That was one good thing about the open-plan building: it left nowhere to hide. Light came through the four windows, scattering shadows under the table and in the corners of the kitchenette. Still, Sam remained alert as she descended the stairs and stood, shivering, in the centre of the room.
If I’m alone, what caused the noise?
The answer came when she glanced towards the cold fireplace. A log had fallen off the wood pile and lay on the fur rug.
Sam let her breathe out in a whoosh and hurried to her travel case. She unzipped it and dug through the clothes to find her thickest jacket and a pair of hiking boots, which she swapped for her thin sneakers. It wasn’t enough to stop her from shivering, so she turned towards the fireplace with the intention of lighting it.
She made it halfway across the room before she stopped. She’d been so intent on looking for a stranger in her cabin that two very important changes had escaped her notice. Firstly, there were three mugs laid out on the kitchen bench, just in front of the window overlooking the shrubs behind the cabin. She hadn’t used any mugs the day before. The cups had been arranged with precision, too; their handles all pointed in the same direction—towards the easel.
There she found the second change, and it froze her breath in her lungs. Someone had painted on the canvas.
A man’s face stared at her from the cloth. It was a closely cropped portrait, realistic and barely dry. Deep-set grey eyes gazed out from above a crooked nose and thin lips. He had thick salt-and-pepper hair and uneven stubble. A red mark—a cut that had not quite healed—marred his cheek.
“Oh,” Sam whispered, unable to think of anything else to say. “Oh.”
She recognised the style. The thin strokes, the mingling of the colours, and the particular way the hair had been painted were all very familiar, because she’d seen them hundreds of times before.
Either I painted this picture or someone spent an awful lot of time and effort imitating me.
Sam struggled to slow her frantic breathing as her mind snatched at shreds of logic amongst the rising panic. Am I sure I’m alone?
The axe was leaning against the wall beside the fireplace, where she’d left it. Sam picked it up and raised it in front of her body, even though it was a struggle to keep it steady. She could think of only a couple of places an average-sized person could hide, and she moved through them quickly. First, she tried the kitchen pantry, which was still stacked with canned soups, pastas, and far too many tins of Spam. Next, she tried the cupboard below the stairs, where she found nothing except a stack of spare blankets and empty buckets.
Sam ran back up the stairs, staggering under the weight of the axe, and into the bedroom. She doubted anyone could have gotten up there without her noticing, but she still checked under the bed and in the wardrobe. Finally, she moved to the balcony and pulled back the thick curtains, exposing a breathtaking view of the outside world.
Mist had rolled in overnight. It covered the ground like a blanket and drifted across the lake in lazy swirls. Sam followed the low-lying clouds to where they rose against the bases of the mountain, clinging to the greenery like a ghostly spiderweb. It was one of the most eerily beautiful things she’d ever seen.
Sam exhaled, and the plume of her breath rose past her to dissolve in the icy air. It had to be early morning; there was enough light to see her way, but the sun hadn’t yet topped the mountains in the distance.
Dark motion in the mist caught Sam’s attention, and she turned back to the lake. When she squinted through the thick fog, she caught glimpses of… What? The dock? No… something on the dock.
Sam gasped as another billow of mist engulfed the dark shape. She didn’t waste time waiting for the fog to clear, but turned, crossed the room, and took the stairs two at a time. She skidded on the main room’s polished wooden floor and hit the door with a thud. Her fingers shook as she fumbled to turn the handle, then she burst through the opening, axe held high, and took two stumbling steps towards the dock.
The mist rolled around her, seeming to pull her into its folds. It was much thicker than it had looked from the upstairs room. It prickled at her cheeks and nose, freezing her lungs when she inhaled. Stepping outside was like entering another dimension; even the sounds from the forest seemed muffled. Sam squinted, searching for shapes amongst the sea of white as she staggered forward.
The beginning of the dock appeared first, the tar-black pillars materialising through the mist like phantom ships. Sam continued until she was even with them then put one hand on the closest pillar. The condensation that had gathered on it trickled down her wrist.
