Echoes of Darkness

by Rob Smales

  Julie touched her daughter’s soft hair, then kissed the top of her head. “Can you put them away long enough to have breakfast, though?” She twitched the picture off the table by a pinched corner. “I’ll put this on the fridge for now, okay? Keep it safe until Uncle Connor can see it.”

  “Okay, Mommy.”

  Pearl began to gather the scattered crayons together as Julie tucked the picture under a pair of refrigerator magnets, Dora the Explorer and her friend Boots the monkey holding the paper securely by the corners.

  After her shower, Julie returned to the kitchen for her second surprise of the morning.

  “Where did he come from?”

  Pearl looked up from where she knelt, hands buried in thick, golden fur. The dog, a retriever, Julie thought, merely wagged his tail, thoroughly enjoying the little fingers scratching beneath his jaw. “He was crying at the front door,” said Pearl. “Can we keep him? Can we, Mommy? Please?”

  Unease began to seep through Julie’s surprise. “Oh, honey, I don’t know. He must belong to someone.”

  “He doesn’t have a collar.” Pearl’s voice held a wheedling lilt. “If he doesn’t have a collar, he can’t belong to anybody, right?”

  “Now, that’s not necessarily true . . .”

  Julie’s gaze was drawn to the refrigerator door, and the crayon sketch hanging there. Her eyes flicked from the drawing to the scene in the kitchen, then back. Even with the addition of her daughter clinging to their visitor’s neck, the resemblance between the two was obvious, right down to the expanse of green floor.

  Christ, she thought, that’s almost creepy.

  “Are you sure you don’t know where this guy came from?” she said, thinking Pearl may have seen the dog in a neighbor’s yard, and incorporated it into the drawing for her uncle.

  “The porch.”

  “No, honey, I mean do you know who he belongs to?”

  “He doesn’t have a collar, Mommy. He doesn’t belong to anybody.”

  “No, honey, I mean . . . what’s this?”

  Distracted by the dog, she hadn’t seen the crayon set, open and scattered about the table again, another drawing lying haphazardly beneath the mess.

  “What did you do, pull that out again as soon as I went to take a shower?”

  “Huh?”

  Focused on the retriever, Pearl wasn’t really listening. Julie looked at the dog closely for the first time. He appeared well nourished, and clean, and was obviously used to children: definitely someone’s family pet. It occurred to her that, as well cared-for as he looked, no one had as yet vouched for his house training. She looked out the window to check that the back gate was closed and saw the yard was secure.

  “Why don’t you take him out into the backyard while we figure out what to do with him.”

  “Okay.”

  Julie held the door while Pearl led her new charge out to the grass, then turned to packing away the crayons again. Rather than putting them back in Pearl’s room, where they would be a constant temptation, she slipped the wooden box up on the refrigerator, tucked out of sight, toward the back. She scooped the new drawing from the table and stuck it on the fridge door, next to the dog.

  She looked closely at the pooch in the sketch.

  Wow, that really does look like that dog in the yard, she thought. That is the strangest coincidence!

  She glanced at the new picture, some kind of big green bird with a red forehead and a big, black, threatening-looking beak, and shook her head with a smile. Pearl was really going to some colorful lengths to impress her uncle. Wherever he was. She turned toward the window over the sink, the one overlooking the yard, intending to check on Pearl and Dog—and froze.

  Perched on the windowsill, head twisted sideways to better stare in at her with one round, black eye, was a big, green bird. Almost a foot high, from its great black talons to the scarlet splotch on the crest of its head, the bird stood motionless, nothing but that dark eye twitching as it scanned the kitchen, the hooked, black beak—nearly as long as Julie’s finger—actually touching the glass.

  Julie whirled to look at the drawing on the fridge: big green bird, red splotch, hooked black beak. She spun back to the window: big green bird, red splotch, hooked black beak.

  That’s impossible!

  Without thinking, Julie lunged toward the window, wanting a closer look at this strange, new visitor. But the bird at the window was not a drawing, and her sudden motion sparked an explosive flurry of feathers, and the window was empty when she arrived. She touched the glass, the pad of her middle finger coming to rest on the spot where the great beak had so recently rested.

