1
My latest medium—pale canvas stretched taut over red, wet clay—lies alone in the fetal position on her couch, a masterwork waiting to be born. Honing my substance to a point, I slice through the veil. The space around me ripples and shimmers in a revolving prism of color. Sliding through, I abscond the void and emerge—disoriented—into the four-dimensional plain where my medium resides. As she slumbers, ignorant to my presence, I begin to work, to paint, to sculpt—to minister the birth of my vision.
* * *
Curled up on the couch, Kristina Cameron dreamed of a hallway. Her bare feet tread its length, over mismatched rugs and polished hardwood. One wall was paneled oak. The other dressed with heavy curtains the color of a fine merlot. Behind them, she knew—as one knows in a dream—were a series of raised bedchambers. Each was furnished with a mattress cluttered with pillows, an oil lamp, and a tray of aphrodisiacal incense. The place reminded her of a boutique hotel she had visited with her ex-wife, Gale, on their honeymoon seven years ago. As she wandered, running her fingers along the fabric of the curtains, she mused whether the dream would veer into erotic—her sex life with Gale, unlike virtually every other aspect of their relationship, had been electric. But as she reached the end of the hallway, a chill of unease seized her, erasing all thoughts of arousal.
She was being watched.
Another step and everything changed. She could not shake the feeling that her dream had been hijacked. She now lay naked on a black marble slab. And though her hands and feet were not visibly restrained, she was unable to move. She could not even blink. Water droplets fell in a calculated rhythm from the darkness overhead, landing with lubricating relief on her wide, staring eyes. Directly within her line of sight, but unseen in the darkness, Kristina sensed something huge and imposing looming over the slab. It watched her. Studied her. Dissected her. She could feel the pressure of its gaze on her skin, in the wrinkles of her brain. Oddly, she was not frightened. Rather, she observed these details with a kind of curious awe, tempered only by that whisper of dread.
A second presence, or more accurately, presences made themselves known in her peripheral vision—a ring of restless motion encircling the slab. When she focused—she had to squint because she was not wearing her glasses—she saw that it was formed of what appeared to be living busts. Their heads blended seamlessly into elongated shoulders. They were dark and smooth as polished stone. Each possessed a set of glowing, iridescent eyes, and the center of their masses opened in a crooked orifice that leaked, bubbled, and spurted some dark, viscous substance. They watched her intently, an atmosphere of anticipation crackling in the vacuous space around them.
They stirred as something moved, unseen, in the void above Kristina’s paralyzed form. She sensed hands kneading the flesh of her stomach, and looked down. The skin dimpled under these invisible ministrations. Pressure increased near her navel—eliciting neither pain nor discomfort—until a concave hollow had formed—a bowl of strained, whitened flesh several inches deep. Abruptly, the skin snapped firm again and Kristina felt those invisible fingers inside her, rearranging, inspecting, prodding, massaging. It was almost as though the thing was shaping a sculpture and her innards were the clay.
A loud knocking resounded in the chamber. It echoed and the living busts blinked their confusion. The hands stopped moving inside her and retreated. The knocking came again—louder this time and more insistent. The chamber started to unravel, grow soft, hazy around the edges and Kristina—
* * *
—lurched into a sitting position. Drunk with sleep, she glanced around the room, unsure where she was. Cream-colored walls. A photograph of Barb, the old family dog, above the gutted fireplace. Home. Thank god. She was on the couch in her living room, unshowered, and wearing the same sweats as the previous three days. Judging by the dust on the unlit ceiling light, the power was still out. How long had it been now? A week? She couldn’t remember. Time had become a meaningless concept.
Someone knocked on her door. She startled at the sound, recalling, however vaguely, the content of her dream: glowing eyes in the dark, the pressure of fingers inside her body—the knocking. She groaned to her feet, sniffed, and rubbed her eyes on her sleeve. Her heart beat its tremulous rhythm, as it always did when she was confronted with the prospect of social interaction—especially now, with the world plunged into darkness.
