“Frankly? It’s hard to tell. I mean, I knew he had to have a hidden agenda of some sort, right from the moment he first offered me the possibility of finding Japery’s back-stock; the goodness of Wrob’s heart is an entirely negotiable concept, as I’m well aware. Which makes what happened my fault entirely, in that even when the warning bells were going off loud and clear, I simply ignored them.” A beat. “What he took . . . you’ve seen it, of course. The clips.”
“Striking stuff.”
“No one can claim Wrob doesn’t have an eye. Interestingly, I’d never worked hands-on with silver nitrate before—afraid to, really, given its reputation. But Wrob has a positive knack for it. His digitization is pristine.”
According to Mattheuis, Wrob had already catalogued nine different complete, partial, and fragmentary one-reel films he believed to have been produced by the same filmmaker by the time he was caught “sampling” red-handed and fired. “But there was a scene when he left, typically, and after that we were reduced to working from his notes—he wouldn’t take my calls. The notes were handwritten, and that man has the worst chicken-scratch I’ve ever come across, outside of someone with an honest-to-God medical degree.”
“Did he work with all four caches?”
“Mainly the last one, actually. I suppose he’s told you about that.”
“Not directly.”
“Well.” Mattheuis hesitated then glanced away, as though gathering himself—like he expected his next words, whatever they might be, to cost him. “It’s an . . . interesting anecdote, I suppose. Especially so for me.”
So I’ve been told, I thought, but didn’t say. Just waited for him to elucidate, which—eventually, in slightly halting fashion—he did.
According to Mattheuis, he’d already bought up the Quarry Argent Folk Museum’s little back-stock of silver nitrate films and was planning to drive back to Overdeere, where he was staying—at Wrob Barney’s old family house, as it happened—when he somehow managed to get off-course and found himself hopelessly lost in the woods on what locals refer to as the “Dourvale shore” of the Lake of the North. “Now, I don’t know how much you’ve already heard about that area . . .”
“Let’s assume nothing.”
“Yes, me either. But apparently, it’s a bit of a legendary dead spot; cellphone service tends to go out, as does GPS, and—on occasion—cars just tend to, uh, stop. Like mine did.”
Mattheuis thinks it was about 10:00 P.M. at this point, but has trouble narrowing things down further, since he doesn’t carry a watch, and after a few minutes fussing with his phone it simply went black. The sun had fallen, leaving only a few deep purple streaks near the horizon as the full dark of the country took hold: cicadas, crickets, a dense cacophony of buzzing, rustling, and vague animal noises. He didn’t even have a flashlight in the glovebox.
“When I finally did get to Overdeere, most people informed me that if I’d been born in the area, I’d’ve known to just lock my doors, stay in the car, and wait for morning. But since I was a city boy, I wasn’t having any of that. I needed to take charge of the situation.”
So Mattheuis got out and walked up and down the road a bit, “maybe thirty paces in either direction,” without much joy. He was about to give up when suddenly he thought he saw lights moving through the woods to his left—faint but distinct, a kind of “globular, dim, intermittent” brightness which waxed and waned as it travelled in and out of the trees. “I won’t say it looked like people, exactly, but what else could it have been? Like . . . hunters, maybe, or somebody from a cabin, a campsite, searching for the perfect place to use as a bathroom. So I made the decision—rather silly, in hindsight—to go after them.”
Much like Little Red Riding Hood, therefore, Mattheuis stepped off the established path (or road, in this case) and into the brush, calling out that he was lost, in trouble, could anybody help him? The lights didn’t seem all too far away, so he forced himself onwards, making brisk progress, but to little effect. Soon, he found himself far enough from his point of entry that he could no longer tell which direction he’d originally come from—he was surrounded on all sides by thorn-bushes, gnarled trees, and uncertain footing. One way was choked with mud, the other with what he thought he recognized as poison oak, and the misty night was getting progressively colder.
“Eventually,” he continued, “I ended up at the edge of what seemed like a swamp or a sump—there’s a lot of that around Lake of the North, very alkaline, very unreliable. I didn’t want to risk my shoes any more than I already had, so I leaned back against this tree and just stayed there, stock-still, almost frozen. The lights were gone. I don’t know how long that lasted; might’ve fallen asleep a couple of times, I guess. Finally, around five or six in the morning, the sun came back up, and everything got grey. Which is when I turned around and realized that all this time, I’d been right next to one of the famous Hell Holes, those limestone shafts that open up suddenly underfoot and seem to go down forever. Like, close enough to step right into it if I’d gone just a few more inches.”
The tree Mattheuis had been leaning against grew up out of the Hell Hole, its roots clinging to its interior, and it was “not healthy, by a long shot—I mean, I’m no tree surgeon, but this thing looked diseased. Had a big, open, rotten gap in the trunk, far down enough I hadn’t been able to feel it. But as I recoiled, I went far enough I wasn’t blocking the sun anymore, and I saw something glint: dull, but obvious. Metal. Rusty, old . . . really old.”
He looked at me then, as though daring me to interrupt; for emphasis, the way some people do. Like calls to like, they say—he and Wrob Barney were definitely the same sort of drama queen. But then again, so was I. So I just waited.
“I don’t know why, even now,” he continued, finally, “but I put my hand in, felt around. It was all soft in there, like fungus. Mushy. Wet. And then I closed my fingers on something that felt like an edge and grasped hard. I pulled it out.”
It was a canister, obviously—film. Silver nitrate stock.
With the sun up, the path back to the road became obvious. Acting on instinct, Mattheuis kicked open the hole in the tree further, exposing what would turn out to be five separate reels, and wrapped them in his coat, using it as a makeshift sling. He then humped this bundle through weeds and stickers, deadfalls of browned-out milkweed and Queen Anne’s lace, a poisonous harvest of deadly nightshade berries bursting underfoot. Dropping it in the back seat, he turned the key in the ignition and heard the car turn over, catching perfectly; though his phone had also turned back on, he didn’t even need to call CAA—he simply drove ba
ck to Overdeere, calling Wrob to tell him he had potentially exciting news.
“What did they say happened?” I asked. “I’m assuming you had it checked out, afterwards.”
He nodded then shrugged. “No idea. Like I said, apparently it just goes like that, sometimes. Shore don’t want us, that was the mechanic’s diagnosis. Car’s iron-made, and they don’t like that. Whatever the hell that means.”
“‘Iron-made’?”
“You got me. That car was a Prius, steel from one end to the other. Metaphorical iron, at best.”
The canisters did indeed turn out to contain the fabled fourth cache of silver nitrate film. “Five reels, like I said, and according to Wrob—if he can be believed—they matched up with four of the Quarry Argent Museum films, in terms of content, methodology, and what he calls ‘signature.’ Basically, they shared the same sort of intertitle cards, which appear to have been hand-lettered. The museum films all had Japery’s mark, as though they were copies struck through Japery and sent out along the circuit, which made a sort of sense; the community apparently used to show them for free to area kids on Victoria and Dominion Day, right up until the 1960s when somebody finally went ‘gee, maybe that’s not the very best idea, given they might explode if they get too hot.’ The films I found in the woods, however, have no mark at all—they’re originals, not copies. And I can see why Japery probably didn’t want them, because they are . . . odd, to put it mildly. Not exactly blockbuster material.”
“How so?”
Again, Mattheuis hesitated. “I’d probably have to show you,” he said, finally.