But the boy hadn’t, of course. And this whole idea, the absurdity of it, made his lips draw up into a cynical smirk. He felt like a kid, trying to draw shapes out of a passing cloud in the vast fields beside the orphanage.
“Dog,” David had said as Daniel scanned that boundless Midwest sky filled with countless clouds. “Dog with three legs,” he added.
“There,” Daniel pointed above them, his fingertips no longer wrapped in bandages but now dotted with small scabs.
“Not bad,” David said as something wriggled in the grass nearby. A bug, perhaps a rollie-pollie. He thought that he might try to find it and feed it to the geckos in the science room. No, that would be a mean thing, he thought. He didn’t do mean things anymore. Instead, he decided he’d rather sit with his little brother.
“My turn,” Daniel said, eyes scanning the sky. “Okay, the Thinking Man.”
“Like, the statue?”
“Yep,” Daniel answered. David studied the tapestry of the cloud, the puffs of white shifting at the ends as lazy winds tugged them over the Great Plains. One cloud stuck out, a shape closer to a rectangle with a small protrusion that seemed to reach out and curl back, and he could see blue sky through the errant wisp.
“There,” David said, pointing straight up, and as he did the shape emerged from the cloud and he saw with precision what Daniel had wanted him to see. The vague form of the upper half of a man, his arm curled back, hand resting beneath a head that hung downward in contemplation. The Thinker.
“Found it,” he gloated. “Okay, my turn. How about...”
He scanned the clouds. So many possibilities, so many pictures, and one even looked like a rabbit.
“Bugs bunny. See if you can find that,” David said, nodding and turning to his younger brother, but Daniel wasn’t there any longer, and only an empty spot of flat grass remained.
The clock down the hall chimed again and Dan blinked, unsure of how long he’d held his stare on the painting. He tried to remember how high he’d counted. Had it been two hundred? Three hundred? He had lost count, and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t recall what benchmark he’d passed.
His eyes were dry and the piece of glass behind them throbbed in low dull bursts that left a sour, dirt-like taste in the back of his throat. And his legs, they lacked feeling. When he tried to flex his toes a pain shot upwards from his feet and ended at his waist, half asleep and buzzing with phantom beestings.
And over all of this the painting still loomed, staring back through three sets of eyes: the boy, the girl, and the shadow, closer still. As he blinked he sensed they were blinking in time with him, no different from his own reflection when he combed his hair in the mirror. As he took a breath, it seemed, so did they.
That frustration, that impotence of being unable to catch them in the act, grew like a rash screaming to be scratched. The more he stared, the more still they remained. And yet, like a trick of light, out of the corner of his eyes, he could see dust particles floating in that old room behind the layer of paint and a distant firefly flickering in the twilight field.
“Come on,” he said, feeling his fists ball up.
“Come on,” he said, standing up.
“Come on!” his voice rose as he took several steps forward, closer to the ring of cameras pointed at the painting. Only the mocking tick-tock of the clock down the hall was brave enough to answer him.
And the painting remained, as it always had, still and quiet.
His eyes scanned around the picture, starting with that boy, across the room to the girl, and then between them, rising upwards, like finding the tip of an invisible triangle between them. His glare stopped on that hill with the single sick tree, its leaves now gone, its branches like a thousand broken fingers reaching to a blue sky filled with clouds.
Clouds, he thought. Perhaps even Bugs Bunny. Those clouds hadn’t been there before, had they? Yes, the sky had been empty, rendered with a western glow, this he knew. But now it was deeper, the shadows were longer, and the clouds had bled in as if they’d always been just beneath the surface, emerging like water stains.
And the shadow atop the hill. That abstract form of vague, human semblance. It was larger, closer, as if it’d taken yet another four steps towards the viewer. And yet, Dan couldn’t imagine the painting any other way. He knew it had changed and yet, it seemed to have always been this way, as if this were its natural state of existence and the change had taken place not on the canvas but in his memory.
