The Influence(91)

She considered calling Ross and asking him to come over, but didn’t want to throw this on him right now, not with everything else he had to worry about.

She’d tell him tonight when he called.

There was a knock at her front door, and her heart leapt in her chest.

“Anyone home?”

It was Ross! Grateful, she ran to the door and yanked it open.

“Nice day for a…walk,” he said, frowning as he took in her rattled, disheveled appearance. “What happened? What is it?”

Unable to stop herself, she burst into tears, throwing her arms around him and hugging tightly. She made him close the door and lock it, and on the way to the couch told him about Puka. Immediately, he turned around and went outside to look at what was left of the dog. She could see the expression of horror on his face when he saw the flattened, bloody remains and knew he was far out of his comfort zone, but when he offered to pick up and dispose of the body, she gratefully allowed him to do so. Part of her wanted the dog buried—she owed Puka at least that much—but the animal was not what it had been, was not the pet she had known, and she did not raise any objection when Ross used her shovel to scoop it into a Hefty bag and then threw the bag into the covered garbage can at the side of the house.

Afterward, she made him wash off the shovel with Lysol and leave it lying flat on the ground at the side of the house to dry.

“Done,” Ross announced, coming back inside, and he scrubbed his hands with Comet in the kitchen sink in order to get off whatever germs might have been on his skin.

Jill was not a drinker, but in the cupboard she had a bottle of scotch left over from her old boyfriend that she’d brought with her to Magdalena and kept on hand in case she ever entertained and guests wanted some. It hadn’t happened yet, but she could really use some extra courage right now, and she poured herself a shot. Ross declined an offer for one of his own, so she drank his, too. He was considerably less rattled than she was, but then he hadn’t seen Puka in action.

She was putting away the bottle when she saw Ross looking at the paintings against the wall. “When did you do these?” he asked.

“The past few days.”

Frowning, he started looking through them. He pulled one canvas out from the back and placed it next to one in the front, rearranging all of them until, in a few minutes, they were lined up in a semi-circle around the room.

Jill saw the progression immediately. She hadn’t noticed it before because her eye had always been on the creature, not the background, but now she saw that there was a story going on around the central figure.

“When did you paint this one?” Ross asked.

She could barely speak. Her voice when it came out was a whispered croak. “The day before yesterday, I think.” In this picture, the monster was curled up inside of what looked like a translucent egg on the floor of a darkened room. Inside the egg, one clawed hand was pointing to the right.

And at the edge of the painting, between the wall of the room and the edge of the canvas, a small skinned Puka, standing on hind legs and nearly invisible amidst a depiction of dead cattle, was heading off in that direction.

She didn’t remember painting the dog at all. She remembered painting the cocooned monster, but, if asked, she would have sworn on her mother’s life that the background had been a solid brown or blue.

Only none of the backgrounds were solid colors. They were all scenes, though that was not something she had noticed even this afternoon when she had been sorting through the works herself. Looking at them now, in the order in which Ross had placed them, Jill saw the evolution of the beast from a dead body enveloped in an egg to a fearsome monster standing tall and looming over the smoldering ruins of Magdalena. Somehow, in her paintings, she had predicted not only the return of her dog but the burning of Dave and Lita’s chickens, which were visible in the corner of the very first canvas. Seeing that, it made her wonder if the other events depicted would come true. There was a line of angry well-armed men with elongated animal shadows walking through the desert, a street littered with the mutilated bodies of women, a field of wildly overgrown and unsettlingly colorful vegetation, and those smoking ruins, out of which were crawling creatures that looked like they’d come from the depths of hell.

She tried to tell herself that it was all coincidence, that none of it meant anything, but she did not voice that thought to Ross because she knew it was not true.

Were they all hers? Or had something been working through her?

She was afraid to even consider that line of reasoning.

“Did you really come here for a walk?” she asked, clumsily trying to change the subject.