The Vorrh

blame and distrust glinted against him. The elder helped the old woman and the medium leave the room, turning his stiff back on the upstart who had contaminated their tabernacle with his past lives and his bewilderment of irritant equipment.
    When all had left, the photographer stood adrift in the empty room, unable to make sense out of all that had occurred. There was no meaning in any of it, and he felt foolish and mistaken. God knows what he would find on his glass negative. He suspected there would be nothing but blurs and shadows, and that his cynicism would be justified.
    In the red cave of his private darkroom, blood-warm fluids made his hands puffy and succulent. He peered into the night trays and saw patches of light rise up against the settling blacks. He moved them to a fixing tray and rocked them to and fro, simmering them into permanence.
    He turned on the light to view the first picture. The image showed the whole group leaning towards the medium, whose out-of-focus head and body had been moving during the exposures. Her edges were undefined in relation to the sharp, delineated forms of the others in the weird room, but it was, in all other respects, a perfectly ordinary image.
    The second picture was quite different. All the sitters had been caught in the flash powder, like victims in a blast. All showed agitation; the old woman and the horse-faced one stared directly at the camera, responding to his call of ‘NOW!’. Their eyes were blurred on the inside, and their whites gave off a disturbed incandescence as their faces gawped. Elder Thomas was caught staring stiffly away, looking straight at the medium. Madam Grezach herself was stock still and in focus. She had been speaking at the time and her expression was held in the vice of a twisted smile. He shivered as he recalled her hocus-pocus about the dead child, suddenly noticing a difference in her face, a change of shape, as if a smaller face was being born through it, not violently, but with a rippled plumping. He was horrified by the notion, but could not deny the effect the flash had caught.
    He dragged his eyes to the third print, another open shutter which held a room of blurs. He couldn’t recall any accidental movement, but he must have juddered the tripod or rattled the lens. The sitters and the table were smooth and softened, as if diluted and coming apart at their edges. He laid the print to one side, relief creeping in to cover his initial misgivings.
    Then he looked at the last image. The light had not startled the party this time, but they had been upset by something else; he recalled the pitiful voice of the London street woman. They stared at the medium in distaste, the flash catching the repugnance in their postures and on their exposed faces. Madam Grezach looked straight through him and her expression made his blood run cold: it was no longer life and theatre that illuminated the medium’s face; her features and nuances of gesture had been stolen and replaced with facsimiles from another time. The magnesium burn had dredged out a decoy of rank terror, which in turn aimed its shivering sinews and pitiless hunger towards him.
    He stepped back from the table of rectangular dishes in dismay. Had he really made a genuine psychic photograph? Had he achieved what others had only faked? With shaking hands, he lifted the wet paper out of the fluids and pinned them up to dry. They had already changed. The significant, unique transformations in the medium’s face had diminished; now it was only conjecture, a matter of interpretation and not fact. The images of Madam Grezach had become normal, blurred pictures of a normal, blurred woman. What had he seen before? Was he imagining things?
    He collected the negatives and set them on a glass table with a light beneath them. Their reversed faces seemed skeletal and goat-like, but without any obvious signs of distortion. He became more perplexed: he had obviously been wrongly influenced by a desire to achieve the images that Sarah Winchester had wanted; her perception must have clouded his defined eye for a brief moment. Indeed, that influence was probably the very heart of the whole meaningless business. The next day loomed in his confused mind; the presentation of the prints worried him. There was nothing to show, and his anxiety at that knowledge forced him to see the inconsistencies in the chemical waters, as if the solutions he sought lay at the bottom of a glass or in the centre of a