“
I was alone, Evan, you know that. There was no one out there with us.”
“
But the camera saw her! She’s on the plate! This is not a smudge in the way; it’s not bad light. You can see her skin through a hole in the dress she’s wearing!” he was becoming frightened again as he imagined the thing he saw in Shelly’s photograph. “You can see her limp, dirty hair! She is as solid as I am.”
Evan did not even want to look at the building. His grip on her hand actually hurt but she did not make him let go. She needed to see it for herself and she did not know how to tell him, so they waited a while longer. She had to pee so bad it hurt, and when he finally let go, he refused to go back into the shop with her. She could not hear those words from him. Not from Evan.
“
But I’m about to wet my jeans, Evan. I have to get back in, and we need your camera. We can’t leave here without it. Your tribe will kill you, it will start a bloody feud, and we have more clubs than your bunch. Do you want to be the death of the Bryant clan because we’ve been screwing each other more than your lot?” Shelly was hoping to make him laugh and perhaps calm her own mood. The dead were visible in the Reisman Portraits now, and she had to go back in there, either that or pee in the alley.
“
I’d piss on the wall before I went back in there. I’m sorry Shelly. I’ve got no guts for that again.” He had crossed another invisible line with her. Two very bad accidents in the same day, it caused her a sudden pain near her heart.
“
Then stay here you wuss. I’m going to go uncover my ass without you, and rescue your precious toy!”
And she ran to the building before he could grab her hand and make her ruin her jeans for the day. She was already crying before she reached the front door to rush inside. He was outside - her Evan was staying outside; she did not know what to do, to make him brave enough to come back in with her.
Her life depended on bravery he could not show.
Half an hour later, she was mad as hell at him, walking back to the car with the Bryant in her hands. She waited and cried, hoping he would find a reason to come back. But he was on the curb, where he lost his lunch in the gutter.
She was gentle with him because of that.
“
You are some protection you wimp!” She kicked his butt playfully. “Weren’t you the least bit concerned what might be ripping my ribcage apart in there?” as she sat down next to him.
She wanted him to notice she had cried.
“
Yes, and that’s why I puked trying to go back in.”
Evan did not like being frightened at all and she fell terrible for him. She spent her life looking for ghosts in her building, she loved being frightened by them, but he was different and she sat there next to him, to explain what she was feeling. She explained why she had taken so long.
“
It’s her, Evan. In the plate with me?” She took his hand and kissed it. He was still shaking a bit and was trying to hide it. “It’s the girl who died with Yousep, upstairs.”
A moan escaped his lips, and he looked over her shoulder back at the silent building.
“
I’ve never been afraid in there before,” she said, “That’s why I wanted to see the image. I believed you, but this is my heritage, my history. I couldn’t refuse even a terror from my family’s past! I wanted to hold the plate and feel how real that horror had been.”
She put her arms around him and began to kiss his cheek and try to help him understand she was okay.
“
I was never afraid until today, and I’m all-right with that. What I believed is very real and it scares the shit out of me too. But, there is nothing in there which will hurt me; do you believe that with me?”
“
I don’t think I can go back in there with you!” He hung his head, ashamed. “This is not just a story people tell to work up their kids. This isn’t a parlor trick to make people laugh.”
“
I know that, Evan. I’ve never felt anything scare me like that plate does, but it can’t keep me out of there. It never has.”
“
But, it might be very dangerous Shelly!” He pleaded with her. “That is a real thing! I don’t think you know what it can do.”
“
Are you telling me you won’t ever go back in there with me again, Evan. Are you saying you can’t walk into the building?”
It was distressing her to say such things, but it was exactly what he wanted to hear. That they would never go back; that he could try to forget the day he took a photo of something that was not there to see in the daylight. He wanted her to leave the building forever. He was on the safe side of that invisible line of hers, but it was the most important line she made and he knew what she was about to say - it was like thunder after the lightening.
“
Then don’t make yourself come back.”
And those whispered words hurt his ears worse than if she screamed them at him in a rage.
She rose and walked back to the Reisman Portraits. He watched her walk and noticed the wetness in the back of her jeans. She was scared of the image enough to wet herself, even after her desperate trip into the toilet. That plate could really do some harm and he dreaded it. Shelly Reisman was swallowed into the front of the building and he heard screams of anger she had been too kind to throw at him. She gave them to the ghosts instead, because it was their fault she was alone with them again.
The weekend plans were dashed. Evan knew he was a creep, a pig, a
haser
, as her family would surely call him. He sat on the curb next to his car until the sun was burning his neck. He sat there for hours and she had not left either. The window and door were too well papered up; she would have no hole to peer through to see him still waiting, without the courage to enter on his own legs. She would have to look out the door and he knew she had not. He was so ashamed of himself. If she found the courage to be in there, he would find some too, and it took nearly all of it to stand and approach the door again. Whatever still held her heart, the Reisman Portraits was not drawing him at all. It was threatening to him. It was repulsing him. It was pushing Evan while she was being held by it. He could feel the building preventing him as he touched the door and opened it to walk into the gloom.
The stillness hurt his ears. He could hear his own heart beating and feel the rush of blood inside his head. He gently called her name and hoped she would peer to see him from the studio in the back. But she did not answer. He walked back through the displays and passed the empty darkroom closet. The candle still burned, it was nearly to the nub, but he did not go near it. The plate was still there; he would not look at it again. Not even for Shelly. But she still did not answer. The studio was the brightest room and ahead of him, and he hoped with all his heart she was there and just mad enough to curse him and shove him out. Again, he called her name. His heart beating within his own ears answered him. Shelly was not in the studio. Shelly was not in the front. He stood, and listened, because he knew if he held his breath, he would hear where she was, and he was correct, and his limbs went numb as he stood in the studio - and looked to the ceiling.
