The People in the Painting

© 1999 Rich Logsdon
All rights reserved.

I.

The bell tolled. It had been icily drizzling for three months, the sky always leaden gray. He had not seen the sun for a month and wondered if God were suffocating the huge city under a black mass of clouds. It was a time of darkness, the night a continuation of gray, chilling days. Professor Benjamin Lewis, sitting in the old cathedral, was depressed beyond words. His thoughts dark as night; he had been out of medication for days and couldn't refill his prescriptions until tomorrow. He had taken his last medication yesterday morning and knew severe depression was inevitable. Soon, he feared, he would become suicidal.

The bell tolled again. Professor Lewis squirmed. It was mid-December, the temperature having dropped to well below freezing for the past three weeks. Just outside the city last week, a family of four had been found frozen to death in their car, stranded along the side of the road. According to coroner's reports, the family members had been dead for a week. Lewis wondered when it would end; concluded that the end of the age drew near. The air outside was so cold and dirty that it hurt to breathe, so the professor stayed indoors, preferring even darkened and dirtied subway stations to a brisk walk through abandoned streets.

Exhausted from a stressful semester, verging on brief psychosis (which often attended the end of the year, ever since his wife Cathy's brutal and incredibly bloody murder in the broad daylight of the city park in front of the professor and his 18-year-old daughter, Annie, four summers ago), Professor Lewis tried to relax in a wooden pew in the back of the huge gray church. Days ago, the border between reality and fantasy had started to crumble, inspiring him to double his intake of anti-depressants. Now, having no place to go, stripped of desire, he tried to convince his dead soul to absorb the gothic majesty of the place. The church was over two hundred years old and had been fashioned after the old medieval cathedrals of Europe. He recalled that Cathy had loved cathedrals.

The church's floor, uncarpeted, was worn coarse stone, made uneven by centuries of treading feet. The thick gray stone columns situated in the back and along the side aisles pushed heavily into the musty air of the church, supporting a lofty ceiling, the highest point of which was one hundred and fifty feet from the ground. On a bright day, one could see the gold ceiling, covered with frescoes depicting saints waging war against the forces of darkness.

The centuries-old stained-glass windows, brought over from Coventry, England after the Germans had demolished the city in World War II, were colored in bold reds, blues, and greens, and each of the twelve windows—six on a side—told part of the story of Christ. The thousands of candles lit by desperate worshipers these past weeks illuminated the huge stained-glass gothic windows. The light generated by the candles and windows in turn brought a subtle flush to the magnificent rose window set high in the wall at the back of the church, behind the cross from which a bloodied ivory Savior hung in endless agony, dying for the sins of the world. Next to the cross stood a statue of the Virgin Mary, weeping for her son. The professor fixed his eyes on the statues, wished he were stone.

The bell tolled a third time, signaling (the professor knew) the departure of someone's soul from the realm of the living. Sometimes, he wished he could exit the realm of the living. It had been a bad semester for the professor, who taught English at a small college of on the West side of the huge city. In the past, ten years ago, after a bad semester, he and Cathy would head for the coast and stay in a little cottage near Newport for a weekend. A fire would be lit, if it were winter, and the two would read together in bed and then make furious love. Now Professor Lewis had to go through the increasingly brutal semesters alone, his daughter having left the city six months after her mother's murder. The closer the millennium, the professor thought, the crazier and more violent things become—and the more depressed he became.

This fall semester in particular, students and professors had behaved like savages. There had been fist-fights in the hall between students, professors occasionally slugging it out with each other, a female colleague of his raped in a college parking lot, three sorority girls murdered in their sleep on Halloween. Such activity was unconscionable on a college campus and reminded the professor of a medieval painting he had seen in a German museum years ago: a disturbingly colorful depiction of the damned in Hell fighting among themselves, in which in one corner a clown dressed in reds and blues and wearing a bull's head was tearing out the eyes of a screaming, prostrate priest. The professor was sure that those savage activities had pushed his soul to the madness he was now struggling to avoid.

It's like that painting, the professor told himself as he studied the eyes on the cross. The world is that painting. We've all become like the people in the painting. Even me. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Even me.

He seemed to recall that, at the start of the semester, he had gone to a restroom in the library early one evening, where he had encountered a student—a behemoth of a man, middle-aged, with missing teeth, the rotting smell of death, and a bad leg that he dragged as he walked.

