It was strange seeing Emma so completely at home in his house, although there was little in the way of creature comforts or a woman’s touch to welcome her. She gravitated to his kitchen and started going through cabinets. Boxes of sugary sweet cereal dominated the pantry, as well as standard-issue shrink-wrapped packages of ramen noodles. Catching Michael’s bewildered stare, she justified her intrusion by declaring, “Not enough whole grains and vegetables.” The visitor eventually made her way into the living room, and with no less attention. Her expression hovered somewhere between amusement and bemusement while she assessed his negligible imprint on the house. His lifestyle more closely resembled that of a schoolboy left to his own resources by vacationing parents than to a cloistered monk. “You need a plant,” was her diagnosis.

The bachelor shrugged.

Emma at last strolled to the foot of the staircase and peered up its two flights. Dimness crept down the well to mirror the track of a cloud over the house.

Michael looked toward a window, dismayed. “It’s going overcast…”

“Well?” she interrupted. “Aren’t you going to show me your studio?”

The resident, gathering courage, moved past his guest to graze taffeta. On reaching the attic studio, Emma returned the favor by gliding past him. The door was nudged open with a creak, and the change of mood could not have been more dramatic. Michael’s paintings took on a macabre glow under the graying skylight.

The visitor walked in a little disoriented, but was quickly bowled-over by the wealth of artistic detail before her. Excited and perplexed, she stared at one outlandish monster for several seconds, and then at the reserved, conservatively dressed artist. Highlighting the disconnection, she confessed, “I would never have guessed you painted like this.”

Michael made his customary apology. “You don’t find them a little disturbing?”

“They’re that, too.” She was quick to add, “But not all paintings have to be pretty in the usual sense.” Examining one work closely, she thought to play psychologist. “It’s interesting horses frighten you so much when you choose to paint monsters.”

Michael grinned at the irony. “Just because I’m terrified of horses doesn’t mean I don’t admire their beauty.”

“I’ve never thought of beauty as something one should be frightened of,” she ventured.

He made a diversion of his CD player. “Would you like to hear something beautiful that isn’t scary?”

Emma smiled to see his boyish excitement.

A button was pushed and a mournful piano tune filled the studio. “This is Schubert’s unfinished Piano Sonata in F sharp minor,” he explained. “One movement. Played by András Schiff as the composer left it.”

“Unfinished?” Emma said slyly. “Like your poem.”

He was already absorbed in the music.

She took the interlude to study the half-unpacked boxes around her. Many contained books. Not all the books were about art, though most could be related to the paintings in some way. The subjects included anatomy, botany, birds, medical illustration, typefaces, films, toys, circus memorabilia, astronomy, and antique farm equipment. There were also atlases and anthologies, as well as various other reference books without illustrations. She picked up one, The Eighteenth Century Background by Basil Willey, and was surprised to discover its margins filled with copious handwritten notes.

Michael was content to let her rummage through his things, as though her actions were choreographed to music that soulfully explained him.

Boxes not containing books contained hundreds of CDs, alphabetized by composer from Albinoni to Zemlinsky. Plastic organizers filled with all manner of curios were among the few things unpacked. Collections were sorted by tray or Ziploc bag, and included rocks, fossils, seashells, broken glass, rock salt, plastic army men, plastic insects and fish, rubber monsters, brightly colored beads and trinkets, used-up markers and pens, old toothbrushes, old candy, game pieces (minus their games), and random doll heads and toy fragments rescued from out-of-doors. Hundreds of pages of Michael’s comic artwork occupied the lower shelf of a built-in bookcase, and these were sorted by board size and project. Dozens of spiral bound notebooks were less organized, and doubtless owing to overflowing pages of frantic writing that could not be readily sorted.

To the visitor’s mind it all weirdly fit. The art and artifacts were part of an artist’s studio that rightly belonged in this room. Yet beyond the bedroom and kitchen downstairs, the remainder of the bare-walled house served no purpose. The tenant assumed ownership of the property and its furnishings upon moving in, much in the way a chameleon assumes the character of a backdrop. But it was truer to say he was a squatter here—and one wary of being found out. At the abrupt but poignant end of the piano piece, she commented, “Beautiful.”

Michael smiled to share one source of inspiration with another. “Schubert is to music what Vermeer is to painting. There is light and shadow in his sonatas, but no real destination. He leaves you very much where he finds you, only deeper in the landscape.”

Emma puzzled aloud. “Why don’t you hang your paintings downstairs?”

“I feel exposed by their extravagance,” he explained.

“No one would think you vain.”

