Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

And now she’s Bluebeard’s wife holding the word divorce in her mouth, the bony shape of it there, its sour ashy taste, but she can’t spit it out.

She stands at the entry to hallowed ground: his studio-slash-sanctuary. Just an unused corner room now, two more windows the nights keep peering into. But she needs some sense of him with her. Already she’s breathed his smell out of the clothes in his closet. She reaches in and snaps the overhead light on. The room stops breathing and a long shadow shrinks into the far corner.

She steps into the office and she’s only Ada, and Luke wasn’t quite a Bluebeard until recently. There’s a lot left in his office, considering he moved out the day after the Breakup, coming to the house while Ada was sobbing at her friend Regan’s place. Four weeks and two days ago.

Empty boxes wait for him just like she does. Two tripods, a dolly, some of his lights are still here. His desk. Only the one bookshelf, half filled with tumbled-over film school textbooks. He was never a big reader until this last, awful year, when his love dried up and he started eating and sleeping in here, collecting piles of books and stacks of pages from his printer. She’d catch glimpses of a huge map with pushpins clustered where the Smoky Mountains rub against the Blue Ridge, papers taped up like detective novel wallpaper. But she never came inside until now.

Gram taught her well, not to go places.

And here, this photo facedown on his desk, is exactly the reason she’s still not ready. His whole inner life, separate from their coupledom, was held in this room, and he’s chosen that inner life and left the picture of them behind. She has to gather the courage to turn the frame over. Four summers ago in Raleigh, they’re smiling into that piece of future they still have. Luke’s reddish straw hair, hazel eyes, his nose orbited by freckles, and Ada’s wide dark gaze and a face that always looks so open and sure in photos. Her forever-short hair, her tomboy angles. Their differences are what stand out, because they stood out for him. He loved them, those differences, but she used to hate it when she caught him comparing their skins when they were pressed together in bed. He couldn’t get over his fascination of being with a black girl, but she’d welcome it now, to feel him climb onto her.

Stop using the past tense with him, Ada. She positions the picture frame where it would face him if he were sitting in his chair, then starts opening the desk drawers. In the second she finds an empty journal and a sheaf of his photographs. He never let himself get serious with stills. Here’s the half-skeleton of a burned house they saw once, out near the beginning of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Luke told her once that some religious group had lived there, probably died there. Ada’s sure this is the same house, remembers the day they found it in the woods. That was a fairytale day, but he didn’t have a camera with him. She’s sure of it. On the back of the photo, in Luke’s scrawl: Still in area? Who owns this land?

Another picture slowly reveals a shadow of something hanging in the charred doorway of the same ruined house. STILL THERE is printed neatly on the back. The next is completely black, but there’s the feeling that it’s not finished, it hasn’t escaped the light all the way. She flips it over and there’s a black circle filled in with Sharpie ink. But most of the photos feature trees, the anonymous ground, no art in them, as if he went into the woods and turned in a slow circle. There’s no writing on these. In the last two a ring of narrow sticks marks the ground in a clearing.

She rifles through the rest of the drawers, all empty except the last, which is full, inexplicably, of soil. She rakes her fingers through it and stirs up several short twigs, picks one up only to realize it’s a dead caterpillar. She jerks her hand away and rubs it on her jeans. There’s something else buried there, half-risen, red plastic with a cap on one end and a keyring hole in the other. A USB drive, she thinks, brushes it off, reads the word EMMA scratched into it, penknife etchings.

Emma. He’s never said anything of a female subject, or a female friend, but this room feels full of the things he never said. The thought of another woman’s been a ghost in Ada’s mind for too long now, a ghost she’s nearly wished would haunt her. All the bitter energy needs a conduit.

She pulls the cap offand stares into the slit of the device’s mouth. Bluebeard’s wife again. Her laptop’s in the bedroom, but she brings it back into Luke’s studio, boots it and tries not to look at the photo of them while she waits. She inserts the drive and clicks its icon when it appears on her desktop.

There’s nothing on it except four small mp4 video files in a folder named found . They’re all dated 16 September, four days before the Breakup. She mouses over the first, consecrate , braces herself for a bedroom in low light, writhing movement and Luke cupping breasts much fuller than her own, hungry mouths opening onto each other. A breath, a deeper breath, who are you, Emma? She opens it.

Four figures stand in the middle distance, shin-deep in a creek whose waters in the hazy lens glare run the reddish brown of Georgia clay. They hold hands and stare into the soft current, grouped like a closing parenthesis, water stains creeping up their pants. There’s no sound and a vague tracing of video static drifts over the figures. The details of them are hard to grasp. One is taller, stooped, she thinks. Two have short hair, though as she leans closer, dragging the play bar back twice, Ada becomes convinced one of these is something like a mannequin held upright by the others. A thing limp in its clothes, faceless and without clear hands. The clip’s all one steady shot, as though from a tripod, a minute and thirty-eight seconds until she notices the blot of shadow coming out of the woods on the other side of the water. It stains a corner of the screen as it spreads toward the creek bank.

Now the shot cuts to black, but still with the grainy digital snow. She lets it play out to be sure, sitting crosslegged on Luke’s favorite rug. After nearly three minutes, the audio snaps on, a scrape and the low moan of a cello, a forlorn thing that chills after all the silence. The dark fades bluer and a half-moon suddenly appears, sliding around on the screen. She hears the bow wring one long final note on the cello string that bends in the middle and stops. A click, a lingering hum, then the QuickTime control panel reappears.

She doesn’t pause before clicking on the second file, titled bowl . Instant movement, the shot traveling through woods in middle-night dark, a flashlight in its dying throes drifting over a carpet of dead leaves. Tree silhouettes, hints of deeper forest. No sound again and none of the snow from the first clip.

The cone of light diffuses, the ground dropping away into a pit of some kind, something dug out of the earth. The view tips forward and Ada can see a long white hump down in the hole, the sprawl of a body, nude or clothed in white. The shot blurs for a moment, whips around to scan the woods behind, silent black cut with wedges of indigo. The camera returns to pan across the pit, and the white body is gone. A flutter, flicker, the flashlight wavers and gives up to the dark.

Again she waits the clip out. It cuts back to life — or the light’s batteries are replaced — past the three-minute mark, Ada gasping as she sees two feet in the frame, inches away. The camera is in the pit now, the electric light a degree stronger. White fabric ends at dark knobs of ankles, two dirty feet. For a rattled instant she thinks they are her own feet. Paler than usual in the yellowing light, the shape of one big toe calling to her. Chipped pearl nail polish. But as she peers closer, another figure crawls out of the background, over the body and toward the camera in one lurch. Flat coin eyes gleam and the light spins away, the video ends.