“Hello?” Sam called, but the fog seemed to swallow her voice. She shuddered and glanced at her feet, where the dark planks grew out of the grassy shore. Peter said not to go on the dock…
The mist thinned as a gust of wind tore through it, and Sam glimpsed the end of the dock. Empty. The black pillars marking the walkway’s end were barely visible; beyond them, everything was white. Is that what I saw? I suppose, in the fog and from a distance, it would be possible to mistake a post for a kneeling person.
Even so, Sam didn’t turn away immediately, but watched as the mist enveloped the dock once again. She felt, deep in her bones, that she wasn’t alone. It was one of the most uncanny sensations she’d ever experienced. She let the axe drop and rested its head on the ground, keeping her fingers on the handle to stop it from tipping. Somewhere in the distance, a bird screeched, and a flurry of wings followed as it and its companions took flight. Sam turned, but the mist was too thick to see them.
It was too thick to see anything.
Sam tightened her shaking fingers on the axe. She kept turning, searching for a landmark, any shape at all, but all she could see was a wall of white. No trees. No cabin. It’s like I’ve been transported to another planet.
The thought frightened her, and she started forward, guessing the direction of the cabin as well as she could. The axe’s head dragged over the frosty, sparse grass, and for a moment, the grating noise was all she could hear. Then more birdcalls and whirring wings filled the air, and a tall, familiar outline emerged from the fog.
Thank goodness.
Sam increased her pace to a sprint and pushed through the cabin’s door. It was dark inside—darker than she remembered it—but it felt safe, and with a sigh, she dropped the axe beside the fireplace.
There wasn’t much kindling left, but she managed to light it and spent twenty minutes carefully feeding in the smallest pieces of wood until the fire was strong enough to survive without her. The sun had topped the ridge by the time she looked out the window, and she was surprised to see the fog had almost entirely disappeared. Pockets of it lingered in the corners of the mountainside, and thin wisps were rapidly dissolving from above the smooth surface of the lake.
The dock was easy to see. Its dark wood contrasted with the crisp blue, and the view looked good enough to make a decent painting.
On the subject of paintings…
Sam reluctantly turned to face the portrait in the corner of the room and met the cool-grey eyes of the strangely familiar face.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sam stepped towards the painting. The eyes transfixed her. The cruel gaze held secrets she never wanted to hear.
She couldn’t remember where she knew him from. He definitely wasn’t someone she was on first-name basis with. It was a brief familiarity—like someone she’d passed in the street, whose face had been unique enough for her to subconsciously make a note of.
Her apartment was on the outskirts of the state’s largest city. Sam guessed she would have passed at least a hundred new faces each day—and yet, she knew if she’d seen that face before, she wouldn’t have forgotten it so easily. Where’d it come from, then? A dream?
Yes, she realised. I did dream him. But not in that way.
Images rose in her mind when she closed her eyes. She saw herself walking down the stairs and passing the fire, which had been reduced to coals. She’d taken he
r place in front of the easel, palette in one hand and brush in the other, and painted as though she were in a trance.
Sam pressed her palms to her forehead and rocked on her feet. I’ve been sleep-waking, then. Or, rather, sleep-painting…
She thought she remembered putting the paint in the desk’s drawer before returning upstairs. Sure enough, when she opened the drawer, a plastic pallet sat inside, covered with well-blended colours.
It’s the stress. I’m panicking about the Heritage show and stranger in the mist, and my brain’s blending the ideas and processing them the best way it can.
Sam glanced at the painting again. If it was a message from her subconscious, it didn’t bode well: the haggard face, the cruel, hungry expression, and the way the deep grey eyes seemed to follow her… Sam closed the distance between herself and the painting, pulled it off the easel, and propped it against the wall so it faced the wooden planks.
