The Grave Shadows

9. The Paintings

Yes, the paintings.

In those nights, David woke the world with chilling howls. "Mine!" The scream ripped his vocal cords. "Mine! Mine! Mine!" He shuddered in the north hallway, clinging to a wet masterpiece. This lovely gesture was Van Gogh having finished another painting. Scratches proliferated on anyone who dared to intervene. Nothing calmed David's unfathomable rage, but exhaustion.

One night, a commotion frustrated Everett out of his bedroom. When Bill Watts's stupid hounds sneaked in the mansion, the cherubs spooked them. But unsurprisingly, the animals were more intelligent than a freak. The ruckus was merely Bill Watts's precious second-born.

David and Bill Watts wrestled in the dimmed passage.

Everett took a step back, his eyes on the smudged illustration, wanting to yell, For a million times, we know, freak!

In the bloody chaos, Bill Watts winced, covering a malicious scratch on his face. His fist involuntarily hurled at David's cheek. Bill Watts gasped—he never hurt David as he did the other boys.

From David's nose, blood dripped and dyed a lock of his blond hair. He screamed, "Mine!" His eyes were red, his body nearly cracking from the explosion of his growls. "Mine! Mine!"

Will and Simon clutched David to the sweat-splattered carpet.

"What did you do?" Mary pushed Bill Watts out of the way and pulled the mad Watts boy into her chest. Tears streamed down her face as fast as David's blood.

Everett jerked Mary's arm, terrified for her safety, but her great courage burned the hallway like a summer sun.

"Yours..." Mary wiped David's mouth and kissed the top of his head. "Don't worry, my baby. She's yours."

Everett stiffened on the black linen, perspirations grasping on his bare chest. Through the windows, the sylvan breezes from the north of the estate sneaked into his bedroom. Cicadas whined, keeping the night alive. After two in the morning, he spun out of bed and looked under the mattress.

Coincidence was a simple word for Everett's statistical-concerned mind. Random events coursed through the earth. The brain had the innate to find structures, so noticing these synchronicities was a way to configure the mess. People shared the same birthdays, and doppelgangers passed through generations. There were the sentences people said in unison, the thoughts they reminisced together, the same tastes they developed, and the blood they shared. Logics, probabilities, numbers, and science sufficiently explained these concurring serialities.

What explains you? Everett thought as he gazed upon the troubling evidence.

A sketchbook trembled in his hands. If David or Bill Watts knew that Everett took the collection, they would gash him without blinking. The Watts family took disciplinary to heart. David's things were off-limits—it was the absolute rule for everyone in this house.

David's insanity began before Everett was born and haunted the otherwise perfect lineage. Will and Simon brought up the past when they were drunk enough to mention David—a dull child, the opposite of Hector. Simon said Hector was too perfect; God made David a little vague. Bill Watts and Eleanor cared about David more than the other boys. Will thought it was sympathy at first, but pity was a foreign vocabulary to the Watts Clan. The couple worshiped their freaky angle. David was pure, fragile, and unique, people compliantly said, but the Watts boys knew that the correct term was mentally disabled.

When David was five, his condition worsened. At one point, nobody could get close to him. The precious child decayed in his room, eventually developing some unnatural crap that nobody was supposed to broadcast. That new hobby anchored him, calming him down and distracting him from throwing other weird tantrums. Soon later, the drawing was everything to David, his only way to be. His creations were imprecise at first when the skill was stabbing the canvases with pencils. But as the lines became substantial, the shadows and the curbs rendered his imaginations. The color bled throughout the frames, and a creature took shape.

All David sketched, painted, and created was one thing. The blue-eyed girl—laughed, smiled, and cried. Throughout David's strange life, it had been about her. The pictures of the girl overflowed his bedroom, turning the mansion into his brain—a mysterious chasm stuffed with one girl who looked far too real. Sometimes, David's talent convinced the Watts boys that she existed.

David had never talked about her while he swam in the closed realm where madness was free and nurtured. In the real world, nobody acknowledged David Watts's condition despite his apparent eccentricity. Hitting rock-bottom when Bill Watts hit him, David, with most of his paintings, moved to L.A. Bill Watts tried to get the broken boy home, but the effort was useless. When it came to David, Bill Watts dropped his knife before the throat. David was Bill Watts's only weakness, his one limit.

Out of the blue, the brothers found out that David was famous. In the end, he was the Watts boy, born with a jawline made for fame. Dark Prince of Modern Art, Hollywood called him. But David's celebrated works were other abstracts, not the mysterious portraits of the girl. Seemingly, even a madman knew what to hide.

The girl in the sketches was Cyan or her reflection at least. Her laugh vibrated on the papers; her irises David's primal urge; the strands of her hair, the lines of her frowning, and the plumpness of her lips his graphite. Everett knew the girl for years, and perhaps he had always believed David.

The papers glued to Everett's hands. This extraordinary similitude was his secret, too. At first, he snatched this particular collection for the nudity. The airy traces of her anatomy were microscopically correct. How could David paint Cyan before she was born? These sketches were over twenty years ago. Another calculation struck Everett—if David got the details of Cyan's face so elaborately accurate, other parts of her body in the sketches had to be precise. Warm thirst settled in his throat, and the mystical rain engulfed him.

Everett held his breath, dropped the sketchbook, and clenched his fists against his sides. He was ready to sneak in David's world.

No, she's not yours, freak.