Painted Black

by Greg Kihn

  He turned to confront whoever it was. Was somebody being playful?

  Frank? Is that you? What the fuck are you doing? He felt something push down on his shoulders, and then a foot in the middle of his back.

  Brian tried to accelerate away, but the hand still gripped his ankle. Was this just horseplay, or something more? Still, Brian wasn’t overly concerned. He knew he could swim his way out of anything.

  Then the downward pushing became more forceful. Frank? What the fuck? Come on, let go!

  Brian fought to get away. But it seemed as if there were an extra pair of hands in the water now.

  This is not funny!

  Brian kicked at the hand and freed himself momentarily. He needed to surface and take a breath of air. Asthma made filling his lungs with oxygen more difficult. Still they pulled him down.

  Brian’s lungs burned. He held his breath even though he felt about to explode. He fought desperately to get away. He couldn’t get a good look at who was pushing him down, but he assumed it was Frank. But this guy seemed heavier than Frank, and more forceful.

  Distortion in the water made it difficult see faces.

  Brian was losing time. He fought to hold his breath. Something in Brian clicked. Suddenly, it all made sense.

  This was what the mirror had been trying to tell him.

  Suddenly, everything went black. The floodlights had gone out. He was suspended in the dark.

  He fought a losing battle against the dark. He became disoriented. Which way was up? Finally, he opened his mouth to cough and water rushed into his lungs. At that moment, he realized his fate.

  He felt his body sink slowly to the bottom of the pool. With his lungs full of water, he lost his natural buoyancy. He heard someone get out of the pool, but it seemed miles away.

  The floodlights came back on. The entire pool area lit up again.

  Is this how it ends? Brian looked down at the scene below. He saw himself floating lifelessly at the bottom of the pool. He watched as his last moments ticked by.

  Claudine Jillian came to him. Eleanor Rigby appeared to him. The embraced him, saying nothing, understanding everything. Looking around, he saw that he was on the other side of the mirror now, too. He saw the mirror in his room. He could see the light coming through it from the other side and looked in, there he saw himself in the pool.

  Brian understood that this was his fate. It always had been. It always would be. To fight it would be to fight nature. Though Jillian and Eleanor had tried to warn him, there was no turning back. He was part of rock’s tragic legacy of death. Every A side like the Stones has a B side like Brian Jones. He couldn’t escape it. He wouldn’t be the first and he certainly wouldn’t be the last.

  Brian accepted it. This is my fate, God’s will, he surmised. Call it what you will. I had a good run.

  He hadn’t noticed, but while he was contemplating his life, everything around him had turned into a great white light. A vortex of intense brightness swirled before him, blinding him and filling him with light at the same time. He was drawn toward it. Its pull was irresistible. He felt like smoke being sucked through a fan.

  Brian Jones let go of life. He let go of the Stones. He let go of his women and his constant need for affection. He let go of the booze and drugs. He let go of trying to prove himself. He let go of fame and fortune. He let go of history and history let go of him. Legend would take over from here.

  You can’t sing the blues unless you pay the dues.

  Skully crouched down and ran along the line of deck chairs next to the pool. Somewhere behind him, Renee was running along in her black tracksuit, blending with the shadows.

  Skully watched Brian, but something was not quite right. Something was different. The cadence of the swimming had changed.

  The smooth steady swimming laps had ceased. There was a rush of water, and a great thrashing underneath the surface.

  Abruptly, the floodlights went out. The pool, the house, and the yard were plunged into darkness. Only light from inside managed to leak out in feeble beams.

  Skully, taken by surprise, looked up in the direction of the light switch, which he knew was just inside the door. He saw a backlit body silhouetted for split second before the door closed. An accomplice in the house?

  Shit! I should have kept an eye on the lights! That’s the oldest trick in the book!

  Suddenly, there seemed to be more bodies in the water. Where had they come from? Skully couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard them splash as they hit the water. In total darkness, Skully had no idea what was happening in the pool. He only heard the sound of water splashing.

  Was it Frank? Skully couldn’t see a thing. From what he saw just before the lights went out, this guy was much more muscular than Frank.

  What the hell was going on here?

  It was pitch-black in the pool. For some reason, he didn’t think he was looking at Frank when the lights went out. It was hard to tell. The glare of the floodlights wiped out all the details when they were on. And when they were off, they made you blind.

  Whoever controlled the light switch controlled the situation. Skully couldn’t tell if the figure he saw at the door was male or female.

  Someone shouted something that Skully couldn’t hear and the lights went back on. The floodlights illuminated the entire pool area again, blinding Skully temporarily. The lights had only been off for a few minutes, but in that few minutes, something had happened.

  When his eyes adjusted, he saw Brian at the bottom of the pool. He was alone and still.

  “What the fuck?” Skully said in a hoarse whisper. “Did you see that? I don’t believe it.”

  “Somebody drowned Brian,” Renee said flatly. “Who was it?”

  Skully and Renee looked at each other in astonishment.

  “Was that Frank?” Skully asked. “I couldn’t see. They turned off the fucking lights!”

  “Who else would it be?”

