The Painting (2 page)

He opened the letters and felt incredibly guilty for doing so. Even though it was the mail of a dead woman, there was still that fear in the back of his mind that, at any moment, she could just walk on in through that door and lambast him for sitting in her chair. His gran used to tell him that mail was a window to a person’s soul—a part deep within that nobody ever got the chance to truly see but the addressee.

Donny thought mail was just an unnecessary inconvenience.

Unpaid bill after unpaid bill, with the occasional eviction notice every four or five letters. But mostly bills: £47 for electricity, then another £68 for gas. One would think the electricity and gas companies would be enlightened as to the goings-on round this place. As a matter of fact, it was a wonder anybody found Manny Bates’ body at all. Whoever had could’ve finished the job at least. Instead, it seemed they were more worried about leaving the house to do its own thing.

Unpaid bill after unpaid bill. Poor Manny Bates was building up a debt even whilst buried in the ground. Maybe that afterlife answerphone wasn’t such a smart idea after all.

Donny leaned back in the wooden chair and looked around the kitchen. It was coated in dust, the wallpaper greying from years of ill attention. A glimmer of sunlight attempted to peek its way through the window but the grime coating the glass held it back.
Gonna struggle to write in this shithole.
Donny stood up from the chair and walked across the dirty white and black tiled floor. He reached over the sink, which was laced with thick brown grime, and rubbed the sleeve of his fleece against the window, making way for the light to continue.
Better.

He walked back over to his bags on the table and picked them up. If he was staying for a few days, he needed to know the sort of place he’d be sleeping in. He’d never been good away from home, right from an early age. It didn’t help that Sara and he had been having intercourse practically twice a night for the last few weeks. She wanted a kid; he just wanted his kicks.

A heap of dust fell from the loose lightbulb as he pressed the switch in the hallway.
Of course—no electricity.
Good job he’d brought along a torch, not that he was planning to venture far during the night anyway. If there was one thing he’d learned from horror films, it was to stay damn well put when he heard a noise outside his room or a creaking floorboard.

He walked up the stairs, the carpet a faded green, and round the corner towards the upper floor. The corridor was narrow, with two doors on the left and one at the end. He reached for the one on the left and tried to open it—no use, locked shut. He stepped over towards the other doors and poked his head into the next one—inside, something that resembled a bathroom. The once gleaming white of the room was a greying mess, the lid of the toilet coated in brown grime and the bath filled with sawdust.
Didn’t anybody ever clean up in here?
To look at it, one would think Manny Bates had died three years ago, not six months. Then again, the woman who had lived here before Manny Bates decided to squat had died quite some time ago. She didn’t have any surviving family—no one to clean it up.

By the corner of the bath, a shriveled plant curled at the leaves, giving up in its attempts to salvage one final glimpse of light. Donny shook his head and headed on to the other door.

For its purposes, the bathroom would be fine.

As he stepped into the bedroom, he held his breath. Judging by the state of the rest of the house, the bedroom would be little to sing home about. To his surprise, it was in relatively sound condition. The red bed sheets were made—a little dusty, but folded suitably—and the wallpaper had much more life than the rest of the house’s decor. He tossed his bag to one side and stretched out on the bed. On the right hand side of the room, the last of the day’s light peered in through a large balcony-esque window and, in front of him, a blank, cream wall stared back.

Better get to work.

He sighed as he stepped up from the bed and headed back downstairs, a smile on his face at the relatively well-kept condition of the bedroom. At least he wouldn’t have to sleep in such a shithole for the next few days. He could even give Sara a call and see if she fancied joining him for…

No. He needed to work. He was here to work. His publishers were already on his back after the last fiasco.
We’ll give you ten more weeks,
they’d told him. Ten weeks—five of which had passed—and he still had sweet nothing. So much for the
new Stephen King
.

