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“Like draws like,” Soraya told Safie that first afternoon in between sips of her cold brew. “I knew when I first saw you and Lois Cairns – the same way that Max and I both knew when we first sat across from each other at that damned screening.”
Safie could only sit there, notepad in front of her and pencil in her hand, and wonder just what she had agreed to by coming here.
The invitation had arrived, as did all things Soraya had her hand in these days, via post. A small, nondescript envelope with a flimsy piece of paper wedged inside, inviting her to coffee at the Slanted Door. Safie had thought, then, that her old partner wanted to catch up, now that the initial, brutal flash of publicity following Lois’ book had died back down somewhat.
Looking at Soraya sitting there across the table, though, Safie didn’t need any preternatural skills to tell that she’d been wrong on that account.
“I thought that—well. We’ve all heard the official version by now, about Wrob and Jan and all that silver nitrate. Doing what silver nitrate does best. But,” and here Soraya did that little twist of her head that Safie had always admired her for, that little gesture that said, we both know where this is going but this is pretty good for dramatic effect isn’t it, before continuing, “that’s not all there was to it. Right?”
A little voice in the back of Safie’s head had wanted her to lie, then. To shake her head and give a rueful little smile and say, No, silver nitrate does burn so easily and even if Wrob should have taken more precautions, there was nothing that could have been done. It was an accident. Nothing more.
But she still remembered the tall shape of Lady Midday, and she remembered the glint of the fire catching on her scissors, too.
And so she said: “Right. There was—something else. Someone. A . . . small god, my grandfather would’ve called it.”
“Small gods,” Soraya repeated. Very carefully, very deliberately, she flattened the pads of her fingers against the edge of the table. They were stained black with—ink? Developing solution? Safie had never quite figured it out in all the time she’d worked together with Soraya. “Yeah. I think—I think that description fits them very well, doesn’t it? Small, forgotten, angry little gods.”
Let’s dispense with the rumors first: Max Holborn is not dead. Max Holborn also isn’t holed up in his own home, isn’t tucked away under some blankets or strapped to some bed to keep him safe from the outside world. There is no conspiracy that has kept him out of the public eye for the last two years, no illness that has confined him to his house.
That would be too easy.
Because you see: it would mean that there is a way to fix what has happened to him.
Soraya Mousch and Max Holborn, like so many other unfortunates, met during one of Ryan Jean’s notoriously large film galas. He’s long since retired to warmer, more sand-filled pastures these days, but ten years ago his screenings’d had all the energy of the awfully drama-filled gatherings of film makers that could usually only be found in Hollywood itself.
For one: they were extremely extravagant. Where Toronto’s indie film scene usually tended towards the more casual by necessity – can’t spend money on impressive locations and small canapés if there’s no money to be had, after all – Jean had all the money in the world to throw at these gatherings of Toronto’s local film makers. (Where he got that money from was another matter entirely, and had a lot to do with his continued, now potentially life-long stay in a little island country with nice beaches, warm weather, and no extraction agreement with the government of Canada.)
The other, far more mundane reason for Jean’s successful events was that he tended to invite everyone.
Soraya was a particularly little-known part of that “everyone”. Had just made her first big splash in the film industry last year, only to have already fallen out of the public’s quickly-changing favor – she garnished a few looks at Jean’s latest gala, and a few more attempts at conversation that eventually devolved into her having to defend her lack of any recently finished work. Part and parcel for an event like this, of course, and Soraya gave as good as she got; still, after almost two hours of it she was ready to just watch whatever terribly self-indulgent film Jean had dredged up and just not talk to anyone else ever again.
To this end she’d found herself a little booth near the open bar – could count on Jean for that, if nothing else –, carefully out of the way of any too-eager passer-bys and with just enough view of the main stage that she’d be able to at least make passing commentary on the movie afterwards.
A man half-fell into the booth beside her. He was young – about her age, perhaps a few years older – and dressed in one of those indeterminably-patterned tweed jackets that Soraya had long come to associate with aged university professors. A bright red necktie adorned his otherwise remarkably colorless outfit. He looked out of place, not least of all because he was now blocking Soraya’s view of the movie finally starting up, and when Soraya met his eyes, crinkling with some unspoken joke, she found herself suddenly disinclined to tell him to fuck off and leave.
“This is the worst screening I’ve been to in my life,” the man across from her said by way of greeting. “And I had to attend Anneliese Graf’s showing seven years ago.”
Soraya regarded the man for a moment longer. Then, very slowly, she slid her second, yet unopened beer towards him.
It was Max who noticed the figure first, of course. He’d always been the more naturally observant of the two of them – he’d had that eye for worldly things where she’d always been more focused on the less-easily grasped images. He’d been the perfect partner for her on the project because of it: filled in all the holes she had in her own perception of things. Soraya would film the way the road curved just so at one hour past midnight, and would immortalize in her images that one spot of sky that no bird ever seemed to cross – and Max, he’d photograph the way Soraya would accidentally stand too close to the road while filming, for how her posture was always slanted that slight tilt to the left where she usually carried her bag, and the slow, silent way exhaustion would creep up over them both as the days filming wore on.
