Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity

by Andrew van Wey

  He shifted onto his side and used his left hand to hold the screw driver up, freeing his right hand. He began to cut a stamp sized square from the lower fold of canvas with the X-acto knife.

  “I’m not saying that honey,” he said as the X-acto knife caught on a tough thread of canvas like a tendon in meat. He sawed the knife back and forth, clenching his teeth and applying increasing pressure.

  “So what are you saying? Because, frankly, our daughter’s like a stranger at times, and I’m all out of ideas.”

  “What I’m saying is--”

  The X-acto burst through the thread of canvas with sudden force. Dan felt it arc inward, shaving under flesh from wrist to thumb. He clamped down on the wound instantly as his hand snapped back and burned.

  “Fuck!” he shouted, dropping the X-acto as blood and warmth rushed to his head. An inch long curl of skin hung from the outside of his left thumb, flopping back all the way to where it met his palm. For a brief second he saw pink muscle beneath the peel before the blood pooled in like a red tide. He clutched the wound, forcing the loose skin back against his thumb. Wetness ran down his fingers and out the bottom of his other hand. It already hurt like hell.

  “What’s wrong?” Linda asked, and gasped when he emerged from behind the painting. His sleeve was already stained crimson and growing. What the fabric didn’t absorb dripped off his elbow and onto the hardwood floor. More than the pain, he felt embarrassed and helpless, like a kid.

  “Oh my God, honey that’s really bad!” she said, wide eyed at the sight of so much red.

  “No shit,” he snapped, storming towards the door. “So where’s the fucking Bactine?”

  Linda insisted that he go to Intensive Care to have the wound looked at, but he would hear nothing of it. Two sets of stitches for the same family in less than two weeks was not a precedent he wanted to set. Instead, Dan dressed the wound himself, wincing first at the sight of that flap of skin shifting about on the pool of red, then at the burst of pain as the Bactine coated the raw tissue.

  He kept pressure on it for a good twenty minutes before the bleeding finally slowed. The adult bandages were old and stiff so he settled on two of Jessica’s Hello Kitty bandages. Even cleansed and dressed he still saw crimson beneath the white and pink bandage and knew that Linda was probably right, he should have gone to Intensive Care.

  He returned to the study with several paper towels and cleaning spray. When he searched the hardwood floor around the painting he found no traces of blood. Only that piece of cut canvas remained on the floor where it had fallen. Perhaps Linda cleaned the blood, he thought, although he was certain he had heard her go upstairs. Or perhaps he hadn’t dripped any on the floor. He felt it drip, but he hadn’t seen it.

  He took the piece of cut canvas and dropped it in a small plastic sample bag from the university labs. He labeled it: Anonymous - D. Rineheart, then turned off the lights in the study. For a brief second, as the darkness took over, he swore he heard a dog bark. When he listened again only silence answered him.

  Gates of Hell

  SHE TOOK THE sample bag, clipped it to the requisition form, tore the barcoded receipt off, and handed it back to him.

  “We should have preliminary results in a few days professor,” Denise said with a smile that hinted at more than just professional courtesy. He only saw her once or twice a semester, when some side project brought him to the museum’s lab, and every time her hair was a different color. Today it was a shade of lavender over silver. Karina had never liked her and Dan realized it was, perhaps, because she too recognized a flirt when she saw one.

  “Thanks Denise. Take care,” he said and walked out.

  “You too,” she called out and he heard her popping her bubble gum and knew she was grinning.

  It was a sunny afternoon, a slight breeze blew through the eucalyptus trees that lined the walk from the museum back to the Fine Arts Building. Students sat on the grass of the quad, studying or tossing Frisbees or just enjoying summer’s dying grasp into autumn.

