Shadow Over Sea And Sky

by K H Middlemass

  Emily stopped walking and stared at Simone with open confusion. “What?”

  Simone’s smile broadened. “Remember that fancy car that was always parked in the driveway? That’s where Nick is. He’s in the car, waiting for us.”

  Emily blinked and shook her head. “I’m just going to say that that’s both really stupid and a little bit badass. Let’s go.”

  “Oh, come on, don’t act like you don’t love it,” Simone said cheerfully. She was in an alarmingly good mood, all things considered. They started up the walk again, side by side. The car was parked a little further down the way, the engine purring reassuringly. Simone was beside herself with glee, unable to stop herself from rushing down to the car, leaving Emily to catch up.

  When she reached the Bentley and got into the back seat, Emily was greeted with Nick’s exhausted but smiling face.

  “Good to see you’re back, Emily,” he said. “Where’s the reverend? Do you know if he’s okay?”

  And in that moment, Emily’s escape was tainted. She shook her head, a coldness washing over her.

  “He hasn’t come back.”

  A heavy silence filled the small space of the car, and everyone was quiet. The fire was spilling from the manor’s windows. Emily turned around to watch the flames dance.

  Then Nick said, in a steady voice: “Let’s get out of here.”

  He put the Bentley into gear and began the increasingly speedy descent into the town, away from all of this at last.

  Nevertheless, Emily kept her eyes on the burning house until it had disappeared from view.

  ***

  Finally, after what had seemed like years, Emily found herself back in her bedroom. It was still early and when she had gotten home she had found her parents sleeping in the living room, sitting up with their fingers linked together. They must have been waiting up for her. She went to check her mother, moving across the floor almost silently. Victoria was, incredibly, breathing steadily and strong. Her colour was better too, but Emily still couldn’t be sure if her mother was truly in the clear. After all, she didn’t know what was going to happen to herself. There was no sign of the police yet, no sirens piercing the air, so Emily decided that it was better to leave them there and let them sleep. She crept up to her bedroom and closed the door quietly.

  They had abandoned the Bentley in one of the streets of Caldmar town centre and walked back to their respective homes, with Emily and Simone promising to call each other later, after everything settled down. All three of them knew that there were going to be serious repercussions from this, but all of them agreed that they would bear the consequences if they had to. Because in the end, they had done the right thing.

  Then they parted, Nick and Simone walking away hand in hand, their love unshakable, and Emily left to walk home alone.

  And now here she was, sitting on the window seat and wondering what to do.

  So much had happened that her head hurt to think of it. Emily placed her head in her hands and fought back tears of relief and horror. She may have taken Volkov’s head, she may have given him the true death, but he would live on in her memories. Memories that she would not forget.

  Emily lifted her head and looked around her room. She looked at her dresser and her bed, the artwork on the wall above it. She looked at everything, and saw that it was all hers. She was still alive. Volkov and the countess were not.

  And then she knew what she needed to do, and it seemed so simple that she couldn’t believe that she hadn’t thought of it before. She got up and collected some things; a sketchbook, some pencils and an eraser. She gathered them up in her arms and went back to the window seat. Before settling in, Emily decided to open the window and let the cool air in, the air you can’t get anywhere else. She never realised how much she loved the smell of the sea. She could open her windows again and take it into her lungs whenever she wanted. She was free.

  The morning was crisp and cool, and the sea air particularly delicious. The gulls called out to each other, ignorant to the chaos occurring below them. Emily sat with her back pressed up against the wall and settled the sketchbook on her lap. It was her special sketchbook, the one her parents had bought for her, and she opened it up on a fresh, blank page. Picking up her pencil, she tried to sort the array of fantastic, terrible ideas that were flooding into her mind.

  Emily took a deep breath, and began to draw.

  Epilogue

  Caldmar Bay saw the opening of its first art gallery one year after Fairbanks Manor burned to the ground. A small, narrow space located close to the sea, the Van Buren Art Gallery was open from 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday, open to 12pm on Saturdays, and was doing well thanks to Caldmar’s thriving tourism industry and the fervently proud citizens that wanted to show their support in whatever way they could. They had heard about the accident at the Fairbanks house, how Volkov had knocked over a candelabra which had caught on the curtains and set the place ablaze. No bodies were found, and it was officially declared an accident. Emily and her friends had gotten off with it scot free. It all seemed far too convenient, too simple, but them Emily suspected that Volkov’s influence, and her own by extension, the police and everyone else involved was willing to accept this fabrication without question. It was over and done with, just like that, and life went on. Even the car, which they had left abandoned on the street like idiots, was written off when Emily claimed that she’d jumpstarted it into order to escape the house as quickly as possible.

