No Evil Shall I Fear
Book 1
by
Joseph Sweeney
Joseph Sweeney, 39 Primrose Hill, Tower, Blarney, Co Cork. Ireland.
00 353 21 4382112 joesweeney@eircom.net
Prologue
Beaver Lodge, Canada, 1990
Maurie Cairns woke, heart pounding, wondering what had woken her. She struggled from the tangled bedclothes and went to the window.
The woods around Winniker’s pond lay shrouded with snow. A strange peace lay over the landscape, as if eternity had descended again in the night. Here and there the drifted snow had formed into mounds reminding her - as it had always done when she was a child - of burial mounds. She had made childish sketches of bodies beneath them. Moccasined trappers with beaver hats, Indians with feathers still stuck in their hair; soldiers - French, Dutch, English ; miners with black faces, railroad workers, Polish, Chinese, Irish. She had heard tales of poverty, of something called famine, which had driven the Irish to America, seeking salvation. They had come on 'coffin ships', so called because so many had died on the long transatlantic voyage. She had heard stories of railwaymen from Donegal in Ireland being murdered, and buried in secret to cover up the signs of cholera. Some locals, even to the present day, claimed to have seen their ghosts. She wondered what their ghosts looked like, eerie strings of mist, vague shades of countless unknown victims who lay cold and uneasy in their unmarked graves. She used to imagine that it was they who were pushing up the snow, hoping to live again, trying to grope up with their fingers, to raise their heads, to see the new sun, or the old moon.
Maurie peered out but, unable to see through the swirling snow, and hearing nothing unusual, returned to bed. Her head had barely touched the pillow however when she heard a footstep, a clink on the porch below, and then a knock on the door.
She got out of bed, pulled on her dressing gown, crossed the room and with trembling hands gripped the door handle. She tried to calm herself, to reason. Who could it be? The lodge was surrounded by woods on three sides, on the fourth by Lake Winniker. The highway was miles away. No motorist would come here. In any case she hadn't heard any engine. The forest was thick, the path that lead to the lodge easily missed if you didn't know where to look; and there was a gate blocking the path, a sign saying Beaver Lodge, Private Property, Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.
She returned to the window and pressed her forehead against the ice- cold window. She gripped the window catch and jerked it open. A flurry of snow flakes blinded her. She sensed rather than saw or heard something moving below.
Frowning, she hurried into the bedroom her father used when he used to come to the lodge. The room smelt musty. Perhaps it was her father? That almost made her laugh, and then it made her feel strange. What had put such a thought into her head. She hadn't seen her father in years. Her father, arriving in the middle of the night, from Boston, hundreds of miles away?
She went to the top of the stairs. The wind whined, the snow whooshed softly against the skylight above her. It must be fifteen below, she thought. More probably. She shivered, hugged herself to keep warm.
And then she heard something. She backed away from the window, holding her face in her hands, unable to pretend anymore that it might only have been in her dream that she had heard the sound, the sound that had first woken her. She was sure of it now. This sound was real, unmistakeably real. It was the jangle of harness, a snort, followed by a nervous whinny. And then someone was banging on the door, this time beating on it with a fist.
Chapter 1
Oil On Troubled Waters
Three weeks before the incident in Beaver Lodge, Maurie had called at the apartment of Quincey Lovett, her agent in Boston. Lovett appeared at the door, blinking the sleep from his eyes and tying the belt of his dressing gown.
"Christ, Maurie! It's after midnight."
She brushed past him and placed the three canvasses against the wall, then stepped back so he could examine them. He glanced at her, frowning, then turned reluctantly to look at the paintings.
"They’re extraordinary," he said, the frown now gone. He directed a spotlight towards them. "Extraordinary."
He leaned closer. He glanced at Maurie. Her eyes never left the canvasses.
"They seem identical, and yet…they are not."
A group of hooded figures, dressed in black, were huddled around a great fire, in some kind of dance, their elbows locked together. Their faces and heads were concealed by black cowls that drooped down in distended ellipses, the openings where the faces should be like huge black mouths, like empty chasms. Flames of crimson and blue writhed upwards like snakes, casting shadows on to the ground, distorting and elongating the hooded figures into monstrous proportions. Shadowy ruins lurked in the background, and right at the edge of a cliff, two standing stones formed a gateway. A third stone, wide and flat lay nearby. In the sky, a pale moon hung over a black sea, trying in vain to penetrate a mist, to adulterate the inky darkness that was surging in.
