Syndrome E

6

Ludovic Sénéchal lived behind the Marcq-en-Baroeul racetrack, in a calm town right next to Lille. Discreet neighborhood, “contemporary”-style single-family brick house, lawn small enough so you wouldn’t spend your entire Saturday mowing the grass. Lucie raised her eyes toward the upstairs window, a wry smile on her face. It was in that charming little room that they’d made love the first time. A kind of online dating package: you meet for fake, then for real, you sleep together, and you see how it goes.

She’d seen. Ludovic was a good man in every respect—serious, attentive, with a heap of other sterling qualities—but he was definitely lacking in the thrills department. Quiet little life spent watching movies, putting in his time at the Social Security office, then watching more movies. Not to mention a real tendency to sink into moods. She had a hard time imagining him as the future father of her twins, the one who’d cheer them on at dance competitions or take them bike riding.

Lucie slid the key into the slot, but saw that the door hadn’t been locked. It was easy to guess why: in his panic, Ludovic had left everything as it was. She entered the house, bolting the door behind her. It was large and handsome, modern, with all the room she and her girls lacked. Someday, perhaps…

She remembered where to find the cellar. Their private movie screenings, with beer and freshly made popcorn, seemed somehow memorable, timeless. Walking down the hallway, she came across broken or toppled objects. She could easily imagine Ludovic feeling his way upstairs, completely in the dark, knocking everything over before he managed to get her on the phone.

Lucie went down the flight of stairs that led to the mini-cinema. Nothing had changed since last year. Red carpeting on the walls, the odor of old rugs, seventies ambience… It had its charm. In front of her, the pearlescent screen quivered under the white light from the projector. She opened the door to the minuscule projection room, which was hot as an oven, owing to the powerful xenon lamp. A loud hum filled the space, the take-up reel spun uselessly, the tail of the film clacked in the air at each rotation. Without thinking, Lucie pressed the fat red button of the power unit, a mastodon weighing 130 pounds. The rumbling finally stopped.

She flipped a switch and a neon light flickered. In the small room, empty film cans, tape recorders, and posters were stacked haphazardly. It was Ludovic to a T: an organized mess. She tried to remember how you went about loading a film: switch the feed and take-up reels by slipping them onto the projector arms, screw on the knobs to keep them in place, press MOTOR, align the film sprockets with the rollers… With all those buttons in front of her, the operation was more complicated than it appeared, but with a certain amount of luck Lucie managed to get the machine working. Through the magic of light and optics, the succession of still images would be transformed into fluid movement. The cinema was born.

Lucie switched off the neon light, closed the door of the elevated booth, and descended the three steps that led to the screening room. She remained standing against the back wall, her arms folded. This small, empty room, with its twelve green leatherette seats, had something profoundly depressing about it, just like its owner. Staring at the screen, Lucie couldn’t help feeling a vague apprehension. Ludovic had talked about a weird film, and now he was blind… What if there was something dangerous about these images, like… like a light so sharp it could ruin your vision? Lucie shook her head—that was idiotic. Ludovic had a brain tumor, end of story.

The beam of light titillated the darkness and briefly lit up the white rectangle. Then an image of uniform black spread over it, followed, five or six seconds later, by a white circle that settled into the upper right-hand corner. Suddenly, music rattled the walls—a jolly tune, the kind you used to hear in old street carnivals, among the wooden merry-go-rounds. Lucie smiled at the awkward splutters that were plainly audible; the sound track must have come from an old 45, or even a 78.

No title or credits. A woman’s face appeared in close-up in an oval that occupied the center of the screen. All around this oval, the image remained dark, a kind of grayish, almost black fog, as if the cameraman had put a mask over the lens. It made you feel like a voyeur peeping through a keyhole.

The actress struck Lucie as beautiful, hypnotic, with large, enigmatic eyes that gazed directly at the lens. She was about twenty, with dark lipstick, jet hair brushed back, a kiss curl on her forehead. One could glimpse the top of her checked suit and pure, immaculate neck. Lucie was reminded of those family photos, the kind you find inside austere pendants hidden in grandparents’ jewelry boxes. The actress didn’t smile and seemed a bit distant, the kind of femme fatale Hitchcock would have loved on his set. Her lips moved, briefly: she was saying something, but Lucie couldn’t make out what. Two fingers—a man’s fingers—entered the frame from the top and spread the lids of her left eye. Abruptly, jutting from the left, the blade of a scalpel slit the eye in two, rightward, in the throb of circus music and the clash of cymbals.

