The Murals Read online

  ‘It was a eureka moment,’ he said. ‘Like this is what I’ve been waiting to find since Tally and I started on the project. Then to just stumble on it in that nothing house! I knew as soon as I poked my head through the hole in the floor that this was something big!’ He paused. ‘But of course it wasn’t a “nothing house.” It was a strange house, not like any other – on a strange street, too. The whole place gave off a vibe.’ He gazed at me. ‘What’d you think?’

  I had some thoughts but wasn’t ready to express them. He was excited enough, keyed up like an artist in a manic fit of creativity, and I could see that he was struggling to stay calm. Anyway, I tend to distrust my first reactions. He’d barely slept, and now he’d come to me for validation. I wanted to be sure my own excitement derived from the power of the murals, and not because I’d been swept up in his feverish account of finding them.

  ‘The size of them! The way they dominate that little room. I know my images can’t convey that.’

  ‘Hey, take a breath,’ I told him. ‘Take your coffee out on the terrace while I study them. I’ll join you in a while and then we’ll talk.’

  ‘Sure, Hannah. Cast a cold eye.’ He smiled. ‘You’re good at that.’

  OK, I thought, after he’d left me alone, this isn’t about Jason’s photography. It’s about a set of murals he discovered and documented. So forget these are pictures of pictures. Look at these murals as a work of art.

  As I ran the images through his laptop, peering closely, trying to piece them together in my head, I had to admit that the cumulative effect was compelling. And, I thought, it would be even more so if I’d come upon them the way he’d described. There was, I thought, an ‘outsider art’ aspect to them, a mix of sophistication and naïveté. Perhaps they were by an artist who was talented yet not fully skilled. The drawing struck me as a bit cartoonish. The expressions on the characters’ faces weren’t subtle. There was no doubt they were leering. The double-faced figures, which Jason said he found so evocative, struck me as attempts at psychological portraiture. But I found the overall concept powerful: full-length, life-size frontal images of people on four walls facing one another, or perhaps observing something in between. And on the far right of one wall, a little girl on hands and knees with a puppy, peering with eyes filled with wonderment from behind an adult woman’s legs – that was extraordinary, I thought, as if she were a voyeur who had snuck into the scene and was gazing out at something forbidden.

  I was also impressed by the scope of the work, the commitment by the artist to a major project. These murals must have meant a great deal to him. They spoke of a huge investment of emotion. What else would compel someone to climb into an attic, seal up the windows, then create something on such a scale? In this sense it reminded me of one of those weirdly powerful outsider artworks that rare individuals have created out of an inexplicable inner need, works like the Watts Towers in LA, or the obsessive drawings of Henry Barger, works that perhaps started out small but then grew very large, illustrating stories they were seeking to tell themselves which they likely couldn’t tell any other way.

  Looking back, I think it was the figures’ eyes that got to Jason. He had this thing for eyes. His book on Aleppo was called The Eyes of Aleppo. In every photo there was someone looking straight at his lens, making direct eye contact with the viewer. In a way, I think the murals are also about the figures’ eyes. Some people think it’s the mouths, the somewhat cruel way they’re turned. But I think to Jason it was those people’s eyes. What were they telling him? When I asked him about that, he shrugged. But I felt that he had seen eyes like those before, sometime in his life. Or were they his own eyes, and he’d seen them in a mirror?

  Jason was looking for something; he didn’t know what. He told me this when I asked him why he kept going on his Leavings project long after he had more than enough images.

  ‘I keep thinking,’ he said.

  ‘Thinking what?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s more.’

  ‘More what?’

  ‘More to be seen, to be found.’

  Well, now it seemed he’d found that ‘more.’ Stumbled upon it, as he put it. And now he was hooked!

  I must have spent an hour scrolling through the images before I went on to my terrace to talk to him. I found him sound asleep on one of my chaises longues. Smoke hung in the air. There’d recently been a lot of fires in the city. The sun had risen and was already beating down. Reluctant to wake him, I rolled a sun umbrella to the chaise and arranged it so it shadowed his face. Then I went back inside, knowing sooner or later he’d wake up and come back in to talk.

