Dark Rivers of the Heart

about them, which makes me dangerous enough. Tom will never stop looking, as long as he lives."
        Like a great black wasp, the helicopter droned across the Nevada badlands.
        Roy was still wearing the telephone headset with the saucer-size earphones, blocking out the engine and rotor noise to concentrate on the photograph of Steven Ackblom. The loudest sound in his private realm was the slow, heavy thudding of his heart.
        When Ackblom's secret work had been exposed, Roy had been only sixteen years old and still confused about the meaning of life and about his own place in the world. He was drawn to beautiful things: the paintings of Childe Hassam and so many others, classical music, antique French furniture, Chinese porcelain, lyrical poetry. He was always a happy boy when alone in his room, with Beethoven or Bach on the stereo, gazing at the color photographs in a book about Faberg's eggs, Paul Storr silver, or Sung Dynasty porcelains. Likewise, he was happy when he was wandering alone through an art museum. He was seldom happy around people, however, although he wanted desperately to have friends and to be liked. In his expansive but guarded heart, young Roy was convinced that he had been born to make an important contribution to the world, and he knew that when he discovered what his contribution would be, he then would become widely admired and loved.
        Nevertheless, at sixteen and bedeviled by the impatience of youth, he was enormously frustrated by the need to wait for his purpose and his destiny to be revealed to him.
        He had been fascinated by the newspaper accounts of the Ackblom tragedy, because in the mystery of the artist's double life, he had sensed a resolution to his own deep confusion. He acquired two books with color plates of Ackblom's art-and responded powerfully to the work. Though Ackblom's pictures were beautiful, even ennobling, Roy's enthusiasm wasn't aroused only by the paintings themselves. He was also affected by the artist's inner struggle, which he inferred from the paintings and which he believed to be similar to his own.
        Basically, Steven Ackblom was preoccupied with two subjects and produced two types of paintings.
        Although only in his mid-thirties, he had been obsessed enough to produce an enormous body of work, consisting half of exceptionally beautiful still lifes. Fruit, vegetables, stones, flowers, pebbles, the contents of a sewing box, buttons, tools, plates, a collection of old bottles, bottle capshumble and exalted objects alike were rendered in remarkable detail, so realistic that they seemed three-dimensional.
        In fact, each item attained a hyperreality, appeared to be more real than the object that had served as the model for it, and possessed an eerie beauty. Ackblom never resorted to the forced beauty of sentimentality or unrestrained romanticism; his vision was always convincing, moving, and sometimes breathtaking.
        The subjects of the remainder of the paintings were people: portraits of individuals and of groups containing three to seven subjects. More frequently, they were faces rather than full figures, but when they were figures, they were invariably nudes. Sometimes Ackblom's men, women, and children were ethereally beautiful on the surface, though their comeliness was always tainted by a subtle but terrible pressure within them, as if some monstrous possessing spirit might explode from their fragile flesh at any moment. This pressure distorted a feature here and there, not dramatically but just enough to rob them of perfect beauty.
        And sometimes the artist portrayed ugly-even grotesque-individuals, within whom there was also fearful pressure, though its effect was to force a feature here and there to conform to an ideal of beauty. Their malformed countenances were all the more chilling for being, in some aspects, lightly touched by grace.
        As a consequence of the conflict between inner and outer realities, the people in both types of portraits were enormously expressive, although their expressions were more m3/-sterious and haunting than any that enlivened the faces of real human beings.
        Seizing on those portraits, the news media had been quick to make the most obvious interpretation. They claimed that the artist-himself a handsome man-had been painting his own demon within, crying out for help or issuing a warning regarding his true nature.
        Although he was only