Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity

by Andrew van Wey

  The pain in his hand was instant and electric. When the light fell upon it he saw glass and bent fingers and blood pouring down his arm. His hand was a broken claw.

  It was not his son that stood in the doorway, but the dark child that had stalked him in the dreams of the past weeks, dreams of a lifetime he thought false. A wet rattle escaped the boy’s blue lips, those pinhole eyes flaring in the shadows. His arm was fused to a shaking old trunk.

  His wife, that form he had been in nude embrace with, now rippled with tattoos and jet black hair. Her smiling mouth: a toothless chasm of gore.

  Tick-tock tick-tock went the phantom clock as a dog yelped out in pain.

  There was no anchor to reality, no safe warmth in that room, no respite or calm. Only madness and chaos and his fingers grabbing at the cold, slick bedsheets as he tumbled backwards, away from the twisted shade at his side that screamed his name.

  “Daaaaaaaaaaan!”

  Falling backwards, hands grabbing the flower patterned bedsheets that felt of plastic and water, screaming, back into the darkness as the world shook and that voice called his name.

  Confession

  FLOWERS IN THE darkness, his fingers tearing at them, a scream, and he ripped himself free from the shower curtain as the bathtub rose up to catch him. Water and porcelain and a flash of pain in his mangled hand all overlapped. The broken bathroom mirror, the shaking door, the cheap floral shower curtain, all rounded out the scene. The final shard of the broken mirror rattled and fell, shattering among the others on the counter.

  “Dan,” screamed that voice as the bathroom door shook again, buckled, then snapped off its top hinge and swung inward. Light flooded in, burning his eyes.

  Linda fell halfway into the bathroom. The broken door knob clattered to the floor, and the bent remains of the laptop she had busted it in with fell from her hands.

  “Dan, what are you doing?!” she coughed forth. Her eyes searched the bathroom, the broken mirror, the swollen and twisted remains of his right hand, blood leaking down the tangled shower curtain. She found no answer in anything, only fear and confusion.

  “I can’t do this any more,” he gasped and he realized that he was crying. Tears poured down his cheeks, warm and heavy.

  “Are you all right? Honey? My God your scaring us--” and she covered her mouth with her hand as her eyes sprang leaks. “Please stop, please,” she begged.

  For the first time in ages, for the first time in his life perhaps, his thoughts were clear and his course of action was laid out like a straight path before him. He saw the end game, saw what needed to be done. It would hurt, this he knew. It would hurt unbearably so, and those who had loved him and trusted him would find their heart’s broken. He would shatter it all, this house of lies he had built.

  All he needed to do was open the door.

  “I lied,” he said in a whisper so quiet that he had to say it again to make sure it had even come out. “I lied to you. I lied to the family. I lied to myself.”

  And all she could say was: “What?”

  “This whole time... I’ve been lying, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Silence. Her face melted from disbelief to a worry so deep she seemed to become a different person, a woman he’d never seen.

  “What are you talking about?” she whispered. “Did you... did you hurt someone?”

  He nodded. “I did.”

  “That girl?”

  “No,” he answered. “I hurt you.”

  “I don’t understand. How? How did you...” Epiphany flickered and grew in her eyes.

  His voice was calm and lucid. It didn’t even seem to come from him, but from some place long ago, forgotten and buried. Keep calm and carry on.

  “I’ve been having an affair.”

  The words slipped out like a vapor, easier to say than he had ever imagined. They hung there in the silence of the room, and she didn’t even react for what seemed like an eternity. Every inch of her skin was unmoving. It wasn’t her husband standing there, broken and bleeding in that bathroom. No, it was someone else, something old and cold, wearing the false skin and name of her husband. It wasn’t Daniel but her father she saw that dim room. That old smile, the reek of cigarettes and scotch on his breath as he shrugged and said: “Thought it about time you knew the truth princess.”