He offered no defense of his view.

One of the painter’s cardigans was lying across a chair; the girl put it on without much forethought. It was the frank, artless act of a young woman where, in laying siege to an article of clothing, her biochemistry took possession of a scent. Loathed too read too much into it, Michael distracted himself from the evolving dance steps by staying close to the CD player as another sonata started up.

Emma knelt down to look into one box away from the others. It was crammed with see-through folders containing clipped magazine and catalog pictures of attractive women. “Do you ever need a model?” she asked innocently.

He looked up, feeling the ballet floor tip under his feet.

Emma turned to face him. “I would be happy to model for free if you’d fix me dinner sometime.”

The painter’s attempt to string together a response was painful to watch.

She continued, less confidently. “In the nude, of course.”

Turning off the CD player, he glanced up at the skylight. “We’ll have to run to beat the rain back to the car.”

The guest stared at the threatening weather. “Or we can wait it out.”

His eyes remained fixed on the panes.

Emma moved away from the last box, putting some distance between herself and her offer. The host started rocking unconsciously back and forth, and his level of unease pained his guest. Her next question cut to the heart of everything he had allowed her to see. “Is there a destination to you, Michael?”

A crack of lightning seared the window overhead. The startled painter, seizing on the drama, dashed over to the studio door to look down darker stairs. Leaves were seen scampering across the living room floor. He rushed down ahead of Emma to find the backdoor blown open; a black-knuckled thunderhead bore down from the west. Stepping out on the stoop, he exclaimed on seeing her catch up, “Quickly!”

The couple ran from the house back the way they came. The occasional lightning strike added incentive to speed their return to the car, but they were winded from their earlier jaunt and the two flights of stairs. The landscape turned to nightscape more swiftly than either would have thought possible, and by the time they reached the side of the mound, both were crawling to its summit with bursting lungs. Emma seized her companion’s arm at the top, slowing to smell the rain that was about to overtake them. The shrinking sky ahead had turned an odd shade of periwinkle, and low-slung sulfur clouds, the color of butterscotch, formed a calamitous furnancework along the western horizon. Michael tracked the remaining stitch of light to see a rangy figure stumbling towards his car below.

“Christ in Heaven!” Emma cried. “He followed us!”

The dark sea captain—with a face gleaming of death—cut a stark profile against the pale, turbulent grass. He staggered like Frankenstein toward Michael’s vehicle, and it was going to be a whisker-thin finish to beat him there. Michael pulled Emma down the slope like a force of nature. With wind and momentum at their backs, they were running as fast as they could together on hitting the bottom of the hill. The car, however, cut off their view of the man. Both got in on the driver’s side—Michael in the front and Emma in the back. Large splattering raindrops began to pelt the windshield in a preamble of what was about to come.

She was breathless. “Where is he?!”

The driver reached over to lock the passenger door just as a watery avalanche crashed down, yet saw nothing of the man, either. He shifted the car in reverse, though was unable to comprehend what lay in front of him. At first it looked as if all the oil drained from his crankcase, but it was only the cadaver captain rising up in the high beams and wiper blades. He planted a boney hand on the vehicle’s hood; Emma screamed. Michael punched the accelerator and flew back to hit the other side of the cutaway. By the time the brakes were applied, the car overshot the clearing to land its rear in the thicket. He shoved the stick shift into drive, but the front wheels started spinning out in the loose dirt. The kaleidoscopic image of the lumbering man pruned and sweltered on the windshield in a way that made it impossible to lock him in place. Emma was about to squeal again when the car tore away over the dampened ground. Michael steered wide in hopes of not hitting the fellow, but the captain was abruptly on the passenger side like a too-close mailbox; there was a glancing blow. Emma yelped to see him roll off her door in a blur. Michael skidded several yards before the tires anchored. He looked back over his shoulder; nothing could be seen through the fogging glass.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

Emma was trembling too much to respond.

The driver threw open the door and pushed against the deluge to the bumper. “Hello!” he shouted. A hard squint turned up the impaled remains of the bonfire effigy sideswiped on a pole. He ducked back into the car. “It was only the effigy!”

Emma was coherent. “Let’s go, Michael.”

Without argument, he sped down the cutaway. The squall did not let up with a change of terrain, but there was relief on connecting with the lavender mist of pavement. The passenger remained quiet in the backseat, having shrunk down under his cardigan to become another shadow in a hurried nightfall.

Her voice was low in the din, but steady. “The lily is gone.”

Michael kept his eyes on the tremulous white line ahead, but confirmed her observation with a glance at the dripping dashboard.