Ghosts didn’t scare me. Neither did vampires or werewolves. I could salt and burn restless spirits, and shoot or slice the others. I’d even bagged a were-squonk, a zombie, and a troll, plus the marsh monster. All in a day’s work.
Events that required dress slacks and a tie terrified me. Even more so if they required a jacket. Wedding receptions generally assumed civilized dress. Which meant I was shit out of luck.
I glanced in the mirror and figured I cleaned up well, although I still looked like I’d been in a bar fight. One eye had bruised into a not-quite shiner, my split lip had stopped bleeding but still looked puffy, and my hands looked like I’d dug myself out of a grave.
My friends wouldn’t have cared. But they weren’t going to be at the reception. My niece Nikki had gotten married earlier today, and tonight was the party.
Sean’s daughter. My dead brother. With the wife who hated my guts for living when her husband died. Like I didn’t have enough survivor guilt as it was. Amy refused to have me at the ceremony, but Nikki put her foot down about the reception. Which meant she was every inch my brother’s girl.
So, for the second time today, I headed into battle. I grabbed the present I’d left by the door to remind me to go. The store wrapped it much better than I could have managed. Blair and Chiara picked it out and assured me Nikki would love it. Right now, I couldn’t even remember what the gift was. That didn’t matter. Nikki wanted her Uncle Mark to share her special day, and so I would, and the devil take the hindmost.
I even ran the truck through the car wash. Amy would find a million reasons to fault my continued existence, and I didn’t want to give her any ammunition. Hell, I didn’t want to fight over who missed Sean more, although I’d been his brother longer than she’d been his wife. I heard him scream when the wendigo tore him apart, after the creature had tossed me into a tree and knocked me senseless. And after I’d lit the monster up with my flare gun, too little too late, I’d held Sean while he died, right next to the cooling corpses of my dad, uncle, and cousin. I loved him, and I mourned him, and I’d miss him forever. And if there was ever a competition I didn’t want to win, it was this one.
The parking lot at the Polish Club in Sharon was already mostly full when I eased the truck into a space. I adjusted my tie, checked myself in the rear-view mirror, and then grabbed my jacket and gift. My stomach clenched like it always did when I went to face my worst nightmares, and I felt naked without my gun. But my weapons wouldn’t do me any good here, so I’d just have to rely on my natural wit and charm.
In other words, I was totally fucked.
The party had already started, and I slipped in the back, handing off my gift to a waiting attendant and giving her my name so I could get the right “hello, my name is” tag. I lingered in the back, not quite sure where to go.
After Sean and the others died, people who had been part of our friend group for years drifted away and never came back, as if they could catch death cooties from me. Some stayed, but many others didn’t come around anymore. When Lara left me, that peeled away still more of my social circle. Now, I’d settled in with a core pack of people I could trust to have my back and take me for all I was worth at poker. But for a few years, when I needed my family, it had been rough.
“Uncle Mark!” Nikki’s squeal sounded just the way I remembered from tickle-fests and bedtime stories. She made a beautiful bride, all grown up, no longer the sullen, grieving schoolgirl who had to bury her father. Sean had been seventeen when he’d married Amy. Nikki had just turned seventeen herself. I felt ancient.
I grinned from ear to ear and swept her up into my arms, ignoring my protesting ribs that might have been cracked from the landslide. “You look fantastic, Pumpkin,” I said, kissing her on the cheek. She took my hand and led me into the fray, straight toward a young man in a tuxedo with a gobsmacked look on his face.
“Uncle Mark, this is Trey. Trey, this is my Uncle Mark.”
Trey had a deer-in-the-headlights look I remembered from my own wedding. I took his hand and shook it for both of us. “Nice to meet you, Trey. You’ve got a real special girl here, hope you know that.”
Trey managed a slightly incoherent answer, which I took to be affirmative. Before I had to make conversation, Nikki dragged me across the dance floor to greet a few elderly great-aunts whom I barely remembered. My mom had passed on by the time we went on the hunt, and Uncle Christoph was divorced. Greg, my cousin, had been dating someone, but they hadn’t gotten engaged yet. I’d still been with Lara. And Sean had Amy and Nikki. Since Dad didn’t have any other siblings and Mom was an only child, there wasn’t much-extended family. Greg’s sister had never stayed close. I’d just had Amy and Lara, and then even that went to hell.
