Experimental Film Read online

  At this, Lady Midday’s eyes flashed like a sword heated red-hot, thrust deep into the very heart of the fire, and she bent herself double to put her face right up next to the boy’s so that her hair fell around them like a veil. Whereupon the heat of her was so great the boy thought either he would smother, or that his cheek would crisp like bacon.

  “Oh,” she said, so sweetly, “but you are a good boy, to do your mother’s bidding thusly! Do you not wish to stop and drink a bit, if only to refresh yourself once more for the work you have yet before you? See, I have brought water in a cup, cool and deep. You may have it all, if you will only turn to look my way.”

  Yet the boy did not, shaking his head and bowing still further. “No thank you, milady, for I cannot turn myself from my work, and am not fit to look upon such sights—for how is it that I, a poor boy, could count myself the equal of such a personage?”

  “You think me fair?”

  “I know it, milady.”

  “But only by report. Turn now, and see.”

  How he yearned to do so! Yet the heat of her was so dreadful, parching his mouth and setting his skin to sizzle, and the light she gave as bright as though the sun itself sat on her shoulder, an ornament for her long white hair—hair which was neither plaited nor tied, but dropped straight down to her feet, so bare and dainty, whose nails were great claws made from brass.

  “I cannot, milady,” he answered. And he closed his eyes in fear, though he ploughed on, that he might not have to see the terrible scissors descend.

  All at once, however, Lady Midday withdrew her attentions, and her voice became gentle, though no more like a human being’s.

  “Because you have been diligent and polite,” she told the boy, “and answered me with the courtesy due my station, I will give you for a gift that so long as the sun’s eye falls upon it, your field will flourish. And I will not bother you again.”

  And indeed, after that, she never did.

  Further on, a grown man ploughed his field, cursing his lot and the sun’s pitiless stare. He beat his mule hard enough to draw blood, complaining all the while, instead of giving his task the attention it merited. And since the noon hour was not yet done, the sun at its still point above him, there came by Lady Midday in all her awful finery, to ask—

  “It is a hard day for ploughing, and you without even a cup of water. Do you not wish for rest and comfort?”

  The man raised his eyes from his task and looked at her straight on, haughtily. “What a stupid question!” he replied. “It is hotter than the hobs of Hell out here. Is that water in your hand?”

  “It is. May I take it you find me pleasant to look on?”

  “Indeed, you are a fine, tall baggage. But how foolish you must be! Can you not see I am dying of thirst? Give me that cup, and quickly!”

  “I think not,” Lady Midday told him. “Yet because you have not answered me with the courtesy due my station, I will give you for gift something very different.”

  With that, she attained her full height, blazing so bright that the man went blind. Which is why he did not see to duck when she brought her scissors down with a great snip, cutting his head clean off.

  “Now go home, if you can,” she said, “and have your wife sew this back on for you. Then wait until your sight returns and do your work with more diligence from now on, living the rest of your life in fear, for there are those in this world far less merciful than I.”

  The man made his way home in terror, by long degrees—stumbling wild with his head hugged tight in his arms, unable to see where his feet were taking him—and never more dared to step outside until the sun had fallen. But for the rest of his life he felt Lady Midday’s eye upon him, always fearing to look too far up or too far down to avoid it, lest the stitches rip and his head fall clean off once more.

  I’m supposed to be objective here, right? One assumes. That’s certainly what they try to drill into you at journalism school. But the thing is, it’s never made all too much sense to me, this idea of trying to divorce yourself from any hint of personal reaction—keeping stringently to the facts, ma’am, just the facts. Which may be why I drifted into being a film critic in the first place; why shackle yourself to fact checking, on exactly how close to the truth you can parse things, when you can just get paid for voicing your opinion instead?

