contaminating noises about the place, that he would have oiled the mechanisms well.
Now I must say that I had crossed many thresholds in my comparatively short lifetime. It is a simple matter. One puts a foot over the door line, shifts one's weight to that foot, and then brings the other foot to follow.
This door, I remember distinctly, was not so easy to cross. My right foot, being in the lead, refused to budge. My muscles felt a little weak, in truth, like I might collapse from the effort. I lowered my foot and tried with the other, with similar results.
“Oh, come on!” the Professor hissed, pulling me roughly inside, “Enough horseplay.”
I was more than a little shocked at the behaviour of my limbs. Looking back at the door, there was nothing there that should have cause such a strange sensation. I put it down to nerves, inexperience, that which separates the novice from the amateur.
I looked about.
Inside was, naturally enough, dark. The light from the street lamps outside were only just able to penetrate in through the front door and through the various crack in the boards on the windows. The floorboards were clearly defined, with not an ounce of a carpet or a tile to cover their shame.
The room to the left, facing the street, had a fireplace set into the far wall. A smattering of ash and creosote had burst from its stomach across the floor, made recently, it would seem, since the particulate held no footprints. I suspected that perhaps a downward gush of wind may have kicked it from the flue on a particular blustery night.
As I was looking in the room, I had the odd sensation that the room was looking back at me. Now, I know that sounds absurd, but I can think of no better way to describe it. Imagine, if you will, entering a room where a band is playing merrily, and a party is sitting down to dinner. Now continue with the image and picture the band suddenly ceasing their music and the guests lowering their forks, and then having all eyes turned toward you.
There was no band or guests in this room, no eyes that I could see, and yet I could feel a gaze upon me.
A flood of warmth swept over me, followed by a cool blast from my kidneys. In the darkness, I could feel my face turn red from, well, embarrassment!
My heart beat fast. My breathing shallowed some. I felt unwelcome. No, that is not quite right. I felt like I was being inspected.
I came back, stumbling a little, keen to put a some distance between myself and the room, to find the Professor glaring at me. He was standing by the door and pointing angrily to the bags that I had left on the portico. I did not mean to seem insolent, and I would have apologised and said as much, but I remembered quite clearly the requirements of silence administered by the Professor only moments before.
I reluctantly held my tongue, dutifully picked up the bags and carried them in, placing them where he indicated at the foot of a humble staircase. I stole another glance into the room, upon my return, wondering how such an empty space, with only a dirty old fireplace to break its monotony, could fire up my emotions so.
He closed the door, softening the noise of the brewing wind without to a hush, and turned back noiselessly.
He came up with a pair of lanterns, which he set on the floor, and took out a box of matches, indicating that I should cover my eyes. I confess that I did not honour his appeal, rather I was blinded momentarily by the stark flash and brightness of his match as it flared and shone against the drab surroundings.
Too late was I with my hand to my eyes, that I stood for several seconds, mouth open and blinking like an idiot. I knew the Professor was shaking his head and muttering to himself inside that critical cranium of his, but I did not care. For as my vision cleared with each blink, I became aware of another presence within the room.
Perhaps it was just the shadow cast from the obstruction of the Professor's hand over the match as he brought it to the lantern, or perhaps it was the play of the rain upon the exposed window in the room across the way, but I saw, at least I think I saw, a small boy skip lightly, silently, up the stairs.
It was really little more than a hurried, pale pair of legs attached to a dark torso, and could just as easily be attributed to my eyes adjusting to the darkness of the house. My mind, though, was stubborn in its assessment.
I rubbed my eyes and looked again, but any form that might have been there was gone. I did not hear any footsteps and, by the age of the staircase, it ought to creak and groan just by looking at it.
With one hand I grabbed the Professor's shoulder, and with the other I pointed warily up the stairs.
