by Matt Drabble
Benedict Worthington staggered up the stairs, noisily reaching the top and crashing through the door. Pierce saw that his eyes were glazed and frozen; that was never a good sign. Benedict should have been on a whole battery of medication, but he chose to administer his own. Pierce did not know, nor did he care to ask just what substances Benedict pumped into his body, but they could not have been healthy choices.
As Benedict entered the apartment, Hugo stood to greet his host. Pierce shuddered as the two men locked gazes and the air crackled between them. He could feel the electricity as if the unholy union were forged in fire and brimstone. Deep in his seventeen-year-old gut, he knew that nothing good could ever come of this meeting.
And he knew that he should run.
‘I think we could use a little coffee, boy,’ Hugo commanded, and Pierce’s legs moved involuntarily.
Two months later Pierce was finally able to sneak a peek at what Benedict had been working on around the clock, driven like never before. The negotiations between Benedict and Hugo had been kept from him. He didn’t know what, if anything, Benedict was being paid for the portrait, but he felt instinctively that money wasn’t the currency in play.
Hugo had commissioned a portrait of himself and his wife. As far as Pierce knew, Benedict had never worked on anything similar before. His usual work was dark and disturbing, frightening images dragged from a deranged imagination. Pierce had once seen a book cover in the local library for a set of books by HP Lovecraft. The twisted and scary images had haunted his dreams that night, and they were the closest thing he had seen to Benedict’s work. Quite how or why a famous and wealthy man like Hugo Montague had chosen a man like Benedict to produce his painting, Pierce had no idea. Even stranger than choosing Benedict was his ability to gain such devotion and concentration from the artist. He had never seen Benedict so focussed before, nor so sober for so long. He would work long arduous hours before collapsing into a deep slumber. Pierce was in the background for all this; he kept the apartment clean, the art supplies stocked, and the cupboards full.
And his eyes open.
A week went by after Hugo’s initial visit before he returned with his wife in tow. Benedict had spent the week on the ragged edge of panic at the thought of Hugo not returning. He had paced the apartment endlessly, not working on anything else, not leaving to search for his usual debauchery – only waiting.
When Hugo finally made his appearance with his wife lagging behind, Benedict was overcome with relief. He buzzed around Hugo like a star struck teenager confronted with their matinee idol.
Pierce endured Benedict’s increasingly barbed comments; he had not known what would be worse – Hugo reappearing or his continued absence.
When at last Hugo stormed into the apartment larger and louder than Pierce remembered, his sheer force of personality overwhelmed all before him. His wife whispered after him, a small pocket of timidity and nervousness. She was not a particularly short woman, but she seemed diminished, as though she wasn’t there at all. Pierce figured that Hugo must cast a shadow too large to walk in.
With a dismissive flap of the hand she was introduced by her husband merely as “Eleanor”. Pierce thought that beneath her permanently creased and worried brow she was pretty enough. Her hair was a dainty brunette wave; her figure was petite with narrow hips and a slim waist. She wore a knitted suit that seemed impractical in the current warm weather, but nevertheless looked stylish and elegant.
Pierce offered her a small smile, but her eyes darted nervously away from making even the briefest of contacts. Pierce felt for her immediately; he could only imagine what it must be like to be constantly surrounded on all sides by the sheer overwhelming magnitude of the great Hugo Montague.
Their sittings were long and uncomfortable. Every day for six weeks, for hour after hour they came and sat. Eleanor at all times endured silently; Pierce had imagined that a man such as Hugo Montague would have little patience, but just as his wife did, he endured too. Whatever he was waiting for, it had to be worth it.
Pierce watched as Benedict suffered setback after setback: whatever he was trying to produce just wasn’t coming. Every night after the Montagues left, Pierce would watch Benedict staring at his work, his face screwed in concentration and deep in thought. Pierce had witnessed many tides of Benedict’s emotions, but never this – never such stillness and calm.
After about six weeks the Montague’s part was done. Pierce never heard any discussions between the parties, but one day they were there as usual and the next they were gone. Benedict began to bury himself in the painting to the expense of everything else. Pierce watched as his employer stopped eating, drinking, sleeping – practically living. His face grew gaunt and haunted; his eyes fell into deep dark sockets that no longer saw the world that existed outside his painting. He grew thin and pasty, his skin was flaking and his clothes billowed around him. Despite his frequent bad treatment, Pierce still felt a sense of loyalty, enough to show concern for Benedict’s condition. But his efforts were mainly ignored.
Normally Pierce mixed Benedict’s oils for him, but after the Montagues left, Benedict became increasingly secretive about mixing his own paints, and had changed his medium from oils to Acrylic. Soon a timetable of sorts set into a familiar routine. Pierce would arrive at six in the evening to find Benedict stirring his own mixtures. He would normally be draped in a dark dressing gown that was beginning to look at least two sizes too big, swamping his emaciated frame. Pierce would clean away the previous day’s mess and set the coffee to percolate; it seemed that at this point Benedict was running almost exclusively on coffee.
On the final night of Pierce’s employment he arrived at the same time as usual, only to find the apartment empty. The room smelt badly of body odour and a strange pungent, ripe aroma that only seemed to exist when Benedict was in one of his worst moods.