"What do you think?" Maurie said, lighting a cigarette.
"Are these really yours?" She made no reply.
"I’m sorry. That was a silly question. "
She gave a faint smile. "Well I suppose I might have found them in an attic somewhere… done by some unknown old master. Or mistress."
"They remind me of that painting by Munch, the Norwegian. The Scream, wasn't it?"
" Der Schrei in German, Skrik in the original Norwegian which I always felt sounded more like shriek."
He nodded. "There is the same atmosphere of distended horror. Something inhuman about the figures. The empty cowls. " She watched him as he gave a slight shudder and took another step back from the paintings.
"People aren't going to like them, are they?" she said.
"It's hardly a question of liking or not liking. They are so powerful, so detailed. They leap right out at you. On a superficial glance the figures seem like a gothic cliché, yet the closer you look at them, the more real they seem. As if they might turn at any moment and…come alive. Remarkable."
He moved a hand in towards the first painting, brushed it lightly with his fingers, felt the texture.
" The suggestion of a horse in the waves, in each of them, yet each horse is different. And the goat is nowhere to be seen in the third one. The great black dogs, their eyes shining like wolve's eyes. Very striking. It's all bizarre, yet somehow it convinces, captures the mood of a world darkening into storm, a world about to be overwhelmed by unreality, by chaos." He smiled wryly. "Not likable, that's for sure, but gripping." He turned to her with a faint gleam of amusement in his eyes. " I must say these are unexpected offspring, Maurie."
"You don't believe I painted them, do you? "
"Well of course. If you say it I believe it. It's just they are so unlike your other work. I didn't mean - "
"I know what you meant. They do have a strange, illegitimate feel somehow, Quincey. I've been wondering who the dark father in my unconscious who begot such images might be."
"Don't you know?"
She shook her head.
"Perhaps Munch's work as I suggested? "
"No. I haven't seen his work in years. It was only when you mentioned it that it came back to me. " She shrugged." Anyway the similarity is minor."
"Things can lodge in the subconscious for years," he said, " It might come from anywhere, from early childhood even."
" Actually, I have been having an old nightmare recently, one I used to have as a child."
" There is certainly a nightmarish quality".
" The peculiar thing is I can never remember what the dream is about. It always fades away the moment I open my eyes. I just woke one night suddenly went down into my studio and started painting. It was like something had possessed me. I couldn't stop myself."
She joined her hands together, knotting the fingers tightly together.
"When was this, Maurie?" he said, trying to see her face, but she kept it turned away from him.
"About three weeks ago. The night of the 14th of September to be precise. The same night of my father's 65th birthday dinner… "
"Your father?" He looked surprised. "I didn't think you - "
"We don't. It was entirely out of the blue." She turned away and stood with her back to him, looking out the window. "I only went out of curiosity. It was a kind of retirement party, I suppose."
"I didn't think your father was the kind of man to …well..." He hesitated.
"Throw parties? Celebrate his life? He's not."
He paused for a moment, out of delicacy. "How is your father?".
"I don't know. Same as ever, I suppose, only worse. "
"The papers say that he has lived like a recluse for many years."
She half turned to him.
"Let's just say I think he could give Salinger a run for his money. As a child I thought of him as a kind of Robinson Crusoe, a pen for a musket, shooting at shadows, or squirting ink at them at least." She gave a wry smile. " You know, Quincey, when I heard he was throwing a fancy dress party I actually thought for a moment that maybe at last he was changing, that he was going to reach out to the world, that his ship was coming in…"
"So how was it? "
" The party. Like a joke that no one could get. Everyone in masks, dressed as historical characters. Except me, of course. I thought I'd annoy my father and come as myself."
She took up a book and looked at it idly then put it down again.
