Fiction Vortex - October 2013 Horror Issue Read online

  Bernadette took out her cell phone and called Le Musée de Moderne. Tomorrow night she would install her new piece.

  ~~~~~

  "You can leave now," said Bernadette.

  The two workers who had just fastened her canvas to the wall nodded and left her. They were used to temperamental artists, and Bernadette was known to become enraged if someone crowded around her pieces for too long.

  The museum was dark now, empty. Compared to the laughter and shouts of tourists, the clicking of cameras and squealing of children that filled the museum during the day, the quietness was eerie. Static. Dead.

  Bernadette smiled. The museum could never be completely dead with her pieces hanging, so beautiful, so alive on the wall. And this new piece was really her masterpiece. The museum promised her that, as long as she kept painting, they would keep buying, but Bernadette wondered if she would ever top "Flare in Orange." She wondered if it was because she had used a younger model than the first two paintings. The girl had more life to give Bernadette’s work.

  The piece was gorgeous, oranges vibrant, and Bernadette swore that she could still see the figure move, its violent bucking manipulating the paint that flowed across the surface freely, dripping onto the floor.

  Bernadette frowned.

  She walked over to where the painting hung and knelt down, brushing her thumb across the two spots of orange on the white marble floor.

  The painting had plenty of time to dry. Maybe these orange dots weren’t paint at all, but some kind of cleaning fluid trailing from the workers’ boots. Bernadette would have to tell them to clean themselves off before coming into her gallery again.

  A third orange drop splattered by her knee.

  Bernadette stood up and backed away from the painting. It was more than alive in the art sense, in the way the critics and public loved so much. The paint was wet and writhing over the surface, rivulets of orange flowing and splattering as the figure in the painting thrashed. Bernadette could see the canvas billow and flatten with the movement, the paint flowing around the imprinted image of the girl’s body as she desperately tried to escape. Bernadette clasped her hands to her ears, but could still hear the muffled sound of the girl’s screams.

  Was she still in there? Had Bernadette made some mistake?

  No, no. She had thrown the girl into the river when she was through, same as Angelo and Lucas. Another artist gone mad. Another grievous death.

  Then why was the painting moving?

  "Your work is dead."

  Bernadette spun around, and faced the flowing stain of Angelo’s head, as it rocked and turned the canvas. Red pooled beneath the piece, paint and blood, reaching out toward her feet. Bernadette stepped back, but had to avoid the purple that spilled from Lucas’ hands as his image pressed out from the canvas.

  "You are life! I made you life!" Bernadette screamed. "Help, someone help!"

  No one came.

  "Your work is dead."

  The canvas had become soft like putty. Lucas and the young girl had reached out so far their torsos were free from the wall, their orange and purple arms pushing out towards Bernadette, grasped and leaving splattered drops on the floor and walls. Bernadette backed up and heard a dull thud behind her; something pressed against her leg. She looked down to see the wet, red form of Angelo’s head, free from "Rebirth in Red," staining her stockings with sticky fluid. Bernadette screamed and kicked it away, then ran from the room.

  She had to get out of there. She was losing her mind.

  But it was hard for her to run. Her leg, where Angelo’s head had rested, felt unsteady and unsupportive. She reached down and grasped her paint-coated calf. The flesh was too soft, like a barely solid goop, like half-dried paint. The fabric of her stocking felt stiff. Like canvas.

  She heard something wet and plodding in the darkness behind her. Three somethings making their way to her, trailing their mess behind them.

  Bernadette ran, limping, crooked, racing as best she could through the galleries, hearing her art following relentlessly behind her. In her panic, all the halls looked the same. She could not tell if she was heading toward an exit or trapping herself further inside the museum.

  She heard footsteps coming up closer behind her, and as she chanced a glance behind her, she fell flat through a doorway into another gallery, landing hard with a faint splash.

  The front of her body was soaked blue, as the currents of Angelo’s masterpiece flowed around her, and then over her. She began to sink. Bernadette knew that the blue liquid was only inches deep, and yet her body continued to submerge itself into darkness. She kicked out, desperate, and the blue flowed around her beautifully, the struggle for life sinking into art, deeper and deeper until the currents flowed red.

