In the spring of 1906, Leland Vacher was thirty-eight years old and made his living stealing faces. That was how he thought of it on his black days. On his good days, he called it portrait work. He was an itinerant photographer, driving a painted wagon from county to county through backcountry where no proper studio had ever stood, and for a coin or a chicken or a sack of meal, he would set up his big box camera and take your likeness.
But in those years, half a man’s business came from the dead. People would send for him when somebody passed before the body went off, and he would pose the departed in a chair as if only sleeping, eyes sometimes painted open on the print after. He had photographed more dead faces than living ones some years. It does a thing to a man, that work.
It makes him believe that a photograph holds something—not the soul, but something; a little of the person, caught and kept. He came down into the valley on a wet April evening with his one swaybacked horse and his rattling wagon, and stopped at the only lodging for twenty miles, a long low boarding house at the mouth of a hollow kept by a widow named Drusilla Coker. She gave him a room and a plate of beans, and over that plate Leland made his mistake: he mentioned he’d heard there was a grand old family at the head of this very hollow, a family who would pay in gold coin for a portrait made of them, and who’d been waiting years for a photographer good enough to come. Drusilla Coker set down the spoon she’d been about to wash.
Who told you that? He’d heard it three counties back, from a man in a tavern—a house full of money up the creek, paying gold for pictures, and not a soul in the trade willing to go earn it. And did the man tell you why, she asked, not a soul in the trade is willing? He allowed that the man had not.
She sat down across from him, which she had not done before, and told him there was a house at the head of the hollow, that part was true. Big, old, sitting where the creek came down out of a cleft in the rock, far too fine for the poor country around it. Travelers did go up to it—tinkers, traders, preachers, peddlers—and yes, she said, looking at him steady, photographers, men with cameras. They went up the hollow road toward the gold, and they did not come back down, not one, not ever.
Eleven years back, a man named Faelan Voss had sat at that same table, laughed at her, and driven up for the gold. His horse came down on its own three weeks later, dragging the empty wagon. The camera was in the back, set up like he’d been about to make an exposure, with a plate in it, exposed but never developed. I kept it all these years, she said.
I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out and I couldn’t bring myself to develop it, neither, because I am an old woman who has buried two husbands and I do not need to know what Faelan Voss was pointing that camera at when the house took him. She kept a little book recording every traveler who’d taken a room under her roof and driven up that hollow and not come back: Silvanus Bragg, a horse trader who went up in the autumn, his horses coming down by ones and twos, riderless; Isham Who, a peddler who swore he’d go no farther than the first bend if the road felt wrong, and simply never been seen again; Cleophus Mund, a circuit preacher who climbed with his Bible held before him like a lantern, whose horse wandered home with the Bible still in the saddlebag, the leather cover swollen and warped as though left out in a hard rain, though there had been no rain that week. I have a page for every one of them, Drusilla Coker said, and I have left a space at the bottom of the last page, because I have learned not to flatter a man’s chances. Neither of them noticed the subtle corruption of the name they both spoke, the slow drift of letters that had already begun to alter what Leland called himself.
A man who has spent his whole life photographing the dead is not a man who scares easy, and he heard a warning as a challenge. More than either, he heard the soft clink of gold, which to a broke man on a swayback horse is the most persuasive sound in all the world. But one thing snagged in him: he asked to hold Voss’s undeveloped plate, and when he held it up to the lamp, his hands went cold as creek water, the way they only ever went cold in the cold parlors of the dead. He went up the hollow anyway.
There’d be no story if he didn’t. The road up was strange, and it got stranger the higher it went. It was not dark and forbidding; it was the opposite, and that was worse. It was beautiful, kept, the verges trimmed, every briar cut back, a perfect green lane through woods just coming into April leaf.
The first wrong thing was the compass: the needle was turning, not pointing, sweeping the dial around and around as if north had simply left the country. The second wrong thing was the light: he’d come into the hollow at evening with the sun low and gold, but the light didn’t go; the sun stayed exactly where it was, snagged on the same ridge, the shadows of the trees lying long and black hour after hour, as if somebody had reached up and stopped the sun in the sky. And the third wrong thing was his own shadow. With the sun behind him, his shadow ought to have fallen ahead.
Somewhere in that endless golden evening, he glanced down and his shadow was falling the wrong way—lying behind him, as if the light were coming from ahead, from the house he could not yet see. Something up the hollow was casting it, drawing the dark part of him gently up the road the way you draw a fish you’ve already hooked. He passed a great split boulder, marked it as a landmark, and some long while later passed it again, in the same unmoving light. The road had not forked.
