by Clive Barker
He also broke two mirrors, a coffee table, the shower door, the bathroom cabinet, six picture frames, three light bulbs, a mantel clock, and his entire CD collection.
Sleep brought no such relief, because of the nightmares. He tried staying awake, but always succumbed, often weeping. Into the cold…the darkness. His dreamscape was a desperate place, where sometimes his dead son stood alone, and always the red drips of Stickling’s painting tried to lure him deeper. He followed—what else could he do?—but always woke up before the end, like those dreams of falling…never hitting the ground.
* * *
The little girl stood at the foot of his bed. Maybe ten years old. Long black hair and a bloodstained dress. Her face was a gaping hole. It looked like she had been broken with a hammer.
“Who are you?” James asked.
The details of his bedroom were exact. The stains on the walls. The sweat-stink of the sheets. Even the sounds outside his window: distant cars and rattling branches. If this was a nightmare, its realism was unsurpassed.
“Are you from the painting?”
She crossed to the dresser and picked up a photograph of Stuart—the one taken in James’s old office. She looked at it with her empty face for a long time. James watched her a moment longer, then hid beneath the sheets. Not real, he decided, and by morning the little girl was gone but the photograph was on the pillow beside him.
* * *
“Simpatico Museum.”
James heard her tongue bar tapping against her teeth.
He sat in the corner of his living room, among ruin, dressed only in underpants and a raggedy beard. Five weeks and three days since he’d bought Typing the Canvas. He knew this because he’d kept the receipt and could still count. That part of his brain hadn’t yet leaked away. He couldn’t remember when he’d last showered, though, or brushed his teeth. Judging from the dirt in the creases of his arms and neck, and the thickness of his tongue, it had probably been weeks. Not that it mattered. Time moved differently now. He’d broken all the clocks in his house. Night and day meant nothing. But the man on the radio said that the date was August the 15th, which meant that exactly five weeks and three days had passed since he’d bought that ungodly painting.
“Simpatico Museum.”
Again with the tapping.
“James,” he said. “Cloak.”
“Mr. Cloak,” she said, allowing a moment to place the name. “Yes. How are you?”
And he replied, “The painting is cursed.”
Not that it had taken him five weeks and three days to realize this. And it wasn’t so much the blinding headache (he was used to the pain now—couldn’t imagine what his head would feel like without it, in fact) or the vivid nightmares. He could still—though barely—ascribe these anomalies to the power of persuasion. But the painting itself, the way it pulled him in and possessed him, went beyond explanation.
It was powerful, and it was destroying him.
Angelique Mayer tapped the backs of her teeth as she considered her reply. James imagined grabbing that silver piercing, yanking her tongue from her mouth, and snipping the tip of it off with a pair of sharp scissors.
“Are you,” she began hesitantly, “experiencing some…?”
“Everything,” he growled. “Headaches, nightmares, hallucinations. I’m losing my mind.”
“With respect, Mr. Cloak, this is—”
“You can have it back,” he said. “No charge. Just take it away. Get it out of my house—my life.”
After a pause, she said. “Thank you, Mr. Cloak, but the Simpatico Museum has no interest in that piece.”
He remembered the barcode tattooed on the back of her neck, and wondered—if he scanned it—what her value would be. Was she an August work of art, to be exhibited at the world’s premier museums? Or a throwaway piece—all style and no substance—that nobody would miss?
“Just take it away,” he said. “I don’t care what you do with it.”
“You might try another museum.” Angelique’s voice trembled. “Or you could simply destroy it.”
“Simply,” James said. He laughed, and the sound was just one degree from maniacal, perhaps two from a scream. “It can’t be destroyed, Ms. Mayer. It can only be deciphered—an endeavor that is quite beyond me.”
He had thought to destroy the painting on many occasions. A knife would surely do it. Several broad slashes across the canvas, until it was in ribbons. Or he could bury it, deface it, burn it. Throw it on the railway tracks or off the Romney Bridge. But first he needed to get close to the painting, and therein lay the problem. Every time he got to within a step or two, it curled red hands around his throat and dragged him in. It howled and screamed in multiple voices, and he rode the lines and tried—oh, how he tried—to untangle them.
He could burn his entire house to the ground. He wouldn’t need to get close to the painting then. Not being able to leave, though, meant he’d go up in flames, too. A laudable sacrifice, perhaps…but losing his mind was marginally better than burning to death.
“I can’t help you, Mr. Cloak,” Angelique said.
“You have to.”
“I gave you full disclosure.”
“Please.”
“I’m a curator, not a doctor.”
Tap-tap went her piercing and again he imagined cutting off the tip of her tongue and perhaps eating it, feeling the little bar click and clack against his own teeth. Then he could drive the scissors into her eye and work them inside her skull, cutting little triangles—snip-snip—out of her brain.
“Do you have value?” he asked. His voice was full of broken pieces.
“What do you mean?”
“Will you be missed?”
She hung up. The sound of nothing was inexplicably loud in his mind. A great, tumbling emptiness that reminded him just how alone he was.
* * *
Stuart’s voice on the radio.