He shook his head in annoyance and pointed back to the lantern, fiddling with it to get it lit. While he tinkered with the wick, I stared up the stairs again, wondering if my eyes were playing tricks. Nothing stirred up there, no matter how hard I stared. Again, I put it down to unfamiliarity with my surroundings, inexperience and nerves. That was all it was.
After a second or two he had the lantern operating, and the bright light it displayed showed me clearly that there was nothing and no one upon the stairs.
Checking behind me, back in the front room, I allowed the Professor's light to reassure my senses that everything was as it should be. After all, this was the Professor's calibration house, one void of anything fancy.
The Kitchen
We brought ourselves into a kitchen area, complete with an aged table. The wood worms had had their fill, and what was left could barely be called the skin and bones of it. The lantern and the lighter pieces of equipment were set upon it and it held them sturdy enough. The rest, for fear of them being too much of a burden for the poor piece of furniture, were placed carefully on the floor.
The Professor, double checking the pieces, drew near and whispered, “Now, we shall begin our calibration.”
I nodded, indicating that I was ready to do what needed to be done, but I was very unsure what that entailed.
“This is our base of operations, you may say, where our equipment lies. If you need me, or if I need you, we shall meet up here. It is central enough to the house. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Good lad. Now, let me show you some pieces you will be observing. Don't worry, it doesn't take a scientific eye to read a measurement, although there is a lot of science behind them,” he hummed, not letting his voice go much higher than the permeating sound outside.
He pointed to the camera box, “No one but myself will operate this. However, I will require you, later on, to feed me the plates and handle the spent ones. Have you done so before?”
I nodded. I had worked for a couple of months during a visit to Amsterdam as a photographer's lackey. The pay was not good, and the conditions were terrible. For hours I would wait around while his Grand Highness, the Maestro (as he insisted I call him), prepared his equipment and set up the flash and measured the angles and readjusted the lens, only to be yelled at and clipped across the ears as I hastily reset the camera plates after his shots.
Only once had I dropped the plate. Well, it was several plates. The whole box, in fact. After a long day of shooting, I was carrying the plates back with me to his studio, when I noticed that his Greatness, the Maestro, had left a shroud on the ground. I stopped and turned to go back and pick it up, naturally enough, only that I had not noticed that his Eminence, bringing with him his mighty stomach, was walking closely behind me.
He brushed past me, well, more of a bump than a brush. Actually, one might describe it that he slammed into me with his gut and bowled me over like a skittle! In any case, the box flew from my hands, spilling its contents about the grass. Each plate was exposed to the burning sun, ruining the day's work.
For this I endured such a broadside that I shall never forget, followed closely by the dreaded stare and those ominous words I would hear all too often from my employers.
“Fresh plates are here. Used ones go in here. I shan't need to explain the manner in which they must be treated?” asked the Professor carefully.
“Do you have a shroud?” I whispered, my voice sounding strangely
foreign to me for having been silent for more than a few minutes.
“Yes, in that bag there. And the flash powder is a concoction of my own, designed to produce a more dull light, suitable for indoors. So the process will be,” he said as he held up one finger at a time, “Load the plate, charge the flash, I take the photograph, unload the plate, clean the flash, repeat.”
I nodded. My neck was feeling a little loose from it all. Sitting in the dark like that, huddling about a lantern on a mouldy table, the situation became a little more clear to me. This was something very out of the ordinary.
Sure, I wanted the experience, I wanted to learn what it was like to be a scholar of a scientific field. I had visions of peering through a microscope or handling a crucible filled with a bubbling, molten concoction, not squatting in decaying houses taking photographs of rotten furniture.
“First we need to do some base readings. Now, to the equipment. This,” he said, pointing to the glass bell-jar he had showed me earlier, “Is an electroscope. If the air above the plate here becomes charged, the repulsion of these filaments here becomes greater than the gravity that restrains them, and they will separate.”
“Charged?” I whispered, “But how?”
“Good question. One that I greatly wish to investigate. I've only witnessed it directly a handful of times, and each time I've scored a hit or two on my other