Experimental Film

by Gemma Files

  I can describe the photos Safie took from memory.

  Picture a strip of field, narrow and rough, suitable for wheat or rapeseed but gone untilled since the turn of the twentieth century. At one end there’s a small stand of woods, too knotted for easy penetration. At the other, a house—first raised in 1885, then rebuilt to its owner’s specifications in 1902—that has stood here so long it’s begun to sag and split along the centre-line, becoming two rough half-mansions smashed haphazardly together, sutured only by the further process of decay. Between field and house stretch the remains of a garden verdant with weed and herb, a simple maze whose box hedges have grown so thick that access to the back door is difficult in any season but winter.

  Back and to the right, however, is the ruin of another building entirely: iron struts, black and rusty, outlining what seems to be an invisible barn, a boxy greenhouse cleared of its contents shortly after Hyatt Whitcomb’s “burial” and converted first into an artist’s studio, and then—as we now know—a movie set by adding a stage, a series of hand-painted backdrops, and a windowless wooden shed probably used as a dark room for developing the resultant film strips. Fifty years of foul weather had broken nearly every last pane. Even the shards left behind were dull and blunt, matte grey in any but the brightest light.

  “All the time I was growing up here, the Vinegar House was our main creepy landmark,” Safie’s footage shows Moraine telling us, as we stand outside the front door, its gleaming brass padlock the only bright new thing on the entire edifice. “Kids used to sneak over and break in all the time—almost like making a pilgrimage—but we never stayed too long, just looked around a bit and left. Nobody ever had parties here. Nobody came here to park and neck, or what have you. For myself, I haven’t been inside for three years at least, and the one thing I remember is that there doesn’t seem like there’s ever been any graffiti in there, anywhere, crazy as that sounds. What bunch of teenagers doesn’t scribble all over everything?”

  Safie turns her camera on me at this point, and I give the lens my most obvious and disdainful eye roll. But it got harder to be snarky once we were inside, especially when we hit an unexpected roadblock; right on the front steps, the little girl, Aileen LeFray, suddenly had a complete meltdown and absolutely refused to proceed further, to the point that she started kicking and punching when her exasperated father picked her up and made as if to carry her. Her parents gave up, and the mother took Aileen around the back—“See if there’re any crabapples ripe enough to eat,” Moraine suggested. Then, lighter by two, our group made its way past the doorframe . . .

  . . . and there really wasn’t any graffiti. Not, as Moraine gleefully pointed out, “a scrap.”

  But that’s not to say there wasn’t any decoration.

  We came in down the House’s main hall, checking constantly for sags and gaps in the floorboards. “This floor can be treacherous,” Moraine said. “Five years back, a kid from Overdeere was here doing his thesis and fell right through, up to his hip. Got stuck there overnight. It was so cold that year, he was almost blue when they found him!”

  For all her morbid glee, however, she seemed as relieved—and unsettled—as the rest of us, once we finally got to where we were going.

  The “paintings” we found ourselves confronted with were actually a series of freehand-drafted murals covering much of three walls in what was once the Whitcombs’ grand dining room, located at the rear of the house. Its main table—now missing all its legs due to rot, almost invisible upon the rubbish-strewn floor—would have once been angled toward a set of four large windows looking out onto the maze garden and glass house alike, flanking a set of double doors which give way to the terrace. The murals start at the baseboards and rise to a height of roughly eight feet, which suggests they were finished by someone already fairly tall (as a young woman, Mrs. Whitcomb stood five feet, eight inches) using a ladder to boost her reach.

  The original paints appear to have been white lead-based, which perhaps accounts for their surprising durability under harsh circumstances. On the video, you can see that although there’s a lot of mould and peeling, the general shape of these images remains clear, along with enough fine detail to give a distinct impression of what Mrs. Whitcomb must have had in mind. (To rebut critics who speculated she must have had help while installing them, the museum dug up records showing Mrs. Whitcomb only brought in local men to help her lay the foundation before sketching over it in charcoal and dividing each wall into sections, which she then personally filled in over a period of two years, 1907 to 1908.)

