Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator

by Jennifer Allison

  “Weird,” said Gilda. “They’re all black.”

  Juliet scrutinized an image of a woman’s profile facing an empty landscape. “It looks like she used ink instead of paint for these.”

  “How can you tell?”

  Juliet shrugged. “I can just tell. Besides, there are bottles of ink right here on the easel.”

  As she stared at the moody image painted by her aunt, Juliet felt as if she were peering through a window that allowed her to see more clearly into her own past. A picture entered Juliet’s mind—an image of herself and her aunt Melanie standing in the garden, looking at roses that sparkled with dewdrops, like jewels in the morning light.

  “See there?” Melanie said, pointing. “That’s a fairy.”

  And Juliet saw it, too, just before the tiny creature quickly hid its translucent wings under a rose petal.

  “They live in the roses,” Melanie explained.

  “I want to catch it!” Juliet said.

  “Oh, no,” said Melanie. “You’ll kill it if you try to catch it. Just be happy that you caught a glimpse of a real fairy in your own backyard.”

  Juliet’s mother appeared in the garden. Dressed for work, she wore her high heels and strong perfume.

  “Mommy!” Juliet shouted breathlessly, running toward her mother. “Aunt Melanie and I saw a real fairy in the garden!”

  Her mother led Juliet away from the garden and peered earnestly into her eyes. “Listen, Juliet,” she said. “You didn’t see a fairy. Fairies aren’t real.”

  “But I did. Aunt Melanie said—”

  “Juliet, you may have seen a hummingbird or a butterfly, but you did not see a fairy.”

  “But—”

  “You mustn’t believe a word your aunt Melanie says,” her mother had told her.

  Juliet now felt that the shadow woman in her aunt’s stark painting was the loneliest image she had ever seen.

  “There’s just one more room,” said Gilda, staring at the stairway that curved up from the floor, leading the way to the room where Melanie had taken her last steps. Then she noticed that Juliet appeared to be paralyzed by one of the paintings.

  “What’s wrong?” Gilda asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” said Juliet, forcing herself to turn away from the painting. “It’s just—I’m starting to remember some things.”

  “What things?”

  “I just had this memory of standing outside in the garden with Aunt Melanie.”

  “And?”

  “… and she saw a fairy.”

  “A fairy?”

  Juliet nodded. “The funny thing is, I remember thinking that I saw it, too.”

  “Well,” said Gilda, “my grandmother McDoogle used to say she believed in fairies, so who knows—maybe you did see one.”

  “All I know is that I wanted to see it,” said Juliet. She reflected that even if her aunt Melanie had been mentally ill, the fact was that there had been something appealing about her. For that moment, Aunt Melanie made the world seem genuinely magical.

  Gilda waved her flashlight at the opening leading to the stairs. “Should we check out the next level?”

  “I’ll go first this time,” said Juliet.

  When she had climbed high enough on the spiral staircase to peer up into the room on the top floor, Juliet stifled an impulse to scream again.

  “What is it?” Gilda asked.

  Juliet didn’t respond.

  “Juliet? Are you okay?”

  “I think we’ve just found the meaning of the last clue,” Juliet said, remembering the phrase your eyes on the ceiling as she cautiously entered the room.

  It seemed as if she were gazing into a monster’s eyes—an alien galaxy of blue-gray eyes that covered the walls and the ceiling, watching blankly, observing silently.

  Each painting displayed nothing but a single eye. Juliet noticed that the eyes looked similar to those that had gazed at her from the self-portraits on the first floor, but these were disembodied: some were enormous, and some were tiny. Something about the eye paintings reminded Juliet of the medieval images of bizarre angelic creatures she had seen in museums—bodiless eyes and wings that gazed with a flat, all-knowing power.

  Following Juliet, Gilda entered the room and caught her breath. She waved her flashlight wildly, as if she expected the walls themselves to come to life and attack her. The multiple eyes reminded Gilda of something disturbingly alien and insectlike—something that made her feel small and helpless. Maybe this is how a spider’s face looks to a small bug trapped in a web, she thought. Feeling the need for some kind of protection, Gilda located the crucifix she carried in her pocket and held it in front of her like the priest she had once observed in the movie The Exorcist.