"Anyway, later that night after the party, back in my apartment, I awoke at about three o clock and couldn't get back to sleep. Night after night, non-stop, for the next two weeks, I slept in the day, painted at night. It was like I couldn't have stopped myself even if I had wanted to." Quincey changed the angle of one of the spotlights.
"There's a surprising complexity in them. They seem to change with the angle of the light. And the images are thickly, layered, as if there are other images hidden beneath the surface, a kind of palimpsest in oil. Was that conscious? I mean did you intend that, or was it just constant changing?"
" I can hardly remember the painting process at all. The hours went by in a haze. The same images kept teeming up into my mind, like fish, and I …kept getting them down."
She glanced at him, saw a glint in his eyes, wondered if he was amused. She stopped.
"Nothing like this ever happened me before," she said.
"I believe you."
"I came close to destroying them."
He stared at her. "Why on earth would you do that?"
"They have nothing to do with me. I consider them …I don't know. Not my real work."
She could feel his eyes on her.
"I would say that they are more your real work than anything else of yours I've seen. They obviously come from a deep - ".
" No. They have nothing to do with me. " She turned her back on him and stood looking out the window.
"Maurie," he said, after an awkward silence, " I wouldn't rush to dismiss them."
He got down on his hunkers, to examine the paintings more closely again. "There really is so much more to these than meets the eye on a first appraisal, you know." He waved a hand.
"At one level they are allegorical, fantastic, unreal. At the same time there's something almost…. Its the anguish I think, the strained severity of the bodies bending over the fire; not just silhouettes, but like real people somehow, trapped inside these black habits and cowls, waiting for their moment of release, watching, attending something… "
Maurie laughed nervously. "You're beginning to sound like an estate agent, getting into sales mode, trying to sell an old crumbling manor house."
Quincey smiled and continued to examine the paintings, closely, comparing one with another.
"The figures seem frozen in the act of twisting around, as if they had heard something, or been called, yet their heads are angled slightly towards one another, as if listening... preparing...," He moved to the second painting. "Each of them slightly different from the others, as if part of a story." He stepped back and regarded all three. "They work well as a triptych."
He pointed towards a central figure, small but commanding, standing apart from the circle. The face - or what would have been a face if there had been anything there - was turned towards the front of the painting as if staring from infinite darkness, right out at the spectator.
Quincey moved from side to side, uneasily.
"I don't know how you achieved it, Maurie" he said, glancing at her,"but there is something about this figure. No matter what angle you look at it it appears to be following you. The way the hand is about to rise up in a warning, or is it admonition, or... " He hesitated
She looked at him. " What?"
"… invitation perhaps ? Inviting the spectator, perhaps someone in the scene but not in the frame of the painting, someone not visible to us? Does that make sense? A sort of artistic ghost?" He laughed, nervously. "Or perhaps the unseen one is the spectator. " He waved his hand as if to dismiss the thought. "There is so much going on. " He frowned, stood back and pointed to paintings again. "These thin crisscross lines that cover all three paintings...? As if we are looking through a cage or a net. What did you intend by these? "
"I told you already, Quincey. I didn't intend anything. They just came out that way."
"They create the impression that the figures are trapped maybe... ? Or is it we the spectators who are imprisoned, captivated at the very moment of seeing, paralyzed by our own curiosity ? Or is it the figures who are paralysed, as they realise they are being watched? Turned to stone by the truth? The flames, you know, curling like snakes, remind me of the Medusa."
Maurie still standing at the window, turned only briefly to glance at the paintings before looking away again.
"I'm glad you can see so much in them, Quincey, but really I wasn't thinking of Greek myths or anything else while I was painting them."
"And the subtle differences between the three paintings are intriguing. They run in a kind of narrative. Each is like a snapshot in time, a freeze frame. What a thought? Freeze framed in oils."
Quincey moved forward to examine the third painting again. In this the same central figure was standing erect between the two monoliths, with arms raised, holding something up.
He stepped back and after a moment said: "What made you do three, Maurie?"
"Four, actually.".
He laughed half in delight, half in disbelief. Maurie's face remained serious.
" You actually did a fourth one?"
She nodded.
"So where is it?" he said.