  He had fallen in love with the university on a day like today, a decade ago when Dean Robert had escorted Linda and Dan around, stopping at the sculpture garden outside the museum. The offer had been ten grand less than what Chicago had offered for an associate professorship, a significant difference. Yet it was the laughing voices and the warm breeze through the trees that had sold him. He had accepted the job on the spot with a handshake as they laughed before Rodin’s Gates of Hell. Even today he could still hear the laughing voices and see that sculpture garden from his office window, and he knew that for all the mistakes he had made, that one decision years ago was not one of them.

  Back in the office he spent almost an hour looking up any information he could find on Cobald & Sons, but found little other than a dozen dead ends. Then, on a hobbyist forum, he found a reference to a clock manufacturer in Monterey by the same name. His heart jumped when he saw the 831 area code, despite the decade old copyright at the bottom of the webpage.

  The phone rang six times and he was about to hang up when a breathless old voice answered with a cheerful “Hyello.”

  When Dan asked if he’d dialed Cobald & Sons and the voice gave an affirmation, correcting his pronunciation. “Ka-buld, like a stone road,” the voice said.

  “Right. I know this sounds odd but, I’m trying to track down any information on a specific model of clock you might have made.”

  The cheerful voice asked for a model number.

  “That’s the problem,” Dan said. “I have a photograph. Would that help?”

  “Perhaps it might,” said the cheerful voice.

  “Could I fax you a copy?” Dan asked.

  “Only if you want to buy us a fax machine,” the voice laughed back.

  “I guess email’s out of the question.”

  “And you’d have guessed right,” the voice answered with a laugh that turned into a cough.

  Dan glanced at his watch. “What time do you close?”

  They closed at six which gave him just under four hours to drive to Monterey. Plenty of time, he thought, and he could even stop in Gilroy for a burger. The last time he’d passed through had been with his kids on the retreat from their ill fated Disneyland trip. A trip that included Jessica getting pink eye from the swimming pool and Tommy throwing a tantrum after discovered he’d left his Nintendo charger at home halfway to L.A. The whole drive back all he had looked forward to was that garlic mushroom burger, most of which ended out in his lap as Linda yelled at him for trying to eat and drive at the same time and “No, he didn’t want to kill the family,” he answered, but he was quickly changing his mind. They had both vowed never to take another road trip until they were driving their kids to college.

  He studied the photo print out one last time, fixating on the painted clock and the time its hands were frozen at. 5:55. The number held no special meaning, at least none in the academic world he was familiar with. Yet he felt he should know it, like an old friend’s birthday, or the lyrics to a pop song he hadn’t heard since the eighties. Five fifty-five. It rolled off his tongue, maddening, and the more he thought of those three numbers the more he looped back to the realization that he was chasing a phantom. He filed it away further down his mental to-do list, then he put the photo into his briefcase, took the directions, and shut off his office lights.

  The office hallway was dark, unusually so for the afternoon. The air held a chill and lingering dust, perhaps from the repair work two floors up in The Archive. The door handle gave him a static shock as he locked it. Down the hall the overhead light closest to The Turtle flickered on and off then died with a faint hum. A second later the elevator doors opened with a ding and a groan.

  Then something poured out of the elevator.

  Or at least, Dan perceived it to have poured out. As the light inside the elevator dimmed, he realized it may have just fallen from the old doors as if it had been leaning against them. There it lay, an androgynous lump on the dark ground at the
end of the hallway. Behind it, sat a rectangular object, blocking the door. As the elevator doors closed and opened on it and he saw something glimmer in its shape, like brass buttons or metal.

  “Hello?” he called and he noticed another overhead light, closer, flickering on and off in rapid succession. The thing on the floor writhed as if it had been jolted with electricity. Then it did the impossible.

  It vanished.

  The elevator doors closed with a ding.

  And Dan blinked in disbelief, mouthing: “What the fuck?” as his mind rewound what he had just seen.

  The elevator doors had opened.

  A shape had fallen inward.

  And then it had vanished into the floor.