  Both girls had the disconcerting sense that the painted eyes could somehow perceive them as they moved through the studio.

  “What does it mean?” Gilda whispered.

  Juliet shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  The paintings seemed to be the work of an obsessed, unhinged mind. In a museum, a similar display would have seemed a disturbing but interesting artwork, but in the tower, after dark, there was something genuinely horrifying about the eye paintings.

  Gilda noticed a small table in a corner of the room. The table had a single shallow drawer, which Gilda opened. Inside, there was nothing but a piece of tightly crumpled paper.

  “Hey,” said Gilda, shining her flashlight on the paper after she had smoothed open its folds and creases. “I found a letter!”

  It was from Melanie. Gilda noticed that her handwriting was neat and oddly geometric, as if she had purposefully shaped each letter as a tiny bit of art:

  DEAR LESTER,

  YOU’RE RIGHT: WE CAN’T GO ON LIKE THIS.

  I KNOW I’VE BECOME A TERRIBLE BURDEN LATELY, AND IT ISN’T FAIR TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY. YOU NEED TO MOVE ON AND LIVE YOUR LIFE WITHOUT ME, AND I NEED TO MOVE ON AS WELL.

  I HOPE YOU WILL BE ABLE TO FORGIVE ME FOR LEAVING THIS WAY. I’M TRULY SORRY.

  MY ONLY REGRET IS THAT I WAS NEVER ABLE TO CAPTURE IN MY ART THE THINGS I PERCEIVED IN MY LIFE. WHEN THEY WEREN’T TERRIFYING, SOME OF THEM WERE BEAUTIFUL.

  NOW I’VE LOST THAT ABILITY, AND EVERYTHING HAS BECOME VERY DARK. IN FAET, I CAN HARDLY SEEN ANYTHING AT ALL: MY EVES WORK, BUT I HAVE GONE BLIND.

  YOU MUST UNDERSTAND WHY I HAVE TO LEAVE.

  LOVE ALWAYS

  M

  “It sounds like a suicide note,” said Gilda, handing the letter to Juliet. “But it’s strange that it’s still here, crumpled up inside this drawer.”

  As Juliet read the letter, she felt a combination of sadness and revulsion. She imagined her father finding the letter, crumpling it up, and slamming the desk drawer shut forever.

  “I bet both of my parents were furious with her,” Juliet said. “There’s nothing they hate more than changes of plans and messy situations.” And what could be a messier change of plans than a family member’s suicide?

  Juliet suddenly recalled her mother’s attempt to explain Melanie’s death: “Your aunt Melanie is gone,” her mother said. Only a little girl at the time, Juliet remembered staring at her mother’s frosty pink lipstick and feeling as if she did not understand at all.

  “But when is she coming back?” Juliet asked. Just the day before, her aunt Melanie had promised to help her do some finger painting.

  “I keep trying to tell you,” the pink lips explained, “Melanie isn’t coming back ever again. An angel has taken her away to heaven.”

  “Oh,” said Juliet, still feeling confused. She decided to draw a picture of Aunt Melanie. She would send the picture to her aunt in heaven.

  But which version of her aunt should she draw? After all, Juliet’s aunt seemed to be many people; they all had long, blond hair, but one could never be certain which one might turn up. There was the playful Melanie who loved telling stories and drawing pictures, and then there was the weeping, angry Melanie who broke things and sometimes screamed for no reason
. Recently, there had also been the Aunt Melanie who sat and stared at nothing.

  Using some of Melanie’s oil pastels, Juliet tried to remember the parts of her aunt’s face. She knew the hair was yellow—almost white. The eyes were blue. Or were they gray? Juliet couldn’t find a color that exactly matched her aunt Melanie’s eyes. She compromised by using several colors together. Then she added an angel in the sky—an angel that had fierce eyes, enormous, colorful wings, and claw-hands like talons.

  Juliet felt frightened by her own picture. The idea that an angel might simply decide to swoop down and take a person away at any moment was terrifying; it reminded her of a television program she had seen in which a rabbit ran in hysterical figure eights, trying to escape a large bird of prey that swooped down, grabbed it, and dragged its dangling body into the open sky.

