“You know about this?”
“She was abandoned by the two people who were supposed to love her more than anyone else in the world. This fantasy is her way of coping, gaining control,” Miriam’s voice took on a tone John associated with his fifth-grade social studies teacher. “It’s called magical thinking, and it’s actually very normal for a child in her circumstances.”
John squinted at his wife. “Normal? I call that weird, Miriam.”
“If she can believe that she sent her parents away because they hurt her cat—that’s what she says, that she sent them away to protect Mittens—then she doesn’t have to accept the reality that they abandoned her.”
“Does she think she can send other people away, too?” John’s mouth tasted sour. Had Grace told Miriam what she’d done to Shane Malone? Would Miriam have some kind of child psychology mumbo jumbo to explain that away?
“Yes, she says she had to send her uncle away to protect her aunt and cousins. He was abusive, you know.” Miriam’s hand pumped the knife up and down, reducing the carrot to an orange mound. “That’s how she rationalized the fact that her aunt couldn’t afford to keep her when the uncle abandoned the family.”
“Anyone else?”
Miriam eyed him. “Of course not.”
“So, when she tells you these things, what do you say?” John asked. “Do you try to reason with her?”
Miriam smiled and shook her head. “What good would it do? The books all say that once she feels safe and secure, she’ll gradually let go of her magical thinking.”
John rubbed his temples. “What if she doesn’t let it go? Maybe there’s ...” He took a deep breath and chose his words carefully. “Maybe her problems are too big for us to handle, Miriam. Maybe we’re not the right family for Grace. It wouldn’t be fair to the boys—”
Miriam’s eyes widened, and she stopped chopping. “You get one thing through your head, John.” She wagged the knife to emphasize each word. “We are not abandoning that child. Grace has found her forever home, and it’s right here with us.”
JOHN slipped out to the back deck with the laptop and Googled magical thinking. What he read seemed to confirm Miriam’s theory. Small consolation—if the kid wasn’t dangerous, she was crazy. Something in the computer’s browser history caught his eye: garter snakes. He clicked on it and a picture of a green and brown snake filled the screen.
Recoiling, he rushed to close the window. Before he could, a skinny arm reached around him, and a short finger tapped the screen. “They’re not dangerous at all,” Grace said. She pursed her lips disapprovingly. “You were silly to be scared. Because of you, I did something unfair.”
John’s hands clenched the arms of his chair.
“Unfair?”
“I sent the little snake away because he scared you. But he wouldn’t have hurt you. I’ve been trying to bring him back, but I can’t.” Grace’s head drooped, and she scuffed her sneaker across the deck. “That makes me sad.”
John forced himself to relax his grip on the deck chair. Miriam said to humor her. He spoke softly. “Can you send anyone away, Grace?”
She looked at him through her wispy bangs as if he’d asked if she could fly. “Of course not. It only works if I need to protect someone.”
Like Christopher.
John looked into her fierce, righteous face, and he knew fear. Would he wake up one day and find Gordon gone because he called his little bother a twerp or trounced him in a video game?
“Grace, Shane Malone was just a rude teenager. He didn’t hurt Christopher.”
She regarded him with that special look children use when they’re astounded by the stupidity of the adults who control their lives. “I wasn’t protecting Christopher. I was helping the girl with Shane. When the bright light flashed, I saw Shane hurting her, trying to do what my uncle used to do to my cousin, Lori, when he sneaked into her room at night. The girl screamed, but no one came to help, because everyone screams in that place. So I sent Shane away.”
“There you are,” Miriam appeared at the sliding glass door with the phone in her hand. “It’s the detective working on the Shane Malone disappearance.”
John accepted the receiver. The mild summer air felt as treacherous as a riptide.
“Sorry to bother you again, Mr. Harrigan,” the detective said. “I happened to notice a discrepancy. The credit card records indicate you paid for five admissions, but your family photo shows only four people. Who’s missing?”
