The Painted Darkness (2 page)

But on the morning that would change his life forever, an hour before sunrise, Henry was wide awake and he wasn’t thinking about the woods…although they would call to him soon enough. He was tucked under his warm blankets, feeling like a freshly toasted marshmallow, staring at the glowing green stars his father had stuck on the ceiling years ago—and he was trying his hardest to go back to sleep and pretend he didn’t have to pee so badly his belly burned.

Eventually, though, Henry knew there was no way he was going to sleep. He crawled out from under the covers, shivered as his bare feet settled on the hardwood floor, and he scurried off to the bathroom. He was finished and debating whether to flush, which might wake his parents, or not to flush, which might get him scolded in the morning, when he realized there was frost on the window above the toilet. He closed the lid without flushing and climbed up for a better look. There were thick ice particles on the glass and snow was clinging to the trees in the backyard. The lawn was buried under a blanket of white powder.

“Mom! Dad! It snowed!” Henry cried, jumping off the toilet and running to the hallway. He pushed open his parents’ bedroom door and scampered into their room, leaping onto the bed between them.

“What’s wrong?” his father mumbled, rolling over, blinking his eyes open in the darkness. His mother covered her head with a pillow and muttered something.

“It snowed, Dad, it snowed!” Henry cried.
“Are you sure you didn’t imagine the snow?” his father asked, checking the clock on the nightstand. It wasn’t much past six.
“No, Dad, it’s real this time, I swear!”
“Okay, okay, go get dressed and we’ll check it out together,” his father replied, rubbing his eyes.
Henry didn’t wait a moment to run back to his room and start digging through the closet for his snow pants. He tossed everything else over his shoulder, creating a lopsided pile of discarded clothing and toys in the middle of the floor.
As far as Henry the Child was concerned, today was going to be the best day of his life. Maybe the best day ever.

Henry understands these words are true—they’ve never led him astray—but right now all he can do is stare at the huge oak tree outside his window. The view reminds him of a tree he once discovered in the woods behind his childhood home. There was something unusual about that particular tree, but his memory is faded and he doesn’t try to delve into the thoughts. Some topics, he suspects, are better left buried.

Henry loves the home he and Sarah bought last summer, using their life’s savings as the down payment, but he now understands how truly isolated it is. The former farm borders a state park on three sides and there’s forest for as far as the eye can see. Dozens of streams and ponds are within a mile of the main house, too. This is the perfect place to raise a little boy; that was Henry’s first thought when he and Sarah visited with the real estate agent last summer. A little boy and maybe even a man with a lot of little boy left inside of him—a description Sarah has lovingly tossed at Henry from time to time when he’s lost deep in thought.

Henry touches the silver crucifix hanging around his neck and he watches the tree twist in the wind. Under the window is the painting he worked on yesterday, but he has placed the finished canvas against the wall so the image faces away from him. There are a dozen paintings in a row like this one, turned so they can’t be seen—and although Henry can’t remember the subject matter of most of them, he doesn’t need to see yesterday’s artwork to remember it.

There is a lot of red and gray and black flowing across the front of the canvas. The scene is set in an ancient dungeon, and not the type you’d find in any fairy tale. The rough stone walls are damp with blood. The dirt floor is littered with the bloody remains of hundreds of dead rats.

In the middle of the canvas, he painted a princess wearing a tattered gown standing between a lumbering monster and a small child. She has put herself in the path of certain death and there’s a fierce determination in her eyes. She holds a sword in her right hand.

The monster leans forward like some kind of insane hunchback, growling and snarling with slimy teeth. Hidden in the dark shadows are dozens of red glowing eyes. Henry cannot remember the actual act of painting the image—which isn’t unusual, he rarely recalls how the paint made its way onto the canvas once all is said and done—but when he finished, he wondered where this idea came from and why he didn’t choose a dark knight or some more traditional villain for the setting. Why does he always return to the monster?

Henry never understands exactly why his paintings are what they are, no matter how many times he tries to decipher what’s happening inside his mind. He simply paints or draws what he sees in his head, and doing so keeps his dreams sane.