Warily, Kristina strode toward the entrance. No one was visible through the beveled glass window to the left of the frame. She angled her body so that she was nearly pressed against the door, one ear suspended inches from the cold metal. A neighbor? Unlikely. Her closest neighbor lived over a mile away. This was wine country, after all. Miles of rolling hills sparsely furred with woodlands and veined by tributaries. During the off-season the roads and countryside were eerily calm—even more so now with the blackout.
“Who is it?” she said, loud enough to be heard.
“Police. Open the door.”
She frowned. What the hell did the cops want? Did it have something to do with the power? She had heard on the car radio that looting and vandalism were rapidly becoming common occurrences. Perhaps the police were ensuring she was okay?
The man who confronted her when she opened the door—only so far as the security chain would allow—did not look like a police officer. Short but wide, with a square head and small pig-like eyes, he looked more like a caricature than an actual person. Ill-fitting clothes hung in an odd silhouette about his frame, rounded shoulders stretched tight against harsh, unnatural angles. He stank of stale sweat under an eye-watering overlay of deodorant and aftershave. There was something else too, another smell she could not identify. It was at turns cloying and sulfurous, like roses and rotten eggs. His mouth convulsed, lips twitching away from teeth in an unsettling parody of a smile. It reminded Kristina of blood-bloated maggots wriggling away from the bones of a recent meal.
He made a bizarre hand waving gesture, like he was tracing a figure in the air and said, “I am here about the power. May I come in?”
“The power?” Kristina said, taken aback. She felt exposed. Like he was reading her mind. “Why do you need to come in? Can I see some identification, please?”
The man reached into his jacket, produced a leather wallet, and flashed something silver and gleaming in her direction. She blinked and it was gone. She was not even sure what a police badge looked like, not exactly, and the man probably knew this, which explained the rapid, almost dismissive display of his credentials. Fine, she thought, even though a shiver of apprehension nagged her. Let’s get this over with.
Her heartbeat quickened as she unlatched the door, her anxiety rearing its ugly head. She invited the little man inside, stumbling over her words: “I’m in the middle of something, so—unfortunately—I can’t host you for long. Ten minutes. Is that cool?”
He looked her up and down and his lips quivered again in a smile. “That is fine.”
“Would you like something to drink? I’d offer coffee, but I have no way to boil the water.”
“I am fine,” the man said and took a seat on the couch, his rear—Kristina noted with a twinge—sinking into the pillows where her head had rested only minutes before.
Kristina lowered into the old rocking chair opposite. The joints creaked under her weight. She rocked nervously. “So, what is this about?” she asked.
The man was looking around the room. Still smiling. “The power,” he said.
“What about the power?”
“We did not anticipate such a prolonged absence.”
“And what does that have to do with me?”
He stopped looking around the room, his gaze settling on Kristina. “There was a surge from your location,” he checked his watch. “Five minutes, thirty-two seconds ago.”
“I’m sorry, you lost me.”
The man shifted. Placed his hands on his knees and smiled up at the ceiling. “There is more than one party interested in your material, Kristina Cameron.”
“My material? What are you talking about?”
The man reached into his jacket pocket. His pale hand emerged clutching an L-shaped object the size of a disposable razor. He pointed it in her direction. His finger twitched—pulling a trigger, she realized too late—and she dropped to the floor, every muscle in her body contracting like a fist. Her bladder released a warm rush down her thighs. Limbs seizing, she tasted blood as her teeth bit deep into her lower lip.
Kristina had never experience real terror until that moment. It expanded to bursting in the pit of her stomach and clawed up her throat, strangling her. Unable to move, powerless, she watched as the man reached again into his jacket pocket and dragged out a rusted hammer. He said, “This is a great honor. Not many have had the privilege to be remade by my hand. My technique will certainly elude you, but I believe one of your cultures employs a similar practice. Kintsugi: the art of mending pottery with veins of gold and silver. However, there is an inconsistency in that comparison. You are not broken. Not yet.”
