Lost: The Novels

by Catherine Hapka

  The dreams were at first merely vague—menacing, half-seen figures, odd shapes. Everyone seemed to speak in a language that Jeff didn’t understand…and yet he did. When he awoke he was puzzled by what he had seen in the dreamscape, but could only remember flashes of imagery. And when he impulsively began sketching those weird symbols, he didn’t connect them with the dreams at all. Even after he started making things, drawing pictures every day, he never wondered where his inspiration was coming from. On some level, he was glad to be creating again, even if this new art bore no resemblance to anything he had ever done before. Jeff didn’t think much about that difference, either; he just kept working. If it ever did occur to him, even in passing, that he was traveling in an entirely unfamiliar artistic direction, he dismissed it immediately as being the natural result of working under vastly different circumstances with only those tools he could scrounge up from the island.

  But today Hurley’s presence had forced Jeff to look at his island art for the first time. Jeff thought hard about the latest drawing he had been working on and was almost startled by it, as if he were only now fully aware of what he had sketched onto the lined notepaper. Not for the first time, he had the odd feeling that he created this artwork directly from his unconscious. Even more oddly, it almost felt as if it were created by someone else, with Jeff merely the instrument. Jeff could almost take comfort from that fact because, especially recently, he had been unleashing nightmarish visions that he had no desire to claim as his own. What was at first merely eccentric attempts at “found” art had begun to metamorphose into darker, more disturbing imagery. The malevolent creatures in the drawing Hurley found so disturbing had been creeping into Jeff’s work with greater clarity and frequency.

  Looking out at the sea, Jeff thought about how out of place these visions of horror seemed to be in such a lush and gorgeous setting. Down the beach, several castaways sat or squatted in a semicircle around the cooking fire, eating the fish Jin had caught. Hurley was nowhere to be seen.

  The tide was coming in, and each wave lapped closer and closer to the place where Jeff sat. But he was too deep in thought to notice. Something that Hurley had said only a little while ago kept replaying in his mind. As they stood together in Jeff’s studio, Hurley asked the standard question that all artists, sooner or later, are asked:

  “Hey, dude,” Hurley said, “where do you get your ideas?”

  Jeff shook his head. “I’d tell you if I could,” he said. “But these things just come to me. I just wake up in the morning and…” He waved his hand at all the pieces that lined the grassy floor of the studio.

  Hurley nodded thoughtfully. “You must dream it all.”

  “Perhaps,” Jeff said.

  “You know what you ought to do?” Hurley said. “You ought to keep one of those, what do you call ’em…? Oh, yeah, dream journals.”

  The statement startled Jeff. Savannah used to tell him the same thing.

  6

  WHEN JEFF HADLEY ARRIVED at Robert Burns College in Lochheath, Scotland, he felt like a real celebrity. True, his reputation had been growing quickly in London and he was used to being feted by gallery owners, acclaimed by critics, and courted by art collectors eager to latch on to the next big thing. But London was too big, and the pool of celebrity too vast for Jeff ever to feel like a true star.

  But from the moment he stepped off the train in Lochheath, he knew that things were different. There was a welcoming committee on the platform, and one middle-aged woman, Jeff was amused to note, actually held a large sign reading WELCOME JEFF HADLEY! He stepped off the train, a suitcase in his right hand and a tweed overcoat draped over his left arm. When the cheer of welcome went up, he paused on the top step, feeling as if he were reliving a moment from an old film. Actually, he had chosen to make the journey by train instead of driving up just so he could make such an arrival. But he didn’t really expect anyone to play along. And when he looked out on the small sea of some forty beaming faces, he was both delighted and slightly embarrassed.

  A tall man of about fifty stepped forward, holding his hand out to Jeff. He had thick black hair, close-cropped, and was dressed neatly in a three-piece suit. Jeff recognized him from their previous meetings and remembered him as being something of a nerd. Still, he told himself, he was immersing himself in academia now and knew that if he held a prejudice against nerds, he would be a lonely man indeed.

  “Mr. Hadley, Mr. Hadley, Mr. Hadley,” the man said with syrupy enthusiasm. “I am Gary Blond. Delighted to see you. Simply delighted!”

