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The
Soul Catcher
Chapter
one
It was early; the morning sun was just rising,
catching the woman’s face with a luminescent
ambiguity. She looked like she was in her mid
twenties, although it was hard to tell with the
make up and clothes. She was slim and frail
looking. She looked pale, like she hadn’t
eaten for a while or had spent the night
sleeping in the cold, damp, park. She walked
down the street unsteadily, she was wearing high
heals and it looked like she wasn’t used to
them. She had on a tight figure hugging black
dress; her make up was slightly smeared. A tired
expression was on her face as she walked along
the street. As she stopped to cross the road,
something caught her eye; she frowned then
smiled and bent down to pick up a slightly
bashed flower. She held it up and admired the
fragile yellow flower in the morning sunlight,
in the distance a camera flashed, the moment
captured for eternity.
Scott
McKenzie had been watching the woman for a
while. He first noticed her a few days before,
on a morning returning from monitoring another
subject. Something about her had held his
attention, she wasn’t stunningly beautiful,
but something about her was captivating. She had
a face that said she had a stormy past; it held
many stories, some dark and sleazy, some
passionate and tragic. Scott waited before
taking her picture; these things couldn’t be
rushed. He had to be sure she was genuine, he
had to capture exactly the right moment, that
moment of ultimate truth where the person is
unaware of the camera and their soul is bared
for all to see. This is what made Scott’s
pictures so special, they showed the truth, the
real person. That was why he spent so long
monitoring his subjects, he was like a hunter
who studied his prey, followed it, got into
rhythm with it and then when they are totally
unaware he pounces. Scott didn’t like people
to know that their picture was being taken, if
they were aware the picture wouldn’t be true.
You never see the truth on a picture where the
subject is aware the picture is being taken.
That point where the woman found the flower was
her moment of truth. Scott had captured a piece
of her, Scott’s picture showed her soul.
Some
people thought he was obsessive, others just
thought he was strange, but Scott knew he was
the best photographer around. He never displayed
his pictures to the public, in fact only a few
people close to him had ever seen them. He
didn’t tend to stay close to people for too
long though, the pictures always came first. He
thought there was more honesty in his pictures
than in real contact with people. Human beings
can’t help but lie, he thought, it’s their
self-defence mechanism against other human
beings. Only when they think they are not being
observed, or in an ultimate moment of intimacy
or violence are they ever truly honest. This is
when their true soul can be seen; this is what
Scott had captured on his camera. As soon as he
captured the picture of the woman he turned and
left her behind. Any thought of the real person,
the subject, had left his mind. He had got what
he came for, captured his prize, that’s all he
cared about.
It
wasn’t far to Scott’s flat; he lived on the
third floor of an old tenement building. The
outside of the building was that dingy grey
colour buildings go after years of pollution
from abusing traffic. The inside was a
reflection of outside, neglected by years of
abuse; graffiti instead of pollution covered the
walls. The whole building was a statement on the
people who lived there, neglected, abused, and
without the power or the will to change their
situation. Scott liked living here; he saw a lot
of what he called real people. These people
couldn’t afford the pretensions of the rich,
what you saw was what you got. It was easy to
capture them in their moments of honesty. It was
what initially attracted him to the area, but it
soon became too easy to capture these people, he
needed more of a challenge. That was the reason
he put so much effort into monitoring his
subjects before he actually photographed them.
Scott had taken to wandering the streets at all
hours of the day and night looking for the
perfect subject. He didn’t look for anyone in
particular they just tended to stand out,
capture his attention like the woman he captured
that morning. Scott climbed the weathered stairs
of his building and arrived at his door, he
noticed that it seemed to have less graffiti on
it than the others, it was almost as if people
where scared to upset him. His neighbours did
avoid him, but he avoided them too. He wasn’t
really interested in getting to know them as
people, just capturing their truth on film. He
never was particularly good at getting to know
people anyway; they always thought he was a bit
weird with his peculiar passion for photography.
