Inside, the mask smelled like library paste and hashish. I took it off and put it back where I’d found it then picked up the book.
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. The same book I’d seen in Denny’s bus. I set it on the table, frowning.
Something else had fallen over, a photo in a cheap plastic frame. I picked it up.
It was an SX-70 close-up of a naked girl lying on her back, hands splayed beside her face. The film emulsion had been manipulated so that fizzy lines exploded around the edges of the picture. Her hair formed a dark corona around her head, and an eye had been drawn on each of her open palms.
You couldn’t see her face. It was covered by a tortoise shell that had two more eyes painted on it. In one, someone had painted a tiny green star.
“What the hell,” I said.
Toby came up alongside me. “Whatcha looking at?”
“Where’d you get this?”
He took it and held it to the light. “Denny. Sort of experimental, isn’t it?” He handed it back and pulled meditatively at his pigtail.
“Who’s the girl?”
“That was a girl named Hannah Meadows—’Hanner.’ She had a real strong Maine accent. You can’t tell from that, but she was real good-looking.”
“You can’t tell from this if she was even alive.”
“Oh, she was alive. She was one of Denny’s girlfriends. He had a bunch of them back then. Bunch of women, bunch of kids. He got into all that tribal stuff.”
He pointed at the mask beneath the table. “Like that. That took me forever to make. And God, did I sweat in it.”
“You made that?”
“Sure. We all had to make our own masks—that was part of the thing. You chose your spirit animal, and then you made the mask, and then we had a ritual, and you were filled with the mask’s energy. That was the theory, anyway,” he said and laughed. “But Hannah, she was a nurse—she worked the night shift at the hospital up past Collinstown. She was beautiful, and something about her—well, a lot of those girls were cute, but Denny just loved to take her picture. She used to model for him all the time. He even talked about marrying her.”
He whistled. “And boy, Aphrodite, she wasn’t happy about that. And she sure didn’t like him taking all those pictures.”
“What happened to the girl?”
“Oh, that was terrible. Really sad. She got into a car accident driving home one night. In the summer; it was after she got off work. She flipped over the guardrail and went into a lake. She got out of the car okay, but then she never made it to shore. They got the car out of the lake, but she wasn’t in it. Took them almost a week to find the body. Denny was the one found her, he was with the crews out looking. She’d gotten tangled up in some alders along the shore. I guess it was pretty bad. Something had been at the body, some kind of animal. He kind of went off after that, accused Aphrodite of cutting her brakes, though I don’t think they ever found any proof. It was a bad scene. Hey, you okay?”
His face creased with concern. “You look like you’re going to pass out.”
“C’mere.” He steered me to a chair and made me sit. “Put your head between your knees,” he said. “That’s it. So you don’t faint. Just stay there for a minute, I’ll be right back.”
He went and got a cold washcloth, pressed it to my forehead. “There. Boy, you look a mess. Maybe you should try to take a nap. Sounds like you had a rough morning over there.”
“I haven’t eaten anything,” I said, though the last thing I felt like was food. “Do you have some crackers or something?”
He got me some stale Uneeda Biscuits, also a glass of something cold and brown. “Here, see if this helps.”
I ate a cracker, took a tiny sip of the brown liquid. “Christ, that’s disgusting! What is it?”
“Moxie.”
“It tastes like Dr. Pepper laced with rat poison.”
“That’s the gentian root.”
I shoved the Moxie back at him and finished the crackers. Toby raised an eyebrow. “Better?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
He puttered into the kitchen. A few minutes later he returned, carrying something. “Denny gave me this last time I saw him, back around Labor Day, when I brought his supplies to Lucien’s house. This is what he’s doing these days.”
It was a large color photograph, 12x24, in a handmade frame, like the one at Ray Provenzano’s house. From an upright black shape, like a rock or tree, something protruded. A truncated branch, or an arm. Leaves surrounded it, silvery green. It was impossible for me to tell if the color was real or if the emulsion had been tampered with.
But in other places, the photograph had definitely been distressed, with needles and brushes, maybe a fingernail. Layers of pigment bled through. Handmade color separations, I would bet my life on it: a brilliant serpent green, a murkier, brownish jade, brilliant scarlet, dull orange, porcelain white. A muted, flaking shade of rust, like old iron.
I ran my finger across the surface, feeling countless little whorls and bumps and scratches, then held it beneath the lamp.
“There’s leaves in there. And insects,” I said, squinting. “And, I dunno, some kind of bug. A baby dragonfly, maybe?”
“Where? Oh—yeah, you’re right.” Toby ran his finger along the outline of an insect’s thorax, with tiny, oar-shaped wings. “That’s a damsel fly. A darning needle, we called them when I was a kid. They were supposed to come into your room at night and sew your lips and eyes together while you slept. Denny was scared of them.”
I looked at the damsel fly. Beside it were scraps of paper, each with a letter on it.
ST 29
Part of an address? I brought the print to my face. “Jesus, this is like the other one! It stinks.”
“Denny’s not much of a housekeeper.”
“It smells like dead fish, only worse. Skunky.”
“Well, he sets out a few traps, for lobster. And I know he goes ice fishing in the winter.”
I was going to ask how you went ice fishing in the ocean, but then I saw something written in the margin.
Some Rays pass right Through S.P.O.T.
“‘Some rays pass right through.’” I looked at Toby in surprise. “That’s from a Talking Heads song.”
“Denny’s big into music. I don’t know it.”
“It’s about exposing a photograph—that’s what happens, you expose the emulsion paper to the light. Some rays pass right through.”
I tapped the edge of the photo. Tiny particles rained from it.
“Ray told me these pictures are worth a lot of money,” I said. “Denny just gave it to you?”
“It was payment for some work—I built him a new darkroom a while ago. I do a lot of jobs on barter. I live here free, in exchange for keeping an eye on things. Thinking of which—”
He crossed the room. “I’ve got to get ready to go.”
I sat for another minute, examining the photo. A flake of rust-colored pigment came off and stuck to my hand. Where it had been, I could clearly see a torn piece of paper that had been embedded into the emulsion. A fragment of another, a black-and-white photograph of a bare foot with the ghostly outline of a street sign and something scrawled across it in blue ink.
ICU
My foot. Canal Street.
It was a detail from one of the photos in Dead Girls.
I stared at the flake of pigment then sniffed. It had a faint whiff of that same fishy odor. Cupping it in my palm, I walked to the wastebasket, fished out the wadded-up paper towel I’d just tossed, and smoothed it on the desk.