The server returns with Sarah’s drink, asks me if I’d like more coffee. I decline. If you need anything, she says, and leaves.
“All right,” Sarah says after tasting her drink. “How should we do this?”
“Why don’t we start with a question: why now? Why wait ten years to reveal this new information? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to do so back when the movie was first released?”
“Possibly,” Sarah says. “I don’t know. At the time, Isabelle and I weren’t on speaking terms. We still aren’t, but then, it was new. We’d had this massive fight—things didn’t just turn ugly, they turned hideous. Everything felt pretty raw. Part of me did want to go public with the documentary stuff, but it was mostly because I thought it would hurt Isabelle. She was back at graduate school, trying to pull together a dissertation. If word got out that she’d been part of this crazy documentary project, I figured it would make her study less pleasant.
“For once in my life, though, I listened to my inner Jiminy Cricket and did the right thing. For a long time after that, I was so busy, I didn’t have time to think about the footage. Really, when I sat down for the interview with Rue Morgue, I had no intention of mentioning any of that stuff. It just… came out. I don’t see the harm in it, now. I mean, Isabelle left her doctoral program, didn’t she? Isn’t she a massage therapist or something?”
“Yoga instructor,” I say. “But you have to admit—”
“The timing is highly suspicious, yes. I can’t blame anyone who thinks that. It’s what I would say.”
“You, however, have the original documentary.”
Sarah nods. “I do.” She raises the laptop’s screen. “The problem is, we’re living in an age where it’s easy to fake stuff like this. If you have the resources, you can put together something that would fool everyone up to and maybe including the experts. Although, why would you want to?” She lifts a hand to forestall my answer. “Yeah, publicity, I know. It’s a case of diminishing returns. If all I was after was to generate interest in the movie, I would have ended my story saying that the original footage was lost, wiped when my computer crashed. It wouldn’t be worth whatever meager spike in sales you might project for me to go to the trouble of creating a new fake film.”
“Which is exactly the sort of thing I’d expect you to say, if you were trying to pass off a fake movie as authentic.”
“Yeah,” she says, sweeping her fingers over the computer’s touch pad to bring it to life. “The thing is, if you want to believe something’s a conspiracy, you will. No matter what I say, one way or the other, it’ll be evidence of what you’re looking for.”
“Fair enough.”
“Okay.” She taps keys, and turns the computer ninety degrees, allowing me a view of the screen. The window open shows a woman’s head and shoulders foreground right, the entrance to the mine background left. It’s Isabelle Router, her face burnished by the same late afternoon sunlight that paints the rock face behind her bronze. “This is how we began,” Sarah says. “Isabelle standing in front of the mine, reciting the history of the mystery woman. We could watch it, but you already know the story, right?”
“Right.”
“Let’s…” She fast forwards ten minutes. We’re inside the mine, rough rock walls and ceiling, scattered trash on the floor. To anyone who’s seen Lost in the Dark, it’s a familiar shot, although the voices are different. Somewhere off screen to the right, Chad Singer is saying, “Am I going to have to carry this for very long? Because it is heavy.” From what sounds as if it might be behind the camera, George Maltmore is muttering about the acoustics of this damn place. Much closer, Kristi Nightingale says, “Eww,” at the desiccated carcass of a small animal, likely a mouse. “We had to swap out the soundtrack for something more atmospheric,” Sarah says to me. “Plus, Chad had left, so we couldn’t use his voice.” She pauses the video. “There’s plenty more of this kind of thing I can show you, if that’s what you want.” She advances five minutes, to the crew encountering a piece of Jack-Kirby-esque machinery the approximate dimensions of a refrigerator, its yellow paint faded and flaked away in patches, the large round openings in its sides strung with cobwebs. A leap of another six minutes brings us to the comic relief of the ancient Playboy, its cover and interior pages crumpled. The crew’s jokes approximate those in the later film. Ten minutes more down the dark tunnel brings the first surprise of the interview, the portrait of a woman’s face on the rock wall. It’s exactly as it appears in Lost in the Dark. Despite myself, I flinch, say, “Jesus. This is for real?”
“It’s what we found,” Sarah says.
I stare at the waves of the woman’s hair, the lines of her cheekbones and nose, the weird smearing on the right hand side of the drawing, which gives the left half of the face a roughly skeletal appearance. I fight the urge to reach my fingers to the screen. “I assumed—I mean, I know Isabelle’s uncle mentioned it in his story, but I figured he invented it.”
“Me, too,” Sarah says. “It seemed hard to believe, didn’t it? Like something out of a horror movie.”
“Who did it?” I can’t stop looking at the portrait, which is in some ways no different from what I’ve seen previously, and in other ways has been fundamentally changed. Stranger still, the portrait’s resemblance to Isabelle remains as strong as ever. “I mean, did Isabelle have any friends who were artists?”
“She swore it wasn’t her,” Sarah says. She lets the movie play. The camera pans from the tunnel wall to Isabelle, who is not pleased. “Very funny,” she says.
“What do you mean?” Kristi says.
“You think I don’t know who this is?”
“Isabelle,” Sarah says, “we didn’t do this.”
“Yeah, right,” Isabelle says.
“Seriously,” Kristi says.
“You think we had something to do with this?” Priya Subramani says.
“Obviously,” Isabelle says. “How else do you explain it?”
“Um, someone drew it,” Chad says. “Someone who isn’t one of us.”
“Are you sure?” Isabelle says.
“Yeah,” Chad says. “When my friends say they didn’t do something, I believe them.”
“What would be the point?” Sarah says. “Why would we do this, and then lie to you about it?”
Doubt softens Isabelle’s features, but already, she’s invested too much in the argument to yield the point. Plus, she doesn’t want to contemplate the implications of the crew telling the truth. She says, “Whatever,” and turns away.
The camera swings to Sarah, who blows out through pursed lips while rolling her eyes.
“Probably should have omitted that last bit,” she says, tapping the touch pad and freezing the screen. “After we returned from the mine and were going through the footage, Kristi suggested that maybe Isabelle was responsible for the drawing. I told her there was no way, she was being ridiculous. Had she not seen Isabelle’s reaction to the thing? When the group of us met to screen what Kristi and I had put together, she asked Isabelle about the portrait point blank. I didn’t stop her. I’ll admit: I was curious. Isabelle acted genuinely surprised at the accusation, enough for me to believe her. Although, when I think about her performance in Lost in the Dark, how well she acted, I wonder.”