Night
Vision ii: Eleven More Haunting Tales
By
Jackie Vivelo
Copyright 2011 by Jackie Vivelo
ISBN#
978-0-9839726-2-4
Smashwords edition published by Jupiter Gardens Press at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition,
License Notes
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized editions and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Permission is granted to make ONE backup copy for archival purposes.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
There’s
Nothing There At All
The rain started on Monday, a drizzle from a gray sky. On Tuesday, the drizzle turned to a downpour.
It rained all day. All through the night, rain pounded on rooftops. On Wednesday, the school bus felt as wet inside as out. Wet children in wet clothes slid across wet seats. Drops of rain beaded on the window.
Children rain through the rain into the school, dripping water across the floor.
“Rainy days bring out the worst behavior,” Mrs. Adams, the reading teacher, said, as the dark morning wore on. She separated the class into small groups to read aloud.
“May we tell stories?” Lindy asked for her group. Steven, Gerry, Lucy, Lindy, and Barbara had the corner of the room farthest from the door. They were sitting in a circle on a rug below windows that reached to the ceiling.
Mrs. Adams hesitated, looked at the rain falling beyond the windows, and said, “Yes, you may.”
Outside the classroom, water slid down the windows. The sky was almost black. The rain shut our all the rest of the world. The students in Lindy’s story group felt a little like they were on a ship at sea with nothing around them but water for miles and miles. Steven was careful to pull his legs onto the rug with the rest of the group, instead of sprawling half off it the way he usually would.
“Just don’t tell ghost stories,” begged Lucy.
“Yes! Let’s do ghost stories,” Barbara said. “It’s as good as nighttime.”
Gerry said, “Lindy, you start. It was your idea to ask if we could tell stories.”
Without waiting for another protest from Lucy, Lindy began, “Once in the dark of night a man left his room an in old hotel and counted the steps as he went down the stairs. ‘. . . fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,’ he counted as he reached the bottom. Later, when he started back up in the pitch darkness, he counted the steps again.
“Finally, he reached fifteen and then sixteen. He was sure he was back at the top right in front of his door. But no, there was one more step. ‘Seventeen,’ he counted. Then, ‘Eighteen, nineteen, twenty.’”
“That’s creepy. How could there be more stairs?” Lucy asked.
No one had an answer.
“I know another story,” Steven said. “It’s really short.”
Lucy wrapped her arms around her knees and pretended not to care.
“It was the middle of the night, and a man was all alone in the cemetery,” Steven said. “Just then he heard a cough behind him.”
“What happened?” Lucy asked, because she had been listening even though she pretended not to.
“That’s it. That’s the whole story.”
“No one was there. No one at all. But someone coughed?” Barbara asked.
“That gives me the creeps,” Lindy said.
“That’s not so scary,” Gerry said. “I can think of something worse than that.”
“What can be worse than when something’s where nothing should be?” Lindy asked.
“Is it a story?” Lucy asked.
“Sort of. Only it really happened. It didn’t happen to me. It happened to my cousin. I don’t think I could stand it if it happened to me.”
“So tell us,” Steven insisted.
“Are you sure you want to hear it?”
Everyone nodded, even Lucy.
“A couple of years ago, my cousin—he’s fourteen now—told me this story about something that happened to him when he was a lot younger.”
Lindy, Barbara, Steven, and Lucy sat quietly. Lucy chewed a button on her sweater, but no one made a sound. Everyone in the group wanted to know what can be scarier than something that’s there when nothing should be. They waited and listened as Gerry told his story.
Dan was four years old when his family moved from an apartment in the city to a large, old house in the country. The house was big for four people, and it needed a lot of work. The way Dan described it, the house had a monster of a furnace in the basement, as well as rats.. He was scared to go down there. In the attic, a colony of bats rose up in a cloud whenever anyone opened the door. So, he didn’t go into the attic either. Dan’s dog didn’t like it any better than he did. His older brother Billy always shrugged and said, “It’s a house in the country. What do you expect?”
