She was certain the sound was coming from beneath her feet. She looked to the center of the room. The bare wood floor here was scuffed and deeply scratched. Hinges and a metal handle stood out in stark contrast to the dark wood.
The old woman slipped through this hatch. There’s a tunnel down there that connects to all of the other hidey-holes in London. Why the fuck not?
Eleanor tugged at the handle. The trapdoor was locked from below. Whoever was down there must be able to get out on their own then. She felt a bit relieved at this revelation.
The smell hit her. A reptilian musk. Rotting meat. Like a poorly maintained vivarium.
The old woman moves about freely down there. Unnoticed. In secret.
The wailing increased in volume, though the tone was different now, a raw uninhibited quality to its fervor.
The hungry cry of a newborn baby.
Eleanor stepped back. Should she call out to make sure everything was ok? Ring the police? She backed out of the room. Abrupt, hurried steps led her to the entrance. She left the front door in the same position she’d found it. None of this was any of her business. She’d gone poking her nose in where she shouldn’t have. Best to leave well enough alone.
All of her actions were familiar, like an old videotape recorded over long forgotten shows, fleeting images of the original programming peeking through.
It had started to rain while she was inside. Thick, oily drops clung to everything. She rolled her grocery cart back to her flat, the soggy contents of the bags sloshing as the wheels caught every crack and bump in the sidewalk.
When she arrived home she closed the blinds so she wouldn’t have to see the neighbor’s flat.
The pattern had acquired Eleanor’s distinct chin and subtle shape of her forehead, yet retained the sunken black blemishes where eyes should be. It looked as if it had been intentionally sketched by a child with charcoal powdered hands, slapping their palms against the wall, wiping shadows across the surface. A trickle of moisture had further distorted the visage, lengthening it into a wedge shape not unlike a snake’s head. The hair was vibrant, growing further up the wall and across the ceiling.
Eleanor wasn’t staring at her own face. She was seeing things that simply weren’t there, convincing herself that the water-stain hair was undulating with supple life. She’d been rash enough to enter a stranger’s home—she simply didn’t have her head screwed on right at the moment. Everything was coming across as threatening due to stress.
She took a sip of Merlot from a juice glass, the daffodil design circling the base faded and chipped. A dark flake floated in the pink liquid. She let her mouthful trickle back into the glass, set it on the knife gouged Formica counter. There was some currant squash in the small refrigerator, but the thought of drinking the beverage weak left a cloyingly sweet memory in her mouth.
Lydia had texted a reminder that the art exhibit was that evening, so Eleanor had started on a new sculpture to get into the artistic mood of things.
But this one looked like all the others. Same dull expression. Same features. She no longer felt she was an artist, more like a forensic anthropologist sculpting a corpse’s visage from the remnants of a former life, resurrecting an identity lost to violence and decay. She’d tried to make a simple object, a bowl, a vase, anything except an anthropomorphic representation. But every time she manipulated a blob of clay it demanded it take the shape of the head she’d become all too familiar with.
She set her tools aside, pushed the modeling stand away in frustration. The wheels squeaked until it gently came to rest against the wall.
A walk around the neighborhood would put her in a better frame of mind. Fresh air, would do wonders. Best to have a clear head before visiting the gallery tonight.
The rain tapped her umbrella like impatient fingertips. She kept her head down, walking quickly, the need to stretch her legs and fill her lungs with untainted air more important than being aware of her surroundings. She only looked up briefly when passing the mysterious woman’s flat. The door was closed.
She walked with a frenetic pace until she’d reached Shoreditch and the bustling crowds.
Her umbrella scraped against a body. Eleanor turned to offer an apology. The businessman kept going, seemingly unaware of the intrusion. The drizzle and a fog of cigarette smoke thick around his shoulders made it appear as if his head was a lump of malleable clay, glistening with the silvery sheen of connective tissue.
