The Painted Room Page 8

Chapter 5

  The Artist's Story

  The room was freezing. The food was disgusting. The awkward quiet was almost unbearable. May's only solace was that Carlisle hadn't touched anything on his plate, and he was working on his third glass of wine. Hopefully, if he drank enough, they might somehow manage to get the door key from him.

  She only hoped he was as dumb as he looked.

  "I'm sorry it isn't much," Carlisle apologized about the food. "This room is always cold, too. I don't use it often—never actually."

  Getting no response again, he sat back suddenly, took in a loud breath and let it out in an irritated sigh. He rubbed his forehead with the back of his thumb in a gesture of frustration. His patina of Victorian gentility was proving to be no match for his own native curiosity.

  His loud voice cut into the silence, startling the both of them. "Could I ask how you girls got here?" he said in a tone that demanded an answer.

  "W—Well ... " said Sheila, dodging a deadly look from May, "we were in my living room standing in front of your painting of this place—you know, the castle here and—I don't know. May, what would you say? It like, sucked us in?"

  "I suppose you could say that," May responded flatly, glaring at her.

  "I guess that's the right word," mused Sheila, avoiding May's fixed gaze.

  "You got sucked into a painting?" said Carlisle.

  Sheila nodded delicately.

  "One of my paintings?" He touched himself lightly on his chest.

  "Yes," said Sheila, nodding again. "Your painting. It like ... came alive or something, and the wind started howling and the next thing I knew I was hanging onto the frame."

  Carlisle took a sip of wine and drew down his thick eyebrows.

  "May here grabbed my hands to pull me back into the living room, and then it like, just sucked us both in."

  "And I would have got you, too, if you hadn't let go of the edge like that," May said to Sheila, then finished to Carlisle, "I can tell you that was a nasty surprise!"

  There was silence as his eyes traced a path from May to Sheila, then settled on his wine glass. He scratched his scraggly chin, looking even more dumbfounded than he usually looked.

  May realized that Carlisle didn't believe them. Well, why should he? May could hardly believe the story herself now, and it had happened to her. It hadn't occurred to her that he might not know where he was. She said, "Where in the hell did you think you were?"

  He pursed his lips as he poured another glass of wine. This was his fourth glass by her count, and he must have drunk nearly the whole bottle now. But when she looked at the decanter in his hand, it was still full.

  She had only been concentrating on keeping track of the glasses he was pouring himself. After the first, she hadn't even looked at the bottle, so she hadn't noticed that it wasn't emptying.

  The other realization that hit her was that Carlisle was still as sober as a Baptist on Communion Sunday.

  "Where did I think I was?" he repeated with a wry smile as he contemplated the contents of his untouched plate. After a few moments he said to the plate, "Dead, I suppose. I guess you could say I thought I was dead. The truth of it is, Miss Taylor, you are not so far from wrong—I thought I was in hell."

  "Then how did you get here?" May asked.

  At the question, he looked up at her with his eyes focused on some internal sequence of events. "Let me think. How did I get here? Well, I recall I was working in my art studio. I had just finished a painting of this place." There was disgust in his voice as he gestured vaguely with his hand around the room. "I don't even know why I painted it. I remember thinking at the time, how my wife never liked it here." He picked up his wine glass and added, "She hated it really. She preferred the tiny cottage we lived in when we first got married."

  Looking at his left hand, May noticed he wasn't wearing a wedding band. All at once, she was aware of a sudden silence in the room and glanced up to find his black eyes directly on hers.

  "The late Mrs. Carlisle, that is," he said in a tone that registered her intrusion.

  May's thoughts trailed back to the painting of Carlisle's wife. She had hardly glanced at it, but she now remembered she had seen a small white house in the background. There had been a serenity to that painting as though Cora Carlisle had been happy there. Moving her here from that sunny, warm place to this damp, freezing castle was as good as a death sentence for a woman with tuberculosis. Any fool would have known that.

  By the look of him, this was an idea she felt certain had occurred to Carlisle as well.

  May was leaned back in, what she had decided, was the most uncomfortable chair she had ever sat in. She poked a few beans with her fork and glanced at Sheila who looked for all the world like she had just found a lost puppy.

  Carlisle had stopped talking and gazed into his wine in a brooding fashion, watching the dark liquid as he swirled it around the bottom of his glass.

  May left off prodding her beans and decided to prod Carlisle instead. "Go on. So what happened next?" she said loud enough to stir him from his trance.

  Her voice jarred him awake. "I'm sorry, where was I?"

  "You had just finished the painting of the castle," prompted Sheila.

  "Thank you, Miss Hazelton. That's right, I remember now. Next I went to the window. I'd heard the casement bang. There was a storm out at sea and the wind had been wailing for hours. In all honesty, I had been meaning to fix that window clasp for ages but ..." There was a sheepish look as he shrugged an explanation. "Anyhow, I can only think that the casement must have blown in and struck me, because after that I woke up on the castle grounds by the gate with one very enormous egg on my head and the worst headache I've ever had in my life."

  Watching him pour himself another glass of wine, May snorted and said, "I'll bet it was a real doozy then."

