switched the lamp back on. With a lot of care I proceeded in developing the film, making sure I did not accidentally destroy it by a thoughtless lapse, I even doubled the time to rinse it with fresh water from all the chemicals in the end while I tried to soothe my expectations with absentmindedly watching television.
Finally the alarm rang and I could open the tank and produce the spool. With wet fingers I fumbled for the film and held it against the light. To my disappointment it was as clear as a strip of Scotch tape. Every single silver halide crystal had been leached out of the plastic base and not even the obnoxiously sophisticated CSI investigators on TV would have been able to restore any trace of a photograph. All exposures were beyond repair, lost forever. I accepted this fact after a good deal of denial at the kitchen table beneath a lone, dim light bulb. It needed the help of some Bowmore 1991 scotch to sink in. I had saved the bottle for exceptional occasions and, frankly, this one was exceptional. Playing with the cheap shot glass in my fingers, I gazed into the big dark eye of the camera. It made me feel stranded in the solitude of my apartment, alone but with promise of something just out of reach. I was drinking and agonizing for an hour past midnight whether to risk another attempt at the remaining roll.
I know now that I should have gone to bed and handed the matter to a professional, historian or anybody with the proper routine than myself to unveil the exposures of the forgotten films. But reckless pride and voracious curiosity fuelled me in preparing for another round. I retraced my preceding developing process and concluded that the developer had been too aggressive on the aged film. With a much lower concentration, lower temperature and longer development duration I felt sufficiently certain, that I would not destroy the second roll. And so I continued my preparations, killed the light and unraveled the second film. It felt not quite as smooth as the first, some parts felt grainy, as if some fine sand had settled on the emulsion. Nevertheless I proceeded and was noticeably faster and more proficient than the first time around, my anticipation increasing with each successful step. When the film was processed I could not restrain myself for much longer and instead of waiting until the inside of the drum had been rinsed for half an hour with fresh water again, I opened the tank after mere minutes of flooding.
I lifted the spindle from the black drum and carefully pulled out the film. It was not as clear as before although far from being perfectly processed. Still: To my delight I saw now shapes of many grades of gray, darker spots and light lines in ten neat squares on the plastic, thin but definitely discernible photographs! Exalted I went through the drawers for the loupe to scrutinize the negatives millimeter by millimeter. The close inspection revealed that the diluted developer still washed away a great deal of the silver halides but enough remained to form pictures. I saw a couple of negative landscapes, dark sky, bright branches, leaves and smoky clouds. One exposure towards the end of the strip being incredibly blurred by a swift motion. Was there a bright silhouette of a person with an extended arm in it or did my brain just misinterpret the pattern of stripes? The very last picture was a landscape much like those before but in the golden section to the right there stood the shape of an angular white jagged block against the sky. Too far away from the photographer that even the magnification of my loupe did not reveal further details, even as I pulled the lamp in as close as I could. But being this near to the emulsion I noticed something else: Fine, black specks with the thinnest bright coronæ emanating from the white shape into the air. Very subtle and very faint but blacker than everything else on the negative, as black as usually the disc of the point-blank sun would appear in a negative. How odd. I reviewed the previous exposures again and, yes, there too were some of those black specks to be found in the last four pictures. Just a few and well hidden in the shimmering contrasts of twigs and leaves of the birch trees and the blades of grass.
Puzzled I hung the strip up to dry and went back to the kitchen and to the single malt. Black spots on the negative meant bright lights in the positive. But if the air was scattered with bright fireflies, Derleth sure must have noticed them on his journey. Why didn’t he relay this strange phenomenon in his journal? Or was he being intentionally leaving out details like he did with the factory?
