Night Shadows

by Greg Herren

  In the room, on one side, the floor-to-ceiling bookcases were filled with books, all stacked neatly with the edges out to the end of the shelf the way the nuns had taught them books must be shelved. But on the other side were the jars. These were stacked from the floor to about a foot or so above eye level, so that none of what was inside could be missed, yet not all could be seen. Most were of a uniform size—about a gallon, Faye thought, envisioning the plastic milk jugs at home. Some were smaller, like the jelly and jam jars her grandmother would put up at the end of the summer.

  All the jars were filled with a murky yellow-green liquid that looked like the bottom of the creek near her house where she would take the dog on Saturdays after confession and where you could see the small fish swimming under the flat rocks. But though the liquid was the same, the contents of each jar were different.

  Faye thought of this as the experiment room. The jars were the most compelling thing in the school, to her—after Mary in the grotto and St. Cecelia on the marble slab. She often thought Mary or Cecelia could easily come back to life if the right miracle occurred, the kind of miracle they were always talking about at school. But she was certain nothing in the jars could come back to life, and uncertain if they had ever even been alive. Faye was surprised these things were even allowed in the school, since they all seemed as if they came from Satan and could never have been created by God.

  All the things in the jars were dead, of course. Some she knew what they were—frogs and toads, some split apart and floating, their eyes open and staring out from the jars. She also knew the nematodes, because she’d studied about them and about the salamanders. There were some other slithery things—large, fat worms and little garter snakes. But the other things, she wasn’t sure. One looked like a baby with a huge head that curved away from the body that seemed shrunken and too small—how could it ever hold that head up? The eyes of the big-headed baby were a milky blue and were set into a too-pink and somewhat bloody socket. There was something that looked like a tiny pig that had been skinned or had never grown a skin, Faye wasn’t sure. Like the frogs, it too was splayed open and the eyes had rolled back in the head, exposing only the whites. The legs stuck out in front, like it was reaching for something, and the mouth was open, and Faye could never tell if it looked like it was smiling or screaming.

  The most disturbing jars held things with more than one head. A rat, a frog, a kitten, another animal that looked like a fox, but wasn’t. A baby alligator. A squirrel. These had all been sliced open and had an eerie comedy/tragedy look to the different heads. In the kitten, an eye had come loose from the socket and floated out a little on a shred of skin that looked like a stalk. If you moved close to the jar, the eye would move and turn a little toward you. Faye didn’t like to think about the two-headed kitten with its floating eye.

  Faye could never tell what was in the jars on the highest shelves and she had never dared to drag one of the big chairs over to stand on to see what was in them. The higher the shelf, the more horrifying the contents of the jars, so she always imagined that the ones she could not see were the ones that held the things that weren’t meant to be seen, the things that she was certain had not come from God ever, but which were like the bits and pieces of bodies she had seen in the photographs in her grandfather’s darkroom: Things that it was best never to know about. Things that held mysteries it was better not to have revealed.

  Faye wondered why there were never any students in that room, and she thought maybe it was because those things weren’t really meant to be seen, but were there as a warning, just like the statue of St. Cecelia. All those things were meant to warn the girls at the school to be careful, to do what they were told, to stay away from places where blood drenched body parts and kittens lolled with two heads and floating eyes, and someone could strike you down with their knife and slice open your neck so deep, you could never close it up ever again.

  Whenever Faye thought about these things, she would stop looking at the jars and walk over to the chairs and sit, positioned so that she could see both the jars on the bookshelves and St. Cecelia lying, bathed in the colored light from the stained glass, and wait for Mother Superior to call for her.

  4.

  It never seemed like a big leap from those early days in the dark room and running her fingers through St. Cecelia’s wounds and cataloguing the science specimens to where she was today. Faye Blake was born to photograph carnage—or at least that’s what she would say to slightly appalled friends and colleagues from the time she was in college until now. Once she was on her third drink it was easier to explain how she’d been mesmerized by the red light of her grandfather’s darkroom or transfixed in a kind of religious fervor by St. Cecelia and her Reliquary, as she had come to refer to the science library, and how both had propelled her to her career—or her fate. Faye was never exactly sure what she should call what she did. She knew there was nothing else she could do; she’d never tried, but she didn’t have to. She was meant to do what she did from the very first time she’d sat on the stool in the darkroom. She was meant to do what she did from the very first time she had felt St. Cecelia’s wounds or gazed up into the contents of the jars in the science room. Some of the girls she had gone to school with had become nuns. Not many, but a few. She had become—this—but it was a calling, nevertheless. Of that, she was certain.

  The squeamish were put off early by the baldness of Faye’s statements about her work and why she did it, but others were, naturally, intrigued. The wrong sort of men and the wrong sort of women were drawn to Faye and Faye herself had no flair for the normal, so she dove in, wondering sometimes if she was looking hard for the kind of end that had befallen St. Cecelia and was destined to ignore every bit of what the nuns had taught her about circumspection and restraint. When Faye thought restraint she thought of people bound and gagged and waiting for something terrible to happen. She never thought of holding herself back from whatever it was she wanted to do. Restraint was a form of punishment, it was sitting waiting for Mother Superior, it was not going home with the woman with the switchblade in her boot, it was choking back everything.

