Our Lovely Artwork: Chapter 3

Do You Believe In Angels?

I tried to catch them when they came to visit me again.

I had started to pin up the drawings that they would send me. I installed a Ring doorbell to try to get some kind of recording of this artist that had taken over Grant County; the artist that I couldn’t get out of my head, and who I saw in my nightmares. The second time they came, I had woken up in a fright, having sprinted to the door as quickly as I could with my gun drawn. But when I got there, there was nothing but an empty street and a flickering street light. I didn’t sleep that night, instead sitting on that porch with the present box they left behind in my hands, looking down at the image of a more finished rendition of the drawing they had given me after their first killing.

I sat outside at night regularly after that. In the dead of midnight, I’d be sitting outside for hours, waiting and watching for some kind of dark figure to lurch out from the shadows and try to have a go at carving me into their next creation. I waited, and I even hoped at a certain point. I would start to see shapes of a lanky figure of indistinct sex standing in the dark behind the light of the street lamps, a sea of hair surging like tentacles. But the image would eventually disappear, a trick that my mind was playing on me, tormenting me like that damned artist.

And the following morning, I would see a present brought to the back of my house. And then when I started sitting out back, with a camera pointed out the front, the present was sent at a completely different time, when I couldn’t take it and passed out from exhaustion. I remember one night when I discovered a new drawing of a black, writhing figure with long fingers lying on its side, no doubt a depiction of the wax woman found at the boxing gym. Her name was Jenna Brahms. She owned a pizza restaurant not far from the gym, and she was described as one of the most gentle women in town. People came to her restaurant for good food and good talk– she had wanted to become a psychologist, but couldn’t find the money to continue school. She still loved to comfort people and talk about any troubles they had. She wasn’t marred in any controversy. She wasn’t suspected of doing anything wrong. And the artist had decided she was the perfect target to be filled with wax; to be bathed in the burning oil while bound and unable to do anything to escape her fate of being turned into some macabre decoration for my viewing pleasure. It made me sick to my stomach that I was part of this in any way, even though I never asked to be someone’s twisted art critic.

The frustration got to me. I smashed a cup against the wall when I walked back inside and found a sketch nailed above the sink. I watched the shards spread across my floor and skitter underneath the sink like spooked rats as I asked myself the question: why me? Why did they choose to keep me alive just to fuck with me, and kill other citizens in my stead? Why not just kill me and get it over with already? Or maybe this was some kind of punishment for being so dedicated to finding this freak.

But I was still here. Miserable, sleep-deprived, and furious, but still here. I needed to go back. Maybe there was something I missed. There had to be.

Late at night, I drove back to that dreaded farmhouse, the one where I found Richard Carlson pinned to the barn above his ceramic-clad family. I parked a distance away in case any officers were still here. Everyone probably thought I was going crazy from everything that had happened– after the fifth drawing sent to my house, and seeing how truly tired I was, they told me to take a short leave so that I could get some sleep and do my duty more effectively. But I know that’s not the full reason why they made me leave– I figured out that it was someone from the Department who was The Artist. They knew I was on to them. They had to try to get rid of me before I found them out. They thought they could get rid of me and throw me out of this. But like hell they were going to get me to stop.

They thought they could keep torturing me and try to get me to roll over and die. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about it a few times. I needed rest. I couldn’t sleep during the night, and barely during the day. My heart couldn’t stop palpitating in my chest, and I found myself nodding off in the middle of things I was doing. But I kept hearing their whispers in my ear. Sometimes they were deep and rough. Sometimes they were feminine and wicked. There was no face I could put them to, so they eventually became an amalgamation of the fragments of many faces I had seen before– a Picasso of different people melded together to make the horrific image of the Bloody Artist. Neither man nor woman, and somehow both, and a mixture of Human that was not stitched but clearly not whole. And when they opened their mouth, their voice was like a song from a thousand different birds.

But maybe that was their intention all along– to create an image for themselves that put their real one to shame. To make the perfect piece of art, one that didn’t exist physically, but instead in the mind of some poor sap that was cursed with its knowledge. And that poor sap just so happened to be me, trapped with this moving self-portrait of theirs.

And even after this… I felt as though I would be stuck with that for life. Lucky me.

***

I walked back onto the property, the barn doors covered with police tape; it didn’t seem as though anyone was here, which was both unsettling and relieving. As I walked inside the barn, I was hit with a disgustingly musky scent. Everything inside that I remembered from the crime scene initially had been taken out– even the pigs below Carlson’s hanging body were taken away, likely as pieces of evidence themselves. Inside, there were also markings where the body was, an eerie white outline to replace the visage that was a man’s corpse strewn for everyone to see. I climbed up to the next story similarly to how I did last time, and sure enough, there were also outlines of how the family was sitting. I remember the movement of his old man’s eye from behind the glassy material, which was another vision I kept seeing whenever I closed my lids. Maybe there was still hope for that family once they were pulled out from that prison made out of china. I looked at the floorboards, seeing tiny chips of the ceramic left behind. Not worth taking, I thought– though, glancing down at them, I saw that some were lightly bloody, and others were not. Maybe it was because they fell off at different parts. But it still worried me that the Carlson family could potentially be dead or dying by the time they were released.

I looked far and wide throughout the barn, but found very little else of value that I didn’t already see before. Some parts of the barn had been scrubbed down, which was clear from how bright the wood was compared to other spots. Peculiar, to me anyway. Maybe there was some kind of procedure I was not aware of, but considering this was an active crime scene, I presumed that nothing should be touched until it was all said and done. Just another sign to me that someone from the department was trying to manipulate things behind the scenes.

