The Murals Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Recent titles by William Bayer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Jason Poe

  Hannah Sachs

  Tally Vaughan

  Jason Poe

  Hannah Sachs

  Joan Nguyen

  Jason Poe

  Hannah Sachs

  Tally Vaughan

  Anna von Arx

  Jason Poe

  Joan Nguyen

  Tally Vaughan

  Johnny Baldwin

  Jason Poe

  Joan Nguyen

  Hannah Sachs

  Thérèse Zellweger

  Jason Poe

  Noah Sachs

  Joan Nguyen

  Hannah Sachs

  Thérèse Zellweger

  Penny Dawson Ruiz

  Johnny Baldwin

  Penny Dawson Ruiz

  Jason Poe

  Hannah Sachs

  Joan Nguyen

  Thérèse Zellweger

  Tally Vaughan

  Joan Nguyen

  Acknowledgements

  Recent titles by William Bayer

  The Janek series

  PEREGRINE

  SWITCH

  WALLFLOWER

  MIRROR MAZE

  Novels

  PUNISH ME WITH KISSES *

  PATTERN CRIMES

  BLIND SIDE

  THE DREAM OF THE BROKEN HORSES

  CITY OF KNIVES

  HIDING IN THE WEAVE

  THE LUZERN PHOTOGRAPH *

  THE MURALS *

  * available from Severn House

  THE MURALS

  William Bayer

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  This eBook edition first published in 2019 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2020 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  Copyright © 2019 by William Bayer.

  The right of William Bayer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8973-7 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-634-0 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0333-5 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  Preface

  The following account of the discovery of and investigation into the creation and meaning of the so-called Locust Street Murals is told in the voices of its participants. Their testimonies were recorded, compiled, arranged and edited by one of them … whose identity will be revealed in due course.

  In order to enhance readability, recounted conversations are presented in dialogue form and occasionally condensed. Names and features of several of the characters have been changed to disguise their identities. Certain fictional techniques have also been employed in the tradition of the ‘non-fiction novel.’

  Some of the participants have dramatized their participation while others have flatly presented theirs. These variations in style are due to the individual personalities of the speakers, each of whom has his/her particular way of recounting events.

  The reader may note that portions of some testimonies are inconsistent with or directly contradicted by others. These anomalies have been left unedited with the understanding that different people often have different perspectives on the same series of events. Whether one narrator or another is to be regarded as ‘unreliable’ is a matter best left to the reader.

  Jason Poe

  Pow!

  The murals hit me hard. First came terror, then awe. It was only after I’d taken them in that I began to feel their immense power.

  ‘The Locust Street Murals,’ as we later called them, covered all four walls of that little room, and the strange menacing figures all seemed to be staring at me, meeting my eyes with theirs, following me as I turned from one to the next. Clearly, they told some kind of story. I had no idea what the story was, but from the first I knew I had to uncover it. I was equally determined to discover who had told this story, the name of the artist who’d painted these figures.

  I’d been photographing the interiors of abandoned houses for a couple of years, sneaking in at night, looking around, finding something interesting and poignant, then setting up my camera and using my miner’s headlamp to paint it with light. These long slow exposures were parts of a project I called Leavings: The Things They Left Behind, which I later hoped to assemble for exhibition, and, if the images were strong enough, publish together as a book.

  There were so many abandoned houses in the city that the project took on a boundless quality. My close friend, Hannah, after looking at a huge number of my images, kindly suggested that perhaps it was time for me to stop. ‘You may have a problem with repetition,’ she told me. ‘You need to decide when you’ve made your point.’

  She was right: I was repeating myself. But I wasn’t ready to call a halt. There was something missing, I told her, something I was after, and I didn’t want to stop until I found it. I shrugged when she asked me what this something was. ‘I wish I knew,’ I said.

  Whenever I entered a house, I had a pretty good idea what I was looking for: the detritus folks abandon when they hurriedly leave a place – upended furniture, unwashed dishes, gunked-up cooking equipment, torn bedding, unlaundered clothes, the scattered food containers out of which they ate their final at-home meal. I often found broken toys, discarded school books, crumpled newspapers open to the Help Wanted pages. But I was after the unusual object that spoke of the anguish of people who had left in a rush because their mortgage was underwater or they couldn’t make rent: a final eviction notice, heap of unpaid bills, dented old tuba wrapped in soiled high-school band uniform, perhaps a treasured set of drums that unhappily hadn’t made it into the family car.

