One, two, three, he thought. Focus on the task at hand. Keep calm and carry on.
His fingers reached to his pocket, feeling the memory cards inside. When he got to school he would, of course, make copies, but not until Dean Robert had seen their contents. There would be apologies, of course, directed at him. There would be speculation and verification and the video would be analyzed until the old man had nothing to do but turn to Dan and say: “My God, you were right.”
Yes, that’s how it would go, he thought.
But that was hours away. For now, he had more pressing matters. The painting had to go. Another hour in the house was another hour of infection, another hour for those things to step out of the frame again. If it was up to him the whole thing would burn, but this was bigger than him, bigger than one dead psychic and another who had fled. This thing, he realized, changed everything he believed in. If paintings could move then, well, there were other roads to go down. Roads that led to answers for questions he had yet to consider.
Chicken, he thought. Tamara had been a chicken, but he wasn’t.
The wretched painting seemed to know his intentions and from the backseat he heard a dog whimpering and a clock ticking. They would be silenced shortly, he thought, as he turned on the engine. He had just the place for them.
He pulled into the storage facility five minutes after it opened, driving through the gate and down the rows of endless orange storage sheds until he found unit G-22. He did his best to focus on the crappy pop music. He had to. The voices had started shortly after he left his house. An incessant whispering and counting, like children playing hide and seek behind him. He half expected to look in the rear view mirror and see their ashen, painted faces looking back, but they never appeared. Still, their words lingered, distracting, and he drowned out their counting and laughter with bad radio.
His tires squealed as he pulled up sharp to the curb and popped the trunk. He paused before the digital lock to the storage unit, struggling to remember the combination. It was rented in the university’s name, paid for on his faculty credit card, and its contents were mostly old student projects and furniture of little value from his previous office. He had also stored some of Karina’s belongings in there when she had moved apartments in March.
That was it, he remembered the combination. It was her birth day, month, and year, in that order. He had changed it so she could get in and had forgotten to change it back.
He punched the eight digits in. The display chirped and the metal shutter rumbled upward, dropping small plumes of dust.
“In you go,” he said to the painting, placing it against an old bookshelf that had sat in his office until last winter. The florescent bulb above flickered twice, one-two, bathing the interior in a lazy yellow glow.
He gave the painting a final glance and thought of Ginger and how she’d whined at the kennel, literally screaming and throwing herself about the cage, all over a week long vacation they took to Hawaii that had cost him a month’s salary. He caught a whiff of Karina’s fragrance, and heard a faint buzz of a summer cicada.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he said, and pressed the close button.
Melt Down
“JESUS DANIEL, YOU look awful,” said Dean Robert, mouth hanging wider than usual. Sajid turned, having been in whispered conversation with the old man when Dan had burst forth from the stairwell. His eyes opened so wide that his tan forehead became a creased sheet of wrinkles.
“Bob, you nuh-nuh, you nuh...” Dan struggled as the words caught on his tongue, thick as clay and tasting of salt. He tried again, slower, holding up the memory card. “You need to see this.”
“I don’t follow. What am I supposed to see?” Dean Robert asked, squinting through his glasses at the image on the screen. Sajid had imported all the photos from the camera memory card and was scanning through them like a flip-book on the monitor. They started with the test photo, where Sajid had tripped the motion sensor, and it captured the painting in perfect clarity in three separate snapshots. The timestamp read: 8:22pm.
The next set of photos came at 10:24pm, another series of three depicted Dan waving his hand before the camera and studying it with disdain. He remembered taking those when he tested the set up a second time.
“First two sets were good,” Sajid said. “But after that, it’s corrupt.”
The remainder of the memory card, 185 sets of three photos each, were all indeed corrupt. Each photo was little more than an inverted mosaic of dark pixels that matched the color palette of the painting. On some photos entire sections were simply black patches where no image had been recorded. Others captured brown and black static or mirror image pixel-blots like some low resolution Rorschach print.
“That’s not right,” Dan said. “Something’s wrong.”
“It’s what’s on the card,” Sajid shrugged. “User error maybe, I don’t know.”
“I saw it, there was no user error,” Dan said and reached into his pocket, finding the memory card with the video on it.
“Here, try this one,” he said and Dean Robert watched his trembling hands pass it to Sajid, who ejected the first card from the computer and inserted the second with a sigh. It took the computer several seconds to read the contents of the card and in that silence Dan could hear Dean Robert’s teeth grinding.
“Don’t worry Bob,” Dan said with a smile that the old man ignored.
“Okay, here we go,” Sajid mumbled, clicking on the video files. The screen dimmed for a moment and the video began playing. Like a surveillance video, it showed a jerky still frame every half second above audio. In the center sat the painting. At the bottom of the image, in the timeline slider, waveforms depicting recorded sound rose and fell like small mountains.
“Here?” Sajid asked.
“No, keep going.”
Sajid sped through the thumbnails of the video, pausing over a set of audio waveforms rising around an hour in. He slowed the video down again, still centered on that unmoving painting.
“We’re going to bed,” said Linda’s voice off screen. A break of thirteen minutes of silence in the audio waveforms was depicted as a plateau, then another wave rose up and Sajid played that.