“I’m so glad you came, Uncle Mark,” Nikki said, tugging me in yet another direction. “I miss you. And I’m sorry about Mom. She’s…Mom.”
“I understand.”
“I wish Dad could have been here,” Nikki said, and her smile looked a little watery.
I hugged her close and kissed the top of her head. “Me, too, kiddo. Me, too.”
Nikki pointed me to my assigned table for dinner, with a group of people I didn’t know but which was fortunately out of Amy’s blast zone. I’d glimpsed her a couple of times in the crowd and wondered if Nikki’s sudden need to play tour guide had been an attempt to forestall an ugly showdown. I’d already resigned myself to taking whatever Amy dished out so as not to spoil Nikki’s special day, and I hoped like hell Amy could put her grief aside long enough to do the same.
Over on the far side of the reception area, a DJ started setting up for dancing after dinner. I really hoped I didn’t have to do the Chicken Dance, but I’m pretty sure you can’t get issued a marriage license in Northwestern PA without it.
“Are you the guy who owns the auto body garage out near Atlantic?” My tablemate was an older gentleman with gray hair who looked wealthy and distinguished in a dark suit and power tie. His place card said “Ted Collins.”
“That’s me.”
“The ghost hunter?”
I resisted the urge to tug at my tie. People’s opinions tended to split into two camps when my other profession came up. Either they wanted to talk all about the shows they’d seen on TV or the ghost tour they’d done on their vacation, or they launched into a rant about how there was no such thing as ghosts. And in both cases, it left me struggling not to be a total asshole. So I smiled and hoped my eye didn’t twitch.
“Yes.”
To my surprise, Ted slid a business card to me. “I run an auction business out on Route 19, and we have a problem that I think is in your wheelhouse.”
“Tell me about it.” Talking shop meant I didn’t have to strain for chit-chat.
The other people at our table were engaged in their own conversations, including Ted’s wife. He leaned a little closer and dropped his voice. “We got in a new shipment for a big estate sale. Some doctor up in Meadville. Most of the stuff is pretty normal, but there’s a painting that has me freaked out.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What’s the painting of?”
Ted shook his head. “The painting shows people sitting in the lobby of a grand hotel. It’s nicely done in oils, although I’ve never heard of the artist. But I swear the painting is alive.”
That got my attention. “Alive?”
“An object from one of the other collections will go missing—something distinctive, one of a kind—and the next time I look at the lobby painting, the missing item is somewhere in the picture, and it wasn’t beforehand. Twice now, my staff has sworn they’ve seen a stranger milling about one of the rooms where no one should be, but when we go to look, there’s no one there. Both times, they recognized someone in the painting as being the person they’d seen.”
“Maybe they need more time off,” I suggested.
“Then just yesterday, I noticed a new person in the scene. Someone who wasn’t there before. It’s the old man who owned the painting, the one who died. Now he’s in the picture.”
Okay, shit just got real. “That’s…very interesting.” My mind raced. “Can you tell me the name of the painter?”
“Thomas Arhawk. My staff researched his work, for the auction catalog and the appraisal. He isn’t well known. The painting is nicely done, but hardly a Rembrandt.” Ted wrote the artist’s name on the back of his business card. “Maybe you’ll see something if you look into him that we didn’t.”
If Arhawk was a dark witch or had made a deal with the devil, it wasn’t likely to be on his web page, but I’d turn it over to Chiara and see what her online ninja tricks could come up with. “I’m very interested.”
“Please, call me,” Ted said. “I need your help, and I can pay your fee.”
I pocketed the card, surprised and intrigued. Ted looked more like a banker than an auctioneer, and not the kind to believe in ghosts or ask for help. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I promised. “How do you know Nikki?”
Ted smiled, and all of a sudden looked much friendlier. “She worked at the auction over the summers. One of the best employees I ever had. Happy she’s going on to bigger things, but sorry to lose her.” He glanced at my name card. “Family?”
“Her uncle.” I could almost see the wheels turning in his mind and figured he remembered the news stories about the hunt. To my eternal gratitude, he didn’t bring it up.