Once, a few years ago, he stopped creating any kind of artwork for a week, just to see what would happen. The result was clear and instantly noticeable: his dreams became warped and disturbing. His future wife, who was then simply his girlfriend, claimed his mind needed to release its creativity, one way or another. The theory was good enough for Henry and now not a day goes by that he doesn’t draw something. The work is his own form of therapy.

Henry’s eyes shift from the back of yesterday’s finished painting to today’s blank canvas. The canvas stares at him and the sensation is unsettling. The white space has never felt so huge—like the emptiness is trying to pull him into an inescapable void. The fear of having hit a permanent creative roadblock is stronger than ever.

“Just start at the beginning,” Henry whispers as he closes his eyes. He takes a deep breath and adds, “I paint against the darkness.”

Finally, after hours of self-imposed isolation, stars appear in the empty place behind Henry’s eyelids—and then there’s a burst of color in the distance. The stone wall in his mind starts to crumble—a few pieces near the edges at first and then larger sections in the middle—and finally Henry pushes through his accumulated worries to the place where the images are trapped, just waiting to be released.

Without even opening his eyes, Henry begins to paint. One stroke at a time. One color at a time. One step at a time, like the journey of a thousand miles. His toes curl on the cold wooden floor and he rocks on the balls of his feet.

Henry easily slips into the in-between world where he lives when he’s working, half-asleep and half-awake and not totally aware of anything beyond the canvas and the scenes unfurling in his head. He paints and he translates those visions the best he can, releasing the images through his nimble fingers.

It won’t be until much later that he’ll realize he’s painting the princess in the dungeon again.

father were in the front yard, throwing snowballs and shoveling the driveway as the sun rose above the distant mountains. The wind created drifts taller than Henry, but he carved a path through them the best he could. The sky was clearing and a beautiful blue morning grew from the horizon as the sun rose, sending bright rays through the ice hanging from the trees and the gutters.

Soon the neighbors were awake and tending to their driveways and sidewalks, shovels clanking against the asphalt and concrete. Everyone waved to everyone else, or you at least nodded, even to the neighbors you didn’t really know or speak with often. Henry’s father finished their sidewalk and continued on until Ms. Winslow’s sidewalk was done, too. Then he returned to his own driveway where his son wasn’t having much luck clearing the snow with his little plastic shovel.

A few minutes later, Henry’s mother opened the front door and called for Henry to come inside and have some hot chocolate. He and his father were near the end of the driveway—his father using the big coal shovel his father had handed down to him while Henry worked with his plastic shovel. Henry looked up at his father, trying to hide the exhaustion and the cold creeping into his bones. His father saw the fatigue, of course.

“Go inside, Henry, and help your mother with the hot chocolate so she gets it just right. But don’t forget to save some for me!”

Henry smiled, tossed his shovel into the snow, and ran to the front door, which his mother was holding open. She tussled his hair as he passed by and she called after him to stop and take off his yellow rain boots. He didn’t have snow boots yet, but these kept his feet warm and dry, which seemed good THE PAINTED DARKNESS

Henry drank his hot chocolate and watched his morning cartoons while his mother finished washing the dishes from the previous night’s dinner. Henry waited patiently for his father to come inside so they could plan their big snow day together, but when Henry’s father finished the driveway, he hurried to take a shower and soon after he announced he had to leave for work.

“Why, Dad? It snowed!” Henry said, dumbfounded. He and his mother had checked the local newscast a couple of times to confirm the schools were closed and Henry didn’t have to get ready for the day right away like he did on a normal morning.

“Well, the schools are closed for students, but I have a job to do, even if there aren’t going to be any kids in the classrooms,” his father explained, tussling Henry’s hair like his mother had earlier.

Henry wasn’t pleased at all, and his mother saw this, so she offered to play with him until she had to leave for work. Although Henry loved his mother with all his heart, the offer just wasn’t the same—but being smart for his age, he said nothing as he watched his father carefully steer the station wagon down the slick driveway, waving one last time as he pulled away.

mental wall, a noise from the cellar awakens him from his creative half-coma, and he mutters a curse when he realizes what the sound is: the thump-thump-thump of the boiler gulping for oil while trying to expel its belly of built-up pressure.

