I trail off. It sounds ridiculous.
The woman takes the card from me, holds it close to her eyes to study it. “Do you pay?” she asks.
“Yes,” I answer at once, even though my funds aren’t that healthy at the moment.”I pay twenty-five dollars for a few shots.”
She sniffs. “Fifty. Take it or leave it.”
I can tell she won’t negotiate, but the price is still cheap, of course. I nod. “OK. I can stretch to that if you give me a full hour. Tomorrow?”
She puts my card in her pocket. “Has to be morning. Early. Around seven. Have things to do.”
“That’s fine.” I pause. “Would you let me have your name?”
“Kezia.”
I’m itching to point my phone at her, but sense this is not part of our agreement; it would seem too eager.
“I’m staying at The Gilman. Would you meet me there?”
“I’ll be outside at seven,” she says and turns her back to me.
I stand there for some moments, because although our scene has ended, we’re both still standing in it. It’s awkward. I’ll go and look for Robert. “Goodbye,” I say, but she doesn’t respond.
I find Robert sitting on a memorial bench at the harbour. He’s staring moodily out to sea. I’ve seen photos from his medical records, but the man before me now is shape-shifting, perhaps becoming more like what I find interesting rather than what he really was. He’s dark, ascetic-looking, but attractive in a gaunt, Gothic way. No one would believe his anguished stories. He’s tragic.
“Let’s go back to the Hotel,” I say to him. “You must sit downstairs in the bar alone, but you have plenty of money and can drink there.”
When I’m creating imaginary people, I try to give them some autonomy, the permission to exist when I’m not there. Whether this is effective or not, I of course have no idea.
I meet Robert at breakfast. He’s sitting at one of the tables and appears to have been waiting for some time. He’s irritated. I sit down and say good morning. A waitress comes to take my order—no buffet meals here. Today is the Eve of the Hallows, the day when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is reputedly thin. Perhaps this is true. Robert is vivid across the table from me.
“I’m going to take photographs of a young woman this morning,” I tell him. In my mind, I’m talking aloud, but naturally it’s not advisable to talk to invisible people in public. Our conversations must remain private, silent. “I want you to come with me and tell me what you think about her.”
Robert doesn’t speak but stares at me, blinks once.
“I want to believe she’s a descendant of an original inhabitant,” I say. “Perhaps you’ll have more idea about this than me.”
He shrugs, then says, “Why do you keep me here?”
“Because you’re a witness. You can help me. I’m here for two days, then you can go.”
He looks at me with contempt, so I visualise the waitress bringing him a breakfast and he has to eat it. His miserliness won’t allow him to let the food go to waste.
After our meal, when we go outside, Kezia is standing hunched on the hotel porch, her hands thrust into the pockets of her coat, which hangs open and looks somewhat damp and mildewy, as does the long black woollen dress she wears beneath it. Her feet are encased in workman’s boots. “Can I have my money?” she asks.
“When I’ve taken the pictures,” I reply, then add, “I need to go to the bank. I have no cash.”
“Where you want to go?”
“Well, let’s just walk, shall we? You must know the streets that are least touched by… change.”
I notice she glances to the side of me, where Robert is standing. For a moment I think she can see him, then realise she must be looking into the hotel lobby, which is no doubt a place she’s never been.
She jerks her head to indicate I should follow her.
After calling at the bank, where she waits outside for me, we head down to the waterfront, but not to the harbour. We traverse one of the six bridges across the river into a residential area. There are fewer tourists here, even though a fair percentage of the buildings are now guest houses. The decorations on the doors are traditional—woven dried grasses, elaborate wreaths of foliage and dried fruit, with the inevitable cackling pumpkins squatting on the porches.
“This town is lucky, in a way,” I say to Kezia. We have walked most of the way in silence, with her only occasionally pointing out areas of interest to me.
“How do you figure that?” she asks.
“Well, because of its history, for a long time it was… shunned. This means it wasn’t gutted and mauled by town planners. What remains has been renovated with at least some dignity or left alone completely. Have you lived here all your life?”
“It’s my home.”
“Let’s take some shots here.”
I position her before the tall, gambrelled buildings of Washington Street, but she doesn’t look comfortable. This isn’t her area; at one time it was affluent, before it was abandoned, and now it’s affluent again. I realise I’m imagining she’s lived here since the 1920s, which is clearly not the case. She’s no ghost, and if she were really that old, she would’ve transformed into a denizen of the sea, as the elderly Innsmouth inhabitants were said to do. “Isn’t that right, Robert?” I ask silently.
“That’s what happened,” he says. He’s oddly unmoved by Kezia. I was hoping for fear, surprise… something.
“If you were to be photographed in the place you felt you most belonged, where would it be?” I ask her.
“Out by the sea,” she says.
“The wharfs?”
“The place I love is the far side of the cape. It’s wild. No one goes there.”
“Sounds perfect,” I say.
“It’s a long walk.”
“That’s OK.”
On the way, I take pictures of the houses and occasional shots of Kezia when she’s not aware. She feels increasingly to me like a teenager who wants to appear rebellious or different. She’s not told me her surname and I realise I’m not going to ask for it; I’ll imagine it’s Marsh, Waite or Eliot, or another belonging to one of the old families, not a name from somewhere else, somewhere new.
We walk down Martin Street towards the sea and eventually come to Water Street, which follows the harbour all the way round the inner rim of the cape. Gradually the buildings become fewer and shops and cafes are no longer to be seen. As we reach the farthest side, the quays are more widely-spaced, and the boats moored there are mostly dilapidated. Sheds huddle in exhausted groups. A cold wind blows over the land, which is flat and sandy, but for the rise of dunes on the seaward side, and covered in a dry kind of grass that is almost colourless. The only trees are bent and spiny like hunched crones, maledictory branches pointing like fingers. Water Street persists, but is now a sodden boardwalk, occasionally covered by sand. Bleached wooden picket fencing staggers beside it, almost upright in places, but mostly fallen, with grass growing over it.
“Stand still,” Kezia says to me. “Listen.”
The wind is singing, or perhaps hidden within it is a voice calling from the deeps. Melancholia steals over me. I’m overwhelmed by a feeling of reverence.
“This is the best spot to hear the song of the wind and sea,” Kezia tells me.
I realise she’s opening up slowly, if not exactly warming to me. “I can see why you love it here,” I say. I notice Robert has wandered off towards the open ocean to the east. He’s of course drawn mournfully to what he believes lies beneath the waves.
Kezia and I walk in the same direction. The smell of salt and fish is overpoweringly strong. We climb a rise of dunes and, once at the apex, gaze down a stone-littered sandy slope towards the sea. To our left a tall, sagging lifeguard’s chair still stands, if leaning dangerously towards the ground. It’s hard to imagine that once people spent summer days here, children running in and out of the waves, women lying down on the sand wearing sunglasses. Now, the beach lies desolate and abandoned, as if we’ve walked into the far future of the world and no one is left alive, anywhere. But what kind of people once came here?