Old Moskowitz would not be back at the store till Sunday morning. As long as the black velvet drawstring bag was back in in the iron safe in the back room by eighty-thirty, no one would know. Repeating these thoughts like a mantra, Sam tried to calm herself. Still, the chill she felt was more than just the thick Saturday morning fog blowing in off San Francisco Bay. Shivering, she pulled her black shawl tighter around her shoulders and checked the address on the scrap of paper against the numbers on the row houses. With her other hand she took a long drag on her cigarette. Even the nicotine wasn’t calming her like it usually did.
She had closed the jewellery shop as she usually did on Friday night. Moskowitz, as was his habit, had left early that February afternoon to start his Shabbas observance at sundown. This time she only locked the door and closed the curtains. She left the velvet display trays full of rings and unset stones on the glass counter tops and left the money in the cash register – it was important to her, for her conscience, that she had not taken the money as well, never mind the diamonds were worth at least a hundred times all the cash in the shop. She sat on a stool in the back room and waited a whole minute before spinning the tumblers on the safe. Twenty left, thirty right, nine left. She tugged on the handle and the safe swung open soundlessly, the tightly packed velvet bag nearly invisible in the low light.
After dropping the bag into her handbag, she put up a handwritten “Closed Saturday” sign. That would be Moskowitz’s first clue that something was wrong when he came to open on Sunday morning. The main reason he employed a Gentile girl was to be able to open on Saturdays.
After passing the bag to Royce with a kiss, she waited in the parlor of Mrs. Belchik’s rooming house, one, then two, then three hours after he had said he would come. The streetcars did not always run on time, she had tried to reassure herself, maybe Royce’s contact had been late. On the fourth hour, at eleven o’clock, when Mrs. Belchik had come downstairs for a snack from the icebox, she had asked Sam what she was doing, not noticing the packed suitcase by the door. Sam broke into tears, saying she had been stood up by a date. Mrs. Belchik soothed her with a cup of tea and cheap drugstore chocolates, then sent her off to bed. “If he’s any kind of a man,” Mrs. Belchik said, giving Sam a motherly hug, her housecoat smelling of liniment and mothballs, “he’ll call tomorrow. If he doesn’t call, you’re better off without him.”
Sam had not slept that night. Her tossing and turning woke her roommate, Claire. Sam could only say that she had lost something valuable at work. Claire reassured her that it could be found. In fact, she said she knew someone who could help.
The address Claire had scrawled out for Sam on the notepad was to a yellow row house on the east end of Bayview. The sidewalk dropped away gradually to Sam’s right as she faced the house, only the slowly moving green and red navigation lights of ships dimly shining through the gloom revealing the waters of the Bay. Thankfully, there was a streetlight right in front of the house, otherwise she might have missed the house number and kept wandering.
The house was plain and spare, with white trim around its windows and door. The yellow-painted wooden siding was peeling and warped by damp. A waist high wrought iron fence guarded a postage stamp-sized yard of dead brown grass and untended ceramic planters full of dried up weeds. Up a short flight of narrow, chipped stone steps was a door with a heavy, plain brass knocker. Sam stubbed out her Marlboro under her brown strap shoes, threw open the creaking gate, and walked up the stairs. Just below the knocker was a small copper plate, verdigrised by years of sea air. The inscription read: “J.W. Briar, Finder of Lost Objects.”
A tall man wearing a dark suit opened the door on the third knock. He had a long face, rounded in the chin, and heavy eyebrows below a shock of black hair streaked with gray. His eyes, wrinkled around the edges, were oddly bright in the dim light. He blinked twice at her, as if not quite seeing her, then said “Welcome to my house, young lady. Please come in.”
Holding the door open, he gestured in what Sam took to be an old-fashioned way with his arm into the dark entranceway. His English was heavily accented but clear. Educated, Sam thought. Similar to Moskowitz’s, but different, Eastern European without the Yiddish inflections.
“Thank you,” Sam said, “I would have called but I didn’t have a number.”
