Sunruined: Horror Stories (6 page)

They lay there for a few moments, breathing heavily.

“Would you follow me anywhere?” Magdalena asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Will you follow me inside?”

“Yes.”

But maybe dreams were just starting to mix with reality because he didn’t really remember saying anything at all and after they had this exchange they both still lay there. He felt too heavy to move. It felt like he was sinking into the soft mat of grass and he couldn’t imagine her house, however accommodating it looked, being more comfortable than that patch of grass under that moon with that thick night air washing over his skin.

Then he watched as Magdalena stood up and sloughed off the scrap of green dress. She reached down for him from somewhere impossibly far away and he felt his hand in hers and his body slowly rising to its feet. She kept her arm behind her, leading him along. He looked at her exposed backside, the red marks from his rough hands smudged along her back and buttocks.

She led him back to their original spread. Her hands were all over him, pressing one of his arms down to his side and crossing his other arm between his chest and his stomach. Magdalena got down on her knees before him and closed her mouth around his cock. He looked down at her and she returned his stare. Her eyes were green and vibrant. Was that the first time he had noticed her eyes were green?

She took her mouth away and said, “I love to taste myself,” before going back to her suckling. He felt his sex stiffen again. He looked up at the sky and then back down. She held a cup, wine remnants sloshing around the bottom, and pulled her mouth away just before he came into the liquid.

Magdalena stood up and held the cup to his mouth. “Would you like to taste yourself?” she whispered into his ear, her hot breath running down his spine.

He wanted to object, knock the cup away or something, but he couldn’t move. She put the cup to his lips and tilted it up. He felt the warm liquid slide down his throat and hit his stomach and then felt like he had to be sleeping because he couldn’t move and everything was black.

Slowly, the blackness of night gave way to the gray dawn. A cacophony of birds unleashed itself upon the garden. He thought he must have gone to sleep out there and tried to roll over, half-expecting to see Magdalena still sleeping beside him, but he couldn’t move. He looked around the garden, verdant and dripping with life. He looked at the statues, the well-built men and women, dark gray with the night’s dew. They were full of life, too, weren’t they? he asked himself. A sickening dread hardened the inside of his body when he realized his fate.

Time was not a factor. For days, weeks maybe, he drifted in and out of consciousness. Every now and then Magdalena came into the garden, sometimes to sketch, sometimes just to take her morning coffee, sometimes to take a lover and drink wine, the last thing Hutchens had tasted, mingled with the last bit of life he had. Other times, she brought patrons out to the garden, told them lies about the statues. Sometimes the patrons offered her vulgar amounts of money for them. Smirking with the knowledge that she had things people wanted, Magdalena sent them away disappointed. Sometimes she would stand in front of the statues, staring up at them. It was at these times he wanted to be free, but only so he could once again feel Magdalena’s skin in his hands and lose himself in that whiplike smile and those clover eyes.

The Smoke of Samuel

Decayed leaves dropping from a tree, the memories swirl back into the autumn of her mind as she sits thinking.

She slowly surveys the room. It truly is picturesque in its decay. Easels burdened with blank gray canvases surround the middle of the room like dark monks preparing for séance. Stacks of books, magazines, photos, and old drawings are limp heaps in the corners. Two stark gray filing cabinets are locked against the wall to her left. The walls are bare, absent of pictures, no life clinging to them. Dust is the only substance that clings to anything. Dirt dust, incense dust, dead cancer cigarette dust. Dust is death, she thinks, we rise and fall into dust.

After nearly a week, they had finally moved all their stuff into the sizable but dilapidating house. Samuel Bean, secretly tortured artist and alleged master of mayhem, disturbance, and vandalism at Raven Creek High School was finally settling down at the ripe old age of twenty. Married to the former Gina Blanc, aspiring dancer and general wallflower of Raven Creek High School, they made a good couple. She appealed to Samuel’s quiet, artistic side, while responding well to his exuberant energy in bed.

Most of Samuel’s stuff had been haphazardly sorted into the upstairs studio. His boxes of books covered the vast wooden floor, canvas-burdened easels standing erect on its surface. He left the middle of the studio open so Gina could practice her dance. Samuel enjoyed watching her. He enjoyed watching her thin, well-defined muscles rippling beneath tights or, sometimes, nothing at all. She seemed to float around the room. The silent beauty of a butterfly pleasing his eyes and sinking further into his heart.

After they had been there for a few months and were somewhat practiced about coexisting with one another, Samuel decided to sit down and begin painting again. He was mad to get back to it. The art had been eating away at him.

Once he began painting he felt somewhat out of practice. It seemed that everything he started ended up looking like something else or something that resembled excrement. Searching for a reason, he came across the only explanation he could think of.