  One, two, three, rattled the glass as faint auras sprouted like flowers from the corner of his vision. Another overhead light gave a final hiss and dimmed. In an instant the shape was rising beneath it, followed by a sucking sound and a low level ultrasonic pop like a change in air pressure. The shape didn’t so much as reappear but unfolded from the dark floor the moment the light faded. As if the two points of darkness were connected by some subterranean tunnel.

  Four, five, six, clacked the glass as the writhing shape crawled out of the ground inside the darkness.

  A grinding sound came from the shadow. Metal clattered against linoleum flooring as something heavy scraped across the floor in slow, clumsy movements. At the edge of the darkness a lurching, humanoid shape drew closer to the light. Dan squinted, and for a second he could see the frame of a small boy, sunken pinholes eyes and a cruel sneer, pulling a rattling object behind.

  Another overhead light flickered on an off, two doors down from Dan’s office. That lumbering shape unfolded in that new pocket of shadow. Another wet slurp and a pop in his ears followed the jump from shadow to shadow as the shape grew closer.

  Seven, eight, nine, said the glass inside his head, drowned out by a rattling noise, a loose lock against metal.

  Another hum as a filament in the hallway light burned bright and then faded, first to a small orange ember, then to darkness. The shape unfolded a third time, spanning the gap between the lights with a wet smack. Something wretched filled his nose, like that of a corpse or the stench that came off Linda’s father in the moments after he’d sputtered forth his final incoherent words--“open the door”--and then expired.

  A single light remained between him and the lumbering thing, that child-sized shape dragging the clattering, abstract block, and he saw something wet and glistening connecting them.

  Ten, eleven, twelve, said the glass and Dan realized he was counting the number of steps the child-thing took. The moment this epiphany struck him the child-thing paused, its hidden slouching form quivering and growing erect. It extended its right arm out to point at Dan from the shadow.

  A noise filled the hallway, growing like a midnight train, and Dan recognized it. It was the rattling sound of the dying, the final breath as life left the lips of the dead. He had heard it when Linda's father had died. He had been the only one there to hear it when that old salesman gave up the ghost. Yet Dan didn’t believe in the supernatural, nor put any stock in the final words of a cancer stricken old man who had lied half his life to his family. There were explanations behind everything, even the apparition that moved towards him.

  And until that sound, that rattle, he hadn’t felt scared, only confused by the image that his mind was unable to perceive or understand. It was as if he were numbly watching a contortionist, or a magician perform a trick. The rattling sound, it sharpened his senses and at once a panic, not unlike what he’d felt on that ill fated dinner with the kids, seized his body and sobered his thoughts.

  Run, he thought.

  Where? Doesn’t matter. Run and hide.

  The light outside his door blinked above him and the death rattle grew louder.

  Run and hide and never ever look back.

  Ready or not, said Mr. Glass.

  He crashed into his office, slammed the door behind himself, and locked it. Outside, through the open window, he saw daylight, a shocking contrast to the dim hallway where that thing had crawled between shadows. He closed his eyes and counted backwards. Ten, nine, eight.

  Rewinding the events of the last minute, he found there was a sharp divide between them, not unlike the curtain between fading dreams and waking realities. And his dreams had always been dark for as long as he could remember.

  Seven, six, five.

  Had this been a waking dream? Had he been daydreaming, no different than Jessica, or all those years he spent staring out a window over the plains of the Midwest? A scared little kid, listening to his brother’s ghost stories then taking them to bed with him where the demons and monsters lurked, waiting just beyond the light? There was nothing to be afraid of he had thought once, and now found himself thinking again. The light of dawn always came, revealing those monsters to be lies, revenants conjured by his mind, banished back to imagination.

  Four, three, two.

  Yes, there had been nothing out there in the hallway. Only a brief power outage and the residual effects of the panic attack from the other night. That was it, he thought. Things did not crawl forth and warp from shadow to shadow. And painted boys did not stalk him. To think otherwise was...

  What? Mr. Glass asked. To think otherwise was what?

  “One,” Dan said aloud.

