The Singularity Cycle 02 Song of the Death God

by William Holloway

  He walked to the back, poured water from the cistern into a large glass, and then he heard the crash. It was a sound he knew, a sound he feared and hated—the sound of a painting frame breaking, the sound of canvas tearing. Then he heard another one.

  Ernst was out there destroying the paintings!

  Renaud picked up the washbasin and ran out with it, running past paintings reaching out for him from the corners of his eyes.

  Yes, there was Ernst, holding a painting over his head and shattering it against the wall, then tearing the canvas viciously and throwing it atop a growing pile of other paintings he’d destroyed.

  Renaud swung the washbasin and was satisfied by the loud crashing as the porcelain shattered against the back of Wilhelm’s head. Ernst crashed to the floor and went limp. Renaud fell to his knees to catch his breath. In front of him was his wealthy partner and benefactor, and he’d just bashed him over the head with a washbasin. Blood poured from the back of Wilhelm’s head and over a pile of shattered frames and torn canvasses. Renaud caught his breath and held it.

  On many occasions he commiserated with other gallery owners about all the things that could go wrong, and nearly always did. They talked about flighty and mercurial artists and overbearing, pretentious benefactors. They talked about customers who failed to pay and petty, nasty art authorities. But never once had he ever heard about terrified workmen, haunted paintings and mad, possessed benefactors. He doubted anyone would believe him if he told his tale.

  He stood up and gingerly rolled Wilhelm Ernst off the pile of paintings he had destroyed so far. There were three, and Renaud knew that if he hadn’t stopped him, that every single one of these paintings would be gone. He destroyed one of Gilles Lombard’s hateful animal and children amalgamations, and one of his outré minimalist landscapes. The last one Wilhelm got was one of Uli’s most evocative. It was a painting of a beautiful naked blonde girl marred by the bestial snarl of a cornered wolf. She was radiant, she was evil incarnate, and like all of the paintings, she was composed of lines and geometries that made the mind instinctively look away but come back for more. Now the frame was broken and the canvas torn and battered. It was worthless.

  Tears came to his eyes. This was desecration, heresy. This was the act of a petty man so consumed by his own shallowness that he had elevated his “mysteries” and his “grief” to the point of religious devotion. Well fuck him—and fuck that.

  But regardless, Renaud was terrified. Tomorrow was the most important day of his career, and he had just bashed his partner with a washbasin.

  He reached down to feel for a pulse and sighed in relief. Ernst was alive, but blessedly unconscious. He sighed again and shook his head. For some reason, Wilhelm Ernst must amuse God because he kept him alive. If not for this divine intervention, the fool would be long dead. There was only one thing to do. Bandage Wilhelm’s head and call for a carriage to take the fool to the hospital. He considered just calling the gendarmes, but things would be strange enough between them tomorrow. Hopefully, the idiot would stay in a bed in the hospital and not emerge for his brother’s show out of pure shame. That would be his just reward.

  He reached down to touch Ernst’s neck again. Still out cold. No motion behind his eyelids, no quickening of the breath. “Wilhelm, if you can hear me, I’m going to get some towels to bandage your head. Please don’t move… and please understand that I only did what I had to do to protect your brother’s art. You’ve acted the fool today. Don’t make things worse for yourself.”

  Renaud again walked to the back for another washbasin and some clean cloths. He had a bottle of pure alcohol he used for smudged paint and cuts to the hands of the workmen. He put it all on a tray and perked up his ears for any more foolishness from Wilhelm.

  Not a sound.

  As he rounded the corner to go back into the gallery, he felt a hot jagged pain in his neck. Wilhelm stood in the shadows to his side. Renaud turned to look at him. Ernst was ashen, his eyes seeing everything and nothing at all. There was blood pouring from the wound on his head, but also blood on his hand.

  Renaud wondered, how did he…, then the shadows that fled earlier when the candle was extinguished returned. They slid along the walls and stepped out from between the paintings. They slithered along Wilhelm’s ashen face and up into his eyes.

  Wilhelm whispered in German, “Do you see now?”

