The Glimpsing (13 page)

I immediately burst into laughter.  I touched her hair with my fingers, and asked what the hell she had done to her herself.  But Portia just kept gazing awestruck at Susanna, who was now returning a sardonic grin.

“Time to go home, little girl,” I heard Susanna say.

Portia suddenly cut her eyes back to me.  Her pain was almost palpable.  She looked physically ill, as if the pain of my betrayal was simply too much for her to fathom.  Her hands came up and covered her face.  She then turned and hurried down the hall. 

I recall feeling particularly grieved.  I had an impulse to chase Portia down, to do my best to diffuse the situation, but Susanna had come up behind me and was sliding her arms over my chest.  She pushed the door closed, and mere moments later, Portia was the last thing on my mind.

I only know what happened to Portia after this because for the last twelve years, she has dragged me out of the closet, propped my listless body up in a chair, and recounted it to me step by appalling step.  She intends to hurt me by doing this, knowing that I now understand that it was that day that changed her, that day that led to my own demise, and prompted all the ugly horrors that were to follow.  And even to this day, every time she chooses to do so, it does.  It hurts like you can’t
possibly
imagine.

Portia drove home that night utterly devastated, barely able to breathe.  She cried for several days.  Within a week she was deep within the throes of a severe depression, one from which she’d never recover.

It wasn’t long before the darkness came.  And, as if to welcome it, Portia began to do something she hadn’t done since she was very young.  She began to paint.

She’d always enjoyed painting and was so naturally skilled at it that had I not introduced her to modeling, she could easily have made a living from it.  As a child, she had few friends—most considered her a “weirdo”—so painting became a pleasant way for her to occupy her time.  She hadn’t given up the craft until she’d befriended a thirteen-year-old girl, who visited every summer from Brazil (I believe the girl’s name was Gabrielle), who convinced her try out for the school play.                  

On this occasion, however, Portia’s painting was not merely to pass the time or soothe the effects of her depression.  She was doing it as a way of saying goodbye, as a final memento to this cruel and twisted world.

She had closed the sheers on that fateful day.  Their cranberry color had left the room glazed in a reddish hue.  The room was almost completely empty, save for the easel, which she had dragged out of the closet, and the stool upon which she sat.

In the beginning, she wasn’t sure what to paint.  But soon enough, an idea flowed forth.  She began with the tapered shape of a head, followed by the hollowed circle of two eyes and a loosely defined nose.  It was a face. 
Her own.
  At least that was the way it began.  As the image continued to take shape, it began to reflect different features: a slightly less narrow chin; lips that were a tad less plump; eyes deeply black instead of blue.  It wasn’t until after the face was completed that Portia realized what she had done: created a visage that perfectly harmonized her own face with those of Susanna’s, the woman I’d been having an affair with.

Inspired, Portia continued the painting, adding a shoulder-length mane of black hair, styled the way Susanna’s had been on that dreadful night.  She added the outline of a body, this one her own, postured on her stomach with her arms crisscrossed in front and her feet raised playfully in the air behind her.  She painted a bed for the woman, and then, for the background, added a bedroom, my bedroom, the place she had intended to lose her virginity that night.              

Portia then calmly lifted away from her stool, went to the bathroom, and pulled open a cabinet.  She removed a razor and, with the tranquil ease of a skilled surgeon, carved two neat slits into each of her wrists.  The blood flowed forth, not in a great gush, but slowly, steadily. 
Perfectly.

She returned to the room, took hold of the paintbrush and easel, and sat on the stool, preparing to add the painting’s final element: a brilliant red dress, the same red dress she had worn to my apartment that night. 

But as she resumed work on the painting, blood continuously dripped from her wrist to the easel.  Noticing this, Portia first considered rinsing the easel clean, but she quickly realized that would be of no use.  Her wrists would only continue to bleed, and the easel would have to be cleaned once again.  Instead, she decided to put the blood to good use.  She twirled the paintbrush in, and then brushed a few strokes to the canvas.  She then went back to work, seeking to complete the dress using the precious liquid draining
fr
om her wrists.

Finishing the dress was more difficult than she had presumed.  The action of painting had caused the blood to flow faster.  It was staining her arms, smearing her clothing, creating a small puddle beneath the stool.  She became so sullied that at one point she decided to stop and strip down to nothing but her underwear.  In doing so, she almost passed out.  Time, she knew, was growing short.

In a matter of minutes, her skin had grown chalk white and her breathing labored and shallow.  Focusing was becoming difficult, and she had to fight to keep from fainting.  But she pressed on, determined to complete the dress.

And then, finally, she did. 

She leaned back, beholding her work.  A wearied smile formed on her lips.  The woman she’d made, the woman formed by her hands, was nothing short of perfect.  She loved the woman.  She loved the woman because she knew that I would love the woman.  And she knew that I would love the woman because she was a faultless blend of both Susanna and herself, a woman who possessed the body of a virgin, and all the blatant sensuality of a whore.  Portia believed she would have been the woman of my wildest dreams.

