Quicksilver(51)

As we would learn, the Quonset hut, which faced directly east at its entrance and west at its back door, was laid out like a shotgun house, without hallways: first, a large living room; then beyond a doorway, a smaller dining room; thereafter, another door into a kitchen; beyond the kitchen, a bathroom; beyond the bath, a garage in which a vintage Range Rover stood in wait.

The initial space, a living room with a circle of six armchairs and small tables to serve them, also included a large adjustable drawing table with a tall swiveling chair, a cabinet in which she stored brushes and paints, and a pair of easels to each of which was fixed a painting in progress.

Judging by just those two incomplete works, I thought Panthea Ching was immensely talented. Sadly, the paintings by the fry cooks Phil and Jill Beane—he with spiky purple hair and shaved eyebrows; she with spiky green hair, black pajamas, and red shoes—were by comparison much less affecting. If my friends, the twins, shaved their heads and dyed their skin blue, and if the art establishment decided they were marketable, perhaps the two paintings of theirs that I’d bought, which currently hung in the employee bathrooms at Arizona! magazine, would soar in value and provide me with the funds for a comfortable retirement. However, I had to admit that such a bonanza now seemed even less likely than a monster hunter’s living long enough to retire.

The Quonset hut was big, and the front room, by far the largest of its spaces, measured perhaps sixty feet square. On the long north and south walls were the halves of the mural she purported to have painted in her sleep.

“Each wall was completed over a period of weeks,” Panthea said. “I would often wake at night and be working on these. At times during the day, I’d be overcome with weariness, lie down, fall into sleep, only to wake hours later and find myself with the trolley, brushes and tubes of acrylics arranged on top, painting feverishly.”

We moved to the left of the front door, to the long south wall, where the eight-foot-tall mural began, portraying in vivid detail what I had seen in the motel-bathroom mirror that morning. Then it had been a three-dimensional underworld with its denizens in motion. Here it was a two-dimensional static image, although the artist’s passion and technique gave it unsettling power. The labyrinth of tunnels, the surreal architecture. Dead people hanging from the walls or lying on catafalques, spectral light emanating from their open mouths and sunken eyes. Ghouls devouring.

There were other terrors that I had only half registered when falling through the world of the mirror, a scene with the intricacy of a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch, but more horrific than anything Bosch could have conceived.

Panthea had painted this weeks before Bridget and I had been briefly plunged into a vision of this wretched, perilous future—if that’s what it was.

The mural continued on the north wall. Swarms of terrified, naked people panicked through a dark train tunnel in which cattle cars packed with the condemned rollicked along. The burning city, violent crime rampant in every corner. The shrieking horse pulling the blazing carriage. The sobbing woman with a bloody baby held in her arms. In this end-times metropolis, the Screamers moved among the rapists and murderers, as though more than observing, as though mentoring, encouraging. Yet we came to something that unsettled us more than anything we’d seen elsewhere in the mural. Floating above the dying city in a smoky sky orange with reflected fire, rendered as a pair of pale moons, were my face and Bridget’s, gazing down on the destruction and brutal murders, our expressions as they almost certainly had been when we’d looked into the motel mirrors and found ourselves plunging into the abyss.

“You painted us before we’d ever had this vision,” Bridget marveled. “You knew we’d have it.”

“I knew nothing,” Panthea said. “I really did paint it all as a sleepwalker, or in a fugue state if you prefer. When I woke, I was always chilled by the images I’d created. But when I finished it—then I knew you’d be coming and that together we would do our small part to resist the world becoming as it is here on these walls.”

Hearing this, Sparky turned to his granddaughter, his scowl so fierce that it confirmed he could have been, in his younger years, capable of merciless retribution against the enemies of his country. “Vision? You saw all this in a vision, not a mere presentiment? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was only this morning, Grandpa. Quinn and I experienced it separately. I’ve been processing it ever since. So has he. I didn’t want to talk about it until I understood it.”

“You evidently talked about it to Quinn.”

“Not really, not much,” I said. “We only confirmed with each other that we’d seen something terrible in our mirrors.”

Bridget put a hand on my shoulder to silence me.

Sparky said, “Girl, we’ve never hidden a thing from each other. We’ve been in this together.”

“And we still are, Grandpa. I wasn’t hiding it from you. I only needed time to think it through and then to understand what Quinn made of it.” She went to him and put one hand to his cheek. “You know, Sparky, it’s not just two of us anymore. It’s three of us—”

“Four,” said Panthea.

“Four of us,” Bridget corrected.

Winston grumbled.

“Five,” Bridget said. “You and me, Sparky—we’ve been through a lot together, and we’ve been great. But we need help now, and it’s being given to us. How many were in a SEAL team? Just two? I don’t think it was just two.”