“I do not own a phone,” the man said, closing the door quietly and helping her out of her coat. “I do not like to be disturbed by people who will not show me their face.”
He hung her coat on a wall hook then gestured towards a door on the left of the hallway just inside the entranceway. The walls were dark, of heavy lacquered wood panels. A lightbulb in an iron wall sconce provided a dim light.
As she walked through the door, Sam heard a faint crying from upstairs.
“You have children?” Sam asked, trying to be polite.
“I have no children,” Briar said, “though I believe there is a little boy next door.” The crying stopped.
The room was panelled in dark wood like the hallway, its walls bare of ornament. The panelling reminded Sam of a funeral parlor. There was a heavy gray desk near the far wall, with two overstuffed high-backed chairs in front of it. On the desk were a dozen small, lacquered boxes, each about the size of a cigar box, arrayed in a half circle around the main chair. Gray morning light mixed with the streetlamp’s glow came through a bay window facing the street
Briar took a seat behind the desk and directed Sam to take one of the chairs.
“Coffee? Tea?” Briar asked, raising his prominent eyebrows.
“No, thank you,” Sam said, feeling nervous as she sat down. In truth she would have loved a coffee but did not want to be in this man’s debt. Not yet, anyway. Sam’s fingers played with the hat in her hands, the one Royce had given her. She didn’t need any more debts.
“You are looking for something you lost, something important to you. I will be able to help you.”
Briar had a grandfatherly manner about him, though he didn’t appear much older than sixty. Moskowitz was fifty-five but looked much older. Perhaps this man had fewer cares.
“It’s not for me, actually,” Sam began, only to be cut off by Briar’s raised hand.
“You do not need to tell me what it is,” he said. “In many ways, it is better if you do not.”
“But how will you know what to look for?” Sam asked. She was about to get up, certain it was a confidence trick. But Claire had recommended him, had told her Briar had found her mother’s engagement ring, the one Claire had lost down a sewer grate.
“I have ways. First, we must discuss my fee.”
Claire had been vague about what she had paid Briar, even when Sam had pressed her.
“Well, you see Mr. Briar, I am short of cash but I get paid at the end of the week and –“
“I am beyond money,” Briar said, a small smile on his lips, “I have had no use for it since I was a much younger man.”
Sam tried to think of how much wealth a man needed to not care about having more. It had to be a lot, more than even that bag of diamonds would fence for. But Briar was living in a seedy neighborhood few blocks above the shipyard. If he was so rich, why wasn’t he in a mansion down in Hollywood, being neighbourly with Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino?
Sam’s skin crawled at the thought of what men still wanted when they were beyond money.
“Please have a look at this,” Briar said, sliding one of the wooden boxes across the table. Claire picked it up. A paper label, faded to yellow, was glued to its top – “Abigail Sinclair as in life.” It was hinged on the left-hand side. Claire opened it.
At first, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at – just blotches of silver and black under a heavy glass plate. But as she turned the box, the light struck the image correctly, and she saw a striking black and white picture of a young, fair-haired girl asleep on a bed. The girl couldn’t have been more than five years old. Tucked under her arm was a large teddy bear with a bow tie. Sam could tell it was a very old photograph – the silver backing, the image seemingly built up by millions of grains of fine ash.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. And it was – the image was clearer than all the photographs Sam had ever seen. Though the picture was small enough to fit in her hand, she could even make out the little girl’s eyelashes. Sam wished she could reach into the picture and stroke that smooth forehead.
“It is a daguerreotype,” Briar said, breaking Sam out of her reverie, “A very old and very fine method of reproducing images of life. I am a collector. In exchange for finding the item you misplaced, I wish you to get one of these for me.”
“But surely,” Sam said, “you could just buy these. Are they very expensive?”
“If I wanted mere portraits or nature prints then yes,” Briar said, “but the subjects I prefer are never offered for sale. Look at the words inside.”
Sam looked at the words written inside. “Abigail Sinclair, 1853-1858.”
