Awake Page 9

  No one could think of anything, so Ivy called up a cab from the company they’d used the day before. While they waited for it, they watched some more of The Stand, but they were all too excited about going into the city to pay much attention. Ben had always been into visiting museums and ‘places of culture’, as he put it, and Ivy seemed genuinely excited too, as Lee knew she would be.

  When the cab arrived, Lee was pleasantly surprised to see that it was the same driver who had picked them up the night before. They’d used the same company, sure, but he assumed they’d have tons of drivers in a city like Chicago. Maybe he’d heard the dispatch and called it before another driver could take it, hoping for another big tip like the night before.

  “Hey man, it’s good to see you again!” Lee said to the driver as he got into the passenger’s seat.

  “It’s good to see you too,” the man said. “Where you want go today?”

  “Take us to the Art Institute, you know where it is?”

  “Yes yes, I do this long time,” the man said, chuckling.

  It was another long drive in heavy traffic to get to the museum. When they got there Lee tipped the driver well again, and they all got out. The Art Institute was a stately building that reminded Lee of pictures he’d seen of the Capitol Building in DC. The wide stairway leading up to the entrance was flanked with two beautiful bronze lions, long since tarnished to the shade of green that was atypical of that type of sculpture.

  “Wow, those are beautiful! I’m already excited,” Ivy said, pointing at one of the lions.

  “That’s really cool,” Stella conceded.

  They admired the lions for a few minutes before going into the museum. Lee went to the cashier to pay the “suggested donation” from the prices listed on a board on the wall behind the counter, but was surprised when the cashier simply pointed to a pile of tickets lined up on the counter and told him to take however many he wanted. “It’s free admissions day, we do it once a month,” the cashier explained, when Lee gave him a confused look.

  “Thank you,” Lee said.

  As they browsed through the first of the exhibits in the entrance area, it quickly became apparent that touring as a large group was impractical. They split into couples like they had at Valleyfair, with a plan to meet back at the entrance in two hours. “Don’t you two have too much fun now,” Ben said as they parted.

  The collection that the museum had was stunning. Lee was a frequent visitor of the Seattle Art Museum and loved the place so much that he had a membership, but he had to concede that the Chicago Art Institute was better. The pieces were world-class and he saw many paintings that he was familiar with. They worked their way through the museum, going around counterclockwise in a manner that one of the curators suggested, the beauty of the works awing them at regular intervals.

  “God that is absolutely beautiful,” Ivy remarked at one painting in the European collection. It was titled Paris Street; Rainy Day, and featured people bustling about their business in nineteenth century attire, many holding umbrellas that were all a similar shade of blue. In the foreground was a couple out for a stroll, looking away from the viewer. The truly remarkable thing was how realistic the scene looked; it was like staring into a frozen moment of time through a window.

  “It really is amazing,” Lee agreed.

  It was when they got to the American art section that things went bad.

  At first, it was amazing. Some of the art wasn’t brilliant, in Lee’s opinion, but then they stumbled upon the classic painting Nighthawks almost by accident. Both he and Ivy stopped in their tracks, recognizing in an instant the iconic painting of a diner at night, with its three serious patrons, and the attendant forever frozen bending down to grab something from under the counter. Lee was floored to be standing mere feet away from the famous painting.

  “Where do I know this from?” Ivy asked.

  “I don’t know, but I recognize it too.” He looked about and found the placard hanging underneath the painting. “It’s called Nighthawks. I’ve seen it a million times before on the internet and TV, but I never knew its name.”

  They studied the painting for as long as they could, but other museum goers were trying to view the painting too, so they walked on to give them a chance. They glanced around the rest of the section and marveled at a few of the works, but nothing caught their attention and stopped them in the same way until they came upon American Gothic.

  They noticed the crowd around the painting first, and walked over knowing that there must have been a particularly famous work there. Soon the painting came into view, and as others walked off they made their way to the front of the crowd.

  This painting they both knew the name of on sight. Lee couldn’t believe that he was standing only feet away from one of the most famous American paintings he knew of, only blocked by a measly velvet rope. By the look on her face, Ivy was just as excited.

  As Lee gazed at the legendary painting of a stern country couple posing in front of a country house, the man’s look suddenly changed from one of humorless near-boredom to one of indescribable rage. Lee gasped, and a quick glance at the others in the crowd told him that he was the only one seeing it.

  The woman in the painting looked afraid, and turned towards the man. The man spun suddenly, violently grabbed the back of the woman’s hair, and started forcibly dragging her towards the house, revealing a rotting, headless dog lying in the yard as they got closer to the house and more of the foreground came into view. It was lying there behind them the whole time, Lee thought madly.

  The man threw the woman face-first into the ground, next to the dog. As she struggled to get up he planted a foot on her back, flipped his pitchfork to face downwards, and plunged it through the woman’s neck, pinning her to the ground.

  While she flopped around feebly, the man turned back around, his face contorted with an almost inhuman level of rage, and suddenly seemed to notice Lee staring at him. He started running towards the foreground of the painting, towards Lee.

