WELCOME HOME PADGETT No, there was one that broke the barrier. It hung just above the floor, along with others on the same theme. The well paintings. The grim shrine to the Fire Valley Massacre stood before different incomparable and colorful backgrounds, as Adrienne had described. But the one... Instead of blue skies dotted with puffy cumulus, the backdrop was a variegated firmament, black and gray streaks careening haphazardly through a dominant splotch of orange. Around the well were half-figures, some sprawling, some upright, shadowy caricatures with vague features, save perhaps for the agony in their long conical faces. Painted in crimson and claret red, they seemed to mesh in a crisscrossing pattern, red paint trickling from them, from the larger bloated forms that were animals, and from the well itself, seeping through the stones, pouring over the mouth. And there were no wood posts, no pointed parasols. Mesmerized by the painting, Greg dropped to his knees and stared into its three-dimensional depths. It came alive for him; the figures writhed, beckoning obscenely with their thin appendages, perhaps pleading. There were sounds, at first distant and unclear, then louder. Cries and shrieks of mindless terror, anguished moans rising, rising to an unimaginable crescendo. And a word (padgett) uttered amid the cacophony in an emotionless, genderless voice. (padgett padgett) Over and over, again and again, until all the figures were prone, some segmented. (padgett padgett padgett padgett) And more red spilled from them, and more gushed from the well, spreading over the canvas, dripping to the floor of the studio. More red...