Chapter Text
Joseph Desaulniers has spent the better part of the last hundred years anywhere but home.
But where is home, really? Lyon, where he was born, then chased out with torches and pitchforks, clutching at his mother’s skirts with one hand and his brother’s fever-clammy palm with the other? Canterbury, where he fled, forced to grow up as one half of a whole, with a gaping wound in his side that will never heal?
The late King had granted the Desaulniers family a pity title when they reached land. They’d been counts back in France, and of course it was only natural they were still counts in England too, hush, don’t think too hard about how that horribly uppity Third Estate may have had a point. And with that pity title had come pity lands and a pity house, passed down from Father to Joseph, then from Joseph to Joseph (he’s got to fake his own death and subsequent re-emergence as the new heir every forty years, just so the neighbors don’t get too suspicious), in a quaint little country village that Joseph cannot bear to spend time in. Instead, Joseph packs up and moves abroad for years at a time, taking photos of whoever catches his fancy, leaving a trail of disappearances in his wake, only returning to England for a few weeks to make sure the estate is still in order before he is gone again. Are those homes? Or placeholders, meant to fill a void?
Currently, Joseph lingers in the downtrodden southwestern corner of Germany, in a rather unpleasant little town, so far out of the way that paving the roads leading into it would be useless. The weather is poor, the occupants are poorer, and the castle he’d purchased from a short-on-funds acquaintance had been an impulse buy, done without seeing the structure itself. A year and a half ago when he had first taken up residence, the place had been a pigsty. Only after numerous inconvenient renovations and a disproportionate amount of money spent on repairs does Joseph at last consider the place a pleasant residence.
It also helps that the locals are in such poverty that bribing them into accepting his invitations to pose for photographs is child’s play, and the place is insignificant enough that no one looks for them once they are gone.
He has always been fond of the fall. The bright autumn moon peeps charmingly through the grand windows of his study, almost bright enough to render his desk lamp irrelevant as he sits and reads (some novel about a man who stays young forever through a cursed painting, Joseph can appreciate the irony) and enjoys the silence. he is interrupted by the telltale creak open-shut of the door. “Don’t you know how to knock?” he snipes and looks up.
He goes through household staff so fast these days. They quit or they model, reaching their end either way, which makes it pointless to remember the differences of one from another. It’s some girl who can’t be older than sixteen. She has dark, curly, hair and round cheeks with a permanent flush, trembling at the sight of him. Joseph’s never seen her before; she must be a new hire. “My lord,” she says, twisting her hands in the fabric of her apron, “there is someone here to see you.” Joseph is about to ask why they’d ever let some stranger in, frowning, but the girl forestalls his reprimand with a quick “he had a summons.”
“Who?”
“We didn’t get his name.” He does not get many guests. The list of people who it could be is short. “He is in the solarium.”
He. The list grows ever shorter. “Thank you…” Joseph pauses, waiting for the girl to fill the empty space with her name. She does not. He folds a slip of blank paper into his book to save his place and puts it down on his desk. When he approaches the door, she flinches. “I will see him.”
The guest sits in the dark solarium, lit only by the cast light from the door, hunched over in the armchair he occupies. He has not removed his coat or gloves, like he’s ready to make a run for it at any second. Had no one lit a candle for him? "Hello,” Joseph says sweetly as he approaches. “Who are you?” He is only playing. This guest is so distinct-looking that there is only one man it could be.
There is a familiar looking piece of stationery clutched in the guest’s gloved hand, and he stands up and thrusts the letter into Joseph’s face. “You know.” He doesn’t need to read it to know what it is. An invitation. “Now stop writing to me,” says the guest with a murderous scowl: Mr. Andrew Kreiss, local grave digger at the Laz Cemetery, and current object of Joseph’s artistic obsession. Splendidly ghastly, like death warmed over, a complete anomaly in appearance, Mr. Kreiss is a unique, perfect, candidate for immortalization in film.
Joseph has been writing and writing to this man once a week for the past three months, bidding him to pay a visit every Sunday, the grave digger’s day off, to have a portrait made. And so he kept writing, waiting for an acceptance or a denial, and neither had come until today. “You want me to stop,” Joseph delicately plucks the paper out of Mr. Kreiss’s hand, “and yet you are here anyway,” he drawls, using the informal you as opposed to its more proper equivalent . Joseph does not miss the way Mr. Kreiss’s red eyes narrow at the disrespect.
Mr. Kreiss does not stoop to Joseph’s provocation and continues to speak in language that is formal on a technical level. His caustic tone, however, kills any possibility that he is being polite. “To tell you to stop inviting me,” he repeats.
“Yes,” muses Joseph, “and if that really were all there was to it, how did you miss the return addresses featured prominently on my correspondence?” Mr. Kreiss’s scowl pinches. “If you wanted to refuse, all you had to do was write a declination and mail it, and that would have been the end. You knew where to send the letter, and instead you are here. So, if I’m being honest, I don’t believe you.”
