Personal Effects: Dark Art

21

My bicycle weighed less than twenty-five pounds, but it felt oppressively heavy on my shoulder as I trudged up the steps of my building. The carpet-covered wood creaked beneath my feet. The old light fixtures struggled against the dimness of early evening. My Cannondale’s rear tire spun sleepily as it skipped against the wall.

Tick-tick-tick, went the wheel. And then, skitter-slide: tktktk.

I stopped, clutched the banister, sensing something unfamiliar. There was no breeze here in the stairwell, but it was chilly, as it always was this time of year. I sniffed, smelled plaster and wood polish. The air felt damp, heavy. It pressed against me like fog, another skin, claustrophobic.

Tktktk.

I shuddered, resisting the urge to turn around.

It was the Cannondale, yes. It was the Cannondale’s tire whirling round and round, and the air had changed because people were heating their apartments now. That was all, an elementary deduction; my Spock-side would be proud. I leaned against the handrail, inhaling deeply. The whirlwind days and sleepless nights were catching up with me. They’d come, finally, to collect.

Tick-tick-tick, went the wheel.

“Oh, shut up,” I said.

I clomped up the second flight, relieved to be home.

Rachael and Lucas were waiting in the living room, their faces pinched and fretful. I smiled. It was a weary-faced farce. They knew it, too, and I loved them for that.

My brother pulled the bike from my shoulder and wheeled it to the hallway closet. I heard him hang it on the door rack.

I gazed at my woman standing in the center of the room, surrounded by our red halo of chili-pepper lights, drinking up the sight of her. I went to her, hungry to feel warm, held, beloved.

Her inked arms pressed me closer. I sighed. The steel cables in my shoulders slackened a bit. I kissed her, breathed in her scent of shampoo and skin. Goddamn, this was perfect. Holistic. Necessary.

“You should’ve let me pick you up,” she whispered.

I pulled away, gave her lips another quick kiss. “No. I needed to be alone. Needed to think.”

Lucas stepped into the room, a fresh beer in his hand. I accepted the bottle and slid onto our couch. Compared to the stiff hospital bed and metal chairs in which I’d spent nearly my entire day, this felt luxurious. Rachael joined me. Bliss hopped into my lap, delighted. Her other half, Dali, was nowhere to be seen.

“Tell, bro,” Lucas said.

I sipped the beer, unsure of what to say. Drake’s personal effects lay strewn about the steamer trunk before me: wallet, phone, envelopes, letters…

“Failure,” I said finally. I suddenly wanted to cry, but I didn’t have it in me.

They waited. Lucas sat on the floor.

“So there was an accident,” I said. “I told you that. And I’m fine. But… I… this morning, I watched my friend head-butt his brains all over a wall.”

“Oh my God,” Rachael said. “Why?”

“Because he’d been hacked, like a computer,” I murmured. “He’d been reprogrammed by that son of a bitch. Our CIA interrogator spent days spooking him, slow-boiling him like an egg. Today… today the shell came off. Jesus. Emilio is… Emilio was always a little off-center. Drake exploited that.”

“He’s dead?” Lucas asked.

I nodded slowly, my lips trembling.

“He must be. They took him topside. A chopper medevaced him out. No one’s told me anything, but there’s no way a person could survive that.”

In my mind, I heard the Brinkvale tile shatter against the hallway floor. I shuddered.

Emilio was dead.

“No way,” I repeated.

“This just… happened?”

I turned to Rachael.

“It’s my fault. I told Drake my theory about Alexandrov. He broke through, he actually saw… and then he broke down. Starting screaming about the Dark Man, how it was going to hunt us, kill us.”

“Oh, babe,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Who’s ‘us?’” Lucas asked. His voice was low.

“Us three, and Dad.”

I watched him. He pulled his knees up to his chest. Now, he hugged his shins. An incisor dug into his bottom lip. Oh, no.

“Lucas, relax,” I said. “It’s bullshit.”

But it’s not, cooed a slippery voice inside me. You’ve been marked. Time’s running out. Tktktk-tock.

I shook my head.

“It’s a con, Luc. A way he controls his life, and others. It isn’t real.”

The voice in my mind tittered.

“It’s not,” I said again, more insistent. “Paranoia only has power if you buy what it’s selling. You have to believe, man. Emilio was like that, God love him. He was eager. He was unbalanced. He bought into it.”

