The Dead Assassin

CHAPTER 5 RAISING GHOSTS

The face moves forward through the gloom and presses its forehead to the metal visor, eyes peering through a tiny glass window. One hand gropes the handle of a crank. The other drops a penny into a slot and the mechanism unlocks with a metallic clunk. Electricity flows and a bulb within the Mutoscope glimmers to life, illuminating a rustic scene: a lake surrounded by hills. (The English Lake District?) No, the hills are too high, the lake too wide. Not a lake but a loch somewhere in the Scottish highlands.

The black-and-white photo is creased from use, but the image is clear. The sun slanting low across the flat water suggests that it was taken in the early morning, scarcely after dawn. The face presses closer, eyes devouring the image. The hand slowly turns the crank. Within the Mutoscope, a drum of eight hundred paper photographs revolves. A brass finger releases, dropping a second photo and then a third, a fourth, a fifth… etc. The cranking speeds up. Photographs cascade in a riffling purr, and like a child’s flip-book, the scene animates with motion.

A low, rippling wave disturbs the glass-smooth waters. A tenuous veil of silver mist ascends from the surface like a specter rising from its tomb. The viewer draws in a breath. The hand turns faster, and the scene comes fully alive.

An open steam launch puffs across the loch, dragging behind it the expanding V of a trailing wake. Another photo drops and…

The scene changes.

The camera, closer now, looks onto a muddy foreshore where two figures stand.

The scene changes.

The camera, closer still, reveals the image of a young woman. Tall. Slender. Dressed in a light summer dress. She has peeled off her black stockings and kicked aside her shoes and now she wades in the shallows. Her shoes and stockings, along with her hat, sit neatly piled on the dry shore. The young woman’s hair is so blond it burns luminous as a white flame. The camera delights in her image, one of the Graces caught by human eyes, idling in a moment of unawareness.

The hand ceases turning. The image freezes. The viewer draws in a deep breath and exhales raggedly. The hand resumes its cranking, and the figure in the viewfinder squeezes up from two-dimensions into three. She strolls toward the viewer in dreamy slow motion. When she notices the camera, her coy smile suggests embarrassment and she lowers her eyes demurely. Her hair has come unpinned and her slender fingers sweep back a stray lock that has fallen over one eye. She paddles through water so shallow it scarcely covers her bare feet. Her hitched skirts are gathered up in one hand, revealing to the lascivious camera slender calves and shapely ankles. Distracted by something behind her, she turns to look over her shoulder.

The scene changes.

A little boy stands calf-deep in the loch. He is togged out in a sailor’s suit and knee britches. The boy, perhaps four years of age, has the same white-blond hair spilling from beneath the sailor’s cap and is almost certainly her child. He holds a toy boat in hands chubby with baby fat. The toy boat — a tin-plate warship — sports a huge key protruding from the top deck and now he winds it, the young face taut with concentration. He lowers the battleship to the water, aims, and releases. The windup ship motors off, trailing a wake churned by a whirling propeller. The large tin rudder has been bent so that the warship sails in a tight circle about the boy’s legs. He silently claps his hands and mimes laughter. It is a wonderful moment of childish innocence.

The hand turning the crank stops and the riffling cards cease their tumble, arresting time. The moment hangs frozen. The watching eyes blink tears from their corners, peer deeper, harder, greedy to absorb every last detail. A noise escapes the hunched-over viewer: a sound halfway between a sob of mourning and a keening wail that is a premonition of something dreadful yet to come.

Slowly, reluctantly, the hand tightens upon the crank and begins to turn. Photographs spill from the drum.

The scene changes again.

A long view of the loch. The camera pans to reveal the foreshore and a reviewing stand erected on the loch side. A crowd mills before it.

The scene changes.

Uniformed naval men in plumed hats mingle with bureaucrats in tight suits and top hats. They puff cigars, releasing wisps of smoke. Gesticulate jerkily.

The scene changes.

