Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts Read online

  A woman’s voice spoke in my ear, husky and somehow familiar, “Now to the Brocken the witches ride,” and then I woke on the bed, still dressed, my face and hands beaded in cold sweat. Again the clock averred that only a few minutes had passed, and I had a moment of lurching terror, the feeling of being trapped in a hallway that you know you have just walked down before. Outside the window the night was merely dark, the wind only a whisper that played along the eaves, the red lights of the Sender Brocken blinking their warning.

  ***

  I splashed water on my face, had a drink from the mini bar, and then another. In spite of my earlier instructions to Nicky, I couldn’t stay in the room, and I didn’t feel like navigating the blind, empty hallways that would take me up to the observation deck, a prospect which left me sick with indefinable horror. Instead I left him a note and went in search of the elevator, which didn’t seem like it could possibly be too difficult to locate since I remembered riding it up. Still, I took two wrong turns in the red-and-gold halls trying to find it, and at the second turn I thought I saw someone from the party up ahead, just going around a corner. A flash of silver and fur, a glimpse of a leg, and then she was gone. My first thought was of the girl that had ridden up with us in the car, and I opened my mouth to shout, but then I remembered the woman from my dream, and my voice died in my throat.

  By the time I found the elevator and got down to the main floor, it was only twenty minutes to midnight. Buffet tables had been set up in the entryway, covered in brie and strawberries and other delicacies. I passed them by without a second look, because even though I hadn’t had a bite since the airport, the very thought of food made my stomach turn.

  Inside the ballroom, the black drapes had been removed from the easels. The paintings they revealed must have been Henri’s own. They could have passed for Goya in bad light, or at a distance, but their colors were more garish, their subjects more universally grotesque or occult in character. Goya’s entire oeuvre, rendered into nothing but Black Paintings. In the largest painting, sitting in a dominant spot along the far wall, warped figures crouched around the form of a massive black goat, an obvious and blatant copy of Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath. More the 1798 one than the 1820s. I walked over to it, and found that there was a title hand-written on a piece of paper and affixed to the easel: “Chernobog.”

  “Chernobog was a Slavic god, represented by a black he-goat,” Henri’s voice suddenly said from over my shoulder. “Of course, when the Christians came, he got turned into the devil, like so many others.”

  “Subtle,” I said with a forced smile, turning around and reaching for his hand, not wanting to let him see that he’d startled me.

  He smiled himself—his more genuine than mine—and shrugged. “Subtlety, like painting, never really was my strongest suit.”

  We were momentarily isolated from the noise and bustle of the room, caught in a bubble of quiet and stillness near the big painting, under the golden eyes of the black goat, and I was still shaken from my dreams, which seemed to lurch about in my head like wheeled carts on the deck of a ship. That’s probably why I didn’t banter with Henri as I normally might have, and just asked him straight, “Are you really giving it up? Retiring?”

  He nodded, and though his smile didn’t falter, his eyes looked sad. More than just tired, as they had before. Exhausted, spent. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “My time has come. One last revel, and then it’s out, out brief candle.”

  As he spoke, I saw Nicky come into the gallery out of the corner of my eye, and at the same time Henri looked down at his wrist, though he didn’t wear a watch that I could see. “Speaking of which, the time is almost upon us. You’ll excuse me?”

  I nodded and he was gone, lost to the crowd. I started to walk toward Nicky, but then Henri reappeared, standing near the projector in the center of the room, and everyone was muttering into silence and Nicky was raising his camera to his eye, and so I froze where I was.

  I can’t remember what Henri said, standing there next to the projector. There was a ringing in my ears, and my headache had come back full force. I thought I could see someone over his shoulder, a familiar shape in fur and silver and long, dark hair. No matter how I moved, though, I couldn’t get a clear look.

