Elizabeth Hand: Wylding Hall

The light was clearly different in these pictures — very bright, low-slanting sunlight. It made the grass look golden and all the other colors stand out more brightly. They weren’t terrible photos, but they weren’t anything approaching professional quality. Just amateur snapshots.

I turned to the boy and said, “Yes, these are very nice. But as I told you, we—”

“You have to look at them. These three.” He indicated the photos where everyone stared at the sky. “Tell me what you see.”

It was a minute before I saw it. Inside the walled garden with the others was a sixth person. While the band were all looking at the sky, someone else stood to the right and gazed straight ahead, into the camera. In the first picture, the figure was perhaps twenty feet from Julian. In the next photo, it was closer. In the last of the three, it stood directly behind him, and I could see it was a girl, wearing a sleeveless white dress.

“What the hell is this?” I looked at Billy Thomas.

“You tell me.”

I glanced at the photos again — all of them, in order. I shook my head. “Did you doctor these? Is this some kind of joke?”

“I swear to you on the Holy Bible, this is how they came out.”

I stood and stared at the pictures. I tried to recall everything I could about that afternoon. I’d been inside the mobile unit, but the back doors of the lorry had been open the whole time, so I could watch whatever was going on as I worked the boards. I hadn’t moved from there except once, to take a piss.

I remembered exactly when these photos had been taken — I’d yelled at Billy not to trip on the cables as he scampered around. I remembered the sunlight, which had been so beautiful that day. There were only ten shots, so it can’t have taken him more than twenty or thirty minutes, if that.

And there had been no one at Wylding Hall that afternoon, except for the members of the band, and Billy and me.

I looked over at Billy. “That afternoon, when you took these — did you see anyone?”

He shook his head. “There was no one.”

“Pick those up and follow me,” I ordered him. “Back here.”

Moonthunder’s art department was a storeroom where we had a mimeograph machine, some light boxes, a filing cabinet, and a table covered with photos and design sheets and layouts for album art. I swept these aside, pointed to where Billy should put the photos, and found a loupe and a magnifying lens. I kept the loupe, gave him the magnifying glass, and turned on the table lamp, which was very bright. We couldn’t afford a proper light table, but these pictures were so small, it would hardly have made much difference.

I spent the next hour scrutinizing those photos — the only reason I stopped was that I could feel a migraine coming on. With the loupe, it was crystal clear that the person was indeed a teenage girl, fourteen or fifteen or sixteen. Billy’s age. There was nothing fuzzy about her image — it wasn’t in any way blurred or hazy or transparent. She looked as solid and real to life as everyone else.

“Do you know her?” I glanced at Billy. “From school, or the pub? Is she a relative of yours?”

“A relative?” He laughed. “No girl in my family would be allowed to run around like that. Besides, all my cousins live in Farnham.”

“And you don’t recognize her from school?”

“It’s a small school. I’ve known everyone since we were kids.” He hesitated, then said, “She looks like the girl they talked about. The one from the Wren. The girl who went off with Julian Blake.”

I felt like my head was going to explode. “This is crazy. Someone must have doctored these. Or, I don’t know, swapped them out for some other photos. Where’d you get them developed?”

“Snappy Snaps. I already called them. They have a machine they run the film through, it’s all done automatically. The only thing a person does is stick them in the envelope and hand it to you. And take your money.”

We stared at each other across the table and for a long time said nothing. Billy was the one finally spoke.

“Do you think I should bring them to the police?”

“Why the hell would you do that?”

“Because it might help them find him. And her — both of them.”

I thought about that, then said, “No. There’d be too many questions. None of which we could answer,” I added, gazing at the pictures. “Look, can I keep these? Just overnight? I promise I won’t do anything to them — I won’t destroy them or anything like that.”

Billy nodded. “Yeah, sure. I have the negatives at home.”

“Smart lad. You have my word. Any objection to me blowing these up? Enlarging them so I can look at them more closely?”

“I guess not.”

He looked a little put out, so I said, “How’s this — if I can make use of these, I’ll pay you a professional’s fee and give you photo credit. If I can’t make use of them, you let me keep these and give me the negatives, and I’ll pay you a hundred pounds.”

His eyes got big, but he made a show of thinking it over before he nodded. “Okay.”

We shook on it, and I told him I’d ring him up after I had a chance to look over the enlargements. I thought I’d flatter him by suggesting he’d be a pro — I had no intention of doing anything with those photos, except destroy them.

Jon

Tom called me, demanding to know what the hell was going on with Billy Thomas and these photos. As I hadn’t seen the photos, I told him I had no effing clue. Billy hadn’t told me anything about them, other than the fact that they weren’t what he’d expected, and he thought someone from the group should see them. I was the only one whose telephone number he had. I didn’t want to be bothered, so I told him to ring Tom. After leaving Wylding Hall, I’d had to move back in with my parents in Muswell Hill, and I wasn’t too happy about anything right then.

About a week later, Tom rings me up again and tells me to come by the Larkspur office next morning. He wanted to see everyone, he said. It was very important.

Uh oh , I thought.

Lesley

We all went over to Tom’s office. Me and Will went together, so at least we had moral support. I’d spoken to Ashton and Jonno on the phone after they’d gotten the call. I assumed Tom was going to sack us — cancel our contract and tell us we were on our own. We’d still have the first album and whatever piddling royalties that generated, after he’d been paid back for everything he’d spent on Wylding Hall. Without Julian, we no longer had a second album, or a band. Windhollow Faire was dead.

Ashton

Tom waited till we all arrived, then led us into the back room, where the photos were all laid out on a table. He didn’t say anything except, “Look,” and stood back to wait for our reactions.

I thought it was some elaborate, incredibly cruel joke he was pulling. I think everyone else felt the same, except for Les. She actually had to run out of the room because she got sick. By the time she returned, Will and I were shouting at Tom, and Les and Jonno had to pull us off before we knocked him down.

Jon

I knew immediately that they weren’t fakes. They were very grainy, more like cheap newsprint photos, but they were real. What else could they have been? It looked just like her, the girl who’d run off with Julian.

Only the photos had been taken a week before that happened. And, of course, she hadn’t been there the day we did the outdoors recording.

Tom

It took me a good quarter hour to get them all calmed down. I explained as best I could about the photos — which wasn’t much explaining at all, just sharing of information. I’d bought loupes for them all, so everyone spent an hour looking through those pictures like they were searching for gold dust. They were eight by ten enlargements, cropped to accommodate the square format of the film. Like I said, not the best quality, but it was clear to me that they weren’t fakes.