The pain was gone.

All of his works had been driven by pain. Pain and ugliness. Gray death, black suns. There was no happiness inside of Samuel Bean.

A testament to Samuel’s artistic rendering of pain was Gina’s refusal when he had asked to paint her naked. “I’m sorry, Samuel. I really mean no offense. You just… well, you have a way of making things look, uh,
ugly
.” She quickly reached out to catch his plummeting ego, “I’m not saying it’s not good. It’s brilliant, it really is. It’s beautiful in its own way. But I really just don’t want my feelings to be hurt.”

Samuel, looking at things objectively, understood what she meant. He still argued to do it, mainly because he thought it would be a huge turn on, but she was unwavering in her stance.

Gina’s observations had been something that Samuel had lived with ever since he had started showing his paintings to her. Continually, it popped up in criticisms of his work, if it was a criticism at all. Samuel had never really stopped to figure out why his art was so ‘ugly.’ To him, it was the only thing he knew, what he’d been raised with.

Samuel had grown up, most of his young life, in Louisville. The worst parts of Louisville. The parts that nobody ever thinks of when they think of Kentucky because pictures of the slums and the factories didn’t make it into the travel brochures. There were no horses for miles and you’d have to walk through an ocean of concrete to get to the nearest mountain.

His family had moved to Raven Creek at the beginning of his freshman year. Raven Creek was a small town where everyone had pretty much the same income, but Samuel seemed to bear the stigma of living in the absolute
worst
house in it. The feeling of being the only poor person in town was coupled and tripled with the facts that he was not athletically inclined in the least and he was relatively bright.

During high school, he was the daily subject of beatings, taunting, and general disdain directed in his favor. He was once shoved into a ditch and called “nigger,” even though his skin was quite pale. Samuel guessed that the fine rednecks of Raven Creek, Kay-Why, population 512, had never even
seen
a black person outside of the television, which made the KKK carvings in the school desks pretty much irrelevant.

He became involved with Gina his junior year, bringing her into his dull realm of pain. Her first taste of that, other than the rumors, was reaped when he had tied her up. Before him, nobody even knew who she was. With him, she enjoyed wide fame under such names as: poor white trash, bitch, slut, whore, freak, as well as many others that were much less pertinent to either her gender or socioeconomic status.

So, after graduation, Samuel and Gina moved as far away from picturesque little Raven Creek as they could while still remaining in the beautiful blue mountains of Kentucky.

Still traipsing in the midst of his funk and wallowing in self-pity, Samuel sat himself in front of the only window in his studio. In the mist of a gray morning, through the window, across the river behind their house, Samuel found his muse. His ugly, decaying, wasted muse. A river mill of some sort that had slowly devolved into an industrial wasteland unveiled itself in all its desolate grandeur.

Positioned between two objects of sheer beauty, the river and the lush green hills drifting steeply upward to meet the sky, the mill sat like Satan ready to be cast out of heaven. Lifeless smokestacks rose, brown brick streaked with black stains, to probe the surrounding magnificence. The mill seemed immense in its horizontal gray-brown-black structure, a line of shattered windows sitting on top of its ‘X’-shaped steel supports. It looked like someone was trying to smudge it out of existence.

This is it!
Samuel thought, excitedly grabbing his sketch pad that had sat beside him ever since his slump began.

He didn’t know where to start. It was all so voluptuously ugly!

Once started, Samuel realized he wouldn’t be able to quit until it was finished.

At first, Gina brought him coffee and ran to the discount tobacco store to get him Sampoerna clove cigarettes, happy to see him working on his ugly art again. Then her visits became less frequent, punctuated with grumbling complaints. His body, which should have been aching with unnoticed nicotine, caffeine, and general sustenance withdrawal was fueled by the painting. Eventually, Gina would only come up to practice her dance and, without speaking to him, storm out of the studio, slamming the door.

When too tired to stand up or move his arms, Samuel collapsed onto the floor, waking to the developing painting before him. A beard burst through the smooth skin of his face. New smells from various areas on his body reached his nose. He was thankful there was a toilet on the same floor.

When it was light, he could not stop staring at the vast industry, trying to capture and detail every last trace of ugliness. By no means was it a photorealist piece, but there was some nuance forever jumping out at him. Something he had to incorporate somehow. When it was dark, he couldn’t stop thinking about it while he applied layer after layer of thick oils. The scenes that must have been played out there! The horrors that no doubt lurked in the minds of some of the extinct employees. The pain that seemed to surround the mill, envelop it in bleeding red. The stink of those who had, for whatever period of time, become machines or parts of the machine, fighting to keep themselves and their families alive.