  Then perhaps Faye would simply end up like her parents—dead from a drunk-driving accident on New Year’s Eve, blood and flames running hot red rivulets into the snow, the car crumpled like leftover gift wrap from Christmas.

  Faye tried to care about what might happen to her, tried to think about the danger, tried to lean more toward normalcy, but it seemed counterintuitive to what she wanted from her life and the work that she also considered her art and which was inextricably linked to what she did when she wasn’t drawing or photographing. She wanted to catalogue those things on the upper shelves, the hidden horrors she had never been able to fully glimpse. Faye knew there was more than the two-headed kitten with the floating eye or the flayed-open pig with its hideous gaping mouth. There was how they got there in the first place. She had known all along those things weren’t created by God. What she hadn’t known was that it was people, not Satan, who had filled those jars and thought nothing of it as they did so. Once she understood that, Faye wanted to be the artist who shocked and appalled and drove people from galleries with their hands over their mouths, unsure if they were going to scream or vomit or both because she had shown them something of themselves that they wanted to see, couldn’t wait to see, were in fact desperate to see and even excited to see, but which revolted and horrified them nonetheless.

  Just as Faye’s fascination with her grandfather’s darkroom and the dead things she found at school had started soon after her parents’ deaths, Faye’s career had followed a similarly clear-cut path. After college, Faye had started on her quest simply enough, doing the kind of photojournalism that won awards and which no one thought of as voyeuristic because it had purpose and meaning. Art was always her end game, but she wanted that foundation of sincerity first. She wanted to tell her stories, but she never wanted to be perceived as a monster just because she wanted to roll back the roc
k to see what slithered underneath. After all, Faye was merely moving the rock and showing what was beneath it—she was doing what she had always done, recording the deaths of the little creatures with as pinpoint accuracy as she could, but she wasn’t doing the actual killing. Faye didn’t create the things no one wanted to see—and it wasn’t because of her that they couldn’t keep themselves from looking. Everything Faye had photographed from the time she had gotten her first camera at eleven when the notebooks and drawings were no longer enough had led her in the same direction: show the wounds deep enough to lay a finger in, examine the jars on the uppermost shelves, see if the bodies really do come together in the trays of developer, or if they were never whole in the first place, if it was always the fleshy, gore-streaked, blood-soaked shrapnel of human carnage, of what people can do to each other when no one else is looking.

  In an interview after her first big award, after she had chronicled the impact of an arson fire on a small town where several hundred people were trapped in a theater for a children’s Christmas pageant and the charred bodies had been laid out on the snowy sidewalk like some horrific holiday display, Faye had told the reporter that it didn’t faze her to detail what people were capable of because she knew everyone, given the right circumstances, could do the most unspeakable things and have no conscience about it whatsoever. Faye had leaned forward and looked directly into the face of the interviewer as she explained how the person who had set that fire had done so deliberately, had put two-by-fours through the door handles, had poured the accelerant all around the building and then lit the match—knowing there were three hundred people inside, more than a third of them children, and that it was a week before Christmas and everyone in the town would be touched by the tragedy.

  “We’re all capable of killing,” Faye had told the reporter, who was older than she by at least a decade and clearly unnerved by what he had hoped was merely her youthful candor and artistic bravado.

  “The question is, why would we kill? To save ourselves? To protect someone we loved? Or just because we wanted to know what it was like to watch the blood or breath run out of someone else? Or because we’ve come to love the sound of other people’s tormented screaming?”

  That first award had led to others, because the stories had gotten grislier and more provocative and sometimes it seemed that only she had the stomach to tell the tale—the stomach and the interest. Faye was always interested.

  Faye covered other terrible events—fatal fires, multiple killings. She had been the first photographer on the scene of a freak accident when an 18-wheeler carrying steel pipe had lost its load on the West Side Highway where it wasn’t even supposed to be. Lengths of pipe had flown off the rig, doing damage as they went. Two lengths shot through the windshield of the cars directly behind the truck. One driver had been decapitated instantly, his head flying into the seat behind him. The EMTs had found it later, on the floor. In the other car, a passenger had been impaled. The steel pipe had gone through his chest just above his heart, skewering him to the car seat. It had taken over an hour to cut him free, and even then a piece of the pipe protruded from his chest as he was lifted onto the gurney. Five other pieces of pipe had flown over onto the sidewalk, killing three dogs and fatally injuring their owner, who died later at the hospital.

  The paper’s photo editor had looked at Faye’s photographs and then at her.

  “Good stuff,” he’d said, then added, “for a horror movie. No way we can use these. What were you thinking? Decapitation? Impaling? Dead dogs? Really, Faye? We’ll use the first one. The rest you can take home for your scrapbook. And remind me never to look at that.”