Still gazing at her creation, Portia finally succumbed to her wounds.  Both easel and paintbrush went clacking to the floor.  Her eyes rolled away to the whites.  She teetered
a moment, and then drifted, falling from the stool, her body was as limp and listless as a rag doll.

She landed on her side, hitting the floor with a loud thud.  The puddle of blood immediately soaked her hair, wet one side of her face, and crept warmly into the corner of her mouth.  Moving was all but impossible.  One of her arms—she could not comprehend which—was elbowed out in front of her.  She watched as the blood continued to trickle from her wrist, forming another pool beneath her hand.  A thin tentacle of the liquid soon broke away and began to run toward the bedroom’s rear window. 

Pain, sharp and sudden, ravaged her chest.  Her ears were ringing loudly.  She could feel her heart, its hard but increasingly slower pounding.  It was coming, she had thought.  Soon the
darkness,
and blessed peace.

She didn’t know what happened after that, a strange pause of some sort.  Perhaps she had blacked out.  But she could see that the blood tentacle had now reached all the way to the window and was beginning to pool beneath it.  Her heartbeat now seemed absent, a perfect stillness in her chest.  Was she dead?  But then it sprang to life, just one shockingly hard throb that made her entire body convulse.

Then a cold blackness covered her eyes.

Somewhere within it, as the seconds or minutes, or perhaps even hours passed, she heard something: a decidedly loud thud, the same sound her body had made as it hit the floor.

As if jolted by this, her vision momentarily returned.  Her eyes were cutting upward, trained on her creation, the painting.  And that was when she saw something that upset her to the point of tears.  The woman she had painted was no longer there.  No face.  No red dress. 
Nothing.
   

She suddenly realized that she had never really painted the woman, that it had all been a delusion, a pernicious hallucination brought on by bleeding out too fast.

But then her eyes drifted away.  They focused on something, something odd.  And that was when she saw her, the woman she had painted, lying there in front of her.  She was adorned in that blazing red
dress,
and gazing at her blankly, beautifully, with
Susanna’s bold black eyes.   

Portia felt a wave of overwhelming joy… and then her eyes grew stiff.

The darkness is coming for Jack.  The darkness is coming for Gabrielle.  It’s coming for them, just as it came for Portia.

It was pushing towards 5:30pm.
 
Jack Parke sat in his study, a relatively small but handsomely furnished room located in the southeastern corner of his residence.
 
His right hand rested atop a large and sleekly designed black portfolio.
 
His index finger brushed back and forth over a single word etched there in exquisite gold lettering.
 
The word was Noelle.

He’d had no intention of appraising modeling prospects today, or doing anything work-related for that matter.
 
Some of that had to do with the thick fatigue that had weighed him down since this morning—a fatigue that had only grown as the day had progressed.
 
But most of it had to do with the incident at Magnolia’s, the haunting vision of the tree and its eerie manifestation of red flowers.
 
Its image had harassed him since departing the restaurant.
 
It consumed his every thought, danced before his eyes, burned in the open air of his mind like a circle of white-hot sun.
 
Trying to distract himself he’d come here, intent on doing something, anything, to free his mind from the vision of that godforsaken tree.

He slipped a finger in and flipped the portfolio open.
 
He was met by a crisp black and white of Noelle’s striking profile.
 
It stressed her slender neck, tightly sculpted chin, and stately nose.
 
Her cheekbones were high and impressive.
 
Her eyes powerful in their effect.
 
For a nineteen-year-old, she already exuded a presence common only to seasoned models six or seven years her senior.

He peeled back the next page and beheld a full-color close-up of the girl smiling broadly.
 
One eye was sealed shut in a playful wink.
 
The other was wide open, a radiant ball of emerald green.

He could feel himself relaxing, and that was good.
 
Already the portfolio was doing its job, acting as a salve to his mind, forcing the menace of the tree and its flowers into the background—that was, until he turned the next page.
 
There he saw Noelle standing in a sea of tall white flowers… and wearing a florid red dress.

His face tightened to a grimace.
 
Noelle’s dress had raised another form in his mind, one imposing enough, powerful enough to supplant even the horror of Magnolia’s great
tree.
 
It was Rose, the entity who had haunted him last night.
 
She had told him she would prove her existence, and through the tree she had done just that.
 
She was real.
 
He had to accept that, whether he wanted to or not.
 
Something supernatural really was happening to him.

Of course, Gabrielle had tried to convince him otherwise.
 
After he’d seen the tree’s true form, she had rushed in to repair the damage, not only doing her best to explain it away, but the peculiar events of the prior night as well.

She had urged they leave Magnolia’s and go to another restaurant, where they could clear their heads.
 
They’d done so, entering an Irish pub called
Fado’s
less than three blocks away.
 
She then asked him to retrace every event from the previous night, beginning with the party and ending with his arrival at Magnolia’s.
 
He did that in as detailed a manner as he could (although he was still careful to leave out all mention of Portia’s visit and the painting).
 
Gabrielle had listened closely, letting him
speak,
only occasionally interrupting with a question or two.
 
When he’d finished, she then began a very mechanical deconstruction of everything he’d said, attempting to prove that none of what happened was either strange, or had anything to do with Rose.

