SIDLO: [Quiet] No. I never did.
DR. ABBOTT: Why not?
SIDLO: Because I understood how it happened. Oh, not the exact mechanics, but . . . it would have been all right, I believe, except for one thing: the impulse to poke your tongue into an empty socket, to worry at a wound. Her memory was on the film, you see; she could have buried it, burnt it, never had to deal with it again. But she couldn’t take it on faith. She had to see.
DR. ABBOTT: See . . . what?
SIDLO: To see if it was there, at all. To watch it. To know I’d gotten it right.
“I’ve had a long time to think about this,” Sidlo told us. “And what I’ve come to see is that . . . she lied to me, Mrs. Whitcomb. Probably for good reasons, and yet: a lie, at the very heart of our dealings. If only she would have told me the truth, it might have changed everything.”
Or not, I thought. But since I needed him to keep talking, all I said was, “What did she lie about, sir? Why?”
“Oh, as to why, I think she wanted not to scare me. And as for what . . .” He trailed away for a moment. “I now believe she was tired of waiting for Her to re-appear, of praying in vain for some answer to the question of what had happened to Hyatt. That, I think, was how the paintings and the films were meant—as offerings; Hyatt’s own drawings, the paintings, the films, all meant to placate Her. But when that failed . . .” Sidlo turned up his hand “. . . she turned from propitiation to conjury. She wanted to open a doorway and find Her there, in that moment. The moment where She lives, always.”
“In the field,” said Safie.
“In every field, every appearance, every tale told, every dream. The Lady is not like you or I, miss, to say the least. Kate-Mary des Esseintes believed there were things that lived outside the boundaries of time, as we perceive them: ghosts, angels, demons. Gods.”
I nodded slowly. “So when you made that film for her,” I said,
“you gave her a key to open a door from . . . wherever she was, to . . .”
“To there. To Her.”
A moment passed, while we all digested that idea.
“Well,” Simon said, at last, “that didn’t seem to work out all too well for Mrs. Whitcomb.”
Sidlo shook his head.
“Might be a lot of reasons for that,” Safie pointed out. “Maybe she asked the wrong questions. Maybe she didn’t take precautions.”
“What sort of precautions?” Simon demanded. “I mean, does any of us know? If it was just a matter of getting a priest involved, or throwing holy water at her, or—” He ground to a halt, seemingly equal parts angry and afraid. “This is useless,” he said, finally. “I don’t know what you expected to find here, Lo, but I don’t think we’re going to leave happy.”
I raised both hands, mind racing, and outright shushed him like he was Clark. “Let me think, Simon,” I begged. “Just, just . . . fuck. Let me fucking think.”
Safie: “Miss—”
“Quiet, for shit’s sake! I need—”
And that was when it came to me, right that moment: an idea so stupid, so hubristic and reckless, it could really only have been conceived by a person who’d been awake all night and stretched to their very limits, somebody hovering on the ragged edge of losing not only everything they’d ever had, but everything they ever would have. Like a spotlight on the brain, full blast—creativity erupting like madness, through the top of the head.
Like Hephaestus opening up Zeus’s skull only to see Athena pop out, born full-grown and armoured, shining like a second sun.
The impossible made possible. The only option left.
Even then, though, I knew I couldn’t just blurt it out, ’specially not in front of Simon. I had to wrap it up inside of something else, put things in place, then spring it on the others while he was out of the room.
Funny how time seems to slow in a crisis, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s that you speed up, all your neurons firing at once.
“Safie,” I said, “do you have any film stock? In your van?”
She huffed, eyes widening as if dazed by the sudden swerve. “Um . . . yeah, yeah, I do. Got a whole reel of Super 16 Soraya gave me, along with a whole bunch of other shit I keep saying I’m going to put away.” With a shrug: “I’ve even got some unexposed silver nitrate, as it happens.”
Simon said, “Seriously?”
Safie flushed a bit. “Yes, seriously—I like dead tech, sue me. Why?”