Inflictions

by John McIlveen

  As Felix turned, something caught his eye. He quickly looked back at the painting but saw nothing. Turning away again, something shifted in the far corner of his vision. Felix looked at the painting yet again. Nothing. But there appeared to be a wave in the texture, a swath of a deeper black.

  It moved.

  Subtly, it shifted again, drawing him in. The black transformed into stygian pockets, now moving faster, beckoning him. Faster, pulling. The sound of slithering and rasping, the shifting of giant eel bodies moving against each other. More sounds, little gusts of wind, rapid writhing and tunneling and hissing voices and breaking glass.

  Felix shook his head and tore his gaze from the painting. He looked down at his shattered glass on the parquet floor.

  Terrified, his heart hammering, he backed away with averted eyes. He turned and nearly broke into a run for fear that something mammoth and lethal would leap out of the frame and attack him.

  He hurried upstairs to the bedroom, quickly closing the door behind him. Justice lay propped up on her pillows, eyes slightly open, which was not unusual for her, but never failed to creep Felix out a bit.

  “You awake?” Felix asked softly.

  No response.

  Felix went into the master bathroom, brushed his teeth, and gargled none too quietly. He returned to the bedside and felt a little growing indignation. She could at least stay awake to greet him.

  Felix undressed to his boxers and draped his shed clothing over a straight back chair near the bed. He cleared his throat loudly, to no avail.

  Deciding to administer a full dose of rude awakening, he yanked back the covers and slid in, making sure to give Justice a jab with his big toe.

  “What’s with the LaBrea Tar Pits at Midnight?” he asked gruffly.

  He looked at Justice’s semi-opened eyes and still bosom. A sharp jolt seared the back of his neck and shot down his legs.

  “Oh, shit,” he whispered, moving away slowly as if she had become toxic. Rising, he rounded the bed and gingerly touched a finger to her pale cheek.

  Cool, but not cold. Was she dead?

  He lowered his hand to her neck and pressed an index finger to her throat.

  No pulse. Dead, but not for very long.

  He looked at her eyelids, so odd a texture. They looked like a blending of rice paper and the petal of an iris—so soft. He wanted to touch them, but he knew he’d be disappointed.

  He backed away again spooked by this woman who had been soft-spoken and gentle in life and now terrified him in death. Or maybe it was simply death that terrified him.

  Felix reached for the phone on the nightstand and saw the little blue capsule and empty wine glass.

  Felix didn’t question why Justice took her own life; he wondered why she’d waited so long.

  He called 911 and then dressed.

  The paramedics and police arrived quickly, though Justice was beyond saving. Two police officers and two paramedics filed into Felix’s home pulling a stretcher and assorted paraphernalia in their wake. The EMTs attended to Justice, while in the den, the police officers listened to Felix’s retelling of the night’s events.

  Felix kept his eyes averted from the painting, although it called to him, unrelenting, boiling in his peripheral vision—a swirling darkness accompanied by that damned sound, like white noise or dead air on the phone.

  The police and paramedics passed by the painting several times, but only the one female paramedic kept glancing uneasily at it; the others didn’t seem to notice it or care.

  They finally wheeled Justice to the ambulance, and to Felix’s relief, led him outside. Felix followed them to the hospital in his Mercedes.

  It was nearly three-thirty in the morning. Felix sat inside his Mercedes, before one of the three garage doors. He dreaded entering his house, afraid to face the painting again. A man of controlled emotions, Felix had never really experienced fear before.

  He didn’t like it.

  He would have to call his daughter Rachel and her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was the only family he had left now.

  He had to take the painting down. He’d go into the house with his eyes closed and rip the fucker right off the wall. Easy as that—problem solved!

  With renewed resolve, Felix marched through the doorway, eyes fixed to the floor. He grabbed the frame and was instantly snared and pulled down into darkness. His muscles contracted, forcing his eyes wide, and causing him to grip the frame tighter, though every element of his being wanted … needed to release it.