I found myself wishing I’d brought Sara with me. We weren’t really a couple. Not yet, maybe never. But for the first time since Lara walked out, I’d found someone I enjoyed spending time with. She ran a bed and breakfast out near Kane, but my work took me through those parts fairly often, and I’ll admit to taking a few detours to provide excuses to stop in. She was widowed, I was divorced, and we both were cautious. Six months had passed, and we were still going out. Right now, I missed her like crazy.
We made it through dinner and were heading up to the dessert buffet before Amy cornered me.
“I thought you’d have the good sense not to come,” she hissed.
“Nikki wanted me here. So I’m here.”
“Nikki wouldn’t have asked you if she knew the truth. Sean’s dead because of you.”
I glanced around, hoping no one else was listening, and tried to nudge Amy away from the cake. “Sean’s dead because a wild creature killed him. I wish I’d been faster with the flare gun, but I’d just had my head cracked open against a tree. God, Amy, I’d give anything for a do-over. But it doesn’t work like that.”
“People talk about you,” she spat. “They say you’re crazy, hunting ‘monsters.’” She didn’t need to put the word in air quotes. Her scathing tone did the job quite well. “Maybe you did something with all your mumbo-jumbo that called that thing, that creature that killed them. You brought this down on them.”
I took a deep breath and willed my fists to unclench at my sides. Pointing out to Amy that I didn’t start hunting monsters until after the tragedy wasn’t likely to break through the story she’d told herself. She needed a bad guy, someone to blame, and since the wendigo had gone up in flames and I survived, I got to be the whipping boy. “Please Amy, not here. Not today. For Nikki.”
“You probably made some kind of deal with the devil.” Amy’s expression showed her contempt. “All that occult stuff you’re into, witchcraft, satanic cults—”
“None of that’s true.” I didn’t mention that one of my monster hunting partners was a priest. Nothing at this point was going to change her mind.
“Oh, God. Did you come to put some kind of hex on Nikki? Are you going to take her away from me like you took Sean?”
Amy’s voice rose, and I saw Nikki give me a look from the head table, trying to figure out what was going on.
“No hex, Amy. I’d never harm Nikki, or you—or Sean. Please, don’t spoil Nikki’s party. I’ll go.”
“Damn you to hell, Mark Wojcik. I hope you burn for what you’ve done.”
I kept on walking. Everyone heard Amy’s last salvo, and I knew they’d turned to look. I kept my face blank and made a beeline to the door. Nikki actually ran to intercept me, hiking her big skirt up to her knees.
“Uncle Mark—”
I cupped her face gently and leaned down to kiss her forehead. “It’s okay, kiddo. Your mom’s just tense with all the wedding stuff. Thanks for the invite. Hope you like the present. And call me sometime. I’ll drive over, and we can do lunch.”
Nikki stretched on tiptoe to kiss my cheek. “Whatever she said, I don’t believe it,” she whispered. “Love you.”
“Love you, too, Nikki,” I said. “Now go dance with your husband.” And with that, I headed out the door and got in my truck, with a long quiet drive in front of me.
I spent some extra time scratching Demon’s ears when I got home and took him for a bit of a walk around the yard, as I tried to let go of Amy’s words. Back in the day, back before, she and Sean and Lara and I had been tight. We got together every few weeks, babysat Nikki so Sean and Amy could go out, and went on vacations together. Then it all went to hell, just another casualty of that damn wendigo.
Once I fed Demon, I texted Chiara with the info about the artist, poured myself a couple of fingers of JD and pulled out my laptop. Demon napped on my feet while I dug around on the internet. I’d do the easy Google stuff and let Chiara dig through the seedy virtual alleys of the Dark Web.
Ted was right: Thomas Arhawk was a man of mystery. I couldn’t find much of a social media trail, which in itself seemed remarkable, especially for someone trying to promote their work. He’d had a few gallery showings in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and some museum acquisitions. His webpage didn’t even have a digital showcase, and none of his work was featured on any of the popular online art sites.
But what I did find intrigued me. Three of his larger works sold at auctions throughout the country, for five-figure prices. Not too shabby for someone who only seemed to have a history going back two or three years. An article about one of those sales portrayed Arhawk as a troubled, reclusive genius who had burst on the art scene out of nowhere.
