The Writer and The Artist: The Connection

Chapter 8: The Connection

 

THE CONNECTION

 

1

 

They left the painting, taking the crow with them.

            They figured that because the crow in the bin had not been a part of the main painting that Laura had created, unlike the vase and the dress, it did not matter that the crow would be removed. Besides, they both knew that this crow was a clue, regarding the location of her comatose husband.

            Sitting beside the crystal, Laura examined the pizza box, with the crow still enclosed inside it. No matter how much of a clue it might be, neither could stand laying an eye on it.

            But without even looking at it, something was apparent to Laura: ‘This crow definitely means something.’

            ‘You sound very certain,’ Ethan replied, standing beside her.

            ‘When I first saw it,’ she said, placing the box onto the ground, ‘my stomach did a somersault, yes, but not just because of its sickening sight. There is something about this crow that has got to me. It’s trying to tell me something.’

            ‘What, exactly?’

            She pondered. ‘That I have seen it before. I don’t really know.’ She had seen the crow had a small bald patch of skin between feathers ruffled underneath the left wing/ For some reason she recognised this particular detail.

‘I reckon it is something I have been suppressing, though.’

            ‘Why is that?’

            She looked up at him. ‘Because I threw up so hard.’

 

2

 

Ethan asked her if the crow had any relation to her other paintings in any way. Laura thought back to the view room and the countless number of coloured canvases she had made of her husband’s mind. She could not recall a single black crow in any of them, bald patch or no bald patch.

            ‘Then on the assumption that your memory is paramount to your gift,’ Ethan concluded, ‘then the crow does not represent another painting of yours.’    

            Laura felt dubious. ‘Maybe, somehow it does.’

            ‘Why?’

            ‘If my husband is within one of my paintings, and if that crow is some kind of clue, then there has to be a link.’

            ‘But you can’t think of one.’

            ‘D****t, Ethan, no!’

            He quickly closed his buzzing lips and looked away, back into the crystal. She bit her lip, wanting to apologise, but it really was starting to nag at her brain. If she could get this far then surely she could keep going? She just had to work out how.

            And then Cosy came to mind.

            Why was I taken to Cosy? she thought. Was there something there I could have taken?

            She thought about what had been in the room. Not what she painted, but rather what was there behind the painted angle. There had been a wooden cabinet filled with ornaments of animals and…some china? Yes that was right, the china with the red and gold pattern. Had there been a figurine of a crow? Thinking of the ornaments made Laura’s thoughts go blurry, so she took that to mean the ornaments were not important.

            But something was. Something about that edge of the painting had been significant.

            As she thought about it, Ethan admired the colours swirling within the painting. He smiled to himself, noting how each colour felt so beautiful on its own and yet together they could form countless numbers of artistic scenes: portraits; pictures of distant landscapes; crowds of people; abstract imagery, similar to what Laura had painted in Bubble.

As he observed the colours, he noted something that had passed over his head the first time he came to the tower. All these colours were so bright and energetic. Sure there were different tones of colour, yet there appeared to be no single dull, gloomy colour amongst them. No black, no grey, no navy blue.

But wait, what was that colour there? A spec of…?

‘I need to go back to Cosy,’ Laura quipped, as Ethan thought he spotted a spec of darkness roaming within the depths of the crystal.

He turned his attention on her. ‘You have worked something out about the crow?’

‘Not so much the crow,’ she said, ‘but more the two paintings themselves.

‘And what they have in common.’

 

3

 

Leaving the crow in the pizza box on the floor, Laura leaned on the crystal for support as she stood up, facing its gigantic structure as she stabled herself. ‘Maybe if I just imagine it,’ she said, placing both hands onto the crystal. She closed her eyes and in her mind she painted the picture of Cosy.

            Ethan observed her behaviour and was intrigued by how sure of her actions she was. ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ he asked her.

            In truth, she did not; she was relying purely on inspirational instinct. ‘What I’ve learnt so far,’ she replied, ‘is that anything appears possible. I can enter the world of my own paintings. Heck, even this crystal is made up of the colours I use. So why the hell wouldn’t my idea work?’

