The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

TONY RICHARDS Man, You Gotta See This!

See, there's this thing about Jer.

There was a Monet exhibition in our city once. I and Kara — my then girlfriend — trooped through with the rest. Gazed upon the garden scenes and renderings of fog-bound London. Were awed by the way the paintings changed with age and failing eyesight. Loved it. But…

There is something more than love, in art. I found that out right at the end.

The exhibit reached its conclusion, you see, in a big square room that just contained one painting. A triptych, they called it. Three almighty canvases put together to form one.

It was water lilies, of course. Took up an entire wall.

And there were benches in front of it, so I just sat down. And then allowed my mind to fall forward into that weightlessness of pastel colour.

I didn't realize Kara had gone wandering back to see the scenes near Tower Bridge again.

When she tapped my shoulder, asked me if I'd been sitting here all this time, more than half an hour had passed.

I had gone completely elsewhere. I'd been lost. Blissfully so.

And Jer would never understand that.

Jerry Mulligrew — almost like the jazz saxophonist — my oldest and closest friend. Thirty-four, but looking rather younger. Pony-tailed and scrawny. Avoider of honest labour, as, for the most part, was I. Connoisseur of soft and medium-soft drugs. Lover of heavy metal. Expert puller of the student babes at our local bar — thus proof that earnest eyes, a winning smile and a quick sense of humour compensate for what I'd call weasely looks and dubious dress-sense.

Jer just wasn't into beauty of that kind. It was a concept, he often told me, which had had its day. All of that was misty-eyed stuff, far removed from actual life. We were in the Cyber Age now, and that kind of beauty was old hat.

"And we should replace it with what?" I'd ask him.

"Wonderment, man. Just… infinite possibilities. There ain't nothin' we can't do."

We both lived on Packwell Street, me in a pokey one-bedroom apartment that had had its rent fixed twenty years ago, Jer a couple of blocks down in the loft room of a long established squat. If you walked past late at night, you could see the glow of his three state-of-the-art home computers through the window, like some otherworldly glow.

Seeing as he hadn't held down a job since the original George Bush, you might ask how he managed to afford them.

Don't ask.

And… when Old Man Hubert died, it was rather like that thing Dorothy Parker said when Calvin Coolidge — I think it was Calvin Coolidge — did the same. "How can they tell?"

No one could remember when they had last seen him. He'd had his groceries delivered, and he'd never ventured out. He was almost like a mythic figure to most people on the street. He'd lived in the big house at the very end of Packwell, where the street met the hill, rose for a few blocks, and then gave way to shabby looking woods. Huge house. Old house. Cupolas and stuff. It was surrounded by an iron fence, and all the drapes were permanently closed.

What did he do there?

"He's supposed to be a painter," Ray the Bartender informed us one time.

"No shit? He has opening nights and stuff?"

Ray shrugged. "Never heard of any. Never seen anything by him. S'far as I know, he never even tries to sell his paintings. The word is he's got inherited money."

I exchanged glances with Jer, but he just shook his head.

"No way, dude," he said once Ray had moved off. "I'm not into that art-stuff, but I respect all creators. In a way, I'm one myself. He's old anyhow. We'll leave it till he's dead."

And now he was.

One day, a hearse simply appeared at the end of the road, but with no limousines following it. A coffin was brought out, and loaded in, and then driven away. The front door was padlocked and the windows boarded up. No moving truck appeared.

When I saw Jer that afternoon, his thumbs were pricking, like the witches in Macbeth. He was all keyed up. Then he looked down at my ankle, remembered that I'd twisted it last night — on a loose paving-slab, extremely drunk; he'd had to help me stagger home. And groaned.

"Ah, what the hell?" he philosophized. "It'll probably be months before some lawyer gets around to having the place emptied. We can be in and out as much as we like, take a little at a time. Like — shoplifting, you know? There must be God-knows-what in there."

He was off towards the house alone an hour after darkness fell. Sitting in front of my TV, feeling pretty sorry for myself, I could imagine him prying back the boards.