  Renaud coughed and blood poured out of his mouth. “Yes, I think I do, Wilhelm.”

  Then he reached up to a throbbing pain in his neck and felt the long slender piece of painting frame embedded there. He felt the other side of his neck where it protruded through the broken skin. His knees gave out beneath him and he slid against the wall until he lay on the floor, looking up at Wilhelm Ernst. Then he watched as Ernst turned away from him without a word.

  The last thing Renaud saw was a madman smashing paintings and tearing canvasses, destroying genius works of art, dousing them with alcohol and lantern oil, then dropping a match atop the pile. Renaud’s life work, the Gallerie d’Arte Voltaire, burned to the ground, taking him with it.

  PART FOUR

  GNOSTICA

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  Karl Kreutz felt the gummy, sugary smoke in his mouth, simultaneously sweet and numbing. He nodded in regret. He knew exactly where opium would take him. He knew it would kill his soul, just as it had in Africa.

  But that was exactly what he wanted.

  He’d worked for diamond traders, providing security from thieves and worse. The mine owners were soulless slave drivers working thousands of children to death digging diamonds from the earth. Few made it to adulthood. These men affected the graceful manner of colonial plantation owners, but miles away in the jungle were their other sources of income. West of Lake Victoria, the mines operated around the clock, the nights broken by torch fire and the sound of whips on human skin.

  And the Africans themselves? Sometimes they kidnapped their own nieces and nephews to sell to the slavers. They were afflicted with chaos, the vilest acts always at hand. Their life expectancy was nasty, brutish and short. But why had their society gone so very mad? It seemed it had always been that way, the European colonists just the latest entry into the tooth and claw life of the jungle.

  As best as he could tell, it was because of their folk religions. Most belief systems were nonsense, but not those of the Africans. There was a real potency and power to those sects. They were frightening and bloody, the shaman more frightening still. Their primal spirits were hungry, and the shaman worshipped these petty demons to be granted petty powers to further their petty ends. They could cause blindness or curdle the milk in a cow’s teat, but couldn’t heal the sick or bring peace to the never-ending cycle of vendettas. Sometimes the people rose up and killed a witch doctor, but another one would emerge from the jungle to take his place. Sometimes a regular African went into the jungle and come back a sorcerer, as if the jungle made them that way. These shamans were the will of the jungle, breeding chaos until reason was forgotten. If there was a devil, Africa was his playground.

  One time, Karl led a party of men deep into the jungle to deal with a witch doctor who terrified the African villagers into refusing to work on one of the sprawling tobacco plantations. They found him in an odd clearing full of giant stone ruins, bas-relief blocks as large as the ones that made the pyramids in Egypt. Karl and his party were awed by these blocks, but knew the jungle hid many secrets. The shaman didn’t even seem to see the blocks. He gibbered, he spoke in tongues, he pointed and laughed at the European hard men with their guns. They shot him dead.

  They spent the night in the clearing, but when they awoke, the giant blocks were gone, simply vanished in the night, but the shaman was back. His body was gone—it had vanished as well—but an identical sorcerer was now in their midst. He wasn’t mad, but appeared to be deaf mute. He stared with no expression at all. Karl and his men galloped back to their base, and didn’t report what they had seen. They smoked opium and they didn
’t discuss it.

  Yes, Karl left Africa willing to live as a humble carriage driver, but opportunity presented itself and Karl took the bait. Now he was back to smoking balls of tobacco and opium at night so he wouldn’t dream, for to dream in this haunted house was to go mad.

  He lived in a lavish room next to Carsten’s. He ate the same meals as his master. He wore fine suits and carried a gentleman’s walking stick with a sword inside. He slept with the housemaids. In short, he lived like an Ernst.

  He also turned the Ernst manse into an armed camp. There were never less than three armed men at his disposal. The carriage ferrying Greta and Karin was driven by a man carrying two big revolvers and a lever action rifle. At night when he slept, the other men walked the grounds, but never approached the little servants’ quarters in the back. He only knew of one time when a man fell asleep on the job. That man woke up screaming and left, never to return.

