by Clive Barker
A twenty-minute drive home that felt more like twenty hours. He hit every red light, and the speed cameras on the Bickford bypass meant that he never climbed above forty MPH. To compound his misery, his mobile phone chirruped less than three miles from home, and he answered it without screening—something he’d never do when more alert.
“James. Not too late, I hope?”
William, his older brother and former mainstay. William, who had shown indefatigable support during Stuart’s illness, and indeed beyond. Annie, in particular, had found comfort in his attentions. Stuart was barely ashes in the wind when they’d discovered that solace was more rewarding with no clothes on. They lived together now in a four-bedroom detached in the Beeches. William drove an Aston Martin. Annie a Lexus. James drove a four-year-old Ford Fusion, and left them to their happiness.
He almost cut the call without speaking. How delightfully easy, to press a little red button and make his brother disappear. Such a shame all of life’s annoyances couldn’t be so conveniently deleted. Instead he sighed, and tiredly said:
“Not too late, but I’m driving and I have a headache. Let’s make this quick.”
“Ah, yes. The resentment. The sour grapes. Even now.”
And always, James thought. He eyed the little red button, then his gaze flicked to the rearview mirror, where one corner of Stickling’s painting was reflected from its place on the back seat. It was covered, but still it pulled.
“What do you want, William?”
“Annie left a box of photographs in the attic. Your attic. Old, family photographs. Her side. She’d rather like them back.”
James—stopped at a red light—pressed a hand to his forehead. He felt the pain dissipate momentarily, then it blew back in…thicker, darker. It was like fanning smoke. The painting on the back seat urged him to look. He obliged, eyes to the rearview.
Green light. He drove.
“James?”
“In the attic?” he said. “I’ll get them when I have time. Can I post them to you?”
“I’m in your neck of the woods on Friday,” William said. “I may as well pick them up. Then it’s done, right?”
“I suppose.” The last thing James wanted was to see William. Three years had passed since he and Annie revealed their affair. It was still very raw. But it always would be. “Listen, I have to go.”
“I’ll see you Friday.”
He cut the call and tossed his phone into the passenger seat. A mile from home now. The headlights of oncoming cars were like spears in his eyes and the streets buzzed in their pale electric glow. He clasped one hand to his brow as he drove—imagined a blood clot skittering spider-like along the sulci of his brain, looking for a place to settle. At last he arrived. He parked on the road outside his house and sat for a moment, both hands pressed to his temples. A single tear leaked from his left eye. He used his cuff to wipe it away.
* * *
In his dream he was in a cold and black space with but a single point of light in the distance. Stuart, he thought, and ran toward him. Short breaths snapped from his lungs. The darkness whispered to him and pushed its full body close. It touched him with fingers like seaweed. He heard screams and felt rain on his back.
“Stuart.”
He ran into a room filled with boxes that towered and creaked. Blood on the floor. Faces in the window. They had lost eyes and pale skin, and were tethered to something unseen. Typing the Canvas was placed on an empty desk at the back of the room. Stuart stood before it, his back to James. Delicate shoulders. Small, bald head. James couldn’t remember what he looked like with hair.
The faces pressed against the window. Their lost eyes looked everywhere.
Stuart reached out and touched the painting. The bottom right hand corner. The fingerprint.
“You didn’t save me, Daddy,” he said.
One of the faces screamed. Its black mouth smeared the glass.
Stuart turned around. He had no eyes. No mouth or nose. Where his beautiful face should have been—beautiful, even at the end—was a large red fingerprint.
James closed his eyes. He felt his son’s hand on his face. It was cold.
“You didn’t save me.”
* * *
James left work early the next day. His headache had faded, but not disappeared. A pulsing behind the eyes that made concentrating on sales quota reports next to impossible. At no point did he entertain the idea that Stickling’s painting was in some way affecting him. He was tired. Hadn’t slept well. A little stressed about his brother’s imminent visit. Nothing more than that. Indeed, as soon as he got home, he loosened his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, and stood staring at the painting for almost six hours.
