I can't believe I'm actually doing this.
Calling the venture ill-advised barely began to cover it, but Daria was there all the same. Her initial burst of manic curiosity faded into doubt as she drove to the edge of the suburb, specifically to the stretch of modest tract homes where Mrs. Johanssen lived. She couldn't be sure that the woman wasn't still in police custody.
On the plus side, it's not more insane than anything else in the past few days.
Daria stepped out of the car and into the slow-roast heat of the late afternoon, red light bleeding into the sky. A single-story blue home waited at the end of the walkway, its lawn tidy and plain.
Imagining herself with Jane, bags of chocolate in hand like that day so long ago, she marched up to the door and knocked. Part of her hoped that no one was home. The faded green Civic in the driveway, however, indicated otherwise.
"Just a minute!" a voice wheezed.
The door opened a crack to reveal Mrs. Johanssen's hard face, dark eyes suspicious.
"Oh, it's you," she grunted.
"Hi, Mrs. Johanssen. We've met a few times before. My name's Daria," she said, her voice sounding like a pre-recorded message. "Do you have a minute?"
"You here to laugh at me? I'm not gonna put up with that, I'll tell you right now," Mrs. Johanssen threatened.
"No. I had some questions about, uh, Pat's Easel. I want to hear your side of the story."
The door slammed shut. Then she heard the sliding of a bolt, and it opened again. Mrs. Johanssen stood to the side and motioned for her to enter.
"I guess you girls did do me a good turn back when I fainted. Always felt sort of bad about complaining for you not selling me the chocolates," the woman said.
"That's okay."
The interior was more or less what Daria remembered, a standard suburban assemblage of simple furniture and bric-a-brac. Mrs. Johanssen guided her to a worn but comfy-looking sofa next to a glass-top coffee table.
"You want anything to drink?" Mrs. Johanssen offered.
"No thanks, I probably won't be here long."
Nodding, Mrs. Johanssen settled her bulk onto a chair opposite Daria.
"I'm just going to go ahead and tell you, and if you want to laugh and leave, go ahead, I don't really care," she began. "I know what they're doing at Pat's Easel. First, tell me: what were you doing there?"
"My friend, Jane, was submitting a painting she made."
"Was it one of the bad ones?"
"How do you mean bad? She's an excellent artist."
"I mean it showed dark things, evil things," Mrs. Johanssen described. "Things you wouldn't want on a painting."
Great, I'm probably dealing with a religious nut.
"Maybe according to some perspectives."
"You're not making this easy, Daria," she growled. "Paintings of some ugly city, right? Like Stonehenge, but in the water, with these monsters dancing around?"
"I guess that's a fair description."
"Listen to me, here, Daria. I'm from Galveston. You know where that is?"
"Coastal Texas. I'm actually from Texas. Highland."
"Oh, well a fellow Texan!" she said, brightening up for the first time. "Maybe that means you'll be tough enough to handle this. Back when I was just a little older than you, a really peculiar sort, Joshua Stafford, came into town and opened an art gallery."
By peculiar, you mean that football was only his second-favorite sport? Daria didn't even smirk at the thought.
"He looked just like that Pat fella. Barely human, like his grandma had been a fish or a frog or something. Still, we didn't make nothing of it. Not his fault, and he seemed friendly enough.
"Now my little brother, Andy, he was one of them artistic sorts; always making pictures. Drove my folks nuts, but he was good at it. Then one day he starts getting these awful dreams. I remember, I'd hear him wake up in the other room, and then see him turn on the light and start painting like crazy."
A chill settled on Daria.
This can't be happening.
"Made my folks mad as hell, but Andy couldn't stop. They figured it might be some drugs, but I knew that was wrong, not Andy. He was clean as a whistle. What he made was strange, though—the bad paintings I was telling you about. I guess he did a good job, when it came to skill.
"Joshua announced a big showing at his gallery, so Andy jumped at the chance. A couple of other folks made paintings a lot like his; they'd been having dreams too."
"These paintings: they all showed the same thing?" Daria asked, her voice quiet.
This whole thing is starting to resemble some elaborate Candid Camera prank. Any minute now, some bastard's going to come out of a hiding place and tell me I'm on TV. It's the only explanation.