  ~~~~~

  The next day, Le Musée de Moderne was packed with critics, reporters, and tourists, all reveling in the glory that was Bernadette’s complete gallery. Many were surprised that Bernadette did not attend the opening, but few were concerned. Her body would not be found until days later, floating in the river by her apartment, her dress stained red, purple, and orange. Another unstable mind. A common fate for an artist.

  But her legacy would live on in her paintings. "Rebirth in Red," "Life in Purple," "Flare in Orange," and the greatest of all, "Finale in Blue."

  Critics swore that it was a self-portrait, a final flight into immortality before she abandoned the mortal, static world. Janitors claimed that at night the piece seemed to move, the canvas pressing outward, the paint still flowing around her form, though journalists wrote their stories off as unnecessary publicity for an already popular collection. The pieces were so alive. The public flocked to see the work that possessed so much talent, sorrow, and beauty.

  But much sooner than anyone could have expected, the popularity faded. People stopped going into Bernadette’s gallery. People started actively avoiding it. They claimed the novelty had worn off. They claimed the work had too many sad stories attached to it. They claimed the pieces were haunted. They claimed a thousand different reasons.

  Because no one would admit that, as hard as you tried, it was impossible to ignore the sounds of muffled screams.

  Alexandra Grunberg is a New York City based author and actress. Her work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Pantheon Magazine, Perihelion Science Fiction, and more. Her story, "Any Ending," won third place in Fiction Vortex's August contest. You can find links to her stories at alexandragrunberg.wordpress.com.

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  Too Much Sleep

  by Brendan Verville; published October 4, 2013

  Linda was over for her weekly visit at my cabin, her pant legs still wet from the long canoe ride, and we were trading ghost stories. Strangely enough, out of the hundreds of conversations we had shared there in my cabin, we had never tried to scare each other as we were, or even touched upon the spiritual realm. We usually just cooked food, talked about nature, listened to music on my transistor radio, or made love. Maybe there was something about that night, like a thickness, without a single breeze to scratch the branches outside, or an animal to grace the well-worn trails. Or maybe it was because the sun had set so quickly, and it was too dark for Linda to travel home. So we curled up on my grandpa’s couch with the lights as dark as the windows, and wondered what we should do.

  "That radio is a dinosaur," Linda said to me. She was right. Even a "grizzly man," as Linda liked to call me, knew that the cinderblock sized contraption sitting on my shelf would be refused by any pawn shop, even if it was given away for free. "Did you know that they make radios now that are—"

  "Hey, that sounds like outside talk," I interrupted playfully. She laughed, but did not persist. She knew it was a lost cause with me. Sometimes she would come over and mention in passing something from the news, or a new technology that interested her, and I would always cut her short. Twelve years ago I had left the world, to distance myself from those distractions, politics, money, technology. I wasn't that old of
a man, only in my late thirties, and Linda was just a little older than me, old enough to understand my strange fascination with the wilderness, and my reluctance toward society.

  The childhood summers at my grandpa’s cabin were some of the happiest memories I still keep, fishing in the lake, hiking up the hills, chasing squirrels up and down trees. He had built the cabin with his own hands, and then later settled there to live a life of simplicity, completely alone, yet content. After my grandpa died twelve years ago, leaving the cabin in my name, I vowed that I would live completely self-reliant in the forest like him, growing my own food, hunting my own meat, and finally rejoining the nature I had been born into as a dandelion seed. If only that cold wind hadn’t stolen me away and dropped me into an even colder world.

