by Brian Hodge
Absinthe was the key, but it had to be the Absinthe. His Absinthe. Was it right? Were the caves of ice raised from stalagmites of peppermint? Did they tingle with too-clean, too-bright taste, or would that fail as it blended with the wormwood’s bitter kiss? What did he see?
The mint drifted slowly, so thin it resembled a coin-shaped shard of ice. Belle watched, waited, as it fluttered down to the bottom of the glass. Fluttered and melted, flew and flown and – gone. The Absinthe swallowed it completely.
Art shuffled back into the room, but she paid no attention to him. She was staring into the green depths of the glass, mesmerized. He watched her, sipped on a fresh beer and frowned. Her hair dangled over and around the glass, and with the dim candlelight flickering, he could catch green glimmers. The wink of some huge, forgotten emerald. The eye of a great cat. Spider webs of dark hair shimmered around it, slender pale arms braced against the floor.
“Found the Flubber, then, did you?” he asked softly, tipping the bottle up again. He tasted the beer, but he remembered the bite of the Absinthe. He remembered her concentration, and how it shifted. He remembered long fingers and curved nails wrapped around a different glass, a slightly different green. He remembered the taste, and the burn. He remembered.
Art turned away and lurched through the room, down the hall that branched left and right. He turned left, not bothering with the lights. Two doors ignored, the third entered and he stopped, tilting the bottle up and closing his eyes. It was there. He knew it was there, didn’t need to see to know. Moonlight streamed in the window and glowed on the surface of a canvas that reclined on an easel and watched him in return.
To one side, on a dresser that had been recruited as a workbench, his palette sat, paint dried on the surface in careless blobs, brush dry-tight in the deep blue. The palette itself was a work of art, a reflection of pain. Art stepped closer and tipped the bottle back, gazing at the canvas. He turned, grabbed an empty beer bottle with a candle protruding from the top off the dresser and lit it with a match pulled from ratty jeans.
The light flared. The Heineken bottle candelabra gleam lit the surface of the canvas with a dim, yellow glow. Art drank, and stared, and drank again. He reached out with one hand and traced the brilliantly hued parapet of a domed cathedral, drawing down to rings of fruit trees, littered with bright-colored fruit, rooted in beds of flowers. Ice coated the surface of the cathedral-like doors. Behind, rising up and up the mountains disappeared into clouds that shimmered with color, a cotton-candy treat for the gods.
The temple was an entrance, doors swung wide to reveal a jeweled cavern within, lights placed strategically, every brilliant beam reflected and refracted, reflected again, dancing from surface to surface. It was a cave of ice. Art drained his beer and wished it was something stronger, something with ice he could swirl around in his mouth as he had when he painted. Cold, biting, distant. Footsteps drifted in, quiet and rhythmic, but Art didn’t acknowledge them.
The scent of Jasmine teased his nostrils. Art felt a small shiver run up his spine, but still, he didn’t turn. It was Sammy. She made little sound, even when she was in the room you had to concentrate to realize she wasn’t part of one of the tapestries on the wall, or an oversized doll. Sammy was an afterthought to the world, so paper-thin, frail and pale she shimmered and sometimes, if you didn’t look closely enough, she wasn’t there at all.
“It’s like she’s made of ice,” Belle had said one day, watching Sammy flit about the room. “The ice you see, just after it freezes, so thin on top of the water you know that if a wave rose up from inside, it would shatter.”
Art set the empty beer bottle beside the dried palette on the dresser. He placed the second bottle, with the burning candle on top, beside it.
“Pretty,” Sammy whispered, standing very close to his side and staring at the painting, as he knew she’d stared a thousand times before, when he was there, and when he was out. When he was sleeping. Sammy was fascinated with the painting, and when she wasn’t playing her music, she was staring at the painting.
