Darkroom (27 page)

Jim said, ‘You're right. I've been thinking a whole lot about her. I can't understand how he found her, or how he persuaded her to help him. He's a monster, after all. What kind of a woman is going to help a creature like that?'

Freddy wiped tomato catsup from his chin. ‘Next time, Mr Rook, we should follow her, and put her out of business. We should wreck his van. Like, without a van to get around in, and somebody to drive it, what can Vane do?'

‘He's still very dangerous,' Jim replied. ‘I didn't see any sign of his van when he came to the cemetery and set fire to the college bus. He can get around, believe me, even without a van. He's quick – and to most people, of course, he's invisible.'

‘No harm in boosting his wheels, though,' Randy suggested, his mouth full of sausage.

‘You're right. But it's time you all got yourselves home. You can take a shower and sleep for a couple of hours. I'll meet you back in college at twelve thirty.'

Jim went back to the Benandanti Building. Mr Mariti nodded to him as he crossed the hallway and said, ‘You look like ten miles of bad road, Mr Rook.'

‘Thanks, Mr Mariti.'

Tibbles was waiting for him right behind the front door, and she stayed two or three inches behind him wherever he went, so that he kept tripping over her.

He walked across to the fireplace and looked up at the painting. He knew that Robert H. Vane was back inside it now, or at least his spirit was, or whatever it was that Robert H. Vane had turned into.

‘What are you, Robert H. Vane?' Jim asked him out loud. ‘What do you really want?'

Tibbles rubbed his ankles and purred. She knew what
she
wanted: cut-price tuna, squashed with the back of a spoon.

After he had fed her, Jim stripped off and took a shower, turning the faucet marked ‘Torrent'. The noise from the plumbing was deafening, like a subway train hurtling down a tunnel at high speed, and the water pressure was so powerful that he had to lean against the shower cabinet to stop himself from being beaten down to the floor.

When he had finished, he climbed out, wrapped a large blue towel around his waist and went into the kitchen to make himself some more coffee. He switched on the portable television on the kitchen counter.

‘… Nine people died last night in eleven unconnected fires in the Santa Monica and West Hollywood districts. In one, TV actress Kathy Mulholland was burned to death in her automobile as she stopped at a traffic signal on the Pacific Coast Highway. In another, the head of Cellcorp mobile phone systems was found dead in a seven-hundred-dollars-a-night suite at the Palms Marina Hotel, along with an unnamed woman …'

Jim stood with the kettle in his hand watching the news as fire after fire was reported, and in each case the victims had been burned ‘almost beyond recognition.' He was still standing there when a slight movement made him glance toward the doorway. Eleanor was standing there, staring at him, white-faced. She was wearing a short black dress and black pantyhose, with very high black patent shoes. He was so startled that he almost dropped the kettle in the sink.

‘Eleanor! Jesus! You frightened me.'

‘I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. I heard noises, that's all, so I came in to make sure that everything was OK.'

Jim switched on the kettle and defensively tightened his towel. ‘You probably heard the shower. It's like Niagara.'

Eleanor came into the kitchen and circled around him. ‘So, how did it go last night?'

She stood very close to him. In her black patent shoes she was almost two inches taller than him, which he found strangely disturbing.

‘Well, we almost got ourselves killed, but we found out where Vane is storing all of his stuff.'

Her green eyes widened. ‘You're not hurt, are you?'

‘No, thank God. But it was close. We were still searching through the daguerrotypes when their images returned – their shadow-selves. And their shadow-selves can do what Vane can do. They can set off flashes of intensely bright light, and incinerate anything that happens to be in the way.'

‘Were there many of them?'

‘Twenty at least. We had to make a quick exit out a second-storey window.'

‘So where was this?'

‘An old animal hospital on Palimpsest. It looks like it's been empty for years.'

‘You didn't have time to destroy any of the plates?'

Jim shook his head. ‘No – but we will. We're going back later today.'

‘What about Vane himself?'

The kettle boiled and Jim poured water into the cafetière. ‘My students asked me that. I don't know what the answer is, not yet. But you know –' he tapped his forehead – ‘I'm working on it.'

