There were long stretches of time when he was alone with the artwork. He got used to their erratic behavior. The dancing balls of light, the shifting images were soothing, and it had been a long time since he had felt good just being in the moment.
***
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Howard. He had his coat and hat on, flexed his umbrella since there was a downpour. He had a doctor’s appointment, so he had to leave early that day. “You have my number if you have any problems closing up.”
“See ya,” Linc replied, and Howard went out into the misty windy outdoors. This was the first time he’d been alone in the building. Howard was always there when he got to work in the morning. He hovered around Linc as he did his rounds, as if he didn’t quite trust him. Linc supposed that it was to be expected, him being new to the job, but Lenski was disquieting.
He was always straightening things, the brochures that almost no one touched, putting trashcans at the proper angle, checking if the tapestries and paintings were level. Lenski worked in the back office, but he would come out at least once an hour to pace and cast sly, supervisory glances at Linc. For his part, Linc tried to stay busy, but, frankly, there was only so much busy work he could do.
Lenski never engaged in small talk, but he could rattle off information about the artwork like he was a walking encyclopedia. Linc privately referred to Lenski as WikiMan. The man was a walking hyperlink.
When Howard Lenski left the museum, it felt like the atmosphere inside changed. The tension in the room disappeared, and left with the man into the rain. Linc felt his muscles relax. He exhaled. He had at least three hours before he closed the museum, three hours of solitude. Probably there would be no visitors; the torrential rains were supposed to last well into the evening.
There were three galleries in the building. The main one housed Whitby’s tapestries. The second one was Grayson’s. The third gallery was smaller and featured artists inspired by the two of them. He was well-acquainted with the first two rooms. He slipped back into the third gallery, with the self-justification that he should know everything about the museum. He wouldn’t be in there long, anyway. And if there was a visitor, he could hear them enter. The acoustics of the museum were echoey and cavernous.
None of the other artists’ work was as compelling as Whitby’s or Grayson’s. But they used the fuchsia hue or images of the marsh-bell. Most of it was amateurish, primitive folk art. One woman, Bathsheba Upchurch, repurposed church banner material, felt and Velcro. Her church banners had bright marsh-bells stuck against white satin banners, arranged like notes in a staff. There were two of them mounted on the wall. Linc read the bio stenciled next to the art.
Bathsheba Upchurch’s art was found in the church basement, hidden among the items for an upcoming White Elephant sale. Bathsheba spent most of her free time at Trinity Methodist, serving on many committees and prayer groups. Her work was covered by a dusty tarp, reportedly sandwiched between a rack of dresses and an old bookcase.
Bathsheba Davis was born outside of St. Louis. She married young, sixteen years old, to John Upchurch, who was 10 years her senior. They moved to Shimmer sometime in the 1920s. Mr. Upchurch worked as a general laborer at various places, including the stockyards and a bottle factory while Bathsheba raised their 8 children. Not much is known about her, save for the fact that she was devoted to both her family and her church.
James Olds’s work was encased in a Lucite block. There were six glass bottles of different shapes and sizes, all decorated in that orchid shade, with painted shells and beads meticulously inlaid like mosaic pieces.
Olds’s decorated bottle trees were randomly scattered among his 2-acre property, located on the outskirts of Shimmer. The bottles were all shapes and sizes, ranging from the iconic Coke bottle to milk bottles.
All of the artists lived in Shimmer at one point. There were watercolors, magic marker drawings, and in one case, a series of dolls in fuchsia outfits. Another thing he noticed was that all of the artists had no particular ambition to share their work. The art was found posthumously or hidden. It was eerie.
In the crawlspace beneath the stairs, Edna Wray had built a room inhabited by sixteen porcelain dolls. The room was carpeted, and she had built shelves, on which the dolls sat, arranged around the small room. The dolls were all in various states of disrepair, missing glass eyes or hands. Some of the skulls were cracked open, revealing the hollow insides. A couple of them had burn marks on their clothes. They were all castaways, all of them denuded of hair.
