Experimental Film

by Gemma Files

  On its head was a crown. In its hand, tip drooping, scoring the floor, a sword.

  Lady Midday.

  And here is where things start to shiver; here things blend and bend. Here is where things stick, like a frame of film through a projector’s gate. Here is where things start to catch, and melt, and burn.

  Inside the pocket, the whole rest of my memory’s contents peel and whisk away, leaving nothing behind but a pitiless circle of light. Just me and Vasek Sidlo, frozen inside its circumference, with this phantom leaning in overtop, sliding one hand down under his shirt collar and cupping his frail breastbone, that lid beneath which his ancient heart beats.

  I am abruptly hyper aware of the danger—my body, a mere meat-bone-blood-shit shell for my frenzied brain; a cage without keys. Sweat pricks my palms, my temples, muddies the small of my back. Pins and needles in my damaged shoulder, both arms clenching so hard the nerve cuts off, twangs like a pained string. My back hunches, furls, longs to grow wings.

  Sidlo’s looking up now, eyes narrowed, studying. Then they widen slightly, and—he smiles, the same way he did when I first walked into his room, at the home. As though he recognized me.

  So long, so long I’ve waited . . .

  . . . to see you, and not again, not really. No.

  For the first time, ever.

  Giscelia, that was my name, the painful-burning figure hovering above tells me, as Sidlo relaxes against her like a tired child, head pressed to her bony, shrouded bosom. Then Iris, then Mrs. Whitcomb . . . so many names, as poor Vasek says. So many attempts to reach you, after such long silence.

  I blink at her, so dry I can almost hear my lids click; wish I could cry, if only for purposes of hydration. Try to summon a suitable response—any response, really—but nothing comes. We are so far beyond all known maps, and I have no stars to guide me—no instinct, no tools. Not even a compass.

  I shut my eyes tight against the light as death’s breath meets mine, smelling of rotten flowers.

  So very long, the figure repeats. But time grows short, for all of us, and I have to show you something, sister, directly. Since you still refuse to listen.

  “I don’t—”

  Sssh, hush. Be quiet, that’s all I ask. For once.

  Now open your eyes once more, and watch.

  I met Her in the field, when I was a child, trembling under my father’s wrath—his God-madness. And that was the beginning of it, as you already know.

  “Yes.”

  I grew up, possessed by Her image. I met Arthur and married him. Because he loved me, he took me there, to find out what it was I’d been seeing all those years—Dzèngast. “Home.”

  “I know, yeah. I found your—”

  I let you find it, sister, led you to it. Like She led your friend in the woods. As She would lead you elsewhere, if I did not stand between.

  I frowned. “Stand between . . . So everything up till now, everything that’s happened—that wasn’t Lady Midday after all? That was—?”

  Yes, sister, me. Hurting you to spare you further hurt. Visiting harm on you and yours, in the service of saving you from harm.

  “You killed Jan, that’s what you’re saying.”

  Something I’d mourn, if I still could. And yet.

  (And yet.)

  Now: are you ready to see?

  “See . . . what?”

  What you did not want to then. What you blinded yourself in order not to see.

  Something you’d rather sit in the dark with forever than look at directly. That’d be bad, man. Really bad. I didn’t know if I was capable of looking at something like that, or anything else. If I was—capable, at all. If I ever had been.

  I kept my eyes closed in the field when She came; you keep your eyes closed now. But you can only be selfish so long, sister.

  Mrs. Whitcomb’s skeleton hand slipped further down to rest lightly over Sidlo’s hidden, fluttering heart.

  This world is full of terrifying things, yes—far more than we ever thought; things that make us want to run, to hide, to dig ourselves deep and pull the earth up over, a child under blankets. But being a mother must put paid to all that, don’t you find? It’s like being born again, your heart on the outside of your body.

  It all sounds so simple, because that’s how I’m making it seem—so glacially paced, when it actually went by in a drunken rush, a neural pop. Because when one mind touches another, even through the medium of a third mind, things happen at absolute top speed; essentially indescribable, even when you struggle to. Particularly then.

  Be bold now, Lois—for Clark’s sake, if not your own. Please.

