Then he also lost his way. In the fog the quiet residential streets lay in a twisting grey void of shapes and trees and nothing else. The town was a labyrinth of shadows and mansions just beyond a white veil, and he felt like a ship’s captain, trying to navigate a rocky strait between abandoned lighthouses. Every turn was a mistake that could spell ruin.
“Please Lord,” he mumbled as he came to a cul-de-sac and turned back, eyes scanning for house numbers but finding none among the mist.
Then he saw them. A pair of taillights, pinpoints among the fog. Fireflies, really. Another ship in the misty straits between rock and ruin. He followed them until they turned bright red and slowed to a stop by the curb.
He switched his headlights off, watching that parked sedan in the fog. A shape emerged from the car, a shambling mess of a form with a hand that curled in on itself as if broken and useless. The form stopped by a familiar maple that he recognized even among the fog. It stood like a sentinel in front of that psychopath’s house.
He had come home.
The form carried something enormous, a large, rectangular object. Cooper felt his heart leap and sing when he realized what it was. The painting, the skin, the evidence. The fool had brought it back to the scene of the crime. Bait and wait, his faith had said, and it had led him true.
Yet there was something else carried in that hook-like hand and Cooper understood at once what was unfolding before him. The fool carried a plastic canister, wet and dripping. He had returned home, just as Cooper suspected, for a clear purpose. He was going to burn the evidence. The painting, that skin and oil, would go up in flames, and with it the entire house and perhaps even himself.
Yes, Cooper thought. There had been a sort of sick, suicidal gleam in the perp’s eye back in the interrogation room and Cooper knew there was a strong chance he would be using his gun before dawn. Death by cop. He imagined that would be how it would go down if it came to it.
And if it did? So what. There would be awards and handshakes and people would say: “Lucky you stopped him, Detective.”
No, not luck, he thought. Luck was just another name for the intersection between talent and timing and faith. And it was finally his time. He had waited a lifetime for this. He had followed his faith when everyone else had faltered, and now it had led him to this moment.
He threw the brakes on and came to a stop just behind that silver sedan. He opened the door and his feet glided out across the wet cement and sidewalk and he noted that the whole world shook like footage in a war movie as he ran towards the house. His approach was silent and fast. It surprised even himself that at sixty-four he was capable of covering such distance. It was the adrenaline. It spiked everything, tinting his vision brown, no different than the mold and decay hanging from the trees.
The perp hadn’t heard a thing. He disappeared into the house and left the front door wide open and through it Cooper could see his back exposed inside the foyer.
Then, beyond everything, in the silence before action, a niggling doubt asked: sure you want to go through with this, old bones? That house and that fella, they don’t look right. And in there may be the stuff left out of last Sunday’s sermon. It may not be the starring role you’ve always wanted Coops, may not be much of anything inside that door. Sure you want cross through?
More sure than ever, he thought. Then, as quick as they came, the thoughts vanished.
Now or never, into the open door.
He unbuckled his gun and rushed forward, crossing the threshold to the house and shouted: “Freeze!”
The shadow inside the foyer paused and Cooper knew in an instant his orders had been heard. It was dark in that foyer, too dark to see anything other than the vague form of the perp and that giant painting. Weapons, he thought. What if he has a weapon?
Cooper fumbled for his flashlight, raised it up, and shouted: “I said don’t fucking move!”
The beam of light fell on the back of the perp’s head, who gave a slow turn back to regard Cooper’s intrusion if it were one of only minor inconvenience.
Cooper’s hands went numb, and he heard, as if from a great distance, the clang of metal as the flashlight and gun in his hands clattered together. He felt his mouth drop open, limp and slack, and a sudden relaxation grew in his bowels and he knew, but didn’t seem to care, not in the slightest, that he had just shit himself.
His flashlight held on the man and that painting for only moment, but it was enough, far too much in fact.
The weathered and aged face of the perp stared back from the darkness, a face that Cooper no longer recognized. His face appeared as if a hundred years old, and yet, beneath it like a backlit mask, the face a young boy stared back. Yet, it was not the man, but the object he carried that bore out a great cavern in Anthony Martin Cooper’s mind. A shifting, painted thing, endless and awful; a truth that would haunt his dreams until the end of his days.
The detective felt for a second, but would never be able to recall, that there was a brief snap deep within himself as the beam of light scanned across that canvas and revealed only a glimpse of its contents. Then his hands dropped to his sides like two dead kites and he turned and ran, shrieking, into the fog.
In the hours that follow, Detective Cooper is found wandering among the community gardens, his gun and flashlight still held in his hands. A college student, awoken by the sounds of fire trucks, finds herself unable to fall back asleep and decides to lace up and go for a jog. She cuts through the community gardens by the park and comes to a halt before the stiff form of what she believes to be a homeless man, due to the reek of piss and shit emanating from him. He spins toward her with a gun in his hand and mumbles: “Freeze, don’t move,” but she does neither. Instead she breaks into a sprint, her fastest ever, and, upon arriving home in record time, she calls the police.