At first, Art had been jealous. He liked Sammy, and he loved the painting. Both meant a lot to him, but neither would share. Sammy didn’t ignore Art, but she didn’t adore him. She adored the painting, worshiped it, and that was supposed to have been Belle. The painting was not for Sammy. The house, its walls dripping thick with images and angst, dreams and nightmares leaking into them, all of it was an extension of Belle. The painting was a failure. Art had failed, and for his pain, a woman he quietly and privately loved had fallen in love, instead, with his failure.
Art turned, pinched the wick of the candle between his thumb and forefinger, relishing the heat as he held tight. The burn. It took his thoughts away, for an instant. He turned and headed to the door. Sammy didn’t move. She stared at the painting as if the light had never shifted. As if seeing the same image she’d seen by flickering candlelight. As if she had never seen what Art had seen at all, or what he’d painted, but something more.
Head pounding, Art paced back toward the kitchen for another drink. Stronger, and more final. Something tall and amber and clinking with ice that would burn his throat as the candle had burned his fingers, numbing the pain.
The night had deepened. There was no light save that of the candles circling the room. On the floor in the center of the patterned carpet, Sammy sat quietly. On her lap, a wooden dulcimer rested. Art slumped deep into the depths of his old armchair, cloaked in shadow. Invisible. Occasionally the soft clink of ice on glass could be heard, accompanied by a quick flash of reflected gold tossed between whiskey and candle through a lens of smudged glass.
Belle knelt on the rug before Sammy. In Belle’s hand was a crystal goblet, glittering with ghosts of light from the candles. The goblet brimmed with dark liquid. The light was yellow. Shadows loomed. Art knew what was in the goblet, despite the lack of color. He knew the deep, emerald glitter, and the scent, crusted sugar and licorice, the hint of something more. Different, each time, and yet the demon’s breath called with the same voice. Words rose unbidden to Art’s lips. He whispered them, then downed another wet-hot gulp of whiskey.
“As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing.”
Belle swung her gaze around and caught Art’s eyes as he spoke. She smiled, nodded slightly, then returned her attention to the goblet, and the girl before her. Sammy gazed straight through Belle’s eyes. She didn’t see the glass, or the long, slender fingers that proffered it to her. She saw what she saw, and Art wondered, if his painting had been in the room, whether she would have stared into its depths in that moment. He shivered.
“Drink,” Belle whispered. Beseeching. Commanding. Neither of them had ever seen Sammy drink anything alcoholic. She seldom ate, and when she did, it was the picking of a bird, the brush of butterfly proboscis over nectar-soaked petals. No substance. Now, as they watched, Belle entranced, and Art aching, half-with the need for this moment to end badly, leaving him the one elevated moment, the knowing he had accomplished where another had failed, even if his offering had fallen short – and half with the need to know. She would drink, or she would turn away.
Art did not share Belle’s dream, her deep encroaching need. But he wanted to know. He held his breath.
Sammy took the goblet, staring into its depths as though seeing it for the first time. Her concentration was absolute. She held the goblet reverently, and Art knew the scent that reached her nostrils. He knew the taste that would burn against her tongue, the numbing, intoxicating sensations to follow.
Arthur had bought plenty of Absinthes since Belle had offered her goblet to him, but his purchases, steadily more covert and in-depth in their inception, had proven themselves to be nothing more than a series of well-crafted lies. They had gotten him drunk. They had similar taste, and, in a few cases, similar eff
ects, but they were miserable recreations. They were the work of a thousand clones, repainting over and over the work of the masters, vending their wares on dingy street corners and dreaming of castles of ice. Belle was a master. Belle might be the last master of a dead art. Art had not painted since the night she had him drink.
Sammy drank. One last second’s glance into the depths of the clear crystal, brimming with the green, and she shifted. Everything shifted. The glass tilted, Belle leaned back onto her heels, eyes glittering brightly, fixated on Sammy’s face. Her form. Her eyes, now closed, head drawn back and long hair dangling behind as she drained the glass. No sipping. No tasting. No hesitation.
