The Locked Room

Theo stood in the living room of the house on the hill, and the room did its best to impress him, and the room failed. He looked at the paintings on the walls, the furniture that had belonged to famous dead men, the view of the city through the glass, and he looked at them the way a doctor looks at a patient's decorations, with a professional indifference to everything that is not the symptom.

"Seven years," Theo said. "I've been trying to write to you. I've started a hundred letters. I never sent one, because I didn't know what to say to the boy I painted, and I was afraid of what I'd find out about him."

"You've found me. I'm fine. I'm better than fine. I'm the most successful man of my generation, Theo. You can read that anywhere."

"I've read it. I've also read the other thing. The thing they don't print in the success stories. I've read the reports, Jace. The actor who checked into the clinic. The heiress's marriage. The dancer who disappeared. I've read them all, and I've watched you in photographs at all of them, and your face has not moved once. And I've come to tell you something, and I want you to hear it before you decide what to do with me."

"I'm listening."

"I know," Theo said, "what I put into that painting. I told you, the day I finished it, that every portrait that's any good is a portrait of the painter. I told you that I'd put too much of myself into it. And I've lived with that for seven years, Jace, lived with the knowledge that I put something into that canvas that I never meant to give anyone, and that you took it and locked it away where no one could see it. I don't know what you've done with it. I don't know if you've kept it, or sold it, or burned it. But I know what it was, and I know what it meant, and I've come to ask you to let it go."

"Let it go."

"Destroy it. Whatever you've done with it, whatever it's become, destroy it. I painted a boy I loved, Jace, and I watched you become a man I don't recognize, and I know in my bones that the painting and the man are the same thing, and that one of you is keeping the other alive. I'm asking you, as the only friend you ever had, to end it. Whatever it costs you. End it, and come back, and let yourself be the man you were going to be."

Jace stood by the window with his back to the light, and the city burned behind him, and he looked at Theo for a long moment, and something in him that had been sleeping for seven years woke up, and it was not mercy.

"Come with me," he said.

He led Theo up the stairs. The house was quiet, the way houses are quiet at noon, and the stairs creaked in the places they had always creaked, and Theo followed him without asking, because Theo had been waiting seven years for this door to open.

Jace unlocked the room at the end of the hall. The key had been in his pocket for seven years, and it was warm from his body, and he put it in the lock and turned it, and the door swung open on the gray afternoon light.

The room was smaller than Theo remembered it being, when it had been a boy's bedroom. It was bare now, stripped to the floorboards, with a single window that faced the canyon, and against the far wall, in the frame Pemberton had built, hung the painting.

Theo walked to it. He walked the way a man walks to a thing he has been told is a body, and he stopped in front of it, and he looked at it, and the sound he made was not a word.

The painting had been young when he made it. It had been Jace at twenty-two, in the amber light, with the hand in the pocket and the head turned toward the door, impossibly, wastefully young. The painting in front of him now was not young. It was old, and it was terrible, and it was accurate in the way only a record can be accurate. The face in the frame was the face of a man of sixty, a man who had lived Theo's whole life and then some, a man whose eyes had seen things and kept them. The mouth was a cruel line. The skin was sallow, lined, graven. The hand in the pocket was a claw.

Theo turned, and his face was the color of the wall.

"Jace," he said. "What is this?"

"You painted it."

"I painted a boy."

"You painted a contract." Jace had not moved from the door. He stood between Theo and the stairs, and his face, his young, untouched, impossible face, was the cruelest thing in the room. "You painted me the way I was, and I made a wish, and the wish was heard. That's all you need to know. That's the whole secret. I stay young, and it pays for it. It's been paying for seven years, Theo. Every drink, every room, every thing I've ever done has gone into that face. And it's the only honest thing I've ever owned."

"Jace. This is—you have to destroy it. You have to burn it. This thing is evil. It's taken your life and put it in a frame. It's—"

"It's all I have."

"It's all you have because you gave it everything else!" Theo's voice cracked, and he came toward Jace, and his hands were shaking. "Don't you see what's happened to you? You've spent seven years feeding your life into that thing, and you've become what it's made of. Look at yourself, Jace. You're the most feared man in this city. People cross the street to avoid your reputation. You have no friends. You have no one. You had a girl who loved you and you killed her, and you had an aunt who loved you and you let her go, and you had me, and you've kept me at arm's length for four years because you were afraid I'd see—" He gestured at the painting, and his voice broke. "Because you were afraid I'd see what I made."

"Careful, Theo."

"I'm not being careful. I've been careful my whole life. I was careful when I painted you, and I was careful when I loved you, and I've been careful every day since, and look where it's got me. Look at what my carefulness made." He turned to the painting again, and his shoulders shook. "I have to tell someone. I have to tell the world. I can't carry this. I made this thing, and I have to undo it—"

The knife was on the table by the window. It was a letter opener, a heavy, silver thing, a prop from one of his films, and Jace had left it there years ago and had never moved it. He did not decide to pick it up. His hand did, the way his mouth had said the words in the dressing room seven years ago, in Whit's cadence, without the permission of the rest of him.

Theo heard him move and turned, and his face opened in surprise, and Jace drove the knife into the great vein behind his ear, the way you drive a key into a lock.

Theo made a sound. He went down slowly, the way a man goes down when his body has not yet understood what has happened to it, and he lay on the floorboards of the locked room, in the gray light, in front of the painting that had been his best work, and the painting looked down at him with its old, terrible eyes, and Jace stood over him, breathing, and the knife was in his hand, and the room was very quiet.

He stood there for a long time. He did not think. Thinking came later, in the small hours, when the house was too quiet and the body was in the trunk of the car and the question of what to do next had to be answered. At that moment, in the gray light, with the blood going out across the floorboards, he stood and he breathed and he looked at the painting, and the painting looked back at him, and the face in the frame had not changed at all, because the account, for the first time in seven years, had been paid in blood, the one currency the frame could hold.

He went down the stairs. He made a call. He said, into the phone, in a voice he did not recognize, "I need you to come to the house. I need you to bring everything you have. And I need you to not ask questions until after."

Then he sat on the bottom stair, in the dark, with the knife in his lap, and waited for the man who could make it go away.