Hard Light (32 page)

Tamsin's eyes closed. Within moments, her facial muscles slackened. Her mouth opened, exposing several missing teeth. She began to snore.

I glanced up at the others to see what they made of this macabre interlude. They regarded Tamsin so intently she might have been a cat video, their faces lined up in profile: Adrian, then Krishna, then Sam, all of them backlit by the window. The trio of silhouettes made for a strikingly odd affect—human faces fanned out like three-card monte. I reached for my camera bag, then froze.

It wasn't just the angle, or a trick of the light. Their features were strangely, disconcertingly similar. The same strong chin and deep-set onyx eyes, the same thin mouth and black hair, even the same expression as they stared at Tamsin—a sort of expectant apprehension, as though waiting for the curtain to rise on a show they knew would be a disappointment. Sam shared the same lanky, big-boned frame as Adrian.

But Krishna had inherited her mother's spare figure, along with her voice, and the violet flicker in her dark eyes.

I dropped my gaze, praying Adrian wouldn't notice my face flush in anger and fear. Did Krishna know her parents were Poppy Teasel and Adrian Carlisle? Adrian had lied to me about it, which stacked the deck in favor of him lying to Krishna, too.

Had he told Sam?

Because even now, sitting side by side, neither Krishna nor Sam seemed to show much interest in the other. Given Sam's isolation and over-eager response to the slightest bit of adult attention from me, I found it hard to believe she wouldn't have latched onto Krishna like a tick, once she learned they were half-sisters.

If they
were
half-siblings. I totted up the years: Poppy would have been in her mid-forties when Krishna was born—like Tamsin, an older mother. Though if Tamsin had any children, none of them were in the room with us at the moment.

I picked up my bag and got slowly to my feet. I half expected Adrian to stop me, but his gaze just flicked over me before returning to Tamsin. Krishna appeared preternaturally still, her amethyst-flecked eyes fixed on Adrian. Only Sam briefly looked up, before she returned to crooning at the tortoise.

I walked into the kitchen. Bruno's heavy coat hung beside the door; I grabbed it and pulled it on and hurried outside, toward the barn. The sun had already begun its slide into the west. Ice skimmed a large puddle beside the Land Rover. An older Range Rover was parked beside it—Tamsin's car.

The living room windows overlooked the moor, not the yard. As far as I could tell, no one watched me as I entered the barn, and I recalled a fairy tale where goblins were hypnotized by a campfire and never moved again.

Bruno's overcoat was warm, but I wished I'd remembered to get my leather jacket from Sam. I'd wait till nightfall, then hightail it down to the main road, and walk or thumb a ride to Penzance. Nothing I'd seen so far suggested an active constabulary, and at this point I'd risk an encounter with the locals. They couldn't be much crazier than the Kethelwite clan.

At the back of the barn, the storeroom door was ajar. I slipped inside, closing the door behind me.

I flipped the lightswitch. A bare overhead bulb came on. I jammed a lighting rig under the doorknob to keep anyone from entering easily, then checked out the canisters stacked along the wall.

The ink on the labels was faded and, in some places, unreadable. Those I could read seemed to be reels from
Thanatrope,
the dates out of order and written in blue ink.

Than. May 72

Than. August 73

Spot Reel June 72

I counted seventeen cans—a lot of thirty-five-mm footage for a flick without any studio funding, even if the film stock had been damaged to begin with. Something poked from between two canisters. I carefully pulled it free. A photograph, torn on one side. It showed the teenage Morven and Tamsin with their arms flung over each other's shoulders. A ghostly extra arm on Morven's shoulder indicated where a third girl had stood beside her. Someone had ripped Poppy out of the frame.

I set aside the photo and turned. Curling lengths of acetate were draped over the back of the Steenbeck, like old nylon stockings left out to dry. Another photo was propped on top of the editing deck—Sam and Tamsin crouched beside the tortoise Tithonus, both of them laughing. A strip of footage was still in the Steenbeck's guillotine splicer, ten or so frames of color stock, with a container of splicing tape alongside it.

