The storm weighed upon us, closing in as we sank. A hurricane is an ocean come walking. I did not understand the sickness I had seen in Bellkleft’s apartment, or the beauty, or the wings. Crispin’s gaze settled, not on me, never on me, but beyond. I should have turned away and left. But I had come so far down with him already, and I felt that I would drown, rising on my own.
I took off my clothes, and became awakening. My body knew the pose by now. Crispin removed the drape from his canvas, and painted.
The light changed. Yellow deepened to orange, and the orange tinted green. Wind keened through bare branches.
“Storm rising,” I said at our break.
“Yes.” Branches tapped our window, scraped through ten silent minutes. Crispin whispered, and I could not make out the words, or even the language. His brushstrokes grew surer on the canvas. Long spans of time would pass before his eyes dawned over the painting’s edge, and when they did, a feverish light burned within. Each brushstroke was a cliff collapsing. Rain lashed the windows. I felt full of waking, filled with it, in building waves, as if I lay in a lover’s bed about to come, only with everything twisted ninety degrees to the left, bliss, pain, release all askew.
“Crispin,” I said.
“No talking.” His voice was tight as over-tuned piano wire.
“Crispin, it’s time for a break.”
“So close,” he said, and “Sorry,” and I do not think he was apologizing for the delay.
The wind screamed louder, and branches struck the window.
“Crispin,” I said. “We’re three floors up.”
“Yes.”
“There are no trees outside your window.”
“No.”
“So what’s scratching?”
He did not speak. But I did not need his answer.
I had glimpsed them through smoke and flame and storm on Central Park West, the facets of their eyes, the stretch and shimmer of their wings. They had burst through the gate Crispin made of my face, and now they gathered close, to sing in the wind, to watch this new work end.
This work that I had not seen.
I had never looked at Crispin’s paintings of me, straight on in full light. In Bellkleft’s burning room, I had peered through a hole—but never seen the canvas itself. Crispin and I dove together, drowned together, but I had never seen what he saw when he looked at me.
I wanted, I needed, to know.
Rising from that divan felt like rising through an ocean of honey. My limbs strained to move, my breath came slowly, and the further I departed from my pose the harder it felt to do anything but return there, as if the substance of space had been reworked to fit me into that position, that warped pleasure, that broken release. He’d made me a key, and I dragged myself from the lock.
“Go back,” Crispin said. “Lie down.” His voice was so tight cracks opened in it, and through the cracks I heard the waves of an unlit sea wash a dead city’s shore. The screams outside the windows swelled, the clattering things clawed harder at the glass—they’d broken Morrison’s apartment windows no problem, but that was out and this was in, and the two directions are nothing alike. I walked to the edge of the canvas.
“Crispin. Stop.”
“Go back,” he repeated, louder, and damn if I didn’t almost listen. But I didn’t, I wouldn’t. I had to see. God, it hurt; my muscles wanted to crawl from my bones, the whole world felt uphill, but I walked to the painting’s edge while his brush growled, and around—
Crispin caught me, or something that looked like Crispin but its pupils were worms. I pushed, and he pushed back, with strength those scrawny arms never earned. His thin lips rolled back to bare long teeth. I hit him in the nose with my forehead, heard bone crunch. His grip broke and he folded around his bleeding face. I swept past him to stand before my portrait, to see the monster he had made of me.
The thing upon that canvas was beautiful and hideous, promise and trap and temptation and door. And I saw through it. Oh, you old desert God who calls for the sacrifice of children, I saw through it—through the eyes, through the cracked skin and the wet red muscle, through the flayed flesh and the bare skull, saw the thing he’d summoned, this creature his mad beholding had chiseled from raw space, cancer and mother and blood, swollen, breaking open, shaking ropes of flesh, hair a coil of serpents, panes of body and breasts and thighs venting vapors that were fingers reaching through.
“Crispin,” I said. “That’s not me.”
But I felt it inside me, around me, the form his eyes chiseled onto mine: fishhook pain twisted like a bad pregnancy. He’d made my image door and mother of monsters.
