by D I Russell
On the bright screen, her own reflection a veil on the scene, she sat on her bed as Woe reared up beside her.
Samara raised the remote control and clicked the standby button, plunging the screen to black.
For a second, Woe remained, her shape sitting on the bed beside her. The image flickered.
***
No reflection. Only darkness.
In the bathroom, Samara refrained from pulling the cord that turned on the bright fluoro tube. The mirror of the medicine cabinet reflected only ghosts as she swept it aside, fingers seeking out her prize. Toothbrushes, cans of deodorant, her father’s hair gel. A packet crinkled under her touch. She probed the opening, finding one of many long plastic handles. Samara blindly selected one and brought it close to her face.
She had not lied to her mother. This was art.
Art required tools.
She resisted the temptation to run her thumb across the sharp edge, having done something similar as a child, finding her father’s razor at the side of the bath. So sharp, right? The two blades contained in his razor, held within wires, appeared innocent enough. She’d run her thumb across the innocuous edge, feeling nothing. Then the pain had hit: thin ribbons across the pad of her thumb, blood trickling from the two vents that blurred into a single slash. A subdued agony.
Her replacement tool was still trapped in its plastic frame: unwieldy for intricate work. One could cut, but not intricately carve, in the present state.
She’d brought another tool from her collection, one that could create as well as the brushes and pencils it laid between. The art knife, with its dented metal casing and short triangular blade, lacked the finesse of the razor she sought, yet what it failed in intricacy, it triumphed in destruction.
Samara plunged it deep, prying the cheap, brittle plastic from the metal razor. Snapping the outer casing, she had more work ahead for both blades.
***
She returned to her open bedroom doorway, having stashed the new acquisition in a fresh envelope. Her father had ditched her painting of Woe onto her desk, so she had no need to paint a fresh guardian. A quick fold and the replacement was hidden away, now stored at the bottom of her art supplies box. They had no call to look in there.
Samara looked down the hallway, considering her next move. It made sense to pass by her parents’ room and visit her sister…minimise the risk. However, it would only take a cry from Kelly for both her mum and dad to come barrelling on top of her in a blind panic. No. Time to think. To plan.
She took a few steps along the hallway, past her now dark and empty bathroom and paused in the open doorway of her parents’ bedroom. They lay in two heaps, side by side. The radio alarm clock on her mother’s bedside table showed just after eleven. Her father snored, probably due to the afternoon beers and the few cans he’d had after coming home. His arm draped over the slumbering form beside him. Her mother laid on her side, facing away, barely tolerating his touch, even in deep sleep. Samara could just make out her face, fitful within her dreams. Did she watch her failures, the pathways cut off by time?
Samara stepped deeper into the bedroom, her body casting a long shadow across the carpet and across her sleeping parents, long and distorted. Pausing at the foot of the bed, she raised the art knife, swaying the triangular blade back and forth. Her father was clearly the more physical of the two, yet his afternoon at the pub would have dulled him. His discovery had surely driven him back to his remaining cans of cold beer.
Her mother, on the other hand, never drank and was a light sleeper.
Samara walked to the other side of the bed, her footsteps light on the carpet. She fidgeted with the art knife, spinning the metal handle between her fingers despite the slight rattle of the blade in the housing. The fingers of her other hand twitched and drummed in the air, the movement somehow offering comfort in light of the hard work ahead.
She looked down upon her mother trapped in the slideshow of sleep. What did she dream? Unemployment? The monthly budget? A daughter who didn’t fit? The twitches and frowns darting across her face belied the mundane visions. She had no idea of terror. The fantastic and horrific had been purposely avoided, and the ladder of suburbia, no matter what the rung, provided a step away from real fear.
Samara plunged the art knife into her mother’s neck just below the jawbone.
She expected a Hollywood reaction: her mother’s eyes flicking open, a hand shooting to the wound. Her mother’s neck failed to gush and spray, but the blood flowed and spread, creeping through the bed sheets in a gory chromatography. Her eyes half opened, a disturbed sleeper, confused by the sudden interruption. Fingers found the opening and, now slick with blood, fluttered around the wet skin. Her mother released a long sigh, already appearing to go back to sleep.
