×4. The two men shook hands.

  “Nobody followed you?” asked the Arab.

  “What do you think?”

  Atef was wearing a khaki-colored outfit, like a safari suit. Loose-fitting shirt, trousers with wide side pockets, hiking boots. Sharko, for his part, had gone with the tourist option: Bermuda shorts, docksiders, and sand-colored shirt.

  “I’ve got the info,” said Atef. “We’re going to where the garbage collectors live. There’s a hospital there, the Salaam Center.”

  “A hospital?”

  “If you’re looking for a common thread among the victims, that’s it. The girls had all gone into city hospitals, almost at the same time. That was in 1993, the year before they died. And one of them, Boussaina Abderrahmane, went to the Salaam Center.”

  “How come?”

  “My uncle isn’t sure. Mahmoud hadn’t told him about it in too much detail. But we’ll soon find out.”

  Sharko had sensed it: the killer had some connection with the world of medicine. The medical examiner’s saw, the removal of the eyes, the ketamine. And now the hospitals. The path was coming into focus.

  The Arab picked up the handle of the tire jack, which he wiped with a cloth.

  “Bad luck. I just got a flat in the left front tire. It’s supposed to never happen with these Japanese cars. Let me just fix this and we’ll get going.”

  Sharko took a few steps back to gauge the extent of the damage.

  His skull then seemed to shatter into pieces.

  The blow had knocked him flat on the ground.

  Dazed, he tried to stand up, but less than ten seconds later his hands were joined behind his back. The rasp of adhesive tape. Atef bound his wrists and stuffed a rag into his mouth, which he surrounded with several layers of tape. He snatched the policeman’s cell phone.

  Shoved into the trunk, Sharko heard, before the wall of steel cut him off definitively from the light:

  “You’re going to join my brother, you son of a dog.”

  The car sped off.

  In an instant, Sharko understood that he was about to die.

  25

  Lucie hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep. How could she even begin to forget the horrors viewed in the neuroimagery unit? How could she rest easily after such a burning flood of darkness? Huddled in a corner of the hospital room with her laptop, she replayed over and over the hidden film that Beckers had burned for her on a DVD.

  The film within a film, adjusted to the right contrast, speed, and brightness settings.

  The one about the rabbits and the children.

  Children, for the love of God.

  Once more she pressed PLAY, feeling the need to understand, beyond the images themselves, what could have happened in those distant, forgotten years.

  The images succeeded one another at the rate of five frames per second. It made for a staccato viewing experience, with gaps in information between each scene. But the feeling of movement and continuity was almost there, filtering through at the edge of the senses. With repeated watchings, Lucie’s eye had learned to focus on the scene that interested her, and to screen out the initial, superimposed, parasitic image. At this point, she saw only a single film: the hidden film.

  Twelve children, girls, were standing, squeezed together, hands clutching their chests. They were all wearing pajamas that were surel
y white, a bit too large for their slight frames. Their eyes were rolling in their sockets, and almost every face was twisted in thick, tenacious fear. It was as if a heavy black storm full of monsters was thundering over them.

  Almost every face…Because the one on the child from the swing was frozen in a cold expression, the same emptiness in her eyes as when staring down the immobilized bull. She stood in front of the group, at the head of the line, and didn’t move.

  Thirty or forty rabbits, little creatures not yet fully grown, were trembling in a corner. Ears flat back, fur raised, whiskers twitching. The cameraman was probably located in another corner, which allowed him to keep both the girls and the rabbits in his field of vision, at a distance of about five or six yards.

  The child from the swing suddenly turned her gaze left. Quite clearly, she was looking at someone unseen by the viewer. The same mysterious presence that hovered over everything was lurking outside the camera’s range and seemed to be coordinating the whole scene.

  Who are you? Lucie thought. Why are you hiding? You need to see without being seen, don’t you?

  Suddenly, the girl’s lips pulled back, uncovering her teeth. Her features creased. Lucie had the sudden impression of confronting an incarnation of absolute evil. Like a warrior, the child began running toward the rabbits, which hopped in every direction. With a rapid movement, she grabbed one by the scruff of its neck and, with a grimace that must have been accompanied by a shriek, ripped its head off.

  Blood spattered over her face.

  She dropped the tattered animal and attacked another, still yelling. Lucie clenched her fists. Even though the film was silent, one could gauge the power, the savageness of the child’s scream.

  In a cacophony that the cop could easily imagine, all the girls started panicking. They huddled tighter together, while the terrified rabbits ran between their legs. Their faces turned toward the corner where the girl from the swing had looked the first time. Lucie was certain that someone was standing there, talking. Someone the cameraman had taken care never to film. No doubt the organizer of these abominations. The guru. The monster god.