Fiction: Latent Image
The commandant looked into Martha's face. He had, she thought, the passionless eyes of some kind of wild animal; a predator lazily watching a mortally wounded catch. Waiting patiently for it to attempt a last futile escape, or to slowly bleed out.
"You shouldn't have come here," he intoned slowly. "There was no reason for you to come here. You weren't on any lists. It was a big mistake for you to do that."
In his calloused hands he gently rotated her camera. Martha still felt numb to her personal situation, but oddly a blush of nausea washed over her at the thought that this man would destroy her camera. She had loved it, risked everything to bring it here, where she had naively imagined she could illuminate every shadowed corner with its glass muzzle. But she had failed, and now she would die here in this facility.
"A big mistake," he drawled again, "a big mistake."
Rough hands hauled her up from her chair, and she was bundled through endless corridors – could she run now even if she had the strength? The interior of this place was like a labyrinth, each wall blank and featureless. Where were all the exterior windows, the doors?
They were taking her, she knew suddenly, to the pool that lay beneath the complex. For the first time her limbs awakened, she began to flop around, struggle, but a sharp slap from the officer stunned her back into torpor.
Anything but that, she thought, I would have taken anything but that. After all the atrocities she had seen at this place, still the pool filled her the most with horror. She knew it to be filled with sharks, gigantic hungry cave fish, maybe even worse creatures. Something within revolted at the idea of her murder being delegated to a fish; at being thrown back into primordial waters full of terrors a hundred million years distant. Yet her strength to resist was at an end. Down stairs they went; stairs upon stairs, descending miles into the Earth, every so often passing through a room guarded by a bored soldier, feet up on a paper-strewn desk, giving a start as the commandant entered, only to relax back with a knowing, monstrous grin as he saw the prisoner.
The scale of the complex was inconceivable. Martha began to despair for her entire purpose. It would be impossible to win the War. Nobody could stand against the enormity, the resources of such an evil. What would exposing it to the light do? Down, down again. The unblinking eyes of security cameras observed their descent. Even here there were still members of the civilian class, cooks and cleaners stepping back into dim rooms to let Martha's convoy pass.
Then they were there, in a cavernous room of almost total darkness, and Martha dimly perceived an object that reminded her, bizarrely, of a child's water slide. She began to laugh, and then cry, and then beg and babble something incoherent, but the rough hands would not listen, and then she was tumbling down the slide, leaving the overworld behind.
Into the darkness she slid, and she braced herself at any moment for the splash of the water, the teeth of the sharks, but it did not come. The slide was much longer than she had anticipated, and though she could hear the gentle echo of the water lapping against the walls of the closed space, still she did not reach it. And then a new pair of hands seized her, much softer this time, and she was lifted from the slide and onto a dimly-lit platform.
Strong arms, but kind arms. For a moment she could not perceive anything else. A protector had seized her from the jaws of death. At length she determined these tender arms with their hard muscles and soft hair were encased in a loose white shirt, above which rose a neck and then a shaved chin, a blond moustache, prominent cheekbones, and – oh, the eyes that were so unlike the dead eyes of the commandant! These were lively eyes, concerned eyes; eyes that without a word asked her if she was hurt, did she need anything? Eyes deeper and darker than the shark pool but with such a brilliant, soothing warmth!
And from those eyes, all around Martha the world remade itself. Candlelight spilled from them, filled the room around; for they were indeed standing in a room, and Martha perceived that it was a kind of living room, with a fire crackling in the corner. Until now she had not realised how cold she was. With a tender understanding the beautiful man wrapped his arms around her shoulders and drew her close, and then even picked her up as if she weighed nothing, and laid her gently down on a nearby sofa, where she fell into a sleep without dreams.
For a long time Martha slept. Whenever she briefly woke, a warm bowl of soup was next to her, a tender hand on her forehead. Over days and weeks, she regained her strength, and gradually came to know the man who had saved her.
The man was called Michael and he had lived on the platform for some time. He had no memory of his life before the pool, though he seemed to be aware of an outside world, and the camp above, and the War. He had personally known only desperate struggle to survive down here, but had managed by strength, cunning and guile to keep himself from the dreadful waters, and after a period of time had built a comfortable place to live. The shark pool was around ten meters below them, he explained, but he had not yet ascertained the distance of the walls of the cavern from his platform. He suspected the shark pool was not man-made; the sharks themselves had probably been brought here by the army, but he theorised that the yawning space they occupied was a natural underground cave, perhaps hollowed out from the surrounding limestone over millions of years.
"Was I the first to come down the slide?" Martha asked.
Here the handsome man paused and a darkness clouded his face, a certain sorrow and pain which Martha felt sorry to have caused.
