Darkroom Read online

  ‘Jim – you always were soft. You should see some of the scripts my students send me, complete with totally impossible camera directions and casts of thousands. Scene one: exterior; a high aerial shot; the Battle of Gettysburg; day.’

  Jim laughed. ‘So tell me about Tibbles.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Tibbles jumps up on to the table and starts to nose at the photographs. Then suddenly she knocks one over, with her nose. It’s a picture of my half-sister, Isabelle.’

  ‘You should have whacked her. Tibbles understands whacks.’

  ‘Well, whatever, Mary shoos her off, and stands the picture up again. The next thing we know, she jumps up again and knocks it over a second time. So this time Mary takes the picture and puts it up on the fireplace. Tibbles doesn’t try to get up on the table again, but later on we go into the kitchen, and we hear this crash. Tibbles has only jumped up on to the fireplace and knocked the picture into the hearth.’

  ‘I’m really sorry. Like you say, she can act a little strange. I think she’s probably descended from a long line of witches’ cats.’

  ‘You’re not kidding. A half-hour later Isabelle’s husband Michael calls up and says that Isabelle has fallen down the front steps and broken her hip.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ said Jim.

  ‘You can call it what you like. I call it weird. Tibbles knocks the same picture over, three times; and how many steps does Isabelle fall down? Three.’

  Mary appeared, with a long-suffering Tibbles hanging from her arm. ‘I found her under the bed. Her, and seven dead spiders.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jim. ‘She likes chasing spiders. She kind of – well, she collects spiders, live or dead.’

  Dennis shook his head. ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’

  Five

  From the moment he dropped her on to the threshold, Tibbles sniffed at their new apartment with deep suspicion. She smelled the shoes heaped up in the entrance hall and violently sneezed, and when she walked into the living room she stopped and looked around, and her tail slowly lifted as if she could sense something there that she didn’t like at all.

  Jim went through to the kitchen with his bags of groceries, but then he came back to see what she thought. ‘Well, TT, how does it grab you? It’s kind of well-worn, I’ll admit. Decrepit, even. But it has atmosphere, doesn’t it?’

  Tibbles padded across the hearthrug and looked up at the painting of the man with the black cloth draped over his head. She stared at it, unmoving, although both of her ears were pricked up.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Jim after a while. ‘I’m going to see if Genevieve Frost can sell it for me.’

  Tibbles turned around and looked at him, and gave him a querying miaow.

  ‘OK, we can leave it up if you like. But Vinnie says it gives him nightmares, and it’ll probably give me nightmares, too, especially after six beers and a quattro staggione pizza with extra jalapeno peppers.’

  Tibbles gave a more dismissive miaow, as if she didn’t want to discuss what Jim was like after six beers and a quattro staggione pizza with extra jalapeno peppers. Then she jumped up on to the sagging brocade couch and sniffed distrustfully at the cushions.

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Jim. ‘That can be your couch.’ He went across to the throne-like chair which was standing in the far corner of the room. ‘This one’s going to be mine.’ He confidently tried to pick it up, but it was carved out of solid Spanish oak and he couldn’t even lift it off the floor. In the end he had to drag it and push it and walk it on alternate feet. He maneuvered it to one side of the fireplace and smacked its seat cushion in a cloud of dust. Its purple velvet upholstery was faded and threadbare, and half of its buttons were missing, but it still had grandeur. Jim sat down on it and said, ‘There … King Jim and Queen Tibbles in their royal palace. No serfs, admittedly. No minstrels, no dancing girls. But what do you expect for seven hundred and fifty bucks a month?’

  Tibbles didn’t stay on her couch for very long. While Jim watched her, she jumped off it again and started to explore the rest of the living room. ‘You hungry?’ Jim asked her, but she didn’t respond. ‘I bought anchovies. Mmmm, anchovies! No? How about a saucer of milk?’

  When she didn’t respond, he went back into the kitchen and took a cold can of beer out of one of his grocery sacks and wrenched open a giant-size bag of pretzels. ‘Beer and pretzels, the food of real men everywhere!’ He unpacked Tibbles’s bowl and set it on the floor next to the antiquated fridge. ‘You’re sure you’re not hungry?’ he asked her. ‘I bought spaghetti shapes, too. Simpsons spaghetti shapes, your favorite!’