  Karl knew what kinds of dreams that man had, and why he had them.

  Carsten was doing the same sort of magic as the African shaman, only in a systematic and scientific way that escaped Karl’s comprehension. It was in those books. Karl knew it was immoral. He knew it was dangerous. He also knew it filled his pockets with silver.

  He held the opium smoke in his lungs until it burned and then released the cloud to swirl around the ceiling. One of the big revolvers was cleaned and oiled and loaded, the other sitting disassembled in front of him. He did this every night, but lately he couldn’t help but notice the change in the air.

  It was menace, palpable and growing.

  Something was heading in their direction, and he wondered if bullets would be enough to stop it this time.

  ***

  Wilhelm shuddered and coughed. His muscles spasmed. He dared not open his eyes lest the blazing light sear his retinas. He tried to relax his muscles, but they were knotted into steely bunches bulging painfully against the cold cobblestones.

  That’s strange, he thought. What is this? Why does my feather bed feel so hard? And why aren’t the curtains closed to block the sun in this ungodly hour of the morning? Another spasm hit him, and he gasped at the smell. He was smelling himself. He heaved, but nothing came out. He heaved again, and his eyes opened despite his need to keep them closed.

  He saw, he remembered, he knew.

  It’s the living nightmare of violent blackout drunks to know that one day they will awake and discover that they’ve really hurt someone. This time there would be consequences, this time he would not escape them, and this time they would be permanent. He left Munich under the threat that he could leave or go to jail. They let him leave to save face. There would be no saving face this time. He was a murderer.

  He was lying under a pile of trash in an alley. He was soaked with dreck, his hands caked with what could only be shit.

  His own shit.

  He was looking at his handiwork. A mural finger-painted with shit covered the wall in front of him. A large work of a dignified and wise older man motioning with his hands to a painter working frantically on a large canvas. The painter was Uli, and the man was his grandfather. This was his dream from the night before…

  From the night before he had watched Carsten…

  And Ava…

  And the dead dog…

  And the thing that Ava became and the resurrection of the dog and…

  Karl clouted him… he had crawled back into the house to find… oh God, no!

  Uli hanging from a rope, and the terrible painting of Ava possessed.

  He was sitting at a table across from Carsten. Bound to a chair and gagged.

  Carsten placed his hands on the table and spoke words in Latin, he motioned with his hands. He did this for several minutes then fixed him in his gaze and then… nothing. He woke with no memory of the entire week, only the crushing guilt that he could have saved his brother… somehow.

  Wilhelm washed the shit and blood off his hands in a puddle of brackish water. He took off his expensive dinner jacket and threw it aside. It was far easier washing shit out of just the shirt underneath. But washing shit off a garment in a puddle of stinking rainwater in an alley can only be so successful. His white shirt was now brown, and even if he took the back streets and alleys to his flat, he still looked worse than the wild-eyed vagrants that lived there.

  As he nervously walked the alleys back to his flat, the passersby gave him a wide berth and expressions of revulsion and disgust. He was a man caked in shit. Mercifully, expressions of contempt were all they had for him. But he knew the truth. He was a murderer. He killed a man who, for all of his faults, had been a far better man than he. He had killed a man who showed him the patience of a saint. Renaud didn’t deserve what he gave him, and Wilhelm knew it.

  Beneath the smell of shit in his clothes, he could smell smoke and fire. If the gendarmes found him, it would take very little time for them to tie him to Renaud and the Gallerie d’Arte Voltaire. In Paris, his money wouldn’t buy him a reprieve from justice as it had in Munich. He would go to prison, and he could be executed.

  He came up the alley a block from his flat. An area where the police wouldn’t tolerate a vagrant covered in shit. He came to the end of the alley and warily looked both ways. No gendarmes.