An hour and a half after darkness fell, my phone went. It was Jer, on the cell phone he had bought from Ray a month back.

"Man, you gotta get up here!"

"What are you talking about, bro?"

"Man, you gotta see this!"

I felt myself go slightly red. "I'm a cripple, for chrissake! I can't go doing B-and-E in my condition!"

"You get up here right now, man, or you'll forever kick yourself. I shit you not even slightly. This has to be seen to be believed."

What did? I next asked him.

But he told me that he could not even describe it. He gave me details of how to get in.

I was cursing as I limped up the gradient. Two things, apart from the discomfort, really bothered me. First, Jerry often took some kind of upper before heading out on such a venture, to heighten his senses and make his reactions quick. I wondered if his wild excitement was simply the product of some chemical, and nothing more.

Secondly — and this one, honestly, had been nagging away at the back of my mind ever since that talk with Ray — if Old Man Hubert had been a painter, then what was he painting with the drapes all drawn?

The door might be padlocked, but the metal gates had been left open — forgotten about, presumably, when the hearse had driven out through them. I went down the shadiest side of the house, brushing past a row of trees, and there was the small side window, just as Jer had described, with two-thirds of the boards pulled away. There was an overturned bucket to heft myself up from, otherwise I don't think I'd have made it. But my ankle was still hurting like hell by the time I was inside.

"Jer?" I whispered.

A small flashlight came on.

I couldn't see Jerry behind it, but could hear the tremolo in his voice.

"C'mon man! Follow me! You gotta see this stuff!"

He sounded like a little kid who'd just found a dead squirrel.

I hobbled along behind him, painfully aware that if Five-O showed up now I didn't have a chance of running. And I prayed that there weren't any stairs involved.

There weren't.

We went down a corridor into the pitch-black centre of the house. Through a door, which Jer told me to close.

Once I did, a switch clicked — and I was temporarily blinded.

"Jesus!" I swore quietly. "You could have warned me."

"Power's still on. Everything's still on. Seems like most people don't even know Old Hubert's dead."

Or was even alive, I realized.

"So, what's this boundless treasure-trove you're so eager to show me?"

I was aware, by now, of the heavy smell of oil paint in the large, windowless room. And there was an easel propped against the far wall. Different colours spattering the floor. This was where the man had worked.

"That's the crazy thing, dude," Jerry now informed me. "All the rest of the stuff in this place? It's in the plastic-dolphin, souvenir-of-Seaworld category. And this old cat had money? But the stuff in here…"

Framed canvases were stacked, facing inwards, thirty or forty deep, against the two side-walls. Pile after pile of them. They were ranked according to size. None of them as big as the Monet triptych, but there were some very large ones. There were also dozens as small as an edition of Hustler.

More than a thousand in all, I took a quick guess. The smell of oil paint had grown so strong, now, it was starting to make my head reel.

Why might Hubert paint all these, simply to keep them here and face them inwards?

But then, why would Van Gogh want to go and cut off his own ear?

"Jer," I said to my friend. "I thought you weren't into paintings."

"Usually no, but —»

"Are they valuable?" I cut in.

"I'd suppose so, dude. I can't imagine anybody not wanting to buy them. Take a look."

And he turned one of the largest ones to face me.

The truly weird thing was, when I'd gone into that blank at the Monet exhibit, I'd at least still been aware what I was looking at. A pond. And lilies.

But I have simply no idea, to this day, what was actually depicted on the canvas that Jer showed me. Except that I'm sure it wasn't abstract.

A pastoral scene? A garden? A house? Cityscape? Night sky?

I just don't know.

What were the main colours used?

So far as I can remember, all of them.

Jerry shook me rather annoyedly.

"Hey, man!"

"Wh —»

I looked away, with difficulty.

"Dave? I've been talking to ya, like, the last five minutes. You been dropping too many painkillers?"

I looked back at the painting.

Jerry shook me again.

I didn't even say «wh-» this time. Didn't look around. He had to physically put a hand to my face, turn it.

"Dude, what are you on tonight?"

I shook my head, trying to clear it. "Nothing," I replied, trying to hide my own confusion.