And you? the slippery voice said. Aren’t you in line to buy? You heard it, scritch-scratch, tktktk. You felt its breath on your neck. And now the voice was Richard Drake’s: You’re wrong, so wrong…

“Don’t be eager,” Lucas was saying. “Heh, right. Dookle. What’s the opposite of ‘eager?’”

“Skeptical,” Rachael and I said simultaneously.

The three of us smiled. I felt a little better. I rubbed Bliss kitty’s head. She hopped from my lap.

“Are you done with Drake?” Rachael asked. “Is it over?”

I shrugged.

“After I watched Emilio… ah, jeez… after I saw it, I fainted. Woke up in the infirmary. They fussed over me. Dr. Peterson came down, personally conducted the interview for the incident report. That was awkward. Cops took a statement. Of course, no Zach Taylor screw-up would be complete without a cameo by Nathan Xavier.”

“Is that the prick who looks like a Ken doll?” Lucas asked.

I nodded.

“Plastic prick,” Rachael said. “Doctor Dildo.”

I smirked, grateful for the joke. “I spent most of the afternoon in a counseling session. I had questions about Drake, but everyone was giving me the ‘wait and see’ line—probably because Xavier is gunning for the job. All I know is that the man has completely shut down. He isn’t moving, talking, eating. Near-catatonic state. Oh, and he’s blind again.”

“Everything’s undone,” Lucas said.

“Pretty much.”

I sighed.

“I don’t know what to do. I was ready to sign him off as unfit to stand trial, I really was. He’d never given me a reason to believe otherwise. Therapists and patients are supposed to work together. You give, you get. But Drake never gave an inch.”

I pointed at the belongings on the table.

“I had to steal whatever I got,” I muttered. “Goddamn. Do you realize that I’ve been more like Anti-Zach in the past four days than I have in the past four years?”

“That’s not true,” Rachael said. “You’ve been trying to help.”

“I haven’t helped anybody. I killed my friend.”

“Z, you didn’t—”

“He gave you the song,” Lucas interrupted. “‘Night On Bald Mountain.’”

I paused. Yes, the song. But Drake hadn’t given that willingly, either. I never told him the Casio recorded his every note. Sure, the tune was another glimpse inside him—another validation of the Dark Man. But that was worthless now. Everything I’d done was worthless. In fact, that stupid song had been the only “art” this stupid art therapist had extracted from his patient. I was a fraud, a boy pretending to be a man. I’d been so desperate to—

Wait.

Wait just a damned minute. It wasn’t the only art…

My hand shot to my jeans pocket, nearly spilling my beer. Both Lucas and Rachael looked on, perplexed, as I pulled out my cell phone and pressed my thumbnail against its side-seam. A moment later, a black plastic rectangle was in my hand.

I passed the memory card to Rachael.

“We need your computer,” I said.

As the laptop’s photo editing software imported my two photographs from Room 507, I quickly explained the pastels I’d left for Drake, and the wall murals he’d drawn.

We crowded around Rachael’s tiny desk: she was driving, Lucas and I stood behind her, leaning in like cartoon vultures. I sipped my beer as the photos blinked onto the screen.

“Windchill,” Lucas said, rubbing his arms. “This… is some spooky shit.”

Yes. Yes, it still was. The photos couldn’t evoke the scale of Drake’s murals—the jaw-dropping awe of their size. But their frantic, fluid mania was here, captured in pixel-perfect precision. Inelegant curves, swirls, zigzags… blotches of color here and there. It was an on-screen acid trip, incomprehensible, a half-remembered dream.

“He didn’t tell you the point of this,” Rachael said, her finger teasing at the laptop’s touchpad. “Didn’t give a hint.”

“No. He said the Dark Man drew them.”

Lucas squinted at the image of the left wall—the first photo I’d taken. He trailed his finger along part of the image in a vertical, vaguely S-shaped path. He didn’t touch the LCD; he’d been around Rachael enough to know better.

“See that?” he asked. “These curving vertical lines here and here, and down there. They’re incomplete. They start and stop, so this is easy to miss. But watch. Try to imagine, hmmm, heh. Yeah. Think of a long spaghetti string.”

He finger repeated the motion, and the pattern became more clear. These lines were not connected—globular gulches of color separated them—but it was clear they followed the S-shape Lucas had illustrated.