  One way or the other, I knew I’d read “Lady Midday” before. Had to have. Why else would I have kept the book? How else could I have connected the dots? But—

  When I think about the stories that have stayed with me throughout my mythocentric life, which shaped me as both consumer and creator, this just wasn’t one that floated automatically to the top. It seemed familiar, yes, but only in a pattern-recognition sort of way—i.e. I recognized sections of it, echoes of other folk-tales and fables, other hard-judging, unreliable supernatural mentor-archetypes: Mother Holle and Mrs. Gertrude, from Germany; Baba Yaga and King Frost, from Russia. The latter, very much.

  Are you warm, maiden? Are you warm, or are you cold?

  Yes, thank you, King Frost; I am warm, thanks to your munificence. I am not cold, not at all.

  Ah, but you shiver. Your lips and hands turn blue. Are you sure you are not cold in truth, pretty maiden?

  No, thank you, great king.

  The maiden suffers politely, beautifully, deferentially, so King Frost—impressed by her polite lies—gives her a reward. Her shrewish stepsister complains, like any normal human being, and is frozen alive. The young boy gives Lady Midday her proper respect, survives, and prospers. The older farmer mouths off and gets his just desserts.

  A familiar idea, except for the trappings. And there was something about it which reminded me of The Golden Bough, James George Frazer’s compendium of pagan lore and tradition. The idea that most fairy godparents were really former gods, small-d deities of place locked to various community-sustaining natural phenomena—the earth, the harvest, the wind that shakes the barley—run through a Christian repurposing machine, reduced to creatures whose malice can be averted through basic cleverness, cold iron, and rote Church cant. For I said my prayers all out in a rush, Henry Treece concludes, at the end of his poem “The Magic Wood,” and found myself safe on my father’s land.

  All I can tell you, in the end, is this: the more I studied “Lady Midday” line by line, seeing almost every phrase of it reflected it my memories of Wrob Barney’s Untitled 13, the extent to which it already disturbed me began, at length, to disturb me even more.

  Still does.

  So: riddle solved, sort of. But what to do with this information?

  I brushed my teeth, went to bed, and slept till eleven, disturbed only briefly by Simon on his way out, wedging Clark into his clothes for that Saturday Social Situations course he was doing at the Trebas Institute, while the end credits of Thomas gave way to the title sequence of Star Trek: The Next Generation, with Clark doing his best Jean-Luc Picard imitation: “Stardate 24608.5. I am sending an away team down to the surface of planet Rigel Four, the Enterprise is filmed in Panavision.” What eventually woke me was my mom, her timing impeccable as ever, phoning about whether or not I knew if Clark was signed up for summer school yet (no, the Catholic School Board wouldn’t send confirmation until probably the week before, just like last year, and the year before), or if I wanted to bring him over to her place once the Institute dropped him off that afternoon. “Sure,” I told her, still sleep-stupid. “That’s, yeah—no problem. I can do that.”

  “Are you all right, Lois?”

  “I’m fine, Mom.”

  “You don’t sound ‘fine.’”

  “Had a migraine last night, that’s all. Took me a while to get to sleep.”

  “Hmmm.” A beat, while I literally bit my tongue to keep from responding. Then: “That’s happening more often, isn’t it?”

  “More often than what?”

  “Lo
is, I know you know what I mean—you had one just last night, remember? Around this same time, actually.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Well, even so; it’s not normal. Maybe you should see somebody.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. And hung up.

  A shower and some coffee later, I was sitting in front of the computer tapping a pen, trying to rough out a plan of attack. If there really was any sort of link between Mrs. Whitcomb’s story and the footage Wrob had spliced into his film, then the easiest way to confirm that might be to go directly to the “source”—i.e. get in touch with the man himself, start a conversation, then drop hints hoping he’d simply admit it. So I accessed the Ursulines’ website and clicked on the phone number provided, straightening as it began to ring; raked my hair into place for the web-camera, grateful I’d at least had the sense to put on pants beforehand.

  User is offline, F2F told me, eventually. Would you like to send a message?

  “Yep,” I replied, out loud, and switched to voice-text: “Caught Untitled 13 last night, comma, my review should be up this afternoon, full stop. Would like to follow up with an interview, comma, are you interested, question mark? Please mail or call, comma, Lois Cairns.”

