by Dan Jolley
Darius had been trying to decide whether or not to buy one of the magazines for Frederick, bring it home and surprise him with it. He’d seen how much pleasure Frederick took from the glossy photos, and he agreed that the men in the pictures were indeed beautiful, but Darius had never bought a magazine of that kind in his life. He felt, and would admit it readily, unreasonably squeamish about it.
He took his hand out of his pants pocket, made as though to pick up a magazine. Hesitated. Glanced up at the proprietor, who favored him with a dull stare and said, “Decisions, decisions.”
Darius had his mouth open for a retort when a tortured voice carried over the ambient sound of traffic.
“Justice has come to Atlanta!”
Darius swiveled around, searched for the source of the voice, and heard it again: “The city hath responded to the wickedness that plagues our world today, and sent a predator!”
Darius spotted it: an old homeless woman, clad in rags, stood on the opposite street corner and waved a scrap of newspaper. Darius thought he recognized the scrap, but couldn’t tell for sure at that distance. He dropped his own newspapers back on the rack, waited for the light to turn green, and crossed the street.
Atlanta had more than its fair share of the homeless. Many of them were frighteningly aggressive in their requests for money, and many more left little doubt that they were mentally ill. But the woman across the street seemed different right away. Her voice, though badly strained, held a note of coherence and purpose that Darius suspected had come from formal training.
“Thieves, murderers, rapists! Thine evil ways do not escape the sight of justice! Thy days of chaos are numbered, know ye this!”
Darius drew close enough to see the newspaper clipping. It was one of the front-page Chronicle articles from a few days before, describing the “masked woman” who had allegedly appeared out of the night to save the lives of a couple of cops in a screwed-up drug sting. A couple of subsequent sightings had surfaced, carried by several of the smaller papers as well as the Chronicle and the Journal-Constitution. The tattered orator waved the clipping like a flag.
“No longer are you the apex predators! The city has risen up, and the old hunters soon will be prey! A gray widow walks among you! And she will feed!”
Darius stared at the woman as he passed her. Gray Widow… He rolled the name around in his head. The old lady had undeniable charisma, and Darius wondered what she might have been earlier in her life. A preacher? A motivational speaker, perhaps? Maybe a drill sergeant?
His conjecture cut off abruptly as he jolted hard into a stringy teenager who seemed to be equally mesmerized by the homeless woman.
The kid had shaved one side of his head bald and dyed the straight hair on the other side a brilliant red. It hung down past several facial piercings to the collar of a battered leather jacket. Until Darius bumped into him, the kid’s eyes were big as the proverbial dinner plates, staring alternately at the old woman and at the clipping.
Startled, the kid and Darius made mumbled apologies, and Darius hurried along his way, faintly embarrassed by his clumsiness. The homeless woman’s voice grew fainter behind him, and faded completely as Darius turned another corner.
The voice stuck in his head, though. Through the lobby, into the elevator, up to the sixth floor and the Chronicle’s rabbit warren of desks and privacy dividers, the street orator wouldn’t leave him alone. One name rang in his ears: Gray Widow.
Through a window, he noticed the sky beginning to turn overcast after all. Darius rapped on the glass wall of his editor’s office and pushed on the door just below the name “Edgar Watts.” Watts looked up as Darius entered. The antithesis of the harried, cutthroat newspaper editor, Watts dressed even more neatly than Darius, with razor-cut hair and a meticulously trimmed gray beard. He didn’t wait for Darius to speak.
“This woman in gray thing is turning into something real.” His voice flowed out clear and smooth. Darius loved to listen to him. “Fodder for your column, I’d say. There’s a doctor over at Gavring who claims this masked female delivered a patient to her last night and then vanished into thin air. Doctor’s name is Carla Gates.” Watts paused to take a long swallow from a bottle of spring water, and Darius casually and with faint and lingering disappointment regarded the framed pictures of the man’s wife and children on his desk.