  I don’t know yet if it’ll be viable to get any of the photos or still frames from the footage into this book, or whether it’s even worth trying. Nothing we took that day does the place justice; nothing really captures that room’s queasy power. What few European artists and critics took note of the pieces produced during Mrs. Whitcomb’s honeymoon tour all mention her odd, wavering figures—thin-limbed and indefinite under haloes of diluted washes, outlined in receding layers of pale green, violent yellow, or stark white, as though viewed through eyes squinting against a bright light. If her earlier work was mainly Impressionist and only tentatively Symbolist, the Mural Room friezes seem to transcend these influences—to take them and wring them out, boiling them down to bare essentials, pure, weird, and stark.

  Set against a background of a thousand tiny colour points and arranged in a sort of procession moving inward from either side, faces cast down but hands upraised as though in supplication, the figures range from child-sized to adult but have few other signifiers—possibly universally feminine or simply androgynous. Some appear to carry farming tools like rakes and scythes, while others tote sheaves of fruit, grain, or flowers. All have something in common with both Jan Toorop’s Indonesian shadow puppet-inspired “soul” figures and classic Byzantine ikons, up to and including their use of three-quarter semi-profile and full-body mandorlas or glories, outlining light clouds similar to the effect observed in Kirlian spirit photography, which supposedly reveals the human body’s aura, or life-force.

  But they’re also attended by what seem to be “shadows” done negatively, in even brighter colours—green shading upwards to viridian, yellow to citrine, white to palladium. Slightly larger than the figures that cast them, these “shadows” are thin and predatory, almost skeletal, with long hands and nodding, wide-mouthed heads, blind and seeking. Their bottom halves terminate in tails rather than legs, coiling and twining with each other like snakes or tentacles, in some cases seemingly attempting to ensnare the feet of the individual figures to whom they find themselves attached. As in the famous illumination from the Liber Scivias showing Saint Hildegard von Bingen receiving a vision from God and dictating its content to her personal secretary, the processional figures are also linked by a five-tongued flame emanating upwards from their eyes, which joins into a vine or tree-branch above them.

  On either side, these branches merge with the gigantic central figure—not immediately apparent on entering the room, since you have to turn around to see it—whose body is mainly composed of the yawning aperture of the dining room door, two flaps of a pale cloak or pair of wings falling to either side of the frame, and a veiled, almost featureless face with blazing white eyes fringed in gold glaring down at visitors from just above the lintel.

  No flaming sword, Safie’s notes read—margin-scribbled, almost a footnote. But it’s Lady Midday all the same. Who else?

  I don’t remember exactly how long we held up the tour in that room, though it was probably a good thing Aileen LaFrey had ended up staying outside with her mom, given the awestruck, breathless, and totally obscene exclamations I kept making. Our fellow tourists Axel, Holle, and Max were all too ready to leave before long, but as Moraine explained, insurance regs meant she couldn’t let anyone out of her sight; so long as one stayed behind, everybody had to. To get us moving, Moraine finally had to lean between Safie and me, and offer—

 
“Hey—want to see Hyatt Whitcomb’s secret place? Upstairs?”

  Because he spent the latter half of his short life increasingly subject to debilitating seizures, the Whitcombs’ only child lived in what Moraine called “a glorified closet” next to his parents’ bedroom. “They wanted easy access to him at all hours, just in case,” she said, as we trudged carefully up the stairs, “so they took the doors off and hung up a curtain. He was seven years old but he still slept in a kind of a crib with a lid over the top they could latch every night, because sometimes he would get up in his sleep and wander off. They’d already hired a girl to go everywhere with him when he was awake—her name was Maura Sauer, from God’s Ear—so they made her a bed in there that was right up against the side of his crib, hoping if he did get up, she’d be there to catch him.”

  Much like his mother, Hyatt Whitcomb was artistically gifted. Whenever he was ill, which was often, he would lie inside his crib sketching on long rolls of rag paper with soft chalk. A lot of those drawings are in the Quarry Argent Museum’s back-shelves, only a chosen few on general display. What neither of the Whitcombs could know, however, was that Hyatt had already found a way to get out of the crib and avoid his nurse’s detection.

