Searchers After Horror

by S. T. Joshi

  His memory wasn’t working. If he tried to think back more than a few minutes there was nothing. There was only the distress of inexplicable grief, which was giving way to a curious mental numbness. He did not know what he was fleeing from, only that he must go. It was like letting go, as if he had dangled from a railing over an abyss and released his grip, falling down forever. The impression was reinforced all the more by the fact that the ground dipped slightly as he began walking, and he stumbled into a ditch and lost his glasses before he regained his feet. But then he instinctively began to climb the rocky hillside, into the trees. Before long the darkness had closed around him entirely. He caught hold of the trees—thin, leafless— and hauled himself up.

  It was like swimming in a dream, up, up away from a black void that threatened to swallow him, as if he were ascending into the sky.

  Like a dream, it was silent. He heard only his own gasping breath, his heartbeat throbbing in his ears. Like a dream of drowning perhaps. The forest lacked all the usual night noises: crickets, birds, even the sound of branches creaking in the wind.

  Instinctively, he struggled ever upward, perhaps for hours. Perhaps, as in a dream, there was no time, and this night would never end and he would go on climbing forever.

  He wept softly, not entirely sure why. Something floated out of the darkness of his lost memory, like a painted white sign drifting up from the bottom of a murky pool, and it came to him that in the morning, if there was to be a morning, the sensational headline in the papers would say considerably more than MAN WALKS IN THE WOODS.

  But what it would say, he somehow didn’t want to find out. He refused to formulate that thought. He knew he mustn’t. It was like when your mother tells you: Don’t pick at it.

  Don’t.

  Don’t.

  Don’t.

  Only after a very long time did he realize that he was not alone.

  It wasn’t so much that he heard anything, and he did not see anything but the darkness. Without his glasses, in any case, everything less than a few feet away would be a blur. When he looked up he saw nothing at all, either because the sky was overcast or because he could not make out the stars. (On a clear night, he knew, the stars out here could be brilliant, wonderful. This was not a clear night. Either that or, somehow, there no longer were any stars.)

  No, he just felt a certain closeness, a proximity like when you are groping in a lightless tunnel and you reach out your hand, you are almost certain of the nearness of the wall, even if you can’t quite touch it.

  He continued for an endless time, certain that a great number of others were all around him, like a rising tide, sweeping him along; but that was when, catastrophically, either by malign accident or the perverse doings of Poe’s Imp, which he often explicated in his professional lectures, he did not do the easy thing and just go with the tide, but stopped.

  Something crashed into him, nearly knocking him over. He stumbled, staggering about noisily in the fallen leaves and underbrush, and he even called out, from stupid reflex, “Hey, watch where you’re—”

  Then he did hear motion all around him, like the rising susurrus of a tide, and—as the protective armor that encased his memory began to break—he recalled that he had a cigarette lighter in his coat pocket. His fingers, more than his mind, knew to how get that lighter out and flick it on.

  The glare of the flame might have been a suddenly rising sun.

  The faces revealed around him were all dead. He was sure of that. They were dead. No, their eyes did not glow. Some of them did not even have eyes, only dark pits. They were pale, so very pale, and he knew they were all corpses or ghosts, dead, walking up this hillside in the forest with him, yes, like a tide in their inevitability.

  “Have you lost your way?” one of them said.

  That was when he was certain, very certain, more fantastically certain than anything else in his life that this was wrong, so very, very wrong—and why WOULD they say that he was mad?— to paraphrase the line he used to use to punctuate his very popular Poe lecture up at the universities in Rochester or Albany.

  “I don’t belong here,” he said. “I’m not one of you.”

  He tried to make his way back down the way he had come. He pushed his way through the crowd of the dead, shoving them aside, smelling the foulness of them, their butcher-shop odors of blood and spoiled flesh. Sometimes a hard, cold hand would grab hold of him, but he always managed to break free, and he was running now, running, almost flying, hurtling back down the hill, back toward—what?

  And that was when he remembered everything. Maybe it was his perverse imp after all, or just malign something or other, picking, picking; and the armor that had shielded him thus far suddenly turned into glass and shattered into a million pieces. He sat down, weeping once more, as it all came back to him, everything he had forgotten, everything that had blasted his brain out into merciful, dark amnesia, now coming back, like a fire rekindled from smoldering ashes as he helplessly relived it all, the screaming argument, the obscenities, the struggle, the thunderclap moment in which his life, his existence, all his future snapped and was destroyed.

  The gunshot.

  The morning’s headline, which would read something like COLLEGE PROFESSOR MURDERS FAMILY, FLEES.

  Something like that.

  He could only sit on the hillside now, with the dead passing all around him, drifting up that slope. He could only wait until the last of them approached him, and he, perversely, flicked the cigarette lighter one last time; the last of them walking up to him, his wife, Margaret, with the whole front of her blouse soaked in blood, and then his twelve-year-old daughter Ann, who wasn’t supposed to have been there, who had come home too early from band practice and blundered in on something she wasn’t supposed to see.

  Half of her face was blown away, but she was the one who said, “Why, Daddy? Why?”

