Black Water

by Ninie Hammon

  He’d been able to entertain that notion until he’d seen the canvas on the easel with the window already drawn there, the blank window. Then he knew. She had done what T.J. had said she’d do, what T.J. said his mama had done. She’d started painting pictures with blank windows in them. Was compelled to paint them. And one day, she began to fill the windows with an image.

  The worst one Dobbs had ever seen was the one that showed the mill workers crushed by falling lumber, their insides squashed out of them.

  Though T.J. had witnessed it, this was Dobbs’s maiden voyage down this river of impossible, and he marveled at it, knowing that he was watching an act that was not of this world. He was standing in the presence of the supernatural and that understanding instantly pebbled his skin with gooseflesh.

  She had started with the one brush, had picked it up in her right hand, had glared at him and T.J. as if daring them to point out that she was standing in front of a canvas that already had a window painted on it.

  The pallet in the tray in front of the easel had had gobs of paint on it, different colors, reds and blues and greens, white and burnt umber. In some places the paints had been swirled together to form other colors. But the paint was fresh, not dried out. She must have used that pallet recently. Dobbs knew nothing about paint, but surely you couldn’t leave gobs of it sitting out for long or it would dry. Which meant she had been painting with that pallet … when? This morning before they got here?

  She had dipped the brush into the blob of blue paint and touched the tip of the brush to the blank space in the window on the canvas. It was like watching a man grab a high-voltage electric wire — she instantly froze, every muscle rigid. As she slowly relaxed, she moved the brush downward, drew a line. She stopped then, like she didn’t know what came next.

  Then, she leaned her head back, tilted her face upward so she was looking at the ceiling instead of the painting — if her eyes had been open. Dobbs knew then that Bailey Donahue had left the building.

  The hand that held the brush began to move over the canvas, smearing blue across the surface. She lifted the brush and dipped it into a gob of black paint, mixing the blue on the brush into the black, then returned the brush to the canvas, to the exact spot where she had left off.

  Had her eyes closed the whole time.

  Dobbs may have burped out some kind of sound then, surprise, shock, he didn’t know, because T.J. glanced at him.

  The hand moved faster and faster.

  Then she picked up another brush with her left hand, touched it to the pallet, and began to paint with that brush on a different part of the window.

  Dobbs felt suddenly weak and lightheaded, and nausea’s greasy fingers clutched his belly. But he stood firm, watching as an image began to form in the window. With incredible speed, features began to appear.

  First a foot, down at the bottom of the picture, painted with her right hand. A foot clad in a pink sneaker. A child’s foot. Then the leg up from the foot. It was dirty, mud-splattered. The other foot formed next to it, but this foot had no shoe, only a sock so dirty you couldn’t tell what color it had been.

  Dobbs looked up then and saw what her right hand was painting at the top of the picture.

  The image of a child began to form there. Wet, filthy, slathered in mud with pieces of twigs and sticks stuck to her. She was lying on her back in wet goo, splayed out, the right leg from the knee down at an impossible angle. Legs didn’t bend that way. It had to be broken. As the image began to appear clear enough to identify, Bailey painted faster and faster, the brushes flying across the canvas so fast that paint splattered on her hands and the floor.

  Her face was no longer serene, blank, eyes closed. Expressions crossed her face, she opened her mouth as if she were trying to speak, closed it again. She began to pant, to gasp. She shook her head, and her legs began to tremble so violently it was amazing she was able to stand. And still she painted, flawlessly, creating the image of a filthy child, lying injured in the mud.

  She began to cry out, muffled, grunts coming from her throat, her face becoming a mask of terror, gasping, shaking her head.

  Dobbs thought of the bullet in her brain. If it moved the least little bit, it could kill her, paralyze her, rob her of sight or hearing, thought and memories. Now, she thrashed her head from side to side, crying out without making any noise, clearly terrified.