In my paranoia, I tried to move the straw beneath my feet, only to find it barely budged. I knelt down on the floor, pulling on the straw only to find that it was firmly stuck to the floor. Stuck because of mud or manure? Maybe. But I wasn’t taking my chances. I pulled and ripped at the straw, and when that became too much of a chore, I took out my utility knife and started cutting away at the base of what was keeping them there. As I cut away, I pulled up a clump that had a gray substance at the bottom. It was more solid and smooth to the touch.

Plaster.

I cut where this plaster was most prevalent near the back of the barn. I spent a long time scoring that plaster, just to see if there was something underneath. Or if this was some kind of trick my tired mind was playing on me again. But eventually… I hit something. I stabbed into a crease in the floorboards larger than the others, and after clearing out more of it, I looked down to see a simple trapdoor– a basement afoot.

Without hesitation, I opened it up and walked down the rickety stairs below. Immediately, an oily, acrid scent filled my nose as I started to move more hurriedly. I kept my flashlight up near my head and my gun in the other hand, worried about whether anyone was still held up in here. When I got to the bottom, I was met with a room of horrors– there were paintings, dozens of them. All of them depicted different people; one was a painted rendition of the drawing I first received, the face of a man broken into several different pieces like a glass mirror, with each line being a dusky red along shattering skin. Another was of the woman in black, squirming and struggling in a fetal position with a mouth wide enough to drop to her feet. But then there were the others that I didn’t recognize that scared me the most: one of a man that looked more corpse-like and skeletal, with his eyes straining in their sockets, another with cupcakes on a platter, each one holding the face of a little girl with different facial expressions; some screaming out, some in quiet peace, and some tearfully crying. There were too many to count, and the faces of all these victims started to blend together in my head in a storm. Were there more kills than the ones that we’ve found? How long has this psycho been doing this for? And how long had it been since then that we found the first victims? All of it was so overwhelming.

And as my flashlight whipped around, I shouted in utter terror as my light landed on a piece that made my stomach lurch. Before me, sculpted with a gut-wrenching amount of precision, was a sculpture of meat and bone. The bones had been bent and twisted to fit a cubic art style, resulting in a fleshy swirl that was turned into numerous shapes that were made to elongate and exaggerate the features of the individual. A nose pushed forward to be larger. An ear pushed in to look smaller. Lips shaped with unused bone in order to make a rhombus-like shape. And along it were many eyes. Not just a pair that would come from one person, but instead from many, including those that looked inhuman and animal in shape. The blood below and along it had dried up, though there was almost a moisture still to it that remained fresh, as flies were already starting to buzz around the defiled corpse.

I was left on my hands and knees, holding my stomach as a surge of vomit spilled from my mouth at the sight of the grotesque figure. It made my gut hurt worse than any ache I’ve had in my life. And at the very end, I felt tears welling up; this couldn’t be real. I was hoping that I would wake up from all of this in bed, staring at my ceiling in relief that what I was seeing was all just fake and some delusion in my head. But as this pain washed through my body, I knew it was all too real. And I was forced to accept this twisted creation as a reality.

But as I was finishing throwing up, I heard the sound of a gunshot ring out behind me, which created a whole new sensation through my body. I pushed my hand against my back and felt the warm trickle, starting to feel my throat well up with blood as I collapsed on my side, coughing it out of my mouth as I was left stunned by the weight of my own body. I looked up to see a flashlight shining in my face, and a figure starting to walk towards me from the top of the stairs. As their face got closer to me, I started to shudder. It was my supervisor. The same person who had been chewing me out for going out to this place the first time. The same person who wouldn’t tell me any of the details of other cases like this, so much so that Erin had to be the one who told me about everything. And the same one who had recommended I take a mental-health leave.

“Y-YOOOOOU-!” I let out in a pure, straining shriek of agony and rage before I started to cough out more of my blood onto the floor. My body felt colder, and even with me getting so tired, I forced myself to stay awake.

He looked at me with a stare of utter despair and helplessness. “I-I’m sorry… no one can know. She’ll stop eventually… but you can’t now. She has someone important to me, and I can’t let anyone get in her way while she’s on her tour….”

“H-Her….?” I was left tearful, left with a chilling realization of the situation.

Just as he raised his gun, ready to finish me off, he was suddenly stopped as something suddenly jutted out from his throat– a sharpened chisel, now ripe with red. A slithery voice came from behind my attacker.

“What did I tell you…? You’re not allowed to kill our greatest friend! You should’ve listened, naughty Beckett~.”

The figure’s head leaned forward against his shoulder. The lowermost part of their face was pale, with their teeth yellowed as they smiled.

“... He’s already dead. But don’t worry… he’s immortalized now. With me.”

A tear appeared to stream down his face as the figure yanked the chisel out from his neck and left him to choke on his own blood, writhing on the ground and kicking him aside. She moved to pick up the flashlight. Her voice seemed to come out more cheery than before.

“I’m so sorry you had to see that! You’ve already seen so much, and I’ve hated to see you like this, y’know. I can’t have you overworked and sleepless if you’re going to see more of my work! After all… you are my very special, very favorite fan!”

Seeing her in full, it rocked me to my core as I was starting to fade. Her teeth were yellow, her skin was pale, and her hair was a long brunette curtain that hadn’t been cut for some time, some parts of it colored with different blacks and reds from different paints she hadn’t bothered to wash out. And behind it were crystal blue eyes, driven by a powerful mania.

“I promise. I’ll take very good care of you.”

There she was. Caesarina Carlson. Wife of Richard Carlson.

And she was The Artist to save my life.