  He had no answer. He could only protest that this was all wrong, that he didn’t belong here, as cold hands took hold of him and led him up the wooded hillside after the others, up, up toward that mysterious ridge line where the black, naked trees stood silhouetted by pale fires burning beyond them, fires that, he was certain, no passing motorist, however observant or imaginative, ever saw from the highway.

  Dark Equinox

  Ann K. Schwader

  There was a crack in the gallery’s front window. In one of the small top panes, but still obvious, just as last fall’s leaves on the porch were. Or the doorknob’s accumulated grime, though the sign inside that door read OPEN.

  Not for much longer, I’m guessing.

  Jen frowned. Despite its website optimism, this place was on its last financial legs after the holidays—with any remotely valuable photographs long gone.

  The door’s anemic bell did nothing to boost her optimism as she entered. Beyond a desk cluttered with large-format books and brochures, there were only two narrow display rooms divided by a staircase. Their carpets, though good once, bore worn ghosts of patterns, and the walls held more faded rectangles than images for sale.

  What she could see of those images didn’t leave much hope. Still, Leonie Gerard was listed among the gallery’s artists— and she was local to the Denver area.

  Or had been.

  Shifting her messenger bag across her back, Jen started her search. The first room held photographs of the modern West: no photomontages, nothing remotely experimental. She recognized few of the artists, though a spatter of tiny red stickers showed most were already sold.

  The second room, though smaller, seemed more promising. One Uelsmann. A couple of Bonaths. One remarkably contorted Michel Pilon, and—

  Not possible.

  She stepped closer to the print. Against a carefully composed mosaic of images—mainly archaeological—three oval objects descended in series. They were almost, but not quite, eggs. No visible light source defined them, yet the closest bore faint scrawls of s
hadow.

  Or perhaps harbored them within its shell. Waiting, and growing stronger, and testing for cracks—

  She blinked. How had that thought come up?

  Before her imagination could distract her any further, she checked the print’s bottom border. Last year’s date, in pencil . . . 3 / 7 . . . and a signature. Her signature.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind her, followed by a soft clank of bracelets as someone turned up the overhead light.

  “You know Leonie’s work?”

  An elderly woman in Southwestern clothing stood in the doorway. She wore more silver than Jen had ever seen on one person before, and her long velvet skirts looked vintage. The gallery’s owner, she guessed, hoping for one final sale this afternoon.

  Jen nodded. “I did my thesis on her, two years ago.”

  Even at the time, she’d been dissatisfied with it—as had her thesis committee. To their minds, Leonie Gerard’s photomontages were less a subject for contemporary art history than for science fiction, or possibly horror. Though Gerard limited herself to black and white, her juxtapositions of image-fragments from exotic locations had grown increasingly bizarre.

  Jen suspected her thesis had only been approved out of loyalty to the local arts community. CU Boulder, got to love it.

  Silver rang at her elbow. “And you followed her career . . . afterwards?

  “All the way.”

  In the silence that followed, Jen finally checked the print’s information tag. Vernal Ascension. The date, again. Archival silver print. No red dot. And no mention of a price, not even NFS.

  “So you’ll know what this one is, then.” The older woman’s voice quavered. “Her last.”

  Three of seven, but only three had ever been printed. Jen hesitated.

  “I’ve read about it, and seen a reproduction in an article. But I’ve never actually--“

  “It feels different, doesn’t it?”

  When Jen nodded mutely, the other woman took the print and turned it over, revealing the handwritten label. It gave her the same chill Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Crows did, though the image itself was oddly tranquil.

  But was it for sale?

  Before she could ask, the gallery owner replaced the image and stepped back, motioning for her to do likewise. Weak afternoon light from the front window picked out details: the shattered top of an obelisk, vine-smothered carved steps, the snarl of a jaguar god. Fragment upon fragment—until some critical mass of mind revealed the pattern beneath. A living landscape of antiquity and shadow.

  “I don’t think she ever made anything else quite like it.”

  Jen nodded again. While researching her thesis, she’d seen reproductions of most of Leonie Gerard’s work—and experienced a few in person at museums. None of those skillfully assembled images worked the way this one did.

  She couldn’t say why, either. Something in the angles, perhaps, or the sites themselves. Where had the artist traveled? Though she recognized sacred sites in Belize and Turkey, and one T-shaped doorway from Chaco Canyon, most of the locations eluded her. She wondered how many were on the State Department’s no-go list.

  “I never got the chance to talk to her about it, either.” The older woman’s skirts swished as she walked back to the print. “Her brother brought this one in.”

  Now or never.

  “Just for display?”

  The gallery owner produced a tiny silver pen and a pack of business cards from her pocket. She jotted a number on one before extending it to Jen.

  “Are you, um, sure about this?”

  “For the right collector, yes.” A shadow smile crossed the older woman’s face. “And don’t tell me you don’t own anything else of Leonie’s. It doesn’t matter. You take her work, and her life, seriously.”