  Dobbs was afraid for her, for what she might do to herself. How could she whip her head around like that without… When her head snapped back at an angle that looked like her neck had broken, Dobbs couldn’t stand it anymore. He stepped forward and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “Miss Donahue, Bailey, you can’t—”

  She froze the second he touched her. Her right hand had completed creating the image of muddy, wet hair in a tangle of sticks and debris and it was moving down onto the forehead, beginning to paint the face below the wet hair. But she froze in place at his touch, shook all over as if in the grip of a grand mal seizure.

  “No,” T.J. shouted, “don’t touch her. Don’t interrupt…”

  But it was too late. The paintbrush dropped out of her right hand to the floor, splattering cream-colored paint. Then the left brush dropped. She stood frozen in front of the canvas. Not moving, not blinking, not breathing.

  Then she folded up like a marionette and fell, boneless and limp.

  T.J. was faster than Dobbs, stepped forward and caught her by the shoulders and eased her gently to the floor so her head wouldn’t bang on the hardwood.

  She was breathing fast. But no other part of her moved.

  Dobbs looked at her pale face, immobile now where it had been contorted with emotion only seconds before. And he was certain that the expressionless look was one she would wear for the rest of her life, that she would never wake up, that the piece of metal in her brain had been torn loose by her frantic shaking and had moved.

  Bailey was gone. Not dead, but gone. She would never wake up. Whoever had been Bailey Donahue, the woman whose body had been seized by some supernatural force, was no more.

  Then her eyes fluttered, opened, closed again. Opened a second time and stayed open. They focused, registered recognition, traveled from T.J.’s face above hers to his and back to T.J.’s. She started to cry.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Darkness. Black. Nothing. Dead.

  Then Bailey gasped, sucked in a lungful of air.

  Air!

  The cold was gone, the darkness was melting away into the normal dark of closed eyes, rather than the infinite dark of death. She blinked. Light, then dark again.

  She opened her eyes and looked at…

  Faces, one black, one white, looked down at her.

  Why was she forever opening her eyes to faces looking down at her?

  She glanced up past the faces, but her old friend the ceiling tile was nowhere to be found.

  Jumbled thoughts began to untangle themselves.

  “Bailey, you alright now? Can you talk to me?”

  Sensation was returning all over. She lay on the floor, could feel the chill of the hardwood.

  Why was she on the floor with these two — T.J. Hamilton and Raymond Dob—?

  She gasped, not merely to get air into her lungs this time, cried out, a small squeak of a scream but it was all she could manage, then she began to scramble upright, trying to sit up.

  “Now, why don’t you lie where you’re at for—?”

  She shoved T.J.’s restraining hands aside and sat up. Then she pulled her knees up to her chin, wrapped her arms around her legs and sat there like that, breathing hard. Crying. Was she crying? Yes, she was crying.

  She looked at T.J. who was down on one knee beside her, his hand on her shoulder.

  “I was … I…”

  How could she explain it?

  “You seen something, didn’t you, missy?”

  “Yes, yes! I saw—”

  “You more than seen it, though. You experienced it. You lived it.”

&n
bsp; Bailey was grateful that he was tagging words onto what she was trying to say because her own thoughts and emotions were so tangled up with impossible images, and horrible sensations, that she could make no sense of it.

  “I was … drowning!” She gasped out the last word, the memory of water, cold black water, filling her lungs so visceral she clutched her chest, feeling again the agony.

  T.J. stood, reached his hand down to her.

  “Can you stand?”

  She obediently took his hand and let him pull her to her feet. She was wobbly, unbalanced, but the other man — Dobbs, his name was Dobbs — was instantly at her side, steadying her.

  T.J. turned her toward the door and walked her out through it and she went along gentle and pliable as a lamb. He took her into the living room and eased her down on the sofa. He sat beside her, and the little dog, the adorable little dog, hopped up into her lap and snuggled close. She was grateful for his warm presence, and she buried her face in his soft fur, trying to shake loose from the … what, hallucination?

