The Hollow Saints: The Negative in The Floor

The reel clicked against the stainless steel reel and Cora Vance stilled her hands, holding the canister at an angle beneath the safelight so she could pop the lid. A quarter turn. The faint metallic snap echoed in the darkroom like a fingernail flicked against a thumbnail. She had set up the space two days ago in what had once been her grandmother's root cellar, hauling the chemical bottles up from the basement shelve, rewiring the single red bulb to its own switch, and hanging a black curtain across the doorway that she had pinned with clothespins to keep out every stray photon. Hettie had used this room. Hettie had used it for decades, judging by the pattern of water stains on the concrete floor where the old developing trays had once sat.

Cora set the reel onto the spindle of the developing tank, fed the film leader through the slot, and began to crank the spiral. The 35mm threaded itself through the grooves with the soft, stubborn resistance of wet thread through an eye. She counted the rotations by touch. The room smelled of acetic acid stop bath and the faintly rotten-egg tang of mixed fixer, sharp enough to make her sinuses pull tight. Outside the curtain, somewhere beyond the cellar door, the farmhouse settled on its old bones. A board in the upstairs hallway ticked once and was still.

She had loaded the tank in complete darkness. She had stood at the workbench at quarter past three that morning with the flashlight pressed beneath her sweater, cutting the exposed roll out of the Nikon with the same deliberate quiet she might use to ease a splinter from a sleeping child's finger. The bell tower photographs. Twenty-four exposures on a single roll, shot from below with the sun low and raking the limestone, the tower's narrow lancet windows glowing from within as if the building itself had swallowed a sunset. She remembered every shutter click. She had reviewed none of the images on the camera's LCD. She had wanted to see them properly, in the only room left in the house where she trusted the light.

The tank lid seated with a soft hiss. Cora poured in the developer, temperature-checked an hour ago at twenty degrees Celsius, and started the timer on her phone. Eight minutes. Sixty seconds of initial inversions, then four gentle agitations every thirty seconds. She lifted the tank, rotated it smoothly through two hundred and seventy degrees, and set it back down. Once. Again. The smell of the developer rose like the interior of a borrowed dream, faintly coffee-bitten, faintly metallic at the back of the throat.

In the upstairs kitchen, a faucet ran. Cora heard it through two floors of plaster and oak, the thin hiss and percussion of water on enameled steel. Her sister Iris had been up since before five, unable to sleep past the small hours as she always could not when the weather turned. Cora had told her to stay out of the darkroom. She had told her twice. The third time she had simply closed the curtain in Iris's face, and Iris had gone quiet and watchful and retreated to the kettle.

The first inversion. The second. The tank warmed faintly under Cora's palms.

When the timer chimed, she poured the developer into its brown bottle and tipped in the stop bath. Thirty seconds of agitated swishing, the liquid turning the color of weak tea as it neutralized the developer. The fixer went in last, and the room now filled with the sharper, more insistent smell of sodium thiosulfate, the undercurrent of sulfur that she remembered from high school photo class and from the few times Hettie had let her watch down here. When Cora had been nine, perhaps ten. Hettie's hands on the tongs. The slow lift of a single print, dripping, into the wash water. A photograph of the house itself, taken from across the road in autumn, the bare branches etched black against a pewter sky. Looking at that print now, more than twenty years later, Cora could not say what about it had unsettled her at the time. Only that she had asked, and Hettie had turned the photograph face-down on the rack without answering.

The fixer needs five minutes. Cora sat on the three-legged stool and watched the hour hand on her phone creep. The red bulb painted her hands the color of a day-old bruise. Outside, the wind moved through the corn stubble in a long, unhurried exhalation. The window Hettie had cut into the cellar wall and blacked over with a square of foam board let in no daylight. The room was a closed system of shadow and crimson, and Cora was conscious, for the first time this morning, of how small it felt. How the walls seemed to be listening.

She thought about the bell tower. About the way the western lancet window had glowed. About the way the second window, above it, had seemed to hold its light differently, more sullen, more reluctant, as though something inside the upper room had not wanted to be seen. She had shot twenty-four frames in series, tightening her angle with each pass, using a forty-millimeter lens to keep the perspective honest. She had not seen anything standing in any of the windows. She had not seen the figure that, according to every photograph Hettie had ever taken of the tower from this same angle, was always there.

The timer chimed the second time. Cora drained the fixer into its marked bottle, rinsed the tank under the trickle from the cold-water tap she had plumbed in here last week, and lifted the reel out into a tray of standing water. The film came off the spiral in a loose, damp curl. She clipped the end to the line she had strung across the ceiling with binder clips and let the strip unspool, weighted at the bottom by a clothespin she had bent into a U. The celluloid hung there in the red light, swinging faintly with the last of its motion, water droplets patterning the concrete beneath like a row of small dark commas.