  He appeared half an hour later, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Sorry I fell off,’ he said. ‘Barely slept last night. I’m thirsty as hell.’

  I poured him a glass of water. He thanked me for setting up the umbrella.

  ‘It’s wicked hot out there. I didn’t want my best friend to get burned.’ I looked at him. ‘We have a lot to talk about.’

  He listened closely as I told him what I thought about the murals.

  ‘They’re not like anything else I’ve seen. That alone makes them interesting. I think they might be about feelings … rejection and humiliation. The frontality of them – I find that extraordinary. And I love the little girl and the dog. Also the consistency of the artist’s vision. I think whoever painted these knew exactly what he wanted to do from the start. Fill up the four walls. Arrange the same number of figures on each. Show them all reacting to each other or to whatever was happening in the middle of the room.’

  ‘What do you suppose that was?’

  ‘From reading their faces, something dark. That’s why these murals are so powerful. We can’t see what they’re seeing, but we can imagine it based on their collective gaze, their malice and scorn. And the little girl – she’s different, still uncorrupted. That tells us something too.’ I paused. ‘We keep saying “he” wanted this, “he” painted that. What if the artist wasn’t a “he”? Maybe it was that girl. Maybe this whole thing is about a memory of something she saw—’

  ‘That she wasn’t supposed to see. Like she snuck in there, nobody noticed her, and then she saw … whatever.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too.’

  He told me he wanted to make a model of the room – piece his images together, blow them up, laminate them on to cardboard, then set them up facing one another exactly as arranged on the walls. He thought that would give him a better idea of the work and ignite new insights.

  ‘I asked Tally to find out whatever he can about the house – who owns it, why they’re still paying taxes on it, why there’re all those bunk beds upstairs, what the hell was going on in there. I also want to go back and take another look.’ He paused. ‘Would you come with me?’

  I thought about it. That would be a way for him to test his first impression and for me to experience the work firsthand. But I was hesitant. I didn’t know if I could handle sneaking in, crawling in through a rear window, taking the chance of being caught.

  ‘What about first getting an outside opinion? I have a friend, Anna, who wrote her doctoral thesis on art brut. She works in fundraising at CMA, also curates their outsider art collection. She found a donor who’s into it, persuaded her to fund some acquisitions. Turns out the public loves that stuff. She’s trying to get the museum to establish a department of outsider art.’

  Jason was skeptical, said he was a long way from wanting to reveal what he’d found. Also, he didn’t want to admit to breaking into a property that hadn’t been legally abandoned.

  ‘We’ll just show her your photos and ask her to evaluate them. We’ll set ground rules – no questions about where you found them. I’ve known her a long time. She really knows the field, always attends the annual Outsider Art Fair in New York. I think if we showed her these photos, she’d tell us honestly what she thinks.’

  It took Jason the weekend to stitch together four master images, print them out on four-foot-wide s
heets, laminate them and construct his model. Saturday and Sunday we were in and out of each other’s lofts numerous times. Once he had the model built and set up on a table, we designated the walls A, B, C and D. Then we began to see things in them we hadn’t fully noticed before.

  The little girl crouching in the corner of Wall A was depicted further back than we first thought, not close to the legs of the woman beside her, but in what looked like a doorway lost in the gloom behind.

  Although we’d thought the four sets of figures were standing in limbo, we were now able to make out a kind of structure behind them on Wall C. Perhaps a chimney or maybe a tall window; there was something structural back there left undefined.

  We also observed that a nearly identical pair of characters, a double-faced man and woman in the center of Wall A, appeared again on Wall C.

  ‘I’m starting to see these people as chess pieces,’ Jason said. ‘That pair in the middle, King and Queen, opposing another King and Queen across the way.’

  But he was quick to agree that the chess analogy didn’t hold. So why did the artist repeat this pair? What role had they played in the drama … if, in fact, a drama was what this work was about?