Samara headed around to the other side of the bed.
***
Back in the hallway, she fought the urge to return to the bathroom and wash her hands. The blood bothered her, tacky and drying to flakes on her fingers. No matter. She could wash soon. No point cleaning just to get dirty all over again. The logic soothed the itch of her skin.
Kelly had left her bedroom door open. Never a fan of the dark, she preferred the light from the upstairs hallway to shine into her room. Their mother had left the light burning every night, always worried that one would awaken in the early hours and in need of the bathroom, and in the dark somehow trip and break their neck.
Samara slipped inside, stepping into a room that spoke in scents of various sprays and perfumes. Soft toys filled a bookcase, soaked in the stench. Various eyes mounted to the wall watched Samara proceed towards the sleeping form in the bed, all members of Boyzone and Backstreet Boys silent witnesses, their posters pulled from magazines and fixed haphazardly about the room.
“Kelly…”
Her voice, strange in the silence of the house, caused her to pause, startling in its depth.
The risk was over. Only her sister remained in the house, and a younger sibling posed little threat compared to their parents. They both laid in bed, half-gazing at the ceiling, grinning wider than they ever did in real life, new smiles beneath their chins.
An active antagonist, her sister would be offered no merciful end. Their mother and father were merely the preparation, the practicing and perfection of a new technique. Now came the moment for real art, and real art required appreciation.
9.
The table bore an art history more personal than any textbook. Stained with the dark, rich smell of oils, wearing slips of paint that refused to shift and cuts that ran too deep, it had housed the creation of hundreds of projects. How many stood in this exact spot, Samara wondered. How many stared through this very window to study the grey world beyond, with its grimy aluminium sky. Ashen buildings, blemished by smoke and stained by soot, lined the quiet road leading past the college. Each piece of unique architecture shared a palette that smothered them into a single dreary entity.
Samara lowered her gaze back to the infinitely more vibrant tabletop and the open envelope she clutched between her fingers. She had removed the contents, four neat and perfectly square pieces of paper, just a little rough to the touch. Having lined them in a precise row, Samara scrutinised each one in turn.
More students entered the studio, shaking off the cold from outside, and shrugging out of heavy coats. They drifted to their workstations, pulling back sheets from canvases, squeezing thick and colourful worms of paint from foil tubes, or arranging brushes like surgical implements. The background noise gradually rose to a grating chatter that tried to force its way into Samara’s head. She felt the pressure and forced it back, filling her head with the rich smells of art and the brutal images seeping out from four squares of neat and perfectly square pieces of paper.
She closed the envelope and slid it into the back pocket of her combat pants, before anyone spied the smudged fingerprints adorning its surface.
The four images, caught in a moment of inspiration the previous night and deli
cately captured in fine charcoal, showed the face of a teenage girl. The first emphasised the fight of denial: eyes staring out from the picture, fixed and defiant, on the observer. Pristine white teeth clenched. The second? Acceptance. Gone was the challenge, and she looked inward, as did the viewer. The picture formed a vortex, pulling one into the dark depths in which the girl now resided. A tear, growing in weight, at the corner of her eye. Teeth now hidden behind pressed lips. A wrinkled chin pulled taut by trembling muscles under the temporarily intact skin of her face.
Samara knew she’d been a fool. The torment of her subject, captured in painstaking detail on the large canvas behind her, had been all for shock value. The blood seeping through her talons as she rendered her own flesh, and how she’d captured the shine of exposed and sallow cartilage, all to make them squirm. But the face…the expressionless pout as replicated from the model in the magazine, how…arrogant. The artist had created an image of agony, and while the subject exposed her own beating heart, and strained to scream out the shadowy terrors that lurked in her throat…her eyes betrayed her. Samara had tried to hide the pain and confusion with the cold stare of indifference. This simply would not do. The current expression of the girl suggested that even she had found some small way to cope with the horror. Samara wanted all who viewed her work to have no such solace.