Lucie jerked her face away, teeth clenched. Too late: the image had struck her like a blow and it filled her with rage. She had nothing against B horror movies—she often rented them, especially on Saturday evenings—but she despised this method of suddenly splashing something horrific over the screen without any warning. It was cowardly and low.

Suddenly, the fanfare stopped.

Not a sound, other than the harrowing thrum of the projector.

Shaken, Lucie looked back at the screen. One more scene like that and she’d turn the whole thing off. After her time in the ER, she’d had quite enough of blood.

The tension had ratcheted up a notch. Lucie no longer felt quite so assured.

The projector continued to send out its cone of light. The next image was the soles of shoes. By a translatory movement, they receded into the distance. The sky shone reassuringly. A well-dressed little girl was on a swing, smiling broadly. It was shot in black and white, silent, even though the girl could be seen talking at various points. She had long, fair hair, blond no doubt, and she radiated liveliness. Her eyes caught the light; the shade patterns from the trees played over her skin. The lighting, the camera angles, and the expressions drawn from her childish face suggested that this was the work of a pro. Most of the time, tracking shots—he must have swiveled around with a handheld camera on his shoulder—stayed on the girl’s eye: clear, pure, and full of life, it palpitated, the pupil contracting and widening like a diaphragm. The white circle did not budge from its position in the upper right, and Lucie found it hard to ignore. It wasn’t that it attracted her—more like it irritated her. She couldn’t say why, but she felt a prickling in her stomach. The scene with the slit eye had definitely affected her.

Next came some very quick cuts focused on the girl. A jumble of disconnected sequences, as if in a dream, which could be situated in neither time nor space. Certain images skipped, probably because of the quality of the film. It flitted from the slit eye to the swing set, from the swing to the little girl’s hand playing with ants. Close-up of her childish mouth eating, of her eyelids opening and closing. Another, in which she petted two kittens in the grass for two or three minutes. She kissed them and held them tight against her, while fog—Lucie couldn’t help wondering about the technique used here—closed in around her. When the girl raised her eyes to the camera, she wasn’t acting. She was smiling in complicity, speaking to someone she knew. Once she came toward the camera and began spinning around and around. The image spun as well, accompanying the dance and, amid the fog, provoking a sensation of vertigo.

Next sequence. Something had changed in the little girl’s eyes. A kind of permanent sadness. The image was very dark. All around her swirled the same drenching fog. The camera moved forward, then back, as if taunting her; the girl pushed it away, both hands in front of her, as if she were chasing away an insect. Lucie felt out of place as she viewed the film. She felt like an intruder, a voyeur secretly watching a scene that might be taking place between father and daughter.

Just as suddenly it tipped into another sequence. Lucie’s eyes widened, taking in the scene: a stretch of grass surrounded by fences, the sky black, stormy, chaotic, and not quite natural—a special effect? At the far end of the pasture, the same girl waited, arms hanging along her body. In her right hand she held a butcher’s knife, so out of proportion to her small, innocent fingers.

Zoom in on her eyes. They stared at the void, pupils visibly dilated. Something had shattered that child; Lucie could feel it. The camera, placed behind the fences, spun rapidly to the right to focus on a furious bull. The animal, monstrously powerful, foamed at the mouth, pawed at the ground, and butted against the barriers. Its horns pointed forward like sabers.

Lucie’s hand flew to her mouth. They weren’t really going to…

She leaned against the back of a seat, head bent toward the screen. Her nails dug into the leatherette.

Abruptly an unidentified arm entered the field of vision and lifted a latch. The person doing this had taken care to remain offscreen. The pen was opened. The overexcited beast charged straight ahead. Its body expressed power of the purest, most violent kind. How much did it weigh—a ton? It stopped in the middle of the field, pivoted around, and then seemed to focus its attention on the little girl, who remained motionless.

