The Canvas Thief

by P. Kirby

“I’m tired, Maya.” His words were punctuated by a definite weariness. “Of this life, half-life. I want to go home, to EverVerse.”

  “Ever-what?”

  He answered her question with a question. “Were Adam Sayres and I the only people you imagined when you were a kid?”

  “Adam and I?” Good God, he thinks he’s Benjamin Black.

  “Well, no. I believed there was a troll that lived in my closet. And a tiny fairy that lived in the big chitalpa tree in the backyard.” Maya smiled. “I thought she slept in the flowers.”

  “And what happened to them, the fairy and the troll?”

  Maya frowned. “What ‘happened’ to them? Nothing. They—were imaginary. Just like Benjamin and Adam.”

  “Except you started to draw Adam and…Benjamin. And you never stopped. You kept at it until you got it right.”

  Maya gulped. How did he know all this?

  “The power of a child’s belief is so strong that it gives his or her imaginary people a kind of life. These people call themselves the UnReal.” He paused, eyes on Maya. “For a time, until the child loses interest in them, the UnReal live in a place called NeoVerse, keeping to the roles and personalities defined by the child.”

  He’s insane. Maya eyed the fire poker in his hand.

  “When the child moves on to things that are less childish, the UnReal Fade from NeoVerse and move on to EverVerse.” His shoulders rose with a deep breath and his eyes gleamed with a fanatical light. “And in EverVerse, the UnReal can have a true life, beyond the confines of the child’s imagination.” He met her eyes. “A true life and a family.

  “I want to go to EverVerse,” he said, shoulders slumping, weariness pouring from his eyes.

  He’s a lunatic. A gorgeous lunatic, but a lunatic just the same.

  Since the lunatic held a potentially lethal fireplace implement, she humored him. “I still don’t understand what this has to do with my drawings.”

  “Your art brought me to the Real, the world you know. Until everything with my image is destroyed, I’m stuck here. I can’t Fade to EverVerse.”

  “That’s crazy,” she blurted. “If that were true, the world would be full of fairies and trolls, knights in shining armor and things that go bump in the night. Most children have imaginary friends or monsters that live under the bed.”

  “There are ‘things that go bump in the night,’ but they aren’t the product of children’s imaginations.” He shrugged. “But that’s beside the point. Very few UnReal are brought to the Real because it takes a person with extraordinary abilities to make them Real. Someone like you.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Maya said. She sat up and swung her legs, putting her feet on the floor. Bloodstain notwithstanding, nothing felt wrong. If he had forced himself on her while she was out, wouldn’t she be a little sore?

  “I guess you could take it that way.” One of his eyebrows arched upward. “The drawings, Maya. Get them, now.”

  Maya’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t give me orders.”

  His shoulders rose and fell with the suggestion of a sigh. “You want to get rid of me? Burn the drawings, burn everything with my image, and you will. Forever.”

  “No.” She took a breath, willing her legs to cooperate, and stood. “You say you’re not a liar.” Back straight, she faced him, trying to look imposing, a difficult matter in pink flannel pajamas. “I don’t think you’re a killer, either.” His fingers tightened around the fireplace poker and she wondered if she was making a mistake. “You didn’t hurt Ms. Kalman.”

  “Your neighbor? She had me outgunned.” There was no emotion in his voice, but Maya thought she detected a hint of humor around his mouth.

  “Look, there has to be some other way to get you back to NeverNever Land—”

  “EverVerse.”

  “Whatever. You’re talking about artwork that’s important to me. I can’t just pitch it on the fire on a whim.”

  “This is no whim.”

  “There has to be an alternative to destroying my work. Have you—”

  “There is no alternative. Don’t you think I’ve tried?” He stood and stabbed at a burning log with the poker.

  Maya closed the distance between them, until she was just a few feet away. “Maybe I can figure something out?”

  “What the hell are you going to do? You don’t even believe me.” He rounded on her, poker in his hand.

  Cursing herself for naïveté, Maya cringed and took a step back.