The room was warming up, thanks to the fire, and Sam took off her thick coat and draped it over the back of the chair. She was ravenous. The pantry held a stack of baked bean tins hidden behind the Spam, and she tipped one of them into a blackened pan to heat over the fire.
Sam ate straight out of the pot while she warmed her dew-dampened shoes in front of the fire. By the time she’d finished eating and had washed up, the forest was alive with noises. She checked her phone; it was just after ten in the morning. Good. Still early enough to have a productive day.
There weren’t any service bars on her mobile, but that was to be expected. She’d been watching the signal on the drive up, and it had disappeared not long before she’d entered the woods. For the rest of the trip, her phone would be a very expensive, cumbersome clock.
Sam stretched, working the tension out of her back and shoulders, then pulled the wooden dining chair up to the easel. She picked out a small canvas, one only a little larger than her head, and set it in place. A smaller canvas means less space to fill… and less pressure to make it perfect.
She pulled the pallet out of the drawer and stared at the myriad of blended oil colours. She still found it hard to believe that she’d painted such a coherent image while asleep. Sam pushed the thought from her mind and dabbed her brush into the paint. It was tacky from being left in the drawer overnight, but not completely set, so she grabbed the bottle of primer and added a dollop to loosen the paint. It was an expensive brand of oils, and she didn’t want to waste any more than she already had.
A large smudge of green-grey covered one corner of the pallet, so Sam swirled her brush through it and raised her hand to apply it to the canvas. Okay, Sammy, what are we painting today?
She hesitated, the brush held a millimetre from the cloth. She hadn’t planned anything, and the usual ideas seemed reluctant to enter her mind. All she could think about were the sallow face and cold grey eyes.
Focus! Pick something and put it on the canvas. It’s that simple. What about a bird? You used to love painting birds.
Sam lowered the brush and looked at the rest of the colours on the pallet. Dusky pink—that had been for the man’s face. The grey-blue had been his flannel top. The dull green, which was currently on her brush, had been used for the trees behind him. And the deep grey, just a tiny amount, was for his irises.
Why can’t I get him out of my mind?
“C’mon, Sam,” she coached herself, rolling her head to relax the muscles in her neck. “Push through the block. Start freestyle. Paint abstract, even. Just get some colours on the canvas, and it’ll get easier—you’ll see.”
Twenty minutes later, Sam carried the canvas, half-covered in haphazard smears of greens and blues, to the fireplace. She threw it onto the flames and wiped the tear tracks off her cheeks as she watched the wet paint send up plumes of black smoke. The aborted painting took far longer to burn than she was comfortable with.
“Damn it,” she hissed, pressing her palms against her eyes to hold back the dampness. “Get it together, Sam. You’ve only got a week.”
She personally knew at least three artists who would have committed first-degree murder for the chance to show their work at the Heritage Gallery. It was the sort of thing an artist put on a resume to raise eyebrows, and the gallery had launched more careers than she could count.
Denzel, her childhood friend, was interning at the Heritage. He’d called in every favour he was owed and blended them with a lot of grovelling and carefully placed hints to work the impossible: a show for Sam, a nearly unheard-of artist.
The gallery’s co-ordinator had given Sam eight months to prepare a collection of a dozen exhibits. Eight months had seemed like an eternity at the time, but there she was, with nine days until the matinee night, and nothing was ready. Nothing started. Nothing even conceived.
During the first week following her invite, Sam had felt as though she might explode from all of the possibilities filling her mind. She’d shared them with her mother that crisp autumn morning as they’d enjoyed their coffees at the local café. While they talked, Sam had idly sketched her companion’s eyes without fully realising how much they’d sunken in a few short weeks, how gaunt her mother’s cheeks were, or how her skin seemed almost papery in the fluorescent light.
Sometimes, Sam wondered if her mother had ever intended to tell her. If she’d known, Sam could have taken time away from her job, moved back in with her mother, and spent as much of those last few days with her only remaining parent as possible. Instead, she’d had to hear it from her mother’s doctor at the stroke of midnight. “The cancer’s progressed far more rapidly than we anticipated. If you would like to say goodbye, you’ll need to come quickly.”