  He slid her a look out of the corner of his eye as he replaced the crystal stopper on the wine decanter. "Well, Miss Taylor, yes. As a matter of fact it was a—what did you call it?—a real doozy." He rolled the word around in his mouth and smiled as though he liked the sound of it.

  "You got knocked out?" she said more seriously.

  "Yes, I think so."

  "You must have stumbled back into the painting. Is that possible?"

  He considered. "I suppose I could have; it was just behind me."

  "Then what happened?"

  "Well, at first I couldn't understand how I could have wandered so far from the house. I thought maybe the bump on my head had given me ... uh, given me ... " He searched for a word and gave up with a small shake of his head. "I thought it had made me forget things. But then, when—"

  "Amnesia?" interrupted May.

  "Excuse me, Miss Taylor?"

  "Amnesia. You mean you thought you had amnesia."

  "Right. Yes, that's it. Thank you, Miss Taylor. Anyhow ... " His voice trailed off. He had lost his train of thought again.

  "You had just got a bump on your head!" said May, annoyed.

  "Right, right. Thank you, that's right. Anyhow, when I got back to the castle, at first, everything seemed normal, but then I began to notice that little things weren't quite right. Some things had moved from one room to another, for instance; other items were gone altogether. My entire art studio is simply gutted. There's nothing left there now. It's just empty." He swirled the wine in his glass again, then stopped abruptly. A little of the liquid swished out and formed a bright red puddle in the center of his plate.

  He leaned into the table and hushed his tone. "Even worse, there's more that doesn't make sense. The pantry is always full no matter how much I take from it and, as you've already noticed, Miss Taylor, the bottles never drain no matter how much I drink."

  May bristled. Was she that transparent?

  He added with a shudder, "And it's horrible stuff, too." He pointed with his thumb to the hearth. "Even the firewood never diminishes."

  May looked at the stack of firewood behind him. Carlisle had placed several lo
gs on the fire since their arrival and yet the amount of firewood next to the hearth was exactly the same.

  "And there's absolutely no way out. At least none that I've found. I haven't even bothered to look of late. I finally decided that the knock on my head must have killed me and here I was in hell."

  "You've been here all by yourself, Mr. Carlisle? No one here at all?" inquired Sheila.

  "Not a soul, Miss Hazelton."

  "For how long?"

  "I don't really know anymore. I've lost track. Several years? I couldn't say." He took up the glass in his hand and tossed back the rest of his wine. "Years anyway. Two? I don't know—maybe three." He said this as if it were a matter of small consequence which May highly doubted if it were true.

  Carlisle had the look of someone who had spent too long with only his own uninterrupted black thoughts to accompany him. Regardless of his attempt at a matter-of-fact manner, his depression clung to him like a gray veil.

  "But now here you girls are. Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased, but I'm also at a loss. You were sucked into a painting of mine, you say?" He gave a small, crooked smile.

  May felt that the dining room had become darker somehow. Maybe the fire was fading or maybe Carlisle was dragging them into his bottomless well of guilt and self-loathing that had probably caused the vortex into this God-forsaken nightmare in the first place.

  She dropped her fork as loudly as she could into her plate and pushed her meal away. "Well, I can't vouch for you, but I'm sure I'm not dead. And I don't think I've done anything awful enough to go to hell for—especially not your private hell. Besides—" May thrust her hand into her back pocket and pulled out the newspaper clipping, "they never found your body." She crumpled up the paper and threw it at him. It hit him in the chest and bounced down onto the table.

  Stunned, Carlisle only stared down at the wad of paper by his plate. May couldn't decide whether he was shocked by her rudeness or simply unwilling, or unable, to explore the contents inside.

  She finally decided it was both. She picked up the paper then flattened it out on the table. In an elaborate gesture, she moved his plate to the side and slid the news article in front of him.

  He cleared his throat and murmured, "Thank you, Miss Taylor," as he began scanning the page. He pointed one long pale finger at the dateline and not looking up, he said very quietly, "And can I take it that's the—that's the year you—two thousand and—"

  "That's right," said May.

  Still looking at the paper, he nodded and said, "And I didn't think anything could surprise me anymore. At least now I know why you're both dressed that way." Without looking up, he said in a distracted manner, "I'm sorry. I don't mean to offend."

  He picked up the paper, squinted at it, then shifted back in his chair to catch the gleam of the fire behind him. With his thumb against his jaw, he rubbed the knuckle of his index finger against his lips.

  May watched his face. For a man who was reading his own obituary, he was taking it surprisingly well.

  Darkness had fallen outside in the space of time they had listened to their host's story. From the corner of her eye, May caught a flash of light outside the window and less than a second later an earsplitting crack of thunder sounded. She and Sheila both looked at one another.

  Folding the newspaper article, Carlisle said, "I'll return this to you in the morning, Miss Taylor."

  "The—ah—morning?" stuttered May. "I don't think so. Thank you for the simply delicious food and sparkling conversation and all, but we really need to get going."

  Through the window panes, an instant shock of blinding white light took a picture of them in the oversized, underused room. May blinked as her eyes readjusted to the darkness again.

  "You're not going anywhere tonight," said Carlisle. "Not in this weather."

  A long low rumble of thunder shook the castle to its foundation.

  Sheila sent May a queasy half smile and shrugged.