  Henri thanked everyone for coming, and started to talk about why we were there, about Muybridge and his films. First the stuff that you could find in the history books—studies of animals in motion, his murder of his wife’s lover and subsequent acquittal—but no one in the crowd was there for so mundane a scandal, so then Henri talked about Muybridge’s other films. Short topics of occult interest, all of them lost to rumor and speculation and myth. Some said he’d even caught the Devil Himself on celluloid.

  My head was splitting, and I needed to get out of the gallery, find a drink, hair of the dog. I was pushing past the other revelers, who all had their gazes fixed forward, on Henri, while my eyes were only for the door. Maybe that’s why I saw her there, standing just inside the entrance. Long, dark hair, dark eyes, fur coat. Her hand on the light switch.

  The lights went down, and the gallery filled with the whirring sound of the projector. In the flickering silver glow that came from the screen, I could see the faces of the people around me, all of them transformed into pallid, disfigured masks by the play of light and shadow, the “servants” now indistinguishable from the guests. All their eyes were black pits, all staring up at the screen. Reluctantly, I turned to see what they were seeing.

  Twenty feet tall, on the wall of the ballroom, three figures wearing conical hats danced in a circle. Their arms were interlocked, their heads down, the points of their hats nearly meeting in the middle as they turned, slowly, rhythmically, like figures on a German clock. Intercut with them were other frames, more animal studies, but wrong this time, donkeys up on their hind legs, turning in a circle. It was just a few frames, figures and donkeys, repeated again and again. Turning and turning, in a dance that would never end.

  There was a flicker, then, and the scene changed. A grove, somewhere, in a black forest, dark and thick as the Dore-inspired jungles of Skull Island, but a real place. Fires burned in the background, out of focus, and cloaked figures watched as a young girl, not more than sixteen, coupled with a black goat the size of a bison. Her eyes and mouth were black holes burned in the film. The images moved with the stuttering, shuddering jerkiness of a zoetrope. Just a few frames, turning on an endless loop. A dance that would never end.

  The blemish began at the place where the girl met the goat. A rip in the film, a hole that gaped wider and wider as the film burned through, with that familiar sound of bubbling and tearing. For a moment the screen was white, and then there was a crack as glass shattered under extreme heat, and the room was plunged into complete darkness.

  It’s hard to remember what happened next. The mind almost certainly played tricks at the time, the memory just as surely has played them since. I know that there was a moment of stillness, as the white light burned on the wall of the gallery. I turned in that moment, my eyes searching for the woman I’d seen inside the doorway, but all I saw were our shadows transformed into giants on the walls behind us.

  When the light went out completely, there was a sound like a rising tide, as dozens of voices all spoke at once, whether to calm or panic, and dozens of bodies all started to move in different directions. The ringing in my ears seemed to have left my head and spread out into the room itself, and underneath it I would have sworn that I could hear the orchestra playing. Others would later say that they heard it too, some wild, discordant melody that none of us could identify but that we all thought sounded very familiar. Then the whole room tilted, or at least that’s how it felt, like the hotel was just a model sitting on a tabletop that somebody had stumbled into.

  I felt bodies slamming against me, elbows jamming into my sides, my face. I felt my lip split against bone, I felt myself stumble over someone or something in the dark. Bright strobes of light were going off, and at the t
ime I couldn’t account for them, thinking maybe they were going off inside my own head, though now I know that they were the flashbulb of Nicky’s camera as he desperately sought to catalogue something of the disaster.

  In the flashes, I remember feeling like I had stumbled somehow into one of Henri’s paintings. The faces of the people around me seemed bloated and dead, seemed to float up from out of the darkness to assail me. Like I was drowning in a black river, with only corpses to keep me company. The “servants,” I told myself later, in their grotesque masks.

  I have no clear recollection of making my way outside, but that’s where I found myself, my hands on my knees, Nicky trying to staunch the flow of blood from my face. The bright lights of the hotel were on, making our shadows long on the gravel in front of us, turning the night sky into a black dome above our heads. I turned around, and saw that the hotel was on fire. Flames licked out of the doors and windows of the first floor, sending embers spiraling up into the darkness, like lanterns carried aloft.

