Pictures in the Dark

by Eildon Rhymer

A young photographer finds a body, and becomes the uncomprehending witness to a terrible drama.

Part two: Morning

He woke to snow, but also to a crisp and flawless blue sky that made the whole world sparkle, like something out of a dream. Tom rubbed his eyes, to drive away the last of the sleepiness, and resolved to go outside with his camera immediately, without even stopping for coffee. With sunlight that bright, the snow would not linger, not in late March.

As he reached for his camera, he saw his watch, and was horrified to see how late it was. It was almost ten, and he was normally up by eight at the latest. It had to be today of all days that he overslept! Today, when snow had fallen out of nowhere, unexpected and unprecedented. A hundred stunning photographs had been waiting for him at sunrise, but he had missed his opportunity, and now they had gone.

Irritated, he pushed his arms into his coat, and tugged it around him. He felt tired, too, as if he had hardly slept, though he remembered coming home at dusk, spending a quiet evening doing nothing, and going early to bed. There had been strange dreams, but no memories of sleeplessness. He must have had nearly twelve hours' sleep, but he felt as if he had had only four or five.

The cold hit him when he opened the door. He considered going back for a scarf, but decided not to waste time. There were photographs there for the taking, and they were calling to him, seducing him.

His hands itched, his heart was beating fast. He ran round, giddy with excitement, lining up close shots here, crouching in the snow, stepping back for a wide vista. He went further, still further, photographing frosty branches and hills and half-covered stones. He felt truly alive, and that was what Rob could never understand...

He stopped, and a little of his elation trickled away. He had not thought about Rob once since seeing the snow, and yet here he was, intruding again, spoiling the moment. It was true, though. Rob called it selfishness, but what he could not understand was that there were moments when, for Tom, nothing in the world mattered but finding and immortalising the pictures that lurked in the ordinary landscape around them. Not even Rob existed in moments like that. Not even Tom himself.

The thought of Rob had been enough to break the mood. Tom surfaced, and became once again the professional artist who took photographs with half a mind on how people would react to them. He started to look back through the pictures he had taken, nodding with satisfaction because many of them were good. Others fell short of the transcendent image that he had seen in his mind when taking it, but that was only to be expected. He could take a hundred pictures, but only two or three were good enough to exhibit.

Somewhere not too far away, he thought he heard a car. Pressing his lips together, he decided to return to the house. He was hungry and very thirsty, and he had no desire to be here when car-loads of children turned up to scream and play on the snow-covered hills. He had paid good money for this cottage in order to be alone, and what right did other people have to come and play on the stage he had set aside for his pictures?

As he walked back, he recognised the place where he had found the man the night before. Strange, he thought, frowning. He had forgotten almost entirely about the man, until he came to the place where he had found him. It was nothing unusual for him to forget other people, of course. The man had disappeared, thus proclaiming that he was not Tom's responsibility, and was nothing for him to trouble his mind about. Still, this felt different. It felt like a memory a few months old, not like a memory from the night before.

"Odd," he said, but then he shrugged, because, really, it was not his problem. The man had chosen to wander off. He had probably had a car parked just over the hill, and was back home in some comfortable house, living his conventional and tedious life.

He walked on. There were hoofprints in the snow, he noticed. He knew next to nothing about horses, but he thought they looked unusually big, but shallow. Then, a little further on, he saw human footprints, dusted over with a thin layer of snow, showing that this person had been walking there in the night, before the snow had stopped.

The wind gusted, and seemed to wail with an almost human sound. Someone's behind me! Tom thought, but when he whirled around, nothing was there. A cloud had appeared in the east, though, like a clenched fist on the horizon.

Tom realised for the first time that there were no birds. It was the first time ever he had heard the hills entirely silent.

He speeded up. Soon he saw his cottage ahead of him, but there were no lights on inside it, and the windows looked completely black. The roof was covered with snow, like a shroud, or a heavy weight that would drive it into the ground.

Something black moved across the snow. Tom looked up, craning his neck, frozen like a rabbit in the gaze of a kestrel, for the dark patch was the shadow of a single bird, large and black. It flew slowly and low, as if it was searching.

"Stupid," Tom told himself, shaking himself. "Don't be stupid." He took a picture of the bird, almost defiantly, but it had already passed, only a shard of darkness in the blue.