"I just said that, didn't I? Andy didn't win, at any rate, but the dreams didn't stop. Joshua closed shop and left town right after that, we never knew why. Andy kept getting worse.
"He would wake up every night, crying like a girl, and spend the day painting the same damn thing over and over again! My pop never really liked him very much, always thought he was funny, and they finally took him to one of them asylums."
Mrs. Johanssen's voice shook, her face scrunched in a frantic attempt at control.
"They released him a year later, but he wasn't ever the same. All the life just sucked right out of him. He hung himself a month after coming back."
Mrs. Johanssen covered her face with her hands, body quivering in silent sobs.
"I'm very sorry to hear that, Mrs. Johanssen."
"Do you have a brother, Daria?"
"A little sister."
"You keep her close. Maybe if I'd stood up for Andy more he'd have been okay."
"It's not your fault."
Daria shifted in her seat, trying to sort through this information, finding that easier than trying to offer more lame condolences. She never knew what to do when tears were involved, other than try to change the subject and ignore the guilt she felt for not addressing it. Tears never seemed to solve anything.
"I left home the day after the funeral, never looked back. I did start asking some questions; I wanted to find Joshua and make him pay! Never did track him down, but I learned a few things. You ever hear of the Innsmouth Raid? Back in the '20s?"
"Um, yeah, that was some big anti-bootlegging operation."
"Nuh uh. Well, maybe there was some of that, but there was a lot more. Y'see, everyone in Innsmouth had this disease, made them look all wrong. Like Joshua looked, and now Pat. They ran some kind of cult too, killed people for these awful sea gods, made others go crazy."
"Sea gods?" The ridiculousness of the statement pulled Daria out of Mrs. Johanssen's spell.
"You heard me! That's what they believed, and that was the real reason the Feds stomped them out. But a few survived! That's what Joshua and Pat are—they've got Innsmouth blood, and they're trying to spread their evil wherever they go!
"Not many folks know about this. One of them who did, an old professor out in Peoria, showed me part of this book he had. Called it the Necronomicon."
"Necronomicon? Like in The Evil Dead?" With that, Daria's fear ebbed even further.
"I don't know anything about any evil dead, but this sure seemed pretty evil. Talked about some of these sea monsters. He reckoned it was some kind of holy book for these freaks. That's about all I ever got to learn about it though."
"I'm sorry for bringing this up again, but did you ever find out why Joshua left so quickly?"
"He had worse up his sleeve. He said he was going to have the winner—Betty, I think her name was—do a special project. Something made him leave before that happened, not that it helped Betty. She got deep into drugs, died a year later from sticking something bad in her arm."
"A special project?" The words struck like lightning. Whatever occult nonsense Mrs. Johanssen was ranting about, something strange was happening.
"I don't know anything about it. Probably best that it didn't happen; poor Betty had enough bad things happen to her."
Gripped by a new sense of urgency, Daria almost jumped to her feet.
"Thank you for your time, Mrs. Johanssen. I know it must have been painful talking about it. I really have to go."
"You took me serious, more than my husband ever does," she sighed. "Now Daria, you need to warn your friend. I don't want to see this happen to anyone else. Maybe a lot of what I said was crazy, but there's real evil here, and I know I ran into it. I don't want you or your friend to end up like my Andy."
"We'll be careful. Thanks again for telling all of this to me."
Turning around to leave, suppressing the urge to bolt out of the house, Daria caught sight of a framed photo on the wall. A young woman, broad and heavyset but exuding an unmistakable confidence, stood on a beach with her left arm draped around a skinny boy a few years younger than her. Both were dressed in clothes from the late '60s.
"That's me and Andy right there. I keep it as a reminder, even though I sometimes want to take it down."
"Ah," Daria said, her mind too busy to formulate a proper response. Offering another hasty thanks, she left the house and broke into a run after the door closed. Once at her car, she took the cell phone out of the glove compartment and dialed Jane's number, terrified of not receiving an answer.
"Hello?" The sound of Jane's voice soothed some of Daria's fears.
"Jane? Are you all right?"
"Depends on how you define 'all right'. I haven't had any sleepwalking episodes, if that's what you're worried about."