  He was forced to look into the painting. The swirling eels demanded his full attention, beckoned him—shifting wildly, converging and separating, forming, sloughing away and reforming.

  A figure started to emerge amidst the churning shadows. Strands like hair, long and fibrous, flowed within, revealing glimpses of an eye … a pair of eyes.

  Dark eyes … haunted and terrified.

  Asian eyes.

  Felix remembered those eyes even forty years later.

  A face emerges. Pretty, a young Korean woman, more like a girl, fetal on a dirt floor, sobbing desperately as three sailors advance on her, laughing riotously. A young Felix swings a belt, connecting sharply with her upper leg. The memories play out before him like a malevolent movie; only now, Felix feels the sting of the leather and the girl’s terror. It is now his torture. Her pain meshes with the fibers of his soul and feasts. The beating and repeated rape, and desecration of a child-woman’s innocence … all to alleviate boredom.

  “Having a good time,” the sailors had called it.

  Felix felt the excruciating pain of her defilement so absolute that the girl’s eventual death was a welcome relief.

  Her image was dragged away in tides of black, just as her body so many years ago was claimed by the midnight waters of the Yellow Sea.

  To Felix’s right, another image materialized. He couldn’t look away.

  Justice, twenty-two years old, her face tear-streaked, clutches a shrieking sixteen-month-old Rachel protectively to her body. A hand grabs Justice’s hair and yanks her head backward. Felix feels the pain sear across the back of his head as a thirty-four-year-old Felix screams insanely, spittle flying into Justice’s face, “Shut that fucking kid up, or I will!”

  Emotions flood Felix as Justice’s hopes dwindle. He feels her thoughts of bleak finality. There could be no more children. Protecting just one from this insane bastard will take all her energy.

  Images began to emerge more quickly, a slideshow of years.

  Justice gets her tubes tied; Rachel hides fearfully in the shadows while her father rants wildly. Rachel is sent off to spring camp, summer camp, ballet school, the grandparents’ house—Justice employs any means, and a healthy amount of cash, to keep her daughter away from Felix. Faster and faster the images flash by. Justice escapes to the basement, painting her landscapes, hiding in them. A staccato display, faster, swirling, throbbing, and finally, an exploding force drives Felix to the floor.

  Retching and feeling like something thick and alive was thrusting up from his stomach, Felix rushed to the bathroom and vomited explosively.

  “Hello?”

  Rachel’s voice was rushed. About seven in the morning, probably hurrying to get the kids off to school before she left for work, Felix figured. Rachel was a psychology professor at Harvard, where she had studied.

  He paused, unsure of what to say. He couldn’t recall the last time he had talked to his daughter. That was Justice’s arena.

  “Hello?” Rachel repeated, sounding irritated now.

  “Rachel,” he said.

  “Hello? Who is this?” she asked with an edge of concern in her tone. “Father, is that you?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” he said.

  “Is everything all right?” There was a growing thread of worry in her voice. Understandably so, Felix thought. Her father, who probably hasn’t said more than a dozen words to her in the last ten years, calls her out of the blue … doesn’t need a Ph.D. to figur
e that out, and she has one.

  He took a sip of Evan Williams whiskey and said, “Rachel, your mother died last night.”

  “Oh, my God!” Rachel’s voice cracked. “What happened? I just talked to her Tuesday.”

  “Pills.”

  “Pills?”

  “Yes, pills. Barbiturates.”

  “She took sleeping pills?” Rachel was nearing hysterics. “She killed herself?”

  “Yes.”

  Rachel said nothing for a few moments, but her silence roared. Felix knew she held him responsible. He listened as she pulled her rapid breaths and sobs under control.

  “Why? Did she leave a note?” she asked. “She seemed all right when I spoke to her.”

  “No note,” he told her. “The only thing different was a new painting.”

  “How is that different? Mom’s always doing new paintings.”

  “Not like this one.”

  “Why?”