In between the attic and basement was the big house that had once been a funeral parlor.
Dan was afraid of his house from top to bottom, and who can blame him?
Besides staying out of the attic, Dan had other things he did to protect himself. For instance, at night he would reach over the side of his bed to just the floor, just to be sure it was still there. Sometimes he imagined he was lying in bed with nothing at all around him. Touching the floor let him know that everything was still where it should be. Maybe not being scared means you don’t have any imagination.
Anyway, one night when Dan was nearly eight, he woke up and it was completely dark. He imagined, as he sometimes did, that the floor had disappeared. He rolled onto his side and reached as far as he could until his fingers touched the polished wood of his bedroom floor. On most nights, he would feel reassured, wrap his arms around his teddy bear Tink, and fall asleep again, but this time the house felt wrong.
Everything was completely quiet, and the very quietness seemed think and heavy. Dan thought he could almost hear the silence. He couldn’t bear his older brother breathing in the twin bed on the other side of the room. He didn’t hear any of the ordinary creaks and snaps of the old house. He didn’t hear the rustlings of bats or other creatures. He couldn’t hear the rattling of the pipes that meant the old furnace was working. He couldn’t hear the wind. He couldn’t hear his father or mother. He couldn’t hear anything at all.
First, he whispered, “Billy?”
But Billy didn’t answer.
He tried again louder this time, but still nothing. He listened to the silence in the room and knew his brother wasn’t there.
“Mom!” Dan called, softly at first and then louder.
No one came.
“Dad!” he called, and still nothing happened.
Beginning to feel really scared now, Dan called his dog, Gunner. Gunner didn’t come either.
Dan sat up and looked at Billy’s bed. It was empty. He didn’t want to get up and cross the dark room into the silent hallway. He lay in bed and tried to go back to sleep, but he found himself listening for Billy to come back to bed. After what seemed like hours, he sat up on the side of his bed, found his slippers, and put them on, then stood up, hanging on to his bear Tink with one hand. He thought he would just go to the door and call again for his parents.
At the door of his room the silence seemed thicker than ever. Dan shook his head and stepped out into the hall.
No matter what happened, he intended to see his parents. At the door to his parents’ room, he paused and called out.
No one answered.
The house seemed even quieter here.
Dan edged his was over to the big bed, sliding one foot after the other. He hadn’t given up on the idea that the floor might not be there when you couldn’t see it.
When he reached the bed, he called out again. No one answered. He touched the bed and it was cold. He felt the bed and no one was there.
Dan had been scared before; now he was panic-stricken. He hurried from the room to the bathroom at the end of the hall, thinking Billy might be there.
The bathroom was empty.
The absolute quiet in the house had been telling him it was empty. But now Dan knew that he was all alone in the house, that house with bats in the attic, rats in the basement, and a one-time funeral parlor in between.
He found the stairs. Clinging to the stair rail with one hand and still holding his bear Tink in the other, he made his way down. In the front hall, he turned on the lights. Then he went from room to room turning on the lights. The living room, the dining room, the bathroom, the kitchen, the pantry, his father’s office—all were empty.
“Dad!” Dan called. “Dad? Where are you?”
Dan stared at the door to the basement, but he couldn’t bring himself to open it. He went to the back door and turned on the outside light. He stared out for a long time, but he didn’t see anyone. Softly, he called, “Mom? Dad?”
When he couldn’t stand the silence any longer, he opened the door and called for Gunner again. Maybe the dog was outside, he thought. But Gunner didn’t come. How could everyone be gone? Somebody should be there.
Finally, he turned back and looked at the dreaded door to the basement once more.
He had to open it. He was going to find other people no matter what.
He turned the doorknob and eased the door open slowly. For a while he stood back in the kitchen and called, “Billy, are you down there? Mom? Dad? Is anybody down there?”
He started to get hoarse, so he fell silent. Still, he didn’t want to look into the basement.
Maybe something had gone wrong with the furnace; maybe everyone was working on it.