“There’s something like that over here,” I said, pointing to a series of lines on the other side of the photo. They lanced downward in a diagonal formation, also separated by manic patches of color.

“Kinda like missing data,” Rachael said.

My eyes flicked to the second on-screen image. The photo I’d taken this morning.

“No. Encrypted data. Look.”

The right wall’s mural featured the same “spaghetti string” lines Lucas had identified, as well as the diagonal ones I’d just found. But there was a twist. This photo’s lines represented the missing content from the other photo. The stuff that filled the gulches.

“No fucking way,” she said. “He’s blind. There’s just… no fucking way.”

Lucas’ voice was a whisper. “Do it, Hochrot. Merge the pictures.”

Her finger slid against the track pad as she created a new file. Tap. Click. Double-click. Click-click.

Tktk.

I shivered, suddenly cold.

She pasted the first mural image into the new file’s blank canvas. The mouse pointer rushed to the second photo. Copy. Now back to the new file. Paste. The mouse highlighted a tiny number in a sub-window. 100%, it read.

Her finger tapped the “down” arrow on the keyboard. 90. 80. 70.

The second photo faded with each keystroke, slowly revealing the first photo beneath it.

60. 50.

“Stop,” I said.

“Windchill,” Lucas muttered, shaking his shaggy head. “Windchill, holy shit, windchill.”

The two images were now perfectly visible together, stacked like plates of semi-transparent glass.

The lines Lucas had spotted were now complete. The picture itself was… complete. Two halves made whole.

“This isn’t possible,” Rachael said. She reached up, absently tugging the bottle from my hand. She downed a hearty gulp. “This can’t be happening.”

We stared at the screen, too stunned to say more. The once-manic crosshatches and half-swirls now made a kind of sense, meshed together. Triangles popped from the colorful ether. Diamond shapes. Serpentine lines. There was still no overt message here… but there was purpose, and that fascinated me.

It also frightened me.

A clatter rang from our bedroom. The three of us flinched simultaneously then gazed past the living room doorway, through the kitchen, into the dimness beyond. Bliss hissed from the shadows. An invisible Dali spat, then meowed.

Rachael turned back to the screen. “Play nice together,” she whispered, distracted. “Play nice.”

I shivered, again. The air in here felt heavy and wet. Claustrophobic. I glanced around the living room, feeling foolish—feeling crazy—as I did an inventory of the walls. I looked up, at the ceiling. Had that water stain been there before—

“The Black,” Lucas said.

I blinked.

“What did…” My tongue was thick and dry in my mouth. “…you say?”

He tapped the LCD this time, his fingertip smudging the screen. Rachael was too engrossed to complain.

“There’s black here and here. Dig it. Half swirly-moon on the right.” My eyes slid leftward as he spoke. “Half swirly-moon on the left.”

The black scribbles—which had been etched into the high corners of Room 507’s murals—were near the top of the merged image, each positioned equidistantly from their respective vertical edges. Lucas was right. They looked like half-moons.

My eyes trailed down the picture, following a straight line from one of the black stains. A column of strange colorful shapes ticked down the photo. A “U” on its side. Three bars stacked atop each other. A thumbnail-sized crescent moon. Others.

“You see that” Rachael asked. She took another pull of my beer.

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

Lucas gave a little yelp then snapped his fingers. Rachael and I gasped.

“Print,” he said, patting her shoulder. “Print, sister, print. Control-P. Nitro-like, meep-meep.”

She executed the keyboard command. The nearby laser printer whirred and hummed. Lucas snatched the color photograph before it hit the tray and bolted back to the steamer trunk. I was a half-step behind him. Rachael closed the laptop and followed.

He cleared a spot on the table’s center, shoving Drake’s personal effects to one side. He slapped the picture onto the trunk and looked up at us, his eyes gleeful.

“Pole of gob-gook here,” he said, finger dragging down one column of runes. He jabbed at the other black splotch. “Pole of gob-gook here.” He repeated the move.

He grinned.

“Now watch this katabatic shit.”

He folded the photograph into vertical sections then overlapped the paper, accordion-style, until the black halves became a full moon. The process reminded me of the puzzles on the back of MAD magazine.

There were words on the page now.

“‘RETURN TO SENDER,’” Rachael read. She looked at me. Her face was white. “This can’t be happening.”

Lucas’ fingers were a machine gun now, tapping the photo.