Funny thought, said Mr. Glass, and he felt it slide upwards through his brain and come to rest directly on the bone of his forehead.
“Come on,” he said one last time, willing it to do something, anything, to prove that part of him that thought this madness incorrect was not indeed mad nor incorrect. A part that said it would be easier to follow the madness, to give in to it rather than to step back and think, for one clear second, that this fact was true: he was in his house, talking to a painting, and daring it to move.
The clarity of that one thought was sobering. It was as if the manic energy that had kept him focused on that painting for the last three and a half hours had, in mere seconds, revealed itself as a symptom of something far darker.
David finally lost it, Mr. Glass mumbled. Went away and never came back. Care to keep going down the rabbit hole?
“Cowards,” Dan found himself saying, not just to the painting but to himself. He had allowed Tamara to infect him with her ideas and superstitions, just like his brother’s scary stories that had lingered with him until dawn.
Chicken, Mr. Glass replied, but the only sound that answered back was the distant metronome of the clock down the hall as Dan switched off the light.
He poured himself a glass of pomegranate juice and swallowed it in a half dozen gulps. His eyes stung, his throat felt parched, and his thirst was bottomless. He poured another glass and did the same, wiping his mouth and licking a small splotch of the ruby juice off his hand like a vampire.
The last several hours had passed in a blur, a splice cut from his life. Despite having remained as focused and motionless as a monk, he felt exhausted to his core, as if he’d run a marathon or been locked in another all-nighter with Karina at the Chateau Adultery. His hands danced and shook when he held them out in the glow of the refrigerator light. He put the juice away for fear of dropping it.
He placed the cup by the sink, eyes falling to that jam jar on the sill next to the wilted roses. Inside sat the tissue, and something else. It wasn’t the cicada he had found the other night but something brown and old. He opened the jam jar and fished it out.
It was a piece of leather. It was old and cracked, covered in stitching from where it had been attached to something. It looked as if it had dried and fallen off a suitcase from a century ago. Or something larger.
No, it had come from the inside of the wall, he told himself. The house was old, and things lay beneath the layers of paint and wallpaper that even he didn’t know about. Not bugs but physical things, remnants of its previous lives with previous families no different from fossils. There were no cicadas, and any other explanation led back to Tamara and her infectious ideas and this whole stupid plan.
He would go to bed, he thought. Go upstairs, lay down next to his wife, and fall fast asleep without brushing his teeth. His body would welcome the warm bed, and before he could count to fifty he would fall asleep.
Then, as he threw away that piece of leather, a realization washed over him; an electric arc between two related thoughts; a connection that made his body grow cold.
He had thought of falling asleep before he counted to fifty, and he been counting the clock for the past several hours.
But now, the clock was silent.
No, said Mr. Glass, it’s always been silent. Or did you forget?
Yes, he thought. It’s always been silent and he had forgotten.
The clock had been a gift from Linda’s parents, and it had sat in the hallway for eight years. But that was unt
il two years ago when Tommy and Sam had knocked it over, splintering it beyond repair. Not even the faint spot on the wall where it had hung for years now remained. It had been boxed up, put in the basement long ago, swallowed by time and memory along with all the other forsaken things that lay beneath the floorboards.
Something popped like a single kernel of corn and while he was pondering the clock, it popped again. A third time, and he smelled a faint odor, as if a fine layer of dust had been burnt.
And then he saw it. In the hallway, beneath the door to the study, came a flash of white light followed by the sound of a camera clicking away.
The doorknob to the study was cold to the touch and he hesitated, listening as the camera whirred in a rapid one-two-three click on the other side. Pulses of light reached out beneath the door. He braced himself, turning the knob, and the door didn’t so much as open but rather seemed to melt away into the walls and the shadow.
