Bad Spirits

by Keith Keller

Three artists worked in the old colonial building on the corner of Nuñez and Mesones. It had been unoccupied for a long time and was the worse for wear. Rumor had it that it had been an inn before the Mexican Revolution. If so, horses and other animals owned by the guests were probably kept in the courtyard. William, the newest of the three artists, tried imagining what the building must have looked like crammed full of people and animals. There was a large room to the left of the entrance. The room faced Nuñez on one side and the courtyard on the other. Perhaps this was where the family that owned the inn and their guests took their meals. Several other small windowless rooms and one very large room with a higher ceiling also opened onto the courtyard. He assumed the smaller rooms were the guest quarters.

* * * * *

W illiam painted and taught in the largest room. He had a small following of students, mostly retired American women who had been painting with him for some years. They missed the Hotel Sauto, the favorite location among the several studios in which they had painted with William. The current location had mice living in the crumbling adobe walls and the students said the building was creepy and dank.

The other large room in the building was the studio of a ceramicist named Luis who produced beautiful pieces from his small kiln. Luis was a polite, soft-spoken man and was a good listener. William, who was chatty, liked him. The third artist in the building was Don Thomas, who never said anything. A true primitive artist, he nailed, wired, or glued junk together and painted it. One of his favorite motifs was leopard skin.

Don Thomas was the only one of the three artists who lived in the building. He was very old with long white hair, nut brown skin, stretched thin over his angular face with a pattern of spider web wrinkles, reflecting his years of toil under the relentless Mexican desert sun.

There was no bathroom in the building and Don Thomas was in the habit of relieving himself in the corner of the small room he lived and worked in. This added to the already funky atmosphere of the building. The landlady was Don Thomas's patron, charging him no rent, which was close to what the other artists were paying. She had promoted him successfully as a primitive artist, which indeed he was, and organized several exhibitions for him. It was William's suspicion that Don Thomas might be making more money than he and Luis combined.

One wet and chilly February morning William sat on a stone ledge in the barren courtyard washing down a Mexican pastry from the corner bakery with a thermos full of hot milk and coffee. Coffee bothered his stomach. He was looking at the cool grey light on the wall across from him and the deep shadows cast within the pile of rocks stacked against the wall. There was an annoying black smudge just above the pile of rocks, ruining the composition. He got up to take a closer look, taking another bite from his half-finished Mexican danish. He found a cross, painted in black, with what at first appeared to be an "M" painted either on top of the cross or behind it. The image seemed familiar.

* * * * *

W illiam was waiting for a client, a not so common occurrence. Charles actually was not a client, but a friend. He was one of a half-dozen Sanmiguelenses who had made it possible to extend William's overnight visit to San Miguel by twenty years; purchasing his paintings of women in tight dresses, or women painted as religious icons, or women as religious icons in tight dresses. These paintings made most viewers either confused or uncomfortable. Despite this, William had a small following of buyers, and on occasion, sold a painting to a tourist. This combined with his teaching, kept frijoles on the table.

Charles arrived, and as was his habit, began poking around William's studio, always looking for some hidden treasure as opposed to the large framed oils hanging on the studio walls. That was too simple.

"What's this?" Charles asked as he was pulling a painting out of William's "I'll fix that someday" pile. He carefully blew dust off the painting's surface.

It was a small painting. On a large bed lay a dark, emaciated man, of no determinate age, covers drawn up to his chest. At the foot of the bed is an open window. The window's white transparent curtain floats in the air between the viewer and the small man. On the wall behind him hangs a cross with a white piece of material wound around the junction and draped in the form of an "M".

* * * *

T he following day William found three more crosses painted on the walls. One was painted next to his studio door. William asked Luis if he had noticed the crosses. Luis looked a bit surprised by William's question and then very calmly answered,

"I think Don Thomas painted them. They look pretty fresh," he ventured. "Maybe he's adding graffiti artist to his repertoire."

"You ever talk to him?" asked William.

"No, I don't think he talks much," answered Luis.

It was twilight, a warm evening with a soft breeze. The building was quiet. Luis had left for the night and Don Thomas' door was tightly shut. William found it bizarre that that the old man slept in that dank, stuffy, small room with no windows and the heavy wooden door firmly sealed.

He stared at the entry to one of the other unused small dark chambers. After a few moments he walked into the room and closed the door firmly behind him. It was absolutely pitch black. William just stood there in the silence. Then he began to imagine there were others in the room with him, standing around him, looking at him, one face only inches from his own, staring into William's eyes that saw nothing in the dark. The small hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He felt the gentlest touch of a hand on his shoulder. That was enough. He threw open the door.

William had always had the odd habit, ever since he was a kid, of scaring himself. His mother always said he had "an over active imagination." This was an expression commonly used by mothers to explain any child's exceptionally weird behavior. A few days later Don Thomas sat in the courtyard wiring a plastic funnel to an old stringed instrument. It was some sort of guitar William had never seen before. Don Thomas had given it a nice leopard skin patina. William went out to the courtyard with a sketchpad and started to draw, sitting a couple of yards from where Don Thomas was working. William spent a little time enhancing the shadows in the crevices of the rock pile. He added in the cross, and on impulse, added a white cloth in the shape of an "M", with a bit of grey tone around it to bring it out. When he was finished he held the drawing up for Don Thomas to see.

"What is this?" William demanded, pointing to the cross in the drawing and then to the one on the wall. Don Thomas, much to William's surprise, responded, and in English.

"To protect against bad spirits," he answered without expression, then looked away and went back to his guitar.

* * * * *

T he landlady eventually sold the building. When she informed Don Thomas that she had found him a small house with running water on a friend's ranch he became both articulate and a legal expert on the subject of squatter's rights.

Eventually though, he agreed to move, claiming he was fed up with the mice. Many years later, after William's fortunes had taken a turn for the better, he purchased a house from one of his patrons, who had bought a number of paintings from him. After taking possession of the house, he found something he had not noticed before. Imbedded within the overgrown courtyard wall, covered with vines, was an old weathered guitar, the faded leopard skin pattern still visible. When he removed it and held it up to the light for closer inspection he found on the backside of the guitar the faint black mark of a cross with the letter "M". As he stared at it he thought he felt the slight touch of a hand on his shoulder. "Just the breeze moving my shirt," he thought as he carefully returned the guitar to its rightful place on the wall.