Arcane II

by Nathan Shumate (Editor)

  He shook his head, still stunned. He turned the camera over in bemusement. “Sorry, Sunny, end of the roll,” he murmured, but stayed hunched over it long enough that she touched his shoulder.

  The question was, had those shots been enough to leach out the darkness?

  Marty opened the camera and laid the film along the grass to curl and dry.

  He could breathe with no trouble at all. Tried a smile, found it was working again.

  “That was a bad roll, baby. Let’s go into town and get some new film.”

  She looked somewhat doubtful, especially when they left the film lying there on the sun-crisped lawn. But she didn’t hesitate to climb into Marty’s bright red car.

  III.

  Martin Leroy Gregory lived in a tiny flat, part of a converted three-story mansion. He had a beautiful bike and a smoothly-running girlfriend, or was it the other way round? They’d tried the live-in thing off and on, and right now it was off, but Leroy hoped it would be on again soon, because he really missed her. Especially those wild moonlit rides, feeling her snug against his back, the bike purring beneath them, the hills unraveling on either side. Clouds, skidding past above, never enough to obscure the moon... stopping in a field somewhere, only the stars above... God. Sunny was a beautiful person, too good for him, Leroy thought, and built enough to be anyone’s model. She always had at least ten guys slavering after her, offering to fill his place. Leroy was determined they never would.

  He liked to keep his life simple. He worked only enough to support himself, odd hours at the photo lab. When he worked days, he’d mind the counter or do commercial shoots; nights, he’d catch them up on their developing. Their day developer, Justin, was his best friend.

  Gus sometimes asked Leroy to test and repair antique cameras. The odd ones always drew him: the one-of-a-kinds; the long obsoletes; the ones with bizarre, irreparable defects that could turn into happy bonuses in the right hands.

  On Thursday, Justin brought out a leatherette box camera that Leroy itched to hold. Leroy hunkered down in front of the counter. “Kamaret, 1891,” he breathed.

  “Pick her up. You’ll get a lot better acquainted in the next few days.”

  When Justin left, Leroy spent the rest of the evening with the box camera, testing it, cleaning it. The guard against double exposure didn’t work, but as he determined how to repair it, a peaceful respect for the centenarian’s quirks descended on him like dust, and he let it be.

  When he brought the camera home for further testing, Sunny was sitting on the army chest at the foot of his bed. Leroy arranged the camera on the window-table so that it caught them directly with its lens. He set up a time delay. The streetlight poured through the open window, along with a fresh chill. When he pulled Sunny onto his lap, she squealed, 150 pounds of curve and well-trained muscle.

  He held her tight about the waist, the pressure of her hips grinding into his flesh. As the camera stared back at him with its dark and solitary eye, he felt something rising within him, dull and dead as rusted steel, a thickness that filled his mouth. It swelled within his chest, threatening to burst free. Sunny... she dazzled so many men it was hard to believe she’d settle for just one. He grabbed her hips tighter, digging his fingers into her flesh, willing something safe and human-sized to stir, anything to take his mind from this terrible compulsion. Under the dark eye of the camera, he wanted to rend her flesh with his teeth, grind it into meaty strings. He wanted to—

  Suddenly his warm cock flared up like a saving beacon; he gasped as the black pressure eased. He pushed Sunny from his lap, jumped up to pull her from the apartment. In the sudden flurry of escape, he heard the tiny click of a shutter as the darkness fell away.

  ***

  The next morning Leroy sat on his bike in the gray predawn. Sunny still slept, and he paused a moment, gloved hands on the handlebars, staring up at the glint of pink light on the windows. During the night, he could have sworn he’d taken at least a hundred shots, startling, strange, surreal. Some of them had shown him a new vision, a beauty like the smooth matrix of cathedral arches that made him tremble as the cold prints rested in his hand. He’d woken with swollen fingers, as though he’d been working for hours; woken and cried in surprise, because everything had been so real he’d never expected sleep’s layer to peel away.

