A Perfect Canvas

by Kevin Adkisson

  Chapter 28

  Paige huddled with her back against the steps, the door above her head, and her knees pressed to her chest. The room was all blackness on blackness, devoid of a single thread or dot of light. Why had she come down here? Dumb move. She should have stayed up in the living room. She didn’t want to die down here in this cold, dark place. She started weeping and almost lost control again. The whole house was a place of madness crammed full of sickness.

  She tried to calm herself down, to bring back the image of the red Indian Blanket wildflowers with their yellow tipped petals, but with the blood hammering through her head she couldn’t concentrate enough to bring them into focus. The image darted away from her like a startled bird.

  Paige wiped the tears from her eyes with the palms of her hands, took several deep breaths. She was going to have to face this.

  From across the room, she heard Chris hushing her. “Shhh, shhh,” as if she were an infant. Then Chris began to sing.

  “Hush, little baby, now, don’t you cry

  “Daddy’s gonna give you a mountain high

  “If that mountain top’s too cold

  “Daddy’s gonna give you a--”

  Paige snapped, her anger ripping its way out her throat. “Open the damn door you bitch!”

  No answer. Just the sound of her own voice echoing off the concrete. The silence deepened the darkness of the room.

  “My husband Nick used to sing that to me when he’d want me to give him a blowjob,” Chris said. “Only he would change the words around. That’s pretty screwed up isn’t it?”

  Anger wasn’t going to get her anywhere with Chris. She was working with Nicholas. She’d become his Igor, his Renfield, his evil assistant.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I yelled at you, that I called you that. I just want you to open the door. Will you please open the door?”

  “I will. I will. But we need to talk first. Really talk. Come down. I’ll turn on a light. We’ll talk. We need to talk. We’re on the same side.”

  “I don’t think so,” Paige said. “You’re working with him. You’re helping him.”

  “No. No. No. I mean, I am a part of this. But not the way you think. Come down. I’ll turn on the light. You’ll see for yourself. You don’t have to hide anything from me. I want us to be friends. I can help. Really I can.”

  Paige just wanted the madness to end. She wanted all the power play games to stop. Why wouldn’t Chris turn on the light?

  “I’m not hiding anything, Chris. If you’ll turn on the light first, then maybe I’ll come down.”

  Paige wasn’t really sure if she would go down into the room even if Chris turned on the light. It all depended on what was in the room.

  “I’m just saying I already know who you are, what you are. There’s no reason to hide from me. I already know why you came here. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Exasperated, Paige said, “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. This is all nonsense to me. I didn’t come here. Nicholas brought me here against my will.”

  The buzzing began again.

  “Okay. Fine,” Chris said. “Have it your way. You were brought here. You didn’t have any choice. I understand. I told myself those same things. Felt the same way. But we both know the truth. There’s no need for lies anymore. People lie out there. Not in here. You can be what you are here, without shame. We can be friends here.”

  For a few moments, neither of them spoke. The only sound between them was the buzzing.

  Paige’s teeth began to chatter. Even with the throw blanket wrapped around her body, the room was so very cold. She didn’t see how Chris could stand being naked in it. Time was running out. It slid out from under her. Chris wasn’t going to help her. Nicholas would return soon. She needed to get out and find a weapon before he did.

  “Since I was a little girl, I’ve had these desires,” Chris said. “My earliest fantasies involved being wanted, chosen. I would dream of being used in elaborate rituals, of being the one who must surrender herself for the good of the community. I didn’t understand why I had dreams like that. At some point I realized that control had come to mean everything to me, that I had to let go. You’ve had fantasies like those, too. I can tell. You wouldn’t be down here if you hadn’t. Can’t you see? I found my bliss in the darkness. So will you.”

  “You call this bliss? Hiding here in the dark is not bliss. It’s denial.”

  Chris snapped on the light.

  Paige winced at all the brightness. The basement was nearly the size of the room above them, and it was deep, deeper than she’d originally thought. The distance from the floor to the ceiling of the basement had to be more than twenty feet.

  Paige scooted away from the edge of the stairs until she was up against the wall, away from the long drop to the floor, which looked to be black painted cement. From her high perch, she saw evenly spaced stainless steel columns supported the ceiling. Two large ceiling fans spun lazily, circulating the already frosty air. An iron cage maybe four feet tall hung up in one corner of the room. A black metal wagon-like wheel hung in another corner.

  “There,” Chris said. “I’ve turned on the light. Now why don’t you come down here? I have something I want to show you.”

  Chris remained perched atop the desk in the far corner of the room. More buzzing. This time Paige knew the sound was coming from what Chris held in her hands. A small grapefruit and what looked like some kind of electric engraving pen. The buzzing sound was coming from the pen. The tone of the buzzing changed as she dragged the tip of the instrument across the skin of the grapefruit. It wasn’t an engraving pen. It was a tattoo machine. She was tattooing the grapefruit.

  Paige pointed at the tattoo gun. “See. You are with him.”

  Chris held the grapefruit up. “This is for passing the time and making him happy. I’m not working with him. There’s nothing else to do. Can’t you see? It’s not as if there’s a TV to watch. It’s not like there are bookshelves loaded with stuff to read, although, that would be nice. I like to read. My favorite is The Monk by Matthew Lewis. It’s about this monk who feels--”

  “Chris. You’re frightening me. Don’t you understand normal people don’t act like this? What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m frightening you?” She shook her head, lowered her chin. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. It’s been a while since I’ve talked to anyone but him. Sometimes he brings clients in. Brings them down here and works on them. But I don’t ever get to talk to them. Sometimes he lets me watch on the monitors.”

