Pictures in the Dark
by Eildon Rhymer
A
young photographer finds a body, and becomes the uncomprehending
witness to a terrible drama.
Note: I wrote this a month ago, and have been sitting on it ever since, filled with insecurity about it. Please read the following warnings before reading on.
Warning no. 1: There are references to a past gay relationship. It is in the past, it contains no sexual references, and it is between two original characters, rather than any Dark is Rising characters. Still, please don't read if such an idea offends you.
Warning no. 2: The entire story is told through the eyes of an original character, who doesn't understand the full significance of what he is seeing. This means that there will be loose ends in the story, and some things left unresolved.
Now on with the show…
Part one: Dusk
It was dusk when Tom found the body.
He had his camera with him, of course. It was an inconceivable for him to go out without it as it would have been to go out without clothes. He had photographed shadow and light, trees and hills, and the melancholy tumble of ruins. He had taken his fill, and was on the way back to the cottage, when something dark had caught his attention, lying in the shelter of a rock.
He turned his head towards it, raised the camera. Then, as happened so often at times like this, he heard Rob's voice in his head, as if his former friend and lover was beside him, the two of them together, as they had been for so many years.
"So, you're going to do something?" Rob asked, his voice light, but his expression sober.
"Take pictures, of course," Tom replied.
"Fiddling while Rome burns," Rob said. "Honestly, I can't believe you sometimes. You have to do something."
"What?" Tom asked, as he stalked around the edge of the scene, trying various angles. "If he's dead, it's too late. At least this way he can be immortalised. His death will become art."
"And if he's not dead?"
Tom zoomed in, focused. He could see no movement at all. The dead man's face was drained of colour, and his chest was still. "Even if he wasn't dead," he said, "what can I do? It's the middle of nowhere. It'll be hours before help comes, so a few minutes won't make any difference."
Rob was about to say something else, but Tom took control of his imagination, and made Rob nod and smile, as if to say You're right. But he held the camera a little more tightly afterwards, his hands suddenly trembling. If Rob had really been there, he would have said something very different. It had been one of the many things they had argued about, right at the end. It had been one of the worst. Things had been said...
Tom shook his head briskly. "I don't need you, anyway," he said, to the ghostly memory of Rob. He had come here alone to take the photographs that would relaunch his career, that would show Rob just how well he could do without him. He had art to create. Art never shied away from terrible things. It told truths, and what could be more true and absolute than death?
He was glad it had happened at dusk. Life had slipped away from this man, like light leeching out of the sky at the end of a winter's day. Tom was glad he had decided to photograph in black and white today. The body would be dark grey on the paler grey of the ground. The critics would comment on that, he thought. He could imagine them talking. "He's showing us that after death, we all return to the earth," they would say. "In the midst of life, we are in death." "No, no. What he's showing is..."
The man moved.
Tom started back with a cry, almost dropping the camera. His heart started to beat very fast.
The man opened his eyes. His hand twitched, his chest rose and fell, but he did not sit up.
Tom took a step backwards. Dead, the man had been interesting, something to be photographed. Alive, he was... a threat, Tom thought. They were in the middle of nowhere, and Tom lived alone. Even if this man meant no harm, there was a strong risk that he would start demanding help and other inconvenient things like that. Tom thought he should probably back off quietly, and hope that he could be away completely before the man turned to look in his direction.
"Don't even think of doing it," Rob chided him in his imagination.
Go away! Tom told him. We split up! You left me! I can do what I like.
Perhaps he said some of it aloud, or perhaps he just stood on something that rustled or broke, for the man turned sharply towards him. With his eyes open, he looked older than Tom had initially taken him for. Dead, he had looked to be in his early twenties, but his eyes made Tom think of age and sadness. "I... I thought you were dead," Tom stammered.
"Dead?" the man echoed. A small furrow appeared between his eyes. He seemed to be testing the idea. "No, I don't think I was." The frown deepened. "I just... went." He gestured with his hand, a curious open movement, that seemed to encompass the sky above him, and things beyond. Then the hand fell limp at his side again. "I don't know why."
"Well..." Tom cleared his throat. It was growing darker by the second, and he was several miles from the cottage. Already it felt far colder than the forecast had suggested it would be. "I should..."
"Go," the man said. "Yes. I understand. I understand that, at least." He pulled himself into a sitting position, his head slumped back against the rock. His skin was pale ash, suffused with the colour of the dusk. "But not the rest." He brought his hand up to his brow. "Something's gone, I think."
Just walk away, Tom told himself. It's not your problem. He was annoyed at losing his pictures of death, though. Still, perhaps he could still exhibit them. Many great photographers used models and actors to pose for their pictures... But, no, he couldn't do that. It would be against his conscience and his artistic integrity. His art was about truth. He would never sell out, or tell lies for money.
"What day is it?" the man asked. "It's cold. It was March when I... left. Now it feels more like winter."
"Still March," Tom told him. Clearly this man was mad. He raised his camera and took a picture of him leaning against the rock, like something empty and broken. Not images of death, after all, but images of madness, of a lost soul adrift in a world he did not understand. It would be art and social commentary in the same picture, suggesting to the viewer a story that would be forever unknown.
