Negative Space

by Mike Robinson

Overview

Twilight Falls is just your standard northern California town, right? It's not a playground for anything dark and unfathomable, right?

"Hauntingly poetic." Jeff Soyer, Alphecca Review

"What a page turner! ... Robinson is a fine writer, with an enviable gift for the poetic turn of phrase." Kitty Burns Florey, author of "Solos" and "The Writing Master"

A provocative painter named Max Higgins is on the verge of local fame. What is the secret to his work's haunting allure? He collects photos of missing persons and incorporates them into his paintings, giving the faces, as he puts it, a "new home in his work." This fascination stems from the bizarre disappearances of people he knew growing up, including his father.

When someone recognizes a face in one of his paintings, he's suddenly thrust into a journey as surreal as anything from his brush, a journey into his past that will irrevocably determine his future.

EVOLVED PUBLISHING PRESENTS the second book in the chilling "Enigma of Twilight Falls" series, where dark, terrifying, unimaginable events will rise up to haunt your dreams.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798890251169
Publisher:	Evolved Publishing
Publication date:	02/07/2025
Series:	Enigma of Twilight Falls , #2
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.49(d)

About the Author

AUTHOR:

A writer since age six, Mike Robinson is the award-winning author of ten books, including the dark urban fantasy trilogy "The Enigma of Twilight Falls" (The Green-Eyed Monster; Negative Space; Waking Gods). His short fiction has appeared in over twenty outlets, and he has sold work to Amazon Audible. He's received honors from Writers of the Future, Publishers Weekly's BookLife Prize, the Maxy Awards, the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the Pinnacle Book Achievement Awards, and more. A native of Los Angeles, he is a charter member of The Greater Los Angeles Writers Society (GLAWS), a freelance book editor and book coach, as well as an active screenwriter and producer. A short sci-fi thriller he co-wrote, Chrysaline, is on ThinkShorts and making the film festival rounds.

EDITOR:

My initial editing experience came in the swarms of prose I pumped out into the world, only occasionally into the world of actual magazines, anthologies or e-zines. Soon, as I began selling more regularly, and as publishers took note of my longer works, I began freelance editing.

In the past eight years, I've edited screenplays, memoirs, novels, children's books and, would you believe it, epic narrative poetry. One of the novels I edited, Under the Tamarind Tree, was shortlisted among nine others for the 2014 Dundee International Book Prize. A charter member of The Greater Los Angeles Writers Society (GLAWS), I am also the managing editor of the organization's official publication, Literary Landscapes, which features stories, excerpts, articles and poetry (see issues here). In addition, I belong to the editing collective Write For Success, for which I perform manuscript critiques and consultation.

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE--1971 I

"Get away! Get away from my house!"

His mother's frightened face unnerved Max Higgins more than the face that caused it: the one staring in from the window, with its arrangement of soulless eyes, a long doorstop nose and a few brown teeth that clung to the gums in a refusal to join their departed neighbors.

The face stared behind the glass, pleading and demanding at the same time. The storm continued its onslaught, growing a winter rage in defiance of this month of April. It was one of the worst storms to strike the Northern California town of Arondale, not only in Max's seven-year memory, but in the entire history of the town.

Or so the TV reporter said before the power outage blinked him from the screen.

"You can't call the police, Mom?" Max asked, visibly trembling. It was the first thing he'd said in an hour--for Max, much of the storm had been spent escaping into his drawings that now littered the floor around him.

"The phone is dead, baby," Cynthia Higgins said. "We might as well be stuck on an island. But don't you worry. God is here with us."

But if God looked anything like the face peering in from the watery darkness, Max certainly didn't feel comforted. And he didn't want to die.

From the window, drowned in water and storm, came a voice.

"Hey lady, have a heart! Let me in! I'm dying out here! Please!"

"Go away!"

The vagrant began rapping on the window. The sky rolled with thunder. Inside the Higgins' home was an oasis of light, several lit candles that jerked and flittered to the lightning-flashed rhythm of the darkness. The windows cried with metallic sheetsof rain, and in one of them the vagrant remained firm, shadowy and persistent.

"Max, take my hands."

"Mom--"

"Max, just do as your mother tells you, okay? Take my hands."

He obeyed, and for the first time in three hours his hands were without a crayon or marker.

