The Dead Assassin: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Vaughn Entwistle Read Free Book Online Page B

crank. The other drops a penny into a slot and the mechanism unlocks with a metallic clunk . Electricity flows and a bulb within the Mutoscope glimmers to life, illuminating a rustic scene: a lake surrounded by hills. (The English Lake District?) No, the hills are too high, the lake too wide. Not a lake but a loch somewhere in the Scottish highlands.
    The black-and-white photo is creased from use, but the image is clear. The sun slanting low across the flat water suggests that it was taken in the early morning, scarcely after dawn. The face presses closer, eyes devouring the image. The hand slowly turns the crank. Within the Mutoscope, a drum of eight hundred paper photographs revolves. A brass finger releases, dropping a second photo and then a third, a fourth, a fifth … etc. The cranking speeds up. Photographs cascade in a riffling purr, and like a child’s flip-book, the scene animates with motion.
    A low, rippling wave disturbs the glass-smooth waters. A tenuous veil of silver mist ascends from the surface like a specter rising from its tomb. The viewer draws in a breath. The hand turns faster, and the scene comes fully alive.
    An open steam launch puffs across the loch, dragging behind it the expanding V of a trailing wake. Another photo drops and …
    The scene changes.
    The camera, closer now, looks onto a muddy foreshore where two figures stand.
    The scene changes.
    The camera, closer still, reveals the image of a young woman. Tall. Slender. Dressed in a light summer dress. She has peeled off her black stockings and kicked aside her shoes and now she wades in the shallows. Her shoes and stockings, along with her hat, sit neatly piled on the dry shore. The young woman’s hair is so blond it burns luminous as a white flame. The camera delights in her image, one of the Graces caught by human eyes, idling in a moment of unawareness.
    The hand ceases turning. The image freezes. The viewer draws in a deep breath and exhales raggedly. The hand resumes its cranking, and the figure in the viewfinder squeezes up from two-dimensions into three. She strolls toward the viewer in dreamy slow motion. When she notices the camera, her coy smile suggests embarrassment and she lowers her eyes demurely. Her hair has come unpinned and her slender fingers sweep back a stray lock that has fallen over one eye. She paddles through water so shallow it scarcely covers her bare feet. Her hitched skirts are gathered up in one hand, revealing to the lascivious camera slender calves and shapely ankles. Distracted by something behind her, she turns to look over her shoulder.
    The scene changes.
    A little boy stands calf-deep in the loch. He is togged out in a sailor’s suit and knee britches. The boy, perhaps four years of age, has the same white-blond hair spilling from beneath the sailor’s cap and is almost certainly her child. He holds a toy boat in hands chubby with baby fat. The toy boat—a tin-plate warship—sports a huge key protruding from the top deck and now he winds it, the young face taut with concentration. He lowers the battleship to the water, aims, and releases. The windup ship motors off, trailing a wake churned by a whirling propeller. The large tin rudder has been bent so that the warship sails in a tight circle about the boy’s legs. He silently claps his hands and mimes laughter. It is a wonderful moment of childish innocence.
    The hand turning the crank stops and the riffling cards cease their tumble, arresting time. The moment hangs frozen. The watching eyes blink tears from their corners, peer deeper, harder, greedy to absorb every last detail. A noise escapes the hunched-over viewer: a sound halfway between a sob of mourning and a keening wail that is a premonition of something dreadful yet to come.
    Slowly, reluctantly, the hand tightens upon the crank and begins to turn. Photographs spill from the drum.
    The scene changes again.
    A long view of the loch. The camera pans to reveal the foreshore and a reviewing