Dellar stepped out into the stairwell, onto the steel landing. His feet rang on the floor. The mere smell of the place – a sweet, sickly smell he could never quite identify – was always enough to make him feel uneasy. He never liked leaving the darkroom, even though he knew Roberts would manage perfectly well on his own. However, the image he'd just had to process was a little unusual and he needed to show it to Brendel, to see if he could cast any light on it. Fortunately, it was only one flight up to Floor 36, where the entrance to the archive was located.
The trouble was, it always took Brendel a long time to answer the door. As usual, Dellar was left standing out on the landing in the gloom, listening to the distant throb of the machine coming up from the depths of the shaft and the low, continuous hum you could hear everywhere but which you only seemed to notice when you were standing around with nothing to do. Floor 36 being the top floor, Dellar, as he invariably did, found himself staring up at the ceiling while he waited, wondering what lay beyond it. There were various fanciful theories, but nobody really knew. The vertigo he felt standing there was as much to do with the unease he felt at this as it was to do with the sheer drop on the far side of the steel bannister. If, back in the relative comfort of his dark-room, you asked him what he thought of the stairwell, he'd tell you he didn't care much for it, but, in fact, whenever he was there, what he actually felt – despite the vertigo – was a thrill.
He looked down over the bannister, past all the dimly-lit landings below him, into the depths. His job sometimes took him downstairs, but, all his life, he'd never had reason to go down more than a couple of flights. He had very little idea what went on below that. He was a specialist. Somewhere down in the depths he could see flashes of light, as if faulty fluorescent tubes were flickering on an off. Or they could be electrical discharges. Something was obviously wrong. He'd heard nothing about it, though. No doubt the maintenance teams would soon be onto it, if they weren't already.
After what seemed like an age, Brendel opened the door.
“Come in, young man,” he said, smiling over his half-moon metal-rimmed spectacles. It was a joke of theirs, referring to each other as young men. In fact they were both about the same age and neither of them were young. Dellar smiled back and stepped into the entrance hall, then followed the other man down the short, spiral staircase that led to the archives proper. He always enjoyed spending time with Brendel. They inevitably ended up talking about old times and the work they'd done together. Not only that, but the archive itself with its soft lighting and its smell – a heady mixture of chocolate and good coffee – was a pleasant place to pass the time. His visits usually ended in a panic, with him suddenly realising he'd been away longer than he should've been, and a mad dash back down the stairs to the darkroom.
Most of the archive was taken up with filing cabinets and card-index drawers. They were all full to overflowing, with piles of cards, papers, spools and images stacked untidily on top of them and on the floor beside them. It looked chaotic, but Brendel always insisted he knew where everything was. The reality was slightly different, but he was such a nice guy that no-one complained when they had to wait a few minutes for him to come up with the goods.
In one corner – the only space not full of cabinets and papers – there were two leather sofas placed either side of a Georgian occasional table, on top of which stood a coffee-machine. The two men sat themselves down. Brendel poured them both a coffee. Only then did Dellar hand the archivist the image he'd brought. Brendel, tilting his head back and peering down through his spectacles, perused it for a few moments.
“A ceiling,”he said.
“Yes, but where?” said Dellar.
“I don't know,” said Brendel. “Some sort of public building?” He pointed to the top corner. “That looks like the end of a light-fitting...” He got up, still perusing the image. “Give me a moment...” He went over to a draw, opened it, and went through a few of the papers there. “Thought so. Probably a hospital.”
“Right.”
“Let's hope it's nothing bad.” Brendel went over to the telephone and lifted the earpiece.
“We seem to be in a hospital. Is there anything I ought to know?” he said, speaking into the microphone.
Dellar could vaguely hear a voice talking on the other end. Brendel took the receiver away from his ear, looked at it with some irritation, then hung it up.
“They said they'll let us know. They claim they don't know any more than we do.”
“There might be some trouble in the lower levels,” said Dellar. “I saw these weird, flashing lights down there when I was out in the stairwell just now.”
Brendel frowned. “No doubt they'll tell us in their own good time,” he said.
A buzzer sounded. Someone was at the door.
“I better get that,” said Brendel, getting up.
Just for a moment, the lights flickered.
“It's done that a few times recently,” he said, frowning.
Dellar watched his friend as he made his way as quickly as he could – not as quickly as he used to – up the spiral staircase. He returned a moment later with Roberts. Roberts was holding another rolled-up image in his hand. He smiled when he saw Dellar.
“I thought you'd both want to see this,” he said.
“You've left the darkroom unattended?” said Dellar. He sounded alarmed and slightly annoyed.