  “That little cubby’s right back against where part of the roof comes down to meet an outer wall, close to one of the chimneys,” Moraine said. “And if you take the wood panelling off, you can get into an access ladder-way the builders left to make it easier to clear blockages out of the flue. There’re rungs cut right into the big load-bearing beams, going all the way to the ground and a little service door out the back. Well, poor little Hyatt must’ve figured out one of those panels was loose, or maybe he kicked it loose during one of his fits and nobody noticed, I don’t know. One way or another, he finished prying it free, dropped it down the ladder-way, and tacked up a bunch of his sketches to curtain it off, so he could come and go as he pleased. Boys do things like that, no matter how ‘special.’”

  Discovered after Hyatt’s disappearance, the top of the access shaft was left open throughout Mrs. Whitcomb’s subsequent tenure in the bedroom (she moved in a month after Mr. Whitcomb’s departure for Europe, and was never known to sleep anywhere else from then on), only to be sealed up with the rest of the house in 1925. Though it’s clogged now with cobwebs and blocked off at each floor with wire mesh, with a flashlight you can look down all the way to the bare earth, three floors below. The rungs Hyatt used can still be seen, incised into the foot-thick vertical beams, wood worn smooth—possibly slippery—with age.

  And if you lean into the shaft and wait for your eyes, and your camera, to adjust, you will see that almost the entirety of its interior has been covered with crude yet recognizable yellow, white, and green chalk scribblings—sketchy parodies of Mrs. Whitcomb’s finished product downstairs.

  Stay in the shaft long enough, Moraine told us, and a smell begins to collect in your nostrils: faint but acrid, something hot and rotten that stings the eyes. Not everyone reports this scent, apparently—Safie didn’t smell a thing and says I claimed not to either, though Axel, Max, and Holle said they did—but nobody who has reported it was ever able to identify it, or find any kind of biological or chemical source for the stench. Whatever it was, or is, it drove Holle out of the room in five minutes, loudly exclaiming that she wanted to puke. Axel went back downstairs with her, as did Max, who went outside to join his wife and daughter; this time, Moraine didn’t try to stop them.

  Safie says that when I asked Moraine if anybody knew which particular sketch or set of sketches had camouflaged the shaft, she told us they were simply views of the maze garden and the field beyond it, as seen from the dining room’s windows. The chalk drawings Hyatt made while inside, however, obviously served as prototypes or “raw” versions for the processional and shadow figures in the Mural Room, as well as its overhanging central image, suggesting that Mrs. Whitcomb almost certainly deliberately incorporated them into the Murals after her son’s death.

  “You can see a lot of crossover, true enough,” Moraine acknowledged on the recording, after I asked her about this. “Probably went both ways—he grew up watching her paint, after all, and she’d been doing that since before he was born. Maybe by way of being a memento, as well, after his death. But there’s a long way between Hyatt’s drawings and those paintings.”

  From our own review of the shaft’s artwork—or what our camera captured of it—the image Hyatt repeated most often was definitely the veiled, glaring face his mother painted above the dining room’s main door: a disturbing design, especially when you consider it was drawn by a child of less than eight. I’ve read other people’s accounts of visiting the Vinegar House, and a number of them have asked the question (rhetorically left unanswered, perhaps because it’s unanswerable): of all the works her son produced, why would Iris Whitcomb choose this one above all others to memorialize?

  Then again, given their origin, the murals gain further troubling context from the fact that the maze garden they frame, Hyatt Whitcomb’s favourite source of daytime entertainment, is also the place where his parents and nurse eventually found the last trace of him ever discovered: his abandoned nightclothes, partially buried in the earth just beyond the maze’s far edge, bordering that final strip of field between the Vinegar House grounds and the woods.

  According to at least one report I turned up, Hyatt’s nightclothes had somehow been pushed so hard into the ground that they became jammed in a cracked chunk of granite and had to be cut free.