  But the old salesman was dead and buried, and it wasn’t her father but her husband, that man she’d locked eyes with one night over champagne flutes and shared walks with back when they lived in a crummy apartment on the bad side of the bay. That man, that liar. No different than the only other man she’d loved and trusted.

  “I’ve been having an affair and I’m so, so sorry,” he said.

  In that silence there was nothing, no action or reaction, only an understanding and a subtle glimmer in her eyes. Then her face wrinkled in on itself and for a moment it looked like she was going to smile but he knew she wouldn’t. She had made that very expression after her father died. It was the look of denial giving way to realization as it swept through her body.

  “What?” she choked out.

  “With one of my students. I was stupid--”

  “No,” she whispered. “Please, Dan no...”

  “--I was weak. I was so fucking stupid--”

  “No, no, no,” she said again and took a step back.

  “--I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want it to come to this,” he said and took a step toward her. “Princess, I’m so sorry,” he said, voice again laced with scotch and cigarettes. No, it wasn’t her husband or her father, but perhaps she had confused the two and put all her hope in a man who was now revealing his grand masquerade to be a wretched lie.

  “No,” she said, voice growing stronger. “No, you... you stay there. Don’t move, don’t come any closer.” Her eyes darted about the ground, scanning the mess on the floor as if it held some answer among the broken glass and blood. Her husband had gone into this room, but now something else lay inside, and she refused to believe it was the same man. It couldn’t be...

  “Linda please,” he reached out, but she recoiled as if he were a snake ready to lash out and strike her. “I didn’t want it to come to this. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “Come to this?” her voice cracked, hand covering her mouth as she felt sick. “Hurt me? Oh God, how could you? Our family, our children. I trusted--”

  “I know.”

  “We trusted you Dan. We trusted you!”

  “I know,” he sobbed.

  “You...” she said, words failing her as her hands wrapped around her chest, the sickness threatening to leap out of her stomach at any second. “How could you?”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Tommy, Jessica, get your things,” she whispered.

  “Go,” he said.

  “Tommy, Jessica!” she screamed into the motel room, surprised at the sharpness that came from her own lips. “We’re going.”

  “Mommy?” Jessica's voice answered back.

  “Get your things!” Linda snarled. “Do it!”

  “Go, please...” Dan sobbed. “Don’t come near me.”

  “GET DRESSED TOMMY!” she shouted again, then turned her anger, her rage, back towards Dan.

  “I didn’t want to hurt you,” was all he could say.

  “You...” she pointed a shaking finger at him. “You stay there, right there. Don’t come any closer.”

  “Get out of here,” Dan said as he slid down to the cold tiles.

  “TOMMY! JESSICA! NOW!” she screamed, and Jessica appeared at the doorway, clutching Mr. Bun. Tears streamed down her face and her head was hung low, unable to even look at her father. Tommy joined them and took in his father’s shape through confused eyes.

  “Dad?” he gasped.

  “Go, get out of here,” Dan said as he wiped tears away. “I’ll be fine buddy,” he said, voice cracking.

  In that doorway his family looked broken, like refugees from a disaster. And then
he realized he’d seen this same image before, the same composition dozens of times. It had sat in his study, painted on canvas, only the subjects had been different. The girl had been crying and the boy had been staring straight at the viewer. But this was no painting, this was his family.

  Staring at them, only now, once the paint of his deeds and deceptions had dried, did he understand that he was the artist. This moment, he had painted it long ago, when he followed that young girl out of his office, when he had lied into his wife’s eyes every day since.

  He thought of Tamara and her final words, how sad she had looked, and what she told him to do. To get his family, far, far away.

  She was right. There would be no trip south, no midnight run across the border, no new life and no new names. She had always been right.

  There would be no happy ending.

  Last Call

  HE NEVER SAW his family again.

  There had been words spoken as they left, but he didn’t remember them. They were distant, whispers in a hurricane. Then the door had closed, and between his tears and sobs the room had grown cold and empty. What had started as sorrow, a vast pain that curled him in on himself, gave way to an overwhelming sense of relief and joy, and he found himself on the cold the floor, laughing.