He sat down at the kitchen table and pulled his writing pad out of his pocket. Despite the rise of technology, he’d always been a traditionalist in the writing sense. Truth was, he hated computers and they hated him. When they weren’t deleting his work, they were freezing when he was sending off important emails. Sara always told him he gave off a ‘negative energy’ but he wasn’t having any of that new-age bullshit. No—all he needed was his pad and his pen. That’s all a writer ever needed.

He pulled the chair under the table and scratched the ball of the pen against the paper—nothing.

Maybe it wasn’t only technology that had it in for him after all.

He tossed the pen to one side, hearing the clinking of glass as it collided with something. He looked down at where it hit and saw the corner of it staring back at him.

He could have stayed in that chair. He could have pulled another pen out of his pocket and started writing, but something made him stand up. Something compelled him to stand up and walk over to that rectangular object propped up against the wall.

He pulled the green cover aside to see what hid behind. When he did, his eyes widened.

It was a beautiful painting. About four feet wide and one foot tall, free from the dust that coated the rest of the kitchen. Donny pulled it from its green plastic cover and slid it across the floor so it was fully in view, being careful not to scratch the edges. He rubbed his finger across the glass panel, a speck of ink where the pen had hit it. On the painting, a forest, autumnal leaves falling from a perfectly aligned row of trees and towards the ground. Yellowing grass built up to the trees—a perfect colour compliment. In the foreground, some sort of a fence. The attention to detail was crisp and immaculate. He could see a depth behind the row of six trees, the forest preparing to reveal itself as it shed its armour of leaves. He looked at the bottom corner for a name or a date—nothing. Shame—he’d always enjoyed collecting art, especially landscape work. He had no time for any of this abstract stuff. Although he was an artist of sorts himself, it helped when things had real clear meaning.

He covered the painting and stood up, walking back over to the table. He’d take it upstairs later—something to look at in the bedroom. It wasn’t such a bad room but it would benefit from a bit of a personality injection. If he was going to live here, he needed something to look at, and with the internet and Sara out of the question, women would have to be put on a temporary hold.

He sat at the table and pulled a spare pen out of his pocket. As he scribbled on the top corner of the pad, a rush of jet-black ink seeped onto the page. At least this one worked. He looked at his watch. It was ten past five. Write until seven, grab a bite to eat, then write some more.
Focus, focus.

In the top corner, he jotted down his project note:
Manny Bates, 2011.
Then, he opened the pad and wrote.

Plan: woman goes mad in old house.

Would it be better if he took another look around and got a feel for the place before writing about it?

No. Character, motivation, three-act arc—that’s all he needed.

He put pen to paper and let the words flow.

By seven PM, he’d barely reached the one-page mark.

He held his head in his hands and stretched across the table. The top quarter of the page was filled with words—ideas, mostly abstract—but nothing concrete. He just couldn’t seem to capture that one idea that he needed to progress. When he was younger, he used to be able to pull an idea out of thin air and map out entire storylines in his head. Now, his brain was muddled, completely drowned out by the white noise of bills he had to pay and social commitments he had to carry out.

It’d be much better if you just got a normal job like the rest of the kids,
Mum used to tell him.
Just get a nice job, a nice girl, and you can be happy.

He couldn’t be happy, not now he had this chance. Publishers didn’t come looking for new talent every day. He had an opportunity to make it big. His first book—he could put that behind him and focus on the future.

He just needed that one idea. One idea.

He rubbed his eyes and looked around the kitchen. The room was gloomy as the sun descended, stacked plates coated in cobwebs barely visible over by the sink. The loosely attached window rattled as the wind pushed it against the frame, tap-tap-tapping repeatedly.
Great—
something to keep him awake at night. He sighed and scooped his notepad up, slipping it into his coat pocket, and walking over to the kitchen door.

He’d completely forgotten about the painting until he saw it resting on its side.

He reached down for it and picked it up by the string at the back, being careful not to snap it. It was impossible to imagine just how long it had been down here, fatiguing away with nobody to admire it. It was a shame how art became irrelevant. Not the Da Vincis or Picassos of the world—they were timeless—but the art that belonged to old women and abandoned office blocks. What often looked like a mere visual distraction was something quite beautiful. He eased it under his arm and carried it up the creaking staircase, squinting to find his way.