That worried me. Nothing says crossroads deal with a demon like someone who goes from zero to sixty almost overnight. If Arhawk didn’t sell his soul, some of that black magic Amy was so sure I practiced might have been to blame.
I sipped my glass of Jack and tried not to dwell on the reception clusterfuck. Instead, I grabbed a pen and pad and jotted down the names of the galleries and museums—and any individuals—who had acquired an Arhawk original. A quick online search gave me the identity of the local doctor whose estate sale was being handled by Ted’s auction house. Then I looked to see what became of them.
“Well, lookie here,” I murmured. The list read like a disaster report.
Within a year of acquiring an Arhawk painting, two of the galleries filed for bankruptcy, something that came as a surprise to the business news sites. One of the museums had a major fire, while another had a very destructive water main break. The rest of the galleries and museums fared equally badly, including a few that were the site of random shootings. Individual collectors had just as bad luck, and as best as I could piece together, most of them died within twelve to eighteen months of purchasing one of his pieces of art. The causes varied, but all were sudden, and many violent. I did my best to find photos of the unlucky purchasers, to see if they had mysteriously appeared in the hotel lobby painting.
What little “art” I owned was either blown-up snapshots I’d taken myself from hikes in the woods or prints I‘d picked up cheap from roadside vendors. Right now, I felt pretty lucky that I couldn’t afford the “good” stuff.
I closed the laptop and knocked back the rest of my drink. The whiskey still hadn’t taken the sting out of Amy’s accusations, just like ten years didn’t take the pain out of my grief. As much as I had wanted to see Nikki and make her happy by attending the reception, I had been afraid doing so would slice open barely healed-over wounds. Father Leo cautioned me on more than one occasion that “death by monster” can be a form of hunter suicide, and if I were honest with myself, I’d straddled that line too many times for comfort. I would have gladly traded places with any of the people I’d lost that day. If I couldn’t, then hunting down creatures like the thing that killed them would be my penance for surviving.
Before I could think better of the impulse, I speed dialed Sara. She answered on the second ring. “Mark?”
“Hey,” I said. I was smooth with conversation like that. “Just…thinking about you.”
She chuckled. “Did you drunk dial me?”
“No. Maybe. More like buzzed-dialed. Thinking I need to come up and take you out to dinner.”
“That would be nice,” she said. I heard affection and a hint of amusement in her voice, as if she wondered whether I’d remember our conversation tomorrow. “Anytime soon?”
“Next weekend? And if I’m not hunting anything, you won’t have to sew me back together first.”
“A true romantic,” she chuckled. “Sounds good.”
“Miss you,” I sighed. “But I’ll see you soon.”
“Miss you, too,” she replied. “Now go sleep off your drink. Night, Mark.” I echoed her good-bye and ended the call, suddenly feeling lonelier than before I dialed.
“Come on, Demon,” I said, rousing the slumbering dog. “Let’s turn in. I’ve got a haunted painting to hunt down tomorrow.”
I didn’t know what to expect from Ted’s auction house. What I found was a combination of art gallery and a big cinder block building like the fairground has for its craft displays. Ted met me in the office. He looked a little more relaxed than he had at the reception, with a collared shirt—no tie—tucked into dark, pressed jeans over expensive cowboy boots.
“I’m glad you came,” Ted said, shaking my hand with a firm grip. “We’ve had another incident.”
He kept talking as I followed him back to the storage area behind the showroom. We walked through a modern all-white gallery that looked like something out of a museum, with paintings on the walls and breakable things in Plexiglas cases.
“What happened?”
He ushered me into the back room. Several workers looked up from where they were busy cataloging or photographing items. “Something went missing—and damned it if didn’t show up in the painting. We all swear it wasn’t in the picture before. But it is now.”
I stood in front of the Arhawk picture. It gave me the creeps, and I don’t have a magical bone in my body. No ESP, no spidey sense, mundane through and through. And still, it made my skin crawl. I was amazed the people in the room could stand to work around it, and I didn’t even want to think about having it in my house.
The painting showed a group gathered in a well-appointed lobby. Some sat, some stood. Others leaned against the frame of a large window, looking out at the grounds beyond. Children played on the floor, and a dog curled at its master’s feet.
