by David Boop
* * *
At home, the photographs from Naciemento brought Caleb Willows some measure of fame. Wealthier residents hired him to memorialize their children while they were alive, and to make records of weddings and other occasions, as well. For those without the resources to spare, a photograph of a dead loved one was a necessity, lest that person’s face fade from memory with time. Caleb’s studio on Commercial Street grew, he took on assistants when necessary, and his reputation spread.
He considered it his due. He had, after all, studied in New York under Mathew Brady, Jeremiah Gurney, and Alexander Gardner. That training had prepared him well for his career, and he had resolved to take his talents west, to a place with less competition and unlimited opportunity. He had hoped to make his living in portraiture of the living, and perhaps to make excursions into nature, to photograph scenes of the West that heretofore had only been shared through paintings and etchings. But the dead kept him busy.
He found himself wondering sometimes if Nate Murdock might drop by. He’d enjoyed getting to know someone so unlike himself—a real westerner, not some eastern transplant like himself. But he had never seen the man again after dropping him off on Naciemento’s main street.
One evening in late winter, a few months after that Naciemento trip, an assistant named Elspeth dusted and straightened the photographs displayed in the shop’s front window. As she did, she made a little noise in her throat, then said, “That’s odd.”
“What is?” Caleb asked.
“This photograph. I could have sworn there was a child on this chair before.”
“There is,” he said.
“There’s not.”
Had she gone blind, or been imbibing spirits? He stormed over to the window and snatched the frame from her hands. Soft light fell through the window from outside, onto the print. “You’re right…” he began. Then he let the sentence trail off.
He studied the image he had made of the Benson girl. Addie.
All it showed now was a chair, empty but for a doll seemingly forgotten there by a child who’d wandered off.
“There must be some mistake,” he said. “Did you replace this one with another?”
“Never!” Elspeth cried. She was young, in her teens, and her fair cheeks flushed when she was angry or embarrassed. She had only been in his employ for a couple of weeks; he’d found it more than passingly hard to retain help. “I don’t like those images of the dead. I only touch them when I absolutely must.”
“Well, I never took this one,” Caleb said. “Put it in back; I’ll have to find something else to replace it in the window.”
He had, by now, taken enough photographs of the dead in Trinidad to fill the window many times over. But clients passed by the studio on a daily or weekly basis, and he didn’t want to remind them of their losses. Instead, he used the Naciemento images to promote that particular service.
He went to his files. He had made multiple prints of each—those he sold to the families in that bizarre little town, and others for his own use. But when he found the prints where Addie Benson should have been, she was missing from them all. Only the doll remained, on the chair where he knew he had posed the dead girl. As much trouble as that had been, he wouldn’t have misremembered it.
Nor would he have wasted his efforts photographing an empty chair. But he held in his trembling hand the proof of it.
He studied the other prints. Most appeared as he remembered them, but on another—he thought it was a boy named George, eleven years old, who he’d posed with his favorite drum—the image of the boy had faded to a ghostly shade of itself, through which could be seen the sofa on which he’d lain.
Caleb had several prints of this one, as well, and the same effect showed on each.
He knew photographic technique as well as anyone, he believed. He didn’t understand the chemistry behind it all—he knew how to mix and use the appropriate chemicals, but he was no experimenter or inventor. Possibly this phenomenon was due to some flaw in his chemicals, or the way he stored the prints. He didn’t think so, but he was at a loss for any other explanation.
Back in New York, Caleb had seen some of William Mumler’s “spirit photographs,” in which ghostly images appeared around those living beings who posed for them. If trickery had been employed, Caleb couldn’t spot it. The war had seemed to increase the public’s appetite for word from beyond the veil of death—little wonder, since so many knew someone who had gone to battle and never returned. He had never heard of vanishing subjects, though.
He wondered whether he should report it to the photographic section of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, in New York. Union experts could examine the photographs and perhaps discover the explanation that evaded his own grasp. In the end, he decided against it; he couldn’t bear the thought of being labeled a fraud by those experts he so respected.
More weeks passed. Each time he looked at those prints, more of the children had faded away. Never the adults; they remained as distinct as ever. But the children disappeared, with only whatever object he had posed them with—a spray of flowers, a hoop, a favorite hair bow—remaining to indicate they had ever been there at all.
Then one day, he had another visitor from Naciemento. The man introduced himself as Jacob Banister. “You came to Naciemento in the early fall, and photographed some of our townsfolk,” he said.
“That’s right. Memoriam photographs.” He wasn’t sure whether he should say anything about the vanishing images.
“Can you return?” the man asked. “My son…there’s been another wave of illness, and nobody in our town has your skills, or your knowledge of the necessary processes. I want a photograph of my son, before it’s too late, and I know others will want them as well.”
Caleb didn’t want to spend another few days like the last time, working from dawn to dusk capturing images of one dead child after another. But only the photographs he’d taken in Naciemento were subject to the mysterious fading; if the trip gave him the opportunity to figure out why, it would be worth it.