“She’s dead,” Sam said with a small voice. Briar nodded.
It was an awful thing to hold, a picture of a child’s corpse. Closing the lid, she pushed it across the table to Briar. “Why would you collect such things?”
“Men are collectors,” Briar said offhandedly, cradling the box in his hands as if it were a small vulnerable animal, “some paintings, some animal heads, some mistresses. I like to collect things that cannot be bought.”
Sam regretted that she had come. Briar was strange, his collection eerie, and she wanted no part of it. She felt a chill in the room too, deeper than the one she had felt in the fog. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Briar, but I don’t think you will be able to help me.”
She was about to stand, when Briar stopped her with his words: “Very well, if you are happy to explain the empty safe to your employer, the Old Jew.”
“How did you …?” Sam began to say but stopped herself, too late. Briar smiled thinly at her.
“The same way I will find what you are seeking,” Briar said, “if you bring me what I want.”
#
Riding the clanging, jostling streetcar afterwards, Sam tried to sort out her thoughts. Somehow, Briar had known what she had done. Damn him. Damn Moskowitz – why had he left the safe combination in such an obvious place? And damn Royce, the smooth talker, for getting her into this in the first place. Damn them all.
And damn me, she thought, screwing up her face to stop the tears from coming. Damn me for being such a fool. She looked out the window of the jostling streetcar descended the hill. The fog was lifting, but it was going to be a gray, dreary day. Not once in six months in this city had she seen the sunshine like it was on the Autochrome postcards her friend Eugene back in Akron had tacked up above her bed - bright sunlight streaming down out of an azure sky onto a deep blue bay, a white city seeming to rise out of the bay like a lily flower towards the sun. Everything here was fog and wind and rain.
It must be a daguerreotype, he had said, because it must be unique. There was no negative, no duplication, just a pristine capture of the subject in iodine vapor on a silver plate. He wanted things that no one else could own, and that could not be bought.
Though Briar had told her they were never for sale, Sam took a chance on the antique shops on 17th Street. There were tintypes and ambrotypes and cabinet cards, but few daguerreotypes. None of the pictures, whatever the medium, were of corpses. At last, in a dusty, crowded shop at the end of the ock, she asked the proprietor casually whether he had daguerreotypes of the deceased. The bespectacled, sandy-haired proprietor thought for a moment, then went to rummage around in his back room. When he emerged from behind the thick curtain, Sam’s heart beat faster – he was holding a case like the ones in Briar's office. Opening it, however, her face fell. It was of a young man standing in front of a display of flowers.
“Looks very lifelike, doesn't he?” The shop owner said.
“Yes, because he is,” Sam said, closing the case and trying to hand it back
“Look closer,” the man said, refusing the case and reaching out to open the case again. He pointed to the young man's arms.
“See that stand under there?” the owner said. Sam nodded – under the young man's arms were two poles he was resting his hand on. Sam could see it extending down his back and out between his legs
“In post-mortem photography families wished the deceased to look as lifelike as possible,” the man said.
“I’ve seen them posed as if they were sleeping,” Sam said.
“Exactly,” the proprietor said, “They also, more rarely, propped them up like they were just standing to have their picture taken. You must understand, often the post-mortem daguerreotype was the only picture a poor family would ever have of their loved one.”
Sam bought the picture for fifteen dollars, most of the money she had in the world. She was going to be short on the first of the month, but Mrs. Belchik was a kind-hearted soul, always forgiving of “her girls.” If she could just get the diamonds back, she’d get paid on Friday and everything would turn out right. She didn't know how long it would be till she would ever have enough for train fare to Los Angeles, but that could wait; she was used to waiting. Damn that Royce, she thought again, making her think there was a fast way to what she wanted.
At least she hadn't slept with him. After leaving Akron behind her, that was a mistake she wouldn't make again.
#
Briar answered the door on the second ring. Without saying hello, he smiled and motioned her inside. Seated in his office, Sam handed across the wooden box.