  “What the hell is goi—”

  The door burst open beside her, nearly stopping her heart as a shrieking six-year-old thundered into the house. “My bird! Did you see my bird? Mommy, I saw my bird!”

  “Honey,” Julie began, a little dazed from seeing the bird herself, but an abrupt commotion from the front hall startled her into silence. Sharp knocking rapidly progressed to frantic pounding, and Julie peered into the front hall to see the solid oak front door actually shuddering in its frame. She reached for the phone, thinking a 9-1-1 call might be in order, when a shout came from the front porch in a voice she recognized.

  “Julie? Julie, are you in there? Pearl, honey? For Christ’s sake, is anybody home?”

  Swinging away from the phone, Julie marched down the hall, flipped open the deadbolt, and flung the door open, revealing a tall man in travel-stained khakis, a worn leather jacket, and a slightly ridiculous wide-brimmed fedora, which she knew—knew—he thought made him look like Harrison Ford. She opened her mouth to speak, but from behind her came yet another shriek, adding to the confusion roiling in her head.

  “Uncle Connor!”

  Julie was nearly bowled over as Pearl pushed past her, cannoning into the tall man’s legs, wrapping herself about one of them in a hug worthy of the most amorous of canines. A hand reached to pat the child’s back, but the tall man’s focus was entirely on Julie, staring at her with intense, fear-stricken eyes.

  “Has it arrived?” he said. “Did I beat it here? Did the box get here yet?”

  Catching her balance, Julie ignored the tall man’s questions, instead finally finishing one of her own.

  “Connor, just what the hell is going on?”

  “I was trying to get here before the damn box even arrived,” said Connor, pacing about Danny’s den, ignoring Julie’s instruction to take a chair. Julie perched on the edge of Danny’s desk, arms folded over her chest, counterpoint to Connor’s wildly swinging limbs. It had taken them over a half hour to get Pearl to leave her uncle alone and go in her room to play. Julie finally had to invoke the words, “We have some grown-up stuff to discuss,” and Pearl unhappily tottered toward her room, allowing the adults to retire to the den, closing the door for privacy.

  “Well, you didn’t make it,” said Julie. “Missed it by a day, actually. Just like you missed your own brother’s funeral. What the hell were you—”

  “Where are they? In her room? Does she have them now?” He was already moving toward the door, with the obvious intention of fetching the box. “Has she used them? The crayons? Has she draw—”

  “They’re on top of the refrigerator for safekeeping, and I’m not answering another damn thing until you tell me where the hell you’ve been for the past ten months, Con!” Her shout brought him up short, surprise sloughing the fear and intensity from his features for a moment. “You said you’d be back soon, then left for almost a year. Danny was circling the drain, and you ran off on one of your stupid treasure hunts. I needed you. Pearl needed you. And Danny was asking for you, there at the end.”

  Connor’s hands were up, patting the air between them in a placating gesture, words still tumbling from him in a torrent.

  “I know. You’re right. I know. I was horrified when I got your letters—the mail didn’t reach me where I was, and I got a whole bunch all at once when I got back to the city. By th
e time I was reading them, Danny was dead, and I wasn’t going to make it back in time. I haven’t had a cell phone in months, and when I realized what was happening I put everything I had into a plane ticket home, and—look, I’m sorry, Julie, sorrier than I can say, but we really need to focus on fixing what’s going on here and now, okay?”

  “That’s what I’ve been asking.” Her frustration was palpable. “What the hell is going on, Connor? Explain. Now.”

  The last two words were said in the same tone she’d used on the night of the funeral reception, and now, as then, they brooked no hesitation or rebuttal.

  “I went to China,” said Connor.

  “China.”

  “Yes. It occurred to me that the brush was the answer, so I had to—”

  “What brush?”

  “Ma Liang’s paintbrush. Do you know the legend of Ma Liang and his magic paintbrush?”

  She sighed. “No.”

