The Painted Darkness (7 page)

there is no sign of whatever has trashed the house. He steps into the kitchen. This time the broken glass and china crunch under his work boots. He stops at the sink and opens the cabinets one more time, retrieving the matches Sarah purchased to light their Christmas candles.

When Henry arrives at the bottom of the cellar stairs, he lights one of the matches and tosses it at the end of the mop. The strands of cloth explode into flames. The sight is impressive.

Henry uses the flaming mop to cut a fiery path through the darkness. The monster—whatever it might be—may not have been afraid to knock the flashlight out of his hands, but Henry is betting fire will be a different story. Fire has always defeated monsters in fairy tales.

There are now three graves in the dirt floor, two large, one small. Beyond them is the boiler and the mutilated remains of the rats… but the boiler no longer appears to be made entirely of metal and asbestos. Although the middle is still firmly attached to the floor, the twisting pipes have transformed into scaly arms—dozens of them, reaching and twisting and pulling. The boiler’s metal door on the fat belly grins at Henry, showing a frightening hint of the raging fire inside.

The monster says: “Hello, Henry.” Henry gasps as the memories come pouring back: the woods that snowy day when he was five, the tree house, the river, his father’s apparent death, and most importantly, his father’s return that evening, alive and well with not a mark on him. Henry had locked these memories into the furthest corner of his mind, behind a wall of stone he didn’t realize was there.
In this moment, as Henry faces another monster, he understands those events were all true—not necessarily real, but true. Everything may not have happened exactly the way he thought it was happening—his imagination was a wild place—but there was an underlying truth to what he saw. Which means…
“None of this is real,” Henry whispers.
“Silly little boy. You accepted me as real when you were still wetting the bed. You can’t back out now.”
Henry considers this and says: “I don’t want this to be real.”
“Henry, I didn’t call myself into this world. That beautifully twisted mind of yours did. You called me, you keep me. That’s the way life works.”
“Then go away. I’ll make you go away.”
One of the monster’s scaly arms rises and points at the flaming mop, which looks much less impressive in the light of the boiler’s flaming belly. The monster says: “You think a little fire will stop me from eating your family? I’m a fat bear with my own fire in my belly, you silly little boy.”
The boiler shivers as the asbestos continues the transformation into sharp scales. The top of the boiler bulges into a meaty hunchback, the flesh writhing and twitching. The metal door grins at Henry, showing off newlygrown fangs.
Henry realizes the mistake he has made. Fire isn’t going to do anything to stop this creature. It loves fire and heat. It lives for the fire.
Henry takes a step backwards, throws the flaming mop in desperation, and then he sprints up the stairs again. The boiler swallows the mop in one big gulp.
“You can run from me, Henry,” the monster calls, “but I’ll always find you. I’ll always be with you, no matter how far or how fast you run! You called me, remember?”
Henry hears this but he doesn’t really hear it. He’s bounding up the steps two at a time and through the first floor, not even seeing the smashed furniture and broken plaster and all the damage the boiler inflicted upon the house with those dreadful arms.
Once in the attic, Henry slams the door and falls to his knees. His heart is pounding and tears are dotting his face. He holds his head with his hands, pulling at his hair, and he studies what remains of his studio.
Paintings are shredded—including the Princess in the Dungeon series he never liked anyway—and paint is spilled everywhere. There are splashes of red on the walls, white on the ceiling, blue on the floor, green on the window.
A single blank canvas remains untouched in the middle of the room.
Just start at the beginning, Henry’s father whispers in his mind, and the rest will take care of itself.
“The beginning? What does that mean?”
Just start at the beginning.
“This afternoon when I couldn’t paint?”
Further back.
Henry closes his eyes. “The Princess in the Dungeon?”
Further.
Henry pulls his hair. The pain is sharp and his mind flashes on an image of a tree house and the coldness of the snow and the ice on the river and….
“The day when I was five?”
Yes! is the thunderous reply.
And finally Henry understands. The answer was there in his father’s advice all along. He grabs a blank canvas and his paint palette and he shoves a brush into his pocket. He runs downstairs toward the cellar, again taking the steps two at a time, almost tripping on his own feet in his hurry.
He doesn’t slow, he doesn’t let himself think. Thinking gets in the way; thinking will create doubts, build walls. He had the right idea the first time—he just took the wrong weapon with him.