So yes: naturally Max noticed the man in red first.
“You have a particularly motivated fan, Soraya?” he asked her one evening in between edits of their latest project, an experimental installation that would combine Soraya’s aesthetics with Max’s sharp eye for detail to create the most intriguing of inter-linked mazes inside the summer film fair’s main pavilion.
“What makes you say that?” she shouted from across the room, still bent over her little match-stick model of the maze. Only when there was no immediate answer did she finally look up. “Max?”
“C’mere for a sec.”
Looking over his shoulder, she saw that he had pulled up several of the environmental shots they both of them’d filmed over the last few days. Most of them showed Soraya herself in the frame somewhere, which made her raise an eyebrow; Max would have to cut her from them all if they were going to be able to use them in the installation.
“This is just a fraction of the pics I took, don’t worry. Just little spur of the moment things.” Max now pointed at one of them seemingly at random, taking a moment to stab his finger at the spot just behind Soraya in the photo. “Here. Who’s this?”
Humor me for a moment, if you would, and imagine the following: you are a mid-19th-century photographer. Through years of apprenticing yourself to a fellow craftsman in your youth, you have by now acquired both the funds and the technical know-how to operate one of the greatest machines mankind has ever invented: the daguerreotype camera. Hours, if not days faster than Niépce’s own first foray into the field, it produces finely-detailed images after mere minutes’ worth of exposure. It is a marvel. It will forever revolutionize the way we immortalize moments in time.
You are (let us be kind here, in our imagination) good at what you do. Your images show what they’ll later call “an eye for composition” – you know how to stage your subjects to really make them pop against what little background the negative can afford to depict.
Mostly you photograph people. There is money to be made there, after all; you’ve long ago discovered you can tack on an extra fee the more people you have in the image. In your free time – when you can afford the silver-plated copper and mercury vapors – you also immortalize the city, ever unmoving, and the countryside in all its black-and-white glory.
There’s few mistakes to be found in your finished daguerreotypes. A little smudge on a face where your subject couldn’t help but laugh; a tree caught in a sudden breeze and forever trapped as a silhouette on the silver.
One day (let us say you are, oh, forty-three years old) you notice a smudge on one of your negatives. The image is that of a field in summer; you took it only yesterday, for you liked how the stalks of grain stood tall under the glaring heat of the sun. At the back of the image, right where field meets horizon, you find that smudge that looks more like a person than it should, considering that there was no-one else around that day in the field but you.
Annoyed at this imperfection, you dismiss it summarily from your thoughts come evening.
Three days later, on request, you take a photography of a family. Father, mother, three children and a dog too old to do much in the way of moving.
When you develop the image, there is, however, a sixth person. Standing near the back of the shot. Face invisible against the silver sheen. There is something around the man’s – for it is a man, you can tell that much from the way it is dressed – throat, but the image is too washed-out for you to be able to ascertain what it is.
Heavy-hearted, you scrap the negative and call the family back to pose for your camera again.
And again, that mysterious sixth figure shows up.
You notice him more often after that – he shows up in every shot you take. He follows you across negatives, appearing here and there and always, always growing more defined in his silhouette. Soon enough you begin to see him everywhere.
Mercury-poisoning, the doctors will proclaim when they eventually find your corpse. An avoidable if not unexpected cause of death for one in your line of work.
For your funeral, your family puts up one of your earliest images: a little church, overlooking a farmhouse. None of them think to question the shadowed figure standing inside the church doors.
Now imagine that you are a 21st-century filmmaker. Imagine that no matter what medium you use – camera, film, digital photography – there is always, at the back of the shot, a figure in red. Imagine that over the months it takes you to notice its presence, it becomes less smudged. Imagine that no matter how hard you try, and which methods you employ, you cannot edit this figure out of your negatives. It persists in the data, appearing where there should by all rights only be emptiness. Imagine that it grows larger over the weeks until you realize that it is coming closer; imagine that one day, it is almost close enough to the camera that you can make out the details of the red blotch staining its neck.
Imagine you are Soraya Mousch.
Soraya’s small god – only she didn’t call it that then, instead defaulting to “that damn fucker ruining all my shots” – turned out to be omnipresent. Wouldn’t let himself be shaken off, regardless of the lengths Max and her went to in order to ensure that he was not in any of their new shots moving forward.
And yet: though the street was utterly devoid of life save for the two of them, the moment Max snapped the photo there was the man in red, standing only a couple of feet behind Soraya herself. When they took a selfie in front of their finished maze installation: there he was, reaching out towards Soraya.
