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.”