  ‘I think this thing is based on a memory, but stylized and distorted like in a dream.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘A haunting vision by a haunted artist. There’s a story in there.’

  ‘A mystery story,’ Jason said.

  Tally Vaughan

  Jason wanted me to research the house. Since I’d already checked out the address at the Hall of Records, I decided to go back to Locust Street and see what I could find out from the locals.

  I parked in my usual spot, just outside the gates to the Kenyon-Garfield Observatory, then took a long slow walk through the neighborhood. Although it was two o’clock on a pleasant autumn Saturday afternoon, I didn’t encounter any pedestrians, or even kids riding bikes or playing pick-up games in the fields.

  There’d been quite a few tear-downs. Most of the houses still standing looked to be in poor shape. At least half were abandoned. Although others showed signs of being occupied, there was an eerie silence – no one puttering around in a garden or cleaning up a yard, no sounds of TVs issuing through open windows, or wash hanging on outdoor lines. Far as I could see, Locust Street was dead.

  Returning to my car, I spotted an old guy raking leaves in front of the observatory. I called out to him. He turned, studied me for a moment, then started down the slope toward where I was standing outside the gate.

  ‘Yo!’

  ‘Yo, yourself,’ he said. He looked to be in his sixties, African American, friendly face. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Not sure,’ I said. ‘I’m kinda curious about the neighborhood.’

  He nodded. ‘Folks are curious about it. Every so often someone comes by, asking me to point them to the murder house.’

  ‘Couple blocks down the street, right?’

  ‘Number 2462 before they tore it down. They razed it after the trial. That was about ten years ago.’

  ‘Why’d they raze it?’

  ‘They thought they’d find more bodies. They didn’t. Also, they didn’t want folks turning it into some kind of shrine. More folks lived here back then. They didn’t like Locust being called “Street of Horror” and all those rubbernecks coming around. So the city tore it down. Some are disappointed when I tell them that. Others are bitter they came all this way for nothing.’

  Hmmm. ‘What about the house where that couple kept the girl?’

  ‘We called that one the bondage house. Tore it down, too. The prisoner-girl – she got ownership, part of her reparations package. She wanted it obliterated from the face of the earth. She was there the day they bulldozed it. We all watched, everyone in the neighborhood. She looked happy when the walls collapsed, or at least pretended she was. My opinion, I don’t think it was all that satisfying to her, considering all she’d gone through in there.’

  He was well spoken, educated, used words like ‘reparations,’ ‘obliterated,’ and was clearly well versed in local goings-on. He told me he’d been caretaker and watchman at the observatory for fifteen years, ever since the university took out the big telescope and closed the place down. He told me he lived there with his wife the first couple of years, but then she left because she couldn’t take the loneliness. He liked the job, liked leading a solitary life, and so decided to stay on.

  ‘There’re all sorts of interesting things going on around here if you’re patient and stare hard enough. Like the murder house. I had a feeling something bad was going on in there. The guy was a loner, quiet, polite, but you could see the weirdness in his eyes. ’Course, if I’d known what he was doing, I’d have spoken up.’ He shook his head. ‘Same with the bondage house. The couple lived there – they had this furtive way about them. I noticed they never went out together. It was like one always stayed home to guard. No way of knowing they had a girl locked up in there. They say she was chained in the cellar all those years without even a glimpse of daylight.’

  He looked straight into my eyes then. ‘Aren’t you going to ask about that one?’ He gestured with his head toward the gothic house with the turret. ‘I think that’s the one you’re interested in.’

  I felt a chill when he said that, but did my best not to show it. ‘Yeah, I was going to ask you about it too.’

  He smiled, a little grin to himself. He must have noticed me surveilling it.

  ‘I call that one the cult house,’ he said. ‘I saw you and the white fella go in there Thursday night.’

  He didn’t speak accusingly, simply stated what he’d observed. From the way he spoke, I knew there was no point denying it.

  ‘Seems like you know everything going on around here,’ I said.

