The Black Path of Fear

8

It was just a small attic room, about what you’d expect for a shoestring-photographer’s studio. It had no windows, but the ceiling broke in the middle; on one side of this central seam it was level and at full room height; on the other it sloped downward in a sort of gable effect, and the end wall was only about shoulder-high. In this sloped section there was a skylight vent. That was one of the things I didn’t like the looks of.

It had been glassed over, but the glass was all out, except for a spiny fringe around the edges, and you could see stars needling the black up above it. Directly underneath the gap the floor was all twinkling and littered with shards of broken glass. That meant unlawful entry. Then there was a straight-backed chair standing there in position right under the rent, and that meant unlawful exit again. It had been moved over after the glass had already fallen through, because its seat was clean; there were no particles a-twinkle on it such as even a brushing off would have left.

It was easy enough to read the little still life. Somebody had jumped down through the skylight, feet first. Somebody had climbed up out through it again, using the chair for a stepladder.

It looked like there had been a fight, or at least some kind of strenuous resistance, in between the two events. Two other chairs like the first that he’d had in there were lying toppled flat on their backs, and a couple of the legs of one were badly fractured. The portable tripod he carried around with him was lying there on the floor, smashed, and with all its guts spilled out, as though somebody had been trying to wrench it apart in a hurry to get the plates out, or it had been plentifully stepped on in the course of a struggle.

A couple of sample portraits that he’d had tacked on the walls as a decoration had slipped their moorings, jarred out of true by the vibration. One had dropped down all the way; the other still clung tenuously by one corner.

That about finished the front room, or at least the main part of it, that he’d used for posing his subjects. There was, however, a curtain strung across one entire side of it, to my left as I came in, subdividing the already modest space into two unequal parts. It had, strangely enough, not been disturbed, or, if it had, had fallen back into proper place again without revealing any trace of it.

I went over to it, jerked it aside, and looked through. Behind it there was just an alcove, a small rectangle that he used as a combination darkroom, for developing his plates, and sleeping quarters. There was a cot crowded into it, and then there was an ordinary built-in washbasin against the wall that he used for a developing tank. It was still full of solution, but there were no pictures soaking in it when I stuck my hand in and felt carefully all around the sides and bottom.

He had a wire strung diagonally across the tiny cubicle, from curtain pole to wall, that he’d used for hanging negatives on to dry, like wash on a line, but they’d all been pulled off by somebody, as if in hasty examination, and then thrown down. They lay all over the floor, like curled-up black celluloid leaves.

I didn’t bother retrieving them and taking them out into the light and going over them individually to see if the one I wanted was among them. I didn’t have to. There was a short cut to finding that out. I counted up the negatives at sight from where I stood: there were eight lying around me. Then I counted up the “clothespins,” the little wooden grips he’d used to fasten them with, that were still hooked onto the line. There were nine. One negative had gone out of here — up through the skylight.

So had he. The cot had been slept in; it was easy to see that. The lower end of the coverings still retained the funnel shape his legs had hollowed out in them; the upper end had been ravaged, violently cast asunder, as if by a startled leap to upright position. At the sound of glass sundering and spilling down into the room on the other side of the curtain, most likely.

He hadn’t had time to dress. His coat and shirt and tie were lying on the floor, all mangled and stepped over. They must have taken him with them just as he was. Or at least just lingered long enough to force his kicking legs into pants and shoes and then hoisted him out with them the same way they’d come in. There was no sign of these last two items anywhere around.

He hadn’t gone docilely. The condition of the outside part of the room showed there must have been quite an unheaval, a weighted staggering back and forth and flinging around, before he’d gone at all. Then maybe when he had at last, he’d gone out senseless, they’d had to do it that way. In here, to show for it, there was a little slap of blood on one of the sheets that lay trailing off the cot toward the curtain, as though caught around someone’s foot. I pressed my thumb down on it, and the linen was soggy yet there where it was. Just now. Just a little while before I got here, maybe after I was already well on the way over. Just a little too soon. Good timing. But not for me.

Well, he hadn’t gone submissively. I gave him credit for that much, anyway.

I went out slow, even slower than I’d gone in, and I’d certainly made my way in slowly enough. I reached back over my shoulder and gave the light cord a disgusted tweak as I drifted by below it, and the room went back into the oblivion it had been in before I came here. Just a glimpse in the night of a strange room in a strange town. Someplace you’d never seen before and would never see again. And yet the memory of it would probably stay with me far longer than of many another far more familiar place.

There went my last chance. I elbowed the door closed behind me and teetered through the dark toward the place where I last remembered leaving the stairs.