He fired another magnesium flash, to banish the vulgar words from their company. White smoke flared from his camera and the voice disappeared. The medium sank into heavy groans and placed one hand drunkenly on her head, dislodging one of the tortoiseshell combs that kept a curly torrent of unruly auburn hair in place. It spilled onto the table unreasonably, covering her face and the groans beneath, giving the now slumped figure a grotesque, simian quality. Just for a moment, he heard a distant flock of birds sing from her dripping and distorted mouth.
Sarah said something to Elder Thomas, who stood up and shuffled to the door. Moments later, the lamp glowed brightly and the room’s shadows receded to other parts of the house. The sitters stood up and fussed around Madam Grezach to regain her posture and her hair. Muybridge met the eyes of Elder Thomas, communicating with the slightest of expressions his disdain of this frantic, hysterical woman and the whole façade of music hall nonsense. He expected to see his subtle glance of cynicism mirrored in the elder, to gain a nod of support and agreement. Instead, he saw the opposite: total belief in the procedures, and disapproval of Muybridge’s own expression. Worse still, he saw blame and distrust glinted against him. The elder helped the old woman and the medium leave the room, turning his stiff back on the upstart who had contaminated their tabernacle with his past lives and his bewilderment of irritant equipment.
When all had left, the photographer stood adrift in the empty room, unable to make sense out of all that had occurred. There was no meaning in any of it, and he felt foolish and mistaken. God knows what he would find on his glass negative. He suspected there would be nothing but blurs and shadows, and that his cynicism would be justified.
In the red cave of his private darkroom, blood-warm fluids made his hands puffy and succulent. He peered into the night trays and saw patches of light rise up against the settling blacks. He moved them to a fixing tray and rocked them to and fro, simmering them into permanence.
He turned on the light to view the first picture. The image showed the whole group leaning towards the medium, whose out-of-focus head and body had been moving during the exposures. Her edges were undefined in relation to the sharp, delineated forms of the others in the weird room, but it was, in all other respects, a perfectly ordinary image.
The second picture was quite different. All the sitters had been caught in the flash powder, like victims in a blast. All showed agitation; the old woman and the horse-faced one stared directly at the camera, responding to his call of ‘NOW!’. Their eyes were blurred on the inside, and their whites gave off a disturbed incandescence as their faces gawped. Elder Thomas was caught staring stiffly away, looking straight at the medium. Madam Grezach herself was stock still and in focus. She had been speaking at the time and her expression was held in the vice of a twisted smile. He shivered as he recalled her hocus-pocus about the dead child, suddenly noticing a difference in her face, a change of shape, as if a smaller face was being born through it, not violently, but with a rippled plumping. He was horrified by the notion, but could not deny the effect the flash had caught.
He dragged his eyes to the third print, another open shutter which held a room of blurs. He couldn’t recall any accidental movement, but he must have juddered the tripod or rattled the lens. The sitters and the table were smooth and softened, as if diluted and coming apart at their edges. He laid the print to one side, relief creeping in to cover his initial misgivings.
Then he looked at the last image. The light had not startled the party this time, but they had been upset by something else; he recalled the pitiful voice of the London street woman. They stared at the medium in distaste, the flash catching the repugnance in their postures and on their exposed faces. Madam Grezach looked straight through him and her expression made his blood run cold: it was no longer life and theatre that illuminated the medium’s face; her features and nuances of gesture had been stolen and replaced with facsimiles from another time. The magnesium burn had dredged out a decoy of rank terror, which in turn aimed its shivering sinews and pitiless hunger towards him.
He stepped back from the table of rectangular dishes in dismay. Had he really made a genuine psychic photograph? Had he achieved what others had only faked? With shaking hands, he lifted the wet paper out of the fluids and pinned them up to dry. They had already changed. The significant, unique transformations in the medium’s face had diminished; now it was only conjecture, a matter of interpretation and not fact. The images of Madam Grezach had become normal, blurred pictures of a normal, blurred woman. What had he seen before? Was he imagining things?
He collected the negatives and set them on a glass table with a light beneath them. Their reversed faces seemed skeletal and goat-like, but without any obvious signs of distortion. He became more perplexed: he had obviously been wrongly influenced by a desire to achieve the images that Sarah Winchester had wanted; her perception must have clouded his defined eye for a brief moment. Indeed, that influence was probably the very heart of the whole meaningless business. The next day loomed in his confused mind; the presentation of the prints worried him. There was nothing to show, and his anxiety at that knowledge forced him to see the inconsistencies in the chemical waters, as if the solutions he sought lay at the bottom of a glass or in the centre of a spinning mirror. He switched off the lights and turned his back on the darkened room, making his way to bed with a desperate sense of having been undervalued again and, in some inexplicable way, tricked.
He slept badly, in a dream of being continuously awake. The pillows aggravated his rest; the sheets clung or slipped; his bladder was the only fact that ruled and divided the short night.
He rose far too early and snatched the dried prints from their stringy line, bustling them into an envelope and a leather satchel. He had not even fully dressed yet, and he roamed about with his lower half naked and ultimately flaccid. By nine o’clock, he was exhausted but did not dare sleep. The outside world was working, and it was time he joined it.
He washed and dressed for his meeting with the Winchester woman, preening disconsolately before his looking glass: if he must present his failure, at least he would do so with some dignity. It had been her idea, he mused in the endless carriage ride, to make these pictures in the first place; he had tried to explain to her from the beginning that it was not his usual subject. By the time he arrived, he had an entire speech prepared, about the true nature of photography and its urgent importance as a scientific instrument. He did not want to insult the old woman or her puerile beliefs; it might still be possible to get her to fund a real project, one worthy of his talents and skills.
He was ushered through the gloomy polished rooms, which seeped resin from all the fresh wood but refused to shine, and into another reception room where she waited for him. To his horror, she was not alone: Elder Thomas stood by her side, his lank, dark seriousness absorbing the little brightness that the room possessed. He looked at Muybridge with a polite indifference, which the photographer suspected covered a seething contempt. Sarah’s eyes drifted from his nervous face to the satchel in his nervous hands.
‘Thank you for being so prompt, Mr. Muybridge,’ she said, generously ignoring the fact that he was forty minutes early. ‘I do hope your journey over here was not too tiresome.’
‘It is always a pleasure to call on you, ma’am, the distance is of no importance,’ he said.
‘As you can see, Elder Thomas is joining us today; he is as excited as I to see what you have achieved.’
This time, everybody present looked at the satchel. It was time for the speech.