Writers of the Future Volume 31
Then I heard gasps behind me, and I turned my head and saw my nephew for the first time since Jessica had left with him: naked and clinging to me like he would never let go.
Poseidon’s Eyes
written by
Kary English
illustrated by
MEGEN NELSON
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kary English grew up in the snowy Midwest where she avoided siblings and frostbite by reading book after book in a warm corner behind a recliner chair. She blames her one and only high school detention on Douglas Adams, whose Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made her laugh out loud while reading it behind her geometry textbook.
Today, Kary still spends most of her time with her head in the clouds and her nose in a book. To the great relief of her parents, she seems to be making a living at it. Kary lives on the West Coast with a spouse, a teenager, and a polydactyl feline overlord. She is working on a planetary fantasy series (available in late 2015) and a middle grade fantasy saga about a little girl and an orange kitten.
A student of New York Times bestsellers David Farland and Tracy Hickman, Kary aspires to make her own work detention-worthy. Her fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, the Grantville Gazette and Galaxy’s Edge.
Visit Kary on the web at www.KaryEnglish.com.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Megen Nelson was born in 1991 in Palm Bay, Florida. She has been drawing ever since she could hold a pencil, encouraged by her friends and family. When she discovered Hayao Miyazaki’s films, dragons began to crawl out of her sketchbook, joined by giant wolves and sometimes the odd space ship.
It wasn’t until high school that she discovered that art could be a profession. In 2011 she was accepted into the Computer Animation program at the Ringling College of Art and Design, but was unable to attend. Instead, she studied art at Eastern Florida State College while pursuing her Associate in Arts (AA) degree, where she was honored for her work.
She is now attending the University of Central Florida, majoring in English literature, which is her second artistic love. She will graduate with her bachelors in 2015. Currently she helps write and construct online web courses for use in colleges all around the world. She also does freelance illustration and comic work when her schedule isn’t a many-headed beast. She has written two novels and illustrated a children’s book, and hopes to combine her love of art and writing into something awesome.
Poseidon’s Eyes
Sometimes you can get to know a whole town by understanding just one man. In the seaside village of Summerland, that man was Peyton Jain. Peyton was in his 60s, as best I could tell. His face was craggy and weathered, with a beard like sea foam on rocks and eyes of Poseidon’s blue.
Some folks thought of Peyton as a nuisance to be reported or a vagrant to be run off, but I knew different because it was Peyton who put me right with Summerland’s spirits. The locals have joked about spirits as long as anyone can remember, but it took the murder of the Kelly children to remind us just how real—and how powerful—the spirits could be.
Summerland sits like the Pythia over a cleft in the rock, soaking up the vapors of prophecy along with the California sunshine. Spiritualists started a commune here over a century ago. Egalitarians at heart, they outlawed money and divvied the land into tent-sized plots.
Oil—oil money, really—edged the Spiritualists out. Derricks took over the beach, and the Spiritualists’ canvas utopia turned into a shantytown for oil workers. My house was made from two of those oil shanties sandwiched together. The shanties had been built before electricity, so the wiring came up through holes in the floor, and the doorbell was an old ship’s bell, corroded green with salt and time.
The house had no foundation, just posts and piers and seven jacks. When the floor sagged, Peyton crawled beneath to twist the jacks until everything was more or less level. That was a blessing to me because I couldn’t abide the narrow crawlspace with earth pressing in around me and voiceless whispers winding snakelike over my skin.
The county said the whispers were nothing to worry about. Radon gas. Natural seepage. Buy a detector and install a fan. But radon doesn’t creep up through the floorboards in silver ribbons until it pools in the corners, like living smoke. Radon doesn’t whisper in the darkness like waves on sand.
But spirits? That’s exactly what they do.
Peyton’s battered brown pickup rumbled up the hill while I was taking out the trash. A Sport King camper perched on the back, listing to one side like the shell of a hermit crab. The old truck clunked into park just outside my front gate, and Peyton leaned out the window. He looked bright-eyed and freshly showered, which should have meant he was doing well, but his passenger window had been busted out and covered with blue painter’s tape and an old trash bag, and that meant trouble.
