Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (21 page)

“Go ahead and get started,” Claudia told her students on her way out. “No lecture for today.”

She left the room to a sarcastic round of cheers accompanied by the magical sound of brushes touching canvas.

“There’s bad news,” Marlene whispered after she’d closed the door to the painting room. Marlene always whispered. “Someone from the shelter was killed last night.”

Claudia closed her eyes as a chill ran through her. Once again, she thought about Jake and the overturned taxi, and the big cop hunched over him, waiting.

“Who was it?”

“Mr. Archer. They found him last night next to a dumpster behind the Side Street Café.”

Mr. Archer — Archie to Claudia — was a crusty old white man, skinny as a rail and mad as a hatter. But he was always a gentleman in her class, and some of his painting styles were inventive, if not near genius.

“Claudia?” Marlene touched her hand. “I’m sorry. At least Mr. Archer is at rest at last, away from all the ugliness.”

“Yeah,” Claudia said, wiping a tear from her eye.

When she lowered her hand, she saw the smudge of paint again, even though she knew she’d scraped it off this morning with a brush and a bit of turpentine. This time, the dark colors kept swirling when her hand stopped moving.

“Claudia?”

When she raised her eyes, she realized she was now sitting on the floor, with Marlene hovering over her.

“Claudia. I’ll cancel class for you, and you can get some rest. You work too hard — when was your last day off, girl?”

“Mmm,” Claudia mumbled. “What month is it?”

A few minutes later, after Marlene had told everyone in the classroom to come back tomorrow, Claudia entered the now-empty room. She couldn’t stop shaking. She was starting to think she’d come under some kind of curse that had caused Archie’s death and Jake’s accident.

Then she noticed the paintings. Everyone in class seemed to have hit upon a similar theme.

She walked past the first canvas stained with so many blacks and browns that the subjects — an outstretched hand and the neck of a guitar — were almost completely obscured. In the shadows of the background she could see light glinting off guns as well as the hint of a familiar brick building. That painting was Briana’s.

Next to her dark artwork was Derron’s somewhat abstract take on Raleigh’s two skyscrapers. Just a few days ago the piece had been a bright landscape with streaking blue and red cars crisscrossing on busy one-way streets. Now, the cars had been replaced by tanks and humvees churning through a dark brown river edged in dark blue and rust colors. The blocky gray heights of the BB&T building and the slick black Capitol Center were striped red and ringed with fire.

All the other paintings had undergone similar changes: light replaced by dark, shadows overtaking the subjects like rot on a piece of fruit that had been fresh only a day ago.

The lone canvas that she couldn’t see had been turned away and covered. Archie’s. He’d always preferred that corner of the small room, close to the window and as far from the other students as possible. She took a deep breath before touching the thin cloth hiding his forever-unfinished painting from her.

•

In spite of the heat, Claudia hugged herself in her grandmama’s apartment, wondering why she was putting herself through this. The walk over here from her parents’ house had taken forever, and she was convinced someone would knock the canvas from her hands or pull the thin towel from the top of it, exposing her painting to the world before it was ready.

She set the canvas on a rickety card table in front of the tiny black and white TV set. Her first serious painting.

“Ready?” she asked her grandmama, who sat in her rocking chair about six feet from her. Just the right viewing distance.

“Almos’,” grandmama said, lighting a fresh cigarette.

Inspired by her incident with the Marine, Claudia had been working for over a week on what she thought of as her new, adult style. She’d filled this canvas with as much detail as she could, including a small squadron of Marines in the lower left, advancing on a four-story apartment similar to the rundown one in which she now stood above her grandmama, while the green sky filled with warplanes mingling with doves and bats. The distant ocean’s blood-red waves were tipped with yellow foam.

“Ready,” grandmama said, exhaling a plume of gray smoke.

Claudia lifted the old towel from the canvas and closed her eyes. She smelled spicy food on the stove, making her mouth water. The radio played a song popping with accordion music when she turned to her grandmama.

“What do you think, grandmama?”

The thin old woman was not smiling. She kept the cigarette in her mouth as she inhaled and exhaled. She looked as if someone had told her soldiers were coming for her.

“No, child,” she said at last.

Claudia tried to find her voice. “What do you mean?”

“You don’ know ‘nough yet. Don’ fool wit dese pictures ‘til you’re ready to deal wit’ the consequences of your work. You don’t comprehend, child.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “This ain’t your callin’, I t’ink.”

Burning from the inside out, from betrayal and anger and a lingering sense that her grandmama had been right, Claudia had packed up the painting and run down the steps from her grandmama’s apartment before the tears of betrayal and anger forced her to stop. With the firecracker sounds of gunfire in the distance, she’d thrown the painting into a garbage can next to the apartment building, breathing hard to get the flavors of her grandmama’s cooking out of her nose and mouth.

•

Over twelve years later, Claudia blinked away the stinging memory of her grandmama’s harsh critique and flipped the piece of cloth from the front of Mr. Archer’s painting.

The piece had been composed using only black paint with brown highlights. Archie had spread on the paint so thickly that it had a three-dimensional effect, like the topographical maps of mountains Claudia had once seen in the library. There was no pattern to Archie’s work, just angry coats of paint.

The brown and black ridges and valleys called out for her to touch them. She used her finger to trace the most prominent ridge of brown paint, and she felt a tiny shock with the contact. She saw the pattern, now, with physical contact.

Hidden inside all that paint was the outline of a face. Eyes glittering with anger, dark with need. Hunger. Claudia fingered a tiny sliver of white on a ridge of the face’s cheekbone, like a scar made by the beak of a small, angry bird.

She jerked her hand away from Archie’s painting as if it had burned her. Pulling the cover back over the painting took most of her strength before she turned her back on it and walked out the door of the tiny studio.