  Lee jumped back so fast that he stumbled, and fell on his ass. He quickly hopped up, spun, and started walking away from the painting as quickly as he could, trying not to look as crazy as he felt. “What’s wrong?” Ivy asked, following him.

  “It’s nothing, I just feel a bit dizzy and need some fresh air,” Lee said, not wanting to reveal the truth within earshot of so many people.

  As they made their way out of the American gallery, Lee found that all off the sculptures had turned into twisted, macabre versions of their former selves. He looked away before he could make out specifics, and turned to Nighthawks. It was the same, only now there was a massive creature standing outside the diner and peering in at the patrons, so hideous that it made the demon seem cute by comparison.

  He increased his pace to a walk so fast it was just shy of a jog, trying to look at his feet and only glancing up enough so that he didn’t run into any of the pieces or people. Each time he looked up he’d catch glances of more creatures and awful scenes of brutality and death.

  In the European section Lee glanced up at Paris Street; Rainy Day, thinking for some reason that it would be different from the others, unchanged, and that it would calm him. He was wrong: the couple that had been in the foreground were still in the foreground, but now they were lying on the ground next to each other, their heads smashed to pieces by an unseen assailant, and their umbrellas lying on the ground next to them. Gawkers had come up and there was a semicircle of people staring at the bodies. One looked up at Lee and smiled. It was the demon.

  Lee promptly threw up on the floor, his body not giving him the usual warnings. A woman nearby gave a startled cry, and several others looked at him in disgust. Others just ignored him and hustled off.

  “I’m sorry, I’m feeling really ill,” he said to a nearby curator who had a look of horror on his face. “We’re leaving.” Ivy apologized as well, and led the rest of the way out of the museum while he stared at the ground.

  “Here,
sit down here,” she said when they got to the steps. He sat on the stairs, to the side so that they weren’t blocking foot traffic, and she sat next to him.

  “What did you see?” she asked after giving him a few minutes to get his breath back and for his heart to slow.

  “Monsters. Awful things,” he said, not being able to put it clearly into words.

  “It’s going to be alright,” she said, embracing him and rubbing one hand on his back comfortingly.

  “No, it’s not,” he said, struggling through a cracking voice, an overwhelming wave of depression crashing through him. He barely managed to hold back tears, the indoctrination against male crying taking precedence even now.

  He wrote horror for a living, but he never thought that he would find himself in a nightmare like this. A crazy notion came to him that the characters he thought he’d only made up were real, and this was his punishment for putting them through such terror.

  After a quarter of an hour he had finally managed to stop shaking and get ahold of himself, his mind slowly rationalizing everything, convincing him that everything was in his head. Ivy’s comforting presence helped too, as she kept holding him and telling him that everything was going to be fine.

  He started apologizing for the scene he’d made, but Ivy would have none of it. “You’re sick, you have a condition. Don’t be embarrassed about things you can’t control. I know you don’t like to talk about it, but I understand. I don’t think you’re crazy or anything,” she reassured him.

  “Thanks,” he said, felling almost back to his old self. He already couldn’t remember much of what he saw, it was as if his subconscious was going through his memory and deleting the things that he couldn’t handle.

  “I’m going to text Stella and tell her and Ben to meet us out here. It will probably help if we get out of here, maybe get you some food, and then head back to the RV so you can rest,” Ivy said, pulling out her phone and starting to type away.

  It was another fifteen minutes before Stella and Ben came out, with Ben apologizing and saying “Sorry about that, we were in the Modern Art annex when Stella got the text. It was a bit of a walk to get back out.”

  “Yeah, that place sucked though, I was glad to get out of it,” Stella said. “There was a ‘painting’ that was literally nothing but a canvas painted eggshell white.”

  “There really was. Honestly, it just kind of pissed me off when I saw it,” Ben said.

  “Glad I didn’t go there, that would have pissed me off too,” Lee said, laughing. Some of his humor was coming back.

  “Where to now?” Stella asked.

  Lee didn’t want Ivy accidentally saying anything about his little episode, so before she could say anything, he said “Let’s head over to the science museum, I could use a change of scenery.”

  9

  Ivy was about to try and find a nearby taxi on her own since none of them knew how to hail a cab, but as she was whipping her phone out Lee saw a cab draw near and awkwardly hailed it the way he’d seen people do in movies. It pulled up and stopped. They piled in, Lee grinning and feeling pleased with himself. It was a van, so no one had to sit in the passenger’s seat. It was a short drive to the Museum of Science and Industry; even with the traffic they were there in twelve minutes.

  The Museum was huge, with multiple buildings that took up an entire city block. The building was beautiful, built in the same classical style of the Art Institute. It was very busy, with tourists of all nationalities bustling about.

  As there was a café near the entrance, they went in and grabbed a bite to eat before exploring the museum. Satiated, they then split up again into couples to explore the museum. They didn’t set a particular time limit this time, Ivy telling Stella “I’ll just call you later on, or you guys call us if you get bored.”

