Part 17

        It didn't take me all that long to get back to the Mayhew's, I was back in time to throw on some fresh clothes and join everyone for dinner. It took a little over an hour to find my way to the road I knew ran perpendicular to the one the Mayhew's were on, and once I reached it, it was hardly another hour before I was back. Sweaty and with sticks in my hair, but I'd made it.
        "You didn't get lost out in them woods there, did you?" Mr. Mayhew asked with a sly grin.
        I laughed. "Actually, no, I didn't... Took me a little while to find the creek, just because it curves so much, but I followed the road back."
        "Well that's good," Mrs. Mayhew commented. "Did you take a lot of pictures?"
        "Too many, as usual. I think I'll stay on campus after work all of next week to use the dark room, I'd like to start making prints of some of these, if I can get caught up with developing all this film."
        "You'll have to show us some, when you do!"
        Part of me was dying to ask if they knew anything about an abandoned house out in the woods - they'd both lived here their whole lives, they must have heard some rumor or another. But a much bigger part of me was reluctant to say anything, though I wasn't entirely sure why. Partly, I suppose, because I wanted it to be my discovery, my own private little place. And I knew it would be hard to explain my fascination with it... and I think I felt like it would take away from the ethereal feeling of the place, if everyone knew about it. Like if I told other people, suddenly it would have empty beer bottles scattered around the yard, and the windows would be cracked and broken, and there would be graffiti on the walls, and...
        "You're awful quiet tonight, you tire yourself out today?" Mr. Mayhew broke in, scattering my thoughts.
        "Yeah... yeah I think I did, I haven't taken a hike like that in a long while. The woods back home weren't anywhere near as big as this, I don't think they were more than a quarter mile deep at any one point. Just a bit of divider between housing tracts, really."
        "Well, you be sure you're careful out there," Mrs. Mayhew advised. "You know what kind of snakes to look out for, things like that?"
        I nodded. "Oh yeah, I did a lot of wandering through the woods as a kid, my dad beat all of that into my head pretty well." Of course, it occurred to me that I really hadn't been keeping an eye out for that sort of thing while poking around the house. Just because I couldn't get inside, didn't mean that wild animals couldn't. I'd really have to be a lot more careful. I had already started a mental list of things to have on me when I went back - some means of getting a lock open, a flashlight, a bandanna or something to breathe through, in case the air inside the house had gone weird, because of asbestos in the walls or something... I didn't realize until I got back that I hadn't had my cell phone on me, I should definitely not forget that again, I'd be screwed if I got hurt way out there.
        Mrs. Mayhew shooed me out of the kitchen after dinner. "There's hardly any dishes to be done, when Caleb's not here. You go on up to your room and rest, you look awfully drained, dear."
        I protested, but weakly. I had so much on my mind, and I really did feel pretty tired. It felt like years ago that I'd been worried over finding my lost roll of film, how on earth had that been only that morning? I took a hot shower and changed into my pajamas. Though it was hours earlier than I usually went to bed, I laid down, thinking I might read for awhile or something, but I couldn't get my mind off the house. I turned the radio on low, and sat back against the pillows, looking blindly out the window. The sky was a faint purple-ish red, the color from the sunset spilling into the rest of the sky, staining it with rich saturation.
        Caleb wouldn't be back until next weekend, I was pretty sure, though I could always look up picking locks on the Internet or something. But apart from tomorrow, I'd be busy all week anyway, with work and the dark room. I should go out tomorrow and run some errands, I really needed more film. And if I stayed around the house, all I'd do was think about the villa... not that I was going to be able to stop thinking about it anyway. There were too many mysteries, too many strange things...and I hadn't even been inside yet! What on earth would I find there? Even though my common sense kept telling me it would be largely empty inside, I kept imagining ancient wood furniture, elegantly wrought brass lamps, crystal chandeliers, once-luxurious carpets that had faded over the decades...