No, he explained. A steady stream of prisoners has been thrown down. A small group had coalesced from the survivors to live together on the platform. But as the time passed, the others had begun to grow restless. Perhaps the War was over by now? They mused. Perhaps the world above had returned to normal, but they had been forgotten, down on their platform? They should at least verify. They couldn't hide down here from the army forever, wasting away their lives when for all they knew, their country had already been liberated.
Only Michael had refused to assent to the plan. The others had built a small boat, and lowered it down to the shark-infested waters. They and Michael had shouted to each other, back and forth, as the boat gradually went out of sight in the darkness. Finally their replies were too faint to hear, and Michael had been left alone on the platform until Martha had come down the slide. Nestled in his arms, Martha looked up and saw a tear well up in his soft dark eye, threatening to break and roll down his face at any moment, and she wondered to herself whether they too were sitting on a giant eye, filled with this black, forbidding water, and whether the pioneers on the boat had really escaped, or drowned, or had simply spilled over the edge on a tear.
Though she comforted Michael and held him as he wept for the fate of his companions, Martha was secretly rather relieved that she didn't have to share the platform with anyone except her husband. Michael took care of everything for her. He cooked delicious, filling meals. He was remarkably handy; he would do an hourly lap of their platform and the house built upon it – inspecting the quality of the wooden boards, replacing those which were beginning to rot, building furniture and tools for use around their home. He somehow had a knowledge of photography too, even a camera whose provenance was unquestioned by Martha, and he had an eye for the aesthetics of the home; the proportions of the rooms, the lines and shadows cast by the candles in the eternal gloom of the cavern. The dark corners here held no horror, nothing more terrifying than a spiderweb. Most importantly, always was he there with his strong, tender arms and eyes overflowing with love and candlelight, always present whenever she most needed him. And his presence was a necessity, for whenever she wasn't looking directly at him, she had terrifying visions of the commandant, and the corridors, and the dangerous waters below.
Soon Martha found that she didn't much care whether the War had finished, though she suspected it had. It must have been months or years since she had found herself on the platform, but nobody else had yet come down the slide. Perhaps the War had finally been taken care of, the camp closed forever, shut down without her camera and her hubris and her dreams of resistance. But it didn't much matter to Martha. She had become accustomed to her life here with its odd, sunless routines, accustomed to the faint echo of the cave every time she stepped out of their home. She would often look up, far above them, into the artificial night of the underground, but it was hard to imagine that there were people living up there. At times the cave even seemed unbounded; Martha imagined she could see the faint glitter of stars above, the dimmest of flashes, like gaslight seen through a dark fabric.
Martha and Michael grew old in each other's arms, ensconced in the permanent glow of the hearth's fire. Whoever she had been in a previous life seemed far away now. Only in dreams did the fear ever come back to her. But each time she woke, the comfort of the fire and the room and the arms of Michael dispelled it, and she was lulled back into the rhythm of their daily life.
Martha gazed at her strong, sweet husband. She lightly fingered the cup of tea on the table before her, blazing hot between her chilly hands. Contentment washed over her. Michael's camera sat before her on the table. She fingered the edge of the lens, and saw that, curiously, it wasn't Michael's, but hers – the one the commandant had confiscated. Contentment bubbled away under a wave of giddiness. The evidence on this undeveloped film would be overwhelming. It could convict the commandant, certainly. But as Martha pondered, she began to think again of the enormity of the evil that burrowed into the Earth above and around them, and feel hopeless for the War, and the chances of ever bringing him to justice. And what would justice mean, anyway, for the thousands of people who had been tortured and killed here? With no trial for the commandant, and no way back to the surface, the images on this film just confirmed the evil, preserved it forever. Martha was seized by the desire to wipe over it, overexpose the pictures, fill the remainder of the roll with happier memories. And so she picked up the camera, turned on the flash, and took a photo of Michael standing in the dark corner.
The flash was searingly bright, and it didn't turn off. Michael looked at her with an expression she had never seen before, a look of helpless horror. The light of the flash became brighter and brighter; not a single corner of their house remained unilluminated, every bare wall and corner was filled with the piercing light. Michael was barely visible, he was so exposed. Martha tried to scream, tried to throw the camera down, and the light from the flash was hot now, and it burned through the wooden planks of their floor so that she fell down, back onto the slide; indeed, she knew now she had never been off it. And though the pale halo of Michael dropped his tools and ran towards her, she knew he wouldn't make it – there would be no salvation in his arms this time.
Martha hit the cold water with a shock. All around the sharks noticed her; began to turn; fixed her with their dead, passionless eyes. Her limbs moved, unsynchronised, clumsy. She swam slowly, hopelessly, seeing already that the sharks were many times faster. Where even to swim to? And as she was pulled down, she stretched out her hands, so close to Michael in the water, but unable to touch him, unable any longer to see him, as her head filled with a blinding, terrible light.