She waited a full minute. Then another. She clipped off the first six frames and held them up to the safelight with a pair of plastic tweezers, turning them slowly, reading them as best she could in the crimson dark. The negative image was inverted, the bright areas of the photograph reading black, the shadows reading translucent amber. She could make out the shape of the tower, its roofline, the sky behind it with the sun that had been behind her left shoulder. She could make out the first of the lancet windows, a tall black slit against the pale stone. The image was sharp. The exposure was correct.

She shuffled to the second frame. The third. Tower, stone, sky, window. Tower, stone, sky, window. The composition tightened frame by frame, as she had intended, the roofline rising, the lancet window sliding down toward the center of the frame. Tower. Stone. Sky. Window.

She shuffled to the seventh frame and stopped.

In the highest window, the one set at the very peak of the tower above the belfry proper, the rectangle of glass that she had framed alone in the eighth and ninth and tenth exposures, there was a shape. In the negative it read as a hard, vertical density, an upright oblong darker than the stone around it, set against the lighter translucence of the sky beyond the glass. It was roughly the height of a person. It was narrower at the top than at the base, as though draped in something heavy that fell in long lines to the floor.

Cora lowered the strip and raised it again. She tilted it under the red bulb, turning it slightly, the way Hettie had taught her, to catch the surface of the emulsion at an angle. The shape did not change. It did not soften. It held its edges.

She unclipped the next frame. The eighth. The figure was there. The ninth. The figure was there, and it had shifted, its outline now subtly different, the dark mass leaning a fraction of an inch to the right within the frame of the window, as though it had moved between exposures. The tenth. The eleventh. She worked her way down the strip without breathing evenly, her fingers tightening on the tweezers until the plastic creaked. The twelfth. The thirteenth. The fourteenth.

In every frame the figure stood inside the highest window. In some it filled the space from sill to lintel. In others it seemed to press forward, its leading edge darker, more sharply defined, as though it had stepped closer to the glass between one shutter click and the next. The robed shape was the same width at the shoulder, the same hang to the hem, the same absolute blank where a face should have been. Cora knew blankness when she saw it. She had looked into enough old portraits in this house to recognize the shape of an absence. The figure was faceless. Not blurred. Not underexposed. Faceless in the way a door is faceless, in the way a coat on a hook is faceless, by intent and by long practice.

She had not seen this figure when she had stood in the side yard with the Nikon pressed to her eye. She had not seen it when she had tilted the lens up toward the belfry, framing the second story of the tower in raking afternoon light. She had looked straight at the highest window. She had looked for a full second through the viewfinder before each click. She had not seen a thing.

Twenty-four exposures. Twenty-four frames. Twenty-four instances of a shape that had not been visible to the naked eye, standing with its patient, indefinite face turned outward, watching her shoot it.

She was still holding the strip when the cellar door at the top of the stairs creaked open. A wedge of gray daylight fell across the concrete floor at the foot of the steps.

"Cora." Iris's voice, dry and cautious, came down through the slit. "The kettle's on. I made eggs."

Cora did not look up. She held the negative tighter. The crimson bulb hissed softly overhead, a sound like breath drawn through a clenched jaw.

"Iris," she said, her own voice rougher than she had intended, the rasp catching at the end of the word. "Come down here."

"The curtain is closed."

"Then open it. Come down here."

A pause. The soft friction of the curtain pulled on its clothespins. The careful, deliberate sound of her sister descending the wooden treads. Cora watched the figure in the negative, the robed shape standing in the lit window of the bell tower, and she turned the strip in her hand so that the first frame faced the stairs, ready for her sister to see.

"There's something on this film," she said. "I need you to tell me whether you can see it."

Iris reached the bottom step. Her hand found the edge of the workbench and rested there, her fingers pale under the red light.

"I'm looking at it."

"Not yet. I want you to look and tell me what you see in the highest window. The one at the very top of the tower."

Iris took the negative. Held it up. The black oblong inside the lancet window trembled faintly against the gray stone, a shape waiting to be named.

"I see a woman," Iris said quietly.

Cora's knuckle whitened around the edge of the film.

"No," she said. "Look again. There's no face."

Iris did not look away.

"I know," she said. "I still see her."

The safelight buzzed. The negative swayed on its clip. Outside, across the fields, a crow lifted from the bare branch of the oak that had stood on the property line for as long as anyone in the family could remember, and the empty topmost window of the bell tower caught the morning sun and held it for a long, deliberate moment before the light moved on.