  I only kept the radio around for Linda, in case we wanted to listen to some music. Hell, I didn’t even have power. The radio ran on batteries and the lamps in my cabin were oil. Still, she enjoyed visiting my cabin. She felt like she was going back in time whenever she stepped through my door. She was used to it by now. You see, whenever we met, she always crossed the lake to visit me, but I never crossed to visit her. She stopped trying to convince me to visit the town on the other side of the lake. Even though it only had a population of a few hundred people, I considered that town civilization, the same civilization I had given up years ago.

  Linda was my final connection to the outside world, the one guilty pleasure I could not do without, even after all the things I had given up for my life in the wilderness. And although I forbade her from bringing her gadgets and her newspapers into my cabin, I loved to hear her speak.

  That night Linda stared longingly out the window, at the dark trees that appeared as cracks in the wall of the forest. She shivered to herself and I felt the aftershock up my own body.

  "I can start a fire if you’re cold," I told her. I reached over to brush the gray hairs away from her forehead. She looked at me with a set of deep green eyes, which I imagined had once been a stunning olive color in her youth.

  "No, I’m not cold," she said. "I just remembered an old story I once heard. It scared the hell out of me when I was a little girl. Maybe you’ve heard of it, the story of the gaunt man."

  "Doesn’t ring a bell. "

  "It’s an old Japanese folk tale about a tall, spindly man that lives in the woods, disguised as one of the tallest trees. He only shows himself to children as they hike through the woods at night. He follows them home and steals their souls from their bodies as they sleep, and then traps them inside the trees for all eternity."

  "Jesus, that’s pretty grim," I said.

  "The trees at night have always spooked me. I know it’s ridiculous. I think my dad only told me the story so I wouldn’t go outside at night, or else the gaunt man would get me."

  "I know I’ve heard a story like that," I said, trying to clear her mind. "It plays off the belief that when we go to sleep, our spirit leaves our body to wander the earth. One day a man sat down under a tree in the forest to sleep, and he decided to leave his body to explore. When he returned to enter his body, it was missing. A deer came by and told him that a cougar had eaten him. The man’s spirit entered the deer’s body instead, and he lived for many years as an animal in the woods. Then one day his path crossed that of the cougar, and he ran into a lake to escape, but he drowned, or something. I can’t really remember it now."

  "What’s the moral of that story?" Linda asked with a laugh.

  "Just because you can swim as a human doesn’t mean you can swim as a deer," I offered her. "That’s about the only scary story I have."

  Linda tapped an elongated nail against her lip. She rested her head on my shoulder and tucked her legs under our blanket. "I got another. I don’t know where I heard it, but someone once told me that when you die you’re visited by three spirits, who judge your sins and prepare you for the afterlife."

  "Like the ghosts of Christmas past?" I laughed, but she was too consumed in her own thoughts to hear me. "Wait, speaking of ghosts," I said, pushing up from the couch. She watched me with interest as I rooted around in an old bureau and returned with a faded Polaroid picture. I handed it to her and she squinted in the darkness. I brought over a lamp and we looked at it in the halo of light. In the picture, my father and his brother were inside the cabin, standing by the fire and holding the head of a deer up for the camera to see, their trophy from a day of hunting. Standing beside them was a faded image, blurred, yet still crisp enough to make out. I didn’t even need to point out the period attire, the head, shoulder, and the clear facial features for her to see it was the transparent figure of a man. She gasped and looked me in the eye.

  "Is this—"

  "My grandpa," I said. "This picture was taken only days after he died. My dad and his brother came out here one weekend in his memory, and this is what they found. Their father posing in the picture with them."

  "Oh my God! That’s so ... creepy!" she blurted. I almost had to tear the picture out of her hand to return it to the drawer. "Do you still think he’s here?"

  I looked around the living room as if expecting to find my grandpa leaning up against the fireplace. "I don’t know. I sense him sometimes, but that may be because all this stuff was once his, and it still holds his scent ... his energy. If he was still here you’d think he’d say hello some time."