I paint against the darkness, Henry thinks as he navigates his way through the trashed first floor to the kitchen and the cellar steps.
He slips on the broken glass in the kitchen, slams into the wall next to the cellar door. His leg twists awkwardly, but he stays on his feet. He hobbles down the narrow wooden steps and then he trips and falls onto the dirt cellar floor. The canvas flies from his hands.
The cellar is dark and damp, except for the light from the fire in the boiler’s belly whenever the monster speaks.
“Decided to give yourself to me?” the boiler asks, showing its new metal fangs again.
Henry ignores the question, getting to his feet. He retrieves the canvas and leans it against the mound of dirt next to the three graves. He pulls the paintbrush from his pocket and jabs it through the paint on his palette without even looking.
“What are you doing?” the monster demands.
I paint against the darkness, Henry thinks, but he doesn’t answer. He closes his eyes and applies the paint to the canvas just like when he works in the dark in the middle of the night. He doesn’t need to see what he’s doing. The image in his mind is larger than life.
The Princess appears, holding her sword, putting herself between the monster and the little boy in the dungeon. Henry sees for the first time that he is the child.
The monster, lurking in the corner of the scene, is hunched over, drool dripping from sharp fangs. The monster growls and breathes fire at the Princess. Her flowing gown, which is already tattered and torn, bursts into flames, but she protects the little boy with her body.
Then, releasing a fierce battle cry, she charges at the monster, a trail of flames flowing behind her like beads of water in the air.
The Princess slices at the monster with her sword; he deflects her blow with his massive arms. The sound is odd, though, like steel on steel instead of flesh.
The boiler screams, but Henry barely hears. He continues to paint, his brush moving from the palette to the canvas so quickly his arm is a blur. Paint splashes on his clothes, the dirt floor, the wooden beams, the stone walls.
Thump-thump-thump, cries the boiler.
In Henry’s mind, streaks of colors circle the Princess, swirling and dancing like the fiery bubbles trailing her wherever she goes. She grunts and swings her sword and this time one of the monster’s arms goes flying in a splash of blood.
The boiler screams.
Henry feels an electrical current in the air. There’s heat pounding him like the hottest summer day.
In Henry’s mind, the monster fights back, grabbing the Princess and throwing her across the dungeon, nearly knocking the little boy down. The boy stands frozen in shock, unable to help or run.
In the cellar, one of the boiler’s pipes strikes Henry in the chest. He falls backwards, the breath ripped from his lungs, but he jumps right back to the canvas without opening his eyes and he continues his work without missing a beat.
Thump-thump-thump.
Using a mix of white and gray, Henry adds a wavy bubble of hard air around the Princess and the little boy on the canvas.
The Princess charges again. The monster takes a swing at her, but the razor sharp claws simply break off when they connect with the protective bubble.
The monster screams and so does the boiler.
The colors swirl faster around the Princess, brighter and more vivid.
The monster backs away from her, into a corner.
Thump-thump-thump, cries the boiler.
The Princess—still on fire and badly injured—shows her teeth through a fierce grin as she charges one last time, driving the sword into the moist belly of the beast.
The monster and the boiler scream—and a second later, Henry is engulfed by the roar of an explosion; a wave of heat blows past him and up the cellar stairs.
He opens his eyes. The boiler is shredded and the entire cellar is burning. The brightness of the fire hurts his eyes and the heat makes his skin throb. Yet the flames do not touch him; they’re held at bay by an invisible bubble surrounding Henry. The sight is like taking a peek through a portal into Hell.
Henry feels a surge of triumph, but it is short-lived. The monster is dead, but the explosion damaged the line from the oil tank to the boiler. Black liquid is squirting on the stone walls.
Henry’s eyes widen and he clutches his paintbrush tightly as he sprints up the stairs to the kitchen one last time. He continues out the door and he’s halfway to the garage when the house explodes in a flash of intense white light, knocking him off his feet. The noise is deafening and the entire world glows brightly like a star supernova and then quickly fades to black.

bed when he heard the front door of the house open and close. The room had grown dark as the sun disappeared for the day and he was still wearing his yellow rain slicker. His clothing was soaked in sweat, his face was wet with tears. A puddle from the snow melting off his boots trickled across the hardwood floor. He sobbed until his eyes burned.

