“I’m glad you came,” Ted said, shaking my hand with a firm grip. “We’ve had another incident.”
He kept talking as I followed him back to the storage area behind the showroom. We walked through a modern all-white gallery that looked like something out of a museum, with paintings on the walls and breakable things in Plexiglas cases.
“What happened?”
He ushered me into the back room. Several workers looked up from where they were busy cataloging or photographing items. “Something went missing—and damned it if didn’t show up in the painting. We all swear it wasn’t in the picture before. But it is now.”
I stood in front of the Arhawk picture. It gave me the creeps, and I don’t have a magical bone in my body. No ESP, no spidey sense, mundane through and through. And still, it made my skin crawl. I was amazed the people in the room could stand to work around it, and I didn’t even want to think about having it in my house.
The painting showed a group gathered in a well-appointed lobby. Some sat, some stood. Others leaned against the frame of a large window, looking out at the grounds beyond. Children played on the floor, and a dog curled at its master’s feet.
“There,” Ted said, pointing to an ornate timepiece on the mantle in the painting. “The empire clock.” He pointed to a frou-frou decoration that looked like it should be in some French palace. “And this is the guy who owned the painting last,” he added, directing my attention to an elderly bald man slouched in an armchair.
“How long did the doctor own the painting?”
“Four years. His daughter said that he bought it when he was at a low point in his life, and things turned around for him after that, until his death.”
So another sell-your-soul reversal of fortune. Doc must have been a bad negotiator. Four years is a pittance. Then again, given his age, maybe it was four more than he would have had otherwise.
“Did he buy it from the artist? Or were there previous owners?” I circled the painting, careful not to touch it. I’m no art critic; my taste tends toward landscapes and wildlife photos. Maybe a sunset over the water to mix things up. But even I could appreciate that the artist had talent. The detail looked almost photographic, and the details were impressive.
“We know very little about Thomas Arhawk,” Ted conceded. “His paintings came on the market for the first time about five years ago. He guards his privacy intensely, even when doing interviews might boost the value of his work. Some professionals are wary about that level of secrecy. All kinds of rumors went around.”
“Like what?”
Ted shrugged. “Everything from Arhawk being a team of painters instead of an individual, to being the alias of another famous artist who wanted a fresh start, to questions about the authenticity of his technique, since it’s very photo-realistic. He hasn’t had new work out for a while, so of course, there’s talk about him being dead.”
“And what did the critics conclude?”
Ted chuckled. “They’re critics. They never ‘conclude’ anything. But the market ignored them and liked what it liked. So the paintings sell well.”
“Except that bad things happen to the people who buy them. And sometimes, to the places that show them,” I added.
The look on Ted’s face told me he knew about the rumors. “You don’t really believe that kind of thing.”
“Kinda goes with my business.”
Ted paused long enough to send the two staffers from the room. “Yes, I’ve heard the rumors. But all kinds of crazy things get said on those forum boards. If I believed half of what I read, I’d think that there were haunted objects all over the place—”
“Which wouldn’t be completely wrong,” I interjected.
He looked a bit shaken by that. “We don’t often get high profile pieces of art, given where we’re located. I don’t know why the family didn’t decide to send this to Sotheby’s or Christie’s—”
“Or maybe they tried and were turned down.”
Ted nodded. “Maybe, if the acquisitions people were superstitious. But this could be a big windfall for us—”
“Are you willing to let people get hurt for that? Because whatever forces Arhawk was playing with, they’re real, and they’re dark, and they feed on blood.”
That’s when I noticed that the painting had changed. Where before, the people in the scene were looking at each other, or out the window, or at the children playing on the floor, now all of them faced outward, right toward us.
Shit. The painting was sentient.
I turned my back and tried to play it cool, although my heart thudded. “Can we talk in your office?”
Ted glanced around the empty room. “There’s no one…” I knew the minute when he realized the painting no longer looked the same. “All right,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’ll put on a fresh pot of coffee.” From his voice, I figured he’d be tempted to dump in some whiskey, just because.
Ted’s office had a practical, stripped-down look to it, despite him being a well-to-do businessman. “I don’t want to talk in front of the painting,” I said when he closed the door. “I think that somehow, it…listens.”
“The people had turned around.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I saw that, too.” I paused trying to figure out the right way to ask my next question. “How much trouble would you be in if something happened to the painting?”
He frowned as if the question hadn’t been entirely unanticipated. He licked his lips, struggling to answer. “There would be an inquiry. Insurance investigations. The estate would be unhappy, since the painting is likely to fetch a good price.”
“Here’s the thing: I don’t think we can neuter the danger and keep the painting intact,” I said. “I don’t know how or why, but power like that is fed into an object throughout the creation process. Arhawk paints dark magic into his works, and they hurt people. If you sell that, it’s going to hurt—probably kill—the next owner. If you keep it here, it’ll likely ruin you, the way it’s been a curse to others. So, I believe that I can solve your problem, but the only way to do that is to destroy the painting—carefully.”