"Hey lady! C'mon, open up!" the bum cried. "Have a heart!"

Young instinct told Max--with iron certainty--that things would only get worse. If his mother didn't open the door then the man would surely find some way in, quite possibly a violent way, and he worried that every denial of access from his mother was only another step towards that breaking point. And when the house was broken into, it could very well become a welcome sign for many other stranded folks, desperate for shelter from the millions of tiny watery fists that pummeled their bodies, eager to escape the canals that used to be neighborhood streets.

"Dearest Lord Jesus," his mother began. "We pray, in this time of fear and desperation, for you to comfort those in need, to guide them..."

As she prayed Cynthia closed her eyes, but Max could not. He worried that the darkness might grow hands to strangle him if he took his eyes off the world, or however much of the world was left to see.

The man had moved to another window. He was rapping harder. He was yelling louder. Lightning flashed, thunder erupted.

The rapping soon turned to banging.

"...give us your love, oh Lord, and sweep these devil waters and their devil spawn back to the rivers of Hell..."

The banging grew in ferocity. Max clutched the gold cross that had been hanging from his neck since he was three.

"C'mon lady! Have a heart! Have a heart!" the vagrant kept shouting. "Fucking bitch won't open up!"

Max wondered how many more of them were out there, and if they might be coming to join the man in his fight to elude the storm. He also wondered if they would hurt him or his mother if they were let in peacefully.

There was another lightning flash.

"...carry us in your arms, Jesus, make us--"

"Mom?"

"What is it, Max?"

"Aren't we being bad?" he asked. "You know, by not letting the man in? Wouldn't God want us to do that?"

Candlelight shifted masks on his mother's face. "We can't do that, Max. God wants us to be safe, and letting that man in our home would not be a safe thing to do. That's why He's blessed us with this home, to shelter us, to keep us warm, and to keep such creatures as that man out there, in the open way of his wrath."

Max didn't say anything. His gaze fell to one of his drawings, one of his many Lone Ranger sketches, then craned up to a crucifix hanging on the far wall that was scarcely illuminated by the candlelight.

"You remember the story of the Ark, don't you?" Cynthia asked. "Noah's Ark, and all the animals."

"Of course..."

She smiled. "This isn't much different. God is washing the world of its sinful creatures."

"Is that what happened to Dad?"

"I don't know, Max, but if the Lord had a good reason for taking him away from us, then we mustn't question it, mustn't give it too much thought."

"Hey!" came another gargled shout from outside.

The weather continued its tantrum, as if trying in vain to cover the sounds of the vagrant banging on the window. The sound was amplified, it seemed, pounding in from all directions.

"Mom--"

Somewhere a window broke, and Max felt the merciless cold of the storm winds on his face. Somewhere another window broke, and driven into Max was a fine blade of terror that told him his fears had come true, that there were more of these transient freaks, more of civilization's warts and moles that sought shelter from their watery judgment.

"Stay out! Stay out!" Cynthia shrieked. She broke her hands away from Max's. "Honey, you stay put, you understand me? Don't you move."

"Where are you going?"

She raced towards the kitchen, fumbling momentarily but finding herself amidst the outer reaches of the candlelight. There was a clattering of dishes, pots and pans. Max ignored his mother's words and slowly broached the kitchen himself, watching her as a black silhouette shuffle through dark cupboards.

Somewhere close Max heard laughter and two men exchanging gruff voices. Cynthia continued her frantic weapon-search, prayers dribbling from under her breath, and finally settled on a cooking pot roughly five inches deep.

For Max, she changed in the moment he saw her hold it up, clutching it like a caveman might a large club, her flesh pale and trembling. Max had seen her many faces, from her prayers, to her arguments, to her deceptively calm demeanor at Sunday sermons where she would put on a gentle and loving mask that hid a fiery house of judgment. But he had never seen anything like this. She was determined. Wildly determined. Fear and instinct governed her.

"Max, you run and hide. Got it, baby? You needn't see this, you just--"

"Anybody home?" shouted a voice. Over the sound of the storm Max could hear the cautious footsteps of strangers in the house, shadow-steps that fell at every tenth or so of Max's increasing heartbeat.

"Get out of my house!" Cynthia screamed. "Lest God bring you eternal damnation!"