“I didn’t want to waste money on postage when it is such a quick walk, unlike some of us.”
Joseph is sure that’s true. It’s maybe a forty minute walk on a dirt path from the Laz Cemetery to his ‘vacation home’ here in this run-down rural hamlet, and, especially on a grave digger’s wages, frivolous expenses like unnecessary postage will not fly. But it also cannot have been the only reason. “You didn’t come here to refuse. You came here because you’re curious. You have heard that Count Desaulniers’s camera makes people disappear—” Andrew’s eyes widen in surprise, “yes, I know what people say about me—and wanted to get a look for yourself. Oddities attract other oddities, after all.” Joseph really does not know as much about Mr. Kreiss the creepy grave digger as the other man must think if the way his scowl has deepened is anything to go by. However, he’s heard enough about him by virtue of living here for the amount of time that he has, and knowing what people say about Kreiss (he’s reclusive, a weirdo who can’t look others in the eye or hold a proper conversation, never out during the day, poor as dirt, and cursed) makes it easy to put two and two together: Kreiss is in search of another person even stranger than he.
Everyone wants someone else to point and laugh at. Mr. Kreiss is that walking joke for so many others, but he wants to make Joseph into his. And Joseph, the mad foreign count obsessed with the occult, who has made his way so insidiously into the heart of this town’s affairs so that the fearful powers in charge cannot remove him no matter how much they want to, because his money weighs more than the souls of all those he has trapped, qualifies as a worse pariah.
“Oh, I’m not accusing you of anything. Curiosity is a natural human emotion,” Joseph’s expression is shit-eating, and Kreiss just keeps rising to every instance of provocation. The grave digger is near-apoplectic, sneering down at Joseph like he’s thinking about bashing his head in, and Joseph doesn’t understand where the popular opinion of Kreiss as shy had originated. Kreiss isn’t withdrawn, he’s downright antisocial . He knows he should stop, because there’s no way this is endearing himself to his prospective victim right now, and up until the moment of truth, Kreiss is free to leave. But it’s so much fun, the most Joseph’s had in years, to stand here and push his buttons.
Kreiss moves to snatch the invitation back out of Joseph’s hand. Joseph holds it out of his reach, even though he’s about a foot and a half taller than Joseph and probably double his weight in muscle alone. Unfortunately, Joseph is afraid of nothing and no one. “What do you want this back for if you wanted me to stop writing so badly?”
“I’m leaving,” he hisses.
“Go, then.” Kreiss doesn’t budge. “That’s what I thought. I am at your disposal, Mr. Kreiss.” Joseph bows, and it isn’t a true bootlicker’s obsequious bow, but is deep enough to piss him off more. “And will gladly indulge you if you really want to be a subject.” Kreiss glares at Joseph like he wants him dead. He repays the other’s spite with a cherubic closed-mouth smile. “Follow me.”
The photography studio faces the east side of the villa so that it can catch as much light as possible. At night, that doesn’t matter, but it’s lovely during the day. Andrew Kreiss is a good model, easy to work with, and doesn’t move unless Joseph is the one maneuvering him. Best of all, he is quiet when he isn’t spitting verbal shrapnel like a blunderbuss, which already makes him so much more bearable than Joseph has come to expect with his subjects. Some people are so uncomfortable with silence that it chokes them, choosing to blabber on and on as if they are afraid airflow will cease once they are not using it by talking. It is refreshing to be in silence for once.
Most portraits are taken standing, as it’s easier to assess the model’s size from a glance if they are upright, but Joseph has never encountered someone quite as tall as Kreiss is, who might not fit in frame if he is on his own two feet. He will not take chances and instead pulls a chair over from the side of his studio, pushing Kreiss bodily down into it. All of his hard work is undone by the position change, and he sets back to fiddling with his subject. Mr. Kreiss is pliant as he lets Joseph adjust the angle of his arms. At last, the perfectionist in him is satisfied. “Enough,” Joseph says, “You’ll be beautiful.”
Mr. Kreiss’s shoulders tense.
“You can still run.” The mirthful tinge to Joseph’s voice is nothing short of evil as he checks the view through the camera. “Nobody would judge you if you left right now.”
“Just take your photo, Count Desaulniers,” Kreiss snaps, derisive. He’s nervous. But like so many other of Joseph’s victims, he’s fallen prey to the sunk cost fallacy. He’s here, he’s already arranged in a pleasing composition, he might as well see it through, regardless of the danger.
Joseph is familiar with the perverse curiosity that infects those that star in his photos. It isn’t like he ever impairs them in any way; they’re all sober and of sound mind when they lay down their lives, but he doesn’t have to. They accept the call to his studio and let their souls be taken, because every last one of them thinks that they will be the exception. He has killed all who came before, they believe, but I am different! I will survive! Every single one of them sticks their hands into the wolf’s mouth so willingly that he has no pity when they are surprised that it bites down. But Mr. Kreiss, balanced in the chair before the fatal lens, looks at Joseph like he expects to die.
