The Painted Darkness (4 page)

floor, the linoleum is ice-cold under his body. Before he understands how badly his right hand is burned, before he can comprehend what the stickiness under his left hand must be, he knows he never completed step number five in the twice-a-day boiler maintenance program. He didn’t turn the unit back on. It sits down there, hungry and empty, and the house has sucked in the chill of the winter storm blowing through the valley. His skin is like ice.

Then the pain in his right hand comes roaring into his brain and Henry screams. In this moment he doesn’t care about the temperature; he envies the cold. He wants the cold to wrap around his skin again and extinguish the fire raging in his fingers.

Henry rolls onto his side, through the congealing blood from the wound on his forehead, and he pushes himself to his knees. He gets to his feet and flips the light switch. His hand is badly burned: red and purple and nearly black in places, the skin loose and flabby. Another scream rises in his throat.

Be calm, his father’s voice whispers in Henry’s mind. Maybe this should alarm Henry, but it isn’t the first time he’s heard his father since the old man died. He often remembers his father’s words of wisdom in his father’s own voice and he finds this to be soothing. Be calm and take things one step at a time.

Henry does not scream again. The voice is right. He knows how to treat burns; he can handle this. He breathes in deeply and thinks through the process.

The first step is to soak the affected area. He stumbles to the sink, knocks the stopper in place with his good hand, and starts a stream of cool water. This will hurt at first, but then it will help. He gently lowers his aching hand as the water rises. He grits his teeth and looks away. The window above the sink is covered with frost and the big snowflakes are still falling.

“It’s dark,” Henry says, reaffirming how much time has passed since…since when? He has no idea how he came to be in this state. He recalls working on a painting and then running downstairs to feed the boiler and then…what?

Henry reaches for the cabinet next to the window and retrieves the bottle of extra strength aspirin. He pops the bottle open with his thumb and swallows four of the white pills without a drink.

After a few minutes, he lifts his hand from the water and gently pats the wound dry. Next he applies his wife’s aloe vera cream from the same cabinet where he got the aspirin. The affected area aches, but the immediate burning sensation and the howling pain have dimmed.

After he wraps a gauze bandage around his hand again and again, Henry surveys the room. There is a puddle of blood on the floor where he had been laying. He touches his forehead, feels the stickiness on his scalp.

“I’m a mess,” he says. “What the hell did I do?”
He still can’t remember what happened, but he cleans the small gash on his forehead, washing the wound and patting it dry with a clean paper towel. The bleeding has stopped, but he applies a large bandage to be safe. He probably needs to visit the emergency room, but that’s a good thirty minute drive in the best of weather, and this is not the best of weather.
The back door’s window is coated with ice and frost. Henry unlocks the deadbolt and opens the door, but a gust of frigid winter wind knocks him backwards. Snow is blowing hard across the glacial winter landscape; the sight is beautiful in a ferocious kind of way. There’s at least two feet of snow with several inches of ice mixed in for good measure.
Henry isn’t driving anywhere. Even if he did venture across the lawn to the snowpacked garage under the big tree, his little Honda isn’t up to the challenge. He wouldn’t get out of the garage, let alone through the snow dunes between him and the two-lane road that won’t be plowed until morning.
Henry closes the door, locks it. The winter wind gusts against the house and the coldness pushes deeper into his core. The aching in his bones isn’t just from his wounds. The winter chill is inside the house, gnawing into him.
The cold jogs his memory. The thumping of the boiler. The twice-a-day maintenance. The red eye blinking at him from the darkness of the drain.
Henry does the only thing a grown man can do upon remembering such a series of events: he laughs.
“An eye in the drain?” he says. As bad as the wounds on his body are, he can’t believe what he thought he saw. He laughs again. What else can he do?
Henry is about to head downstairs to take care of maintenance step number five— turning the boiler on so it can gulp the oil and send steam throughout the house into the metal radiators—when the phone rings. The sound startles him. He hadn’t realized how bad his hands were shaking until this moment; his entire body is rocking.
Henry hurries to the phone and answers, but there’s only silence on the line.
“Hello?” he says. “Sarah?”
There’s a brief burst of static, the crackle of a voice, and the line goes dead. Henry hangs up and tries to dial the number for the condo in the city, but there’s no dial tone. He’s not terribly surprised. He lives in the middle of nowhere and phone problems aren’t uncommon, even in this fiber optic day and age. He waits in the kitchen for a few more minutes, hoping he might get lucky and the phone will ring again, but there’s nothing.
Henry returns to the top of the cellar stairs. His trusty flashlight, which sits next to the boiler where he left it, is cutting a bright corridor through the darkness.
Thump-thump-thump.
Henry cocks his head, puzzled. This sound isn’t from the boiler. The boiler is switched off, after all. The boiler is metallic and big. This noise was small and wet.
Henry stands motionless while his frazzled brain attempts to decipher what he could have heard.
Thump-thump-thump.
And this time, the flashlight moves.
And then comes a growl, deep and guttural, like the one that greeted him when he looked into the cellar drain.
Henry’s instincts take control and he’s bolting through the living room and up the stairs before the flashlight in the cellar has even settled back into place.

