Inside was the photograph album. A few loose pictures slipped from between the pages as he lifted it out of the box. He balanced it on his pointy knees, opened the cover.
There she was.
He brought the album closer to his face, angling it so that the pictures caught more light. She was slender, of medium height, with long, dark hair: nice-looking. In the first picture, she was with Dad, standing by a bridge with tall lamp posts. Trees and old stone buildings lined the far bank of the river. The Eiffel Tower stood in the background, outlined in neon. Dad was looking straight into the camera, smiling, but his mother was looking away at the Eiffel Tower, her face very still and serious, half-turned in profile. Eric felt his skin crawl. It was virtually the same pose as Gabriella della Signatura’s.
Underneath the photo, in handwriting he’d never seen before—his mother’s, he guessed—it said “City of Light.” In the next picture, his mother was standing alone in front of a fountain with a winged statue at its centre. She was smiling, but her eyes were still solemn.
He studied her face carefully, but couldn’t see any similarities to his own features. Maybe, he thought bitterly, if he’d looked more like her, Dad would have paid him more attention. Maybe. But he was built like Dad: same narrow bones, same skinny face.
Eric flipped ahead through the album. There were more shots of Paris, and then some back here in the city, in places that he knew. His mother wasn’t smiling in most of the pictures; when she was, there was a forced look about it.
Near the back of the album, she was pregnant, getting bigger; then, on a page by itself, was a picture of her, all slim again, a little tired-looking, sitting in the living room, holding a baby in her arms.
That’s me, he realized.
He waited for a surge of emotion, but it didn’t come. He didn’t feel as if he were part of the picture. He didn’t have any memory of being held like that. It was him, and yet it wasn’t him at all.
In the photo, the living room looked exactly the same as it did now—not a piece of furniture out of place. Dad must have kept it like that on purpose. It wasn’t normal. Dad hadn’t even tried to forget her. More than that—he was doing all he could to remember. It didn’t make any sense, Eric thought. Why remember if it was so painful?
He paged backwards through the album, glanced at the loose photos at the bottom of the box.
His throat tightened. He’d wanted to learn all about her, to get all the answers. But all the photographs in the world couldn’t tell him what he longed to know. Idiot, he told himself; you were an idiot to think they would.
He put the album back in the box and left the heat of the attic. There was an empty ache in his stomach. He slid the ladder back up and, with a sudden surge of frustration, slammed the trap door shut. The sound boomed through the house.
“I saw the pictures,” he said.
His father nodded. He didn’t seem at all surprised, merely tired and defeated. He brushed perspiration from his forehead.
“I don’t know why you never showed them to me.”
“It was stupid. You have a perfect right to see them. I’ve done this very badly.”
His father fell silent again, and Eric looked across the room at him. The space between them seemed infinite. Eric had hoped that the pictures would bring his Dad back, give them something to talk about.
“Come on,” Mr. Sheppard said, rising quickly from the chair, “I’ll show you.”
“What?” Eric said.
“Come on.”
The necropolis sat on a hill overlooking the city. Eric gazed at the dim clutter of tombstones, butting up against one another, many worn and chipped, some split in two. Family crypts had settled askew into the earth. Grave monuments thrust up crookedly from the weeds and wild grass, mirroring the city’s skyline.
Eric looked at his father, face pale in the lunar glow of the city. So this is where she’s been all these years, he thought.
He squinted at the dates on some of the tombstones as he and his father passed. Many were hundreds of years old, so blackened and eroded that he could barely read the chiselled inscriptions. Here lies … In beloved memory of … Rest in peace. Everywhere he stepped, it seemed, there was a small grave marker underfoot, with nothing but a name and date cut into it.
“Here,” his father said. “It’s here.”
A few steps more and he stopped at a tombstone, erected recently enough so that it gleamed white in the darkness. Eric leaned closer to read the inscription, the dates, his mother’s name.
“I would have come too,” he said.
“She haunts me, I think,” his father said. “Not a ghost, nothing that spectacular—just insistent thoughts of her and the suffering. Maybe that’s all a ghost ever is: memory.”
Eric pictured her death, as he had done many times before, like some horrible cartoon played in slow motion. A woman caught in the closing doors of the train, the train starting slowly into the tunnel, speeding up. He winced and blocked out the image.
“We’d been planning on leaving,” his father said. “I was going to take you and her out of the city to live somewhere else, someplace where you could fall asleep without the sounds of traffic and television ringing in your ears.” He tapped his knuckles thoughtfully against his chin, then shook his head. “I shouldn’t have put it off. I waited too long.”
“Too long for what? How could you have known she was going to be in an accident? That’s crazy.”
“I should have known, though.”
Eric watched his father run halting fingertips over the tombstone. He felt helpless. All the sentences he was trying to form in his head seemed childish and useless.
“Why can’t you forget it a little?” he said after a while.
“It’s impossible,” his father answered.
“Don’t I help at all?” Eric asked quietly.
A low-flying advertising blimp moaned overhead, sending swirling patterns of light across the necropolis.