It appeared that someone was continuing to edit
Thanatrope.
Tamsin, if she had indeed been the guiding force behind the film. Maybe some outlet specializing in obscure or transgressive movies was interested in a director's cut, or maybe Tamsin needed a hobby to occupy her golden years.

Editing with a Steenbeck would certainly take up a lot of time. It's a slow, painstaking process, almost entirely superseded by digital software like Final Cut. A Steenbeck flatbed cost thirty or forty grand when they were first introduced over a half century ago, to compete with and ultimately replace the Moviola. The rig looked like a scale model of some intricate futuristic city, but the big table was an analogue morgue for what had once been state-of-the-art German technology: brushed nickel fittings, rollers and spools, take-up reels and relays, spindles, mirror optics and lenses, a projection lamp and viewing screen, along with two sets of aluminum plates for both sixteen- and thirty-five-millimeter film.

You mounted the film reel on the aluminum plate to the left, then threaded the film through a dizzying number of spindles and rollers and spools and relays, so it could pass through the picture gate and be rewound on the take-up reel on the right-hand side of the table. It seemed impossibly complicated.

Yet the setup was low-tech. You turned a dial to adjust how fast or slow the film would move, which enabled you to view the film at the customary thirty-five frames a second—the speed at which a film was projected in a movie theater. You could move the film forward or in reverse.

Or you could slow it down, so you could watch it frame-by-frame on the screen in front of you. You could pause the mechanism to view a single frame, though you couldn't leave it in the picture gate too long, or the heat from the projector bulb would melt the acetate.

All editing used to be linear editing, and it was almost inconceivably intensive, detail-oriented work. With a computer, you're not restricted to a linear approach: You can move digital images around however you want.

But back then, you had to scroll through it all reel by reel—tens of thousands of individual frames—looking for flaws in the film stock, lens flare, a clapper or boom mike in the frame—any one of the countless things that can go wrong during a shoot. After deciding which frames to remove, you had to cut the acetate using the guillotine, then splice it all back together with tape. Then look at it again to see if your edit had improved the film or not.

Film editors are the silent sharers of cinema: They form a sort of cinematic binary star system with the director. Robert Wise and Orson Welles; Thelma Shoonmaker and Martin Scorsese; Susan E. Morse and Woody Allen.

And, it seemed, Tamsin and Leith Carlisle.

I made sure the door was still guarded by the lighting rig and settled into the swivel chair. Something clanked as the chair moved—a metal trash can.

I picked it up. The bottom was coated with black sludge and peppered with dozens of spent matches. The perforated edge of a piece of acetate adhered to its side. Gingerly I peeled this off. The charred acetate was shriveled into a wormy black string where it had melted. Whoever used the Steenbeck wasn't taking any chances with edited clips left on the cutting-room floor. They were burning them.

 

37

It didn't take long to figure out the basics of running the Steenbeck. I located the main switch and turned it on. The motor whirred to life, and after a brief warmup settled into a steady drone. The screen went from black to stark white as the projector's bulb shone through the gate. I began turning the black dial: the film moved quickly through the gate, way too fast for me to get a clear sense of what I was seeing. I played with the dial for a few minutes, running the same loops of film back and forth until I got the hang of it. The apparatus made a low whirring as the turntables spun.

Images flickered across the small screen, out of focus and harshly lit. I adjusted the focus and dialed down the contrast, reversed the film and ran it through the projector again. Now the picture was clear enough for me to discern six or eight people lying on the floor of a large room, with high clerestory windows set into the stone wall behind them. I recognized the setting, and this scene, from
Thanatrope
—one moment the room was empty, the next it was filled with revelers. A flash cut, amateurish but also spookily effective.

When I watched it again, the people on the floor writhed with a strange languor, moving so slowly that I checked the Steenbeck's speed to be sure I wasn't watching something that had been shot in slow motion. Just out of frame, someone held a fill light closer to the action, but he or she wasn't doing a very good job. Both the lamp and the hand that clutched it juttered in and out of sight.