“That possibility occurred to me when I asked you to investigate,” Ted replied with a sigh. “I can’t in good conscience sell it, but we’d never be able to convince the estate of the danger.” He looked up at the ceiling, beseeching the fates. “I feel like I’m talking to the Mob. Can you…can you make it look like an accident?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah. We can do that.” It wouldn’t be the first time I’d faked a robbery to get rid of a cursed object. I had no intention of telling him that my partner in crime would be Father Leo. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Again.
Ted gave a sharp nod. “Yes. Do it. I’ll…deal with the consequences. Just please, stop it from hurting other people.”
“Go about your usual routine for the rest of the day. Don’t do anything that’s going to look unusual. Just make sure nobody has a reason to come back here after hours.”
By the time I got home, Chiara had left a message to call her back. I suspected that the kind of intel she had for me shouldn’t be left on a voicemail.
“Whatcha got?” I asked when I pulled into the drive and returned her call.
“Arhawk seems to have tangled up Picture of Dorian Gray and the collected work of Aleister Crowley,” she replied. “He got into trouble in college for making terroristic threats toward other classmates and vandalizing a dorm room with pig’s blood.”
Sean used to complain about his roommate leaving dirty laundry on the floor. Arhawk was out of their league.
“What else?”
“Galleries shunned some of his early work for being too violent,” she continued. “He had a thing for painting dismembered bodies. It didn’t sell.”
“I’m amazed. Didn’t people buy paintings done by that clown serial killer?”
“Gacy. Yes. But I guess there’s still a limit. At least this week.” She shuffled papers for a second. “I wasn’
t kidding about Aleister Crowley. He was a painter, too, in addition to all his magic and occult writing. Arhawk became obsessed with him in college, which sealed the deal about getting him thrown out.”
“I’ve seen Crowley’s paintings. They’re a lot more…symbolic…than the one at the auction house.”
“Yeah, Arhawk apparently wised up,” Chiara replied. “His crazy shit didn’t sell, and he needed money. So, he started painting normal scenes and doing rituals to work the magic in with the paint. Most were curses that somehow worked to his benefit. He either gave them to people he wanted to be rid of or used them to influence buyers to hand over their money, their investments, even their wives.”
“That’s quite a racket.”
“It worked—until he tried it on someone with more magic than he had,” Chiara said. “Arhawk died of a mysterious wasting disease. His agent kept the death quiet. Arhawk’s condition didn’t match anything in the medical books. He believed he had been cursed and said so to anyone who would listen. But the doctors wouldn’t believe him, and he’d made so many enemies in the supernatural community that I’m guessing they were all celebrating the fact that someone figured out how to get rid of him. He died young, but the source I found said he looked like an old man.”
“You think he went into one of his paintings?”
“Could be,” she allowed. “Maybe one of his curses backfired. Or maybe he thought he could be immortal if he transferred his essence into the art. But I think someone just didn’t like him and whacked him.”
“Good to know. Any ideas about how to get rid of the painting?”
“You could ship it down to those people you know in South Carolina who deal with that kind of thing. They could make it disappear.”
“Yeah, I thought about that, but getting it there is the problem. That’s a long way from here, and it’ll have been reported stolen.”
“Shit. I couldn’t find anything specific about neutralizing the magic. Arhawk seemed pretty omnivorous in the kinds of power he studied, and so did Crowley, so I doubt he used spells from a single tradition.”
“Just keeps getting better and better,” I mumbled under my breath. “So we just try everything until something works?”
“Salt and fire are tradition-agnostic,” Chiara pointed out. “Father Leo might be able to dampen the magic and give you an edge. Just be careful—Arhawk might not have actually been the big deal warlock he thought he was, but everything I’ve found says he did have power and knew how to craft a nasty curse. You’d be cute as a toad, Wojcik, but I don’t have a terrarium big enough.”
“Funny. Not. Okay, thanks for the info. How about you and Blair come over, and we eat popcorn and mock ghost hunting shows? We can turn out the lights and admire their night-vision goggles.”
“And keep yelling, ‘did you see that’ every five minutes,” she added. “Tell you what—why don’t we go to your place before you get back and we’ll be your alibi?”
“Works for me. Just don’t eat all the popcorn.” Good friends help you hide the bodies. Best friends not only help you dig the grave, they bring snacks.
For a priest, Father Leo made a damn good lookout. I picked the lock on the auction house’s back door and silenced the alarm with a handy magical item a witch who owed me a favor made for me. The warehouse had alarms on the doors but no cameras, Ted assured me. And no motion sensors. Maybe in a big city, those would have been common. Not so much out here in the boonies.
We crept into the storage room and found it just the way it had been that afternoon. A security light gave us enough illumination to move without tripping over crates and chairs. Next to the wall, a workbench lay littered with jewelers’ tools, specialty cleaning brushes, and an array of bottles that looked to my untrained eye to range from paint thinner to degreaser and Lysol.
My simple plan involved stealing the painting, hiking a mile behind the auction house into the woods to an old abandoned dump, and setting the artwork on fire, with Father Leo mumbling some Latin. I didn’t really think it would be quite that easy, but life had taught me that complicated plans just made fate more determined to fuck me over.
Movement at the edge of my vision made me turn my head, only to find nothing but shadows. Another almost-there motion and my head whipped back the other direction, but saw nobody.
