The tour was composed mostly of fat men in loud shirts and hats advertising beer brands or truck companies, and women whose purpose in life was to bat futilely at crying children. I walked slowly, dropping behind them all, paying no attention to the tour guide’s cheery speech about the Thanksgiving Day Battle of 1864 in which Union soldiers had put the entire downtown area to the torch. New buildings had eventually been built on top of the old, leaving the fire-gutted ruins to molder in darkness until the city fathers had decided in 1957 to restore them as a tourist attraction.
I was surprised at how accurately I remembered it; particularly Alastair Street, the infamous artists’ colony. Even as a child I had been fascinated with its history. Here such authors as Bierce, Brochensen, Dedric, and even Poe had lived or visited in antebellum times. In 1849, while living in a small garret overlooking the square, Marnauk had composed The Executioner’s Daughter, an opera considered at the time so savagely perverse that there had been talk of deporting him. It was in his Alastair Studio that Courtenay had painted his two most controversial works, and also such masterpieces as Images in Stone and Flame. Every other doorway along the narrow, twisting length had been rumored to hide an opium den or a Satanic church. The colony had lived on in various imaginations after the fire: in the 1930s Weird Tales had published the lurid “Alastor Street” stories of Westin James, a pulp writer of the Lovecraft coterie. There had been a Roger Corman movie and even a rock album during the Sixties, all inspired by the legends of Alastair Street.
I walked along the rebuilt wooden sidewalks, looking into houses and stores. Some interiors had been outfitted with displays in an attempt to recapture the stilted past. I leaned against the four-paned window of Courtenay’s studio and looked at the mannequin within, stiffly posed in oil-daubed smock, palette in one hand and brush in the other. A statue of a young female model, discreetly draped in a robe, reclined on a nearby hassock. The exhibit was staged so that one could not glimpse the painting on Courtenay’s easel, but the pose of the model—if not the bland features—suggested Eros Exotica. The scene was the beginning of his work on it, of course; good taste would have prevented the designers of the tour from even hinting at the final stages. The choice of paintings was appropriate. Eros Exotica had been Courtenay’s last work, finished only a day before the Union Army had attacked. The artist had died in the fire, and yet he was here, frozen in time by the strength of his art and the memory of others. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath of stale air, and thought about the black waters of Devil’s Bay, only a few miles away.
When I opened my eyes again, the model had moved.
I stared in surprise. The hassock was near the fireplace, where the red light reflecting off crumpled foil looked vaguely like logs ablaze. The model leaned forward and stretched, then looked toward the window. I saw her face quite clearly, white as fresh-cut pine, with delicate bones. Her eyes were violet. They went wide with surprise—and fear—when she saw me. Then she stood, wrapping the robe about her, and was quickly gone into the darkness of another room.
I heard footsteps behind me.
“Will you please keep up with the group, sir?”
The tour guide was about ten years younger than I and politely stern, like an airline stewardess trying to convince someone to fasten a seat belt. The group waited several pools of light down the street. I felt oddly contrite. The astonishing scene I had just witnessed, and the calm unreality of the city itself, made my transgression seem somehow more serious than it was.
“I’m sorry.” I made a vague gesture toward the window. “There’s someone in there.”
“Quite possibly, sir. We have people working on these exhibits all the time.”
“No, I mean the model in the exhibit—” I turned back toward the window, gesturing, and stopped, speechless. The model was still there, exactly as she had been posed before, unmistakably a construct of paint and plaster.
The guide turned and started back toward the rest of the group. I hesitated, then hurried forward and caught up with her. “I’m sorry—I’m not feeling too well ...”
Her expression changed immediately to one of professional concern. This was a situation she knew how to deal with. “Of course, sir. This way.” She took me back to the exit stairs, keeping up a solicitous monologue. I hardly heard a word of it. The face of the model stayed before me in the darkness of the Underground City. I knew I had seen her before.
Darkness had fallen; the Night People, as I thought of them, were out in force. I walked home quickly through the crowds, past street dancers and musicians, solicitors of both sexes, and others, paying little attention to the impromptu street parties and cheer that always filled the bright streets after sundown. My mood was difficult to describe; I was not so much concerned for my state of mind as I was preoccupied by the strength of the vision I had seen. It is, I understand, common among artists, whatever their fields, to place any shock or traumatic event safely within the boundaries of their work. Samantha had told me once that her first reaction, upon hearing of her husband’s death, was to think of it as a dramatic scene in a novel or story. Actors and musicians I have known have confessed similar urges to sublimate terrible or frightening events in the contexts of their artistry. So it was now with me; I avoided thinking of what had just happened in terms of losing control, and concentrated instead upon the happening itself.
When I see something in a vivid moment of imagination—as I had thought I had seen the woman’s face turning toward me in the studio—then it stays with me, and I tend to see it almost everywhere I look. Women whom I passed on my way back to my apartment, and female faces on billboard advertisements, all seemed to take on that same pale, shocked look, that intense violet gaze. I studied the vision as I saw it in these many manifestations, and the more I saw it, the more I was convinced that I had seen the face before.
