It was getting harder to make changes to the drawings, especially the later scenes. I tried to draw new scenes of the girl with all manner of ridiculous changes. The girl perusing a convenient armory located next to the living room, with machine guns and knives lining the walls. Four burly, ex-military looking dudes trying to escort her to an armored car.
I even tried drawing the hazmat guy alone, surrounded by a bunch of half-opened boxes labeled “Caution: these snakes hate yellow”. Okay, I didn’t actually expect that last one to work.
In fact, none of them had worked. Drastic changes to the drawings just sort of snapped the connection to what felt real. When I looked at them they were just drawings. They didn’t have that super-realism you got when you looked at the others. I looked at the bedroom scene on the wall, the two people still locked in struggle for the door, and put my hand over the girl, and closed my eyes.
You’re not safe yet.
Then I looked at the hazmat man. No, you’re not safe by a long shot.
God, I needed sleep.
I’d figured out that while huge changes didn’t work, I could make small changes to the drawings. But when I did, I could feel an opposing force, and it was strong as hell. Changing the later scenes at all was more like drawing on myself with a scalpel than drawing on paper with a pencil. So, I settled for making small changes to the early scenes, in hopes that it might make a difference later. I would do little things like changing the names of books on the shelf to:
“Arm Yourself: Or Else”
“Danger in the Summer House”
and
“He Can Be Killed”
I had no idea if that last one was true, or if it even made any sense. Idly, I wondered if things were getting harder to change because events were solidifying, becoming permanent. Like drying ink. What would happen if the ink dried right now? I stared at the bedroom struggle. The outcome wasn’t hard to guess.
There was a knock on the door behind me. Mike stepped in with Chinese takeout in hand.
“Oh my God, Drew. What happened to you?”
I laughed cynically.
“I’ve been busy.” I said, trying to disarm him with a smile.
“Doing what? Drinking bleach? You look like shit.”
“Your concern is noted. Your offer of food even more-so.”
He shook his head, irritated, and dropped the Chinese food on the desk behind me.
“That’s creepier than I remember.” He said, staring at the bedroom scene.
“We’re getting you out of the house, and away from …” he started waving his hand over my drawings and notes strewn across the room.
“All of that.” He stopped to point deliberately at the crazed man forcing his way into a bedroom, to do who knows what to a pretty girl. It dawned on me that this probably didn’t look healthy.
“Tomorrow we’ll take a drive down the coast.” He added.
I thought about driving down the coast in early fall. Mottled gold, orange, and red forest on the left, and sheer cliffs above crashing, foaming waves on the right. We’d borrow Betty’s little convertible so we could smell the cool, salty air. We’d just live.
“Sounds nice.” I said, closing my eyes and leaning back in the chair. My eyes were so heavy. It did sound nice.
“Mike, do you think I’m going crazy?” I asked, not even knowing where that had come from.
He waited a moment, then spoke slowly, taking great care to craft each word.
“I think that you’re passionate, under stress, and a little weird on the best of days.” He smiled to ease the tension a bit. I returned it. It took a special person to love someone like me.
“– and I think that you need to keep journaling. It helped… before, and I think it’s good for you.”
“I’ll write it all down.” I promised.
I took another look at the drawing of the hazmat man. He had a twisted smile now. Was he smiling before? Maybe we could take that drive, sometime after this was all over.
Mike caught the direction of my gaze and frowned. He stepped out of the room and came back with a large frame wrapped in butcher paper. He set it down in front of me.
“Here’s the one Betty had framed. It was the weirdest thing. When I picked it up, the kid behind the counter looked like he wanted to either throw up or slug me, but since he was taking his time deciding I just paid and left.”
I tore the paper off the frame, revealing the drawing she’d returned. Mike stepped around to take a look.
“Hopefully you can fix it quickly and get it back to her…” He trailed off, and we both saw why the kid had been rattled.
“I… I don’t think I can fix it this time.” I said, tears welling in my eyes. I forced myself to take in every detail of my failure.
Aunt Betty had the only drawing chronologically after the bedroom scene. I hadn’t realized it until now. Originally, this was a picture of the girl laying in bed, twirling her hair and looking up at the ceiling. Things had changed. Everything had changed. It turned my stomach to look at it.
The man in the hazmat suit pulled the girl’s body by one foot behind him. Her lifeless arms dragged and her head lulled to the side at an odd angle. Dark red blood matted her beautiful, wavy hair and made it stick the side of her face. The bones of her face were caved in on that side, as if she had been bashed against the floor over, and over. One red eye peeked through the hair, bulging and swelling out of the socket. Her mouth hung open to reveal a ghastly, jack-o-latern smile of broken teeth. The other half of her face was unmarred in awful contrast. The other perfect, dead eye looked directly back at me as she was pulled out of the room.
