Page 13 of Retrograde

“I said we’re done!” I cut him off without bothering to look at him. “If you don’t shut up now, you’re a fucking tableau.”

Predictably, he goes quiet. They all do.

“Anything on there to support what they said?” I ask my tech guy, a sixty-year-old dinosaur who worked for one of the big IT companies back in the day.

He’s at the desk in his little nook, hunched over the crybaby’s laptop, ignoring me with an expression of intense concentration.

“Martin?” I nudge him.

“Huh?” He raises his head, his thick-lensed glasses reflecting light and obscuring his eyes. “Oh. No, not really. But there is something you should see.”

Hitting the keys, he hands me the laptop. Repulsed, I sink onto his unmade bed. The quilt is tangled, and the sheets are yellowed. I try my best to ignore the stale stink that assaults my senses, focusing on the screen instead.

I’m looking at a folder titled ‘Macabre Marvels’.

“That’s poetic,” I remark.

“Open it.”

I do, fumbling, the mousepad unfamiliar underneath my fingertips. Dozens of other folders are revealed within. As I scan their titles with my eyes, I realise they’re familiar. Alleyway, Tent, Tower ... those are all codenames for my tableaus. Pinned at the top is a folder titled ‘Selection’.

I open that, large picture icons popping up as they load slowly. Without looking at them more closely, I’m already recognising these. Curious, I click on the first one and then, hitting the right arrow, I hop through all of them.

Two lines of oiled wooden stakes, placed evenly on opposing sides and angled just right to form a triangular alleyway, a man speared on top of each.

A large tent made of nothing but bones, wire, and large patches of skin sewn together, pink sunlight seeping in through the peels of tissue.

A tower made of chopped-off limbs, joints and tibias broken in half, protruding from the decomposing, maggoty flesh.

I took photos of all my tableaus, but they were nothing like these. Mine were just plain documentary shots, a few from each side, and done. These are infinitely more inventive; taken from unusual angles with the light hitting just right, some with shadows hiding the faces, others with sunlight falling through the hollowed-out ribs, the last shreds of skin and flesh almost transparent like curtains. My photos merely showed my tableaus. These show them off.

I huff in disbelief as a new masterpiece is revealed with each click of a button.

She must have spent hours on the sites. Lying in the dirt on the ground, hiking up the surrounding hills, crouching motionless in wait until clouds parted just right. Scaring off the crows, letting them re-settle, then scaring them again, over and over, until the perfect picture of them rising from the corpses like a black cloud was born.

“You’ve got to give it to her. The girl is good.” Noticing my astonishment, Martin chortles; the sound is wet and guttural, making me think of a bubbling pool of mud.

“We already knew that,” I point out dryly.

It feels like a lie, even if it isn’t. Yes, I did know she was good—we all knew she was good—but fuck me, until now I didn’t even know that good like this existed.

Hardly breathing and not taking my eyes off the screen, I make it to the final picture. That one is different because it’s a photoshopped montage of two things: a free newspaper article about me that came out a few years back, and a shot of my most iconic tableau.

On a gently sloped hill, thirteen crosses rise from the ground. And crucified to them and wrapped in the coils of bowels spooling from the jagged gashes in their abdomen are thirteen men who deserved to beg for death long before I granted it.

The newspaper overlays the image, semi-transparent and blending seamlessly into the ghastly background. A headshot of me, my most recognisable skull mask showing nothing of my face but my eyes, simpering with determined rage.

The article’s text is unreadable, too small, and not opaque enough. It serves only to lend the image a gritty, grainy quality. But the headline is legible, black and bold. A quote I gave that reporter, not knowing it would become my signature line.

“I am the Necromancer. I summon the dead and make them speak for me.”

4

EIGHT YEARS AGO

The Greatest Emerging War Photographer Is a Child!

As tensions in [REDACTED] escalated at the beginning of this year and armed conflicts broke out in [REDACTED], [REDACTED] and [REDACTED], an unknown photographer who goes by the nom de guerre of ‘Riley’ has taken the world by storm. Their photographs of the renewed protests have won multiple awards, and almost overnight, Riley has become an established name in photography.