The boiler can devour as much oil as it wants—and the big beast does, according to the hefty bill left on the front door every time Greensburg Oil & Gas fills the tank—but the unit cannot drain itself of the used water, and without proper drainage, the dirty water and the steam pressure can build and build until it has nowhere to go but through the weakest seams in the pipes. The results could be deadly, a fact that isn’t lost on Henry even when his mind is cluttered with other worries.

Henry forgot his morning maintenance session in the cellar today, and now the boiler is calling for him. Warning him in the only way it can.

Better get moving, boy, ’cause things are getting a bit tight in here.
Henry heeds the call and rushes down the attic stairs, past the family photos and the spacious rooms their unassuming furniture can’t fill. He doesn’t bother to stop and put on his shoes, although he should, considering what’s waiting for him in the cellar.
Henry hurries into the brightly painted country kitchen where he and Sarah had their fight the night before. The cellar door is tucked to the left of the pantry almost as an afterthought. He grabs the glass doorknob in one smooth motion, picking up the heavyduty flashlight off the kitchen counter at the same time.
Thump-thump-thump, calls the boiler.
“I hear you, you stupid fat bear,” Henry replies, using his father’s phrase without even realizing what he’s saying.
He opens the door and flips the light switch. It flickers to life in a yellow burst above his head, but there’s darkness beyond the bottom of the stairs. There are no additional lights down there, yet he catches a glimpse of a rat scurrying off into a corner. He shudders at the thought.
This is why his flashlight never travels far from the kitchen counter. There are no windows in the cellar. Only darkness and dampness and an uneven dirt floor—and the rats and centipedes and other bugs that mostly stay in the dark where they belong. Henry’s attempts to exterminate them— traps and poisons—have failed, but at least he hasn’t seen the little monsters anywhere other than in the cellar.
Henry stands on the top step, staring into the gloom, watching for anything else to pass through the slot of light at the bottom of the stairs.
Thump-thump-thump, calls the boiler.
Henry hears the sound, but the noise is suddenly miles away. His vision spins; the stairs twist and roll; the dim light flickers and flashes. The chipped stone walls sweat condensation and he hears the crackle of running water off in the distance. The sound is not really there. It’s more like a memory he can’t quite recall. But everything else is as real as his trembling hand pressed to the damp wall. He shivers.
Thump-thump-thump.
Henry stands at the top of the stairs, one hand clutching the slim metal railing, and he closes his eyes. The vast darkness behind his eyelids spins; he sees colors in the darkness, the same kind of colors that come to him when he’s painting. Bright white stars burst to life in the distance. His fingers tighten on the railing, but he doesn’t step backwards, he doesn’t sit. He remains standing.
Henry isn’t afraid of the dark; he knows the dark intimately. In fact, he has learned to embrace the darkness and control his terrors to his own benefit. His paintings appeal to collectors who still worry about monsters lurking in the darkest corners of their bedrooms and deep in their hearts.
Once, when asked why his work features terrible events happening to perfectly good people, Henry had simply replied: I paint against the darkness.
He never quite understood why those words were so important, but now, as he stands at the top of the spinning stairs, the phrase floats inside his eyelids, the bright red letters hovering in the star-spotted blackness. The stars spin clockwise and the words twist and rotate counterclockwise.
“I paint against the darkness,” Henry whispers, his voice foreign to his own ears.
When he opens his eyes, the rickety wooden stairs have returned to normal. They are steep and narrow but passable. They do not twist or roll. The walls are merely damp. There is no running water anywhere. The light above his head is steady and dim. It isn’t a beautiful light, but rarely has Henry considered any light to be beautiful. Light is, after all, only the absence of darkness.
Thump-thump-thump.
“Get a grip, Henry,” he whispers. “This is the kind of foolish crap Sarah was talking about.”
Henry descends the stairs, his flashlight burning a path through the dark. He keeps a hand on the railing and he remains steady. At the bottom of the steps, he surveys the cellar, shining the flashlight from side to side.