“The new mall,” his father scoffed, wincing at the brightness of the billboard sign. “It’s inhuman. They’ll want to put a mall here one day. They’ll want to dig up the earth and all the bodies and build a new mall.”
He fell silent for a few moments.
“Well, I’ve shown you now,” he said.
Eric sniffed derisively. “What? What have you shown me? This?” He waved his hand at the tombstone. “This is nothing! This doesn’t tell me anything. You have to tell me, Dad!”
“There wasn’t an accident,” he said, not looking at Eric. “I wanted to make it easier for you. You were too young.”
“What do you mean?” Eric croaked, his throat dry.
“She killed herself. She jumped in front of a train.”
“Why?” Eric asked after a moment. He felt as if his knees might buckle beneath him.
“She often had long bouts of depression.”
“Why?” Eric asked again.
“That’s the question that goes on forever. Maybe I should have taken her somewhere better. Maybe I didn’t love her well enough.”
Eric shook his head in disbelief.
“You let me believe a lie all this time,” he said, incredulous.
“I shouldn’t even have told you now. It’s like a cancer. It just grows and grows. It’s impossible to forget.”
Eric stared at his father, hating him. Thirteen years and you’ve done everything you can to remember. You don’t want to be happy. Won’t even try. All you want is your stories and your memories and your dates and your visits to the museum. You don’t want me. You lied to me.
“I can’t ever forget,” his father said. “And I’m worried I’ll never forgive her.”
The city’s electric glare seemed to hollow out his father’s cheekbones.
You belong here, Eric thought. City of the dead.
In the dream, Eric was gazing into the locket, studying the portrait of Gabriella della Signatura. The lines of the painting seemed sharper than usual, the colours m
ore vibrant. Light danced off every surface. And then he was no longer simply looking at the picture: he was a part of it. He had somehow been pulled across the threshold of the painting and was now standing in the same room as the young woman.
She sat very still, posing for her portrait. She didn’t notice him. Her eyes gleamed challengingly, fixed on something at the far end of the room. Eric tried to turn and look, but couldn’t. All he could do was look straight ahead, but atthe edge of his vision he made out the hazy shape of a standing human figure. He tried to wrench his head to the left, but it was no use.
He felt panic rising. Who was there? The figure stood motionless. He tried to call out, but he had no voice. He looked back at Gabriella. Her gaze was unbroken, intent and passionate. He looked out through the arched windows to the landscape beyond, and then all at once, though he wasn’t aware of moving, he was outside.
Gone were the rolling hills, the church spires, the sea. A scorched desert stretched before him, the throbbing sun close to the horizon. The light hurt his eyes. There was Jonah up ahead with his fishing rod, casting his line out into the sand dunes.
He won’t catch anything, Eric thought. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Can’t catch fish in the desert.
Then he realized he wasn’t alone. Alexander was walking alongside him.
“Did you know her?” Eric asked, turning to look up at Alexander, but unable to see his face, because it was veiled in shadows. When the shadows cleared, Eric saw that Alexander’s face was swarming with flies, collapsing, his skin sinking around his cheekbones, sand blowing into the empty eye sockets, the gaping mouth.
Eric woke with a start. It took him a few moments to catch his breath. Just a dream, only a dream. He saw light coming from outside his door and knew that his father must be awake. He turned over and shut his eyes. Tomorrow he’d take the locket back for good.
8
Speaker of a Dead Language
“You’re like me,” Alexander said. He appeared without warning at Eric’s side, in the dinosaur gallery. “Yes, much like me.”
“What do you mean?” Eric kept on walking and fought back a shudder, watching Alexander from the corner of his eye. That musty smell permeated the air, stronger than before. It made Eric think of very old things, ancient ruins lost in desert sand.
“That’s how I knew,” Alexander hurried on. “I was certain I was correct. I’ve observed you over the years—the innumerable visits you made here with your father, all the scribbled entries in your notebooks. How many have you filled now over the years? Three, four?”
“Four,” Eric said.
“I’ve seen your eyes, filled with awe. And that morning in the medieval gallery, when the armoured soldier was knocked over—I saw you flinch, almost cry out, as if stung. What was it that appalled you so?”
“I brought you your locket,” Eric said perfunctorily. He didn’t want to hear any more. He wanted only to get rid of the locket and leave the museum.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” Alexander went on, brushing flecks of dry skin from his thick eyebrows. “You love the past; you crave it like an opiate, an elixir, a drug.” He had lowered his voice to a whisper and leaned closer, as if sharing a secret. “You understand its beauty and its power.”
“Why have you been watching me?” Eric demanded. He stopped in the corridor and faced Alexander. He wasn’t frightened anymore; he was too angry. And he was tired of secrets, tired of people hiding things from him.
“It’s being consumed, Eric. Here, in the city, all around us, the past is being demolished and burned. This place is one of the last strongholds, here in the galleries, in the workrooms and storerooms. You don’t want to see it vanish, do you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Eric snapped.
“You have only to look at the new buildings heaving themselves out of the earth—look no further than the building across the path, the new shopping mall,” Alexander said. “You have only to look at the moving pictures of the television to see the world speeding away from the past at a horrifying rate. Look at the fires—at the library and the antiques dealership.”
