Could Resort Partners have already started their reconstruction? That was possible, but if so, where were the construction vehicles? Where was the scrap dumpster? Where was any sign that anyone except him had been here within the last month?
“I’m getting back into my truck and continuing to drive into Wood City,” Jack said, holding the camcorder lens up to the windshield and trying to keep it steady as he slid back behind the wheel. “And while I’m not a religious man, may God go with me.”
Driving and taping at the same time was not easy, but he did the best he could. He passed cabin after cabin, slowing down to get a good video shot of each one, muttering over and over, “I don’t fucking believe this.” When he finally came to “downtown” Wood City, he saw Marcus Broarty’s Jaguar parked in front of the City hall building. So Marc was still here, somewhere. Jack made his way to the city hall building, stopping only to mutter, “Goddamn.”
The structure was not simply newer than the last time he had seen it, it was new. Its marble walls shone, and there were now doors at the entrance, which hung open like the arms of a preacher waiting to re-welcome him into the fold. A freshly-mown lawn sat in front of the building and the windows had glass in brass frames. There was a dedication plate on the cornerstone to the right, which Jack did not take the time to read.
Holding the video recorder in front of him almost like a shield, Jack started up the stairs toward the building. “Marcus? You here? It’s Jack Hayden. Hello! Emac? Anyone?”
No sound came back to him. If Broarty was here, he was keeping silent.
Jack was at the doorway now, looking in.
The inside of the City hall was as pristine as though the ribbon had not yet been cut. Marble facing tiles gleamed and brass fixtures on the walls shone. The place seemed filled with light and looking up Jack saw a huge chandelier, its many bulbs blazing.
“There’s electricity,” he uttered, feeling cold. “The juice has been turned on.”
Almost reluctantly, he looked over to the far wall, the one that contained the mural.
The painting was completely revealed now. There was no trace of gray covering paint anywhere. In fact, it smelled like the pigment was fresh.
“Marcus, are you in here?”
No answer.
In a shaky voice, Jack said into the camera: “I’m inside the City hall building now. The last time I was here, only days ago, it was in ruins. Now it is new, brand new. I can’t begin to explain this. I’m not even going to try. But the mural, the WPA mural that was complete covered up on the back wall is now totally exposed in all its original glory.” Jack stopped talking as he examined the mural more closely.
Among the dozens of figures it portrayed was one that particularly drew his attention. The setting was a slaughterhouse—not a particularly popular subject for a piece of artwork, but one, he knew, that did occasionally surface in the pop culture of the Progressive movement, nowhere more obvious than in Sinclair Lewis’s The Jungle. But here it showed innocent looking pigs being led into an abattoir, not by white-jacketed workers, but instead by evil-looking men in three piece suits. These were no doubt intended to represent Capitalists, and the symbolism was not all that hard to decipher. But what really caught his eye was the first “pig” in line: it was not a pig at all. It was not even an animal.
It was Egon McMenamin. Emac’s severed head was lying on the ground in front of his kneeling body, his face twisted in a scream of agonized horror.
Jack was unable to tell if he had any feeling left in his body.
Lifting his gaze upwards from the painting of Emac, Jack focused more clearly on the suited capitalists in the painting, particularly the one leering gleefully over the slaughtered body of McMenamin.
It was the image of Marcus Broarty.
Jack suddenly felt ill. He made it outside just in time and vomited all over the City hall steps, then dizzily sat down, oblivious to the smell beside him and to the fact he had captured his losing his breakfast on tape.
Confronting the impossible was not Jack Hayden’s strong suit. Looking at real existing walls, floors, ceilings and corners and searching for any clues that would indicate whether they were all working together or acting like a ’70s rock group on the verge of splitting up—harmonious on the outside to the casual observer, but dangerously weakened on the inside—that was his job. But he could not ignore what was happening around him. Whatever the hell it was wouldn’t let him ignore it.
He had to go back in. He had to examine that damned painting.
