The Mural

by Michael Mallory

  “Pull in,” Jack said, and Dani did. Jack ran inside and came back a few minutes later with a large bottle of iodine, a bottle of drinking water, and a plastic party bowl. “We may need something to develop the pages in,” he said. “Okay, punkin, now we’re going to the beach.”

  “Yay!” Robin cried.

  Following the signs, Dani pulled into a large parking lot for Moonstone Beach, and everyone got out. Looking around, Althea said, “I can’t believe how everything has been built up. Even this road was not here back then.”

  It was the warmest day so far that week. The sun was nearing its apex over the water, radiating heat and comfort down on the sandy patch of coastline, and the rhythmic, comforting pattern of the tide waving in and out almost made Jack forget about the way his life had turned into a bizarre waking nightmare over the past week or so. Whatever instincts had prompted Althea to choose this location were sound, for the place felt not only peaceful, but safe and protected.

  There were a few other people out on the beach, which increased the feeling of safety for Jack. Robynn, naturally, rushed to the surf, but came running back a second later. “It’s cold!” she cried.

  “Just stick your toes in until you get used to it,” Jack said, walking down with her to make sure she didn’t get in over her comfort level.

  Althea and Dani stayed back a ways from the water, settling in near a rock outcrop that was dotted with a mysterious honeycomb pattern, the delicately elaborate product of wind and water. There Althea took a handful of blank pages from the journal and ripped them out of the binding.

  “What are you doing?” Dani asked.

  “It’s the only way, dear,” the old woman said, putting the first page in the bowl Jack had bought, and smearing iodine over it. Immediately, rust colored words began to appear. “Could you do the rest of them, one at a time?” Althea asked. “Use the iodine sparingly, and if you need to, dilute it with the water.” Dani took over the developing process, while Jack was totally focused on watching Robynn, who was now in the water up to her knees. Dani smiled as she watched the two of them having fun.

  “Please give me the next one, dear,” Althea said.

  “Oh, sorry,” Dani replied, handing the next developed page over.

  “They’re special, those two,” Althea commented, looking at Jack and Dani.

  “Yes they are,” Dani agreed. “Althea, do you really believe that Howard came to Robynn in her sleep?”

  “Of course he did. She’s too innocent to lie.”

  “But why her?”

  “Well, he came to me, too, remember.”

  “But you knew him in...well....”

  “Go ahead and say it. In life. It’s not like I don’t know he’s dead.” The old woman took another page and held it up in a futile attempt to dry it in the sun. “What you’re really asking me is why a ghost is appearing to an old woman and a little girl, instead of you or Jack, isn’t that it?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  Althea turned to Dani and smiled. “I’m ninety-three years old, Dani, and soon I’ll be dead too.”

  “Althea—”

  “No, let me finish. When you get to be very old, something happens to you. You start believing again. Howard came to me and I believed it was him. I didn’t look for an explanation. It’s the same with the very young. Their minds are open, they believe. If Howard had appeared to you or Jack, you would have wracked your brains trying to figure out what had caused such a strange dream, and then dismissed the whole thing. But the old and the young, we believe.” She put a withered hand on Dani’s sun-warmed arm. “You’ll understand someday.”

  Dani continued handing Althea damp page after damp page; so many that the old woman started to carefully lay them down on the sand in the sun. “I hope that won’t make them fade again,” Dani said.

  “So far, so good,” Althea said.

  When the last page had been developed and slightly dried, she picked them all up and began to read. For the next fifteen minutes, the only sound any of them heard were the waves lapping up onto the sand, and Robynn’s delighted squeals. When Althea finally looked up, having finished the last page, all the color in her face had drained away. “Dear god in heaven,” she uttered.

  “What is it?” Dani asked. “Are you all right?”

  Althea shook her head, and then slumped over onto her side.

  “Jack,” Dani called.

  Jack and Robynn were at the surf line, with the girl happily building a sand palace. Jack turned back to see Althea, seemingly stricken. “Punkin, stay right here, okay? Don’t go back in the water on your own.”