"Yeah. Listen, I don't think you should do the Foundation's special project."
"Why not?"
Her mind raced for an answer. Honesty probably offered the best policy.
"I just talked to Mrs. Johanssen. Apparently something like this happened to her."
Daria explained what she'd just been told, fully aware of how ridiculous it all sounded. Her confidence faltered by the word, so she spoke faster in hopes of getting through it all without hanging up from sheer embarrassment.
"Wait. Daria, you're serious about this, aren't you."
"Look, I'm sure Mrs. Johanssen has a confused idea as to what actually happened. I know I'm probably overreacting. After all that's happened though, I think it's best to avoid this."
"Jeez, Daria, I'm not made out of glass."
"That's not—could you please just not do this?" Daria begged.
"I actually think I'd feel a lot better if I did. I did a little of my own research, and it doesn't sound like there's any connection between dreams and sleepwalking."
"You don't think it's odd that Mrs. Johanssen's story lines up so perfectly with what's been happening?"
"Sure, I think it's weird, but so what? Coincidences usually don't mean anything; you taught me that! I'm really surprised that you're the one saying all this."
Daria paused, trying to think of some way to back out of the ridiculous situation. What on Earth had convinced her to take Mrs. Johanssen at face value? She'd suffered a tragedy, sure, but that didn't make her credible.
"You know what, Jane? Maybe I'm still a little mixed up. That does sound pretty absurd."
She recalled Mrs. Johanssen's weeping face, on the other hand, as being anything but.
"Something strange is going on here, but it's probably no worse than that one time everybody got freaked out about communist aliens," Jane said.
"Good point."
"All right, you actually woke me up from the middle of a recovery nap, and I'd better get back to it."
"Still getting the nightmares?"
"No."
"Hopefully you can forget this conversation ever happened."
"See you later," Jane said, with a laugh.
Daria's emotions switched between embarrassment and renewed concern all through the night The former tended to be stronger, yet she could not so easily dismiss Mrs. Johanssen's story and it's odd similarities to recent events.
Curiosity moved her to do some research on the Innsmouth Raid and the Necronomicon. Oddly, the raid seemed to have completely bypassed the conspiracy radar, with no one thinking it anything other than part of Prohibition. Perhaps Mrs. Johanssen had manufactured that lead on her own.
The Necronomicon turned out to be a ridiculous occult tome of dubious provenance. She found a dozen partial online transcriptions, usually of eye-searing red or yellow text on a black background, flanked by rotating skulls and burning torches.
The only really useful information came from a site debunking the book, which argued that no such person named Abdul Alhazred (not even a real Arabic name, apparently) had ever written such a text, and that it was instead the invention of 18th century English mystics who attributed the translation to John Dee (whose interest in celestial numerology, an entirely different kind of nonsense, made him an unlikely author).
Daria did have to give some credit to the Necronomicon's authors for at least being a bit more creative—Cthulhu instead of Satan, R'lyeh rising instead of Mercury being in the right phase—but her research just rendered the whole thing ridiculous.
With Mrs. Johanssen's bizarre behavior explained (and, she had to admit, the parallels still unexplained), Daria began to think about her own role in the whole mess. The idea of leaving did bother her more than she cared to admit, independence quite terrifying when held so close to her. A few years ago she'd have jumped at the chance, confident that she'd be able to brush off the worst the world had to show. However, the episode with Tom had demonstrated that she was more corruptible, more malleable, than she cared to admit.
Just because you lapsed in your standards once doesn't mean that you will again.
The lack of sleep catching up to her, she prepared for bed and soon had the lights off, her head on the pillow. About a month remained before school started.
One month without Tom, without Principal Li or Mr. O'Neill. One month with your family less annoying than they used to be. One month you can spend with Jane.
Satisfied by that, she slept.
Jane hadn't precisely lied about not getting nightmares. It wasn't as if the otherworldly vistas had gone away or changed in content; merely, they no longer held any terror.
She'd entered a new world not long after Daria had gone back home, the grand corpse city manifesting in the furniture of her aging home. Walls and frames melted, as pliable as glass in a Dali painting, and opened up new vistas of untold glories. Jane stood at the precipice of a new world, one that touched only the minds of the worthy.
