Behind the Drain

I had been here before.

It was the red light that did it. I had stood in it once, at seven, with a paper bag of lemon drops in one fist and my other hand in my grandmother's coat pocket, and asked, Grandma, why is it red?

So the pictures don't wake up, she had said.

The door under the lamp had a bell on a spring, and a man inside who smelled of peppermint had looked up from a counter and said, Mrs. Ostrander. The usual? I had forgotten all of it, until a man held a red light up at me in the dark and it came pouring back like water out of a stone.

…

"Well?" said Voss.

He had not moved from behind the chair. The alley was silent except for the dull far thudding of fists on steel, and the sound was growing fainter, as though the men behind the gate were giving up, or the gate were thicker than anyone had guessed. I looked at the sign. I looked at the building under it: a squat brick back with a loading door at street level, a rolling shutter of corrugated steel, painted green and furred with rust, pulled down to the ground. Beside it, a smaller door. Beside that, a drain.

"That's the place," I said.

"Is it?"

"I came here when I was seven. With Grandma. For my passport photo." I swallowed. "I'd never have remembered. But the sign. And the red."

"And?"

"And there was a room."

Rhonda made a small sound beside me, a kind of gasp. I felt her sleeve shiver. And Voss, behind the chair, lifted his chin.

"A room," he said.

"At the back. Behind a curtain. A red one. Heavy, like in a theater." I could see it: a thick maroon velvet curtain, gone bald at the edges, hanging in a doorway behind the counter with a sign pinned to it in faded ink. STAFF ONLY. "I wasn't supposed to go in. I ducked under it. I was seven, I wanted to see what was in there. It was dark, and it smelled like pennies and vinegar, and the floor was wet. There was a drain. A long gutter in the middle, with a grating."

"A darkroom," said Voss softly.

"At the end of the drain there was a door."

I closed my eyes. It was the first time I'd let myself, in all that terrible night. I closed them because the picture was clearer that way. A little iron door at floor level, set into the wall, no higher than a child's waist. Black and heavy. Flaking with rust. A lock on it as big as my fist.

"I put my hand on it," I said. "Grandma pulled me back."

"Pulled you."

"She grabbed my wrist. Her fingers were ice. She'd never done that." I opened my eyes. "She said, Children can't go in there. Or they'll get lost."

…

Not lost, I thought. Hidden. It's where you go to be hidden.

"The shop," said Voss. "Show me the door."

I lifted my hand and pointed at the green rolling shutter.

Rhonda breathed out.

It was a very small breath, but I heard it. I heard her shoulders drop an inch. She had been holding herself like a drawn bow, and now, with a faint soft rush of air, as if she'd been punched in the stomach, she let go. Her hand came out of her sleeve. In it, glinting in the red glow, lay the folded brass key.

"Here," she said. "I told you there's a hidden door. I told you she'd know it. It's in the back, Mr. Voss. You'll see. It's a little one, under the—"

She stopped.

I looked at her.

…

She stood with her mouth half open. She had just heard what she said. She had said under the, and then stopped, because she did not know what came next. She had never been inside. She was not Voss's partner. She was his canary, something he sent down the mine to see if the air was bad.

"Under the what?" said Voss.

"I— Under the— I don't—"

"Rhonda."

"I'm sorry. I only meant—"

"Open the door," said Voss.

…

She did it with shaking hands.

I watched her kneel at the foot of the green shutter, a thin dark figure bent double in the red light, fumbling at a padlock the size of a paperback. The key went into it on the third try. She turned. It clicked. She seized the bottom rail of the shutter and heaved it up, hand over hand, in a scream of rusty rollers, and it rose in a long ribbed wave and vanished into the dark above, and a breath of air came out of the shop.

It was cold. It was thick with mold. It had the smell of a place that has been shut up for a very long time, damp paper, stale paste, the sweet rotten smell of dead mice, and under it, sharp and sour and tickling the back of the nose, the smell of vinegar and pennies.

My heart turned over.

I know that smell.

Rhonda fumbled a phone from her coat. Its light came on, a hard white circle that flashed across the floor and the wall, and she held it out in front of her like a candle in a crypt.

"Off," said Voss.

It was a bark. It was the first time I had heard his voice rise. The word cracked across the alley like a whip, and Rhonda jerked as if she'd been struck. The phone went dark in her hand. She stood trembling in the doorway, clutching it to her chest.

"No white light," said Voss. "Not in there. Not tonight." He drew a long breath, and I heard him master it. "The red will do."

…

I looked at him.

I looked at him quite carefully. It seemed to me that I had been doing that all night, looking at the corners of people, at the places where the face failed to match the voice. And now I saw something I hadn't seen before. A tiny movement, very small. His hand had gone to his pocket. It had come out holding a handkerchief, a plain white one, folded in four, and he'd put it to his mouth and nose. Not as a man does who is going to sneeze. As a man does who is afraid of a smell.

He doesn't like the dust.

He doesn't like the dark. He doesn't like the white light. He wants the red.

"The darkroom can't have white light," I said.

The words surprised me. They came out of my mouth in a clear, light, childish tone. "Grandma said. She said that what's inside spoils. If you let it see the light, it goes bad. It goes all black." I let my voice drop. "She told me the man at the counter used to say it. It's the light that kills them."

He had turned and was staring at me.

"You remember well," said Voss.

"I remember everything."

"Yes." The pale eyes went over my face. "I'd say you do."

He's afraid of the light, I thought. Of being seen. A man who has lived his life in the margins of pictures can't bear to be developed.

I put it away in a corner of my head. I did not know yet how much I'd need it.

…

They put my mother in front.