“Well, then, the fates have smiled on us this morning,” Darius said. “Forget calling her ‘masked woman’ or ‘woman in gray.’ Her name is the Gray Widow.”
* * *
Outside, on the street, Nathan Pittman shuffled along the sidewalk toward the MARTA station, the homeless woman’s speech echoing in the back of his mind. Nervously he adjusted his eyebrow ring. He couldn’t stop thinking about school, though. Couldn’t stop thinking about Paige.
At his old school he’d made the dean’s list every quarter. He maintained at least a 3.87 GPA. He was staff photographer for the yearbook, and had five trophies in his room from kickboxing tournaments. It hadn’t mattered what he looked like; he’d chosen his own appearance and been accepted that way, and whether or not he dyed his hair or put a ring through his eyebrow hadn’t mattered one bit. Nobody said, Hey, there’s that freak with the crap in his face. Or Man, what a loser. If anyone said anything at all, they said, Hey, that’s Nathan Pittman, he’s up for Star Student.
Well. Maybe not total acceptance. The old administration wasn’t too crazy about his appearance, no. But the principal was pretty liberal, and the few times a teacher had called his parents...
Ha. Wrong place to look for concern.
The two ghouls he had to call “mother” and “father” didn’t give a rat’s ass about him, unless he somehow directly inconvenienced them. They hadn’t even put him in a private school because it would be good for him; they did it because it would make them look better.
Here no one knew him. Though more than ready to prove himself, to show his new classmates who he was, no one gave him the chance. No one except Paige.
He closed his eyes briefly, and corrected that thought. No one at all.
When Nathan opened his eyes again, the day had darkened. He glanced up at heavy rolling clouds as rain began to fall.
* * *
At 12:22 that afternoon, Tim Kapoor stood in the hallway outside Janey Sinclair’s apartment and stared at the door. He held a stack of honeycomb air filters in one hand and a sheaf of work orders attached to a clipboard in the other. Leon, the man his mother had hired to handle maintenance in the building, was at that moment across town on a loading dock, arguing about refrigerators. Tim’s mother would have let the air filters go until Leon got back, but Tim saw no reason to wait. He shifted the clipboard to his other hand, where he could just barely hold onto it with his thumb, and rapped on Janey’s door a second time.
“Ms. Sinclair?”
No one answered. Rain lashed the window at the end of the hallway, and the lights dimmed for a second as another huge wave of thunder crashed over the building. Electric blue-white flashed again, and Tim smiled.
He loved thunderstorms. As a child at home, back in Florida, when his mother sat agonizingly still in her armchair and tensed her muscles against the next boom of thunder, Tim always went to stand at the sliding patio doors, face pressed against the glass. He reveled in the storm. He loved the saturated feel of the air, the way the trees whipped in the driving wind. He loved the sound of the thunder itself, from the single basso booms to the high, brittle, crackling crashes that lasted several seconds at a time. The thunder always kept him company.
Now, in the hallway, despite the storm’s companionship, he felt paranoid for a second or two. He imagined Janey Sinclair just inside the apartment, watching him through the fish-eye lens of the peephole. His cheeks heated up.
Rarely did he bungle anything as badly as he’d bungled meeting Janey Sinclair. He could only imagine what he must have looked
like. An art groupie, at best—at worst, a puppy dog, yapping at her feet. No wonder she practically ran away. He might have too, in her place.
Tim set the stack of air filters down and dug the huge jumble of keys out of his jeans pocket.
The door opened smoothly when he worked the lock, and he poked his head inside. “Ms. Sinclair? Are you here? I need to replace your air filter.”
No one answered. He stepped through the doorway.
The LaCroix Apartment Building housed two kinds of apartments: small one-bedrooms and minuscule one-bedrooms. Janey Sinclair occupied one of the small one-bedrooms, but judging from the decor and amount of furniture she owned, Tim suspected she could have lived comfortably in a minuscule. No lights burned, but he saw well enough not to trip over anything, despite heavy, charcoal-and-black draperies that blocked out nearly all of the storm-filtered sunlight.