When I reached my room I opened Images of Madness, a large reference book on the works of Albright, Bosch, Munch, and others, including Courtenay. I found the detail from Eros Exotica and stared at it for quite some time. It was the same. The mannequin had been merely a department store sculpture, without even a superficial similarity to the painting; but the image before me now was that of the woman who had looked at me and fled the room. I had seen the luckless, nameless model Courtenay had used over a hundred years before in his most depraved—and most brilliant—creation.
As a child in New Delphi, I had entertained for many years the notion that night was a magic, timeless environment, in which past, present, and future were one and the same. Looking out from my window at the dark street, it was easy to imagine that pirates still docked in Devil’s Bay, or that the shouts and cries I could occasionally faintly hear were the sounds of Union and Confederate soldiers fighting. The rising sun thawed time again, set it flowing once more, and restored order to the world. But at night, all times were one.
I had told Samantha once about this, hoping she would find the childish notion as charming as I did in memory. Instead, she had asked me how I explained the many evidences of the continued functioning of time after sundown, such as clocks ticking off the minutes until dawn. I had countered by asking how someone who wrote childrens’ fantasies could be so literal-minded, and it had built from there into yet another fight.
And yet I was right, in an ironic sense. For I left her at night, at that time when she was most alive, and now she is suspended, frozen, no less than my childhood friends or Justin Courtenay himself.
I had chosen oil as my medium. Acrylic and watercolor dry too fast, and none of the other methods I had used in the past—etching, lithography, charcoal—seemed appropriate. I had started with the most somber shades and built up from them, trying to evoke the image from the darkness.
It had been hard, at first, keeping the room properly lit. As the sun moved across the sky, it was necessary to change the easel’s position accordingly. The best time, I found, was twilight; in that brief stillness after sunset and before darkness, subtle shadi
ngs and interplays were most visible to me. On occasion I would have to alter what I had done earlier. It was frustrating.
My hand would cramp from holding the palette, and the old coveralls I had bought at the Salvation Army crackled with dried paint. I wished I could continue working after dark, but the harsh artificial light destroyed all subtlety and delicacy. It was ironic: having finally become a night person I was now engaged in a project that could not be pursued after dark. Samantha would have laughed.
Though she had considered herself an intellectual and was quite well read, Samantha had known very little about art. What few concepts she had picked up she tended to state dogmatically, as if intensity made up for information. One of these was the tenet that an artist’s visions grew more powerful as the artist slipped gradually into insanity. She would cite van Gogh’s progression of self-portraits as an example. “The trouble with your art,” she would tell me, “is that you’re too sane. You need to set free your dark side.” I was never sure how serious she was. At the time the critique had infuriated me; now I considered it perhaps the only thing worth salvaging from our relationship.
I had been working steadily on my painting since my return to New Delphi, but now, after my visit to the Underground City, I had stopped. My vision, so clear these past few weeks, had been obscured; Courtenay’s model had come between me and the canvas.
For several days I tried to paint around it, to recall the memory I was trying to set down. It had not been that long ago, after all. But it was no use; I was no longer sure which face I saw. Courtenay’s style and subject had been my inspiration this time, and now it was working against me. I had brought with me no photographs, no sketches; I had to rely on the purity of vision. I was feeling the pressure of time; I knew I could not count on being undisturbed for too much longer. At night I felt no time pass; I experienced only a calm, Zenlike now. But I could not paint at night. And the sun moved the days relentlessly.
I knew what I had to do. I had to return to the Underground City and somehow—I had no plan—learn who or what it was I had seen. Only by doing that would I be able to end my preoccupation, to see past her face and view the face in my painting clearly again.
I thought of waiting until nightfall to take advantage of whatever subtle magic the darkness might bring. But that was not necessary; it was always night in the Underground. I bought another ticket and descended the steps once more. It was easy to slip away from the group once we had reached Alastair Street, to hide in the darkness of a recessed doorway until they were gone. Then I made my way down the narrow Parisian street to Courtenay’s studio.
The mannequin of Courtenay still stood before his easel, studying the model’s casual pose. I stared at the still life for what seemed an age, waiting for one or both of them to move. Nothing happened. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until bright green lights swirled in darkness. What was I doing? I was far too old to be chasing phantoms; I had been an artist far too long to justify blaming my failure to create on so absurd a concept as ghosts. I had to seek what reasons there were for my inability within that small apartment on Evangeline Street, not here in a city of the dead.
I opened my eyes—and saw that the model was gone.
The door was secured with an anachronistic padlock and hasp. I had to break the window with my shoe and carefully pick the shards of glass from the frame before I could vault into the studio. I was sure my action would bring a security guard or some other official, but there was no sound. In fact, I realized when I stopped to listen that the silence was perfect; I could no longer hear the faint voices of the tour group in the distance.