seemed larger and more dangerous than he remembered—maybe because he could finally climb up there and discover what was hidden inside. The snowdrifts had blown around the base of the mammoth tree, forming something like a ramp to the lowest branch. From there it would just be a matter of careful climbing. He had climbed smaller trees; he knew he could do it.

So why was there such a tight knot swelling in his stomach?
Henry reached for the lowest branch. That was his only answer to the questions his body was asking him. He climbed and he kept his eyes locked on the next branch. All he could do was keep moving. He imagined what he must look like to someone watching him: the bright yellow rain slicker slowly ascending the thick trunk of the tree.
A few minutes later, the winter air was biting at Henry’s fingers through his gloves; his hands and his feet were starting to ache. To make matters worse, the wind was gusting, blowing chunks of ice and snow off the branches, pummeling him as he climbed. Twice he almost lost his grip, and his stomach lurched into his throat each time.
When he finally arrived at the bottom of the tree house, Henry gasped in relief. He reached for the latch that held a trap door in place. He struggled to release the metal latch, which seemed to be frozen in place. He debated taking off his right glove to get a better grip, but he quickly dismissed the idea. His hands were cold enough.
Henry stood on his tippy toes to gain more leverage; his legs were wobbly. He grunted and put all of his weight into turning the latch— which suddenly gave way, flipping to the side. The heavy wooden door swung open faster than Henry had expected, passing within inches of his face. He was so startled he almost stepped backwards. His eyes instinctively shifted to the ground far below the barren tree branches covered in ice and snow.
Henry stared in horror as the ground zoomed up at him and his world began to spin. He felt himself falling…but he wasn’t moving. His insides were merely anticipating the descent he sensed was coming; his mind was readying for the shock of hitting those branches on the way down, followed by the frozen slap of the snow-covered ground.
The world continued to spin and Henry couldn’t stop staring; he was mesmerized by the ground that seemed to be lunging up at him. His center of gravity shifted as the winter wind whipped past his face.
The icy air on his cheeks shook Henry from his daze. He wrapped his arms around the tree trunk and he turned his head. He would fall if he didn’t move. He reached through the trap door, grabbed on to the edge, and started to pull himself to safety. For a moment he thought he wouldn’t have the strength to make it, but then he braced his yellow rain boot against a branch and launched himself through the opening like a champagne cork being popped.
Henry rolled across the floor, closed his eyes, and breathed in deeply while pulling his knees to his chest, rocking himself gently. He knew this wasn’t the Big Boy way to handle the situation, but he couldn’t help himself. He was more scared by the near disaster than he had ever been in his entire life.
He could still feel himself almost falling, and he understood for the first time how easily death could come for anyone, even little boys. He wasn’t sure if he believed in the Heaven and the Hell the preacher at church talked about, and he definitely wasn’t sure where little boys who snuck off into the woods were sent when it came to the afterlife, but he was certain he would rather not learn the answers to those questions anytime soon.
Once his breathing had returned to normal, Henry opened his eyes. The roof of the old structure was partially collapsed and the dark wood of the walls and floor were rotten in places. There were crude windows on three sides and Henry could see he was above the rest of the trees. The gray clouds swirled through the valley, the wispy remains of the unexpected winter storm.
Henry turned to look for the trap door—he didn’t want to fall through when he moved— and that was when he saw the skeleton sitting in the far corner.
And that was when Henry screamed.