Another two-finger high shot passed down my throat before I laughed out loud into the face of the surrounding darkness, for a divine intuition had led me to the explanation of the oddity. Most likely sand or pollen crept into the film magazine somehow on Derleth’s journey and bit by bit contaminated the film—Ockham’s razor at its best. Once formulated in my mind, yet another epiphany followed suit: The film magazine! There still were more unseen exposures to be found, exposures of the enigmatic factory, objective evidence of what it was that Milosh Derleth sought to uncover so eagerly.
Running low on chemicals and a bit high on alcohol, I prepared the darkroom and its contents a last time to aid me in uncovering the past. In the gloom and isolation of the little room I opened the magazine with the film still loaded, carefully pulled it out and let my fingers gently brush across its surface. Again I felt the sensation of little grains as before, but to my surprise they increased in number and texture from one inch to the next. At one point the film felt as if it had been partially burned and my hypothesis of pollen or sand inside the magazine was as useless as the first film. I struggled long with loading the tormented strip of film onto the spool for development inside the tank. The minutes passed like hours during the whole process and again I cut the rinsing time short by a great amount, intrigued and a bit worried what the negative would still be able to tell.
The first couple of exposures depicted the factory. It was old and partly collapsed, dilapidated and run-down and to my eye as exciting as the factory portraits by Bernd and Hilla Becher: Plain, almost boring, if not for the tiny black spots on the negative. Each successive exposure made clear that the dancing dots must have travelled through the camera’s lens instead of chinks and seams in the magazine because they clearly were stronger along the dusty floor and riveted metal struts of the factory.
The assembly hall appeared not as derelict as the rest, although still covered in thick dust, footprints in it much like Armstrong’s on the moon. It was beyond my expertise to tell what might had gotten assembled or manufactured there, only that the equipment must be decades old, black dots all around. What was it you were after, Milosh?
The next picture presented a flight of concrete stairs with footsteps leading down into what appeared as a very dark passage with a reflective surface on the ground, dots swirling around the railing into the darkness.
When I advanced to the next exposure with the loupe to my eye, I felt a primal sensation of horror arise in me, as ancient as the fear of darkness and thunderstorms. I saw a strong, round vault door, three or four feet of thick metal and it was partially open. Yet what was so disturbing about the picture was the nature of the black dots: They were no dots anymore but a solid, black shape that burst from the inside of the vault past the door, a black stream, no, a black tidal wave pushing through the little opening. Despite the dim hall, the negative was almost completely consumed by this darkness, overexposed from whatever had made its way through. Milosh Derleth had been staring at something that he could never see. But his camera did and burned it onto the film. Carefully I touched the still wet strip where it was the darkest and, no doubt, it felt like scorched plastic. Witnessing this strange event, even in this little 2.5-inch square negative, even many years since the event had taken place, stirred up some dread inside me and all of a sudden I realized that I was completely alone in the dark in my apartment. And there still were three more exposures.
I took the wet film with me into the kitchen, to the scotch, and half the bottle was gone until I dared to view the remaining photographs. One was the front of the mysterious factory, a nondescript building, its architecture solely functional and without any spark of creativity. But a storm of black dots and hazy black lines from below made this picture impossible to read further. Of th
e billboard above the entrance, most likely bearing the name of the factory or its owner, only D and R could be guessed, the rest was hidden behind the nightmarish flood spilling from the doors and windows into the surroundings.
I was glad to have the bottle at hand when I moved down to the penultimate picture. It was overexposed, out of focus and behind a veil of the black particles, yet clear enough to depict a sad scene. It showed the figure of a man on the forest soil, his back leaned against a tree, his head dropped, the face almost completely hidden behind hair and a scarf. He wore a jacket, boots and jeans, a backpack at his side and the very same camera bag that now rested on my kitchen table, the length of an arm away. Little doubt, that the picture showed Milosh Derleth in a state much like Schrödinger’s cat, impossible to tell whether alive or dead.
The very last picture was underexposed, sufficiently focused and like a sigh of relief in comparison. It was the picture I took through the door of the girl with the nose ring in the café, decades away from the scenes that took place only inches apart