  He ran, sprinting down the street and past the open air cafes where the urbane and civilized ate their breakfasts. Heads turned in disgust at the man of grime running past them. More than one person yelled their disapproval at him. To his dismay, one of them was his landlord. This was bad, this was very bad. His landlord was an irritating old biddy whose sexual advances he’d rebuffed on more than one occasion. After she gave up on bedding him, she turned ugly, complaining about every drunken revelry.

  He pulled out his keys as she yelled in the background, shakily trying to push it in the keyhole and missing. He grabbed his hand with the other hand to steady it. Her yelling and threats of eviction grew louder behind him. The key slid in and turned. He pulled open the door and slammed it behind him, entering the foyer and running up the stairs to the safety of his flat.

  His time here was over. His life as he knew it was over. He tore his clothes off and scrubbed away the filth, knowing the police would arrive soon. If he was lucky, he would escape with the money in his flat and the clothes on his back.

  ***

  Ava shook her head to try to dispel the clouds that constantly dogged her mind. She was supposed to clean Carsten’s chambers and then mop the hallways and then… had she already cleaned Carsten’s chambers? She was in the kitchen, holding a knife, a large ham in front of her, halfway carved.

  Her mother was speaking to her. She looked like she was trying not to cry. “Ava, Ava, Ava, please come home. Please stop spending nights in this place. Your sisters, your grandmother miss you so.”

  Ava held up the knife and looked at it. She didn’t remember going into the kitchen or having a conversation with her mother or that she was carving a ham.

  Ava turned and looked at her mother queerly. She gazed at her hands. They were covered with the blood and fat of the ham—obviously, she’d been working on this a while. Yet she had no recollection of this or when the conversation with her mother began or what they were talking about.

  “Mama? How did I get here?”

  Her mother blinked to fight back tears. “Ava, this is the second time that you have forgotten where you are and what you are doing today. Yesterday, I had to remind you of where you were and what you were doing four times. Four times!”

  Ava looked at her mother. It was obvious they were talking about her leaving to work at another house. Her mother had asked her to do this before; in fact, it seemed like she may have asked her many times. But, like everything else, she just couldn’t be sure.

  Her mother’s breath came in short bursts. “Ava, Ava please. This house. Even during the day, I can tell. There are ghosts here. They were not here until Uli went mad. We know, the other staff know, Ava. Carsten is about some devilry here. They say that he has taken y
our will away from you, that he is…” Her voice trailed off.

  She only knew the other staff wouldn’t set foot in this house after sunset. When the shadows grew long at dusk, they moved.

  Ava heard her words, but they did not register in her mind. For a brief moment, she felt she should be angry, that she should defend Carsten, but she just didn’t have the focus to be mad. “Mama, why do you say this? Carsten loves me. He needs me. He says that when he is done with his Great Work, that we will be married.”

  Her mother put down the large ladle she was holding and closed her eyes tightly. “Please, Ava. Please remember. We had this same discussion yesterday. Carsten cannot love you. He is rich. He has to marry a rich woman or his family would fall into further disgrace. You must stop this silly girl’s dream. He was never yours. He will never be yours.”

  Ava gasped. “Mother! How could you say such a thing? We are to be wed! Carsten said so!”

  Her mother was now yelling as loud as she dared. “Ava! Over and over, we talk about this! No! It can never be. You must stop with this fantasy!”

  Ava turned to run and yelled, “We’ve never talked about this!”

  She sprinted from the kitchen and through the large living room, where Karl conferred with two of his men. The two men looked at her and then back to Karl curiously. Karl shook his head and motioned for them to ignore this, indicating that it wasn’t a topic for discussion. Karl had very strict rules for the house, and one of them was that certain things were not to be discussed. Ava was one of those things.

  She continued running until she got to Carsten’s wing of the house. Something was wrong here. The floors were already clean. Had she perhaps cleaned them yesterday? No, there were still damp spots and marks from the towels she dried the floor with. She walked over to the large ornate hamper in an alcove of the hall and lifted the lid. The towels were freshly damp. But for the life of her, she couldn’t recall mopping. And yet, she was the only one who could have done it. The other staff were forbidden from entering this wing. It had been this way for a few years now, and Karl had made that policy official last year.