The Mural

by Michael Mallory

  God, he wanted a drink!

  “Jack,” the figure of Elley moaned from the painting, her voice faraway and distorted. “Give it to me.” With a sudden thrust she wrenched her right arm free of Igee’s grip and reached through the painting. Jack yelled and stepped back, but not out of Elley’s reach. She grabbed the jug from him and, with her arm still protruding out from the wall, swung it forcefully against the mural, just over her head, where Igee’s face was now visible. The jug shattered and Jack leapt back to avoid an acid shower. Igee took the full force of the liquid. His mouth as wide as the entrance to Hell, but no sound came out. The painted skin on his face boiled and then dissolved, leaving only bare plaster and a gag-inducing stench of sulfur. The acid then spread downward to Elley.

  Even as she was being burned by the liquid, the figure of Elley Gorman Hayden managed to raise her head to face Jack. She tried to speak, but could not. She mouthed a word. Jack wasn’t sure, but he thought it might have been Robynn.

  Then she was gone; melted away.

  All of the figures around them stopped moving, like as though a film had suddenly freeze framed. The colors on the wall began to fade, the wetness began to dry, and the figures now appeared aged and cracked. Bit at a time, little pieces of ancient paint flaked off and fell to the floor, as the mural began to collapse. Light streamed into the interior from the now-opened doors.

  Jack staggered backwards, exhausted, and stumbled into Dorgan. “You okay, Jack?” the officer asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. But now we have to find Robynn.”

  “She’s right outside, Jack. She was the one who led me to the last jug of acid. She’s the one who saved all of us.”

  Jack raced through the doors and saw his daughter was standing at the base of the steps. “Daddeeeee!” she cried.

  “I’m here, punkin!” he cried, leaping down to her and picking her up in a tight embrace.

  “Daddy, I was so worried!”

  “Me too, punkin, but everything’s okay now.”

  “What about Mommy?”

  Jack sighed and held her tighter. “Mommy’s not okay, honey,” he said. “Mommy’s gone.”

  “She changed, Daddy,” the girl said. “She wasn’t like Mommy. But I don’t want her to be gone.” She began to cry.

  “I know, punkin, I know. I don’t want her to be gone either.”

  Robynn rubbed her runny nose on Jack’s shoulder.

  “I met another girl, Daddy. Her name is Victoria. She was a ghost. She untied me.”

  Jack felt chilled, but he kept listening as Robynn went on to tell him how Uncle Tim had suddenly appeared in the bathroom of the house. At first she was scared, but when she saw it was Uncle Tim she was okay. Then he told her that she needed to wake up and get that last big glass bottle that Noni had told her she needed to bring up to the building, so that the big policeman could come out and get them. “And you know what, Daddy?” she went on. “Until Uncle Tim told me I had to wake up, I didn’t even know I was asleep.”

  Jack was still hugging her tightly when Dorgan rushed outside. “We have to get them out of here, Jack,” he said. “The whole place is breaking up in there.”

  “I have to put you down, punkin’,” Jack said, “but don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

  He accompanied Dorgan back inside and that Creeley had been propped up against the wall, and looked barely conscious, and Dani was sitting next to him, still in shock. “I’ve radioed for backup and an ambulance already,” Dorgan said. “But we have to move them. Look.”

  The wall that had once contained the mural was now flaking and crumbling onto the marble floor. At that moment a loud cracking sound came from the ceiling, and both men jumped back as a chunk of plaster fell down. “It’s reverting to ruins,” Jack said. “We’ve got only a minute or so.” Dorgan handled Creeley and Jack took Dani, who was as easy to lead around as a child, and ran outside where Robynn was waiting for them. A siren could be heard in the distance. “Head for the highway, stick to the road, and be careful,” Jack said. “You going to make it, Cree?”

  The chief’s good arm was draped around Dorgan’s shoulders, and his face was ashen and sweaty, but he smiled and asked: “You know of a better option, Jack?”

  Behind them another crack came, this one louder, and the entire roof of the City hall caved in. As quickly as possible with an injured man, a little girl and a woman in shock, they raced down the roadway, listening to the destruction behind them. Each building and house of Wood City, as they passed them, would give way and fall in on themselves, leaving nothing but rubble.

  When they passed one of the last ruined houses, Creeley suddenly cried out: “Shit, there’s a baby over there!”

  Jack looked over, but recognized the house in question. “No, Cree, don’t worry,” he said. “It’s a doll. I saw it days ago.”

  “It’s Victoria’s!” Robynn said. “She said she had a doll! And look, there’s Oyster Cracker!” The girl pointed at the remnants of the building, and Jack saw the ruined toy he had bought for his daughter only days before, once plush and furry, but now threadbare, sodden and leaking stuffing, destroyed by exposure to the elements for seventy-five years.

  “I love her, Daddy,” Robynn said. “I love Victoria.”

  “Then I love her too, punkin,” Jack said, taking his daughter’s hand and running away.

