Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity

by Andrew van Wey

  The GPS listed 84 miles before the his next turn, another 55 miles past that, and then 30 more, for a total time just under three hours. He pushed the pedal down, hoping to make it up the coast in two hours and change.

  He made it in just over two hours, crossing the old truss bridge that spanned the Greywood River where it emptied into a lazy cove beneath towering sea cliffs. Driftwood lined the flat, drab beaches. A faint marine layer hung over the horizon. A single fisherman slept in a distant chair as his fishing pole stood watch over the cove.

  The town was small and quiet, a sleepy getaway where families vacationed in the summer then forgot about in the off seasons. It seemed to exist in a different country, where time stood frozen in a glacial decay of post war industry and spotted tourism. Where every store sold the same knickknacks made by a few local artists, and all the postcards were from a decade ago.

  He had little trouble finding Yuray Arts. It was an unmissable building, a converted barn flanked on the sides by a market and the local post office. He pulled into a parking space, stepped out and stretched his body, nodding to a boy walking his dog who stared at him with a mix of curiosity and suspicion.

  Denise had called the supply store a mom and pop operation, but when he stepped in he realized she’d been way off the mark. The store was larger than most craft stores, even larger than the university supply store back in Alder Glen that served a student population ten times this town’s size. Hand carved driftwood signs hung above each section of the store. Even the door was decorated in the style of the sixties, florescent paints and endless spirals like a silkscreened poster of a some Haight-Ashbury folk band. Bells clattered as the door closed.

  “Be down there on the dub,” said a voice from above, and Dan craned his neck upwards, surprised to find a loft area that contained even more supplies. The man upstairs was tall, easily over six and a half feet. A salt and pepper beard hung in two braids halfway down his chest. Dan couldn’t decide whether he looked like he belonged behind the handlebars of a Harley, or beneath a protest banner waving a piece sign.

  “What can I do you for chief?” the tall man asked.

  “I have sort of an odd request,” Dan answered as he took out the lab report.

  “Long as it ain’t a blow job, I’m all ears.”

  Dan laughed. “No, I can’t say it is.”

  “Then we’re good. What’s hurting ya?”

  “I’m working on tracking down the artist of a painting I received.”

  “Collector?”

  “Professor actually. Down in Alder Glen.”

  “Ah. Go Oaks,” the man said with a weak pump of the fist.

  “What?”

  “Football team. You got a solid line up this year.”

  “Right, yeah. Anyway, this is sort of a side project,” Dan said as he slid the lab report and a photograph of the painting to the tall man. He studied the painting, muttered “far out,” and turned to the lab report while Dan continued. “We ran an analysis of the paints used and they were mixed here.”

  “Been selling paints since seventy-eight. That’s a lot of ground to cover.”

  “Here’s a partial list of the pigments used. I feel stupid asking this, but you’re the only lead we have. You wouldn’t happen to remember selling them, would you?”

  The tall man stared at the page. His blue eyes squinted and created even more wrinkles that ran across his face like folds on a blanket. Then he nodded.

  “Yep. Yep. Lucky day chief.”

  “Really?” Dan asked and he felt embarrassed how enthusiastic he’d sounded. Like a kid getting a new toy.

  “Came in over the phone about, oh, two months back. I remember it cause I drove out to deliver it. We do that with all orders over a hundred.”

  “Who was it?”

  “The artist, or who ordered it?”

  “Both.”

  “Well, I can’t be sure about the artist, but it was Halgrove,” he said and handed the sheet back to Dan. “Old Mabel Halgrove. She ordered this batch specifically, in this order, plus maybe a dozen others I suppose. I remember thinking it kind of odd, but par for the course with her.”

  “Why would that be that odd?”

  The tall man smiled. “We’ve got some interesting folk around here. Real characters, if you catch my drift. And Mabel, she’s in a class all her own. That’s not a bad thing, it is what it is. But I will tell you there is no way on god’s green earth Old Mabel painted this.”

