SEVEN
When daylight broke, I was sitting at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere. The morning was misty and frosty, and I was frozen stiff, my fingers still clamped around the camera. A bus pulled up and I didn't see where it was going, but I climbed on anyway. When it terminated. I caught another. I vaguely recognised something, and climbed off. I tried to read the timetable, but it took four attempts for the words to really sink in. Two buses back to the city centre. Two hours later and I was numbly unlocking the door to my flat.
I sat down, still holding the camera. In my ears, I could hear water sloshing about, Auggie's last desperate attempts at survival before death came for him and dragged him down to the bottom of that lake. But of course, death was already ready for him before that. Vincent and his camera. Me, his accomplice. There was nothing I could say, and nothing I could do, but still, I sobbed and no tears came.
I wondered if they would find him quickly, or if I should call someone and tell them what had happened. I didn't, because I knew I was guilty. Vincent had told me he taped deaths. He gave that example of the woman who had succumbed to old age. He told me about suicides. I had never imagined, though he had never claimed otherwise, the more guttural part of his work- people who didn't want to go and reached a hand out, grasping for help, only to find the lens of a camera shoved into their face. Vincent had said he had done this many times. He was no better than a murderer.
I grappled with the camera, pulling it open. If he was to come back for me, I would want nothing to do with him. There would be no film. I used the thumb control pad to cycle back through the previous few days' worth of footage. There was a lot to do with me- our conversation in the car park of the Landy Centre, my flat, my work, and other images from my life that now did manage to bring a tear to my eyes. A tear at how thorough he'd been, dredging up memories that I would never have thought of. Watching it back, I realised it was me. I deleted it all.
Worse, there was plenty of footage that was Auggie's, and little of it I understood until I came to the events of the previous night. The camerawork was smooth, focused on the water and unwavering, even when I watched back the part where I was hitting Vincent, where he had held onto me to stop me from saving Auggie. My screams were in the background, but the moving image showed nothing of the struggle. The framing was calm as Auggie sank to the depths. The last few bubbles came quickly to the surface and disappeared forever.
I put the camera on the table and sat back, again toying with the idea of turning the camera over to the police. I didn't think I could. Marshall leered next to me, but I turned the camera away so he couldn't see. I had much to do.
I locked the door and drew all the curtains. I collected my razor blades and lay them out on the table, next to the camera. And then I began to write. A long-form note, something of an apology. Most of it was about Auggie. I described the night he died in vivid detail. I talked of profuse regret and begged for forgiveness. I wrote of Vincent, and his methods. I damned him. I wrote that Auggie might have made a nice Santa. I laid the note, ten pages in length, down next to the camera, picked up the razor blades, and headed to the bathroom.
I turned both taps on in the bath, and perched on the edge of the toilet and waited for it to be over. I watched the water gurgle from the taps. When there was a sizeable pool of it in the bath, it was nearly dark outside once again. I moved to turn the taps off, but became distracted by movement under the water level in my tub. It was almost imperceptible at first, a few ripples of disturbance, a few bubbles. I turned the taps off, sure I was imagining it, but then it continued. The ripples became longer in duration, the bubbles more powerful, until splashes were erupting from the bath, spraying the mirror and drenching me. I shot backwards, pressing myself against the bathroom door, as with one tremendous splash, a hand rose up out of the water, blue and pale. Another followed, this one clutching a glass bottle and slinging itself over the side of tub for purchase. The bottle fell from its fingers and rolled across the tile floor. The thing pulled itself up out of the water, and stood to full height. It was puffy and bloated. The skin of its face possessed none of the rosy glow I had seen in its photograph, instead a mottled grey and powder blue. Its white eyes bulged like peeled grapes under its eyelids, and its swollen fingers clutched at nothing as it spun around wildly before finally seeing me. "Where am I?" Auggie burbled, as water fell in droves from his ruined mouth.
"Auggie," I wept, and he looked at me in confusion.
"Where..." he repeated, his tongue thick in his mouth. He tried to step out of the bath and stumbled, so I did what I should have done last night and ran to help him, impressed by my resolve but quickly putting all selfish thoughts out of my mind. I grasped his sleeve, freezing cold and horribly tender like modelling clay underneath, and helped him step out of the bath.
"Auggie, you're dead," I whimpered at him.
"Don't be stupid," he said to me, and pulled his arm back. I felt his flesh slide with the movement. He seemed not to notice, and pushed past me. "Where am I?" he asked again, sludging toward the bathroom door and pulling it open. He wandered out into my flat and I followed.
"Do you remember me?" I asked.
"Yes," more water trickled from his mouth as he stared around blankly. "You were there when I went over. I must have knocked my head. You pulled me out of the water?"
"No, Auggie..." I spoke. "You went in and I... couldn't get you. You never came back up."
"I'm not dead, for God's sake," he said hotly.
"Auggie-"
"Who are you?"
"Please," I gestured to the sofa, next to Marshall. "Please. Why don't you sit down for a second." He did as I asked and water pooled off him, dripping from the sofa and onto the floor. He looked at me expectantly.
"Right," I said. "I'm going to try and explain... but I don't know- I don't know the best way to put it. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry." I said, and I was crying again and I looked at him, and he stared back blankly. He looked vaguely confused.
"There was a man with me. Do you remember him? Before you went into the lake."
"It was only you I saw," Auggie shrugged. Marshall looked at him with mild interest.
"No," I said. "I was there with this man- Vincent Vulture. He knew you were going to die."
Auggie looked like he was about to protest, but I cut across him. "Just listen," I said. And then a thought occurred to me. "I'm going to tell you a story," I said to him, and I picked up my note, shuffled the pages. I began to read to him. My voice caught in some places. I couldn't look at him. When I had finished, his face was slack.
"Some story," he said after a moment. "Is that it?" he asked. "I'm just a scary story? A campfire tale? You saw me die and now you're very sad about it- but you did nothing?" He settled back into his chair, letting the anger wash over him, and I sat afraid to move.
"And you tell me about this guy Vincent, but I didn't see him. There was no one there but you."
"He was! He was there!" I battled "Look, I'll show you." I hefted the camera toward him. "Watch."
I played it for him. His eyes never left the screen. Even in places where I couldn't make heads or tails of what was going on, he seemed transfixed. It was a rough cut, I knew that. It was unedited. Vincent had told me it helped them. I hoped that was true even in its unpolished form. We got to the part where he went under, and I looked away, but Auggie didn't, and then the screen went black- no more footage to show.
We sat in silence for what felt like a long time. He turned to me eventually and spoke. "You know... I was meant to be a Santa. At the club's Christmas party. We did it every year for the kids. I never had any kids, you know. I couldn't have any. But my niece, well, I loved her. She was going to be there, and they had asked me to be Santa. I'm not really a good actor. Do you think I would have been good?"
"I think you would have been great," I said quietly.
"He filmed that? Your Vincent?"
"Yes. We didn't help you. I'm so sorry. He was filming. I thought... I thought you were gonna top yourself like me. I thought it was all figured out."
"I never met him. I've never even seen him. But he's seen me- clearly." Auggie looked up. "I knew I was going to die, you know. I've felt it coming for weeks. This dread has been hanging over me. I've seen things that don't make sense, and I've felt like I was, perhaps, out of synch with the world. It wasn't for me anymore. That's why I was drinking. I never drink like that. I'm so embarrassed. But that's not what did me in. I was meant to go- I'm sure of it. But now I have an ending.
"Read me your story again," he asked of me, and I did. And when I had finished and I looked up again, he was gone, and the water he had left in pools on my floor was gone, and when I went to check the bath, it was full to the brim and still and clear. The flat was quiet.