Paint by Magic (22 page)

The artists glanced at one another. They stood still, waiting. Then they pulled the handle on the door to the studio—and it opened quite easily now. In their panic they left behind everything in the studio they had planned to take. Everything—except the carved, wooden paint box.

Unpleasant laughter, borne on a foul-smelling breeze, followed them as they escaped into the sunlit courtyard.

Fitzgerald Cotton reeled in shock when he saw the little face painted down in the corner of the portrait of Mom.
He really didn't know!
I thought, but ignorance was no excuse.

Fitzgerald Cotton rubbed his eyes. He took a deep breath, glanced at the signature face on the ugly portrait, then away, then back again as if he really couldn't believe it was there. As if he hadn't been the one to paint it there himself.

"This rather changes things," he murmured. "Indeed, I think it does. I thought you were out of your mind, lad," he said, looking over at me now with something like wonder in his usually fierce eyes. "But..."

"But you didn't know you'd painted the face?" asked Betty in a hopeful voice.

"I didn't know," he said. "It puts a rather different ... ah,
face
... on things. If you'll pardon the pun. It's very strange indeed. I have felt odd ever since I began using the ancient paints. They exert a—a
spell,
you might call it. I paint better than ever when I'm using them. I feel a very compelling ... ah,
power.
"

He collapsed onto the couch and put his face in his hands. "When I returned from Italy some time back, I'd carefully stored away the special paints I'd purchased at such great expense. But then one day I ran out of inspiration. I lacked the drive to paint—felt all my subjects had been exhausted. It's a terrible feeling for an artist, I tell you, to feel so
blocked.
So empty of passion and drive. For months I did not paint! Then one day I decided that maybe using the special paints would give me some new ideas ... and so I opened the box and started to mix the dry pigments the way the old masters had—using a fresh egg yolk ... That's the first time I felt it. The power."

He stopped talking into his hands and raised his head to look at Homer and Betty and me. "When I finished mixing the paints, all was ready. I was motivated, excited again—except I still had no fitting subject. It seemed to me that paints like these needed a very special person posing for a portrait. I walked to the window and stared down—amazingly a vision came to me, a vision of my next subject. Quickly I snatched up my sketch pad and a stick of charcoal, and I started trying to sketch what my mind was imagining—the loveliest woman in the world down there in the garden. I imagined her sitting on lush grass, a smile lighting her eyes, her hand lifted toward me as if in welcome or desire ... and that's the way I drew her."

That was
the
sketch! The one I'd been searching for. But where was it now?

"
Ahhhh.
" He shook his head dreamily. "When I had completed the sketch, I stared at it a long time. Then something made me look out the window again—and that's when I saw her."

"Saw who?" I asked, but somehow I knew what was coming.

"I looked down, and I could see into the garden," Fitzgerald Cotton repeated in a dazed voice. "And there—what do you suppose?—I saw the figure of a woman lying on the grass by the vegetable garden." He took a deep breath. "And not just any woman! The most ethereal, most exquisite, most
paintable
woman in the whole world. The very woman I had just sketched!"

Betty glanced out the window. "I don't think you could really see much of a person from way up here, Uncle Fitzy. Not really."

"I could see every hair on her head," he insisted. "It was the same woman I had invented with my sketch, and I knew I must paint her. Clearly this was my muse. I had conjured her up, and she was meant to be mine."

"It was Pammie," said Homer. "Let's see the sketch you did of her, Uncle Fitzy."

"Yes—please?" added Betty.

Fitzgerald Cotton's eyes fastened on mine. When he spoke, his voice shook. "I ran downstairs and out into the garden. There she was, lying on the grass. My fingers actually itched, I tell you. Itched to hold a brush and start painting again. It was a wonderful feeling—heaven-sent."

I could picture it perfectly, like it was happening on video. Like I'd been here that day.

"She sat up and looked so confused—reaching out her hand to me, asking where she was. She smiled at me then, and looked exactly like the sketch. But when I asked her how she'd come to be here in our garden, she seemed not to know. I told her she must be my muse, sent from heaven to inspire me! She came inside and had dinner with us. She knew her name was Pamela—but she still couldn't remember anything else about who she was or how she'd come to be in our garden. My parents pressed her for details, but I knew it didn't matter. A magical creature such as she could not have come from the ordinary world."

