“Fuck it,” he said aloud, and pulled his elbow back to punch out one of the mullioned panes. Then the voice—the one with the perfect memory—reminded him of the ring of keys back in the fridge.

He ran inside, grabbed them, and came back out—all in a quick jog. He tried a few keys until he found one that worked, then opened the door and stepped inside.

Jake closed the door behind himself, flipped the lock, and slowly moved into the dark.

He cracked the lighting to life and looked around. Like the house, the space had a large main floor and a mezzanine overhead. About a quarter of the downstairs was the garage, and had a single door centered in the wall as access. The rest of the space had been Jacob Coleridge’s studio, but unlike the stasis of the house, the studio had changed. A lot. Jake looked around and sucked in a long, low breath that actually scraped his windpipe as it went down.

Jacob had painted every available surface—including the floor and ceiling—a flat black. He had then decorated this negative space with dozens of portraits of the same bloody man from the hospital wall, filling the dark expanse with anatomical studies out of a Hieronymus Bosch-inspired hell. They were deftly executed and hyperdetailed—anatomically perfect. Except they were faceless. The sense of menace they conveyed could not be ignored.

Jake walked to the center of the studio and spun in place, trying to take in the work. Each figure was frighteningly executed, the flesh breathing, the blood pumping. No matter which figure Jake looked at, it seemed to be watching him back with faceless malevolence.

The ceiling was twenty feet above the painted concrete floor of the studio, hidden in a seamless cloud of shadow and black paint. As he moved beneath the beams the figures painted on the ceiling looked like they were crawling around in the darkness, following him. When he stopped moving, the illusion ceased, and the bloody figures froze in place.

But the strange part—the part that somehow eclipsed Jacob’s garage/studio Sistine Chapel of demented demons—were the canvases piled up everywhere; the same senseless pieces that were scattered all over the house. There were hundreds of them—maybe even thousands—filling every available scrap of space, stacked like valueless cargo. Jake looked around in awe, thinking of the old adage about the manic woodchuck. How many crazy paintings would a crazy painter paint if a crazy painter could paint crazy paintings?

The answer was, of course, a shitload.

Jake picked one up and examined the composition. It was like the ones in the kitchen drawer, or in the upstairs hallway, or under the piano—a lifeless shape of near-color. He flipped through a few. Some were gray, others black, some the color of rotting tumors. More paintings of nothing. Negative space. Dead blobs. But the quantity gave them a communal voice that let him know that there was a point to them. How long had these taken? A year? Two? Ten? He put the canvas back and looked around the studio.

The faceless figures up in the rafters were still following him. His father had never considered himself a classicist, but the three-dimensional representations of whatever the fuck he was looking at were beyond lifelike. They were astounding. Tormented, horrid effigies, that represented…that represented…he swung his head across the black skyline of the ceiling, pulling in the details of the same man Jacob had painted on the wall of his hospital room—just what did they represent?

Skinned, they whispered in unison.

These were a message. A signal. There was a reason behind them. Jake could sense its signal but he couldn’t isolate the meaning. And this bothered him. These lifeless little canvases said something. Like the faceless man of blood on the hospital wall. Like the Chuck Close portrait with the missing eyes. Like the stacks of paintings. Could it be nothing more than madness? Alzheimer’s? Paranoia? All of the above?

Somewhere in the decaying apple of his father’s mind was a worm of a thought that the old man listened to. It had wriggled through his skull, sending him diseased instructions that he deciphered in his own way. How much of that had bled into what he had tried to say here? This couldn’t all be random—there was too much in the way of long-term planning and execution. Someone with Alzheimer’s would have gone off the rails a long time ago. So what was he trying to say?

Jake spun on the floor, his eyes digging into the walls, trying to see around the pillars of canvases stacked like pizza boxes. From a trompe l’oeil perspective, it was an engineering feat. Wherever he stood, the faceless watched him.

They were trying to tell him something.

Like the speech of the dead that he deciphered, he needed the code. The common language. That secret way his old man’s mind worked. Which might as well have been written in Easter Island glyphs.

What he did—what he was good at—was figuring out how killers thought. And the killers he hunted were artists. From a societal perspective it was demented, sadistic art, but that was missing the obvious; to them it was art. And it was always expressed with a unique voice; the language of the worm firing bursts of code into the rotting apple. Jake’s gift had always been figuring out the artist-specific language of the murderers he hunted, figuring out their own personal symbolism and its subtext. If he could look at a murder scene through the eyes of the psychotic, how much harder would it be to look at this space through the eyes of a man he shared some common ground with? It was a different language—the language of the mad—but it was still language. Which meant it was decipherable. What was—?

—And there was a jolt of electricity that came at him out of nowhere, shaking the engine room beneath his ribs. He had time to grab his chest before there was another crackle in the circuitry. Fell to his knees.

Then his stomach.

The floor stretched away into the dark at a right angle to his line of sight, and dust bunnies danced in front of his face with his breath.

How many crazy paintings would a crazy painter paint? echoed somewhere off in the distance.

Then everything faded away, even the canopy of faceless stares.

28

For a second there was the black-hot pain of a fist clenching inside his skull and as quickly as it took hold, it faded to a distant hammer against the membrane of his mind. Kay was in a rectangle of light, her hair outlined in a phosphorescent glow, rushing forward, mouth flying open. A filling twinkled amid her molars.

“Jesus! Fuck! Jake!”

He pushed himself up onto his knees, holding his chest.

“I prefer See Spot run, but if it turns you on…” He let the sentence trail off.

Kay helped him to his feet.

“Sorry, baby. The jukebox took a hit. I guess I got too excited.” He stood up shakily, massaging his chest.

She punched him in the arm. “Thanks for scaring the piss out of me. Usually you just twinge a bit and you’re good.” Kay wondered what could have set his heart rate through the roof.

Jake turned away from her, back to the images on the walls and ceiling. “Whacha think?” he asked, nodding up into the darkness.

She followed his nod and her mouth twitched into an uncomfortable grin, all teeth and no lips. “This is Gustave Doré on psychotropic leave.”

Jake nodded. “Apt comparison.”

Kay walked slowly around the room.

Like Jake, she was more impressed with the endless stacks of little paintings than the bleeding men in the black sky overhead, although it was obvious that she felt they were following her as well by the way she kept glancing up at them. She threaded between the pillars of paintings, trying to make sense of it all. “There has to be three thousand of these things.”