Not-Stanley said, “Now go finish the job.”
FERNANDA
Fernanda had learned to tell stories from her grandmother. The little boy who found a city in his trunk. The coyote who tricked the eagle to carry him to the moon. The ocean princess who came to land looking for friends. Again and again and again, one story following the next from her grandmother’s lips with grace and endless style:therewas the real master.
The trick? Her grandmother actuallybelievedthe stories, or believed pieces of them, or maybe just believed the stories as she told them. Her grandmother believed in a lot. Spirits and wards, crosses and smoke. She never passed a cemetery without blessing herself and pressing a hand over her navel. She never came home from a long trip without saging her house.
She never approved of her son, Fernanda’s father, growing wealthy on camera stores. Never approved of Fernanda’s interest in photography, for that matter. “Cameras and mirrors—you have to be careful with both,” the old woman said. “They catch pieces of the soul.”
Fernanda had always written this off as superstition. She was a rational woman. Well traveled. An economics major.
But as Tabitha told her story about the way this motel had apparently become stuck in time, Fernanda found herself thinking of her grandmother. Realized, almost to her surprise, that she wasn’t at all incredulous of what this could mean. It felt like the sort of story her grandmother would tell, one of the wilder ones.Have you heard the story about the travelers who became trapped in the desert to seal away a god?
Fernanda wouldn’t say she exactly believedeverythingTabitha was telling them, but shedidbelieve her eyes. She’d spent ages studying the film Ryan Phan had brought from Sarah’s room, the amber roll with its last six shots sliced away. In each of the surviving frames, Fernanda had found a single dark gray smudge.
Ryan had called the smudges defects in the film, but that didn’t seem right to Fernanda. If the smudges were a flaw in the film, theywould appear in the same position within each frame, but no. They moved from shot to shot: left side, right side, upper corner, lower edge. The smudges grew and shrank, almost seemed to blur or sharpen, like an object obscured by distance or lack of focus.
For reasons she couldn’t quite explain, Fernanda had found herself fascinated by these little black smudges. Finally, she’d had the idea to use Ryan’s shot glass as a magnifier, like a jeweler’s loupe. She’d tipped up the shot glass, allowing a last thread of whiskey to drain free, and held it to the light with one hand. She’d threaded the film between the finger and thumb of her other hand and brought it, too, to the light. She’d peered at the film through the thick glass.
It worked.
The first shot Fernanda studied was a photograph of the wooden house behind the motel. The photograph grew large under magnification, and clear enough to make out the shape of the house’s porch, its door, the bottom frame of an upstairs window.
And there, on the porch, was one of those strange smudges. Fernanda brought the film closer to the glass. She squinted.
Magnified, the dark smudge took on the shape of a man. A tall man. He wore a suit and a hat and a smile. Yes, even with his face blurred, his expression shaded, Fernanda could see a wide, wide smile on the man’s face.
That smile waswrong. It was too wide. Too tight. Even in the quiet cafe, even as Tabitha talked, Fernanda had imagined she could hear the smile’s teeth grinding together like stones.
This man in the suit: he was the dark smudge in every photograph.
Here he was at the end of the long front porch. Here he was in a photograph of what looked like Sarah’s room in the motel, standing near the dresser. The last frame on the film was a photograph of the motel and its parking lot, shot from behind and at some elevation and there, in the parking lot, the man was staring up at the camera—up at Sarah—with a tight, tight smile and a hand raised in greeting.
Fernanda didn’t understand how it could be possible, but she knew where she’d seen that man before. He had stepped into the motel’s office at midnight this evening, scaring the absolute hell out of everyone, and eaten a mouthful of buckshot from the shotgun Kyla had brought with her from Ethan’s room.
But these pictures had been takenbeforethe man’s arrival tonight, hadn’t they? Of course they had. Because look, here in the left edge of the last photograph, at the shot of the motel taken from behind and above: there, that sliver of a car’s hood on the road, about to make the turn into the parking lot. It was the Malibu.
Sarah Powers had taken their photograph, had snapped Fernanda and Kyla as they arrived a little after four o’clock this afternoon.
And the man in the gabardine suit had already been here, smiling and waving to anyone who could see.
Cameras and mirrors.
They catch pieces of the soul.
Fernanda had gone stiff then. Ethan had finally noticed her tension, turned to see what about the film had so fascinated her. Fernanda had lowered the glass, risen, and stuffed the film in her pocket before he could get the chance.
She said to Kyla, “Where is the other roll of film? The one stolen from Sarah’s room?”
Fernanda needed to see that film. Develop it. She felt a sudden sick fascination with what she’d just discovered. It frightened her in a way that was hard to describe.
She needed to know how the gabardine man could do this. How he could be in every frame of this motel. It felt important, somehow. Vital.
Ryan Phan, too, seemed restless. He rose and grabbed a gun, which made Fernanda figure she should take one for herself. She tucked the Glock down the back of her jeans and stuffed her hands in her pockets, burying the film further. She did not want to frighten the others with this information yet. She wanted to seeallthe photographs Sarah had taken, get the full picture of what was happening. Pardon the pun.
Ethan said to Tabitha. “Didn’t you say that the first night, the night in ’55, ended a little after four o’clock?”
“Yes.”