Drab normalcy sometimes returned to the dusty rooms. These reversions left Jane alternating between relief and panic, her mind not yet willing to be severed from her old life yet still craving the alien sights.
Daria's call came as an unwelcome interruption. She'd answered all the same, moved by a remnant of the horror she felt from the sleepwalking episode. Jane didn't see any reason for Daria to be involved, at least not yet.
She never feels very comfortable doing new things, and this is pretty new.
Dwelling on the issue only robbed Jane of her of time amidst the visions, and she vowed to never do so again. She lived what other artists only dreamed.
Why did this ever frighten me? she wondered, beholding the inevitable realm with new eyes. The last of the rotting house's walls peeled away. Her bed transformed into dark stone that possessed the consistency of skin. A great plain of plasticine viscera splashed and coiled for miles all around, and beyond that towered the mighty temples, their black surfaces gilded in suppuration.
No longer a stranger to the place, she felt no fear as something lifted her from the altar. The sea of limp flesh uncoiled fine cilia in tribute at her passing. Blister-capped temples bled and shook, soft metal scales tearing through yielding skin to renew the City, so long lost and buried.
Her guardian carried her farther each time. It was preparing her for something even more wondrous that lay behind this new world, the truth of existence written in the stars. Bits and pieces of the final pattern shone out through the muck, getting clearer with ever passing moment.
Of the world's billions of people, Jane alone could recreate the pattern. There were plenty of more skilled artists, but none saw what she saw. Once she etched it on the canvas of reality, His herald would arrive, ushering in a new era.
Jane knew no fear when the vision faded that time, certain it would return in greater detail. Lying on her dank bed, flies crawling on the ceiling, she felt her lips turn up in a weak smile.
"Don't worry, Daria," she muttered. "I'll go to the doctor soon, like you said. I just need to see this thing through to the end. You'll probably think it's really cool."
Her only answer came from the buzzing of the flies.
Monday passed between the pages of books. Daria called Jane twice, her failure to answer the first call almost prompting Daria to make a visit. Caution won out, and she was rewarded with an answer on the second try.
"You'll never guess who Quinn saw at the food court," Daria said, as the conversation wound down.
"Dr. Shar flipping burgers?"
"If only. She saw Upchuck and Andrea together; they're apparently still an item."
"Ha! That's so weird and unsettling I can't help but find it kind of sweet. This worries me though; what are we going to talk about in Boston? Everyone we like to make fun of will still be here or in some other college."
"I wouldn't worry about it. If there's one thing I learned in moving from Highland to Lawndale, it's that stupidity is infinite in its variety."
"Amen to that. Oh! Hey, I gotta run."
"Okay," Daria said. "Do you want to get together Wednesday? Celebrate the special project they're giving you?" She hoped she didn't sound too pleading, but she still felt uneasy about Jane's well-being.
"Sounds like a plan, and I'll try not to go into another sleepwalking frenzy. I really need to go, so adios!"
Jane hung up, and Daria put down the receiver. Her being able to joke about it was probably a good sign. Jane said that she'd called Trent, and that he'd be home a few days earlier than planned. Part of Daria wanted to call Trent herself, just to make extra sure, but decided that would be too intrusive. She had to trust Jane.
In the lonely evening hours, however, the old worry crept back into her brain.
You've spent the better part of high school worrying about nothing, so what's a few more months?
Except it wasn't nothing, not exactly. Mrs. Johanssen's talk of her brother's—and the other artists'—dreams couldn't easily be relegated to coincidence. Then again, plenty of people suffered nightmares. Maybe Andy really did have a mental illness of some kind. Betty's death, though tragic, was hardly uncommon.
Jane won't end up like that. She's much too smart. If anything does happen, you'll be nearby.
Telling it to herself until she believed it, Daria fell asleep. Arising late in the next morning, she awoke a sleeping Jane with another phone call and idled away the hours. The air that day, so hot and damp, seemed tense. Daria got the curious feeling of something momentous approaching her, the way she used to feel just before one of the big storms back in Highland.
It wasn't until she read the notice tucked in the back of the newspaper, describing the suicide by pills of one Mrs. Johanssen, that her defenses buckled.