  A crack of lighting lit up the room and we both jumped. We looked at each other with our hands on our hearts, smiling and breathing hard. She hurried to the window and looked outside. Already there was the pitter of pin and needle raindrops on the glass. She cursed and hurried to find her coat.

  "Whoa, I thought you were spending the night," I called after her.

  "I left all the windows open in my house. I didn’t expect it to rain tonight," she said, opening my door. "And we both know when it rains here, it rains."

  I followed her outside with my collar turned up. We strode down the hill together and onto the wooden dock over the lake, now choppy with dark ripples of water. Linda’s canoe bobbed in the surf, tied to a post with a length of rope. The rain was picking up now, and the clouds had covered the moon completely, snuffing out all natural light. We only had the soft haze of the houses on the other side of the lake, where people sat around electric TVs and glowing light bulbs.

  I had a flash of the first day I’d met her, there in the lake, right outside my front lawn. I was swimming and she happened by in her canoe. I remember coming to the surface near her boat, surprising her so much that she dropped her paddle. My face tensed with a smile, but then dropped again.

  I kissed her sadly and she sensed my distress. "Come across with me," she said.

  "Linda, you know I can’t."

  "Come on, I can’t walk home alone, not with all those dark trees. Who will protect me from the gaunt man?" She prodded me with a smile, and that smile was so lovely I swooned into her.

  "I don’t know."

  She nodded her head, the raindrops trickling down the length of her bangs and the wrinkles on her face. She kissed me again and climbed into the canoe. Before she could go, I felt my body duplicate into two separate doubles. My double stepped out of my body as if it were only shrugging off a coat, and stepped into the canoe with Linda. She squealed happily and threw her arms around him. Both of them selected a paddle and set off across the dark lake, which might as well have been an ocean for me, standing on the dock, watching them go. This private island would be the death of me, surely.

  ~~~~~

  A week later I was in the woods behind my cabin in the late afternoon, watching a deer through the telescopic lens of my rifle. I thought about Linda and the last time I had seen her, stepping into her canoe in the rain. I hadn’t seen her since then. More than a week had passed and she had missed our date together. I had waited by the shore of the lake, hoping to catch a glimpse of her canoe, but it never came. What worried me was that she never missed a date. I couldn’t call her because I didn’t have a phone, and I wasn't about to padd
le over to her side. Was she angry with me? Had something happened to her?

  I cursed myself for not getting into that canoe. It hadn’t been the first opportunity I’d passed up. It used to be that my promise to my grandpa was enough of a conviction, the promise to take care of his cabin and live there for as long as I could. At the end of his life he worried so much about his land, and it later became my major fear, a shared burden that was passed down for me to carry. To leave it for a day would be to abandon it, and with the abandonment of the cabin would be the abandonment of my duty. My isolation from society was nothing short of a sacred oath, like something a monk would devote his life to, knowing that it was for some greater good, not yet fully realized. If I was to cross that lake, it would be like undoing all the long years I had proudly carved into those cabin walls. It would be like a smoker disciplining himself for a decade and then suddenly giving into temptation. After that, what is there? I had gone too far to give up now, and that was what killed my grandpa in the end. Once he had disciplined himself to that point of no return, his destiny was already sung, and when he did pass, he died in the upstairs bedroom of his cabin, without a single loved one at his bedside.

  As I held my rifle, I thought of my grandpa, and how he had first taught me to handle it, with the stock comfortably nestled against my shoulder. I sat on the upper bough of a tree with my legs dangling down, listening to the pops and cracks of an animal in motion. Then a deer strode into the clearing ever so carefully, a female doe, older, with a thick pelt and murky eyes. I watched the deer through my sight, counting my heartbeats. I held my breath and applied pressure to the trigger. I thought about the deer head from the ghost picture, and how Linda had responded to it, shaking excitedly like a child.

  The deer looked right up at me and I choked on my breath. It didn’t move. It just stared at me with those dark eyes. I knew that if I stayed completely still it couldn’t sense my presence. Then it spoke to me in a deep and raspy voice.