by K.Z. Freeman
3
She told me later she had gone to town to get some food and had just come back when she saw me blundering into the woods.
I had no idea what to say to that, and after I told her what had happened, disconcert found its way into her face and stayed there for the remaining month. She later became content I was back to my old self, whatever that was, and stated we should go and look for this lake I kept going on about.
“At least this way I can see it too,” she said.
Instead of the lake, however, we find a house. We first see it some distance ahead in what looks like a small clearing. The trees rise up high above it, making its roof almost impossible to distinguish in the shade.
“Have you seen this before?” she asks me.
“If I have I don’t remember it,” I tell her.
She doesn’t like my answer, she never seems to when I imply I don’t remember something that by all rights is strange enough that one should remember. We creep nearer.
“I know this place!” she says in a hushed tone. “You’ve painted this once too, remember? You sold it to... what was his name?”
“The guy from Sweden, you mean?” I ask.
“Yeah. What was his name?”
“Something Swedish, I presume.”
She snorts a laugh as we pass the last tree, coming before the edifice. Its walls are of piled stone and I can almost feel the age of it pulsing from every piece of masonry. It is a simple house, so simple I’m surprised it’s still standing. Each grey stone of its construction is in varying stages of ruin and I’m certain a strong breeze might collapse the whole thing at some point. We dare not touch anything. The sides of it are overgrown by moss making the thick chimney barely distinguishable. A tree protrudes from its centre through the grey stone roof.
“You see this, don’t you?” I ask her and her look reminds of the ones she used to give me years ago, when the two of met at university. We both studied anthropology then, until I later decided to focus on my painting instead. We had been inseparable since, yet as of late I find myself weary of her. Something had been off since the day she saw the face in the painting. “You do see the house, yes?”
She arches an eyebrow at my question.
“Of course I see it,” she says circling around the stonework. “What are you saying?”
“Nevermind.”
We locate the entrance and step inside. It takes me a while to get used to the dark as only small bits of light pierce through the chinks and apertures of the stone.
To say I am surprised by what we find within is an understatement of vast proportions. I watch Maya as she becomes stuck in place, struggling to process what is standing before her. I know what goes on in her mind, because I feel it also. The scene is nothing special in its composition, it is rather what it implies which frightens us enough to turn back and run from the house as fast as we can.
I had painted so many pieces of the lake over the period of seven years that I scarcely remember all of them. But I do recall that I could not locate some of them. I painted over quite a few, so at the time I figured most of those I couldn’t find lay somewhere between the stacks of canvases, or had been worked over by my own hand. But in that house, against all of the walls and with small candles burning in a half-circle around each in a way that seems almost ritualistic, were all my missing paintings. And worse, they were all worked over. The figure I had painted upon them was added to, with every small detail improved upon to the point where it looked frighteningly realistic. Whoever had done it was a master, a painter of increased calibre – certainly a better one than myself.
The shapes looked like they might come out of the frames, and it is that notion that keeps me running without looking back.
When we reach our home, it takes a while for us to catch our breath. We share looks of disquiet, while afterwards I try to convince Maya it is not I who had done it, since she becomes adamant in her belief that I’m playing some sick joke on her. She says she won’t speak to me until I admit and apologize, she says.
But what she doesn’t, or perhaps cannot understand, is that I am just as confused as she.
She packs her bags the next morning and leaves. She doesn’t make it far however. I watch her go beyond the edge of town from atop the hill where our house stands. She comes back in tears, frightened and broken. We talk for a long while and, sometime in the morning hours, decide to revisit the house together and confront whoever had made those paintings.
“I suggest we bring a gun with us just to be safe,” I tell her. We don’t have one, so we pack a knife instead, one for each of us.
We trod the woods and to our dismay and further confusion, never find the house again.