No…it wasn’t affecting him at all.
* * *
Three AM. Awake on the sofa. Bad TV reflected in his eyes. He wasn’t watching it. Too doped up for that. Painkillers—strong, wonderful painkillers—and lots of them. Too many, probably. His living room appeared rounded, somehow, all the corners and edges smoothed away. Same as the pain. His mind, too. Everything was just a little numb and that was fine. The painting called to him—it even said his name—and sometimes he looked at it, sometimes he didn’t. “I’m too tired,” he would say. “We’ll talk later.” And then he would laugh. Stupid painkillers. Playing their games. At one point he picked up the phone and spoke to nobody. At another he hugged a cushion close to his chest and wept.
* * *
Sleep, when it finally came, brought another terrible dream, one of swirling red drips and darkness. He woke up on the sofa. Mid-morning sunlight filled the room and the TV still played to no one. His mouth was dry and his head whirled. The nightmare didn’t fade. It felt as if those red lines were wrapped around his brain.
He called the office to let them know he wouldn’t be in. His partner, Harrington, assured him his timing was horrible. “The Brighton conference is next week,” he said. “It’s the big one, remember? Money to be made. This is not the time to fall ill.” James told him to hold the fort and hung up, but that little dose of reality—hearing the anxiety in Harrington’s voice—made him feel better. He ate a light breakfast, took two more painkillers, and showered.
His phone rang at lunchtime. It was William. He chose not to answer, but it reminded him that it was Friday, and his brother would soon be knocking on the door. It also reminded him that he needed to get Annie’s photos from the attic. He had little inclination to do as such, but being able to hand William the photos as soon as he walked through the door would no doubt ensure the visit was brief. Thus, he fetched the stepladder from the spare bedroom (formerly Stuart’s room) and positioned it beneath the hatch. He climbed up, pushed the hatch door to one side, and hoisted himself into the attic.
James knew that one day Annie would remember her photographs and ask for them back. He had hoped, to begin with, that he could use them for emotional leverage. Maybe he’d even get an apology from her. But where resentment had once turned to anger, it now turned to tiredness. Better to hand them over and do without the dispute. James was not without emotion, however; crouched in the attic beneath a dimly glowing bulb, he opened the box and flipped through his ex-wife’s photographs. Most were of her family—her siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles…people who had faded from James’s life since the divorce. So completely gone they might never have been there to begin with. There were a few Polaroids of Annie as a baby—all kiss-curls and smiles—and some of her as a teenager. There was even a photograph of the young woman James had fallen in love with, looking exactly as she had when they’d met at the Glastonbury music festival in 1994. Grungy, yet together, and with a fierce intellect that leapt from her expression. Seeing her like this again, even in a photograph, touched him inside, deeply and unexpectedly, and placed small, bright tears in his eyes. It passed through his headache and fatigue like an arrow, and stirred memories of a life before it had been so irrevocably ruptured.
His emotion was not tempered upon finding three photograp
hs of Stuart. One at the beach, armed with bucket and spade. One with his Spider-Man outfit on. The third was taken at James’s former place of work. He sat on James’s knee with his big eyes shining and happy. Four years old, and only weeks from showing the initial symptoms of a disease that would kill him. James clearly remembered this picture being taken. He could feel the weight of his son on his knee, and smell that dusty office with the rickety desk, the old-fashioned rotary phone, and the marked map of South Buckinghamshire—there, it was even in the photograph—on the wall.
James lowered his head and wept in the dim light. It felt okay to cry in this tight space, where no one could see him. It was like holding his pain in cupped palms, like a bird with a broken wing, and waiting for the moment it would take flight.
