“What is?”
“I don’t know what it is, but it’s everywhere.”
“In the floor?”
“No, everywhere. Like the tea, it’s moving from place to place. Growing like an infection, a sickness.”
He thought of Linda’s rose bushes and how sick they had looked. That crack in the wall, how the very plaster had grown moist with something foul and rotten inside. The cicada, the photos of the dog, the blue jay, even his dark dreams these last few days.
“I sense memories. Sorrow and rage, like a... a voice crying out from the nether, not for justice... but something darker.”
“Back up,” he said. “What do you mean, memories?”
“Some spirits are shades, traces of negative emotions left behind by an incomplete life, an injustice. A stain, if you will, unable or unwilling to be washed away and forgotten. Over time, they grow, distorting, fermenting, transforming. Like an organism in hibernation, until they’re strong enough to emerge from the cold nether.”
“What’s the nether?”
“It’s the negative space. The void between life and absence. To cross back, they need a conduit, a hole between this world and the nether.”
“And then what? Ol’ Mabel found it?”
“Or maybe it found her.”
She bent down and opened her bag. He caught a glimpse of several woolen wrapped objects and the glint of metal. She removed a wooden bowl with an inlaid layer of metal and glass.
“What is that?” he asked.
“It has many names, but most call it a scrying bowl. Those older and wiser than I believed silver to harbor special properties when dealing with the metaphysical.”
“Vampires and such, right?”
“Not quite. Silver conducts energy and reflects light better than any other metal. As a man of science I’m sure you knew that.” She winked at him, reached into her bag, and pulled out a bottle of water. She shook it several times.
“Holy water?” asked Dan.
“Blessed by a virgin priestess of the Oakland tribe.”
She took a sip and swallowed it.
“It’s tap water, Dan.”
He smiled as she poured it into the bowl, lifted the bowl up, and swirled it around until a small whirlpool pierced the surface. Then, she placed it back on the floor and waited for the water to settle. Beneath it, the silver acted as a mirror where Dan saw his own distorted reflection.
“Please, step back while the water settles,” she said and he took three large steps back towards his desk. “Try not to make any vibrations.”
“What are we supposed to see?”
“Extra-dimensional entities, spirits, if you will, are often dormant, invisible to our spectrum of light. It takes a lot of energy to manifest in our dimension. That’s why, some believe, hauntings happen in waves. Phases, they call them. Like the moon.”
“So it’s a ghost camera,” he said with a smile.
“In a sense. The water and the silver distort this residual energy, like a crystal or a camera lens, bending it into our dimension where its shadow becomes visible.”
She bent down, looking at the clear, motionless surface of the water.
“Here we go,” she said, and picked up the bowl.
She began by walking around the room, holding the scrying bowl close to her chest like a hot bowl of soup. Each step was careful, precise, and she moved with a grace he’d thought impossible for someone of her weight and age. Her face held a focused, concerned expression as she took two steps closer to the painting. Her bottom lip quivered, and he could hear a slight gasp of air escape her nose as her nostrils flared.
“What do you see?” he asked, thinking for a moment that a small part of him was beginning to believe the theatrics, if only out of morbid curiosity. What had she said? Open the door? Yes, he was opening it, but only a crack. And what he saw inside seemed like bullshit.
“I...” she said in a quiver.
“What?” he asked.
“I... I don’t...” she peered closer, face wrinkling.
Spit it out you old kook, he wanted to say.
“I don’t see anything,” she said, turning to the left, angling the bowl at the painting again and craning her neck sideways. She did the same, to her right, and took another large step back.
“Nothing?”
“I don’t understand, I felt a presence,” she said, her face filled with confusion. “I’m sure of it.”
Dan stepped towards her, making sure his footsteps were light and soft. He peered into the bowl, his back to the painting, and as he did this Tamara screamed.
The bowl fell from her hands, clattered, and rolled across the floor, leaving a trail of water behind. She leapt backwards, and her face changed in an instant, from confusion to horror and repulsion. She covered her mouth as she stared at Dan with wide eyes. His heart pounded, ears ringing and flushed with warmth.
“What was it?! What duh-du...” he stuttered, words like glue in his throat and he could feel his fingers curling. “What did you see?”
“I need to go,” she said, and there was no sense of calm or kindness in her voice anymore. Instead, she sounded like a scared child. “I’m sorry but there’s nothing I can do here and I really need to leave.”
She left the bowl on the floor, broken and wet, and by the time he caught up the front door was closing.
“Tamara,” he called out as he hurried to the driveway. She slammed the trunk and made for the driver’s side door before he could intercept her.
“Tamara, please, wait, I don’t understand--”
He grabbed her shoulder and she shrieked again, sliding away, down the length of the car as if he were about to stab her.
“Don’t touch me!” she gasped. Her hands dug into her pockets and she took out the money he’d given her. Four hundred dollars, eight fifties, and she didn’t so much hand it to him as toss it on the ground at his feet. “Take it back, I don’t want it.”
“What did you see?! Tell me!” he demanded and she took another step back like a kid about to be whipped by a belt.