Dan looked through the door and saw that the light wasn’t on in the basement. He switched it on and waited for scurrying noises to stop before he stepped onto the stairs. Halfway down the stairs, the monster came into view.
Dan swallowed hard and stared at the ugly old furnace. Living with it hadn’t changed his opinion. It was huge, orange and gray, with two big arms—one that turned up and one that turned down. It also made gurgling, chewing sounds. There was no way Dan was going down there. He spun around and got up the stairs as fast as he could, still carrying Tink.
He went back up the main staircase, ran down the hallway past the empty bedrooms, and found the door to the attic stairs. He only hesitated a moment before he opened it and climbed up. He stood with his head just above the floor and looked around the attic. Dan could see the slatted vent at the end of the room that was the bats’ entranceway to the attic they used as their cave. Overhead he saw the rafters of the house; he looked at the floor and saw it was littered with bat droppings. No one ever came up here. No one was here now.
Dan stood frozen to the step.
Just then something small and black flew at his head.
Quickly Dan ducked to miss the swooping bat and nearly slipped on the narrow step. He caught the rail and climbed down, stumbling as he went.
At the foot of the steps, Dan closed the door to the attic. He felt numb.
Still holding onto Tink, he went back to the main stairs and sat down on the top step. He would wait until someone came home. He wrapped both arms around Tink and held the bear close to him.
He sat there, listening to the silence. Resting his head against his bear, he waited. Sometimes he lifted his head and looked around hopefully. Sometimes he cocked his head and listened harder. All the while he hugged Tink. Out of everything he trusted in the world—his parents, his brother, his dog—only a stuffed bear remained. Sometimes Dan whispered to Tink.
All around him the quiet old hose waited. Dan remembered that it had been a funeral parlor, and he thought of dead bodies in coffins. He tried not to, but he even imagined candles burning. Suddenly he smelled flowers.
He didn’t see or hear anything. Then, slowly, he began to grow cold. The cold seemed to come up through the floor. It chilled his hands and his feet. Dan stopped whispering to Tink and just listened. He felt cold all the way through. Blackness and silence and cold moved up through the house. It came from below him, maybe up from the basement, rising like evening damp or nighttime chill. A cold, dark cloud of silence moved up the stairs toward him.
The cold was a real thing. So was the silence. So was the blackness. All of them were nearby. Dan felt them moving toward him. The smell of flowers made him choke. Soon the cloud would cover him too. Dan had trouble breathing. Something dreadful was creeping up the stairs one step at a time, nearer and nearer. For a moment he was frozen and couldn’t move at all.
He grabbed the stair rail beside him and pulled himself slowly up, in a struggle that was a little like swimming in pudding. He was holding the rail in one hand and Tink in the other when he felt something grab Tink and tug.
Then Dan screamed. He yelled as loud as he could. He called out for his mother, his father, his brother, his dog. He could feel Tink slipping out of his grasp.
Suddenly Tink was pulled away and Dan ran. He reached his room and slammed his door with the cloud of dark silence moving up behind him.
“Billy!” he called. “Billy!”
No answer came from the bed on the other side of the room. Dan knew there was till no one there.
He grabbed the extra blanket from beside his bed, piled up all the bedclothes he could find, and climbed under the covers where he lay shaking and shivering.
His teeth were chattering. He knew he’d hide in his bed, awake and terrified, for the rest of the night.
Would morning come?
Would he find anyone if it did?
Maybe he was all alone in the world with that silent, cold blackness waiting outside for him.
The next thing he knew, sunlight was streaming through the window.
Dan sat up in bed and saw his brother sitting on the bed on the other side of the room, putting on his shoes.
“Where were you last night?” Dan asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I woke up in the night and you weren’t there.”
“Of course I was there! Where else would I be?”
“You weren’t in your bed. I called you, and you didn’t answer.”
“You were dreaming!” Billy said.
“I looked at your bed, and it was empty,” Dan insisted. “You weren’t there.”
“Give it a rest!” Billy said. “You had a dream.”