* * *
He kept the photographs of Stuart—put them on the dresser in his bedroom. Annie was not getting those. The rest he put in the box and took downstairs. He meant to place them on the telephone table in the hallway, but was halted in the living room by Typing the Canvas. He’d hung it on the north wall, because it was a dour space and it needed the color, but also because it was out of direct sunlight, where bleaching would be minimized. As James passed the painting, he felt it—actually felt it—reach out of the gloom, grab his shoulder, and drag him close.
“What do you want?” he said.
The bloody lines drew him in. He followed them, like pathways, with his heart pounding and sweat running into his eyes. He dropped the box of photographs. His head filled with a glassy ache. He moaned and covered his eyes, but the red lines were still there.
Something, he thought. A key. A riddle. A puzzle.
Blood leaked from his left nostril.
Something about those lines.
He slapped himself. Hard.
And that fingerprint.
Cold air swirled around him. He saw shapes in his periphery. They drifted across the living room and he wanted to look to see what—who—they were but couldn’t drag his eyes from the painting. He felt them settle behind him and loom. He recalled Angelique Mayer’s full disclosure. She’d used words like “cursed” and “visitants.” Blood trickled onto his upper lip and he licked it away. She’d used the word “hemorrhage,” too.
Tiredness. Stress. The power of persuasion.
What else could it be?
“WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?”
He whirled on his heels but saw nothing. Nobody. The TV was still on, reflecting images onto the pale walls. He slapped himself again, then grabbed an empty vase from a nearby side table and threw it at the wall. The breaking sound was perfect.
He crouched for some time in the corner with his hands over his head, shivering, licking the blood from his upper lip. He imagined his mind like the vase…shattering. It made the same sound.
By the time William rang the doorbell, James’s nosebleed had stopped and his headache abated—nothing more than a listless throb, at least. He sat in front of his own blank canvas, as he had many times over the last three years, charcoal stick in hand, waiting for something to say. But inspiration, as ever, proved difficult to attain.
He was shirtless. Dried blood caked his left nostril and he’d charcoaled a few doodles on his body. As such, he opened the door.
William, understandably, was taken aback.
“My God, man!”
“Welcome, brother.” James grinned. “It’s been a long time.”
William hovered on the doorstep a moment before coming in. He followed James down the hallway, into the living room. James sat in front of his canvas and studied its emptiness. William gave him a wide berth, as if he were a stray dog. One that could bite.
“I thought you’d pulled yourself together,” he said. “But obviously not. You look terrible.”
“As endearing as ever, dear Bill.”
“You think I enjoy seeing you this way?”
James sneered. “Annie’s photographs are over there.” He gestured to where they were strewn on the floor beneath Stickling’s painting. He hadn’t picked them up. “They…fell out of the box, I’m afraid.”
“So I see.” William’s nostrils flared. He started across the room, but stopped when he noticed the broken vase. His gaze darted from the scattered pieces, to the photographs, and then to James. “Oh, I understand now.”
“I doubt you do.”
“You looked at the photographs.” William nodded. His mouth was a thin, dry line. “Of course you did. And the memories came flooding back, didn’t they? You became angry. Threw the photographs on the floor. Broke a vase. Your mind, too, I’d say.”
“Such powers of deduction.”
“Look at you.” William shook his head. “It’s suggestive of manic depressive behavior. Bipolar, even.”
James drew two faces on his chest. One happy, one sad. He looked at William and shrugged.
“You need help, James.”
“Indeed,” James said.
William gathered the photographs while James leaned back in his seat and watched. They were physically alike—were often mistaken for twins: tall and slim, with dark hair turning gray at the temples, and that English countenance a foreigner might consider regal. James often wondered how unusual this was for Annie, even now, taking William into her arms, into her body. Did he kiss her in the same way? Did he hold her throat while they made love, and squeeze lightly?
Did she lay silently afterward, her hair spilling onto his pillow?
If they were to have a son, would he look like Stuart?