The model of Justin Courtenay stood calmly before me. This close, I could see that it was not a particularly inspired or maintained reproduction; the plaster tips of his fingers were chipped, and his eyes were the wrong color. I stepped around the easel to look at the canvas, and was not surprised to find it blank.
Oddly enough, I felt no worry over my forced entry, even though I knew what repercussions discovery could bring. Such concerns seemed remote, unreal, belonging to another age. I stepped through the far door the model had used for escape the previous time.
I don’t know what I expected to find; what I found was a room filled with dusty boxes, crates, and stacks of partially dismembered nude mannequins. On the floor before me was a rumpled piece of white fabric with dark stains. The only light filtered dimly from the street. A rear door, barely visible, was partially open. Beyond it lay blackness.
It was at this point that I finally became afraid.
There was no hint of light beyond the door—and yet I knew, somehow, what was waiting in the darkness. I picked up the robe on the floor before me; the robe that the model had been wearing. It was still warm; the dark stains streaking it were still wet.
I looked at the door again. If she waited out there, it would not be as a plaster mannequin, nor as the frightened model I had seen in my previous glimpse of this past. It would be as Courtenay had painted her, in his last, most powerful vision.
My mouth was dry. I could smell the cloying scent of pigments and oils—and something darker. I dropped the robe, turned and stepped quickly back into the studio.
The statue of Justin Courtenay was gone. The studio was empty, save for the furniture and the easel. No fire, real or simulated, burned in the fireplace. The painting upon the easel was Eros Exotica; the fresh pigments gleamed in the flickering light from the street gas lamps. I knew that if I touched it, it would be as wet as the bloodstains on the robe.
I stared at it, fascinated. It is one thing to view a reproduction of such a work, quite another to witness the vibrant original. Though I was familiar with every line, every nuance of it, still I stood, paralyzed with horror and admiration, at the genius of Courtenay’s work. He had shown the same skill with the knife as with his brush. What in lesser hands would have been mere psychopathic barbarism had here been elevated to art—a sculpture of living flesh.
I tore my gaze from it and looked toward the window. It was unbroken. Through it I could see lights in other windows, and, above the buildings, a sky filled with stars as mad as van Gogh’s.
The Night People walked the street.
I could see them quite clearly—women in bustled silk dresses, men with muttonchops and canes. These were the real Night People, I knew, the ones upon whom Courtenay had based his famous work. They sauntered casually through the evening air of Alastair Street, nodding and tipping hats to each other. I recognized the dark, brooding face of Edgar Allan Poe as he stopped to speak to a gentleman who could be none other than Ambrose Bierce. This was impossible, of course—Poe had died of debauchery while Bierce was still a child. I watched Sara Eaton, her skin as white as the marble she sculpted, strolling proudly with her lover, the ballerina Anastasia Cyril. From an upstairs window a whore leaned, her bare breasts polished by the gaslight, and waved at prospective customers. Egan Marnauk and Miguel Gaspar, Goya’s only disciple, stumbled drunkenly across the street in pursuit of a girl barely in her teens. They had no more been contemporaries on Alastair Street, I knew, than had Bierce and Poe. I saw other artists, famous and infamous, some acquaintances of those about them, others separated by years or decades. But all walked Alastair Street this night.
There was no sound; even the carriages and horses on the cobblestones were silent. And then I heard a noise behind me.
I turned and saw her emerging from the night beyond the second floor, her face still in darkness, the blood running like shadows over her body. I heard again the drops hitting the floor. She took another step, and her face became visible. When I saw it, I screamed.
I ran from the studio into the midst of the Night People. Though they were all about me, I collided with none of them, and they took no notice of me at all. I broke through them and ran. Alastair Street stretched before me, endless, serpentine ...
“Set free your dark side,” she had told me, more than once. Our quarrels, as I have said, had been dry and
intellectual for the most part—at first. But we both had gradually descended into that gulf between us, accusing each other of darker things, things worse than infidelity and uncaring, worse even than disparaging each other’s talent. For at the bottom of that gulf lay madness—the ultimate artistic goal. And we had come to suspect each other of it; and from there, to encourage it.
I don’t know how long it took me to reach the steps that rose to the surface streets. At one point I heard shouting behind me, glimpsed one of the Underground City’s security personnel running after me. Perhaps they had seen me break the glass. I did not stop running.
It was night, of course, when I emerged. In Xavier Square the crowds were thick and varied: teenagers with spiked hair and tattooed cheeks; gays in leather, handcuffs locked on their belts; brightly-colored prostitutes. Their pervasive decadence seemed nothing, somehow, when I compared them with the sedate strollers I had seen. And yet they were the same; as I stumbled home, it seemed I could glimpse among the crowds gentlemen in ascots and bowlers, and ladies veiled in lace. It was the same endless night I had seen on Alastair Street—the same night in which I had left Samantha.
I had succeeded in my purpose, at least, though not in the way I had intended. The face that had emerged from the shadows in the studio had not been that of Courtenay’s model. Instead, I had seen what I needed to see to finish.
The Year's Best Horror Stories 14 Page 12