Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

Finally, on the Friday afternoon, he went into his temporary studio. He put up a canvas. He lifted a 2B pencil from where he’d placed it in readiness, and quickly outlined some shapes. After ten minutes he pulled the iPhone out of his pocket and consulted a shot he’d taken that lunchtime, in the tiny courtyard of a coffee house hidden in the centre of the village. He put the phone back in his pocket—even when working from reference he needed to feel he worked from memory too—and made minor alterations.

He stood back, looked at what he’d done. It seemed okay. He put the pencil back in its place and walked into the house and had a shower.

* * *

On Saturday morning he found himself back at the same coffee shop. He sat at the same rickety metal table in the courtyard, watching the light on the opposite wall. The wall was more or less white, the kind of white you see on an exterior surface that was painted white a year or two ago, on top of a previous coat of white, and has since then experienced sun, shade, and only very occasional rain.

To the incurious eye, it looked… white. David’s was not an incurious eye, and the wall was what he was hoping to portray. His additions would be shadows. His last successful series of works had involved placing shadows of people on largely featureless walls. A woman sitting, a man standing. A couple together. A suggestion of content through absence. He’d stopped wanting to paint these things, but now he was finding that he did again.

He sat for two hours, drinking three coffees. Usually he’d have one in the course of a morning, two at the most. The brew at Bonnie’s was good, though. It had a nutty flavour, a little smoky. While he sat, he eavesdropped and observed a sequence of locals as they passed through, stopping to chat at the other tables. There was talk of planned or recent trips to Europe, the pleasures of a newly acquired boat, upcoming IPOs in Silicon Valley. This was not the kind of content he wished to suggest.

He left and went back to his temporary studio, where he worked all afternoon. It felt good, and as always when it felt good he was baffled why he didn’t do this all the time, springing out of bed in the mornings and getting straight to it. Each stroke of the brush seemed to flow from the previous and into the next, urging forward. So why did the chain fall apart so often? Why did it fragment into a series of dull, rusty links that seemed impossible to join together?

Rather than worry at the problem—David did not want to bring activity upon himself by thinking about it, however constructively—he kept working, for once going beyond outlining and starting to actually paint. This wasn’t his process, but maybe this was a good thing. Maybe the process itself was flawed. If there’s one thing he’d learned over the years it was that if something’s working, you keep doing it. Don’t question, don’t second-guess. If you decide later that you don’t like what you’ve done, you can fix it. But you’ve got to have done something first.

So he did.

* * *

That evening, to celebrate, he took himself out to dinner. He chose Max’s mainly on the basis that it had the most attractive patio, overlooking one of the central streets. He drank two glasses of a very crisp Sauvignon Blanc and ate a ribeye, medium rare. The steak was excellent, of course, accentuated before grilling by some kind of spice rub, smoky and a little sweet.

When the waiter came for his plate David asked what was in the spice mix. The man smiled and said it was a house secret. As usual, David found this irritating. He wasn’t going to run off and start his own restaurant on the back of a single recipe.

“Is there coffee in it?”

The waited inclined his head. “You have a good palate.”

“Tastes like the brew they have over at Bonnie’s,” David said.

The waiter smiled again, as if to say that he couldn’t possibly confirm or deny such a speculation, and took his plate away.

Back at the cottage, David found himself wishing he’d had one more glass of wine, or else thought to buy a bottle earlier in the day. To distract himself from this line of thinking he went into the studio, though he never normally worked in the evenings. He picked up his brush.

He stopped at midnight, a little confused at how much work he’d done, and the unusual colours in it.

* * *

On Sunday morning the work still looked good, but he wasn’t inclined to add anything just yet. Instead he went walking again. He remembered to take his proper camera this time, and spent a couple of hours taking pictures of particular houses he’d noticed on previous strolls.

After snapping a series of an especially perfect Storybook cottage, he turned to see a man watching him. Not merely a man, in fact, but a policeman, in khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirt. David felt instinctively defensive.

“Beautiful, huh,” the cop said, however. He was young, with short brown hair and a pair of dark glasses. “Always been one of my favourites.”