Mom,
I was thinking.
My ordinary, precious mom.

"I painted her every morning, using the old paints. I was painting better than ever before. Soon it felt like she'd always been with us. She made herself right at home with my parents and Joanna. You kids adored her—right, Homer, my lad? Betty?"

"She was the bee's knees," Homer agreed readily.

"She was very nice," said Betty. "But I could tell she was sad inside."

"She was happy with us," the artist went on, ignoring Betty. "I was please^ she had amnesia. Sometimes she started saying it was time for her to go home—but I'd get a terrible panicky feeling, and I'd say, '
Just one more painting, my love, just one more!
' And she'd agree, and then she'd be happy here again and wouldn't be talking of leaving us. As long as I painted her, she stayed. And everything I painted of her was a success. I started entering my work in shows. I was asked to exhibit in galleries all over the state. Collectors came from all around the country last fall—some even from Europe! It was amazing, and I owed my success, my moments of glory, to my lovely muse. But then, one day—"

He fell silent, staring at the awful painting on the big easel. I sat quietly, my arms wrapped around the paint box, hardly daring to breathe.

"One day I fell ill," he said simply. "I was sick for weeks, and I could not paint her. Couldn't lift a brush. At first she brought my food on a tray, tried to help nurse me ... But then she stopped coming. Joanna or my mother came instead. I asked for my muse. I cried out for her! They told me ... told me she had left." Fitzgerald Cotton snapped his fingers. "Gone. Just like that. My life was over." He buried his face in his hands again.

"She came home to us," I murmured, my eyes on him.

"I searched everywhere," Fitzgerald Cotton confided, lifting his head. "Until finally even I had to admit she was really gone. So I tried to paint her anyway, tried to pick up where I'd left off before my illness—I figured I could just envision her, paint from memory ... And of course I would use my best paints, the way I always had. To honor her."

We sat staring at the grotesque painting. No honor there. None at all.

"Now look at her," groaned Fitzgerald Cotton. "Sweet Pamela, what have I done to you?" He clutched his head as if it ached. "It was never my intention to hurt you, my love. You must believe me. I can't bear to be the cause of your unhappiness."

I couldn't decide who this man next to me really was—an evil madman or a humbled, grieving artist. From one minute to the next I could believe he was either or neither—or both.

Fitzgerald Cotton tore his anguished eyes from the awful portrait and jumped up off the couch again. "Every time I try to paint her, it comes out looking monstrous," he cried. "I've been trying and trying and making myself crazy trying to get it right—it was so easy before!—but in every single painting now, she looks just terrible." He picked up a brush and jabbed at the canvas. "And yet, I
must
paint her!"

He looked like he might cry, for a second or two.... But then suddenly he was looking really different again, as if that invisible brush had swept across his face and replaced sadness with slyness. The eyes narrowed, the eyebrows quirked up. The mouth twisted into a crafty sneer—the smile of a different man entirely.

"You must
not
paint her," Betty said quietly. "For your own sanity, Uncle Fitzy."

"And for hers," I added. "Never again." My own words sent a shiver down my back, because I knew now what I was going to have to do to make things right.

Betty stood up, still holding the art book. "Francesca Rigoletti is somehow connected to Pammie. They even have the same last name! We think she must be a direct ancestor, linked through their bloodline all through the centuries, linking Connor, too. We think that since Lorenzo da Padova can't have his original muse, he'll take one who looks like Francesca Rigoletti! Someone who is related to her. And you're related to
him,
Uncle Fitz."

"Not just related to him," I corrected. "You're
becoming
him."

Fitzgerald Cotton snorted, a most unpleasant sound. "Utter nonsense. Pure rot."

"We think you're possessed by Lorenzo da Padova against your will!" cried Homer.

"Either that, Uncle Fitz, or you're
letting
it happen. We think you're very wrong to let him use you this way." Betty crossed her arms and stared at her uncle angrily. "And we won't let you do it anymore."

