Читать книгу The Mural - Michael Mallory - Страница 3

PROLOGUE

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

The town had sprung up out of the ground like a bush.

City hall, market, school, restaurant, auto garage, and houses all stood on a plot of Colonel Henry Jackson Breen’s land that only two years before had shown nothing but trees and bramble. More trees surrounded the buildings and those trees, as well as the soon-to-be-built lumber mill they would supply, were the reason for the fledgling town’s existence.

Breen’s mill; Breen’s town. Soon Breen’s workers would come here to operate the mill and live in the town, which had been christened “Wood City.” They would arrive on the just-completed highway that hugged the coastline and overlooked the Pacific, and he hoped Old Man Hearst up on his goddamned mountaintop just a few miles away would choke on his silver spoon every time he saw the signs of industry that he wasn’t any part of, and never would be, damn the man.

Stepping out of a battered Buick sedan that had been purchased specifically for his visits to Wood City, having concluded that there was little purpose in pummeling his Duisenberg town car on the rough washboard road that accessed the site, Breen surveyed the brick and wood buildings. Most of the civic section had been completed, though there was still a good deal of work to do on the residential sections. But since the level of construction on the houses would be far cheaper, it would move quickly. People could start to move in even before the running water hook-ups were complete.

It was Sunday, which was why the town was devoid of workmen. It was a cooler, crisper day than Colonel Breen had expected, though he knew well enough how the fog and wet mist could settle over the coast, and Wood City was only a few miles inland. Shivering, he pulled the fur color of his overcoat tighter around his neck, jammed his hat down further. Leaving his sense of satisfaction trailing behind him, like so much cigar smoke, he made his way straight to the city hall building. His visit today was a surprise one, which is why he had come up here alone. He had to find out for himself what that Bolshevik painter from Roosevelt’s damnable public art program was up to (or, rather, Rosenfeld’s, since the bastard in the White House was rumored to be a secret Jew intent on carrying out an international cabalistic agenda).

Breen could not even remember the painter’s name, but he knew the type: temperamental, argumentative, with a tendency to use his talent—real or imagined—like a weapon, pulling it against a “lesser mortal” like a dueling saber. Worst of all, all reports from his staff indicated that he was one of those born with a misplaced sense of entitlement, as though the world owed him a free lunch.

Breen had not even wanted the damned mural in the first place. He had seen examples of this so-called art and had hated it. It was nothing more than unrealistic, distorted figures that looked as though they belonged on the walls of some ancient tomb in Egypt rather than in a modern American building. It had been one of Breen’s subordinates who had encouraged him to take advantage of the program, since it was, in effect, free to him. But even at that price it was no bargain, since the “artist” was stalling, refusing to show up for work for days at a time, insisting that he could not create while hampered by a timeline.

Well, by god, there was a timeline, and it would damned well be met! No force on Heaven or earth was going to prevent Colonel Henry Jackson Breen from dedicating Wood City on schedule, at the first of the month. If the damnable mural was not finished, then the wall would be painted over and the lazy Communist hired to create it could be thrown into the ocean, for all Breen cared.

There was a light on inside, indicating the rotter was there. All of the town’s public buildings had already been wired for electricity, and all of the workmen had been using floods to finish their interior work. The front door was unlocked, another sign someone was here, since Breen had personally ordered that all buildings were to be locked once the day’s work had been completed (though he himself held a key to every building in the town, even the houses).

“Hullo!” Breen called out, stepping inside. For some reason, the floods had been turned toward the entrance, leaving the rest of the interior in the shadows. “Is anyone in here?” He received only silence in return. “I said, is anyone in here?”

The smells of drying plaster and paint permeated the interior, barely overriding another earthy, slightly foul odor, like decay. From somewhere inside the building came a sound, almost like a voice, but not quite. Could an animal have gotten in from the woods? Could the damnable thing have come inside and died?

He swung one of the floods around and washed the side wall of the building in a bright, white glow. Breen looked around but could see no one. “Well, let’s have a look at what the genius hath wrought,” he muttered to himself, repositioning the light so that it faced the back wall, and the mural. At his initial glance, it looked to be complete: a massive painting crammed with imagery and overpopulated with figures, like all other Socialist art. At second glance, though, Colonel Henry Jackson Breen saw it for what it really was. It was not the expected depiction of American business and industry; rather it was a monstrous tapestry made up of scenes of misery, degradation, and horror.