“Did you—”
Father Leo nodded. “Yes. There are entities present. Something not quite human and very unpleasant.” I didn’t ask how he knew that, but I’d always suspected that the padre had some clairvoyance of his own going on.
“Cover me while I snatch it,” I murmured.
I moved forward while Father Leo began to chant. It wasn’t the exorcism from the Rituale Romanum, which is the extent of my Latin, and I didn’t recognize the words, but Chiara thought he could tamp down on Arhawk’s curse, and any help was welcome. I had my eye on the big painting and tried to figure out how I was going to need to tilt it to get it out the door.
A woman in an evening dress body slammed me into the wall. I went to grab her, and when she turned sideways, she became nothing but a line. As if she were a drawing come to life.
I pulled a knife from my belt and slashed, cutting the figure in two. She vanished and left a slick of oil paint on my blade, along with droplets of pigment-like blood on the floor. Before I could move toward the painting again, a man in a dark suit came at me, hands outstretched to wring my neck. He dodged my blade, and I feinted to the right, trying to get around him. I wondered what would happen if I dug my knife down the center of the canvas. Would it destroy the sentience, or let it escape?
A knife flew through the air and hit the man in the center of his back, point protruding from his chest. Father Leo’s no slouch: his chant never wavered, although I did catch a hint of a self-satisfied smirk. The man from the painting vanished, but in the next breath, two more of the figures from the canvas closed on me.
Father Leo apparently decided that faith without works would get us dead, so while he kept up the chant, he moved in with an iron bar he had brought from my truck. Ghosts hate iron, and it stood to reason other spirits didn’t much like getting a beat down. He swung for the person on the right, a woman in a cocktail dress, while I went at the man in a polo shirt on my left.
The iron bar made the woman’s spirit vanish. I swung and missed with my knife, and the painting creature grabbed at me. His ice-cold hands pulled at something deep inside me as they connected, and I swore my heart stuttered as I gasped for breath. Then Father Leo brought the iron bar down through the apparition with both hands, and I staggered.
“Don’t let them touch you!” I warned as he kept up his chant. I dove for the painting, grabbing it and wrestling it off the tripod.
Arms reached out from the surface of the canvas, and I dropped the artwork, scrambling backward. It had felt for all the world as if the creature who had grabbed me wanted to pull me into that infernal portrait, sucking out my life and soul in the process.
The painting lay face-up on the concrete floor, and as I watched, a man began to emerge as if he were climbing out of a door to a basement. I stumbled backward and collided with the workbench. I threw the first thing I grabbed, a pair of pliers. They went right through the man, ripping a hole in his shirt, but this time, the creature did not just vanish.
I reached behind me, and my hand closed on a can. I meant to lob it, but hesitated long enough to read the label. Paint thinner. As Flat Man eased his way out of the painting, freeing first one leg and then the other, I wrenched off the lid and sent a spray of solvent splashing over both our 2-D menace and the painting beneath his polished oxfords.
Green melting witches had nothing on this guy. His face smeared, features blurring into a flesh-colored nothing, and his body began to dissolve from the middle out. I couldn’t see what the liquid did to the actual painting, but angry shrieks echoed through the storage room: women, men, a child, even a dog frantically snarling as if he, too, wanted to rip out my guts.
/> Melted Man wobbled toward me, and though I couldn’t see his expression, there was no mistaking the malice in the way he blindly reached for me.
I sloshed the rest of the solvent at him and watched his whole shape run like sidewalk chalk in the rain. The puddle that had been Melted Man inched its way toward my boots, still intent on dragging me into the painting, and I sidestepped, but it followed me. I’d never heard of possessed paint, but there’s a first time for everything.
Father Leo ran to grab one side of the damaged painting, taking care to avoid any of the leaking pigment. I took hold of the other side, and together we navigated toward the door. The air smelled of acetone and the shrieking grew louder and more frantic. The canvas bubbled and rippled as the creatures trapped inside tried to escape. On the floor, rivulets of multi-colored haunted paint ran unerringly toward us like beads of mercury.
The image of people in a parlor was lost in a runny mess of colors and bare canvas. I kept my fingers well back on the edge of the picture. As if the presence inside the painting knew we were winning, the liquefying paint on the canvas started splashing, spitting pigment at us like a cobra aiming for the eyes. Trying to keep clear of the encroaching swirls of killer paint nearly made me fall down the steps, but I managed to make it out the door. I didn’t think we could get the damned thing all the way out in the woods, not without being splattered either by the canvas or the runoff.
I wondered what the use was of Father Leo continuing to chant, until I realized that his words made the encroaching pigment shrink back. His raspy voice was giving out, and he was fading fast.
“Here,” I said, indicating a bare patch of ground with a jerk of my head. “It’ll have to do.”
The painting bucked and rattled on the dry dirt, spraying droplets of paint like a contagious convict trying to infect his captors. I pulled on gloves and grabbed a welder’s mask out of the back of my truck. Then I took a KA-BAR and stabbed the painting right in the center, and drew the tip down, cutting a slice in the canvas.
Open Season Page 6