Later, at the hospital, Barton will have trouble recognizing his partner of four years, and his partner won’t even recognize him. Instead Cooper will stare through him, beyond, as if to something distant and shattering. He will laugh and cackle and shout for doors to be closed and ask for jars to catch fireflies in. Later, Barton will walk among the still warm coals of that house and wonder: what was it inside that reduced that once proud man to a husk?
A stroke, the doctors will guess, admitting there’s little evidence. Months later they will discharge him into an empty parking lot where a social worker will take him back to his house and he’ll sit at his coffee table, listening to a police radio for a call that will never come. There will be no awards and no handshakes and no one will say: “Lucky you stopped him, detective.” His pension will only cover a portion of his medical and psychological expenses, and on some rare nights when the fog is thick, he will find himself screaming at paintings that do not exist and looking for doors that need to be shut.
Then one day, years later, after he bags her groceries at the local Whole Foods, a woman will thank him for helping carry her groceries to the car. His mind will struggle to remember her face and where his memory was once clear there will only be a hole, a void. Where things had once been easy they will now be hard, and the words will come slow. And for a moment, in that parking lot, that kind woman will seem to recognize him and he’ll wonder if they had perhaps worked together, long ago, before the coming of the void and the words that now hang in his throat, thick as mud. Then she’ll offer a sad smile and pass him a large tip while a polite teenage boy takes the groceries from him and packs them into the trunk of an old sedan where a girl with strikingly golden hair will call out: “Shotgun!” as she races her brother to the front seat.
The Open Door
IN ANOTHER LIFE his brother had chased him through the fields of Nebraska beneath the late afternoon sun.
In another life, they had found an old house and hid away inside while the other kids had searched for them.
And in that other life, they had found a secret hiding spot in a dark place that had sat forgotten for years.
“Inside?” Daniel
had asked.
“Mmm-hmm,” David had nodded. “Come on in. The door’s open.”
The inside of Dan’s house on that quiet side street of Greer Park Lane was unrecognizable. It had, at some point, shifted through time and memory and become a distortion, a place that he knew existed with all the clarity of a dream consigned to oblivion. The walls were crumbling. Wallpaper hung in large clumps where a dozen little dirty hands had pulled away at it. The house was dying a rapid death, the decay of decades in minutes.
Somewhere upstairs, a girl with strawberry hair pressed her face against a crayon drawing of a tree and started to count.
“One, two, three,” she called out.
He swung the canister of gasoline, splashing a wide arc across the entry way like an abstract expressionist before an empty canvas.
“Four, five, six,” he called back as he flung gasoline across the entryway. The wallpaper curled and fell from where the gasoline spattered.
Footsteps echoed out upstairs. Childish laughter hung in the air, and he heard cicadas and birds and a voice that shouted: “I’m not chicken.”
In the living room the couches collapsed in on themselves like rotten fruit. The fireplace belched green flames and from it fireflies fluttered out and danced in the air. The mantlepiece sagged and swung downward in a crooked angle like an old porch swing hanging from a single chain.
“Seven, eight, nine,” the girl called out.
Dan lugged the painting behind him. From it, from somewhere through it and perhaps beyond, a dog whimpered in pain. As he pulled the frame of the canvas into the hallway it grew heavy and howled in protest. The edges scraped against the walls, leaving smears of filth and muck that spread out in cancerous tendrils. Every framed photograph that hung from the wall swayed in the dusty air, color fading into sepia tones as he lugged the heavy painting past them.
“Ten, eleven, twelve,” he laughed, and threw splash of gasoline into the coat closet. The jackets and scarves, the rollerblades and helmets, the towels for guests who would never again visit, all turned brown as their fabric frayed and mold blossomed out from beneath.
The painting grew heavier as he gave it a fierce tug and yanked it further down the hallway. He gave a sidelong glance into the kitchen. The windows were covered in a layer of dust, the yard beyond: muted and vague. The vase that had once held his wife’s roses was now a fountain of gore. Ill veins hung from dead flowers, cascading off the shelf and into the sink.
He threw the painting against the hallway wall and crossed into the kitchen, the floorboards bending and buckling beneath his feet. He opened that drawer of Linda’s and reached deep inside. It was wet and warm and reeked of filth and disease as his fingers dug around inside it. His broken hand cried out in pain as his fingers wrapped around the silver lighter. With a searing tug he pulled it free from the muck.
Then, he flicked it twice. Sparks erupted, but no flame grew from the perforated tip. He shook it and tried again. Nothing. A third time brought sparks and a flame, and he smiled at this small victory.
A wet gagging noise came from the corner. There, on the rotted remains of her once white doggie bed, sat Ginger. Her form quivered and what remained of her hair hung in small clumps over bald mange. Her back arched violently as she whimpered, heaved, and belched, brown teeth chattering with each convulsion. Her stomach distended and then, a second later, collapsed inward as another wet belch erupted from her snout. She whimpered and repeated that sick act a third time, those milky, rueful eyes never leaving her former master.