“There,” Ted said, pointing to an ornate timepiece on the mantle in the painting. “The empire clock.” He pointed to a frou-frou decoration that looked like it should be in some French palace. “And this is the guy who owned the painting last,” he added, directing my attention to an elderly bald man slouched in an armchair.
“How long did the doctor own the painting?”
“Four years. His daughter said that he bought it when he was at a low point in his life, and things turned around for him after that, until his death.”
So another sell-your-soul reversal of fortune. Doc must have been a bad negotiator. Four years is a pittance. Then again, given his age, maybe it was four more than he would have had otherwise.
“Did he buy it from the artist? Or were there previous owners?” I circled the painting, careful not to touch it. I’m no art critic; my taste tends toward landscapes and wildlife photos. Maybe a sunset over the water to mix things up. But even I could appreciate that the artist had talent. The detail looked almost photographic, and the details were impressive.
“We know very little about Thomas Arhawk,” Ted conceded. “His paintings came on the market for the first time about five years ago. He guards his privacy intensely, even when doing interviews might boost the value of his work. Some professionals are wary about that level of secrecy. All kinds of rumors went around.”
“Like what?”
Ted shrugged. “Everything from Arhawk being a team of painters instead of an individual, to being the alias of another famous artist who wanted a fresh start, to questions about the authenticity of his technique, since it’s very photo-realistic. He hasn’t had new work out for a while, so of course, there’s talk about him being dead.”
“And what did the critics conclude?”
Ted chuckled. “They’re critics. They never ‘conclude’ anything. But the market ignored them and liked what it liked. So the paintings sell well.”
“Except that bad things happen to the people who buy them. And sometimes, to the places that show them,” I added.
The look on Ted’s face told me he knew about the rumors. “You don’t really believe that kind of thing.”
“Kinda goes with my business.”
Ted paused long enough to send the two staffers from the room. “Yes, I’ve heard the rumors. But all kinds of crazy things get said on those forum boards. If I believed half of what I read, I’d think that there were haunted objects all over the place—”
“Which wouldn’t be completely wrong,” I interjected.
He looked a bit shaken by that. “We don’t often get high profile pieces of art, given where we’re located. I don’t know why the family didn’t decide to send this to Sotheby’s or Christie’s—”
“Or maybe they tried and were turned down.”
Ted nodded. “Maybe, if the acquisitions people were superstitious. But this could be a big windfall for us—”
“Are you willing to let people get hurt for that? Because whatever forces Arhawk was playing with, they’re real, and they’re dark, and they feed on blood.”
That’s when I noticed that the painting had changed. Where before, the people in the scene were looking at each other, or out the window, or at the children playing on the floor, now all of them faced outward, right toward us.
Shit. The painting was sentient.
I turned my back and tried to play it cool, although my heart thudded. “Can we talk in your office?”
Ted glanced around the empty room. “There’s no one…” I knew the minute when he realized the painting no longer looked the same. “All right,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’ll put on a fresh pot of coffee.” From his voice, I figured he’d be tempted to dump in some whiskey, just because.
Ted’s office had a practical, stripped-down look to it, despite him being a well-to-do businessman. “I don’t want to talk in front of the painting,” I said when he closed the door. “I think that somehow, it…listens.”
“The people had turned around.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I saw that, too.” I paused trying to figure out the right way to ask my next question. “How much trouble would you be in if something happened to the painting?”
He frowned as if the question hadn’t been entirely unanticipated. He licked his lips, struggling to answer. “There would be an inquiry. Insurance investigations. The estate would be unhappy, since the painting is likely to fetch a good price.”
“Here’s the thing: I don’t think we can neuter the danger and keep the painting intact,” I said. “I don’t know how or why, but power like that is fed into an object throughout the creation process. Arhawk paints dark magic into his works, and they hurt people. If you sell that, it’s going to hurt—probably kill—the next owner. If you keep it here, it’ll likely ruin you, the way it’s been a curse to others. So, I believe that I can solve your problem, but the only way to do that is to destroy the painting—carefully.”
“That possibility occurred to me when I asked you to investigate,” Ted replied with a sigh. “I can’t in good conscience sell it, but we’d never be able to convince the estate of the danger.” He looked up at the ceiling, beseeching the fates. “I feel like I’m talking to the Mob. Can you…can you make it look like an accident?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah. We can do that.” It wouldn’t be the first time I’d faked a robbery to get rid of a cursed object. I had no intention of telling him that my partner in crime would be Father Leo. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Again.