She averted her eyes. " I couldn't finish it. I was exhausted at this stage. Then dawn came and it all just went from me. I knew it was all over. The images in my mind, the whole setting, drowned in the light. It never came back after that. I've tried, but it's all gone. One more hour, just one more hour, and I might have…" She stopped.
"What? "
" I don't know. I don't know if I wanted to finish it. Their faces maybe, other details, like what the figure at the pillars was holding up and -."
"Where is it Maurie, this fourth painting? Can I see it ?"
She shook her head.
"I destroyed it."
Her announcement was followed by a long silence. She turned towards the window with her back to him again, staring out at the moon that was turning the Charles River to pale cold steel.
It recalled the long feverish nights when she had worked on the paintings, often by the light of the moon. Those nights had produced her best work. She had stopped when grey dawn came through the window. She had covered the canvasses with white sheets every morning so she wouldn't have to look at them…until the following night; and the following night she always came back to them with a mixture of dread and…determination.
She had slept by day and worked by night, but several times her daytime sleep had been disturbed. The cowled figures had come to her in dreams, risen like eerie marionnettes from the canvas and invaded her sleep. The central figure turned and beckoned to her, then the rest of them, nodding slowly, one by one, looked into the snaking flames, as if finally agreeing something. On several occasions Maurie awoke in shock, feverish, mistaking the sun coming into her bedroom for the fire in her imagination.
Most bizarre of all was when she dreamed that the door of her studio flew open and four white sheets advanced towards her bed. One of them floated right up unto the bed and as the white sheet slipped to the floor, she found herself staring at the fourth picture -the one she had destroyed.
"…no reason not to exhibit them right away, I think." Quincey's voice broke in on her thoughts. "We must come up with a title, though, something catching…"
He had already dialled Douglas Perlman's number.
"Do you have a title, Maurie?" he asked, drumming his fingers on the table.
"Apocalypse" she said faintly, as if talking to herself. "Apocalypse one, two, and three."
Quincey's fingers tightened on the phone. Perlman was curator of a small but very successful commercial gallery in New York. It was very late to be ringing him but Quincey had a feeling about these paintings. He had never seen anything quite like them. And he knew that, in this business, he who hesitates is lost. A single buyer, he was thinking, might take all three. That's what he would angle for. Together, as a triptych, they were a phenomenon, unique, with more impact than any single one on its own. They were like three sisters, they belonged together. Intimately. "
"Come on, Perlman." He drummed his fingers louder on the table. Maurie, still staring out the window into the darkness, suddenly turned.
Quincey held the phone in mid air.
"What is it?"
"No" she said, walking towards the paintings.
"No? No what?" Quincey said, staring at her.
"I'm not putting them up for exhibition."
An irritated voice crackled to life at the other end of the line. Quincey ignored it.
"I'm sorry," she said, her lips compressed with sudden determination. " I didn't mean to mislead you." Quincey heard the line go dead, and could only watch in dismay as she gathered the canvasses together.
She moved towards the door, clasping the paintings tightly to her body, as if she couldn't bare to look at them anymore.
"I shouldn't have come.."
"Maurie? " he called, but she was already at the door.
"I know what I have to do," she said. " I should have done it already."
She had already closed the door behind her. He ran and opened it.
"Maurie!" he called, but she kept was hurrying down the corridor, and was in the lift, descending, before he could do anything.
Dark clouds were drifting in from the Atlantic as she drove back to her apartment, the waves in Boston Harbour getting choppier, the wind strengthening. When she was still only half way home the storm broke and flashes of lightning lit up the water and the city. As she entered her studio, a loud clap of thunder shook the windows. With the rain drumming on the skylight above her head, she laid the canvasses on her work table. She wrapped them in their white sheets again, as if they corpses. Having put them away out of sight behind other older canvasses, she went to bed.
She could not sleep. At three in the morning she got up, lit a fire in the grate, and taking the paintings from their hiding place she tore the canvasses from the boards, cut them into strips and threw them into the flames.
She watched the flames, blues and purples and greens, die away and the paintings become nothing but sparks winking their way to extinction in the grate. She went back to bed and tried to go asleep, but it was not until dawn was creeping, grey and tiny as a mouse, into her room that she finally let go, and sank into unconsciousness.