The wordless sounds coming from his throat didn’t even sound human to him, much less like any noise he could willfully make—and for a moment he was certain the shriek had come from the skeleton. His scream echoed through the woods.
After a moment, though, Henry stopped. He tried to calm himself the way his mother would if she were here. He had already acted like a baby once today; he was supposed to be a Big Boy. Yes, the skeleton was scary, but it couldn’t hurt him, right? A skeleton was a person who had been dead for a long time, and a dead person was a sad thing, but the dead couldn’t hurt the living. His parents had explained this to him once while dressing him in his Sunday church outfit on a Tuesday morning, the day of his grandmother’s funeral the previous summer.
Now Henry studied the skeleton of a child about his age. The skull was grinning. The skeleton wasn’t as scary as Henry first thought, but what did frighten him was the tattered yellow rain slicker and the boots— they reminded him of what he was wearing.
Henry closed his eyes and took a series of deep breaths. When he opened his eyes again, the skeleton was gone.
The bones hadn’t even existed in the first place, and Henry had no idea what to think now. It was as if one of the games he liked to play in the yard had gotten out of hand—as if the line between his imagination and the real world had blurred and he didn’t even realize it was a game.
Henry stood and approached the corner where the bones had been, careful to avoid the trap door.
There were no bones, but there was a necklace. The silver was tarnished. Henry picked up the chain, tentatively touched the metal Christ hanging from the loop. The metal was cold and he wondered where the necklace had come from. Why would someone leave something like this in a tree house? How could it have been forgotten? What happened to the previous owner?
Henry dropped the necklace in his pocket, put his hands on the crude window, and gazed out over the endless forest and the snow-covered river in the distance. The sight was beautiful, but Henry was concerned by the coldness he felt tightening inside himself, as if he was still on the verge of falling. Only the height wasn’t what made him nervous. His parents always said he was a thoughtful boy and he accepted he spent more time just thinking about stuff than other kids, but he didn’t know how to be any other way. He simply was the way he was.
So Henry stood in the empty tree house and he stared at the snowy winter landscape and he contemplated what was happening in his ever-expanding world of youthful magic and wonder.
A few moments later, right as he felt the floor crumbling under his feet, he noticed the movement in the bushes beyond the clearing: thousands of white rabbits with dark red eyes, all of them bounding through the woods like a herd of cattle.
But before Henry could really grasp the bizarreness of the spectacle, his entire world flipped upside down and he was falling for real.

himself to be either a brave man or a coward, but now he knows which side of the fence he falls on when strange things happen. He’s a coward and he plans on having no problem telling everyone that once he learns what made the sound in the cellar. And what moved the flashlight.

Henry sits in the attic and listens to the storm blowing against his house. He’s a grown man and there must be a reasonable explanation for what happened. He tells himself this because he understands it’s what he’s supposed to believe as an adult.

The problem is, Henry thinks as he sits in the darkened attic with the door locked, there is not a good explanation.

Sometimes he may spend hours lost in his imagination, certain there are mysterious forces at work in the universe that allow him to take the worries in his head and transform them into beautiful and disturbing images painted on a canvas, but he’s not ready to admit there could actually be some kind of monster in his cellar. Those kinds of thoughts open the doors to madness. There must be a better explanation.

“Those stupid rats!” Henry cries, quickly latching on to the sanest idea his semihysterical mind can conjure. “Could they have made that sound? They certainly could have moved the flashlight, right? Of course they could! They’re always moving crap down there.”