John’s hand tightened on the phone. “Uh ... Grace. She’s nine. She was hiding behind me because she was scared. When the flash went off, she must’ve jumped back and got cut out of the picture.”
How quickly the lie had formed in his mind. How glibly it flowed from his lips. John realized he was holding his breath, waiting to hear if the detective accepted this explanation.
“That’s what I figured, but I had to check.”
John could hear the disappointment in the detective’s voice.
“Just for the record, Grace is your daughter?”
John looked across the deck. Grace stood by the railing, her fair hair illuminated by the rising moon. She’d caught a firefly in her hand and was studying its rhythmic flashing. Then she shook her hand and smiled as it flew into the night.
“Yes,” John said. “Grace is my daughter.”
Sift, Almost Invisible, Through
By JEFFREY SOMERS
I
“What am I looking at?”
The little man, Richard Harrows, pushed his thin wire glasses up the bridge of his nose and leaned forward a little. Philip K. Marks looked up at him and kept his face blank.
“A photo, Mr. Marks.”
“Did you take it?”
“No. This was last year, on vacation. I’d asked someone to take my picture.”
Marks hoped the little man wouldn’t launch into a description of the trip. “Okay. Why am I looking at it?”
“Because of him.”
Harrows reached over the desk to point a nail-bitten, shaking finger at the photo. Marks followed it to where a thin man had been caught by the camera, leaning against a railing. Marks glanced up.
“So?”
Richard Harrows was a balding, short man with a precise and nervous air. Marks had seen plenty of people in his time, and his professional opinion of Richard Harrows was that the man was the sort of honest-by-default person you could trust but never rely on.
“Look closer, Mr. Marks.”
Marks sighed and returned his attention to the photograph. The man was tall, and wearing a dark suit and white shirt. He was off to the left side of the framed area, behind Harrows’ shoulder, leaning casually against the railing, one hand in a pocket. Marks studied his blurry form and blinked, looking up at Harrows.
“You know this guy?”
Harrows laughed nervously. “I’ve never seen him. Not in the flesh.”
“Because I would swear he’s looking at you. Or at the camera.” Marks shook his head. It was an odd impression, the more so because the focus of the camera was obviously nowhere near the man.
“Ah, yes,” Harrows said with another little laugh, “you see, Mr. Marks, that was the beginning of the problem. He wasn’t there. He’s never actually been anywhere, but he’s showing up in pictures of me, as if he were.”
Marks glanced up sharply. “Excuse me?”
“Look.” Harrows produced a small stack of photos. “Here are samples from the past year. The one you have is the first, and it is from almost a year ago exactly. Here are others.”
Marks took the stack and examined them in turn. In each photo of Harrows, obviously taken at different times, during different seasons, in different places, the thin man appeared, in the same dark suit, looking directly at the camera, always just off from the actual focus of the picture.
“You’re sure you’ve never met him? That you don’t know him?”
Harrows shook his head. “Mr. Marks, I would swear that he was never
there. I would have a photo taken of me somewhere, anywhere—I like to travel, you see—and be sure he wasn’t there. This is more recently, when I became aware of him, you see. Then, I’d develop the film, and there he’d be.”
Marks shook his head. “It is odd how he seems to be following you, and how he seems to know you’re posing for photos, but I still don’t see—”
“Mr. Marks, I came to you because of your reputation—”
“For being someone who believes every line of bullshit that comes through my office,” Marks finished. “I’m well aware of my reputation, Mr. Harrows. I’d like to think I also have a reputation for getting paid to look into things.”
“Mr. Marks,” Harrows said slowly, “I think you will be interested in my story, because if you look at the photos again—they are arranged in chronological order—you will note that he appears to be getting closer.”
Marks looked through the photos again and felt a chill go through him. He could see, over the course of the fifteen or twenty photos, that the thin man was slightly closer to the camera each time.