‘You're not worried, when you go back, that Vane will try to stop you?'

Jim looked at her. There was an expression on her face that he couldn't read at all. Was she being provocative? Or was she trying to warn him?

He said, cautiously, ‘He'll have to get there somehow, if he's going to stop us.'

Eleanor said nothing, but she didn't take her eyes off him and she didn't blink.

‘He travels around in a van, advertising old-style photos. That's how he gets people to pose for him. But if he's going to stop us … first of all he has to know what we're going to do, and second of all he has to arrange for his van to take him there.

Still Eleanor said nothing. Jim slowly pushed down the plunger on the cafetière, and said, ‘Coffee?'

‘No, thank you. I find it difficult enough to sleep as it is.'

Jim filled a large mug with a sepia picture of Harry Houdini on it. ‘The van … it's driven by a woman. She was dressed all in black when we saw her last night. She reminded me of you, maybe taller. You wouldn't have any idea who she is?'

‘None, I'm afraid.'

‘Maybe your friends the Benandanti might know?'

‘If they do, they've never mentioned her to me.'

‘It's just that we can't work out how Vane persuaded anybody to act as his assistant. What kind of a woman would agree to drive him around like that? We don't know if he's even capable of talking. He's a living nightmare, after all.'

Eleanor shrugged. ‘When you look around you, Jim, you can see strange relationships everywhere. But when you realize what each partner is looking for in those relationships – sometimes it's love, sometimes it's nothing more than sharing the same taste in music – they don't seem nearly so strange after all.'

A
s Jim walked along the crowded corridor to Special Class II, he caught sight of Vinnie Boschetto coming the other way. Vinnie was wearing a red-and-yellow shirt with parrots on it, so he was hard to miss. He turned on his heel and tried to hurry out of the doors that led to the swimming pool, but Jim caught up with him and grabbed his belt at the back.

‘Where the hell are you going, Boschetto?'

Vinnie raised both hands in surrender, dropping test papers all over the pathway. ‘Jim, believe me, I'm so sorry.'

‘You're sorry? Two of my students were burned to death, right in front of my eyes!'

‘Jim, honestly, I never thought it would come to this. It's tragic.'

‘For Christ's sake, you knew what you were dealing with! You almost got me burned to death, too!'

‘We had no idea that Vane was going to get so angry! We thought that you would find a way to deal with him. Come on, Jim, you've handled stuff like this before! Spooks, demons, things that go
arrggghh
in the night …'

Jim seized the lapels of Vinnie's shirt and screwed them around so tight that he pulled off the two top buttons. ‘You bastard. You and your goddamned Benandantis. You deliberately offered me that apartment cheap, didn't you, knowing that I was going to come face to face with a creature that could have cremated me? I could be dead by now – nothing but ashes, like Pinky and David.'

‘Jim … what could I do? We were desperate! Uncle Raymond died of a heart attack and we had nobody to keep Vane in check.'

‘Oh, yeah? Why didn't you volunteer?'

‘I wouldn't have known where to begin. I'm a history teacher, Jim, that's all. I don't have any knowledge of religious rituals, like Uncle Raymond, and I don't have any psychic powers, like you. How was I supposed to deal with an invisible thing that hides in a painting and steals people's souls?'

‘So you tricked
me
into doing it?'

‘I'm sorry. When I heard that you were coming back to West Grove I thought you were going to be the answer to all of our prayers. I'm sorry it all went so wrong. If only there was something I could do to make amends.'

Jim released his grip on Vinnie's shirt, although he was still shaking with anger. ‘I can't even ask you to call on Pinky's and David's parents, can I, and tell them the real reason why they died. That would only make things worse.'

‘Jim – buddy – whatever you want me to do, I'll do it. We had no way of knowing that Vane would attack you, or attack your students. He's been trapped in that painting for more than thirty years … We just didn't want him to get out and start taking pictures again.'

‘You mean you wanted me to take care of him for you, without even bothering to warn me what I was up against?'