  Felix took a long drink of whiskey before answering. “Because this one is … fucked, for lack of a better word. Huge, it takes up most of the den’s north wall, and disturbing, to say the least.”

  “What did she paint?” Rachel asked. The need for answers, or at least a clue to her mother’s actions, was evident in her voice.

  “Not a goddamn thing as far as I can tell. No landscapes, no people, just a bunch of black swirls and whorls. When I got home from San Diego last night, the ghastly thing was on the wall, and the bitch of it is, I can’t take my eyes off it. Have you ever known her to do this … abstracty kind of stuff before?” he asked.

  Rachel was silent a while, then said, “Yeah, she painted some for me and the kids.”

  “She did?” Felix asked, surprised that Justice would send something so horrendous their way.

  “Did she sign it?” Rachel asked.

  “I never knew your mother to sign her paintings,” he said.

  Justice refused to sign any of her paintings, even those she sold, despite protests from collectors. But each piece of work had her personal logo hidden within the scenery, a small symbol Justice had designed for herself that was evocative of both Celtic and Pagan. She would painstakingly hide them within her paintings, sometimes taking Rachel hours to find them. Sometimes she couldn’t.

  “Her logo,” Rachel said.

  Felix considered looking for it, but the thought of getting that close to the painting again was too disturbing. “I’ll have to check that out,” he said dismissively.

  “Did she say anything before you left? Did mom say she was feeling down or anything like that?”

  “I was in San Diego for a couple days, but last time we talked, she sounded fine.”

  “Aw, shit,” Rachel said, sniffed, and cleared her throat. “I’ll call Ben at work; we should be able to get there sometime tomorrow.”

  Both ends of the line remained silent for a few moments.

  “You need money?” Felix said.

  “We’re all set. You should try to get some sleep,” said Rachel.

  “I’ll do that,” Felix said.

  Rachel hung up.

  She sat on the couch, legs folded beneath her, phone still in her lap.

  Mom’s gone … Mom’s gone … Mom’s gone!

  The words flashed through her like a beacon. It didn’t seem real or possible. She couldn’t be gone.

  And suicide? What’s with that? She was the strong, stoic one and an optimist to a fault.

  Too many things did not make sense. Like her father, that unflinching, cold-spirited, selfish bastard being unnerved by a painting. Rachel couldn’t imagine something like that upsetting him.

  She tried to envision the painting and could only conjure the paintings Mother had given to her and her children. What was it, three years ago? About a third the size her father described, but similar by the sound of it—swirls and whorls without any definable subjects, though some shape always seemed about to emerge.

  They were anything but ghastly, as her father had said, but he was right that they were magnetic. Rachel found them oddly comforting and supposed the kids did too, since she often found them staring intently at them.

  Ben was neutral; though he didn’t find the art upsetting, he certainly felt they were odd. “What’s the sense?” he asked.

  Unlike her standard paintings, Mother’s logo was not on the personal ones, at least obviously so, but what Justice did do was write the feeling or emotion she was trying to convey on the back of each picture. A landscape with a babbling stream would be “serenity” or “peace,” or a wild stallion might be “intensity” or “spirit,” but unlike the silly motivational posters these emotions often brought to mind, Justice’s work was true art.

  Mother had been adamant about where the paintings should be hung. The lavender one labeled “Grace” was in Stephanie’s room. The blue one titled “Nobility” belonged in Daniel’s room and the beige “Devotion” was in Rachel and Ben’s bedroom. It seemed they were prophetic or maybe a cause to the effect, because each child embodied the quality named in the painting, and Ben and she were very devoted to the children and to each other.

  The colors complimented the labels, too, which made Rachel wonder, why black?

  Anger?

  Hatred?

  She couldn’t picture her mother capable of either. What had she written on the back of the black painting?

  Rachel lifted the phone from the cradle and punched in her parents’ number.