            Ethan said nothing. He did not want to break her concentration. Focusing her attention on the crystal once more, she maintained her instinct once more.

            With the image of Cosy firmly set, she used her will to push it through her body towards her fingertips. Any doubts she may have possessed her were quietened by her determination to find her husband alive and well (and in one piece). She closed her mind off from all senses, except that of the cold touch she had with her palms pressed firmly against the crystal’s frosted glass. As she transferred the image of Cosy to the crystal, she could feel the middle of her palms warming.

            Ethan watched the whole time without moving an inch. He was amazed by the strong feeling of faith around her.

            He admired her for it.

            His thoughts of her sharply digressed when within the crystal he noticed the image of Bubble breaking into segments of colour, as the recognisable image of Cosy returned.

            Laura opened her eyes and relaxed, removing her hands from the crystal. She looked across at Ethan and said, ‘It’s your turn, now.’

            ‘Yes ma’am,’ he replied as he stepped forward and placed his hands onto the crystal, feeling the surface waver and break under his touch.

            Laura placed the pizza box beside the crystal and stepped within.

4

 

Now inside Cosy, Laura went immediately to what she was looking for, whilst Ethan, with a foot held firmly in and out of the painting, observed her closely.

            Ignoring the chatter, which had been pushed into the background by stubborn tenacity, she walked towards the cabinet. She checked to see if what she remembered had been there: the glass doors; the positioning of the white china; and the ornaments neatly placed on each shelf.

            But she was not there for the cabinet.

            She walked past the cabinet and inspected the closed wooden cupboard beside it, realising how stupid she was for forgetting to check it earlier. This was why the crystal had brought her here.

            The cupboard was only waist high, Laura realised, as she stood before it. Both the doors and the top of the cupboard were simply bare, varnished wood. But around each door were peculiar carvings with brass (ironically gold-painted) shiny door knobs attached to them in the centre. She first took them to be weird hieroglyphics or some other foreign symbolism. But then she remembered when she last thought this and then it clicked. They were the same abnormal markings inscribed into the body of the tower.

            New questions and developments formulated themselves in her thoughts, which Laura dismissed and stored for later. Right now, the cupboard was her only concern.

            And, more importantly, its contents.

            Laura knelt down in front of the cupboard and, taking both handles, pulled the doors open.

            Her lips parted with awe.

 

5

 

Leaning in through the white tear formed between the painting and the crystal of the tower, Ethan watched Laura open the cupboard, suddenly understanding what Laura had deciphered. The bin of Bubble; the cupboard of Cosy: two containers, each holding a hidden clue.

            They were on their way.

            When Laura pulled the doors open, he could not see what was inside as she was crouched in front of it. All he could do was wait until Laura revealed it to him, ignoring an insouciant member of John’s family as he asked him to sit with them and drink tea.

            After a minute of her gawping at what was inside the cupboard, Ethan watched as Laura carefully placed her hands inside the cupboard. He pondered her over-attentive mannerism and was about to call out and ask if she was okay, but Ethan remained still as she got up from the floor; her hands were cupped together to concealed whatever was inside.

            Was it another animal? Ethan thought, as he glanced between Laura and the ornaments situated on the cabinet. It might explain why Laura was cautious in taking whatever was inside. If it were a living organism, it could only be the size of a rodent. A hamster, maybe? But Ethan doubted this notion as Laura approached him with her hands completely motionless.

            And her face said something more; it was not as pale as when they found the dead crow. However, she looked strikingly concerned, as though whatever lay in her hands were in fact dead. ‘Show me,’ he said, unable to wait any longer.

            She looked into his eyes, as her hands blossomed open, revealing the flower inside.

            A single red rose, with a single thorn breathing from the stalk.

 

6

 

Returning to outside the crystal, Laura placed the rose (also out of the main picture) onto the floor beside the pizza box and flicked her eyes between each one, waiting for a glimpse of inspiration.

A crow and a rose. A vase and a dress?

A trigger of a connection?

Nothing.

To allow her thoughts to set sail elsewhere, she turned to other possible connections:

            The markings of the cupboard – the tower. Perhaps this tower knew something of the items she had found.

