by Matt Cardin
“You must paint this final piece for me, Mr. Thornton,” Anthony said. “Or at least, I hope you will. Despite appearances, I’m not an arrogant aristocrat who issues orders simply because I think I can buy people and manipulate them to my will. I’m seeking a true collaboration between the two of us, one in which the environment and financial backing that I can provide will enable you to create a masterpiece—the final painting in this important series.”
He paused, and Thornton knew a response was required. He licked his lips before speaking. “Thank you for all this, Mr. Anthony, including the good words about my work. And my apologies, but I feel I need to remind you that I didn’t paint those works deliberately as a series. I mean, look.” He pointed to each painting in turn. “Time Enough for a Scream is over a year old. The next three I painted over the course of last winter. I only finished The Hatchlings recently. They’re not a series, they’re individual works. I created each one without thinking of the others. I wouldn’t know where to start painting something to finish ‘the series,’ because there isn’t any series to begin with.”
“Strange, then,” said Anthony, “that I knew how to line them up in chronological order. Wouldn’t you say?” He waited for Thornton to see it, and when he did . . . by God, Anthony was right. Starting with the top point of the arc, the paintings were hung in the order of their creation. A moment earlier, when Thornton had pointed to each and recounted this order, he had not noticed that he was simply tracing the arc Anthony had created.
As he looked more closely, the artist began to recognize a distinct thematic consistency to the paintings’ arrangement. For all the world, it was as if Anthony truly had found an implicit coherence that connected this recent string of work—an internal thematic logic that had been hidden from their very creator.
“Now, perhaps, you can see,” Anthony said, smiling in a way that was not at all lopsided, “why and how I have come to be known as a nurturer of new talent.”
Thornton smiled, nodded, blinked—and, in the nanosecond of darkness behind his closed lids, saw a cowled face staring at him with yellow glowing eyes.
“Perhaps I could,” the artist finally said after a long pause, during which he kept himself very still, both mentally and physically. “Perhaps I could come up with something. Perhaps I could complete this series that I didn’t even know I was painting. It would take time, though. I can’t tell you how much. I never know.” He hesitated and then forged ahead. “Not to sound crass, but there’s still the matter of payment.”
Anthony’s smile was radiant. “Money is no object. Since you brought it up, am I to understand that we’ve now reached the negotiation stage of this transaction? And that you have, therefore, said yes?”
Standing there in Tony Anthony’s subterranean gallery of hidden, hooded artworks, which was located beneath the immensity of his isolated, convoluted mansion, which perched halfway up the sloping expanse of The Mountain, which sat under a white sky that concealed a glittering infinity of star-strewn space, the artist parted his lips, drew a breath, and said, “Yes.”
4. The Crucible
Erik Thornton did not know what he had expected to happen as an immediate result of that crucial assent. The situation was unprecedented, so he had no context by which to judge the likely unfolding of subsequent events. He held no expectations about what the following weeks might hold. One thing he had not expected, however, was failure. Utter, abject failure of a type he had never before encountered. Desertion by his muse. Inability to make even an inch of progress. So when this very thing manifested itself, beginning the day after his deal with Anthony and continuing unabated for two weeks, he was thrown into creative agony, tipping over into outright, clawing despair.
It began the day after they closed the deal. Anthony sent him home bearing a cash payment of a ridiculous sum, representing only half the total amount to be paid, with the remainder to be paid upon completion, and with Thornton agreeing to return in twenty-four hours to commence work on the new project. That was one of Anthony’s conditions, and one so distasteful that only the money could overcome it: “You must start tomorrow, and you must paint your final picture right here, with the others in view.”
Anthony had been serious when he’d referred to the basement as the studio. Thornton was required to complete the work entirely in that environment. He was even prohibited from producing any preliminary sketches at home. When he left and drove back down The Mountain to spend the rest of that day and that night brooding in his attic, he surprised himself by honoring Anthony’s request and refraining from conducting any “test borings,” as he customarily called his initial efforts when gestating a new painting. When he slept soundly that night for the first time in weeks, with no dreams disrupting his rest, he took it as a good omen and a sign of the rightness of his decision.
The next day he returned to the mansion and followed Anthony into the basement, and found that he had been supplied with a new easel, a fresh canvas, and more paints and brushes than he had ever worked with before. The easel was set up to face the alcove where his paintings were hung, and he was expected to start right away.
Anthony barely spoke to him. Yesterday’s warmth and enthusiasm had vanished. The eyes of Thornton’s new patron were completely crossed again, and the smiling, encouraging, congenial patron had been replaced by a cold and distant supervisor. Anthony showed him where a bathroom was located in the basement, referring to it in European fashion as a water closet, and he showed him a digital wall panel in the main basement area by which Thornton could order various coffees and teas, pastries and cheeses, even an entire meal if he wished. Anthony offered him lodging in one of the guest suites, but Thornton declined. His host did not acknowledge the refusal.