And when Max took a parting photograph of her, to print out and paste onto the flyers for Soraya’s newly established film studio: he was standing so close to her that there was no more visible space between the two of them.
All the while his hands were wrapping tight around her throat.
The next morning, Soraya awoke to a ring of angry red bruises lining her neck.
She dabbed at them with concealer, but it only made them look worse; she tried to wear a shawl, only it was too hot.
“I think,” she therefore told Max first thing, door to their shared work studio not yet fully slammed shut behind her, “that I’m in trouble.”
He was kind, even in the face of her terror. Patient when assaulted by her fear.
The very picture of calmness, for sure, when they sat down in front of his laptop and searched for anything, literally anything that might make sense about their situation on the internet. The very personification of hope, too, when all that turned up was a couple of diary entries from the mid-19th century, only half of them digitized and those that were in such terrible condition that it took them a good two hours to be able to puzzle together any information from it.
And yet: Max’s expression was worried, mirroring Soraya’s own when they were both at the point of exhaustedly tearing their eyes away from the screen. He regarded her with an intense concern that she found almost suffocating in its well-meaning, and for all that the summer heat was yet filtering through the large window front of the studio, she couldn’t help a shiver when Max cleared his throat.
“This is going to sound strange, but I think I have an idea.”
A flutter of images, pressed into Safie’s hands across the table:
Soraya, face pale and drawn, sitting down on a nice if worn-looking couch. Safie knows that couch, has sat on and at one point slept on it: the image was taken inside Soraya’s home. Next to her, on that couch, sitting at the far end, back pushed up against one of the cushions, is the man with the cut neck.
Another photograph: Soraya staring to her right, wide-eyed, arms brought up to brace against something she can’t see in the moment but knows will be able to harm her nevertheless.
Another, with a blurred shape blocking out most of the previous image. The timestamps embedded into the bottom right corners of all the photos indicate that this one was taken mere seconds after the previous one.
Yet another: the blurred shape has resolved into the image of Max Holborn, leaning over the couch. Getting ready to sit down.
“He set it on autotimer. He was there with me before I could even—before I could even properly see what he was doing.”
The final image is a strange one, looking almost as if it wasn’t developed properly. There is, once again, Soraya, sitting on her couch. Her eyes are wide with fear, and her hands only just coming up to cover her mouth in shock. Next to her, arms reaching for her neck, is the man with the cut-open throat. There is a knife tucked into his belt, coated in old, dried blood.
Sitting right on top of him, superimposed over his wavering form, is Max Holborn. There is a grim smile settled into his lips, and if you look closely, it looks like there is something—pain, maybe—twinkling in his eyes. As if sitting right there, on top of the man with the cut throat, is taking a toll on him. Taking something out of him.
But who knows? There is no way to ask him what was going through his head when he forced himself to occupy the same space the man in red did.
“Sitting on that couch, together with him—them—that was the last time I ever saw Max Holborn.”
“It stopped, after that. The next and last photo I took – fearing for my life, honestly – the Man in Red was back to skulking in the far corners of the shot.” A pause. The clink of a spoon against the edges of Soraya’s cup. “I lied, you know.”
Safie looked up from her notepad and the barely legible scrawl she’d made of Soraya’s story. It felt like coming out of a trance, almost, squinting up against the summer sun and over at Soraya and wondering, absent-mindedly, when it had become so normal for her to keep notes on stories that no sane person would ever be able to publish. She blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“I lied when I told you that I keep my face out of photographs and videos nowadays. I mean,” Soraya quickly added, “I still do my best to avoid it. Can’t have the Man in Red coming closer again. It’s difficult but—doable. But every once in a while I take my phone, and I point it at a mirror, and I . . . well. I take a photograph.”
“Why would you when you just told me—?“
All Safie received in lieu of an answer was a wan little smile as, with the quickest of shrugs, Soraya began to dig in her coat pockets. “I’ll show you.”
With a triumphant little noise, Soraya pulled out her phone. At a gesture from her Safie scooted her chair over, so that they were sitting next to each other – “Smile, Safie!” -- and with a loud k-chick Soraya had taken a selfie of them sitting there, backs to the street.
“Is the Man in Red—“ Safie began, only to quickly trail off as Soraya all but shoved the phone at her, angling the screen against the glare of the midday sun.
And, yes: though Soraya and Safie herself took up most of the image, and the sky a good part of the remaining space, the streets behind them in the photo—
Safie gasped, and before she could stop herself she was already turning around in her chair, trying to get a good view of each little cornerway behind them.
Empty. A couple of cars, parked on the sides of the street.
But in the image—
Soraya let out a toneless little laugh. “I don’t know if it does any good, and honestly if anything it’s only letting the Man in Red get closer again. But,” and she pointed to the far corner of the image where, past the impossible speck of red on the empty street behind them another, slighter shape had appeared in the farthest alleyway. “It’s the only way I could find to let me see how Max is doing.”