  He opened the fridge. It was reasonably clean inside, even if it smelled a little like sour milk and the light kept flickering, as if it were trying to warn him of something. He took out the salad tray, sniffed it to make sure, and then filled it up with green capsicums and beef tomatoes and a cucumber. He had made up his mind that he was going to eat much healthier food now that he was back in Los Angeles. When he was in Washington he had been too harassed and overworked to cook for himself, and he had lived mostly on cheeseburgers and fried chicken. He hadn’t put on very much weight, because he had been too stressed out, but he had always felt slightly nauseous, as if he had just staggered off a fairground carousel.

  He was stacking blueberry yogurts in the fridge when he heard a screech of agony. For a split second, horrified, he thought that it was human. He dropped one of the yogurts and it splashed across his foot. ‘Tibbles!’ he called. ‘Tibbles, are you OK? Tibbles!’

  He pushed his way through to the living room. The spectacle that greeted him made him stop dead, and he felt as if cockroaches were running down his back. Tibbles was perched right on top of one of the torchères. It was over five feet high, and how she had managed to jump up on top of it without knocking it over he couldn’t even begin to imagine. Her eyes were like slits and her lips were stretched back over her gums, baring her teeth. Just above her head, a twist of brown smoke was lazily unwinding, and the room was thick with the stench of badly scorched fur.

  Tibbles had been burned all over, so that she was crusty black instead of tortoiseshell, and she was still smoking. Tiny orange sparks winked in the fur around her neck and her haunches.

  ‘TT! What’s happened? Jesus Christ, TT – you’re on fire!’

  He dodged around the couch, holding out both of his hands to her, expecting her to jump down from her perch. ‘Come on, baby! Come on, Tibs!’ But she spat at him, and cackled, and lashed out with her left paw to warn him off.

  He stopped. ‘Come on, TT. We need to get you into some cold water, pronto. Come on, baby.’

  He edged closer, but she remained rigid and wild-eyed, hissing at him with total hostility. He tried to soothe her. ‘Come on, baby, everything’s going to be OK. What have you been doing, playing with matches? You remember what happened to Harriet, when she played with matches?’

  He was close enough to reach her, but he held back and waited, hoping that she would start to relax. “Then how the pussy cats did mew; what else, poor pussies, could they do?” Come on, TT. I only want to help you.’

  She didn’t blink. He waited nearly half a minute more. At last he said, ‘OK, you want to stay there, smoldering? Have it your way,’ and he pretended to turn away. Immediately, he turned back and tried to grab her by the scruff of the neck, but she hissed and reared up and lashed out at him. The torchère tipped sideways, Tibbles dropped to the floor, but as she fell her claws tore the skin across the back of his hand, and the next thing he knew he was spraying spots of blood across the carpet.

  He sucked his hand and shook it. ‘Jesus, Tibbles, that hurt! What’s got into you?’

  Tibbles had scrambled under the couch. Jim knelt down and peered underneath it. Tibbles stared at him out of the shadows, one lip caught in her tooth so that she looked as if she were sneering.

  ‘Tibbles, it’s no use hiding under there. You need treatment.’ He waited, and waited, but she didn’t show any signs of coming out.
After a while he straightened himself up and checked around the room. He couldn’t understand what could have burned Tibbles so badly. There were no candles anywhere. No naked wires. The grate was clogged up with paper ash but that had all gone cold, long ago. Even the sunlight that filtered through the grimy French windows was as weak as watery tea.

  Jim bent down again. Tibbles had retreated even further, where the springs were showing through the sagging hessian. Maybe it was better to leave her. As far as he could see, her burns were mainly superficial, and maybe she needed some time to herself, so that she could recover from the shock.

  He waited for a while longer, and then he stood up and went back into the kitchen for his beer. He caught sight of himself in one of the glass-fronted cabinets and thought he looked like one of the photographs in the living room. Mystified Man in 1930s Kitchen. Well, he thought, I am mystified. Cats don’t spontaneously catch fire, do they? If you brush a cat the wrong way, briskly enough, static electricity can build up in its fur, and you can sometimes produce a crackling noise, or even sparks. But enough sparks to set it alight? That didn’t seem at all likely.