Like a stain on her vision, the brown and black shadows that had overwhelmed her students’ paintings now tainted everything that she saw on her way home from the shelter.

She felt like she was walking under dark clouds even though the day was clear and the sun was out. Most of the snow from the storm yesterday had either melted or been cleared from the sidewalks. Still, all Claudia could see was a growing darkness.

A tattered page of the
News & Observer
blew against her leg as she was crossing Wilmington Street. The torn and wet piece of newsprint nearly shouted at her: “U.S. Marines Enter Haitian Capital.” The page was dated two days ago, from Tuesday’s paper.

She looked at the photo of the Marines in dark camouflage, handing equipment off the back of a truck. Brownish shadows filled the background of the photo, obscuring all other details. Claudia squinted and blinked at the newsprint. On the flip side was a short headline with the words “Street Killer” in it.

What if the chaos back home was like a virus? Claudia wondered. And it had finally caught up to me here?

She dropped the wet piece of newsprint and saw, to little surprise, that the smudge of paint on the back of her right hand had grown larger, stretching toward her fingers and wrist.

She turned into the wind and hurried past the empty block of brown grass and park benches that made up Moore Square. She was nearly running by the time she got back to the house on Oakwood Street. She kept her right hand buried in the pocket of her coat so she wouldn’t have to look at it until she got home.

•

When she finally set down her brush and turned to her clock toward her, she gave a grunt of surprise: 11:41 p.m.

Her feet and back hurt from standing hunched over her painting for so long, and her hands ached from gripping palette and brush. She was done.

She stepped back before looking at the canvas a final time.

Swirling black and brown shadows highlighted a streetlight, a brick wall, a car wheel. Chalk-white symbols were scribbled onto the stained concrete. Slightly off-center to the left was a bent figure whose head was just beginning to lift, exposing a narrowed set of white eyes just below the brim of a black hat. A hat that could have been a helmet. Or a policeman’s cap.

The eyes gazed off into the distance, and she knew she’d put just the right amount of shadow around the face. Other than the tiniest bit of white for the eyes and a thin white scar matching the one on Archie’s painting, the only other colors she’d used had been dark red, midnight blue, and a muddy brown.

He was waiting for her there, she realized, in an alleyway off Bloodworth. The soldier, the cop, the hunter. He was her responsibility now.

“Now you know it, girl,” she whispered in a voice like her grandmama’s. “And maybe now you’re starting to
comprehend
.”

On a sudden impulse, she reached back for the old piece of white chalk on her dresser before she closed the door behind her, thinking of her grandmama. The old woman would have loved the sight of Claudia leaving home at just a few minutes before midnight, on her way to meet someone on a street named Bloodworth.

•

She’d been painting all day in her grandmama’s spare bedroom, hiding her work from the old lady while trying to keep an eye on her, when she heard the kids yelling outside. Paintbrush still in her hand, she went out to stop them from throwing rocks at the Marines and Haitian soldiers patrolling the area. The local men cheered on the kids.

A storm was brewing in the sky as well as on the street, and Claudia could barely breathe for the electricity in the air. The weather was much too hot for October. It made people crazy.

Including her grandmama. Pulling two skinny boys off the street, Claudia saw at least two rifles point up at her grandmama’s window the instant she heard her grandmama’s voice.

“Ged on outta heah,” she was screaming, her voice cracking with rage. Claudia realized, too late, that she should never have left her grandmama alone.

“The witch,” one of the Haitian soldiers said, pointing.

Behind her, the local men swore at Claudia for stopping the kids and their fun. In front of her, the big Marine who’d critiqued her pentagram stepped up to the Haitian soldiers and put his hands on the barrels of their rifles, lowering them. The big man always seemed to be around whenever something bad happened in the neighborhood, especially if there was a shooting or a death. He never raised his gun, however. He was just always…there.

At that instant, little Daniel Blaise threw the last rock that would be thrown that day. With a dull slapping sound, the rock hit the big black Marine square in the helmet.

The Marine took a step back, but he never went down. His eyes went wide and white, then they narrowed as the street filled with Grandmama’s mad, cackling laughter.

“Move out,” he hissed.

His voice barely carried to Claudia across the square, above her grandmama’s laughing. The soldier looked up at Grandmama for a moment, and his eyes narrowed. Her laughter came to a sudden stop, followed by a panicked scrabbling sound at the windowsill high above them. Then the old woman fell out of her window.

Claudia let go of the young boy she was holding back and tried to move under her grandmama, as if she could cushion her fall somehow.

The too-loud thump of her grandmama hitting the pavement silenced the crowd more effectively than a pistol shot.

The Haitian soldiers took one look at her grandmama and hurried off down the street after the Marines. Claudia kneeled next to her motionless grandmama, rocking back and forth over the old woman’s broken, lifeless body.

Soon a shadow smelling of gun oil fell over her. The big Marine had taken a knee next to her. With her vision blurred with tears, Claudia saw his dark face flicker with emotion for a moment, followed by a sickening expression that looked to Claudia like satisfaction.

“We tried to help,” he muttered. “But now, you people are on your own. You people chose this outcome.”

His thick fingers rested on her grandmama’s shoulder, sausage-like fingers kneading her flesh.

Claudia’s hand moved before she realized what she was doing. The brush still clamped in her fisted right hand swung out in an arc that ended at the big Marine’s cheek. She wanted to kill him for touching her grandmama like that. As if painting on a slick, glistening canvas, the brush left a three-inch-long line of white paint on his dark skin. Claudia’s only regret was that she hadn’t been holding a knife.

The soldier reared back as if he was going to swing his fist at her in return. But at the last instant he dropped his arm and stood up.