Niceville

a ragged line, watching the work.
    He tried to get the image to focus, straining his eyes, stepped forward—
    “Nick, honest, don’t touch it.”
    “I’m just going to—”
    He heard a sound, a low hissing growl that sent a chilly ripple up the back of his neck. At that moment, the field of light flickered, jumped, and changed. Instead of a tree line and a farm field, and workers digging at trenches of some kind, the scene had changed completely, and now he was looking at an upside-down image of a row of slate roofs, big old houses, spreading live oaks with drooping strands of Spanish moss, rolling lawns, and closer in, a wrought-iron fence, a gate, a red and black Jeep with a dark figure beside it—
    Nick turned his back on the light wall, and walked across the basement towards a blacker patch high up on the far wall. As he walked, his shadow grew larger on the image, until it blotted it out completely. Nick held his hand up and saw, on his flat palm, a small disk of shimmering light.
    He moved his palm forward toward the dark patch until the disk shrank to the size of a quarter.
    Now the basement behind him was in total darkness. He looked at the dark patch and saw a tiny circle of light in the middle of it.
    He reached out, felt some kind of heavy cloth, and in the middle of the cloth, a small hole, perhaps a rip, about an inch in diameter.
    He stepped back, shaking his head, and started to laugh.
    “What is it?” asked Beau, as Nick’s black shadow receded and some of the color field came back on the wall. Nick reached up and tugged the shade open, and the image on the wall disappeared in a wash of bright sunlight streaming in through a basement window.
    Then he drew the shade closed again, and the glowing image on the far wall reappeared, although, Nick realized, not at all like the image he had first seen, that strange unreal scene of a green tree line, and workers in a farm field, a tractor towing a sled of small pale round objects that could have been white stones.
    Or skulls
, the thought came, but he said nothing. Instead he looked at Beau.
    “Ever hear of a camera obscura, Beau?”
    “Yeah, I think so. Isn’t it like a pinhole camera? We studied them in school, made ’em out of shoe boxes.”
    “Yeah. That’s what this room is right now.”
    He turned, pointing to the field of light.
    “I guess the light’s about right for this effect. There’s a small hole in this black shade here. When it’s closed, the sun comes in through the hole in a narrow beam, just like in a pinhole camera. What you’re looking at there is an upside-down picture of the street out front. There’s the Armed Response Jeep, that figure is Dale Jonquil standing next to it, those are the gates, the fence, and the houses and the lawns across the street.”
    Beau stared at it, frowning, and then got it, in that abrupt and startling way that an optical illusion will suddenly reveal itself. He stepped up to the wall, reached out, and felt cold stone under his fingertips.
    “Damn, Nick. Scared the living—”
    “Me too. First time I ever saw something like this, I was a kid, helping some friends move. We rented a stake truck, with a tarp over it. There was no room in the cab so I rode in the back, under the tarp. I had my back up against the side boards—it was pitch dark—and I realized that there was something flickering on the far side of the truck. There was a small hole in one of the boards, and the daylight was coming through it. Took me a minute or two to figure out I was looking at an image of the streets and cars going by, only upside down. A camera obscura. That’s what this room is.”
    “You figure Miss Cotton set it up like this?”
    “Don’t know. Looks like it was just some sort of freaky accident …” he said, his voice trailing off as he tried to deal with the effect that first image had had on him, the image of the farmer’s field and the people working in the earth, the image that had abruptly changed into a reflection of the street outside Delia Cotton’s mansion.
    A ghostly farm, strange twisted trees in a weird golden light, human skulls heaped on a cart, workers—or slaves—digging up … digging up what?
    Coffins?
    “Beau, did you get this on the camera?”
    “I think so,” said Beau, reaching out, finding a switch, and turning the light on, a large electric bulb hanging from a wire in the middle of the basement. The dark shadows leaped away into the corners and the image on