“Look after yourself,” was the last thing she said to me, before I clicked off. I’m somewhat ashamed to say I’d already disengaged so much from the conversation that I barely noticed.
Needless to say, instead of going to sleep, I sat up again and set about sifting through the files once more, hoping Mr. Whitcomb might’ve saved some of his darling Iris’s ghost-busting materials. But halfway down the rest of the stack I found something else entirely, shoved vertical: a sheaf of paper folded in half and stitched up the centre to make a rough sort of notebook. The weave was heavy, the consistency fragile, tea-stained and spotted. I could see where the faded ink intersected with its surface, half-absorbed but half not, rendering part of every word a mere whisper, the shadow left behind when all its thicker parts had rotted away.
Were I able to scribe this in Wendish, I should, to save it from poor Art’s prying, the first page began, yet I cannot; my skills are in speaking and understanding that language only, with nothing written down. This too was taken from me, when he—my father—took my family.
“Holy shit,” I said, out loud.
When we came to that place at last, in the field’s heart, I turned and saw a whirling dust cloud form above the rye, those nodding stalks. I saw it sweep in to engulf the procession, though the women marched on through it, impassive, and without pause. They were used to such things, I suppose. Perhaps the same phenomenon occurs each year, whether a stranger accompanies them on their journey or not.
She can appear as an old woman or a child, the Lady, I recalled my grandmother telling me—and how odd that she should have done so, for me to recall it, walking as I was between a Kantorka so ancient she could barely move on my left-hand side, and her nimble little apprentice on my right, twelve years of age at the very most. She can be a flash on the horizon, or the sun up above at noon. She can be a cloud moving through the harvest crops like God upon the waters, before this world was even made, only thought of.
Can the Lady be so old? I asked her then, or think I did, for I have a strong memory of seeing her nod, lips set, as though she were afraid to speak further. As though the Poludnice were powerful as God Himself—or more so, my father’s vision of Him. I could believe that then.
I fear I can believe it now, as well.
“What did you find?” Simon called from the other room.
“Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb,” I replied.
Next morning, Safie was waiting for me as I walked toward Earworm Audio, a coffee in either hand. “You look . . . upright,” she commented, taking hers; I just shrugged.
Inside, she introduced me to her friend Malin Riegert, whom I vaguely recognized as another Toronto Film Faculty alumnus—the Fac had once been primarily about music production before adding in film and video; they’d maintained a separate stream for that up till the end, allowing Audio students to gain extra credit by working on third-semester projects so they wouldn’t have to set up a competing suite of sound studios. Malin had met Safie, logically enough, by working on Seven Angels But No Devil, cleaning up the final mix before Safie sent it out as a festival submission. Since graduating, she’d gone specifically into digital reconstruction and analysis. “A lot of my income stream comes from packaging up CCTV footage for news broadcasts,” she explained. “I put subtitles on stuff with muddy sound, or boost it back into audible range, sometimes both.”
“Cool,” I said, shaking Malin’s hand. I took a long swig of caffeine before sitting down, orienting myself toward the monitors. “I brought a script for the intro,” I told Safie. “Just the basics, but I can probably go off-the-cuff, for linkage.”
“Good, great. I have a couple of sequences cut together already—clips versus stills, some of the stuff from the museum, Mrs. Whitcomb’s art, plus the Vinegar House interiors. Turn out there were photos in the box, or what?”
“One, so far.” I brought out my sheaf of Mr. Whitcomb’s correspondence and showed her the wedding group portrait, pointing out all the major players. “We can always go back and get shots of the original, I guess, if the resolution isn’t good enough.”
She studied it. “No, I think that’s fine. A little pixellation’s good, right? Makes it look old.”
“That was what I thought.” I bent to rummage in my bag, brought the notebook out with a flourish. “Check this out, though.”
“Holy shit,” she blurted.
I laughed.
“Yeah, that’s what I said.”
While Malin got everything cued up, Safie shot footage of our main character’s spiky, spidery brown handwriting, the pages blotchy as old skin. She thought we could double-expose it, use it as backing here and there, and I agreed; it would look amazing. The idea of people straining to read Mrs. Whitcomb’s own words as they unspooled was an intoxicating one. Here and there, I could already catch phrases divorced from context as they skittered by, each more tempting than the last—
The Kantorka says, when a small child wanders the rows, it is known She has taken it for her own. It is pointless to set a black tracker on its trail, therefore, for her evil eye has rendered it entirely unsalvageable. . . . Her attention is known to cause freckles, and those under her gaze sleep with mouths open, allowing their souls to escape and come join her revels in the fields. . . . There is a story which tells how a woman seen sleeping this way was carefully turned over by her husband, only to be found dead in the morning—because she suffocated, Art suggests, being entirely unwilling to keep such opinions to himself.
Laying in the narration went more quickly than I’d initially expected, though that dissonance I’ve talked about was there in spades—the sheer weirdness of watching yourself play through actions you frankly can’t remember, even though various other background details might tweak your sense of déjà-to-jamais vu. It was like one of those old slide projection systems, except jiggered so part of one image was laid over part of another—half Kodak carousel, half vaudeville-hall magic lantern phantasmagoria. Here and there I saw orbs floating onscreen, like dark spots in vitreous humour, slight corneal flaws—an occasional shimmer just beyond my visual range, too, the migraine sparkler writ tiny.
“You okay?” Safie asked. I looked up and realized she must’ve been watching me closely, checking for signs of another impending episode. I bit down hard, restraining myself from snapping back.
I replied, “Fine, thanks.” To Malin: “You get all that?”
She nodded. “Levels look good.”
“Excellent.”
While Malin made sure the tracks synched okay and started laying in roo
m tone, I filled Safie in on how Mrs. Whitcomb’s notes linked up with Mr. Whitcomb’s testimony about their honeymoon, Hyatt’s birth, et cetera. At first she seemed to be mostly humouring me, but soon enough she was hooked, the story’s inherent pull turning her big eyes starry. “Jesus,” she said, finally. “I mean, wow. This is . . .”
“I know, right?”