Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art

by Christopher Moore

  Even up until the time he grew into manhood, Two Grunts survived in the protection of his mother’s bosom, as no children would play with him, nor, when he came of age, would any girl have him as a mate. So while other boys were learning to hunt and fight, and girls learning to gather roots and prepare hides, Two Grunts was learning the ways of the shaman, the chants, the dances, and most important, where to find the ochres and earths to prepare the colors for the drawings.

  “I’m not going to have to bone all those guys, the way you do, right?” asked Two Grunts of his mother, and in the very asking, which involved no little bit of gyrating and thrusting mime, two women who were watching were frightened by the erratic swinging of Two Grunts’s disproportionately large man-tackle, and thus he found his single source of joy in the society of other people: frightening the girls with his penis.

  When Two Grunts’s mother grew older, she began to incorporate her broken son into the rituals, hoping the People would bestow the same respect and fear, and ultimately care, upon him, but after she died, her ashes had not even cooled before two of the strongest men threw Two Grunts out of the cave to be eaten by tigers, despite his grunts of protest and no little bit of angry willy wagging, which is more or less why they’d chucked him out in the first place. Behind him they threw his skin bag of colors and a long shard of black obsidian, from which he might fashion a weapon or a tool, a particular generosity suggested by a woman named Two Cupped Hands and an Oh-Baby (which translates to Bubble Butt), who, while as frightened of Two Grunts as the rest of the girls, had experienced a pleasant dream involving his dong, and so wasn’t entirely sure he didn’t have power in the spirit world after all.

  Two Grunts found himself wandering the hills in the dark, with no skills to protect himself, except the ability to make fire. He was fairly certain that he was being stalked by a dire wolf, or a saber-tooth, or an enormous dire woodchuck, and for protection he crawled into the hollow stump of a tree that had been struck by lightning, from which all he could see was a small swath of the starry midnight sky. He held the shard of black volcanic glass above his head, and to overcome his fear of whatever might be circling his tree, he chanted all the holy songs that his mother had taught him, calling upon all of the spirit animals to please send him strength, send him power, send him protection, and please, please, please, let the night be over.

  And just as he was improvising a chant that more or less translated to, “And fuck you, too, bears! I hope my pointy bones get stuck in your poop chute!” a huge streak of fire lit up the sky and there was an explosion like a dozen thunderbolts hitting the ground at once, the shock wave of which rolled across the land, flattening the forest for a mile around, including knocking over Two Grunts’s stump and rolling him out into the open.

  He had been rendered temporarily deaf, so he did not hear animals fleeing or the crackling branches of destroyed trees trying to spring back into shape. Stunned, he wandered toward a light he saw in the distance, his addled brain telling him that he would find safety from predators near the fire.

  Even as the smoke blew over the flattened forest, he followed the light until he came upon a great crater, the mounded earth at its edges still warm from whatever had struck and burrowed deep under the ground and now glowed dull blue at the center of the crater in a mass the size of a mammoth.

  Two Grunts was terrified, but as he backed away on all fours from the edge of the crater his hand fell upon a smooth, cool stone no bigger than his fist. He grabbed it and dropped it into his color pouch, then limped away to the shelter of his hollow tree, picking up a few meteorite-concussed squirrels along the way to have as breakfast.

  When dawn broke he climbed from his tree and examined the smooth stone for the first time. It was a brilliant blue, such as he had never seen before, but it tasted like roasted sloth scrotum, which was one of his least-favorite flavors, so he struck it against a black rock jutting from the forest floor and the blue stone broke in two, leaving a trace of blue powder, brilliant in the sun against the black. He tucked the blue stone in his pouch and went about building a fire to roast his squirrels.