The student's name was Alexander Quentin, and not only had the professor failed him, but he had humiliated Alexander in front of the class time and time again during the semester for asking stupid questions, for coming to class late, for failing to have the assigned material read, for failing quiz after quiz. Alexander had finally wept in class, in front of the professor and the other students, and, after class, had even begged, in semi-articulate utterances, for mercy. My mother depends on me, Alexander had tearfully whined to the professor, who had commented that he would think the matter through and had, upon returning to his office, not only failed Alexander for the semester but called the administration in an attempt to prevent the big clown from ever taking a class at that or any other college ever again. The professor had acted, in fact, with malicious glee, for he had it in his mind that his wife's murderer, never seen or caught, must have looked like Alexander.

II.

Now, sitting in church, examining his muddied and tormented soul, struggling with his own often morbid longing to join his wife in the regions of the dead, the professor realized that he had acted out of pure vengeance and ruined the life of a student who, according to sources, had gone berserk when called before the administration and had been asked never to return to the college. Alexander had struck the walls in President Reynold's office with his head, had thrown books from the president's shelves onto the floor, and had finally tossed the leather guest chair out of the three-story window. The president had called security, Alexander had been subdued, the police had come, and Alexander had been subsequently committed.

Things had gotten worse for the big clown. Professor Lewis had heard through the grapevine that, during his commitment, Alexander's mother had died of a heart attack, her corpse discovered three weeks after the fact when the stench had become so unbearable that neighbors had lodged an official complaint. Professor Lewis knew that his mother's death had left Alexander no reason to live. In his heart, the professor painfully acknowledged his responsibility for Alexander's breakdown and his mother's death. In his heart, the professor knew he was a murderer.

Now, with Christmas drawing near, Lewis often wept for what he had done, wished he could save the student and his mother. Guilt cut him like a whip. His hands now folded in mournful, repentant prayer on the back of the pew in front of him, the professor leaned forward and looked beseechingly, questioningly, at the ivory figure on the cross, at the Savior's mother, seeking an end to his own darkness, asking forgiveness and healing, longing for the days not so long ago when he, Cathy and Annie, their daughter, would go to a weekend movie together or, during the summer, go for a peaceful drive in the great northern mountains.

III.

At first, as the professor studied his folded hands and frantically begged in prayer for his own soul, he ignored the chattering from the back of the church. It sounded like talking rats, maybe rabbits and chipmunks. It was only annoying. He could hear sound build to a malevolent whispering, like a breeze blowing through the tops of dying trees, but he tried to think nothing of it.

But when the whispering gave way to a whine. The professor's concentration was broken, his connection with God severed. Who would be whining in this church? he asked himself, puzzled. He crazily envisioned a big dog standing at the back, just before the door, a guardian of another realm. At this point, at the end of the millennium, he had learned to expect anything from this planet. Even the resurrection of Christ or the prowling existence of the Devil himself had become a distinct probability.

Maybe the world needed Christ, the professor thought to himself, realizing that for most of his professional life he had taken a position somewhere between agnosticism and atheism. At this school, his religious stance had become legendary: he had once, in front of the faculty, argued down Dr. Burrows, a professor of theology who, truth be known, was just about the only faculty member who believed in anything beyond the here and now.

But here and now the world had grown cold, dark, and evil. Just seven weeks ago, the old woman in the apartment next to his on 154th Street had been strangled to death with baling wire, her body found on the stairs leading to the fourth floor. The next week, a little girl two stories down had been raped by her uncle and his drunken friends in the middle of the day, her screams filling the building and no one taking the time to investigate. This morning he had heard that yet another body, nude and dismembered, had been found in the dumpster located in the alley that ran behind the building.

The professor again focused on the statue of Christ, forced his thoughts upon John Donne's Meditations, a book he had carried everywhere with him for the past week. He had written his doctoral dissertation on Donne's sonnets years and years ago, before his marriage to Cathy. He pushed Alexander from his mind, sought fellowship with God with all his might, felt a kind of dark peace return.

Then he heard it again. The whine turned into a bestial moan, cutting like an icy razor through the professor's heart and chilling him to the bone. He looked up and to the darkened back of the church. He stared, squinting, and heard low rasping breaths echoing through the stone cathedral. As the professor strained to see, he was quite certain that he could just make out the dark shadow of something huge, a mass of black, standing, watching from the back of the church. Something black was hiding and watching from the darkness.

