Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (30 page)

    "Jesus!" I swore quietly. "You could have warned me."

    "Power's still on. Everything's still on. Seems like most people don't even know Old Hubert's dead."

    Or was even alive, I realized.

    "So, what's this boundless treasure-trove you're so eager to show me?"

    I was aware, by now, of the heavy smell of oil paint in the large, windowless room. And there was an easel propped against the far wall. Different colours spattering the floor. This was where the man had worked.

    "That's the crazy thing, dude," Jerry now informed me. "All the rest of the stuff in this place? It's in the plastic-dolphin, souvenir-of-Seaworld category. And this old cat had
money?
But the stuff in here…"

    Framed canvases were stacked, facing inwards, thirty or forty deep, against the two side-walls. Pile after pile of them. They were ranked according to size. None of them as big as the Monet triptych, but there were some very large ones. There were also dozens as small as an edition of
Hustler.

    More than a thousand in all, I took a quick guess. The smell of oil paint had grown so strong, now, it was starting to make my head reel.

    Why might Hubert paint all these, simply to keep them here and face them inwards?

    But then, why would Van Gogh want to go and cut off his own ear?

    "Jer," I said to my friend. "I thought you weren't into paintings."

    "Usually no, but-"

    "Are they valuable?" I cut in.

    "I'd suppose so, dude. I can't imagine anybody not wanting to buy them. Take a look."

    And he turned one of the largest ones to face me.

    The truly weird thing was, when I'd gone into that blank at the Monet exhibit, I'd at least still been aware what I was looking at. A pond. And lilies.

    But I have simply no idea, to this day, what was actually depicted on the canvas that Jer showed me. Except that I'm sure it wasn't abstract.

    A pastoral scene? A garden? A house? Cityscape? Night sky?

    I just don't know.

    What were the main colours used?

    So far as I can remember,
all
of them.

    Jerry shook me rather annoyedly.

    "Hey, man!"

    "Wh-"

    I looked away, with difficulty.

    "Dave? I've been talking to ya, like, the last five minutes. You been dropping too many painkillers?"

    I looked back at the painting.

    Jerry shook me again.

    I didn't even say "wh-" this time. Didn't look around. He had to physically put a hand to my face, turn it.

    "Dude, what are you
on
tonight?"

    I shook my head, trying to clear it. "Nothing," I replied, trying to hide my own confusion.

    Something in me screamed out not to look back at the painting.

    "Ain't it great?" Jer was enthusing by this time, though. "And they're all like this, all the ones I've looked at, anyhow. And I don't normally dig this kind of stuff, but these are… such amazing use of colour! Hubert was a
genius!"

    He set the painting back in place, face inwards. I felt a massive sense of relief.

    Now, however, Jerry switched into full Scheming Mode.

    "We can't just move them all at once." His tone had become staccato. "What I say is this. We take a half dozen of the smallest ones-"

    
"You
take them. I'm a cripple."

    "And we show them around some galleries and stuff, and get some valuations. Man, the ones I've seen aren't even signed. I could say that I did them myself."

    Which made me wonder if the art world was quite ready for someone like Jerry Mulligrew.

    "And if it turns out they're worth something, yeah? We can borrow Ray's pickup and load it up. We might be sitting on a goldmine here, bro!"

    He chose five, in the end, of the little ones he liked the best. Helped me through the window, but then let me limp back home myself.

    What had happened back there? Just what had I seen? Colours flashed behind my eyelids, every time I blinked.

    There was two-thirds of a bottle of generic vodka waiting for me when I got indoors. I finished the lot during the next couple of hours. Don't remember going to bed.

    It was noon the next day when I awoke. I was woken by the phone.

    "Dude?"

    My tongue just about managed, "Hi, Jer."

    "You've gotta get over here!"

    "The house again?"

    "No, man. April's!"

    April was a waitress he'd been dating - if you could call what Jer did that - for the past couple of weeks. She lived a couple of blocks crosstown, on Miller Drive.

    "What's up?"

    "I'm, like, scared man. She is really out of it. I think she's gone and done some bad stuff."

    "Call an ambulance, then."

    "Man, get your
butt
here!"

    The hangover drew attention from the pain in my ankle, at least. I went up the short flight of steps to the front door of April's tiny but incredibly neat dwelling. Went to press the buzzer, but the door was off its latch.

    I found them both in the elevator sized living room, April sat cross-legged, and Jer hunkered over her, every contour of his body a map of concern.

    Her pretty, fine boned face was entirely slack. A trail of saliva depended from her painted lower lip into her lap. A pool was forming.

    She didn't seem to blink at all. Her pale blue eyes - were they reflecting something?

    "She was like this when I found her," Jerry said, his face screwed up with inner pain.

    And it was a familiar one. People like us, with acquaintances like ours? Once every so often, a pal, a girlfriend winds up in this state and finishes up in ER. Quite
literally
finishes, from time to time.

    He'd just never believed it would happen to someone like April. Yes, she did a little blow, like any normal person. But nothing else that either of us knew about.

    She was facing something that was propped against her armchair. I couldn't see it from this angle.

    "Tell me what happened?" I asked.