  The shock wave from the meteor’s impact revealed a crack in the earth that Two Grunts first explored looking for grubs, but crawling inside found it led to a large cavern, which was relatively dry. With plenty of food and fuel outside provided by the heavenly destruction, Two Grunts was able to set up a camp inside the cave, where he could keep a fire burning constantly with only the effort of crawling outside and gathering the fallen timber. Soon he was decorating the walls of his cave with pictures of the spirit animals, drawing the story of the fire from the sky that the spirit animals had sent to avenge his mother and provide for him. When it came time to paint the fire in the sky, he pounded the blue stone into powder and made it into paste with urine, then painted the fire, blue and white across the cave walls, huge to show its power. He painted until the blue was gone, then slept under the protecting light of the sky fire, as it had begun to glow, pulse with light in its own right.

  On the third night the painting began to fade, and Two Grunts chanted and danced and tried to conjure a vision in the dark, but nothing would come. The painting was pulsing and fading away.

  And she arrived.

  He had known her as Two Cupped Hands and an Oh-Baby, but she was different now as she crawled into the narrow opening of the cave and stood up. She wasn’t afraid of him. She wasn’t disgusted. She looked at him with a sparkle in her eye that he had only seen before in the stars of the winter night. She shrugged off the skins she was wearing and stood naked by his fire, and he watched as her skin appeared to become a vivid, powdery blue. Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell to the ground and convulsed.

  He limped to her and tried to hold her still, afraid she would injure herself on the stone of the fire ring, but his hands came away powdery blue, and even as he wiped the pigment on the skins he wore, on the cave floor, against the cave wall, the color continued to appear on her skin.

  Soon she settled, slept, at peace. He touched her and when she didn’t protest, as he was sure she would, he touched her some more. He touched her until he was exhausted and covered in the blue. When finally he rolled off of her and looked up at the cavern wall he saw that his painting of the fire in the sky was gone. He heard movement beside him and she was lying on her side looking at him, her eyes and the center of her lips the only parts of her not covered in the powdered blue. She licked the powder off her lips and even her tongue took on a deep blue color.

  “Well, this should be fun,” she said in their language (a language poor in vocabulary yet rich with gesture), which involved the roll of her eyes, a joyful screech, a pelvic thrust, and a finger pointing into the future.

  After another two days together in the cave, they returned together to the camp of the People. He carried his newly found blue color to show them, an offering, so they might take him back, accept him as their shaman. Outside the cave, where the women were scraping the tough skins off of yams, the man who had claimed Two Cupped Hands as his mate crushed the little shaman’s skull with a rock and threw his body off a cliff. The girl shook her head, even as the murder happened, their language not having developed the vocabulary to say, “Wow, that was a really bad idea.” She would sneak out of the cave when everyone was asleep and find the broken body on the rocks.

  At dawn, when Two Grunts returned to the cave of the People, he was accompanied by a great she-bear, whose fur was dusted with blue, and who proceeded to slaughter the entire band, who were ripped from their slumber by the screams of the dying.

  Their escape from the cave was blocked by a raging fire Two Grunts had set at the mouth. He moved into their cave, letting the bear drag away the corpses to share with the scavengers of the forest, while he painted his pictures with the blue, over the very sacred pictures drawn by his mother and those who had come before her.

  When, at last, the bear went away and the girl he had known as Two Cupped Hands returned, they m
ade the color, and this time she shed a great mound of the blue, produced by the sacrifice and suffering of the People.

  Eventually the girl grew sick and died, and when he moved on he was followed by a she-tiger, whose tail was tipped with ultramarine. She accompanied him to the next encampment of people, who were much more respectful of the twisted little man who brought a brilliant blue color for their own shaman-painter. They fed him and cared for him, and gave him his own corner of the cave where he could sleep with his tiger. Their shaman would even paint pictures of the little man and the bluish tiger on the cave walls, but for some reason, none of the paintings survived the ages.

  No longer was he Two Grunts and a Shrug, no longer Poop on a Stick; in their more developed language, they would call him the Colorman.