  Present tense. As if she already knew Jen’s struggle for a Ph.D. Her failed applications, her need for more original work to get the attention of the right people, at the right schools.

  Jen swallowed hard. “Thank you.”

  To her surprise, the gallery owner lifted Vernal Ascension down at once and headed for the front desk. Clearing herselfwork space, she began swathing it in bubble wrap.

  “Don’t you want to wait until your show’s over?”

  The shadow smile returned. “It’s perfectly fine.”

  Minutes later, her card had been charged and Jen held the dreamed-of image. The gallery owner thanked her, but made no move to leave her desk.

  “Is there anything else?”

  Jen’s fingers tightened on the bubble wrap. “You mentioned a brother.” She hesitated. “Does he live around here? Would he be willing to talk with me about her work?”

  The wrongness of the question hit her immediately. Mumbling an apology, she turned to leave.

  “Just a moment, please.”

  Behind her, Jen heard a desk drawer open, then a rustling of papers.

  “Sebastian Gerard,” the other woman said, still digging. “I met him once. Interesting man, used to teach world mythology— Joseph Campbell stuff—at some community college. Now he owns rental cabins up in Estes Park, but it’s the slow season. I suspect he’d have time.”

  She exhaled satisfaction as she shut the drawer again.

  “Here’s his card.”

  Jen took it and thanked her, then hurried out of the gallery with her purchase. No sense taking chances. This wasn’t a bad part of town, but there weren’t a lot of good parts this late in the day.

  She was barely off the porch when she heard a noise behind her.

  Glancing back, she saw that the gallery’s door sign now read CLOSED. Only the building’s upstairs windows were illuminated. When even these began falling dark, she tightened her grip on her prize and walked faster.

  “I’m glad you called, Ms. Maxwell.”

  Sebastian Gerard’s voice was older than she’d expected—and better informed. Jen frowned. How the hell did he know her name?

  Insight hit a couple of seconds later. “I’m assuming the gallery told you—”

  “—who bought Leonie’s last piece? Yes. I’m afraid I asked them to.”

  Sunk deep in the folds of her beanbag chair, Jen still felt a chill. This was getting into stalker territory—aside from him waiting for her to call, of course. And it had taken her days to work up the courage to do that.

  “I guess I can’t blame you,” she finally said. “It must hold a lot of memories.”

  “That’s . . . putting it mildly.”

  Whatever was skewing his end of this conversation, it didn’t sound like grief. Or even resentment.

  More like anxiety?

  Start over. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mr. Gerard. Your sister’s imagination was incredible. In those later images, it was as if she was assembling a whole new world.”

  “She was.”

  The chill she’d been blaming on her landlord’s control of the thermostat deepened.

  “I didn’t realize she’d discussed her work with anyone. When I was researching my thesis, I didn’t find many letters or notes. She didn’t do a lot of interviews, either.”

  “No, she didn’t.” Gerard seemed to be gathering his own courage now. “Ms. Maxwell, I’d appreciate the chance to buy back Vernal Ascension. Every cent you paid—and some extra for your trouble.”

  He hesitated. “I never should have put it up for sale.”

  Jen’s frown deepened. Hanging above her futon couch in pride of place—assuming pride even applied to this place— Leonie’s last image pulsed with life.

  The background ruins looked sharper than they had in the gallery, as if some jungle mist had started to lift. Their juxtaposed locations no longer felt jarring, but exuded an organic sense of rightness. The egg-objects were descending toward an earth womb prepared for them. Or perhaps there was only one object, plus two earlier reflections of the journey—

&nbs
p; “Ms. Maxwell?”

  Gerard’s voice sputtered from a fold in the beanbag. Extracting her dropped phone, Jen started to apologize.

  “You were looking at it just then, weren’t you?”

  Go with the weirdness. “Yes.”

  “I had the same experience with numbers one and two of that image, and I didn’t know why at the time. Now I’ve at least got suspicions.” Another silence. “Which is why I’d really like to buy back number three.”

  Jen glanced up again at Vernal Ascension.

  The jaguar god’s tongue lolled faintly red.

  “I can’t do that,” she said quickly. “I’m working on my Ph.D. application. I’m not sure what that gallery told you, but—”

  “—you need to start publishing. Which means original research.”

  He sounded tired. “Ms. Maxwell, I understand your fascination with my sister’s work. And I’m deeply grateful for all the time and energy you’ve spent bringing it to the attention of academia. But this just can’t—”

  He took a ragged breath. “—it can’t really be researched. And if you saw Leonie’s studio, I think you’d understand why.”

  Jen froze. Her studio?

  Almost a year ago, Leonie Gerard’s career—and her life— had ended in a darkroom fire, which might or might not have been accidental. None of the references she’d found could tell her any more, and the rumors she’d chased in the arts community couldn’t be confirmed.

  All she knew for sure was that Leonie’s studio had been in the Colorado mountains.

  “Are you saying you could arrange it?”

  “My sister lived up here in Estes when she wasn’t traveling. I lent her one of my cabins, and we built her studio together.” Gerard hesitated. “There’s not much left of that. But the cabin’s just as she left it.”