Negatives Chapter 18
Megan’s expression was cold. “I’m not the one who’s messed up, Jane. You are. He was right about you.”
18.
Jane was checking Reddit comments during her free period when she got a direct message from one ReachOut2ThaTruth: “Hey, I was looking at your thread and your stuff looks just like my uncle’s stuff. Check out these threads.” He linked to two of his posts. Jane clicked on the first, with the header “THE APERTURE PHENOMENON”
Yeah I know another secret society, your thinking, but seriously this is a real thing, my great-uncle has this power and he’s not in the society but he told me all about it. Apparently this dude William Dunleavy was a photographer back in the 1800s and he was studying this Native American superstition that a camera that took your picture also stole your soul.
Apparently this Dunleavy guy took pics of some duchess and suddenly she wouldn’t leave him alone. She kept showing up to his house at night (she was a shut-in who never left her house during the day which is sus AF) and they’d hang out all evening talking and, I dunno, playing chess and singing showtunes whatever. At first he was like “all right, maybe this rich widow has a thing for me” but after awhile it was like every night she was like “ding dong surprise bitch” and she got, like, super possessive and wouldn’t leave him alone so he told her to pound sand, only all courtly-polite-like. She got all upset but he was like no you thirsty THOT GTFO.
A few days after his last letter to her telling her to leave him TF alone she shows up, bullies her way in, and is like surprise, I’m actually a vampire. She attacked him but he fought back and at some point his walking stick got broken, and after he stabbed her through the chest with it she didn’t just die, she shriveled up like a centuries-old corpse and turned to dust right there on his parlor rug.
Jane blinked at the screen, re-read: super-possessive, wouldn’t leave him alone. She had never seen the Diegos before that day at the mall, when she snapped their photos. Suddenly she ran into them everywhere and they wanted to be her friend. More than her friend; she thought of Aster’s surprise kiss after they escaped the derelict haunted house, of Cyrus’s hungry hands grasping her in the corn maze, Aster’s attempts to seduce her, her voicemail filling up with Aster’s increasingly desperate messages.
I’m actually a vampire.
She thought about what Hailey Vaughn’s mother had alleged, that Hailey had been covered with bite marks. The mark on Nestor’s neck. Had she ever seen the Diegos during the day?
After that he looked some more into it and made some discrete inquiries of other photographers of the era, and most of them were like “naw, dude” but another of them, a dude named Geoffrey Gray, said “man, peep these” and showed Dunleavy all these photos he had taken of local weirdos and there were all these ghostly images in them, like of other people or animals and stuff. And he also had a bunch of these people following him around now, trying to buddy up, or in the case of one native dude all of a sudden he decided Gray was his enemy and kept harassing him trying to get him to “give back what he stole.”
Dunleavy went back to his pics of the duchess and realized that he could see faces in the backgrounds, really faint, sometimes blending into other stuff in the background until he knew what he was looking for. Her victims.
A tingle went up Jane’s spine. The girls in her photos of Aster and Cyrus, sad and angry and terrified, shouting their silent warnings at Jane. She read on:
So these two dudes went through their networks and wrote some letters back home to England and kind of put the call out for other photographers who had this sort of thing happen. He didn’t get a lot of hits but he got enough to kind of cobble together a team to investigate this stuff, and they called themselves the Apertures, after the camera part that lets the light in.
This is where things get really screwy: fast forward a few centuries and now the Apertures are a worldwide secret society not just investigating supernatural stuff but also being like the X-Files/X-Men of policing all these beings. They don’t just have the Aperture photographers anymore, but all these priests and bounty hunters and scientists and doctors and stuff. There are whole facilities in every major US city. They’re not government funded but the government knows about them, maybe not the president but someone knows about them and helps them keep it quiet…
Jane rolled her eyes. Of course, a conspiracy nut. She clicked on their username, ReachOut2ThaTruth, and skimmed the list of their other posts: they were pretty active in the conspiracy threads and anything having to do with the supernatural. Their post and comment count ran into the multiple thousands. Jane wondered if they were a shut-in themselves, and just spent all day on Reddit diving down various rabbit holes.
She clicked on the second link they’d included: PROOF OF THE APERTURE PHENOMENON
As promised I got permission from my uncle Harvey to scan and post a few of his photos. He swears he didn’t do any photo tricks (and they’re all originally film photos, the old dude doesn’t even want to touch a digital anything nevermind use it, he doesn’t even have a land-line I have to bike over there in person whenever I want to talk to the old guy). These are LEGIT and if you don’t believe me and you live in the Lancaster NH area PM me and we can meet up and I’ll show you in person, maybe I can convince Uncle Harv to meet too if I can pry him out of his cabin.
Jane scrolled down the photos. Ghostly figures around old buildings. Creatures in the woods. An inhuman face peeping from outside a window at night. A head poking up through the water in a stream, wet hair slicked down around a woman’s face. Nothing too different from other paranormal photographers, until Jane got to a photo of a beautiful woman sitting on a rocky seaside, her hair wet-looking but her clothing dry. Beside her was the slightly transparent image of a seal.
Finally there was an image captioned: THE INFAMOUS redcap pic! He doesn’t know I have this and I had to sneak it back after I scanned it. It depicted a short, burly old man with a large nose and slightly pointed ears, wearing a red stocking cap and a heavy overcoat. He glared at the camera, looking like a grumpy Santa’s elf. Around him was a virtual army of spirits, blotting out any background. Jane shuddered.