Steeling himself, Jack rose up off the marble steps on shaky legs and pushed himself back inside the city hall. Focusing the camera lens on the slaughterhouse scene, Jack saw that the painted body of Emac was now beginning to decompose. So, for that matter, was the figure of Marcus Broarty.
The goddamned thing is repainting itself! Just like the whole fucking town is rebuilding, renewing! It was insane, but there it was. Maybe he was insane too, but he did not believe so. For one thing, it was too easy an explanation for what was happening around him. For another, Jack had read somewhere that truly insane people don’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether they’re insane or not.
The painted figures glistened wetly and Jack held out a finger to them, when a strong, loud male voice commanded: Don’t touch it! Startled, he spun around to see who had come inside the building with him.
There was no one there.
“Marcus?” he called out, but got silence in return. “Okay, that was in my mind, right?” he asked aloud, almost hoping for a reply, which did not come.
Turning back toward the wall, Jack pulled his pen out of his shirt pocket and gingerly pushed it toward the painting. Upon contact, he rubbed it back and forth and saw the paint smear. Sure enough, it was wet, as wet as though the artist had just left for lunch a moment ago.
Then another sound was heard: that of a motor starting up. It didn’t sound like his truck, which left only one possibility. “Marcus!” he screamed, turning and bolting for the door of the City hall building. He made it to the steps in time to see the rear end of the Jaguar bouncing down the road, kicking up dirt and stones in its wake. Where had the bastard been hiding? After half a minute, it disappeared completely, having been swallowed up by the woods.
Shit. Should he have taped Broarty’s car roaring out of wood city? Would that have been valuable evidence, or just another bizarre image capping a home-made film of a living nightmare? Even if he had recorded Marcus’s getaway, Jack seriously doubted he had the courage to ever rewind the tape and watch the playback. He powered down the camera and set it on the marble step, then took out his wallet to get the slip of paper with Creeley’s numbers written on it. Stuffing his pen back in his pocket, he pulled out his cell phone and dial the policeman’s number, but then cancelled the call before the policeman answer it.
What would he tell Creeley? He had not actually seen Marcus, only his car. As for Marc’s claim that he had killed Emac, he had only the word of the rattled secretary, which he believed would qualify in court of law as hearsay.
Maybe if he could bring himself to genuinely believe that Marcus Broarty was capable of taking the life of another he would have felt more responsible to pass on the information he’d received. But Jack doubted the fat fuck had it in him. If anything, his confession was a hallucination brought on by Broarty’s looking at the mural.
Jack tried to figure out what to do next, but nothing came to him, nothing except get the hell out of the woods. Racing to his truck, he got behind the wheel and started it up, maneuvering it around so that it pointed the way out, then took the mysteriously smooth road as fast as he dared, dreading the thought that he would ever have to come back to this place again.
Jack distinctly heard a voice somewhere in the truck say: Don’t worry; you’ll be back soon enough. That was when he floored it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
By the time Carl Dorgan made his way back to the point where he had watched Jack Hayden turn of
f the highway and into the woods, he figured he was a hound who had lost the scent. Earlier, he had followed Hayden out here from the Tide Pool Inn, where he and Jessie had delivered the Lindstrom’s woman’s car. He had radioed the chief to tell him they were coming back, but Creeley surprised him by asking him to keep an eye on Hayden, just in case. Since he had to stay put, he left Jessie to sweet-talk the motel into shuttling her back to the station (though he knew ol’ Jess could talk just about anyone into just about anything).
After twenty boring minutes in the parking lot, Dorgan had radioed back in. “Chief, Hayden’s truck is still in the lot, though there’s no sign of him,” he’d said. “You want me to go inside?” Before he could receive an answer, though, Jack Hayden had rushed out of the hotel like he was on fire, jumped in his truck, and tore out. Dorgan followed at a safe distance, trailing him all the way to the woods. But then what sounded like an emergency call came in that pulled him away from his stakeout—a call that proved to be bogus. Dorgan could not figure out how someone could have circumvented dispatch and hack into the official channel to deliver a crank call! Whoever had done it, though, had sent him on a thirty-minute wild damn goose chase, and now that he was back, he seriously doubted that Hayden was anywhere in the area.