Something in me screamed out not to look back at the painting.

"Ain't it great?" Jer was enthusing by this time, though. "And they're all like this, all the ones I've looked at, anyhow. And I don't normally dig this kind of stuff, but these are… such amazing use of colour! Hubert was a genius!"

He set the painting back in place, face inwards. I felt a massive sense of relief.

Now, however, Jerry switched into full Scheming Mode.

"We can't just move them all at once." His tone had become staccato. "What I say is this. We take a half dozen of the smallest ones —»

"You take them. I'm a cripple."

"And we show them around some galleries and stuff, and get some valuations. Man, the ones I've seen aren't even signed. I could say that I did them myself."

Which made me wonder if the art world was quite ready for someone like Jerry Mulligrew.

"And if it turns out they're worth something, yeah? We can borrow Ray's pickup and load it up. We might be sitting on a goldmine here, bro!"

He chose five, in the end, of the little ones he liked the best. Helped me through the window, but then let me limp back home myself.

What had happened back there? Just what had I seen? Colours flashed behind my eyelids, every time I blinked.

There was two-thirds of a bottle of generic vodka waiting for me when I got indoors. I finished the lot during the next couple of hours. Don't remember going to bed.

It was noon the next day when I awoke. I was woken by the phone.

"Dude?"

My tongue just about managed, "Hi, Jer."

"You've gotta get over here!"

"The house again?"

"No, man. April's!"

April was a waitress he'd been dating — if you could call what Jer did that — for the past couple of weeks. She lived a couple of blocks crosstown, on Miller Drive.

"What's up?"

"I'm, like, scared man. She is really out of it. I think she's gone and done some bad stuff."

"Call an ambulance, then."

"Man, get your butt here!"

The hangover drew attention from the pain in my ankle, at least. I went up the short flight of steps to the front door of April's tiny but incredibly neat dwelling. Went to press the buzzer, but the door was off its latch.

I found them both in the elevator sized living room, April sat cross-legged, and Jer hunkered over her, every contour of his body a map of concern.

Her pretty, fine boned face was entirely slack. A trail of saliva depended from her painted lower lip into her lap. A pool was forming.

She didn't seem to blink at all. Her pale blue eyes — were they reflecting something?

"She was like this when I found her," Jerry said, his face screwed up with inner pain.

And it was a familiar one. People like us, with acquaintances like ours? Once every so often, a pal, a girlfriend winds up in this state and finishes up in ER. Quite literally finishes, from time to time.

He'd just never believed it would happen to someone like April. Yes, she did a little blow, like any normal person. But nothing else that either of us knew about.

She was facing something that was propped against her armchair. I couldn't see it from this angle.

"Tell me what happened?" I asked.

"Man, I dropped around to see her last night, after… you know! We smoked some, then fooled around a little. I even brought her a gift. Came back here 'bout ten this morning, and she was like this. Her skin's cold, man, like she's been sitting here all night!"

There were no spoons, candles, or tin foil near her. I inspected her arms, found no tracks.

Then I looked at what she was looking at.

Jerry… shook me.

"Dude, what the hell are you doing?"

I had to force myself to look away.

"That's the gift?"

"I thought, why not? We've got plenty of them to spare."

"Jer, there's something wrong with these paintings."

"Say what?" And, incredulous, he almost laughed. "Man, they're just so great. They're… beautiful. See? I said it. I acknowledged the existence of your kind of beauty."

"Jer, they —»

"It's gotta be some pills or something," he was babbling away, though. "Pharmaceutical smack or something. Man, if I get my hands on whoever gave her that stuff —»

And he would not be told otherwise. He took her in a cab to the local ER in the end, bumming ten off me towards the fare.

I followed them out, refusing to glance back.

April was in a coma, though the people at the hospital could not discover why. It was not drugs. I went to see her the next day. Swore I could see flecks of surplus colour in her open, staring eyes.

The thing that keeps people like Jer going and makes survivors of them — it is their ability to just move on. It's not that he didn't care. Far from it. It's just that he realized, without having to vocalize it, that continued existence depends on — do I really have to use that old "moving shark" metaphor?