  She had been drowning.

  “I thought I was…”

  “You was. You was living something that was happenin’ to somebody else. You was living what you was paintin’.”

  She looked toward the doorway leading into the studio and started to rise, but T.J. held her gently where she was.

  “‘Fore you go look at that painting, you’d best sit here a bit, get your breath.”

  He looked up at Dobbs.

  “Why don’t you go see if you can find a soft drink — you got soda pops, don’t you?” She smiled at the reference.

  “Yes, in the cabinet, cans. Just Diet Pepsi.”

  Dobbs lumbered off toward the kitchen and T.J. took her hands in his.

  “What just happened to you, I seen it before. This ain’t my first rodeo. I seen it happen to my mama when I was a little boy. We done told you the pictures she painted, but I hadn’t got around yet to the part about what happened to her when she was paintin’ ‘em.”

  Bailey shook her head, so terribly confused. She had wandered out the back door of the wardrobe this time, right into Hogwarts, Oz and Wonderland put together. Into the Shire. Correction, into Mordor. She wasn’t sure right now what was real and what was not.

  “I suppose it’s something like a hallucination, though I ain’t never had a hallucination. But that’s when you see and feel and taste, and experience something that ain’t really happenin’ to you.”

  “I was drowning.” She sounded like a parrot. “I was … there was water and I couldn’t get my breath and I kept going under and then … then I couldn’t get back up and I … I…”

  She began to tremble and he let go of one of her hands and slipped his arm around her shoulders, patting her comfortingly.

  “What happened to me? Why? What is all this?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  Dobbs returned then with a glass full of ice, popped the tab on a Diet Pepsi and poured it foaming into the glass.

  “I didn’t never expect to see anything like what just happened ever again. The last time I seen it was when I’s eleven years old. I didn’t watch her paint the picture of you, but I seen her paintin’ the one before that, a painting of…”

  His voice trailed off and he fell silent.

  “There was a fire,” Dobbs told her, taking a seat in the wingback chair across from the two of them on the couch. “It started at night. They think it was where creosote in the chimney seeped out through the cracks in the bricks, and when it got hot, it started a fire in the wall.”

  He stopped, looked at T.J., then finished simply. “A mama, daddy and three little kids.”

  T.J.’s voice sounded haunted when he continued. “They said the five of them died of smoke inhalation, that they’s dead before the fire ever got to ‘em. But that ain’t the way of it. They burned up. Mama painted the fire. And she … burned, too.”

  Bailey pushed the memory of the sensation of drowning aside and tried to order her thoughts, tried to be rational and reasonable. She grabbed hold of her emotions, the terror and panic of a few minutes before still lingering like mist above a creek. She sat up straight, looked with a frank, direct stare into the eyes of the old man who had brought total chaos into her world at a time when all she asked of life was smooth waters and a dark, quiet peace.

  “So you’re telling me that your mother painted pictures of … things, events, people she couldn’t see, didn’t know about, that hadn’t even happened yet, that she painted that portrait of me forty … fifty—?”

  “Almost sixty years ago, in 1958.”

  “…Sixty years before I sat in that kitchen,” she gestured with her chin toward it, “and put a bullet in my brain?”

  “She started painting after she fell and hit her head. It was the end of June, the week before the fourth of July.” Dobbs straightened as if he’d thought of something.

  “And that is a portrait of me, I mean it is me — down to the moles on my neck and the mosquito bite on my forehead.”

  “Mosquito bite?” T.J. asked.

  “I guess you didn’t notice, but I did. There’s a pink spot on the picture that matches the mosquito bite I got…” She reached up and felt around above her right eye. “It’s gone now, but I was sitting at the kitchen table … with the gun in my hand when I heard a mosquito buzzing around. I swatted it. And a minute later — no, it couldn’t even have been that long — I heard your knock.”

  She took a shaky breath.

