Photographing Fairies: A Novel

by Steve Szilagyi

  I must have psychological problems, I thought. That’s why I believed that cockeyed constable and his photographs. It’s because my business is going under. Roy could see it. Why couldn’t I? I resolved to read some Sigmund Freud as soon as possible.

  “Are you ready?” Sir Arthur asked.

  I nodded.

  He placed a pile of prints in my hands.

  I picked up the first print. It was an outdoor scene. A lot like Walsmear’s photos. There was a young girl, not nearly so pretty or angelic as the girls in Walsmear’s photos. (Actually, I thought she looked a little cheap.) She was holding out her index finger. And standing on the index finger was — I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  I looked up at Sir Arthur. He was beaming. I looked back at the photograph. I looked back up at Sir Arthur. I started to chuckle. Then I laughed.

  “What’s so dashed funny?” Sir Arthur asked.

  “This picture,” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s a joke, isn’t it?”

  “It is not.”

  “Come on. It’s got to be a joke.”

  “Are you a poor loser, Mr. Castle? Don’t you see the fairy?”

  “Yes, I see a fairy. But it’s just painted on there. Someone’s painted a fairy onto the print and rephotographed it. It’s not even a good painting. I can see the brush strokes. And look at all these others. They’re just the same.”

  “I misjudged you.” Sir Arthur frowned. “You were not the right person to show these to.”

  “Where did you get those?”

  “They came to me from some very reliable people.”

  “Well, they’re fake. It’s so obvious. The artist didn’t even use human models. It’s all out of his imagination. These fairies have popular illustration written all over them. How could you fall for these?”

  Sir Arthur was trying to master his anger. “I suppose you think the photograph you have is superior?”

  I was full of new admiration for the photographs brought to me by the simple policeman. It was a grand demonstration of how truth makes itself known. It spites our expectations, and thwarts the mighty.

  “Yes, it’s superior,” I said. “It captures an actual phenomenon on film. Even if it’s only an optical illusion. Your ‘fairies’ are flat. They aren’t even shaded like the rest of the picture. They’re painted on, Sir Arthur. Painted on.”

  Sir Arthur’s gray mustache twitched. His inhalations grew labored. These must have sounded alarms in Mary. She put a hand on her father’s elbow.

  “Can we talk?” she said. “Outside?”

  They went out into the stairwell and held a murmuring conversation. When they came back in, it was Mary who spoke. “Mr. Castle, you do not think our photographs are authentic. Am I correct?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Is that your professional opinion? Or is it because you have these other photographs?”

  “It is my professional and personal opinion that you and your father are the victims of a crude hoax.”

  “And you say this without having examined them thoroughly? Without seeing the negatives? Without seeing the camera they were taken with?”

  “I don’t need to.”

  “Why not?”

  “A child of ten would not be fooled by those photographs. Not even the most benighted, drooling moron would actually believe that those were — ”

  I stopped myself. Sir Arthur and his daughter believed in the pictures nonetheless. I could see it in their eyes.

  Mary coughed into her hand.

  “So you believe,” she said, “that the policeman’s pictures are authentic?”

  “I think they show something real. If I look up at a cloud and imagine it’s an elephant, at least the cloud is real. It’s not painted on the sky.”

  “And you think our photographs are not real?”

  This was getting exasperating.

  “No,” I said. “Your pictures are crude concoctions pandering to the popular idea of what a fairy is supposed to look like. Look, this fairy here is wearing a gown. Now where did she get that? Are there fairy dress shops? Are there fairy mills where they weave the fabric? And who works in the mills and dress shops? Is there a fairy class system? Are there fairy unions and fairy strikes?”

  Sir Arthur burst out, “Oh, so now you’re the expert on fairies. You know what they actually look like.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You sound like you do.”

  “What I do know is that if there are fairies, they don’t look like popular illustrations. They’ll look how they look. Not how we want them to look.”

  Mary intervened. “Mr. Castle, do you believe in fairies?”

  “That’s not a fair question. Not fair at all. You’ve got to see that, Miss Doyle. It’s rather like being called on the line about religion or something. I mean, what is it to ‘believe’? A thing doesn’t exist just because we ‘believe’ in it. If a thing exists, it exists. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”

  Sir Arthur stared me down angrily. “Well, I do believe in fairies,” he said.

  Mary put a hand on her father’s arm.

  “The world is changing,” she said to me. “A new worldview is opening up thanks to psychic research. Fairies play an important role in that world. We suspect they represent a parallel line of evolution. They may be a kind of intermediate being, straddling the natural and supernatural worlds. From our studies, it appears that they play a beneficent role in the growth of plants and flowers, much like bees and butterflies. We’re not quite sure how it works. But somehow, they provide energy that aids the growth of vegetable matter. However it might be, the subject is potentially explosive. And we believe it has the power to change human thought forever.”

  “You’re entitled to your opinion.”

  “And you’re entitled to yours. But you aren’t entitled to ruin all our work.”

  “What work?”