Then, a chill running through him, his heart skipping several beats, he saw blazing red eyes blinking like something from the Pit. The professor blinked several times, willed his head to clear, and looked again into the darkness in the back of the church. Something—eyes, no doubt—blazed like two fiery dots. Not this, thought the professor to himself; not this. Rats have red eyes, he thought, remembering when, as a 12-year-old rummaging around in his now-deceased parents' attic, he had been attacked by a gigantic rat that had leapt on his back and bitten him on the neck several times before he had freed himself and faced the thing. He recalled that just before the thing attacked him, he had heard a scraping behind him like a rake dragged across concrete. The professor distinctly remembered the rat's demonic red eyes. As a child he had fought this terror by grabbing a machete that he had found in his grandfather's war items and hacking the huge rodent to death. From that day, fearful of the thing's return, the professor had kept the machete, his weapon in the ongoing fight against the legions of darkness. He would rather kill himself than allow the huge rodent to attack him again.

Suddenly, even now, as the professor sat in the old church, the two red eyes disappeared, vanishing like two lights suddenly turned off. The professor waited, thinking that the thing had blinked, but saw only darkness.

Then he heard low, rhythmic breathing and scraping, like a wire brush over concrete, and he knew the thing was moving. As the professor waited, frozen, the scraping became louder (a foot being dragged over stone?), its echoes filling the old church until the professor felt himself ready to be consumed by this dark thing.

The thing, he imagined, was nearly upon him, the darkness ready to take him. Fear slithered into the professor's soul like dark poison entering his veins, numbing him. He fought off the memory of the combat with the huge rat, tried to convince himself that he was now dreaming, that there had been nothing the back of the church, lurking in darkness, watching him, moving toward him.

"Sweet Jesus," sobbed the trembling professor, turning to face the front of the church and casting his eyes upon the cross, "sweet Jesus, take away this horrible darkness, remove this...." The professor gazed briefly into his own dark soul, tried to force repentance into a heart that over the years had gone as hard as stone. Before he finished praying, however, the professor knew the dark thing was gone; he felt it vanish, a dark breeze passing by, a heavy cloak lifted from his shoulders. The professor couldn't wait to get home and call in a refill on his medication. The thought of doing so temporarily calmed him.

IV.

The short walk home was always uneventful, but tonight it might be different, the professor darkly thought to himself as he pushed open the church's heavy oak door, passed the blinking red light of the surveillance camera that watched everyone who entered the sanctuary, and walked down the steps through the moaning wind to the freezing sidewalk. He noted how leaden his arms and legs felt as he headed home. He shivered as he walked in the extreme drizzling cold. The arctic wind howled through his thick winter parka.

After the second block, fighting the unbearable cold, attracted by the corner neon maze advertising everything from an adult book store to a service station to a convenience market, the professor walked into an old building that had been converted into a Seven-11 so he could get some coffee. The night manager, Bill, had taken classes from the professor last year and was always good for a free cup of coffee and a donut.

The old church bell tolled as the professor pushed open the glass door and entered the store. It was empty, the cash register open and unattended. Briefly considering dipping into the till, the professor walked swiftly to the back, where he found the stained coffee pot next to the sugar and cream. He knew that Bill, probably in the bathroom, would return soon enough. Things were all right. Everything was going to be all right. Strong and bitter coffee would steady him.

Yet, as the professor was stirring the coffee with a red pen, he heard another sound, a distant scraping, and he thought immediately of a bloodied body being dragged across the floor.

Instantly, the image of the dark thing with red-rat eyes gripped his mind, and he felt himself transported back to the attic, seconds before the huge rat had attacked. In his mind, the huge rat became the dark thing lurking in the back of the old gothic church, the thing now lurking behind the store's wall.

Recognizing gnawing psychosis, the professor battled for control, clenching fists and jaw, stirring his coffee, then putting the Styrofoam cup to his lips he drank deeply of the scalding liquid that burned mouth and throat. The pain jolted him back to the present.

Looking up from his coffee and turning to face the front of the store, he saw through the glass door the square Seven-11 sign atop the pole in the front of the store and, his eyes wandering further, the blazing yellow-and-blue neon cross sitting atop the building across the street. The red-and-green sign just over the entrance read "Believers in God in Christ Pentecostal Church." For an instant, the professor thought of walking across the street to try the door to the church. Having grown up Pentecostal in the Midwest, the professor remembered his own youth at Living Water Full Pentecostal, and as he imagined blind preacher Ray standing on the pulpit, brown floppy leather Bible in a raised right hand, he remembered the comfort he had once gotten from poring over scripture verses.