The colours of the paints – the crystal. This place knew something. She felt it ripple under her skin from below her feet.

And then a new connection came to fruition.

The tower. The markings. She had seen them once before the tower.

            She had painted them.

            At that precise moment an image of a painting flooded into her mind, removing all other meandering cognition. She could not remember the name of the painting, for that was the key (she now realised) to her remembering each detail. But there was a large circular chamber with a domed roof. Supporting the roof were eight stone pillars, positioned away from the centre of the chamber in a circle. Down each of these pillars were the markings of the tower.

            But what was in the centre? It has to be John, she thought, knowing full well that in pretty much all of her paintings, John was always positioned in the centre of the canvas. Picturing John in the middle of the chamber caressed further detail.

            He has his arms spread out. He is smiling, I think? Yes, yes he is smiling. It was a content smile. Oh God, what was the name of it?

            Laura continued to pick at her memory as she stared blankly at the objects on the floor in front of her. She looked past the pizza box and the rose and focused on the ground they all stood upon. As her mind drifted into random energy, seeking an answer to her riddle, she started to concentrate more and more on the floor. Something had raised her interest towards it. She knelt down and inspected the floor a little closer…

            Her faint reflection gazed back at her.

 

7

 

As Laura chiselled away at correlations unscathed, Ethan sat down and watched the void through which they had travelled from. He heard it faintly twist and groan as it tore at the purple clouds surrounding its gaping hole.

A dilated pupil, he thought.

He tried to see past the incredible darkness and to the painting of Bad Day that was at the other side.

            He was unable to see that far. This was no longer a significant part of Bad Day. It was a painting of its own, with it’s own hidden secrets.

            The void winked at him.

            A trigger was made.

            He looked over his shoulder towards the crystal and admired the colours inside.

 

8

 

Laura tested her suspicions by rubbing an index finger against the surface of the floor, moving it slowly from left to right. Doing so left a temporary smear mark, which faded after a few seconds.

            Glass.

            She then looked around at the floor and had her theory confirmed. The head of the tower was domed.

            The glass roof of the dome…

            The crystal floated slightly above the tip of the glass roof.

Isolation. It suddenly came to her. The painting is called Isolation.

            Isolated within the tower.

            She immediately placed her hands onto the crystal and focused on the painting, closing her eyes and the world around her.

 

9

 

But something was wrong.

‘Ugh!’ she breathed, through panting. Ethan did nothing to disturb her, but watched intently, trying to figure out what was the matter.

As hard as she tried to bring the image of Isolation into focus, she could not complete the picture. There were details of the painting she could not remember. Something about the painting was holding her back.

She let go and opened her eyes to see the amass of swirling colour inside the crystal.

            With her consciousness returned, Ethan said, ‘What happened?’

            ‘I can’t fully vision the image!’ she said, clenching her fists. ‘I don’t know what I am doing wrong!’

            ‘Wait a second,’ Ethan replied, ‘what painting are you talking about?’

            Laura calmed herself through opening and closing her fists and then told him everything she could remember about the painting. She left nothing out; she could recall the finer details: the glass roof that could only just be seen at the top of the picture; the markings on the pillars; the expression on John’s face, everything that seemed of any significance, she mentioned.

            So what was she missing?

            Ethan thought about the painting for a minute, constantly checking the crystal to see if it had calibrated the painting. He found Laura was doing the same, yet neither witnessed a change. That meant the crystal wanted them to tell it, rather than the other way around.

            ‘You just told me,’ Ethan reiterated, ‘that once you remember the name of the painting that you remember everything else about it. Are you sure you have the right name?’

            ‘Completely,’ she said. Her face was scrunched up through confusion. ‘But it’s like there’s something about the painting I am unable to remember, something that must be significant about it. And yet if it is significant, why can’t I remember it?’

            ‘Why wouldn’t you remember it?’

            Laura looked across at Ethan. ‘Beats me,’ she said. ‘I don’t normally forget paintings…’ And then she stopped. Something clicked deep within her, suck at the bottom of an infinite ocean.

Had she forgotten a painting?