A lump appeared in her throat, long and wide, like the bones she had once chewed on. She let out a shrill rattle and a final belch folded her body inward so hard it looked like she would split in two.
But she didn’t.
Thick strands of brown filth poured from her snout as a metal object clattered to the floor. She sniffed at it, sneering, and Dan saw rust and iron beneath the wetness.
It was a railroad spike.
Far away through time, that young girl’s voice called out: “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.”
Dan rushed back into the hallway and grabbed the painting. “Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen,” he shouted back.
The house shuddered and bent to the side. Footsteps rang out above and dust motes fell from the ceiling. Another tug on that heavy painting, another shudder, and the house fought him again. The hallway stretched on, almost infinite, and the door to his study seemed to recede to a pinpoint.
“Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one,” her distant voice shouted as he lugged the painting further down the hallway, deeper into the bowels of the house.
A light flickered behind him in the hallway as a cold presence passed through him. He turned his head, back towards the living room, where a wet shape climbed from a shadow. That dark boy from the painting writhed upwards, glistening and shivering like a newborn animal. His left hand clutched the wall, fingers digging deep into it as if into clay. His left arm stretched back, that leathery appendage pulsating and fused with that old wooden trunk. The pinhole eyes stared into Dan and he felt as cold as he’d ever felt in his life. In those two vacant holes he saw nothing but emptiness and anger and desired nothing more than to stand there, forever, until they swallowed what little remained of his sanity.
No, he thought. Time to open the door. “Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four,” he shouted out.
The boy smiled then opened his mouth and a blue jay emerged from between his brown teeth. The bird squawked and flapped its wings, taking flight down the hallway.
“I’m not finished yet you little shit,” Dan said, and the boy gnashed his brown teeth and unleashed a death rattle.
Dan yanked the painting again, and the canvas grew even more burdensome and corpulent, as if something were growing inside it. He had the distinct feeling of not only pulling pieces of wood and fabric and paint, but of pulling lives and memories and all the moments contained within. Of pulling the clock and the window and even the fields beyond it.
The door grew closer.
The painting protested and fought, and as he glanced back he saw hands and arms reaching out from the frame and grasping at the walls.
“Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven!” the girl called out as the hallway shook and the old pictures crashed to the floor.
“Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty,” he answered, and the painting released its grip on the wall and sent him stumbling forward.
The door was so close.
Behind him, that rotten boy skittered along the wall, anchored only to the floor by that leathery appendage, cinched to the trunk like a dog on a rope. And in the bathroom a woman with tattoos combed her shimmering black hair.
“Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three,” the girl with strawberry hair called out.
The study door stood within mere feet from him. He reached out his hand for the brass doorknob, straining to pull the painting and all its contents, that whole world within it.
“Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six,” he shouted between teeth pressed so tight he thought they might snap.
“Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine,” the girl answered, and he felt fluttering wings and feathers on his neck and a dull beak pecking at his flesh.
He heard the death rattle of that boy, whispering in his ear through sickly lips. “Forty, forty-one, forty-two.”
And Ginger’s cold teeth, sinking into his ankle, chattering and chewing with rotten gums.
“Forty-three, forty-four, forty-five,” Dan screamed.
And Karina’s touch, a single finger sliding down his stomach as she licked at his neck, moaning: “Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight.”
And he shouted: “Forty-nine!” His mangled hand grasped the cold doorknob and everything grew heavy and sideways as a voice whispered: “She’s almost to fifty.”
As he twisted that doorknob he felt all those things release him, the whispers and feathers and teeth all vanished. His body surged forward, as if he had stepped through an invisi
ble film, a layer of skin that had stretched too far and had finally torn. He screamed and threw himself into the study, collapsing onto the hardwood floor, dropping the painting and the container of gasoline.
“Fifty,” he said, voice echoing in the quiet, empty study. There was no decay, no mold or infection. Everything was as the police had left it, even the white grid markings left by forensics where the Luminol had revealed something sinister in the wood.
For the first time since he’d returned home, he could hear himself breath, could hear his heart beating beneath his ribs. He listened as the plastic jug burbled gasoline onto the floor and the cap rolled away. He listened as his ears rang and buzzed. Then he pushed himself up, his hand screaming out in a sharp pain that shot all the way up his arm and into his brain.
He took the painting with one hand, and in the other, still throbbing and near useless, he took the container of gasoline. He hauled them both to the other end of the study. The only sound was the scraping of the painting along the hardwood floor.
“Ready or not,” he said. “Here I come.”
He hefted the painting up, pushing it back against that wall where it had sat for the last two weeks. It crashed and groaned and all six feet of it stared back at him.
The canvas was blank.
Negative Space
“NO NO NO!” he screamed at the empty, white canvas.
His voice echoed back from the solitude of the room. He ran his hands across the white canvas, the smooth fabric, the edges, the places where nails had once held the fabric to wood, but there were no nails, and even the wood felt flimsy and old.
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