As he did so, he became aware that the sound of the car had grown steadily louder. As he lowered his camera, he saw the car drift to a halt in front of his cottage. The engine stopped. One door opened, and then the other. Two men came out, strangers in black.

Run! cried a part of Tom's mind that he had not known existed. Hide! It was the voice of the young Tom, bullied and mocked, who would have given up and given in, had his mother not been there to comfort and encourage him. He dismissed this voice now. It was stupid to be scared just because there were no birds singing, just because a black bird had passed across the sun like a stain. This was a sudden snow fall in spring. Of course nature was confused. Of course the world seemed strange.

He strode forward, then, went down to meet them. They were slow to notice him coming. One of them was knocking on his door again and again. The other was examining the ground, as if looking for footprints. When the one at the door gave up, the two of them stood close, talking in voices that did not carry. Everything about them screamed urgency and fear.

"Who are you?" Tom demanded when he was close enough.

He had the satisfaction of seeing both men jump. The shorter one recovered quicker. "Do you live here?" he called.

"Yes." Tom made his posture say, What's it to you? though he wasn't quite able to bring himself to say it out loud.

"We're looking for a friend," the other man said. "We think he came here. We were just wondering..." The two of them exchanged a quick look. "We're worried about him," the man said. Tom was not an expert on such things, but thought there was genuine pain in his voice. "But, whatever we feel, it's far more important than just..."

The shorter man stopped him with an arm on his wrist. "We just wondered if you'd seen anything," he said. "A man. He looks about your age, or a bit younger. Or, if not, just anything... strange."

"Strange?" Tom laughed, shaking his head. He fought a sudden urge to tell them all his irrational fears of the walk home, and of the man who had been dead, and then had been alive, but he had never been one to talk overmuch to strangers. "Why don't you tell me why you want to know, first?"

"We told you," the taller man said. Now that they were close enough to talk without shouting, Tom realised that he had a Welsh accent. He was extraordinarily pale, and he was wearing dark glasses, either as an affectation, or to protect against the glare of the sunlight on the snow. "We're looking for our friend. We haven't got time for this."

Tom was tempted to deliberately obstruct them, because they had come sniffing around his home, complicating the pristine beauty of the morning. But there was something about them, about their evident urgency... And the shadow of his fear still clung to him, an undercurrent of nastiness to the loveliness of the snow. Besides, the quicker he gave them information, the quicker they would be gone.

"Perhaps I saw him last night," he said. "At any rate, I saw someone."

The two men exchanged glances again. The shorter one was fair, too, though not as startlingly pale as the Welsh man. They both looked to be in their mid-thirties. The Welsh one at least looked suitably dressed for a snowy moorland in the middle of nowhere, but the English one was dressed for the city, and looked cold.

"Where?" the Welsh man asked, and, "Are you sure?" said the other one.

"Of course I'm sure." Tom reached his door, but he would not open it, not while these strangers were outside. He had no intention of inviting them in. "I met a weird man last night. It was only last night. I'm not likely to forget it, am I?"

The shorter man's mouth twitched, as if Tom had said something funny, but the Welsh man was not smiling. "Was he... well?"

"I thought he was dead when I found him, to be honest," Tom said.

"Why?" the Welsh man demanded. For a moment, Tom thought he was going to grab his arm. "Was he hurt?"

Tom shook his head. "I just didn't think he was breathing, but he was. He said some odd things. He looked confused. I tried to bring him back here, but he... Well, I went away for a few minutes, and he'd gone when I got back."

"You should have followed him!" the Welsh man shouted. "How could you just let him go!"

"Bran," the other man said, chidingly. "It wasn't his fault. Let him speak." To Tom he said, "I'm sorry. It's been a stressful time. Our friend, he... Something huge is happening. We didn't know how huge until... Anyway, he just went, and we're afraid for him, and it's far more important than you can ever imagine, because if he... falls, then..." He raked his hand through his fair hair. "Just help us, please. Anything, however small, could be a help."

"Too late." Tom folded his arms. "You had your chance. You Welsh friend ruined it."