  “Why not?” Dan asked.

  “Cause chief,” the tall man said with a smile. “She’s as blind as a bat.”

  The Cat Lady

  THE HOUSE WAS small, a single story ranch home set a half mile down a dirt driveway that took Dan an hour to find. The GPS had led him off the highway to the access road and then flashed: No Map Data Available after a mile. It had taken two trips up and down the bumpy access roads until he saw a hand painted sign by an old metal gate that read: MABEL HALGROVE.

  Twice he called the number the tall man had given him, and twice it went straight to voicemail. He pondered his options, not wanting to drive onto her property without her consent, considering a man with a double braided beard had described her as eccentric. Blind or not, a shotgun could still be pointed in the direction of a sound, and Dan suspected the type of people who lived on these distant ranches and painted boys with pinholes eyes might be the type to be well armed.

  The sun descended, giving the sky an amaranthine and tangerine hue, and Dan decided he’d already driven too far to turn around. He made the decision, opened the gate, and drove a half mile up the dusty road towards the small ranch house atop the hill.

  The first thing he noticed were the cats. There were at least a dozen outside the porch. They darted about, half feral and wild, scattering as his car came to a standstill on the gravel. A few brave ones approached, and one even slithered under the car to seek warmth.

  “Hello?” Dan called out to the house. Lights were on, both inside the house and outside on the porch, where more lazy cats milled about like a backwoods swamp family. Inside, he was able to make out vague movement through the thin patterned curtain. Feline shadows watched from the window.

  “Hello? Miss Halgrove, are you home?” he asked again, and the only answer was the sudden hissing and screech of two cats fighting beneath his car, the loser darting off into the bushes to lick its wounds.

  The porch groaned under his feet, and he tried not to think how many cats were beneath it, endlessly humping and birthing offspring and fighting over scraps. He had disliked Ginger, this much was true, but she had a certain pathetic affection, a need to be taken care of that kept his hate at bay. There was none of that to be found in these cats. Any affection displayed, he thought, was a means to an end. He felt a momentary satisfaction as he gave one of the braver beasts a sharp punt that cleared it off the step.

  “Hello? Miss Halgrove?” he called out again, hoping for some sort of answer or sound from behind the window, but no such response came. The door was ajar, no more than a few inches. The screen in front lay torn and frayed at ankle height, loose strands of metal and hair hanging, evidence of some battle with paws and claws it had lost.

  He knocked on the door frame. While he waited he watched with amusement as a fat stripped cat pushed its way past him and into the house with a lazy hiss like an ornery old man. He knocked again, and again there was no answer.

  Two thoughts crossed his mind at almost the same time. The first was that the sun had finally set, it was past six, and he was two hundred miles from home on a ranch trying to contact a blind cat hoarder who may or may not also be an incredible artist. The second thought was that he wanted to open the door and look inside. If he didn’t, this whole absurd question would go forever unanswered. He wasn’t sure which idea was more irrational.

  Deciding he’d come to far he called her name one last time, and when no one answered he opened the door.

  The smell was the first thing to hit him. It was a sour re
ek of gas and excrement. Piles of cat shit lay about the floor. Paw prints led through the occasional filth like dirt tracks at a murder scene. Pieces of the couch and armchair hung in fibrous clumps, clawed down to the wood. Balls of fur lay like tumbleweeds against the walls. If Linda were here, he thought, she would be in the throes of an allergic reaction at the sight of it all.

  “Miss Halgrove, hello?” he called out again, but after seeing the state of her house he hoped nothing would answer back. If it did, he thought, it might be little more than a shambling mess, a long haired monstrosity like something from a Japanese horror film.

  The living room was decorated with an assortment of trinkets that looked like they’d been raided from a sorcerer’s tower. Dreamcatchers made of dyed thread and oiled twigs swayed in the cool breeze. Crystals and gems wrapped in twine were nailed to the walls like vines on a forgotten jungle ruin. A dozen different idols and figurines all sat on shelves, some were Mayan representing death, or Balinese depicting the afterlife, and a few others that he wasn’t familiar with.