“Okay,” said Dan’s recorded voice said off camera. “Good night.”
Dean Robert fidgeted in his seat as Sajid scrubbed through another two hours of video footage, the sound waveforms little more than a flat line, the thumbnail images unchanging.
Then, at 2:25am the thumbnails showed a dramatic change. They depicted darkness, single frames of shadow. The waveforms rose in steady peaks and that reminded Dan of a heart rate monitor.
“There,” Dan said. “Play that.”
“Okay, here we go,” Sajid said and he tapped the space bar that started the video in real time.
Darkness then light, alternating. The painting and the flashbulb. The audio played the rising whine of the flash charging in the darkness. As it hit its crescendo the painting appeared again, bathed in light before receding into shadow.
“Here, watch!” Dan pointed at the screen with crooked fingers.
Onscreen, the cycle continued.
Darkness.
The rising whine of the flash.
A pop of white and the painting staring back.
And darkness again.
The same pattern continued for thirty seconds until another voice emerged behind the sound of the whine.
“Come on,” Dan’s voice mumbled on screen.
“Come on,” he repeated, sitting before the computer.
The pattern continued.
Darkness...
The whine of the flash...
The pop...
Overwhelming brightness...
And the painting: unmoving. Same as it had always been.
The three men watched the cycle continue and in that time no one said a thing.
“Skip ahead,” Dan said, wondering if last night’s timeline had been altered in his head. Thinking back, even less than ten hou
rs later, he couldn’t pinpoint when the painting had moved. Had it been three o’clock? Four? Five? Any of them seemed possible.
Then the computer speakers blared out a horrible screech! Dean Robert’s hands grasped the arms of the office chair. Sajid’s fingers leapt together over his lips as if he were in wide eyed prayer. Only Dan hadn’t flinched.
The screech exploded again, the camera convulsed, and the screen became a mosaic of green and pink pixels. For a moment, the pixels cleared and the camera auto-focused on the grains of the wood floor, first in perfect clarity, then a blur. Back and forth it went for five silent seconds. Then all went black. The audio continued with a third violent screech, but this time it was recognizable. It was human.
It was the sound of a person screaming.
“No no no no no no,” Dan’s voice stuttered over the darkness on screen. “Don’t pu-pu-put me in da-Da-THA-THERE!” it whimpered, rising into hysterics.
“I’M SORRY I’M SORRY I’M SORRY” his voice cackled, seeming to reverse backwards on itself in an instant, like a child who had cried so long his voice had given out. Then it continued again in a loop as he alternated between begging and screaming.
He didn’t want to believe it was his own voice. Sure it sounded the same, perhaps even came from the same lips, but he did not remember saying those words. He couldn’t have. That voice answering his screams was as alien as the words coming out of it.
“Please,” his voice begged from the dark video frame. “Please don’t put me in there.”
“Here in art, denial,” it said.
“My Name is Daniel Rineheart!” he cried out.
“Here, in art, denial!” it spat back, louder.
“My name is Daniel Rineheart!” he cried out again.
“Here! In art! Denial!” it called back.
“MY NAME... IS DANIEL... RINEHEART!” he screamed.
Then it all stopped. Only the rising whine and pop of the flash in the dark video frames. The room was as quiet as a crypt.
“Enough,” Dean Robert said, and air escaped from Sajid’s mouth as if he’d been holding his breath for minutes.
“Wait there’s more--” Dan said.
“Enough, Daniel,” Dean Robert repeated, firm voice cracking as he added a whispered: “Please.”
Dan saw in there his old friend’s eyes, that same sadness he’d seen before, when he’d lied about the affair, when the investigators named him as a person of interest, and when he had pitched this whole idea to the old man not a day ago.
“Enough,” the old man whispered.
Season’s End
THEY FINALLY DIED.
The roses, all six bushes, had succumbed to the canker sometime over the last twenty-four hours. In the afternoon light, the once green stalks now sagged, bare of petals or color, little more than thorny sticks in a bed of mud. Those petals that had held a pastel hue even up until a day ago, now sat in the damp mud, color bleeding out as rot took over. Linda clipped a few branches one at a time, top to bottom, until they were reduced to grey stumps, indistinguishable from the surrounding foliage. There was nothing she could do, nothing to do, but mourn their loss and remove them.
Move on, like Dan had said about the dog. Move on, from eight years of work in the garden, from seedling to bush and now to dead stick.
“Move on,” she said to herself, taking the trowel and working it into the soil around the root ball of the smallest plant.
“Move on, why? Why? Why did you move on?” she said, feeling the earth split beneath that trowel as she forced it deep into the moist, sick soil.
“Why did you die?! Why?! I did everything for you. I did everything you needed, everything I could,” she said, sweat forming on her brow as she felt the roots snapping and breaking beneath the metal. Her hand drove the trowel into the soil, no longer digging but stabbing the poisoned earth that killed her garden.
