by Jeffrey Ford
Four rooms later, alternating dark and bright, he found the house’s resident sitting near a blazing fireplace, its flames the only light in the room. With a long paintbrush, he was persistently dabbing a particular area with light green pigment. This painting, like the others, had a softness to the forms, as if they were beginning to disintegrate at the edges. Owen sat on the raised hearth of the fireplace, watching the old man work. At some point during his surveillance, it struck him that with all these paintings of night, this fellow might have already achieved the 100 Nights of Nothing. He watched the artist get up and, moving slowly, go off to a kitchen somewhere and bring back a cup of tea. While sipping it, he sat quietly and stared at his progress. The classical music that had been playing in another room suddenly quit. Owen left the house, heavy with the idea he had to warn the painter that he was in the sights of the Solar Cross Gang.
As the birds began to sing—meaning sunrise was no more than an hour away—he thought that at any moment, he’d be snatched back to himself. He strode along, wrapped in thought about this supposed gang his imagination had given life to. He wondered why they would settle in Westwend. The stakes were so meager, and considering the potential danger, one would think a gang would have better plans. Crenshaw might be loaded, but the Busy Bee was a bad move, all for a weekday-morning cash drawer. There couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred dollars, most in change and small bills. Something was off. Either that or this was the laziest, dumbest gang that ever existed. Owen heard movement behind him.
When he turned, there was the old man from the corner of the first house he’d gone into on Margrave. The man approached swiftly and his hands came up in front of him. Owen detected the blank affect in the old creep’s eyes. He realized this was a cord-cutter. The pale hand came toward him, aiming for his chest. Owen, surprised, spun to flee, forgetting to jump, and put one leg in front of the other. He tumbled to the ground. The cutter hovered above him and descended. Owen was on his feet in a flash, but before he could take two steps, there was another cutter directly in front of him and one coming in from the side. As the pack closed in, they made a noise like the hissing of snakes. He heard Melody’s voice in the back of his mind yell, “Jump.”
As his three attackers converged, he flew up and away, and at the height of his ascent, he was yanked back to his earthbound body with a whooshing sound he’d never noticed before. He woke to the birdsong and the red sunrise coming through the blinds of his bedroom. A chill ran through him when the thought sank in that he almost didn’t make it back. What Melody told him was true. Once you noticed the cord-cutters weren’t sleepers, and you registered that frozen look in their eyes, all their actions, dictated by the screwy natural selection of the night world, elicited a sense of nausea.
Monday morning, in the children’s section, he was looking for a book a mother requested. The woman followed him up and down the stacks, and her little girl, maybe three years old, followed behind her. Eventually, the book in question was found out of place in the low bookshelf that ran beneath the painting of Sleeping Beauty.
“One of the kids must have reshelved it,” said Owen, and gave the book to the blond young woman who, while waiting, had lifted her daughter into her arms.
“Here’s the ABCs, Jenny,” the woman said to the child.
“ABCs,” repeated Jenny, but paid no attention to the book. Instead, she was pointing at the mural.
“Sleeping Beauty,” said Owen.
“Beard,” said the child, and he laughed. The paint curling on the neck and lower chin of the fairy tale princess did resemble the shaggy beard of Aaron Feit. Upon looking at the mural, he noticed how similar the style was to the paintings in the big old house the night before. He absentmindedly handed the ABC book to the young mother, and although she thanked him, he was too preoccupied to answer. He was focused on the right-hand corner of the mural. He might have noticed before that there was a name scrawled there in tiny script, but he’d never bothered to try to decipher it. Today was different. He went to his desk and retrieved the magnifying glass he kept in the top drawer for patrons with bad sight.
Back at the mural, he leaned over and trained the glass on the signature. The name instantly became clearer. Val Crenshaw was how he read it, although it could have started with a sloppy H and been Hal Crenshaw. With this revelation, he wondered if outlandish coincidence was part of the ecosystem of the night world. His forays as a sleeper were beginning to blend with his waking life, and every evening’s journey as well as every day’s felt more and more like a concocted dream. The position of Sleeping Beauty in the mural matched that of the image of the man in the chamber below the marble statue, hanging in the painter’s dining room. He broke from his trance and checked the book out for mother and daughter, then retired to his office and computer where he began a search for Val Crenshaw.
Along his walk home from work, Owen pondered what he’d found out. The painter was fairly well known, and had done illustration work throughout the years. When he clicked on the images associated with Crenshaw, he saw a lot of the paintings he’d run into in the old house. He also found a newspaper article someone had posted online about the mural. Valentine Crenshaw, new to Westwend, volunteered to create a picture on the wall of the children’s library, which was due to open in a few months. It said in the article his one stipulation was he would have to paint it at night after his day’s work. The town was thrilled with his offer. And all agreed the finished product, the Sleeping Beauty, was sublime, attracting the admiration of both children and adults.