  Jeff shook his outstretched hand, smiled, and said, “Of course, Mr. Blond. I remember you well. How nice to see you again.” Mr. Blond beamed with pleasure at being remembered by so august a personality and turned to the little crowd. “Fellow faculty members,” he said loudly, “please welcome our prestigious new artist-in-residence, Mr. Richard Hadley!”

  Everyone applauded wildly. Jeff bowed slightly and smiled as warmly as possible. “Thank you very much,” he said. “Er, but one small correction. My name is Jeffrey Hadley, not Richard—but I hope you will all call me Jeff.”

  Mr. Blond laughed in a high-pitched shriek at his faux pas. He slapped himself good-naturedly on the forehead and said, “Blond by name, blond by nature!” No one else laughed, evidently not amused by the man’s asininity, but Jeff kept the wide smile on his face to indicate to one and all that he was neither embarrassed nor offended. He hoped he gave off the aura that he was just a regular chap and not some ivory-tower artist who was unapproachable by the regular folk.

  The rest of the day was an exhausting swirl of introductions, two receptions—one with tea and sandwiches, one with an open bar—and finally a dinner with most of the other art instructors and professors. With the exception of Mr. Blond, the other faculty members struck Jeff as pleasant and intelligent people. The college president, the grandly named Arthur Pelham Winstead, was away at an academic conference. Jeff was relieved to hear it—just one fewer person to meet and engage in bland small talk.

  But Jeff did notice that more than a few of the female staff members were quite attractive. He carefully filed that little fact away with a certain degree of caution.

  Steady on, Jeff said to himself. Remember we’re turning over a new leaf. That way lies trouble.

  At the end of the long, long day, Mr. Blond drove Jeff to his new home. Even by the dim illumination of the single streetlight before it, the cottage was picturesque and inviting, evocative of every Scottish cliché of charm. The walls were of gray stone. The front door was trimmed with wide slabs of limestone, as were the two large windows that flanked it. Two gables jutted out from the slate roof on the second floor. In between them was a small skylight—obviously a modern addition to an ancient house.

  Mr. Blond carried in Jeff’s suitcase and set it down in the foyer. Jeff followed him in and stood at the entrance, taking stock of the first floor. To the left was a sitting room. Someone had come ahead and started a lively fire in the fireplace. To the right was a small dining room. Three candles blazed from a brass candelabrum on a lace tablecloth.

  Directly ahead of Jeff were stairs rudely carved from thick slabs of wood. Mr. Blond pointed at the steps and said, “The kitchen is yon, just behind the staircase. And up here…” he began walking up the stairs “…is your bedroom.”

  Jeff walked up behind him, careful not to get punched in the nose with his suitcase, which Mr. Blond was swinging rather wildly. At the top of the stairs, the bedroom was large but with a low ceiling. The odd proportions of width without much height reminded Jeff of the home he had lived in during his childhood in Arran. The bed was large, with an overstuffed mattress, four huge pillows, and a thick, luxurious comforter. The fireplace here, too, was merrily ablaze. Jeff thought that the whole thing looked like a cinema art director had created it for a fairly unimaginative film set in Scotland. And again, as at the train station, he was both touched and amused.

  Mr. Blond looked around in satisfaction. “The deco
rating committee have done a splendid job, eh?” he said.

  “Yes, indeed,” Jeff said, eager for Mr. Blond to go away. “And that bed looks particularly inviting, after such an arduous day.” Then he added, so as not to offend Mr. Blond, “Arduous, but pleasant.”

  “Indeed,” Mr. Blond replied. He set Jeff’s suitcase on a stand near the tall oak wardrobe. Then he just stood there, smiling pleasantly at Jeff.

  “Well, um…” Jeff said. “As I said, the bed looks most inviting.”

  Mr. Blond looked surprised. “Oh,” he said. “You want to go to bed now. Well then, let me push off and leave you to it.”

  Jeff shook Mr. Blond’s hand and said, “Thank you for everything.”

  “Oh, tut tut tut,” said Mr. Blond. “We are so pleased and honored to have you here.”