“’Morning, Danaë,” he called. “Brought you something.”
Peyton always called me by my right name—Danaë. Everyone else in town just called me Dani.
He extended one hand through the open window, and his fingers uncurled like the fronds of an anemone. Nestled in his palm was a piece of green beach glass, the edges worn smooth by sand and waves.
I accepted the offering and thanked him, turning the glass like a worry stone between my fingers.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought you had a spot away from the beach? That Harris kid giving you a hard time again?” Ike Harris, a teenager with a new Mustang, lived in the Mansions across town.
Peyton gave a shrug that meant yes. “He comes down at night, partying with his friends.” Peyton nodded toward the shattered window. “Broke my window. Cops won’t do nuthin ’cuz nobody saw it.” Dejection colored Peyton’s voice. That truck was all he had, and a new window was more than he could afford.
“Want some coffee?” I offered.
“Nah, I just had coffee.”
“I’m about to make eggs. You hungry?” Sometimes Peyton needed money when he stopped by. I didn’t always have it, but I could manage an extra place at the table.
Peyton brightened at the thought of breakfast, and for a moment his eyes matched the blue of the white-tipped sea. “I’ll take eggs. Café was packed when I was down there. No place to sit.”
“More news crews?” Summerland hadn’t seen a murder in more than fifty years, and the Kelly trial had turned our sleepy little town into the media’s favorite chew toy. Most of the old-timers wouldn’t talk, but that didn’t stop reporters from badgering all and sundry with questions about vengeful spirits.
“I picked up a job today,” said Peyton, following me into the kitchen. “Aames wants me to help Reesie move.”
“Move? She finally leavin’?”
Peyton nodded. “Divorce was final ’bout four months back. Papers say he can have her evicted if she doesn’t leave on her own.”
“What’s he doin’ with the house?” Aames was old Summerland, used to live near the post office, but Reesie had insisted on one of the new places in the fancy gated development near the top of the hill before she’d marry him. Said the gate would keep out the riff-raff, which I suppose meant shanty folk like us.
“Dunno,” said Peyton. “Sell it, most likely.”
I poured the eggs into the skillet. The new places were a bone of contention for us old Summerlanders. Before the Mansions went in, most of us walked or rode bicycles in the open air, and dogs slept in the middle of the street. After the Mansions, stockbrokers barreled through town in Range Rovers, and dogs were something glittering women carried in designer purses.
“Built too tight, those new places,” said Peyton. “Stuff gets in, can’t get out again. That’s when the trouble starts.”
Peyton fixed me with those blue eyes of his, and his voice was like crushed shells. “A house is like your heart, Danaë. Long as it’s open, nothing’ll get trapped inside to fester in the dark places.”
br /> I shivered cold at that, picturing the silver rivulets streaming up through my floorboards the week before, the same ones that had surrounded Percy’s crib when I’d brought him home from the hospital almost twenty years before. Peyton had come by to see the baby and found me in tears, trying to seal off Percy’s windows with plastic sheeting to keep the vapors out. That’s when he explained about Summerland’s spirits. He said they were harmless so long as my heart was in the right place, and I’d know because they’d be silver instead of black. But that didn’t mean I felt easy about them.
Peyton’s gaze was relentless. “I know you’ve seen ’em again, Danaë. I can see it in your eyes.”
I changed the subject. “You worked on Kelly’s place, right?”
“Needed the money. Kelly said I made the weep holes in the window frames too big, left gaps under the doors. Said he was afraid snakes would get in and kill him in his sleep. Told me to get off the property or he’d call the cops.” Peyton reached around me to pour a glass of milk. “Damn shame about those babies. His wife is up there now, hidin’ in the house to keep away from the cameras.”