Dan got dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. His mother and father were both in the kitchen. Dan asked for oatmeal and his mother gave him a bowl of oatmeal with sugar and berries. He ate quietly, feeling dull and half asleep.
As he at, he thought about the night before. It hadn’t felt like a dream, but how could it be real? Was Billy right?
“Don’t fall asleep in your oatmeal!” Billy said, nudging him.
Their Dad walked over and opened the door to the basement. In a moment he came back.
“That one, too,” he told their mother.
“I don’t understand it,” she said. “Every light on this floor of the house! We could forget one, but you know we didn’t leave every light on!”
All the lights on?
Dan lifted his head, wide awake now. Only Dan knew who had turned on the lights. Now fully alert, Dan noticed that is bear Tink wasn’t by his side.
“Where is Tink?” Dan asked, as his parents stood staring at each other beside the basement door. “Have you seen Tink?”
“Probably still in your bed,” Billy told Dan.
But Tink wasn’t in the bed. Tink wasn’t upstairs or downstairs. Dan and his mother and his father and his brother Billy searched everywhere, but that bear never showed up again.
“That old teddy bear named Tink,” Gerry said, “the Dan had since he was a baby, disappeared that night. Dan and his family looked for it, but no one ever saw it again.”
Right after reading class, the students went to lunch. The room was noisier than usual, but some of Mrs. Adams’s students were glad for the noise. Not one of them wanted to hear silence. They tried not to look at the dark, rain-streaked windows or think about the blackness outside. How could they be sure the world was still there?
The
Girl Who Painted Raindrops
“There’s a sort of magic about some pictures. It’s as though the picture knows a secret,” said Rachel, adding touches of foam to a stormy sea.
“What do you mean?” her sister Clara asked.
“I don’t know how to explain it. Sometimes I look at a picture and I think it’s hiding something, something I can’t see. But the whole picture sort of hints at what’s there.”
Clara came to stand behind her sister and, turning her head to one side, studied the painting Rachel was working on.
“You mean something like the boat that’s hidden behind that wave,” she offered thoughtfully.
“Oh, you knew it was there too! I’m glad.”
“Girls, come down,” their mother’s voice called out. “Aunt Cheryl and Lois are here.”
Leaving her easel behind, Rachel raced downstairs with her sister.
At nineteen, Lois was four years older than Rachel and seven years older than Clara. Already, she was a student of the famous Professor Le Brun, who was probably the most respected art teacher in the world.
For a while the girls and their mother listened to Aunt Cheryl talk about her cruise to the Galapagos while they ate Mother’s special, very flat, fried sandwiches and drank lemon tea.
Then Lois began to talk about her studies, how fabulous Monsieur Le Brun was and how impossible to please and what an honor it was to be allowed to study with him because he wouldn’t accept more than one of every five hundred students who came to him.
Before Rachel could stop her, Clara blurted out, “Rachel is a painter, too. Her paintings are beautiful! I bet your professor would let her study with him.”
Rachel wanted to hide. Although she liked her aunt and her cousin, she knew that bragging was their biggest joy in life. They wouldn’t like to have anyone else intruding on their favorite boasts. And Lois’s artistic talent was certainly a favorite boast.
“Oh? How nice.” Aunt Cheryl gave her a beaming smile, then turned to her mother and asked, “Is there any more tea?”
And yet somehow before they left, both Aunt Cheryl and Lois were led upstairs to look at Rachel’s paintings.
When she realized she couldn’t avoid having her paintings looked at, Rachel chose only a few to share. She showed a painting of the mountains looking dark blue against a blue sky, and a picture of a clear gray window with silver raindrops running down the outside of the glass and a spider web on an inside corner, and finally her new painting of gray sea below gray clouds.
“They’re magical paintings,” Loyal Clara said.
“Well, isn’t Rachel the smart one!” Aunt Cheryl said. “How old are you now?”
Lois just looked and acknowledged that the pictures were “nice.”
Rachel felt as though she had been patted on the head.
As soon as they were gone, Rachel said, “Mother, how could you insist that they look at my paintings?”