  He had saved them.

  He pulled himself up and washed his face. The cold water brought an instant clarity to his thoughts and he knew that he had many things to do, and many things to undo before dawn broke.

  Linda had left the car keys on the end table by the bed, most likely by mistake. Whether she had called a cab, or booked another room just down the hall, or taken the children and fled into the night, was now irrelevant. Those things were part of another life, one he had only borrowed.

  He opened his wallet, took out Tamara’s business card, and dialed the number. In two rings her voice answered, groggy and full of sleep.

  “Mister Rineheart,” she said with a great sadness before he had a chance to speak. A firefly landed on the telephone cord.

  “They’re gone,” he said in a voice he no longer recognized as his own.

  “I’m so sorry,” she answered and he believed her. He had lost the three most important things in his life and, alone, he already felt the void. He knew, somehow, she did too.

  “Are they safe?” he asked.

  “I think so.”

  “How do I stop it?”

  There was a long silence at the other end and the hum of cicadas. He heard a sigh, and when he looked at the telephone it was beginning to rot.

  “You can’t. The painting, it was just a doorway. And it’s been open for too long.”

  “I don’t understand. I did what it wanted. I...” he hesitated, then added: “They’re gone.”

  Another long silence. The plastic telephone was turning a sickly yellow. Small flakes of plastic broke off the cord as he stretched it.

  “I know they are, but you’re mistaken. It’s you,” she said.

  “Me?”

  “You, Mr. Rineheart. You’re what’s dangerous.”

  The receiver grew old and light, his thumb scraping away the plastic as it corroded. On the other end of the line her voice quivered and distorted as the connection faltered.

  “Hello?” he asked.

  “--will always be with you--” her voice cut in and out.

  “I don’t... I don’t understand.”

  “--wants to be remembered--”

  For a second, fleeting really, her clear voice cut through the static of the rotting phone and the frayed cords and he heard her, as clear as he had ever heard Mr. Glass inside his mind. “It’s you Mr. Rineheart. You’re the curse,” she said. “You’re what’s haunted.”

  The line went dead.

  PART THREE

  Homecoming

  THE WORLD WAS fog and memory, and within it the city slept in blind silence. A hundred houses passed by, vague frames and cold trees in a sea of white. Each street light flickered and died as Dan drove all twelve miles of the journey to the storage locker in quiet. There were no cars on that drive save one, a pair of headlights that had lingered behind for a few blocks before receding back into the mist.

  The orange metal shutter of the locker showed signs of rust and decay, even from the outside. When he put the code in the keypad it simply blinked: 5:55 before opening halfway and lurching to a stop.

  What lay inside looked nothing like it had the day before. The painting had infected the whole unit. The boxes, shelves, the old dresser and books from his former office, all hung in various states of decay. Wood shelves sagged with rot. Damp mold grew over the floor, crunching beneath his feet like dry grass. Grey cicada’s buzzed about on wet wings.

  The painting, however, was untouched. If anything, it had grown clearer than he had ever seen it. The brush strokes were gone and what remained was a two dimensional still frame of a surreal image, and he felt that he could step into it, but he dared not try.

  “You and me,” he said to the painting and he knew that it agreed. It was time to make terrible and beautiful art.

  The painting went into the backseat. He didn’t bother closing the storage unit. Even if the lock had worked again, he saw no point now. His course was clear, laid out before him in a single homeward line, and there would be no return trips, only one last stop along the way.

  He emptied out the plastic jug from the trunk onto the concrete lot of the Chevron station. Then, he filled it up with gasoline from the number two pump. In a small grass lot beyond the empty gas station he watched fireflies, thousands of them, flickering above the layer of fog. It had been years since he had run in the fields as they flew about in the twilight world. They were beautiful, he thought, and he wished that when this night was all over, he could he could hear the cicadas and watch the fireflies dance and not be afraid of what they heralded.