He raised the hammer and brought it down on her head. A two-inch gash sputtered blood into her eyes. She tried to scream, but only managed a strangled, gurgling croak. Her eyes fluttered. The pain was cataclysmic, an icy, throbbing ache capable of devouring worlds, entire realities. Bile stung the back of her throat.
He dropped his weapon with a brutal thud next to her head. Reaching up, he gripped his upper jaw in both hands—thumbs pressed inside his mouth, behind the front teeth—and before Kristina could puzzle through the pain as to what he was doing, the man started to pull. His upper jaw came away with a sound like someone ripping a wet rag. He gagged as his jaw came away, dragging with it a glistening tubular structure studded with holes.
This is not real. This is not real. Oh Jesus, this can’t be real.
Kristina found she could now move her limbs, but terror held her prone. The tubular structure contracted, and an amber fluid suppurated from the holes. The man leaned forward so that his disassembled face hung directly over Kristina’s shocked visage. A single drop fell, and as she followed it with her eyes, it visibly corrected its trajectory—as though sentient—and landed with a hiss inside the wound on her scalp.
Kristina screamed. Pain, horror, and confusion vied for dominance inside her mind. She wanted to believe this was nothing but a mental break—a hallucination, a waking nightmare. Anything but the impossible reality staring her in the face. Had she forgotten to take her medication when the blackout started? Was she having another episode? There had been no warning signs. The symptoms could not have—
The man rubbed the amber fluid into her wound. Kristina felt it harden, filling the gash like quick-drying cement. The skin on her scalp grew taut and she gritted her teeth against the pain. The organic patchwork left her with a nauseating sense of invasive contact that rapidly spread to the rest of her body. Images flashed in her mind’s eye, inchoate but striking: blasted landscapes that defied her understanding of spatial dimension; beings that looked like an extension of the tubular structure in the man’s skull; a latticework of flesh and bone sheathing an entire planet.
The man smiled on his work, head tilted to one side. He picked up the hammer again, held it aloft—Kristina flinched—and as he brought it down, there was a loud pop, followed by a flash of white light. When the light faded, Kristina was alone on the floor, dazed, nauseous, heart racing, but alone. Several long moments passed in which her mind struggled to catch up with the events unfolding around her. Her breathing came in labored gasps. She stared, dazedly, at the ceiling. Finally, she rolled onto her hands and knees and vomited on the carpet. Once empty, she slowly got to her feet—using the rocking chair as leverage—only to collapse again, one knee splashing in the puddle of orange bile. She crawled the rest of the way to her bedroom, where her phone was charging. She needed to call someone. Needed an anchor to steady her unmooring reality. After some time—she suspected she lost consciousness more than once along the way—she reached the bedside table. As she groped for the phone, she saw the words NO SERVICE in the upper left-hand corner, and the last unread message was an emergency alert: IMPORTANT ADVISORY. STAY IN YOUR HOME. DO NOT GO OUTSIDE. She read the words twice before she lost consciousness again, and this time, she did not wake for several hours.
2
I have made a grave mistake. In my eagerness to create, I neglected to cover my tracks.
The Brutalists have followed me to this place and now my medium is damaged. They are a crude lot—a vastly different school of thought from my own. Of all the artists wandering the planet during this period of darkness, they are the most cruel and iconoclastic. They break and reshape, viewing physiological death as an essential part of their process. The unmaking is just as important as the remaking—it is a process, a performance, and, most of all, an abomination. I cannot bear to think what they have done to my medium. I must affect repairs before I can continue my great work. She is, after all, the only medium that will prove viable for my purposes—the only canvas capable of yielding a masterpiece.
She is prone on the bedroom floor. I roll her onto her back. Her blood oozes dark and thick around the vile filigree on her scalp. I must remove it. It will only interfere with my artistic vision. Extending a part of my essence, I smother the thing, severing its connection to the Brutalists. It softens, liquefies, and trickles down her forehead. Gently, I wipe it away. Behind me, in the living room, what little remains of the Brutalist—a shriveled, vaporous thing trembling under the couch—screams a final crescendo and slips back into the void.
