Calla
The photograph appears slowly.
First the sky darkens around the edges of the paper. Then the rocks rise from the cove in black moss-covered teeth. The fire emerges at edge of the frame, and four bodies gather themselves together on the beach.
I rock the tray gently beneath the red light.
Mack emerges smiling.
Dare looks as though happiness has attacked him without permission.
Finn looks directly at the camera and somehow manages to appear elsewhere.
Then I appear between Mack and Dare, caught halfway through a breath after running across the sand before the timer expired.
The image sharpens.
I lift the print with the tongs and let the chemicals stream from one corner.
It is a good photograph.
Not technically perfect. The flash flattened our faces more than I expected, and the fire burned a white flare into the left edge. My hair has expanded in the damp until it occupies territory belonging to at least one other person.
But we look happy.
The observation unsettles me enough that I lower the photograph into the stop bath too quickly.
The liquid ripples around it.
I have photographs of Finn and me at every age. Hospital bracelets. Shared birthday cakes. Two missing front teeth between us. The first day of school, when he refused to release my hand until Mom bribed him with a plastic dinosaur.
I have hundreds of Mack.
Mack sleeping beneath a library table during finals. Mack wearing my coat backward because she claimed the pockets were more accessible. Mack stretched across the sofa in our Seattle apartment with her feet in
Finn’s lap and her head against my shoulder, taking up space in every direction at once.
Mack holds on to people.
She has always held on to all of us.
In this photograph, she is holding on to Finn.
Her arm loops through his. Her shoulder rests beneath his. Her entire body angles toward him with the unconscious certainty of a compass needle finding north.
Finn’s arm hangs at his side.
Nothing about him announces intimacy.
Nothing about him rejects it either.
I transfer the print into the wash tray, and something uneasy slips up my spine.
This means nothing.
They have known each other for three years. Mack once slept with her face pressed into Finn’s stomach because our heat went out and he was warmer than I was. She kisses strangers at parties and tells bartenders she loves them when they give her extra cherries.
Physical affection is not evidence where Mack is concerned.
Still, I reach for the next negative.
The enlarger hums above me.
In the second photograph, Dare stands beside the fire while Finn says something that has made Mack laugh.
Her head is tipped back. Finn is watching the flames.
Normal.
In the third, Mack sits beside Finn on the blanket. Their shoulders touch.
Also normal.
I expose another sheet.
This one shows Mack stealing the apple from Finn’s hand.
His fingers are still curved around the space where it was.
Normal.
I stare at the photograph until the word loses meaning.
The darkroom door opens into the light trap.
I turn so quickly that the tongs strike the side of the tray.
“Occupied.”
The outer door closes. A moment later, Dare appears beyond the curtain.
Red light cuts the angles of his face more sharply than daylight does. He stops when he sees the photographs clipped above the sink.
“I knocked.”
“The water was running. I didn’t hear.”
“Sorry.”
His gaze moves to the print in my hand.
I place it facedown on the counter. The movement is too quick.
Dare notices.
“Are those from last night?”
“No, actually, I periodically photograph groups of people who resemble us and develop the film the following morning.”
“An unusual hobby.”
“It keeps me mysterious.”
He approaches the drying line.
I step between him and the photographs.
One of his eyebrows lifts.
“They aren’t dry.”
“I wasn’t going to touch them.”
“Your proximity was threatening.”
“Calla.”
“Dare.”
He studies me instead of the photographs.
I become aware that my hands are wet. Chemical water runs over my wrist and disappears beneath my sleeve.
“Your father asked me to find you,” he says.
“Why?”
“He has opened the family archive.”
The photographs stop mattering.
Almost.
“He said I could see them?”
“He said you would attempt to see them regardless, and he preferred to control the conditions.”
“That sounds like Dad.”
“He also said to tell you that nothing leaves the room.”
“That sounds even more like Dad.”
I glance at the wash tray.
Finn and Mack look up at me through moving water.
I turn on the overhead light.
The red disappears.
Everything looks less mysterious in white light.
It does not look more innocent.
The family archive occupies a room behind Dad’s office that I have spent most of my life pretending does not exist.