  Those heads, he had seen them before, all of them. In that anonymous painting a shard of mirror had reflected a row of doll heads. But they weren’t dolls, he realized. They were figurines. A surge of excitement built up as he realized the painting was tied to this house. He was on the right track.

  The floor creaked with each footstep he took. The air was thick with cat dander, the occasional hair floating past in some micro-current like a boat in an invisible river. And the smell. It made his stomach tighten up. He had smelled it before, in the basement, when he found that bird and that rat. He had smelled it in the hallway, outside his office, when he’d hallucinated that shadow child. He had smelled it years ago but he couldn’t remember where. Perhaps, he thought, when Linda’s father had expired.

  Another cat pushed past his feet, startling him. The creature meandered towards an adjoining room followed by two others. From further inside the house he heard the distant chattering of their feral brethren, as if carrying on a conversation. He followed their mewling voices around the corner, deeper into the house.

  “Hello?” he called out, hoping nothing answered.

  The drawing room was spacious and picturesque. A wide window looked out upon the rolling hills where the distant vineyards intersected a highway lit by the glow of distant cars.

  And there it was.

  A massive table sat before the window with a single overturned chair. Torn canvas, wood bars, nails and knives and brushes were covered one end. Tubes of paint lay about the table, each stamped with that familiar Y symbol of Yuray Paints. Those colors, he recognized them from the canvas back at his house. A palette sat nearby, covered in paints and a layer of white mold from where a cat had defecated on it. This spot, overlooking the hills, had once been a place of creation. Now it sat in decay.

  Next to the mess sat several pieces of paper and an old black fountain pen. The words: HERE IN ART, DENIAL were written dozens of times in a haphazard scrawl and then crossed out. The variations changed, the word HERE becoming HER and the missing E finding itself in front of ART, spelling EART. Some letters were written larger than others, circled and refined, D’s and A’s and I’s all bearing different strokes as if practiced in the dark.

  He dropped the papers as a sudden discomfort washed over him. A feeling, an epiphany, that he had wandered far off the lit path and deep into the forest. This woman and this house, he thought, were not right. Not right at all.

  “Miss Halgrove,” he called out a final time.

  The cats continued their chattering in the nearby kitchen. One hissed and ran past him with something wet in its mouth and the smell made him gag. He turned his attention past the darting feline to the kitchen beyond.

  Then his mind went blank.

  The first thing he saw were the shoes. One was angled upright, toes pointed at the ceiling. The other shoe was twisted on its side. The brown leather was speckled with bits of a dark substance that caught the light like oil at night. The socks that rose out of the shoes had probably been white, once long ago, but were now stained brown and green and crusted over as if embalmed in scabs. What remained of the legs were discolored and yellow, swollen in places, raw in others. Sprouts of dark hair adorned the pieces that hadn’t been consumed, and only bone remained of what had.

  His mind went over the images--the shoes, the socks, the patchwork flesh--up the remains of the body until he comprehended what he saw. And when he did he ran through the house and out into the front yard, where he threw up in the bush.

  The police and paramedics took over a half hour to arrive. In that time Dan ventured back into the house to verify that what he had seen had been real, and not another illusion of his mind, like the belly of the inflatable snake, or the dark child in the hallway. He steeled his stomach for the sight but upon a second viewing he didn’t fare much better, and the sour boiled in the back of his throat.

  He was only able to look at the lower half of the body from the other room. Its upper half was obscured by the kitchen counter, but even that, he knew, would be seared into his mind for life. The old woman’s body had been stripped almost to the bone in small, haphazard mouthfuls. The remaining parts, pieces really, were discolored and alternated between an olive green and a mustard yellow. It had bloated, grown in mass, and its skin had cracked in places, not unlike an old painting.

