Over the Darkened Landscape

by Derryl Murphy

  “So he has settled for this, although not happily, I can assure you. He will request that the door be locked again when you go in to visit, and I highly doubt that he will allow any more than the two of you in.” Both guards started forward at this, but MacDonald stopped them with a wave of the hand.

  “How fast can your men unlock the door and get into the room?” he asked.

  “Scant seconds, sir. But don’t worry. Wain is anything but dangerous.”

  “Very well.” He turned to his two guards. “You can make do with standing out here and watching through the peephole.” Then he turned to the doctor. “We’re ready to go in.”

  The intern opened the door and Wells stepped into the room, then MacDonald. It was small and functional. Perhaps ten feet by twelve, a cot with one lumpy pillow and a threadbare blanket along one wall and a toilet and sink in the opposite corner. A small table with a lamp sat at the head of the cot, a copy of the Times with a headline from one day last week taking up the rest of the table space.

  In the middle of the small room there stood an easel with a canvas on it, a painting in progress. So far it had taken no form that Wells could discern; merely splotches of colour in a few seemingly random locations, as if the artist was still searching for the best way to attack his subject.

  The artist himself stood beside the easel, eyes wide and darting to and fro. He clutched furiously at the brush in his right hand, his knuckles turning white.

  “Louis,” Wells said softly.

  Wain fixed him with a stare for a brief second, long enough for Wells to tell that he was with them in the here and now, but that it likely wouldn’t last long. “H.G.,” he gasped. “Mr. Prime Minister. So . . . very good to see you . . . again.”

  Both men smiled, trying to be disarming and peaceful in their looks and their actions. MacDonald took two slow steps forward, towards the painting.

  “What are you working on, Wain?” His tone was cautious, his stance relaxed. Wells knew that he didn’t feel that way, but his years in politics had trained him to project what his audience needed.

  Wain glanced at the painting, eyes wide, as if he feared it would tell something about him, perhaps even betray him. Which, mused Wells, it was entirely possible that he did. “Just, just, just a piece, sir, a piece about, about . . .” He bit his lower lip, unable to carry on.

  “Cats?” prodded Wells, softly.

  The artist moaned loudly, and under the wretched sound Wells heard a scratching at the door. He turned his head halfway and out of the corner of his eye thought he saw something small at the foot of the door, but when he turned his head all the way it wasn’t there. The sound must have come from one of the nervous guards on the other side.

  MacDonald cleared his throat. “You had wanted to talk to us, Wain?”

  Wain paced around behind the canvas, appearing for one moment to be stalking something, the next to be hiding. “I . . . I wanted to thank you for, for getting me out. Out of the, the, the poor ward.” Wells wryly observed that MacDonald was standing even straighter.

  “It’s nice,” continued Wain, gesturing around the room. “I mean, I mean, I know I’m still . . . crackers, still, still not well, but here I can paint, can, can . . . I like it better here.” He smiled at the relief of having made it this far.

  “We were glad to be of service,” said Wells. The year before, in 1924, Wells and MacDonald, then in the middle of his short eleven-month stint as Prime Minister, had discovered that Wain was shut away in the pauper ward of a mental institution. They had started a fund to save him from this terrible fate, and a short while ago had managed to have him transferred to the Bethlem Royal Hospital.

  In the 1890s and the early part of this century, Louis Wain had been one of the most successful artists in all of England. His humourous paintings of cats in human situations had become hugely popular, and Wain could turn out literally hundreds of drawings and paintings every year.

  But he was not a very good businessman; when he sold his paintings he relinquished the rights as well, and when his work began to fall out of favour, due to many imitators and to changing public tastes, he sank into poverty. After the Great War he had begun his long descent into madness and extreme paranoia, finally being institutionalized in 1923.

  Wain dabbed a small amount of paint on his brush and stabbed at the canvas with it, then continued. “I also wanted to tell, tell you that I’m going to be . . . to be having my own, own, show.”