This is partly because it is locked.
It is mostly because Dad once explained that the shelves contain deeds, death certificates, estate inventories, burial records, tax documents, and correspondence from several generations of people who believed paper should outlive everyone involved.
I was twelve.
Nothing in that description competed successfully with the internet.
Dad unlocks the door and switches on a green-shaded lamp.
The room is narrower than I expected. Shelves rise from floor to ceiling on three walls. Flat archival boxes occupy the lower cabinets, each marked with a date range in Dad’s precise handwriting. A long table fills the center, leaving barely enough space to move around it.
Mack is already seated there.
Finn stands behind her chair with two mugs of coffee.
He places one beside her right hand.
Mack picks it up without looking.
“Perfect,” she says after tasting it.
Finn sets the second mug at the empty place across from her.
My place.
I look at Mack’s coffee.
Then at Finn.
“Where’s yours?”
“Already drank it.”
“You made hers first?”
The question leaves my mouth before I decide to ask it.
Finn’s attention sharpens.
Mack glances between us.
“He made both at the same time,” she says.
“I didn’t ask you.” My voice is sharper than I intended.
Silence enters the room.
Dad places a gray archival box on the table.
“If the coffee examination is complete.”
“It is,” I say.
Finn leans against the shelf.
Mack takes another drink.
Neither of them looks at the other.
That proves nothing.
Dare closes the archive door behind us.
Dad removes the lid from the box.
Inside are three narrow ledgers, a bundle of letters tied with faded black ribbon, several rolled plans, and a photograph mounted on thick card. The photograph shows six men standing beside an opening cut into the cliffs. Five wear work clothes. The sixth stands slightly apart in a dark coat and narrow-brimmed hat.
His face has faded into silver.
Someone wrote a date beneath the image.
October 1888.
Below it, in different ink:
Western excavation. H.P. and crew.
“Hiram?” I ask.
Dad nods toward the man in the coat.
“Presumably.”
“You don’t know?”
“There are no confirmed photographs of him in the family collection.”
“Why not?” Mack asks.
“He was removed from the family’s affairs. My ancestors were thorough when they wished to forget someone.”
Finn reaches for the photograph.
Dad stops him.
“Gloves.”
Finn looks at him.
“The wet cellar was fine, but the photograph requires gloves?”
“The cellar was not one hundred and forty years old.”
“The cellar is significantly older than that.”
Dad opens a drawer and distributes white cotton gloves.
“The photograph is less replaceable.”
We put them on.
Dare does not move.
He is staring at the opening in the cliff.
“What?” I ask.
His eyes remain on the photograph. “Nothing.”
“That answer is losing credibility.”
“The opening is familiar.”
Dad’s expression closes.
“Have you seen it?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s the western cave,” Finn says. “You saw it from the beach.”
Dare shakes his head. “Not from outside.”
No one speaks.
He reaches toward the photograph but stops before touching it. “There should be an iron gate farther in,” he says.
Dad looks at him.
“There is.”
Dare’s hand drops.
Mack sits forward. “Have you been inside?”
“I don’t remember being inside.”
“That isn’t the same answer.”
“It is the only one I have.”
The sentence sounds like Mom.
I glance at Finn. He is already watching Dare.
Dad removes the photograph and sets it aside.
“The gate appears on the plans.”
He unrolls the first sheet across the table. Finn and Mack catch the corners before they curl inward. Their
hands meet on the paper.
Mack moves hers first.
I look down at the map.
Ink lines divide the estate into foundations, tunnels, drainage routes, and chambers cut beneath the rock. The
Main House sits at the upper edge. The Carriage House appears below it. A narrow route begins beneath the cellar and bends west before ending abruptly halfway to the cliffs.
Another passage rises from the cove.
The space between them is blank.
It’s not unfinished. It’s cut.
A rectangular section has been removed from the center of the plan with a blade. The edges are too straight
to be accidental.
“Someone took part of it,” I say.
Dad studies the missing section.
“Yes.”
The exposed paper has darkened nearly to the same color as the rest.
Finn traces the route from the Carriage House without touching it.
“The passage yesterday descends left.”