“It can’t hurt for them to realize that you have talent too. And perhaps Lois will mention you to her professor.”
Rachel did not think that was at all likely. Even if the professor did hear of her, what good would it do? One of the things Aunt Cheryl had included in her list of brags was how many thousands of dollars they were paying Professor Le Brun to give lessons to Lois. As much as she loved art and would like to study with someone like the professor, Rachel knew her family couldn’t afford his fees, even if he would accept her as a student, which of course he wouldn’t anyway.
Several months later a phone call came from Lois. Her professor had an opening for another student, and Lois had described Rachel’s work to him. The professor wanted to see Rachel and a sample of her work. Rachel would have to understand that there would be thousands trying for the same opening. Would she come?
“Yes, of course,” Mother said and hung up before Rachel could raise any of the ten objections that sprang to mind.
“I haven’t finished school,” Rachel said, picking one problem out of many.
“You can finish school there. He hasn’t accepted you anyway,” Mother argued. “We will worry about when, where, how—if and only if he accepts you as a student. You have talent, but you may never really be an artist if you stay here. This is a chance. You must take it.”
So Rachel painted a new picture especially for the professor and packed her things for a two-day visit. The following week she boarded the train at their little mountain junction and began her trip to the city.
She almost took a seat beside a man smoking a strong cigar, but she noticed the smell just in time to turn aside and sit down beside a small, white-haired man who was dozing, undisturbed by the train’s brief stop at Rachel’s depot.
Rachel was sorry that the little old man had the window seat, but she contented herself with looking past him into the mist of the early morning fields to watch trees speed past and the mountains beyond slowly roll along. After a while she turned her attention into the rail car and looked over her fellow travelers. A little girl tugging at her mother’s sleeve saw Rachel looking he way, immediately dropped the sleeve, and squirmed down from her seat to come and stand beside Rachel.
“What’s your name? Mine’s Susan.”
“I’m Rachel. Where are you going, Susan?”
“To see my grandmother in the city.”
In a few moments, Rachel had learned that Susan was four, her little brother was two, and they lived on a farm some twenty miles beyond Rachel’s town.
Rachel, in turn, had to explain that she was going to the city to find out if she could study there.
“What do you paint?” Susan asked, having managed to seat herself on Rachel’s lap.
“I paint clouds and spider webs and mist. See the mist above those trees? It has been steadily rising all the time we’ve been rushing along. Wouldn’t you like to catch it and keep it?”
Susan made a face at Rachel.
“You can’t catch mist.”
“No, but I can paint it. I can put it in a picture and keep it.”
“What else do you paint?”
“I like raindrops and storm clouds and waves. I like to paint things that don’t last, like colors in the sky.”
“Is that a picture?” Susan pointed to the wrapped package in front of Rachel.
“Yes,” Rachel answered reluctantly, knowing what was coming next.
“Please let me see.”
As Rachel hesitated, trying to think of a way to refuse that would not send the child crying to her mother, another voice cut in.
“Yes, let us see the painting. A girl who paints raindrops shouldn’t hide them.”
Startled, Rachel turned to find the old man was now awake, though his head still rested against the back of the seat. His pale gray eyes were watching her, and Rachel wondered how long he had been listening.
“I’m sorry. I don’t think . . .”
“Your package there is only tied. We have no seals to break. Slip the cord off and let us see this famous painting.”
Rachel could have said no, but there was something very tempting in the eager interest of the old man and the little girl. Because she was a little frightened thinking of the judgment to come, she liked the idea of sharing her picture with uncritical admirers. So, setting Susan back on the floor of the car, she reached for her picture. Sliding the cords aside, she unwrapped the brown paper and held up the painting.
At first it looked like an abstract painting, all soft grays with a streak of golden-orange.
“What is it?” Susan asked.
“Look at it and tell me what you think it is.”
“I think . . .” Susan hooked an index finger over her lower teeth. “It’s the sky in the morning, and that’s out mountains.”