  (A classic fairy tale instruction, with its provenance daylight-clear: the sign over Mister Fox’s murder warren, that grim den of bones, warning unwary potential brides away. Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, Lest that your heart’s blood should run thick with cold.)

  “What do I have to do?” I made myself ask.

  What are you willing to do?

  “What’s necessary?”

  I meant it as question, but she took it as a statement. And there she was, all of a sudden—closer yet, engulfing Sidlo, who gasped in pleasant pain: Oh yes, oh thank you. At last. Her shrouded face pressed up to mine, teeth to lip, so near my nose almost fit the hole where hers should have been.

  Listen to me, she repeated—a whisperless whisper, so strong I felt my whole head resound. She is not here, not yet, but soon; call me Her harbinger. She shone her light on me and I became her reflection, her crooked shadow. But I am not even one-tenth of what she is—a ghost, not a god. You would always rather deal with a ghost than with a god.

  “I—yes, yeah. I agree.”

  And the reason She is coming is you. Accept that. Because you wouldn’t turn away. Because you kept going when everything—when I—told you to stop.

  “I understand,” I admitted, not wanting to.

  You made a door for Her, and it will open, unless you close it. Or the only control you have left will be over where She arrives, and who She shows Herself to.

  Time to do the unselfish thing, in other words. Unlikely as that was.

  Mrs. Whitcomb’s ghost looked down then, or seemed to—hard to tell without eyes. In Dzèngast, when I asked the Kantorka how I might yet escape, she laughed at me. As she was right to. What she told me was this, and I have remembered it ever since, though I never wanted to believe it: “Only do your duty and you will not be chosen—that is Her promise. Unless She decides your duty is to be chosen.”

  I cleared my throat. “Will you leave them all out of it if I do?”

  Yes, sister. To the best of my ability.

  “Will She?”

  I cannot know. No one can.

  No surprise there.

  So I bent my head in the dark, not daring even to pray. “Show me,” I told her.

  I opened my eyes. I saw.

  I was seen.

  And like my self-proclaimed “sister” before, I knew I would never again be un-seen.

  The blinds behind her were sealed back together now, narrowly bisected, daylight threaded. I saw images spill across them, flaring like a plume of steam—memory as movies, pulled straight from her head through Sidlo’s, black and white and silver burnt all over. Reflections in the mind’s eye of a long-dead woman.

  The images were constantly oscillating, rendering them impossible to understand for a few seconds, till I recognized a particular pattern of rhythmic blur: the way sunlight flickered through the GO Train windows when we took it down to Mississauga on a summer afternoon so Clark could spend time with Gran and Granddad, Simon’s folks. Which, in turn, snapped everything into focus, an optical illusion flipping from nonsense to meaning.

  A dark-panelled train compartment with cushioned benches, smaller than any I’d ever travelled in—Victorian, Edwardian maybe. One
door, one window; a cream-gloved hand (mine?) pushed in the last of a series of pins fastening a sheet across the already-drawn blinds, shutting out the last of the popping, scratching, flickering outdoor light. But the haze around me wasn’t all darkness—there was something else in my way, a sort of swaying scrim, lightly floral patterned. Cream too, or even white, dimmed down to dirty grey.

  (A veil.)

  Squeezing back past the projector, set up on the compartment’s tiny side table, I watched “my” hands travel up past my face, then peel the occlusion free from my head on down, like shedding skin. The image immediately sharpened overall, lightened, though only slightly. The bulk of it fell sidelong, topped with the flat, broad-brimmed beekeeper’s hat it’d swung from, trailing over the closest disused row of seats.

  There was one further, small pause, time enough to wonder if “I”—this memory-movie’s unseen protagonist—might be nerving herself up for something. Then, all at once, the gloves reached out once more, snapping a series of switches; the clacking, whirring sound of a film reel kicking into motion, rattling gears mimicking the train wheels below as light splashed against the haphazard sheet-screen in a blaze. And underneath: harsh breathing on the ragged edge of sobs. It rose over the camera’s whir, keeping a gross sort of time.

