Eyes that stare out at the horizon. They stare, not because they are looking, but because they can see. They do not want to see, but there is no choice. Once the lids, which are full of sand, slam shut, the eyes open and see what is before them. What really is before them?
I stared for a long moment at the painting. Well not just one painting, but many paintings. They all had captured the same image.
A suburban house that stood alone in an empty neighborhood. Street lamps illuminated a road that wisped into the grassy unknown beyond. The perspective was from the back. There was an in ground pool, a few beach chairs on the side. A set of wooden stairs rose up on the right side to meet a small porch which sat on stilts. It was empty, but led to a large window that casted a reflection of the night landscape. The house was two stories with a basement that had no exit from the back. The first floor had two windows on the left side of the house which is that side you could see, another two upstairs right above them. On the back there was the large window to the deck and one window to the upper left. The house had beige side paneling until the basement level which was a slab of gray concrete. The pool had ripples ever so slightly running across its surface and the moon reflected upon it. The sky was dark with even darker clouds. Somehow the paint that was used conveyed a sense of unrelenting dread, like this place stood out in the middle of an ocean with a storm approaching in the distance. Utter destruction was imminent. Crawling towards its peaceful existence.
There was not just one painting of this house, but twenty,thirty, maybe more. Each one was the same. This lone house at night, the pool reflecting the moon. As I looked I started to notice. There were shadows creeping differently in each painting. The paint blending ever so lightly into the canvas and with the landscape that one could stare and pass by and never whiteness these creatures.
I tore my self form them and look up to the artist. I reminded my self where I was. A local art fair. In the cities library. The man looked tired, he sat in a folded out tall chair. He noticed me staring and snapped out of his own trance.
“Well, what do you think? Any of them take your fancy?” He chuckled getting up and standing to my side.
“So what is the story behind this place?” I asked.
The man rubbed his chin and pursed his lips in a face of deep contemplation then said “I dream it. Every. Night” He took a deep breath blinking a few times to refocus “and I can’t seem to paint anything else. when my brush hits the canvas it’s like”
The artist flashed his hand in front his face
“a trance. When i come to, there it is, the house from my dreams. I will tell you something, when I closed my eyes I hear the cicadas and all the animals around this place. Even before I can see the house and that pool I know where I am. Then I open my eyes, the moon is illuminating the house you know “he points to one of the paintings “Just like this and I stand or sit or what ever I am doing, I can’t move, all I do is watch. I hear the wind blow over the landscape in the dead of night, that silent, no ones around sorta of sound. I’ve sold a few of these hear and there. Resonates with some folks, truth be told. I don’t know what to do anymore. I dream and paint, dream and paint.”
The artists stops talking. There is a long silence between us as others walk by with out even peering over at the houses.
I point to one of the thinly veiled shadows “What are these?”
A laughter comes from the artist as he brushes past his paintings and rummages through a box. He pulls another painting of the house and places it on easel before us. This one is the almost identical as the rest, but there is one difference. The light in the upstairs window is illuminating the room with in. I step closer and squint.
I recoil immediately.
“I never know why it picks the places it picks and I never know who they belong to. I paint them over and over again and present them at these shows. Sometimes people actually buy them, but that’s not the purpose.” The artist says brushing his right hand across the illuminated window. “You liked the terminator films George?”
I know why I can’t take my eyes off of it. The house is slightly different here and there, it throws of the familiar knowledge that I have in my head. The memories, the mental representation, it did not connect.
“How many bodies, George?”
I snapped to look at him. He looks at me with his tired eyes “What do you mean?”
“Come on man, don’t play dumb with me. You can see them. The shadows. I never know if they are the same person or not. How many bodies?”
“You’re crazy, you thinking paintings mean anything?”
“No, but the fact that you can see them, the shadows, means something. I couldn’t tell you why, but I always know who can see them. I see it in their eyes when they look closer. Killers are all the same George. Who has made me their instrument, I can’t tell you. My eyes see what it wants me to see”
I turn away and start to make my way to the exit.
“George, those shadows, they know now. You can’t escape” I hear the artist proclaim.
I walk to my pickup truck and smoothly exit from the library and head down a bit out of town. I pull off down a dirt road and go to check the flat bed of the truck.
I pull the gate.
Panic sets in and I remove the top cover and stare in disbelief at the bed of the truck.
The body is gone.
I put the cover back on and re-latch the hatch. I look up towards the driver door and freeze. Terror pours through me and I all I hear is the artist’s words in my head.
“Those shadows, they know now”
My sister told me of an artists she saw at a art festival who had paintings of the same house. Each one was of the same subject. A house with a pool at night. I thought of many ways to spin this story and the ending came out of now where for me. I had different versions where the main character remembers seeing a pair of eyes out his windows at nigh, which would turn out to be our artist.
I like this concept and I always imagine the painting drawn in a sort of liminal space rendition.