At the bottom right-hand corner, where I usually sign, the name had been erased. In its place a single word was written in neat, simple letters:
“Mine.”
--
“What is that?” Mike shouted.
Somehow, I didn’t feel like shouting too. I was feeling the most bizzare, unnatural calm. I responded without thinking, slow and trancelike, as if the answer had been given to me from some universal teleprompter.
“Nemesis.” “Ruiner.” “Defiler of beauty.”
“It wants everything beautiful for itself, and if it can’t have it, it destroys it.”
And as I spoke, I knew that this had never been some grand battle between good and evil. I was watching a slow, meticulous, inevitable scouring of everything wonderful and meaningful from our world. The man in yellow wasn’t a man. It was the smallest manifestation of will from something very powerful, and very, very old. To say it was a conscious effort from The Defiler would be a lie. It was merely a momentary consideration from a piece, of a piece, of a piece, of a million pieces of a mind deliberately shattered to accomplish a single goal. It was just a chess move by one of countless, decrepit, twitching fingers on a chess board that stretched to the horizon in every direction.
And yet, as insignificant as the man in yellow was compared to the whole, I could no more stand against him than I could hold back the tide with my arms. I was hit with the vision of him, or one of the trillions like him, dragging the girl into an underground ocean of other defiled, beautiful things. Her crushed, dessicated corpse churning under a mountain of dust and gore. Pushed by towering, endless waves of cracked and broken things as a planet’s worth of once pretty things is shoved into The Defiler’s maw every, single, blink of the the eye.
I shook my head to clear the unnatural vision.
“Fuck me” I whispered hoarsely.
Warm tears finally came unbidden down my cheeks, and I knew it was over. I couldn’t believe it was over. Seriously, was crying all I could do?
What was even saving? A drawing?
No. Not just a drawing. It was Art, god dammit. More importantly it was my Art. The only thing of beauty I’ve ever made with my own hands.
What was I saving? Something beautiful, from something vile. That was all that really mattered. My throat went dry. I put my hand over the girl in the drawing.
I’m so sorry that I wasn’t strong enough to save you.
It was over…
I slid my hand over just a little and then cocked my head.
What if…
I looked intensely at the spot where my hand had been. It was over, unless… Unless I did something unexpected.
Just before the ink dried.
I smiled. “Don’t stay up. I’ve got one more drawing to do.”
Time to do something really stupid.
--
(I hope I feel silly and erase this last bit tomorrow, but just in case.)
You might have to take that drive without me, buddy. Love ya, Mike.
-Drew
--
This is Mike again.
That was Drew’s last journal entry, and that night was the last time I saw Drew alive.
I found him the next day on the drawing room floor. It looked like a bomb had gone off. There was blood everywhere. Somehow he had thought to cover up his drawings with a cloth.
It took almost 24 hours for someone to carry his body away. Almost 48 hours later his cause of death was ruled “cardiac arrest”. My response got me asked to leave the police station immediately, otherwise I was told I could spend the night. In other words, they had no idea what happened and didn’t want to deal with it or with me. The whole thing stunk of non-chalance and incompetence. I pressed the coroner’s office hard for information. Aunt Betty had pressed them even harder and gotten a real autopsy done. Want to know what they had to say?
“I’m sorry for your loss. This is just one of those things.”
One of those things where the man you love dies in a fountain of his own blood, after he loses his mind doing the only thing he ever loved.
Yeah. I understood. I was hoping they would understand why their tires all had holes in them. Interestingly, I found on the way out that they were not only already all flat, but a few of the cars had choice words carved into the paint. Aunt Betty, who reassured me that she would always be “Aunt” to me, seemed eager for me to hurry into her car and out of the lot.
It’s been months now and it seemed the right time to share Drew’s work, and his demons. Really, they were one in the same.
I sold off all the drawings except two. It’s been cathartic for me. I moved into a smaller place too. I have Drew’s last two remaining drawings framed side-by-side above my fireplace mantle. Visitors often stop to stare, and inevitably remark on how dark the scenes are, and how lifelike they seem.
The drawing on the left shows the girl bracing a bedroom door against a man in a yellow hazmat suit. She has an expression of mixed surprise and terror. She is looking down and to the right at a kitchen knife laying conveniently on the floor next to her.
The drawing on the right shows the same bedroom, but it’s dimly lit, and completely empty except the furniture. The bedroom door has been left wide open, exposing an empty hallway. There is blood all over the floor.
One long, red smear runs from center of the room all the way to a closet just at the edge of the frame. Another, smaller trail of blood leads out of the bedroom and into the hall.
If you look very closely, you can just barely see something hanging out of the partially opened closet door. A single, limp, yellow arm. And just below that, once again present, in a proud flourishing script, is the name of the Artist.
“By Drew Mitchem”.