In reality, nowhere on Earth would be far enough away for her. A couple thousand miles – that's just an illusion, a scrap of geographical distance comforting in theory, but about as effective as a cross held up to the fangs of a monster. Space is an illusion. Light is an illusion too. Hallucinations, it's just the brain misfiring, miscalculating, creating a different arrangement of photons. Tired people hallucinate, see things that aren't there because it's so easy to manipulate the light, to re-frame and rearrange it.
But darkness is absolute. Darkness is real, palpable even. Velvet soft, yawning and rushing and roaring. Darkness is consuming.
"Not quite," Dr. Hendrick murmurs, tilting his head to squint at the canvas.
She ducks her head quickly, a flush creeping up her alabaster neck, bird-like wrists tightening like springs as she grips her brush in both hands – waiting for feedback. It comes gently, like the breeze picking up outside as the sun sets on the red-bricked buildings of campus.
"Dark lines are an illusion. Don't think absolute demarcation, Christine. The only thing separating an object from its background are shades of light and color." He gently runs a thumb over the edge of the table she's been drawing for the past five hours. "Next time, I want you to use black paper. Go from darkest to lightest as you shade. Some of us work better in the dark."
He smiles, leaves to help another art student.
She's too late in returning the smile, his back is already turned, but it's for the best anyway; she can feel her mouth twisting into a grimace as she shifts on her chair, her back injury flaring up.
Pain is an illusion too – isn't that what they say?
She thinks about the pills stashed in her bedside table and wants to gulp down a handful like candy.
Her phone dings and she pulls it out, gives it a quick glance before tossing it back in her tote and climbing down off the chair. She murmurs her goodbyes after rinsing her brushes off and setting the canvas against one of the crumbling plaster walls of the classroom. Dr. Hendrick says farewell with a brief touch if his fingers to his right brow, giving her a melancholy smile as she slips into the hall. The night air falls on her like water, whips around her huddled form and tosses her dark curls up like the foam cresting a crashing wave.
She wants to pause, to take her time on the walk to the garage, but it's an impossibility. And that's why she can't stop thinking about it as her feet propel her faster and faster across the grassy, winding grounds of campus. The darkness is real and that's why she can't afford to stop. The darkness is real, and she knows what lives in it, what might be moving through it now to intercept her like a cutter ship before she's reached her Camry. The heels of her boots echo as she enters the garage. The lets out the breath she's been holding since she left her art class after climbing into her car and locking the doors.
She slides the key into the ignition and moves to put it in reverse but stops to scroll through the news-feed on her phone.
Darkness permeates everything, even the news. She sifts through story after story of violence, crime, gore and theft, duplicity and deceit.
He isn't in any of the headlines. A small consolation – like the couple thousand miles between her and Chicago. She draws a straight line in her mind between there and here in Seattle, exchanging the flat, cold, and windy for the mountainous, cold, and lush. The line turns into a string, a rope suspended in midair, angling downward to land in Chicago and she hangs a basket on it, sets her thoughts inside it. Papa. I miss you. I love you. She lets the basket go, watches it slip away on that invisible string towards its target, pictures it gently bumping her father's window, him opening the casement to let it fall inside and its contents spill out over the floor in a flurry of whispers. I miss you.
She tosses her phone down on the passenger-side seat and it slides down, the news story she'd been reading still lighting up the screen.
SEATTLE HERALD
Fears that a new drug smuggling ring has infiltrated Seattle resurfaced last Friday after an inner-city party turned deadly around 2:45 in the morning. Ten individuals were shot and killed, and three others were found drained of blood. The owner of the house – one of the shooting casualties – had ties to a Vampira drug lord rising to prominence in the Portland area. Two-hundred pounds of meth and cocaine were seized by the DEA.
The phone starts to ring before she's pulled out of the garage.
"Yeah, Meg," Christine answers, the call switching to Bluetooth. "I'm leaving right now. Class went late."
"Something came for you in the mail," Meg says, her voice somber. "Do you want me to open it?"
Christine stops, rests her head against the steering wheel briefly. "No. I'll be home in ten."
She ends the call, watches the red lights of a car backing up in front of her, takes a deep breath then startles as a figure in all black moves into her line of sight. Heart straining, she sits helplessly as the person jumps menacingly to the side before realizing her car is still in park and her foot is all the way down on the accelerator. The figure in black resolves itself into a tall young woman in a dark raincoat. She shoots Christine a dirty look as if to say psycho, and vanishes into the dark recesses of the garage.
Hallucinations? Visions? Whatever they are, seeing him everywhere is exhausting.
Christine tells herself it's just another trick of the light as she finally pulls her car into drive and takes off for home.