A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Tobias opened her lorgnette and gave her the once-over through it. Meadows went over to the window, and the camera followed her part of the way. That left Tobias over at the left-hand side of the screen and partly out of the picture, with just one shoulder, arm, and the side of her head showing. She started to rock back and forth and tap her lorgnette against the back of her hand. I had my eyes glued to Meadows though. She turned around to look at her “sister.”

“Oh, won’t he ever come?” she said.

Her face sort of tightened up — changed from repose to tenseness. A look of horror started to form on it, but it never got any further. Right then and there the thing happened.

The best way I can describe it is, a sort of bright, luminous flower seemed to open up half way down her dress, spreading, peeling back. But the petals of it were flame. An instant later it was all over her, and the first screams of a voice that was gone now came smashing out at my eardrums. And in between each one, the hellish sound-track had even picked up and recorded the sizzling that her hair made.

“Cut!”

I turned around and yelled back at him: “For Pete’s sake, cut, before I throw up!” and I mopped my drenched forehead. “I did — twice — while I was processing it,” he confessed, looking out of the booth at me.

It hadn’t told me a thing so far, but then I hadn’t expected it to — the first throw out of the bag.

“Go back and start it over,” I shivered, “but, whatever you do, leave out that finale! Take it up where she turns at the window. Slow-motion this time. Can you hold it when I tell you to?”

He adjusted his apparatus. “Say when,” he called.

The figures on the screen hardly moved at all this time, eight times slowed down. They drifted lazily — sort of floated. I knew the place to look for on Meadows’ dress now, and I kept my eyes focussed on it and let everything else ride. A moment later something had shown up there.

“Hold it!” I yelled, and the scene froze into a “still.”

Now it was just a magic-lantern slide, no motion at all. I left my seat and stood close up against the screen, keeping to one side so my own shadow wouldn’t blur out that place on her dress. No flame was coming from it yet. It was just a bright, luminous spot, about the size and shape of a dime.

“Back up one!” I instructed. “One” meant a single revolution of the camera. The scene hardly shifted at all, but the pin-point of light was smaller — like a pea now. You couldn’t have seen it from the seat I’d been in at first.

Two heads are better than one. I called him out and showed it to him. “What do you make of this? It’s not a defect in the film, is it?”

“No, it’s a blob of light coming to a head at that place on her dress. Like a highlight, you might say. A gleam.” Which is what I’d had it figured for, too.

“Go three forward,” I said, “and then hold it.”

He came out again to look. It was back to the size of a dime again, and only a turn or two before the flames were due to show up.

“There’s heat in it!” I said. “See that!”

The white spot had developed a dark core, a pin-head of black or brown.

“That’s the material of the dress getting ready to burn. See that thread coming out of the dot? Smoke — and all there’ll ever be of it, too. Celluloid doesn’t give much warning.”

So far so good. But what I wanted to know was where that gleam or ray was coming from. I had the effect now, but I wanted the cause. The trouble was you couldn’t follow the beam through the air — to gauge its direction. Like any beam of light, it left no trail — only showed up suddenly on her dress. The set-up, so far, seemed to fit Nellie’s theory of spontaneous combustion perfectly. Maybe one of the powerful Klieg lights, high overhead and out of the picture, had developed some flaw in its glass shield, warping one of its rays. But the electrician had gone over them afterward and given them all a clean bill of health.

“Start it up again,” I said wearily. “Slow motion,” and went back and sat down. I was farther away now and had a better perspective of the thing as a whole; maybe that’s what did it.

As the scene on the screen thawed and slowly dissolved into fluid motion once more, it gave the impression for a moment of everything on it moving at once. Therefore it was only natural that the one thing that didn’t move should catch my eye and hold it. Tobias’ lorgnette, and the wrist and hand that held it. The three objects stayed rigid, down in the lower left-hand corner of the screen, after everything else was on the go once more. The chair she was in had started to rock slowly back and forth, and her body with it, but the forearm, wrist, hand and lorgnette stayed poised, motionless. There was something unnatural about it that caught the eye at once. I remembered she had opened the scene by tapping her lorgnette as well as rocking.