A long silence, broken only by the crackling of flames, and a whirring sound in my ear: the film had run out, whipping ’round and ’round the projector’s take-up reel. Nothing else mattered, not except Lady Midday, and that blazing sword high above.
(be blind then. forever.)
The sword swept up—
At the last minute, though, came the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, or ever expect to see: Wrob Barney, of all people, charging in to knock me aside. Wrob Barney screaming into a goddess’s face with only a folding chair raised between, for the world’s most ridiculous weapon—no, you do NOT, it was ME all along, not her, not her! It was supposed to be ME!
Choose me, choose me, choose me, like a kid on a playground. Like the teams were all matched up for kickball, but nobody had picked him.
I mean, I didn’t like Wrob, and I still don’t, not even now. Not even after he obviously saved my life, if not—for all I know—my soul.
Christ Almighty, though. What a pitiful goddamn way to die.
I remember lying on the floor, contorted in pain, as the projector fell away from me, Sidlo’s film sparking, going up like a Catherine Wheel. I remember Wrob falling the other way, in two pieces. Lady Midday, first there, then gone. Her sudden absence left a scar on the world, white hovering over black, reversed.
Somebody who later turned out to be Safie turned me over, drawing a scream. She slid her arms up under mine and hugged me around the chest, dragging me back toward the doors, where she was met by Leonard Warsame and somebody else—Simon, staring down at me white-faced, grabbing my ankles. They heaved me up, then headlong down the stairs and out, under the stars.
(No, I couldn’t see them, obviously. But I knew they were there.)
The night air was cold, but clean. I breathed in, coughed, breathed in again. Felt everything around me narrow like a D.W. Griffith signature move, so damn old it was new all over again: up, back, down. My mental camera’s perspective, dollying straight in on my own shrinking pupils, employing first a slow pull into focus, then an equally slow pull back out of it. An iris, shrinking inward, taking everything with it.
Simon’s lap was warm, comforting. He and Safie were talking to each other someplace far above my head. He stroked my hair, possibly not even knowing what he was doing. Soon enough there were sirens, coming closer.
I lay there a few minutes more, contented, until I finally fell asleep.
Credits
In their forensic analysis of the Ursulines Studio fire, the Metro Toronto arson team’s report implies that something almost as flammable as silver nitrate itself—a casually thrown joint, perhaps, though the screening room was supposedly a non-smoking space—must have hit the projector in mid-rotation, thus causing Untitled 14 to ignite. And certainly, a few witnesses do claim they saw it burning merrily in the moments before that last explosion, the one which supposedly ripped Wrob’s head from his shoulders with one single, weirdly level blast, cauterizing his neck from throat to spine. Of course, none of that really explains where his head actually went after that, or how it eventually came to be found buried two feet down in the concrete floor of the bike shop, a whole storey beneath where the rest of his body fell.
Construction workers finally drilled down into it during the rebuild, five years later, when that whole block was being turned into a condo everyone else in Kensington Market almost killed themselves protesting. The end of an era, some said. The end of something, anyhow.
By then, the book Safie and I did indeed end up co-authoring was into its third printing, and still going strong: Highly Combustible, a weird—and in the event, award-winning—mixture of true crime and lost Canadian cinematic history; the story of how one filmmaker’s obsession with curating another’s legacy ended in literal disaster, accidental mass murder, and equally accidental suicide. I think the real cornerstone of our pitch, once we’d recuperated from the fire’s aftermath, was having returned to Quarry Argent and confirmed—via Val Moraine, natch—that the unlucky “kid from Overdeere” who fell through the floor in the Vinegar House and got stuck there overnight while researching his thesis had been, in fact, Wrob Barney himself. He’d been enrolled in Brock University’s film studies program under a different name, doing his courses on a correspondence level, while simultaneously amassing a move-to-Toronto fund by working in one of his family’s stores.
In hindsight, it all looks remarkably straightforward: this traumatic experience obviously formed the cornerstone for Wrob’s lifelong jealous obsession with Mrs. Whitcomb and her art, which led in turn to him trying to seize it and make it his own, both literally and figuratively. With Leonard Warsame’s testimony backing us up, we can retrospectively assume that Wrob had already found and planted the cache of Mrs. Whitcomb’s films, to which he led Jan Mattheuis, having done all the necessary legwork while tracking down Japery’s old pit stops and discovering the Quarry Argent collection. Building on the same theory, we can likewise assume that Wrob somehow arranged for me to be there to review Untitled 13, expecting me to imprint on his use of Mrs. Whitcomb’s clips and become his champion, making sure he was credited for her discovery. Then, when I not only didn’t but tried to co-opt “his” project as my own, he got progressively more unstable: bribed people to stalk me, arranged burglaries, maybe even stage-managed the NFA fire and Jan’s death. That last part’s not strictly provable, so we didn’t end up going too far with it, in the end—but then again, we didn’t really have to, once it became clear the Barneys had no interest in suing us for defaming their familial black sheep’s name post-mortem.
It sounds ridiculous, obviously, given what I’ve already told you. I’m well aware of that.
Funny how eager people will be to believe almost anything, though, especially in the face of tragedy, so long as it sounds even mildly plausible.
The book sells well, even now, and I’m proud of it, which I suppose only makes sense—it’s made me more money than anything else I’ve ever written, hands down. Too bad I can’t ever tell anybody outside my own home that it also happens to be my very first stab at fiction.
When I woke up after the fire, back in hospital yet again, Detective Correa was standing over my bed. I saw her indistinctly, as through a mist, and smiled—mainly because I wa
s surprised to be able to see her at all.
“Ms. Cairns,” she said. “You’re either the luckiest woman I know, or the exact opposite.”
I coughed, throat rough, semi-cooked. “Six of . . . one, I guess,” I whispered, unable to stop grinning.
She told me thirteen people had died in the fire, which seemed surprisingly low, considering what Safie and I’d stumbled across on our way in. But while the injury toll was far higher, and almost nobody involved had escaped without damage, the people we hadn’t been able to save had either all died before we got there, or been unable to escape for other reasons. One guy, for example—his name was Hartwin Tolle—had somehow managed to get his arm stuck halfway inside the wall, as though it had suddenly become so hot the plaster itself had started to melt. I didn’t even know if that was strictly possible, according to the normal laws of physics, but it didn’t really seem like something worth bringing up at the time.
Only two of the dead remained unidentified, Correa said, a pair of skeletons found near where the screen had once hung. Both were totally denuded, fleshless, and old, though one appeared to be older than the other—a mature woman and an immature child, probably male, possibly around ten years old at the original time of death. Did I have any ideas about who they might be?
I allowed that I did, but that the idea might sound a little nuts, even in context. To which Correa just crossed her arms, eyebrow hiking only slightly.
“Go on,” she said.
Eventually—a relatively long while later, at least by CSI standards—authorities were indeed able to match the DNA of the late Arthur Macalla Whitcomb’s surviving relatives to the child’s, thus proving he was probably Hyatt, while similar tests matched his DNA with that of the woman, revealing her to have once been Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb, née Giscelia Wròbl. What demented satisfaction Wrob Barney might have gained from digging up their bones after somehow finding out where they were both buried, meanwhile, remains a mystery, as does the exact cause of Mrs. Whitcomb’s death—let alone how she ended up back near Quarry Argent after having disappeared, while still in transit, from a Toronto-bound train. But given how much other cracked-out shit Wrob’d been posthumously charged with, in the interim, I suppose everyone involved just sort of agreed to let it slide.