“No such thing,” Jake said.
“You need new data,” he said, mimicking Dennison from the NHC. “This thing will be pounding lightning around like some kind of science fiction film. We could be the last people to be standing on this spot, Jake. A few days from now, this could be in the ocean.”
“In a few days from now we could be dead,” Jake said, taking the existential statement one step further. “Or the planet could be gone.”
Hauser shifted his gun hand. “You are one grim sonofabitch, you know that.”
Jake shook his head sadly. “Every time I see some broken, discarded person left in a field, or washed up on a riverbank, I think to myself, This is it—this is the last one. Tomorrow I will wake up and people will no longer do this to one another. Yet they do.”
“Is that it? The work? I mean, have you gotten so used to seeing—” he paused, his mind taken back to the skinnings up the beach—“things like last night that you just think all people are bad?”
“It’s like we’re just filling out time until the whole anthill bursts into flames.”
“What about your kid?” As a father, he knew that children could bring a lot of good to their immediate surroundings. He also knew they could bring a lot of sadness to the world. Hauser’s son had been killed by a drunk driver.
Jake walked through the open doors, onto the stained, salt-eaten deck. “Jeremy’s the best. But he’s three and there’s a lot of road between now and the end of his life. He’s never going to grow up into one of the monsters I hunt—I know that for a fact.” At the back of his mind, hidden behind a few crates of bad memories, he felt something twitch in the darkness. “But I can’t guarantee that he’s going to be happy. Or have good self-esteem. Or marry someone who loves him as much as I do. Sure, right now—I mean right now—things are all shiny and bright.” He thought back to Jeremy on the beach that morning, still giddy from riding on the bus, thinking that Moon Pies were better than anything in the world. It would be great if things stayed like that. But what about thirty years from now?
Hauser’s head shifted a few degrees, like a dog listening for a noise it thought it had heard. “One of those glass-is-half-full kind of people.”
Jake shook his head. “Not at all. The glass is what the glass is.”
“You have a unique way of looking at things.”
On the horizon the clouds had thickened. They were not yet ominous, but something about them suggested that they were recon scouts for an approaching army. “Landfall’s not until tomorrow night but the NHC guy said we’ll see the front come in later this evening. The wind’ll pick up and the rain is going to start. It’ll be uncomfortable by tomorrow afternoon. By nightfall hell will be rolling through town.”
Jake thought back to the woman and child up the beach. Skinned. He thought about his father, ramped up on sedatives and scraping portraits onto hospital room walls with fried bones and charred flesh. He thought about the old man’s screams. About how his mother had been murdered. About all the poisonous water that had gone under the bridge in this place. “Hell’s already here,” he said, and walked back into the house.
27
Hauser was gone, and Kay and Jeremy were finishing up lunch, Jeremy’s face bisected by a line of raspberry jam that made him look like the Joker. The clouds on the horizon had grown fatter, and the pregnant belly of the ocean was hazing over. The wind had picked up but it was still little more than a fall breeze, a light little hiss that would soon begin to change into a malevolent beast. Jake stood in front of the studio, another member of the quarter-century club, and wondered what he would find inside Pandora’s building. He felt like he was using his father to avoid the case even though there was very little he could do right now. He had seen the crime scene, talked to the ME, and received Hauser’s protocols. There wasn’t much for him to do now but sift through what he had—and give Hauser all the information he could put together. So he occupied himself with trying to find a way into his father’s studio.
He walked around it a few times, searching for an entry. There wasn’t much in the way of security; the windows were all single-pane, glazed with brittle old putty; the door had a decent lock on it but the top half was glass—all he’d have to do was smash it and reach inside. The weird part—if he could even consider it weird after everything else he had found—was that all the windows had been painted over from the inside. Wherever he tried to see into the building, all he saw was a black mirror reflecting his own image.
“Fuck it,” he said aloud, and pulled his elbow back to punch out one of the mullioned panes. Then the voice—the one with the perfect memory—reminded him of the ring of keys back in the fridge.
He ran inside, grabbed them, and came back out—all in a quick jog. He tried a few keys until he found one that worked, then opened the door and stepped inside.
Jake closed the door behind himself, flipped the lock, and slowly moved into the dark.
He cracked the lighting to life and looked around. Like the house, the space had a large main floor and a mezzanine overhead. About a quarter of the downstairs was the garage, and had a single door centered in the wall as access. The rest of the space had been Jacob Coleridge’s studio, but unlike the stasis of the house, the studio had changed. A lot. Jake looked around and sucked in a long, low breath that actually scraped his windpipe as it went down.
Jacob had painted every available surface—including the floor and ceiling—a flat black. He had then decorated this negative space with dozens of portraits of the same bloody man from the hospital wall, filling the dark expanse with anatomical studies out of a Hieronymus Bosch-inspired hell. They were deftly executed and hyperdetailed—anatomically perfect. Except they were faceless. The sense of menace they conveyed could not be ignored.
Jake walked to the center of the studio and spun in place, trying to take in the work. Each figure was frighteningly executed, the flesh breathing, the blood pumping. No matter which figure Jake looked at, it seemed to be watching him back with faceless malevolence.
The ceiling was twenty feet above the painted concrete floor of the studio, hidden in a seamless cloud of shadow and black paint. As he moved beneath the beams the figures painted on the ceiling looked like they were crawling around in the darkness, following him. When he stopped moving, the illusion ceased, and the bloody figures froze in place.
But the strange part—the part that somehow eclipsed Jacob’s garage/studio Sistine Chapel of demented demons—were the canvases piled up everywhere; the same senseless pieces that were scattered all over the house. There were hundreds of them—maybe even thousands—filling every available scrap of space, stacked like valueless cargo. Jake looked around in awe, thinking of the old adage about the manic woodchuck. How many crazy paintings would a crazy painter paint if a crazy painter could paint crazy paintings?
The answer was, of course, a shitload.
Jake picked one up and examined the composition. It was like the ones in the kitchen drawer, or in the upstairs hallway, or under the piano—a lifeless shape of near-color. He flipped through a few. Some were gray, others black, some the color of rotting tumors. More paintings of nothing. Negative space. Dead blobs. But the quantity gave them a communal voice that let him know that there was a point to them. How long had these taken? A year? Two? Ten? He put the canvas back and looked around the studio.