  The trill of a phone burrowed into Felix’s sleep, pulling him from dreamless depths to the present. He opened his eyes and gasped, reaching out to keep from falling. He was standing with his face mere inches from the painting. The phone rang again and Felix turned for it, but he couldn’t tear his eyes from the undulating silhouettes pulsing before him. The phone continued to ring, but Felix no longer heard it.

  Instead, he saw.

  From the ebony field, a young man materializes. Nathan Rutledge sits at a barroom table directly across from Felix. They’re in The Rusty Bucket, a friendly little tavern that they frequented in the mid-Eighties when they both worked at Logi-tel. Nathan worked in accounting, and Felix directed programming.

  Nathan tells Felix that a large amount of money is being skimmed from the corporation. An inside job, but he’s sure he’ll nab the bastard soon. Nathan laughs and says something. Felix remembers the words.

  “Once I bring this son of a bitch to light, I’ll get my big promotion, and I’ll get you a bigger office.” They laugh.

  Nathan’s laughing visage dissolves. No longer laughing, his head is at an odd angle, wedged against a tire in the trunk of Felix’s Thunderbird; he barely fits.

  Felix feels the pain—Nathan’s pain in his temple, huge and disorienting where the rock hit.

  Then Nathan is tumbling down the embankment to the rocky depths below.

  The vision fades, and Felix is standing in a cemetery, holding Nathan’s wife Rhonda, as her son Sammy stands nearby. Justice and Rachel stand toward the rear of the assembly of mourners, suspicion burning from Justice’s eyes.

  Felix hadn’t noticed the look back then, but he was distracted by more important things.

  Rhonda and her son weep bitterly, sharing their utter anguish. Felix flounders in their pain and chokes on it.

  “Who would do this?” she laments. “Why?”

  Felix was never a suspect. Everybody knew they were best friends since childhood. Hell, they went fishing together most weekends. Felix’s grief was so convincing that everyone sympathized, telling him they understood how it must be like losing a brother.

  Nathan’s face returns contorted with anger and hatred, comprehension in his eyes. His mouth opens in a silent scream as his image rockets toward Felix. Felix cowers and falls to his knees, hiding beneath raised arms as the power of Nathan’s need for vengeance rushes over him.

  Terrified, but too afraid not to look, Felix raises his eyes to the painting again. Gone is Nathan, and gone are Rhonda and Sammy.

  The
re is a shift in the blackness; a force glides across the painting, hissing like cardboard sliding on sand. Another shape appears, a woman’s back, naked and sultry. She sits on a bed, her hair pulled over one shoulder. She faces away from Felix. Hands wander across her back. Felix’s hands. He leans into her, and his hands reach lustfully around. The woman turns to look at Felix, and her face changes like a slow-moving film strip, like masks, another woman’s face … then another … then another—a slot machine of woman. More movement in the blackness, and then Justice is standing to his left. As each new face surfaces, Justice flinches as if slapped. Felix feels the sting, the insult. Justice does not cry; she is beyond that, but the humiliation of the offense is still there.

  All those trips to San Diego and L. A., he was never alone, and she knew. All the years, she said nothing to anyone, just buried it away with her pride.

  Felix moves away from the woman on the bed. He watches Justice, who looks at him. She raises one arm and reaches for Felix, the sadness in her eyes is complete and a single black tear—one formed of thousands—falls from her eye.

  Felix lifts his hand to her, compelled beyond his will. As their fingers touch, a searing coldness shoots up his arm, and he is hurtled from the past to the present.

  He knelt on the floor before the painting. The phone rang again, and he knew he should answer it, but he couldn’t. The burning coldness in his arm hadn’t subsided, and he couldn’t shake it. He looked at the painting.

  “Oh, god,” he said. Whatever was going to happen next, he knew it would be more than he’d be able to handle.

  From the ebony depths of the painting, a long and slender coal-black arm extended, the hand clamped firmly to Felix’s wrist. He tried freeing himself from the steely grip, but was forced to his feet. More of the figure emerged, a face rising as if from a pool of oil.