“Start now,” he said. “Stay until at least five o’clock. You will not see me again today. Return tomorrow at the same time.” Without waiting for a reply, he turned and walked back through the sheeted gallery of statues and paintings to leave Thornton to his work. When Anthony shut the door to the stairwell behind him, Thornton’s heart lurched momentarily, and he waited to hear the sound of a lock being turned. But there was no such sound. There was only the shrouded silence of this subterranean madhouse, as he had begun to think of it.
He took a few minutes to collect himself. He examined the tools Anthony had supplied, admired the brushes and paints. He mixed a few colors experimentally. He primed the canvas with the provided gesso. Then he sat on the stool Anthony had left for him—no chair, no sofa, just a three-legged wooden stool in all that floorspace—to contemplate his finished paintings on the wall, and to stare into the blank canvas on the easel as if it were a window and he were waiting to see what walked past it.
That was the beginning of his agony. For nothing walked past the window. The canvas, it turned out, was not a window but a wall. It was a blank barrier, impermeable to creative sight. He had expected this at first, but when it persisted for half an hour, and then a full hour, he began to perspire. He shifted on the stool, rubbed his eyes, rolled his head and shoulders. Still nothing, no inspiration, no spark, not the faintest hint of the vaguest idea.
He settled back down into his inner seat of power, and bore down in the way that he had learned and practiced all these years, pressing down into the well of his soul where he and his muse lived in communion at the deepest level of their respective beings, where they were essentially a single entity. He had learned this trick, or rather this inner discipline, long ago, and had found from hard experience that, by means of this technique, inspiration could in fact be forced, at least to an extent. He could kickstart creation, and it had never once failed.
Until now. The psychic bucket that he cast down within himself hit the bottom of the well in his soul and seemed to strike dry ground. He felt it scrape across an unyielding surface, drawing up absolute nothingness. He gulped and gasped, and bore down again. This time the effort caused him an almost physical pain, as if a hand had seized his heart from within his ribca
ge and given it a violent squeeze. He almost cried aloud. Again, he was left with nothing, not a hint of soul fire or creative energy. For the first time in his life, the well was empty. He was flatly, starkly, helplessly becalmed.
When five o’clock rolled around, he had sat there for eight hours in a daze of wretchedness, trying and trying again, and failing each time, and finding himself weaker and more wretched after each effort. He departed the basement at five o’clock sharp, as if he were on a punch clock, leaving a blank canvas that terrified him with its emptiness, especially in the face of the finished works that glared at it from the alcove. The house, as before, was empty as he fled. He descended the mountain as if fleeing the scene of a crime.
That night, he slept dreamlessly.
* * *
The blockage continued the next day, and the next, until the days became a week. Several times during those interminable hours, he made a few exploratory strokes. He spent time mixing colors and visualizing scenes and shapes. Once he laid out a surreally distorted landscape in his mind’s eye and then spent two hours attempting to reconstruct it on the canvas. But it was soulless and forced, an arbitrary act of desperation. He found it garish and awful, and actually horrifying in its spiritual emptiness. He wiped the entire thing away with a rag and linseed oil and then knocked the canvas to the concrete floor, where it lay the rest of that day. When five o’clock arrived, he placed the canvas back on the easel and climbed the stairs with legs that were numb and a heart that was heavy with desolation. He felt the Hatchlings watch him leave. Their eyes were filled with sadness.
* * *
The days rolled on. The meals were good, when he wanted them. All he had to do was make selections on the digital panel, like ordering in a restaurant, and they were provided via a dumbwaiter in the wall behind him. During the first week he had hardly eaten; but now, during the second, he tried to fill the emptiness inside him with three meals each day. Despite the food’s high quality, it left him feeling bloated and sick. This did not disturb his sleep when he got home, though. He passed each night in his attic immersed in total unconsciousness, like lying in a coma at the bottom of a deep, dry well.
* * *
During the second week, the daily journeys up and down The Mountain and the basement stairs began to blur into an indistinguishable unity, as if he were perpetually ascending and descending at the same time . . . as if he were staring at the blank canvas in the basement while simultaneously lying comatose in his attic.
In time, he began to feel that a strange alteration was taking place inside him. For many years he had believed that, as an artist, he was in control of his soul. He had thought that through the exercise of his art, he had made a bargain with the dark forces of his unconscious mind and kept them from running amok, the way they did in other people’s lives. Now he began to fear that he had been wrong about this, for there was a new force at work inside him that moved with unknown rhythms and made him feel a stranger to himself.
He could sense its presence at all times, whether ascending or descending, waking or sleeping, and yet he had no conscious access to it. It was alien to him, something independent and autonomous. He could not fathom its nature or motives. He only knew that it was there. It felt, he realized, as if he were literally haunted—not by some ghost or revenant that threatened him from outside, but on the inside, within or behind his own self. He found he could not even look at the Hatchlings anymore, for their wide eyes and rounded mouths were now unreadable, and the painting frightened him with the hidden meanings that it might signify.