Wray transformed them. Each doll was painstakingly painted or glazed in shades of brown, mimicking the skin tones of African/black skin, from high yellow to blue black, still dressed in satin and silk petticoats. All female dolls, from babies to little girls, some of them older women. All of the dolls were arranged in a semi-circle, gazing at the center of the room. In the center, Wray had placed a toy flower pot, and growing out of it was a silk and wire orchid, in a magenta/fuchsia shade.
Linc would have stayed in the small gallery for a little while longer, but he heard someone in the main room. He hurried up to the information desk, only to find that no one was actually there. Gusts of wind blew veils of rain out over the marsh. Maybe he had heard something blowing around in that sodden mess.
He pulled out his phone. It was great to have one again. It was a cheap, prepaid phone with limited data. But it could text. He’d gotten it with his first paycheck. It felt nice to be a part of the normal world again. He saw that there was a text from his sister.
—Just checking in. How are you?
—Doing well. Looking for a permanent place 2 live, he texted back.
—You know, I told Mom that U & I were in contact.
Linc’s stomach dropped, right into his guts. It took him a moment to work through the storm of emotion that sizzled through his head before replying.
—What did she say?
He held his breath. It was reflexive, this pocket of air trapped, suspended in his lungs.
—She says Daddy and her think about you constantly. They would love to hear from you. They’re happy to know you’re clean.
Clean. The word, in this context, was repulsive. All the nights he slept in the park, washed up in bus station bathrooms, begged on the streets of DC, Baltimore and Wilmington came back to him. The second skin of grime that washed down the drain of a shelter’s shower. Sucking cock, having his own sucked for money, the horrible passionless orgasmless mechanics of sex for cash. Was he Clean? No. He was cleaner. But he still felt the stains that no amount of scrubbing would vanquish.
—I’ll send them an email. Even as he texted it, he knew that it was a lie. Or, at least, a partial lie. He would email his folks, just not now.
—I wish you would tell me where you were, Elaine texted back. —I could send you some money.
Linc heard footsteps. He looked up from his phone screen, trying to locate the sound.
“Hello?” he said.
Silence. He paused, listening for more sounds. A minute passed, two.
—Don’t worry about me, he texted Elaine back, —I’m making decent money.
He heard it again. Feet on poured concrete, the sound muffled yet reverberating. It came from the small gallery in the back. He put his phone back into his pocket, and left the information desk. He knew it was next to impossible for someone to slip by unnoticed in the museum. He still felt like a stupid white girl in a horror movie as he crept through the gallery. Then, as he turned to go back to the information desk, something moved.
It was instinct that made Linc glance at the three dolls in their Lucite-walled display case. One of the track lights was focused on it, flooding their platform with illumination. One of the dolls was missing an eye. Another one had a crack, straight down its porcelain face. All of them were glazed with a brown tone, over their original cream-and-roses complexion. Edna Wray’s dolls were probably the creepiest thing in the collection. Linc stared at them, waiting. Nothing happened. But as soon as
he looked away—
There! Something bright wavered. He looked at the display head on. The dolls weren’t moving, thank God. But their clothes were. Well, the clothes weren’t exactly moving. They were rippling, like they were pools of water. A gentle, lulling pulse of fuchsia.
When he’d tweaked on crystal, he’d had hallucinations like these—minor disturbances. Delicate, fractal-like distortions, objects that had momentary animation. He hadn’t touched the stuff for months, not since he had left Baltimore and Gash behind. For one second, he was transported back to that dank basement apartment, tweaking as he watched the gelatinous bubbles of a lava lamp drift and form new shapes.