A striped cloth couch and matching chair, both tasteful but not very expensive, formed a sparse conversation corner against the far wall. A small TV sat on an old typing desk, positioned so that someone could watch it while lying comfortably on the couch. He didn’t see anything like a game console or a stereo. Tim wondered if, like one of his former roommates, Janey Sinclair preferred to keep all her expensive electronics in her bedroom.
A glass-topped table stood near the kitchen alcove, but the four chairs surrounding it didn’t look as though they’d been moved in months. The sink stood empty and scrubbed clean. Tim figured that for either a very good or a very bad sign, depending on whether the empty sink resulted from a healthy respect for neatness, or a streak of anal retention.
He stopped, surprised to find himself building a mental image of Janey Sinclair based on how she kept her apartment. He hadn’t done that with any of the other tenants.
Of course, none of the other tenants were anything like Janey Sinclair, either. Tim closed his eyes and remembered her paintings. They were like...he searched for comparisons. Beautiful music. A perfectly cooked meal. They were like expressions of the best qualities humanity had to offer.
He tried to deny it, but he felt a serious, guilty thrill, being in her apartment alone.
Okay, Tim, that’s some heavy-duty creepy you’ve got going on. You need to get out of here.
He set the stack of air filters against the wall beside the door, took one of them and went to the utility closet that housed the AC/heating unit. It was near the door to the bedroom, next to a slightly narrower door, which he knew opened onto a coat closet.
He had his hand on the utility closet doorknob when he glanced at the door to Janey Sinclair’s bedroom. It was pulled to, but not shut completely. A sudden thought made him twitch.
What if she didn’t use a studio? What if she painted here?
“Hello? Ms. Sinclair? Are you here?” He let his voice get louder and louder with each word. The silence that came back to him was broken only by the sound of an upstairs neighbor turning on a vacuum cleaner.
This is creepy. By being in here, and thinking about taking a look in her bedroom, I’m being a creep.
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
Just a quick peek!
Hating himself a little, Tim went to the bedroom door. He felt more and more like an intruder with each passing second, but…to get a glimpse of a Janey Sinclair painting in mid-process? He put his ear to the door, sure that Janey was gone but fearful enough to make doubly certain before he truly invaded her privacy. Finally he sucked in a deep breath and pushed open the door.
Tim stayed that way, rigid and staring, for a full minute.
A tremendous clap of thunder sounded, and his hand fell away from the knob. The air filter dropped to the floor and propped itself against the wall. The maintenance chores forgotten, Tim took a few small, hesitant steps into Janey’s bedroom, his breath shallow and fast. The door, not hung quite properly, swung shut behind him and tapped against the door frame.
A huge painting rested on an easel beside the window. Illuminated only by the storm’s thin, gray light, its details remained stunningly clear. It nearly touched the floor and stood almost as tall as he did, and he couldn’t take his eyes off it.
The rest of the bedroom registered on his mind only peripherally: a narrow twin bed, a battered chest-of-drawers, a small night table that held up a reading lamp. A three-legged stool sat in front of the easel, and orderly stacks and rows of painting materials rested on a small work table a few feet away. Tube after tube of oil paint pointed to a coffee can frenzied with different styles of brushes. Beyond that sat a complete set of Design Markers, each one upright in the stand, bristling like grown-up Crayolas.
But the painting, not its surroundings, demanded his attention and took away the air from his lungs.
“Wow.” He’d taken a class in college, “Criticism of the Arts,” and for a semester had forced himself to come up with words that would “codify the physical expressions of the minds and hearts” of a selected group of artists. Sometimes he did it successfully, sometimes not, but he’d left the class believing he could verbalize something about any creative subject.
Nothing came to him now except awe and, he couldn’t deny it, a growing spike of fear.
