The Night Wire: And Other Tales of Weird Media by Worth Aaron

Author:Worth, Aaron [Worth, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: British Library Publishing
Published: 2022-09-06T06:00:00+00:00

III

Again I struggled within me, bit at my lip till I tasted blood, and presently the blind paroxysm passed. It must have been longer in going than I thought, and the old man must have all that time been speaking, for when I could once more control my attention, hear and see him, he had taken up a position near the sink, about ten feet away, and was addressing me with a sort of “platform” manner, as if I had been the large audience whose absence he had deplored.

“And so,” he was saying, “I was forced to make these plates very carefully, to truly represent the characteristic hues of each separate organism. Now, in colour work of every kind the film is necessarily extremely sensitive. Doubtless you are familiar in a general way with the exquisite transparencies produced by colour photography of the single-plate type.”

He paused, and, trying to act like a normal human being, I observed: “I saw some nice landscapes done in that way—last week at an illustrated lecture in Franklin Hall.”

He scowled, and made an impatient gesture at me with his hand. “I can proceed better without interruptions,” he said. “My pause was purely oratorical.”

I meekly subsided, and he went on in his original loud, clear voice. He would have made an excellent lecturer before a much larger audience—if only his voice could have lost that eerie, ringing note. Thinking of that I must have missed some more, and when I caught it again he was saying:

“As I have indicated, the original plate is the final picture. Now, many of these organisms are extremely hard to photograph, and microphotography in colour is particularly difficult. In consequence, to spoil a plate tries the patience of the photographer. They are so sensitive that the ordinary dark-room ruby lamp would instantly ruin them, and they must therefore be developed either in darkness or by a special light produced by interposing thin sheets of tissue of a particular shade of green and of yellow between lamp and plate, and even that will often cause ruinous fog. Now I, finding it hard to handle them so, made numerous experiments with a view to discovering some glass or fabric of a colour which should add to the safety of the green, without robbing it of all efficiency. All proved equally useless, but intermittently I persevered—until last week.”

His voice dropped to an almost confidential tone, and he leaned slightly toward me. I was cold from my neck to my feet, though my head was burning, but I tried to force an appreciative smile.

“Last week,” he continued impressively, “I had a prescription filled at the corner drug store. The bottle was sent home to me wrapped in a piece of what I at first took to be whitish, slightly opalescent paper. Later I decided that it was some kind of membrane. When I questioned the druggist, seeking its source, he said it was a sheet of ‘paper’ that was around a bundle of herbs from South America.

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