  Absorbed in her drawing, Juliet almost didn’t notice her father looking over her shoulder. When she finally looked up at him, she saw that her father’s face was wet with tears. How odd that her father was crying! Clearly, he didn’t like her drawing.

  “It’s a picture of Aunt Melanie,” Juliet explained.

  “That’s enough,” her father said. “It’s time to do something else.”

  Juliet reread the suicide note and wished for a moment that she had never discovered the glimpse of her aunt’s state of mind. On the other hand, the paintings were evidence that Melanie’s life had meant more than either the blurry photograph or the newspaper article describing her tragic death had suggested; even if her aunt had been mentally disturbed, she had also been an artist—a woman with a talent and a passion. That, at the very least, is interesting, Juliet thought.

  The door leading back to the garden would not open.

  “It’s stuck!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure! It almost feels like someone’s pulling on the other side!”

  “Pull harder.”

  “I’m trying!”

  Both girls tried to pull the door open, but it wouldn’t budge. An unusually strong wind began to howl outside the tower.

  “Where’s the key?” Juliet asked.

  “I think we left it in the lock when we first walked inside,” said Gilda. “It’s on the other side of the door.” She attempted to pull the door open once more, but failed. She placed her hands on her hips and nodded wryly as if she were a police officer surveying a car accident. “Juliet, don’t panic, but I think we’re trapped.”

  “You mean we’re prisoners in here!”

  “We have to stay calm,” said Gilda, speaking as much to herself as to Juliet. “Who knows how long we’ll be in here. We don’t want to use all the oxygen.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Juliet felt anything but calm. The wind that whined and shrieked outside the tower seemed to mirror her frazzled state of mind. “This is so dumb!” she lamented. “We should have brought something useful with us, like a cell phone, instead of raincoats and sunbonnets and that stupid camera!”

  “Look, nobody stopped you from bringing a cell phone,” said Gilda defensively. Secretly, she had to admit that this might have been a good idea.

  Juliet sat down on the floor and rested her head on her knees, sulking. She felt an urge to throw a childish temper tantrum.

  A psychic investigator must stay calm at all times, Gilda reminded herself, sensing that Juliet was ready to have some kind of meltdown. “Okay,” she said, trying to sound positive, “let’s take a good look at our options. Number one: We can try pounding on the walls and calling for help. I’m sure your father would eventually hear us and come open the door.”

  “You’re forgetting that he takes sleeping pills at night, so he might not hear anything,” said Juliet. “Besides, if he finds us in here, he’ll kill us!”

  “Good point,” said Gilda. “In that case, we’ll call that plan B.”

  Juliet sighed. “So what’s plan A?”

  Gilda stood up and began to pace back and forth in an attempt to generate some inspiration. “This is an artist’s studio, right? There must be some tools in here that we could use to break through one of the boarded windows.”

  Juliet shrugged. “Like what?”

  “A knife or a hammer or something. We might as well look.”

  After stumbling over canvases and paints in each studio room for nearly an hour, the girls found themselves back on the third floor. By now, Gilda also felt exhausted—overwhelmed by a desire to sleep.

  “Listen,” said Gilda. “This is what we’ll do. We’ll wait until morning when there’s more light, then we’ll figure out a way to break out of here. Either that, or we’ll just have to face the music and wait for your father to come help us.”

  Gilda squinted at her watch. It was midnight. Outside, the wind had died down, leaving a silence that felt ominous rather than reassuring.

  Huddled close together, the girls sat on the floor and leaned against a wall.

  “Do you think there’s any chance we’ll see her ghost?” Juliet whispered.

  “Maybe,” said Gilda. “In fact, she might be here with us right now and we just can’t see her.” This reminded her to pick up her Polaroid camera and hold it tightly, just in case she needed to snap a picture of any visible evidence of ectoplasm.

  “I don’t want to see her,” said Juliet. “I just want to get out of here.”

  Just then, they both heard the thump, thump, thump of footsteps slowly ascending the tower stairs.

