The Barn Painting

by Travis Flatt

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

Although Eddie was fast, a born athlete and runner, he felt the thin man gaining on him. He didn’t dare look back. The trees grew closer and closer, but somehow, within seconds, the skinny man wasn’t behind him but running beside him, sprinting at Eddie’s shoulder. “You haven’t earned your eight kroner yet, Eddie.”

What was more terrible than being caught was this taunting. Eddie ran hard enough for his heart to pound, but he could hear the man in his ear, whispering. “Your friend Josef Lukas will paint if you won’t, Eddie. And he doesn’t need the money.”

It was obvious that the skinny man ran without effort and, when Eddie glanced down, he saw that the man’s feet weren’t touching the ground. The skinny man’s legs were bent at the knees, and he was floating, dreamlike, beside Eddie to match his pace. When Eddie saw this, he stumbled, threw his hands out before him, and fell hard onto the rough grass.

He’d been running so fiercely that his hands slipped, and his chin banged on the ground. His vision swam for a moment — only a second — and when he looked up, the skinny man was crouched down in front of him, grinning an incongruent smile of straight, white teeth.

“Mikel, get over here and help me with this.”

“I’m coming, Piet.”

Eddie tried to stand, but the skinny man’s hand, like a snake strike, tapped Eddie’s shoulder. The boy fell heavily down onto his chest in the grass.

“Just stay there, Eddie. We’ll get your money now.”

When the skinny man pushed him down onto the grass — and it had only felt like a little pat — it had knocked the breath out of Eddie, who lay wheezing in the grass. A large hand picked him up by a rumple of the back of his shirt and began carrying him like a suitcase across the field toward the barn. He tried to kick his legs and swing his arms to fight, but his limbs were watery, sluggish, and horribly impotent, like fighting in a dream.

The barn door was gateless, huge, and yawning, though it glowed from inside brighter than the August afternoon.

Inside hung a candle-lit chandelier.

When the big man, Mikel, tossed Eddie onto the barn floor, which was hay-strewn and foul-smelling, Eddie saw that the iron chandelier held countless red candles burning. If the painting on the far side of the barn was terrible, it was nothing compared to the paintings on the walls inside.

There was a giant, musclebound old man clutching a human torso upon whom he feasted. Other paintings depicted casual cannibalism; bodies hung by chains in contorted positions; screaming men and women dissected alive.

And there were demons — demons of all shapes and sizes — more demons than all of Eddie’s father’s sermons from infanthood to teenage years could begin to conjure. These paintings were rendered across the decrepit wooden slats of the barn’s interior wall with astounding — yet terrible — skill and in wildly different styles.

Eddie tried to struggle to his feet and found that his legs fought his desperate pleas. Standing over him were the two men, the skinny and the large, Piet and Mikel. Though the candlelight illuminated every inch of the nightmarish paintings, the two men were dark and shadowed.

The thin man, Piet, leaned down again. “We’ve saved you some space on the wall for your painting, Eddie, so you can still earn those eight kroner. But — there’s a problem... we’re out of paint.”

Eddie saw that the dark form of hulking Mikel held a long, thin knife, and at his feet was a small bucket. Eddie managed to hoist himself to his knees.

Piet, who’d stayed leaning and was at Eddie’s ear once more, said, “We’re not going to hurt you. Stay still. Let me see your hand.”

Eddie slapped his palms to his thighs in resistance, but Piet reached and took the boy’s left wrist and easily pulled it away from the leg. He examined the hand in the chandelier’s light. Mikel nudged the bucket underneath Eddie’s hand with his giant boot, and Piet took the knife from the larger man and swiftly pricked the center of Eddie’s palm.

First, one fat red drop formed, and then Piet squeezed Eddie’s wrist. The drop of blood fell into the bucket with a splat. What followed was more blood, a stream of blood. It flowed out of Eddie’s pricked hand in a continuous stream until it quickly overran the sides of the little bucket. The skinny man squeezed his wrist again and the blood stopped. Piet dropped the wrist and Eddie’s hand fell, his arm numb against his side. The boy felt faint and the candlelight faded.

* * *

When Eddie awoke, he saw the two men standing before him, but they were different. First of all, they were upside down. Eddie was hanging by his ankles; a hairy rope bit him, and his shoes were gone. The men, whose hair had been lank and greasy, were now blond, clean, and younger. Neither had been ugly, but now they looked angelic — gorgeous and radiant. Their filthy, dark clothes were replaced with white, well-tailored suits gold-buttoned and jewel-cuffed.

With blood rushing to his head, Eddie was growing dizzy, but he realized that he felt sticky from head to toe. His shirt and trousers had been removed, but he still wore his undershorts. When he lifted his head to look down/up — which took enormous effort — he saw that his body was covered with strange red symbols painted in a language he’d never seen.

A little whistle came from below.