Linc made a decision then, to ignore this visual irritation. Flashbacks weren’t a part of crystal addiction. But that didn’t mean they were impossible. One of the reasons why he wasn’t quite ready to return home was that he didn’t trust himself. He didn’t know where Gash was, but he was afraid if he saw him again, he would fall back into his old ways. Linc did not crave crystal at all. The initial rush and cascade of euphoria was great, yes, but it came bundled with rage, psychosis, and bone-deep illness. There were days when his nerves felt like strings, taut and ready to be plucked. They were followed by days of darkness, when the strings were snapped and untuned. When sleep could not cure the exhaustion, when even the blood in his veins felt sluggish. What he did crave, though, was sex on crystal.
Sex had always been awkward for Linc. The placement of body parts, the delicate timing, the occasional discomfort, the mess afterwards. When he was on crystal, none of those barriers remained. Everything was amazing, nothing off limits. If some dude wanted to lick his eyelids, then his eyelids became hot-wired sexual organs. He found pleasure in the strangest places. The crooks of elbows, between fingers, behind the ears. If another dude wasn’t into foreplay, that was cool. If another one was just into dry humping, Linc could dry hump him for hours. Sex on crystal was intense, euphoric and endless.
But I’m not on crystal anymore, he thought. Then why was he seeing rippling dresses? Linc turned away from the room, went back to the main gallery and sat behind the information desk. Outside, the wind had died down and the rain was steady but no longer pounding.
Linc put on his rain poncho to check on the marsh-bells. They were beneath an awning, spared from the worst of the rain, but the wind still could have done some damage. He fully expected the flowers to be destroyed, the bell-shaped petals scattered across the entrance.
The flowers were intact. Not a bloom askew. They stood up against the wind, without so much as a quiver. It was odd. The winds had been pretty high. According to his phone’s weather app, the storm wind’s gusts were up to 40mph. But the marsh-bells stood still.
No.
Not still.
The tiny bell-like blossoms rippled with color. Each individual blossom radiated briefly before settling down. It was random, which blossom would glow, which flower, like twinkling Christmas lights.
Gerald said the museum was haunted. Lenski’s words came back to Linc. He thought that this was silly. He’d seen some ghost hunter shows on television and it was his personal belief that the ‘investigators’ freaked themselves out. The flickering plants were an optical illusion, a visual hallucination. Residual detoxification. A flashback. That was all.
He went back inside the museum. He checked his phone.
—I love you, Elaine had texted. White words against a sky-blue text bubble.
“Damn,” he said aloud, to no one. Because he was crying. It took a lot for his sister to write those words. He dried his eyes on his sleeve.
When he lifted his face from his forearm, something had changed. There was the smell of brackish water floating in the air, along with a faint trace of sulfur. Linc heard sounds. No footsteps, but the distant cry of seagulls and the whispering of reeds in the wind. And the fuchsia spots on Whitby’s quilts were animated, undulating like the dolls’ dresses and the marsh-bells.
The pieces of fabric shifted into flowers, into a vague female shape and back again. Linc knew that this was no flashback. He checked the Shadrach Grayson gallery. The orbs burned like fire, amorphous over their watery landscapes. He could guess the same thing was happening in the other gallery.
Linc wasn’t afraid. He was strangely elated, as if he was honest with himself. Weird things didn’t happen to him. And this wasn’t just weird, it was miraculous. He took pictures and videos of the phenomena with no real plan in place. He did know, however, that he would not show it to Howard Lenksi. That seemed wrong, somehow. The artwork lay dormant when Howard was around, as if his presence suppressed the phantom energy.
The bottles glowed and grew ghostly marsh-bells that faded and regrew. Grayson’s orbs detached from the somber background and floated out, spun around the room before returning to their paintings. Linc laughed, maybe for the first time in months.
Then, the spectral hue began to whisper.
13: Iris (1987)
A Black Madonna statue was in the window, staring out at the street. Her skin was actually black, the color of charcoal. It contrasted with her sky-blue robe. She was surrounded by a halo, rays of gold leaf. The child she held in one arm, however, was white, with a painted peaches-and-cream complexion and a puff of pale blond hair. The name BOTÁNICA OLOKUN was painted on the window in gold letters in an Art Nouveau style.