The darkroom smelled of stop bath and the faint almond ghost of old fixer. Iris stood at the small porcelain sink against the far wall, running warm water over her hands to rinse the developer from under her nails. The white bulb above her buzzed in its porcelain housing. Through the wall she could hear Cora in the kitchen, the heavy rhythm of her boots as she paced between the sink and the stove.

The plumbing under the sink had been complaining for years. It was a noise like a small animal caught in a wall, a kind of wet clicking that started whenever the tap was shut off and continued for several seconds after. Iris knelt to look. The trap was a white PVC elbow jointed with a coupling that looked newer than the rest of the fittings. Beneath it, set back against the back wall of the cabinet where the wood was dark with old moisture, sat a tin.

She would not have seen it if she had not knelt.

It was a tobacco tin, the kind her grandfather had kept on the porch rail in summers before his hands had begun to shake, the lid printed with a stylized leaf and the name of a brand that had gone out of business before Iris was born. The tin was the size of a small book. The lid came up with a reluctant scraping sound, and the hinges protested as though they had not been moved in a long time.

She set the lid aside and looked at what was inside.

A photograph lay on top. Not negatives, not paper, not film. A single photograph, glossy and black and white, the corners faintly curled from years of being pressed under the lid.

She took it out.

The photograph showed a group of people standing on the front steps of a church she had never seen, although she knew at once which church it was. The steeple was the same shape as the one in the print she had helped Cora make that morning. The bell tower was the same. The lancet windows were the same. The stone around the foundation was the same, the lichen that grew in the cracks by the steps, the iron railing that ran up to the doors. It was the Hollow Saints church. It was the church on the rise at the end of the road, the one whose shadow had fallen across her grandmother's kitchen window every morning of Hettie's life.

The people in the photograph were arranged in three rows on the steps. The front row was seated on the lower step, the women in dark dresses with their hair pulled back, the men in suits that did not quite fit them. The second row stood. The third row stood behind them, the men's hats making a ragged line against the bright summer sky.

At the center of the front row, in a chair that looked like it had been carried out from inside for the occasion, sat a man she did not recognize. He had a beard trimmed to a point. His suit was better than the others, and there was something in the way he held his hands on his knees that suggested he had been placed there rather than having taken his seat.

A woman stood beside the chair. She was tall and thin and young, and she was looking not at the camera but at something off to the side, and her face...

Iris's hand went cold.

She knew that face.

She had seen it in every photograph in the house.

Iris set the photograph down on the floor with great care, the way one sets down something that might break or might bite. She did not let herself look away from it. She let her eyes run over the young woman's face, the sharp cheekbones, the way her hair fell in two dark wings against her throat, the slight outward turn of her left foot as though she had been on her way to step forward when the shutter fell.

It was Hettie.

It was Hettie at perhaps nineteen, maybe twenty. Iris had never seen a photograph of her grandmother that young. Every picture in the house showed Hettie older, settled, the creases already at the corners of her mouth. But this one was before. This one was the girl who had lived in the house on the rise before the house on the rise had become the house Iris knew.

She picked the photograph up again. She held it closer to the lantern. The young woman was looking at something off to the left of the camera, something lower than the camera, and the angle of her gaze gave her whole face a quality of listening. As though whoever stood just out of frame had said something she was considering.

Iris turned her attention to the man in the chair.

She studied him the way she had been taught to study the things in the fields that did not quite belong, the way her father had taught her to look at a fencepost that had moved overnight or a gate that had unlatched itself. You looked at the thing. You let the thing look back. You did not turn away first.

The man had a long face. The beard came to a point just below the knot of his throat. His eyes, in the photograph, were not focused on the camera either. They were focused on the young woman beside him. There was an expression in them that Iris could not name. It was not fondness. It was not appetite. It was the expression of something that had been given a thing it had wanted very badly and was still unsure of the shape of it.

His hands lay flat on his knees. His fingers were even. His thumbs lay along the seams of his trousers. There was no wrinkle in the cloth around his hands, no bunching where a real man's fingers would press and pull. The suit fit him the way a suit fits a department store dummy. It fit perfectly because nothing inside it was moving.

Iris thought of the negative in the floor. She thought of the shape Hettie had drawn in the dirt, the limbs too long, the joints bent wrong. She thought of the thing Sheriff Merritt had felt under her hand when she touched the wall of the cold room.

She set the photograph down again. She got up. Her knees cracked. The cold of the floor had crept up through her bones and she could feel it now in her ankles and the small of her back. She crossed to the shelf and brought down the third jar of journals, the one labeled in Hettie's hand with a single date, June 1923, the year Hettie would have been nineteen, the summer the church had been finished and the photograph taken.