Briar opened it and laughed softly. “How much did you pay?” he asked.
“Fifteen dollars,” Sam said.
“Then you have been robbed, my dear,” Briar said.
“But he told me it was a …“
“May have been robbed,” Briar interrupted, turning the box to her and sliding it across the table. “The young man in the picture was very much alive when it was taken. The process took so long that stands were provided for the subjects to stop them from fidgeting.”
Sam bit her lip and bunched up her dress in her hands. Sam felt the tears burning down her cheeks, running through her blush and concealer to drip down on her handbag.
“Do not cry, my dear,” Briar said, reaching into his coat pocket to withdraw a green floral handkerchief.
“Thank you,” Sam said, taking it and dabbing at her eyes.
“An admirable try, my dear,” Briar said. “But you are, and I am not mistaken, running out of time.”
Sam’s face flushed and she looked away from Briar towards the door.
“It is not my usual practice,” Briar said, “but I can lend you some assistance. There is a church on 7th Street. Be there by three this afternoon and you will find you are looking for. It is not a daguerreotype, but it is unique and will suffice.”
“If you know,” Sam asked, leaving the handkerchief on Briar’s desk, next to the small wooden boxes, “why can you not get it yourself?”
“Because they’re not just going to give it to you,” Briar said, “but I don’t think that will be an obstacle to one such as yourself.”
As Sam left, she heard the faint sound of a tears again, another child. Turning around, there was no one but Briar, waving her goodbye and firmly closing the door.
#
It had begun to rain while Sam rode the streetcar to 7th street. She had only two dollars left now, maybe enough for a sandwich and Coke for dinner, after the return fare. If she could return the bag to the safe, she could ask Moskowitz for help – an advance, perhaps. The important thing was not getting caught.
She had to walk five blocks from the streetcar stop to the church, her shoes squelching in the thick mud which soaked through to her socks. The church was easy to find, a long, low building with rough cedar plank walls and a shingle roof, with archways around its portico. Five black cars were parked out front, including a hearse. All the vehicles were hung with black ribbons and garlands, the paper decorations being ruined by the rain. There was a sign by the double doors in English and Greek. The English said “Greek Orthodox Church of San Francisco.”
Inside, the church was gloomy, with light coming in only through tall, narrow windows. There were no pews. A few wooden chairs were lined up by the walls. A black garbed crowd of about twenty people stood around a plain wooden coffin at the front. There were pictures on the walls, but no photographs, just paintings on wooden planks in a style she did not know, everything tall and angular. She knew that some of the pictures had to be of Jesus, because of the prominent crosses. She didn’t remember enough of her Sunday school to fathom the others – grim faced, dark robed figures on dark backgrounds, like the sorrowful men and women here, all clad in black.
In one of the chairs, a young woman in a black headscarf sat wailing, clutching two sad-eyed boys to her. An older man with a gray beard stood beside her, his hands on her shoulders. A man Sam took to be a priest, in a flowing black robe with a long gray beard, a large wooden cross hanging from his neck, stood at the woman’s other shoulder. The other mourners either stood in small groups or gazed at the coffin. A few people sobbed openly, but most were silent.
Off to one side, in an area free of mourners, a clean-shaven man in a white calico suit sat in a chair, looking occasionally at his watch. His expression was serious, but not sad. Next to him was a large tripod with a camera on it. The bulky lens of the camera was facing the open coffin, in which lay a small girl dressed in white.
The sight of the little girl stopped Sam cold, halfway to the group of mourners. The little girl looked radiant, her cheeks pink even in the dim light. She looked like the little girl in Briar’s daguerreotype, only with dark brown hair and in colour.
“Two more minutes, please.” The calico suited man whispered. Sam knew he must be the photographer. He tapped a hand impatiently against his thigh. Sam recognized the gesture – the man needed a cigarette.
Sam stood in the shadows off to the far side of the church, her presence unnoticed by the mourners who were focused either on the mother or on the still form of the girl.
