The Painter

by K.Z. Freeman

2

  I burn the unfinished canvas over a pyre behind the house and watch the black smoke curl into the fiery goldness of late summer morning. The western slant of the sun illuminates the forest’s edge with bright greens and subtle brows. There’s a crackle of burning wood as I listen to the chirping of birds.

  I think of what happened to me all those years ago, as I have done countless times before. Perhaps I had indeed fainted – just like she had today – and fallen into the lake? But how did I get out?

  The wind shifts and blows some of the ash into my face, making what happened next all the more questionable. I cannot say if what I saw was real, for it could just as easily have been something caused by the sudden scraping of residue in my eyes. It stood there for a moment and only a moment, behind the trees – a figure draped in black – before it moved away without sound.

  I’ve seen that figure before and my every nerve urges me to follow it, despite the intense fear. Goose bumps creep down my neck. The pull is a calling, like a need to escape into the sun after a week indoors hiding from the rain. But I don’t follow. I go back to check on my wife instead. She remains too dear to me to leave unattended.

  I leave the smell of burning wood behind and find Maya still unconscious on the bed I had carried her to. I dip the tip of my fingers in the glass of water and splash tiny droplets onto her face. She wakes with a start and yells out something quite incoherent.

  “Are you okay?” I ask her. She is clearly not, panting and sweating, her eyes darting about as though searching for some hidden foe. I don’t know what else to ask.

  “Tell me you’ve burned it!” she demands. “Tell me it’s gone!”

  “I did.”

  “Did you watch it burn? Did you see it burn out?”

  “No, I came back here to–“

  She gets up and hurries out in a rush I can barely follow. Down the steps and into the brightly illuminated kitchen she runs, then out the back door and onto the backyard bordered by the oak and beech forest. She looks down the cindering flame circled by burned grass and collapses on her knees before it. I have never seen her like this.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  She doesn’t respond as I look over the fire. The canvass is missing and there’s evidence water had been poured over the flames as the wood is glistening wet.

  She gets up and looks me in the eye, “Promise me you’ll never paint the lake again,” she says. “Please promise me, Martin!”

  “I suppose I…” I stammer my first words then nod, “I promise.”

  I wish to describe the horror I had depicted in paint and tried to burn, but don’t want to even think about it, and yet... There remains something in that face which calls to me.

  We spend the rest of the day in silence, watching movies and trying to take our minds off what has happened. We fall asleep sometime late evening curled up on the couch.

  I wake up to the sound of hushed speech. Looking around I cannot see Maya anywhere, until on the edge of my hearing, I pick up the sound of her whispering voice. I freeze at first. The menacing quality and the tonality if it sends beads of sweat down my armpit.

  “Maya?”

  No answer.

  “Maya!” I yell out and the whispering stops, replaced by silence. I hear the song of crickets and somewhere in the distance, there’s an owl hooting.

  I would have been content to stand up and search about in silence for her, but what happens next set my mind on edge more than the silence ever could. The whispering resumes. It is not something I’ve ever heard my wife do in such a manner. Why doesn’t she answer my summons?

  I rise from the couch and fumble in the dark.

  It amazes me how I can still forget where precisely the light-switch is. Illumination should bring some order and sense into the world, I think, as I turn it on. I squint and find the room empty with the backdoor swung open, the plasma screen is turned off and a cool breeze wafts in to caress my sweat-covered forehead. I shiver in the evening’s cold and follow the sound. I walk for a bit, the soft grass swishing between my toes.

  I meet the loss of my resolve at the wood’s edge. I am shaking now, for the tonality of the voice has changed, or perhaps I have simply picked up on the subtle wrongness of it. The whispering isn’t hushed at all. There’s something out there. I can see it moving in the moonlight’s gaze like a dark curtain. I take a step forth when the inexplicable madness drawing me to it becomes physical. A need. My feet follow the shape to some pull my mind is all too eager to accommodate. I will myself to stop, but am powerless to resist my stronger desire to follow. The voice is as the lake, at once known to me, yet freighting with its undertones of total strangeness and peculiarity. I am lost in its lure.

  After an indeterminable passage of time, I sense I am no longer following the voice, but He who walks behind the trees. I go between the thinning Oaks, past the shoulder-high pines and closer to the luminous fog. I don’t recall it being like this, but then I again, I don’t think I had ever seen it at night. The veil of moisture moves in the moon’s rays and I work up the courage to call out again.

  “Maya?” I still hope she might answer, but there is nothing and the black shape disappears into the fog. I take another step when something grabs me from behind and rounds me about.

  “Martin! What the hell!” she shouts at me. “What are you doing, I’ve been calling out and you didn’t stop!” She explains all this between pants, bereft of breath. “I didn’t know you could run so fast!”

  “I was running?” I think this to be most strange of all, for I don’t feel the least bit tired.

  “What are you doing?” she asks again.

  “There it is,” I tell her and turn.

  “There is what?” Worry hangs over her face.

  “It’s the...” my words are caught in my throat. The fog is gone and the trees stand as thick as always around me. There’s a distant sound of an electric coil spinning and a smell of moist woodland. At first I simply look at her, wondering what to so say. Should I even explain anything? I dare not mention the sound to her or she’ll think I’ve gone completely nuts.

  She doesn’t speak, and I spend the next month trying to convince her I’m not crazy.