He chuckled in a sinister, highly theatrical fashion and moved on to a night scene showing a dim and lonely street lamp only barely illuminating a hunched and frightened old woman in black mourning making her way along a cracked sidewalk and staring anxiously into the almost impenetrable darkness of the ancient city street beyond.
“I marvel at the way you’ve suggested . . . something . . . on the glistening tarmac of the narrow street approaching the woman from the direction of the other sidewalk!” whispered Ratch in genuine awe. “It is brilliant how the viewer sometimes reads it this way, sometimes that – it is genuine painterly magic, my dear boy! Wizardry! You can rest assured the critics will never be finished writing competitive essays attempting to explain that one.”
He then pointed at a painting of a gaping policeman, his gun still drawn, kneeling in hard, bright sunlight over a man he’d clearly just shot and staring in horror, along with a small surrounding crowd, at the thing which was bloodily tearing its way out of the dead man’s chest and glaring furiously up at the officer.
“But the true underlying miracle of all these new works is their universal convincingness!” he said, patting gently, even lovingly, the glistening face of the entity scrabbling its way out of the corpse. “In spite of myself I find I suspect that this horrible thing may actually exist, that it may even be alive today in a hidden chamber of some prison hospital!”
He turned to study Barstow intently and tapped the artist at the exact same spot where the gruesomely productive wound had been painted on the slain man’s chest.
“Somehow, Kevin, you have suddenly developed the ability to present fictitious images which are simultaneously entirely fantastic and totally realistic,” the art dealer intoned with great solemnity. “Never in my whole career as a dealer have I seen such a world of grotesquely macabre impossibilities more believably presented. I am both frightened and thrilled.”
He paused to once again study the gory thing depicted in the painting with undisguised affection and then murmured softly, almost inaudibly, but with enormous pleasure: “We shall become unbelievably rich.”
Then, almost reverently, he returned to the largest and most centrally located painting of all: the one of the pale, elephantine female nude staring out through the studio’s window. The dead-looking flesh of the huge creature’s back was turned to the viewer as she idly observed a crowd of subtly bizarre pigeons milling on the widow’s ledge and the fire escape beyond.
“This, as I am sure you are well aware, is the supreme work of the exposition,” said Ratch with great solemnity, and then he turned to look at the artist curiously. “Have you given this painting a name?”
Barstow nodded.
“I call it ‘Louise’,” he said.
Ratch nodded sagely.
“As though it was the name of an actual model,” he said approvingly. “And so enhanced the ghastly notion it might actually be the depiction of a living monster.”
Ernestine, on the other hand, had begun to show signs she had at least momentarily lost something of her customary professional detachment and was regarding the painting with undisguised repulsion.
“My God,” she whispered, “Look at the thing’s hands! Look at its claws!”
Ratch gazed at the unmistakable fear in his assistant’s eyes with enormous satisfaction.
“You see?” he crowed, “Even my cool Ernestine is very seriously disturbed by our monster.”
A sudden spasm crossed Barstow’s face at Ratch’s second use of this description.
“I do not think of her as a monster,” he said.
Ratch regarded the little artist first with some surprise and then with dawning understanding.
“Of course you don’t,” he said, and then he waved in an oddly gentle sort of way at the paintings grouped around them. “Nor do you regard any of the creatures depicted in these other works as monsters. As in the work of Goya, one can tell that they are sympathetically, even affectionately observed. That is the secret of their beauty.”
Then, after a thoughtful pause, Ratch turned back to the paintings and began to walk among them as he softly dictated observations and instructions to the now partially recovered Ernestine. Barstow stood by and watched them at it until he caught a flickering to his side. He turned and his eyes widened when he saw that a great crowd of pigeons had assembled on the window’s outside sills and the old iron work fire escape beyond.
Quietly, unobtrusively, he made his way over to the windows and though some of the birds flopped clumsily off at his approach most of the creatures ignored him.
They were a much more varied group of pigeons than those one would ordinarily observe in, say, Manhattan. Not only were their markings extraordinarily colorful and individual – ranging from playful Matisse-like patterns of stars and spiralings to blurry Monet style shadings to stern geometric blockings of black and gray and sooty white highly reminiscent of Mondrian’s abstractions – their bodies were also quite remarkably unlike one another.
The pigeon pecking at the sill just to Barstow’s left, for example, was almost as big as a cat and sported a spectacular hunch on its back; the one next to it was extremely narrow and so thin that the rest of its body seemed an almost snakish extension of its neck and the one next to that appeared to be little more than a feathered pulsating blob with wings and an oddly skewed beak.
Barstow stole a quick look behind him to make sure both Ratch and Ernestine were absorbed in their cataloguing and calculations and when he looked back outside he was alarmed to see that one of the pigeons had wandered off from the sill and begun to march awkwardly but casually up the dirty pane of window with its fat, gummy feet clinging to the dirty glass and that another, after alternately extending and shrinking the length of its body in a series of odd, painful-looking little heaves, was working its way along the underside of the railing of the fire escape for all the world like a beaked, glittery eyed worm.
Barstow hastily threw another glance back at his guests to make absolutely certain they still hadn’t noticed any of these goings-on and then he executed a series of violent and abrupt gestures which, much to his relief, successfully startled all the pigeons into clumsily flying away from the sills and fire escape and out of sight.
Eventually, after what seemed to be aeons of discussion and plan-making, Ratch and Ernestine and their summoned chauffeur descended in the creaking elevator along with a very sizable selection of paintings leaving Barstow with his triumph and a great exhaustion.
He made his way to the stool by his easel and sagged onto it with an enormous sigh. It would be a while before he’d have the energy to stir.
He heard the soft opening of a door behind him and smiled as the studio’s floorboards groaned nearer and nearer under Louise’s enormous weight. When she leaned over him Barstow gratefully and deeply breathed in the spicy, slightly moldy air that wafted out from her body.
