Hard Light (33 page)

Thanatrope
's director seemed to have taken Mortensen's lesson to heart. As neuroelectrical impulses, the footage wormed its way through retina, optic nerve, occipital lobe, to make a direct strike on that part of the human brain that registers pure existential horror—all while compelling the viewer to keep watching.

I could see why the movie had been pulled upon its initial release. It was more like a virus than a film. My reputation as a photographer had rested on the fact that I never flinched, no matter what awful thing I shot. Now I broke into a cold sweat at the thought of what I'd seen on the Steenbeck's screen.

I closed the book and returned it to my bag. The overhead light stung my eyes, but without the projector lamp, the room had quickly grown cold again. I stared at the strip of film in the guillotine splicer. Eleven frames. I didn't see a loupe or magnifier, but there was a small panel on the Steenbeck where you could place film to view it—a miniature light table built into the console. I found the button to turn this on, and placed the film strip on top of it.

Even without a magnifying lens, I knew what I was looking at: naked human corpses strewn across a patch of moor. I counted four—not infants but adults. One appeared slender enough to be a teenager. Each lay, face up, atop a large flat stone or pile of stones. Their placement seemed less ritualistic than functional, as though they'd been arrayed carelessly and then forgotten. Outtakes from one of the time-lapsed scenes in
Thanatrope
.

Or maybe they weren't outtakes, but material to be added to some ghoulish director's cut as a means of intensifying the film's malign impact. If Scotland Yard really had interviewed Leith Carlisle, as he'd claimed, they'd done so without access to this crucial bit of evidence.

I stared at the strip of acetate on that glowing white screen. Finally I reached beneath my sweater for one of the rawhide cords and pulled it over my head to hold in front of me. The bone disc turned lazily, revealing one face then another. Girl or old woman, both nearly indistinguishable. I flicked it with my finger so it spun.

With a deafening crash, the lighting rig fell to the floor behind me. The leather cord flew from my hand as someone kicked my chair: Tamsin Carlisle. Before I could move, she snatched up the bone disc, cradling it in her palm. When she looked at me, the nacreous blue eyes no longer seemed impaired by cataracts, but piercingly acute.

“Where did you find this?”

I swallowed. She stepped beside the door and thrust her hand between the light poles and microphones leaning against the wall. When she turned back, she held a shotgun, the thaumatrope dangling between her fingers.

“I'll ask you again. Where did you get it?”

I measured the distance between myself and the door. No chance. I took a deep breath. “Poppy Teasel.”

“Who?”

“Poppy Teasel.” I spoke quickly, as if that might make her forget she was holding a gun. “I saw her in Stepney before she died, she—”

“Wait—” Tamsin stepped over to me, lowered the shotgun's barrel, and peered into my face. “What did you say?”

“Poppy, she—”

“You said she was dead. Is she dead?”

I nodded. Tamsin's milky blue gaze wavered between me and the thaumatrope she clutched like a rosary. At last she lowered the gun to her side. With one hand, she expertly threaded the rawhide cord between her fingers, until the disc rested in her palm. The lines etched on the bone surface showed a face with uptilted eyes and mouth, a crosshatch of hair.

“This is the one that girl gave to her in France,” she said. “How do you have it?”

“I told you, she gave it to me. I was—I was at her flat.” I paused, wary of mentioning the gift Morven had me deliver. “She told me she was sick. Brain cancer.”

“Brain cancer,” murmured Tamsin. “I always thought it would be the drugs.”

“It was. She OD'd a few days ago. Smack.”

“You mean heroin?”

“Yeah. The needle hit an artery. She bled out.”

“I can't believe it.” Tamsin shook her head. “I haven't seen her for years—decades—but I understood she'd gotten treatment a long time ago. Are you sure?”

Like Adrian's, her shock seemed genuine. I shrugged. “Why would I lie?”

“Because you stole this.”

I laughed. “Why would I steal it? It's not worth anything to me. I don't even know what it is.”

For the first time, she noticed the Mortensen book on the Steenbeck. With that same strange quicksilver grace, she strode past me and picked it up. “Where did you get this?'