The only problem was it stated in the article Crenshaw was twenty-eight when he did the mural in 1948. If that was accurate, it meant he was nearly one hundred years old. No doubt, Crenshaw looked old, but certainly not a century—he got around well enough to live on his own. Owen would have pegged him in his seventies. Another article listed some of the painter’s more famous pieces and what they’d gone for at auction. Each painting was worth at least ten to twenty thousand dollars, and a few were a lot more. The same article mentioned museums that had bought and displayed his work. On more than one site, he was said to be an adherent of the Brandywine School of painting, centered around the artist Howard Pyle. Owen could see the influence—Crenshaw’s work had the same effect of no hard lines, of obvious dry-brushing, a technique that gave a scene the look of memory.
Back home, at bedtime, he went to sleep revisiting all the coincidences and vague synchronicities of the night world, trying to sort out the actual from his own fanciful speculation. There were elusive interludes of near-solution and long whirling storms of incidents and numbers until finally, perched on the verge of an answer, he woke to the paralysis and began, again, his struggle for freedom. Equally as tantalizing as the dream, escape from the loathed state of live burial harried him for hours. At one point, he even began praying, certainly not his usual practice. And, finally, he found himself rising away from his bed and body.
As Melody approached the picnic table, Owen called to her from the other side of the hedge. She passed through and asked, “What are you doing over here?”
“A little girl who lives in the house over there saw me last night.”
“Saw you? How do you mean?”
“I heard her crying to her parents there was a ghost in the backyard.”
“Very rare,” said Melody. “We’ll have to steer clear of her.”
They made their way toward the side fence and passage to the road. “What happened last night? I had to go it alone,” said Owen.
“My kid was sick. He had a fever and was puking. It’s going around the junior high like the Black Plague. My apologies.”
Down the street, there was a house with a fake wishing well on the front lawn. It was wrapped with silk flowers. In the waking world, every day Owen passed it on the way to work, the sight made him giddy with disdain for its creepy niceness. He led Melody there and they used it as a place to sit as he filled her in on what he’d discovered the previous ni
ght. While she swung her legs, her calves disappearing through the brick work of the well top, he caught her up on the solar cross, Aaron Feit, Crenshaw, the old house, and his theory as to the caper Feit and the young mother, Kiara, had planned. He paused and added, “I think the baby’s name is William.”
“What a night,” she said.
“And I haven’t even mentioned my run-in with cutters.”
“How close did they get?” She put her hand lightly to her chest and shook her head.
“There were three of them. I tripped trying to get away and they got damn close. This one I’d seen earlier. A creepy old guy hiding in the corner of a young couple’s bedroom while they were engaged in sex.”
“They’re known to be attracted to scenarios happening in the waking world like you mention.”
“Sex?”
She nodded. “If they can’t find likely sleepers to unhook, they will crowd, invisible, into the bedrooms of the living and watch as life is conceived and the silver cord is set.”
“What’s the chances there will be an unseen cutter around any time anyone has sex?”
“About ninety percent. And usually more than one.”
“Kind of off-putting,” said Owen.
“To say the least,” she said.
They headed downtown, bounding down the center of the street as Owen had done the night before.
10
THE WEATHER WAS MUCH nicer that night, a soft breeze instead of a driving wind and rain. The sky was clear and the constellations looked like illustrations in a star chart. As Owen and Melody bounded along past the Busy Bee, toward the center of town, he remembered how he’d seen the miasma at a distance the previous night. When he told her, Melody said, “You were probably better off being on your own last night. Look how well you handled all of it. You need more nights like that and then I can leave you to explore alone.”
“The incident with the cutters was almost fatal,” he reminded her, feeling a pang that one day, she’d no longer travel the night world with him. He felt it might be too lonely to endure solo.
When they reached downtown, he showed her Margrave Street, and upon seeing the entrance to it off Cobb, the main street of Westwend, she mentioned that she once had a friend who’d lived in the house on the corner.
“What did you have in mind for when we get there?” asked Melody.
“I just wanted you to see it. Tell me what you think. Tell me how I can warn the old man, if it’s not too late.”
She nodded. “I agree with your assessment of what you encountered.”
They reached the spot where Owen and Feit had stood the night before. Again, the lights were on in some of the rooms and music drifted out. “Barber, Adagio for Strings, Opus Three,” she said.
“You’re full of surprises,” said Owen as they crossed the street.
“I listen to classical music all day long,” she said. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”
He nodded and then ascended the steps to the front door. Before he could take a breath, he and Melody were standing in the dimly lit foyer, peering down the hallway. They proceeded through the rooms. He told her that the mural adorning the wall in the children’s section of the library had supposedly been painted by the old man. She stopped walking when he said it, but then quickly continued as if she didn’t want him to catch her hesitation.
“What is it?” he said to her.