I lift my medium from the floor—she floats up, weightless, arms and legs dangling, limp—and carry her to the bed. It does not take me long to rearrange the cellular structure within and around the wound. Soon, what was once broken is now whole—the fissure in her skull, the blood and budding lesion on her brain.
When I am finished, I let her sleep. She must recover before our next session. I will remain by her side until then, unseen, watchful, waiting.
I cannot let the Brutalists interfere again.
* * *
Kristina woke with the dawn. Her sleep had been deep but dreamless. The events of the previous evening were little more than a shivering, uncertain memory. And yet her anxiety remained. A dull persistent throb joined by the sensation that something was deeply and fundamentally wrong. She fought to control her breathing, recognizing the presages of a panic attack. As her wakefulness increased—and her awareness expanded—the pull of her anxiety became stronger. If only she could just go back to sleep.
Her hands went to her head, fingers massaging her scalp, inspecting for signs of damage. Nothing. A shiver passed through her body. No. No. No. No. No, her mind quailed. This is wrong. I felt pain. I was bleeding. She took a deep breath. Held it. Let it out in a vibrating rush. Maybe it was all in my head. Another nightmare I twisted into some horrifying reality. It had happened before—the holocaust of panic and delusion that lead to her diagnosis over ten years ago. Oddly, the memory calmed her somewhat. At least her illness was something she could understand. Understand and combat. She recalled, with sudden clarity, advice her therapist had given her, advice that had—over time—crystalized into a sort of mantra within her mind: Think of your anxiety as a complex machine. If you don’t commit to regular maintenance, it will fall into disrepair. Better to keep the gears oiled and the parts clean than take the whole thing apart when one component breaks down.
It was an unnecessarily complicated metaphor for a simple concept. Anxiety lay at the heart of her condition. And as long as she found ways to curb and cope with it, she could avoid the manifestation of more serious symptoms. Of course, she had the assistance of antipsychotics and antidepressants, but—as her therapist often said—she needed to put in the effort as well. Her wellness was a work in progress from multiple fronts. If only she could remember that when things got particularly bad.
Her cellphone buzzed on the nightstand. Another emergency alert—or was that another component of her delusion? She leaned over, frowning. It was an incoming call from Gale. She seized the phone—caught a glimpse of her reflection on the black mirrored glass of the screen, dark stains around her eye sockets and over the bridge of her nose, stains like, no, don’t think of that right now, you have no wound on your head, you’re okay, there’s nothing wrong—pressed the answer button, and held it against her ear. “Hello?” Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. “Hello? Gale?”
“Kris, I can barely hear you.” Gale sounded tinny and far away. “I just wanted to check in and make sure you’re holding up all right.”
Kristina bit her lip. Tears blurred her eyes. Even years after the divorce, Gale still made the effort to reach out, to ensure she was managing her illness, to inquire whether or not she was happy. Kristina was no longer her responsibility—her burden—and yet here she was, proving on some level that she still gave a shit. This act of compassion, or charity, or whatever it was, did not give Kristina hope of a rekindling what was lost—she had long since abandoned such reveries—but it did demonstrate to her that though their relationship had atrophied and died, there still remained a germ of empathy and friendship. The notion filled her with a combination of joy and unbridled sadness.
“I’m so happy to hear your voice,” Kristina said. She sniffed loudly. “You don’t know how much I needed to talk to someone right now.”
“What’s wrong? Did something happen?”
Kristina told her about the memory, the dream, or whatever the hell had happened with the false police officer. Spoken aloud, the event sounded like the rambling, nonsensical plot of a nightmare. Kristina felt her cheeks grow warm and her voice turn frantic with the telling. Gale listened as the weak cellular signal crackled and buzzed between them.
“And you think this was one of your episodes? Are you sure you weren’t actually attacked?”
“I really don’t know what happened.”
“Do you need me to come over?”