  23

  Mr. Splinter’s Discovery

  Mr. Splinter suffered from chronic insomnia. Whenever he did finally fall asleep, he had a recurring dream that always left him feeling at once bereft and guilty. Sometimes the dream was so vivid and realistic that when Mr. Splinter awoke, he found actual pieces of the dream with him in his bed: a rose petal on his bedspread, a few blades of grass on his bare feet.

  The truth was that Mr. Splinter often walked in his sleep.

  As a child, he had sometimes sleepwalked right out the back door of the house and into the garden, where his mother would later discover him dozing forlornly on a patio chair or curled up in front of a rosebush. His mother subsequently locked all the windows in Lester’s room and blocked his door shut, and the habit eventually ended.

  In adulthood, Mr. Splinter occasionally awoke in the parlor or the kitchen feeling disoriented, but he never guessed that these occurrences signaled the return of his old habit of sleepwalking.

  He was, however, aware of the unpleasant recurring dream:

  In the dream, he was still a very young man. He sat in a stuffy room with his mother, who was slowly dying as the grandfather clock ticked away the seconds.

  “Lester,” his mother said, taking his clammy young hand in her withered fingers, “promise me you’ll always take care of Melanie after I’m gone.”

  “I promise,” Lester said, knowing that his sister was not like ordinary people; she couldn’t be expected to take care of herself and live on her own. He thought of his sister as a magical, fragile creature. Throughout their childhood, he had been entertained by her frantic, intoxicating activities: she climbed the rose trellis outside the tower for no reason at all; she painted one of the walls in Lester’s bedroom with an enormous, red L; she arranged a breathtakingly elaborate tea party for invisible guests. Melanie believed that people could visit one another in dreams, and she encouraged her brother to join her in a place she herself often traveled in her mind—a place with a violet lake and flowers that only bloom at night. “I wish I could draw you a picture of it, but I can’t capture the way it really looks when I go there,” she said. One day, Melanie suddenly had a pet—an enormous cat that resembled a cloud of blue smoke. When asked where she found the cat, she would only say, “He came in with the fog.”

  “You’ll make sure Melanie always has a home, won’t you?” Lester’s mother insisted. “You won’t let anything bad happen to her.”

  “I promise, Mother,” he repeated. “Melanie and I will be fine.”

>   Then something surprising happened in the dream: Lester’s mother abruptly crawled from her sickbed into the grandfather clock and disappeared, leaving him alone.

  Suddenly aged in his dream, Mr. Splinter found himself walking up the spiral staircase in the tower, which his sister had turned into a chaotic art studio. He looked at the stacks of her canvases and knew that the old Melanie was disappearing. She had recently destroyed hundreds of her early paintings in a fit of rage—the whimsical landscapes that used to fill the long hallways of her mother’s house. Instead, she had taken to painting a series of self-portraits and images of disembodied eyes, believing that a long list of famous people had requested them. Mr. Splinter couldn’t tell whether her artwork had become strikingly original or merely disturbing; he only knew that nobody had bought a single one of her paintings for some time.

  Mr. Splinter was now a married man—a man with a child, a job, and numerous responsibilities. His sister no longer seemed magical; she seemed ill.

  “We simply can’t take care of her anymore,” Lester’s wife had recently complained. “Besides, she’s a bad influence on Juliet. Yesterday, she actually made Juliet believe that she saw a fairy in the garden! And what if she hurts herself one of these days? What if she hurts someone else?”

  Mr. Splinter approached his sister, who looked thinner than ever in her faded, paint-splattered jeans. Her unwashed hair hung like frayed rope around her small frame as she crouched over a tiny picture of an eye, which she painted with painstaking detail.

  “Melanie, did you take your medication today?” Mr. Splinter asked, knowing that the answer was no.

  Melanie refused to look at her brother. She continued painting as if she couldn’t afford to stop working for a single second.

  “You know what the doctor said might happen if you don’t take it,” Mr. Splinter added.

  “I already told you; I can’t take that stuff! It makes me feel dead, and I need to perceive things if I’m going to get ready for this show. There are over fifty celebrities who are interested in my work!”