  “HE LIVES,” SAID CARMEN. SHE DROPPED HER FAN AND LOOKED DIRECTLY AT the painter. She was posing in a Japanese kimono, white silk with a bright blue chrysanthemum pattern, her garish red hair pinned up with black lacquered chopsticks. Henri liked the idea of her shy aspect in the Japanese motif.

  “Who lives?” Henri asked, putting up his brush.

  “He! He! Who do you think? The Colorman. I can feel him. I have to go.” She rustled around his studio, shrugging off the kimono and gathering her clothes from the floor, where they had been thrown in the passion of the night before.

  “But, ma chère, I watched him burn.” Henri was distressed at the idea that the Colorman might be alive, but also that she had broken the illusion they had been sharing. Yes, he knew that she was possessed by the muse, but she was his Carmen, shy, sweet, rough at the edges, raw and tired from a life of hard work, and not at all like Lucien’s Juliette other than she was a masterful model. “Please, Carmen.”

  “I have to go,” she said. She snatched her bag from the shelf by the door, then stopped and returned to him, looking at the small canvas on which he’d been working. “I’ll need this.” She took it from him, kissed him on the nose, and bolted out the door.

  He wanted to follow her, but he, too, was wearing a silk kimono with a floral pattern, and a wig pinned up with chopsticks. He would need to change before going out into the street and she’d get away, but he had some idea of where she might be going.

  Quickly, he gathered his clothes.

  MORNING TWILIGHT OVER MONTPARNASSE. THE COLORMAN STUMBLED OUT of the Catacombs a blackened, broken, twisted thing, and while alive, he was not completely recovered from his latest death, and great chips of blackened skin crackled and flaked off him as he limped through the alleys of Paris.

  Well, if Bleu was going to keep killing him, he was going to kill her right back. The baker and the dwarf didn’t have the stones to follow him to his cache of paintings and attack him—to burn his paintings. They would have required inspiration, and that was her raison d’être. She had used them as her weapons.

  He would kill her quickly, then slowly and painfully—no, better, he would ravage her Juliette body first, then kill her. Then ruin the body and resurrect her as a ferret. She was strong, but he was stronger. He would do it. Kill her, then ravage her dead body, then call her up, then tell her that he had ravaged her until she screamed with rage, then kill her again and laugh at her when she came back as a ferret. Yes, that’s what he would do. But he’d have to make the Sacré Bleu. He needed the Sacré Bleu to resurrect her into a new body, and he needed the Sacré Bleu for himself or he would remain a blackened, crispy thing for some time. The old paintings had protected him, but he’d had to wait, first for a rat to stumble into the tarry puddle of his remains, then for Étienne, lost in the dark, to come to him. It was his faithful steed who had provided the life that had gotten him this far, but without more painting, he couldn’t make himself heal any more. It was a good thing he didn’t have to take a new body, like Bleu, though. He would have been a rat, or just as bad, Étienne. He had never told the donkey, but he hated that fucking boater hat he had worn. Still, that was a penis that you could frighten some girls with. He sighed a sooty sigh of a dream denied.

  As he passed through the Latin Quarter, he found some clothes hanging from a line between buildings. They were far too large, so he rolled the sleeves and trouser cuffs, but they cut the cold somewhat.

  For once, the nosy concierge at his building was sleeping, and he had remembered to find his keys in the mess of his charred belongings before making the long crawl out of the underground city. He wasn’t even sure how he had found his way. It was as if he had been given new strength from long, long ago.

  Where he’d gotten it, of course, was from the intense ultraviolet light bathing his paintings at Pech Merle. Until Dr. Vanderlinden had lit his arc light, those powerful talismans had never seen daylight, never emitted their full power.

  “Aha!” he said as he burst through the door. The Juliette doll was standing there in the dark, in her pretty periwinkle dress, doing nothing more than blinking. She turned to look at him but registered no recognition. She blinked. It was wildly unsatisfying. He would have fired his pistol for emphasis, but he had left it in the Catacombs because he had no more bullets for it.

  “Aha!” he said again. And again, Juliette blinked.