“Poppy.”

Tamsin opened the book to the frontispiece, read what was written there. Her face grew dead white.

“This was my book,” she said. “He stole it from me, like he stole everything else.”

She dropped the book and lay her hand atop the Steenbeck's picture gate, peering at the take-up reel. “This is warm. You've been playing with my film. If you know how to operate a Steenbeck, you probably know what
this
is.”

She drew her hand back and lashed me across the face with the thaumatrope. I cried out as the bone disc bit into the skin beside my eye, pressed my fingers to the barely healed wound there and felt them grow slick with blood.

I stared at Tamsin, too stunned to speak. The thaumatrope turned in her grasp, one of its ivory faces now red-streaked. Tamsin's hair stuck out wildly, and when I lowered my gaze I saw her battered Wellingtons. The rubber had cracked with age, but they were recognizably the same boots worn by the tall red-haired figure in
Thanatrope
.

“Who are you?” She raised the shotgun and pressed the barrel's cold mouth to my cheek, just below where she'd struck me. Pain flared through my skull. “Tell me. No one here will think twice about an old woman killing an intruder.”

“Cassandra Neary. A photographer—” I gasped as she ground the gun's barrel against my cheekbone. “Christ! I'm telling you the truth—that's how I know about the Steenbeck. And your movie—I just wanted to see how you did it.”

Regarding me coldly, she lowered the shotgun, and I wiped the blood from my face.

“It's even better than I remembered it.” I knew I sounded desperate. “So much darker and—”

“Do you think I don't know my own work?” She looked at me with disdain, then stretched out her hand to rest it upon the editing deck. “You knew I did it.”

It wasn't a question. “Yeah, I did. Not always, but I figured it out.” I nodded in the direction of the Steenbeck. “I just wanted to see for myself, you know? I knew Leith Carlisle wasn't the real director. But I wanted proof.”

“Leith could barely hold a camera. Once upon a time, when he had someone there to steady his hand, maybe. Nic Roeg was good at that. But on his own, Leith was incapable of shooting a minute's worth of film worth saving. A useless, witless parasite.” Her milky gaze curdled into pure hatred. “Destroying my family's home was the least of it. He did unspeakable things. Terrible things. He poisoned everyone he touched. All of them. His blood was poison…”

I recoiled as she leaned closer to me. “His
breath
was poison. Like the night-blooming heartsease. Do you know what that is? A beautiful trumpet flower that grows on a vine like the morning glory, with roots like invisible hairs that go deep into the soil and send up shoots a mile away. Its blossoms open only on a warm rainy night in spring. It has the most rapturous scent, like jasmine and lime blossom.

“But if you breathe deeply of it, the scent causes nerve paralysis, and within a few hours, death. There's no treatment and no cure. That's what Leith was like: a beautiful man, so seductive—you just wanted to inhale him. And when you did…”

Her hand whipped through the air, the thaumatrope trailing it like a comet. “The poison got into your lungs, and you could never expel it. Never.”

“The movie.” I pointed at the blank screen. “You're editing it, after all these years. How come?”

She hesitated. “There are scenes that don't belong, and other scenes that do. It should never have been released back then. It was a mistake. It didn't have the impact it should have.”

“Yeah, but the movie's online now—you know that, right? People have seen it. Maybe not a lot of people, but some. They—”

“No one should have seen that version. I should have burned it. My technique has improved: I know what I'm doing now. You saw some of it?” I nodded reluctantly. “And what did you think?”

“It made me … queasy.”

A flicker in her eyes, triumph or malice or amusement. Probably all three.

“Queasy?” she said. “You have a strong constitution, Cassandra. Most people can only sit through a minute or two. Sam's like you—she's watched it any number of times—but I started her young.”

“What about Adrian? Didn't he inherit your constitution?”

“Adrian?” Tamsin shook her head, perplexed. “Why would Adrian have my constitution?”

“Because—”

I fell silent. Tamsin stared at me with those opaline eyes, and for a fraction of a second, pity won out over spite.