Dare’s gaze follows his finger.“Toward the missing section.”
“And the water?” Mack asks.
Dad indicates a series of faint blue lines beneath the cove.
“Sea caves. Some flood with the tide. Others contain freshwater seepage from above.”
“Comforting,” Finn says.
Dad opens the first ledger.
The pages list names, hours, equipment, and costs. Hiram paid for blasting powder, timber supports, iron brackets, lantern oil, hauling, and medical treatment. Several workers left before their contracts ended. One was paid three days’ wages for a single shift.
Beside his name, someone wrote:
Disputed duration.
“That’s the man who went missing?” I ask.
“Possibly.”
I turn the page.
Later entries become less orderly. Expenses appear in the margins. Names are crossed out. Instructions
interrupt the columns.
No work beyond the western gate after dark.
Three pages later:
Men must enter in pairs.
Then:
Remove all bells from the lower works.
Mack reads over my shoulder.
“Why were there bells?”
“They may have used them to signal between crews,” Dad says.
“Why remove them?”
“Keep reading.”
I turn another page.
The handwriting changes.
The earlier entries are narrow and controlled. These words have been pressed into the paper hard enough to
score the sheet beneath.
The bell sounds when no hand is near it.
Beneath that:
Do not follow it.
Finn’s gloved fingers tighten against the edge of the table.
I look at him.
He releases the paper.
The next two pages have been torn out.
The page after them contains only one sentence.
If the rock speaks in a familiar voice, do not answer.
No one moves.
The archive seems to shrink around us.
I hear my own voice from the cellar.
Be quiet.
It knows we’re here.
Dare reads the line again.
Mack’s coffee sits forgotten beside her hand.
Dad closes the ledger.
“That is enough.”
“That is absolutely not enough,” I say.
“It is enough for today.”
“You knew this was in here.”
His eyes meet mine.
“I had not read Hiram’s ledgers in years.”
“But you had read them.”
“Yes.”
“And when I told you Finn’s voice came from behind the cellar wall, you didn’t think this was relevant?”
Finn looks at me. Dad’s voice remains level.
“I thought removing all of you from an unstable underground passage was more immediately relevant.”
“You could have told us afterward.”
“And said what? That an increasingly unwell man wrote warnings in a work ledger more than a century ago?”
“You believed him enough to forbid us from going inside.”
“I believed the flooded caves, failed supports, and history of collapses.”
“Only those?”
Dad does not answer.
I find Dare on the back terrace twenty minutes later.
Rain hangs in the air without fully falling. The gardens below the stone railing shine dark green beneath the cloud cover. Beyond them, the greenhouse glows faintly through the trees.
Dare stands with both hands resting on the wet balustrade.
I stand beside him.
The stone is cold beneath my palms.
“You knew about the gate.”
“Apparently.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
He looks at me.
“Everything bothers me.”
“You hide it well.”
“So do you.”
I turn toward the garden.
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“You concealed a photograph when I entered the darkroom.”
“It was wet.”
“You also stood in front of the others.”
“They were wet too.”
“A dangerous morning.”
I fold my arms.
“Why do you care?”
“I don’t know enough people to waste opportunities for concern.”
The answer should sound practiced.
It doesn’t.
I look at him.
Rain has darkened his hair. A drop catches in the small break through his eyebrow and follows the line of his temple.
“I noticed something,” I say.
“In the photograph?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“My curiosity is piqued.”
“It might be nothing.”
“Most things are.”
“Helpful.”
“You haven’t told me what it is. How can I be helpful?”
I watch Finn and Mack through the kitchen windows.
They stand on opposite sides of the island. Finn says something. Mack laughs and throws a dish towel at him.
He catches it before it reaches his face.
Normal.
Everything is normal once I decide it must be.
“I think two people I love might be keeping something from me,” I say.
Dare follows my attention toward the windows.
He does not ask who.
“Do you think they intend to hurt you?”
“No.”
The answer is immediate.
“Then perhaps secrecy and betrayal are not the same thing.”
“They can feel the same.”
“Yes.”
The agreement irritates me less than it should.
I lean against the railing.