The bulb flashes. The shutter clicks. Mr. Kreiss is still there.
The brief supernova-bright flare of the camera’s bulb sears Andrew, so sensitive to light already, and the afterimage burnt into his eyelids fades slowly. Beautiful. Why had Count Desaulniers called him beautiful? His work done, the Count detaches the camera from its perch and primly folds the tripod, depositing it in a corner as he holds the box itself like an infant.
“I’m still here,” Andrew says. He does not get up.
Count Desaulniers grins. He is such a small man, but he has the presence of someone very dangerous, and it is not a joyful expression. “Of course you are. Why wouldn’t you be?” What bullshit. They both know the reason.
“The rumors—“
The Count cuts him off. “Are only words, Mr. Kreiss; do you believe everything you hear?” He does not. But where there is smoke, there is fire, especially concerning his previous models. Andrew does not often speak to other people, and even he has heard about their usual fate. “If you want to see the finished product tonight, you’ll have to wait about an hour for it to develop. Are you willing to stay, or are you in a hurry to leave?” His eyes crinkle like he’s mocking Andrew for the idea of wanting to escape this murderer’s villa.
He will not be cowed out of seeing the results of his lethal modeling session. “I will wait,” Andrew says.
Without saying anything, Count Desaulniers plunges his hand down the front of his shirt, and Andrew yelps, turning away furiously. From out of his field of vision, a sudden laugh floats up behind him. When he looks back, nothing is different, except that Count Desaulniers is holding a key, worn on a chain around his neck, that he pulls up and over his head. He flounces towards a door that Andrew had paid no mind to and unlocks it. “Stay put,” he orders, “I am only visiting the darkroom.” He enters, closes it, and Andrew can hear all the way from his seat that he re-locks the door from the other side and then walks down what sounds like a flight of stairs.
What the hell did he think Andrew was going to do, go after him? He has already engaged in enough suicidal behavior for one day by showing up here in the first place. There is no need to add “following a probably-homicidal nobleman into his murder basement” to the list of stupid things he has done today.
It takes about ten minutes for the Count to finish whatever occult business he had in the darkroom (dark room? Every room’s dark, it’s night), which Andrew spends milling about the studio. God, he hates the rich. Every part of the room is overdone, from the molding on the ceiling to the glass in the windows that is worth more money than Andrew will ever see in his life. He briefly lays down on the floor and almost cries with the realization that his bed is less comfortable than Count Desaulniers’s rug. When his host climbs the mysterious stairs back up, Andrew dives for the chair, pretending that he has not moved as Count Desaulniers opens the door.
The same unlock-relock process repeats again, and Count Desaulniers turns to Andrew. “Shall I send for tea?” he asks, tucking the key back against his chest.
An hour passes in total silence. Andrew has nothing to do but watch the clock and stare at Count Desaulniers as he sits across from Andrew and goes through whatever paperwork important men have, and he must find such boredom amusing, because every once in a while, Andrew catches him glancing up and suppressing a smile. Exactly sixty minutes later, the unlock-relock-downstairs, silence, upstairs-unlock-relock dance repeats once more, and Count Desaulniers presents him with a small picture about the size of a book page.
The first thing Andrew thinks is that it is not him in the portrait.
It can’t be, because the figure on the thin sheet of film is merely a man with light hair and sad eyes. Where is the evil haze that clings to Andrew’s shoulders like a funeral shroud? Where are his cloven hooves, his tail, his horns? His mark of Cain? There is nothing monstrous about this photo’s subject. It is just a man. “Are you sure this is correct?”
“Photography is infallible.” That may be true, but the Count is just a man. There has been a mix-up in the basement, and the Count has taken the wrong photograph upstairs, because this cannot be Andrew.
“This is not what I look like.” He traces his own recorded form with one finger before putting it down on the arm of the chair he occupies.
Count Desaulniers hums and takes the photograph. “Is it offensive to you?”
“I only thought I would be…” Andrew cannot articulate what he means when Count Desaulniers’s emotionless gaze flicks down from the photograph, pinning him in his seat like a butterfly on a corkboard. He makes a grabbing motion with his hands, which gets his point across well enough.
“I’m sorry to let you down, Mr. Kreiss, but my camera only shows what is there.”
“I-it wasn’t a letdown!” he stammers.
The Count smiles, and it does not reach those piercing eyes. “I’m glad this art can touch hearts other than mine.” He stands, still holding the photograph. Andrew wants to demand that he give the picture up as a souvenir, but surely such an image cannot be real. He will not be made into an idolater, worshipping some false image of himself, generated to show him what he wishes to see. It is better if the picture stays out of his hands. And besides, if Count Desaulniers has let Andrew live, there is some catch that has not yet made itself known. There always is. “I hope you will join me again soon,” Count Desaulniers purrs, and leaves the room.