  Connor took a breath, gathering his thoughts. “There’s a folktale in China, about a young man named Ma Liang who acquired a magic paintbrush. How doesn’t matter. But according to the legend, whatever Ma Liang painted with the brush would come true: animals came to life, food could be eaten, he even created an island in the sea. Other people tried to use the brush, but it would only work for Ma Liang.”

  “What does this fable have to do with—” Julie began, but Connor’s voice rose, and did not stop.

  “‘Wow,’ I thought, ‘if only someone else had ever been able to use the brush, that would be just the thing to save Danny: paint him healthy, and he’d be healthy.’ It was the way the brush worked for Ma Liang, and no one else—that bugged me. So I did some research, made some phone calls, and looked into some databases I wasn’t supposed to. I managed to get a look at the most accurate renditions of the legend—not the watered down, Americanized version you might be familiar with—and I came up with a theory.”

  “I told you, I’m not fam—”

  “I discovered that while the Americanized versions all referred to Ma Liang as a young man, the ancient scrolls mention him as a youth. As in a boy. And what’s the biggest difference between children and adults?”

  “Connor . . .”

  “That’s right! Belief! Kids believe in everything! Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny . . . just everything! Grown-ups don’t believe in anything. You have to prove things to us. Even when we want to believe in something—God, Satan, infomercials—there’s a little part of us that’s holding back, hoping not to be disappointed, because, like it or not, we don’t believe. Not like children do, wholeheartedly and without reservation. And if belief was a factor in the magic . . . I went back through the records, looking for everyone who might have given Ma Liang’s paintbrush a try: adults, every one.

  “It needed to be a child. All I had to do was find the brush and get it back here for Pearl, and she could save her father. It was perfect! It . . . just took longer than I expected.”

  “No shit?”

  “I—look, I finally tracked the brush to a little village in China, a tiny place a million miles from nowhere. Of course they didn’t want to give it to me, so that . . . slowed the process again.”

  “What, you mean they didn’t want to just hand over this miracle? Even if it was all bullshit, if it had any historical value at all—how did you talk them into it, anyway?”

  Connor looked at the floor. “I, uh . . . I didn’t.”

  “What do you mean you didn—” her arms came off her chest, practically levitating to her feet as realization came. “Oh my God. You didn’t! You stole the damn thing?”

  “It was the only way I was going to get it out of there. But it took me a while to figure out how to do it—even in a small village, they have the law, and it’s not like I’m a master criminal or anything.”

  “Master bonehead is more like it! What the hell did you do?”

  “It’s a long story, and we don’t have time. I got the brush out of there, and mailed it to you; let’s leave it at that.”

  “Mailed it to us? Well then this is your lucky day, Connor. We never got a brush. All we got were some crayons—they’re these gorgeous foreign crayons and all, and it’s a terrific box, but no brush. Sorry.”

  “That was it. That was the brush.”

  “I just told you—”

  “I had to get the thing out of the temple, then the village, then the region . . . look, when the thing went missing, don’t you think they’d search anyone who stood out? I was the only white man in the village. You want to talk about a sore thumb? I had to disguise the brush, or alter it somehow. Figuring that out was part of what took so long. Then I had to have the box made. See, when I found the brush it was nothing but a handle; the bristles—probably hair from some animal—had long since turned to dust. But the wooden handle was pristine, not rotted or desiccated at all. They claimed this thing was over a thousand years old, but it looked like it had just come from the factory.”

  “It probably had,” said Julie. “I remember that time—”

  Connor waved a hand. “Just listen. The magic of the brush was in the handle, not the bristles, and when I got it out of the temple, I needed to change it to something they’d not recognize. You understand? And making paper isn’t really that hard, once you have some pulp to work with, so I ground up the handle—”

  “You what?”

  “Listen! I ground up the handle and mixed it with some other pulp and made a sheet of paper out of it. I was pretty sure the magic was intact, because, well, you’ve seen the crayons, right?”

  Julie remembered colors shimmering along paper tubes, and suddenly Connor didn’t seem quite as silly as he had a minute ago. She nodded.