“What if the secret changes everything?”
Dare watches the rain gather on the stone between his hands.
“Perhaps that is why they haven’t told you.”
“That isn’t a defense.”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
“Fear.”
He says the word quietly.
I think of him waking in the Carriage House with no name and no history. I think of the western gate he
remembers without remembering. The passage that bends left. The water beneath stone.
“Are you afraid to remember?” I ask.
His jaw tightens.
“Sometimes.”
“Why?”
“Because whatever I was before may change what I am now.”
The space between us shifts.
Inside the kitchen, Mack retrieves the dish towel from Finn. Her fingers close around one end. He keeps hold
of the other.
For a second, neither lets go.
Then Finn releases it.
Mack turns toward the sink.
“People don’t get to decide whether the truth changes things,” I say.
“No.”
Dare looks at me instead of the window.
“But they sometimes get to decide when they are strong enough to survive the change.”
I should disagree.
Instead, I remember the darkroom.
An image does not appear all at once.
If you force it, you ruin it.
By evening, the photographs are dry.
I carry them upstairs in a flat archival envelope and spread them across my bed.
Cheeto walks directly over Dare’s face.
“Excellent,” I tell him. “Your critical eye remains unmatched.”
He sits on the group photograph.
I move him.
He returns.
“This is why no one invites you into the darkroom.”
His tail strikes my wrist.
I retrieve an old photo box from the closet.
Seattle fills the bed around me.
Mack behind the counter at the coffee house, holding two cups beneath her shirt and announcing that she
has finally achieved her ideal figure.
Finn asleep on the apartment floor with an open textbook over his face.
The three of us crowded into a photo booth, Mack in the middle, kissing my cheek while pulling Finn’s hair.
Mack on my back outside a concert.
Mack stretched across both of us on the sofa.
Mack’s arms around our necks at New Year’s, her face pressed between ours.
In every photograph, she belongs to the space between us, always with the both of us.
I return to the cove picture.
She is not between us.
She is beside Finn.
There is a knock at my door.
I sweep the older photographs into the box and close it.
“Come in.”
Mack enters carrying two bowls of ice cream.
“Emergency provisions.”
She stops when she sees the photographs across my bed.
Only for a fraction of a second.
Then she smiles.
“Oh, good. Evidence that I look incredible.”
She hands me a bowl and drops onto the mattress.
Her knee lands on the corner of the group photograph.
I pull it free.
“Careful.”
“Sorry.”
She leans over my shoulder.
“Dare looks like he’s being held hostage.”
“That may be his natural expression.”
“No, his natural expression is more brooding. This is distinctly captive.”
She picks up a photograph of me from beside the fire.
My thoughts have become grammatically unstable.
“You look happy,” she says.
“I was.”
“Past tense? Did something terrible happen in the last eighteen hours?”
I look at her.
She lifts a spoonful of ice cream.
Her face is open.
Mack has never been good at lying. She adds too much detail, gestures with both hands, and becomes
offended by questions no one asked.
She is not lying now.
I haven’t asked her anything.
“No,” I say. “Nothing terrible.”
She studies me for one beat longer.
Then she eats the ice cream.
I pick up the group photograph.
“This one came out well.”
Mack looks at it.
Her expression does not change.
“Except Finn looks like a Victorian child being informed he has consumption.”
“He always looks like that.”
“True.”
She takes the photograph from me.
Her thumb rests against Finn’s printed shoulder.
“Can I have a copy?” she asks.
“Of course.”
“Make one for Finn too.”
There it is.
Not proof.
Still, something inside me becomes very quiet. Why does she think I need told what to do in regard to Finn?
Mack places the photograph face-down on the bed.
“What did you find in the archive?”
“Hiram left instructions for his workers.”
“The highly practical don’t-answer-the-rock policy?”
“Among others.”
Mack steals a photograph of the ocean and holds it up to the lamp.
“Do you think the voices are ghosts?”
“I don’t know.”
“Cave acoustics?”
“That can explain echoes. It can’t explain hearing a person who isn’t inside the cave.”
“Maybe there was someone else in the passage.”
The thought settles badly.