  He suddenly thought of Bobby Tubbs and Sara Miller. Another case of spontaneous combustion. Or what had looked like spontaneous combustion. He couldn’t seriously compare what had happened to Tibbles to the way in which those two had been totally incinerated, down to the bone. But it was coincidental, wasn’t it? Two unexplained burnings in two days.

  He went back into the living room. To his surprise, Tibbles had emerged from under the couch and was sitting right in the center of the rumpled-up hearthrug. She was no longer smoldering but her fur was badly charred and in some places it was burned almost down to the skin. She was shivering, almost imperceptibly, as though suffering from a chill.

  ‘Hey, TT … How are you feeling, baby?’ As bedraggled as she was, Tibbles didn’t seem to be listening to him and she didn’t deign to look at him either. She continued to stare at the painting over the fireplace, and when Jim came closer he could hear her soft, harsh, strangulated breathing.

  Jim glanced up at the painting. The man was still standing in front of the mirror with his black cloth draped over his head. Not that Jim seriously expected him to be doing anything else.

  ‘Listen, Tibbles. It’s only a picture. Paint and canvas, that’s all. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to take it down, right now, and put it out in the corridor. Then tomorrow morning I’m going to put it in the car and take it along to the auctioneers to have it valued. And sold. Then it’ll be gone, OK, and it’ll be somebody else’s problem.’

  Tibbles still didn’t move, or even acknowledge that he was there. Jim made no more attempts to pick her up. She had been in weird moods before, particularly after he had boarded her at the Paws-a-While cattery in Anaheim, and he had learned to keep his distance when she was feeling resentful or out of sorts. Once – when he was first dating Karen – he had left Tibbles alone in his apartment for two days, and as soon as he had opened the front door she had sprung up at him like a jack-in-the-box and furiously scratched his cheek. All the rest of the staff at West Grove had assumed that Karen had done it, and he had been forced to endure days of winks and nudges and ‘got too fresh, did you, Jim?’

  Grunting, he dragged the throne-like armchair across the hearthrug, and pushed it as close to the fireplace as he could manage. He climbed up on it, his shoes sinking into the threadbare cushions. ‘Look, TT, I’m taking the picture down, OK?’

  It was easier said than done. The painting was titanically heavy, and he struggled for three or four minutes just to lift it off its hook. ‘Come on, you bastard,’ he grunted, but the wire kept catching, and in the end he had to go through to the dining room and fetch a chair that was higher, with a harder seat. Tibbles watched him with half-closed eyes, as if he were the local retard.

  At last, his teeth clenched, straining every muscle in his arms, he lifted the painting off the wall and lowered it down to the floor.

  ‘There,’ he panted, and he had to lean against the side of the fireplace to get his breath back. When he looked up, he saw that the painting had left a large unfaded square on the wallpaper where it had been hanging for so long. The pattern had been surprisingly bright and jazzy. He could almost hear the Charleston, and the chatter of bright young things.

  The back of the picture-frame was woolly with dust, and there was a deeply discolored label on it, with italic handwriting in brown ink. Mr Robert H. Vane, Daguerrotypist, September 17, 1853. In mourning, after the occasion of the Dagueno Tragedy.

  Jim cocked his head so that he could look at the painting more closely. Daguerrotypist, huh? He knew that daguerrotypes were an early kind of photographic plate, in the days before film had been invented. Several famous daguerrotypists had roamed California in the middle of the nineteenth century, taking pictures of mountains and valleys and Indian tribes.

  But who was Mr Robert H. Vane, and what was the Dagueno Tragedy? And why had he chosen such a bizarre way to display his grief, with a black cloth draped over his head?

  Tibbles let out a high, sharp wheeze, more like a cough than a miaow. She was still shivering, so Jim went through to the big gloomy bedroom, opened the immense mahogany blanket press and found her a blanket. It was thick and prickly and it faintly smelled like some kind of horse liniment. He knelt down and carefully draped it over Tibbles, and this time she didn’t seem to mind at all. She didn’t even protest when he bundled it right around her, picked her up and laid her gently on the couch. He didn’t quite know what you were supposed to do when a cat went into shock, but he guessed that keeping her warm was pretty much top priority.