When he stepped into the bedroom, he turned back to look down the corridor. A cloud of dust had crept its way up the stairs behind him, rising like a spectre. Sara would’ve hated that. She was obsessed with the idea of the supernatural. Even the suggestion of a ghost in their flat would be enough for her to pack her bags and move out. He missed her, but it was a good job she wasn’t here.

He shut the screeching wooden door and turned back into the room, the comfort of his surroundings resembling a safe room on a video game. He’d eat, rest, and then see what he could come up with. But first, he’d put the painting up. Sometimes, staring at art was a great inspiration. Not the sort of art with character—Donny always found that somewhat forced—but landscape art and mood art.
A mood writer.
Not a bad label.

He stepped over to the wall at the foot of his bed and noticed a metal nail sticking out. The wallpaper underneath had curled with the disturbance, a crack working its way down to the patterned, red carpet below. He lifted the painting onto the nail and supported it, being sure that it didn’t bring the wall crashing to the floor with it. The last thing he needed right now was a caved-in wall—now that would affect the ambience somewhat. He was already breaking some laws by being here, but it was only for a few days so it didn’t really matter. Anyway, nobody came down here. He was safe.

He walked back towards his bed and brushed his hands. The painting looked right at home on the wall. In the path of the torch he’d brought with him, the orange autumn leaves glowed as they fell from the row of trees towards the ground. There was a vibrancy to the painting; a certain realism about the green-grey sky. Pity he couldn’t find the name of the artist. Maybe he’d take it back with him and have it inspected.

But for now, he only had one thing on his mind—Walkers Crisps.

After eating five bags and a prawn cocktail tang lingering in the back of his throat, he was suitably relieved of his hunger.

Sara had packed him twenty bags, along with eight bottles of Evian and three sandwiches.
Make sure you eat the sandwiches first or they’ll be off in a few days,
she’d told him. That was the intention, but sometimes crisps were just so damn appealing.

He leaned back against the pillow of the bed and stared up at the ceiling. He had that niggling voice in the back of his head, that sense of inevitability gnawing away inside.
You’re not going to get anything written tonight.
Was that such a bad thing? Maybe he could just spend tonight settling in; close his eyes and see what he came up with.

Woman goes insane after losing a child.

No—covered a million times. Too safe.

Woman goes insane after murdering child.

Wait—this was supposed to be his breakthrough book. He needed something that would resonate, not something that would scare readers off. He needed something golden.

He held his breath as fragments of ideas slipped into his mind then sighed as they flew away. He could get up early and attempt to come up with something in the morning.

He reached over to flick the switch of his heavyweight torch.

The last thing he saw before the room was swallowed with darkness was the six trees in the painting, shedding their dead leaves.

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

Tapping at the window. One, two, three.

Their eyes on his skin and dripping across his flesh.

Tap, tap, tap.

He shot up, gasping for air in the pitch black. He fumbled around for the torch. When his shaking hands found it, he flicked it on and leaned forward.
Just another nightmare. Deep breaths—stay calm
. He wiped the sweat from his head and checked the clock on his phone: 2:13 AM.
Shit
. He’d only been sleeping for a few hours. He had the whole night ahead of him yet. Nightmares were something he’d always suffered with right from an early age. His dad used to tell him they were a gateway to a
‘world of infinite stories’
.

Donny just thought they were fucking terrifying.

He stood up and headed towards the bathroom, taking the torch with him. He could hear the wind outside and the tapping of the kitchen window against the window ledge. Somewhere in the house, the slight creaking of a door as the foundation was battered by the breeze.
Welcome to the Ritz.

He pushed the bathroom door open, dust glowing in the aim of the torchlight. He tried to keep his eyes off the rest of the corridor and clenched his jaw as he stepped into the bathroom, keeping the door ajar. As he walked over to the toilet, the coldness of stagnant water seeped through his socks and between his toes. This place really could do with a cleanup.