Shelly was there, in the attic, in the storeroom and he could hear her sobs from where he stood. They were faint, as if the strength to make them were nearly gone. They were not sobs of fright, or anger. They were sobs of grief and they were dying away to whispers. Evan lost his fear enough to rush to the stairs. But he was too hasty to see Shelly at the window of the rear door, outside on the porch. She was too slow to call out to him before he ran upstairs where someone was crying. She had not heard a thing but saw his face. She instantly knew, he made a terrible mistake and he did not know it.
Evan Bryant burst the upstairs door, not to frighten Shelly, but to hurry to her side. But mere steps from the attic door she sobbed for him again and he could tell she was in anguish, near to faint from the sorrow in her failing breath, but as the door moved, and the dust blew aside from his rush, there was no other living person in the attic of the Reisman Portraits. Evan had been baited, and he hurried inside the empty room. He could not move as the door closed behind him, whether swinging back from his rush, or from its satisfaction of having him again, he could not guess. His mind was twisting in darkness he could not avoid.
Shelly found him in the room, but he was not waiting; the shelves were around him and he was twisted as if he had fallen in a struggle and fell with a force. And near his damaged brow lay a jar, which was the heaviest in the storeroom. Her terror at his pose spun her completely in the room and she backed herself into the corner, sobbing that he not be dead. She wept as she screamed at him to be but harmed, she pushed herself into the corner as far as she could go and stepped with her bare feet into a newly wet stain on the floor, but she had not lost her water there. It was not Shelly who soiled the spot where she stood and cried, wanting Evan to be alive. Shelly was reduced to whimpers when she fell to the floor.
The Reisman Portraits watched the street empty in the front as evening came, sending a soft, honey glow into the studio in the back. It waited until the streetlight in the front, on the walk, came alive, filling the shop with the sepia color Evan desired to capture with his Bryant Waterbury. When the sepia tones matched the oldest images on the walls, faces dead now more than seventy years, the building made sounds it waited until the darkness to make. The screams in the attic echoed into the street, and a couple walking by were shaken and made to run across to the other side. The woman clutched at her husband, hearing a second scream that made her hide behind him.
“
911 services, what is the nature of your emergency?”
“
We need police on Eldridge near Broome, Lower east side. Yes, Reisman Portraits building. We’ve heard screams. They should hurry.”
Another wail pierced the walls of the building, and lasted in full breath until the couple on the street ran in fear and the approaching police sirens could be heard as the scream died away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Shelly sat near the bed Evan had been sleeping in for six hours. She had not moved, and his family was furious with the hospital staff she was even allowed in there with him.
“
How do the police know she wasn’t the one who bashed him you idiot!” his mother yelled at the doctor in the corridor. “I don’t care if they want her to stay here for questioning! I want that bitch out of that room now!”
But the officer at the end of the corridor decided he had enough worry with the assault to have to deal with upset relatives. He grabbed Evan’s mother’s arm, and told her to shut up the yelling or he was going to take her down stairs himself. She was as welcome as anyone was, until she started acting like that, he did not care who she was.
Shelly cried until she could not anymore, and Evan had not made a sound to her since puking on the curb that afternoon. His clan was not the only loud family gathering to find out what the hell happened to their kids in that building.
Shelly had cringed in the dusty corner of that attic, in the stench of old urine, and heard whispers, sobs, and shuffling around her until she was nearly mad from it. As the room darkened, the noises grew, until they surrounded her in the corner, and she was backed into it as far as she could get. Evan only moved once the entire time; it did not look like he could have made the movement, his foot moved as if shoved and then his leg moved, not the other way around. She could barely tell he was breathing.
When the door opened in front of her, and no one was there, she began screaming and it was a good thing she did; Evan would have died before morning. His brain was swelling and the front of his brow had been cracked. Nearly fifteen pounds of heavy glass jar, filled with silver nitrate, battered him unconscious. It was the only thing nearby, in the clutter of the shelves, which could have done such damage.
The paramedics took him down by hand; the stair was too narrow to allow the gurney. The police allowed Shelly to accompany him, she was in shock, and, even if she had tried to kill him, she was too addled to run off. Plus, she clearly loved him; you do not act that way over people you’ve just tried to kill with big heavy jars. She was only asked to show her driver’s license, and it satisfied them she had every right to be in the old building, and to bash anyone else who should not be there in the dark. The police were hoping it was an awful accident, and it was not a lover’s spat, and the kid would not die.
Evan needed medical help hours before he got it. She was still so terrified, she started screaming again, even with the police and all the flashlights. She was spooked like they had never seen. So, Shelly was allowed to sit in the room with Evan Bryant, and so could his mother if she would just shut up the yelling.
Surgeons were preparing to relieve the pressure in his skull if he did not show better response to the medicines they had given him. He was so heavily sedated, he would not be moving if Shelly wanted him to anyway. So she sat there and wished the day had not happened at all; he warned her, the ghosts in the Reisman Portraits might not want to be friendly.
She had agreed with him, while she stood on the back porch that afternoon. She only needed to peek around the corner of the alley and she could see, afraid as he was, he had not left. It meant a lot to her, she opened a door so he could run away, and he stayed put. It would take some powerful stuff to damage their feelings for each other, if this shit had not done it. Shelly was thankful her meddling aunt introduced them. He was worth any trouble he might cause by accident, and she was going to stay by his bed, until the doctor told her to leave. They did not seem to care she was there.