He sounded alarmingly like Eric’s father. Eric wasn’t interested in any of it anymore. Not his father, not the locket, not the museum. None of it.
He pulled out the locket, feeling only the tiniest tug at his heart as Alexander’s hand swooped down like a bird of prey to seize it.
“Good, good,” Alexander said. “You’re most trustworthy, as I thought.” He pried the locket open hurriedly, as if to make sure the portrait was still there.
“Did you steal it?” Eric wanted to know.
“Oh no, no. It’s mine—a family heirloom.”
“Who was she?” Eric heard himself ask.
“Gabriella della Signatura,” Alexander replied softly, still gazing at the locket. “The third daughter of a wealthy Venetian spice merchant, and an unrivalled beauty. There were more than a hundred suitors, from as far away as the British Isles, vying for her hand—or so it was said. She wanted none of them. But her parents eventually betrothed her to Giovanni Braccio, a Florentine prince. She died before the nuptial mass—a sudden fever that took her swiftly.”
Eric watched Alexander’s face in amazement. It was filled with the same longing and remorse Eric had seen on his father’s face as they had stood looking at the tombstone.
As if he knew her.
There it was again, that same thought, slithering through his head.
“She has a mesmerizing face, doesn’t she?” said Alexander sadly. “So vital still after these five centuries.” He brushed the portrait gently with one finger.
A segment of the dream he’d had the night before played itself out in Eric’s head like a stuttering, grainy image on a ?V screen: the room, Gabriella della Signatura, the windows, and someone at the very edge of the picture. Who?
Alexander closed the locket and slipped it into his coveralls before looking down at Eric. “I knew you wouldn’t fail me,” he said.
“It was all some kind of test, wasn’t it?” Eric said warily. “What if I hadn’t brought it back?”
The suggestion of a smile passed across Alexander’s wrinkled mouth, but his expression quickly turned into a grotesque grimace as a cough tore through his chest and throat. A dream image flared in Eric’s mind—Alexander’s face, his flesh and bone, caving in, disintegrating.
“No,” Alexander said after the coughing had calmed to an asthmatic wheeze. “That was never a possibility. I’ve been observing you. I knew it would bring you back. I am well acquainted with the effect the past has on people. It’s like gunpowder in their veins; they can’t stop thinking about it.”
Just like Dad, Eric thought—obsessed by her death. Suicide. It was worse than an accident, worse than any other kind of dying. As dead as you could ever be. A shapeless anger stirred inside him; he hated his father for telling him something so terrible and, at the same time, for hiding it for so long. He hated his father for not forgetting—not even wanting to. Hated him for not loving him enough.
He glared up at Alexander. “Why have you been watching me?” he demanded, his voice rising. “What for?”
A knot of visitors was making its way through the gallery, and Alexander waited a few moments before he replied.
“To see if you could be trusted,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
“Trusted for what?”
“There’s something—”
The lights flickered, like candle flames in a gentle breeze.
Eric felt a ghostly prickle of sweat across his back.
Alexander’s eyes darkened, sweeping across the ceiling, as if he expected one of the pterodactyls suspended there to come swooping down upon them.
Another winking of the lights.
“The man in the armoury?” Eric said.
“Yes.”
“Who is he?”
“An old acquaintance.”
“And he’s making the lights do
this?” Eric asked, and was surprised at the skepticism in his voice. He sounded like Chris. “How?”
Alexander waved his hand dismissively. “He has a mastery of machines. He can control them. Electricity!” He said the word contemptuously. “That is his strength. He understands machinery. I do not.”
“So what does he want?” Eric asked.
“Something very ancient,” Alexander said. “And very valuable.” His voice gained urgency. “He’ll try to steal it. But if you were to take it away for a while, like the locket, just like the locket, and keep it safe—”
“Why don’t you call the police, if you’re so worried?” Eric cut him off, belligerent. So that was it: Alexander wanted to use him. Maybe Chris was right; maybe there was something illegal about it all. Well, he’d had enough; he was sick of the cryptic answers he kept getting to his questions—when they were answered at all. He wasn’t going to be used like a fool.
“The police would be of no assistance,” Alexander said darkly. “Were they able to prevent the last two conflagrations?”
Eric felt suddenly lightheaded; everything seemed to shift sharply to the right. He touched the railing for support. A chunk of memory plunged from the ceiling of his mind: the words of the man in black. Flames are best for old things … They burn so easily. They didn ‘t have what I was looking for, so … The fires at the rare-book library and at the antiques dealership!
“He set them?” Eric gasped.
“Those aren’t the only two,” Alexander said quietly. “There have been others, many others.”
Eric took a step back from Alexander.
“Who are you really?” he asked, panic flapping through his insides. “You aren’t really a museum worker, are you?”
“Will you take it?”
“I don’t know you.”
“Yes, you do,” said Alexander insistently. “You’re like me.”
Eric was enveloped in Alexander’s thick, dusty smell. He thought he was going to choke. He looked into Alexander’s face, saw the deeply etched lines around his eyes and nose and mouth, the vertical furrows gouged into his gaunt cheeks, like dark grooves in ancient clay.