Art expected her to spew.
Sammy only smiled. On her lap, the dulcimer sat silent. Potential sound embodied in curving wood and twisted strings. Gut strings. Strings that had once been the inner workings of a cat or a horse. Strings that had been part of the fabric of some living, breathing being, woven now to the wood, and to her fingers. Sammy didn’t speak. She didn’t even seem to breathe, though Art stared at her breasts. She fascinated him.
Then she moved. Pale hands tipped by wraith-fingers slid to the strings, pressed against the frets, exploring. No sound at first, only a flicker of fingertips that caused her nails to reflect the candlelight.
Somewhere in the past moment Belle had reclaimed the goblet without insinuating herself into Sammy’s motion. Like a snake. A dark snake, swaying in front of the one she would hypnotize, or the one who hypnotized her. Art lifted his drink, but it did not reach his lips. Eyes still closed, lips parted slightly, Sammy began to play.
There was a shift in the room. Subtle, hard to pin down, and so complete that every detail was skewed. Art held very still. His fingers trembled, wrapped around the icy glass, slick with condensation, but he didn’t risk draining it. He might make some vulgar, slurping sound that would break the spell. It would be his fault. His mind snapped into focus on his painting. It had been his fault that time, not again.
Belle paid no attention to Art or his frozen mime-with-a-whiskey-glass pose. Sammy paid no attention to Belle. The music soared. Pale fingers flew, dancing down chords and melodies with quicksilver speed and liquid grace. The notes didn’t fade. Not for Art. They hung before him, pixellating the air. He somehow found the coordination to set his glass on the table beside him. He did not see the table. He felt no chair.
The image of his painting grew before him. Each color blended to the next, woven from a tapestry of threads that never existed in the center of the room. Incense smoke and candle light? Too much alcohol and flashback images? Sammy played, and the questions faded to meaningless white noise in the back of Art’s mind.
The painting grew, hers now, his as well, but altered. More vivid. The notes danced along the iced parapets and flowed around the base of each tree, gushed from the geysers and taunted him with all that had remained just beyond his clouded vision. He heard the birds. He heard the rush of water and the echoes from within the caverns beyond the massive doors. He heard the rhythm of drums, marching feet, a horde. A heartbeat.
The image shivered, and Art held his breath. The music reasserted itself, and the room flickered into focus. He wanted to shake his head, but he held the urge in check. The notes weren’t stopping, merely shifting, and the smoky air coalesced once more. A face twisted and writhed, fighting its way through the gloom, drawing strength from the sound. The eyes flashed with emotion. Anger? Lust? Rage? Desire? Art gripped the arms of his chair and leaned back. The features snapped into focus for one long, lingering moment. The eyes focused, not on Art, but on Belle, who lay back now, knees spread wide and back arched, long hair flowing over her shoulders to the floor scant inches beneath. Her gaze was locked on that image, her lips parted and her breath came in heaving gulps.
Art stared, the image forgotten, the music lost as the motion of her body called out to him. His body reacted with stunning force and he gripped the chair more tightly still, hips arching, jerking. Her flesh was coated in a hot sheen of sweat. Her eyes were wide and her taut nipples strained against the loose fabric of her blouse.
A string broke.
The silence that followed this jarring sound was deep, molasses thick and cloying. The scent of the incense flowed in. The dim light of the candles drew back, dragging shadows across the floor and into the corners. The image snapped from existence so suddenly that breath ceased. Nothing moved. The room was a still life, each of them frozen in disbelief. In loss. In pain.
Belle broke first. Her carefully arched body, still stretching to the air above Sammy, curved like a tightly strung bow. Her eyes rolled back and Art saw her hands slip to her hair. Her shoulders slumped to the floor as she tore wildly at the long, silky locks. Her lips parted, but no sound emerged. Not at first. She drew breaths too deep, too full for any lungs and her jaw worked so fiercely that he feared she’d bite through her own tongue.