Was she ever likely to?

‘Why would I forget a painting?’ She then asked Ethan directly, ‘Why would anyone forget anything when it is so significant?’

            Ethan thought about this and said, ‘Maybe it’s something difficult to live with.’

            ‘You mean like a traumatic incident?’ Immediately she could picture John in that hospital bed, completely wired to all the hospital machines required to keep this hunt going.

            ‘Yes,’ Ethan replied. ‘Has there ever been a painting so traumatic, perhaps terrifying, that you can’t remember it completely?’

            The word terrifying did make Laura’s spine shudder. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘but I still don’t know what.’

            ‘Okay,’ Ethan said, ‘let’s think away from traumatic, what don’t you like about your paintings that you would rather forget, or perhaps you have forgotten?’

            Laura knew the answer to the opposite question: what she liked about her paintings. She looked towards the crystal and admired all the wonderful bright colours she had used in the past.

            She gazed at them for a moment and then shuddered. Seconds went by, as the power of thought took over.

She swam to the bottom.

She thought she might have heard Ethan call out her name worryingly, but she did not properly register the sounds above water level.

Frantically she searched.

            All those beautiful colours; all those wonderful light acrylics.

            She preferred the lighter colours.

            They protected her from the darkness…

            ‘Laura?’

            This time Ethan’s voice brought her back to life. She shook her head, knowing she had made a development. There was a painting she had forgotten.

            One she was yet to remember. One she was absolutely terrified of.

            ‘The dark colours,’ she said, ‘that is what I have forgotten.’

 

10

 

She thought hard about the painting of Isolation, more than she had thought about any of her paintings before. There were traces of dark colour in that painting. The question was:

            ‘Where the hell did I paint them?’ Laura said, to herself rather than to Ethan. She thought of what could be seen of the glass roof. No, that was all glass, nothing significant. She then thought of the dome’s interior. Where exactly was the light coming from? she thought, remembering how well lit the scene had been when she painted. The glass roof could not have been sufficient to bring so much light into every corner of the room, for there had been no shadows omitted from the pillars.

            Windows, she thought, that’s right, large church-like windows. They were also dome-shaped.

            Ethan returned to the crystal, in search for the dark colours. If only there was a way to bring them out…

            Laura thought about the windows a little more. There were six visible windows in the picture; each window was glass-tiled, mosaic, with the different colours of the crystal contained within each square-tile.

            The tower? Laura thought, remembering how this picture could not physically be in the inside of the tower, for there were no windows on the body of the tower.

Unless they were not windows at all? Laura decided to shake that thought off, believing the sense of reality in her paintings was little more than a topic of insignificant debate. There was something connected to the light entering through those windows that Laura had trouble remembering.

But there was one last crucial detail she could remember; the beams of light coming from those windows and how each of them immersed John in incredible layers of colour.

That was when she remembered the floor below his feet.

She smiled. Bingo.

            A buried treasure chest welcomed her.

 

11

 

‘I remember now,’ she said to Ethan, placing both her hands onto the crystal once again. ‘It’s called Isolation.’

            ‘You remember the whole painting?’

            She nodded. ‘Everything. All I need to do is inspect the painting for myself.’

            Ethan could see how positive she was; her eyes were brighter, her spark of hope suddenly washed over her old tired expression like a raging flood. ‘Do you think you know where John is?’

            Feeling a slight struggle in her memory, she held onto the scraps of hope she clung so dearly to and said: ‘Not quite, but I think we are close.’ We have to be.

            But there was no time to allow doubt; she closed her eyes and concentrated hard on Isolation.

            The crystal reacted immediately, as though it had been anxiously waiting for this moment for so long.

 

12

 

They took no time in admiring the work of the painting this time, the hunt was beyond that stage. When the image was complete inside the crystal, Ethan unlocked the painting and Laura stepped inside.

            As before, Laura stood within the white void and a rendering of John welcomed her. A brightly coloured (isolated) John, his arms spread out to embrace the colour that brightened every spec of his body. Laura had to squint in order to see the ecstatic expression on his face, as he looked upwards into the blank abyss.