The room was as dark as he’d left it, yet it felt larger, cavernous. The overhead lights gave a dim flicker as their power was redrawn to the flash bulbs aimed at the painting. A half second after they pulsed the room dropped back into shadow, the coils of the flashbulbs fading from a brilliant white to a faint amber. In that half second explosion of light, that blinding freeze frame where all was visible, he could see the air thick with dust motes that danced like fireflies. A few pieces of dust landed on the hot flash bulbs and were vaporized into wisps of smoke.
In the center of it all sat the painting, motionless and still. Nervous, Dan approached the circle of cameras, looking for movement within that forlorn canvas but finding none. His glance dropped to the three cameras, one capturing three still frames in rapid succession, and the other two recording video. The video camera’s display jumped between shadow and blinding light, catching only brief glimpses of the painting before the pixels bled white from the flash and the autofocus readjusted. The thermal imaging camera display showed the painting in that same cool color as the rest of the room, deep blues and turquoises giving way to faint wisps of red from an outside streetlight. There was no movement in either of them.
“Come on,” Dan said, staring back at the painting and, a second later, he felt a chill, as if a pocket of cold air passed through him.
It started, first as an imperceptible shift. Darkness grew, no more than an inkblot on the thermal imagining viewfinder, and for a moment Dan thought the camera itself was malfunctioning, like an antique movie projector burning a reel of film. The inkblot bled across the display, outwards in symmetrical directions from the point on the painting where the shadow stood. It unfolded, as if a line divided it and the halves were mirror images of each other. It grew into a viscous stain of darkness, swallowing the amber and purple heated hues of the thermal display, two lines protruding like long ears. He heard a voice say: “Found Bugs Bunny!”
But it wasn’t a cloud or a rabbit on that liquid crystal display but rather a hole opening, a shadowy orifice that swallowed the rest of the picture’s heat signature like invisible flames consuming the canvas. His eyes left the viewfinder and fell on the painting itself, scanning it in the brief light between the darkness, but nothing was amiss. Everything stood where it should: the boy, the girl, the clock, the room, even the shadow. There was no change, only an evanescent feeling that things were not as they should be.
The thermal viewfinder showed a different reality, one beyond his vision. In that dimension the inkblot grew larger, like a cancer attacking healthy cells, consuming them and turning them to shadow. It rippled as it grew, repainting the canvas not in a single shade of darkness but an undulating abyss of black, colors impossible to isolate from each other. A shimmering oil slick of emptiness.
And it grew larger.
A pop, a flash, and three clicks.
The shadow reached the edge of the painting.
Another pop, another flash, and three clicks.
He took the thermal camera and zoomed out until the canvas shared the viewfinder’s space with the study and the room around the painting. Through the LCD the shadow bled over the edges of the painting and he felt his mouth dry up. The darkness was cascading from the borders like vines, climbing the wall behind the painting. Blackness dripped out onto the floor and up the bookshelf until the camera could zoom out no more and cold shadow devoured it all.
Another pop, another flash, and three more clicks.
Movement caught his eyes and he looked up from the now black thermal display. He heard a distant tick-tock as the clock in the painting began to swing its pendulum. At first the motions were rigid and strained, like a flip book animation or an old movie effect. It swung in three frames: left, right, center, and repeated. Then it added a fourth and a fifth frame until its motions grew as smooth as any other clock. He no longer saw the layer of paint on the canvas. It had vanished. Or perhaps, had simply never been there at all.
Another pop, another flash, and three more clicks.
The clouds came next. They shifted and moved away from the viewer, giving that painted window a feeling of endless depth. Long shadows passed over that grassy hill with that rotten tree atop.
Another pop, another flash, and three final clicks.
Then the thermal viewfinder changed and his eye fell from the painting back to the LCD screen. The darkness remained, but a new color grew from it. Blue. The coldest color on the spectrum that the camera could capture. Two blue figures emerged from that black void.
A boy and a girl.
Dan’s eyes snapped back to the painting, and there they were, staring back at him. The painted girl stood up and the boy smiled through brown teeth.