  “Okay.”

  Jack ran back to the old woman and knelt down beside her. “Althea, what’s the problem. Do you need us to call a doctor?”

  “No,” the old woman responded. “It’s not me. I’m fine. It’s us. All of us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She looked up at him. “I’ve just read everything Howard wrote to me. Everything he wanted me to read.”

  “And?”

  “And we are in more danger than you can possibly imagine.”

  BOOK FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THE JOURNAL OF HOWARD E. KEARNEY

  Dearest Sweet Althea:

  I have done something that is horrible. I am hoping that in confessing this I might be able to clear my soul, if indeed a black mark has been imprinted upon it. I imagine that you will find it funny to hear me speak about a soul, but the hard truth is that I have never acquired the glib rejection of all things spiritual that some of my colleagues have. Without a soul, could a man truly be an artist? Or even a good man? Or—

  Howard Kearney stopped and took a deep breath before dipping his pen back into the chipped shot glass containing the lemon squeezings and writing: an evil one?

  A few short months ago, had anyone asked him to describe his concept of evil, he would not have given it any particular supernatural connotation. Howard believed that evil, like good, existed within everyone, like white blood cells and red, and the same with Heaven and Hell. He had certainly known men, along with a few women, who had taken up residence in both places long before they left the living world. But now, knowing what he knew, having done what he had done, he could only pray that his own soul was safe. Fergus’s as well; his friend and mentor, and the man he had murdered. Or maybe it wasn’t murder at all, given the circumstances. If only he could know for certain.

  In the week since the killing had taken place, Howard kept hoping that it had only been a nightmare. He had dreams sometimes that were so realistic he would later become confused as to whether the incidents in question had really happened or whether they were night fantasies. But the murder did not feel like that. It seemed too real, no matter how fantastical it had been.

  After the fire that destroyed the inn in Glenowen, he and Althea returned to the Bay Area, where her family had been waiting for them. To say that her father had not been pleased about her jaunt down the coast with a struggling artist was like saying the Bolsheviks of Russia had not been pleased with the Tsar. Mr. Dorneman became almost apoplectic when he heard about the fire that had, in his mind, threatened their lives. Howard could hardly defend himself by saying, No sir, she was never in any danger because when the fire took place, I was having sex with her in the Pacific Ocean. For everyone’s sake, Howard decided that maybe he and Althea needed to be sneakier in their trysts.

  As for Fergus Randall, he went off in some other direction after the fire, and the only thing Howard had heard from him over the next three months was a scrawled note, partially obscured by a blotch of liquid (and he could well imagine what kind of liquid it was), that had come from Mexico.

  Then in early September, Fergus had showed up unannounced at the door of Howard’s tiny artist’s flat in San Francisco, near Chinatown. At first Howard thought he was in the midst of a bender, because he looked terrible and smelled even worse, but the older man assured him he was stone cold sober as h
e all but pushed his way inside. Stopping to examine a canvas Howard was working on, Fergus muttered: “You’re getting damn good, lad.” Then he sat down on Howard’s sole spare chair. From inside his worn, workman’s shirt, he pulled out a stack of folded papers, some of which were newspaper clippings. “Got anything to drink around here?” Fergus asked.

  “I think there’s some wine in the other room,” Howard replied.

  Fergus Randall winced, but then shrugged and nodded, and Howard left his living room-studio to find a glass. He returned with jelly glass filled with red wine and handed it to his friend. Fergus took a sip, shivered, and then took another before setting the glass down on the bare wood floor.

  “So, are you here on a job?” Howard asked, seating himself on a short stool.

  “Not a paying one, no. Though it might be the most important thing I’ve ever done. Take a look at me, lad.” Howard did, and saw a man who appeared to be much older than the friend he last saw in Glenowen. Fergus’s red eyes were ringed with worry, like he had not been sleeping, and his unruly hair showed streaks of gray that had not been there before. His stubble was almost thick enough to qualify as an early beard. “Do I look insane to you?” Fergus asked.