The furnishings in the flat were minimal, the
ever-present photos were scattered around the
place. Many where pinned to the walls in
irregular fashion as if he was to hide some
hideous secret behind. Every picture was of a
different person, none of them looked aware that
their picture was being taken. There was
something captivating about all of them; it was
hard to draw the eye away from one to another.
Something about the people pictured made you
feel you knew them, had experienced their life
with them. At the same time the pictures gave
you an uncomfortable feeling of intimacy, like
you where intruding on their personal privacy,
like this was a moment nobody was meant to see.
Scott made himself a coffee from his sparse
kitchen and sat on his battered sofa staring at
each picture in turn. He gave a satisfied sigh.
He knew he was good, they were good pictures; he
thought he was the best, but he would never know
until he let the public see his pictures and
decide for themselves. The problem was he knew
that he couldn’t do that because if he did he
would never be able to take another picture. The
people he had captured on film had all
disappeared. After each picture had been taken
the people vanished. It was a mystery to the
police who were currently searching f!
or a serial killer in relation to all of the
missing people. Scott knew they were not dead,
he knew exactly where they were. That was why he
could never show his pictures, people wouldn’t
understand. It was also one of the reasons he
chose his subjects so carefully, because he knew
by taking their picture he was giving these
people a life sentence. The subjects weren’t
dead, they weren’t kidnapped, and they were
here in his flat all around him, on the walls,
captured for eternity. By taking their photo’s
at their ultimate moment of truth Scott took a
little bit of the subject for himself. He
captured their soul on the film of his camera.
A
few hours after arriving home Scott woke up. He
had drifted to sleep looking at his
masterpieces, the only things in his flat, with
the exception of his dark room, that he took any
care in. The pictures looked like they were
displayed randomly on the walls, but each one
was placed with careful precision. Everything
Scott did with his pictures was done with
careful precision. Scott had been having a
bothersome dream, a phone kept ringing, never
stopping, but he was unable to get to it. He was
sitting in an old style office, like something
from a Humphrey Bogart detective film, smoky and
mysterious. The phone was sitting right in front
of him on the desk, ringing and ringing, but
somehow he was unable to pick it up. He
couldn’t move his body; all he could do was
listen to the tortuous ringing. After a while a
voice appeared, it sounded oddly familiar, but
he couldn’t place it, it was a voice in the
air, disembodied. The voice was telling Scott to
pick up the phone, “I can help you, you just
have to pick up the phone.” Something about
the voice annoyed him, was it the mocking
sympathy or the disgruntling feeling of
familiarity? He didn’t know but it was at this
point of annoyance that Scott shook himself out
of sleep. He looked bleary eyed around the room;
saw the cold cup of coffee sitting on the table
in front of him. His camera was sitting there as
well, the film still undeveloped. Scott wondered
how he could allow himself to be so callous as
to keep his masterpiece trapped for so long
within the film of his camera. It needed to be
set free, join its brothers and sisters,
displayed for all their glory on the sparse
walls of Scott’s flat. The ironic
juxtaposition of his pictures beauty framed by
those grimy walls amused Scott, it all added to
the aura of truth and reality in them.
Scott
picked up the camera and walked across the room
to his dark room. The living room of his flat
looked a reasonable size; this was because it
led into the kitchen, giving it the illusion of
more space. Two doors led off the back wall, one
to the bedroom, the other to the dark room, this
also doubled as the bathroom, but Scott rarely
liked to think of practicalities. The whole flat
was sparse and functional, only the pictures on
the walls gave any sort of decoration. The
cupboards in the kitchen were filled with fast
food. T.V. meals and tinned goods, food that
required no care or thought, the nutritional
value hardly mattered, food was just there to
fulfil another function. The dark room was
different, it looked like the room that was most
used, lived in. It would look comical to an
outside observer, the cluttered belongings
scattered over a toilet and sink. The bath
formed the main laboratory area for the
processing of his films. Around the floor,
bottles of processing chemicals lay randomly;
offshoots of film and photography paper were
scattered in bundles. Every wall of this room
was framed with shelves, stacked on these were
the trappings of his work. The fragile light
sensitive paper sealed in its black packaging,
the viewer that he placed on his makeshift desk,
the sink; there were also rolls of film ready to
be used. Their was no window in this room to
block out, only the door had to be carefully
sealed so that no light could corrupt his work,
ruin his beautiful creations. There were two
light bulbs in the dark room, one red and one a
brighter yellow. Scott turned the red one on,
sealed the door and prepared to work.