“My word!” William said. He had retrieved the last photograph, and on standing directly faced Typing the Canvas. James distinctly saw his legs wobble, and his upper body tilt forward, just a fraction, but enough to note.
“My new painting.” James sprang from his chair and stood at his brother’s side. “Isn’t it delightful?”
“You did this?”
“No. I bought it.” James indicated the signature in the bottom left hand corner. “It’s an original Edward Stickling. Have you heard of him?”
“Of course not,” William replied. “Abstract art isn’t a passion, James. You know that.”
“Yes, I suppose.” He grinned. “Do you still have that wonderful print of The Hay Wain in your living room?”
William jerked his gaze from the painting. His posture realigned, shoulders square, and he regarded James with disdain. “You’ve no place for snobbery, James, looking like you do.”
He turned away and James placed one hand on his upper arm. The charcoal on his fingers left gray smears on William’s shirt.
“Is there anything…familiar about it?” James asked.
William looked at the painting again. He shook his head.
“Something in the pattern—in the placement of the lines?”
“Nothing.” William leaned forward again. His eyes shone. “Should there be?”
“I don’t know,” James said. His hand fell from William’s arm. “It just triggers something, and I can’t think what.”
“It’s ghoulish.” Again William pulled his gaze from the piece. “Looks like blood.”
“Well—”
“Abstract nonsense.” His upper lip curled, as if he had an unpleasant taste in his mouth. “But then, our tastes have always been different.”
“Except in women, it would seem.” James said.
“Touché, brother.” William pushed past him. Their shoulders butted aggressively. He strode across the living room, but paused at James’s easel and regarded the blank canvas with a bemused expression. “A potential masterpiece?”
“A work in progress.”
He rolled his eyes. James led him into the hallway and showed him the door.
“Always a pleasure.”
“You know,” William said. “There was another reason for my coming here today, quite aside from collecting Annie’s photographs.”
“Oh?”
“I was hoping we’d begin to smooth things over. We’re brothers, after all.”
“We still have a long way to go, I see.”
James pointed at the unhappy face on his chest.
“Get some help,” William said, and left.
James slammed the door, then reeled back into the living room, sat in front of his canvas, and fell into its emptiness like a beaten man.
* * *
He never made it to the conference in Brighton. The next thirteen days passed in a storm of pain, delusion, and despair. He spoke only to his partner—furious Harrington, who called him a condemnable bastard and slammed down the phone—and his doctor, who immediately arranged for tests at Bickford Hospital. James had every intention of going. The possibility of a tumor seemed suddenly very real. It perhaps being psychosomatic, caused by the power of persuasion, mattered not; the interminable headache and frequent nosebleeds could no longer be discounted, and demanded a more reliable diagnosis. James showered thoroughly—washing the crust of blood from his upper lip and the doodles from his body—and dressed in clean clothes. He faltered, however, when it came to leaving the house, getting only as far as the front door before collapsing in a fragile heap.
He burned through painkillers. Crunched them dry. Dozens every day. They masked the headache, but didn’t eliminate it. He ordered more when his supply ran short and had them delivered to his house. The alcohol in his liquor cabinet took a hit, too, but coupled with the painkillers offered no relief—only a bleak, slumberous wave of hallucination. He saw faces at his living room window. Shadows without reason. A bloodstained dress draped over the shower rail. None of this is real, he thought, and sometimes just had to laugh—mad, whooping sounds. Not real. Not at all. Eventually, he took the bottles from his liquor cabinet and hurled them spectacularly against the wall.
Breaking things helped.
While James found the act of destruction satisfying, the breaking sounds—particularly when they matched the frequency of his mind—were altogether soothing. A long period of anxiety was lifted when he took a cricket bat to his television set. Smashing an antique lamp gave him a brief rush of optimism. His insecurity faded, albeit temporarily, when he shattered his collection of Waterford figurines. And feelings of worthlessness were suppressed when throwing crockery on the kitchen floor.