  Confusion tightened his handsome features and then he looked down at his hands. With a loud sigh, he set the poker on the banco.

  Maya gulped. “Have you checked the, um, internet? Everything’s on the internet.”

  His mouth twitched as though trying to smile but unable to sort out the correct muscles. “Everything is on the internet…except the Lore of the Formed.”

  “The Formed?”

  “People like me, imagination made real.”

  “Oh,” she said. The silence hung heavy between them as she contemplated her next words. “Give me a month. If I haven’t figure out a solution, I’ll destroy the drawings of Benjamin Black myself.” In the meantime, I’ll get an alarm system. And a big, vicious dog.

  “A month is too long. A week.”

  Maya straightened, her mouth set in a belligerent line. “A month.”

  “Two weeks. That’s final.”

  “That’s ‘final’? You can’t—”

  “Maya, I’m a desperate man.” His long legs folded and he sat heavily on the banco. “If I can do this with your cooperation, I will, but…” The word hung in the air.

  Not even the slightest trace of emotion touched his face. Smooth skin, no frown or smile lines. All the emotion his face seemed incapable of expressing shone from his eyes. Maya opened her mouth, but her retort caught in her throat. With the same intensity as Adam Richards, he pummeled her with a combination of desperation and hope.

  And she felt a kind of pity.

  He’s nuts, Maya. He broke into your house and threatened you at knifepoint. He’s wanted by the ATF. You can’t possibly take him seriously.

  Except there was his uncanny resemblance to Benjamin Black. She studied him, her mind on Adam Richards.

  “What about Adam Sayres?” she asked. “Is he…real?”

  “Formed. Yeah.” He stared at his feet.

  “Why isn’t he demanding that I destroy my work?”

  “He doesn’t want to go to EverVerse. He likes it here.” He looked up. “Two weeks, Maya. I’ll give you two weeks.”

  “Fine.” In two weeks she should be able to figure out some way to persuade him he wasn’t Benjamin Black. Because that just wasn’t possible, right? He couldn’t really be a comic book character come to life.

  He looked away, shoulders slumping and attention now on her front door. Yeah, she thought. It’s time you got the hell out of my house. Except she said nothing, transfixed by his resemblance to Benjamin Black. Behind him, the fire bounced along the top of a log. One bright flame shimmered on the banco next to his right hand.

  “Not fire,” Maya said, voicing her thoughts aloud, “a reflection on…blood. You’re bleeding.”

  He looked at her and then followed her gaze down. He lifted his arm, wincing as blood dripped from his hand into the small red pool. His attention turned abruptly from his dripping hand to the floor. There were several dark spots on the saltillo floor.

  He shot a quick glance at her. “Sorry,” he said, sounding like a child who’d spilled his milk. “You, uh, pack quite a wallop.”

  “I did that?” she asked, simultaneously pleased and horrified.

  “Not you, exactly. Your neighbor shot me in the shoulder. You just reopened the wound.”

  He stood, unfolding to his full height. Maya looked up at him realizing that, first, he was tall, and second, she was standing just a few feet away from her attacker. This close, she could see the blood that had seeped from his collar, at the base of his neck.


  She took a step back, finding that her legs were wobbly with the sudden absence of adrenaline. Truthfully, her body’s response mirrored her mind’s. He didn’t seem much of a threat at this point, standing before her, looking vaguely sheepish, his bloodied arm folded and clutched close. In fact his demeanor had turned downright vulnerable, and she felt a perverse desire to get the first-aid kit and patch him up.

  “Don’t you have somewhere else to bleed?” she snapped.

  His response was a quick nod, two graceful steps around the blood on the floor, and a few long strides that took him to her door and out into the night. Maya followed a minute later, turning the door latch to engage the deadbolt. The lock couldn’t keep out beautiful lunatics who possessed an amazing resemblance to fictional characters, but it worked well against the rest of Santa Fe’s criminal element.

  Maya headed for her bedroom, where she locked the door—fat lot of good that would do—picked up her purse and pulled out Adam Richards’s business card. She scooped her cell phone off the dresser and punched in the first six digits. She paused, thumb poised over the seventh number.