    "Man, I dropped around to see her last night, after… you know! We smoked some, then fooled around a little. I even brought her a gift. Came back here 'bout ten this morning, and she was like this. Her
skin's
cold, man, like she's been sitting here all night!"

    There were no spoons, candles, or tin foil near her. I inspected her arms, found no tracks.

    Then I looked at what she was looking at.

    Jerry… shook me.

    "Dude, what the hell are you doing?"

    I had to force myself to look away.

    "That's the gift?"

    "I thought, why not? We've got plenty of them to spare."

    "Jer, there's something wrong with these paintings."

    "Say what?" And, incredulous, he almost laughed. "Man, they're just so great. They're… beautiful. See? I said it. I acknowledged the existence of your kind of beauty."

    "Jer, they-"

    "It's gotta be some pills or something," he was babbling away, though. "Pharmaceutical smack or something. Man, if I get my hands on whoever gave her
that
stuff-"

    And he would not be told otherwise. He took her in a cab to the local ER in the end, bumming ten off me towards the fare.

    I followed them out, refusing to glance back.

    April was in a coma, though the people at the hospital could not discover why. It was not drugs. I went to see her the next day. Swore I could see flecks of surplus colour in her open, staring eyes.

    The thing that keeps people like Jer going and makes survivors of them - it is their ability to just move on. It's not that he didn't care. Far from it. It's just that he realized, without having to vocalize it, that continued existence depends on - do I really have to use that old "moving shark" metaphor?

    Over the next couple of days, he hauled the five paintings - he'd taken April's back - around some dozen galleries.

    "What is with it with these fools?" he now complained. "They're supposed to be businessmen, and all they do is gawk? I couldn't get a price-tag out of one of them! And for such beautiful paintings!"

    And I finally realized what this was. It was all to do with -immunity. Resistance levels.

    A disease goes around, see? A plague. And most people succumb. But a few just have something natural in them that subdues the sickness, makes it less effective.

    So it was with Jer. He'd always been aloof towards fine paintings. Totally immune to artistic beauty. And so, when the bug had struck, it had affected him to a degree - but had not felled him completely like the rest of us, apparently.

    "Jer-" I tried to tell him for the dozenth time.

    But he still wasn't prepared to listen. Maybe that was a part of the paintings' limited effect on him.

    When he went home, he looked annoyed enough to do something exceptionally stupid.

    Which bothered me enough to go around at ten o'clock and check up on him.

    The door wasn't locked. The pungent aroma of California Gold hit me as I went into the hallway.

    There were no lights on in Jer's living room. Just the glow of those three screens. That was strong enough to pick out, on the little dining table, an open jar of pharmaceutical coke and a half-empty bottle of bourbon.

    Jer was hunkered over the screen of the middle computer, and there was a scanner humming beside him, and several wooden picture frames lay scattered on the floor.

    His back was in the way, so I could only see the edges of the image on his screen. It was enough.

    It didn't mesmerize me, this time. Maybe you needed the whole picture for that.

    "Jer, what are you doing?" I asked.

    When he turned towards me, I could see how out of it he was. His face like a plastic mask in the weird light. His pupils too large, his thin lips twitching. He tried to smile, but it came out as something else entirely.

    "They're so beautiful, dude," he informed me, like a stuck record. "Beauty like I've never seen in my entire life. If those asses at the galleries won't show them - well, the whole world ought to see them. That's what art's about, right? It belongs to everyone. The entire world."

    His e-mail page was now up on the screen. He turned back to it, and started making attachments.

    What the-?

    "Jer, no!"

    And I started lunging forwards.

    He had clicked on SEND before my hand could reach him. I stopped, feeling a lot more than helpless, letting my arms drop down to my sides.

    "The whole world, man," Jer was mumbling to himself again. "The entire teemin' world."

    It is two days later, by this time. And everything has changed.

    No planes pass overhead any longer. There are far fewer cars, no trains. The mail hasn't come. The mart down the road is running at half-staff, and running out of supplies. There are hardly any trucks at all.

    Not everyone has a computer, of course. Most of those people are just wandering around, trying to figure what the hell is going on.

    Sooner or later, most of
them
go into a loved one's place of work, or an offspring's bedroom. And they do not re-emerge.

    This morning, a fire started up near the centre of town. And is still spreading. I can see the vast plume of smoke from my window. And I keep on wondering. Those people in front of their screens down there - do they even move when the flames start to consume them? Chill thought.

    The power hasn't gone out yet. Emergency measures, I suppose. I wish it would. Although that might change nothing. It took only the space of one night to put April in a coma. And it's now been forty or so hours for most people.

    I ought to go see if she's come around, but cannot bring myself, since I suspect the worst.

    Jer dropped round about an hour back. He still doesn't seem to realize what's going on.

    As I said, maybe that's a side-effect of his partially-immune reaction to the paintings.

    He told me six more times how very beautiful they were.

    There's looting.

    I keep thinking of places that I've only ever seen on the TV. Craggy places. Dusty places. Places where there is not so much as an electrical wire, but people live there.

    They don't even know it, but they've just inherited the earth. Does an absence of technology make one meek in any sense?