  “Oh, the honor is all mine,” Jeff said, feeling that this cross-talk act was going to go on all night, “and I’ll see you first thing in the morning.”

  “Yes yes yes,” said Mr. Blond. Jeff was growing quite weary of the man’s habit of stating everything in triplicate. “First thing. Indeed indeed indeed.”

  When Mr. Blond finally walked out the front door and Jeff heard the car start, he breathed a sigh of relief. Now that the house was Blondless, he could take in its considerable charms with more appreciation. He walked into the small, low-ceilinged living room and sat down in a large overstuffed chair that had been placed near the fire. There was a small table beside it on which stood a bottle of brandy and a single snifter. He poured himself a healthy dose and sipped it appreciatively. Soon, with the combined effects of the fire and the brandy, he was nicely warmed both inside and out. And the chair was so very comfortable that, despite how inviting the bed upstairs had looked, Jeff found himself blinking back sleep for a few seconds and then was out.

  He awoke when the sun’s rays shone through the window shade and directly into his eyes. He stood up with an unaccustomed stiffness and realized that he had probably not moved a muscle all night long. He walked back into the kitchen and began opening cabinets. He found that someone—perhaps the decorating committee of which Mr. Blond was so proud—had done some grocery shopping in anticipation of Jeff’s arrival. He found tea, coffee, eggs, bread, butter, sugar, and orange juice. Only coffee sounded appetizing at the moment, and he soon had a pot started.

  He sipped the coffee in a sturdy wooden chair set on the steps outside the back door. Jeff’s back garden was small but lushly green. It would be comfortably shady in the summer and even on this brisk autumn morning he already knew that he had found his favorite spot in his new home.

  Jeff was immediately comfortable and happy at Robert Burns College. Lochheath was typical of many of the hamlets that dot the Scottish countryside. Rows of stone houses and small businesses, the buildings often joined in groups of three or four, lined both sides of a wide street. There were four parish churches, and their steeples rose above the thatched or slate roofs, offering the traveler either literal or spiritual direction, whichever his need.

  Just beyond Lochheath, a dark sea crashed fiercely onto a rocky shore. Brave fishermen in flimsy-looking boats set out each day in search of a bounteous catch. They and their forebears had forged an uneasy alliance with the angry ocean for centuries. Jeff loved both the sight and the sound of the sea. Even in his cottage, nearly three miles from the beach, he could sometimes hear its powerful roar and he felt comforted.

  His celebrity had, of course, preceded him and from the beginning his lectures were packed. He was gratified to learn that many of the students possessed true talent and he soon had a vibrant, if unofficial, master class going on in the large studio attached to his office.

  The eagerness of his students to ingratiate themselves with the great painter often offered Jeff other kinds of temptation, as one enthusiastic and nubile college girl after another made it known to him that they themselves had lessons to teach him. Jeff’s inner mind urged him to take each young woman’s offer seriously, but his greater conscience stubbornly resisted the easy pickings.

  Of course, this did not mean that Jeff had turned into a monk as well as a professor. To the contrary, the field of available gallery owners, museum workers, and art critics, not only in Lochheath but in Glasgow, proved to be nearly inexhaustible. And, once every three or four months, Jeff returned for a long weekend to London, where his pool of contacts was still considerable. He often told himself that if he spent even half the energy on his art as he did on the art of seduction, he might yet turn into a painter of true greatness. But, he then had to admit, the trade just didn’t seem to be a fair one.

  Because Jeff’s romantic life was filled with great variety—if not much true emotion—he was able to erect an impenetrable mental barrier between himself and even the most comely of his female students.

  But that barrier fell with a crash the day he met Savannah.

  Jeff was forever after a little puzzled why Savannah McCulloch made such a powerful impact upon him. Looked at dispassionately, she was no more beautiful or sensual than any of a dozen other young women in his class. She was a talented artist, but was by no means a prodigy or a genius in the making. She was intelligent and had a quick sense of humor, but the same could be said of many others. Nevertheless, from the moment he saw her in the second row of his lecture, sketching earnestly in an oversized pad of drawing paper, he was smitten in a more powerful way than he could ever remember.