After an almost unbearable wait, the man stood up and slid shut the lens of the camera.
“You can go up now,” the man said, “but please, no touching the camera.” With that he stood up and walked out, passing Sam without noticing her. He was already drawing a pack of Imperials and a silver lighter out of his coat pocket. All the attention of the mourners turned to the coffin. An elderly woman with a cane approached first, kissing a cross at her neck while stroking the little girl’s hair.
Sam walked up behind the mourners, invisible to them in their grief. She examined the camera quickly. A black handle stood out of the side of the main body, attached to a metal plate within. Sam looked behind her. Through the open doors she could see the back of the photographer looking out at the rain while he smoked.
At the front of the church, there were two arched doorways on the left and right. Through one of them she could see gray daylight. Probably an open door, she thought.
She kept herself from looking at the coffin again. She would not be unable to continue if she saw the girl’s face again. Instead she grabbed the handle on the side of the camera and pulled. To her relief, the metal plate had a shutter that clapped shut quietly, meaning she had not ruined the picture. Holding the plate tightly, she strode out the left-hand archway, her back tensed, certain someone would shout an accusation after her. No one stopped her as she left the church and walked out into the rain.
#
Dr. Forrester was a good man. He'd been physician to Sam’s family for twenty years, delivering Sam as well as her younger sister and brother, cured her father of a stomach ulcer, and knocked out a persistent rash on her mother's back for good. When Sam had been bleeding, at four months, when she was the only one who knew, he bundled up what came out of her, placed it in his medical bag, and told her parents she had just had a bout of menorrhagia, not common but something that could happen to young women of nineteen. She never asked, and he never told her, what became of the still form in the white blanket.
If it had been a girl, Sam would have called her Abigail.
Rather than look at Tom Parsons again, or see anyone from her family, she took her savings from her laundry work and took the train passage to San Francisco. Los Angeles was the destination, to try her hand at being ‘discovered’ like Mary Pickford, but the fare to San Francisco was cheaper.
#
It was growing dark by the time Sam returned to Briar’s house, the rain still pouring down, the slim autochrome plate awkward where she tried to conceal it between her side and her handbag. She worried others on the streetcar could smell the pungent, vinegar smell coming off the plate. No one seemed to notice though, the evening commuters absorbed either in staring out the window or browsing their newspapers.
The Bayview street was empty of people, like it had been the previous two times she had visited that day, but there was a dark Buick Six parked in front of Briar’s house. The headlights flicked on as she approached, momentarily blinding her, and the driver side door opened.
“Ah,” she heard Briar say, “you’ve come.” He was dressed in a black coat, with a broad-brimmed black hat.
He walked around to the passenger side door to let her in, taking the Autochrome plate from her. “Perfect, my dear, just perfect. Let us go and recover what you lost.” He placed the plate in the back, next to what Sam recognized as a dozen small daguerreotype boxes.
Sam hesitated a moment before sitting down. She didn’t like what she had done, liked it much less than lifting the pouch of tiny, cut diamonds from Moskowitz’s safe. She didn’t like Briar but figured if he tried anything she could get away from him easily enough. Added to that, she could see no other way out.
“You could have told me it was a little girl’s funeral,” Sam said, looking out the window as Briar pulled away from the curb. She didn’t try to hide the disgust in her words. “Is that the only kind of picture you collect?”
“Not exclusively,” Briar said, pulling away from the curb. “But the shades of children are easier to work with. Less demanding, at first anyway.”
“What do you mean?” Sam asked.
“The dead exist in an in-between place,” Briar said, “they know many things.”
Sam felt stupid, like this had been a confidence trick all along.
“Look,” Sam said, “my landlady reads tea leaves. If I wanted some mumbo-jumbo, I could have just gone to her. Stop the car, please.”
“Did she know you’d stolen from your employer? Could she turn you in to the police?”
“You can’t prove anything,” Sam said. Not the words of an innocent person, but she felt she could drop the lie now.