Ted gave a sharp nod. “Yes. Do it. I’ll…deal with the consequences. Just please, stop it from hurting other people.”
“Go about your usual routine for the rest of the day. Don’t do anything that’s going to look unusual. Just make sure nobody has a reason to come back here after hours.”
By the time I got home, Chiara had left a message to call her back. I suspected that the kind of intel she had for me shouldn’t be left on a voicemail.
“Whatcha got?” I asked when I pulled into the drive and returned her call.
“Arhawk seems to have tangled up Picture of Dorian Gray and the collected work of Aleister Crowley,” she replied. “He got into trouble in college for making terroristic threats toward other classmates and vandalizing a dorm room with pig’s blood.”
Sean used to complain about his roommate leaving dirty laundry on the floor. Arhawk was out of their league.
“What else?”
“Galleries shunned some of his early work for being too violent,” she continued. “He had a thing for painting dismembered bodies. It didn’t sell.”
“I’m amazed. Didn’t people buy paintings done by that clown serial killer?”
“Gacy. Yes. But I guess there’s still a limit. At least this week.” She shuffled papers for a second. “I wasn’t kidding about Aleister Crowley. He was a painter, too, in addition to all his magic and occult writing. Arhawk became obsessed with him in college, which sealed the deal about getting him thrown out.”
“I’ve seen Crowley’s paintings. They’re a lot more…symbolic…than the one at the auction house.”
“Yeah, Arhawk apparently wised up,” Chiara replied. “His crazy shit didn’t sell, and he needed money. So, he started painting normal scenes and doing rituals to work the magic in with the paint. Most were curses that somehow worked to his benefit. He either gave them to people he wanted to be rid of or used them to influence buyers to hand over their money, their investments, even their wives.”
“That’s quite a racket.”
“It worked—until he tried it on someone with more magic than he had,” Chiara said. “Arhawk died of a mysterious wasting disease. His agent kept the death quiet. Arhawk’s condition didn’t match anything in the medical books. He believed he had been cursed and said so to anyone who would listen. But the doctors wouldn’t believe him, and he’d made so many enemies in the supernatural community that I’m guessing they were all celebrating the fact that someone figured out how to get rid of him. He died young, but the source I found said he looked like an old man.”
“You think he went into one of his paintings?”
“Could be,” she allowed. “Maybe one of his curses backfired. Or maybe he thought he could be immortal if he transferred his essence into the art. But I think someone just didn’t like him and whacked him.”
“Good to know. Any ideas about how to get rid of the painting?”
“You could ship it down to those people you know in South Carolina who deal with that kind of thing. They could make it disappear.”
“Yeah, I thought about that, but getting it there is the problem. That’s a long way from here, and it’ll have been reported stolen.”
“Shit. I couldn’t find anything specific about neutralizing the magic. Arhawk seemed pretty omnivorous in the kinds of power he studied, and so did Crowley, so I doubt he used spells from a single tradition.”
“Just keeps getting better and better,” I mumbled under my breath. “So we just try everything until something works?”
“Salt and fire are tradition-agnostic,” Chiara pointed out. “Father Leo might be able to dampen the magic and give you an edge. Just be careful—Arhawk might not have actually been the big deal warlock he thought he was, but everything I’ve found says he did have power and knew how to craft a nasty curse. You’d be cute as a toad, Wojcik, but I don’t have a terrarium big enough.”
“Funny. Not. Okay, thanks for the info. How about you and Blair come over, and we eat popcorn and mock ghost hunting shows? We can turn out the lights and admire their night-vision goggles.”
“And keep yelling, ‘did you see that’ every five minutes,” she added. “Tell you what—why don’t we go to your place before you get back and we’ll be your alibi?”
“Works for me. Just don’t eat all the popcorn.” Good friends help you hide the bodies. Best friends not only help you dig the grave, they bring snacks.
For a priest, Father Leo made a damn good lookout. I picked the lock on the auction house’s back door and silenced the alarm with a handy magical item a witch who owed me a favor made for me. The warehouse had alarms on the doors but no cameras, Ted assured me. And no motion sensors. Maybe in a big city, those would have been common. Not so much out here in the boonies.
