by John Moss
When she emerged from the bathroom, Morgan stood up and looked her over. “Good,” he said, in a burlesque of the dutiful spouse. “You look lovely today.”
“It’s a new outfit. An exact replica of the one I wore yesterday. Once you find your style, you stick with it.”
“Really,” he said. “You look fine.”
“I like you better sarcastic. What do you think of your friend’s English exploits?”
“We’ll talk on the road. Let’s grab our coffee and doughnut and get out of here.”
He drove, following the signs to Penetanguishene. She explained he needed the practice. They discussed the third binder, which was first in the deadly trilogy.
“Maybe it’s just fantasy,” he said. “A prelude to murder. If you read it as fiction, it’s brilliantly conceived. I know Madam Renaud’s in London. The Chamber of Horrors. I actually have bittersweet memories of being there, twenty years ago. It was a girlfriend thing. A sad parting. I’ve never told you about Susan.”
“There’s lot you haven’t told me, Morgan. I don’t need all the details. Was she nice? If it was sad, she must have been nice.”
“Too nice. The problem was she was too nice.”
“I can relate to that.” She paused, not sure if she could. “Why the Chamber of Horrors?”
“Just a place we knew,” he responded, trying to remember which of them had proposed meeting there. He had been on the Continent for months; they had already broken up after sharing a pair of adjoining bedsitters in Knightsbridge for the better part of a year. She had a child before she got married. She had flown over from London to Toronto for dinner, just before Morgan’s own wedding. Was that her idea or his? Was she married then or not?
Miranda’s voice penetrated his gnawing reverie.
“For Shelagh Hubbard, Madame Renaud’s was almost inevitable. I ran across a reference when I was checking her out. She actually worked there after she finished a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of London — it was an offshoot from studies in forensic reconstruction, working with wax to recreate faces. It didn’t seem relevant. It certainly does now. But it sounds like a B movie — Vincent Price on the late show.”
“That’s the point, isn’t it? Turning cliche into reality.” Morgan stared at the landscape ahead as the highway rolled under them, periodically reminding himself he was at the wheel. He felt distracted but amused. “Wax figures look dead, even when they’re not meant to. If she really did use cadavers waxed-over to create realistic corpses, and then systematically insinuated her macabre creations into the displays in an actual Chamber of Horrors, like she claims, well, it’s diabolical, isn’t it? Using the dead to simulate death!”
“She’d have to be very good. Not morally speaking, of course.”
“If she really did it, and if no one noticed, she must have been very, very good. She would have treated the bodies to resist decomposition, then sealed and moulded them to the precise shape of the murder victims they were meant to displace on display. It’s all like a gruesome parody of something. Of death itself?”
“Murder victims disguised as murder victims — it’s unspeakably grotesque.” In spite of herself, Miranda could see the black humour. “Can you imagine her hanging out at The Nag’s Head or The Bunch of Grapes? She’d be eyeballing the clientele for who would make the best corpse.”
“Picking up Shelagh would have been a deadly affair.”
“She picked up women, too, you know. By my count she did five, altogether: two men and three women.”
“If you can trust her notes,” said Morgan, who would have preferred not to. “She even enjoyed the existential implications of dealing with the discards. Stripped of their bloodied costumes and rouged to make them appear less dead, they became anonymous in the storage rooms among fallen rock stars, disgraced royalty, and yesterday’s politicians.”
“Surely disgraced royals were kept on view.”
“The hard part was getting the bodies there, I would think.”
“You were reading too quickly, Morgan. Her victims came of their own accord, after hours. She did a Ph. D. at Oxford, postdoc at London; she knew how to turn on the charm, English-wise. She would lead them on an esoteric adventure, their visits shrouded in secrecy. Who could resist the chance for a clandestine tour of the Chamber of Horrors? That was her lure: not sex — morbid curiosity. Death on display.”
“That seems familiar! What I find upsetting is how easily I entered into the story.”
After a contemplative period of silence, Miranda spoke. “Did you ever think about how the way death is experienced was changed by twentieth-century technology?”
“I’ll assume you’re not talking about embalming and the art of the mortuary.”
“No. Being dead.”
“So, we’re not talking about the collapse of religion and the downgrading of heaven and hell to moral analogies?”
“No. From the point of view of the living, death has lost its absolute edge.”
“You are about to launch into a discourse on war as entertainment, the ultimate opiate of the masses?”
“Yeah, partly. World War I, grainy black-and-white photographs. World War II, photo essays by Frank Capra and Margaret Bourke-White. Vietnam, television. A generation later, we watch the wretchedness of Afghanistan as virtual reality. Buffy the Vampire Slayer elicits a more visceral response. No, that’s not what I mean. I was thinking about how different death is since we’ve been able to record our live presence electrically and electronically. The dead aren’t dead in the same way. Death is no longer an absolute.”
“It is for the dead,” said Morgan.
“But not for the living. I have tapes of my mother’s voice, photographs of my father. I can turn on television and see Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. I can watch old Bette Davis in a horror flick, and then watch young Bette Davis devouring long-gone leading men with her inimitable eyes, and so on, flipping back and forth through her life by the press of a button on my remote control.”
