Christina Lindley

Christina Lindley is a seventeen-year-old photographer whose technical skill is recruited into Haven’s collective effort to conceal the town’s destruction. A year after winning second prize in the Fourteenth Annual State O’ Maine Photography Competition, she is sent to document the shattered clock tower and help construct an illusion of the building in the sky. Her photographs turn the town’s ruin into material for a false image, while the recovered picture also preserves a detail the deception cannot erase: the clock hands stand at 3:05.

Identity and Introduction

Christina is introduced through her youth and demonstrated photographic ability: at seventeen, she had taken second prize in the Fourteenth Annual State O’ Maine Photography Competition the previous year. The distinction is not merely biographical. When Haven’s residents need a color image of the destroyed town hall clock tower, her experience makes her a practical participant in the town’s improvised technology and concealment strategy.

Her work places her among a community whose members can coordinate without ordinary speech. She arrives at Henry Applegate’s workshop after being sent into town to take photographs, and her message is carried to the gathered residents through Bobby Tremain’s mind. Her contribution is individual and concrete, but its purpose is collective: to create an image that will make a ruined landmark appear intact.

The Clock-Tower Photograph

After the explosion, roughly seventy Haven residents gather at Henry Applegate’s workshop to build what they intend as a gigantic magic-lantern slide in the sky. The projected clock tower is meant to function as an illusion people can look at—and, if necessary, as an image a plane could fly through. Christina’s assignment is unusually difficult because the tower no longer stands as a whole building. It has been reduced to scattered chunks of brick, masonry, and clockwork, so she must photograph a photograph rather than the tower itself.

Working quickly, she searches a scrapbook of Haven photographs. Newt Berringer has mentally directed her to the scrapbook in Ruth McCausland’s office. Christina rejects two attractive pictures because they are black and white; the planned projection requires a color image. She eventually finds a photograph of the town hall that shows the tower prominently from an angle revealing two sides, providing the depth needed for the stereoscopic effect. Ruth’s notation identifies its source as Yankee magazine, dated 5/87.

The image is not simply a record of a building. Once selected, it becomes the basis for a fabricated sight: a convincing clock tower meant to substitute for the one the explosion destroyed. The residents’ plan depends on photographic likeness, projection equipment, and the audience’s inability to distinguish the image from what is physically present. Christina’s careful search therefore supplies a crucial link between the town’s material ruin and its intended visual disguise.

Work with Bobby Tremain

Christina returns from town with Bobby Tremain, who has driven her at speeds sometimes exceeding a hundred and ten miles per hour. She has been frightened and is out of breath, yet the narration also notes that she feels rather sexy after the ride. The trip conveys both the urgency of the operation and her proximity to the town’s strange, altered social life: Bobby communicates mentally, and his impatient movements are compared to those of a small boy who needs the bathroom.

When Christina finds the usable photograph, she begins to explain that it will work, then breaks off with an alarmed reaction. Bobby comes forward to ask what is wrong; she points at the picture, and he curses aloud. The passage leaves the source of their alarm unstated in the available account, but shows that the photograph carries a complication beyond its technical usefulness. Christina’s response is immediate and bodily; the discovery interrupts the efficient task she had been trying to complete.

By seven that evening, the residents have rapidly assembled a device resembling a huge slide projector mounted on an industrial vacuum cleaner. They test it with an image of Henry Applegate’s grandmother, which appears as a gigantic stereopticon portrait in a field. The successful trial establishes that the machine works, but the residents still need Christina’s color photographs of the town hall—plural, since a stereopticon image requires two images—to create the intended clock-tower illusion.

The Image and Its Consequences

Later, Christina stands beside Bobby in the developing room, watching a blank sheet in the developing bath. Neither breathes as they wait to see whether the image will emerge. It appears gradually: the Haven town-hall clock tower, rendered in living, true color, with the hands fixed at 3:05. The suspended wait gives the photograph a double force. It is an image that can support the town’s elaborate projection, but it also records the specific time shown by the damaged clock.

Christina’s activity belongs to a wider system of concealment. The residents have already decided to close Haven to outsiders, while fearing that an inexplicable barrier in the road would alert people beyond the town. Their strategy depends not only on restricting physical entry but on managing what can be seen and reported. The clock-tower projection extends that effort into the visual field: where an actual tower has been reduced to debris, a photographic image can supply the appearance of continuity.

Christina is not shown as the designer of the device or the leader of the plan. Her importance lies in the specialized work she performs within it: she finds the right photograph, recognizes the need for color and depth, and waits for the developed image that can be used in the projection. The scene makes photography both a craft and a means of shaping public reality. Its final detail—the clock stopped at 3:05—also leaves the image resistant to becoming a wholly neutral piece of deception; the clock tower returns as a picture, but carries the mark of the moment preserved on its face.