He opened the windows and let in the gloomy dusk light and hopefully some fresh air. Standing in the centre of the room was the easel, covered with a clean canvas cloth. He stood transfixed at the vision before him; as Benedict had guarded it voraciously, he had not yet caught even the smallest glimpse of the portrait.
Creeping across the open floor, he paused to check that he was truly alone.
All he could hear was the soft drip, drip, dripping of a tap in the dirty bathroom. He made a mental note to turn the tap off just as soon as he had caught a peek at the painting. He tiptoed across the floor, wincing every time a floorboard creaked. With his ears straining for the sound of Benedict’s return, he stole to the easel and with a trembling hand tightly gripped the covering canvas.
Still echoing menacingly around the empty apartment was the soft drip-dripping in the bathroom. Slowly and delicately he pulled back the canvas sheet. He so desperately wanted to see what lay underneath, but he also desperately did not want to see it. As he closed his eyes and pulled, the dripping echoed off the hollow walls.
He stood in the middle of the room for at least a minute. It wasn’t a huge amount of time, but it seemed to stretch out endlessly. All the while the soft dripping was his only company. Eventually he opened his eyes, ever so slowly, just a crack at a time.
Finally the Montague Portrait stood before him. It was just a painting after all. He had no idea what he had expected, but it wasn’t a normal portrait that he saw. He felt both crushed and relieved – the sky had not fallen in around his ears; he was merely looking upon a painting.
But the dripping tap finally shattered his last nerve. As his annoyance and frustration got the better of him, he stormed into the bathroom to silence it.
Only it wasn’t the tap that was dripping.
Benedict Worthington was lying in the bath, his body ashen white and drained of life. His right arm was hanging over the side of the cast iron tub, and in spite of his heart having stopped gravity ensured that until now a steady drip of his blood had fallen to the floor in small crimson splashes from his slashed wrist.
Pierce staggered back out of
the room. He felt powerless, like a child again. He had been the man of his house for as long as he could remember, but now he was once more a whimpering child.
He stumbled towards the fridge hoping to find a bottle of something to take the edge off his fear. He found the fridge to be strangely cool rather than cold. Inside there were no food supplies of any kind, just pots of paint and bottles of red liquid. Benedict had been mixing his own acrylic paints during the last few weeks, but he now realised with horror what he might have been adding to some of them to thin them down. He lifted one of the red bottles and sniffed gently at the contents. It was thick and smelled of copper. He’d had enough nosebleeds in his young life to know the smell of blood.
Just then the lift exploded into life and began to rise; Pierce hoped that perhaps help of some kind was on the way. But when the doors opened and Hugo walked out, his heart sank further than he thought possible. Hugo marched straight into the room as though he owned the place, and stood before the portrait. He seemed larger and taller than before, and Pierce was grateful that he hadn’t appeared to register on the man’s radar.
‘Perfect,’ Hugo mused to himself. ‘Just perfect.’
Pierce stood idly by as Hugo hefted the painting off the easel, turned and without another word strode past him. He watched Hugo Montague hold the painting under one powerful arm and close the lift doors with the other.
For the briefest of seconds their eyes locked across the room and Hugo smiled. Pierce felt his seventeen-year-old bladder let go and spill its contents down his leg.
It was a smile that would haunt him until the day he died.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HITCHING A RIDE
Travis sat back in the kitchen chair and digested the old man’s tale. After Charlotte’s and Delaney’s, it was now the third such story that had been spun before him. Despite his grounding in reality, he was a firm believer in the Sherlock Holmes old adage that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. All three tellers of tales had no reason as far he could fathom for lying to him.
‘So how are you faring with what you have found so far, Mr Parker?’ Pierce said, his voice croaky as though he had not spoken at such lengths for many years.
‘It’s certainly interesting,’ Travis said noncommittally.
‘And you, my dear?’ Pierce asked Charlotte.
‘It ticks a few boxes,’ she replied, lost in her thoughts.
Pierce slowly nodded his head. ‘Well now, and what are your plans from here?’
‘That depends on where you’re going to send us,’ Travis said. ‘I’m guessing that you have another link in the chain, and right now you’re wondering whether or not to share that with us.’
‘You still mean to go on, after what I’ve told you, after what you already know?’
Travis stared into the old man’s disbelieving eyes. ‘I – that is we,’ he added, sensing Charlotte’s will forcibly beside his own, ‘have no choices, Mr Barnes. For different reasons, this is a path that neither of us can turn away from.’
The air was cool and silent between them for a couple of minutes that for Travis stretched into an eternity.
Finally Pierce spoke. ‘All right, damn you. I’m an old man who has lived in the shadow of that bloody painting my whole life. If I haven’t got much longer on this earth, then maybe I should see this damn business ended – one way or the other.’
Travis watched as the old man wrestled with his conscience.
‘You must go to Florence. Go to the Teatro Comunale di Firenze. It’s an old opera house from the 1800s. If you want to learn about Hugo Montague and just who the man was, then that is where you must go. All his secrets are there, along with the secrets of the portrait.’ Pierce sat back heavily in his chair; his face was drained, but strangely content.