  ‘Well, see, that’s the watchman’s job. Remember, this here’s an observatory. Up here on the rise is a good place to observe.’

  ‘It was pitch-dark Thursday night. Barely a sliver of moon.’

  ‘When I took this job, they issued me a pair of night-vision goggles. They were kinda cheesy, so I saved up my money and bought a really good military surplus pair. With the infrared, I can see all sorts of stuff. I saw you two clear as day. What with these fires breaking out, I stay on my toes. Last night I heard sirens. When I hear them, I get up, go outside and look around for a glow.’

  ‘Then you know I didn’t go in.’

  He nodded. ‘The white fella did. He was in there a long time. Didn’t come out with anything more than he took in with him, so I knew you weren’t robbers. Not that there’s anything worth taking in there. If there were, it’d have been taken long ago.’ He met my eyes. ‘I’m curious what you were doing.’

  ‘I’m curious why you call it the cult house.’

  He opened the gate. ‘I’m Oscar.’ He offered his hand.

  ‘I’m Tally.’ We shook.

  ‘Come on up the hill. We’ll talk.’

  I felt relaxed sitting with him on the terrace in front of the main entrance to the observatory. He had a couple of Adirondack chairs set up there and a little table in between. He went inside, came back with a couple of beers. We each took a quaff, then sat back.

  ‘You go first,’ he said.

  I told him about our Leavings project, the concept behind it and how we’d been going about the work.

  ‘Risky going in cold like that,’ he said.

  ‘Sure, because you never know what you’ll run into.’ I told him about a couple of close calls. He was particularly interested in the time we stumbled into a crack house where a guy pulled out a gun, thinking we were undercover cops. I told him how we talked our way out of that, and how afterwards I spent a lot more time scouting houses before deciding they were worth going into.

  I pulled out my phone, showed him some of Jason’s photos. He peered at them, nodded, said he understood what we were trying to do.

  ‘This ’hood’s seen better days,’ he said. ‘It’s shriveled down last few years. More crime since
folks abandoned places and moved out. I gotta keep my eyes open. The observatory’s big and there’s still plenty of stuff worth stealing inside.’

  ‘Tell me about the cult house, Oscar. Why do you call it that?’

  ‘There was a group living in there, some kind of cult. What I hear, a couple of rich teenage girls joined up and their parents weren’t happy about it. So they got the cops to raid the place. When they did, all hell broke loose. There was a fight and one of the cops got scratched up. They took the girls away, arrested the leaders, closed the place down, and it’s been shut tight ever since. This is all hearsay, understand, ’cause I wasn’t living here back then.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘The raid – maybe twenty-five years.’

  ‘And it’s been boarded up ever since?’

  ‘Far as I know.’

  ‘My partner, Jason, says things inside look untouched – that the kitchen appliances are still there and no one’s gone in and ripped out the copper.’

  ‘I think folks are still spooked by the place. Also, there’s this woman comes by every so often. People think maybe she owns it and they don’t want to mess with an owned house.’

  ‘“Comes by”?’

  ‘I never saw her go inside. She drives up, parks out front, then just sits there in her car, staring at it. Sometimes she gets out and walks around back. If she sees something broken or loose, like that board you pried off, she’ll make a note, then a couple days later a handyman’ll show up and fix it.’

  ‘How long does she stay?’

  ‘An hour sometimes, other times less.’

  ‘How often?’

  ‘Every month or so. It’s not like she’s regular about it. More like she’s checking time to time that it’s still there and no one’s messed with it.’

  ‘Can you describe her?’

  He shrugged. ‘Nice-looking. Middle-aged. Drives one of those Japanese cars – Toyota, Honda or whatever.’

  ‘You think she’s the owner?’

  He shrugged again. ‘Maybe, or maybe she works for a property management firm. If she’s the owner, I doubt she could sell it now, even if she wanted to. Places around here aren’t worth nothing. Locust’s got a bad rep. And I doubt anyone’d rent it. Too big to heat in winter or air-condition in summer. No one wants to live around here anymore.’