After that, she’d had only five hours with her mother—to sit beside the hospital bed, stroking the fragile, bone-thin hand resting on starchy white sheets—before the best person in her life had exhaled for the last time.
The following weeks passed like a dream. Sam had struggled to keep the days straight, often missing her shifts at work or turning up on the wrong days. She’d stopped painting—and stopped thinking about painting—and the Heritage Gallery invite had been lost at the bottom of a drawer.
She’d emerged from the fog of raw grief as a different person. She still loved painting. That was built into her identity. Nothing on heaven or earth could abolish the joy a loaded brush gave her. But the desire was gone. She was like a starving man whose hunger had been sated; he could gaze at a lavish feast, appreciate its appeal, then shrug and turn away.
Then one day, she’d realised the exhibition was less than two months away, and she hadn’t touched a paintbrush in half a year. Panic set in. She’d bought new canvasses, new paints, and a clean set of brushes then tried to create again. The results had disgusted her. You’re just rusty, she’d told herself as she glared at a horribly proportioned, terribly boring tree she’d created. Practice will bring it all back.
Except, it hadn’t. She’d tried to start the show’s collection a dozen times during those two months and had trashed it every time.
Two weeks out from the exhibition, when Sam had been on the verge of calling Denzel to tearfully, humiliatingly cancel, Uncle Peter had called up like her guardian angel and offered her a week at his cabin. It provided the perfect setting to get her back into her art: there was no contact with the outside world. No distractions. Nothing to do except paint.
But all I have so far is a sleep-created, nightmare-induced face. I can’t even imagine what the critics would say if I tried to show that at the Heritage.
Sam watched the fire until it had reduced the canvas to a sad slop on top of the smouldering logs, then she inhaled and leaned back against the armchair. The week’s still young. Twelve paintings is a stretch, but not impossible.
The cabin smelt awful thanks to the burning chemicals, and the stench churned her stomach. Sam glanced at the window and caught a glimpse of rich green trees and blue skies. The day was too beautiful to spend indoors. Maybe a taste of nature will give me the kick I need.
The idea energised her, and Sam pulled on a thin jacket and packed her sketchbook and a box of charcoal pencils into her satchel. She added a water bottle then left the cabin, locking the door on the way out.
The lake’s shore looked worlds away from the ethereal visage she’d walked through that morning. Straggly brown-green grass grew in patches amongst the sand that led into the still water. Sam turned right and followed the curving shore around the lake.
About a kilometre along, the steep mountain to her right softened into a slope. Sam made out an overgrown trail leading into the trees, and picked up her pace as she entered it. The trees and vines grew high over her, blocking out almost all of the sunlight, but not even the shade could spare her as the day warmed and the uphill climb made her uncomfortably hot. She stripped off her jacket and tied it around her waist.
The brush became increasingly thick and snaggly as she moved higher. Vines caught at her clothes and twisted across the dirt path, threatening to trip her. She had to stop several times to remove leeches from her legs.
Then the path turned, and Sam found herself facing an open, rocky area. It looked as though a landslide had occurred there a few years back, and it had cleared a gap in the vegetation. Sam climbed one of the higher rocks and settled down to rest on its flat top.
The forest spread out like a green carpet ahead of her, rushing to meet the blue water. She’d travelled farther than she’d expected, and Sam couldn’t stop a grin from growing over her face as she spotted her cabin, laughably small, at the edge of the lake.
She closed her eyes and drank in the sensations. The cold rock beneath her was refreshing. Dead and dried leaves under her feet crackled whenever she shifted. Birds screamed in the distance, and insects hummed in the foliage.
Sam pulled the art book out of her satchel. The Heritage’s show would need proper canvas paintings, but at least she could sketch some ideas to use as references. She swivelled her wrist to loosen it, then started to draw anything in sight: trees, rocks, leaves, and even her own boots.
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