The crowd parts as a carriage arrives. Dignitaries scuttle to form an honor guard. Bewigged pages snatch open the carriage door and she clambers out — the namesake of the age: Victoria Regina. Her image is unmistakable: Short. Squat. Stumpy and obese in her black mourning dress and headdress of white lace. A bearded man in a uniform bedecked with medals and an admiral’s plumed hat bows and kisses her hand. He escorts her through silent applause to where a throne-like chair awaits beneath an awning. She acknowledges the crowd with a regal wave.

The scene changes.

A stack of wicker baskets. A hand fumbles a latch and white doves spill out in a blur of fluttering wings. The doves scatter into the skies above.

The scene changes.

Out on the loch, a steam launch cruises swiftly over the flat water. White smoke billows from the chimney. At the tiller is a man in a black topcoat and a stovepipe hat. Something with the shape of a slender metal sardine is strapped to the side of the launch.

The scene changes.

A mighty warship lies at anchor. But no, a camera affixed the gunwale of a boat drifts past revealing that it is a sham: a barn-sized wooden cutout lashed to a raft of barrels. It looks uncannily similar to the child’s windup battleship.

The scene changes.

The man at the wheel of the steam launch yanks a lever. A propeller at the rear of the torpedo spins up and the iron fish, steam spouting from a blowhole, drops heavily from the side of the boat. Relieved of its massy weight, the steamer heels alarmingly.

The scene changes.

Churning a bubbling wake, the torpedo streaks toward the battleship target anchored in the distance.

The scene changes.

The crowd in the viewing stands surges to its feet. Men remove top hats, jostle shoulders, craning to see.

The scene changes.

The torpedo speeds unerringly toward its target. It is only seconds away when it abruptly veers left. In the skies above the loch, the flock of doves wheels in an inward tightening circle. Suddenly, the torpedo goes into a wild, tail-chasing spin. Then the lead dove turns and heads for shore, and the cloud of flapping wings follows. The torpedo suddenly straightens. It swooshes past the anchored target, missing by yards and heads straight for the shore. From this distance, the tiny figures of the wading woman and her child can be seen running. Running away. Running for shelter in the viewing stand. But too late. Moving at tremendous speed, the torpedo skims through the shallows and hurtles onto the land, the spinning propeller flinging up a rooster tail of sand and mud. It overtakes the running figures and the young woman and her child vanish in a cloud of steam. Carried by its dread inertia, the torpedo crashes into the viewing stand and explodes.

Although the Mutoscope has no sound, the mind supplies the concussive roar. Bodies and debris tumble high into the sky. The blast hits the camera and the world upends and tilts onto its side.

Feet run past the toppled camera. A top hat falls sideways to the ground and rolls uphill until a trampling foot crushes it. Black smoke swirls and the world dims to darkness.

The scene changes.

Daylight returns. The camera, once again upright, pans across a scene of devastation. Nothing remains of the reviewing stand but jagged splinters of wood, rows of toppled seats, and entangled within, the grotesquely sprawled bodies of the dead.

The scene changes.

Victoria sags in the arms of two men who support her by the armpits and drag her toward the waiting coach. But they must pick their way through wreckage, stepping over fallen bodies and severed limbs. The queen is loaded aboard the carriage, which jerks away.

The scene changes.

A final look at the devastated shore. Hatless and disheveled survivors stumble aimlessly, faces streaked with blood and dirt, eyes spilling shock. A handsome bearded man in a stovepipe hat shambles past the camera, craning to scan the foreshore where the young woman and her child were wading. He calls out for them, his face contorted in a mask of horror. And then his silent shouts become voiceless screams. His face darkens with the rush of blood. Whipcord veins pop from his neck and forehead. He turns away and stares blindly into the camera lens. But then the Mutoscope reaches the end of the drum and the final photograph falls. The coin drops into a metal box with a monetary ka-chunk, the bulb extinguishes, and the viewfinder goes black.

As the cooling filament fades, the viewer draws back from the Mutoscope. His is the same face glimpsed in the final frame, although the once-dark beard is now shock white, the trimmed and pomaded hair is a shoulder-length tangle of gray dishevelment and the handsome face now lined and haggard beyond the normal passage of years. The only thing unchanged is the haunted look of the eyes, which are tunnels receding into an empty, echoing darkness… swarmed by ghosts.