"I was trying to... stop something," the man said. His eyes were still closed, his voice like a leaf in autumn. "I know I failed. But what it was, and what happens next..." He opened his eyes, and looked directly at Tom. "I will remember. It's coming back. You probably should go."
Go home, because it was almost dark. The man had told him to. He had his pictures, and if the man died in the cold of the night, then it wasn't Tom's fault, was it? You couldn't just offer help to strangers in this day and age. You didn't get ahead by putting others first. It was every man for himself, and some just didn't have what it took.
Besides, the man had a thick coat, and there was a stream nearby, with fresh water. The road was only a couple of miles away, and the village only a few more. Chances were, someone was out there looking for him. The man was clearly not homeless, for his clothes were new, and his hair was neat. He would be found and returned home, like a pampered pet that had gone astray.
"I do know this," the man said, almost too quiet for Tom to hear him. "Something is coming. It's safer to be ignorant. People who know too much, who get too close... They die." He spread his hands and looked at them, as if he expected to see something there. "I don't know how I know this, but I do."
Just go, Tom thought. No need to say goodbye. He began to walk away, and the man's murmurings faded, until they were lost in the silence of this place so far from everything Tom knew. The wind started to paw at him, bleak and chilling, like something trying to draw his attention.
"It really is very cold," the man said, louder, but still so terribly sad. Tom paused in his walking just for a moment, then carried on.
And Rob was there beside him, walking next to him on this Northumberland moor, and standing over his packed suitcases in their apartment in London, both at the same time. "I still love you," Rob had said then, and said again now, in Tom's imagination, "but I don't like you very much any more. It's not enough for me to have one without the other."
"Don't be stupid," Tom had chided him. "You love me. You just said so. You can't really be serious?"
"I am." Rob's face had been solemn, no tears in his eyes, and no fury, either. "We've argued about it so much. I can't face doing it again, because it's always the same. You still don't see it. You'll never change, and it's wrong of me to try to change you."
"I'll change," Tom had pleaded then, though he cringed now to remember it. "I'll be whatever you want me to be."
"But that wouldn't be honest," Rob said. "Change needs to come from within, for genuine reasons, and not just be a... a veneer, to please someone else. Your career is important to you. I just have to accept that. More important than other people, more important than being nice, more important than me."
"Nice?" Tom had echoed, laughing derisively. "You want me to be nice? You don't make it in this world by being nice."
"Then I don't want to live in your world," Rob had said quietly.
"Then don't!" Tom had screamed, but only after the door had closed, after Rob had left. "I'll show you! I'm going to make it, and then you'll come groveling back, and I won't take you back. I won't take you back!"
Echoes, now, of that screaming. Tom walked with his eyes facing resolutely forwards. Rob would have taken the man home, he knew. He would have helped him walk, given him a blanket, fed him, counseled him, and looked after him until someone came to claim him. Rob thought it was inhumane for Tom to be walking away, but what did he know? Rob was a bleeding heart. He had talent of his own, but wasted it, because so much of his energy was spent on others. He was not true to his gift. He was wrong, and one day he would realise it.
"How will you feel," Rob asked him in his imagination, "if you find out tomorrow that he died in the night, after you left him?"
"Be quiet!" Tom shouted, raising his hands to his head, digging the knuckles into his temples. Rob left him, but then his mother was there, smiling down at him, holding him and protecting him when he had run home crying from the bullies. She had always dropped everything whenever he needed her, and she had praised him and encouraged him, and told him that the bullies were wrong, that he was wonderful and talented and would grow up to be ten times the person that any of those horrid boys could ever hope to be.
The wind turned colder, and there was a smell on the air that made Tom think suddenly of snow. Snow had not been forecast, but neither had this sudden cold. Tom buttoned up his coat, and speeded up, eager for light and a warm drink. His rented cottage was a mile away, but it suddenly seemed a lot further. His pictures portrayed the dark and threatening side of the landscape, but Tom had never enjoyed the uncomfortable side of nature. He liked to be home by dark, and to spend his nights in a place with heat and running water.
It really is very cold. He remembered the man saying it, the memory as clear as if the man was standing beside him, speaking it.
Tom stopped walking. He closed his eyes, and opened them again, then gave an angry sigh. He would have to go back. It was forced upon him, really, by the weather. He would have to at least offer help. And if the man accepted it, he would have to carefully walk him home, feed him, contact the authorities, and wait for them to come. The peacefulness of his evening would be completely destroyed, but he had no real choice.
"It doesn't mean you've won," he told the Rob who lived in his imagination. "It's just this once."
He turned round, stamped back the way he had come. "Will you be alright, staying out here?" he shouted. "I mean, I've got a house. It's quite a long way away, but..."
Please say no, he thought. Then it's your fault if you die. But the man said nothing in response.
"It's going to get cold..." Tom turned up the collar of his coat. "There's a phone in the cottage. At least tell me someone I can call."
He was nearing the rock. There, between one step and the next, something flickered in his mind, a brief moment of dizziness and disorientation. By the time his foot landed, it was gone. Frowning, he took a few more steps, until he stood exactly where the man had been lying, but there was no-one there. The man was gone.
His thoughts blank, Tom walked back to the cottage alone. He saw nothing but the dusk, and felt nothing but the slithering hand of the wind.End of part one
