The Devil You Know

I got Sebastian into position, steering him with my hand on his shoulders. Peter was getting bored and restive, but we were almost done. I could have ratcheted up the tension a bit more, but since the outcome was still in doubt, I thought I might as well just suck it and see. Either it would work or it wouldn’t. “Okay, on my mark. Peter—smile. Nice try, but no. Kids in the front row, show Peter what a smile is. Sebastian—three, two, one, now!”

Sebastian pressed the bulb, and the shutter made a slow, arthritic whuck-chunk sound. Good. I’d been half afraid that nothing would happen at all.

“Now, we don’t have any fixative,” I announced as my memory started to kick in again, piecemeal. “So the image won’t last for long. But we can make it clearer with a stop bath. Lemon juice will do, or vinegar, if you . . . ?” I looked hopefully at the two grown-ups, and Barbara slipped out of the room again.

“What about developing fluid?” James asked, looking at me with vague but definite mistrust.

I shook my head. “We’re not using light,” I said again. “We’re photographing the spirit world, not the visible one, so the film doesn’t have to develop; it has to translate.”

James’s face showed very clearly what he thought of this explanation. There was an awkward silence, broken by Barbara as she came back in with a bottle of white-wine vinegar, a plastic bowl, and an apologetic smile. “This is going to stink,” she warned me as she retreated again to the back of the room.

She was right. The sweet-sour tang of the vinegar hit and held as I poured out about two-thirds of the bottle, which covered the bowl to half an inch or so deep. Then, with Sebastian still standing next to me, I slipped the plate out of the camera, very deliberately blocking with my body the audience’s line of sight. “Sebastian,” I said, “you’re still the cameraman here. That means you’re the medium through which the spirits are working. Please, dip the print paper in the vinegar, and slosh it around so that it’s completely soaked. An image should form on the paper as you do this. Do you see an image, Sebastian?”

Peter hadn’t even bothered to move from his place over by the wall. In fact, he was leaning against it now, looking more sullen and bored than ever. Sebastian stared first in consternation and then in amazement at the paper as he sluiced it round and round in the bowl.

“Do you see an image?” I repeated, knowing damn well that he did.

“Yeah!” he blurted. Everyone in the room was picking up on his tension and astonishment now; I didn’t need to go for any verbal buildup.

“And what is that image?”

“A boy. It’s—I think it’s—!”

“Of course you can see a boy,” I interrupted. “We just took a photo of your brother, Peter. Is that who you can see, Sebastian?”

He shook his head, his wide eyes still staring down at the muddy photograph. “No. Well, I mean, yeah, but—there’s somebody else, too. It’s—”

I cut across him again. Everything in its place. “Somebody you recognize?”

Sebastian nodded emphatically. “Yeah.”

I like to see what I was doing here as siding with the underdog, but if there had been no element of sadism in it, I wouldn’t have been looking at Peter as I said the next few words. “And does he have a name, this other boy? What dark wonders from the spirit world have we captured and pinned to the wall, Sebastian? Tell us his name.”

Sebastian swallowed hard. It was genuine nerves rather than showmanship, but the strained pause was better than anything I could have choreographed myself.

“Davey Simmons,” Sebastian said, his voice a little too high.

The effect on Peter was electrifying. He yelled in what sounded like honest, naked terror, coming away from the wall with a jerk and then lurching across to the bowl in three staccato strides. But I was too quick for him. “Thank you, Sebastian,” I said, whipping the print out of the bowl and waving it in the air as though to dry it—and as though keeping it out of Peter’s reach was only accidental.

It had come out pretty well. In black and white, of course, and darkened around the edges where the light had got in at the paper, but nice and clear where it needed to be. It showed Peter as a sort of grainy blur, only recognizable by his posture and by the darker splodge of his hair. By contrast, the figure that stood at his elbow was very distinct indeed—sad, washed out, beaten down by time and loneliness and the fact of his own death, but not to be mistaken for marsh gas, cardboard cutout, or misapplied imagination.

“Davey Simmons,” I mused. “Did you know him well, Peter?”

“I never fucking heard of him!” Peter yelled, throwing himself at me with desperate fury. “Give me that!” I’m not hefty by any means, but for all his solidity, Peter was just a kid; holding him off while I showed the print to his friends wasn’t hard at all. They were all staring at it with expressions that ran the gamut from sick horror to bowel-loosening panic.