He started to rise, to go to her and pull her close and bring her back, to be the anchor that bound her to reality, despite the fuzziness in his own head. He nearly made it to his feet before she screamed.
The sound pierced Art to the core of his soul. He slapped his hands ineffectually over his ears, but it had no effect on Belle’s tortured wails. The sound vibrated through his skin, seeped into his pores and resonated through his senses. His nails dug into the flesh of his cheeks and he pressed his hands so tightly to his ears that the pressure threatened to burst his skull. He heard her as if he were kneeling beside her, ear pressed to her soft red lips. There was no escape.
Art dropped to his knees, and the screams slowly died to silence. The dulcimer was silent as well. Art eased the pressure of his palms on the sides of his head, and very gently opened his eyes. Belle had not moved. She remained arched against the floor, eyes closed and her hands tightly gripping long handfuls of her own hair.
Art leaned closer and slid his arms beneath her, one hand in the small of her back, the other behind her head. He held her there, afraid to lift her free of the floor. Afraid of her anger.
So quietly that it was difficult to be certain she’d spoken at all, Sammy’s voice broke the silence. Art glanced at her, shocked again and unable to react in any way other than to listen.
“A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail.”
Belle’s eyes flickered. Opened. Art turned to her and watched her face. She barely breathed. Her entire frame shook, trembling with the strain of holding the position she’d contorted herself into as she screamed, but she was unwilling to shift. Art held her very still, and very carefully, not daring to speak and break the silence. The air was a miasma of silence. Sammy had returned to her mute scrutiny of things unseen. Her fingers lay limp on the strings of the dulcimer.
The glass, only a short time before brimming with liquid emeralds and alive with promise, lay canted to one side on the floor. A very thin trickle of absinthe felt its way tentatively over the rim and seeped into the carpet.
With excruciating care, Belle released her grip and let her hair slide back and down over the carpet. Over Art’s hand. She closed her eyes, relaxed her breathing, and very softly, she spoke.
“Help me,” she whispered.
Art needed to hear no more. He slid his arms more fully under Belle’s shivering frame and braced himself, then lifted. She came easily into his arms, slumped against him, and the nearness of her nearly buckled his knees. His mind shot back to the way she’d arched, the way she’d looked as those eyes that could not have been there, floating above Sammy in the half-light, had devoured
her form. Art banished the images, and staggered from the room.
Laying Belle gently on her bed, Art sat in a chair beside her. She looked up only once, caught his gaze, held it, then looked away and curled into a fetal position. Art reached down, drew her blanket up over her thin shoulders, smoothed her hair gently, and stood. As he left the room, he glanced back at her. She was asleep.
With his mind awash in impossibilities, Art walked down the hall to his own room and did the same.
Belle was up, scribbling furiously in her notebook when Art staggered out of his room. Her hair was wild, and he noticed with appreciation that all she wore was one of his own shirts, buttoned about halfway. She was seated cross-legged on the floor.
Belle glanced up. Without a word, she turned back to her work.
Beside her on the floor she had arranged a number of things, a bottle with the latest recipe minus the peppermint and still intact, some vials, a sheaf of yellowed paper, and other implements so familiar Art paid them little mind.
Apparently satisfied with whatever she’d been figuring, Belle dropped the notebook suddenly and grabbed a small mortar and pestle she had set aside. With deft, sure motion she plucked two peppermints from a bag and dropped them into the wooden bowl. She crushed them to powder, working well beyond the point where Art would have considered them to be dust. Belle carefully inserted a small funnel into the mouth of the bottle and poured the peppermint through. Art watched, fascinated, as the fine powder whirled in the green depths of the bottle like a small tornado, and then faded.
“That was it, then?” he asked softly. “The missing link? The big mojo? Some peppermint?”
Belle glanced up at him, more sharply, and gave her head a shake.