‘They are going to come at you now if they haven’t already,’ he said after a pause. ‘The further down this road that you get, the more they will come after you.’
‘Who will?’ Charlotte demanded.
‘They all will, on all sides until they get what they want,’ Pierce said with a sad look in his eyes.
Travis was about to demand details when the front doorbell rang. Pierce’s whole body jerked to attention and his face creased with dread. ‘No matter how long a man lives,’ he muttered to himself, ‘it is never enough.’
‘Who is it?’ Charlotte asked gently. ‘We can help you.’
Pierce smiled with bitterness in his eyes. ‘Not even God himself could help me now. You must go and go quickly. There is an old passageway through the cellar that leads down the hill and into the village. It’s an old smugglers’ hideaway but it still works.’
‘Please, let us help you,’ Charlotte pleaded as the front door was being heavily banged.
‘Go, you must go,’ Pierce insisted.
‘But we can –’
‘Go now!’ Pierce roared, his throat hoarse with the effort.
Travis grabbed Charlotte’s arm and yanked her to the door Pierce was pointing at. With a lingering look at Pierce and tears in her eyes she tugged against Travis as the front door splintered and exploded inwards.
Charlotte’s struggles weakened as Travis dragged her through the kitchen and flung open the door with his spare hand. Whoever had broken that imposing front door down was not someone he wished to engage in any kind of confrontation. Pierce had made his choice willingly, and it was not their place to second guess his decision.
The stairs were narrow and dark, and he had to wipe several cobweb strands from his face as they descended.
‘Here,’ Charlotte whispered from behind him and placed a small metal torch in his hand.
The beam was powerful enough for them to find their way down behind the now closed door. He could hear raised but muffled voices from the kitchen as Pierce greeted his intruders. He felt Charlotte stop behind him, as though she was debating returning to help.
‘We can’t,’ he said, although he would also have preferred to help, but he knew they couldn’t – not if they wanted to get out alive.
He reached the cellar floor first and swung the torch from corner to corner, worried as there was no immediately visible escape. The cellar had a musty damp smell, and was empty save for the large wine racks that lined the rear wall.
‘Scooby-Doo it,’ he whispered to Charlotte, who looked at him blankly.
Rather than explain he rushed to the racks and began to look for a bottle that would hopefully reveal a secret passage. Considering everything he had heard to date, it didn’t feel like an overly ridiculous thing to try. He shone the torch along the rows of dusty labels. Most of them were written or printed in French and as the voices above grew angry and louder his brain tried frantically to translate the words. Suddenly there was a soft but hollow sounding crack. While Travis was wondering what the noise was, Charlotte elbowed him out of the way.
‘Move!’ she said as loud as she dared as she shoved his careful studying of the racks aside.
Grabbing bottles desperately, avoiding all pretence of subtlety, she started hurling the bottles aside and shaking the shelves.
‘Listen! Gunshot,’ she said as she worked.
Travis stood rooted to the spot, praying that they wouldn’t be heard. Just then he noticed a strange but familiar smell wafting down under the kitchen door. Charlotte was too concerned with the sound of a gun to notice the smell of the gas.
‘Quicker!’ he shouted.
Just as he began to think the search was fruitless and their end would come under several tonnes of beautiful French masonry, his hand fell upon a bottle that did not come away from the rack. It merely pulled out about six inches, revealing a square gap within the shelf unit. The gap was only about four feet high by four feet wide, but it was enough to squeeze through. Feeling gallant he shoved Charlotte through the gap first and swiftly followed. The gunshot had been worrying, but the smell of gas concerned him far more.
They stu
mbled along a dark passageway that looked as though it had been carved through the rock. The floor sloped downwards and he could only hope that they were heading to safety. Somewhere back in the cellar he had dropped the torch and he cursed his carelessness as they staggered forward in the dark.
The sudden roar of a thunderous explosion above them echoed down the passageway. It seemed to Travis as if the world was caving in around them. Dirt and dust fell from the low ceiling and he feared the worst: if the house had gone up, then they were standing in a readymade funnel for the fire to race along. He felt the air around them suck inwards as though the oxygen was being dragged away to feed a hungry beast.
Spotting a dim light at the end of the passageway he shoved Charlotte headfirst towards it. He felt the heat scorch the damp earth around them as the flames were forced along the natural exhaust. He ran faster, keeping Charlotte in front of him, pushing until his legs burned with acid and his lungs were fit to burst.
The light grew closer as the heat grew hotter and still he ran with his head bent forward and his hands outstretched. Just as they reached the light he could see that the exit was obscured by something, and prayed that it was breakable. As the fire licked at his back and burned the hair on his neck he gave all that he had left of his strength. The light was all around them when he realised it was only shrubbery blocking the exit to the tunnel, but it was too late to slow down. The fire from the gas explosion thrust them forward, out of the tunnel. Travis felt the ground disappear beneath him as they were shot through a cave seemingly on the side of a cliff face, and then he was falling. The blue ocean rushed up to meet him and he could not catch his thoughts or his breath as he crashed unprepared into the icy sea. His mouth opened and the salty water gushed in as he sank into the blackness below.
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