And they both blinked. He finally caught them.
Then, in the four second space that it took the flashbulbs to cool down and fire up again, both the painted children traversed a great distance. They moved out of the painting and appeared less than a foot away from Dan, no longer flat but fully spacial and moving. He saw the top of the boy’s head, his hair parted over a grey scalp. And the girl’s yellow dress, billowing as if made from paper.
And in that brief flash, the room became terror.
The boy let out a rattle as he lugged that fleshy trunk-arm behind him. His one grey hand, cold as the deep ocean, grabbed at Dan’s arm. The girl belched forth a backwards laugh as she held a deformed object in her arms like a Madonna with child. It was a twisted canine shape of animal hair and blue feathers sewn together. It wore Ginger’s glittering collar and stared out through button eyes, tongue hanging from where a jaw should have been.
The images overwhelmed his senses and as that flash faded, he saw with utter clarity that he was no longer standing in his study at home, but inside the very room of the canvas overlooking that hill as the shadow walked towards him through the field, and he felt, more than anything, utter and complete regret. He opened his mouth and screamed.
Then, the flashbulb faded, the darkness embraced him, and endless winds extinguished his screams.
Off Site
HER FACE EMERGED from the nimbus of light, wrapped in a hood of golden hair, smiling and reaching out for him. Light bled in around her, and he saw the chandelier of the study ceiling and the crown molding behind her gentle face.
“Dad?” she asked, her warm hands touching his forehead. “Dad? Are you okay?”
Jessica was clutching Mr. Bun and wearing her pajamas. Behind her the light of dawn crept into the study. He could hear a bird chirping through the window and the distant sound of garbagemen as their truck beeped and backed into reverse.
His words were heavy and thick. He tried to answer, but his vocal cords burned as if he’d spent the last few hours screaming, and he thought he just might have. There was no vast gulf between the events and the morning, only another splice and a splitting headache in the form the glass, swollen and sharp. He swallowed and answered: “I’m okay honey.”
She knew it was a lie and her smile seemed to fade a little as he said it.
“What time is it?” he as
ked.
“Early,” she said. “Mommy’s still asleep.”
“What...” he coughed. “What are you doing up?”
“I had a bad dream,” she said.
“Me too,” he laughed. “Me too.”
“I know,” she said and wrapped her arms around his neck in a hug. She held that child’s embrace, her fingers petting the back of his head with the same tenderness she showed her dolls, and Dan felt warmth surge through his body.
“I forgive you,” she whispered, and released her grasp. Then, without any further explanation, she turned and shuffled out of the room, dragging a now eyeless Mr. Bun behind.
Dan rose to a sitting position and surveyed the study. He had lapsed into unconsciousness halfway between the door and the ring of cameras. His neck popped as he sat up and his right ear throbbed as if it had broken his fall.
The painting sat where he had last seen it, the various artifacts and occupants reset to their original positions like some sort of demonic Disney ride. The camera equipment and lights, however, were not as he left them. Both the thermal camera and the DSLR had fallen over. Pieces of the their bodies and lenses lay scattered about like broken teeth. The two work lights had fallen backwards and lay shattered on the floor beside scorch marks. Only the video camera remained upright, its display blinking with a red low battery icon.
He didn’t wait for Linda to wake up or make breakfast. He didn’t even shower or brush his teeth. Instead, he did what he felt was the first smart thing he’d done in weeks: he hauled that evil fucking painting out of the house and stuffed it in the back of his car. All six feet of it went in, back seats folded beneath it. The camera equipment went next to it, broken pieces rattling in the metal cases.
He sat behind the wheel and took a deep breath, trying to shake the chill that had settled upon him after he awoke. It wasn’t even seven and the harsh morning light bloomed off the silver hood of his car and burrowed through his eyes, into that piece of glass behind them, hitting it like a prism that scattered his thoughts.
Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity Page 25