Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity Read online

  He snipped the last remaining tie and gathered and sheets around the base of the canvas. She took it all in. “God, it’s hideous.”

  He took a step back and absorbed it all. The wooden room, the two children, the clock, the window, the tree, the entire unbalanced scene like some schizophrenic dream.

  “It is. Unfortunately, it’s all that’s left. And, to be honest, if the insurance doesn’t cover the fire, I might be out of a job.”

  “I’m sure they’ll cover it,” she said, and he felt a spike of frustration at her simple dismissal of the problem, one that had grown more complicated when the fire marshall had reported ‘irregularities’ at the end of the day and “no, they couldn’t elaborate at this time” he had said before hanging up.

  Doctors spoke like that, Dan thought. Turn a head, take an X-ray, give some blood, and try not to be worried when the lab calls for a follow up. What was it the British said as the bombs dropped?

  Keep calm and carry on, the glass hummed.

  Yes, that’s right, he thought, that’s what they said. Keep calm and carry on.

  “Well, don’t stay up too late, okay?” she said, and gave him a kiss before leaving him alone in the study with the painting.

  With a pop the final studio light hummed on and bathed the painting in a soft white light, amplifying the colors. Odd, he thought. Yesterday the painting had appeared dim, as if intentionally rendered dark, but that had been beneath the old lights of the warehouse. Now, covered in five hundred watts of white light, he found himself impressed with how the painting took on a richer texture. Crimson reds, violets, indigos, some streaks no wider than a hairline, all sprang to the surface and gave the painting an unnatural depth. Whomever painted it, he thought, may not have had an eye for composition, but their precision had become more remarkable with further study. It was as if it had been made to be viewed in the very room it now sat in.

  He centered the camera on the painting, setting the resolution for MAX. It didn’t go high, only to ten megapixels. It was little more than a point-and-shoot, but for now it would have to suffice. He stepped back until the entire painting filled the small viewfinder.

  Cheese, he thought, and snapped the first photo. The camera gave a chirp and a click as the viewfinder flickered and the lens captured the master shot. Another chirp, another click, and deep inside sensors and machinery and mirrors captured the spectrum between black and white.

  Satisfied with a few wide shots, he switched the camera to macro mode. Artists, he knew, left signatures, even if they didn’t sign their work. A cloud, perhaps rendered with counterclockwise strokes. Spattered stars made from tiny circles that spiraled out like the Milky Way. A unique glimmer in the eyes of a portrait, a crashing wave, or even something as simple as the leaves on a tree. These flourishes, no matter how small, told more about the artist and their process than the entire painting. Van Gogh was made more tortured when one saw the depressions left in the oil that formed his sunflowers; a Monet, more mesmerizing when the lilies were revealed as little more than shades dissolving each other up close. These fingerprints defined the art, and they also defined the artist. All Dan knew he needed to do was find one.

  He moved within a foot of the painting and started scanning from the little girl on the right.

  *click*

  A picture of her sack-like face, tears leaking from swollen eyes like overripe tomatoes.

  *click*

  Her hair, which had seemed brown in the dim light of the warehouse, now held hints of rust beneath it, as if it had once been dyed and the roots were growing back in.

  *click*

  Her left hand, clinging to a ragged sock toy held together by threads. A puff of white stuffing leaked from its disemboweled stomach where the stitching had given up, not unlike the stuffed rabbit his daughter clung to.

  *click*

  He panned the camera across the painted room, over the dusty window, falling upon those tiny, brooding eyes of the young boy as if pulled by magnets. They were cold, uncomfortable eyes, and Dan felt that of all the thousands he’d seen on canvas, these were the most unsettling, the most inhuman and yet, the most authentic. It was as if they were staring back at him, stripping him bare and judging him with scorn.

  *click*

  The leathery arm of the boy disappearing off frame.

  *click*

  The grandfather clock, those three missing numbers at 9, 10, and 11, and its hands stuck at 5:55,

  *click*

  The broken shards of a mirror reflecting the rows of doll heads.

  *click*click*click*

  Dan lowered his camera, his own eyes tracing a path across the canvas, from the girl to the boy and over to the window between them. That window, looking out onto that field where a distant tree sat. Again, he felt emptiness, as if it were unfinished.

  Through a window, in stark contrast to the decay of the house, stood that lone green in the middle of the field. When he had last studied the painting he mistook the landscape for a flat field beneath a cloudless blue sky, but it wasn’t. Or perhaps, it wasn’t any longer. Now, a small hill rose from the landscape beneath the tree in full bloom. And the sun, it seemed to have dipped closer to the horizon.

  Of course it hadn’t really changed, he thought. The paint had set and dried long ago and it was only the condition and position of the light that seemed to have transformed it. That was it, nothing more.

  His gaze drifted back to the canvas. Within it there was something else he had overlooked. Behind the tree, little more than a few quick strokes of a paintbrush, stood a dark thing.

  A human figure.

  Sinewy hands wrapped around the tree trunk, as if it was peering out from behind the oak. No eyes, no detail, nothing other than black shadow, but there it was: an unmistakable silhouette of a figure behind the tree.