  “What a question. You look awfully fatigued, maybe even ill, but no, you don’t look insane.”

  “So if I tell you an insane story, you won’t throw me out of here?”

  “Of course not. What’s wrong, Fergus?”

  “I’m scared, lad, that’s what wrong.” Fergus picked up his jelly glass and drained the wine in one gulp. When Howard offered more, the older man shook his head. “You remember this, of course,” Fergus said, handing Howard a clipping from his stack of papers. It was a newspaper write up of the burning of the Saddleback Inn in Glenowen.”

  “How could I not?”

  Fergus passed over another clipping. “How about this?”

  Howard took it and read: Artist falls to his death from Coit Tower. “This was a couple of months ago, right? I remember hearing something about it. He was drunk, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he standing on the ledge at the top, and that’s why he fell?”

  “That’s what the one and only eye witness told the police,” Fergus said. “It’s all there.”

  Howard scanned the article and found testimony attributed to an Italian tourist who was watching from the bottom and saw the victim, a man named George Behlmer—whose name meant nothing to Howard—appear to dance and scream at the top of the tower before launching over the side. He was killed immediately. “This is pretty horrible, Fergus, but I don’t see what it has to do with the fire at Glenowen. Did you know this Behlmer guy?”

  “No. He wasn’t really an artist.”

  “So the paper got it wrong?” Howard had absolutely no idea where Fergus was going with any of this.

  “The paper printed what they were told, lad. Behlmer was only pretending to be an artist. He was really an undercover Pinkerton’s operative on the tail of someone. I did some investigating on my own when I heard about this. That’s about all I’ve been doing for the last few months.” He pulled a half-crushed package of Camels from his pocket and lit one, and then wiped his left eye with the heel of his palm.

  “Fergus, I’m not really following any of this.”

  “Okay, here’s what got me into it. Read that story again, and pay close attention to the name of that Italian tourist who was the witness, and who, not so coincidentally, disappeared as soon as he gave his story to the cops.”

  “All right,” Howard sighed. Scanning the article again, he got to the part about the eyewitness and read, “‘Giulianno Morese, a visitor to the city from Sicily.’ I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it right.”

  “Pronunciation doesn’t matter,” Fergus said, blowing out a gust of cigarette smoke. “You got a piece of paper lying around? Go get it and write that name down.”

  Shaking his head in puzzlement, Howard got up and went to get his sketchbook from the kitchen, where he had been sketching a bowl of fruit, and brought it in. Turning it to the first empty page, he grabbed a pencil from his pocket and wrote the name down. “Now what?”

  “Give it to me,” Fergus said.

  Taking the pad, he began crossing off letters and then rewriting them. When he was finished, he handed it back to Howard, who glanced at the page and felt a sudden strange cold spot in the bottom of his stomach. “Oh, wow,” was all he could say as he read:

  GIULIANNO MORESE

  LOUIS NORMAN IGEE

  “It’s an anagram,” Fergus said. “A perfect goddamned anagram.”

  “Okay, it’s an anagram,” Howard said. “How much did you have to drink before you discovered this?”

  “Not enough. The whole anagram thing came to me in the middle of a dream that I had in the course of my last good night’s sleep.”

  Howard dropped the pad. “So you’re saying that Igee was the witness and he pretended to be an Italian tourist to hide from the police?”

  “It wasn’t Igee. Igee wasn’t anywhere near Coit Tower that night. He was at a fine tavern in Monterey, near Cannery Row, miles away from Knob Hill and San Francisco, and I know that for a fact because I saw him there. A group of us were there to discuss a possible project coming up, and Igee strolled in. He scowled at us as he went past our table, but one of the boys tried to flag him down, bring him over. Another one had just gotten a Brownie camera and wanted to get a group shot of the artists. Igee refused outright, and when the guy forced a picture with him, he became nearly violent, so after that we just left him alone, and he went off to drink by himself. The point is, he was there until closing. There is no way he could have been at Coit Tower that night. None. Not only did I recognize him, but so did four of the others.”