  ***

  I talked about it later, with the other survivors, with Nicky, with the police. I told them what I had seen, what I could remember, though it didn’t seem like much. A few people had been killed in the blaze, many others suffered from burns, smoke inhalation, injuries acquired in the panicked rout. Once the fire was out, they sifted the ruins for bodies, identified the charred remains, sent them back to their families to be buried. Henri wasn’t among them. He was never seen again.

  When Nicky went to develop his photographs from that night, he told me that none of them came out, from any of the cameras. He said that not even the pictures he’d taken earlier, at the airport and on the train, had returned anything but black squares. He blamed a bad batch of film. He should have been devastated, but he didn’t seem to be. After that evening, it was like something turned over inside Nicky. He started photographing again, and turning out good work. The best he’d done in years, but I didn’t like them. They reminded me of things I’d seen that night. He’d go to the zoo and take pictures of the animals; kangaroos and donkeys and goats, yellow eyes staring out of darkened paddocks.

  I believed him, about the photographs, though I wondered about the explanation. I had crazy thoughts, that maybe there was nothing wrong with his film, but instead something wrong with that night. Then I found two of the photographs that supposedly hadn’t come out. They were under the grate in our fireplace, scorched at the edges. One was a blurry shot taken up on the observation deck. It seemed to be one he’d snapped by accident, with the camera in motion so that most of the picture was a smudge, the stars falling like embers, the radome an enormous white blot consuming one entire side of the image. Right at the edge of the picture, though, was a woman, standing near the railing. Only part of her was visible, the edge of a fur coat, long, dark hair.

  The other photograph was obviously one that he’d captured with the flash after the lights had all gone out. In the foreground were the fleshy shapes of panicked guests running in front of the camera, pushing and falling over each other in the darkness, but in the background was Henri, the focus on him perfect so that you could see the defeated expression on his unsmiling face. He stood in front of his “Chernobog” painting, looking out at the rioting crowd as though he could see them, his eyes vacant. Worse, though, than anything about his expression was something that I tried to tell myself was an optical illusion created by the effect of the flash and the angle. The hoof of the painting’s black goat, resting on Henri’s shoulder, beckoning him to turn and follow.

  I kept the pictures, thumbed through them relentlessly, obsessively, wearing smeared fingerprints into the edges. I meant to confront Nicky with them, throw them down on the table, demand to know why he hadn’t shown them to me, why he’d lied to me, burned the evidence. But instead I watched him, his new confidence, his new photographs. He made friends that I didn’t know, went to parties and gallery openings that I declined to attend, staying home with a bottle in my hand. When he was gone I would take out the pictures, look at them again and again.

  Finally, I waited for him to leave the apartment one night and I followed him. Watched him walk down the street, his head up, not slouching, not anymore, and saw him go to the corner and get into a cab with someone. A woman with long dark hair, wearing a fur coat.

  Author’s Notes:

  Here’s a secret: I had already started this story before I was aware that there was going to be a tribute anthology to Laird Barron, let alone before Ross Lockhart and Justin Steele had invited me to contribute something to The Children of Old Leech. I started writing “Walpurgisnacht” after reading Laird Barron’s second—and still my favorite—collection, Occultation. I wanted to see what a Laird Barron story would look like if I wrote it.

  When the invite to The Children of Old Leech came in, I dusted off the story and tuned it up. In writing “Walpurgisnacht,” I tried to do something similar to what I do when I’m writing stories for Lovecraftian anthologies, which was to take more of the beats and themes of Laird’s fiction, rather than copping too many of the names or specific stories, although “Something Scary” and real-life photographer Eadweard Muybridge both found their way in.

  I also worked in some references to my own stories, and both the Steadman Gallery and its show on “The New Decadence” should sound familiar to those who’ve read my previous collection.