* * *
At the end of the second week, Thornton did not return to his own house when he left Anthony’s mansion. Instead, he drove straight to the Mondrago Gallery. He had not spoken with Bernard Powers since the exhibition, and now he needed more than anything to reestablish contact with a member of the wider human race—someone who was not Tony Anthony. In Powers’s particular case, he also needed to connect with someone who represented Thornton’s life before Anthony had come into it. He also needed to read Powers the riot act for failing to warn him about what he was getting himself into.
He found Powers alone in the main room of his gallery, walking from wall to wall with a clipboard in hand, cataloguing works by various artists. Some were Thornton’s, and the artist ignored the imagined hints of visionary fire that he saw leaping out from them as he walked straight up to Powers. The man looked up from his clipboard, startled out of his concentration, and then a smile cracked his serious expression.
“Thornton! Where have you been? I thought you’d call after that night when Tony Anthony showed up. Have you spoken with him again?” His balding forehead gleamed in the glow of the strategically arrayed track lights overhead, contrasting sharply with the dark hair still clinging to his temples. As Thornton searched and struggled for words, Powers’s smile faded. “Erik, you look exhausted! Aren’t you sleeping?”
This pricked a bubble Thornton had not known was lodged in his chest. To both men’s surprise, he burst out laughing. He laughed and laughed until Powers, who at first had joined in with him politely, stopped laughing and observed Thornton more closely. A line of concern creased the director’s brow. “I gather we need to talk,” he said. “Here, follow me.” He led Thornton to his office, where they sat down on opposite sides of the director’s rustic pecan wood desk. “Now,” said Powers, “tell me what has happened.”
By the time Thornton had finished describing all that had transpired since they last saw each other—except for his dreams and visions, which he’d never told Powers about anyway—Powers was chewing on a fingernail and staring down at the desk’s wood-grain pattern. His clipboard was lowered to his lap and momentarily forgotten. He appeared to be deliberating over something.
“That’s a strange story indeed,” he finally said. “I just can’t imagine how you must be feeling. But let me tell you, Erik”—he paused to lean forward, reach across the desk, and put a hand on Thornton’s arm—“this sort of thing is not out of line, not unheard of, for Tony Anthony. You’ve probably already figured out that he’s the very model of a modern lunatic. I suppose I may have, um, downplayed his eccentricity when I introduced the two of you.” He pulled his hand back from Thornton’s arm but remained perched forward in a posture of concern. “I’m truly sorry. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“What else to tell me?” Thornton all but shouted the words. He was still riding high on the energy crest from his laughing fit a few minutes ago. It had felt so good to laugh, and he let the residual wave carry him along and lend force to his words. “I don’t think you realize what you’ve gotten me into. I don’t even think I fully realize it. You have to help me here. Tell me what to do. I can’t back out . . . can I? I mean, Anthony has the power to make or break me, right? Will I even have a career left if I renege on our deal? Or will that be the least of my worries? Will I even still be alive?”
Powers held up his hands in frustration. “Erik, please! Dial it down, my high-strung friend! Don’t get ahead of yourself. And don’t give up. You’re too close to the situation to see it clearly. Anthony may be weird, but he’s not dangerous. He’s crazy Tony Anthony, a category unto himself! And despite your recent close encounters with what truly does sound like some Category Five oddness, he’s just an art collector. A patron of the arts. You’ve met his type many times. Anthony is just more of that type than anybody you’ve ever known. Put that together with his money, and it means his power to help—or hurt—your future prospects is accordingly amplified.”
Thornton nodded as he sighed wearily. He wanted to believe, but he was still wavering.
“Listen to me, please.” Powers pressed on, sensing that he was getting through. “Sure, you’re stuck for ideas right now. But from the way he’s structured your agreement, it sounds like the one thing you do have on your side is plenty of time. I recommend that you just do whatever you’d normally do when you’re stuck. I’ve known you a long time, Erik. I know you h
ave your little rituals. Just do them. Trust the process. Trust your muse. You’ll be glad you saw it through.” He raised his arms in a “Who knows?” gesture and asked, rhetorically and jovially, “Where the hell does inspiration come from, anyway?”
Just as it had happened in the first of the dreams, Thornton’s lungs seemed to deflate. He struggled to gasp. Pressure gathered in his head like a throbbing volcanic seam. Then it let go, and he was calm. Calmer than he had felt in weeks.
“You know,” he said slowly, “I’m not even sure why I came here. I don’t know what I expected. But thank you, Powers.”
Powers sat back in his chair and beamed. “You’re welcome, Erik! Can I assume, then, that my weak words have struck some fire from you?”
“You can. I think I’m back on the horse. A little unsteady, but riding high in the saddle.”
“This is delightful to hear,” said Powers, smiling. “Cowboy metaphors and all.” He suddenly started in his seat and checked his wristwatch, like a man coming to himself after an unplanned nap. “You know, closing time came and went fifteen minutes ago. Would you like to get dinner together? Or coffee? It strikes me that you’d be better off with some company.”
Thornton shook his head. “No. I’d better get back to my attic and sleep. I have to be up there early tomorrow. I’ll never finish if I don’t devote myself completely to it.”
