The faceless figures up in the rafters were still following him. His father had never considered himself a classicist, but the three-dimensional representations of whatever the fuck he was looking at were beyond lifelike. They were astounding. Tormented, horrid effigies, that represented…that represented…he swung his head across the black skyline of the ceiling, pulling in the details of the same man Jacob had painted on the wall of his hospital room—just what did they represent?
Skinned, they whispered in unison.
These were a message. A signal. There was a reason behind them. Jake could sense its signal but he couldn’t isolate the meaning. And this bothered him. These lifeless little canvases said something. Like the faceless man of blood on the hospital wall. Like the Chuck Close portrait with the missing eyes. Like the stacks of paintings. Could it be nothing more than madness? Alzheimer’s? Paranoia? All of the above?
Somewhere in the decaying apple of his father’s mind was a worm of a thought that the old man listened to. It had wriggled through his skull, sending him diseased instructions that he deciphered in his own way. How much of that had bled into what he had tried to say here? This couldn’t all be random—there was too much in the way of long-term planning and execution. Someone with Alzheimer’s would have gone off the rails a long time ago. So what was he trying to say?
Jake spun on the floor, his eyes digging into the walls, trying to see around the pillars of canvases stacked like pizza boxes. From a trompe l’oeil perspective, it was an engineering feat. Wherever he stood, the faceless watched him.
They were trying to tell him something.
Like the speech of the dead that he deciphered, he needed the code. The common language. That secret way his old man’s mind worked. Which might as well have been written in Easter Island glyphs.
What he did—what he was good at—was figuring out how killers thought. And the killers he hunted were artists. From a societal perspective it was demented, sadistic art, but that was missing the obvious; to them it was art. And it was always expressed with a unique voice; the language of the worm firing bursts of code into the rotting apple. Jake’s gift had always been figuring out the artist-specific language of the murderers he hunted, figuring out their own personal symbolism and its subtext. If he could look at a murder scene through the eyes of the psychotic, how much harder would it be to look at this space through the eyes of a man he shared some common ground with? It was a different language—the language of the mad—but it was still language. Which meant it was decipherable. What was—?
—And there was a jolt of electricity that came at him out of nowhere, shaking the engine room beneath his ribs. He had time to grab his chest before there was another crackle in the circuitry. Fell to his knees.
Then his stomach.
The floor stretched away into the dark at a right angle to his line of sight, and dust bunnies danced in front of his face with his breath.
How many crazy paintings would a crazy painter paint? echoed somewhere off in the distance.
Then everything faded away, even the canopy of faceless stares.
28
For a second there was the black-hot pain of a fist clenching inside his skull and as quickly as it took hold, it faded to a distant hammer against the membrane of his mind. Kay was in a rectangle of light, her hair outlined in a phosphorescent glow, rushing forward, mouth flying open. A filling twinkled amid her molars.
“Jesus! Fuck! Jake!”
He pushed himself up onto his knees, holding his chest.
“I prefer See Spot run, but if it turns you on…” He let the sentence trail off.
Kay helped him to his feet.
“Sorry, baby. The jukebox took a hit. I guess I got too excited.” He stood up shakily, massaging his chest.
She punched him in the arm. “Thanks for scaring the piss out of me. Usually you just twinge a bit and you’re good.” Kay wondered what could have set his heart rate through the roof.
Jake turned away from her, back to the images on the walls and ceiling. “Whacha think?” he asked, nodding up into the darkness.
She followed his nod and her mouth twitched into an uncomfortable grin, all teeth and no lips. “This is Gustave Doré on psychotropic leave.”
Jake nodded. “Apt comparison.”
Kay walked slowly around the room.
Like Jake, she was more impressed with the endless stacks of little paintings than the bleeding men in the black sky overhead, although it was obvious that she felt they were following her as well by the way she kept glancing up at them. She threaded between the pillars of paintings, trying to make sense of it all. “There has to be three thousand of these things.”
Jake did a rough and dirty calculation. “Closer to five.”
“There’s a bunch in the house, too.” Kay stopped, picked one up. “Are they all a different shape?”
Jake shrugged. “Looks like. Just in framing it would take a year to stretch all of these. Then to gesso the canvases and paint them…” He let the sentence die. “Mad as a—” he looked around the place and a wave of sadness sunk into his flesh—“painter. You sure you want to spend the rest of your life with a guy like me? This,” he said, sweeping his arm over the piles of canvases, “is hereditary. Except with me, it will be pictures of dead people.” Jake sat down on the edge of the framing table, one of the only uncluttered surfaces in the studio.
Kay pointed at the door to the garage. “What’s in there?”
Jake, brought away from the dark ride he was taking through the demon-haunted universe painted by his father, looked over. “Garage.”
“Can I?”
He shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”
She turned the knob and to both their surprise it swung open on greased hinges. Kay flicked a switch beside the door and the lights in the garage hummed to life. The room, in direct contrast to the studio, was painted in a bright blue-white. A car sat in the middle of the space and Jake eased forward, not realizing that he had stopped breathing again.
He got closer to the door and the image of the automobile began to widen. The skin was obscured by a thick layer of dust that hadn’t been disturbed in years. The windshield was opaque and the whole car looked like it had been sitting in here unnoticed forever. Jake knew this car, knew what it looked like under the neglect, and it reminded him of the night that everything had fallen apart. His life. His father’s. Everything turned to bloody black dirt in one big swing of fate.
It had been his mother’s—a 1966 Mercedes W113 in factory cream with a red leather interior. Jake remembered the morning they had brought it back on a flatbed after her murder. Jacob was drunk and had stayed in the house. Jake had helped them back up the truck and when they had rolled the Benz off, it had grazed the paneling under the window. They had closed the door and that seemed to be the end of it all. The sealing of the tomb of the queen.
At the front of the garage sat a cracked leather Eames lounge chair. It was dust free and surrounded by a forest of whiskey bottles, the floor at its feet worn smooth. He saw the chair, the bottles, and a quick flowchart sparked to life in his head. How often had his father come in here? Once a year? A month? A week? Looking at the forest of bottles and the smooth ring worn around the base of the chair, Jake guessed that he had come in here often. Maybe every night. Perched in his Captain Kirk chair, bottle of anger fuel in his hand, thinking about his dead wife. Probably never driven the car. It had stayed right here for how long? Thirty-three years now.
Jake moved slowly down the wall and peered at the back bumper. It was still touching the panel where it had rolled to a stop all those years ago, a fibrous tear in the grain of the wood, still splintered but now covered in dust and cobwebs.