  Best of all, I’d discover oddities, the images of which I treasured most because they seemed so telling – a painting on black velvet of a movie star hanging crooked on a wall, a ragged stuffed donkey tucked neatly by a child into a crib. In one house I came upon a rusted gynecological examination table with stirrups, suggesting the place had been an unlicensed abortion clinic. In another I slipped on the scattered beads of a rosary, perhaps ripped apart in despair. And, too often, I found messages of anger and contempt directed at mortgage lenders and landlords: smashed toilets, paint flung at walls, pet excrement and opened cans of food deliberately set out to attract vermin and flies.

  Always I’d ask myself: What went wrong in this house? Who used to live here? What made them leave? It was a melancholy quest I was on.

  I harbored the not
ion (perhaps naïve) that such abandoned objects told stories of the people who had left, their anger, despair, feelings of having been beaten down by life. And when I photographed them, I didn’t try to aestheticize the way some photographers do when they shoot pictures of decayed buildings, reveling in mold and peeling paint. I did not, I told my students and colleagues, view myself as that kind of artist. I’m a documentarian, I told them, using still lives to tell stories of broken hardscrabble lives, and, by extension, the breakdown of our rust-belt town, Calista.

  As always, we’d chosen the house carefully. Tally, my former student at Calista Art Institute, had scouted it out.

  ‘There’s this boarded-up gothic place standing apart on Locust,’ he told me as we lunched together in the cafeteria at CAI. He passed me his cell phone. I liked what I saw. There was a small square gazebo perched on top, with a little railing around it, like a widow’s walk on a coastal house, except there was no coast in sight.

  ‘Looks untouched,’ Tally told me. ‘Most of the places around have been torn down. I thought you’d like the turret.’

  ‘I do,’ I told him. ‘I also like that it’s on Locust. Is there a way in?’

  ‘Yeah, there’s a way,’ he said.

  We went to see it on a warm June afternoon. I knew the area, an eclectic neighborhood of houses in different styles, most set far back from the street. Many of the abandoned ones had been bulldozed in accordance with the city’s Tear Down the Blight program. There’d been talk of giving the land beneath these tear-downs to local residents for use as community gardens. I’d yet to see one. I’d only found broken foundations, piles of rubble and empty bramble-choked fields.

  Locust Street fascinated me. The old Kenyon-Garfield Observatory stood on a rise at one end surmounted by the slotted dome that had once housed its fine Schmidt telescope. It was an anomaly in the neighborhood, a reminder of better days. The telescope had been relocated years before. The observatory building, long abandoned by Calista State University, had so far escaped local vandals due to a high-security fence and live-in watchman.

  There were the two famous crime scenes near the other end of Locust that gave the street its notoriety: a house in which a middle-aged couple had imprisoned a young Latina for nearly a decade, and a murder venue just a block away to which a skinhead serial killer had lured black prostitutes for slaughter.

  The imprisoned woman had been abducted on her way to school, then chained up in the attic to be used as a sex slave. As for the serial killer, when he was finally caught, the cops started digging around his place. They found four bodies buried in the crawlspace and seven more in shallow graves in the backyard. After that, TV anchors and reporters at local stations referred to Locust as ‘Street of Horror.’

  Tally was right. The gothic place did seem different from its neighbors, and the turret on top gave it the look of a classic haunted house. There were even decorative spikes protruding from the roof of the gazebo like a structure in a macabre cartoon by Charles Addams.

  We slowed down as we passed, circled the block, then passed it slowly again.

  ‘Best not to hang around and show interest,’ Tally said as he picked up speed.

  He had, he told me, checked it out three nights in a row.

  ‘No one’s lived there in years. Water, electric and gas all turned off. It’s not considered abandoned ’cause the taxes are paid up. There’re loose boards on a cellar window round back. Wouldn’t be hard to jimmy,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know about the taxes?’

  He glanced at me. ‘Hall of Records. You know I always check, Jase. Listed to a corporation with an address on Doverland. I checked it out. Turned out to be a CPA’s office in a shopping strip.’

  ‘So somebody’s paying taxes, but there’re no utilities. What makes you so sure it hasn’t been touched?’

  Tally shrugged. ‘Just a feeling. Maybe someone’s been in there once or twice, but there’re no signs it’s been used as a crack house or occupied by homeless.’ He glanced at me. ‘Something about it, isn’t there?’ He stopped the car in front of the observatory. ‘An aura. Like Stay outta here! We mean it! And for some reason the locals are respecting that.’

  ‘I think you’re being a little mystical,’ I told him.

  He shook his head. ‘Maybe something spooky happened there once and people don’t wanna mess around in it. Anyway, there’s no one living near. A patrol car passes around midnight. Otherwise, it’s real quiet. I spent a couple of hours in the bushes behind. Parked here then walked back. Didn’t see a soul.’ He paused, gestured toward the observatory dome. ‘No moon tomorrow night. What’d you think?’