  A quick stop at the museum secured his old position. Jacques was glad to see him; his replacement had never worked out, and the staff had forgotten the flare of temper that caused him to walk out. They needed a new darkroom tech as well, and Leroy convinced Justin to take the job. Leroy drew them close around him, the perfect combination, people he knew and trusted, the equipment and access he’d need to birth whispering dreams in the waking world, the burning stream of images that hit him with the camera in his hands.

  He came in early, worked late, fingers tingling with energy. It wasn’t long before the mystery photos began to arrive in sturdy cardboard sleeves. Odd shots, with a surreal clarity in the starkness of the shadows, the long focal range—good enough that Jacques laughingly suggested that Leroy might be out of a job. When Claire placed the photographs over his fingers, he closed his eyes, knees weak with the sudden surge of electricity, of recognition... the feel of that heavy black box in his hands, smooth and cold and charged.

  The pictures arrived once a week. Their dreamlike oddity began to frighten Claire. Justin watched him surreptitiously with furrowed brow, saying nothing till the week the Armageddon photos arrived, double-exposed with twisted images of Sunny’s face.

  Then Justin cornered him in the darkroom, his heavy grip pressing Leroy’s shoulder. “Are you all right? You might be able to fool them, but not me.”

  “Leave it be, Justin,” Leroy murmured.

  Leroy was a big man, but Justin was a bear. He grabbed Leroy by the shoulders, propelled him in front of the vat, forced his nose down until the chemical smell seared his throat closed. Only inches from his eyes, one of his latest prints looked up at him blankly. A corpse’s face. The most beautiful girl in the world, cast in plaster, mold-perfect, the smooth arc of her nose bound by an iceberg crushing a helpless ship. The mouth was the worst, car wreck on a lonely highway, high-beams lighting the dead.

  Leroy leaned farther, entranced by the evolving image.

  Justin pulled him away as the picture darkened, wrestled him into to a chair as Leroy felt his limbs give way. He fought for breath, eyes rolling with terrible vertigo, sleep washing over him like waves of nausea—

  Clutching for sanity, Leroy gasped, “Give me my camera.”

  “You’re going to a hospital. Want me to call Sunny?”

  Leroy shook his head frantically, feeling his swollen brain mashing in his skull, the images merging, incredibly dense, with a meaning that he screamed to understand.

  ***

  Sunny came to see him once while he was laid up. Justin stopped by often, with news and mail, and once with Leroy’s cat. Though he didn’t mention it, Leroy knew Justin was taking care of things at work, at the apartment. He even brought the most recent batch of prints.

  Leroy fought back pillows to grab the envelope as Justin dropped it on the table. “These prints—seem vaguely familiar.”

  Justin snatched them from his hands.

  “You can’t think I’d shoot something like that?”

  “Leroy, I’m no longer certain what you might do.”

  “But those were little girls—”

  “You having trouble with Sunny?”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “She’s not at the apartment.”

  Leroy plucked at the covers, stared out the window, his mussed brown hair sticking out at the temples. “You’re a good friend,” he said slowly, as though his lips were just learning the words. “Probably better than I deserve. Do me a favor, would you? Bring me my camera?”

  ***

  They found no cause for his fever. Too little food and zero sleep, he told them. Because he’d been eating, they agreed to release him. Fa
ced with this confirmation, he lay in the darkness staring at the ceiling, realizing what a fool he’d been. How he had taken those photographs, he did not waste his time imagining; why he had taken them, he strove with all his might to understand.

  Justin met him in the lobby. His shades hid his reaction as he passed over the camera. The black leatherette looked worn, comforting.

  “Come on,” Justin said brusquely, rattling car keys, smoothing balding hair. In the parking lot, sunlight speared off glossy red paint.

  “Where are we headed, driver?”

  “My place. I set up the spare room.”

  “But I need to get some work done.”

  “It’ll wait.”

  “Justin, I want to go home.”

  Justin pursed his lips and floored the accelerator, looking unaccountably grim.

  “Come on, Justin, I want to see my cat, for Chrissakes!”

  “Millicent’s at my house.”

  “You can’t mother me, I’m too big a boy. You’ll have to sleep sometime. Come on, daddio, give me the car keys!”