  The first exhibit that Lee and Ivy went to was one about modern farming. It was surprisingly interesting; Lee wasn’t sure how the museum had managed to make such a mundane-sounding subject so fascinating, but somehow they’d managed it. Among the highlights were a display showing how some farms made electricity out of manure and a huge showcase of brand-new tractors, harvesters and other equipment. Ivy was just as fascinated, regularly stopping at different displays to take pictures and tugging Lee over to the next exhibit when she got bored.

  The next stop they made was in a huge section devoted entirely to ants. The exhibit had expansive ant farms, enclosed in glass, that covered entire walls. Most interesting to Lee, was a cast that had been made of an abandoned ant colony by pouring thousands of gallons of plaster into it, letting it set, and then meticulously digging up the hardened plaster, to see what the inside of the colony looked like. The result was startlingly fascinating, a complex network of tunnels connecting numerous domes that must have served as huge, city-sized rooms for the ants.

  As Lee gazed at the ant exhibits with Ivy, he felt almost envious of the ants. Their lives seemed so simple, so purposeful. Humans were more advanced, but for every wonder that came with their new, complex lives, there was also a nightmare that came along with it. Atomic energy and the atomic bomb, transport planes and bombers, unprecedented connectedness accompanied, ironically, by an almost complete destruction of face-to-face interaction. He felt positive that ants didn’t have the same literal and figurative demons that he had.

  “What exhibition do you want to see next?” Ivy asked, her nose buried in a map of the museum she’d acquired somewhere.

  “Not sure, whatever you find on there that sounds good,” Lee answered.

  “They have a train, according to the brochure it’s ‘among the first of the US diesel-electric passenger trains’.”

  “It’s like you’ve known me forever,” he said, and smiled at her. She giggled.

  The walk over to the train was a bit longer than they’d anticipated, due to the colossal scale of the building. They also got distracted by a fairy castle, that had been built in the middle of the museum, and Ivy insisted on stopping. They explored the castle for a bit, and then proceeded to the train.

  The train, named Zephyr, was completely stunning. “Looks like you picked the best exhibit,” he said to Ivy when they saw it. He’d always been fascinated with passenger trains, but had never been on one before.

  They toured the entire train, even the engineer’s compartment, and Lee was as giddy as a schoolchild the whole time. The dining cart in particular fascinated him; he loved meals with a sense of atmosphere, and he couldn’t admire a better atmosphere than being in the train when it was brand new, riding from Chicago to New York on the route detailed on a map next to the exhibit.

  Afterwards they meandered through a few more displays, until Ivy got a text from Stella saying that she was bored. They agreed to meet back out the front and figure out where to go next.

  “Did you guys see the ant exhibit? That was awesome!” Ivy said to Ben and Stella when they all met up.

  “Ugh, Ben went in there, I didn’t. I hate bugs. I just looked through that fairy castle thing while he was there,” Stella said.

  “Yeah, I wasn’t going to miss that for the world. I had no idea that ant colonies could be so complex,” Ben said.

  “It really was cool, best part of the museum after the train, in my opinion,” Lee said. “So where should we go now?”

  “Let’s hit the bars early,” Stella said. “I want to get rid of this hangover already.”

  “I want to see Sears Tower first,” Ivy said.

  “Oh yeah, I’d almost forgotten about that,” Ben said.

  “Ugh, let’s do something I want to do for once.”

  “Stella’s been a good sport,” Lee said, “and a drink doesn’t sound bad. How about we go to the Sears Tower first and then get a drink afterwards?”

  “I guess that’s cool,” Stella said. “Let’s just not take too long.”

  Ben wanted to try hailing a cab and got one on his second try. Twenty minutes later, they were dropped off in front of the skyscraper.

 
“Holy shit, it’s gigantic!” Ben said. “I couldn’t really see much of it from the back of the cab the first time around.”

  “I know what you mean, even looking right at it I almost can’t believe that it’s real,” Lee said, staring up at the tower. It made him dizzy just looking at the top; he hoped he’d be able to go through with going onto the observation deck.

  They went into the tower and were quickly funneled into the tourist section. He paid another eighty bucks for tickets for all of them, and they waited in a long line to get in the elevators that would take them to the top.

  It was a ten minute wait to get into the elevator, but it was worth it. As soon as they entered, it started propelling them towards the 103rd floor automatically; it only travelled between the ground floor and that one, with no stops in between. There were monitors that counted each floor number dramatically as they rose to the top.

  The elevator reached the top floor and vomited its inhabitants into yet another museum. The top of the skyscraper was home to a museum about Chicago and its inhabitants. Lee wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but he guessed some souvenir shops and a restaurant, like at the Space Needle.

  “God dammit, even the ‘non-museum’ that we go to today is a museum,” Stella said as she realized it a few beats after everyone else, but laughed.

  There wasn’t anything more interesting than they’d seen in the previous two museums, except when they got to the sides, they realized that there were glass enclosures jutting out from each side of the museum, suspended over Chicago, where those daring enough could walk out on a glass floor for a panoramic view of the city and the streets below. All of them managed to stand out for a short while to get pictures, except for Ben, who couldn’t bring himself to go anywhere near the glass floor. “You guys are crazy, it could break,” he insisted, even after one of the curators assured him it wasn’t possible.