Free Darkroom by Graham Masterton Page A

some places it was burned almost down to the skin. She was shivering, almost imperceptibly, as though suffering from a chill.
    â€˜Hey, TT … How are you feeling, baby?’ As bedraggled as she was, Tibbles didn’t seem to be listening to him and she didn’t deign to look at him either. She continued to stare at the painting over the fireplace, and when Jim came closer he could hear her soft, harsh, strangulated breathing.
    Jim glanced up at the painting. The man was still standing in front of the mirror with his black cloth draped over his head. Not that Jim seriously expected him to be doing anything else.
    â€˜Listen, Tibbles. It’s only a picture. Paint and canvas, that’s all. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to take it down, right now, and put it out in the corridor. Then tomorrow morning I’m going to put it in the car and take it along to the auctioneers to have it valued. And sold. Then it’ll be gone, OK, and it’ll be somebody else’s problem.’
    Tibbles still didn’t move, or even acknowledge that he was there. Jim made no more attempts to pick her up. She had been in weird moods before, particularly after he had boarded her at the Paws-a-While cattery in Anaheim, and he had learned to keep his distance when she was feeling resentful or out of sorts. Once – when he was first dating Karen – he had left Tibbles alone in his apartment for two days, and as soon as he had opened the front door she had sprung up at him like a jack-in-the-box and furiously scratched his cheek. All the rest of the staff at West Grove had assumed that Karen had done it, and he had been forced to endure days of winks and nudges and ‘got too fresh, did you, Jim?’
    Grunting, he dragged the throne-like armchair across the hearthrug, and pushed it as close to the fireplace as he could manage. He climbed up on it, his shoes sinking into the threadbare cushions. ‘Look, TT, I’m taking the picture down, OK?’
    It was easier said than done. The painting was titanically heavy, and he struggled for three or four minutes just to lift it off its hook. ‘Come on, you bastard,’ he grunted, but the wire kept catching, and in the end he had to go through to the dining room and fetch a chair that was higher, with a harder seat. Tibbles watched him with half-closed eyes, as if he were the local retard.
    At last, his teeth clenched, straining every muscle in his arms, he lifted the painting off the wall and lowered it down to the floor.
    â€˜There,’ he panted, and he had to lean against the side of the fireplace to get his breath back. When he looked up, he saw that the painting had left a large unfaded square on the wallpaper where it had been hanging for so long. The pattern had been surprisingly bright and jazzy. He could almost hear the Charleston, and the chatter of bright young things.
    The back of the picture-frame was woolly with dust, and there was a deeply discolored label on it, with italic handwriting in brown ink.
Mr Robert H. Vane, Daguerrotypist, September 17, 1853. In mourning, after the occasion of the Dagueno Tragedy
.
    Jim cocked his head so that he could look at the painting more closely. Daguerrotypist, huh? He knew that daguerrotypes were an early kind of photographic plate, in the days before film had been invented. Several famous daguerrotypists had roamed California in the middle of the nineteenth century, taking pictures of mountains and valleys and Indian tribes.
    But who was Mr Robert H. Vane, and what was the Dagueno Tragedy? And why had he chosen such a bizarre way to display his grief, with a black cloth draped over his head?
    Tibbles let out a high, sharp wheeze, more like a cough than a miaow. She was still shivering, so Jim went through to the big gloomy bedroom, opened the immense mahogany blanket press and found her a blanket. It was thick and prickly and it faintly smelled like some kind of horse