  Justin whizzed down the maze of streets until every apartment and thrift shop looked the same. Leroy felt dizzy, but never let up the barrage of banter. The skin about Justin’s eyes grew tight; slamming breaks, whizzing around corners... they screeched to a halt in Leroy’s yard.

  “Gee, thanks, chum.”

  “You won’t be thanking me once you get inside.”

  Leroy hurried up the creaking floors of the old house. Second story, third, the keys fumbling, almost dropping. When Leroy pushed the door open, the motes of dust momentarily blinded him.

  Nothing.

  That was what she’d left him: and after that first stunned moment, he hurled whatever was left at the walls—an empty cat food can, a blender he’d always meant to fix. He was trying to rip out the microwave when Justin pulled him away. He couldn’t batter the barren walls with the shit she’d left, so he set up a barrage of sound. Justin dragged him to the bedroom.

  “She didn’t know when I’d be coming back,” Leroy said dully. “Sunny doesn’t deal well with being alone.”

  “I told her you’d be back in about a week.”

  “Thought you hadn’t seen her.”

  “She was here the day I came to get Millicent. With a friend. She didn’t want to talk.”

  “A friend.” He lingered over the words.

  “She’s seen the photographs, Lee.”

  In the silence, those last words hung in the air. Leroy felt every inch of the apartment, every mote, every bar of sun and smudge of shadow. With the camera in his lap, his consciousness expanded, filling the room, spreading like ether into the street. Lazily as a coal-stained cloud, he drifted in pursuit of that lone sunbeam in the gray city—

  —Sunny, riding pillion behind an unknown biker—

  —Justin shaking him, calling his name—

  —Martin Leroy Gregory, 36, photographer, listing like a ship going down, shaking as foam touched the corners of his mouth.

  Justin was yelling, “Lie still, you idiot!” The room narrowed to a tunnel, bordered by black, the camera an unrelenting pinpoint of the end. “I’ll find her for you, for God’s sake, but you know what’s going to happen!”

  Yes, he knew. Darkness, calling him through a lens he thought he’d mastered.

  He dove into the dark place in his mind. Quiet. Cool, slick as mud, dark and rank and calming, smooth squelching between the toes. When he surfaced, it was with a dark filter before his eyes. Justin appeared in negative, black eyeballs and teeth and dark, gray-shaded skin, a patch of white for hair.

  “I’m all right now,” Leroy said, smiling. “Find Sunny for me, that’s all I need.”

  How much easier, to read Justin’s new black eyes. “I wouldn’t take her back.”

  “She’s been with me six years. I want to know why.”

  “I think you might be better off not knowing.”

  Leroy only smiled as lifted the camera, watched Justin’s negative-face darken with pallor. “Run along now, Justin. I’m counting on you.”

  ***

  That night, Leroy sprawled on the bed while he waited for the camera to speak. It was his only tether. He drifted toward sleep, and the camera waited patiently, a black box with a penetrating eye that would open precisely as he dozed, smooth as a cat purring.

  Somewhere at the base of his skull, he felt the tiny click of the shutter. The box probed, recorded what it found. He was drifting in a sky beyond the richest blue he had imagined. Stars, milky-bright as day. He read signs, followed streets, tracking Sunny to her new house, following her about town, watching as she cavorted through carnivals with various boyfriends, giving each of them that radiant smile. Sometimes, her smile darkened, and one of the boyfriends would frown and look behind him, as though they could feel his presence. Days and nights, he took pictures of her in the most intimate and embarrassing moments, against the focus-screen at the back of his eyes.

  One night he was jerked back from his perusal of Sunny with her latest beau to find his mouth filled with the taste of burnt copper. Hammering in his chest, hammering on the door that echoed in the empty stairwell, hollow as a coffin. He lay still, hardly daring to breathe. Had they found him out, at last? The infernal pounding went on and on till he felt he must move or shatter. He thought he heard the click of rifles in the hall.

  He tried to get off the bed. Waves of dizziness washed over him, stinging with nausea, and he had to sit still, bare feet touching the cold wood floor.