We crept into the storage room and found it just the way it had been that afternoon. A security light gave us enough illumination to move without tripping over crates and chairs. Next to the wall, a workbench lay littered with jewelers’ tools, specialty cleaning brushes, and an array of bottles that looked to my untrained eye to range from paint thinner to degreaser and Lysol.
My simple plan involved stealing the painting, hiking a mile behind the auction house into the woods to an old abandoned dump, and setting the artwork on fire, with Father Leo mumbling some Latin. I didn’t really think it would be quite that easy, but life had taught me that complicated plans just made fate more determined to fuck me over.
Movement at the edge of my vision made me turn my head, only to find nothing but shadows. Another almost-there motion and my head whipped back the other direction, but saw nobody.
“Did you—”
Father Leo nodded. “Yes. There are entities present. Something not quite human and very unpleasant.” I didn’t ask how he knew that, but I’d always suspected that the padre had some clairvoyance of his own going on.
“Cover me while I snatch it,” I murmured.
I moved forward while Father Leo began to chant. It wasn’t the exorcism from the Rituale Romanum, which is the extent of my Latin, and I didn’t recognize the words, but Chiara thought he could tamp down on Arhawk’s curse, and any help was welcome. I had my eye on the big painting and tried to figure out how I was going to need to tilt it to get it out the door.
A woman in an evening dress body slammed me into the wall. I went to grab her, and when she turned sideways, she became nothing but a line. As if she were a drawing come to life.
I pulled a knife from my belt and slashed, cutting the figure in two. She vanished and left a slick of oil paint on my blade, along with droplets of pigment-like blood on the floor. Before I could move toward the painting again, a man in a dark suit came at me, hands outstretched to wring my neck. He dodged my blade, and I feinted to the right, trying to get around him. I wondered what would happen if I dug my knife down the center of the canvas. Would it destroy the sentience, or let it escape?
A knife flew through the air and hit the man in the center of his back, point protruding from his chest. Father Leo’s no slouch: his chant never wavered, although I did catch a hint of a self-satisfied smirk. The man from the painting vanished, but in the next breath, two more of the figures from the canvas closed on me.
Father Leo apparently decided that faith without works would get us dead, so while he kept up the chant, he moved in with an iron bar he had brought from my truck. Ghosts hate iron, and it stood to reason other spirits didn’t much like getting a beat down. He swung for the person on the right, a woman in a cocktail dress, while I went at the man in a polo shirt on my left.
The iron bar made the woman’s spirit vanish. I swung and missed with my knife, and the painting creature grabbed at me. His ice-cold hands pulled at something deep inside me as they connected, and I swore my heart stuttered as I gasped for breath. Then Father Leo brought the iron bar down through the apparition with both hands, and I staggered.
“Don’t let them touch you!” I warned as he kept up his chant. I dove for the painting, grabbing it and wrestling it off the tripod.
Arms reached out from the surface of the canvas, and I dropped the artwork, scrambling backward. It had felt for all the world as if the creature who had grabbed me wanted to pull me into that infernal portrait, sucking out my life and soul in the process.
The painting lay face-up on the concrete floor, and as I watched, a man began to emerge as if he were climbing out of a door to a basement. I stumbled backward and collided with the workbench. I threw the first thing I grabbed, a pair of pliers. They went right through the man, ripping a hole in his shirt, but this time, the creature did not just vanish.
I reached behind me, and my hand closed on a can. I meant to lob it, but hesitated long enough to read the label. Paint thinner. As Flat Man eased his way out of the painting, freeing first one leg and then the other, I wrenched off the lid and sent a spray of solvent splashing over both our 2-D menace and the painting beneath his polished oxfords.
Green melting witches had nothing on this guy. His face smeared, features blurring into a flesh-colored nothing, and his body began to dissolve from the middle out. I couldn’t see what the liquid did to the actual painting, but angry shrieks echoed through the storage room: women, men, a child, even a dog frantically snarling as if he, too, wanted to rip out my guts.
Melted Man wobbled toward me, and though I couldn’t see his expression, there was no mistaking the malice in the way he blindly reached for me.