  He listened to the silence. A breeze wafted through the window and he could smell a faint trace of marijuana in it. He knew some of the fine art students were probably outside in the cloisters below, smoking a fatty before Professor Schoeder’s lecture on surrealism. And if there were student downstairs then whatever had fallen out the elevator had to have passed them earlier. Yet instead of screams he heard only hushed laughter.

  He exhaled and shook his head in private embarrassment. Keep calm and carry on, he thought.

  Then, the whole door buckled and rocked. His heart leapt into his throat as his hand curled in on itself. He tasted an earthy odor, rancid and vile, that stuck to the roof of his mouth like bad medicine. He wanted to spit but he couldn’t. The door shook against his back, the doorknob rotated.

  The thing was there, pushing its way in, and in his fear Dan did the only thing he could think of. He grabbed the absurd Thinker bookend, a gift some forgotten undergrad advisee had given him a few years back, and gripped it by its head. He cocked the weapon back, ready to swing it in a wild arc at whatever was coming through as the door opened.

  A wrinkled face peered in with a smile and asked: “Dan, are you in?”

  Dean Robert didn’t quite know what to make of the sight of his colleague, pale, wide-eyed and perspiring, primed and ready to crush his skull with a Rodin. He had only caught the image from the corner of his eye and by the time he gasped Dan took a step back and lowered the bookend.

  “My God,” the old man exclaimed. “You scared me half to death. Are you all right?”

  Dan fumbled with the sculpture, let out an awkward, delirious laugh, and shook his head. “I was cleaning. You startled me,” Dan answered, and Dean Robert blinked as if the excuse was both absurd and insulting.

  “You... never mind. I’m not sure I want to know.”

  “Sorry Bob,” Dan said feeling the need to add something.

  Dean Robert decided to let it pass, not because he believed Dan’s excuse, but because he simply had no idea how to press the matter further without embarrassing him. And besides, he wasn’t alone.

  “Dan, there are some gentlemen here to see you,” he said, opening the door.

  A Small Delay

  HE DIDN’T LIKE the detectives from the moment they stepped into his office. Not because they were impolite or rude, as television shows had conditioned him to expect, but because they were an obstacle between himself and his business that afternoon in Monterey. The longer they stayed, the worse traffic would be on the southbound 101.

  When they identified themselves as detectives he assumed they wanted to interview h
im about the fire and he could brush them off with a quick statement and reschedule for a better time. Then they dropped the bomb and he had to sit behind his desk as the piece of glass slid through his grey matter.

  “No one has seen her in five days,” said Detective Barton, who sat in the chair opposite Dan’s desk. Dan placed him a few years younger than himself due to the smooth face beneath thin stubble that gave him the look of a man trying to appear older. He spoke in an effeminate voice and rarely made eye contact, instead keeping them locked on his leather-bound notepad.

  “Now traditionally we wait a little longer on missing person reports, but the uh, circumstances, in this case--”

  “These particular circumstances warranted our prompt attention,” said the other man in a Southern drawl who had identified himself as Detective Cooper. He was taller, pushing six feet with a stocky frame and grey complexion that made Dan think of those vets that came back from wars, packed on the pounds but kept the attitude of a solider. Dan couldn’t place his age other than to guess somewhere between his late forties to early sixties.

  “I don’t understand. What circumstance?” Dan asked.

  “We can’t elaborate,” Cooper said and turned his attention back to the bookshelf.

  Dan felt a tremendous dislike for him, in particular the way he nosed about the office, picking up each object as if it were evidence in some crime.

  “Well, what can I do to help?” Dan asked.

  Cooper smirked at the answer. Barton clicked his pen several times. “When was the last time you were in contact with Miss Calloway?”

  Dan felt his hand shake at the sound of the pen and her name. He clenched his fist.

  “Karina?” he asked. Of course Karina. They could have referred to her by her middle name, Francis, or KFC, the nickname she said kids called her in middle school, and he would’ve known who they were talking about. He just needed them to think he didn’t know these things.