  Two years into her new life Emily Van Buren ran the gallery with a cool and careful managerial style. She had hired Derek Wilson, who had been living with his grandmother while undergoing therapy for the trauma of losing both parents. The body of Howard Wilson was never recovered. It was decided that he had committed suicide out of grief, perhaps wandered out onto the cliffs and gotten lost. The police talked about him like he was a missing pet, an old dog that had slunk off to die alone.

  She had taken him on for the Saturday shift, teaching him in the ways of criticism and artistic intent, and to his credit he was a fast learner. He was a good-looking young man, enthusiastic and eager to please, and her customers were disarmed by it on an amusingly frequent basis. It seemed to cheer him, working at the gallery, and Emily was glad. She could see the sadness in his eyes and could hardly bear it. She couldn’t imagine what he was going through, but she intended to help him anyway, and would keep helping him for as long as he needed her.

  Simone Dawson was the gallery’s secretary, for all intents and purposes. She didn’t come in that much, preferring to sleep in most mornings with her new husband Nick, who oversaw the gallery’s minimal marketing budget. He had proposed to Simone when they’d gotten back to her house that night two years ago. After a while, the three of them agreed to go into business together.

  Simone not showing up most of the time was okay because it never got busy until about lunchtime, if it got busy at all. Emily spent her days walking around the gallery and loitering behind the reception desk, sitting in Simone’s office chair and writing silly little stories on the computer or sketching on the many notepads stored in the chest. People would come in, look around and either buy something or walk out empty handed; sometimes she drew them in little cartoons and gave them to the ones that bought something. More often than not, people bought something at Van Buren Art Gallery. The paintings were not cheap, but they were beginning to develop a following from collectors from all over the world. Van Buren was becoming a name.

  The paintings were all by Emily, original Van Burens. She had tried to find other artists in Caldmar, but no one came forward when she enquired. She had to stock the gallery with her own work, all a variant on the same theme. The paintings that had made her famous.

  Emily hadn’t meant for the paintings to take off. She had carried out the project to try and deal with her feelings, the depression that had settled over her after the deed was done. When she felt like doing nothing, she tried to do something. It made sense to create, to pour out thos
e bad feelings into her art, to make something great from something terrible and show the beauty of ugliness.

  She had recreated Volkov many times over, a constant stream of portrayals in radically different styles; his assault on her in her bedroom, him forcing her to choose a victim, Emily painting him, the countess, on and on it went. It attracted attention from young people with a morbid outlook on life, and soon she found herself in magazines and newspapers, looking startled and uncomfortable in all the photographs they splashed across the pages. She had painted the works in anger, throwing her frustrations into her brush strokes, and apparently there were plenty of people that identified with that anger. It had become a series, one that Emily decided to entitle, simply, Vampire.

  Emily Van Buren became a success by accident, but she proved to be a good businesswoman when it came to the gallery and the shows, which were infrequent but moderately popular. She lived in comfort, no longer in her parents’ home, and had everything she needed. It didn’t matter that her work contradicted the official story; the beautiful thing was that no one really believed that she believed in vampires. Emily had disclosed that the accident had occurred when Volkov attacked her, and that he’d been harassing her for a while and had threatened to kill her family if she didn’t sleep with him, that he’d already killed someone so I’d know that he was serious. She had escaped the fire alone; at least, that’s what she told the police, and the media that had surrounded her for weeks afterwards. Now everybody was clamouring for a Van Buren original.

  Every day at 6pm, except for Sundays, Emily locked up the gallery and went back to her flat. She had a routine now, one that she could set her watch by. She would go back to her flat, a pleasantly airy space above one of the many boutiques in Caldmar that also served as her studio. Once home, she would do what she always did. She would cook dinner for one, a perpetually depressing act which didn’t really involve much cooking. Emily preferred her food raw these days, or just raw enough to be acceptable when her parents visited. She had dinner with them once a week, and at the last she had noticed that her mother now took her meat the same way. The blood would ooze from the beef onto their plates, forming bright red puddles that soaked into the potatoes and the limp green vegetables. The blood made the other foods tolerable. Emily felt sorry for her father, having to have dinner with people who don’t want to eat week after week.

  And sunlight, that was a problem. When the sky was clear, Emily found herself drained of energy when she went outside. It didn’t hurt, but she was so tired that she could barely walk. On overcast days, it was more bearable. Emily didn’t know what she was, exactly, but in a way she glad that she was ignorant to what was likely to be a horrible fact. She could live with it, just about, so she remained silent. Her mother did the same. They shared in their horrible secrets together, but never spoke of it.