Pain pulled at Peyton’s face. He’d mourned the Kelly children as if they’d been his own. I cut the omelet in half and slid a portion onto each plate.
“Working on the mural today?” he asked, pointing the tines of his fork at my faded t-shirt and paint-smeared jeans.
My work clothes were a private joke between us. Even living in his truck, Peyton’s Levis were bluer than the night sky and his crisp Hawaiian shirt smelled of laundry starch.
“Grand opening’s Monday,” I answered. “Has to be done and dry in forty-eight hours.”
“You ready?”
I shook my head and pushed the last bite of omelet around with my fork. “All except the eyes.”
Eyes are hard to paint. They’re not like trees or faces in a crowd, where a suggestion is all you need. Eyes don’t come right until you can feel the soul coming to life under the brush, and to do that, you have to know what those eyes see.
We finished our breakfast in silence.
The sea and sky were robin’s-egg blue on my walk to the Sea Center, with only a pale smudge of haze to mark where one stopped and the other began. I mixed the colors in my head, pulling out the contrast of pale, cool blues against the yellow-green of palms and agaves.
News vans lined the main drag, and reporters trolled the locals for reactions to the Kelly trial. The Harris kid blew through a stop sign, narrowly missing Reesie Aames, who was talking to a news crew, scratching at her arm with one hand and gesturing east toward the Mansions with the other.
Reesie had been beautiful once, with hair the color of sunlight and a figure Aphrodite would have envied, but drugs had stolen that away. Her hair now hung like frayed straw, and her dress sagged off her hips and shoulders as if it had been made for a different woman.
I passed by, invisible in my shabby clothes. What the reporters wanted was a slack-jawed yokel who’d tell about the time the spirits threw dishes against the wall or made the chickens stop laying. Lacking that, they’d settle for someone like Reesie, blonde and well-dressed, who had plenty to say about her neighbor Herb Kelly, and none of it kind.
If I was lucky, the trial would be over before they got desperate enough to notice a paint-smeared artist in worn sneakers and tatty blue jeans.
The Sea Center sat on the far side of the freeway, across from some weathered picnic tables and a small playground. It was built of grey cinder blocks, with a low, peaked roof and clerestory windows that tilted open at the bottom, the kind of building you’d expect to find in a military depot or a forest service compound. What it lacked in glamour it made up for with a dogged sturdiness that reminded me of the town itself. Perched on bluffs overlooking the ocean, its chief drawback was that the builders had placed the windows too high for a view, a lack my mural was intended to remedy.
The smell of turpentine and linseed oil swirled around me when I unlocked the door. This close to the water, the paint took days to dry, so my morning routine included opening windows and switching on a space heater. A silver spirit floated in one corner, making a soft thrumming sound. I tried to ignore it, but in the back of my mind I wondered if spirits could purr.
My mural covered all four walls of the Sea Center, reproducing the view of the coastline outside. In the center panel, Poseidon, god of the sea, strode forth from the waves with his trident at hand. I’d painted the scenery in layer upon layer of transparent glazes to capture the moody sea and changeable sky. But the sea god himself required something special. He surged forward out of the wall, sculpted from modeling paste and inlaid with bits of rock and shell from the beach below. His wife Amphitrite nestled at his side. Her eyes of green beach glass gazed with adoration, and her white, coral hair flowed into the foaming waves.
Dolphins cavorted around the pair, leaping in playful arcs, while pelicans flew overhead. Nereids chased otters through kelp forests of deepest green, and shafts of golden sunlight pierced the depths below. But alas, Poseidon himself stood as blind as Tiresias, his eyes empty holes where I’d been unable to get the color right, no matter what I tried.
Two hours later, I scraped the paint away and slung my palette knife into the turp jar. The silver spirit had summoned friends, and they rose up around the edges of the mural, flitting from silver to black while they gibbered frustration and failure in my ears. They pooled in Poseidon’s empty eyes in twin voids of black despair.