  By the time they got back to Rob Creeley’s truck, where they were greeted by paramedics, police and firemen, Wood City was dead. Jack Hayden silently prayed Wood City would stay that way.

  EPILOGUE

  SEVEN YEARS FROM TODAY

  “Jack, what are you doing?” Dani called from the other room, while Jack Hayden scanned the headlines on his iLynk. Child porn scandal forces candidate from race, the top one read, and Jack clicked on it. “Good morning, Jack,” said a pleasant looking hologramic woman whose face appeared on the tiny screen, “here is the story you ordered. A spokesman for Senator Matt Comingore’s campaign committee confirmed that the candidate will drop his bid for the White House in the wake of the scandal that resulted from the senator’s attempt to buy child pornography from an undercover FBI agent. Comingore is expected to make the official announcement before the week is out. Sources close to the senator deny that he has been placed on a personal suicide watch by family and friends. Our iLynk poll, taken early this morning, confirms that only fourteen percent of users feel that Comingore should retain his Senate seat during the course of the investigation, while eighty-six percent believe that he should be expelled immediately.”

  The face on the screen now switched to that of a middle-aged, gray-haired man who was identified in a crawl as User docjay. “I simply do not understand the constant stream of these scandals from the rich and powerful,” the man declared to the camera. “They know the world is watching, what on earth could make them do something this blatantly stupid?”

  Jack knew what on earth only too well.

  He switched the pod off as Dani came into the room. “Are you just ignoring me?” she asked.

  Jack looked up at her and smiled. Her new hair shade of strawberry blonde suited her extremely well, better than the light brown she’d been wearing. “You know I wouldn’t ignore you.”

  “Then help me with the invitations. Who do you want to invite from your office?”

  Jack thought for a minute. Dan Killough, would be expecting an invitation, and even though a little bit of Dan went a long way, it was the politic thing to do. Frankly, Dan had been more responsible than Jack had for the success of Prestige Construction Engineering, which Jack had struggled to form out of the ashes of Crane Commercial Building Engineering after Crain had completely imploded, once the revelations came out about how much Marc Broarty had been dirty-dealing clients. Dan was a go-getter with sharp business acumen, but also the kind of hyper-drive personality that wore Jack out even after short periods of time. Of course Yolanda, one of the few carry-overs from Crane, and her husband Ramón, would be invited too, but
Jack didn’t know how many others to include. Then there was Rob Creeley and Carl Dorgan, with whom he had kept in touch over the last seven years, but they weren’t part of the office. Besides, Cree and Maria’s second child was only a couple of months old, so he might not be able to make the trip. This was getting complicated. “I may have to get back to you on that,” he told Dani.

  “Don’t take too long,” she said. “The wedding’s only a month away.”

  “I know.”

  Dani sat down next to him. “Jack, forgive me for asking this, but I have to. You really do want to get married, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “It’s just that you’ve really been in a fog lately, almost like you’re deliberately putting things off.”

  Jack put his arm around her and she rested her head on his shoulder. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to. But the reason we’re able to get married in the first place is weighing me down a little.”

  Dani squeezed his hand. Having to wait until Elley, who officially had vanished and was presumed dead, could be declared legally so by the courts, had not been easy for her, either. At least Lois Eunie Gorman’s ongoing persecution of Jack over Elley’s disappearance had come to an end after Lois had been killed in a freak highway accident involving a paint truck.

  The front door of the house banged open and Robynn bolted in. “Hi, Dad,” she called out before coming into the living room. Seeing the two of them on the couch, she wrinkled her nose and said, “Jeez, you two. Get a room!”

  “I refuse to apologize,” Jack said.

  “Me too,” Dani added. “So there.”

  Robynn rolled her eyes dramatically and then bounded into the kitchen.

  “She’s so grown up,” Dani said.

  Jack nodded. She was beautiful, too. Robynn’s had undergone reconstructive surgery two years ago and while it had left the tiniest trace of a line on her lip, you really had to look for it.

  Robynn came back into the room munching on an apple. “By the way, I talked to Ronni at school and she said her father would be happy to stream the wedding.”

  “Okay, good,” Jack said. Turning to Dani, he added: “See? That’s one thing I got accomplished.”

  “One down, thirty-five billion to go,” she replied. Dani wanted to ask Jack if it would bother him if she had champagne at the ceremony, but that was a question for later, when they were alone.

  “Hey, maybe I could take pictures,” Robynn said. “I’ve got that camera.”

  “Have you tried it yet?” Jack asked. “That was the thing I was using back when—” He didn’t finish. It was the camera he had used for the whole Wood City episode, but he didn’t want to risk any trigger words. Robynn had emerged from the nightmare with no memory of anything that had happened during that week seven years ago, including, blessedly, her mother’s insanity. While for Jack it still manifested itself in difficult, sleepless nights every now and then, which alternated with times when he was convinced that it never happened, couldn’t have happened (until the next nightmare changed his mind back), he was happy to accept the brunt of the memory of that day alone and spare his loved ones.

  He had found his old digital camera in the garage about five months back, and had passed it onto Robynn, more as a toy than anything else. “I’d be surprised if it still worked,” Jack said.