The professor's reverie was broken by a series of thuds from the other side of the wall behind the coffeemaker. Tense, heart racing, the professor set his cup of coffee onto the table in front of him and listened. He waited for fifteen minutes, an hour, two hours.

Then, again, he heard the thumps, louder this time, coupled with a muffled scream. He could swear it was a scream, some woman being brutally murdered, stabbed in broad daylight. Alarmed, the professor began calling out, the wall still thudding, "Anyone here? Anyone here at all? Bill! Bill! Is that you?"

The thudding stopped suddenly, as if in direct response to the professor's words, and then (a minute later?) slowly resumed.

"I said," the professor bellowed, "is anybody here? Where is everyone? Jesus Christ, where are you, Bill?"

Aware of his steadily emerging panic, the professor listened again. The thumping continued, frantic. Knowing that it was time to leave the store, Professor Lewis imagined walking to the swinging metal doors separating the back of the store from the front, smelling the unmistakable stench of shed blood, and pushing the door open.

Blood covered the walls, the ceiling, and the floor; bodies were everywhere in the room whose temperature had dropped to below freezing. Shivering, he wondered how the dead could thump on the wall. As the professor gave the bodies a quick glance, he noticed that the arms of all the bloodied victims were missing. Each victim, now dead, had a bullet hole in its head, suggesting that these people—three store employees wearing blue aprons and two women, one in her mid-forties and the other eighteen or nineteen, who had probably just been out for a leisurely stroll, had been executed separately. All had watched as the executioner shot each one point-blank. The middle-aged woman—she looked like Cathy asleep—had also had her eyes gouged out. Overpowered by the stench of blood, urine, and gunpowder, the image of his wife's murder filling his mind, the professor felt he was going to get sick to his stomach and fell to his knees. In that brief moment, he wished for his own death.

The bell tolled again faintly as the professor covered his eyes, wept for Jesus, and then looked up. Slowly taking his hands away from his eyes, he glanced about the back room, wondering if someone had already cleaned up the mess, and then realized that he had been imagining things. The old wooden door leading to the alley blew open and shut, a plaything of the howling wind. I'm becoming delusional, Dr. Lewis thought to himself. I absolutely must get home.

The professor fought to relax, to maintain his sanity, when he heard it again, the scraping—bodies over stone? metal on concrete?—just outside the door that led to the main part of the store. He was sure it was outside the door. He froze, still kneeling, sure his time had come. The thing, evil and predatorial, was moving back and forth out there. The professor could hear its swoosh, swoosh, swoosh as it glided by, waiting, waiting, waiting for him. He wished for his machete.

V.

When the professor—dazed, delirious—unlocked the door to his apartment at approximately 7:30 a.m., the images of the night assailed him. He had left the college at 3:30 and taken the bus to Russell, where he had disembarked and gone into the glorious old medieval-style church. Then, in darkness, he had left the church and, on his walk home, had stopped to get some coffee at a Seven-11. At 7:05 a.m., after cowering for hours in the back, the professor had decided to take his chances and had stepped through the metal doors separating the back from the front of the store. He had found the store empty again and had left and walked the remaining way home through the icy drizzle, stiflingly cold wind, and perpetually dirty air.

Now, on a blackened morning, he was home, depressed, a bit crazed, and he desperately wanted to sleep the sleep of the dead. But he couldn't sleep without his medication. He needed his medication. The craving brought panic gripping him like a cold iron glove, and he felt himself suffocating. Severe anxiety always preceded a final descent into madness.

Closing the door behind him, locking it four times, the professor took off his parka, tossed it onto the floor, fought for air, and headed toward the bedroom.

He had just removed his shirt, shoes, and pants when he heard the sound, a scraping, someone on the other side of the kitchen wall, tied up in the closet, perhaps. The scraping, the sound made by dragging a bag of dirt over a freshly dug cemetery plot, came from just beyond his bedroom. His heart skipping a beat, hands trembling, the professor longed to call out to his wife, his mother, his father, God, anyone. Terrified, sweating profusely, he realized that he had lost the ability to distinguish the real from the fantastic. The insane, he knew even then, very often know when they're going insane, at least at the beginning; for the professor, it was like being trapped in black box, the sides slowly crushing him, promising extinction of being.