Still, he was here, so he might as well look for him.
Carl Dorgan turned the police vehicle onto the nearly-hidden turn-off and headed into the woods. He had only driven a couple of minutes when he spotted the car parked up ahead. It wasn’t Hayden’s, that was for sure. It was big and expensive, a Chrysler with Nevada plates. What was it doing out here?
Once he had gotten up to it, Dorgan pulled the police car over and got out to investigate. He could see through the windows that there was no one inside. Raising his head, he took a deep breath and called into the woods: “Police!” then waited for an answer. None came. “Is anyone here?” he called again. “Yoooooo!”
Nothing.
Okay, so maybe Hayden had come up this road because he knew the owner of this car, and maybe the car had broken down, so Hayden had shown up to give him a ride back to town. That made sense. It didn’t explain a helluva lot, but it made sense.
Circling the Chrysler, pretty well satisfied that the owner was not anywhere near, Dorgan tried opening the passenger door, and to his surprise, found it unlocked. He went around to the driver’s side and slid in behind the wheel. Nothing looked fishy, just a big expensive car sitting for some inexplicable reason out in the middle of the woods. He got back out and circled it again, taking one last look just for the record, before getting back in his own vehicle and heading for the station.
It was on that final inspection that he saw something.
A small puddle of liquid had collected under the rear license plate. Even though it had mostly soaked into the ground, there was enough on the surface to discolor the earth. Carl Dorgan carefully touched a finger to it and then examined it. “Aw, hell,” he said.
It was red. Blood-rust red. It appeared to be dripping down from the trunk.
“Sweet Jesus,” Dorgan muttered as he went back to the driver’s seat and popped the trunk open. Moving back to the rear of the car slowly and carefully, drawing his gun as he went, he lifted the trunk lid up and peeked inside.
Carl Dorgan was not a man who frightened easily, but this came the closest of anything in recent memory.
* * * * * * *
Jack Hayden was still shaking when he got back to the Tide Pool Inn. He hoped it would stop by bedtime. He hoped a lot of things.
To his annoyance, he discovered that his room had not yet been made up by housekeeping. They were late today. He didn’t really care much either way, it was just that while he was in the bathroom washing his face with cold water, a knock came to his door and he assumed it was the cleaning staff. “Just a minute,” he called, toweling off, and then answered the door.
It was Dani Lindstrom. She had tucked her hair up under a baseball cap. “You look awful,” she said.
“I’d say that it’s been one of those days, but so far it’s been unlike any day I’ve ever experienced,” he replied.
“Can I come in?”
“Sure.”
She seated herself one of the cheap stuffed chairs at the tiny dining table. “I looked out the window and saw you drive in. I need to talk to you, Jack.”
“Okay.”
“You know what it’s like when you have a stuffed up nose, and then suddenly your sinuses clear and you can breathe again? That’s happened to my mind just a short while ago, while you were gone. Just like that it opened up.”
“Isn’t that good?” Jack asked, sitting up on the couch.
“Yes, except that I now remember what happened out there at Wood City. I remember what I saw in the damned mural. Jack, am I going insane?”
“If you are, then so am I, and somehow I think insanity is too simple an answer for what’s happening. What did the mural show you?”
She flinched. “God. When I went there it was like I was being drawn into the City hall building. I couldn’t stop my own legs, just like in a dream. When I got inside, the mural was completely revealed. I stared at it for a moment, and then I noticed that one corner of the painting showed a row of women. It looked like they were coming out of a whorehouse.”
That was a new one on Jack. When he had been there that afternoon, there was nothing that even remotely resembled a whorehouse. “Go on, Dani.”