Lucie considered running back into the projection booth and shutting off the film. Playtime was over; it was no longer about swings, smiles, or complicity—this was sinking into the inconceivable. Lucie, a finger on her mouth, could not turn her gaze from that satanic screen. The film was sucking her in. In the sky, the black clouds swelled, grew darker, as if preparing for a tragic ending. Lucie suddenly had the sense of a staged battle: Good versus Evil. An outsized, all-powerful, unassailable Evil. David against Goliath.

The bull charged.

The silence of the sound track and the absence of music added to the feeling of suffocation. One could imagine, without hearing it, the sound each hoof made as it fell, the snorting from the animal’s greasy snout. The camera now contained both subjects in its field: the bull on the left, the little girl on the right. The distance between the monster and the stationary child was growing shorter. Thirty yards, twenty… How could the girl not be moving? Why wasn’t she running, screaming for her life? Lucie thought briefly of the kid’s dilated pupils: Drugs? Hypnosis?

She was going to let herself be gored.

Ten yards. Nine, eight…

Five yards.

Suddenly, the bull came to a halt, its muscles twitching, while clumps of earth flew from the ground. It froze completely, barely one yard away from its target. Lucie thought it must have been a freeze-frame; she couldn’t breathe. Inevitably it would start up again, and the tragedy would occur. But nothing moved. And yet, the monster continued to pant, frothing at the mouth. One could read in its enraged eyes the desire to continue, to kill, but its hulk refused to obey.

“Paralyzed” would be the best word to describe it.

The girl stared at it without blinking. She took a step forward and slid beneath the head of this beast forty or fifty times her weight. Without betraying the slightest emotion, she raised her knife and slit its throat with a clean swipe. A black cascade began to flow and, as if vanquished by a demented matador, the beast fell over onto one side, raising a cloud of dust.

Suddenly, a black screen, as at the start. Slowly the white circle at the upper right faded out.

And then flickers in the room, like applause of light. The film was taking a bow.

Lucie remained frozen in place. She felt shaken to the core, and very cold. She nervously rubbed her forehead. Had she really seen an enraged bull stop short in front of a little girl and let its throat be slashed without reacting, all of it in one continuous shot with no visible edits?

With a shudder, she returned to the booth and sharply flipped the switch. The rumbling ceased, the neon flickered on again. Lucie felt infinite relief. What twisted mind could have filmed such deliria? She could still see that dingy fog spreading over the screen, those close-ups of the eyes, the opening and closing scenes of such unspeakable violence. There was something in this short that classic horror films couldn’t provide: realism. The girl, seven or eight at most, didn’t appear to be acting. Or if she was, she did it exceptionally well.

Lucie was about to head back upstairs when she heard a noise above her head. The crunch of a shoe on glass. She held her breath. Had the tension of the film caused her to imagine things? She moved forward cautiously, step-by-step, finally reaching the entrance foyer.

The door was open.

Lucie rushed forward, certain she’d locked it when she’d come in.

No one outside.

Dumbfounded, she went back in the house and looked around. At first glance, nothing had been touched. She moved on to the main hallway and checked the other rooms. Bathroom, kitchen, and… study.

The study—where Ludovic kept his many films.

Here again, the door was open. Lucie ventured into the stacks of reels. Dozens of canisters lay scattered about the floor. Celluloid spilled out in all directions. The cop noticed that only the canisters without labels—the ones that indicated neither title, director, nor year of production—had been disturbed.

Someone had been in here looking for something specific.

An anonymous film.

Ludovic had told her he’d acquired some reels the day before from a collector, including the one she’d just been watching. She hesitated, studied the room. Calling in a team to make a report seemed pointless. There was no break-in or vandalism, no theft. She nonetheless went back down to the cellar and packed up the strange film, so she could bring it to the restorer whose card Ludovic had given her. She couldn’t recall ever having seen such a psychologically taxing piece of work. She—who’d been used to autopsies and crime scenes for years—felt drained.

Back outside she thought to herself that, all in all, that glare of sunlight in her face wasn’t such a bad thing.