The jar was not sealed. The lid came off with a soft hiss of stale air. She drew out the journal that corresponded to the summer. The cover was soft with handling. She opened it near the back where Hettie's entries grew longer and more frightened.

She found the entry by the photograph, a date she recognized because she had seen the same date written on the back of the print in her grandmother's careful pencil. She read.

It tried to wear me tonight. I let it have the likeness but not the name. Enoch helped.

Iris read it twice. She read it a third time. The handwriting was shakier than the entries before and after. The ink had bled in two places where something wet had fallen on the page, and she did not think it was water. She thought it was the kind of wet that comes from a person who has been crying for a long time and has stopped noticing that she is still crying.

Below the line, in smaller script, almost an afterthought, Hettie had written a second sentence.

It will sit in the church now. It will wear the man. I am sorry for the man.

Iris closed the journal. She held it against her chest for a moment, the way you hold a child who has been hurt. Then she set it on the floor beside the lantern and went back to the photograph.

The man in the chair. The man in the chair was not a man. He was the thing in the negative. He was the thing in the dirt drawing. He was the thing under the wall of the cold room, the thing Sheriff Merritt had felt when she pressed her hand to the wood and the wood had given back the wrong kind of cold. He had been given the likeness of a man and he had sat in a chair on the steps of the church and let himself be photographed beside the girl who had agreed to let him have that likeness in exchange for something Iris did not yet know.

She thought of what Hettie had said in the other entries. She thought of the candle that could not be lit. She thought of the brass bowl and the name that had to be written down. She thought of the years and the years and the years of Hettie going up the road in the dark, year after year after year, to sit in the church and tend to the thing in the chair.

It tried to wear me tonight.

Iris understood then. The thing had wanted Hettie. It had wanted to wear her the way it wore the man. It had tried, that summer night in June of 1923, and Hettie had felt it pressing at the edges of herself the way a hand presses at a door. And Hettie had done something. She had let it have a likeness. She had let it have the shape of a man, perhaps the man it had killed, perhaps a man who had died and left a suit behind, perhaps just a shape Hettie had agreed it could borrow. But she had not let it have her name. She had not let it have the thing that made her Hettie. And Enoch Bray, the pastor, the man whose own son now kept the church, had helped her do it.

Iris looked at the young woman in the photograph. The young woman was looking at the man in the chair. There was something in her expression that Iris recognized, because she had seen it on her own face in mirrors, because she had seen it on her sister's face in the weeks after their father had gone. It was the expression of a person who had agreed to something and was already beginning to understand the cost.

Iris put the photograph in her coat. She put the journal in her coat beside it. She left the other jars where they were. She stood up and looked around the room. The lantern threw its small circle of light across the jars and the floor and the negative still propped against the wall, the negative that was only a smudge in this light but that she knew was the shape of the thing that had been given a likeness and a chair and a Sunday suit and the long slow years of Hettie Vance's life.

She went up the stairs. She went through the kitchen. She stepped out onto the back step and the cold morning air came at her face and she breathed it in and it tasted like metal and pine and the first edge of a coming frost.

She stood on the step. She looked down the road toward the rise. She could not see the church from here, but she knew exactly where it was. She knew the angle of the steeple against the sky. She knew the shape of the lancet windows and the lichen on the foundation stones. She knew what sat in the chair inside, what had been sitting in that chair for a hundred years, wearing the same suit, growing no older, watching nothing, waiting for nothing, kept there by a bargain a nineteen year old girl had made with the help of a pastor whose name was still spoken in that building every Sunday.

She thought of the new pastor. She thought of Sheriff Merritt's face when she had told them about the cold room. She thought of the new pastor's hand on her shoulder in the church, the hand that had felt wrong, that had felt too long in the fingers, that had pressed too evenly through the wool of her coat.

She went back inside. She found a pen. She found a piece of paper. She wrote down everything she had learned. She wrote it in her own handwriting, not Hettie's, and she dated it with the morning's date, and she signed her name at the bottom. She folded the paper and put it in her coat with the photograph and the journal.

Then she went into the parlor where her grandmother's clock was still ticking on the wall, and she sat in Hettie's chair, and she looked at the cold fireplace, and she let the house be quiet around her for a long time.

When the sun came up she would walk down the road to the church. She would open the door. She would see what sat in the chair.

She would know what to do when she saw it.

The clock ticked. The house breathed. Somewhere below the floor the negative lay in its place, and the shape in the negative lay in its place, and the house kept them both the way a house keeps everything, with patience, and without judgment.