  A thought occurred to him. The position of the shadowy figure, the direction of its body, even how its arm was cocked against the tree, all indicated that it was staring across the field, across hundreds of yards, through the window, into the room, and at the viewer. The distance was impossible, and yet, from the few simple brush strokes that formed the shadow, he felt certain that the artist had wanted the viewer to feel viewed.

  Dan felt a sudden pressure between his ankles, followed by a snort. Ginger pushed her way between his legs as if they were little more than turnstiles. She sniffed the edge of the painting, short grunts escaping her nose like an overworked asthmatic. Then, she straightened up, backed away from the painting, back between his legs where she let out a bark that seemed to surprise only her.

  “You eat your own poop,” he said, scooping up the useless dog. “You’re hardly a critic.”

  Wednesday

  SPLASHED ACROSS THE front of the local paper sat a quarter page color picture showing a plume of smoke rising from the eastern side of the Fine Arts building under the headline: University Fire Claims Priceless Paintings. The beginning of a headache formed like a storm behind his eyes upon reading the local rag’s summary of the fire. Words like ‘mismanagement’ and ‘incompetence’ were sprinkled throughout the article in heavy servings, opinions that a professional reporter would have been careful to back up with quotations or citations. But there were no such citations in the article, only speculation from a paper he regarded as little more than a throwaway.

  Typical, Dan thought.

  He hadn’t expected much from the local rag, which often portrayed the liberal and affluent town as some sort of David locked in an uphill battle with the university cast as Goliath. Last year the paper claimed victory when it uncovered a photo of medical students posing with a cadaver on their Facebook page, a mistake that resulted in a dozen expulsions and ruined careers. The year before, a few hundred dollars in donations to a Republican State Senator cost the Dean of the Business School his job as well. Carbon credits and an inadequate number of electric vehicle charging stations had been another crusade, one that uprooted his department’s faculty parking spots t
o make room for solar charged power outlets that sat empty year round.

  And there it was, his own story beneath a full color picture. Insinuations in black and white that his own department had carelessly housed priceless paintings in little more than a tinder box and oily rags. If the author had her way, Dan thought, she would follow up with an article about how they too had lit the match.

  “Honey, you’re going to be late,” Linda said.

  He finished the last of the coffee and folded that wretched newspaper as Linda called the kids and the sounds of footsteps running down the stairs echoed out in the old house.

  “All right gang, let’s go,” Dan said as Tommy pushed his way past Jessica and called out: “Shotgun!”

  “Tommy, you know I hate that!”

  “Sorry mom,” Tommy called, out the door in a flash.

  Dan gave Linda a kiss on the cheek that made her smile. “Have a good day hon.”

  “You too love.”

  He closed the door, taking with him the noise and chaos of the morning ritual, leaving only silence and the half eaten remains of breakfast. She felt a twinge of emptiness as she cleaned the now quiet kitchen. For a moment her mind wandered to that junk drawer and those cigarettes hidden in the back but she wiped that thought from her mind. No, not today.

  She took the wet towel from the sink, turned the faucet on, and pressed the power on the flip down TV that hung beneath the cabinets. She cycled from channel to channel, waiting for the water to warm up. Postmenopausal women sat on a couch, talking politics and cats on YouTube in the same breath. Morning news and traffic reports and some blowhard before a chalkboard calling the president a socialist. Dancing aliens, manic music, and a DJ in an orange skin suit on a kids show. Nothing caught her eye so she turned off the TV.

  In the reflection off the TV screen, a shadow stood in the doorway behind her. It was no larger than a six year old girl, but Linda was certain she’d heard Dan’s car pull away minutes ago.

  “Sweetie, did you forget something?” she asked.

  The reflection didn’t move, only flickered and bent as if heat passed before it.

  “Jessica? Sweety?” Linda turned around, finding herself staring at an empty doorframe. When she glanced back at the TV the reflection was gone. She rubbed the screen, finding a small patch of oil, perhaps spattered from the bacon she’d cooked. Whatever it was must have caught the light and, from an angle, looked like a shadow of her daughter.

  At least, that’s what she told herself.

  Dan dropped the camera’s memory card off with the department’s digital printing lab technician, a graduate student named Sajid who he sometimes had trouble understanding. Nonetheless he was a friendly student, and the two of them often discussed Indian artwork, where Dan’s fondness for Mughal painting had overcome Sajid’s shyness and accent.

  “I’ll have them printed out in no time,” he said, then added: “So sorry to hear about the fire professor, truly.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Dan replied.

  Two hours later he was nose deep in books.

  The university library housed tens of thousands of volumes on art alone and, to Dan, it had always been a sanctuary, a place he could blend and melt away among the students. It was a quiet place, not unlike a church because a hundred years ago it had been one. Even today Spanish saints stared down from stained glass over the stacks and stations.