  Skully said, “Are you kidding me? This is insane. We come all the way out here to kill this guy, and somebody else beats us to it? I’ve never heard of such a thing. Exactly how many people wanted him dead? What are the odds?”

  Skully began to laugh, quietly at first, until it became a phlegmy cough.

  “The fucking nerve of those guys!”

  Renee began to cry, tears trickled down her face, hesitantly at first, then with more gusto. Skully put his arms around her and pulled her close. She was trembling like a wet cat. He handed her a tissue.

  “Why are you crying? Is it because Brian is dead, or is it because you didn’t get to kill him?”

  “I loved him. I earned the right.”

  “The politics of passion never made sense to me.”

  Renee sniffed and said, “I was ready, I was mentally prepared to do it. It took me all this time to get this close. Now it’s been wrenched away from me.”

  Skully heard some noises coming from the house.

  “Get out of sight! They’re coming back!”

  Suddenly, there was shouting at the back door and several people ran out.

  Anna charged out of the house screaming, “There’s something wrong with Brian!”

  Running right behind her was Frank Thorogood, still in his bathing suit but now smoking a cigarette. Anna dove into the water and went directly to Brian’s body in the deep end of the pool and started to pull him up. Frank tossed his cigarette aside and dove in to help her. But Brian was dead weight. In the water, he weighed a ton. They struggled together to get him out of the pool. Anna and Frank rolled him over and started pumping water out of him. Anna gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Brian’s hand reached out and gripped her wrist.

  “He’s alive!” she shouted.

  But Brian’s lips were cold, and try as she may she couldn’t get him to breathe. The tears streamed down her face as she desper
ately tried to breathe life into her man.

  “Come on, Brian! Don’t die! Hang on!”

  But Brian would not take a breath. Frank and Anna were frantically trying everything to get Brian to breathe again, but nothing worked. They kept pounding his chest and pushing lungfuls of air down into his gullet, only to watch it dissipate in his unmoving throat. The hand that had gripped Anna a moment ago now fell limp.

  Janet phoned for an ambulance. Brian wasn’t moving anymore. His body was pale and unresponsive.

  Anna kept trying to revive him. She rolled him on this side and that side, trying to expel water from his lungs. Nothing seemed to have any effect. It was if Brian had already left his body and didn’t want to come back.

  Anna became more desperate. “Come on, Brian! Breathe!”

  She could visualize Brian’s spirit hovering above the scene, looking down as they frantically tried to resuscitate him. She threw her hands into the sky and shouted into the night.

  “Brian! Come back, damn you! It’s not your time yet! Please, come back!”

  Somewhere Brian heard her. Her voice seemed so far away. Come back! Come back … Come back …

  But it was too late. He didn’t want to come back. He’d had it with this world. Brian’s soul hovered above them, watching the drama below, and then he was gone, instantly and permanently gone.

  Clovis was only a half a mile from Cotchford Farm. He couldn’t wait to see the look on Brian’s face when he saw the console for the first time.

  He’s gonna flip!

  Bobby sat in the cab next to him. “I’ve got a bad feeling about Brian. That’s why I came back tonight.”

  “You mean like Erlene’s visions?”

  “No, I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s just a premonition, I guess. He was going to sack Frank and the others today, I thought maybe that might cause trouble. I didn’t like him being alone with Frank and those goons.”

  “Good point. Was he really gonna sack ’em all by himself? That doesn’t sound like Brian.”

  “He told me he had to face up to it.”

  “Maybe he’s beginning to see the light.”

  From somewhere behind him, an ambulance wailed. The flashing lights were a mile behind and coming fast. In a few racing heartbeats, the ambulance was right behind Clovis, blinding him with flashing red lights and a siren that made the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

  The ambulance filled the night with lights and noise. Clovis eased the big truck over to the side of the road so the ambulance could pass. It hurried on ahead, disappearing between the trees, lights flickering on and off.

  “Somebody’s not having a good night,” Clovis said. “I wonder who it is?”

  “God bless ’em, whoever they are,” Bobby whispered.

  As they came around the final turn, Bobby was shocked to see that the ambulance had turned into Cotchford Farm’s driveway. Alarms began going off in his head. Somehow, someway, at that exact moment, Bobby knew who the ambulance was for. He should’ve known it all along. There was only one answer.

  Oh no! Oh please! God no! Don’t let it be that!

  “Uh-oh,” Bobby said. “It’s Cotchford.”

  For a moment, Bobby thought his mind was playing crazy tricks on him. They lumbered the delivery truck to a halt and got out and ran to the house just as they were wheeling Brian out on a gurney. He had a sheet over his head. Bobby knew who it was without looking.

  “Oh, shit!”

  “Is it … ?” Clovis asked.

  Anna nodded slowly, tears streaming down her face.

  The ambulance attendants wheeled Brian across the lawn where the pieces of the white picket fence were still piled up. They slid Brian’s gurney into the ambulance. The lights and siren went back on and in a moment it disappeared back up the driveway. They took Brian’s body and just like that, he was gone. Gone from this earth.

  Brian Jones was dead. Bobby felt numb. Clovis tried to hold back the tears.