She wanted desperately to say yes, but—
“No,” she said. It’s not safe here. “I’ll be okay. I just need to hear your voice.” She sniffed again, took a deep breath. Then: “Remember the anxiety machine?”
“Of course.”
“While I have you on the phone, can you—” she trailed off, struck by a sudden pang of vulnerability. “—help me get things under control?”
“Yes. I think I can do that.”
“Thank you.”
She moved to the edge of the bed, stood up, waited for instruction. They had performed a similar routine many times before. Only now, they were separated by hundreds of miles of road and wilderness.
“Maybe start with the living room?”
Kristina obeyed. There was a puddle of dried vomit on the carpet. The rocking chair was knocked askew. Her pillows on the couch bore the indentation of a seated body. The fibers would likely be pregnant with the policeman’s strange odor—that stale, sulfurous stench. Kristina tightened her jaw, grinding her teeth painfully together. Something had obviously happened here, but what exactly? If the wound on her forehead had been the figment of a misfiring brain, what else was fabrication? And what was real?
“Kris, you there?”
“Yeah, sorry. I’m just freaking out a little.”
“You’re going to be okay,” Gale said. “You just need to control your environment.”
“I know,” Kristina said too quickly. “Can I put you down for a second?”
“Of course.”
She gripped the side of the couch and dragged it, grunting, toward the door. Bracing one end against the wall, she made certain it was impossible for anyone to gain entry. That should keep the false policeman—and the other interested parties he had mentioned—out of her home. This was her safe space, after all, her sanctuary—a modest realm within the bounds of her meager control. All she had to do was establish her dominance.
She picked up her phone again. “Okay, I’m back.”
“What did you do?”
“Barricaded the front door.”
Gale laughed good-naturedly. “You might want to lock the windows next.”
Moving room to room, Kristina checked all the windows, making sure they were closed and locked, and as a final measure, lowered the blinds to block out the outside world. When she was satisfied with her fortifications, she placed pillows at the bottom of the picture window in the living room, opened the blinds a crack, and scanned the street.
“How is the machine running, now?”
“A little better. Thanks, Gale.”
Outside, the neighborhood was necrotic with inactivity. No cars rolled down the street, no one walked their dog, and not even a solitary bird flitted among the trees. The view was quietly apocalyptic. What is going on? Kristina wondered. The words from the emergency alert flashed in her mind’s eye: STAY IN YOUR HOME. DO NOT GO OUTSIDE.
“Are you going to be okay?” Gale asked after a prolonged, static-laden silence.
“I think so. I just want whatever this is to be over.” She craned her neck and inspected the dust-covered husk of the ceiling light. “It’s like everything that doesn’t make sense proliferates in the dark. Like fungus. Or mold.”
“Yeah, things have definitely been strange since the power went out.”
“You think everything will go back to normal?”
“I fucking hope so.”
They indulged in a moment of cathartic laughter. Then Gale said, “Call me if you need anything. You got this. You’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”
“We’ll be okay,” Kristina repeated with a smile on her lips, and the line went dead.
3
The longer I watch her, the more my empathy grows.
I have resolved to reach inside the secret places of her mind and extract the blemish that has plagued her for over ten years. I can erase her fear and anxiety; return to her existence a boon of easy, child-like joy. And around this reparation, her form will be remade into my greatest work thus far. I have never experienced such affection for a medium before. And I believe this love must be reflected in my approach and methodology.
I will continue my work tonight and reveal myself to Kristina. She cannot continue to believe she is living in a fabrication. She deserves the truth.
The time has come, at last, for the medium to meet its artist…
* * *
Kristina woke on her nest of pillows under the window to the sound of baying coming from the backyard. It did not sound like any animal she was familiar with, nor did it seem to originate from a human throat. The din was low-pitched—so low Kristina could feel it in her chest. If she had to compare it to anything, she might say it sounded like a sound artist had mingled and distorted the percussive barks of a large dog with the chirruping shriek of a tropical bird.