  It had been a good afternoon. Among the stacks he had already found two promising books. One was titled Modern Mysteries: Art as Enigma, by an author he’d never heard of. It displayed landscapes, most rendered photo-realistically with a touch of the absurd. An Alaskan river was turned into a circulatory system where salmon swam up a river of blood. The other book, a retrospective on Appalachian Art from the last hundred years, had also struck him as a good enough place to start.

  The painting that now sat in his home study depicted two children and their style of clothes, particularly the boy’s, reminded him of a distant memory. He and Linda had both seen painted boys wearing clothes like that hung on the walls of various cheap motels that dotted the southern half of Appalachia. They had driven across the country just over a decade ago from university to university, interviewing for any job he could find on a road trip that lasted all summer and resulted in Tommy’s conception. A trip that had, at the time, been ill planned yet carefree and, in hindsight, had come to symbolize the vast chasm between being newly married and being parents. These days commitments and responsibility, soccer practice and homework, all the gnawing necessities of raising their kids trumped the ability to pack up and drive in any direction until they ran out of gas or money. In some fleeting moments, when the kids screamed and fought, Dan mourned that absolute freedom that lay behind him in the rearview mirror.

  Walking down the aisle, he ran his fingers down the spine of the old books. He paused on another that caught his eyes, a collection of paintings by Max Ernst. A tremble started in his finger and ran the length of his arm, all the way up to his head where it lodged itself in the base of his tongue, merging with the glass behind his eyes, tickling.

  That book, the very same edition, had once sat on the shelf in the reading room of the orphanage. He had spent nights, flashlight in hand, flipping through the pages as thunderstorms raged outside. To an audience he had once described Ernst as if Dali had raped Picasso, a description that had earned him a nasty letter from the Dean of Woman’s Studies, but a description he felt valid. Ernst’s paintings, those twisted visions of shapes birthing appendages from the ground, growing skyward, wrapped in colorful cloth and stretched skin, how they had saved him from the fear he felt as the lightning flashed and the orphanage shook. How they set him free.

  That was a lifetime ago, he thought. How could he have forgotten that? A life in which he had stuttered and been scared of the dark, long before the box and the wood and the trembling tongue had all been replaced by that piece of glass and the occasional flash migraine.

  He placed the book back in the shelf and felt the tremble float from his mouth, pressure lifting as he walked away.

  *thump*

  The book fell to the floor.

  It had fallen from the shelf and lay open in the middle of the stacks, pages askew. A tremble surged up his arm again, and his tongue grew heavy as the glass itched.

  He walked back, looking at the book with caution as if, perhaps, it would fly up and attack him. It lay open to a painting, The Eye of Silence, a bizarre, intangible mess of impossible columns and mountains carved into intricate shapes like the skin of a slumbering titan. He closed the book and returned it with haste to its place on the shelf. There, a face thrust itself out at him from the void.

  “Boo!” said the woman’s face.

  He stumbled backwards, dropping the books with another heavy thump. A few students at distant desks turned their heads in his direction. He collected the books, watching the shadow move behind the shelves, now more annoyed than frightened by her sudden appearance.

  “You scared the hell out of me,” he said as Karina rounded the corner with a grin.

  “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. You looked so, I dunno, busy. In your own little world.”

  “Well I was.”

  “There room for two in that little world of yours?”

  “You wouldn’t like it,” he said, putting the book back on the shelf.

  She approached him, bridging the distance between them with the precision of a siren, and Den felt an intense need to make the conversation as short as possible. Especially in public. Eyes were on him, and she had all the discretion of a teenager.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I came,” she started, then paused, blinking her eyes as her smile faded to something less playful. “I came to apologize. Yesterday, I wasn’t myself. The fire, it wasn’t your fault, but I took it out on you. And, well... I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Don’t worry about
it. We were all, I dunno, in shock. Really, it’s okay.”

  “Shock or not, what I said was wrong.”

  She drew closer. Her hand fell to his arm and her fingers ran up it to his elbow. Now that the apology was out and equilibrium was restored that smile and all that it implied grew across her face until she had to purse her lips to stop it.

  “Can I make it up to you?” she leaned in, whispering: “This weekend? Napa? Our favorite place?”

  Her smell inebriated him, wrapped him in warmth and offered the touch of skin. He wanted nothing more than to close his eyes, to kiss those lips, feel those fingers touching him. But beneath that, like a faint odor of something teetering on the edge of rot, was a sad sort of desperation to her voice that had grown in the months spent apart. It was like returning to a childhood playground, once so grand and unending, revealed later in life to be almost pathetic. Despite her scent and sexuality, he thought, time had revealed her to be a shade of what he once desired.

  “Karina...”

  “You and me boo bear?”

  “Stop...” His throat was tight and he had to swallow to get enough moisture to make the words. “Stop... please”

  “I miss that Dan. I miss us. I miss you. All of you.”

  He felt her hand running down his arm, tracing the edge of his belt, dipping under and into his pants. Her desperation repulsed him. His words were heavy and it took all his might to spit them forth and even then all he could say was: “I said stop!”

  But it wasn’t the words that stopped her.

  It was the push.