“It wasn’t enough! It wasn’t enough! It wasn’t enough!” she screamed, burying that metal trowel deep into he ground and then releasing it. She could feel sweat flowing, down her face, and something else dripping, tears perhaps? No matter, she released the trowel and grabbed the base of the dead bush and she felt the thorns dig in through the thick leather gloves and it felt nice, that biting pain in her hands. She let out a scream and as the thorns broke through leather and skin and she pulled the stalk back and forth, feeling the earth and roots beneath it come loose.
“Why did you die?! Why?!” she shouted, and she found strength in that pain, feeling those roots grow weak in the old soil. Those roots, that had born petals she’d nurtured for season after season. Those roots, that’d born colors she’d placed on the windowsill and her father’s grave. Those roots, once strong and alive, now lifeless and limp.
Pulling, screaming, and in an eruption of dirt, she fell backwards, clutching the stalk of the bush, its moist root ball hanging limp at the end of that pathetic stalk. She gasped, looking at the hole in the soil, letting the dead bush fall from her hands, back to that tainted earth. It was done.
She felt, for the first time in years, something. Not a numb void but rather a pain, searing and torn, in the palm of her hands. A glorious hurt beneath the leather gloves, ripped skin and blood and feeling, yes a feeling of life, of something that told her that, yes, she was alive and those roses, like her father, could hurt, even after they’d died. That they would always hurt, but the pain they left behind only meant she was alive and that she had cared.
There, in that dead garden, she realized that despite the tears coming down her eyes, she was not crying, but smiling and laughing.
Linda took a final drag, then twisted the ember cherry of the cigarette, flicking it towards the dense patch of ivy. She wrapped the butt in a tissue, depositing it, along with the remaining pack of cigarettes, into the garbage. She no longer needed them, no longer even wanted them. They were, as they had always been, nothing other than a hollow way to commune with her father. And like the roses, he too, was gone, never to return. All that remained was the lighter, which she placed back into the junk drawer, knowing that in months or years, on one of her cleaning purges, she would find it there and smile at it. Time would relegate it to a happy souvenir, a token from a different life, a memento, and nothing else.
The footsteps came from above, thick and heavy, echoing down into the kitchen. She could almost see the ceiling bending, as if something was running in the very fabric of the house.
“Jessica?” Linda called out as the footsteps faded.
Jessica, she knew, was upstairs but she had remained quiet for most of the early afternoon, content to doodle and have another tea party with her toys. But now she was banging about as if chasing Tommy. But Tommy was off at soccer practice, and the footsteps that rang out upstairs seemed to come from several sets of feet, not one.
Linda took the stairs one at a time, listening as the sounds of footsteps continued to bang out from the upstairs hallway. As she rounded the corner she caught a scent, a distinct whiff, of wet fur and something else, something old and rotted, not unlike the same stench that came off the roses. No, she thought, something deeper. The air smelled of wet earth, pure, like a storm had scoured the interior of the house. Yet outside there was only fog.
Then a distinct chill passed over her, and she had, for a brief moment, the sensation that she wasn’t alone in that upstairs hallway, but rather was surrounded by others. She felt her skin go cold, and her eyes scanned around, but there was nothing. Only her footsteps and the voice coming from the kid’s bedroom down the hall.
She lingered outside the door, listening. From within came a cacophony of voices. Not one but several, all talking over each other like some childish poker game, and beneath it all she heard a clock ticking and the barking of a dog, as if coming from a great distance away. It didn’t sound like a tea party but a full blown event, voices fighting over each other and laughter beneath it. All from a room divided by mere inches of wood.
She ignored the pop of stati
c as she turned the doorknob, driven by a curiosity and a fear that beyond that wood separation lay another horrible discovery: her daughter, face down in the brackish water of the old hot tub, or her father’s revenant, pulling a dirty coin from Jessica’s ear. As the door swung open and her eyes took in the room, she gasped, and her equilibrium fell away.
“My god,” she whispered, unable to find any further words.
Jessica stood in the center of the room, smiling at her mother. In her hand hung the nub of a crayon, worn down to little more than the size of a fingernail. The box of crayons sat on the kid’s table, torn to shreds, splayed open like a dead animal. A pile of worn down crayons, perhaps all sixty-four, sat like discarded cigarettes around the dismembered box.
For a moment, Linda lost all spacial perception and bearings and she felt as if she’d stepped not into a room in her house but another dimension. It was an ocean of color. The walls, the window, the floor, even the ceiling itself, had all been scribbled over in spastic crayon marks. The floor and walls were rendered dark and brown, slashes and circles like old wood. The two walls to Linda’s left and right were covered in jagged sketches of decayed objects; an old bookshelf, a broken mirror, an old sink and what looked like a calendar bearing the year 1952. Opposite Linda, the furthest wall bore an angular grandfather clock. To it’s left, centered, just as it had been in the painting that was downstairs, sat the children’s window, again covered in felt tip marker. Drawn on the glass, and bleeding out from it to the walls in colored tendrils, was a scribbled landscape; a distant sunset over a dead field with a single tree atop a hill.
That window, now covered in marker and crayon, sat more ominous than all the other colors and images. At its center, frozen like a burglar climbing into the house, stood a drawn shadow as large as Linda itself. The dark form was scribbled as if climbing into the children’s bedroom, fingers clutching the windowsill.
Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity Page 26