Outside the howls rose, as the mother’s children welcomed her.
“Deliah,” he gurgled through blood. “I see—”
“You see wrong.”
“I painted you.”
“No. Whatever that is, it’s not me. The sickness, the horror—it’s not in the world, Crispin. It’s in your eye.” I reached for the canvas, but the air around it burned. I fell back, swearing. The figure flexed. Cracks widened. I remembered chicks I’d seen burst from shells. Outside the mother-monster’s children circled in the storm, fanged mouths hungry to nurse. “You made this.”
“Beautiful,” he said.
I slapped him, hard. He lunged for me, and I shoved him back. He fell toward the painting. His oils lay in tubes on the easel shelf; I grabbed one tube and squeezed it across the false me’s face and body, an umber streak. I spread the paint with a brush, mashing bristles to canvas to obscure eyes and ruin the painting’s neck and curve of shoulder.
Crispin screamed and seized me from behind. The brush tumbled from my hand and we fell together, me on top, knocking out his wind. I grabbed him by the shoulders, pointed him toward the window. “Look! Just fucking look.”
Claws and wings scrabbled against the glass. But I only remember stillness, as Crispin stared into the facets of those glittering eyes, gray into gray, the inhuman faces pressed against his window. His jaw slacked, strange, wondering, like someone for the first time recognizing his face in a mirror.
The storm pressed us down.
He tore his gaze from theirs, and turned back to the painting, wondering, slow, for the first time scared. “She’s almost through.”
She strained against the paint, to burst into our world from Crispin’s mad fantasies. My smear would not seal her. She was a dream, and dreams can’t be forgotten, only deposed.
I dragged Crispin to the canvas.
He shook his head.
I grabbed another brush, loaded it with the paint he’d mixed that most resembled one of the colors of my skin—and forced it into his hand.
“Don’t paint her,” I said. “Paint me. As I am. Not as you see.”
He looked again, at me, and this time I looked back.
With trembling hand, he touched his brush to canvas.
The scream I heard next was not the wind. It howled inside me, with strange and deep words. I will not write here. You’ve heard them, I think, in nightmares just before they break.
* * *
The storm passed. We were spared the worst of it, they say.
To seal takes longer than to break. Two months have passed, and I visit him three times a week. We talk before he paints. Not about truth or horror or that other stuff. He talks about his mother, her death; about roasting coffee, and about a time he nearly drowned as a boy, at summer camp, and woke to find his ribs broken from CPR. I tell him about my brothers, about Georgia. He doesn’t believe about the roaches in Savannah. Northern boy.
And then we paint me over her. She’s stopped trying to break through. I think the talking is almost as important as the painting.
And then, Jesus, last week Crispin called me. He has my number, though he never used it before. Called me to say he was taking Steve and some other old classmates out for dinner, and would I like to join them?
He paid me a share of the Bellkleft take—the old man’s still missing—so money�
�s not a problem for the moment. Work continues. I’m acting again, and polishing the one-woman show.
Shannon’s recovering. The lung’s mostly better. The mind, too. She’s back to work, a few days a week, and she keeps calling me about the show. It’s weird to hope your agent likes your work because it’s good, not just because you saved her life.
As for the children of the paintings, with their shining eyes and curved wings—I don’t know what happened to them. Maybe they died without their mother. Maybe not. I read crime reports and watch to see if there are more missing dog posters around my neighborhood than usual. Maybe they’re still out there, hiding, building strength, waiting for someone else to shape their mother into being.
If so, maybe this will serve as a warning. If anyone reads it.
But it’s late, and I owe my own mama a letter. She wants news, though I don’t have much—just questions.
There were monsters. I saw them, and anyway if they weren’t real, where did Morrison Bellkleft go? They’re out there still. They always were.
They have no world but ours.
The End.
About the Author
MAX GLADSTONE went to Yale, where he wrote a short story that became a finalist in the Writers of the Future competition. He is the author of Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Max Gladstone
Art copyright © 2017 by Samuel Araya
Crispin's Model Page 3