Thunder struck again, as if to announce the arrival of a noxious odor that clouded the air in a thick olfactory fog. Shadows once thrown by the bobbing trees and dripping rain now became dark, physical entities that moved towards them, smiling in ragged lunacy, wearing the excretions of their street existence. Max could smell urine and feces and alcohol, the outermost yet intangible layers of their tattered garments.

He had no idea how many there were, but there couldn't be as many as he first saw, something for which his imagination was to blame as it took the fear and the shadows and amassed an entire army of intruders out of them.

They closed in.

"We'll be gone in the morning, lady," one said, his voice sickeningly gargled.

"C'mon, be a dear, and let us stay.... we'll make it worth your while..."

It all happened so fast that Max wasn't sure if he ever really saw it. When he would look back on the incident many years later--something he tried not to do--he found his vision of it was fast and blurry, like a fight underwater. Cynthia had tried to use the pot, flailing madly, but one of the men's hands caught her by the wrist. Then she had shouted at Max, shouted in the animal panic of someone who knew they had mere moments left on Earth.

"Max baby get out of here please oh please run! Run! Escape! He will protect you! Oh God--"

One of the men had made a half-hearted attempt to grab him but Max had torn through the house, his vision having since well-adjusted to the dark, and burst from the back door and into the yard, where he trudged through the virtual everglade their lawn had become. The rain was almost unbearable, but he made it past the fence and onto Clover Street, where the riptide of his own instinctive fear took him far from home.

Max ran and ran, and at times he felt as though he were swimming. Several times he thought he had died, only to awaken and realize Heaven was every bit as stormy and rainy as the town of Arondale. He wasn't sure where he was going, and many years later, he wouldn't be able to recall where he went. The Earth was flushing Arondale down its drain and he felt as a confused and hapless goldfish caught in its current.

Eventually the clouds moved on, like muscle-bound bullies satisfied with a job well done. After his mother was discovered dead and the rest of the house deserted, Max Higgins' missing face appeared in The Post, Arondale's central newspaper, and a search was ignited for the boy.

He was found a week and a half later, thankfully unclaimed by death, yet scarcely tended to by life.

--

II Twelve Years Later

The picture showed what looked to be a dog riding a frizzy-haired woman, humping her from behind, and underneath it were etched the words See Spot dick Jane.

Max Higgins read the etching and glanced at its crude illustration above the urinal, finding that it didn't so much make him laugh as send him into a pensive trance, a thoughtful self-analysis that put on trial the worth of his art school career. He wasn't sure what he was doing at Rheta Art College, just that it seemed the most necessary place to come, the best off-ramp he could've taken from high school or adolescence.

Max zipped up and went to the sink. Behind him another student entered, a flamboyant-looking artiste who teetered between genders. He'd slipped into the cracks between two art-school stereotypes, the girly goth guy and the plain art fag.

Max looked at the guy in the mirror, then threw another glance at the Spot-Jane scribbling. Art school, it seemed, was characterized in both--it was a deviation from the norm, something that bent, broke and laughed at the conventional but still needed it to survive. Rules were told to be broken but still kept thriving.

To be unique, Max often thought. Just like everyone else.

He left the bathroom and headed back to his life-drawing class, where a well-built and athletic female model held a contorted pose only gymnast muscles could tolerate. She stood in the center, the pupil of the classroom iris, unable to see the twenty-two interpretations of her that were being penciled to life.

Max's easel stood by the corner, the spot that saw the least traffic, from either curious classmates or Professor Q. The walls behind him were the ideal audience, the best critics.

The pose was only a minute long. Max had missed much of it when nature called. The model's timer beeped, and she moved herself into a new position of her own making. Professor Q walked into the center, his hand raised.

"Stop for a second," he said, and paused the timer. Everyone's drawing arm relaxed. "Jess, could you possibly move this leg back a bit?"

The model did so.

"And bend it more? Like you're about to kneel? And could you kinda loop this arm back and over your neck, like that--nice! Good, okay, roll with that, everyone."

Max had watched her face as Professor Q touched her, delicately guiding her limbs into position. She didn't like the contact, and made it known in the way her skin trembled, the way her eyes followed closely the migrations of his hands on her body.