Marks looked up. “All right, Mr. Harrows—”
Harrows held up a hand. “Finally, Mr. Marks, there is this.” He pulled another photo from his inside jacket pocket and handed it to the reporter. “Taken just two days ago, at my father’s house. Family reunion, of sorts.”
Marks looked at the photo. He picked out Harrows, two men who appeared to be his brothers or close cousins, and an older man unmistakably his father, mixed in with about ten or fifteen men and women. They stood in an attractive and comfortable-looking living room, sporting two large bay windows. Marks almost jumped when he noticed the thin man standing, partially obscured by a drape, outside one of the windows. He appeared to be bending down slightly to see around the fabric.
“Damn near shit myself,” Harrows said.
“I’ll bet.” Marks considered. “May I keep these?”
Harrows smiled. “You’ll look into it?”
Marks smiled and raised his eyebrows. “You’ll pay me?”
II
Phillip K. Marks was a man in his late thirties, a slight dusting of beard on his face, and a sloppy suit of brown clothes on his broad, tall frame. He smoked cigarettes in a never-ending chain and had a half-full bottle of cheap bourbon in one desk drawer that would be empty within a month. He made a small living doing whatever people wanted to pay him for, relying on word of mouth for advertising. A man lacking any remarkable skills at all, he was proud of himself for having found a niche, even one whose only requirement was a tolerance for pain, humiliation, and dogged relentlessness.
After Harrows had left his small, rented office, Marks pulled out the bottle and poured himself two fingers of liquor, lit a new cigarette off the coal of the old one, and sat back in his chair contemplating the photographs for some time. Without taking his eyes from the newest one, he reached for the phone, dialed by feel, and waited a moment.
“Ralph Tomlin, please.”
He turned the family reunion upside down thoughtfully.
“Hey, Ralph, Phil Marks. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Listen, you think you could squeeze in a favor? Sure, it’s right up your alley. Some photos. Well, I just want to see if they’ve been faked or altered in some way. Ah, peace of mind, you know. You’re handed something and told, hey look at this, you want to be sure you know what you’re looking at. A bunch of photographs—maybe fifteen. You got time?”
He sat up and fished an envelope from his desk. “Great—thanks. I’ll stop by, then. You’re a gem, Ralph. And I don’t forget that I owe you a few drinks—we could meet for dinner tonight, you hand over your findings, I’ll buy, what do you say? Okay, see you then.”
He hung up the phone, slid the photos into the envelope, and stood up.
“Christ,” he muttered, “if I’d known, I would have stayed in school, become an engineer.”
“THEY’RE real, Phil.”
Marks took the crumpled envelope and squinted at it. “You’re sure?”
Ralph Tomlin nodded, eating dried noodles one at a time from his hand. “As far as I can tell, Phil. I did the standard tests—searched for standard stock overlays, pixel differentials, inverted shadings. That’s not 100 percent definitive, but you only gave me a few hours. Give me a week, I’ll take it apart dot by dot. But based on what I did today, it would require serious expertise to have faked those. So they’re either real or absolutely amazing, one-of-a-kind fakes.”
Marks nodded. “Okay. I doubt I need to look that hard at these.” He glanced up at Tomlin, who was a round man, jowly, red-faced, cheerful-seeming. “What did you think of them?”
Tomlin chewed and shrugged, swallowed. “Look like vacation shots to me. Amateur, not particularly inspired—the kind of pictures you get when you hand a cheap camera to random strangers and ask them to take your picture. Sentimental value only, I’d imagine.” He cleared his throat. “Although since you gave them to me, I can only imagine that there’s something not obvious about them.”
Marks held up one at random. “Did you notice the man in the dark suit?”
Ralph squinted. “Okay, I see him now.”
“He’s in every one.”
Ralph nodded. “Okay.”
Marks took the photo back. “No one knows who he is or why he’s showing up every time this guy poses for a picture. That’s the story. So far, at least.”
“Sounds pretty boring, Phil.”
Marks shrugged. “Most stories are. You check out nine to find one that gets interesting. Now, you order anything you want, baby.”