“You thought Adrian was my son?” she asked softly. “Did he tell you that? You see what I mean—he's just like his father. Though he has good reasons, Adrian. I'm not surprised he'd lie to you or anyone else. I'm not his mother. Poppy is.”

 

38

I barely managed to keep my voice steady when I replied.

“His eyes.” I recalled those three faces in profile, each varying so slightly from the others: pages from a flipbook of sexual obsession. “That's why Adrian doesn't have your eyes. Or Sam, or … or Krishna. Jesus Christ.” I stared at Tamsin. “Did he know?”

“Adrian knew. He was Leith's son, he breathed that poison air. They all did, and they were all damned.
Vix gaudet tertius hæres—
I told Leith that would be the motto on his coat of arms, if he had one. ‘Seldom does the third or fourth generation pass, before God visits the sins of the father upon his children.' Poppy was the worst—she thought she lived beyond the law. Human law, god's law, nature's law. But they were all broken people,” she added. “I know, because I broke some of them.”

I slid my hand into my pocket and scooped up the plastic beads.

“I found these with Sam.” I opened my hand, the beads nestled there like so many pearls. “‘Cressida.' Who were the others?”

Tamsin's mouth parted, and I saw the tip of a pale tongue explore the gap between her lower teeth. “Where did you find those?”

“If you'd buried them like the dogs, their bones would have melted away by now. Why didn't you? Were they your children?”

“I have no children.” She raised her hand, gnarled fingers trembling. “Let me see those. Are they Sam's? They could be Sam's.”

I closed my fist tightly. With one swift kick I knocked the shotgun from her grasp, grabbing her wrist.

“They're not Sam's beads. There are three babies in one of those graves. What's left of them. And those bodies in the field—” I pocketed the beads and gestured at the filmstrip on the table. “Who were they?”

“No one who was ever missed.” Her words came out in a hiss. “Vagrants. Addicts. No one ever came looking for them. No one cared.”

“They were in the movie. You filmed them—all those extras.”

I shivered. They really
were
extras. I tightened my hold on Tamsin's wrist. She didn't flinch, just glared at me with eyes like toxic gemstones.

“No one cared,” she repeated. “No one knew.”

“Until now,” I said.

She yanked her arm free and lunged at me, her hands curled into claws. I kicked out again, this time aiming so my heel struck her calf—the boot's steel tip would have shattered her kneecap. Her eyes widened as she fell, her head hitting the floor with a soft
crack
. When she remained still, I bent and moved my fingers down her throat, until I felt a pulse. I dragged her to the far corner of the editing room and retrieved the shotgun from where it had fallen.

I managed to open it, remove the shells, and pocket them, along with the thaumatrope. I tossed the Mortensen book into my bag and swallowed several Vyvanse before turning off the light. I stepped back into the barn and shut the door behind me. I hid the shotgun behind a stack of canvas flats and cautiously walked outside.

The sun burned in a cloudless sky above the waste of mud and farm equipment. The house appeared as I'd left it, though I could hear voices raised in argument. Adrian and Krishna. If Krishna had recently figured out what I'd just learned, they had a lot to talk about. No wonder she'd been acting like she was out of her head.

From the sun's angle, I guessed it was mid-afternoon. It would be more difficult to make my way to Penzance after dark, but I didn't want to risk traveling during daylight. If I could find my way to the barrow where Sam had taken me, I could lay low until nightfall, then strike off across the moor until I found the road. I had enough pharmaceuticals to keep me wired and enough money to buy a bus or train ticket to London, or anywhere else.

Greece, even. Adrian had lied to me about Poppy and Krishna: He might have lied about Quinn, too.

I darted across the yard, to the rough path I'd walked with Sam. I ran up along the trail, my boots skidding across the scree, past the dead garden with its skeletal corvid guardians, until I reached the top.

From here, the compound looked like a discarded game gleaming in the afternoon sun. The wind bit at my neck. I pulled up my hood and walked on.

I'd only gone a short distance when I heard an odd, repetitive sound—a hollow
thwack,
as though someone knocked at a door that refused to open.

I halted. Maybe Tamsin had come to and called 999; maybe Adrian knew another path to the top of the moor and even now crouched somewhere, waiting to attack.