  Slowly, he rose, not fighting the darkness that flashed over his sight. He eased himself to the window, picked up the camera, held it solid and real as a cold-edged dream in both hands. He pressed it to his forehead.

  Somewhere to the left, muffled by the wood, “Leroy? I know you’re in there. Leroy, answer me. Please, baby. Justin says—”

  Sharp pain, tearing at his chest. Before his vision, the camera flashed a series of candid shots, telling the bitter truth: Justin, losing the museum job for defending him... finding Sunny, taking her to work with him at the old camera shop when Leroy didn’t come back. Sunny’s new-found artistry, her photographs surpassing his. Through it all, her love for his best friend.

  Slowly, Leroy sank down on the army chest. He had been happy before all this started. If only he could have stayed clear of everything but his camera.

  He set the timer. He posed wistfully on the chest.

  The shutter clicked down to darkness, encapsulating the speck of light that was his life. He sat on the settle, naked, his hands and his shriveled penis dangling between starved knees: and he waited, and waited, and waited, but the blankness never ceased, and when Sunny finally opened the door, he didn’t feel her hands upon his shoulders, though to her kneading hands his dick rose wildly and unthinkingly, as it had always done.

  The House That Wept Puddin’

  Eric Dimbleby

  When you cross into the cluttered breezeway of his house, you take off your shoes. Darby has asked you to do so. You’re often bothered by having your feet exposed, but you’ve got some thick wool socks on so it’s basically like you’re doubled up in the shoe department.

  “We ain’t wore no shoes in the house, not since my kitty died,” Darby adds to his previous request. You nod, but you’re not really sure why. There’s something sort of transfixing when his drawling voice hits your ears. “Kitty never come back. So now we take the shoes off, got it?”

  “Got it,” you reply. It doesn’t make any sense and you have a sneaking suspicion that it never will. Darby’s got a few loose wires inside of his skull, but luckily they’re insulated, just like those wool socks on your feet, which you’re entirely grateful for wearing now.

  He invites you into his kitchen and the first thing you notice is smell. Not so much a smell, but a stench, really. Something along the lines of a hobo’s bloody, baked-bean-soaked feet after a long day on the rails, or a corpse’s asshole after it’s evacuated the Last Supper. Maybe a littl
e bit of both, but tinted by a garlic clove. You don’t say anything about the odor because that wouldn’t be very gentlemanly.

  You’re quite the gentleman, aren’t you?

  The second thing you notice is that he doesn’t have any lights on. He mumbles something about how he prefers to work by candle light, just as he lights what may very well be the fiftieth actively flickering candle across his house. It puts off a surprising amount of light. You can’t quite help envying him a bit. He’s more environmentally conservative than most, and the man probably votes Republican. Good on him, you note. Good on him.

  You met Darby on the internet, which seems to be the place that most strangers meet nowadays. You sort of miss the good old days, when strangers kept to themselves, never daring to interlope in the vexing lives of others, when people gave a hearty wave on the street, but never gave up any details beyond that. Now, folks won’t even make eye contact in public, but you immerse them into an internet chat room or message board, and suddenly they’re a Mister Fuckin’ Rogers avatar and a hometown listed as “The Moon.”

  Darby has a doggie, and you are in the market for a doggie. Not just any doggie, but a Rottweiler. You know that they’ve got bad reputations, but you’ve been robbed three times in less than two years. Your wife keeps getting on you about buying a security system, but they’re just too expensive. If it was a one-time expense, okay. But a monthly bill for the service? Enough is enough, you say. The night before this one, you told your wife that you were going to pick out a guard dog. She disapproved of that notion, of course, but you went ahead anyway. Because you’re a man’s man, and a man has gotta do what a man has gotta do. And even though Darby’s house smells like Satan’s dickhole, he’s a man as well—a man who happens to own a dog that happens to be well known for biting the throats off of thieves.

  “So where is the little bugger?” you ask. Bugger? You’re not sure why you called it a bugger. Part of you thinks that maybe you ought to have your guard up. That dog could come charging out of any cranny in the house.