“Not through her actual life, Miranda. Don’t confuse the person with the roles she plays.”
“Yes! Her life. I know she was an actress — but it’s the actress who ages, rejuvenates, plays many parts. Of course, my mother’s voice on tape is not my mother, my father’s pictures are not my father. But they connect me to them — the ways she sounded, the ways he looked.”
“It’s still the living who provide narrative context for the dead to endure. I would see and hear the same images very differently. Technology doesn’t change death, it only allows for different illusions than the ones offered by the past.”
“It always comes down to the story, doesn’t it?” said Miranda.
“Renaud’s Chamber of Horrors re-enacts crimes. Stories. The display of mutilated bodies and faces distended with horror wouldn’t mean much without a narrative context. It would be gratuitous, and in very bad taste.”
“That’s why her waxworks project was a failure, not because she had no witnesses to celebrate her prowess. That may have been part of it, but, really, it’s because the stories were already determined. Jack the Ripper, Dr. Crippen… They weren’t hers. She had to animate her own story. Or stories; the ghoulish complexity of her Hogg’s Hollow project was only a prelude to what she had in store for you, Morgan. Or, at least, for your charred remains. I wonder if she’d have been clever enough to leave a few bones missing. For authenticity. I wonder what she’d leave out.”
They drove without talking for a while, enjoying the quiet, which was broken only by the hum of the tires and the low rumble of the engine. Trees and fields swept by, hills carried them high and dropped away. Occasionally one would speak, and the other would nod.
Before they reached Penetanguishene, Miranda directed Morgan to turn off onto a sideroad. After several more turns and a sharp descent into a valley that broke the grid pattern of the concession roads, they rose high onto a limestone plateau where they could see in the distance a stone church and recto
ry rising imperiously above the landscape. There was not a barn or a farmhouse in sight. They pulled up between the two buildings, beside a midnight blue van with the name Alexander Pope in cursive script on the driver’s door. Morgan leaned forward to peer up at the steeple.
“This is eerie,” he said as he got out of the car. “A deserted church, an empty manse, in the middle of nowhere. So much for a hamlet called ‘Beausoleil.’ No cross on the steeple, no sign of a cross or crucifix except in the graveyard.” He nodded in the direction of the derelict cemetery on the far side of the church, surrounded by a tumbledown stone wall. “Do Catholics call it a manse?”
Morgan walked over to the low wall. It struck him as strange, when the church building itself appeared to be in good repair, that graves should be left unattended, with brambles and weeds running riot among toppled monuments, the occasional spire still thrusting toward heaven, although most were on precarious angles. The rectory, on the other side of the church, was a standing ruin.
“I don’t get it,” he said as he returned to where Miranda was standing in front of the church.
“What don’t you get?”
He did not respond. The parts didn’t fit; it was like they had entered a world gone slightly askew.
“Alexander told me it was deconsecrated in the late 1800s,” Miranda explained. “Maybe the graves were emptied, the bodies dug up and reburied.”
“Looks to me more like selective neglect. The church itself is okay.”
Miranda spread her arms wide to take in the empty horizon. “Not much call for bingo or euchre in Beausoleil.”
“The windows are intact. There’s no sign of vandalism. The grass is cut, the shrubs are trimmed.” He gazed up and down the concession road. “There’s no reason for a church to be here. It’s not an intersection, there’s no river for a village to grow on. No railway. There’re just miles and miles of miles and miles.” From close to the building he looked upwards, his eyes following the rough stone to the sky. “It’s imposing. I guess that was the idea, but who in God’s name would want to restore it?”
“I don’t think God had much to do with it,” Miranda quipped.
“Well, let’s take a look inside.”
CHAPTER TEN
Beausoleil
The interior of the church had been gutted, but it was immaculate, and still irredeemably a sacred place by virtue of the Gothic windows, soaring roof, and stone-slab floor. At first they did not see Alexander Pope working on a scaffold raised between two windows. They heard small sounds and, walking in that direction, they discovered him partially hidden by pillars. His back was to them and he seemed almost motionless. There was a large floodlight aslant to the ceiling, illuminating the wall in such a way as to cast no shadows. As they approached closer, they saw he was working with a scalpel, scraping away bits of plaster in small, delicate movements.
Above him the plaster had been stripped away, leaving a colourful mural with the bottom edge ragged, promising a revelation in the ecstatic gleam from the central figure’s eyes. There were smaller figures around her, their reduced size indicating lesser importance, not diminutive stature. She was a young woman, not much more than a girl, with flowers woven through her long hair like a Pre-Raphaelite siren. Around her head was a diffuse halo of radiant light. Her hands, which were just emerging from their plaster shroud, were turned palms outward, with blood-red signs of stigmata at their centres.
“Take a look at the others,” said Alexander Pope without looking around. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
To his left there were three murals that had already been revealed to the light. Whether they had been restored or the original colours had been preserved by their plaster shrouds, they were startling in their vivid portrayal of the same young woman. Both Morgan and Miranda gazed with astonishment at their exquisite beauty, an appreciation for the merging of aesthetics and the spiritual not at all tempered by their differing degrees of agnostic resistance.