  She had taken the photographs home and filed them. The paper had gone with her first shot of the truck and the splayed pipe with the windshield behind the truck smashed through, the headless body obscured. But before the other photos had left the paper, the buzz had gone out about them. Everyone on the city desk had made sure they got a look at them. Just as Faye knew they would.

  That was why the darker assignments had continued to go to her, because everyone knew she’d photograph anything. Then her editor changed. He thought her photos had a whole other level of potential and he wanted to let her run with her gut and his own voyeurism. “People’s right to know, Faye, people’s right to know.”

  That was how she’d been sent to do a series she thought might get turned into a book about children dying in the San Joaquin Valley in central California. A piece had come over the wire about a disease cluster and deaths linked to pesticide poisoning from run-off into the well water in the towns surrounded by the lush, endless fields of cotton, soybeans, strawberries, grapes, almonds, limes, roses, and carnations that spun out in a little hub of perfect produce and collateral damage from Fresno.

  “Fresno is a hellhole of a town,” her editor had told Faye. “But it’s one of those places where a lot happens off the page. Let’s get it on the page. There’s something there and I know you’ll find it.”

  The story was going to be in the paper’s magazine section. Nothing like dead and dying kids when you were having your Sunday breakfast or coming home from church. As she tracked down her sources for the pesticide poisoning exposé, Faye was caught in the endless web of contradiction that was the Central Valley: unremittingly beautiful and gut-wrenchingly grim. It was blazingly sunny every day and by eight a.m. it would be 100 degrees as Faye drove from one small town, Pixley, to another, Waco, and then onto a series of other small towns. Then she would go over to Bakersfield, then back to Fresno. Eighteen-hour days cataloguing things that would make most people scream and run from the room. In each place Faye went there were dead or dying children, their parents’ faces always uncomprehending, unable to cope with the idea that the only work they could get hired to do was killing off their children, slowly and terribly.

  Faye had sat in a tiny oven of a house where a shiny little white coffin festooned with gaily colored woven crosses was displayed in the center of the room. Its tiny occupant was a bald and wizened four-year-old girl in a white frilly dress reminiscent of the First Holy Communion dress Faye herself had worn at St. Cecelia’s. This girl in the coffin was the third child in her family to die from the cancer that came from the work her parents did in the fields.

  When Faye had taken the photographs of the weeping mother and inconsolable father as they sat next to the tiny coffin, the father’s arm draped protectively around it, she had remembered being at the grave site after her parents’ deaths. Her father’s secretary, a trim young woman with fluffy blond hair and big, dark sunglasses had been standing in the snow with a friend, visibly weeping. But when Faye’s parents’ coffins—side by side—were being lowered into the frozen ground, the woman had cried out and run to the edge of the big, gaping hole with the green, fake-grass tarps next to it, and had called out Faye’s father’s name over and over, a white rose in one gloved hand and her arms outstretched, as if she were trying to grab the coffin to her. The friend who was with her had tried to pull her back, murmuring to her to calm down, but the woman had pulled away, slipped on the muddy side of the hole, and fallen onto the coffin. She had gashed her cheek on one of the brass hinges, and blood gushed from the wound and onto Faye’s father’s coffin as she lurched into the open grave.

  A collective gasp had gone up among the mourners and the priest had looked around as if someone else might be able to fix what had gone wrong at the burial and make everything proper and sedate again. He had glanced at Faye, who had been in a kind of shock since her parents had been killed and she had been staying at her grandparents’ house, waiting to go back home.

  Faye’s grandmother had put her hand over Faye’s eyes like a kind of visor—not tight, but just like a shield, as if she were keeping a too-bright sunlight away from her, even though the day was gray, and she had whispered, “Poor girl,” and Faye had wondered if her grandmother had meant her or the woman who had been hurt. But before the woman had been lifted out of Faye’s father’s grave by s
ome of the men at the grave site, blood coursing down her cheek and onto the front of her ivory coat, Faye had seen the look on her grandfather’s face as he watched the sad, macabre scene.

  It was excitement. He had licked his lips and his eyes had sparkled, but not with tears, like her grandmother’s, but a different kind. And Faye had been glad her grandmother had covered her eyes. She hadn’t wanted to see more.

  5.

  After Faye had photographed the little girl in her coffin, she took photographs of the boy with no arms or legs, whose mother had tended the roses and carnations in the fields near Waco until just a few days before her son was born at the hospital in Fresno. The woman had gone mad when she had seen her egg-shaped baby, all round and sweet, but missing so many of his parts. The boy’s father had fled back to Mexico, clutching his rosary and the thick cross around his neck, hoping God would forgive him for whatever it was he had done to create a monster even the Chupacabras would be frightened of. The grandmother had told Faye the story while the boy, now five and very lively, rolled around in the dirt and laughed, crawling on his stomach like a lizard in the hot sun and telling Faye funny stories in Spanish while she took his picture. Faye had thought, just briefly, that he could have been one of the things in the jars back at school, floating dreamily in the murky yellow-green fluid in a perpetual limbo state while St. Cecelia’s mutilated body watched over him from her alabaster slab.