Eventually, Samuel reached a point that would have been called finished if it would have been any other subject, but there was something he felt was missing. It wasn’t one single thing. It was the feeling, the mood. His painting just didn’t seem to encompass
everything
.

Maybe,
Samuel thought,
the shading needs altered.
He covered other miscellaneous canvases with various shades of gray. He mixed every degree of black and white, trying to achieve the perfect value and failing each time.

Samuel fell to merely sitting in front of the window and staring at the damned thing. What the hell
was
it!? What could he not reach out and grasp with his mind? What, dear fucking Watson, was
missing
? What detail? What one little thing? No, it wasn’t any single aspect, it was an
aura
. Not a single facet, it couldn’t be given a term, it was simply something all-encompassing that would make the entire thing work. Yes, but what
was
that aura, that feel, that mood?

Finally, it hit Samuel. The
inside
. He’d never seen the inside of any factory or mill. Maybe the interior was the final veil of sadness. Maybe it was the clarity of a tear, cutting through the years of dust. Even though he wasn’t painting the inside, he felt as though that would be the key. Samuel was certain, certain that all the answers to his consternation lie inside the sadness beast, the breeder of pain and death.

Maybe the workers, the people who
ran
the dead blemish were the Devil and
they
had been cast out.

Quickly, Samuel Bean formed a mental game plan. Tonight, he would rest. Tomorrow morning he would wake up and go to the mill to snoop around and get inside if he possibly could.

Samuel slept. The first night he had even resigned himself to a full night of sleep and he was plagued with a single dream—

He’s almost done but he can’t get off the floor. Why won’t his body move? Deep blazing fire climbing the walls throwing violent light on the circle of easels shifting into hooded Druidic specters moving closer and closer to him horrible chants exiting their bodies through the dim openings in their cloaks like a bunch of dead air a song of dead air a symphony of morose sepulchral breath moving closer and closer so slow but never ceasing no hope of ceasing and the fire not spreading but becoming more alive and violent eating walls eating souls making those insane visionary easel monks more acute more pronounced as they advance and slowly pulling back their cloaks revealing what is inside so ambiguous so bright like the sun at noon on the summer solstice not even seeing everything in front of him and not even seeing
What?
he screams
What is it?
What!

And then the sound of being sucked through a void and thrust into that comfortably dark room.

Samuel spent the rest of the night in a very welcome, very deep, undisturbed sleep.

The next morning Samuel went into the bathroom to shave and take a shower. It felt like a great cleansing to remove his black beard, wash the grease and dust from his long dark hair, and peel back the second skin of grime that had formed over him. Pulling his hair back into a ponytail and donning some clean clothes, he went downstairs feeling fresh and new.

The morning was bright and crisp. Gina greeted him with a fresh pot of coffee and a hot breakfast of sausage and gravy and eggs in the sunwashed kitchen. The first cigarette of the day was strong.

“Good morning,” Gina said, eagerly setting the table in one of Samuel’s flannel button-down shirts and her simple white underwear.

“Good morning, honey. Breakfast smells great.”

“Are you finished with the painting?” she asked.

“Almost, Gina baby. Almost.”

He went on to explain his plans about going into the mill.

“When can I see it?”

“Soon. I promise. Soon. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to put the finishing touches on it but I know, I
know
it’s almost there.”

Gina noticed the fire dancing in his eyes. It was a fire she had not seen in a very long time. As the water and razor had cleansed his outside, she knew the fire was doing the same to his insides.

Samuel devoured the breakfast. It filled him up fast. He ate it all, regardless. After slurping down some milk to nourish his aching calcium-deprived bones, he stood up and said, “Well, I’m going to the mill.”

“Wait a second and I’ll come with you,” Gina said, already walking toward the bedroom to fetch some pants.

“No, honey, I’d… rather go alone.”

A look of hurt pride flooded her sparkling blue eyes.

“No offense. It’s just, well, since I feel kind of close to the painting, I’d rather go alone. I won’t be gone long. Promise. I just wanna poke around on the inside some, that’s all.”

“Okay. I understand.” Samuel admired her deep reservation.

He quickly kissed her on the cheek and left.

Samuel stared at the padlocked garage-type door with growing anger. He picked up a couple of large rocks and hurled them at the rusty iron. There was no way he was going to get this far and then be locked out of the one thing that had become his life for nearly a month. The front of the mill dropped off into the river, making the broken windows there impossible to enter. The back of it was stuck into the mountain. Swearing under his breath, he continued to hurl stones at the unfeeling steel.

“Why won’t you let me in!” he shouted and then thought,
Christ, I’m acting as if this thing were human.