The thought was that the road was longer on the way up than any road has a right to be, and that it might, if a man let it, go on being long forever. His horse stopped dead and would not go on, and Leland had to lead it by the bridle, two frightened creatures on a beautiful road that would not end. He should have turned around, but by the time a place shows you enough wrongness to be truly afraid, a frightened mind will nearly always choose the road that leads toward an answer over the one that leads back into the dark it’s already crossed. The road ended at the house the way a sentence ends at a period.
Three stories, white-painted, tall-windowed, far too fine for that country. Every window was lit, warm and gold, and Leland understood where his shadow had been coming from: not the sun—the house. An old man was waiting on the porch, elegant, stooped, thin as a winter branch, with a face so long and pale and finely made that even in his terror Leland’s photographer’s eye woke up and wanted it. At last, the old man said.
Oh, at last. We have waited so very long for a man with a camera. His name, he said, was Cassius, the keeper of the house, a duty taken up long ago and never once set down. The family was away, had been away a long while, and it was his charge to keep the house ready against the day they came home.
The inside was wrong in a way that took Leland time to identify: it was too full. Immaculate, but full of the signs of people who were not there. The hall closet was packed with men’s coats and boots, set neat toe out as if a great company would be wanting them again directly. The long dining table was laid for twenty places, and the food on it was hot, steaming—a whole roasted goose, bread fresh from the oven—in a house the old man swore held only the two of them.
And on every wall, hundreds of photographs, daguerreotypes and old tintypes, every single one a portrait of a man, posed and formal with that fixed, slightly startled long-exposure stare. Strangers, men of every age and station. And one near the foot of the stairs was not a stranger. The man in it had a camera on a tripod beside his chair, one hand resting on it, proud, and on a little brass plate was engraved a name: Faelan Voss.
Somebody had photographed the photographer and hung him on the wall with all the others. He never could make the one I wanted, the old man said, his voice dropping almost shy. I want my own portrait made. I have kept this house so long, and the family has not come home, and I am so very afraid that when they do come home at last, there will be nothing left of me to greet them.
I want a likeness made of me so that something of me is kept. Will you be the one who can finally see me? And God help him, Leland felt sorry for the old man. That was the whole shape of the trap—not the locked doors, but the pity, the terrible human fear of being forgotten reaching into the photographer of the dead and pressing on the soft place in him.
Before he set up his camera, the old man excused himself to make the parlor ready, and Leland, left alone in that hall of watching faces, opened a door he was not invited to open. Behind it, a room lined floor to ceiling with shelves, full of belongings kept careful: a horse trader’s saddle with the initials SB tooled into the skirt, a peddler’s pack, a circuit preacher’s flat black hat, a tinker’s kit. The kept goods of every man who had ever come up the hollow and stayed. And on a small table lay a guest book.
He opened it: page after page of names, Sylvanus Bragg, Isham Who, Cleophus Mund, Faelan Voss, and on and on. And there at the bottom of the last page, in fresh black ink still wet enough to shine in the lamplight, was a name that had not been there an hour before, a name no living hand of his had written. It was his own. He set up his camera in the front parlor and posed the old man in a tall carved chair.
Ducking under the focusing cloth, he composed the shot on the ground glass—the image comes through upside down and reversed, and a photographer learns to see the world inverted all his working life. There was the parlor upside down, the carved chair, the old man patient. And then Leland’s trained eye caught the rest of the room: the empty parlor was crowded with men. The strangers from the photographs, the tinker and the drummer and the preacher and Faelan Voss, dozens of them, all turned toward the old man, watching with faces full of that same soft terrible pity.
He came out from under the cloth; the parlor was empty. The camera saw what the room truly held. He made the exposure anyway, and told the old man he would need to develop the plates to be sure he’d caught a good likeness. The old man clasped his thin hands in joy: Take whatever time you need.
There is all the time in the world here—all the time there has ever been. In the developing tray, the image came up: the old man’s pale face, and behind him the crowded parlor filling with men, developed onto the plate. And in the front rank, nearest the camera, standing where no one had stood, looking out of the plate directly into his eyes, was a lean dark-haired man with a camera of his own, one hand resting proud upon it. It took Leland a long moment to understand he was looking at himself, photographed among the dead, though he had been behind the camera when the shot was made.