"Tell us!" the man called Bran cried. "Please!" He hurled himself bodily towards Tom, but held short of actually hurting him. Tom saw suddenly that his cheeks were damp, as if he had been crying earlier, his pain hidden by his dark glasses.

Tom had cried, too, the evening after Rob had left... Biting his lip, Tom turned away, fumbled with his key to open the door. And a memory came to him suddenly, of doing exactly the same the night before, as the man who had been dead slumped against the porch, barely able to stand. Hold on, Tom had urged him, concern pushing through the irritation and resentment. Almost there.

"But that didn't happen," he gasped. "He vanished. He didn't..."

He dimly heard the two men react in some way, crying out, and exchanging words. But Tom was blundering against the door, pushing it open. There had to be some evidence. He had come home alone, and had... But, no. It had been an empty night, doing nothing, and he never did nothing. He would have worked on his photographs, or watched the television, or read. And he had gone to be early, but he felt tired.

He raced through the house, crouching, peering. The man had sat there, at the dining table, but had fallen asleep over the bowl of cereal Tom had slammed down in front of him. He had drunk some milk. He had sat in front of the television, and babbled of the most impossible things, of darkness inescapable that came to swallow the world, of voices in his mind that threatened to tear him apart, of grieving for the dead. "It's coming back in fragments," the man had said. "I gambled everything. I offered myself, but it was rejected, and here I am again, and nothing has changed."

"But it wasn't true," Tom cried, his hands rising to his head, fingers tangling in his unbound hair. "He vanished. He didn't come back with me. He didn't."

"But he did." Both men had followed him into the cottage, and stood there uninvited. "He came here, but he's not here now."

"Where's he gone?" They were talking to each other, Tom realised, and not to him.

How could it happen? He had a strange, terrifying double memory. In one version, he had come across a man, talked for a little while, and then gone home alone. In the other, the man had come with him, and they had talked for hours of impossible things, but the man had been gone by morning. One of them had to be a dream. Yes, that was it. The short encounter had been strange enough to plant itself in Tom's dreams, and the rest had been manufactured from there. Of course the man hadn't come home with him.

"When did he leave?" The Welsh man grabbed Tom by the shoulder. "Did he say anything about where he was going?"

"Of course he wasn't here." Tom shook his head. But his hands, unbidden, were going to his camera, were switching it on, were scrolling through the pictures he'd taken, through the pictures of the day before, the pictures of a dead man lying on the gloom... and then, unmistakable, the pictures of an exhausted man asleep at a wooden table, of a man with his head in his hands, begging the memories to go away and leave him alone, to not be true, please not to be true.

"Will," the man called Bran breathed.

The camera fell from Tom's nerveless hands. "But why?" he said. "How could I forget?"

Bran was on the floor, kneeling, as if the muscles in his legs had failed him. "It's real," he was saying. "It's serious. I'd hoped..."

"We knew it was real." The other man's voice was cold all of a sudden. "It became real the moment..."

"I didn't mean that, and you know it." Bran stood up. "But you know as well as I know that there is far more at stake than personal losses. If Will is defeated..."

"But why do you think he will be, just because...?"

"Think, Barney. Use your brain." Bran's voice was as cold as Barney's had been a moment before. "Will evidently made this man forget, but the spell was flawed, or else it's breaking down."

There was silence for a little while. Spell? Tom's mind gibbered. He wished, fiercely, intensely, that Rob was with him, even Rob so disapproving and argumentative as he had been at the end. I'd do anything to bring him back, he thought. Anything.

"I read a story once," Barney said, his voice detached and distant. "A wizard was dying, and his spells, one by one, they crumbled, until..." He let out a breath. "But Will can't die. Can he?"

"But he can be defeated," Bran said. Tom saw him clench both fists with determination. "And there are things worse than death."

Mad, Tom thought. They're all mad. The camera lay on the floor, and he had not yet dared touch it to see if it was broken. If it was broken, then there would never be any proof. He could forget it, tell himself that it had not happened. It always took a photograph to make something truly real.

"Come on," Bran was saying to Barney. There was bleakness in his voice, but courage, too. "This is the most important thing either of us have ever done in our lives. Every second we stay here..."

"Yes," Barney said, and they left together, leaving the door open, so the cold wreathed itself around Tom and took hold of his heart, and held on, and would not let him go.
End of part two