“Okay everyone,” came the call across the studio. Miss Jones had finally made an appearance, late as usual. Breezing in through the door, the short woman still carried a ghost of her fiery auburn hair amid a mass of grey curls. Today she had opted for a loose lilac dress, the dangling sleeves flowing as she walked. Her heels came to a stop with a hard thud on the tiles, and the teacher surveyed the room over thin spectacles. “As you are all very aware, this is your last session before we hang these masterpieces in the exhibition theatre. Exciting times, eh?” She pressed out her cheek with her tongue and raised an eyebrow. Some idiot laughed. “So at the end of the day, make sure your work is clearly marked as yours, people! We’ll cart them all over and make sure they look perfect for your families to admire.”
Samara turned back to the window, meeting her own eyes.
“And pleeease,” said Jones, drawing her attention. Samara glanced at the teacher’s reflection in the glass. “Minor touch ups only today! Paint needs time to dry, you know.”
Already a small group had formed around the teacher, jostling for attention on last minute problems and ego boosts.
Samara scoffed. True art was no popularity contest, and those parading in front of Jones, desperate for her approval, were wasting their time. Effort should be invested in the work. The work would speak for itself. Art should be judged in isolation. Art should not be judged by the artist.
Two girls approached from either side, and Samara watched them both in the reflection of the window. To her left, Vicki threw her long blonde ponytail over her shoulder. With neighbouring workstations, she was never too far away. Thankfully her entourage were nowhere to be seen today; perhaps warned away with Jones’s probable appearance. On the right, the silent member of the class drifted to Samara’s side.
“Hey,” said Vicki. “How’s it going? I won’t be long today, so feel free to spread yourself out. Your picture looks awesome. Not quite something I’d hang on my bedroom wall, though! Scares the shit out of me. Sure the judges will love it.”
Samara stared at the grinning dark-haired girl beside her, slender teeth piercing both lips, effectively sewing her mouth shut. Her long, filthy nails clattered against each other as her fingers twitched. Samara realised it was her own fingers that were thrumming against each other. She squeezed her hand into a fist. “Oh yeah. Thanks. You too.”
“And what are these?” Vicki smiled and looked down for a closer inspection of the four neat and perfectly square pieces of paper. “Oh. Oh!”
“I’ve been going about it all wrong,” said Samara. “The expression…it’s all…so invalid. And these,” She tapped the last two pictures, “these will be the true face of the piece.”
Vicki stayed silent for a moment, transfixed by the quartet.
“Don’t…” She shook her head. “Aren’t you afraid of upsetting people?”
Samara refused to look the girl in the eye. Instead, she gazed at the streaks and scratches of the tabletop: generations of souls trying to speak through art, successful or not.
“It’s horror. It’s meant to upset people.” She slid the small sketches together into a pile and placed them in her pocket with the soiled envelope.
Her mind focussed on the work at hand, she turned from Vicki and the girl that hovered beside her and headed for her workstation: the canvas, unveiled and waiting, the selected paints and brushes, the tools of meaning. The babbling voices of the students around her and the faint din from the radio fell into silence with every step. The other works and the bustling bodies, the blazing light from the overhead tubes, and the grey haze from the window, became swallowed by darkness.
Samara stopped dead before her work, lost in her endless void, the painting a beacon of hope in the bleak, shadowy landscape.
The girl stared down at her through eyes of oil, her arms spread like Jesus revealing his Sacred Heart. Deep furrows of skin and flesh had been torn from her body and hung from her encrusted nails, still stubborn and clinging to her exposed rib cage. The heart trapped within, wet and glistening, pulsed in a slow rhythm.
Samara circled the figure, studying the dimensions, the shine of her slick skin. No light existed on this deep plain, but somehow the girl radiated her own source of illumination.
The artist paused her consideration to peer back over her shoulder. She found only darkness and for a moment became mesmerised by the abyss, all thoughts of her work abandoned.
The true face of the piece, she thought, daring something to step forth from the murk.
The light caress of a needle-sharp claw stroked the back of her neck, pricking the skin.
