The Photographs
Haven’t written anything in so long; forced myself to write this out to try and break my block. Let me know what you think :) (but pelase try and be constructve; it’s been a while; I know I’m crap).
The envelope’s fresh green logos and chipper slogan told me immediately that they had finally arrived. My photos. Our photos? Their photos? Dragged out from underneath decades of boxes, cardboard and wood, covered in dust that had been collecting longer than I had been alive, wedged between the album of my grandmother’s disastrous first wedding and my great-uncle’s box of love letters never sent; I didn’t even know what they were, to begin with. Just another pristine, if dust-covered, brown box wrapped in parcel string. No labels, of course. That summed up my extended family in a nutshell, really; no labels. Still, when I finally had broken enough nails on the knots trying to get it open without resorting to the pocket-knife I’d stupidly left three storeys below me, opened the top and found it filled to the brim with negatives, I wasn’t sure whether the effort had been worth it.
Dim shafts of late evening sunshine, filled with the dance of a million disturbed dust motes, were hardly conducive to revealing the nature of the negatives. No matter how much I screwed up my eyes, the most that I could tell was that they contained people. Probably. Hell, for all I knew those could be mannequins. Or paintings. Or even oddly-shaped mountains. I’d shoved them back in their box a little more roughly than they’d perhaps deserved, and let out an ill-chosen sigh, exploding more of the inches of dust up to coat my lungs.
I’d sent them off to a developer who specialised in old film that next morning, having spent a good few hours googling whether one even existed anywhere near me. Turns out they did, but I needed special-order delivery to be sure they got there and back intact. The pricing was… almost enough to make me change my mind. But I was grubby, I was sore, and I was tired. My lungs were half-filled with dust, my head had a dozen bruises from low rafters, and my knees were killing me; my eyes were strained from the dim light, and my fingers were almost grey with dust, and these negatives were possibly my only lead after six hours of searching. So I bit the bullet and sent them.
And now they had arrived. I would know that green anywhere. It was all over the site I’d spent so long checking over before sending the precious negatives. My hands trembled under the pressure of their load. It felt… heavy. Solid. I wondered how many photos there had been in all. How many would show something useful to my little research trip. How many would merely be holiday snaps or blurred fingers over the lens.
I put the envelope on the kitchen table and sat in the only chair. Looked at it. Reached for it a couple of times, my fingers never actually getting close enough to touch. The clock ticked hollowly in the silence. A single droplet of water coalesced and fell, as if in slow motion, from the ancient tap.
I stood, walked to the kettle on the side, incongruous in its modernity in this world of well-scrubbed oak and polished stone. Filled it, clicked it on. Watched it for a while, until the bubbled began to form in the window and the steam began to whisper from the spout; I fetched a mug, its chipped edges comfortably familiar in strange times, a teabag from the red tin, never the white one with its fumes of peppermint, and the bottle of milk from the fridge disguised as another wooden-doored cupboard. The moves were by rote, a familiar ritual learned from my mother in my earliest days as What To Do When Something Goes Wrong. My hands moved mechanically; catching the butter that always fell from its shelf when the milk was removed, replacing it carefully in its broken compartment, breaking one teabag from the chain with one hand while the other was already putting the rest of the box back in its allocated tin, pouring the kettle’s water carefully into the mug so that nothing dripped and the steam backwash did not blur my glasses and my vision, stirring with one hand while the other removed the lid of the milk… But once the tea was read, perfectly stewed and with just the right amount of milk (no sugar), and everything was put away again, I felt no better.
It sat in the middle of the table so innocuously. I leant back against the worktop with the chipped mug of tea held in both hands like a prayer. After a few moments I shook my head, realising that no staring contest with an envelope was going to bring me the resolution that I sought, and that no cup of tea would fill the hole that was gnawing at the edges of my soul.
“Fuck it,” I muttered to myself, and put the tea, untouched, on the counter-top with a click. I slid into the chair without muttering any more curses, and snatched up the envelope before I could change my mind. The paper ripped with ease, but my hands paused at the very moment that I was about to reach for the contents, a thick wad of shining paper stacked so very neatly within; my fingers twitched inches away from those edges, those small rectangles that would show me the secrets I had tried to find for so long.
Screwing my eyes shut, I reached into the envelope and pulled them out. I didn’t look. I couldn’t. I spread them across the table like a deck of cards, purely by touch; the shining side upwards, spread across the width of the scrubbed wooden table before me. Deep breath. Deeper breath. Eyes screwed shut so hard tears began to form at the edges of my eyes.
“Come on,” I muttered to myself, aware that to any outsiders, I would look more than a little mad even before I started talking to myself. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”
Opening my eyes was one of the hardest things I had ever had to do.
There, across the table where I had spread them, was the evidence that I had been searching for. My breath left me in a whoosh not a little hindered by the sob that rose up in my throat, by the hitch that my shuddering lungs left in what should have been an even breath.
More photos than I could have guessed, but less than I had thought. Each of them old, coloured in sepia tones that told me they were taken with an older device than I had thought, and every photo a revelation.
In the first that caught my eye, a young woman in distinctly-modern gear huddled with a child in what appeared to be Victorian dress, both of them sheltered behind some wreckage that seemed to be from a large piece of machinery that I could not identify from its remains. Behind that wreckage, a towering metal beast stalked a street that could have come straight from one of the old westerns that my dad had loved so much.
Another showed a small coracle, its occupants a young man in eighties disco attire with a baby strapped to his chest in a Native American papoose. The photo appeared to have been taken from the shore towards which he was frantically fleeing, even as he looked over his shoulder at those who were chasing him. One of them appeared to be someone on a jetski, though it was hard to tell from the blur they had left across the frame. The other had either been fired from a cannon, or they were flying.
My fingers trailed across the two images, lost in the strange madness that they showed; too lost to look, yet, at the others. I knew them. Both of them.
The woman in the first was Andrea, and the child was hers, rescued from the nightmare realm of Thousandfold; the man in the latter was her brother Thaddeus. The photographer would be Finella, I knew; the camera must have been her work, cobbled together from whatever they could find out there.
They must have left these photos for me sometime in the distant past, knowing that I would find them. And if they knew I would find them, then… I hitched another uneven breath. Perhaps that meant that I actually had a chance of finding them again.
The thought brought a smile to my face, and small buds of tears to either eye. It gave me a renewed boost of the hope I had been trying to bury ever since I found Thousandfold’s sigil etched into the old oak behind my parents’ house, covered in the moss of at least fifty years.
I could find them.
I would find them.
Wherever, and whenever, they were.