Rachel smiled, looking into the painting past layers of mist to the mountains and above the dark mountains to the gray sky with clouds barely visible and the horizon touched by the first hint of sun.
“Let me,” said the old man, lifting it from Rachel’s hands and turning the canvas toward the window.
He tilted it once or twice, looked at it head-on and from angles. Then with a gruff grunt, he handed it back to Rachel.
Rachel tried to believe he was still grumpy from sleep. Besides, what would somebody’s old grandfather—or a little girl for that matter—know about art? Shrugging off her disappointment, she bundled her mist-shrouded dawn back into its wrapper. Susan helped her tug the cord into place, patted her arm, and said, “Pretty picture.”
When Susan returned to her own seat, Rachel closed her eyes intending just to rest. Soon, however, she fell asleep. She had hardly slept at all for the past two nights because she had been so excited over her trip.
Of course, she couldn’t really begin to study art, not so far from home or with such an expensive teacher. But the excitement lay in showing a painting to someone who actually knew about art, someone who could tell her if her paintings were as good as she believed they were. It was exciting and scary too.
“You like to capture the things that will not last. You dipped your paintbrush in the morning mist and captured water in the oil of your canvas.”
Rachel was blushing with the warmth of the professor’s praises when a sudden jolt of the train woke her up.
The old man who had been sitting beside her was gone. Susan’s mother was handing out sandwiches and hard-oiled eggs from a basket. Clearly, it was lunchtime. Rachel got her own lunch packet and began to eat.
Time passed and the old man did not return from the dining car or wherever he had gone. Susan visited again, crawled into the vacant seat and fell asleep.
At last the train rolled into Rachel’s stop. She returned Susan to her mother and gathered up her things.
Lois, together with three friends, was waiting to meet her on the platform.
“This is the little genius,” Lois said, introducing her. “Talent straight from the hills. Unschooled, of course, but brilliant.”
Rachel couldn’t imagine any good response to such an introduction, but her silence didn’t matter because as they all five crowded into the car, Lois and her classmates began to talk to each other about their own interests, ignoring Rachel. She knew that to them she must seem like an ignorant, tongue-tied child from the mountains.
For a bit she tried to follow the bright chatter of the girls in the car. She noted the chrome yellow of a shirt, the red and indigo sweater, a chartreuse blouse shot through with fuchsia. The girls were as bright and electric as their clothes. The Rachel found she was losing track of the conversation as she tried to see the buildings they were passing. When she tried to recapture the thread of the discussion, she realized there wasn’t one but two or even three conversation, almost one per person. But none of them included her.
She had wondered how her self-centered cousin had ever come to recommend her to Professor Le Brun. Now quietly squashed in the corner of the back seat, she thought she understood. She was her cousin’s “discovery,” something else to brag about but of no importance in herself.
Rachel was sorry she had come. Lois and her friends might see themselves as arty and superior but in Rachel’s eyes they were loud and rude and their professor—their rich, fashionable professor—would surely be like them. What could he know—shut up in the geometrical city, surrounded by bright, painted people—of the quiet things Rachel liked to paint?
When looking and listening became more than she could manage, she pictured to herself a green painting she had done: green, moss-covered rocks; green leaves and vines; a close-up view of a little bit of hillside. Water was trickling over the rocks and over the leaves and vines in the picture, water that had itself turned green from all the greenness it had washed over. A single drop had formed at the tip of one leaf and was just about to fall.
“Here we are!” Lois called out. “Grab your things, Rachel, and bring them up to my room.”
Lois, it turned out, had a small apartment to herself, but her friends all lived in rooms in the same building. In Lois’s sitting room, Rachel spent another hour hovering at the edge of things until the three visitors finally scattered to their rooms.
Left to themselves, Lois and Rachel had little to say. As a guest, Rachel could think of nothing she felt free to do. Lois, however, feeling no similar uneasiness at trespassing, unsnapped the locks on Rachel’s suitcase.
“Here , let’s see what you’ve brought.” Deftly, she sifted through the clothes. Her handling of them and her expression conveyed her disdain. “I think we’ll shake this one out. Maybe it will be okay for this evening.”