  I wasn’t sure. Going in through a cellar window could be risky if that was also the only way out. What if Tally was wrong and I encountered someone inside – crack user, copper thief, maniac with a vicious dog? Tally waiting outside would have my back; we’d be in contact texting back and forth … but still …

  ‘Could attract attention if my lighting shows through the boards.’

  ‘Boarding looks tight,’ he said.

  I thought about it. ‘Let’s try tomorrow.’

  He grinned. ‘Yeah, I kinda thought you’d go for it.’

  We’d been working together on Leavings since I conceived the project, an odd pair of urban explorers, as we liked to describe ourselves: me, the white late-forties former conflict photographer, now instructor in photography at CAI, and Tally, my talented twenty-something former student, eking out a living as a wedding photographer in the African American community.

  We’d worked out a partnership: I’d take the pictures; Tally would handle scouting, protection and transport. His battered Honda ran well and didn’t stand out in poor neighborhoods. We’d split anything we made from print sales or a book, but money wouldn’t be the point. We both loved the combination of photography and risk, plus Tally had special feelings for his home town. ‘It’s about the busted American Dream here, isn’t it?’ he asked when I first proposed the project. Yeah, that’s what it’ll be about, I told him, adding that it was great that he got it right away. ‘I know why you want to do this, Jase. You need the rush,’ Tally said. I was glad he got that too.

  I wasn’t inside a couple of minutes when I sensed this house was different. Soon as I inspected the main floor I understood this wasn’t a typical residence. The dining table was long enough to accommodate more than a dozen people, and I found a standing gong in the kitchen. Could be a dinner bell, I thought, suggesting a lot of people had once lived there.

  I liked houses where it turned out there’d been a lot more going on inside than you could guess from the exterior. Perhaps this one had been an unlicensed boarding house, or group home for the mentally handicapped.

  The place was moderately ratty. There were the usual signs of disuse and decay – cobwebs, rodent droppings – but no sign of black mold. One oddity: the words A Caring Place meticulously stenciled on the living-room wall, with a huge 666, the satanic number, crudely spray-painted on top as if to negate the good intentions beneath.

  Maybe this was some kind of cult house or splinter church that went bad.

  I banded my miner’s lamp to my forehead, texted Tally, then cautiously played the beam on the windows. Tally texted back that no light was seeping out. Relieved, I set down my tripod, battery unit and camera pack, and continued to explore.

  The stairs were in OK shape. A couple of risers were missing, and one step started to give when I put my foot on it. I warned myself to be careful, then continued the climb. I counted three bedrooms and a bath on the second floor and one more on the third, with cots and double-decker bunks in each. Also on the third was a master suite with adjoining study and private bath. Bedding and clothes were strewn about. There were towels scattered on the bathroom floors, old toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes in the sinks.

  All those beds – definitely a lot of people used to live here …

  I remember thinking that this was the kind of house I liked – stuf
f scattered about and a mysterious backstory suggested by that 666 sprayed on the wall below.

  In the third-floor hallway I ran into a hanging rope. Figuring it for an attic ladder drawstring, I checked out the ceiling. My head lamp picked up the outlines of a trapdoor, an entrance hatch to the gazebo structure on the roof. When I pulled on the rope, the trap door dropped open. I pulled on the bottom rung of the attached ladder. It telescoped down to the floor.

  I texted Tally that I was going up to the gazebo.

  Circle the house and check again for light leaks, I texted. Remember there’re windows on all four sides.

  Roger that! he texted back.

  The ladder held steady. A musty smell enveloped me as I approached the top. My breathing stirred up dust as I stuck my head through the hatch. I remember thinking: No one’s been up here in years …

  That’s when I caught sight of the murals.

  No light, Tally texted, but I didn’t respond, just crawled in, then stood still in the center of the ten-foot-square structure and gazed incredulously at the walls.

  On numerous expeditions into abandoned houses I’d never come across anything like this: all four walls covered with artwork, on each a row of six painted life-size, head-to-foot people staring out at me … or maybe at each other. These people, men and women, did not appear friendly. There was intensity about them, ferocity in their postures and the sets of their eyes. Gazing at them, I felt them staring back. I knew at once I was looking at something extraordinary.

  I texted Tally: Pay dirt! Get settled. I’ll be up here a while.

  It didn’t matter that the murals didn’t fit with my theme of ‘The Things They Left Behind.’ I knew I had to document them. The turret room was small, which made it difficult to take good photographs. I’d have to go wide-angle to completely capture each wall. Since there’re distortion issues with wide-angle lenses, I decided to shoot each wall from as far back as I could, then use a normal lens to document details. Later, using software, I could combine the images on my computer.