And there was one quietest horror: in the carved chair where the old man had posed, there was almost nothing—a blur, a faint pale smear, growing fainter even as Leland watched. Every kept stranger developed sharp and whole and permanent. Only the host, only the one who begged to be remembered, would not take. Cassius was already gone, had been gone perhaps a hundred years.
The warm, pleading creature in the carved chair was only the shape the house wore when it wanted to be loved—a grief that had outlived the griever, reaching through a borrowed face for the one thing it could no longer give itself. Leland understood the whole machinery. The house wanted faces, filling the cold ache of its emptiness with the likenesses of travelers, and the swallowing was not a killing but a keeping: the house took your likeness, fixed you, hung you on its wall, set your boots toe out. Faelan Voss was not dead; he was kept, posed and patient, waiting to have his portrait taken by the next man up the road.
The moment Leland made the old man’s portrait, the exposure would be complete, and the house would keep him, too. He went back into the parlor, very calm now, and told the old man the plates were beautiful but the fixing chemicals were down in his wagon—he would only step out, be back directly. And the old man’s face changed. The warmth went out of it; the eyes went flat and dark and ancient.
He rose up out of the chair taller than any old man should rise, the warm gold light in every window guttered at once, and he said, in a voice no longer human, They all want to fetch something from the wagon. And Leland ran. He hit the front door, out into the swept yard, and the night had come at last—not the held-back golden dark, an ordinary dark, or so it seemed, until the road ahead of him ended: the warm gold light, the house, the old man on the porch waiting. He spun around; behind him, the same.
The road ran from the house to the house, looping, swallowing, reeling him in. But Leland had one thing none of the others carried: he had the two developed plates, pulled still damp from the trays and shoved inside his coat. The house wanted faces. He took the first plate, turned, and threw it as far as he could back up the road toward the house behind him, shattering it into a hundred glittering pieces, a hundred broken faces flung across the ground.
And the house stopped—a thing that hungers for faces cannot let a hundred faces lie shattered in its own yard; it had to gather them. He ran the other way, and when that house loomed ahead, he took the second plate, the one with his own face, and flung it down, and burst it apart. His own scattered likeness flung across the swept ground, and the house, greedy and ravenous, stopped to gather the pieces of him, because it wanted him—and in wanting the broken pieces, it let the whole and living man slip past. He ran with nothing left in his coat, the old man’s voice calling after him with terrible tenderness, until the swept road turned rough under his feet, until the trimmed verges gave way to briers, until an ordinary cold dark spring night was all around him.
He fell down in the mud of the lower hollow and lay there until the gray of an honest morning came creeping up the sky exactly when it was supposed to. Three weeks later, Leland sat with coffee going cold in his hands, and he was sick on the floor of Drusilla Coker’s kitchen, thinking about the men hung on the walls, thinking about how long each had been standing in that crowded parlor in their single endless evening. His horse had come down three days before, dragging the empty wagon, with a plate in the camera, exposed but never developed. He never developed it.
He took it out into the yard, laid it on a flat stone, and broke it with the heel of his boot, ground it to powder, because whatever final likeness the house had stolen in its last grasping moment, he was not going to be the one to call it up. Leland gave up the traveling trade. He settled in a river town three counties east, took a small clean studio, photographed living people in good daylight—weddings, graduations, stiff little family groups—and never again as long as he lived photographed the dead. Folks would ask him to make a likeness of a departed loved one, and he would go pale and say no, very quietly, he didn’t do that work anymore.
He grew old, by every account kind and quiet and somewhat haunted, a man who kept all his lamps burning a little too bright and never could abide a room with the door shut. But there were two things. He could not abide a mirror, and he could not photograph himself. He tried once, years later, and when he developed the plate, there was the studio, and there was the empty chair—no Leland Vacher in it at all.
He never tried again. And when he died, his apprentice was left to sort through forty years of his plates. Among them, in a box by itself wrapped in black cloth, the apprentice found one old plate in no ledger: a grand parlor, warm-lit, crowded with formally posed men, a tinker, a drummer, a preacher, a horse trader, all gazing out with that fixed and patient long-exposure stare. And at the front, nearest the camera, a lean dark-haired man with his own camera on a tripod, one hand resting proud upon it, looking out across all the years with a face the apprentice knew at once—it was Leland Vacher, young, whole, standing among the kept and the swallowed.
The apprentice could not explain that plate, could not bring himself to throw it away or hang it up. He wrapped it again in its black cloth and put it in a drawer. Leland Vasher got out. He beat the house.
He threw down the faces and slipped the hook. So why was he in the picture?