  “By God!” announced MacDonald. “That’s fabulous, Wain. Where shall it be?”

  Wain cringed a bit at this booming outburst, but continued. “At, at the Twenty-One Gallery. This, this, this October, I think. Or so they tell me . . .” This sentence didn’t so much end as it trailed off.

  Wells smiled. “That’s excellent news, Louis. You must be very proud.”

  The artist smiled back, very briefly, and then dropped his gaze down to the floor. “Thank you for, for coming.”

  Both men responded with farewells and then turned to leave, but Wells, behind MacDonald, felt Wain’s hand fall briefly and lightly on his arm.

  “Please stay for one more moment?” Wain asked in a small, scared voice.

  Wells nodded, then stuck his head out the door. “I’ll be out in a moment. He seems to want to speak to me privately.” Ignoring the irritated look that crossed MacDonald’s face, he ducked back in and slowly walked back to near where Wain was standing, hearing the lock on the door click behind him. There he stood quietly, waiting for the artist to speak.

  “They’re back, Wells,” he said eventually. “They’re back.” His face looked pale and haunted now.

  Wells, fully understanding the depths of the paranoia that gripped this poor man, did his best to sound sympathetic. “Who are back, Louis?”

  Wain pointed to the canvas. What had been a random collection of colours just minutes ago had now taken shape as a group of cats, although Wells could swear that Wain had only touched the canvas one or two brief times.

  He stared at the painting, trying to fathom what was happening here. There were three cats in the painting, and while the style was recognizably Wain’s, the cats were not posed in the jolly fashion Wells was accustomed to seeing in Wain’s work. Instead, the three cats, while posed as humans on their hind legs, seemed to be maliciously toying with something that had yet to be finished, that appeared so far as only a pale yellow blob.

  “This certainly isn’t what we’ve grown accustomed to expect from you, Louis,” said Wells. The madness must have really taken its toll.

  Wain shuddered, as if he were holding in a great sob. Then he staggered over to the cot and sat at the end of it, paints and brush still in his hands. “It isn’t, it isn’t what I, what I want,” he said. His voice was breaking, and Wells was sure he would begin to cry like a child at any moment. “I try to leave them out of it, but they keep, keep, keep coming back.”

  Wain looked back at the painting, and the look of stark terror that crossed his face transfixed Wells for the moment. Then he said, “I’m sorry, H.G. So very sorry,” in a voice that was almost less than a whisper. “The cats, oh, the cats . . .” His voice trailed off again and he gradually tilted over until gravity won out over his muscles and his face fell to the mattress.

  Wells turned to go back to summon the doctor, but his eyes tracked quickly past the canvas with the cats on it and then snapped back. There was now a figure, seemingly human rather than feline, lying in a foetal position beneath the three cats, obviously the object of their tortures.

  But that was impossible! Wain had sat down, had not been near the canvas!

  Wells’ eyes cast about the room, feverishly looking for another, logical explanation for the anomaly in the painting. He could find none. He rubbed his eyes and looked again, but it was still there. Was this form of madness contagious?

  He looked back to Wain, hoping to find an answer there, but the man had his face buried in the covers and was mumbling to himself; a long line of droo
l hung from the corner of his lips to the tattered blanket.

  Another scratching sound came from the far corner opposite the door, and when Wells turned to look there he caught a brief glimpse of something small and black. Too brief, though; he feared it had been just a trick of the light or his mind.

  Then he looked back at the painting, and froze in horror. The figure now had its face turned towards Wells, and it was a face he recognized well. It was Jane, his wife!

  She looked frightful. Her face was long and drawn out, her beautiful hair matted and coarse, and her normally droopy, sad eyes were wide open, a look of terror and extreme agony in them. Her cheekbones were sunken, and she was dressed in her bedclothes.