‘I'm sorry!' Vinnie repeated. ‘We simply thought that once you'd seen Vane appear, you'd work out for yourself what he was up to, and discover a way to stop him. Did you see the news? Those shadow-selves of his have been starting fires all over. Before we know it, they're going to start forest fires and burn down half of Los Angeles County.'

Jim shook his head in disbelief. ‘You know what I should do? I should just walk away from this, and let you handle it yourself.'

‘Jim, you can't! We're right on the brink of hell here. Not just us, but hundreds of people – thousands, even.'

‘I know,' said Jim. ‘There's no way I'm going to let Pinky and David die for nothing, and there's no way I'm going to let Vane take any more pictures.'

Vinnie watched him for a while, saying nothing. His test papers started to blow across the grass but he ignored them. ‘So what are you going to do?'

‘Last night we followed Vane – me and some of my students. We found his studio, where he's hiding all of his daguerrotypes. We're going around there later to trash them. You can come along if you like, as part of your penance.'

‘Jim, you don't know how bad I feel.'

‘Vinnie, before this is over, I'm going to go out of my way to make sure that you feel a hell of a lot worse.'

Jim's first class was at 10
A.M
. When he walked in, it was obvious that his A-Team had already told the rest of Special Class II what had happened last night, because they were all tense and expectant – and quiet, for a change. Raananah Washington came past the open door, stopped, and looked inside, just to make sure that Special Class II were actually there. Jim called out, ‘Good morning, Raananah!'

When she had gone, he turned to the class and said, ‘It seems like you've all been updated. Last night we found out where Robert H. Vane hides his daguerrotypes. Today we're going to hit back at him. The A-Team are coming back to Vane's studio with me, and we're going to be doing some serious damage. But that still won't solve the problem permanently. We have to find a way to destroy Vane himself.'

Ruby put up her hand. ‘Mr Rook, I was talking to my grandmother yesterday about evil spirits.'

‘Oh, yes?'

‘My grandmother told me that when she was a little girl in Dominica, in Santo Domingo, there was an undead spirit that used to walk around her neighborhood. It used to strangle cats and dogs and steal food and sometimes it stole children, too, and their bones were found in the forests, their bones all gnawed like they was eaten. My great-grandmother wouldn't let my grandmother go out after dark, in case the undead spirit caught her. They used to call it
El Espejo
– the Mirror – because when it came after you, and you looked at its face, all you could see was yourself.'

‘How creepy is that?' said Jim. ‘Did they manage to exorcize it?'

‘My grandmother said that in the end two priests came from Rome and helped them to hunt him down. The priests carried a large mirror with them, and they caught
El Espejo
in a dead-end street, and they made him look in the mirror at his own face. My grandmother has a saying, you know? “Evil can't bear to look at itself.”
El Espejo
fell down paralyzed and the priests buried him. Inside his casket, they fixed a mirror, so that if he opened his eyes he couldn't see nothing but his own face.'

‘Maybe that would work with Robert H. Vane,' said Jim.

‘Yeah,' said Shadow, tilting back his chair. ‘Maybe it wouldn't, either. That spirit your grandmother was talking about, that didn't fry people alive, did it? Robert H. Vane could turn us into charcoal before we got within twenty yards of him, and that goes for any one of those doo-doo-type gooks, too.'

‘Anybody else got any ideas?' asked Jim.

‘What about this reverse exorcism?' suggested George. ‘Maybe Father Foley could help us.'

Father Foley was the priest who ministered to the needs of West Grove's Roman Catholic students. Jim hadn't talked to him in a long time – not since one of his students had been haunted by night terrors about demons from hell – and he remembered that he was very skeptical when it came to the supernatural. ‘Demons are nothing but our own guilt, Jim.'

Jim said, ‘I guess I could try … But I don't think Father Foley is very enthusiastic about exorcisms. In fact, I don't think the Roman Catholic Church as a whole is very enthusiastic about exorcisms, not these days. You need to show them at least one of the five proofs of demonic possession, and before we can do that we have to show them Robert H. Vane himself.'