As the picture faded in, Laura was quick to notice the holy atmosphere: the gigantic stone pillars that reached upwards into the skies of the dome; the cathedral-shaped windows that emitting glorified beams of light from the ‘outside’ world (a world now left behind); the stone tablet floor of colour, similar to the structure of each window, below Laura’s feet. This was a church of a vast rainbow.

As Laura stepped towards the centre, John looked towards her. ‘We are glad you came,’ he said. He then continued to look up, pointing towards the glass dome roof.

We?

Laura followed his gaze into the heavens of the church and was completely amazed by what she saw.

Beyond the glass dome, where she had not painted, she could see the hovering crystal of the tower.

And Ethan, standing beside it.

 

13

 

‘What is this place?’

            ‘It is our haven, Laura.’

            ‘What?’

            ‘Don’t you remember?’ John said to her, ‘when you painted this room, it reminded you of the choice you made of your colours. It was what I visualised – your choice of light over dark. This place represents a haven of your colour, of which my mind is enriched with.’

            Laura looked around at each of the windows that brought in the vast quantity of colour. She had to admit, being a part of this painting did make her feel protected. ‘But you are not the John I seek?’ she asked, realising now that this version of John knew more about this painting then she currently did.

            ‘I am not,’ he said, smiling through the bitter honesty. ‘But you come to this place because you left yourself a clue.’

            ‘Wait a second,’ she said, stepping forward, ‘I left myself a clue?’

            ‘Of course,’ John replied. ‘You have painted the clue within this chamber.’

 

14

 

‘I don’t understand,’ Laura said. ‘Why would I have previously left a clue to the location of my comatose husband?’

            ‘You misunderstand,’ John replied, ‘it has everything to do with this painting. It was not only an image I once had, but it was a reminder to you. It is why you have been brought here.

‘Do you remember what John felt when he experienced this visualisation?’

            Yes, she thought, there was something he had said.

There was a scrap of remembrance she could hold on to. ‘When we met,’ she said, ‘we both felt that we were made for each other, which he felt in this image, a love at first sight, kind of thing.’

‘Two words – an idealisation of love.’

Laura’s eyes lit up. ‘Soul mates.’

John of Isolation smiled through holy light.

 

15

 

‘You both believed you were perfect for each other because you were destined to be together; soul mates that have come together over many ages.’

            Laura remembered now: the theory of soul mates, the belief that two people were at the beginning of time born as one entity – a soul, but the creation of all worlds tore them apart. It is said that soul mates spend their lives searching for one another amongst the worlds and that eventually one day they would come together again, maybe through chance or perhaps through destiny. This painting, to John, represented that notion. Isolation – no  matter where he was, John would always feel bathed in Laura’s light. She would always be with him.

            But ultimately, as Laura was yet to remember, there was always traces of darkness. Soul mates were never destined to have an easy life. Because they were split apart at the beginning of time, life makes it increasingly difficult to bring soul mates back together again. Although soul mates benefit from the immense love they share from one another, they are equally doomed to a moment of tragedy, where life will try and split them apart, as it always intended.

            John of Isolation could see she was remembering. The gifts you both have are so important. They bind both your minds together – they infuse this law of soul mates. Without them, you would fall to pieces.’

‘Especially when you forget them.’

Laura’s brain twitched into gear.

 

16

 

Nearly everything from the past ran back to her, from all those years ago when, as young lovers believe, love holds the utmost importance in any relationship. But time decays the mind and somehow she had forgotten it all.

            Including her own gift; she could see moments of her mind, the same way John could.

            Yet she had forgotten.

            She could not understand why.

            ‘The gift you share is the ability to delve into your own thoughts and harness the moment as a form of reality,’ John of Isolation said. ‘And yet that is not all, for the ability for one to create what the other has seen inside their mind confirms that you were both destined as soul mates.’

            Laura was taken aback. ‘But that means…if I can paint what is inside John’s mind…’ she stopped, unable to believe what she was about to say.

            ‘It is true. John can create what is inside yours.’

            ‘But not through painting…’

            ‘No,’ John of Isolation said, pointing towards the markings on the pillars. ‘Through writing.’