The painting depicted a small house, a cabin really, at the edge of a vast, snowy forest. Yellow-orange light like that of a fireplace shone from the windows, but reached no further. Icy blue dominated the work. It utterly defeated the light of the fire. Beat it back into the windows.
And Tim saw something in the painting.
He blinked, and searched the canvas for an actual image of what he knew was there. He backed away a step.
On the surface, the painting was simply a photorealistic depiction of a cabin near a forest, nothing more. But the longer he stared at it, the more convinced he became that something lived there, in the woods.
Ridiculous. What am I thinking?
Tim’s heart banged against his ribs. Involuntary tears filled his eyes.
Something was there. Something lurked, waiting, waiting and watching. The firelight from the house wasn’t enough to keep it back. The safety of the house was an illusion, a shell of false hope. Something lurked in the woods, something that hated...something that would act. Soon.
He felt the cold from the snow all the way into his bones.
He felt it watching him.
Thunder hammered at the building, and Tim jumped.
A sharp click sounded out behind him, from the apartment’s living room. Panicked and light-headed, he looked wildly around, searching at the same time for a place to hide and something he could use as a weapon. A closet with two folding metal doors took up most of one wall, but he knew the doors would squeal if he tried to open them, which would alert anybody in the living room.
He heard footsteps draw closer. Feet brushed across carpet. Right outside the bedroom door.
Tim backed swiftly into the corner, squeezed behind the easel and crouched down, hidden behind the canvas. He didn’t want to be anywhere near the painting, and shuddered as the edge of the canvas touched his skin, but he held tenuously to a sliver of rational thought, and even more than the painting itself he feared whatever it was that crept through the apartment.
For long seconds, as the footsteps drew nearer, he knew beyond doubt that the thing in the woods had come out after him, come right out of the painting and followed him, and was about to rip him into bloody chunks.
The footsteps stopped, and Tim realized with a thump in his stomach that whatever made them now stood before the air filter he’d dropped, staring down at it. He pictured the head swiveling around, searching for the intruder who obviously hadn’t left the apartment.
Tim’s heart began to ache, his limbs glistened with panicked sweat, and he feared he might vomit.
The bedroom door swung open and he saw, beneath the easel, a pair of feminine feet enter the room. Silently,
carefully, he exhaled. The feet, clad in athletic shoes and white socks, looked completely harmless. Not the clawed feet of a supernatural beast. Not cloven hooves. Just Reeboks. What sounded like keys clattered on the chest-of-drawers.
He almost laughed. Edging ever so slightly to one side, he peered out from behind the easel.
Janey Sinclair was home. Dressed in baggy sweats, she held a dark gray bundle of some kind under one arm and moved the other arm in circles, as though trying to work out a muscle kink. She seemed to have been sweating, though her shirt wasn’t wet.
Tim pressed himself against the wall and closed his eyes for a moment, letting himself de-fuse. Of course it was Janey Sinclair. It was her apartment, wasn’t it? In a rush he grew acutely conscious of how stupid he’d been, jumping and hiding because...why? Because he’d been frightened by a painting. A painting! Oil smeared on canvas! What an idiot!
All his terror switched to embarrassment and shame. He’d set his mind to figuring out how he could salvage even a single scrap of personal dignity from the situation when he heard another door open, and realized he might not have to try. Janey looked as though she were about to step into the bathroom.
Tim waited, hoping she’d be neurotic enough to pull the door closed, even though she believed herself to be alone in her own apartment. If she did, he thought he could creep out silently, and she’d never have to know he’d been there.
Yeah, except you should come clean and tell her, you creep, you freaking stalker.
The air filter wouldn’t get installed, no, but if she called to ask about it he could tell her he’d been there earlier and gotten distracted, maybe gotten a call about some maintenance emergency. He had a way out, an easy and clear one, if she only closed the door. Excited, he silently planted one hand on the floor, ready to spring up and wriggle out from behind the painting as fast as possible. He risked another peek.