“Daddy…Daddy…”
He found it in a sea of static, scrolling across the dial, trying to find a news or weather report—some shot of reality from beyond these walls.
“Stuart?” he gasped. Tears welled in his eyes. “Baby, is that you?”
“Daddy…”
The tears spilled down his face. He touched the radio with a trembling hand.
“Daddy’s here…it’s okay, baby.”
“Can you see them?”
“Them?”
Static, like a sudden burst of rain hitting his window. He tweaked the dial and leaned closer to the speaker. From the midst of the white noise, he heard his son’s voice.
“They’re dead like me,” he said. “And they want you.”
* * *
Where was the line between nightmare and reality? Had everything he’d known, and all the things he feared, toppled into the same indistinct space, for him to pick among the farrago and decide what he could trust?
Early evening. Falling sunlight struck his living room window and painted a broad orange flag on the west-facing wall. James sat in a piss-stained armchair with the radio in his lap. Nothing but static. He hadn’t heard from Stuart in days.
The sun dropped slowly. The flag turned from orange to violet.
He heard footsteps on the stairs.
Not real.
Thud and creak. Someone heavy, or hurting. More footsteps—these lighter—from directly overhead. Someone else in his bedroom.
James placed the radio on the floor and stood up. His eyes tracked from the ceiling to the open hallway door. He moved toward it, hearing Stuart’s voice in his mind: They’re dead like me …And they want you. Two steps into the hallway, until he could see up the stairs. And there, at the top, a stooped figure. He caught just a glimpse before it lurched out of sight. Black rag clothes and pale hands. A face smeared with blood and dirt.
He retreated into the living room, walking backward. More footsteps overhead. His heart slammed bitterly in his chest.
“Not real,” he said, but his voice cracked with
uncertainty. He stumbled over the radio, almost fell, then cranked the volume so that the static drowned all other sound. He crawled past the window and saw his shadow on the wall. A cowering thing, with a crown of wild hair and spidery limbs.
James covered his eyes and waited. He listened to the static and tried to fall into that nothing sound, that nowhere place, away from this cruel tangle of obscurity. When he looked again the light had faded, sweet pink now, like something from a romance novel.
There was a woman at the other end of the room. Her shape was crooked…broken. Her long hair swayed and she moved toward him—strange, gimp steps—until they were close enough to kiss. James saw the bruises on her ribcage and the puncture wounds in her stomach. There was a boot print on her chest. The left side of her face had been smashed open.
She brushed her fingers over his lips.
He fell.
And there was depth.
* * *
His fascination with art stemmed from a propensity for interpretation, to uncover by layers a truth within the frame. All art is story, and all story is life. To look beyond device and form, and to find the place where art breathes, was as close to divine as he would get this side of heaven.
He read the visitants in the same way. They came to him—man, woman, and child—silently, formed of layers, and he uncovered.
* * *
The woman had been a life model, in her early twenties, intelligent and passionate. James touched her hair and saw her ambition—the way she used to smile. In the shape of her eye he determined an infectious joie de vivre. She had modeled for Stickling, of course, and despite promises of fame had scorned his advances. The bruises on her ribs, and her crippled posture, described the artist’s response. James moved his hand to the puncture holes in her stomach and saw a palette knife flash in a cool silver light. He touched the boot print on her chest and envisaged Stickling standing over her, crushing her ribcage with his weight. A tall man, with a scrawl of black hair and narrow shoulders. He carried a long-handled cross-peen hammer. James touched the collapsed side of the woman’s face, and saw the hammer fall.
Her blood in a jar, alongside tubes of paint and used palette cups.
The man had come to him over many nights, and James did not cower, but rather embraced him. He’d been a transient, simple-minded, who had made the mistake of knocking on Stickling’s door in search of work. James had touched his cheap clothes and sensed a heart that wanted only to achieve. His sunken cheeks told of hardship and desperation. James fell deeper. He stripped away the layers and saw Stickling fellating the man, followed by a rush of shame and disgust. The man’s broken bones regaled the level of the artist’s emotion. The hole in the back of his skull was the final, violent flourish.
A second jar of blood on the shelf.
And the child—the little girl in the bloodstained dress. She was, of all the visitants, the most disturbing by far. James cringed at her touch. He wanted none of her depth. But her layers were intricate and vibrant, and he fell into her hardest of all. She touched his face and he heard birdsong. He stroked her hair and saw that she’d been lost in the woods. A long, shadowy man had followed her, skulking between the trees: Stickling. He’d scooped her into his arms and taken her to his house. Her pale skin told James how frightened she’d been, and the bruises on her arms revealed her futile attempt at escape. James counted every tear and heard every scream. He touched the empty space where her face used to be. As hollow as a bowl. He saw that cross-peen hammer again. He saw it fall.
Three jars of blood. Three blood types. Stickling’s made four. And that was when James realized that Typing the Canvas wasn’t a painting at all.
It was a confession.
* * *
But there was more to it yet. A final layer. The puzzle. The key. Something about that fingerprint, and those lines. Those deliberate, wandering lines.
He never stopped looking. He couldn’t stop looking.
And months passed.
“WHAT AM I MISSING?”