Ralph snorted. “Thanks. You’re a big spender, big boy. So what now with this?”
Marks stuffed the envelope into his jacket. “I’ll talk to the fellow who gave them to me, put a little pressure on him, see what comes out.” He shrugged. “It’s a necessary step. You’d be amazed how many real crazy people approach me, feed me bullshit. Sometimes they come up with some pretty complex bullshit, too.”
Ralph shook his head, holding up a menu. “No, Phil, I wouldn’t.”
III
“Mr. Harrows,” Marks huffed, “thanks for coming.”
Harrows took the offered hand quickly and sat down. Marks wheezed around to the other side of the desk and collapsed into his own chair.
“You have some findings?” Harrows asked.
Marks shook his head. “Not yet, Mr. Harrows. I’ve asked you here to ask a few more questions and to perform an experiment. I spent the last two days doing some basic fact-checking.”
Harrows seemed unhappy. “Checking up on me?”
“You didn’t think I wouldn’t, did you?”
Harrows shrugged and looked down at the floor for a moment. “Well? What do you need from me?”
Marks settled himself into the cracked leather of his chair. He placed a large paper bag on the desk and reached into it. “First, I’d like to ask you if you’ve ever experienced anything that could be described as ‘paranormal.’ ”
Harrows shook his head. “I didn’t even realize that this would be considered such until I began noticing ... him. In the earlier photos I showed you, he was distant—part of the background, really, and easy to miss. By the time I started to see him, he was... closer.”
Marks nodded. “Okay. Let me ask you this, then, and please be perfectly honest. Do you recognize the man?”
“I’ve wracked my brain, Mr. Marks. Nothing about him stirs any memory at all.” Harrows laughed a little. “Believe me, I was convinced at first that this... ghost, or whatever, was haunting me, so therefore, there must be a connection. I’ve thought about it and thought about it, and have come up with nothing more than pure imagination.”
Marks began pulling cameras from the paper bag. “Have you gone through older photographs, perhaps?”
Harrows nodded. “Sure, sure. Went through fifty years’ worth of family photos, looking for someone who resembled the man. Nothing.”
Marks placed six cameras on his desk, including an expensi
ve digital camera with a wireless instant printer and a small video camera. “Mr. Harrows, in the samples you showed me, you were in all of the photos—most were vacation shots, where you had asked someone to take your picture, correct? Have you ever noticed our friend in photos you yourself took?”
“No. I’ve checked. When I am behind the camera, he is nowhere to be seen.”
Marks nodded. “Hmmph. Well.” He sat up in his seat. “Well, let’s experiment, gain all the data possible. I’ve got here some random cameras. Certainly not a scientific experiment, but it will at least show us some possible guidelines. I propose to take photos of you—lots of them—using different cameras and see if our friend shows up in them. I’m beginning to have a rudimentary theory—not about what or who, but merely concerning some of the rules of the phenomenon’s behavior. Let’s get started, shall we?”
Harrows looked at his hands for a moment, then nodded. “Fine.”
Marks had Harrows stand against one of the walls of the small office. He took three or four photos with each camera, from different angles and different distances. “I noticed,” he said as he snapped them, “that in all the photos you showed me, you never had your back to a wall. I wonder if that will have any impact.”
Harrows looked startled. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Marks continued to snap photos. “May not mean anything—but that’s the point; we need data. Now, when I film you, just act natural. Move about a bit. I want to see if your movement has any impact.”
Marks lifted the video camera to his eye and pointed it at Harrows.
“See anything?”
Marks didn’t stop filming. “Calm down, Mr. Harrows. If I see any ghosts, I’ll let you know. Everything looks normal. But then I assume you did not see this man when you actually posed for the photos?”
Harrows nodded, shifting awkwardly.
“Okay,” Marks continued, “let’s just get enough video to have something to work with, a minute or so, and then we’ll get this film developed and see what can be seen.”
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