  ‘Just relax, TT. Your fur will grow back before you know it.’

  Tibbles looked up at him as if she wouldn’t trust a human as far as she could throw him.

  When he was sure that Tibbles was settled, Jim turned his attention back to the painting. He couldn’t lift it, so he gradually dragged it across the living room and into the lobby. He stumbled over the shoes, and gave them a furious kick. After he disposed of this painting, the next thing he was going to get rid of was Vinnie’s uncle’s stinky old collection of footwear.

  Sweating and swearing, he managed to open the door and maneuver the painting into the corridor. There, panting, and nursing a badly bruised elbow, he leaned it up against the wall. If anybody stole it, too bad. In fact, they would be doing him a favor.

  He was just about to go back into his apartment when the door opposite opened and a young woman stepped out. She was tall, with long, glossy black hair, cut very straight and severe, and she was wearing a tight black sleeveless sweater with silver sequins in it, and black slacks, and very high black strappy sandals. She had a squarish face, with arched eyebrows and deep-set eyes. Jim’s first impression was: Lady Vampire.

  ‘Hi,’ she drawled.

  ‘Hi.’

  She double-locked her door, then looked at the painting leaning against the wall. ‘You can’t leave that there.’

  ‘I’m taking it down to the auction house tomorrow. I just moved in.’ He wiped his hand on his jeans and held it out. ‘Jim Rook.’

  She ignored his hand and said, ‘Glad to know you. Eleanor Shine. But you still can’t leave that there. Fire regulations.’

  ‘It’ll be gone by tomorrow morning.’

  ‘And what happens if the building catches ablaze tonight? Which it’s not going to, I know. But we can’t have anarchy, can we – everybody doing whatever they damn well please. Next thing we know, people will be throwing champagne parties in the elevators, and keeping pet lions.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I know so. I know people better than they know themselves.’

  ‘Well …’ said Jim, looking at the painting. With each passing moment, he had become increasingly aware of Eleanor Shine’s perfume. It was like lilies, combined with a fear of heights.

  ‘I’d help you carry it,’ she smiled. ‘But my nails …’


  ‘Sure. Don’t worry about it. I dragged it out here; I can drag it back in.’

  He lifted the painting away from the wall. She peered over so that she could see it. She stared at it for a very long time, one hand lifted to hold her gleaming black hair away from her face. At last, she looked up at Jim and she was frowning.

  ‘What a strange picture.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it? It doesn’t belong to me. It came with the apartment. The label says it’s of some daguerrotypist.’

  ‘Some what?’

  ‘Daguerrotypist. A daguerrotype was a kind of photographic plate they used before camera-film, and a daguerrotypist was … well, somebody who took daguerrotypes.’

  ‘Oh.’ Pause. ‘Why is he wearing that cloth over his head?’

  ‘He’s supposed to be in mourning.’

  As Jim shifted the frame around, Eleanor Shine followed him, and examined the painting even more intently. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘Wait a minute … Can you keep it still, please? This is very unusual indeed.’

  ‘Something wrong?’

  She held out her hand, almost touching the surface of the painting but not quite. She was right to be cautious about her nails. They were ridiculously long, and polished silver. ‘This is not just a painting,’ she said emphatically.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This has such power … I can feel it. This is like a man’s soul, rather than a painting.’

  ‘Is it? I’m not too sure I understand what you mean.’

  ‘Can’t you feel it for yourself? Whoever this man was, something of his personality is concealed inside this painting. And I don’t just mean his likeness. I mean him.’

  Jim looked at her warily. ‘I still don’t get it.’

  Eleanor Shine leaned closer to the painting, and steadily drew in her breath. ‘He’s here, I can smell him. Either he’s hiding, or he’s been imprisoned. But he’s here.’

  ‘My cat really hates this picture. So does my friend – the one who owns the apartment.’

  ‘Your cat? What cat? You’re not supposed to have cats here, you know. Tropical fish, they’re permitted, so long as you have flood insurance for a broken tank. Birds, too, so long as they stay in their cages. But not cats.’