Then one day, and quite by accident, with his beard long and his ribs showing, James discovered what it was.
* * *
For three years James worked as campaign manager for the Chesham and Amersham Member of Parliament. One of his duties was to determine effective campaign routes within the constituency, where they could plant their proud blue placards, and go door-to-door where necessary. He bought a large map of South Buckinghamshire and used a red marker to highlight certain roads between key towns and villages. The result was a mesh of lines, looping and crisscrossing, that would appear arbitrary to anyone else, but which he knew as well as the lines on his palm. James had pinned that map to his office wall and looked at it every day for three years. Those red lines glowed in his mind even when he blinked, like the afterimage of a bright light.
That was a long time ago. Happier days, for sure, when he’d had a wife and son…a future. The photograph he’d found in the attic—the one taken in his office, with Stuart sitting on his knee—was a reminder of those days. James smiled in the photograph. Stuart smiled, too. The map was pinned to the wall behind them, its roadways colored in red.
James had looked at that photograph a thousand times and hadn’t seen it. Perhaps he’d been too focused on Stuart. That was understandable. But even when he looked at the map, it wasn’t immediately obvious. It was only when he happened to glance at the photograph via the broken mirror on his dresser that it finally fell into place. His heart had boomed, his eyes like moons. He remembered Angelique Mayer saying that Stickling had lived in Buckinghamshire, and the sound of the final layer being peeled away was like an earthquake.
He grabbed the photograph and a shard of mirror from where it clung to the dresser, and staggered down to the living room. He stood in front of Typing the Canvas (its pull had already diminished, he noted), then turned his back and viewed it via the mirror shard. With his heart still pounding, he held up the photograph. His eyes flicked from the red lines drawn on the map, to the inverted painting.
Stickling had added a lot of artistic subterfuge—random loops and swirls—but the darkest, broadest red lines, running diagonally across the canvas, precisely mirrored a network of roads in South Buckinghamshire.
Typing the Canvas was a confession. It was also a map. Which meant that the fingerprint, placed somewhere between Little Chalfont and Seer Green, was a location.
James lowered the mirror shard and smiled.
“Let’s go for a drive,” he said.
* * *
His car had sat idle for eight months. The battery was dead and it had a flat tire. A wonder it hadn’t been towed away. James called the AA and within an hour they had it running like new. With Typing the Canvas on the backseat (the only way he could leave the house was to take it with him) and old clothes hanging off his emaciated body, he pulled away from the chaotic stink-hole he called a home, and drove east to Buckinghamshire.
He made one stop along the way: a hardware store on the outskirts of town, where he bought a pickaxe and shovel.
* * *
It didn’t take him long to find them.
They’d been buried in a small, wooded area known locally as Magpie Grove. He parked as close as he could—what would be the top edge of the fingerprint—and walked from there, painting under one arm, pickaxe and shovel on his shoulder. It was sunset. Clear tangerine light filled his eyes. The air was crisp and fresh. He crossed farmland, scattering sheep and cows, and reached Magpie Grove as the nightjars started singing. It was gloomy between the trees but the painting guided him. He stepped slowly and thought perhaps the visitants walked alongside him, but couldn’t be sure. When he turned he saw only the shapes of trees, as black as charcoal sketches. At some point the painting lost its hold on him. He threw it to the ground and started digging.
It was soon too dark to see, but he dug a little deeper and then rested. He curled up in the shallow hole and slept. Stuart flew a blood-red kite through his dreams. James woke
to the sound of birdsong. Dawn light slanted through the branches. A fox slept beside him, but was quickly startled awake by his movement and sprang away, tail bouncing.
James resumed digging. He went deep, his hands ragged, bleeding. Just when he began to believe he would find nothing, his shovel uncovered a wet patch of burlap. He worked faster and didn’t stop until the job was done—the remains of three bodies dragged from the earth. Their cerements, mostly rotted, separated easily. He saw their shattered skulls, their broken bones.
He sat at the edge of the grave and lowered his face into torn hands.
* * *
The nightjars were singing again by the time he left Magpie Grove. The sky was beautiful copper. He walked straight and tall despite his fatigue, the pickaxe on his left shoulder, the shovel on his right. He had buried Typing the Canvas in the hole he’d dragged the bodies from. A fitting resting place, he thought. With each shovel full of earth he’d felt the uncomfortable edges pressing into his psyche gradually drawing away. The headache persisted, though. And the darkness, like a shadow at his shoulder.
He’d left the bodies uncovered. Crumbling skeletons like chalk marks in the leaves. They’d be discovered soon enough. Questions would be asked, and never answered. But that was okay, James thought, because in the end they’d be given a dignified burial. They, at least, would find peace.
Home by midnight. He ran a bath and washed the filth from his body, then crawled into his fleapit bed. Sleep didn’t come easy. He tossed and turned for hours. His dreams were fragments, choked with shadow.
He spent most of the following day staring at the empty wall where Stickling’s painting had hung. That’s my life, he thought. A bare and soulless space. He had nothing. No job, no family, no friends. And soon—when his savings ran dry—no house.
He needed something, he realized. New color, new depth. Something to help fill the emptiness.