I sloshed the rest of the solvent at him and watched his whole shape run like sidewalk chalk in the rain. The puddle that had been Melted Man inched its way toward my boots, still intent on dragging me into the painting, and I sidestepped, but it followed me. I’d never heard of possessed paint, but there’s a first time for everything.
Father Leo ran to grab one side of the damaged painting, taking care to avoid any of the leaking pigment. I took hold of the other side, and together we navigated toward the door. The air smelled of acetone and the shrieking grew louder and more frantic. The canvas bubbled and rippled as the creatures trapped inside tried to escape. On the floor, rivulets of multi-colored haunted paint ran unerringly toward us like beads of mercury.
The image of people in a parlor was lost in a runny mess of colors and bare canvas. I kept my fingers well back on the edge of the picture. As if the presence inside the painting knew we were winning, the liquefying paint on the canvas started splashing, spitting pigment at us like a cobra aiming for the eyes. Trying to keep clear of the encroaching swirls of killer paint nearly made me fall down the steps, but I managed to make it out the door. I didn’t think we could get the damned thing all the way out in the woods, not without being splattered either by the canvas or the runoff.
I wondered what the use was of Father Leo continuing to chant, until I realized that his words made the encroaching pigment shrink back. His raspy voice was giving out, and he was fading fast.
“Here,” I said, indicating a bare patch of ground with a jerk of my head. “It’ll have to do.”
The painting bucked and rattled on the dry dirt, spraying droplets of paint like a contagious convict trying to infect his captors. I pulled on gloves and grabbed a welder’s mask out of the back of my truck. Then I took a KA-BAR and stabbed the painting right in the center, and drew the tip down, cutting a slice in the canvas.
“Get back!” Father Leo warned, right before he tossed a match at the acetone-soaked artwork. It went up with a roar, sending a kaleidoscope of color into the flames, but thank God, the shrieking stopped. Images of the people from the painting writhed in the flames, burning and melting, and I wondered where their trapped souls would go. I grabbed a canister of salt from my bag and flung a thick spray of it into the fire. The colors vanished with a whoosh as the flames leapt high, nearly to the roof. The painting began to splinter its frame and crumble in on itself, cracking like bones as it drew up into a charred ball. The flames disappeared as quickly as they came, and in what must have been a trick of the light, a shadow engulfed the burned remains, blotting it out like a mini black hole and then suddenly, all traces of the painting were gone.
“Run,” I said to Father Leo. We grabbed our tools and my bag and piled into my truck. A rough lane led away from the main highway. I’d scouted it earlier and knew it brought us out on a farm road that eventually connected to the back roads we could use to get home. I didn’t let go of my white-knuckled grip on the wheel until I pulled up behind Father Leo’s church in Geneva.
“You know how to show a man of God a good time, Mark,” Father Leo said, clapping me on the shoulder.
“I’m going to ignore how that sounded, Padre, and just say thanks for the back-up.”
Father Leo’s eyes twinkled, and I think he actually enjoyed the evening. “Any time, Mark. Beats hell out of proofreading the parish newsletter.”
I promised him I’d help with the next Bingo night and drove home. To my surprise, a black truck identical to mine sat in the drive. I parked in the garage and closed the door, then headed into the house. Demon met me at the door, smelling of popcorn. I went to the kitchen and grabbed a beer, then headed toward the living room.
From the quick gasp and shuffle, I suspected I’d interrupted something, but by the time I got to the living room, Blair and Chiara sat upright on the couch, with the popcorn bowl on Chiara’s lap. They were too suspiciously posed, and Chiara’s hair looked hastily smoothed.
“Whose truck?”
Blair grinned. “One of Chiara’s brothers parked it right after you left and caught a ride back with another brother. So as far as anyone knows, you’ve been here all night.”
“Tell him thanks, and I owe him a case of beer,” I said, plunking down in my recliner. I glanced at the TV. In the greenish glow of night-vision lighting, anxious-looking ghost hunters with perfect teeth and fashionably mussed hair debated whether or not they heard strange noises in oddly loud stage whispers.
“It’s a marathon,” Chiara said, grinning. “And they’re going into a haunted hospital next.”
“Sounds good to me,” I replied, cracking open the beer. “Anything but an art gallery. Pass the popcorn.”