  “We own all rights to those photographs you are holding. Very shortly, we will be releasing them to the newspapers. For us, it is the beginning of a campaign, complete with lectures and illuminated slide shows. It will be a campaign to make the world believe in fairies. Our fairies. Not yours.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “That is what some part of the public will inevitably say. Fear, disbelief, and ridicule are something that we are accustomed to. That we can survive. But there is something else our movement cannot survive. Can you think what that is, Mr. Castle?”

  “It won’t survive those phony pictures, I’ll tell you that,” I said.

  Mary pretended not to hear me. “Look at the field of religion,” she went on. “Why is it that no single religious idea dominates the world? It is because the first primitive man no sooner put forth his idea of a divinity, than some other primitive man put forward some alternative. And on it went, until today the field of religion is crowded with competing sects, all claiming to be true, and all appearing — to intelligent people at least — to be ridiculous.”

  “So what is it that you are afraid of, Miss Doyle?”

  Father and daughter stood side by side. They stared down at me over folded arms.

  “Competition,” Mary answered.

  So it was that, an hour later, I left the Doyle’s psychical bookshop with a most unusual set of contracts under my arm. They were contracts empowering me to act as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s agent in Burkinwell. My task was to purchase the Burkinwell fairy photographs from Walsmear, the girls, their father, or whoever had the right to sell them. Sir Arthur was willing to pay as much as one thousand pounds. It was in my interest, however, to get the photos for much less; for my pay for acting as go-between would be the difference between one thousand pounds and what the seller of the photographs could actually be persuaded to take for them. In other words, if I purchased the
photos for six hundred, I would get four hundred. If I got the pictures for nothing, the whole thousand would be mine.

  Of course, I was astounded that Sir Arthur was willing to part with so much to rid the world of rivals to his spectacularly bogus “fairy” photographs. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t so strange, considering his opinions — a few more of which I’d heard before leaving his company.

  “We are at a crossroads in history,” he’d said. “Mankind has just emerged from a great and terrible war. The current peace is violent and vexing. The next war will be more horrifying than the last. And the war after that — it is difficult to contemplate. Let us just say that to prevent it, we must redirect the path of human evolution. We must point our race toward those regions hinted at by our innate psychic understanding. We must plant our feet firmly in the spiritual. For there is only one route of escape for mankind, Mr. Castle. And that is, in a sense, through the ether . . .”

  Chapter Seven

  How I Lost My Valise

  I like railroad stations. I like the way they look. I like the way they sound. I like the way they smell — well, I like the way they look and sound. I’m especially fond of railroad stations when I don’t have to catch a train. Strolling hands-a-pocket through crowds of harried travelers calms my soul. I seem to be looking down on the masses as if from a great height. Below me the human condition is spread out like a carpet.

  What do I mean? Well, each individual bears his burden of miscellaneous parcels and luggage. Each is bent on his own concerns. Above us all is a ceiling of clouded glass. This peculiar ceiling admits light, but conceals what lies beyond. Beneath it the brave and cowardly, fool and wise man, all hurry to their coaches and so to be borne away by the solemn black engine of death, which awaits us patiently, chugging at the end of the platform.

  When traveling, however, my concerns are no different from any atom in the churning swarm. I don’t contemplate the mystery of crowds and the pattern of intersecting fates. I just want people to get out of my way.

  So it was two days after my meeting with Sir Arthur. I was at the railroad station to catch the train to Burkinwell. It was late, and for some reason it seemed that great mobs of louts, laggards, and sluggards of both sexes and all classes had chosen this day to take the air at the station. They discovered the points that would be most inconvenient to me, and there chose to form dense, slow-moving knots.

  I was uneasy for other reasons, too. When I’d come out of the psychic bookstore two days earlier, that Bible-crazed crone had been waiting for me. Small, wiry, and dressed in black, she’d leaped out of the hedge. It was like being attacked by an umbrella.

  “Ssssssooooo,” she’d hissed. “What is it now? Chiromancy? Numerology? Chatting with the dead? Reading cards? Casting spells?”

  Recovering from my surprise, I assumed an air of urbane amusement. “No, granny,” I winked. “Nothing sinister. Just fairies. Innocent fays. Gentle sprites.”

  “Demons,” she said, baring long dark teeth.

  “No, no, no,” I chuckled. “Not at all. Sweet little peris, dancing across the buttercups.”

  “Call them what you want, sonny,” she said. “But I’ll tell you — they’re demons straight from hell.”

  It wasn’t hard to disentangle myself from this disagreeable person. But it was not so easy to escape her words. Not for the last time I wondered what I was getting involved in. I didn’t worry so much for my soul as my mind. I was headed down a garden path. What lay at the end? Madness? Were there actually fairies, or only the demons of self-destructive fantasy?

  I was eager to be on my way. I knew that once I was aboard the train and on my way to Burkinwell I would feel better. As I said, however, the crowds at the station did not seem to share my sense of urgency. Worse still were the two porters I had engaged to transport my luggage.

  My luggage consisted of a large steamer trunk and two valises. They were piled on a wooden wagon with a long handle, which one of the porters pushed from behind while the other pulled from the front. They were poking along at an exasperating rate, and carrying on an unintelligible conversation.