  When I listen to Moraine reeling off Hyatt’s range of symptoms, even after re-viewing the footage as many times as I already have, I still feel a sick sense of recognition mounting in me, narrowing my throat; I can only think the same thing must’ve happened then, even if I can’t remember it. Which might explain why the next thing I hear myself asking Moraine is—

  “So—Hyatt Whitcomb was on the spectrum, right? What I mean is, from the way you describe him, he must’ve been autistic.”

  “That’s what they’d call it today, probably, yes. Why?”

  Here Safie suddenly decides to pan around the room, maybe trying to avoid my face, though I can see myself start to look down just as her lens switches away. Hear myself start to say, softly: “Well, I . . . that is, my son . . .”

  “What about him?” The barest pause here, just a fraction of a breath, as she suddenly realizes what sort of hot button she’s tripped across. “I, oh; oh, I’m very sorry. Is he—”

  “Never mind,” I reply after a moment, voice gone quieter yet. And Moraine breaks off as well, switches subjects like the pro she is, hastening to avoid giving any further offence; turns back toward the door, beckoning with a bland, cheerful, empty sort of smile, the kind oncology ward nurses must practise daily. “Well, anyhow,” she says, “let’s go back outside, shall we, since the light’s still with us? I’ll show you two the maze.”

  “That’d be great,” Safie agrees, readily. While at almost the same time, I put in from the side of the frame—

  “You know, I’d actually much rather see what’s left of the greenhouse, thanks.”

  “Thought you wanted to do that together,” Safie says. I shrug.

  “No problem,” I tell her, easily enough. “It’s getting late—might as well split up, get as much as we can, come back tomorrow if we have to. That’ll work, right, Miss Moraine?” She nods. “Yeah, see? That’s why God made iPhones.”

  Safie’s notes say Moraine, Safie, and I came out through the dining room doors, picking up Holle and Axel as we went. The LaFreys were already over by the maze, little Aileen kicking a half-bitten crabapple ’round the first corner like a soccer ball then chasing after it. As Moraine led the way toward the glass house, Safie, who’d been itching to get footage of the maze—the memorial plaque set up where Hyatt supposedly disappeared, in particular—parted ways with us, taking some shots of the maze entrance and its interior’s first few paces
with Axel and Holle posing in it, to lend perspective. True to my word, I took out my iPhone and switched it to video, recording two longish clips I saved to memory before starting my final go-round. These aren’t all that interesting, in hindsight; the best part of the second one is when Moraine, who’s showing me around, brushes a dirt-stiff tarp off of what proves to be a stack of flats from Mrs. Whitcomb’s Lady Midday period.

  “Didn’t even know those were there!” Moraine’s voice exclaims as I start to flip through, using only the barest edges of my right-hand thumb and ring finger; dust puffs up in clouds, making us both cough. Thus revealed, the artefacts in question are bleached-out and stained—edges nibbled, gummed together with a winning combination of insect by-products and bird crap—but the bottom-most one still shows traces of Mrs. Whitcomb’s trademark hypnagogic design and psychedelic colour scheme. Interestingly, as I thumb through the pile, these tints fade away completely, as though she’s figuring out that using shades of grey with the occasional white highlights will suit her method of shooting far more accurately: almost a negative image of what she wants to achieve, pre-jacked so it registers for maximum impact on silver nitrate stock.

  But I don’t have a lot of time to study the mechanics of it all. Because something is about to happen. Is happening already. Couldn’t stop it if I tried, not that I’d know to want to.

  So I’m talking through the colour-shift progression—retrogression?—and Moraine’s barely listening, for which I can’t really blame her; she’s looking over to her left, frowning slightly, saying something I can barely hear. “So much glass,” that’s what it sounds like on playback. Like: “Gotta make sure and get that cleaned up, someone could hurt themselves.” That’s nice—always thinking ahead, that Val. In this case, she’s probably got her head stuck in the future, post-exposé, when everyone in Ontario will want to come see where Mrs. Whitcomb used to work her odd, silent, black-and-white magic. And I can’t fault her can I? Because I’m basically doing the same, until—