I don't mean they carried her. Voss untied her himself, with a small knife, and drew her to her feet by the elbow, and she stood swaying, gray-faced, with her arms hanging, one hand rubbing the other wrist. The right side of her body seemed dead. She held her shoulder at a stiff angle, the way you hold a bad arm, and when he guided her into the shop she walked with a heavy dragging step and did not look at me.

She did not have to. I could feel her.

Rhonda went after, with a battery lantern that Voss had given her, a squat square thing with a red filter taped over the glass. I came after Rhonda. And last of all came Voss, with the camera hugged against his belly and his handkerchief at his face. Behind us the great shutter hung half raised, a black mouth, and in the distance, in the street I had left, a man went on hammering and hammering at a gate that would not open.

Dunleavy, I thought.

Hurry.

The shop was a long low room with a scarred oak counter and a brass bell. Rows of tiny framed faces gone yellow, brides, babies, soldiers, stared out of the dark like fish through glass.

At the back, behind the counter, hung a curtain.

It was maroon velvet. It was balder than I remembered. A smudged paper sign was pinned across it, in a hand I knew.

STAFF ONLY.

Rhonda drew it aside.

The darkroom was beyond.

…

It was smaller than I remembered.

It was a plain brick closet, perhaps ten feet by twelve, with a low ceiling and a wet floor. Rhonda's red lantern showed me the rest: a row of plastic trays on a bench, cracked and yellowed, each with a dried black crust at the bottom like the scum in a pond. A tangle of rubber tubing. A rusted enlarger, hunched like a praying mantis. A row of plastic tubs, split along the seams, with a black liquid dried in them to a cracked tar. On the wall above the bench, a notice, curling: DO NOT OPEN DOOR WHEN LIGHT IS ON.

And across the middle of the floor ran the drain.

I remembered it as a canyon. I'd been seven, and it had seemed to me a river of iron. It was a shallow gutter no wider than my foot, with a grating of rusted bars, running down the length of the room to the far wall. At the end of it, where the floor met the brick, I saw a small door.

It was a foot and a half high, at the very bottom of the wall. It was black. It was iron. It was rusted nearly red, and a thick old padlock hung from a hasp on its face, as big as a man's fist.

I took a step toward it, and the world went quiet.

"Is that it?" said Voss.

"That's it."

"Show me how it opens."

…

Rhonda tried the keys first.

She had a ring of keys, and she tried them one after another, her breath hissing behind the mask. The first would not enter. The second would not turn. The third jammed, and a fourth dropped into the drain with a ting.

"Did your grandmother ever give you a key?" said Voss.

"No," I said.

"Not one?"

"She never gave me anything."

"She only came here once," my mother said. Her voice was a dry husk. "As a child. Leave her alone."

Voss's hand went out to her throat as casually as a man reaches for a salt cellar.

"It doesn't open like that," I said.

His fingers stopped.

…

I knelt.

I didn't decide to. My knees were wet and my hands were already on the floor, crawling to the little black door, and I put my face down close to it, as I had at seven, and looked. Not at the lock. At the foot of the door, where the iron met the floor. There was a seam there, a thin dark crack, packed with a gray crumbling stuff like old putty. Cement. Somebody had poured it, long ago, in a wet line along the sill, and it had hardened.

I remembered my grandmother's shoe.

She had stood in the red light with her fingers locked on my wrist. And while she held me, almost without looking, she had put out the toe of her sensible shoe and scraped it along the sill, hard, once, at that exact spot.

She was not locking me out, I thought. She was checking it was still there.

I dug.

I dug with my nails, because I had nothing else. The cement came away in dry gray flakes. It was harder than it looked. A nail bent back. Another split to the quick, and a white shock of pain went up my arm, but I kept on, and Rhonda stared and Voss said nothing and my mother's breath came fast through her nose. A sliver of cement gave. Underneath it, in a hollow the size of a thumb, a bit of metal shone. A thin hooked end of iron wire.

I drew it out. It was a pick, ten inches long, black with age, bent at the tip.

I did not know how to pick a lock. I had never done it in my life. But I remembered something, a muffled thud from the other side of a door, the sound of an old woman's weight against a latch. She didn't use a key. She never had one. She had slid this wire through the shackle, and pressed down, and pushed a catch on the inside.

I put the wire in. I felt for the catch.

It moved.

The padlock fell open in my hand with a small dry click.

…

I should have stopped there. I think I know that now.

But I was holding the lock, and the door was before me, black and small, an inch ajar on its hinges, and a breath of cold air had begun to leak from the crack. Cold, and dry, and smelling of nothing, the clean sealed cold of a place where no one has breathed in years. Voss bent behind me, a big shadow with the handkerchief at his mouth. "Go on," he said, in a hush of anticipation. "Open it."

I put my fingers to the door.

And I saw it.

It was a very small thing. In the red light of the lantern, along the edge of the frame, where the door met the jamb, a hair of brightness shone. A line of clear thread, thin as a spider's silk, ran from a staple in the iron to a nail in the brick. It was taut. It glinted once as the lamp shook, and went out.

Fishing line.

If I pushed, it would snap. And I knew, in my belly, as I had known about the van, that there was something at the other end of it, something that waited patiently in the dark for the tug.

She hid it twice, I thought. The first lock is for thieves. The second is for the people who think they're clever.

This is the road. It isn't the place.

I took my hand off the door.

I did not look at Voss. I lifted my eyes instead, past the tarry trays and the praying enlarger, to the wall above the bench, where a row of little rusted spring-clips hung along an iron bar. Film hangers. Dozens of them, in a line, with a loop of cord trailing from the end. They had been drying negatives here, once.

"Not this door," I said.