She clicked back to the chat and typed: I was wondering if you could put me in touch with your uncle as I’d like to compare notes with him. I have film prints, black and white, with negatives and everything. I developed them in my school’s darkroom. I can bring everything with me. Maybe we can meet? I live in Pleasant Cove, ME so it’s a bit of a drive but I’m willing.
ReachOut2ThaTruth: Dude are you in HS? Me too! I’m a freshman.
JLaRouPhotography: I’m a junior. Do you think you could convince your uncle to come with?
R: Yeah I showed him your thread and he’s interested. Well, as interested as he gets, he seemed like whatever but I know he’s really intrigued. Let’s say Saturday, noonish? there’s a cafe I like, I’ll send you the addy.
J: Thanks. Oh btw my name is Jane. Jane LeRou. What can I call you?
R: Rory. Just Rory for now. Internet safety yknow.
J: Cool, Rory. TTYL
Jane caught up with Glenn at lunch and asked him about going with her to Lancaster on Saturday. “Saturday? Shit,” Glenn said. “Nestor just texted me today, he signed Black Blood Moon up for some Battle of the Bands thing at the high school in Keye's Landing. It starts at noontime too.”
“Man, I would’ve liked to go to that,” Jane said. She worried at her lip with her teeth. “The kid’s uncle sounded kind of reluctant to meet in the first place; I’m afraid if I try to reschedule he’ll just call it off entirely.”
Glenn looked pained. “I don’t want you going by yourself.” He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “I’ll just skip the show, go with you instead. I mean, it’s just a dumb high school contest. Maybe the guys can find a backup bassist. This is more important--”
“Glenn, no. You go to your thing. I’ll ask Megan,” Jane said.
“Are you sure? I saw her today and she’s looking kind of rough. I mean, she’s hardly backup if something goes wrong.”
Jane took Glenn’s hand. “Hey, nothing’s going to go wrong. It’s in the middle of the day, in this main street cafe. Don’t worry.” He smiled back at her, still unsure. “I’m just sorry I won’t be able to cheer you on in your battle.”
“I’m sure we’ll emerge victorious,” Glenn said, leaning over to give Jane a kiss on the cheek.
“Come back with your axe or on it,” Jane said.
Megan wasn’t in the cafeteria, or the parking lot, or the library (though that last one was a stretch to start). Jane dipped into one of the bathrooms just to make use of it, and when she was washing her hands, Megan came out of one of the stalls. She looked even worse than the day before: her eyes were half-open, ringed with shadows as if she hadn’t slept for days. She wore a turtleneck sweater over yoga pants, and kept scratching at her neck through the fabric as she shuffled to the sink.
“Meg, are you sick? Why aren’t you at home?” Jane asked.
“Mfine,” Megan mumbled, pumping out some soap. Most striking was that she wasn’t wearing any makeup. Megan didn’t go anywhere without full face, even on camping trips. Jane didn’t realize how used to it she was. Megan looked not only sick but almost naked without it.
“You are not fine. I was going to ask you if you wanted to come on a road trip on Saturday but you should probably be in bed.”
“Can’t,” Megan said. “I got a thing.” She scrubbed her hands under the water.
“Are you going to the Battle of the Bands in Keye's Landing? Black Blood Moon is competing.”
“The what?” Megan squinted as if the light hurt her eyes. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, I gotta…” she trailed off in an indecipherable mumble.
“Meg, what is with you lately? If you’re not sick, you gotta be on drugs or something. Is it because of Robbie? Hey,” Jane grabbed Megan by the shoulders. “You can talk to me. About anything. You’re my best friend. If something is eating you--”
“I’m fine! Get off my ass!” Megan whined, pushing Jane away. “Go stick your tongue down Glenn’s throat or something.” She moved to push past Jane and to the door, but Jane stepped in her way.
“Megan,” she said gently, “is that what’s upsetting you? Yeah, we got together, but I’m not going to just disappear into him, like--”
“Like me and Robbie? I know you thought I was a total bitch for ignoring you for him all the time.”
“Meg, no. I get how it is when you’re into someone. You always came back around. I don’t resent you spending time with your boyfriend.”
“Ex-boyfriend now. But I don’t care. I’m too good for him anyway,” Megan sniffed.
Jane smiled. She was sounding more like the usual old Megan now. “I’m glad you’re realizing that. So spill, what’s got you all messed up?”
Megan’s expression was cold. “I’m not the one who’s messed up, Jane. You are. He was right about you.”
Jane felt a chill tickle her between the shoulderblades. “He who?”
Megan blinked and shook her head. “Never mind. Look, I gotta go.” She dodged around Jane and let herself out of the bathroom. Jane looked after, confused and feeling sick.
Movement by the sink caught her eye. In the mirror, the ghost girl who was the image of Anna was staring at her. Jane’s blood ran cold. She wanted to run, but her feet were stuck in place. Anna gave a shy little wave, so commonplace a gesture that Jane laughed, a giddy, mad thing. Anna beckoned her closer. Jane felt her feet move without her conscious decision to move them.
“What are you trying to tell me?” Jane asked her. Anna bent forward, still behind the mirror glass, and opened her mouth as if trying to breathe on the glass. Nothing happened, of course. She pointed to Jane and made the motion again. Jane leaned forward and huffed her breath onto the glass, fogging it up.
Anna drew with her finger, backwards to Jane’s point of view, spelling out a name: C... Y...
The door to the bathroom opened, startling a yelp out of Jane, as a gaggle of girls walked in, laughing and chatting. One edged past Jane to the sink she had been standing at and pulled out her purse to touch up her makeup while her two friends found their way to stalls and continued their conversation. The mirror was clear, no fog, no letters, the ghost girl gone.