  I waited for a few minutes after hitting SEND, just in case, then poured myself a cup of coffee and started Googling: Mrs. Whitcomb (wife of Arthur Macalla, artistic career, Spiritualism, disappearance, Balcarras’s Strange Tales, etc.), The Snake Queen’s Daughter (privately printed, one copy listed at the Toronto Public Reference Library, in the restricted-access stacks), the Wends or Wendish people (inhabitants of the now only German-speaking parts of what used to be the larger region of Old Lusatia, in Eastern Germany), Lady Midday . . .

  Also known as Pscipolnitsa, Poludnica, Polednice, this Slavic noontime demon warns harvesters to pay attention to their duty or suffer the consequences. Generally pictured as a beautiful woman dressed all in white, she carries a pair of shears and roams the boundaries of the fields like a whirling dust cloud, attempting to engage labourers in conversation during the very hottest hour of the day. Any incorrect answer or unprompted subject change will result in a beheading, perhaps a symbolic representation of heatstroke. She may also appear as an old hag or twelve-year-old girl. Even today, the threat of encountering her is often used to scare children away from valuable crops.

  In Wendish mythology, she is known as Mittagsfrau, “Lady Midday”; in Brandenburg, a related mythological spirit called the Roggenmuhme or “lady of the rye” makes ill-behaved children disappear on hot summer days, while in the Altmark the Regenmöhme—“with her heat”—who abducts kids foolish enough to distract their parents from their field-work. Around Lunenberg in Lower Saxony, the name of this bugbear is Kornwief or Kornwyf, meaning “woman of the corn.”

  Sounded like the same person. There was an accompanying illustration that made me sit up a bit straighter, too: all-white bristling hair, sun-rayed in every direction; light-bleached face reduced to a pair of fixed, staring-owl eyes; a fiercely set mouth. Were those wings at her shoulders or a cloak blown out in two great flaps, scudding the cloudless sky? Everything had an odd Impressionist shimmer to it, like a haze; I could almost hear cicadas buzzing in unseen trees, smell the baked metal tang of sweat as the plough passed by, gleaners following behind. I shook my head then, sharply, a shiver of last night’s migraine wincing through my temples. And heard the chime of an F2F reply, appearing in my screen’s bottom left corner: yokay sounds good how bout tonite 6pm sneaky dees @ college/bathurst

  “Can you make it seven question mark?”

  will do txt when ur onsite byeeee

  “Byeeeee to you too full stop,” I muttered, clicking voice-text off. Adding: “Asshole.”

  “That’s . . . pretty similar,” Simon observed, looking at the four clips from Untitled 13 Wrob Barney had put up on his site and comparing them to my own transcription of “Lady Midday.” We’d agreed to meet for coffee earlier in the day, him heading over to get Clark from Mom’s, me with a good fifteen minutes before I really needed to hustle in order to get to Sneaky Dee’s on time; I planned to take a cab anyhow, rationalizing that twenty bucks we didn’t really have as a pretty good investment if you factored in the whole “might change my life” element.

  “I know, right?” I took a sip of coffee. “It’s kind of uncanny.”

  “In the truest sense, yeah. You have any evidence he actually read this story, though?”

  “Nope. No evidence this supposed silent film footage isn’t really his work, either . . . but I do know Wrob Barney’s done it before and more than once—copied stuff from various sources just to stick it inside his own shit, like flavouring: Untitled 5, Untitled 7. He tends to go for stuff that’s out of copyright or porn, or both—stuff nobody’s exactly going to contest.”

  “Seriously?”

  I shrugged. “Sure. That’s how he lost his job at the National Film Archive—somebody walked in on him screening old films and videotaping them off the monitor to get a degenerated image, cutting in camera. Chris Coulby told me.”

  Chris was a guy I’d gone to Figtree Alternative High School with, once upon a time; he’d graduated York University with a degree in Film Studies and Production, the way I’d originally planned before hedging my bets and going to Ryerson instead for Magazine Journalism. He and his fellow classmates had exploded out into the world during a recession and ended up going in very different directions—one formed a band, in which Chris briefly sang backup, before working reception and ticket sales at the NFA. He’d been my inside man ever since, never directly quotable yet the source of much information.