  Shock settled into Wells. He could do nothing but stare at the canvas, horrified by the sight. It took him a moment to lose the feeling of helplessness, but it immediately came back when he realized that the painting had slowly changed positions, the figures moving at some glacial pace so that he did not notice their movements but could see their new placement.

  “Dear God,” he whispered.

  Another scratching sound came from the right, but Wells was too caught up in the tableau to look. The cat on the right side of the painting, a simple orange alley cat, had bent all the way over and was now using one claw to gouge a line in the flesh of Jane’s cheek. Bright, unnaturally red blood welled up, oozing out of the fresh wound more slowly than blood had the right to flow.

  Wells could feel his gorge begin to rise; the taste of bile was sharp in the back of his throat. He turned his head away, and jumped back at the sight that greeted him now, knocking over the canvas in the process.

  Wain was still lying on the cot, but now more than a dozen cats stood around him and over him. All were silent, except for the padding of their feet if they moved, and the distant scratching sounds as several dug their claws into Wain’s back, arms and legs. He could see Wain shudder and shake each time a cat scratched him, but the artist also made no sound. One cat, which Wells realized with even greater horror was the orange one from the painting, turned and looked him in the eye, staring calmly at Wells for a second before arching its back, flattening its ears, and hissing.

  The sound of the cat broke Wells out of his horrified reverie. He turned and stumbled for the door, kicking the canvas that he had knocked over a moment before. His eyes cast down once more to the abominable thing, like steel to a magnet.

  The painting had changed once more. Now four numbers were jaggedly scrawled across the width of it; “1927” it said, in a most sickly gray. One glance at the painting of Jane showed him that she, or at least the figure in the painting, now appeared to be dead, although there was now no blood to be seen. The cats were no longer anywhere in the picture.

  He pulled on the door, it wouldn’t open, knocked frantically, and when the door opened he staggered out, gasping for air. He heard the door shut behind him, and disembodied hands held him up while similarly removed voices chattered at him in a fashion beyond comprehension.

  Gradually, his breathing calmed down, and his vision returned. He looked around.

  An intern was holding him up, and the doctor was examining him worriedly. MacDonald looked on in concern, and the others watched with interest as well. Only the mad that shuffled by paid him no heed, already used to such behaviour on a regular basis.

  “Are you all right?” asked the doctor, at the same time that MacDonald asked, “What happened in there?”

  Wells waved them both off. “Nothing, nothing,” he said, “Just my claustrophobia acting up, is all. Can we get outside?” Wouldn’t do to tell them what he saw. Just be locked up like Wain and the rest of these poor mad souls.

  MacDonald nodded and marched off. The intern who wasn’t holding onto Wells and the two guards hurried to catch him, and Wells slowly followed, careful to keep his eyes down.

  The one time he did look up there were three inmates standing only a few feet away. Each man seemed to be unaware that he had a cat sitting on his shoulders, and each of the cats were intently watching Wells as he walked by. He sucked in a breath and did his best not to whimper, then looked back to the floor and picked up his pace.

  Wells said farewell to MacDonald and the doctor and then staggered away, too in shock to call a cab, first trying to understand, and then rationalize, what he saw.

  Whatever it was, he couldn’t face Jane now. He resolved to leave for his home in France that night, to join his love Odette at Lou Pidou.

  To get away from cats forever.

  France, 1927

  Jane had joined him for his lecture at the Sorbonne, and then shortly afterwards they went back to England for the wedding between their son Gip and H.G.’s best secretary, Marjorie. The day after the wedding he again returned to France.

  He spent most of his time writing, but on the tenth of May a letter from his son Frank arrived in the post.

  Jane had cancer. Had been ill when he had seen her, and had not told him.

  He set down the letter and immediately wrote a quick note to Jane, to tell her he loved her, and that he was coming home to help her. He wanted to write that he would see her through her recovery, but before the letter could get that far there was a scratching at the door of his study. He slowly looked up, hands shaking and mouth dry.