This was the kind of place that Pop-Pop would have called heathen. He’d be frowning down at her from Heaven. If she believed in Heaven, or at least his version of it. Still, it was hard to undo years of brainwashing, so Iris felt a tingle of delicious wickedness in the pit of her stomach when she entered the store. The smell of the place was the first thing to hit her. She smelled herbs, patchouli, anise, mint. There were also floral scents, lavender and rose and the smell of cedar and cinnamon. The aisles were full of marvelous things, like candles of all colors and carved statues of saints and rosary beads. She saw a couple of depictions of Jesus, including one with thick dreadlocks. The botánica was such a strange place—both sacred and pagan. Spells and scriptures existed together in this chaotic space.
The store bustled with activity, and she heard voices in Spanish, Portuguese, English and other tongues she couldn’t identify. Music drifted down from hidden speakers, a light samba beat with mournful female vocals swooping over it. Iris felt like she was in a foreign country. She made her way up to the register. There was the most beautiful man Iris ever saw milling around the area behind register. His skin was smooth and golden, his hair black, and his eyes were the bright green color of pears. She could see his muscles behind his pale cotton shirt.
“I’m looking for Bastien,” she said when she caught his eye.
He smiled. His teeth were perfect. Of course they were. Iris felt flush. At seventeen, she thought that she was no great beauty. She was too short, with no curves whatsoever, and she wore her hair in a short buzz cut. People constantly took her for a boy of ten or eleven. Because of that, she wore skirts, usually without patterns and in solid colors. This gentleman looked like a telenovela star.
“You’re speaking to him!” he replied. “You must be Iris. You look a little like Earline.”
She smiled at him, hoping that it wasn’t a stupid smile.
Bastien called over a woman who was stocking one of the shelves to operate the register. He took Iris into a back room filled with overstock. White saints and black gods peered down on them when the two of them settled into a couple of folding chairs.
Bastien said, “Earline told me a little about your situation. But I want to hear it from you.”
“I see things,” she began. She checked Bastien’s face for any sarcasm or mirth. If there was any, he hid it well beneath a warm and welcoming expression. The lambency in his green eyes compelled to her to continue. “I think that they’re ghosts. Dead people. But they’re not at all like the ones you see in the movies.”
“Hollywood never gets anything right,” Bastien said. “Santeros are portrayed as people w
ho spatter chicken blood over everything.”
“Like that Lisa Bonet movie?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, I don’t see transparent people. I don’t see people at all. No gory bodies. Nothing like that. I see colors and patterns in the shape of people. Sometimes they are solid, like gold and green. And sometimes they look like paper doll cutouts. All of them glow. And sometimes, it hurts to look at them.”
“Everyone sees ghosts differently. Sometimes, it’s not seeing at all. It might be scents or sounds.”
“I wish I didn’t see them. I mean, I’ve gotten used to it, and can ignore them. But that wasn’t always the case. My classmates thought I was odd. A space case. They called me ‘Ritzy Ditzy.’”
She wasn’t invited to sleepovers and birthday parties. Boys and girls avoided her like she had the plague. Iris became resigned to the fact that she exuded strangeness. Even her teachers were jittery around her. Not that she could blame them. The sudden appearance of glowing silhouettes was hard to get used to, even though she got better at banishing them to her periphery.
Iris went on: “These ghosts or spirits are attracted to me. Like a moth is to a flame. I mean, that’s my theory anyway. But they’re just there. They don’t try and interact with me. Half the time, I wonder if they even see me. Like, the attraction is just an instinct, with no thought to it.
“Then I met Pearl. She is taller than I am. Maybe five-foot-six. She was pale pink, the color of cotton candy. I could tell that she was around my age, maybe a little younger. At first, she appeared in my neighborhood. In the corner store, or in Mercy Park. I didn’t think anything of it. I never talk to the spirits. I don’t want to encourage them. Eventually, they fade away after a couple days. She was persistent. I began to see her every day. For one week. Then two.
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