The first panel showed her in a posture of acquiescence, dressed in the clothes of a Victorian farm girl. She was sweeping up, in what appeared to be the opulent austerity of a rectory kitchen, witnessed by a disturbingly animate crucifix looming from the wall. Two cassocks could be seen hanging from a peg rail on the adjoining wall. The slight smile on her face was curiously distracted; she seemed detached, as if her mind was on less worldly things than her domestic labours.
In the second panel, her features had softened. She was kneeling at prayer in landscape much like that surrounding the church on the limestone plateau. In front of her was a makeshift shrine of small boulders. The crucifix around her neck gleamed against the rough cloth of her sombre dress. Her eyes were raised to heaven, which seemed in the arrangement of shadows and light to be hidden by clouds that were about to spread open in divine revelation.
The third panel showed the young woman prostrate on the left side of the Virgin and the same young woman kneeling in adoration to her right. Mary, in the centre, stood apart from the landscape, not hovering in the air, but foregrounded and free of earth’s gravity, casting no shadow. Her right hand was raised, revealing a stigmata impressed on the palm. Her pale-blue robe draped sensuously over her body, portraying her as a worldly woman, and yet her face showed the innocence and sorrow of a suffering child. She was the maiden of Bethlehem and the grieving mother at Golgotha, the Queen of the World and Eve restored to the Garden. The young farm woman on her right gazed with rapturous wonder and seemed to be listening, as if she were hearing Mary’s voice inside her own head. She had become quite beautiful, her hair had fallen untangled across her shoulders, her eyes glistened, her lips parted softly, her skin glowed in a light emanating from within.
Miranda and Morgan were so enthralled with the narrative unfolding in such rich detail, neither of them heard Alexander Pope approach them until he spoke.
“Hello Miranda Quin, hello Detective Morgan. I didn’t realize it was you. Welcome to Beausoleil.” He pronounced the name in a mid-channel accommodation of both French and English: “Bo-slay.” “This is the Church of the Immaculate Conception — or was. I do try to keep it immaculate.” He chortled briefly at his own contrived wit. “It fell on hard times, you know. Welcome, welcome. I hadn’t been expecting you.”
“You invited me to pop in,” said Miranda, a little defensively. “So, here we are.”
“Of course. And you’ve brought your partner. Your other friend, Miss Naismith, she’s not with you? No, never mind. I’ve had a stream of visitors, more every week. It seems there’s some interest astir in the old place. How are you, Detective Morgan?”
“I’m fine, Mr. Pope. And you?”
“Enough of the formalities,” he said abruptly, unfolding his long arms and shaking Morgan’s hand vigorously. Then, leaning down and, with his hands clasping her shoulders, he kissed Miranda on both cheeks. “I really would like a bit of a break. May I show you around?” He loomed over them both, a gaunt figure in the unusually bright but indirect illumination, his frame almost skeletal under work clothes caked in plaster dust. His cheekbones pushed against his sallow skin and his eye sockets were starkly circumscribed by the marks left from his safety goggles. His face showed a stubble of three or four days neglect. Miranda judged that he had been working obsessively on his newest project and she felt a strong nurturing urge, wishing she could protect him from his own excesses.
“Please,” she said, “if we’re not interfering.”
“Tell us about the paintings,” asked Morgan, genuinely interested.
“Well, I have to proceed slowly. They are frescoes done by an anonymous master, one of those itinerant artists from the old country — I’d suspect in this case from Tuscany — making his way through the new world until domesticity took hold in one form or another and he became a common immigrant, like the rest of us, one generation or another in our past. His offspring probably became bakers or farmhands or lawyers. He was inspired, yes, and you’ll notice he was also very accomplished —
trained in the best schools of Florence. And, fortunately for us, his work was covered over in haste. Relatively little damage was done. If anything, the work has been preserved. The plaster covering was smeared on, in some places it barely adheres, nothing more holding it in place than inertia and the will of the Lord.”
“Are you Roman Catholic?” asked Morgan, surprised by Pope’s turn of phrase.
“In spite of the papal surname, I am not. In fact, I am rather opposed to religion. I was speaking of the Lord ironically, Detective. I am sure whatever God might have dwelled in this building has long since taken refuge in Rome.”
“Yet,” observed Morgan, “there is something of the sacred remaining.”
“Perhaps the residue of God, Detective. The deity has fled but his influence remains. Gods do not die easily in the Western world.”
Miranda found his condescension irritating, although it didn’t seem to bother Morgan, perhaps because she wanted to like the man and Morgan was indifferent. She was fascinated by the quality of the frescoes, but Morgan’s interest had shifted to the story they revealed and it would take more than an overbearing interlocutor to keep him from finding how it unravelled.
“Are you doing the restoration for the Church?” Miranda asked.
“Absolutely not. This building no longer exists as far as the Church is concerned. A private enterprise — my mentors.”
“Art lovers, no doubt,” she said.
“It is a labour of love, yes it is.”
“So tell us, Alexander. What happened here?” Morgan asked.