“I don’t need to, my dear,” Briar said, turning the car onto a side street heading south of the city proper. “I just need to tell them a disturbed young lady came to me, the harmless neighborhood eccentric, and asked me to recover something she had stolen.”
They drove in silence after that, leaving the streetlights behind. The rain stopped as they drove south of San Francisco, paved roads giving way to gravel as they turned off up into the hills, away from the city lights. In the headlights Sam saw stands of redwood trees and long driveways leading off into the dark. After half an hour they pulled off at a high iron gate. There were words chiselled on the stone archway above the gate, but the headlights of the car were at the wrong angle for Sam to read them.
“How do you find things?” Sam asked as Briar got out of the car. “How do you talk to the dead?”
“The photographs,” Briar said, holding onto the doorframe. Sam got out after him. “They form a path to the soul of the deceased, if you will. Not a capturing, but a doorway. You can bring them to you if you know how to knock.”
“How do you ‘knock?’”
“You will see,” Briar said. He paused before the chained padlock that joined the two halves of the gate and closed his eyes. Sam watched him reach out and tap the lock, which popped opened just as if he had turned a key. As he did so, the air suddenly seemed much colder.
“How did you do that?” Sam whispered. Her breath fogged in front of her.
“Sorcery, my dear.”
“I don’t believe in magic.”
“And yet you stole a photo for a man who asked you to, climbed into his car, and accompanied him to a cemetery outside the city to recover something twice stolen.” He leered at her, then pushed the gates open. They squealed on rusty hinges. They drove the car through and Briar got out to close the gate behind them. He drove out of sight of the road into the cemetery, between tombstones so weathered with age Sam could not read their inscriptions in the headlights.
Briar stopped at a small clearing among the stones and turned off the engine, keeping the headlights on. Opening his door, he stepped out, pulling a black bag off the floor in the back.
“Bring the pictures,” Briar said, closing the doors on his side.
Sam reached back and gathered the daguerreotypes and autochrome print, hugging them to her chest as she set foot on the wet grass of the cemetery. Beyond the range of the Buick’s headlights, there was only impenetrable darkness without any breeze. The air was full of the smells of wet, recently turned earth. For the first time since she had come to San Francisco, Sam could not smell the sea.
Briar walked forward ten paces from the car, his shadow splashing across the tombstones at the edge of the clearing. To Sam he seemed to be feeling for something, occasionally holding his hand out to feel a current in the air she could not detect.
Deciding upon a spot, he pulled a large black cloth the size of a picnic blanket out of his bag and spread it on the ground. Standing upon it, he reached into the bag again and drew out a long jar, proceeding to pour a white powder from it in a circle six feet in diameter on the cloth. Before he completed it he motioned to Sam, directing her to step through the unclosed part rather than walk over the white powder. She walked in and stood beside him as he finished forming the circle.
He took the daguerreotype cases and the autochrome print and laid them around the edges of the circle, inside the ring of white powder. Then he kneeled and began to draw strange symbols Sam did not recognize in the powder. To her they looked like Greek or Cyrillic letters, but none she could recall seeing before.
“You asked how we knock, my dear,” Briar said, popping the daguerreotypes out of their glass casings and placing the silver plates carefully, almost lovingly, on the black cloth. “The same way Ulysses called up the shade of Achilles from the underworld. With blood, my dear.”
In a swift motion Briar grasped Sam’s wrist and drew a long, curved knife across it, one she had not seen in his hand a moment before. Sam screamed and tried to pull herself away. Briar held her tightly, dripping the blood flowing from her wrist to spatter onto the silver plates. Sam kept struggling, hitting her free hand around Briar’s head and shoulders.
“Stop! Stop!” Sam shouted, tears in her eyes from the stinging pain. Briar’s grip was like iron, and he was squeezing her bleeding forearm like he was milking a cow. While he directed the flow of Sam’s blood, he spoke words in a language Sam did not recognize, in a rhythm almost like the creed’s she had recited as a little girl at the Akron Episcopal church with her grandmother. The air grew colder again. Sam broke away and turned to run out of the circle
“Stop, you fool,” Briar hissed, grabbing her by her upper arm. “Do not stray outside the circle. Break it and we are done for.”
