The studio was freezing, illuminated only by the gray moonlight filtering through the skylight. It smelled like it always did—turpentine, linseed oil, and old canvas. It was the smell of my career. The smell of my breakdown.
Bam!
The door buckled inward. The drafting table slid an inch across the floorboards with a screech.
"Daddy?" Lily was huddled in the corner, pulling a tarp over her head. She looked small again. The weird, possessed calm was gone, replaced by raw, shivering terror. "Is he coming in?"
"No," I said, though I didn't believe it.
I looked at the knife in my hand. It was useless against something that could smash through drywall. I looked at the black gunk coating my fingers.
I raised my hand to my face and sniffed.
I expected the smell of rot. I expected sulfur or magic or death.
Instead, I smelled high school chemistry class.
Formaldehyde. Latex. And... corn syrup?
My brain paused. The panic receded just enough for the logic to slip through the cracks. I rubbed the black sludge between my thumb and forefinger. It was sticky, tacky. It wasn't ink. It was movie blood. Thickened, dyed, theatrical blood.
"It's fake," I whispered.
Then I looked at the door again. The force behind those hits wasn't fake. But the monster? The supernatural ink-demon?
"It's a suit," I said, louder.
A memory flashed in my brain. A barbecue, three years ago. Sarah’s brother, Marcus. He was sitting on our patio, carving a watermelon into a severed head for Halloween. He worked in special effects. He did creature design for B-movies.
I remembered the way he looked at me at the funeral. He didn't cry. He just stared at me with eyes that looked like two cigarette burns in a sheet of paper. You let her die, his eyes had said. You were too busy with your monsters to save my sister.
Bam!
The wood around the deadbolt splintered. A shard of oak flew across the room and landed at my feet.
"Marcus?" I yelled at the door.
The pounding stopped instantly.
Silence stretched out, heavy and suffocating. The wind howled against the skylight, but the hallway was dead quiet.
Then, a piece of paper slid under the door.
It was damp, stained with the black dye. I walked over and picked it up. It was a page torn from one of my old sketchbooks. A drawing of Sarah. But someone had taken a red marker and drawn X’s over her eyes.
On the back, written in that jagged, angry scrawl:
ART IS PAIN. YOUR TURN.
My fear vanished.
It didn't fade away; it evaporated, instantly replaced by a cold, white-hot rage. This wasn't a ghost. This wasn't a hallucination. This was a man in a rubber suit and body armor terrorizing my six-year-old daughter because he was angry.
He slashed my tires. He cut the power. He gave my daughter a knife.
"Okay," I said. My voice was steady. "Okay, you want art? Let’s make some art."
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.