Before Fitzgerald Cotton could answer, Betty turned to me with a look of such intensity that I was sure she wanted to say something more. Taking her look as my signal, I flew into action.

I darted off the couch, the paint box tight in my grasp.

Fitzgerald Cotton lunged after me. I knocked over mason jars of brushes, and tipped a tin can onto the floor in my haste to get away. The stink of turpentine made my eyes water as I ducked away from him. "Betty!" I yelled. "Hey, Betty!"

I tossed her the paint box, right over Homer's head, and she caught it neatly. She should be on a football team, that girl, except that in 1926 girls didn't play football.

Fitzgerald Cotton was wheezing as he turned and leaped at his niece. Betty flung the paint box back to me just as he reached her, and he toppled forward onto the couch. I ran over-to the small porcelain sink in the corner of the room.

I turned on one tap; I opened the box. And then Fitzgerald Cotton was up again, and he was on me. I tried to kick him away, but he grabbed my arms. Then Betty was there, too, pulling him off me.

"Not down the drain!" he howled as I opened the wooden box. "I need them! Even after everything, I
need
them!" But I dumped the little bags out into the sink.

Homer and Betty stood clutching his arms, holding him back as I fumbled to loosen the ties and let the colored powders run away under the pounding water. Cobalt blue. Deepest crimson. Sea green. Two different yellows, purple, brown, gray—and darkest black.

Some of the black paint splashed up out of the sink—onto the back of my hand—burning like a brand.

"Down the drain!" wailed Fitzgerald Cotton. "No—not down the drain!"

"Hey! Oh, hey, looky here!" screeched Homer, with such a note of panic that even his uncle was silenced, and we all immediately wheeled to look where he was pointing. The large portrait of Mom on the easel was shuddering ever so slightly, as if a mild earthquake were rumbling miles beneath the house. The deep thick paint was fading.

And then all of a sudden there was another face there, another face under the paint. It was the face I'd glimpsed in Fitzgerald Cotton's own, but vivid now, nothing shadowy about it. And I realized that Fitzgerald Cotton had been held prisoner just as surely as my mom had by the owner of this face looking out at us. I recognized the narrowed eyes, the swooping eyebrows, the beaked nose, and the arrogant lips drawn back in a smile—recognized them as if I'd somehow always known them.

Here was Lorenzo da Padova, the ancient evil. Laughing at us.

I sucked in my breath and, never taking my eyes from the face on the canvas, turned both water taps on full blast. Lorenzo da Padova's low-pitched chuckle filled the room, even as the paint began dripping down his cheeks.

I somehow heard Fitzgerald Cotton's agonized whisper over the sound of the rushing water. "My poor Pamela! Will you ever be able to forgive me?"

I dumped out every last grain of powdery pigment from the old box, and tossed the paint box into the sink under the flow. Then the laughing, taunting face was fading, and I could see Mom's face there again, underneath.

The luminous hues were changing, growing softer. The shapes and shadows that had formed the portrait of Mom were evaporating as the last powders of ancient pigment were disappearing down the drain under the surge of water.

And then the canvas was blank.

"She's gone!" cried Fitzgerald Cotton, tears of remorse on his cheeks.

I turned off the taps. There was silence, heavy and complete.

"Not gone," I said. "
Safe.
"

We left Fitzgerald Cotton up in the studio, sitting on the couch with his head in his hands. And although Homer and Betty hadn't wanted to leave him there alone, he insisted they go downstairs.

"I have to think," he told us, drooping down onto the couch and staring at the blank canvas on the easel. "So much to think about—so much..." His voice trailed off. Betty looked worried. We all stood there for a moment or two, watching him, until Mrs. Cotton called us to come down to lunch. "You go," he muttered again. "Please go."

I remembered how weak and fuzzy I'd felt after first traveling back through time to 1926. It was sort of like that now, and I could tell Betty and Homer felt the same. Maybe that's how their uncle Fitzy was feeling, alone up in his studio.

Being touched by magic takes a lot out of you.

"What now?" Homer kept asking in a vague sort of way as we sat at the lunch table. "What happens next?" But Betty and I had no answer.