Max wondered if her fidgety nature had anything to do with the scar that wound its way down the side of her abdomen to the top of her hip.

The next pose lasted two minutes, the ideal time for Max to get in a decent gesture sketch. His pencil swung in arcs and curves, as if he were tracing a spew of hairs adrift in the air. He got the body down but left the face the color of the page. He hated drawing faces.

The timer beeped, the sketch done.

"Excelente!" Q shouted in lame Spanish. He clapped his hands together. "Okay, let's squeeze in one last one before lunch. Five minutes. And Jess, go nuts with the pose. Whatever you want."

She stretched her legs apart, curled her left arm up and assumed what looked to be an exaggerated fencing position. When she realized she hadn't set the timer, she reached down, keeping her legs in place, and was stopped immediately by Professor Q.

"Wait!" he exclaimed. "Better yet, hold that one, the one you've got right there!"

A sour confusion crossed Jess's face. "The one I'm in now?"

"Yes, yes! Forget the other one." Q clapped his hands again. He had the spirit of a child with toys that he wouldn't share with anyone else. "This one is much more dynamic."

Jess was about to give in. Max found himself suddenly opening his mouth, without full permission from his consciousness.

"You just told her to go nuts," he said. "To do whatever she wants."

Professor Q's face exploded with what looked like a million thoughts. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

"I did, yes," Q said. "But this one is better."

"Why? Her legs are planted the same. All that's really moved are her arms."

"Untrue, Mr. Higgins. If you'll notice the way her torso is now bent, the sort of undulating, waving gesture she's got going. It almost feels like she's floating, you know, snaking through the air. Just roll with it, Max."

The solemnity in Q's voice challenged him, and though Max would have pursued the petty argument further, the urge to draw was flexing its muscles, and he wanted to lose himself in the page, even if it was a routine and elementary life study that paled in passion to the pieces in his public storage locker or the unfinished summer works still in his apartment closet.

Q left the room and the timer began its five minute countdown. During one of his fleeting glances at the model, Max caught her eyes, which smiled and frowned at the same time.

* * * *

"You gonna have anything to eat?" Jess asked. The entire classroom had been cleared for lunch but Max had remained ensconced in his sketchbook, keeping his drawing hand warm as it ran more erratic cross-country tracks around the page. He hadn't noticed that the model was still in the room.

"I had some boffeer this morning," he said. "So that'll keep me going at least through class. My stomach is like a gnat's anyway."

Jess had thrown on her easy, baggy clothes that could be changed within a matter of seconds, ideal attire for a figure-drawing model. She didn't look much older than Max or any other student. "What in the world is boffeer?"

"It's just a silly combination of coffee and beer. My roommate invented it, actually. Acid trips can really summon the creativity."

Jess laughed. "I suppose any drug can. I've met so many people at so many art schools and sometimes I'm convinced hardly anyone is sober. Not even the teachers."

"I am," Max said, still drawing. Jess sat on the model stand, several yards away. "I've never done anything but alcohol and cigarettes, and alcohol's still pretty new to me. Sobriety is my permanent intoxication."

Jess nodded. "Okay, okay ... I suppose that's much better."

"Yeah, I say, if you train your brain enough, it can be your drug."

"What? Like your imagination?"

"Basically, yeah. You can get high or drunk anytime you want, and you can actually remember when you do."

Jess wore a grin haunted by sarcasm.

Max nodded. "Yeah, I know, sounds like some square geek's cheesy excuse not to pollute his body."

Chuckling, Jess said, "So do you feel like polluting your body right now? I could use a smoke."

Max had been too engrossed in his sketchbook, too far sunken below the surface, to hear the garbled cries of his nicotine-dependent brain cells, and realized it would do him good to get some sun and some smoke, particularly with some good company.

* * * *

"So what's the deal with your professor?" Jess asked, spewing rills of smoke from her nose and mouth.

"Yeah, I know," Max said. "He can be annoying sometimes, without even knowing it."

"Why does everyone call him 'Q'?"

"Oh, that's his deal, what he thinks is a creative little way to count down until retirement. He's been here seventeen years, and plans to stay for twenty-six, and each school year is marked by a letter of the alphabet. So his first year he was Professor A, and in his last year he'll be Professor Z. Supposed to indicate some evolving, aging thing, like teaching is his final art piece."

