Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

“Are you okay?”

“Just give me a minute.”

“Sure. Hey!” Aldridge shouts, pointing his pistol at the opening in the painting.

Roger Wheaton stands just inside the canvas circle, his face a mask of anguish.

“They killed him,” he says. “I heard Leon yell through the window, and I walked to where I could see. A sniper shot him in the head.”

“Take it easy,” I tell Aldridge. “It’s his keys we came to get.”

The FBI agent lowers his gun.

“John said Gaines might still be alive,” I say without much conviction.

Wheaton shakes his head, reaches out with his bloodstained white glove, and touches the trunk of a tree on the canvas.

“Hey!” calls Agent Aldridge. “The guy who painted this might not like you touching it. It’s still wet.”

Wheaton smiles sadly. “I don’t think he minds.”

“He’s the guy who painted it,” I tell Aldridge.

“Oh. Hey, I like it.”

“Thank you.”

“But what’s with the gloves?”

“They protect my hands.”

“I thought the painting was done,” I tell Wheaton, putting my palms flat on the floor to push myself to my feet.

“There are always last-minute additions. It’s finished now.”

My palms are wet. Turning them over, I see red and yellow paint on my skin, bright primary shades like the blue on Aldridge’s feet. This much paint couldn’t be the result of spills. Wheaton must have been painting on the floor. That’s why the drop cloth is here. He wasn’t satisfied with enveloping the viewer in a great wooded circle. He had to paint the forest floor too.

“Have I ruined anything?” I ask, holding up my palms so he can see them. “Are you going to do the ceiling, too?

Wheaton’s face darkens as he realizes I’ve smeared the paint.

“Stand up and tiptoe to the edge,” he says.

“I got some on my shoes,” says Aldridge. “You shouldn’t have sent us after the keys with it wet.”

“Stay where you are,” says Wheaton. “Both of you.”

The artist tiptoes across the drop cloth in a complicated path, like a military engineer walking through a minefield he just laid. As he passes Aldridge, Wheaton takes the agent’s hand and leads him toward me. When he reaches me, he escorts us both to the edge of the floor, then smiles at me.

“You’ve discovered my surprise. I thought it would be dry by now.”

“May I look?”

“I suppose so.”

Aldridge’s walkie-talkie crackles loudly, and then John’s voice sounds in the room. “Daniel? It was a CK. The hostage is unhurt and on her way down.”

“Copy that,” Baxter replies.

“What’s a CK?” I ask.

“Clean kill,” says Aldridge.

“I told you it was a head shot,” says Wheaton, lifting the edge of the drop cloth. “Jordan, would you go down there and lift the other side? We’ll walk it across. If you still want to see it.”

In a haze of incipient depression, I walk down the edge of the cloth and lift the coarse material in my hands.

“Now, walk,” says Wheaton. “Slowly and carefully.”

As I walk forward, the cloth comes away from the floor like Saran wrap stuck to a birthday cake.

“Oh man, that’s ruined,” say Aldridge. “You put that cloth down too early.”

“Thank you for stating the obvious,” says Wheaton.

Halfway across the room, I stop, my eyes transfixed by the images on the floor. They look nothing like the painting on the canvas circle that surrounds us. They’re bright, childlike human figures painted directly onto the hardwood. Wide curves of red, yellow, and blue, with mixed tones where the primary lines cross.

“That looks like finger painting,” I say softly.

“It is. Think of what the critics will say!” Wheaton exults. “I can’t wait to see their faces.”

But I’m not thinking of the critics. I’m thinking that beside every figure is a large X, that all the figures have long hair, and that their mouths are open in huge wailing O’s. I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.

“That’s freaky,” says Aldridge. “You’re the guy who painted this” – he points at a beautiful tree beside his shoulder, then back at the floor – “and you painted that?”

Wheaton touches Aldridge on the arm, and something crackles and flashes blue. The FBI agent falls to the floor, jerking like a man having an epileptic fit.

Then Wheaton turns to me, and the avuncular face is gone. A new intelligence stares out through his eyes: vulpine, knowing, cold, fearless.

“I’m not the man who painted that,” he says, pointing at the Clearing. “The man who did is almost dead.”

With the slowness of nightmares, I scrabble at the right cuff of my jeans, reaching for the pistol John gave me, but Wheaton jerks his end of the drop cloth and my right foot flies out from under me, spilling me onto the floor.

As my hand closes on the butt of the.38, a vicious wasp stings my neck, and my arms begin jerking spastically. The room blurs, fades, then returns. I feel myself rising toward the skylight, and I wonder if I’m dying until I begin moving laterally and realize Wheaton is carrying me.

He walks to the border of the canvas circle, away from the open panel, and I wonder if he thinks he can simply step into his own painting. But inches from the meticulously painted forest, he bends and sets me on the floor, then takes a knife from his pocket. With one great slash he lays open the canvas from top to bottom, then lifts me again and carries me through the crack like a ghost walking through a wall.

Consciousness returns before vision. I know I’m alive, because I’m cold, dreadfully cold and wet. Shivering. I try to touch my face, but my arms won’t move properly. My legs either. With great effort I shift my hips, and pain shoots up my legs. The agony of circulation returning. I focus all my energy on opening my eyes, but they don’t open. My sense of smell is working, though. Urine, pungent and ammoniac, floats all around me. Terror squirms in my chest like a rat trying to fight its way out of a bag.

Stop, says a voice in my mind, and I cling desperately to its echo. My father’s voice. Don’t panic, he says.

But I’m so afraid -

You’re alive. Where there’s life, there’s hope.

Stay with me, Daddy.

Think of happy things, he says. The light will come soon.

My mind is a fog of confusion, but through the mist I see patches of light. I see a little girl, sitting at a desk in a room filled with desks. Beside her sits another girl, identical to her to the last detail. One of the little girls is me. I feel more like a boy than a girl. My favorite book is The Mysterious Island. I order my books from a flimsy catalog the teacher hands out to every student in the class. Emil and the Detectives. White Fang. Like that. Money is tight for us, but when it comes to books my mother is a spendthrift; I can order as many as I like. I sit here day after day, waiting for my books to arrive. My books. It takes a month or more, but when they finally do, when the teacher opens the big box and passes out the orders to the kids, checking the books against a form taken from her desk, I glow with happiness. I’ve never had the newest dress, or the prettiest, but I always have the tallest stack of books. Little paperbacks that smell of wet ink. I lay my cheek against their cool covers, anticipating the stories inside, knowing all the other girls wonder what I could possibly want with those books.

That’s how I discovered The Mysterious Island. It’s about four men who try to escape from a Civil War prison camp in a hot-air balloon. A storm blows them out to sea, and they crash near an uninhabited island. Their task is survival, and they succeed mightily. One prisoner finds a kernel of corn in his pocket, and from this comes their first crop. A former engineer brings irrigation to their fields. The story is a fable of self-reliance, which makes it perfect for me. I have my mother and my twin sister, but my father is gone. Not dead, but away. Shooting pictures for the magazines.