  To wit:

  “Your fault, Paolo.”

  “Your fault, Shorty.”

  “Not so, comrade.”

  “Betcher so it wasn’t.”

  “Betcher so it was.”

  At the time, there was no reason for me to take special note of the way these two looked. Later, however, I had cause to remember their appearance. In fact, their faces and figures were laid into my brain with something like a hot branding iron.

  The porter addressed as Paolo was a tall, stalking creature. Middle-aged. His eyes were dead; his skin was dirty and pale; and his cheeks wore deep, lugubrious creases under long side-whiskers.

  The one called Shorty was Paolo’s opposite number. He was only half his partner’s size, and possibly half his age. He had a pink, butcher-shop complexion, and tiny little teeth through which he sieved his breath.

  “Your plan,” said Shorty.

  “It was a good plan,” said Paolo.

  “It was a stupid plan.”

  “Was not.”

  “Was.”

  “I couldn’t plan for everything.”

  “Guess you were too clever.”

  “Both too clever.”

  “By half.”

  “It’ll blow over.”

  “We’ll lay low.”

  “That’s right.”

  “They’ll forget.”

  “People do.”

  “But people talk.”

  “That’s right, people talk.”

  Here both porters stopped. They looked back at me. Was I listening? Not really. I was just walking slowly behind the wagon, head bowed like a mourner. There was a hot little ball of anger in my gut. I ignored it and grinned at the two in a friendly way. They went back to pushing and pulling.

  I guess they were satisfied that I wasn’t listening in to their conversation. But I wasn’t satisfied. I was late. I coughed in a stern way.

  The tall one was at the front of the wagon. At the sound of my cough, he abruptly stopped. Those of us walking behind did not. Shorty fell over the trunk. I fell over Shorty.

  Paolo watched us disentangle ourselves. “You in a hurry then?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am in a hurry.”

  “He’s in a hurry,” he said to Shorty. “Imagine that.”

  “Yeah. Imagine that,” said Shorty, straightening his cap.

  “You’d think it was our fault,” said Paolo.

  “Don’t blame us,” said Shorty.

  “No sir, don’t blame us,” said Paolo. “If you had left earlier, you’d have gotten here sooner, and you wouldn’t be late.”

  “That’s true,” agreed Shorty. “Some people always wait until the last minute.”

  “Bad habit that,” said Paolo.

  “I beg your pardon,” I interjected, “but I don’t see where it’s any of your business when I left. Your job is to get my luggage to the train. And to make it snappy.”

  “Make it snappy?” echoed Paolo. “He’s an American, I think.”

  “Oh well, fancy that,” said Shorty.

  “Yeah, well, an American, well. And he thinks it’s our fault he’s late.”

  “Our fault,” said Shorty.

  “Listen,” I said. “I left home with plenty of time to spare. But since I arrived at this station, things have been going very slowly.”

  “And that’s supposed to be our fault?” said Paolo.

  “It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” I said.

  “It matters to me,” said Paolo. “How about you, Shorty?”

  “Matters to me. Yeah.”

  “So there you have it,” said Paolo. “It matters to both of us. Now what I’d like to know is if you are in f
act complaining about the way we’re performing our jobs. Because if you are, you can’t just stand there and complain. You have to file a formal complaint. We’re in the union, you know. You can’t just say anything you want to us. It’s not like the old days.”

  “No sir, not like the old days,” nodded Shorty.

  “We’re protected. You can’t just push us around.”

  “All right, all right,” I said. “I’m sorry if I sounded like I was complaining. Let’s forget the whole thing and just get my luggage to the train.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” said Paolo. “You don’t get out of it that easy. We’ve still got to get this thing straight.”

  “Straight, that’s right,” from Shorty.

  “Do you,” said Paolo, “or do you not believe we are in error in moving this luggage slowly through the station?”

  “I do believe you should move along as quickly as you can,” I said. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

  Paolo chuckled knowingly. “For your information,” he said, “we are only following orders. Our supervisor told us that we were to be very careful with this trunk.”

  “Careful,” said Shorty.

  “He told us,” said Paolo, “that there was glass in the trunk. Fragile, he said it was. Is that or is it not true? Am I mistaken, or am I not?”

  “As a matter of fact, your supervisor was right,” I said. “That trunk does contain — ”

  “I mean — ” and here Paolo slammed his hand down on top of the trunk, which clinked loudly “ — it sounds like glass to me.” He slammed his hand down again.

  “Please, be careful,” I said. “You see — ”

  “And who do you think would have to pay for it if we broke something inside?” Paolo asked.

  “Yeah, who?” asked Shorty.

  “I’ll tell you who,” said Paolo. “We would, that’s who. We’d have to pay for your bloody crystal goblets or whatever you lot carry around in your trunks.”

  “Bloody crystal goblets,” spat Shorty.

  “My gosh,” I said. “It’s not crystal goblets. It’s darkroom equipment. Jars of chemicals. Cameras. Lenses. Yes, it’s fragile. And I appreciate your care. But you can move along a little more quickly. I’m the photographer, and I take full responsibility.”