Eleanor nervously walked against the milling masses, down the stairs into the tube station. Her right foot slipped on the slick pavement. She waved her Oyster card over the reader, walked through the gate. She closed her umbrella, head low with determination, dreading eye contact with any stranger. She didn’t know why this was of such concern, but the fear was so palpable she didn’t even look up after roughly bumping against someone exiting the train.
She stood inside the packed car, one hand holding a rail, the other gripping her umbrella as if it were a weapon. Passengers swayed listlessly as the train roared through dark tunnels. The lights grew dim, darkened, lit the interior again. Eleanor had the sense that people’s faces were jumping about every time the lights flickered, sliding from person to person, swapping identities. A bearded young man’s taciturn expression took the place of a woman wearing a headscarf who swapped the frown of a heavyset woman talking on her mobile who exchanged—
The train’s announcer bellowed the name of the next stop, snapping Eleanor out of her daydream. The car slowed. Before the doors even slid open, Eleanor pushed her way to the front of the exiting passengers. She ran up the stairs to the surface. The bustling crowd moved in an unnatural manner, as if they were extras in a film that was so low budget they had to use the same faces over and over again.
In her haste, she jostled an elderly woman. She stumbled to the ground despite Eleanor’s desperate attempt to slow her fall. Mortified, she moved to help her up.
It must have been the adjacent fish and chip shop’s blue-green florescent lights molding the woman’s waxen forehead, cheeks and mouth into something soft. The gray hair uncoiling from her bun only accentuated the impression her skull was indented where she’d pressed up against the cashpoint machine.
The woman raised her runny face and croaked a word that sounded more like a tarry bubble bursting than a coherent phrase.
Eleanor apologized profusely, but the old woman didn’t respond. She regained her composure, wobbled to her feet, moved along. The dull, acne pocked face of the chip-shop’s cashier stared at her from behind the window. A hazy oval, like a splotch of grease.
A panic attack. What else could account for the commuters changing into a stone-headed mob before her eyes? What other reason could there be for their faces congealing into stony visages?
Frozen mono-identities, manufactured statues. An assembly line of us all.
Anxiety and an artist’s imagination. Guilt over trespassing and snooping in an old woman’s home. That explained everything.
Everything.
Eleanor opened her umbrella and walked back to her flat as fast as she could on the slick pavement without risking a fall.
“The Shroud of Turin does not portray the face of Christ.” The short man stood just inches away from the tapestry. An unnamed artist had screen-printed the infamous image onto a sheet of denim, presumably as an anti-consumerist statement. “Don’t misunderstand, it is an acheiropoieton, but we are not gazing upon the visage of our Lord and Savior. The Turin cloak boasts the face of a demon.”
Eleanor gave a wry smile in acknowledgement. The strange man was a squat stack of a human being. He was perspiring heavily. Lydia was nowhere to be found. She was growing more and more concerned that her friend had yet to respond to any text messages.
Nothing but strangers here. Eleanor couldn’t retain the distinctive features of individuals in her memory. It was as if she’d been afflicted with a spontaneous case of prosopagnosia.
“You’re familiar with the Shroud?” the s
hort man asked without removing his gaze from Christ’s bloodied face. Thick glasses made the man’s eyes almost comically large.
“I’m familiar. Not made by hands. I don’t think the real shroud is miraculous or anything. It’s a medieval painting.” Eleanor scanned the room, hoping she’d be able to place Lydia’s pretty smile in the crowd.
“So is this art? Or sacrilege?” The little man waved his hand at the denim shroud as if offended.
Eleanor raised glass to lips to hide her smile. “Art. Then again, I think Marcel Duchamp was onto something.”
“Oh. So you do—”
Eleanor didn’t hear the rest.
A wave of déjà vu enveloped her. She didn’t belong here. This conversation had happened before, everything all too recognizable. She wasn’t standing in an art gallery holding a wine glass. She was in her flat holding a chipped juice glass and staring at something she couldn’t quite recall.