Besides, the last one had paid well. He agreed to leave the next morning, and Jacob Banister thanked him, then headed back home.
In the morning, Caleb loaded his things into the buckboard, shoved his rifle into the scabbard, drew on a hat and a coat, and left Trinidad behind.
Once again, the weather turned while he traveled. The calm, sunny day turned windy. Clouds whipped in from the north, heavy and dark. As he climbed higher into the hills, snowflakes started falling. They were featherlight at first, but then turned wet, sticking to Caleb’s coat and to the ground. Before he finally reached Naciemento, the drifts were two feet deep, sometimes more, and the snow kept coming. He’d made it in a single day, but darkness surrounded him. He would have to start in the morning.
The town seemed little changed. He ascribed the nearly empty streets to the snowfall, which was taking on blizzard proportions. Gaslights burned in some windows, other houses stood dark.
The weather did nothing to improve his spirits. He was wet, chilled to the bone. Even the horse shivered. Caleb was growing to hate Naciemento. This would be his final trip to the godforsaken place, he swore.
He found the Banister home, where Jacob and his wife Eliza mourned the loss of their son, John. When they invited him in, he explained that he couldn’t begin work until the morning. They’d expected as much, and had prepared a room for him.
In the fresh light of morning, Caleb posed John with a favored ball and bat. The print came out perfectly, he believed; young John looked almost glowing, as if he could step out of the image and engage the viewer in conversation. Well satisfied, the Banisters introduced Caleb to neighbors whose infant had succumbed just the day before. Once again, he worked tirelessly to meet the demand of so many deaths.
After several days, he ran out of dead children to photograph. The epidemic had passed, and he was free to return to Trinidad, his pockets stuffed. But he had one more thing to do before he
left.
He rode to the Benson house, climbed down from the wagon, and knocked on the door. At first, no one came. He pounded harder, and finally heard footfalls on the other side. The door creaked open and Hodding Benson stood there, looking somewhat older than he had before. His hair had gone gray in the interim, perhaps from grief.
“Mr. Willows!” Benson said. “I heard you were back in town.”
“So you remember me?” Caleb asked.
“Of course. You’re the photographer, from the city.”
“So I am. And do you recall why I visited before?”
Benson nodded. “To take a photograph of our dear Addie.”
“And did I do so?”
Benson laughed nervously, as if facing a madman at his own door.
Perhaps he was, Caleb thought.
“But of course you did,” Benson said.
“And did I then photograph dozens of others, over the next few days? All of them victims of the influenza epidemic that swept through your town?”
“Indeed you did. And you’ve just done it again, haven’t you?”
“I did. It’s not a pleasant task, and one I won’t do again. The next time an illness strikes here, you’ll have to find another photographer.”
“Oh,” Benson said. “Hmm. That’s unfortunate. You won’t change your mind? We’ll always pay you well.”
“I can’t do it anymore. I refuse. There are others who can do what I do.”
“It’s up to you, I suppose,” Benson said. “But unfortunate, just the same.”
“There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about, Mr. Benson, if I might. May I come in?”
Benson looked over his shoulder, as though someone behind Caleb might be able to shed some light on his odd behavior. He glanced back over his own shoulder, then said, “I suppose.”
He backed out of the doorway, and Caleb went inside, stomping snow off his boots.
“Do you still have the photograph?” he asked. “May I see it?”
“I don’t believe so,” Benson said. “No.”
“You don’t have it? It’s the only image of—”
A child’s voice sounding from the parlor interrupted him. “Who is at the door, Father?”
“It’s just a man I know,” Benson said.
Caleb had been sure the Bensons had only the one child, only months ago. They could have had another in the interim, but not one as old as this one sounded.
Then the child—a girl—stepped into the entryway. “Go on to your room, Addie,” Benson said.
“Addie?” Caleb repeated. “Another Addie?”
“Another?” Benson asked. “What do you mean? It’s just our Addie.”
“But she was… I don’t understand.”
“What’s to understand? You’ve seen children before.”
“But not…” Caleb wasn’t sure how to say it, in front of the girl. He remembered those big, dark eyes, the waves in her hair, even her lips, cherry red now instead of pale in death. “Never mind,” he said. “I-I have to be going.”
“As you will,” Benson said. He followed Caleb to the door, and stepped outside. As Caleb climbed into the wagon, Benson started ringing the bell beside the door.
“What are you doing?” Caleb asked. “Stop that infernal ringing!”
Benson ignored him. He kept ringing the bell. From other homes, more bells began to ring.
Caleb urged the horse on. The sooner he got out of this place, the happier he would be.
But as he traveled down the town’s main street, people started flooding into it, blocking his passage. He recognized many of them; the families he had met on his first visit. Parents who had been grieving the loss of their children glared at him.
Worse, those children were with them.
He had spent more time looking at the children than at their parents. Posing them, exposing the plates, developing the images, making the prints. Then their photographs had surrounded him in his studio—until they had faded away. He knew the face of every child he’d photographed on that trip.