Briar released her arm and mechanically handed her a white handkerchief. Sam pressed it to her arm, biting her lip as the pressure made the pain double. Though her heart was pounding and her legs were tensed, she did not run. She could not say where the feeling came from, but she knew with a deep certainty that they were not the only ones in the cemetery in the damp night.
From between the tombstones, just beyond the light of the headlights, faint gray shapes began to form in the darkness. At first they were as faint as the impression left behind by a bright flash on eyes used to the dark, but as Sam watched they grew in brightness and definition. The light that came from them seemed cold, as if coming from a very far away place.
They were children, boys and girls, the ones whose faces were on the now blood bespattered silver plates. They walked towards the circle and stood at its very edge, looking inside at Briar and Sam. Sam had to stifle a scream when she saw the little girl from the Orthodox funeral.
“Can they see us?” Sam whispered. She felt the little girl’s eyes on her, accusingly.
“Yes,” Briar said, his face rigid with concentration. “And they can hear us too. Say nothing and make no sudden movements.”
The children were beautiful, seemingly made not of flesh but of blue-gray light which shone from within them. The light did not touch the ground, however, nor did it cast shadows on the surrounding tombstones.
Between blinks, the faces of the children changed from angelic to demonic. The whites of their eyes disappeared, replaced by a black even deeper than the night that surrounded them. Teeth bared, their fingers stretched out like claws, they beat at the air on the edge of the circle, unable to cross it. Sam clapped her hands over her ears to block out their shrieks.
Briar raised his hand and spoke a word, and the blue-gray forms cowered away as if a wall of flame had enveloped the chalk circle. They stopped shrieking, crouching down like dogs getting ready to pounce. Sam took her hands off her ears.
“Do yourself a favor,” Briar said softly, smiling grimly at Sam’s fear, “do not ever die. I have heard nothing positive about the other side.”
“What are they?” Sam asked.
“The spirits of the departed,” Briar said, “recalled to life by your blood and the photographs of their dead remains.”
“What do they want?”
“To go back where they came from, but I will only let them go once they’ve done what I want.”
With that he raised both his arms, and the spirits of the dead children look up at him.
“Find this woman’s lost possession,” Briar said, “find it and bring it to us. With that you may depart.”
In a blink they were gone, and Sam and Briar stood alone inside the circle, the headlights of the car casting gigantic shadows before them.
#
Royce tipped back the glass of yellow-red shaojiu and set it down on the red tablecloth. The Chinese liquor burned his throat pleasantly, almost like a good whiskey. The warmth spread through his belly and out into his limbs. Royce was glad of the drink – the warehouse was unheated. “Damn fine,” he said to the young Chinese man sitting across from him, “damn, damn fine.”
The man, Xiping Hu, smiled a small smile. He held his own glass out to one of the three men standing behind him, who took it away. Royce could not tell Chinese apart – maybe the one who took the glass had been the one who had let him into the side door of the warehouse.
“The pleasantries out of the way,” Hu began, the first words he had spoken since Royce was led into this table among the wooden crates, “you have the diamonds?”
“Got ‘em right here,” Royce said, smiling broadly, reaching a hand down into the brown valise at his feet. He frowned when his hands closed on empty air. Hu’s face became like a stone as Royce tried to hide his panic as he clawed around in the valise. The small black bag was not there.
Royce tried to think – the valise had been shut since he left the hotel room. He knew he had placed them there; he could remember feeling the hard chips of diamond through the thin velvet as he shoved it into the leather case. That ditzy girl Sam had not had a chance to filch them – she’d handed them off to him on Friday night, smiling goofily as he kissed her, and he had checked and double checked they were there. Where could they be?