  “I used the paper to make new wrappers for some Crayolas I’d bought for Pearl, and sent the whole thing back here for her. The magic of the handle flowed through the bristles, so I figured the magic of the wrappers would flow through the wax . . . and I was right.”

  He suddenly straightened, looking about.

  “Has Pearl drawn anything yet? Anything at all?”

  Julie’s mouth had suddenly gone dry. “A dog. This morning she drew a dog. It’s on the fridge.”

  “And did anything happen?”

  She brought him to the window: pressed close to the glass, looking at a sharp angle, they could see a good slice of the backyard. As they watched, the golden retriever wandered through their field of view.

  “He showed up less than an hour later,” she said. “I thought he was just from a neighbor’s house, but now—”

  They both flinched as, with a flapping tumult, a foot-tall green parrot landed on the sill, black claws scrabbling for a grip, neck twisting to peer in at them with one huge eye.

  “Oh, yeah.” Julie sounded flat, and felt dazed. “She drew a bird, too.” She pointed to their finely feathered Peeping Tom. “That one, I guess.”

  “Not exactly,” said Connor, leaning in slowly, so as not to spook the parrot. “Look at his foot. See that band?”

  Julie did look, and saw a cuff about the bird’s left ankle, the metal dull from weather and wear.

  “What’s that?”

  “That,” said Connor, straightening, “is an ID tag, probably from a pet store or zoo. Given the size of that parrot, I’m betting a zoo. And you were right: Pearl’s new dog probably did escape from a neighbor somewhere. Has she drawn anything else?”

  “No, that’s it—and the crayons are hidden on top of the refrigerator, like I said. What do you mean ‘it’s from a zoo’? I thought the crayons were magic?”

  “Not the crayons. Their wrappers. And I might have done something I hadn’t counted on, here. Maybe in changing the shape of the item, I changed the magic. Maybe it’s that each crayon only has one sixty-fifth of the power of the handle. I don’t know. But it . . . well, the crayons don’t work exactly like I thought.

  “Two days after I got the brush from the temple, I mailed the crayons out to you, but I had just a touch too much paper. I needed s
ixty-five crayons, but there were only sixty-four in the box. I had just enough paper left to wrap around a pencil and give it to a local street kid to try out for me. He—look, I don’t have time to go over everything right now, but the boy wanted sweets to rain from the sky, so he drew that. Later that day, a truck lost its brakes and shot off the road. It smashed straight through the front window of a local sweet shop. The driver, shop owner, and two customers were killed, but the impact threw a bunch of the shop’s stock into the air, and for a few seconds, it rained sweets in the street.”

  Julie’s hand covered her mouth. “Oh my God.”

  “There were other things that happened before I got the pencil away from the boy, but they were all like that. Instead of creating things from scratch, like the legends say Ma Liang did, the pencil was making things come true, but using what was available to do it. It was just after that I got your final letter.”

  Connor finally took the seat Julie had directed him to when they’d come into the den. “When I ran off to China, I was thinking that all Pearl had to do was draw her dad looking healthy, you know? In the pink. The magic would have taken over, and Danny would have been cured. Now, though, he’s dead, not sick. And Pearl’s not some fantastic artist: she’s six. She was good enough to hook a neighborhood dog, and a bird from the zoo, but if she drew a picture of her father now, I think—”

  “Jesus Christ!” Julie felt sick. “Yesterday, Pearl was planning to draw you something special with her special crayons. She couldn’t make up her mind. Had a whole list. But on that list were a dog, and a bird—and her father. It might have been him riding a unicorn, but it was going to be Danny.” Part of her wanted to shout that this was crazy, that this couldn’t be happening, but, then, there was that bird . . .

  Connor puffed out air. “Wow. Are you sure the crayons are somewhere safe?”

  “She doesn’t know they’re on top of the fridge, but you’re right, we should put them somewhere safer.” She tapped a fingertip to the desk blotter. “This desk locks. Let’s put them in here, until we figure out what to do.”