No, she could smell the short man’s cheap cologne. Feel the cool London air slip through an open window. Hear the pretentious conversations.
And she could see Vashti herself.
Vashti was striking. A tall, lithe woman in a tailored dark green suit. The lower half of her face was obscured by a red veil. She moved like a memory, effortless, yet not in a distinct enough manner to describe. That veil, her posture, the graceful way she greeted the guests, all seemed as if Eleanor had experienced this before.
She watched Vashti scrutinize the crowd. The sculptress’ perfectly shaped face refused to be fully hidden by her veil. Flawless skin meant whatever age her voice and body language suggested, her complexion reduced the years considerably. Straight silver hair fell to her waist. She was beauty and artistic genius personified.
Eleanor was certain she’d seen her before, and recently at that. They’d been close at some point. Had she passed her in the tube station?
Vashti’s eyes conveyed such an intense beauty Eleanor had to consciously keep herself from stepping back. Vashti stood near her sculptures. Eleanor walked over.
A glass fell, shattered against the floor.
Laughter.
Eleanor casually lowered her gaze down to a rock object. It looked like a fossilized internal organ.
Vashti touched her arm.
The corners of Vashti’s dark eyes wrinkled at an unseen smile. She leaned in close to Eleanor. Her veil rippled, “Imagine we’re all templates of one personality. Everything we are, everything that makes us what we are?” She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Simply the slight tweak of the predetermined. All set in stone.”
Eleanor didn’t know how to respond. She said the first thing that came to mind, “I love your sculptures. They’re beautiful.”
“You’re too kind. You like this one?” Vashti laid her long hand on the organic rock.
“It’s remarkable.”
“It’s mine,” Vashti said.
“I came here to see your work specifically.”
“No. I mean this is mine.”
Eleanor was confused. “Yes?”
The sculptures seemed restless. Shadows teased.
Eleanor’s hands were hard with dried clay and the bust before her was shaped into something so terrible she never imagined she was capable of sculpting such a thing. She needed a drink, but her glass of wine had something dark floating in it and there was squash in the small fridge but it didn’t sound appealing. Someone was sobbing outside her flat’s window.
She was mistaken. She was in the gallery, conversing with Vashti. She looked at the sculpture. It was labeled LITHOPEDION XXIV.
“It’s mine.” Vashti whispered. “All of them are mine.”
The gallery filled with the musk of snakes deep underground.
This had all already happened.
Eleanor thanked Vashti, excused herself, turned towards the exit.
A newborn screamed.
Eleanor was back in her flat, staring at the smudge of face on her wall.
She wasn’t sure how she came to be here. Some internal clock told her hours had passed, or perhaps hours had yet to pass. She remembered heads teetering like hardened clay busts on rickety armatures. Calcified hands losing their grip on wine glasses.
Guests toppling, shattering into powdery segments on the floor.
The ominous possibility that she hadn’t left the flat in weeks, if not months, slithered at the back of her brain. This thought was distant, hysterical delirium, a miasma of divine dreaming. An omnipresent gaze locked on the never-ending gaze that stared the world frozen. Eleanor was so tired, her limbs unnaturally heavy. Where was Lydia?
She could hear what she hoped was the fox rummaging around in the dustbin in the alley. She knew it wasn’t her old furry friend. The sound wasn’t delicate enough; it was the raucous noise a heavy body makes undulating across the ground.
And that incessant crying, that damned crying, so sorrowful, omnipresent, as if it would be there even after death.
How long had she been here in her flat? Why was she so thin? Why was she ravenous? She’d closed the blinds when she’d left earlier. Someone had opened them.
No, the blinds had been removed and lay in a crumple on the floor.
She was mistaken. The window was gone.
A gaping hole connected her flat to the alleyway to the neighbor’s sparse flat and the drapes were coiling around and over themselves in humps forming a torso that rose and tapered into a terrible yet delicate face perched daintily up top like an obscene ornament.
