Beer in hand, he went to look in on her, saw only shadows within shadows, but hers the warm nucleus of that dark cell. No ghosts to be seen, until his eyes fell on one of her enlarged photographs, black and white, framed on the wall. Somehow, its pure black was a window to that other world where mere shadow wouldn’t suffice. He saw movement in the black parts of the photo, and would have stepped back out of the threshold, except that as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom he realized Sheila was not at its center after all. He flipped the light switch. A bundle of blankets and pillow, like a soft afterimage of her. So where was she? He turned from the room, leaving also the photo, which had not been stilled with the light.
Not in the living room, either. The one room that remained to be searched was the other bedroom. This, Sheila had made into her darkroom. The door was closed. Perhaps she had waited up for him, despite it being a work night, and was busy at her labors of love. He went to the door, rapped lightly, steeling himself for their confrontation.
Sheila worked for a print shop where she had been their one-person camera crew for two years. But technology had changed and even that old print shop, reluctant to spend the money to update its techniques, had finally given in to it. Artwork was now scanned rather than shot, even though photographs, when scanned, did not have the smoothness of the half-tones Sheila preferred. Still, even with the old technology it had hardly been a craft, let alone an art; just a less computerized mass production. Sheila was now learning the scanner. But he knew it troubled her more than it had already troubled her to work in the plant. When first out of college, she had pursued work as a photo-journalist…but her portfolio had been deemed too artsy, too studied, and Belfast could understand that. She was more inclined to photograph a burned doll than the house fire in progress. He had urged her to employ her talents, her inclinations, toward advertising photography. She had made a slight, defeated attempt. Only her love of photography had remained strong, somehow, when her efforts to live on it had waned. One of these days, she told him, when she had accumulated a worthy enough body of work, she would try to stage her own exhibition. She might be discovered, make a name, be accepted into museums. One day…
He knocked again, more loudly. “Sheila?”
He worshiped her, his young bride. Would do anything for her. Had done things for her, lately, she wasn’t even aware of. He wanted to get her out of that plant. Out of this blighted city. They should travel across the country, across Europe, visiting galleries, bringing her work to show and sell. He had gotten himself involved in shadowy actions. He had gone too far, he knew, through a black doorway, and now…now…people wanted to kill him…he had betrayed someone…but most of all, he had betrayed Sheila…yet the details knotted and blurred in his wounded mind, and he let them go.
Instead of thinking, he turned the knob of the darkroom’s door.
She was not here. Neither the red lights nor the regular lights were on. He put on one of the latter, but even before he did so, he regretted opening this door.
Over the two windows she had taped sheets of red acetate, so that they appeared to be slabs of ruby. The shades were only half drawn, and through the dark red glass glowed street lamps and, further away, city lights. It was an effect they both liked, and they wondered what the neighbors thought, seeing the dark red windows glowing from the other side. They might believe some ungodly supernatural rituals were performed in here.
Their opinions would not have been helped by the color of the walls. Sheila had painted the walls entirely black. Only the floor and ceiling had she spared, though had it not been for the landlord she would have coated them as well.
But now, for Belfast, it was like the room had no walls at all. He was reminded of staring into the great central tank, several stories tall, in the city’s aquarium. Watching sharks and rays glide past like deformed angels. But again it was as though there were no walls, not even the foot thick glass of that tank. It was as though he faced the void of deep space itself…and saw the creatures that lived between stars.
The apparitions swarmed, full size, in great numbers. For the first time, he could clearly take in their entire forms. They fluttered like jellyfish, lazily flapped their limbs like stingrays as they drifted, would suddenly change direction and dart away like startled fish. And they were all looking back at him. They pressed their sketchy faces and the smoky, long-fingered suggestions of hands to the walls, as if to push through to reach him.
Somehow, he knew he was not hallucinating. Somehow, the bullet in his head had made him a new eye. An eye that could see into the world where he had sent the men he killed. The world he had cheated tonight. And that was it, wasn’t it? These specters, jealous, demanded that he join them…
Belfast backed out of the room. “I won’t,” he whispered, shaking, but strong. “I’m not going with you.” Now so many of them pressed unmoving to the walls that it was like looking out on a rapt audience. “Leave me alone!” he hissed, and slammed the door shut.
He turned, and there was Sheila, and she screamed, and in his terror he tore his gun out of his coat and pointed it at her face.
5: DOUBLE ODD
“No, please!” Sheila blubbered, raising her arms to cover her face. “Don’t!”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” Belfast groaned, lowering his still inoperative weapon. He took a step toward her.
“No!” she cried again, backing against the wall of the hallway, trapped there, still cringing. “Don’t hurt me!”
“Sheila.” He reached out to gently touch her hair. He loved her hair. Honey blond, it fell to the small of her back.
“Who are you?” she sobbed hopelessly. “What are you doing here?”
His hand halted, doubted itself, lowered. Was his face so stained in blood that she didn’t recognize him? “Baby, it’s me—Ron.”
“Ron!” she shrieked, at last looking straight at him, meeting his eyes. Hers were red and raw as if she had been weeping for hours, before he had even startled her with the pistol. “You aren’t Ron! Who are you? You’re the one, aren’t you? You’re the one who killed him!”
“Killed him?” Belfast chuckled nervously. “Honey, wh…what are you talking about? Are you all right? Look, it’s me…”
“I don’t know you!”
“You’re talking crazy, okay?”
“You’re the crazy one! You are! You killed my husband, didn’t you? And then you come here and tell me you’re him?”
Oh…of course…he understood. Someone must have called, told her he’d been shot in the head. Of course she would think he was dead. And now, his face brown and flaking with dried blood (face like a burned doll) and hair caked with it, she didn’t know it was him. “Baby,” he went on soothingly, “it’s Ron. I didn’t die. I…”
“Ron did die!” she blurted at him, her eyes going crazed, tendons standing out in her long neck. A vein showed in her forehead. In her fear of him, she was still strong enough to show him rage. “I just came from seeing him! All that you left of him! He doesn’t have a head! My husband doesn’t have a head! I had to identify him by his clothes, his wedding ring, the tattoo on his chest! But he has no face! No head! And you killed him! I know it was you!”
Belfast studied this woman. She was acting like someone else, someone he didn’t even know. But…but he did know her. He remembered their wedding. She had been transcendently beautiful in her gown, tall as she was, a commanding work of art in her own right. He remembered their honeymoon in Florida; it had emptied their pockets. (Someday, he had promised her, they would see the world, not fabricated fragments of it at the Epcot Center.) He remembered when they had met at college. He was immediately taken with her. She was taller than he, slender, long-legged, long-haired. She had a prominent nose that would not be flattering were it not for her pretty eyes and mouth; instead, it gave her a distinct, unusual look that made her all the lovelier. He first realized she liked him when they were chatting outside between classes, one afternoon, and she stretched her arms above and behind her head while they conversed. He had had women do this with him before. An unconscious, instinctual action, like a dog walking in circles to clear imaginary grass before it lies down. She was arching her back, thrusting out her chest in a peacock’s posing, but more importantly, he felt, shooting little pheromone darts like Cupid arrows from her underarms. Animal signals, big smiles, talk of art. They had connected on every level all at once, in a delirious moment that he still thought of as one of the greatest of his life.