“New stuff, all over the place. Those weird shapes from before—they’re new shapes. Hey. A long red line, going from here…”

His finger pressed against the bottom-right corner of the page. It slid upward in a slow, leftward arc.

“…to the top of the page, over here. Little green boxes, bam, bam, bam. Big-ass bluish thing here. And look. From the Earth to the moon.”

A vermillion tentacle snaked from the large red artery, dead ending at the center top of the photo. The swirling black hole.

“Map,” Rachael said.

I nodded, numb.

“Yeah,” I said. I knew it. I’d seen it. “It’s a map leading to Daniel Drake’s home.”

We jumped at the sound of thunder.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony blared from my cell phone’s speaker. The thing jigged on the steamer trunk, vibrating.

Bum-bum-bum-bummmmm.

“Christ, not now,” I growled. I glanced at the others. “It’s Dad.”

“Pick it up, bro,” Lucas said.

I turned to him, surprised.

“Dude, no,” I snapped, appalled. I grabbed the phone. “He wants to sabotage my career for some bloodlust vendetta!” I stared at Lucas, incredulous. “Dad’s been keeping shit from us for years, man, rotten stuff, for fucking years, burying, re-writing…”

I stopped myself. No. Not now. Maybe not ever.

The phone rang again. My thumb jabbed the button that would send the call to voice mail.

Lucas crossed his arms.

“So he didn’t tell us about Sophronia two years ago. So what? Have you told me every girlfriend you’ve ever had”

Faraway, in the bedroom, Bliss hissed again. Dali growled, an air-curdling rrrrreow.

“Knock it off,” Rachael called to the pets. “Lucas, he said he doesn’t—”

“I get it, I do,” Lucas said. “You’re pissed, he’s pissed, it’s a Pissapalooza. But he’s family, and this”—he pointed to the photo—“is windchill shit, too spooky to be anything but real. Can’t you feel it? Dude, look at your arms, you’ve got pebbles for pores. You’re shivering. It’s fucking freaky.”

“Th-that… ,” I stammered, “that doesn’t make it real. This is all explainable. Every bit of it: Drake’s Dark Man, the killings, that map. Just because someone says you’ve been ‘marked’ doesn’t make it so. You wouldn’t even be wigging now if I hadn’t told you!”

Lucas took a step toward me.

“Aren’t you afraid”

“I don’t—”

“Aren’t you”

“Of course I am. How can I not be, with the week I’ve been having? But Luc, being scared doesn’t mean I—”

Another hiss, louder this time. Then came the delicate scratching of cat claws on hardwood. And then: tktktk.

“Did you hear that” I whispered.

The phone buzzed twice in my hand. I nearly screamed.

“Z, please. At least play the message,” Lucas said. “I need to know he’s okay.”

I nodded, because I needed to know, too. Far too much was happening now—this now, right now, this moment, this heartbeat—to ignore the message. I was learning to hate him, but I loved him. I still loved my father.

I tapped the speakerphone button and dialed into voice mail.

The air around us roared; Dad had called from the car.

“Zachary, it’s me. I’m a few blocks from your house right now. I heard about what happened at The Brink today. Incident, ah…”

I heard the flick-rattle of paper.

“…incident report 507-482. My God, young man…”

I pointed at the phone. See? I mouthed. Lucas shushed me. The engine in the background surged, accelerating.

“…Zachary, that could’ve been you,” Dad said. “The next time, it might be you. And it can’t be you, Zach, I won’t allow it. I’m coming there right now to discuss this, and if you’re not there, I’ll sit and wait and whatthehell—”

Car horn now. Tires screeching, sliding. My father, howling.

The phone trembled in my hand, its speaker overpowered by the explosive clap of an impact… and then shredding, squealing metal. Steel laughter.

The line went dead. We stared at each other, immobilized, disbelieving.

From above, from the ceiling: tktktktk.

And then the lights flickered

The lights blinked off, the entire apartment black now, inkswimming

The cat hissed

Lucas moaned, horrified

Light now, on the table, something buzzing on the table

Bzzzzz

Richard Drake’s phone, screen glowing

Bzzzzz

Vibrating

Bzzzzz

INCOMING CALL

Bzzzzz

SOPHRONIA POOLE

In my ear, so close, like a lover

Tktktk.

The three of us moved together. Wrenched open the front door. Pounded down the apartment stairs.

Screaming.