“One of the women was familiar. Uncomfortably familiar. It was me, Jack. I was in the painting. That was bad, but it wasn’t the worst. My picture...god, this is so crazy...my painted image began to move. Then a line of men in the painting all began to move, too. They lined up and they—”
She quietly began to sob. Jack leapt up and went to her, gently lifting her from the chair and walking her over to the sofa, where he sat her down beside him, holding her. “It’s all right,” he said, knowing it wasn’t really.
Hot tears fell from her eyes onto his hand. “I couldn’t move, Jack. My picture could, but I couldn’t! I was frozen, standing there watching as man after man after man raped me.”
“Dani, it was just in the painting.”
“No,” she cried. “I felt it, I felt them, each one of them, every painful thrust.”
Jack winced.
“It took nearly two hours for all of them to finish. Then I blacked out. I don’t even know how long I was there. I don’t know what might have happened to me while I was unconscious.”
“Dani, listen to me. Whatever we are suffering through, it’s in our minds. Whatever this force is, it’s attacking our heads. You weren’t really violated back there, not physically.”
Dani rose up and reached into her jeans pocket, pulling something out and holding up to Jack. It was a pair of white panties, but there was something on them. “I was wearing these the whole time,” she said.
“Is that blood I see on them?”
“Look closely. Smell them.”
Jack grimaced. He was not really into sniffing panties, particularly those that looked like they were stained with menstrual blood. But he did. Then he recoiled like he had been shot. “Oh, Christ!”
It was not blood on the panties. It was paint. Her underwear was smeared with paint.
“There were also traces of it on me,” she said, weakly. “Want to tell me now that nothing physical happened in there?”
There was nothing Jack could say. Dani carried the panties over to the trashcan and dropped them in. “I’d flush them if I didn’t think it would wreck the plumbing. There’s something else, Jack: I don’t want my own room anymore. I want to be with you. I’d like to check out and come down here.”
He hesitated.
“Please, Jack. You have two beds. I’ll pay for my half of the room. I’m not asking for sex. I don’t think I’m capable of sex right now, or any time soon. I just don’t want to be alone.”
“Okay, let’s go up front and take care of it.”
“I have to get m
y stuff out first.”
Jack helped her move her travel belongings to his room, and then went with her as she checked out of room 207. After she had finished, he told her he wanted to go into the coffee shop and grab a sandwich to take back to the room. Dani went with him and got a large cup of hot chocolate. “It’s my traditional comfort drink,” she said. By the time they got back to room, Althea was waiting for them.
“Oh, there you two are,” the old woman said. “I’ve been knocking on the door of an empty room.”
“Sorry,” Jack said, holding his ham and cheese sandwich with one hand while slipping in the key card with the other. He opened the door and let them both in. “What have you been doing, Althea?”
“I ended up falling asleep in my room,” she replied. “Again.”
Jack unwrapped his sandwich. “The rest probably did you good,” he said. “Do you want something to eat?”
“Oh, no, dear, I’m fine, thank you. You go ahead. I wish I could say the nap did me good, but I had a dream.”
“About Howard?”
“No, not this time. There was another man and he was wearing an artist’s smock, and he was tormenting me.”
“Tormenting how?” Jack asked though a full mouth.
Althea took in a deep breath, closed her eyes and then said: “By telling me exactly when and where my death would occur.”
Jack and Dani looked at each other.
“He told me the day, the date, even the time,” Althea went on. “That horrible, mocking voice...‘From the enchanted hill to the entombing hole,’ it kept saying, whatever that means.”
Dani set down her chocolate cup and rummaged through the tourist magazines that came with the room until she found what she was seeking. “See here? ‘La Cuesta Encantada, the Enchanted Hill.’ That’s what William Randolph Hearst called his castle.”
The old woman took a deep breath and her eyes got a faraway look. “Oh, Lord,” she uttered.
“Althea, are you all right?” Jack asked.
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