  Bobby felt wracked with guilt. Oh God, I left him alone. We were never supposed to leave him alone. Erlene warned us.

  As Bruce Spangler passed Cotchford Farm, he saw the ambulance lights flashing in the driveway. He told the driver to keep going. A chill went down his back.

  If anything happened to Brian, I’m a dead man.

  Renee and Skully were back in London a few hours later, checking out of their hotel. They looked like any young couple now as they chartered a cab for the airport. They passed the newsstand, and the headlines of every paper were the same, in as big a type as possible: brian jones dead! they screamed the shocking banner in every language. brian jones mort! brian jones ist tot! ¡brian jones muertos!

  The cops called it “Death by Misadventure.” No one seemed to know anything remotely close to the truth. The police made it seem like a simple drug and booze overdose. These rock stars did it all the time, didn’t they? There was no mention of Frank Thorogood. According to all reports, Brian simply drowned in his pool. He took too many drugs and passed out in the water. Simple as that.

  Skully said, “The lights go off, he’s alive, the lights go back on, he’s dead. It’s like a cheap paperback murder mystery.”

  “Can you believe it?”

  “I swear, in all my years, I never heard of anything like that. How many people do you think were trying to kill him?”

  “Apparently, more than we thought.”

  Erlene awoke from a nightmare in her bedroom in London. She screamed and the lights went on. Cricket was beside her in a flash.

  “What’s wrong, Hon?”

  “Am I awake? Or is this a dream?”

  “You’re awake.”

  “Can I have a sip of water?”

  Cricket handed her a glass and she sipped. She took a deep breath. Lately, her pregnancy had sparked vivid psychic visions, especially at night. Her dreams were haunted by disturbing images of Brian Jones. She felt linked to Brian through the mirror.

  “We have to call Clovis.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, right now. I think something terrible has happened.”

  Bobby and Clovis spent a sleepless night at Cotchford Farm. In the morning, there were still police sniffing around the garden and pool area. Frank Thorogood was still around, too, making statements to the press and posing for pictures.

  “Why are you still here? Get your shit and get out!” Clovis shouted. “You have no legal right to be here anymore, Frank!”

  Frank glared at them. He said nothing. They went into the house. Frank continued loading moving boxes into his car.

  They huddled together in the center of the room, some quietly sobbing, others brooding, some angry.

  Clovis pulled Bobby aside. He dropped his voice. “If there’s money in this house, we gotta get it before Frank finds it. He’s probably been searching all night right under our noses.”

  “Shit!”

  “Brian never told me where it was. Did he ever tell you?”

  “No. How much do you think?”

  Clovis whispered. “He told me it was over a hundred grand in cash in American dollars, English pounds, and Swiss francs.”

  Dust Bin Bob whistled low. “A hundred? That’s a lot of jack.”

  They looked around and saw several places where Frank had already pried panels loose from the wall. Anywhere he thought there would be room to hide the cash he searched. He wasn’t very careful about putting things back. It was obvious he’d been looking.

  “I thought he was packing all night.”

  As Frank finished loading the last of his personal items into his car, Bobby went after him.

  “See here, sir. Any money you find in this house is the property of Brian Jones’s estate. You must report it to the police.”

  “Piss off,” Frank said.

  Bobby knew there
were a few thousand pounds at the very least in Brian’s bedroom in plain view. In true rock-star style, Brian slept with piles of money around him. If he had to pay for something, he loved to lay in bed and count out the bills in cash. That money magically disappeared after the ambulance left, and Bobby was pretty sure of where it went.

  As soon as Frank drove away, Bobby called the police and suggested they search Frank’s car. They stopped him within ten miles. They didn’t find a huge stash of money; only a few thousand English pounds that Frank claimed were his.

  Frank was the last person to see Brian alive. That officially made him a suspect in the eyes of the police. The cops treated him as such.

  Bobby brought their little group into the studio to view the mirror-gazing photographs he’d shot in Morocco.

  “I thought we should look at these all together.”

  He passed them around. Erlene stared at them all, one by one, until she came to last picture of Brian. Tears welled up in her eyes.

  “You know these visions I’ve been having? I don’t think they’re coming from me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Erlene pointed to her swollen belly. “I think they’re coming from in here.”

  “You think the baby is psychic?”

  She nodded. “I never had such powerful visions before I was pregnant.”

  “But how could the baby know anything about Brian? It hasn’t been born yet.”

  “It knew enough to warn us to never leave him alone. Eleanor Rigby and Claudine Jillian were trying to warn him, too. Somehow they all knew Brian. Somehow they all loved him.”

  Cricket said, “I get the feeling the Brian has loved and been loved by lots of women going back many lifetimes.”

  Erlene grabbed Clovis’s hand. She bent over and gasped.

  “Ahh!” she screamed. Suddenly, the floor beneath her was wet.

  “What is it?”

  “My water just broke!”

  Clovis turned a whiter shade of pale.

  “Oh my God! She’s having the baby!”

  Cricket said, “Get in the car, and we’ll drive you to the hospital!”

  Erlene shook her head. Her words were coming in short phrases now, in between the bursts of breathlessness.