5.4

 

He gave a shrug. "How could it possibly be a statue of you, and a moving statue at that, when even your phone records it as an angel?"

"I don't know." She looked again at the block. She could clearly see the series of changing figures exactly as before, each of them a different version of her over the years. "I can still see myself and not the angel."

"Try looking at it through the camera lens." Paul reached across the bed for his own phone and used his fingerprint to activate it. " He took a photo to see if it was a glitch in her camera.

The sudden flash of his camera flash left her seeing spots against the darkness of her eyelids. "I wish you'd warned me you were using the flash setting."

"Sorry. I didn't think to check." He looked down at his phone, opened another app and looked at the image he'd just taken. He turned the phone to show her. "The angel, see?"

"But I'm looking at the cycling images of me." She switched to record and took several seconds of footage before stopping and viewing it. "I must be crazy. I’m looking at a moving me but recording a static angel."

"Maybe it's a vampire thing?"

"What?" She raised a lip. "What are you on about?"

"You know, how in vampire lore they don't show up in mirrors or on film?"

"You think I'm a vampire now?"

"No. It sounds cool, but no. Maybe the stone is the vampire and you're more like a vampire hunter. Only you can see what it really is inside."

"I'm don't believe in vampires, though. Why would I see--" She gestured toward the block. "Something that isn't there?"

"Not believing in vampires doesn't mean they don't exist." Paul grinned. "Actually, not believing in them means they're doing a good job at obfuscating themselves from us mortals, kind of like the way a big cat will blend into the surrounding vegetation?" He mimicked a child's voice: "Don't worry, Mr Antelope. There are no predators here. We'd spot a lion immediately against all the tan and yellowing grassland."

The joke, poor though it was, made her snort. "I don't watch enough horror movies to even contemplate believing in the supernatural. Or too much, and I just see the special effects department at work."

He nodded, his smile vanishing as fast as an Amazon parcel on an untended porch. "Not to state the obvious conclusion here but maybe you're delusional?"

"Thanks a lot." She stared at the flickering stone. "I don't get it. I don't believe in anything. Why do I see something different?"

"No idea." He held out his hands in a shrug. "On the other hand, nobody believes in anything until a conflicting hypothesis is proven to to be true. Doctors didn't believe in germs until Louis Pasteur put forward his germ theory."

"I don't think I'm going to publish a theory of moving sculptures any time soon."

"These moving versions of you. Are they wearing clothes?"

"Are you trying to imagine me naked? Please don't. I would not be flattered, and you wouldn't enjoy the experience. I was a life model once, until the person teaching the class asked me not to come again."

"Did they expect you to be the model, or did you just turn up to a classroom and strip off?"

"Hilarious." She didn't grace it with a smile. "Why, anyway?"

"I see the angel it the standard-issue white dress. If yours are dressed, are thy in the same, or are they age specific? I mean, are they wearing what you wore at that age?"

It was her turn to shrug. "I suppose so. Why?"

"If they're the right clothes you wore then, it means you're projecting the figures yourself, because nobody else would know what you looked like at any given time, except you and your family."

"Worth considering." Roisin reached out but stopped herself from touching the stone. "Can I use your gloves?"

"Sure." Paul passed them to her from where he'd dropped them on the bed. "They might be a bit big for you, though."

"It doesn't matter." She slid the cotton over her thin fingers. "Too small if anything."

"Too small?" Paul looked at her hands. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I thought I had big hands. You could out-dig a JCB."

"Only if I wasn't claustrophobic." She waved her fingers at him, as if he were a child and she had little puppet mice attached. "Can I touch it?"

He nodded. "Now that you've got gloves on, yeah."

She reached for it very gingerly, as if the moving figures were a high-speed fan that could chop off any intruding limbs. She tensed, expecting to feel pain as the stone shifted shape through her fingers, but it seemed to bend around her flesh in exactly the way a steel blade wouldn't. She pressed further in, closing her eyes as her fingers explored the sculpture.