“Will I see Professor Le Brun this evening>”
“No, we’re not seeing him until tomorrow, but some of us are going our for a party tonight. Is that the painting you brought? Let’s have a look at it.”
And just as she had done with the suitcase, Lois made short work of opening up the painting. A little shiver rant through Rachel, but this—she told herself—was what it would be like if she wanted to paint for other people. Besides, Lois, wise from her sophisticated study, would appreciate the subtle painting Rachel had brought.
The paper came away from the painting, and Lois exclaimed, “Oh, no! What is this?”
Rachel was stunned. Lois was not only talented, she was trained. She belonged right in the heart of an art school that Rachel had only dreamed about. She must know what she was talking about.
“Why didn’t you bring that window with the cobweb? I wanted to show Professor Le Brun that I could spot talent—even if it’s crude and untrained. If he sees this, he’ll think I have no judgment at all.”
Lois clicked her tongue and shook her head in dismay, clearly anticipating embarrassment and shame in front of her friends.
Why hadn’t she brought something everyone would recognize? Why had she tried to be clever?
“Well, it won’t do,” Lois continued, sparing one pitying glance for Rachel. “But maybe we can still save it. Some sort of sun-on-the-horizon thing, isn’t that what it’s supposed to be?”
She put aside the wrapping paper and set the painting on an easel. In a sort of frozen horror, Rachel watched as Lois got out her paints and brushes and stood in thought in front of the canvas.
“but it was meant to . . .” Rachel’s voice came out so choked with emotion that she couldn’t be sure Lois had heard her.
“I suppose it’s a sunrise,” Lois was saying. “It could be almost anything.”
“No!” Rachel cried, as Lois swirled a brush in bright color, horror giving way to anger at her cousin’s presumption.
“It’ll be okay,” Lois said over her shoulder. “Some color will help.”
With strong, sweeping brush strokes, she added crimson, gold, and streaks of yellow-orange.
“Now there’s a sunrise. And you see,” she added considerately, “I’ve kept the outline of your mountains and those are your clouds. You composition was good, but you need to learn to use color.”
Rachel felt as sullied and ruined as her painting. By a reflex of politeness, she excused herself from her cousin’s evening plans, pleading tiredness. As soon as she was alone she wrapped herself in her disappointment and went to bed. Thinking over the day, she was angry with herself for ever having made such a stupid and now pointless trip.
Suppose the professor loved the painting? It was no longer hers. He wouldn’t be seeing her work at all. Nothing he said would matter. Even if he wanted her as a pupil, it would be under false pretenses. She wouldn’t accept.
She briefly considered getting up, using a small canvas of Lois’s and starting a new painting. But this place felt all wrong to her. What difference di ti make, she asked herself miserably. And, thinking she would be awake all night, she rolled over and slept.
The next morning she was up, showered, and dressed before Lois woke. Rachel thought about trying to catch an earlier train and just leaving, but she knew she could not afford carfare to the station and Lois would never agree to drive before she had seen Professor Le Brun. However awful it would be, she had to go through with meeting the professor.
As the time for her appointment with the professor drew near, Lois’s three friends from the day before began to arrive.
“They’re coming along for moral support,” Lois explained.
One by one the girls examined and commented on the still-wet oil painting. No one mentioned Lois’s contribution, but Rachel could tell be her cousin’s smirk and the rolling of her eyes at the praise that she had told them all about how she had “saved” Rachel’s miserable flop.
One of the girls, bending close, observed, “You know, the mountains almost look like they’re bathed in mist,” and a spark of feeling flickered in Rachel.
At last they were all ready. Her painting in her hand and her heart in her shoes, Rachel walked with them down the block to the gray stone building where Profesor Le Brun held his classes. They went into an open, sunlit studio, a huge room with long tables and big open spaces, to wait for the professor.