Rats with beady eyes scamper further into the darkness, fleeing the light. They dart behind the tables and empty cabinets of the old workshop the previous owner left behind and which Henry can’t imagine ever using. They sprint into the maze of rusted old rakes, shovels, and hoes. The former owner had been in the process of repairing the tools to sell at the local flea market when he broke his hip and was forced to leave his lifelong home for good. The stairs were too much for him to handle at his advanced age.
Henry doesn’t know for certain whether or not the rats were here when the former owner worked in the cellar, but now they squeeze into the tiny cracks and holes in the stone walls as if there’s a network of tunnels through the foundation where the rats live and sleep and fornicate. That thought also makes Henry shudder.
The cellar ceiling is low and constructed of crisscrossing timbers. Henry must stoop to avoid hitting his head, even though he has never been mistaken for a tall man at any point in his life. The floor is hard dirt, packed solid and tight but uneven. The walls remind Henry of a photograph he once saw in a news magazine: the tiny, hidden cell where a prisoner of war had been tortured to death. Those walls were also wet.
It’s no wonder the real estate agent tried to avoid showing Henry and Sarah this cellar when they first toured the property. But when the agent mentioned the steam-powered heating system, Henry had insisted on seeing the boiler for himself. His father had worked with steam boilers and Henry wasn’t sure about having one in his own home as an adult. They were loud, often clanging like a demon was loose in the pipes, and the older models weren’t exactly renowned for their ease of use.
More importantly, they could be dangerous. If you weren’t careful, you could be injured, maimed, or even killed.
Thump-thump-thump.
The boiler calls for Henry again and he points his flashlight to where the beast hulks, huge and ugly. The center section is round and as black as a moonless night. There are a dozen pipes snaking in every direction from the main body, curving and twisting like a roller coaster with no end. Next to the unit is the enormous oil tank, which has been refilled three times already this winter.
The boiler gulps the oil, Henry once told his wife, and she gave him a funny look.
It gulps, you know? he said earnestly. She smiled and laughed and touched his face with the gentle understanding of a mother whose child isn’t making much sense. She didn’t understand, but he did, and that was what mattered.
Henry stares at those pipes; he studies them closely. Sometimes in his dreams the pipes come to life, quietly shaking loose, stretching and reaching like arms with giant hands. In these same dreams, the faceplate on the boiler inevitably blows open, sending a wave of flames rolling across the dirt floor to engulf him, and the boiler growls and says: You were right, Henry, I gulp and I gulp until there’s nothing left!
Henry always wakes with a start from these dreams, although he knows they aren’t real. There are monsters in the world, but they’re not the bogeymen of children’s stories. Still, after the nightmares, he often slips out of bed and sneaks to his attic studio to paint the darkness away. He paints until his mind and his heart are calm. Then he returns to bed and sleeps like a baby.
The pipes and the main body of the boiler are wrapped in asbestos, which has been encapsulated by thick coats of paint over the years. But the paint is old and flaking, and many of the sections have crumbled into chalky piles on the dirt floor.
“Ah hell, asbestos gets a bad rap,” Henry says, quoting his father. “If you don’t burn it and breathe in the flames, and if you don’t sniff big piles of the dust, you’re good to go. It’s the best insulation there is.”
Henry doesn’t understand why he’s standing motionless at the bottom of the steps instead of getting the job done so he can return to his work in the attic, but he senses there’s something wrong. He can’t put his finger on what the problem is, and nothing appears to be out of place, but Henry’s father taught him to trust his gut and never take chances when it comes to a big old steam boiler, which is essentially a pressure bomb ticking away in the basement of your home. A profound coldness has wrapped around Henry, chilling his arms and legs and closing in on his heart. He shivers; something is truly wrong and he has no idea what it could be.
Thump-thump-thump.
The boiler continues to call, but Henry stands silently in the darkness, unable to move, his legs frozen by a strange fear he can’t explain.
Thump-thump-thump.