  “And that’s impossible. But it’s also right there.” She pointed to the front door, beyond which the broken painting lay on the porch. “You can see it, touch it, hold it in your hand. It’s real.”

  She shook her head in a last-ditch effort at denial. “This is crazy. It can’t be!” She looked from one to the other of the men sitting in her parlor. Things like this didn’t happen to ordinary people like her. This was from superhero comics and fantasy novels and…. It couldn’t be. It flat out could not be.

  But it was.

  She took a deep breath.

  “Why me? What does your mother’s portrait have to do with what happened in there with me and that painting…” She looked toward the doorway into the studio, then got unsteadily to her feet and started toward it.

  “I want to see that painting.”

  T.J. stood to block her way.

  “You not gone like what you see and you still pale as a just-laid egg. With that bullet … why don’t you sit—”

  “Let’s get this out of the way right now, okay?” She pointed to the small bandage covering a fingertip-sized wound on her temple. “This bullet in my head, I have no intention of making it the hall monitor of my whole life, deciding what I can do and what I can’t do, when and where. I could hiccup and drop dead. I could just as likely survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.” She looked deep into eyes so brown you couldn’t make out the pupils. “It’s no secret that life doesn’t matter to me. More than a week ago I turned toward the audience, took my final bow and stepped off the stage. Permanently, or so I thought. But even if my life were precious to me — no, especially if my life were precious to me — I wouldn’t sign over the property and hand the keys to fear and timidity. We clear?”

  She saw a look come into his eyes she hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t pity. Maybe it was respect.

  He nodded and moved aside and she went into the studio, then walked in something like a trance to the still-wet painting, stepping in splatters of paint on the floor.

  A child, a little girl in a wet sundress, lay sprawled on her back in a puddle of muddy water, her long braids so matted with mud and sticks you couldn’t even tell the color, her arms and legs slathered with the same mud and lumps of nameless goo. Her right leg was crooked, must have been broken. Her face was … missing, nothing was painted there, only blank canvas.

  T.J. must have seen her looking at the empty space.

  “Dobbs, he … you was crying out and he was worried you was go
nna … so he touched your shoulder, like to wake you up just as your brushes was starting on her face.”

  “Brush-es? Plural?”

  “Uh huh.” Dobbs nodded. “In both hands.”

  T.J. looked hard at the painting, examined it.

  “This little girl drowned alright, but ain’t no way it was in a swimming pool. Look at all the mess in her hair and on her clothes. She musta drowned in the lake.”

  “Maybe she was out fishing with her daddy and fell out of the boat,” Dobbs said.

  “Or might be she was on the shore playin’ and fell in.”

  “She didn’t drown alone,” Bailey said, and T.J.’s eyes shifted from examining the painting to examining her face. “There were other people there, I could hear … the little girl could hear the cries of other people in the water, people crying for help. And there was some kind of explosion, I could see, I mean she could see—”

  T.J. stopped her. “You was seeing out her eyes, so you saw it, too. An explosion — what kind of explosion?”

  “I couldn’t tell anything about it. I saw the bright lights, heard the boom sound. And there was stuff in the water, big pieces of, I don’t know what, it was so dark, but pieces of broken things, debris.”

  “So something blew up, a boat maybe, and sank, and pieces of it were in the water?” Dobbs asked.

  “Maybe. She was…” She glanced at T.J. and started over. “I was so scared. I couldn’t swim, didn’t even know how to kick my feet to get my head above the water.” Bailey put her hands on her upper arms and gripped, hugging herself. “I tried to cry out for help but I got strangled.”

  She described the tumbling sensation and her fingers slipping on the arm of the Adirondack chair.

  “I was holding my breath, but my chest hurt and I couldn’t.”

  T.J. touched her hand. She realized she was squeezing her upper arms hard enough to leave bruises.

  “It ain’t real. It’s happening in your head like it was real, and it was reality to the little girl here, but you’re fine, you’re here and it’s dry and there’s air. Come on, now, walk it back some.”