“The hell is going on there?!” shouted a voice that he knew belong to Marty. Dan snapped his head around, saw that old bastard by the fence, a hose in his hand.
“Not now Marty!” Dan shouted and turned back to her. “Tamara, what was it? Please!”
Her eyes were filled with tears and her lips trembled as something resembling sadness settled across her face. She shook her head and opened the door to her car. Then she looked him in his eyes for the first time since she’d run out of the house.
“I saw everything,” she said in voice laced with pity. “I saw it all, and there’s nothing I can do to fix this. I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry, but I can’t help you.”
“What? I thought you said--”
“I was wrong. Your family, get them away. Get them far away from all this.”
“What? Where?”
“Anywhere!” she screamed then covered her mouth. Sadness washed over her again and her lips trembled. “There’s no happy ending here, nothing. I’m sorry, but I need to go.”
And she closed the car door, started the engine, and drove off down the street leaving Dan alone on that driveway. Far away a cicada hummed in the breeze of the late afternoon.
Hard Evidence
“LISTEN TO YOURSELF, I implore you Daniel. Listen to what you’re saying.”
He drew a breath in between his teeth as he paced before Dean Robert’s desk. The office was clean, unlike Dan’s, more of a museum than an extension of the classroom. Dean Robert leaned back in his expensive chair, the kind the university only supplied to its eldest and most respected faculty. The chair squeaked and broke the silence as Dean Robert thumbed through Dan’s report.
“I can hardly believe I’m saying it either. Trust me, there’s something wrong with that painting. Something off.”
Dean Robert tossed the report onto his desk as if it were something disgusting, something beneath contempt. It
was so unlike his usual calm that the action struck Dan as vaguely comical.
“Something off?” the old man asked. “You’re basing this, this absurd conclusion, on what exactly? One, some fairytale your daughter told you. Two, a string of coincidences, half of which you admit were dreams, not exactly irrefutable proof given your behavior as of late.”
Dan cut in. “My behavior is not the issue--”
“I’m not finished,” Dean Robert slammed his fist on the desk, rattling his gold plated business card holder. This time the action wasn’t comical but sobering. “And three, and I want you to pay attention to this part: the fact that it gave some psychic, of all people, the heebie-jeebies?”
“I think it killed the artist that made it. Or played a part in her death.”
Dean Robert shook his head, opening the report to the third page.
“Ah, right,” he said in that condescending tone that made the glass behind Dan’s eyes swell. “The so-called artist. An elderly ghost whisperer who, according to this, was blind. And, ignoring that minor detail, she was also best friends with the very psychic who sold you on this crazy idea in the first place. This is how people join cults or... or... or lose their life savings.”
“She didn’t want my money, she gave it back.”
“Sure, and she’ll be back next week for ten times the price! How do you not see this?”
Dan stopped in his tracks, eyes darting about the floor as another idea came to him.
“The fire.”
“What of it?”
“Maybe Karina didn’t set it.”
“I don’t follow.”
“The fire happened the night we got that painting.”
“We received three others that day.”
“But it wasn’t burnt.”
“And neither were they! Not because they’re supernatural. Because, when the warehouse moves a painting to the archive, they go in the first available space, and that space was next to the sprinkler!” He took a deep breath. “My God, I feel like I’m talking to a child.”
A child? The glass behind Dan’s eyes slid back and forth in precise slashes at those words. Fireworks lit up like Tesla coils when he closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. He had to sit on the couch to get his balance. Dean Robert let out a long disappointed sigh, as if his own son had been sent to a gulag.
“I know what this sounds like,” Dan said with a sheepish grin.
“No, Daniel, you don’t. Madness wouldn’t even begin to describe the way you’ve been acting this semester. We’re all on thin ice, what with the fire, now this whole Karina thing--”
Dan felt his fists curl into tight balls. “I didn’t have anything to do--”
“I don’t want to hear it. I’m too old and too tired for lies. Now I encourage you, one friend to another, go home. You want to take on this side project? Fine. Trace it all the way back to Vlad the Impaler, but get hard evidence, okay? Not some silly story that destroys your reputation.”
Dan felt his fingers stop moving. An idea, bright as a flashbulb exploding, swam into his head and the glass stopped moving.
“Hard evidence,” Dan said. “You’re right Bob, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Just do your job,” the old man said, and Dan could see disappointment in his eyes. “That’s all I ask.”
Dan nodded. “I will.”
“That should be the last of it,” Sajid said, screwing the video camera in to the tripod. They stepped back and studied their work.
It had taken two hours to set up the equipment, and now half of the photography lab sat in Dan’s study, pointed toward that giant painting. Tamara had her scrying bowl and he had Sajid, who hadn’t required as much convincing as he thought he would. In fact, he took a particular interest into the technical side of the plan.
The only promise Sajid had required was that the equipment be returned by seven in the morning so that it wouldn’t be labeled as missing when inventory was taken. The university had strict protocols and limits on how much equipment could be checked out and Dan knew he had gone above and beyond that. He also knew that if he put in the proper requisition forms and filed the necessary paperwork, they would make their way to Dean Robert’s desk during one of his mid-semester budgetary reviews. And there was no way he could justify over a forty-thousand dollars of equipment used on a project that, hours before, he had scoffed at. But in the end, he would have his hard evidence and Dan would have his apology.