  “Okay, then, I guess it’s just a coincidence, the names and all,” Howard said, “or am I missing something?”

  “Missing,” Fergus Randall said, showing a parody of a smile. “That’s pretty funny, considering.” Before Howard could ask for explanation, Fergus rifled back through his stack of papers and pulled out a photograph, then handed it to Howard. The photo was of a bunch of men in a tavern, posing rather raucously, several of them clearly feeling no pain, all of them summoning up a scene of hilarity and camaraderie the likes of which Howard would have enjoyed being a part. Smack in the middle of the group was Fergus.

  “Looks like a fun night,” the younger man said.

  “It was,” Fergus confirmed, “at least I thought so at the time. But something is missing. Look directly to my right and slightly over my shoulder. What do you see?”

  Howard looked more closely and described what he saw: a black, faintly humanoid smudge, more solid than a shadow, but not defined in any way. “What is that?”

  “That, lad, is Louis Norman Igee.”

  “What?” Howard looked again. “Was he moving too fast for the camera and just created a blur?”

  “No. He was not.”

  “I’m not getting it, Fergus.”

  The older man reached into the stack and pulled out yet another picture, this one appearing to be of the same shot, but enlarged. Instead of full body shots, there were now a row of faces. The photo was awkwardly cropped, leaving a lot of headroom over top of the men. Howard’s eyes instinctively went to the dark smudge, which was only marginally more defined now. It almost looked like a face, but a face at night, or maybe a face covered with a caul of dark material. But it had definition. “My god,” Howard muttered.

  Studying the blurry, shadowy image, he could make out the faint visage of an enraged demon, with abnormally large teeth bared in a snarl, and huge, hate-filled eyes. Or maybe it was just the power of suggestion. Either way, he felt goose pimples rising on his arms.

  “Here’s the capper,” Fergus said. “The reason there’s so much white space in that shot is I wanted to zero in on the background. See that mirror against the wall behind the bar? See how if you look closely, you can make out the backs of our heads reflected in it? Count the heads.”
>
  Howard did. One was missing.

  Where the reflection of the back of the blurry dark smudge in the foreground should have been, there was a gap in the mirror’s image. “Couldn’t this be some kind of camera malfunction?” Howard asked.

  Fergus sighed heavily. “I’m going to ask you to do something, lad, and after you do it, ask me again if it’s a camera malfunction. Pick up your pad and draw a picture of Louis Norman Igee.”

  “A picture of him?”

  “You know him, you know what he looks like, and you’re a talented artist, so it should be no problem for you. Just make me a sketch of him from memory.”

  With a shrug, Howard got up and went for a rust-colored Conté crayon, then returned and took up his sketchpad. “Okay, Fergus, here goes.” He sketched quickly for about two minutes, and then frowned. Flipping the page over, he stared again, but this time interrupted his work by muttering, “What the hell is this?”

  Fergus looked at him with exhausted eyes. “You can’t do it, can you?” he said. “Neither can I. I tried drawing the bastard twenty times, and every line I put down was the wrong one. I’d try drawing someone else, and they’d come out fine, but not Igee. He can’t be drawn.”

  “This is insane!” Howard said, going to a third page and scratching frantically on the thick paper. When he stopped, Fergus asked to see the result.

  “Looks like W. C. Fields,” the older man said, dropping the pad on the floor. “In one of my attempts, I came up with Teddy Roosevelt. Like it or not, Howard, the truth is Louis Norman Igee cannot be photographed, cannot be drawn, and does not cast a reflection in a mirror.”

  Howard tried to speak but it took a couple of tries before the words came out without a squeak. “Fergus, you’re not going to try and tell me that Igee is a vampire, are you?”

  “In the Dracula sense? No, I don’t think so. But he isn’t entirely human, either.”

  Howard remembered what Fergus Randall had said when the Saddleback Inn was burning to the ground, about detecting the smell of brimstone around Igee’s room. “You think Louis Norman Igee is the devil?”