Rachel knew she would have been excited if the painting now resting on an easel in a pool of sunlight had still been her own. Now she only felt numb, as though her sense had been muffled. She had been more interested in the little girl Susan’s reaction yesterday than in the professor’s today.
The glass-topped door of the room was thrown back with a violence that only just spared the glass. Rachel jumped at the sound and almost against her will glanced at the newcomer.
He was dressed in a black cape that swirled about him. A black hat and white gloves complete his costume. “Costume” was the word in Rachel’s mind. She had no doubt that this was the great professor.
He paused dramatically and looked from girl to girl until he stopped at Rachel. She couldn’t judge his expression because his face was shadowed by the brim of his hat.
After a long pause, during which Lois and her friends were silent, he turned to the easel.
Rachel leaned against one leg of the long tables and looked at her feet.
“Hmm,” the professor said. Then after a long wait, “Ummm.”
Rachel looked up. He had picked up the canvas and was studying it as though he thought he would find it full of bugs.
He isn’t going to like it, she thought, and she was pleased.
The waiting seemed to go on forever. Then just when she thought she would have to sit down no matter what, the professor turned back to the girls.
“Who did this?” he asked.
“This is Rachel Parker,” Lois said, making the name sound apologetic. “She’s the one I told you about, my little cousin from—”
“No!” the professor thundered. “I am asking who sprayed mustard and catsup all over these mountains.”
“Ah . . . why . . . uh . . .”
“Do not tell me. I know. Now go. Get out of here.”
Hastily the girls fled toward the door.
“Not you,” the professor said, stopping the group in mid-flight. “You there, the little one, come back here.”
Rachel let the others slip through the door without her. Then, slowly, she moved toward the professor.
When she stopped before him, he said, “How did you let this monstrosity happen?”
“I’m sorry for wasting your time,” she stammered. “I know I don’t belong here.”
“Now that I agree with. But this—this,” he waved a hand at the sunrise-sunset. “This is not the picture as you painted it, is it, heh?”
“No I didn’t mean to be dishonest. Lois—Lois meant to help.”
“And do you think she ‘helped’ your picture?”
“No, I hate it!” Rachel said, all her anger spilling into her words.
“You think your picture was better?”
“At least it was my picture. No, I don’t want to be modest. Of course, it was better. It was beautiful.”
“And even if I told you that it was very bad, would you still think it was beautiful?”
“Even if you thought it was bad, I would still know it was beautiful,” Rachel said, pushed by her anger into more courage than she had ever had before. “But how could you ever know it was good or bad? It’s ruined now.”
“Perhaps. But I can see through paint. It speaks to me. And this picture is crying out in pain. Look ere.” A swift finger jabbed. “And here. Those are the brush strokes of one painter. These are of another. The painting, the original and dry painting, is very fine work. And that work is yours, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“A very soft ‘yes.’ Where is the courage of a moment ago? ‘Yes, Monsieur Le Brun, and be damned to your opinion.’ I liked that. And I like the mountains and the mist and the single ray of light. Just touching the clouds here, wasn’t it?”
“You really can see through paint!”
The big man tipped back his head and laughed.
“Perhaps. I liked that. And I like the mountains and the mist and the single ray of light. Just touching the clouds here, wasn’t it?”
“You really can see through paint!”
The big man tipped back his head and laughed.
“Perhaps. Perhaps. But I knew when I saw this painting yesterday that you were a girl that puts magic in her paintings.”
“But you . . .” She peered below the shadowing hat searching for a glimpse of the gray eyes of the white hair of the little old man from the train. Little man? This man was much larger. “I don’t think . . .”
“No, you don’t remember me. It was only my cigar you noticed yesterday. It’s always good for keeping a whole seat to myself.”
When Rachel caught the train for home that evening, she was till filled with the sort of glow that comes from being appreciated. Professor Le Brun would take her as pupil; in fact, h wouldn’t take no for an answer. And she did not need to leave school or come to the city.
Studying her picture together, looking beyond its catsup and mustard, she and the professor had talked about her mountains.
“There is a house right here,” he had asserted. “Just behind this fold of the mountains.”