“Don't worry,” said Roberts. “The optical section's shut down. We're going into sleep mode anytime now. We'll probably have to sit it out up here.”
“I can think of worse places to be,” said Dellar.
The three men smiled. Brendel poured Roberts a coffee while Roberts unrolled his image.
“It was the last one we got,” he said.
It was a woman's face. All three of them knew who she was. She was looking into the camera. Behind her was the ceiling they'd seen in the previous image.
“Ah! Diane,” said Brendel.
“She looks worried,” said Dellar.
“And older,” said Brendel.
He nodded towards an image taped to the wall of a young woman in her thirties, blonde hair, sat at a café table, smiling. It was clearly the same woman.
“I stuck it up there,” said Brendel, “because I was forever having to fish it out of the files and put it away again. A place called Paris, nineteen eighty something. Or was it the seventies?”
There was a click from somewhere. The lights dimmed.
“Here we go,” said Brendel. “I tell you what. If we've nothing to do for a few hours, I think – that Paris trip – there are some reels of footage somewhere. It shouldn't take me a moment...” He got up and
“The bank of the Seine,” said Brendel. “I'm sure we visited the cathedral but all I can remember is this view from the outside.”
Dellar noticed that, curiously, Brendel had started to talk of 'we' and 'I', as he sometimes did, as if he'd been there. It was something about the man he'd never really understood.
The clip came to an end. The screen went bank and the spool continued to spin. Brendel reached over, stopped it spinning and put on the next. Now, they were standing on a platform on the Métro. A crowd of people standing around, waiting, their faces neutral, staring straight ahead, all except for Diane, who was smiling at the camera again. A train swept out of the tunnel and stopped. The doors opened. People got in and out. Diane climbed aboard. The cameraman followed her.
“Can't you just smell it?” said Brendel. “That mixture of French cigarettes, eggs, garlic... It's impossible to describe.”
Dellar couldn't. He had little to do with the olfactory section. Not only that, but nothing he'd seen so far seemed at all familiar, even though he knew he and Roberts must've processed the clips for the archive. They'd seen so much over the years – faces, cities, mountains, sunsets – that it all tended to fade into a blur.
Again, the clip came to an end and again, Brendel changed the spool. This time, it was a café. Diane – she could speak French a little, Brendel said – was talking to the man behind the counter. Croissants. Coffee in a bowl. It wasn't very busy. Two other customers, an elderly couple, sat at a table in the corner, deep in conversation.
“They were famous writers, apparently,” said Brendel. “Diane told me who they were. But I've forgotten. She always read a lot more books than I did.”
He changed the spool again. This time, a hotel room. A suitcase open on the bed. Diane, smiling. The view, out of the window, of the rooftops of Paris. The Eiffel Tower.
Suddenly, the projector stopped. The screen went dark. Dellar could hear the click of the switch as Brendel tried to turn the lights on again, but nothing happened.
“Blast!” said Brendel. The lights had gone completely. They were left sitting in the dark. Dellar could hear Brendel moving about, knocking into things. He heard a match strike. The glow illuminated Brendel's face. He was lighting a candle. “There!” he said. He brought it over and set it down on the table between the two sofas. “That should keep us going for a while.”
The three men sat in silence for a minute or two, contemplating the flame.
“It happened before, didn't it?” said Roberts. “A couple of years ago. They got it all sorted out in the end.”
The room had become noticeably colder. He was right about there being glitches in the past, thought Dellar, but it had never been quite as bad as this. He thought of saying as much, but decided not to. His mind wandered back to the time – a quarter of an hour ago? half an hour, maybe? he wasn't sure – when he was standing on the landing, outside Brendel's door. The thrill he felt then had come back, but, more than the thrill, he felt fear. What lay beyond the ceiling at the top of the stairs? It occurred to him he was never going to know the answer. And then there was Paris. Where was Paris? The air seemed stuffy. He could hear Brendel talking, more to himself than to anyone else.
“There were good times,” he said. “Bad times. Good times. More good times than bad times. C'est la vie, eh? Diane. Diane?”
“Listen,” said Roberts.
“What can you hear?” said Dellar.
“I can't hear anything,” said Roberts. “That's just the thing.” The hum wasn't there anymore. The machine, a distant throbbing which they could usually feel through the floor rather than hear, had stopped, too.
No-one said anything else. The three men lapsed into unconsciousness. The candle guttered and went out.
Text © Dominic Rivron, 2023
Illustrations
The Workshop of the Head from The Miracle of Life, ed. Harold Wheeler (?1939)
Ceiling photo taken from: I, Adamantios, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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