  At five feet ten inches, Savannah was taller than most of the other girls in the class. Her hair was long, reaching nearly down to her waist, and the color of sand. Sometimes she wore it in a long thick braid but when it flowed freely, Jeff thought she looked like something out of a Botticelli painting. Her eyes were a pale blue but there was an intensity behind them that made them seem literally to flash, a phenomenon that Jeff had always considered just a literary cliché.

  And it was, he decided later, her eyes that had captured him. Just as Ivy’s haunted eyes had started the sequence of events that would end in his breaking her heart.

  Throughout that first class, at the beginning of Jeff’s fourth year as artist-in-residence at Burns College, it seemed to him that Savannah’s eyes were boring into his like lasers and he felt so self-conscious under her relentless gaze that he lost track of his lecture more than once.

  Afterward, as the rest of the class filed out, Savannah walked up to Jeff’s desk.

  “I think you’re wrong, you know,” she said pleasantly.

  Jeff was startled. “Excuse me?”

  “Your whole obsession with realistic detail,” she said. “That was all well and good back in the old days. But photography took care of that. Now art should go to places where realism can’t do the job.”

  Jeff leaned back in his office chair and smiled. “And you are…?”

  “Savannah McCulloch,” she said. “I’m a painter.”

  Jeff nodded. “Well, I find your theory quite compelling. So did the Impressionists, oh, more than a century ago.”

  “Well, you clearly didn’t take the message of the Impressionists to heart,” she said, smiling. “Now, Jackson Pollock—that’s more like it!”

  Jeff smiled again. “So you’d find my work more compelling if I simply threw a can of paint at a canvas and let it drip wherever it might instead of painstakingly working out a perfectly executed image?”

  “Wouldn’t you agree that the search for that kind of perfection just sucks the blood out of the creative process?” she said.

  Jeff leaned forward. “How old are you?”

  “I am twenty-two years old,” she said, “a fact that has absolutely no relevance to this conversation at all.”

  “Oh, I think it has great relevance,” Jeff said. “That’s why I’ve entertained the subject this long.”

  Savannah narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that the very young are entitled to spout stupidity with absolute conviction,” he said. “It’s only after we grow older and learn much,
much more that we realize how little we know.”

  “Hmm,” she said, still pleasantly, “both a commercial whore and condescending. Be still, my beating heart!”

  “If you find my views and my technique so abhorrent,” Jeff said, “I wonder why you have bothered to take my class at all.”

  Savannah laughed. Jeff was entirely charmed by the sound. She said, “Because I aim to be a commercial whore myself. I just don’t have the technique yet!”

  Now Jeff was laughing with her. He wasn’t completely sure whether she had truly insulted him or if she was just having fun with him. Either way, he realized with a jolt of pleasurable panic, he had just fallen in love.

  7

  THEY CAME QUIETLY AT first, so quietly that Jeff did not so much hear their approach as feel it. He blinked hard, trying with all of his will to peer into the thick haze that surrounded him. But nothing revealed itself.

  Nothing.

  Jeff didn’t know if he was in a pit or a cave or a locked room or purgatory. All he knew was that he was about to learn something that he very much did not want to know. A dark sheet of dread draped itself over his soul, and his body nearly convulsed with the trembling brought on by the exquisite agony of unbearable suspense.

  He looked around desperately. If he could just see where he was, maybe he could figure out what was after him. If only something would show itself. Even a terrible monster would be better than this awful waiting and wondering. At least then he would know what he had to fight, or what had come to destroy him. As terrifying as the idea was, ignorance was even more terrifying.

  Then, out of the mists, they almost began to show themselves. A sweep of fabric here, a deepening shadow there. Eyes that did not glow but were starkly visible nonetheless. Jeff covered his face with his hands, but peeked through his fingers, as he had done when he was a child watching a horror film.

  The things were all around. Not people, not creatures, just…things. Jeff wanted to run screaming, but he had no idea which way to go. And, astonishingly, as much as he was impelled to flee, he felt an even stronger urgency to follow them into the impenetrable mist. He stepped forward, almost unable to believe his own actions. They were leading him, he knew now. They had come for him and were taking him to a place that was prepared for him. Jeff gasped for air and held his hands before him like a sleepwalker.