The bedroom door opened and his father’s familiar work boots crossed the room, landing every step with a dull thud.

His father’s pants were stained with grease and grime and bleach. He took a knee and then, after a brief moment, his weathered, callused hand reached under the bed. Henry grabbed onto the hand, not believing it was really there, but his father gently pulled him out from under the bed just the same.

“What are you doing under there?” his father asked.
“The monsters…I saw the monsters get you,” Henry whimpered before sobbing uncontrollably again.
“Son, that’s silly. What do you mean?”
Henry couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t even get the words to form.
His father said: “It’ll be okay, Henry. Just start at the beginning and the rest will take care of itself.”
While Henry’s father helped him out of his rain slicker and into some dry clothing, Henry told him everything he had seen and done, including the fall from the tree house, the herd of rabbits, the trip down the river, and the monsters in the boiler room of the school.
Henry’s father held him and rocked him while he cried some more. His father said: “Well, Henry, it sounds like your imagination really got away from you today, didn’t it?”
Henry only nodded, unable to believe none of what happened had been real. He had the cuts on his face from the fall, after all, and his heart ached with a deep pain.
His father said, “When the weather gets a little nicer, we’ll go look at that tree house together, what do you say?”
Henry nodded.
“You okay?”
Henry shook his head and blurted: “I was so scared of the monsters!”
“Henry,” his father said, “the monsters don’t live in the dark corners waiting to pounce on us. They live deep in our heart. But we can fight them. I promise you, we can fight them and we can win. Why don’t you get a piece of paper and some crayons. I know something that’ll help you feel better.”
Henry retrieved his paper and his crayons and he sat on the floor in the beam of moonlight coming through the window.
“Okay, draw the clearing with the tree house,” his father instructed, standing next to him.
Henry did as his father told him to the best of his ability, using his green and brown crayons.
“Now, add the skeleton you told me about.”
Henry hesitated. He didn’t want to think about the skeleton anymore.
“It’s okay, trust me.”
Henry didn’t have a white crayon, so he used yellow. The skeleton was sort of hanging off the tree, drawn on top of the branches.
“Now, put a big red X over it.”
Henry looked up at his father, who simply nodded at the paper.
Again, Henry did as his father instructed, only instead of drawing an X, he crossed back and forth over the skeleton a dozen times with the red crayon.
“Good! Use the yellow to add a nice happy sun.”
Henry was already feeling better and he suddenly understood what his father was showing him: he could remove the bad and scary things from the pictures and replace them with something he liked better. Maybe he couldn’t make those changes in the real world, but he certainly could in his imagination. And if removing those bad things and adding the good things on paper made him feel better inside, that was okay, right?
Henry’s father handed him another sheet of paper and this time Henry drew the frozen river at the moment the ice began to crack. He didn’t need his father’s guidance now that he understood the power of what he was doing.
In fact, within minutes Henry didn’t even feel like he was sitting in his bedroom. He wasn’t seeing the paper and the crayons in the moonlight. Instead he was on the river again, hearing the ice cracking—and then fixing it. As he built this imaginary world around himself, he created a place where he didn’t fall through the ice or out of the tree house, where there were no scary birds in the trees and no monsters in the basement of the school.
For the first time, Henry was able to cross between the imaginary worlds he created in the backyard and transfer them into the real world simply by drawing the images on the paper.
Eventually his father slipped away and Henry continued to draw deep into the night. And as Henry worked, the words he had seen in the colorful darkness behind his eyes appeared in his mind again.
I paint against the darkness, Henry thought.
He liked the sound of that. Those words made him feel strong in a way he couldn’t describe. Those words opened doors within his mind; they set him free and they gave him the courage to face the darkest night. He was no longer afraid of the terrifying things he was drawing. After all, he could make them go away the moment they got too scary.
I paint against the darkness.
The monsters were simply shadows to be erased or drawn over, nothing more, nothing less.