Yumi and the Nightmare Painter(6)

He’d tried four times. This last one had gotten further than most of his attempts. A painting of the star, which he’d started after hearing the news of an upcoming voyage intended to travel the darkness of the sky. A trip to the star itself, for which scientists planned to use a special vessel and a pair of hion lines launched an incredible distance.

In this, Painter had learned something interesting. Contrary to what everyone had once assumed, the star wasn’t merely a spot of light in the sky. Telescopes revealed it was a planet. Occupied, according to their best guess, by other people. A place whose light somehow cut through the shroud.

The news of the impending trip had briefly inspired him. But he’d lost that spark, and the painting had languished. How long had it been since he’d covered it over? At least a month.

On the corner of the wall near the painting, he picked out steaming blackness. The nightmare had passed this way and brushed the stone, leaving residue that evaporated slowly, shedding black tendrils into the night. He’d expected it to take this path; they almost always took the most direct way into the city. It was good to confirm it nonetheless.

Painter crept inward, reentering the realm of the twin hion lights. Laughter echoed from somewhere to his right, but the nightmare probably hadn’t gone that direction. The pleasure district was where people went to do anything other than sleep.

There, he thought, picking out black wisps on a planter up ahead. The shrub grew toward the hion lines and their nourishing light. So as Painter moved down the empty roadway, he walked between plants that looked as if they were reaching arms up in silent salute.

The next sign came near an alley. An actual footprint, black, steaming dark vapors. The nightmare had begun evolving, picking up on human thoughts, changing from formless blackness to something with a shape. Only a vague one at first, but instead of being a slinking, flowing black thing, it probably had feet now. Even in that form they rarely left footprints, so he was fortunate to have found one.

He moved onto a darker street, where the hion lines were fine and thin overhead. In this shadowy place, he remembered his first nights working alone. Despite extensive training, despite mentorship with three different painters, he’d felt exposed and raw—like a fresh scrape exposed to the air, his emotions and fear close to the surface.

These days, fear was layered well beneath calluses of experience. Still, he gripped his shoulder bag tightly in one hand and held his brush out as he crept along. There, on the wall, was a handprint with too-long fingers and what looked like claws. Yes, it was taking a form. Its prey must be close.

Farther along the narrow alley, by a bare wall, he found the nightmare: a thing of ink and shadow some seven feet tall. It had fashioned two long arms that bent too many times, the elongated palms pressed against the wall, fingers spread. Its head had sunk through the stone to peek into the room beyond.

The tall ones always unnerved him, particularly when they had long fingers. He felt he’d seen figures like that in his own fragmented dreams—figments of terrors buried within. His feet scraped the stones, and the thing heard and withdrew its head, wisps of formless blackness rising from it like ash from a smoldering fire.

No face though. They never had faces—not unless something was going very wrong. Instead they usually displayed a deeper blackness on the front of the head. One that dripped dark liquid. Like tears, or wax near a flame.

Painter immediately raised his mental protections, thinking calm thoughts. This was the first and most important training. The nightmares, like many predators that fed on minds, could sense thoughts and emotions. They searched for the most powerful, raw ones to feed upon. A placid mind was of little interest.

The thing turned and put its head through the wall again. This building had no windows, which was foolish. Nightmares could ignore walls. In removing windows, the occupants trapped themselves more fully in the boxes of their homes, feeding their claustrophobia—and making the jobs of the painters more difficult.

Painter moved carefully, slowly, taking a canvas—a good three-foot by three-foot piece of thick cloth on a frame—from his shoulder bag. He set it on the ground in front of him. His jar of ink followed—black and runny. Nightmare painters always worked in black on white, no colors, as you wanted something that mimicked the look of a nightmare. The ink blend was designed to give excellent gradations in the grey and black. Not that Painter bothered with that much nuance these days.

He dipped the brush in the ink and knelt above his canvas, then paused, gazing at the nightmare. The blackness continued to steam off it, and its shape was still fairly indistinct. This was probably only its first or second trip into the city. It took a good dozen trips before a nightmare had enough substance to be dangerous—and they had to return to the shroud each time to renew, lest they evaporate away.

Judging by its appearance, this one was fairly new. It probably couldn’t hurt him.

Probably.

And here was the crux of why painters were so important, yet so disposable. Their job was essential, but not urgent. As long as a nightmare was discovered within its first ten or so trips into the city, it could be neutralized. That almost always happened.

Painter was good at controlling his fear with thoughts like these. That was part of his training—very pragmatic. Once his breathing calmed, he tried to consider what the nightmare looked like, what its shape could have been. Supposedly if you picked something that the entity already resembled, then painted that, you would have more power over it. He had trouble with this. Or rather, during the last few months it had felt like more trouble than it was worth.