  Emily’s father, meanwhile, had handled the situation with his typical quiet strength. He had supported his daughter through her journey and had done his very best to protect her. It pained Emily to know that her father cared so deeply; she couldn’t stand to break his heart.

  After dinner, she’d do a bit of reading or play a video game, something to distract her for a couple of hours. Sometimes she’d take a bath or shower, though she never seemed to be able to feel truly clean these days no matter how hard she scrubbed at her skin. As an artist, it wasn’t in her nature to be spic and span all the time; you had to be okay with getting dirty. For the most part, Emily was fine with that. But this wasn’t the kind of dirt that you could simply wash away. It was indelible, impossible to remove. You just couldn’t see it.

  At about 9pm, Emily would put on some music and finally go to work, attacking her canvas like a warrior fighting to protect her king: two hours a day, every day. She was going to have to rent out storage space soon. Her whole flat was filled with paintings. She would exhaust herself in these sessions, but she slept fitfully. She rarely went to bed before midnight anymore. She remembered that she had a new showing scheduled soon, and groaned inwardly. Traipsing through her flat and into her room, she pulled off her clothes and dropped them where she stood.

  Emily had a double bed, because she enjoyed the space, and like in her bedroom at her parents’ house she had painted the wall behind it. But this time, she painted the house that used to stand on the hill that she used to see from the window at her parents’ house. All black, an inky silhouette with white spaces for windows and the door. There were little figures running down the hill, each painted with distinctive features. One had long curly hair like Emily, the other short and spiky like Simone’s. Nick was distinguished by his leather jacket and boots, because his hair was cut so close to the head.

  Volkov and the countess had a special place on the roof of the house, forever unable to get inside just as the painted people running would never make it to the town waiting for them, twinkling prettily at the bottom of the hill.

  It didn’t matter. Volkov and the countess were trapped, and Emily and her friends were free.

  Before she went to bed, Emily pulled on an old white shirt, grabbed a paintbrush and made a quick mix up of paints, putting blobs of yellow, red and the newly mixed orange paint on the first palette she could find. With quick, decisive strokes Emily painted flames around the house, around the monsters on the roof, adding new colours, creating warmth where there was none. The autumnal shades were bright against the blackness of the house, the flames painted in the shape of a tulip. Despite the destruction it represented, it was quite beautiful. Perhaps it would warm her while she slept beneath it.

  Satisfied, she opened her windows – confident that it was safe to do so - and got into bed. Sleep came quickly for her these days whether she wanted it to or not, and she sank into the pillows and slipped away.

  She did not expect her sleep to go undisturbed. The dreams were like clockwork: once a night, every night since the house had burned down. It was always the same dream. Emily would be standing in the smoking room of Fairbanks Manor, the portrait of Volkov that was destroyed in the fire standing before her on the easel. Then Volkov would step out of the painting, morphing into a whole person that was separate from the easel, and begin walking towards her, always saying the same thing in that low, seductive voice.

  “You are mine, you are mine, and you will always be mine!”

  And Emily would try to move, but she never could. Her body was locked with fear. Eventually, Volkov would reach for her and smile, his brows thick and black, eyes glowing. He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand and let it drift down along her collarbone. She shivered, but that was all she did. Volkov put his lips to her throat, his hand clinging at the back of her head, and she felt the fangs graze the skin.

  Emily always woke up before she was bitten. But as she lay there, night after night, panting and sweating from the fright and frantically checking her teeth to see if the pointed tips, which had retreated after she had slain Volkov, had become sharp and merciless once again. She often thought back to the time Volkov violated her, and wept quietly in the darkness. These days she wasn’t crying as much, which she supposed must be a good thing, but she still felt the ache now and then. It was not something that she would ever forget.

  Emily tried to stay awake every night, fighting off sleep, and wondered how long it would be before the dream won out. It was something that lurked in the back of her mind all the time, but it was at its strongest in the night, almost unbearable. She was tortured by her own guilt and fear; though she had cut his head off, Volkov appeared to her in her dreams with it firmly on his shoulders. She was afraid that he would come back, somehow. She agonised over it for hours.

  And then, Emily thought that the dream would make a good painting, the idea beginning to take shape in her mind. There, in the dark, she resolved to get to work on it tomorrow. Thinking this sent her back to sleep. And while Emily slept, a mist rolled in from the sea. The black waves were calm, softly lapping against the rocks. The moon was high, a white pendant shi
ning in the inky darkness, bathing the world in its soft, silver light. Emily slept, and knew that she would be free from the dream.

  One day, she would be free.