I stumbled back from my work and wiped my shaking hands on my jeans. Peyton’s long-ago warning rattled in my head like an old tin can. Black was bad. Black meant that the spirits had found something dark to latch on to—fear, anger, insecurity—something they’d use to destroy me if I let them.
I raked my fingers through my hair, heedless of the paint that rubbed off on my forehead. If the mural wasn’t ready, if the Center’s directors didn’t like it, I’d never work in this town again. Around here, feelings like that did more than stifle your creativity. Around here, feelings like that could kill.
I took a deep breath, let it out, forced myself to walk slowly around the inside of the building, opening the remaining windows. Open house, open heart; that’s what Peyton always said. If nothing else, the fresh air would help the paint dry. The spirits followed me, twisting like cats around my ankles.
If I gave in to fear and ran, they’d drag me down like angry Maenads. I counted each step until I made it to the door.
When I stood outside in the fresh air and sunshine, my stomach rumbled. Time for a break and some lunch.
The Saltbox Café sat in the center of town on the main drag across from the firehouse. Like most of old Summerland, the building was more than a century old, a small, white bungalow of wood and stone that managed to look tidy, yet gently worn. A path of crushed stone wound between plantings of lavender and rock-roses. It ushered guests up four stone steps onto a long, covered porch where they could linger over a glass of Dora’s homemade lemonade. Tables for two lined the porch, and a silver basin offered crystal clear water to four-pawed guests.
Inside, past the clatter of the screen door, more tables beckoned. A padded bench ran the length of the place, and polished, wooden chairs offered their services to those who’d missed a seat on the bench. A river-rock fireplace with an iron grate held court along the eastern wall, and a green velvet settee snuggled up to the hearth, flanked by matching armchairs and a bentwood rocker with a white cushion.
The rocker was Hester’s favorite place whenever a lull in customers offered her a moment’s respite, and the armchair on the right, nearest the fireplace, was mine. A threadbare patch along the edge of the left arm testified to my habit of rubbing the nap of the velvet back and forth with one hand while I worked out drawings in my sketchbook with the other.
The café’s owners, Hester and Dora, had tried to buy the place separately, so the story wen
t, until Peyton brought them together. Once they met, they realized they could do as a couple what neither one of them could do alone. Hester had grey eyes and a smile as warm as apple cobbler. Her old hands were strong from kneading out dough each morning, and it wasn’t unusual to see a dusting of flour across her cheeks or hiding in the wrinkles of her apron.
Dora, the younger and slimmer of the two, had been a socialite in her former life, and she still exuded a vivacious charm that drew customers in and made them feel welcome. Sometimes when I looked at her, I could see the ghosts of flashbulbs popping around her like champagne bubbles. Loss and sadness had ended that life, and the shadow of it still showed in her eyes, if you knew when to look. But whatever sadness it was had left wisdom in its wake, and Hester, Dora and the Saltbox Café were the hub that held the two Summerlands together.
Today, though, Hester and the chair by the hearth were destined ne’er to meet. The line for lunch stood two- and three-deep out the door. It poured over the porch, down the stone steps, over the path and onto the sidewalk. A din of cutlery and conversation drowned out the sound of the freeway, and the salt air took on the scent of panini and wood-fired pizza.
Peyton’s truck sat in the parking lot, and Reesie Aames stood beside it, screeching like a banshee. “If I ever see you again, Peyton Jain, you’ll be a dead man!”
Reesie’s voice sent a shiver up my spine. I wanted no part of her drama, so I cut through the parking lot into the rear yard where the back door to the kitchen stood open. A square box fan blocked the lower half of the doorway, and tables too rickety for paying customers played host to deliverymen and waiters on smoke breaks.
Hester’s back door specials were yesterday’s leftovers, but the food started so fresh that none of us minded. I put a dollar in the tip jar and sat down to a bowl of black bean soup, heavy with carrots and red peppers. A chunk of day-old sourdough served to wipe out the bowl. It was a moment not even an angry spirit could spoil.