“There is a problem?” Hu asked. His voice was harder now, harder than it had ever been when Royce had spoken to him first, proposed this deal – a thousand dollars for a bag of cut diamonds. The two men behind him – boxers, by their build, Royce would have said – stood closer to him, one of them blocking his route to the door.
“No problem,” Royce said, “no problem, no problem …”
The man to his right circled around behind Royce and clamped a powerful hand on his right shoulder. Royce heard the flick of a blade being snapped out and felt cold steel at his Adam’s apple.
“Oh yes,” Hu said, sitting very still, “I think there very much is.”
#
“Look there,” Briar said, pointing at the edge of the circle in front of them. Nearly invisible in the grass, was the velvet bag of diamonds that Sam had taken from Moskowitz’s safe on Friday night. The spirits had returned, standing far back from the circle, and looked at them expectantly.
“Oh, thank God,” Sam said, kneeling down to reach carefully towards it.
“There is one last price to be paid, my dear,” Briar said behind her as Sam’s fingers touched the white drawstring.
“What do you mean?” Sam asked as she stood up, the diamonds in her hand. Then she felt Briar’s hand grab the diamonds away and push her forward. She stumbled out of the circle and fell amidst the ghost children.
“Compensation,” Briar shouted as she rolled over onto her back, “the spirits do not like to be summoned, and always seek to take their revenge. Every now and then one has to let them have it. They are not discriminating though.”
The spirits were upon her then. Their fingers, colder than ice, grabbed at Sam’s hair, at her feet, at her dress. Everywhere they touched her flesh Sam felt as if she had been burned. Briar stood over her, silhouetted in the car’s headlights, laughing. The laughter was soon drowned out by Sam’s screams.
With a titanic effort, Sam flung herself forward. Her legs and arms felt numb where the ghosts had touched her, but she pulled herself back to the edge of the circle. Briar dropped the bag and grabbed up the knife, seeing what she was about to do.
As she reached over the edge of the circle Briar brought the knife down, stabbing through her right hand into the dirt below. Sam nearly passed out at the pain but gritting her teeth she swept her left through the salt circle, breaking it and erasing the words Briar had written there. Only some of the ghostly hands left her, but those that did flew upon Briar. The old man screamed, tearing at himself, trying to mouth incantations to drive the spectres away.
With cold hands still sapping her strength, Sam reached for the autochrome print and ripped the metal cover off, rubbing the black and coloured dots inside into the grass. As she did so she felt one of the sets of hands leave her. It was difficult to get the other plates with her right hand useless and Briar rolling and kicking, trying to drive the ghosts off of him, but she managed to get each plate, turn it over, and rub it on the grass, erasing the delicate patinas from their silver surfaces. As each one was erased, its ghost faded.
When they were all gone Sam sat up, cradling her wounded hand to her chest. Briar’s still form lay sprawled in the headlights. She stood up with difficulty and walked over to him. There was no body, just a fine gray-yellow dust filling his clothes, already starting to scatter in the rising breeze off the sea.
In the grass by what had been Briar’s right hand, Sam found the bag of diamonds, covered in the fine dust of Briar’s corpse. She rubbed the bag in the wet grass bag and walked towards the car, wincing as she slid behind the wheel.
Starting the engine, she drove up to the gate, opened it, and drove through, not bothering to close it. The man’s suit and yellow dust, with the black tarp and tarnished silver plates, would be a mystery for the groundskeeper in the morning. Driving slowly, her bleeding right hand in her lap, she could be back in the city in an hour. Dawn was three more hours away. She thought of trying to get to a hospital, but she wanted the diamonds back in the safe as soon as she could. She would park outside of Moskowitz’s shop and wait for him to come in, and she would confess to him almost everything – about Royce’s seduction, about taking the diamonds, then say she had an attack of conscience and brought them back, narrowly escaping from Royce who tried to kill her. Then she would beg for his mercy, ask him to take the diamonds back and not say anything, promising to vanish from his life forever. Then she would try to forget about this night.