  He screwed the cap on the container and wiped his hands on his pants. They reeked of gasoline, a smell that stuck with him for the final leg of his silent drive home. The clock blinked 5:55 but he no longer cared what time it really was. Such a thing, he knew, didn’t exist. There was only himself, the painting, and his final chore to be concerned with, his final work. The world outside was dead.

  He pulled into his driveway and turned the car off. Had it not been for the police tape strung across the door, he might’ve missed his house. It was unrecognizable. The hedges had died out since he’d last seen them only half a day ago. The grass, once verdant and green and carefully cut, was now little more than plagued patches of muck. That once vibrant maple that Linda had so loved was now sick and corrupted. Damp strands of moss hung from branches, flayed and raw.

  He kicked the wrought iron gate. It fell inward with a rusty groan, clattering onto the brick walkway. He would have cared about the noise, about Marty and the Home Owners Association, but he no longer did. In minutes, he would no longer even have a home. Only the painting and the gasoline mattered now.

  The container sloshed and dripped onto his broken hand, stinging his cuts as he dragged the canvas behind him like a corpse to the furnace. The police tape was stretched across the front door in four diagonal lines that formed two X’s. He smiled at the words: CRIME SCENE - DO NOT CROSS, as if those hollow letters held any true threat. He tore them from the doorframe and threw them to the ground like wrapping paper. He paused at the threshold of his house, his home, a place he no longer recognized.

  Then, he opened the door.

  Old Boy

  THE DETECTIVE’S UNMARKED police sedan drifted through the fog and came to a halt behind another car, one he recognized as belonging to the primary suspect in his murder investigation.

  A call had gone out earlier, a noise complaint over the general radio. Someone was trashing a room at the Terrace Motel and it sounded violent. A woman and two children had fled the scene and Detective Cooper felt an immediate surge. He had been waiting for this. Waiting all night.

  Suspects, he knew, often made their greatest mistakes in
the hours after an interrogation. Something about the surge of fear and the inability to sleep clouded their judgement, and a paranoid compulsion seemed to drive them to cover their tracks. The irony, of course, was that this same compulsion to conceal their mistakes often took them back to some vital clue or the scene of the crime. Instead of concealing, they were revealing. He had bet it all on this one night, that all would come together.

  The last day had been a waiting game really. Baiting and waiting. He’d spent the better part of the interrogation baiting that button down psychopath and now he was waiting for the call, gun and badge sitting on his coffee table as he played solitaire and listened to the police radio. And when it finally came in it was like his prayers had been answered.

  He put his faith in Jesus, but drove as fast as H-E-L-L. Still, he had arrived too late. The motel room was in a revolting state of disarray. The bathroom door hung slanted and broken at the handle, the mirror shattered, blood and shards of glass scattered every which way. The cheap paintings were all askew, the phone had been melted, perhaps with a blowtorch. Even the window was covered with splotches of some brown filth and when he rubbed his finger over the glass he was surprised to discover it was on the outside of the window. He told the patrolmen who had responded to call forensics.

  Then he left as fast as he had arrived.

  The fog outside was thicker than he’d ever seen in the eleven years he’d lived in the Bay Area, as if someone had poured cotton over the world. It seemed to lull the city into a sleep, something he was thankful for as it gave him fewer cars to look out for as he sped down East Charleston and called in the APB on the suspect’s silver family sedan.

  He was tired and the fog didn’t help. The last 48 hours had been a blur of surveillance and paperwork, forensics and phone calls and favors called in, all so he could get that search warrant. But he was still missing the final piece, the evidence that would make this case a sure shot, and so he had staked it all on this one gambit. The playbook in his mind nudged him in a clear direction that lead all the way back to those side streets and that crime scene of a house. He tried to focus through the fog and once, for only a block, he came upon a pair of taillights in the distance, so certain they were the ones he was after, but he lost them in the fog.