“Using Finn’s voice?”
“Maybe Finn’s voice is common.”
“It isn’t.”
“You’re biased.”
“I’ve heard it since before birth.”
“Show-off.”
She returns the photograph to the bed.
Footsteps cross the hall outside my room.
Mack’s attention shifts toward the door.
The movement is small.
Automatic.
The footsteps pause.
Finn knocks once against the open doorframe.
“Mom wants to know if either of you has seen the green canvas bag.”
“Greenhouse,” I say.
“She checked.”
“Cove basket,” Mack says at the same time.
Finn looks at her.
“Side pocket?”
“Under the blanket.”
He nods.
No explanation passes between them.
None is needed.
He turns to leave.
“Finn,” I say.
He looks back.
For one reckless second, the question rises.
Is there something you aren’t telling me?
Mack sits beside me with her spoon suspended above the bowl.
Finn waits in the doorway.
I could ask.
If I am wrong, I make something ordinary strange.
If I am right, they have chosen not to tell me.
Either answer changes the room.
“Nothing,” I say.
Finn’s gaze remains on me.
“You said my name.”
“I forgot what I wanted.”
“Unlikely.”
He leaves.
Mack smiles into her ice cream.
Not at the joke.
At him.
I look down at the photograph lying face-down between us.
An image does not appear all at once.
First the shadows gather.
Then the shape.
Then, whether you are ready or not, the truth comes out.
I do not ask Mack.
Not yet.
But I begin to watch.
Mack leaves after ten with both empty bowls balanced in one hand and a photograph of the ocean tucked beneath her arm.
“Not the group one?” I ask.
She pauses in the doorway.
“You said you’d make copies.”
“I will.”
“Then I’m practicing patience.”
“That seems medically inadvisable. It’d be such a shock to your system.”
“If I become unrecognizable, tell my mother I fought bravely.”
She disappears into the hall.
I remain on the bed with the group photograph facedown beside me.
Cheeto places one paw on it.
“You’re not helping.”
He lowers the second paw.
I move him and gather the photographs into their envelope.
The house has settled into its night sounds. Pipes shift behind the walls. Rain pelts against the windows.
Somewhere downstairs, a cabinet closes.
I carry the bowls toward the kitchen.
Light spills across the hall from my parents’ bedroom.
Their door stands open.
Mom is sitting on the floor inside her closet.
For one second, I think she has fallen.
“Mom?”
She looks up.
Clothes have been pushed aside around her. Two storage boxes sit open, their contents arranged across the rug: photographs, folded scarves, a child’s silver-backed brush, several letters bound with ribbon, and a small cedar box worn pale along its edges.
Mom holds a chain between both hands.
A silver medal hangs from it.
St. Michael stands on one side with his sword raised, the details softened by years of touch.
I have not seen it in a long time.
When Finn and I were little, Mom wore the medallion beneath her clothes. Her hand found it at stoplights, during storms, whenever one of us was late returning from school. She checked for it before she checked her keys.
Then, sometime before we were old enough to ask useful questions, it disappeared.
I remember asking about it once.
Mom said she did not need it anymore.
I believed her.
“I thought you didn’t wear that anymore,” I say.
“I don’t.”
She works at a knot in the chain with her thumbnail.
“Why did you stop wearing it?”
Her hands become still. “That isn’t a short answer.”
“We have nowhere else to be.”
Mom looks down at the medallion. “I became convinced that if I took it off, someone I loved would die.”
The words are too direct to misunderstand.
“You thought the necklace was keeping us alive?”
“I thought wearing it was.”
I sit with that. “Like the candles in the chapel?”
She nods, a flush on her cheeks. “I know it’s not rational.”
“Did Dad know?”
“Your father knew. My doctors knew. Eventually, everyone knew except you and Finn.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“You were children. You did not need to wonder whether your mother believed your lives depended upon a
piece of silver.”
She turns the chain between her fingers.
“My doctors asked me to put it away for an hour. Then an afternoon. Then overnight.”
“And what happened?”
“Nothing, which was glorious. Your father came home. You and Finn woke the next morning. The world continued without me holding it together with this necklace.”