  The Red Church

  At first, Yvonne was happy to get the assignment. She’d been working for The Current for two months now, and hadn’t gotten anything even remotely interesting. Art walks, First Fridays, gallery openings. Nothing juicy.

  Wade Gorman was, if nothing else, juicy. He was a brilliant underground sculptor, or so the word went. He’d had a chance to go mainstream when the Sprint Center went up, was supposed to do something to commemorate the spot of the Union Prison Collapse just across the street that killed four women and injured dozens of others back in 1863, kicking off the Lawrence Massacre. The designs he turned in got him kicked off the commission. Yvonne couldn’t find any good pictures of them online, but the blurry cell phone photos she did turn up looked like a sort of tower made of piled bodies, though whether those bodies were wrapped together in death or pleasure, she couldn’t tell.

  “Why would you even commission someone like Gorman for something like that?” she asked Dale one evening, spinning her laptop around on the kitchen counter to show him one of Gorman’s sculptures, a variant on Saint Sebastian; bald, gray, and sunken-eyed, looking like a corpse from a plague pit, and impaled with dozens of lengths of rebar.

  “The people who put that stuff together don’t even know what he does,” Dale said, leaning down to slide a pan of vegetables into the oven. “They just tell their assistant, ‘Give me someone hip, someone edgy,’ and then when their assistant brings them a guy who sculpts stacked corpses, they chew his ass.”

  There was surprisingly little about Gorman on the Internet. She was able to find a few pictures of his early work, but nothing for at least the last six years. Her editor said he was still working, though, churning away in this building that he owned outright, that was his apartment and studio all in one. “New projects,” her editor said. “Nobody’s ever even seen them. It’ll be an exclusive.”

  In more ways than one, she found, because Gorman had never, ever agreed to an interview before. Even when he got the commission and lost it, when the Star was hounding him for a piece, when even the national news syndicates had come down to try to talk to him, he’d turned everyone away with short, terse replies and “No comment”s.

  Yvonne didn’t ask her editor why now. She assumed that Gorman was planning some kind of comeback, and hoped to use the interview as a catapult. But more than that, she didn’t actually care why. She was so damn sick of fluff pieces, so happy to get something she could at least sink her teeth into, that she didn’t want to look too closely at the mouths of any gift horses.

  Gorman didn’t live in one of the nice lofts in the Crossroads, like m
ost of the artists she knew. His building was farther downtown, and farther east. A brick two-story with a thick iron door and an electrical substation across the street, an old envelope factory next to that. There was nothing else on the block where Gorman’s building sat, and the weeds in the vacant lots on either side grew taller than Yvonne, sporting unlikely purple flowers.

  Her editor told her that Gorman didn’t have a phone. She just had to go. “He’s always there,” her editor said. “Where the hell else would he be?” But the first time she went, she banged on the metal door for fifteen minutes to no avail. Upon first driving down, she’d assumed that the factory across the street was closed, maybe turned into lofts like all the others, but there were workers standing out on the loading dock smoking cigarettes. They watched her, and talked amongst themselves in quick, quiet bursts, but thankfully they didn’t cross the street, didn’t hoot or yell or whistle, even though she was wearing the black skirt that she knew showed off her ass. Eventually, she drove home and left a message on her editor’s voicemail that Gorman hadn’t been in.

  She got a text message back saying, “Try again.”

  The next time she went by Gorman’s building it was spitting rain out of a gray sky. She went on a Saturday, because maybe Gorman would be more likely to be home then. Maybe he secretly had to get a day job to support himself, since he wasn’t selling any sculptures these days. Maybe he was even working across the street at the envelope factory.

  She also figured that, on a Saturday, there wouldn’t be anyone at the factory to watch her. But as she stood in the damp air and pounded the heel of her hand against the door, stepping from foot to foot because of the cold that bit with each gust of wind, she found herself wishing that they were back, because their stares and whispers were better than the barrenness that filled the place now.