In her mind, there were three distinct mysteries, three things that, on the surface, seemed impossible to explain.
 
The first was Jack’s ability to both taste wine and feel pain in a dream.
 
The second was the Magnolia tree, his gross mistaking of the color of its flowers.
 
And the third was the disturbing blood splatter on the tablecloth, how it had appeared out of nowhere.

She began first with the issue of the blood on the tablecloth, feeling it was the easiest to explain.
 
She surmised that what they’d seen really had not been blood at all, but something from the tree.
 
She reminded Jack that
a reddish
nectar had been oozing from them.
 
Very likely then—with the help of a gust of wind—some of that liquid had been sent airborne.
 
It had landed on the tablecloth, there becoming what they both initially mistook as a blood splatter.

She moved next to the dream, using a rather novel term to describe how he had been able to both feel pain and taste wine within it: dreamwalking.
 
By it she meant that he had been acting out his dream while sleepwalking.
 
So while he moved around the bedroom in his dream, he also moved around the bedroom sleepwalking.
 
When he kneeled down to take Rose’s pulse, he also kneeled in the middle of his bedroom.
 
When he tasted the wine, he really had done so because he had actually sleepwalked to the bar, poured himself a drink, and put it to his mouth.
 
Likewise, the pain from Rose’s slap was not because of something she had done, but because of something he had done to himself while sleepwalking.

Finally, there was his faulty vision of the tree’s flowers.
 
He had seen them originally as blue, not because Rose had masked their true color so that later she could reveal it as some dramatic sign, but because of his level of fatigue.
 
He clearly hadn’t slept well the
night before—that was obvious both in his face and heightened emotions—and that was well-known for making one susceptible to hallucinatory events.
 
She’d even read articles stating that some experts believe that the appearance of ghosts, which almost universally occurs at night, was really nothing more than a hallucination brought on by fatigue.

He had found her arguments at least plausible if not fully convincing.
 
It was indeed very likely that natural causes, not supernatural ones, could account for everything that had been happening.
 
That notion had brought him some relief at the time.
 
It seemed that Rose and the queer events surrounding her, little haunts that they were,
had
been properly exercised.

But then he recalled one remaining mystery, something Gabrielle had neglected to mention.
 
It was the red something she’d seen in his bed last night—the red that could only have been the blazing material of Rose’s dress.

When he’d brought this to Gabrielle’s attention, she could only reply with the same explanation she’d already advanced: that it must have been something he’d dragged into bed with him, probably while sleepwalking.
 
And once more he refuted that argument, telling her that he didn’t own a shirt, a sheet, or even a neck tie that was the color of Rose’s dress.
 
To that Gabrielle had made no response.

They’d left
Fado’s
with the matter unresolved, heading briefly to Gabrielle’s home and then to the airport.
 
She was headed to Rio de Janeiro to participate in a cover shoot for a new magazine called Clique.
 
Its owners had contacted Parke Studios and specifically selected her for their cover, this at the urging of one Felix
Nadal
, an international star in photography who had been working with Clique.
 
Jack had thought that a lofty role for someone like Gabrielle, who was new to modeling and was only doing it as a way of advancing her acting career.
 
But it was their risk—and their money.
 
If things didn’t work out they’d only have themselves to blame.

Before she had departed, as he and Gabrielle stood in the door of his private jet, Jack could remember being once more overtaken by the same feeling that had made him so carelessly caress her face the night before.
 
He brought his hand up and did so once more, caressing her face and staring deep into those lovely brown eyes.
 
This time, however, he did it without the slightest care or concern that she was watching.
 
He simply couldn’t fight the feeling that he was never going to see her again.

She had smiled at him uncertainly when he’d done so, clearly surprised.
 
Then she stared at him for a timeless moment.
 
She seemed like she wanted to say something, but was having trouble expressing what it was.
 
Finally, she reached her arms around his neck and kissed him more passionately than he’d ever been kissed before.
 
Then she stood back and stared at him again, as if to suggest that the kiss told him everything she wanted him to know.
 
Standing there somewhat dumbstruck, Jack Parke believed he’d heard her.

Watching the plane rise into the air, he had found himself aching for her presence.
 
He felt strangely alone and unprotected, as if her presence would somehow give him the solace necessary to overcome whatever was coming.
 
And to be sure, something was coming.

Jack turned another page in the portfolio, and then realized that he had been turning pages all along.
 
He was now toward the end of the collection.
 
He shook his head, took a deep breath, and turned his attention back to Noelle, trying to refocus.
 
He couldn’t.
 
He snapped the portfolio shut and departed the study.

Moving through the house, he worried.
 
He worried about Rose.
 
He worried about what seeing her really meant.
 
And most of all, he worried about what lie ahead, what things were still to come.

He made his way to the foyer, and groggily climbed the stairs, completely exhausted.

Upon entering his bedroom he took no notice, either of the painting itself or of the scarlet siren staring at him so eagerly.
 
He merely flopped onto the bed—clothes and all—snatched a sheet over his head, and immediately fell into a deep sleep.
 
It was only 5:40pm.