“Nothing really. Just sometimes, when you fall into a situation in the night world where coincidences stack up, it could be a warning of danger.”
“Are you saying that about this situation?” he asked as he stopped at the entrance to the next darkened room.
“No. That’s why I tried to hide my reaction to what you told me. There isn’t enough of a conspiracy of reality here to warrant it. I’m offering a heads-up for the future. I don’t want you to get lost in that mental morass. Stay clear. We have to help this poor guy.”
When they found the old painter in the same room Owen had encountered him in the previous night, he was sitting in the same chair, holding the brush so it hovered just above the canvas. He could be perceived to be conducting the music, much sharper in the room than it had been out on the street. With his free hand he was petting a tiny black cat that lay on the arm of his chair.
“Oh, Henry,” he said to the cat, gently scratched its head. “What do you think about this piece?”
The cat made a miniscule peeping sound, and Crenshaw said, “You always think I should add a small black cat. I’ve done five pieces with cats since you’ve come to stay with me.” He laughed softly.
“He’s adorable,” said Melody.
“I’m not really a cat fan,” said Owen.
“I meant the old man,” she said. “The cat is too obviously adorable to have to say anything.”
She walked around behind Crenshaw and watched him work as he added a moon to the nightscape he was creating. In the painting, there was a woman in a full-length white muslin dress, standing on the shoreline. Her eyes were closed, although she was facing the light of the newborn moon come to life in white, lime, and pale yellow. A few yards out in the surf, something was rising up out of the waves—an anthropomorphic form with horns and monstrous features. “It’s weird but not really frightening,” she said to Owen, who joined her, standing behind the artist.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
She nodded.
Crenshaw had turned to some detail work on the woman’s face, and was moving in with a dab of dark blue on a different brush that appeared to have but three bristles. He was just about to strike a mark of shadow on the chin when there came a loud pounding noise from the front entrance.
“My new customer,” the painter said to the cat. He stood and removed the maroon robe he wore. Under it he had on a plain white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of black dress pants. He adjusted his glasses, smoothed down his sparse hair, and headed for the door. The cat leaped down from the chair arm and followed him.
“Come on,” said Melody, and they followed a few feet behind the cat.
They arrived at the house’s front door just as the artist was opening it. Standing there, smiling, with his hands clasped behind his back, was a young man with short hair and a dark suit and red tie. He bowed to the old man and Crenshaw invited him in. The identity of the fellow at the door wasn’t clear at first, but when he laughed and introduced himself there was no doubt it was Feit, with a haircut and shave.
“That’s him,” he said to Melody. That’s the guy I followed here last night.”
“My secretary told me you prefer to do business at night,” said Feit.
“Yes, come in, Mr. Feit. She told me you were interested in whatever I was working on currently. I can tell you I just added a moon to the scene. I hope you like moonglow.”
“I’m excited to see it.”
He led the young man down the hall and through the rooms. Along the way, Feit made admiring comments about the art on the walls and stacked in the corners. “If he threatens to kill the old man, is there something we can do?” he asked Melody.
“Nothing we wouldn’t have had to prepare for well in advance. Basically, we can watch.”
“I hope he lets Feit have whatever he wants.”
They returned to the room with the fireplace, where the painter had been working. The music still played in the room next door, something slow and quiet from a piano. The artist showed his prospective customer to a comfortable chair a few feet away from his own painting throne. No sooner did Feit take the seat than the tiny black cat leaped into his lap. The movement startled him and his left hand moved to his inner jacket before he saw what the assault was and could quell his actions.
“I hope you’re a cat fan. Henry is rather inquisitive.”
“Not a problem,” said Feit. “I have pets at home.”
“Dogs or cats?” asked the painter.
“Cats.”
“The superior beast,” said the old man, who gave a
knowing smile and nodded. “Stay put. Mr. Feit, I’m going to get us some tea. Do you prefer cream and sugar or plain?”
“Plain is fine.”
“A perfect choice,” said the host, who left through a passageway toward the back of the house to fetch the refreshments. As he disappeared through a darkened doorway, the sleepers moved around the room to get a better view of Feit. The thief tossed the cat on the floor and brushed off his pants legs with a look of disgust. He then darted a glance at the door through which the artist had retreated, reached into his jacket, and took out the handgun Owen had seen on the table at the place on Margrave Street. Feit lifted his left thigh, put the gun under it, and eased his weight back down upon it.
“You can see he’s nervous,” said Melody.
“That makes two of us,” said Owen.
Minutes passed and the visitor put his right hand under his thigh repeatedly, no doubt practicing grabbing the gun. “Whatever is going to happen here isn’t going to be good,” said Melody. As she spoke, the old man came back through the doorway, pushing a silver tea cart. He poured his guest a cup and set it down on the small table next to his chair.
“Would you like a cookie?” he asked, and offered a silver tray of dainty items with frosting in a rainbow of colors.