  Don’t look, I thought, as though I had a choice. I’m not going to look, I won’t—

  But the real laugh of it was there was nothing there to see. Not immediately.

  (In the field, when she came, I kept my eyes closed. My first sin, in a long line of them.)

  Just darkness at first, close and hot as the train itself, muffled somehow—only the barest lines of light available to become gradually arching upwards, outwards, the veins of two crossed leaves. A tiny, uneven triangle near the top, centre-hung—a sort of upside-down diamond. But watch long enough (you couldn’t not, I soon found), and things got ever more recognizable, in tiny increments. The lines thickened, greying, back lit flesh over bone. Ten fingers separating with slow discomfort, reluctant, as though under orders; that flesh diamond stretching, breaking open, wider, wider, wider: Hell’s own peep-hole, framing an uprooted, alien world. To show, at last—

  A denuded field, bare to the tree line. Dust on the horizon. Ash from a burned-out barn.

  Humps of clothing, some hugged together, burnt and swollen faces turned away. Flies rising, probably buzzing, though the lack of sound made it hard to tell.

  And bright, so bright, but . . . slanted, somehow. Not lit so much by the still-noontime sun above, burning stationary at its centremost point—the time between the minute and the hour, according to Dzèngast’s long-dead Kantorka—as by something located just off-screen and widdershins, on the sinister left-hand side.

  Cameras stayed stationary in the earliest films, but this was memory, no matter the trappings. And Mrs. Whitcomb . . . Iris Dunlopp . . . Giscelia Wròbl . . .

  Her head was already moving, even as her hands dropped. Swinging ’round, eyes slightly squinted, to finally see, to face—

  The sword, and its bearer. That burning crown. That molten hair, falling to brush those bare, brass-nailed feet. That face—too beautiful to not stare at, yet almost too bright to perceive clearly, without threat of damage. That looming body, silver-white shrouded and figured all over with white-hot gold, a slice of sun itself.

  This, this was the real thing, obviously. Real enough to wound. Real enough to tear the wall between worlds like flesh.

  Light roared through the gap, a blinding torrent. “I” threw up my hands—sheer instinct—before forcing them and “myself” back down, to one knee. From somewhere, a word came:

  Lady.

  Nothing remotely feminine—or even human—in the massive force glaring at “me” through that awful gap, so the term rang both hollow and foolish, like calling a volcano “Sweetheart.” Yet it was all “I” had, and apparently, it was enough to merit a reply.

  (daughter)

  At the sound of it, so killing-soft, so—deplorable, equally bruising to the ears as its speaker was to her own eyes, brain, soul—I felt Mrs. Whitcomb reel, momentarily deafened, almost passing out. Then she pulled herself straight again, still kneeling, and repeated:

  Lady, please. I beg you.

  So terrible, to be under a god’s eye, her attention. To be pierced through, pinned, like an insect.

  (daughter of liska, daughter of handrij, I see you, yes)

  (I know your name)

  (what would you ask of me? what would you)

  (offer)

  Not quite so overwhelming, this time, but still a skull-rattling cacophony, still utterly soulless. You know, “I” cried back at her. My son, Hyatt. That he be here, or I be there, with him. I no longer care which.

  (ah, but that cannot be)

  (he does his duty)

  (poor broken thing, gone to feed the earth, and happily)

  (knowing, at last, he has a purpose)

  The train rattled on, as did the projector; the sheet-screen burned still, heatless, unconsumed. And I felt Mrs. Whitcomb rock back on the heels of her high-buttoned boots as though slapped, kick-skirt flaring; felt her lips tighten, her heart skip, her ears burn. Felt her give a long, ragged breath, before gathering enough courage to ask the terrible thing before her—

  What?

  (you heard me, daughter)

  I’d never seen a photo of Hyatt; there weren’t any that I knew of. So instead I saw Clark, of course—grinning sly over his shoulder, trying to catch my gaze so he could spout a string of well-memorized advertising jargon and have me sing it back to him in the same slurred, jazzy way, all inflection, no real content. A bare sketch of conversation, pared down to the simplest of all emotions: contact, acknowledgement, affection. I see you, Mommy; do you see me? I—

  (love)

  The idea, sweet Jesus. The very fucking idea of something, anything, telling me that, about Clark . . . it lit me up, inside. Or was that her, Mrs. Whitcomb? All that fear, all that awe—

  —and now, anger, sweeping it all away. Plain human rage, like a landslide. Like a flood.