  In the sunset light that poured through the window, one thing stood out on her. A fold of white paper sat tucked into her blouse pocket. Compared to the mess, it was clean. If she had painted that thing that sat in his house, had scribbled the note and sent it to him, perhaps she still held one more clue, folded and close to her heart.

  He eyed that paper, focusing only on it, not the shape beneath it or the mewling beasts gathered about and feeding. He took a deep breath, an explorer pushing into the abyss, a deep sea diver, and then he entered the kitchen. He looked away, beyond the corpse and the old house, to a place far off and peaceful and clean. He knew what was there but he didn’t have to see it.

  A cat hissed as his hand lowered closer to her shape, closer to that pocket and the fold of paper. Inches really, that was how far away his fingers were, when he caught the reflection off the window. His blood went cold, his feet refused to move, and he found himself unable to turn away. Most of the old woman's face had been left intact, other than the lips, which had been pulled free in strands like a starfish stripping the paint off the hull of boat. She stared at the window, her final lipless sneer reflected off the glass and straight at him, waiting, perhaps for him to stand right there and see her reflection. As if she was just another subject in a painting guiding the viewer’s eyes.

  He grabbed the piece of paper from her blouse pocket. Then he ran, backwards through the house, and once again his stomach emptied itself.

  He wiped his lips, tasting bitter, and shooed off a cat that’d come to inspect his mess. Then he opened the piece of paper. Scribbled in that shimmering ink in delicate, almost imperceptible scratches, sat the following:

  XII:4I:1II:9III:18

  IV:14VI:5VII:8VIII:20

  V is the key to the door.

  The paramedics had strong stomaches but even they had trouble bagging the body, and he heard them debating how to remove the corpse without it falling apart. Only the sheriff, an old man well past retirement, seemed indifferent. He took down Dan’s story without any suspicion, recording how he had found her, why he was looking for her, and little else. Dan left out a few details, the note in her blouse pocket and how he’d disturbed a crime scene, feeling they’d only raise more questions, questions he didn’t have answers for. Satisfied, the sheriff scratched his mustache, snapped his note pad closed, and spat on the ground.

  “Helluva thing,” he said.

  “How long do they think she’s, you know, been dead?” Dan asked.

  “Hard to say. I’d figure on a few weeks at least.”

  “A few weeks? That long?”

  He nodded. �
�Takes a body a while to bloat up with all the gasses inside. Lucky you found her. That many cats, this far out, might not have been much left in another few weeks.”

  “What was she like?” Dan found himself asking. For the first time since he’d started to look for her, he realized she had been a human, had lived and breathed and had a whole life prior to his discovery. That he had, in his fear and shock, reduced her to a grotesque story made him feel a pang of guilt.

  “Wh’was she like?” repeated the sheriff with a smile. “Well, Old Mabel was, I suppose, same as a lot of folk out here.”

  “How so?”

  “Get,” he said and buried his boot into the side of a cat trying to sneak back into the house for another serving. “Look around son. We’ve got two types of people out here: those born here, and those who move here.”

  “So she wasn’t a local?”

  The sheriff laughed. “Sure, but that’s not the point. See no one moves out here without wanting to leave something behind. Ex-artists and ex-hippies and ex-cons, all looking for some piece of land and some peace and quiet. As long they keep quiet and peaceful, they’re fine in my books. And Old Mabel was as quiet as they come.”

  “Did she have any family?”

  The sheriff raised an eyebrow. “You her biographer or something?”

  “I’m starting to feel like it,” Dan laughed. “I know this sounds crazy but I think she sent this to me. I just need to find out who painted it.”

  He handed the photo of the painting to the sheriff, who gave it only a momentary glance, uninterested.

  “Yep, that does sound crazy. Gonna be hard to confirm it now too. No family that I’ve heard of but I’m sure she didn’t just crawl out of the soil an eighty year old shut-in. As for friends, closest thing to that would be Madame Tamara.”

  “Madame Tamara?”

  He nodded. “Yep.”