  Paige scanned the room. There had to be something down there she could use as a weapon. But nothing jumped out at her. She needed to get closer. Hesitantly, Paige lowered herself on her bottom, one step at a time, moving toward Chris and the desk in the hopes of getting a better look.

  Candles of every color and size--there had to be several hundred--decorated a chest high shelf that ran along all four walls. The wax had melted down the sides of the candles, off the edges of the shelf, and had pooled and solidified on the floor.

  A massage table with black vinyl padding stood next to what looked like a dentist chair. A few feet away from them there was what looked like a wooden bar stool with a metal pyramid on top. Three chains, one from each wall and one from the corner, were linked to a harness that hung above the pyramid.

  “He works on them?” Paige asked.

  “Yep. He’s done a lot of important work here. Tattoos, scarification, flesh removal, body modification, that kind of thing. Sometimes he’ll do basic piercings, but he doesn’t like to.”

  “Where do you watch from?"

  “Upstairs. Like I said, he’s got the whole place wired with video cameras and microphones. I watch them drive up in their fancy cars. Sometimes they ride in limos. Once a woman drove up in a silver Rolls Royce. Shar Quest from the band
Tribal Illusions. Have you heard of her? Nicholas did an amazing tat of a blue Chinese dragon on her back. She got a real kick out of his medieval torture collection.” Chris pointed at a rough wood chair sitting against a wall. “That’s an inquisition chair.”

  Hundreds of spikes covered the chair’s back, seat, arm, and footrest. Metal bars, similar to what you might expect to find on an old rollercoaster, crossed the chest area, thigh area, and the top of the feet to hold the body against the spikes. The bars could be screwed down tight to force the spikes deep into a person’s body.

  Paige stood, took several steps down the stairs.

  “There are closed circuit monitors in the armoire upstairs,” Chris said. “But you can’t watch TV on them. Nicholas says television inhibits creativity.”

  Chris pointed across the room to a steel door like the one in the kitchen. “He brings the clients in through there.”

  Paige took a few more steps down the stairs. She was nearly to the bottom. “Does it lead out?”

  “Yes. That way he can bring clients directly into the studio. But you can’t get out that way. How would you get through the door?”

  “It doesn’t unlock from the inside?”

  “No. It has a magnetic lock like the others.”

  Paige stepped onto the floor of the basement. Walked over to the door, tried the handle. It was locked.

  Small cocktail napkin size sketches of animals, symbols, runes, flowers and every other imaginable thing were taped to one wall. Larger sketches, on what looked like illustration board, were stacked against a table. A painting of a woman sleeping naked on rock hung above Chris. In the painting, near the woman’s feet, a pomegranate floated in mid air, a fish swam out of the pomegranate, a tiger leapt from the fish, and the tiger spewed forth yet another tiger. A rifle with bayonet hung in front of the second tiger, the blade pointed at the woman, and an elephant with long, thin legs walked across the sea behind her. The painting was unmistakably Salvador Dalí, but Paige couldn’t remember the title. Hundreds of photographs, too far away to make out clearly, covered a third wall of the studio. She advanced on them to get a better look.

  “You didn’t scream for help when he brought them in?” she asked, her eyes locked on the wall of photos.

  “Sure. Once. But I guess they couldn’t hear me, and he punished me afterwards, wouldn’t let me watch on the monitors for a long time.”

  The pictures were of tattooed arms and legs, breasts and thighs, navels and backs all riddled with panthers or hearts, zombies or pinups, portraits or dragons.

  “None of them saw you? Through the window upstairs in the kitchen?”

  Chris shrugged. “He doesn’t bring them in that way. Besides, people see what they want to see. It’s not like he lets me run around the house when they’re here.”

  There were also pictures of body modifications on the walls. Images of split tongues and branded arms, castrations, pierced nipples, and even what looked to her like a penis split in two. She gasped at the images, turned away, tried to put them out of her mind.

  “Where does he keep his knives?”

  Chris picked up a magazine and waved Paige closer. “Come here. I want you to see something.”

  Paige cautiously stepped closer. Chris handed her the magazine. BODY ART was the name printed across the top of the publication. On the cover a woman sat with her back to the camera. It was Chris. Paige knew it was Chris even though the photo was a shot from the neck down. The bloody snake writhed on the glossy cover. Its forked tongue flicked out at a strange symbol on Chris’s neck.

  “It came out last week.” Chris pointed to the symbol. “They had to airbrush his signature in.”

  Chris turned and pulled aside her hair to show Paige a small bandage on the back of her neck.

  “It was going to take another four to six weeks for it to heal and the publisher didn’t want to wait. They’re calling it the greatest work ever.”

  The caption beneath the photo read STEELE’S MASTERPIECE.

  “Is that his real name? Steele?”

  “No. I don’t think so. That's just what he’s known by. Like Madonna or Prince or Bono. He’s famous. He’s had spreads in every magazine covering tattooing and body modification. Walk into a tattoo convention and mention the name Steele and everyone will know who you’re talking about. Nobody knows his real name. Well, somebody might, but not me. His clients don’t. The magazines don’t.”

  Paige touched the bandage on her chest and thought of the other scars on her body. It had never occurred to her that some people might find scars attractive, that people would pay someone to scar them or buy magazines devoted to scars.

  “He wants me to call him Nicholas because he sees taking Nick’s name as giving him some kind of power. I think it’s also supposed to serve as a reminder of what happened. He can get kind of mystical about stuff like that. He’ll want you to keep calling him Edward.”

  “Well, I won’t.”

  Chris took the magazine from her, narrowed her eyes.

  “You just don’t get it, do you? You’ll call him whatever he wants you to call him. You’ll owe him that, and more, for killing your husband for you.”