  Two men, both bearing a startling resemblance to comic book characters few people had ever seen, appeared in her life on the same day. What are the odds? And Adam Richards? What had looked like a freakish coincidence now seemed less so in light of her encounter with the thief. She bit her tongue. Ouch. Still awake. She sighed, wishing she could measure her own sanity.

  I should call the cops. Except that would mean telling the police everything the thief had told her. “They’ll probably haul me down to the station for a drug test.”

  The full weight of everything that had happened fell on her eyelids and suddenly all she wanted was the sweet oblivion of sleep.

  Against her better judgment, Maya switched off the phone. Tomorrow she’d call and confirm that Agent Adam Richards was who he claimed to be. Then she’d make a decision what to do about Benjamin Black’s look-alike.

  Chapter Five

  Maya saw her first demon when she was seven. Not that she’d called it that. Demon was a word she would learn a few years later.

  “Mama, look!” Seven-year-old Maya tugged on her mother’s pants. They had just reached the top of the escalator when Maya saw it.

  “What? Where?” her brother, Orson, asked. Two years younger than her, he hated to be left out.

  Maya’s mother smiled but stayed on task in the determined manner of all mothers. She guided her two children safely off the escalator before looking in the direction Maya pointed.

  Maya’s mother saw a man. Though the man was unusually tall, at least six and a half feet, there was nothing extraordinary about him. His clothes were casual but crisp and his blond hair was short and neat.

  “What?” Orson repeated, his voice taking on the pitch of an impending tantrum.

  “Look at the monster. The pretty monster,” Maya said, pointing at the man.

  “Maya!” her mother said. Maya’s shrill little-girl voice had carried across the mall and the man turned to look at them. Her mother forced an apologetic smile at the man.

  “Monster? Where?” Orson’s volume matched his sister’s. “I wanna see.”

  “Shhh.” Mrs. Stephenson ushered her children away from the man and toward the mall exit.

  “Mama,” Maya said. “Did you see the blue-faced monster?”

  “Monster?” Orson’s cry was squelched by his mother’s gentle hand on his mouth.

  Mrs. Stephenson stared at her daughter. “That was just a man, Maya. No monster. Do you understand? No monster.”

  Surprised by the vehemence in her mother’s voice, Maya took a step backward. “But—”

  “No, Maya. You must not speak of such things.” With that, her mother took her hand and towed her and Orson out of the mall.

  Maya followed, not entirely resisting, but leaning back against her mother’s grasp with just enough force to show her displeasure.

  She had seen a monster. Though he was dressed in ordinary clothing, the “man” had milky blue skin the color of a hazy sky, silvery white hair and golden eyes. Two small beige horns jutted from his forehead. As monsters went, he was more beautiful than scary, but Maya’s limited vocabulary could find no more fitting word than monster.

  As the years went by, Maya would see more people who were something more. Short stocky men with olive-green skin and orange eyes; tall, pointy-eared men and women with the physiques of anorexic supermodels; and more perplexingly, people who looked human but whose predatory stares made Maya feel like a weak wildebeest under a hungry lion’s stare.

  As she grew older, monster seemed too simplistic. Some of the creatures reminded her of the depictions of demons in paintings of heaven and hell, and for lack of a better term, she applied it uniformly to all her sightings.

  Although no one else seemed to see the beings, see them for what they were, Maya did not for one moment think she was crazy. In fact, sometimes, the beings seemed more real than anything else. And she learned why her mother reacted so strongly to Maya’s first sighting of a demon.

  After that day in the mall, Maya started to draw the creatures she saw. Blessed with a precocious talent, even those early drawings were good representations of each “demon.”

  Maya and her family lived in a plain ranch-style home on the outskirts of Santa Fe. What the house lacked in character, it made up with landscaping. The previous owners, perhaps trying to hide the ugly house, had planted a small forest’s worth of trees on the property. For Maya and her brother, Orson, those trees were an ancient forest, populated by bandits, dragons and other ne’er-do-wells, all desperately in need of slaying.