Samara gasped and swung around, reaching for the girl that lived in the limitless night. Her fingers closed around the narrow wooden handle of a paintbrush, the bristles wide and dripping with the purest white.
The painted girl, frozen in place, analysed Samara in turn, her open mouth almost caught in silent laughter. Her teeth, a nightmarish collection of varying shapes and sizes, blossomed between her lips. Rows of serrated incisors lined the interior of her mouth, while snake-like fangs struck out, glossy and piercing.
With her free hand, Samara reached towards the girl’s exposed chest. The tips of her fingers explored the edge of torn flesh, feeling the tacky grip of drying blood on her skin. She probed further, easing her hand inside the warm innards of the girl. Her subject remained still and silent, oblivious to this latest atrocity. Delving higher, Samara passed her hand behind the sternum. The beating heart seemed to slide onto her eager palm. She caged it with her fingers, relishing the soothing cadence.
Inside the girl’s mouth, the horrors that Samara had painstakingly created fluttered into life, creeping around the jagged teeth, and mocking the artist with taunting faces. She sensed the creatures trapped within the body composed of rich oils, the beating heart driving them out, the deep, slow drum ordering them through the dark, bloody tunnels. And the girl born of the darkness, the girl that surrounded the macabre piece, forever present, would come, shaped by the terrors that writhed and coiled from within the painted throat.
Samara drew a deep breath and brandished the wide paintbrush like a crucifix. Its power would destroy these creatures, and she had every intention of ending their ridicule. The conceited gaze of the subject, separated and safe from her anguish, would also succumb. A white baptism, allowing the truth of suffering to be free…
“Samara? What do you think you’re doing?”
Her teacher’s voice snapped her back to the art room, flooding her senses. The irritating drone from the radio, the chatter of her fellow students, and the bright glare from the overhead lights. Miss Jones was poised over Vicki’s piece, s
taring across in horror at Samara’s painting.
Samara touched the tip of the wide brush to the canvas, her other hand pressed against the dry paint, the detailed heart beneath her fingers.
“No, no,” said her teacher. “Just touch ups today remember. We don’t have time for any major changes.” She straightened from Vicki’s painting, muttering to her. “Excellent work. Just give me a moment.”
Samara had no idea what the teacher might do to stop her. She swept the brush over the face of the girl, eradicating her features in one white stroke.
Her teacher’s high heels clattered to a stop on the worn tiles. She stared at the painting in shock rather than disgust, the first time since its creation. “Samara! Why the hell…?”
The artist turned to her workstation and threw the brush down. Her other implements had been arranged the moment she had entered the art room. Neat, tidy, ordered. Colours arranged by group; brushes lined up in ascending size. Just one thing missing. She dug into her pocket and placed the four pieces of paper beside her pallet. The correct instruments, inspiration, and blank piece of canvas ready for the truth.
“The show is tomorrow,” said Jones, waving a flabbergasted hand and the ruined painting. “Tomorrow!”
“I only need a day,” Samara replied, dismissing her teacher’s concerns. She reached under her workstation for her black bag and took out her cigarettes. Plenty of time while the whitewash dried.
10.
The early evening bus station offered little protection from the chill, and Samara pulled her coat tighter. Standing in a line of mundane faces, all drained from eight hours at the office or attending classes, she gazed at the empty bus bay. A quick, silent prayer to the gods of public transport had gone unheard. Sharing a smoke and whinge with Lily usually passed the time, but her friend had vanished, most likely finished early and not bothered to stick around. Who could blame her in this? thought Samara, picturing a warm seat at the back of a bus, the vibrations of the engine rumbling beneath her.
She cupped her hands and blew into them, trying to generate some heat. She hadn’t bothered washing them after her marathon painting session. Various colours clung to the skin and occupied the underneath of each nail. She inhaled the opulent scent of oil paint. It had consumed the day, but her work was complete. A greater vision. A faithful vision. Now residing back in their envelope at the bottom of her bag, hidden under various pencils, brushes, and other tools, the four sketches had transferred their terrible veracity to canvas.