And the fill light was way too bright. It washed out the actors it was supposed to illuminate, even as it threw an etiolated shadow across the wall behind them—a grotesquely thin form, one long spidery arm gesticulating violently, its elongated head topped with a ragged crown of hair, so monstrously distorted I thought it must be cast by an immense puppet.

But then the camera, too, went crazily awry. For a second it threw a blinding flash onto a tall figure with wild red hair, wearing a long white apron and pants tucked into Wellington boots. The camera swung back to the bodies on the floor. They continued to move with that nightmarish slowness, as though they'd drowned in sluggish water and remained trapped beneath the surface.

I stopped the film. I'd thought I recognized this scene from when I'd watched
Thanatrope
just a few days before.

Now I wasn't so sure. Everything seemed familiar—the bodies on the floor, the high windows, the flash cut—even the bad lighting and the disturbing shadow on the wall, and that crazed-seeming figure in the white apron.

But
had
I seen them earlier? The images were so weirdly oneiric—more nightmarish than dreamlike—that they made me doubt my own memory of the film. They reminded me of the night terrors I'd experienced in the last few months, the fear of some black arachnid nesting in my skull, unraveling the neural web that was my own consciousness.

A dark wave engulfed me. I'd been betrayed by Quinn and was trapped among people who wanted me dead. I felt myself fragmenting, the way a cracked windshield shatters at the impact of some object.

The stink of melted plastic cut through my despair. I'd left the frame in front of the projector too long. I took a deep breath, then advanced the film and switched off the deck's lamp to check the frames. The acetate had warped, but I'd caught it before it was badly damaged.

The diversion broke the malevolent spell the film had over me. I turned the control knob, and the film slowly wound between the rollers and gears. The screen filled with those same ghostly figures. Light rolled across them like surf as I ran the loop backward to the beginning of the scene, then advanced it very slowly, frame by frame.

Now I could see that the hand holding the fill light was a man's, large and thick-fingered. The figures on the floor were the same teenagers I'd seen in
Thanatrope
. Three girls and three boys. One of the boys looked no more than fourteen, and one of the girls appeared even younger than that.

But even watching the film one frame at a time, I still couldn't tell what those kids were actually doing on the floor. Sex would be the obvious answer. But the interplay of shadow and hard light was so disjointed that, no matter what frame I examined, or what angle I inspected it from, I couldn't home in on any specific detail. No breast or cock or mouth or limb; only an overwhelming sense that something terrible was going on.

After several more minutes, I had to stop. I felt as though I'd been sucked into an undertow of damage so corrosive it burned: I could taste it in the back of my throat. I switched off the editing deck and got unsteadily to my feet, turned on the overhead light and cracked the door to let in a stream of fresh air. The small room had grown warm, heated by the projector lamp. I inhaled gratefully, hoping the cold would disperse the toxic cloud that had settled in my chest, behind my eyes, inside my skull.

The nausea remained, morphing into that sick horror. Black filaments spun from the corners of my eyes. I tasted copper in the back of my throat, spat into my palm, and saw a smear of blood. In the room behind me came the low whir of the Steenbeck's motor engaging. I turned, but the deck's reels and plates were motionless.

I shut the door and sank back into the swivel chair. I wanted to believe that this was the lingering effect of whatever I'd been doped with the night before. But the truth seemed as inexplicable as the fragmented scene I'd now viewed a dozen times. The film footage was making me sick.

I picked up my bag and removed the Mortensen book that Poppy had given me. I flipped to the last section,
Grotesques.
The kitsch factor was high by modern standards, but the pictures still had the power to disturb. These are the images that pop up when you Google Mortensen: a nubile, naked woman preparing for the witch's sabbath; a terror-stricken man facing the blade in “The Pit and the Pendulum”; a man gouging out his own eyes. The fact that he used live models only makes the photos more unsettling.

In
The Command to Look,
Mortensen gave step-by-step instructions for creating an image that will compel viewers to gaze on it, even as they strain to look away. His photos came under fire for the same imagery that has become so ingrained in our visual cortices that we no longer register them as horrific, a viral stream of crime photos and videos of beheadings, bomb victims, maimed soldiers, plane crashes.