  A cat stood there, one he had never seen around the house before. Cats were not allowed in Lou Pidou, his unwavering decree. It stared at him for a moment, then arched its back, flattened its ears, and hissed at him, before turning and walking out. It was the same orange cat from two years before.

  Wells was still for a moment, then he exploded out of his chair and raced to the door. The cat was nowhere to be seen.

  He shuffled back to his study, feeling an odd combination of defeat and relief, feeling that what Wain and the cats had shown him was just about over. He went to his desk, but instead of sitting he lay down on the floor underneath, curled up much like Wain had been two years before.

  “I have had Frank’s letter today and for the first time I learned how seriously ill you have been & that you may still be very ill. My dear, I love you much more than I have loved anyone else in the world & I am coming back to you to take care of you & to do all I can to make you happy . . . My dear, my dear, my dearest heart is yours.

  Your loving Bins.”

  —Excerpt from a letter from H.G. Wells to Jane Wells.

  “ . . . my little wife has to die of cancer & I want to spend what time remains of her life with her . . .”

  —Excerpt from a letter from H.G. Wells to Margaret Sanger, written before leaving France.

  “ . . . and H.G.—H.G. positively howled. You are no doubt aware that he was not a conventionally perfect husband . . . O it was hideous—terrible and frightful . . . The way of transgressors is hard . . .”

  —Excerpt from a letter from Charlotte Shaw to T.E. Lawrence on the funeral of Jane Wells.

  More Painful Than

  The Dreams of Other Boys

  Mike Gordini leaned against the hood of his patrol car and watched the world go by, marvelling at the sight of families all together, children being towed along by parents, patient and otherwise. Kids here were so helpless, so unable to control themselves and their lives, and on the second day of his new duty it was still taking him by surprise.

  His new partner, Simone Perez, came out of the Korean grocery and tossed him his Coke, then walked around and climbed in behind the driver’s seat. Mike opened his door and sat beside her, found himself staring at her and wondering at how she looked; pretty, he thought with surprise, even though a few wrinkles showed and some gray hairs were creeping in around the temples and up top. The ring on her finger told him someone else likely thought she was good-looking as well, but he hadn’t had the guts to ask about that yet. Weird enough that he was here with her, in this strange section of the city.

  She turned her head back from shoulder-checking, caught him staring at her. She smiled. “What?”

  Mike could feel the heat
in his cheeks. He turned his head and looked out his window, pretended he was watching for perps as he cracked open his soda. “Nothing,” he answered, then took a sip.

  “Nothing my ass. I can’t say I know what you’re feeling, Mike, since I grew up here. But I’ve met a couple of people who came out of Templeton, and they’ve told me how weird it is for the first little while. I can only imagine.”

  He grunted and took another swig; watched this city of age go by, and wondered at it.

  *

  For the remaining three hours of their shift, life remained uneventful, the presence of their car serving as a check for anyone thinking of pulling any stunts. Twenty minutes before the end of their shift, all available units were called to an address near the Line with Templeton.

  Simone looked over at Mike. He felt a lurching in his stomach, knew he wasn’t ready to get that close to the Line so soon after having to cross over. But he forced a smile and nodded at her, then turned on the lights as Simone shrugged her shoulders and stepped on the gas. But before they’d gone a block, a second call instructed them to come in to the precinct to see the captain.

  “Come in, both of you,” he said, when they got to his office. “Close the door and have a seat.”

  Captain Munro was even more amazing to Mike. Almost no hair, a huge gut, wrinkles and age spots lining his face, he was everything that Mike had always thought he would never be. Was this how he’d end up on this side of the Line?

  “There’s been a murder,” said the captain. “Derek Hayes.”

  “Jesus,” said Simone. She looked over at Mike, but he just shrugged. The name meant nothing to him. “Very rich guy, sometimes seems like he owns—owned—half the town. To say nothing of all his other interests around the world.”

  “Ah,” said Mike, nodding. He looked back to Captain Munro. “So what does this have to do with us?”