In one scene rows of women, their faces twisted into expressions of agony, sewed on ancient Singer machines in what was clearly a depiction of a sweat shop. The cloth on which they worked was a rich crimson, which contrasted with the more muted pastel colors of the scene, drawing the eye to it. The ghastliest touch, however, was the fact that all of the women’s fingers were literally worn away, revealing white bone underneath.

Next to it was a scene in a machine shop, with agonized looking men struggling against what appeared to be a mechanical monster that literally rent their limbs from their bodies.

Overtop was a panorama of agriculture, with terror-stricken looking farmers plowing a grave yard, the loose earth beginning to reveal its contents.

At one side was the depiction of a meat packing plant, showing miserable, blood-splattered drudges cutting up living animals whose faces bore horrific expressions of pain. Below was the depiction of a man grinning dementedly while sodomizing a headless sheep.

This is a vision that could only come from Hell itself! Breen thought, feeling his gorge rising even faster than his anger. Still, he continued to look.

The painted scene of an automobile factory depicted corpses on the assembly line, and thrusting from it, in a horrifying realistic simulation of three-dimensional art, was the remnant of a faulty car that the dead workers had created, overturned and burning on a road, with a family of four trapped inside, their flesh blackened from the fire, all shrieking in terror and anguish. Breen could almost hear the screams.

Next to it was a scene in a department store, but instead of merchandize such as clothing or toys or books, the shelves were stocked with body parts, including a display of severed human genitals.

This was a goddamned abomination! Breen attempted to dismiss the mural as a sickening practical joke, but too much work had been on done on it to make that explanation credible. The only explanation was that the “artist” was a raving lunatic!

Breen had already made the decision to obliterate the mural before looking at the last section. When he did gaze upon it, it caused his blood to rise to the point where there was a pounding in his ears.

It depicted a lumber mill, well populated by workers, but instead of the dead, hopelessly pain-stricken expressions seen on every other figure in the painting, the men shown here were clearly insane. Each one beamed out of the painting with wild eyes and hideous grins as they manned the huge saws, which were not being used to rip tree logs into lumber, but rather dismember people and turn bodies into carrion.

Breen pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and held it tightly over his mouth. Once the wave of nausea had passed, he used it to mop his sweating face. That undetectable foul odor was becoming stronger now and was intermingling with another smell, an acrid one like that of a freshly-struck match. He had to get out of this place.

He heard another noise, and it seemed to come from directly in front of him. Don’t look at it! Breen ordered himself, but he was powerless to stop. As if not under his own power, his head slowly rose and he faced the mural again. He heard a shout of terror, unaware that it came from his own throat.

Every face in the painting was now staring directly at him, their agony intensified a thousand times by the fact that their wide, pain-informed eyes burned straight into his.

Breen felt the fingers of his left hand go numb and heavy. The numbness spread up his arm and then stabbed him like a dagger under his armpit. He began to reel, his eyes wandering all over the mural. Finally, though, they came to light on one particular spot, which he would swear had not been there before: it was the scene of the dead farmer plowing the graveyard. There were two distinct bodies, half-emerged from the loose soil. A futile cry escaped his lips as he recognized the faces.

But nobody knows this, he thought, madly. Nobody alive knows.

The figures in the painting were two men he had known years ago, rivals in business. Both of them had been dead for decades, which Breen knew for a fact, because it was he who had them killed. That was twenty years ago....

Then as Breen watched, the two figures slowly, painfully turned their painted heads until they stared straight at him. They shook their heads and smiled. The lips of one dead face formed the words, Hello, Breen, so clearly that the colonel actually heard them.

Breen’s bladder gave way and the stream of urine coursing down his leg felt like lava against his cold flesh. A white hot spear of pain shot through his chest. There was a similar sharp jab in the side of his head, and the flood illuminating the room seemed to turn pinkish-red. Clutching at his chest, he started to fall and tried to regain his footing, but it was too late. Like one of the trees that had been cut to make him wealthy, he toppled sideways, hitting the stand of the floodlight on the way down, knocking it to the floor, shattering the lamp and throwing the building into total blackness.

A moment later, writhing on the floor in the darkness of the yet-to-be dedicated city hall, wracked by a greater sense of terror than he had ever known, Colonel Henry Jackson Breen’s heart ceased beating.

The mural’s work had begun.