She cursed under her breath—what the fuck now—and got to her feet. Pins and needles rushed up and down her calves. The house was drenched in darkness, no moonlight piercing the slats in the blinds. She fumbled around for the headlamp, put it on and pressed the power button. The narrow beam revealed the living room in shades of blue and grey. She navigated the space, careful not to trip on pieces of furniture that had grown unfamiliar in the dark. At the rear sliding door, she cupped her hands against the glass and peered into the night. The tree line swayed almost rhythmically. The constant motion made it impossible to distinguish any potential source of the noise. Everything looked alive.
She unlocked the door, slid it open, and peered out. The wind sighed amongst the leaves, the stars and moon shone uncharacteristically bright in the sky. There were no artificial lights to dampen the display overhead. The view had always been breathtaking on her property. Since the blackout, however, the celestial vault glowed even brighter, constellations and the sweep of the Milky Way thrown into near blinding clarity. Kristina stepped out, head raised, eyes narrowed against the luminosity. She switched off her lamp to get a better view. It was then she noticed the red sphere of light moving across the stars.
“What is that?” she whispered aloud.
A branch snapped somewhere ahead. She swung her gaze to the tree line. An animal, limping, wounded, had pushed through the undergrowth, and was now moving in her direction. She almost turned and ran back into the house. But there was something familiar about this creature—the hanging jowls and sagging, expressive eyes. It looked somewhat like Barb, the basset hound her family had owned when she was a child. Barb had been dead and in the ground for over twenty-five years, but the thing that approached her now, could have been plucked from the same litter.
As it drew nearer, however, she realized that it wasn’t wounded, not exactly. It looked incomplete, wrongly proportioned. One of its front legs divided at the knee joint into two separate limbs. It was missing the left hind leg, and the tail curled up and fused with flesh between its oddly pointed hipbones. One eye socket was riddled with small black eyes, while the other bore a single orb, tear-glossed and searching. What the fuck was this thing? A deformed dog? She gasped, took an involuntary step back.
Do not be afraid, said a voice inside her head.
She turned around to make sure someone hadn’t entered the yard. She was alone. When she looked back at the tree line, the creature had drawn closer, and now sat lopsidedly a few paces away. It blinked up at her knowingly.
I will not hurt you, the voice said. It sounded oddly familiar.
“What are you?” Kristina said, hoarse with fear. “Are you like the policeman?”
No, the policeman seeks only to harm. I have come to help.
In spite of herself, Kristina found that she was laughing. Hands on knees, eyes pinched closed, lungs burning from the exertion. “I’m losing my fucking mind.”
What you experienced is real. I am not your illness. Neither was the policeman. I repaired the wound on your head. I am here to help you.
Kristina nodded. Wiped a tear from her cheek. “A hallucination would say that.”
Before she had time to react, the creature stood and pushed its head against her hand. Its coat was soft, warm, and on the instant of contact, she understood the voice was telling her the truth. She knew the reason behind the blackout, the intentions of the false policeman, the nature of the emergency alert. Everything resolved sharply in her mind, and her anxieties bled away until not even the slightest trace remained.
Exhausted from the truth and the unburdening of her anxiety, she slumped into the grass. The creature nuzzled her cheek, licked her with its oddly human tongue. You are not broken. You are not lesser. Fate has been unfair to you. But I will make you better…
* * *
She found herself once again on the black marble slab from her dream. As before, the presence hung in the void overhead and the living statues watched the proceedings with unblinking interest. As she lay there, unable to move but relaxed, warm in spite of her nudity, she felt as though no time had passed between her dream and now—the intervening hours had shrunk into a meaningless clutter of events and impressions. The associated fear and panic were no more than vague memories.
She felt a warm touch against her cheek. A voice in her head asked if she was ready. She smiled and said she was. The hand then reached inside her and repaired, once and for all, the faulty machine rumbling and sparking at the center of her being. And for the first time in over ten years, Kristina Cameron knew no fear. On the edge of waking awareness, she sensed the lights coming on in the house in a brilliant shower of exorcising radiance.