  “I can find out,” she said. “Pleaaaase!”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Dani said. “If it works, you practice with it and get good, and then you can cover the reception. How about that?”

  Robynn smiled again. “Sweet! I’ll go up right now and start!” She ran up the stairs to her room and from below, Jack and Dani could here the sound of her closet sliding open and a ton of stuff being drug out.

  “She’s so impetuous,” Jack commented.

  “She’s so twelve,” Dani said. “But she’s so good that I think we can cut her a little slack, okay?”

  “Okay. I just hope she won’t be too disappointed if the camera doesn’t work.”

  “You know if there’s anyone who could coerce it back into action, it would be her.”

  “Got that right.” Jack stood up. “Since you brought it up, tell me what other thirty-five billion things you want me to do are while I’m still in the mood.”

  “Number one’s shot, because Robynn’s home now,” Dani replied with a grin. “Your loss.”

  “Yeah?” he grinned back. “Well, wait until tonight.”

  Upstairs, Robynn Hayden dug out the shoebox containing the camera that her father had given her and switched it on, not sure if the battery was still good. She was happy when it quietly jumped to life. Looking through the viewfinder, she lined up a series of shots of her room, but when she tried to take one, a flag popped up telling her that there was no memory card. She went back into the shoebox and pulled out a small, stamp-sized plastic wafer and, after poking around, found the proper place in which to insert it. She tried snapping again, but the camera told her that the memory card was full and that she had to get rid of some images.

  “Maaaan!” Robynn sighed, turning the control switch on the camera to view. Looking through the viewfinder, she saw picture after picture of a forest. It looked faintly familiar, like some place she might have dreamed about once.

  Fishing back through the box once again, she found the cable that connected to her computer, which was almost as old as the camera, her dad being too cheap to get her a new laptop. But in this instance that proved to be a good thing, since the camera still able to connect to it. Since her school computer class had spent one whole day on downloading digital photos she had little trouble in getting them from the memory card onto the computer.

  Paging through them, they each seemed to be of trees and woods and occasional tumble-down buildings, except for one that was pretty much intact. It looked like an official building, like the post office downtown.

  The sight of it also stirred a tiny little uncomfortable worm within her brain.

  The last picture startled her. It was the face of a woman. A painting of a woman, actually. Robynn stared at it, wondering who it was, and why her dad had taken a picture of it. She decided to print out a copy.

  Because her color printer was also pretty old, it took a couple of minutes to zap the picture out. Taking it off the tray, Robynn looked at it again, now with new understanding. Enlarged to a full page size, she could see that it was not simply a painting of any woman.

  It was her mother.

  Seeing her mother’s face so unexpectedly forced a flood of conflicting emotions to rise to the surface, and she had to look away. She just didn’t want to deal with that stuff right now, not right before the wedding. Dad and Dani had enough problems without her suddenly developing “Mommy” issues.

  She had always been good at compartmentalizing problems and putting them away for awhile, like folded clothes.

  Now, though, she began to worry that maybe she shouldn’t have deleted it from the memory card; maybe Dad wanted to keep the picture. On the other hand, he had given the camera to her without even looking to see if there were any pictures with it, so maybe he had forgotten all about it. Anyway, the picture wasn’t gone. It was still on the computer. She reached over and made sure all of the images on the memory card were saved. Then she forced herself to look again at the picture she has printed out, and felt immediately foolish.

  The woman in the painting was not her mother. It was not even close. For one thing, pictures of her mom show her with brunette hair, and this woman was a redhead. Jeez, was she spazzing? Robynn held the picture at different angles trying to understand how she could have been so mistaken. Maybe she was starting to lose it like Loony Linda in her class, who was constantly telling people about seeing things that anyone with a brain knew weren’t really there.

  Robynn took a deep breath. She’d have to worry about it all this later; she had things to do now, namely practice with the camera. Standing the picture up in
front of her computer screen, Robynn then reached for the camera and noticed something on her thumb. It looked like colored chalk or something. Noticing a smudge on the printed picture, she realized what it was: toner from the color printer. It was probably too old to use.

  “Jeez,” she muttered, grabbing a tissue to wipe it off. She’d really have try and persuade Dad to get her a new computer some time, or better yet, Dani. Dani wasn’t as big a cheapskate as her dad.

  Taking up the camera, she lined up a shot of her bookshelf and clicked one off, seeing it appear on the viewfinder a second after the flash. Turning to the other side, she snapped a shot of her dresser. That one came out a little blurry. This was going to take some work. Maybe she should go find Claude, the family’s orange tabby cat, and use him as a subject. If she could get some good shots of Claude, she could surely get some good ones of people at the reception.

  Standing with her back to the computer screen, Robynn could not see the printed-out image of the woman’s face behind her.

  Nor the way it turned to watch her as she left the room.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael Mallory is a short story writer, novelist, journalist, and occasional actor. He lives in the Greater Los Angeles area. You can visit him at:

  www.michaelmallory.com