  Maya’s favorite tree, a chitalpa that was covered in trumpetlike purple flowers in the summer, grew just outside her bedroom window. She had her father set her desk under that window and there she did her homework and spent hours drawing all the fantastical things in her head, filling sketchbook after sketchbook.

  That tree was about to bloom the day Maya made the promise to her mother.

  Maya was drawing a fairy, not a tiny Tinkerbell-sized fairy, but the human-sized fairy with the transparent wings that she’d seen at the grocery store.

  A load of clean laundry in her hands, her mother bustled into Maya’s room. Mrs. Stephenson’s sleek black hair was bound back from her face with a red bandana—red suited her mother, Maya thought—but a few strands had worked loose. Blowing the strands away from her face, her mother set down the laundry and moved to see what Maya was drawing.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. “Why do you draw such strange things?” she asked after a long pause.

  “That’s the girl I saw today,” Maya said, sensing something strange in her mother’s demeanor. She twisted her long black ponytail in her fingers. “She was buying ice cream.”

  Startled, her mother looked at her, mouth stern. “No. You didn’t see her.”

  Maya tugged on her ponytail, confused. “I don’t understand—”

  “Do you remember your Uncle Andrew?”

  “Of course, I remember Uncle Andrew.” Maya beamed at the name. Andrew Fong, her mom’s gregarious younger brother, was her favorite uncle. He had last visited Santa Fe when Maya was six years old. Andrew was funny, self-assured, and like Maya, he also saw demons and other otherworldly creatures. Maya idolized him. “Is he ever going to come visit us again?”

  “No,” her mother answered. “He’s not. Do you want to know why?” At Maya’s nod, she continued, “Andrew also sees strange beings. But he is foolish. He tells everyone about these creatures. Friends, family, teachers. Everyone.

  “Four years ago, people came to your Grandma and Grandpa Fong’s house, and said that Andrew had been chosen to attend a special school in London.”

  “London?”

  “England. Far away,” her mother explained. “At first your grandma said no. Andrew was too young to move away from home.” Her mom raised her hand to cover her mouth, and for a moment it looked as if she migh
t cry. She dropped her hand from her face and looked out the window at the chitalpa tree. “And then a few weeks later he was gone. Sometimes he sends a short postcard from London. Once from Paris. But no one in the family has seen him since.”

  Mrs. Stephenson turned from the window and leaned down to her daughter. “Do you know the worst part, Maya?” Maya didn’t respond, but her mother answered anyway. “Your grandparents don’t seem to care anymore. When I asked your grandma what changed her mind, she says, ‘What do you mean? I always wanted him to go.’”

  “I don’t understand, Mama.”

  “These people, this special school, whatever, they took Andrew because he can see demons. And they brainwashed your grandparents somehow.”

  Maya’s mom gently squeezed her arm. “Do you want to be taken from us? Do you want this to happen to your family?” Maya shook her head solemnly. “Then you mustn’t speak of these—” her mother pointed at the drawing “—things ever again.”

  “But, Mom, I do—”

  “I know you see them. But normal girls don’t see such things. Normal girls go to school and get good grades. They go to college and get a good education. Normal girls marry a nice doctor or lawyer and live happily ever after, without ever thinking of demons or fairies. Do you understand?”

  Maya understood, but she could no more stop drawing than she could make her heart stop beating. “Yes, Mama,” she agreed, her attention shifting from the fairy to a smaller doodle where Adam chased Benjamin along the edge of the sketchpad. Studying the drawing with the necessary self-critical eye of an artist, she saw that the pair suffered from her recent infatuation with manga, their eyes too large and hair spiky.

  The thief vs. inspector concept had been planted in her head by a viewing of an old Pink Panther movie when she was seven. But until the day she made the promise to her mother, the duo hadn’t developed beyond their simple role of thief and policeman.

  Now they were a lifeline, a safe expression of creativity. In the years that followed Maya would lavish attention on their story, stripping away the childish aspects of their depictions for something far more realistic.