And he recognized them now, surrounding his buckboard, some of them still with the earth of their graves dusting flesh and hair and clothing. The horse balked, sidestepped, then simply halted and refused to move again. Too many people filled the street. They didn’t say anything to him, but seemed to whisper in that bizarre, sibilant tongue he remembered from Addie’s funeral, sounding like nothing more than dozens of hissing snakes.
“See here!” he shouted. “Move aside! Out of my way!”
No verbal response came, but the townsfolk swarmed closer. Caleb realized with horror that some—the families he had photographed for on this visit—carried the prints he had made for them. He reached for his rifle. A man—Caleb recognized him as the father of a pair of twins who had both passed on the same day, during his first trip—leapt onto the buckboard and wrested the gun from his grip, hurling it far from the wagon.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Caleb demanded. “Let me pass!”
Then the children clambered onto the wagon. Small hands grabbed Caleb’s clothing, his hair, his flesh. He tried to bat them away, but they outnumbered him. They hauled him from the wagon and into the mob, where adults joined in. Caleb struggled in vain as they bore him toward the now-open doors of the seemingly abandoned church. Inside, candles glowed.
Caleb screamed, fury and terror warring within him. The townsfolk seemed oblivious to his cries. They carried him inside the church. There was nothing left of God in the place. The pews had been piled in a corner, along with the altar.
Then they forced him to his knees, at the front of the church. Before him, hanging on the wall in a cruel mockery of crucifixion, he recognized Nate Murdock. The cowboy’s flesh had mostly been eaten away, but enough remained to give an impression of the man he’d been. His chest had been ripped open in the shape of a cross. His misshapen hat, clothing, and boots lay on the floor nearby.
All around him—on easels, leaning against the walls, or just lying on the floor—Caleb saw the photographs had made on his previous visit. In these prints, though, the children hadn’t faded away.
Or they had come back—as the children themselves had.
A couple of men tore Murdock’s corpse from the wall and tossed it unceremoniously to one side. Caleb saw that it had hung from a sharp hook, like a butcher’s meat hook, mounted to the wall and driven through the cowboy’s back.
As he knelt there, held down by dozens of hands, the hissing whispers swelled into chants. The families of the recently deceased came forward, along with the children who Caleb had photographed before. Each child claimed his or her own portrait, and the new families replaced those prints with the ones Caleb had just made.
Caleb started screaming again as realization dawned on him. His photographs weren’t meant to memorialize the children of Naciemento. They had a more devilish purpose. They were totems in an ungodly ritual—a ritual that would bring the dead back to life.
With all the photographs in place and the way cleared, they lifted him up once again. Fighting, struggling, trying to writhe away from the hands, large and small, carrying him toward that hook, he understood.
Part of that ritual included sacrifice.
The chanting voices rose to a feverish pitch. They turned Caleb around, lifted him near the wall. He wanted to close his eyes, but he couldn’t. He took the scene in, as if through an open aperture, and it inscribed itself upon his soul in his last moments—the parents, the children, his photographs, the candles. The open church door on the far side of the crowd, offering an escape he would never know. He saw it all in black and white and shades of gray.
Every shade of gray.
Then the hook bit into his flesh, and agony blinded him.
And even in death, his eyes stayed open.
PINKERTON’S PREY
Frog and Esther Jones
George E. Hoinschauffer cradled his glass, staring mournfully at the rotgut liquor the refreshment-ca
r bartender had poured him in response to George’s request for whiskey. Instead of a rich, amber color, the liquid in his glass shone clear, with only a light brown tint. Where George hoped for an intense bouquet of floral and smoky scents, it assaulted his nostrils with the odor of rotting barley.
“Problem, George?”
From the barstool next to George (and slightly above, given their difference in height), Leonard Neilson looked at him with a wry smile. George shook his head, but said nothing. Neilson shrugged, then tipped his own glass into his mouth with an easy grace that George at once both envied and reviled.
The two men could not have been more dissimilar to look at. Whereas George was short, somewhat pudgy, and certainly balding, Neilson looked tall and lean, and had a thick crop of salt-and-pepper hair peeking out from under his hat. Both wore vests, but where George’s had the crisp-clean look of new silk, Neilson’s had been made of coarse woven cotton, and showed fray about it. Both wore white shirts underneath; George’s had been cleanly pressed, Neilson’s had possibly been laundered sometime in the last month. Neilson wore a faded, dusty derby; George’s balding pate shone bare.
“The trick,” Neilson said, “is to let it hit the back of your throat while spending as little time as possible on the tongue. This ain’t the sipping whiskey you New York folk are used to; this here is to be drunk solely for effect.”
George nodded, then tried bravely to mimic Neilson’s smooth shot. He felt the liquid burn his tongue, then the back of his throat. The rancid-barley finish bloomed in his gullet and coated his mouth; he came up coughing.
“There it is,” said Neilson. “I like you, George. You’re a game sort of fellow. Most of you hoity-toities tend to get upset when presented with a beverage such as this.”