  She had her hands tucked into the small of her back, as if she was about to curtsy to her dance partner before beginning the minuet.

  The Colorman limped to her, reached up and grabbed the ruffles on the bodice of her dress and tore it across the front. She blinked.

  “I’m going to ravage you, then kill you,” he said with a charred leer. “Or vice versa!” He dropped his oversized trousers, then cackled at her.

  She blinked.

  He sighed. A key was clicking in the door and a redheaded woman burst in.

  “Aha!” said the Colorman. “I’m going to ravage and—”

  “Where have you been?” said Bleu. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “No you haven’t.”

  “Look.” She held up the Toulouse-Lautrec painting. “And there’s a completed Seurat, too. We need to make the color. I’m feeling weak.”

  “You got Seurat to finish a painting?”

  She gestured to the canvas that was leaning against the wall by the divan. Small for a Seurat, dynamic for a Seurat, but a Seurat nonetheless.

  “What were you doing to Juliette?” she asked.

  “I was going to kill and ravage her—I mean, you.”

  “Oh, then proceed,” said Carmen. And then Bleu jumped bodies.

  “You’ll be needing this, Poopstick,” said Juliette as the Colorman turned to her.

  Her hand came around from behind her back in a great arc, holding the black glass knife. She struck him deep in the side of the neck and his head flopped to one side; on the return arc she struck again and his head plopped off onto the carpet and rolled to the wall with a thump, while his body crumpled into the pile of oversized clothing.

  Carmen Gaudin had her hands at her cheeks and was breathing as if she might pass out or explode. Juliette pointed the knife at her. “Don’t you scream. Don’t you dare fucking scream.”

  Henri Toulouse-Lautrec stumbled through the door behind Carmen.

  “And don’t you scream, either.”

  Henri looked to Carmen, eyes wide to the point of panic, about to hyperventilate, and put his arms around her shoulders. “I presume all this is a bit of a surprise to this Carmen.”

  “It’s not to you?” said Juliette.

  “I may be becoming jaded.”

  “Good, take the head. Get it out of the building.” She pulled the Colorman’s stolen shirt from the pile and tossed it to Henri. “You can wrap it in this.”

  The Colorman’s body pushed up to its knees and grabbed at the black blade, pulling it out of her hand even as she could feel the edge grinding into his bones, then, quick as a wolf spider, the blackened body scuttled toward its head.

  “Too late,” said Juliette.

  LUCIEN EMERGED FROM THE CAVE BLACKENED AND SMOLDERING AT THE SEAMS but not seriously hurt, although it w
ould be some time before he regrew his eyebrows and the dark shock of hair that normally fell over his eyes. He was dragging a mop stick with the yarn at its head burned to a charcoal nub.

  “What have you done?” asked the Professeur.

  Lucien smiled weakly, then saw Dr. Vanderlinden coming up the trail fifty meters behind the Professeur, and the painter slumped in shame.

  “I’m sorry, Professeur, the cave paintings are no more. They’ve been burned.”

  “How? The mineral on stone—”

  “Magnesium powder,” said Lucien. “There was a large tin of it among the doctor’s photographic equipment. I mixed it with turpentine and painted it over the paintings with a mop, then ignited it with the electrode from Vanderlinden’s arc light. It was more of an explosion than a fire.”

  “That is why they call it flash powder,” said the Professeur. “How is your vision? Have you burned your retinas?”

  Lucien touched a pair of dark mountaineering goggles slung around his neck. “These were also among the doctor’s equipment.”

  “You’ve destroyed priceless archaeological artifacts, you know?”

  “And I hope that’s not all,” said Lucien. “I’m sorry. I had to. I love her.”

  THE COLORMAN SMASHED HIS HEAD DOWN UPON HIS NECK, BUT THE OPERATION being somewhat imprecise, he had to hold it in place with one hand while he brandished the knife with the other. The fury had never left his eyes, even when his head had rolled across the room. He turned on Juliette.