  You took my son, she said, toneless. And you killed him. Continuing then, for all she must have known it meant nothing: How long ago? Was it the same night, or later? Did he live with you, here? Was he happy, even for a little while? He loved you, you vile thing; I saw the evidence—his drawings, his trances, his tiny ecstasies. God damn me, I loved you too, in my way.

  I was never given a choice not to.

  And here I remembered an interview I’d read once with Larry Cohen, non-practising Jew and director of many fine no-budget horror films (The Stuff, Q: The Winged Serpent, It’s Alive!), in which he said that if any of us really believed in God then every time we prayed, the only thing we’d ask for would be for Him to leave us the hell alone.

  To all of which Lady Midday didn’t quite nod, but neither did She—did It—completely disagree. Only replied, in that same dreadful voice—

  (he does his work, yes, for which he was chosen)

  (as you do that for which you were chosen)

  (as you complete it, now)

  And again: What?

  The film, of course: Mrs. Whitcomb’s ultimate vision of Lady Midday, plucked straight from her head and packaged for mass consumption, with Vasek Sidlo’s unwitting help. The image that forms a door, opening from both sides, to let Lady Midday—her inspirational muse’s gaze, her inquisitor-executioner’s judgements, her ceaseless thirst for sacrificial blood—back into an unwarned, unprotected, supposedly safely disbelieving world at last.

  To take possession of someone capable of mastering this language of images and illusion, almost from birth, and use it to create something that could seize an entire audience’s hearts and minds at once, restarting the cycle of worship in an altogether new way.

  Dzèngast had been destroyed during World War I, I
vaguely recalled from my research, long after Mrs. Whitcomb’s ill-fated honeymoon. Which meant that our all-powerful She had already been effectively busted back down to a fairy tale by the 1920s, one unlikely to be told outside Wendish circles, with fewer and fewer people identifying as such. So how else could She expect to gather together another patch of “old heathens” to feed Her the elderly and compromised, to chuck their exceptional offspring into the earth’s open maw, if not through the wildly flourishing new international church of cinema? Where else could She hope to find and train a fresh Kantorka, one whose Cult of Lady Midday-proselytizing songs and stories might reach millions without Her even having to open Her mouth?

  And Mrs. Whitcomb had played right into it, trying to save Hyatt, trying to save herself. Trying to placate this creature that chased her from cradle to grave, from the murder field in Lake of the North District, where she’d first felt Her touch, to this fast-moving Toronto-bound passenger train she stood in now, watching reality’s skin peel away under the toxic weight of her life’s “work.”

  Thinking: I saw You. I saw Your reflection. You were behind me, like a light, on fire; You cast me like a shadow, and then I disappeared. And since then there has been nothing but light, and the light is still here, and I just want it to stop, all of it. I want to sleep, to lie down in the dark. I want it to stop.

  Poludnice, a little sunstroke, under whose scrutiny this shell of delusion in which we cocoon ourselves becomes nothing but dust and ashes. That moment of knowing things are literally irreparable, a last jolt before nothingness, as you shrink down to an easily extinguishable spark.

  Was this what you saved me for, from my father? Mrs. Whitcomb asked. Was this the game, all along? Was I never anything but a key to you, and my boy the key to me?

  Those pitiless eyes. That unforgiving glare. These words, soft as death, and just as inescapable.

  (what else?) was all Lady Midday could apparently think to ask in return.

  The film blazed on, impossibly bright. No darkness anymore, no contrast. Around it, the train compartment had begun to bleach, to lose consistency. Because Lady Midday was so close now, close enough to touch the screen from its other side. In a moment, she would climb through, and Mrs. Whitcomb could do nothing to stop it—tear down the sheet, perhaps, and stuff her back inside? No. The wall beneath would split; the train would crack in half. The sky would crack, and take the earth with it.