The
actual processing of film was easy to Scott, it
was simple, automatic, he had done it so many
times. The only difficult part was that
disquieting feeling he got every time he waited
for the picture to develop on the paper. He
always heard imagined screams of agony and
struggle as the image slowly appeared; finally
resting in resignation to their fate, the
picture appeared. That wondrous moment of truth,
the soul of a human being, captured for eternity
for Scott’s private pleasure. After treating
the film and developing the picture of his
latest subject Scott returned to his living
room. He place the film with the rest in the
dark room, carefully labelled and dated, the
picture was to go on display, pride of place
with his others, into the section he secretly
called ‘innocence rediscovered’. There was a
pattern to the placing of the pictures; it was
impossible to see unless you knew Scott’s view
of the subjects. He had different sections and
different placings within them. Some pictures
were placed more prominently within a section
depending on how strongly he felt they fitted to
the ideal. Some pictures overlapped into
different sections, because the subject had
proved more ambiguous and elusive. The woman he
had captured that morning was fitting firmly
into innocence rediscovered in quite a prominent
viewing position. The picture next to it was of
an old man weeping at a grave, the gravestone
was visible it read Joel Schneider, 1967. The
other sections in Scott’s display were lust,
love, hate, ignorant evil and innocence. Scott
was fascinated at the way humans lose their
innocence and spend the rest of their lives
trying to recapture it, few ever succeeding or
realising the brief moments when they do
succeed. Some of his pictures showed
disturbingly graphic violence, others where
gratuitous in their pornography, some were
touchingly beautiful, all of them were
exceptionally real. A strange aura of truth
purveyed around them.
After he had carefully placed the new subject in
the display Scott sat back down on the sofa to
admire his work. The phone began to ring,
shocking him out of his reverie, he ignored it
but it was ceaseless. Annoyed Scott got up to
answer the phone; he noticed that the message
button was flashing on the answer machine.
He
picked up the phone, “Hello,” he said.
Scott
stood rigid and defiant whilst he listened to
the caller on the phone, “I’m sorry Jack, I
can’t talk at the moment, I’m in the middle
of some work, you know how it is.” He paused
to let the other person answer, then, “look
I’ve really got to go, it can’t wait. Did
you call earlier by the way?” The caller spoke
briefly before being cut off by Scott again,
“Ok Jack I’ll listen to your message and
I’ll try and call you later, see you.” He
put the phone down more abruptly than he had
meant to, still annoyed that he had been
disturbed whilst he was enjoying his latest
creation. His little brother Jack was well
meaning, but always tended to annoy Scott with
his patronisingly sympathetic voice. Scott
always got the feeling that Jack felt superior
to him, just because he seemed so well adjusted
and normal, with his perfect family life; people
never understood what Scott did or the way that
he lived. Still, Scott did love his brother; he
was his only family after all. Jack was one of
the two people that had seen some of the
pictures. He hadn’t understood their truth of
course, but he also hadn’t made the connection
between the missing people. He had only seen a
few pictures, and in that patronisingly
appreciative way he had, he had admired them.
All families do it, no matter what the child
looks like the mother still thinks it is the
most beautiful child in the world, similarly
whatever creation that child produces is seen as
the best piece of work the world has ever seen.
Jack never would fully understand Scott’s
work, he would never honestly appreciate it,
humans, even family, could never be truly
honest. Scott went and sat down again, he fell
asleep on the sofa, distracted by his
brother’s voice, unable to fully appreciate
his new picture properly. His last thought as he
drifted back into his dreams was that he would
listen to Jack’s message later. |
