AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Let go…
I grabbed my sketch pad. I had to get himout.I sketched and sketched: feathered wings touched by moonlight, alabaster skin, black eyes with flames and death in their endless depths. I tried to capture him all at once and in bits and pieces; different angles, different degrees of light falling over him, the lines of his elegant, long fingers, the beetle’s glossy shine, the twist of his lips…
When my hand was cramping from the urgency of my sketching, I set down the pen and realized I’d filled five pages with the demon. The memory of him—no, theimage, I reminded myself—was still with me but not as visceral; I felt like I was allowed to get on with my day.
“Whatever the hell that entails.”
I set down the sketchpad and picked up my phone. Nothing from Vaughn. Nothing from anyone.
Get up. Get out. Do something.
The thoughts were warnings. Flares going up through the bleakness of a thousand other thoughts that wondered what was the point of anything? Stay in bed or don’t, who cared?
Come with me…
“No.”
I wasn’t so far gone that I was going to sit in my bed all day with my own release drying on my pajama pants. I got out of bed and headed to the bathroom, moving through the space where my nocturnal visitor had been standing in my dream.
I caught a whiff of smoke. No, it was ash. A dead fire.
“Your imagination,” I told myself. I had a vivid one, after all. I was an artist. Or had been in another life. But that’s over now…
“Stop it,” I muttered and continued to the tiny bathroom.
I stripped out of my pajamas, and my blood went cold all over. On my thigh was a bruise about the size of a quarter.
Where the corner of the art book hit me when I dropped it…in mydream.
The early morning was bitterly cold and gray. I had the day off from Mulligan’s—my schedule at the pub getting leaner by the minute—and took the bus to Hyde Park, juggling a small stool, my sketchbook, and a coffee. I needed the warmth, but the coffee was making me jittery.
You could’ve gotten the bruise from anywhere. From moving your portraits into your new place. You didn’t notice it at the time, but the dream gave an explanation. That’s all.
The rationale made sense; vastly more plausible than the alternative—that an actual demon-creature had visited me last night. But the uncannyrealnessof him argued back more than any bruise until I laughed at myself.
Maybe I was going crazy. That was the most plausible argument of all.
I set up shop in Hyde Park, put out a little sign that said I’d do portraits for ten pounds, per. From my backpack, I pulled a piece of cardboard on which I’d taped a few portraits—my friend Lucy among them—as a sampling of my “talent.”
The jittery feeling faded under the pointlessness of it all. Resignation infused my every action, turning my world even grayer than the sky. Who was going to sit in the chill wind for a portrait? Stupid. It didn’t matter that other artists were there, setting up their own mini studios. Didn’t matter that the paths were busy with foot traffic and tourists.
It sort of scared me how little anything mattered at all. The nightmare was starting to make more sense.
I sat stewing in my own apathy and almost didn’t notice the young couple standing in front of me, bundled in heavy coats and scarves against the cold, their arms linked. Americans, by their accents, or lack thereof.
“Ooh, he’s good. I want one,” the woman said.
“Go for it,” the guy said, giving her a gentle nudge. “We got time.”
She turned to me excitedly. “Can I?”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “Here.”
I gave her the stool and knelt on the hard stone a few feet away. I set the sketchbook on my thigh and flipped past the frantic drawings of the demon—thedreamdemon, I insisted; thinking otherwise felt monumentally stupid—and began to sketch.
When I set out to do portraiture, the exact likeness of my subject was as important as capturing some innate quality in them that only they possessed. Whatever made them, them.
I blew on my hands and tried to render this young woman’s eyes as I saw them—pretty, long-lashed, but with an inner light that wasn’t dimmed by the drab London morning. But whatever inner lightImight’ve had that guided my art felt distant. Veiled. As if I could feel that it was still there but dulled. I drew the woman from rote skill and nothing more. The couple was thrilled with the accuracy when I was finished and complimented me again and again, but I knew the truth.