The face was no longer wearing a veil. She spoke in a lovely voice,
I am the sorrow in beauty.
Eleanor didn’t have to glance at her sculptures to know that they all wore her own countenance. She looked to the face-stain on the wall. It was as if she were looking into a mirror. All I ever dreamed of was to be the one to determine how to attain happiness.
She inhaled before her lungs were fully ossified, exhaled before her body became too stiff to speak,
“If my heart turns to stone, I won’t feel it shatter.”
She managed a wan smile.
The stain smiled back.
AN INFESTATION OF STARS
When Lilly opened the colorfully wrapped parcel she thought it was a unique edition of the New Testament—of what version she was uncertain for the spindly messiah on the cover was unlike any painting of Christ she’d ever seen. The artist portrayed the crucifix’s wood as ravaged by tunneling and flanked by weird cherubs with rotund bellies, a multitude of growths sprouting from their ankles, concluding at the nape of their necks in imitation of wings. The protuberances reminded Lilly of a species of lichen that grew on the bottom of decayed tree limbs she’d turn over in the woods in hopes of finding interesting bugs.
“Happy birthday, sweetheart. Hope you like it.”
“Thank you, momma. Papa. It’s beautiful.”
Lilly’s mother and father traveled the world studying various cultures amongst strange and wondrous corners of the Earth—she was a sickly thing afflicted with a neurological disorder that confined her to moving about with a crutch.
They’d spent most of their careers collecting data on a religious sect who’d dubbed themselves the Drachtig, even going so far as to relocate to the cult’s isolated compound near the Pontoetoe village. Here they focused their anthropological research on the Drachtig’s elaborate rituals, most of which were inspired by their reverence of insects.
As such, Lilly’s parent’s souvenirs of icons in the shape of grotesque bug-gods never struck her as odd. And while their gift of a Bible that year was somewhat predictable, its contents were quite unusual.
The book’s interior was embellished with art representing various world’s faiths, many of which Lilly didn’t recognize. The pictures ran the gamut from traditional Christian images—one appeared to be from a hand block print depicting Mary and Child, their eyes scarlet pools of kermes dye—another a suiboku painting of the Buddha under a Bhodi tree.
His abdomen
was strangely articulated.
There were more abstract works as well, with colors swirling like the convoluted whorls and cells of a subterranean nest. Lilly spent hours holding a magnifying glass to the pages, revealing details that seemed impossible to apply without some mechanical assistance; the human eye simply could not see such vivid detail unaided. Every page was exquisite, every work of art within overwhelmingly detailed.
The book had no publishing information or interior text whatsoever.
Lilly obsessed over one particular painting depicting two of those disturbing cherubs from the cover rolling a stone away from a tomb opening. There was an insinuation of movement within, a subtle effect of contrasting light suggesting agitation in the pitch black interior. When she held her magnifying glass over the cave’s opening it seemed not one entity within but a seething mass.
That painting haunted her sleep.
Lilly’s father died under mysterious circumstances shortly after her birthday. There was no autopsy and his cremation guaranteed that the cause of death remain unexplained. Lilly was convinced that his murder (for she was certain his demise had been at the hands of the Drachtig) and the book were linked, though she searched its pages in vain for any definitive proof.
Her mother was inconsolable. She took to long walks or reading anthropology publications in privacy.
It was an easy matter for Lilly to freely search her father’s study. She rummaged through his desk and found several correspondences her mother had exchanged with anthropologist colleagues.
These missives explained that the body had been mutilated. The locals suspected he’d expired from the lethal bites of the Paraponera clavata. Lilly was a clever child and found this quite strange; while that species of ant bite was excruciatingly painful, these particular insects were not known to disfigure their prey.
She searched the drawers thoroughly for more documents and found a crumpled carbon copy dated June 14th, five years prior. The carbon impression was faded, her father’s handwriting hurried so much of the page was difficult to read. One particular section caught her eye:
Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales Page 2