Sajid pointed at the camera on the left, the first of three. “This is the primary video, it’ll always be running. Should be able to store at least twelve hours at broadcast quality. It’s not the best but it’ll do for a master shot. Next to it, we’ve the thermal passive imagining camera, this little toy.”
He waved his hand in front of the large camera that looked like something seen at an airport. Dan noted a dark blue rendering of four fingers and a thumb on the display screen. Sajid flexed his hand and orange and purple ripples of heat emanated from it in waves.
“It captures anything with a temperature. It’s calibrated to room temp, so if something’s a hotter or colder, it’ll show up. Like the Predator movies, follow?”
“What about this?” Dan asked, pointing to the back of the camera array. A large DSLR camera sat at waist height with a white ping pong ball sized half circle mounted above it.
“That’s set up with motion sensors, no different than an automatic door, just a whole lot more sensitive.”
Sajid pressed the STANDBY button then snapped his finger in front of the camera. The two studio flash bulbs popped without delay. Blinding light bounced off the silver umbrellas, bathing the room in momentary white as the camera clicked several times. Dan blinked, trying to wash out the spots burned into his eyes.
“Now, once you start it all up, it’s like home security; you don’t need to touch a thing. To turn it off, flip the switch.” Sajid tapped on the industrial power strip on the floor.
“Any questions Professor?”
“Yeah,” Dan said. “Do you think it’ll work?”
Sajid studied the setup, nodding with a proud smirk.
“In theory, absolutely it will, no doubt.”
His gaze fell to the painting, the centerpiece of the setup. The girl, the boy, the room, the window, and that distant tree atop the hill, all frozen and silent as if posing for some surrealist photo shoot.
“Personally, I hope it doesn’t. That’s the creepiest fucking painting I’ve ever seen. And if that thing moves, you’ve got bigger problems.”
“If that thing moves, I may not be as crazy as I feel.”
“Or, you know... crazier,” Sajid said with a nervous laugh.
Tick Tock
“ARE YOU FINISHED?” Linda asked. Her presence brought him back to the present, away from the paper and those words he’d spent the evening studying. She stood at the door, sweatpants rolled up and the remnants of the evening’s cleaning on her terrycloth sweatshirt.
“Yeah, I’m done,” he answered, and she took the plate of cold lasagna from the desk where it had sat uneaten for the last two hours. Her actions were muted, annoyed, like when she shunned Tommy or Jessica for saying something impolite or cruel to her. The only sound was the clatter of the fork and knife.
“This too?” she asked, pointing to the wineglass where the red wine had settled and left a layer of sediment at the bottom. He swirled it, watching the ruby maelstrom engulf the tannins.
“Cheers,” he said with a smile that she didn’t return. The mere fact that he smiled made her eyes squint, as if he’d somehow slapped her with his behavior over the last 24 hours. He had forgotten to order the Chinese food and she had called him, furious, wondering why she was at the restaurant trying to pick up an order never phoned in. Italian had been the fallback, and her mood sank further when she returned to find him and Sajid setting up the camera array. She wanted that painting out, not because she believed it to be any more than canvas and paint, but because her
husband had changed with it around. His eccentricities grew, his stutter was more frequent, and his words were charged with an intensity that made her want to take a step back from him.
He gulped the wine down in one sip, smacking his lips and licking the dry bitterness that coated his cheeks. She took the glass and walked out, adding: “We’re going to bed,” in a flat voice.
“Okay, goodnight,” he called out, but she had left, and some part of his mind remembered it had not been a minute ago but perhaps several. Perhaps an hour even.
He returned his gaze to the notepad spread out on the desk, his nemesis, the thing he’d stared at so long his lasagna had dried and his wine had settled. Old Mabel’s note contained cryptic scribblings, but he was beginning to feel that her madness had a method, or at least a shadow of it.
The note read:
XII:4I:1II:9III:18
IV:14VI:5VII:8VIII:20
V is the key to the door.
The roman numerals had numbers next to it, eight in total. The painted clock had nine numbers, minus one for the V at five o’clock. Yet when he paired them up, all he came up with was a series of numbers that made no sense. And that final hint, V is the key to the door, ambiguous and maddening. The more he focused on the numbers and their sums, the more the glass burned behind his eyes. Like the painting, it was a puzzle without enough pieces to solve it.
He crumpled the note, buried his head in his hands, and pushed his thumbs into his temples. Minutes passed in slow beats during which the glass simmered and cooled. He could hear the tick-tock of the clock down the hall, like a metronome, counting every second. He tried to make it to one hundred without blinking and found it easier than he’d imagined. After all, he’d always kept great time. Down the hall the clock chimed twelve times at the exact second he knew it would.
Dan blinked, and in that brief second as his eyelids descended and a single frame of shadow took over, he felt as if he could see that boy in the overalls blinking with him.
Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity Page 24