  Simon sat back. “Okay, sounds legit. So what next?”

  I thought about that for a minute. “Well, going by what we have here,” I began, finally, feeling my way through the thesis out loud, “it looks like someone made a movie out of ‘Lady Midday,’ probably shortly after the story was published. And since there’s no way it was widely known, given it was published privately, then that person . . . might have been Mrs. Whitcomb herself. Which would be kind of a deal.”

  “And you’re gonna ask Barney about that?”

  “Where he got the clips, at least, and maybe not directly. I don’t think I need to talk about Mrs. Whitcomb per se.”

  “Wait and see if he brings it up?” I nodded. “Okay, but what if he doesn’t? You still need to prove the link, obviously, to get people on board. . . .”

  “Obviously, yeah.”

  “So how?”

  “Noooo fuckin’ idea.”

  He nodded slightly, and we sat there again for a moment or two in companionable silence. Simon and I had known each other for a good seven years before we ever hooked up. Part of the appeal was that friendship; though people always claim it’s good to be “best friends” with your significant other, it does tend to reduce your circle of acquaintanceship pretty severely, especially once you have kids. Especially if said kids are like Clark, and looking back, how could they have not been?

  People still ask me sometimes what I think “happened,” like they’re asking me to place blame, to point to something I did or something that was done to me—to identify what exactly was the glitch that fashioned Clark, made him who/what he is, so they can avoid it. Was it vaccination, pollution, too much electricity in the air? The only thing that has ever made sense to me is a theory put forward by Sacha Baron Cohen’s brother (also Simon, hilariously), who attributes it to simple genetics: the fact that for at least fifty years now, people have been choosing their mates by affinity rather than economic considerations, allowing geeks who test a few points off the spectrum like me and Simon to fumble our way toward each other. A double payload of geekery, therefore, and you get Clark, the über-geek, so subsumed inside his own enthusiasms that on a bad day he can barely acknowledge the outside world—though even on a good day, seemingly, there’s little to nothing beyond the circle of hi
s own skull appealing enough to distract him for long.

  Simon is good at math, loves role-playing games and puzzles, and calculates point scores for fun. His father is a deacon and his uncle a priest—the same priest who married us—so it shouldn’t be surprising that his thought patterns register as Jesuitical, or maybe Thomistic; he used to like to argue for fun, once upon a time, though these days he finds it wearing. He can put on a better social face than I can, but he bruises easily; his emotions are closer to the surface than mine, or possibly just less ground down, less disconnected. On the other hand, he’s really good for bouncing things off of, because he thinks logically, not metaphorically. We’re both pattern makers, albeit of very different types.

  “You better go,” he said, finally. “Mind if I think about this for a while, on my own? I might be able to come up with something.”

  “Please. I’ll take all the help I can get.”

  He smiled. “Excellent! See ya later, then. Love.”

  “Love,” I replied, kissing him goodbye.

  Ten years plus since Toronto went smoke-free in bars, as well as workplaces and restaurants, Sneaky Dee’s is the kind of place that still smells like the inside of an ashtray—dark-painted walls inside and graffiti mural on stucco out, all cartoon cow skulls, cacti, and cowboy hats outlined in blacklight-sensitive DayGlo paint. Weekends, they hold Eighties Music Night meet-and-greets; weeknights, it’s a rotating roster of local nu-punk, black metal, and ghost house bands, cut with the occasional white suburban rap crew. I texted Wrob as the cab pulled up, then fought my way upstairs where I found him crammed into a booth near the back, all long limbs, tousled greaser-black hair, and deep-set glazed, glinting eyes, as far from the stage as possible. He was studying tonight’s flyer and working on his second beer. “Tonight: Prolapse,” he said, shoving it toward me. “Ever heard of ’em? I think they used to be Prolapsed Something, and if so, they really suck. But I’m just not sure.”