"That's, um ... different."

"Yeah."

"What's his real name?"

"I don't even know. I'm not sure any of the students know."

"You get a lot of interesting teachers in places like these." She flicked ashy crumbs from her cigarette and took a long drag. "You guys have Mitch yet? The model?"

"The stout guy with the really curly black hair?"

"That's him."

"He was an interesting draw. You know him?"

"Oh sure, models have their own little community. We're floating all over the area to different schools, so we kinda get to know each other." Jess's eyes became dazed but she kept herself in the moment. "Anyway, he told me one time about this professor he posed for, at some community college, who told his students to draw what they didn't see. So he'd have Mitch pose for like five minutes, then give him a two hour break or something. Collectively he spent fifteen minutes on the stand, in a four-hour class."

"Wow, easy day."

"No shit," Jess laughed. "I need a job like that, when I'm hungover or something."

The two of them were silent for a moment, cigarettes crawling towards their short death. Beating down upon the campus was the Los Angeles autumn sun in its lukewarm imitation of summer.

Jess asked, "So are you enjoying the whole art school experience?"

"I sense some back story in the question," Max teased. "You go to a nut-box college yourself?"

"Yeah, for a little while. Went to one in San Francisco for a couple years. It was cool, I mean, I met a lot of cool people, some of whom I'm still in contact with now, but yeah ... something about it, I don't know ... I dropped out middle of my sophomore year. Just did my art on my own time."

"Good way to go."

"So you're not enjoying it here? What's your department?"

"I am enjoying it, sort of. I started out wanting to go into Fine Arts but I backed off, then maybe Graphic Design, but I hate measurements and being so precise, so I pretty much settled on Illustration. That's why you see me in Q's figure-drawing class. Illustration requires lots of figure drawing credits." Max tapped his head. "I'm gonna have so many naked bodies stored up here my memory's gonna be like some French beach. You know, the nude beaches, all those ... naked folks. Oh man. Some of them are cruel and unusual punishment."

Jess laughed. "Well, I hope looking at me for three hours hasn't been too torturous."

"Oh no.... no no, I didn't mean you ... aggh ... I hate the taste of my own foot. No, you're good. Were you a gymnast or something? Or are you?"

"No, I just work out regularly. Plus I've been lucky--I can eat tons of crap and still keep a pretty trim figure. Although I'm sure it's all gonna come rushing back at me someday.

"Don't worry too much about that. Even if you did put on a few pounds that would just make you more of a drawing challenge. You of all people should know it's the interesting models we like, not the ... you know, beautiful ones. Not necessarily, anyway."

Chucking her cigarette to the ground, Jess pushed herself up, wiping off the back of her baggy jeans. She smiled warmly at Max. "I've gotta say, this is kind of a first."

"What?"

"An actual conversation with one of you. One of you students, I mean. Normally no one really talks to me. They're all just enclosed in their little heads like they're the most important fucking thing in the world, like nothing else matters."

"You sound ... embittered," Max said with a sly grin.

"No, it's just..." Her mind searched for words, snagging and catching them like fireflies in a jar. "As kind of an artist myself I find that engaging in new places and new people is the biggest inspiration, because for me inspiration hides in the unknown, unseen, and unheard. You know? I guess I just can't fathom locking yourself in your head like that."

"I hear ya," Max said, stamping out his own cigarette. "I do."

"Hey listen, I'm gonna run to my car and get another pack." Jess swiveled her head from side to side, surveying the campus as though on a covert mission. "I had to park across the street at the bowling alley, but it shouldn't take me long."

"That's cool. I think I'll just head on back, do my sketch thing." Max stood up. "See you up there?"

"Sure thing," Jess responded with a bubbly smile.

* * * *

Nineteen-year-old Max Higgins was the last to see Jessica Webber for nearly two years.

They discovered her, almost exactly on the anniversary of her disappearance, up in the San Bernardino Mountains, naked and shivering and wholly ignorant of any life led up until that point. She didn't know her own name, or even that she was a human being. She spoke words of English with the awareness of a calculator deciphering equations, and lashed out at the authorities that tried to calm her.

All Max heard was that she had suffered a rare and bizarre form of amnesia, and it was unclear whether or not she would ever recover.