As the scraping seemed to grow louder, the presence of evil became almost tangible, seeping through the walls, through the vents, and the professor turned toward his door and clumsily began struggling with his locks, trying frantically to escape. Like a black smoke, evil saturated the air of his apartment. His hands were drenched with sweat; he couldn't turn the bolts, couldn't work the chains locking the doors. He was trapped in the dark room.

Dark chords of anxiety squeezing reason from his brain, he was determined to survive and charged toward his bedroom. Once in his bedroom, frantically going down onto his knees, he crawled forward until he could just reach under the bed. Reaching, reaching, reaching, he felt the knife, the great rat-killing blade, felt for and grabbed the handle. The act of seizing the blade brought an immediate peace, as if the dark clouds outside had temporarily vanished, leaving the bright sun and warm spring weather in their place.

His heart temporarily calming, dizziness dissipating, the professor slowly dragged the great blade across the carpeted floor under the bed out to where he could see it. Studying the weapon, his room illuminated by the flickering sign just outside his window, the professor realized that safety had everything to do with power and the ability to threaten terrible violence. This is the sword of the Lord, a voice within him seemed to say.

As he rose, the professor became aware of another presence—possibly several. He heard rasping breathing and felt red-devil eyes boring down into him. A chill washed over him. He knew he needn't look. He squeezed his eyes shut, breathed deeply, and held on to his sword with both hands.

When he slowly opened his eyes and looked up, he felt a large, frigid black mass looming before him. It had the unmistakably foul smell of death, and the professor searched the black mass for its eyes, surely blazing red, and then stepped back. , He was certain he could make out a shape within the dark mass. It was someone or something he'd known, someone who was holding something long and huge and sharp. The professor struggled to summon the courage to withstand the cold, evil thing.

"Please, sweet Lord, please," he sobbed, pleading. Nearly overcome by trembling, the professor found the strength to lift his sword to a position of combat readiness.

"Mercy, mercy, mercy," the professor choked, whispered, and sobbed, face dripping with sweat. Now standing prepared for battle, he wanted this thing—the Angel of Death, or the Devil perhaps?—to see his repentant heart. You couldn't attack a repentant man. But the professor knew he couldn't repent. He had passed beyond that long ago, his soul now a block of ice. Frozen by the guilt that often torments the insane, the professor knew that he deserved swift and painful retribution. Universal law demanded at least that.

Professor Lewis studied his foe, saw now within the chilling mass a towering figure, certainly his executioner; thought he saw an ax poised, ready to strike. He thought for an instant that he was looking at a painting, that maybe he was part of a painting, but he couldn't remember the artist's name.

Then, seized by terror, knowing he had surely lost, Lewis screamed. And screamed. And screamed. And, turning his sword inward upon himself, he plunged forward, feeling sharp icy steel slicing through his skin and through his stomach. "Merciful God," he sobbed as he fell to the floor, feeling violently sick. The pain was incredible. He retched loudly and his breathing ceased.

As his own cold blade had run through him, the sudden freezing pain paralyzing and choking him, his head had cleared and his sanity had returned. Under the spell of death's numbing touch, he fell on his side, next to the bed, his great sword run through him, his shirt now drenched in his own blood, and he struggled to look up. He felt a new presence. In place of the dreaded darkness, he saw and felt a glorious singing light, a huge angelic light, expanding infinitely outward. Within the light, now filling the room, the professor made out the silhouetted figure of a robed man, standing near the door, waiting, beckoning to him with outstretched arms and open bleeding hands, and the professor knew he knew the man. He knew the man intimately, or had at one point in his life, and he felt the man had kind, warm, and forgiving eyes. But he couldn't get to the robed man. For some reason, frozen, the professor couldn't even speak his name. Benjamin Lewis wasn't worthy; he knew he couldn't be forgiven.

The old clock from the living room began its tolling, as if for the final time, and the professor felt as though he were turning to stone. Sensing eternal separation from God, his life's blood running out of him onto the bedroom floor, the gasping professor watched the light fade into darkness, felt his pain dissipating, and found himself floating painlessly downward in a gray, freezing watery fog. Floating in the suffocating element, which seemed to promise an eternity of oblivion, the professor knew that he was forever dead.

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