There is no humor in her voice.
Only the memory of how difficult that must have been to believe.
“Eventually, I put it in this box,” she says. “Eventually, I stopped checking.”
“But you’re checking now.”
“No.”
She loosens the last knot and lets the chain fall across her palm.
“Then why are you looking for it?”
“I knew where it was. It isn’t for me.”
I set the bowls on the dresser.
“Who is it for?”
She does not answer immediately.
She does not need to.
“Finn?”
Her fingers close slightly around the medal.
“He has been unsettled,” she says.
“Finn is always unsettled. He disguises it as irritation.”
“This is different.”
I think of him at the cove, looking across the fire as though something stood behind me. His hands in his pockets outside the cellar. His face when we read Hiram’s warning.
“Different how?”
Mom looks toward the bedroom door. “He listens before he answers.”
“People do that.”
“Not to empty rooms.”
Cold moves down my arms. “Have you seen him doing that?”
“More than once.”
“Did you ask him why?”
“I know why,” she says simply. She does not elaborate, and I am afraid to ask. Something in my stomach
turns cold.
Mom turns the medallion over. The reverse is almost smooth.
“Do you think a necklace will protect him?”
“No.”
The answer comes easily.
Then she runs her thumb across the worn silver.
“But I once believed it protected me. And that belief gave me something to hold on to when I felt unmoored. It
is grounding, and I think he might need that.”
I chew on that for a moment. I’m almost ready to answer when the sounds comes from beneath the house.
One metallic note.
Low enough that I feel it through the floor before I understand that it is a bell.
Mom stops breathing.
The chain slips between her fingers. The medallion strikes the cedar box with a small metallic click.
“What was that?”
She is already standing.
I have never seen her move so quickly.
She crosses the bedroom and switches off the lamp.
Darkness takes the closet.
“Mom?”
“Come away from the window.”
“Why?”
Footsteps sound in the hall.
Finn reaches the doorway first. He is barefoot, wearing the same black sweater from the cove.
“Did you hear that?”
Mack appears behind him, her hair twisted on top of her head.
“Please tell me this house doesn’t announce midnight sacrifices with a bell.”
Dad comes from the stairs.
He looks at Mom. She looks back. Something passes between them.
The bell rings again.
This time the note travels through the walls. The window glass trembles faintly in its frame.
Mack’s humor disappears.
“Where is it?” she asks.
The back door opens downstairs.
Dad turns sharply toward the hall.
Dare calls from below.
“Calla?”
I reach the landing before anyone can stop me.
Dare stands inside the kitchen doorway with rain on his shoulders. Behind him, the terrace disappears into
darkness.
“Did you hear it?” I ask.
He looks toward the western windows.
“It’s coming from beneath the Carriage House.”
Mom reaches the landing.
“Close the door.”
Dare does.
Dad crosses the kitchen and turns the lock.
“No one goes outside,” Mom says. “Dare, you can move to a guest room here. Do not go back to the Carriage
House, except to get your things. Phillip, you can go with him.”
Her voice is steady.
Her face is not.
I remember the ledger beneath my gloved hands.
The bell sounds when no hand is near it.
Do not follow it.
“Hiram wrote about a bell,” I say. “In the archives.”
Mom’s attention snaps to me.
“What did you read?”
“Enough.”
Dad closes his eyes briefly. “Calla.”
I descend the remaining stairs.
“He wrote that the bell rang by itself. He told the workers not to follow it.”
Mom presses the medal into her palm.
“I know.”
The kitchen becomes silent.
Finn stands very still beside the table.
“What is happening?” I ask.
Mom looks at Finn.
Not at me.
At Finn.
The bell rings a third time.
The sound rolls beneath the house and fades toward the sea. It is eerie, and echoing, and mournful.
Mom closes her fist around St. Michael.
“That has never happened before,” she says.
No one asks what she means.
For the first time, I understand that Mom is not afraid of what might be beneath our home.
She is afraid because she already knows.
From the Estate
Recovered materials, private records, and curiosities from the episode
Recovered Artifacts
Objects recovered and documented in this Storyworld
(Click an artifact to examine)