Over the next couple of days, he hauled the five paintings — he'd taken April's back — around some dozen galleries.

"What is with it with these fools?" he now complained. "They're supposed to be businessmen, and all they do is gawk? I couldn't get a price-tag out of one of them! And for such beautiful paintings!"

And I finally realized what this was. It was all to do with — immunity. Resistance levels.

A disease goes around, see? A plague. And most people succumb. But a few just have something natural in them that subdues the sickness, makes it less effective.

So it was with Jer. He'd always been aloof towards fine paintings. Totally immune to artistic beauty. And so, when the bug had struck, it had affected him to a degree — but had not felled him completely like the rest of us, apparently.

«Jer-» I tried to tell him for the dozenth time.

But he still wasn't prepared to listen. Maybe that was a part of the paintings' limited effect on him.

When he went home, he looked annoyed enough to do something exceptionally stupid.

Which bothered me enough to go around at ten o'clock and check up on him.

The door wasn't locked. The pungent aroma of California Gold hit me as I went into the hallway.

There were no lights on in Jer's living room. Just the glow of those three screens. That was strong enough to pick out, on the little dining table, an open jar of pharmaceutical coke and a half-empty bottle of bourbon.

Jer was hunkered over the screen of the middle computer, and there was a scanner humming beside him, and several wooden picture frames lay scattered on the floor.

His back was in the way, so I could only see the edges of the image on his screen. It was enough.

It didn't mesmerize me, this time. Maybe you needed the whole picture for that.

"Jer, what are you doing?" I asked.

When he turned towards me, I could see how out of it he was. His face like a plastic mask in the weird light. His pupils too large, his thin lips twitching. He tried to smile, but it came out as something else entirely.

"They're so beautiful, dude," he informed me, like a stuck record. "Beauty like I've never seen in my entire life. If those asses at the galleries won't show them — well, the whole world ought to see them. That's what art's about, right? It belongs to everyone. The entire world."

His e-mail page was now up on the screen. He turned back to it, and started making attachments.

What the-?

"Jer, no!"

And I started lunging forwards.

He had clicked on SEND before my hand could reach him. I stopped, feeling a lot more than helpless, letting my arms drop down to my sides.

"The whole world, man," Jer was mumbling to himself again. "The entire teemin' world."

It is two days later, by this time. And everything has changed.

No planes pass overhead any longer. There are far fewer cars, no trains. The mail hasn't come. The mart down the road is running at half-staff, and running out of supplies. There are hardly any trucks at all.

Not everyone has a computer, of course. Most of those people are just wandering around, trying to figure what the hell is going on.

Sooner or later, most of them go into a loved one's place of work, or an offspring's bedroom. And they do not re-emerge.

This morning, a fire started up near the centre of town. And is still spreading. I can see the vast plume of smoke from my window. And I keep on wondering. Those people in front of their screens down there — do they even move when the flames start to consume them? Chill thought.

The power hasn't gone out yet. Emergency measures, I suppose. I wish it would. Although that might change nothing. It took only the space of one night to put April in a coma. And it's now been forty or so hours for most people.

I ought to go see if she's come around, but cannot bring myself, since I suspect the worst.

Jer dropped round about an hour back. He still doesn't seem to realize what's going on.

As I said, maybe that's a side-effect of his partially-immune reaction to the paintings.

He told me six more times how very beautiful they were.

There's looting.

I keep thinking of places that I've only ever seen on the TV. Craggy places. Dusty places. Places where there is not so much as an electrical wire, but people live there.

They don't even know it, but they've just inherited the earth. Does an absence of technology make one meek in any sense?

Someone just got shot, down at the corner. Is the fire heading this way? God, I wish the power would go out, even though that idea rather frightens me.

Maybe I should try to get away from here, though how or where I simply do not know.

Maybe — better, easier — I'll just go back to the old house, back to that paint-redolent room. Turn one of the canvases around.

And get lost.

The same way everything is lost now.

Beautiful!