        Sunday, I rode my bike into town and ran errands, cashing paychecks and picking up film, food, a few other things. I rode back the long way, away from the strips of giant chain stores and fast food places, and went through the actual town, which was somewhere around a hundred and fifty years old. It really was a gorgeous town (though I'd already photographed it half to death during the school year), tall old brick buildings, a huge Greek-styled bank, all the buildings restored and kept in good repair. As I approached the two small squares of park space in the middle of town, I was looking at a large white house on the corner beside the park...and the words on the sign, though I'd read them a dozen times before, sunk in.
        Darwin R. Barker Historical Museum.
        I nearly skidded to a stop right there - but caught myself, and slowed gradually, backing up to take a better look. I'd known it was there, I just hadn't been all that interested before. I parked my bike and walked up to the front door. It was a tall house, brick painted white, with pretty wood trim along the entryways and windows. An addition onto the back butted up to the small local library, but this portion still looked like a house on the outside. A sign on the door proclaimed the place closed, as I'd suspected. I skimmed over the hours they would be open, though, and tried to commit them to memory. I'd have to come back sometime, and see...
        But I didn't even know the address of the villa! No road had ever seemed to run by there, though there must have been something like one somewhere in the past... how did you look up a mysterious house in the woods? Maybe someone working there would have heard a story... I remembered an elementary school trip to one of the local museums in the city not far from us, and how the tour guide there seemed to know absolutely everything that had ever happened in the city. With a town as small as this, there were bound to be records still of nearly everything that had ever happened, especially involving wealthy residents in the town's formative years. Though I still had no idea when the villa had been built, or abandoned, I only knew that it was before electricity became ubiquitous. Probably before cars too, though I was still pretty sure there had to be at least one more building nearby that I hadn't found yet. No way someone that rich would've walked clear out there from town. Unless they were a crazy hermit or something... maybe it had been a young man whose beloved had died some tragic death, and she loved flowers, and he'd built the house for her, they were engaged to be married, and when she died he was so heartbroken that he holed up in the house, alone and cut off from everyone else, and tended the gardens in heartbroken memory or her...
        I started laughing, and I couldn't contain it enough to do it silently, either, I was laughing too hard. I got back on my bike and started racing out of town, back to the Mayhews. I was out of my freaking mind. I really had to stop being such a recluse myself, or I really would lose all touch with reality.

        True to my resolution, all that week I went to the dark room after work, staying until just before the sun went down every night. I got all the film developed - I really was getting better at it, I was doing it so often now that I finally started to get a better feel for winding the film onto the reels in the dark. There were still a few times I was on the brink of just throwing the damn things into a wall, but, I battled through it, and those battles were getting fewer and fewer. As a result, I was losing fewer frames on the negatives, which was a huge relief. I was actually looking forward to checking the negatives out when they were ready, instead of unrolling them in dread of seeing just what gorgeous shots I'd lost.

        Wednesday night, I made contact prints of everything. These were relatively quick and painless to do, once I got the light and time setting about right for the exposure, I could just do one after another, since the lighting conditions for the photos had been pretty consistent, and these were just tests anyway. I didn't need to fiddle around with focusing the enlargers, all I had to do was set the light timer, and the amount of light coming through. I'd plop a sheet of photo paper into the frame under the enlarger, set the page of negatives on top of it, make sure it was laying smoothly, and hit the button to turn the light on for however many seconds I needed. From there, it was just a matter of inhaling chemicals for awhile, and I was used to that.
        I had picked up a set of small speakers for my iPod on the previous Sunday, so I had music on but could still hear noises in the building around me. Such a small difference, but it really made me feel loads more comfortable in the dark room. Though I'd always been more comfortable in the printing rooms than the developing ones - you never really got used to the complete and utter darkness of the film-rolling room, your eyes could never adjust because there was no light at all for them to grab at, it was so unsettling. This room, though, with its dim, warm red lights, always made me realize that, hey, I really was a photographer! It felt so reassuring, to know that I really did know what I was doing, I could set up the room from scratch and do everything I needed to do to make my photos a tangible reality.
        And then there was the magic of the developer bath.