This new, cleaned-up Piet was smiling benignly. “I told you we had saved you a spot, Eddie. The eight kroner we can’t give you now, but you will have it in time. And much more.”

Piet pointed at a place on the wall covered in drying paint, not blood red, but mostly orange and blue. It showed — from what Eddie could make out from his upside-down vantage — a ghostly, black-clad figure, hands clasped to face and mouth opened and gaping in a terrible scream. “You see? We have something for you.”

The big man, Mikel, stepped closer to Piet and cracked his knuckles. “You like it? That was me.”

“Don’t brag, Mikel,” said Piet. “It’s unbecoming.”

“It’s my best in years.”

The big man, Mikel, subtly nudged Piet out of the way and stood almost eye to eye with the hanging Eddie. His smile was white and clean like Piet’s, and his breath smelled like sweet, fresh herbs. “Remember it, Edvard. Study it. We’re giving it to you.”

Eddie felt tears falling off his face and running down his forehead. “Please, let me down.”

Mikel frowned. “You haven’t dried yet.”

Eddie looked down and saw several buckets underneath him, some partially full of different colored liquids. “Are you going to kill me?”

The two men looked at each other and laughed. Then, Piet spoke: “Kill you? Of course not. Drain you for the rest of your life, body and soul? Yes. But kill you? No.”

Eddie fought against passing out, realized he was swaying gently and shivering.

Piet reached out to wipe tears from Piet’s forehead. “If it makes you feel better, Eddie, in a few years, your friend Josef will burn alive in this barn.”

Next to him, Mikel’s eyes flashed, and he held up a thick finger and waggled it. “Don’t try to stop it. Won’t work.”

Eddie saw that the candles were dimming and that the two men radiated light from their white suits. Though he tried to flick the thought away, for an instant, he saw his rat-faced classmate, Josef, running out of the barn’s open door and into the wheat, wearing a suit of smoke and flame. Eddie struggled, which caused him to sway more and more. He thought he might vomit into his eyes and hair. “How do you know that? Who are you?”

Piet sighed. “That’s not a very good school they have you in, young man.”

Mikel’s face returned to the expressionless mask from earlier that afternoon. “He’s a priest’s son.”

Piet nodded. “Muses, Edvard. Tempters and muses. Hopefully, one day we’ll see you again.”

The pressure behind Eddie’s eyes swelled, and the barn swam away to blackness.

* * *

When Edvard Munch awoke, he was shivering. In his sleep, he had buried himself in rotten hay. He sat, horrified to find himself still inside the barn. It was dusk. Thin light fell between the colorless boards. The barn was large and dim and shadow-draped inside, but one red candle sat burning on an orange clay plate.

Eddie looked up, around. The chandelier was gone, and the gray walls were wiped clean of those nightmare paintings. His head ached terribly, and his ankles were striped in raw, red bands. The strange writing had dried on his skin and was flaking off.

Beside him, folded neatly, were his shirt and trousers. His shoes sat atop them.

He stood and brushed off the moldy hay, watching chips of the red body-writing hail down from his pale skin. He climbed into his overclothes and put on his shoes.

He thought of Josef Lukas, running from this damned barn and into the field aflame. Picking up the candle, he knelt to set alight the pile of hay he’d built around himself while sleeping, but a gust of chill ghost wind flared up and lashed the flame across his wrist like an admonishment, like Sister Agnes’s switch. The candle blew out.

Eddie walked out of the horrid barn into the dying sun. It had cooled off. The barn’s outer paintings had vanished, as well. All that was left was the strange script marked on his skin, and it was crumbling away.

Overcome with the urge to run home and throw his arms around his father, to seek the thin safety of his father’s stern prayer, he took several long loping steps toward the road. He ran in a clumsy stagger, fell upon the slat fence, and leaned there in a vicious fit of coughing. He coughed until he tasted blood, coughed until his jaw ached, slapped his hands to his cheeks, and retched.

He’d come to the place where the dead dog lay, so overcome with the desire to run, with the coughing, that he only noticed when he caught his breath, sucked air, and glanced down at the dusty road. He caught sight of himself with his hands gripping his face, his mouth stretched open, and the blood orange sun lying low in the sky.

He decided when he got home, he’d ignore his father, ignore his mother, and wouldn’t even bathe off the remnants of that hellish red writing.

In his father’s study was a rusty tin can full of pencils. He’d steal a pencil, tear a sheet from one of his father’s notebooks, and sketch what he saw in that puddle, what he’d seen in the chandelier light painted on the barn wall. In time, when he grew in skill and form, he would add what he knew belonged in the picture: a swirling pond for doomed vessels and two men in baggy black rags. Tonight, he would sketch this, and he would fold it and keep it somewhere safe so that he’d never forget it. This image was a promise made in blood, a promise that he’d get what was owed him: eight kroner and more.