He felt the hugeness of her breasts resting on his shoulders and shuddered with pleasure when she cooed something not quite words and stroked the top of his head with a sweet tenderness which was truly remarkable considering the potential brutality of her huge paws.
“He liked them,” murmured Barstow, relaxing back against her vast belly. “He’ll buy all the work I do from now on. We’ll be rich, Louise, you and I. And millions will adore your painting. Millions. And they will see how beautiful you are.”
She cooed again, carefully retracted her talons, and began to knead the tension from his narrow shoulders.
GLEN HIRSHBERG
American Morons
“AMERICAN MORONS” IS THE TITLE STORY for Glen Hirshberg’s latest collection, recently out from Earthling Publications. His first collection, The Two Sams, was published by Carroll & Graf, won the International Horror Guild Award, and was selected by Publishers’ Weekly and Locus as one of the best books of 2003.
Hirshberg is also the author of The Snowman’s Children (also from Carroll & Graf) and a forthcoming novel, Sisters of Baika
l. With Dennis Etchison and Peter Atkins, he co-founded The Rolling Darkness Revue, a travelling ghost story performance troupe that tours the West Coast of the United States each October.
His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including multiple appearances in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Dark Terrors 6, Trampoline, Acquainted with the Dead, Cemetery Dance and The Dark.
He lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife and children.
About the following story, the author notes: “A couple of summers ago, on our way back to Rome from a cousin’s wedding, my brother poured gasoline into a car gas tank marked with a cap reading DIESEL, and we spent four scorching hours broken down beside the superstrade before eventually receiving a tow into a neighbourhood overrun with peacocks (most, but not all of them, living).
“My brother scrawled the titular phrase in the filthy passenger-side window before we abandoned the car, as per our instructions from the rental company. Most of the good, self-mocking lines at the beginning of the story are his. I had the whole piece sketched long before we finally staggered into a hotel room in the middle of the night.”
Omnibus umbra locis adero: dabis, improbe, poenas.”
(“My angry ghost, arising from the deep
Shall haunt thee waking, and disturb thy sleep.”)
—Virgil
IN THE END, THE CAR MADE IT MORE THAN A MILE after leaving the gas station, all the way to the toll gate that marked the outskirts of Rome. Ignoring the horns behind them and the ominous, hacking rattle of the engine, the two Americans dug together through the coins they’d dumped in the dashboard ash tray. Twice, Kellen felt Jamie’s sweat-streaked fingers brush his. The horn blasts got more insistent, and Jamie laughed, so Kellen did, too.
When they’d finally assembled the correct change, he threw the coins into the bin, where they clattered to the bottom except for one ten-cent piece that seemed to stick in the mesh. Ruefully, Kellen imagined turning, trying to motion everyone behind him back so he could reverse far enough out of the toll island to open his door and climb out. Then the coin dropped and disappeared into the bottom of the basket.
Green light flashed. The gate rose. Kellen punched the accelerator and felt it plunge straight down. There was not even a rattle, now.
“Uh, Kel?” Jamie said.
As though they’d heard her, or could see his foot on the dead pedal, every car in the queue let loose with an all-out sonic barrage. Then – since this was Italy, where blasting horns at fellow drivers was like showering rice on newlyweds – most of the cars in the queues to either side joined in.
Expressionlessly, Kellen turned in his seat, his skin unsticking from the rental’s cracked, roasted vinyl with a pop. The setting sun blazed through the windshield into his eyes. “At least,” he said, “it’s not like you warned me the car might only take diesel.”
“Yes I –” Jamie started, caught the irony, and stopped. She’d been in the midst of retying her maple syrup hair on the back of her neck. Kellen found himself watching her tank top spaghetti strap slide in the slickness on her shoulder as she spoke again. “At least it doesn’t say the word DIESEL in big green letters on the gas cap.”
He looked up, blinking. “Does it really?”
“Saw it lying on the trunk while that attendant dude was trying whatever he was trying to fix it. What’d he pour in there, anyway?”
Goddamnit, Kellen snarled inside his own head for perhaps the thousandth time in the past week. Jamie and he had been a couple all the way through high school. Three years into their separate college lives, he still considered them one. She said she did, too. And she wasn’t lying, exactly. But he’d felt the change all summer long. He’d thought this trip might save them.
A particularly vicious horn blast from the car behind almost dislodged his gaze. Almost. “At least diesel isn’t the same word in Italian as it is in English,” he said, and Jamie burst out laughing.
“Time to meet more friendly Romans.”
Too late, Kellen started issuing his by now familiar warning, cobbled from their parents’ pre-trip admonishments about European attitudes toward Americans at the moment, plus the words that had swirled around them all week, blaring from radios, the front pages of newspapers they couldn’t read, TV sets in the lobbies of youth hostels they’d stayed in just for the adventure, since their respective parents had supplied plenty of hotel money. Cadavere. Sesto Americano. George Bush. Pavone. Not that Jamie would have listened, anyway. He watched her prop her door open and stick out one tanned, denim-skirted leg.
Instantly, the horns shut off. Doors in every direction popped like champagne corks, and within seconds, half a dozen Italian men of wildly variant ages and decisions about chest hair display fizzed around the Americans’ car.
“Stuck,” Jamie said through her rolled down window. “Um. Kaput.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not Ital –” Kellen started, but before he could finish, his door was ripped open. Startled, he twisted in his seat. The man pouring himself into the car wore no shirt whatsoever, and was already gripping the wheel. The rest of the men fanned into formation, and then the car was half-floating, half-rolling through the toll gate into traffic that made no move to slow, but honked gleefully as it funneled around them. Seconds later, they glided to a stop on the gravel shoulder.
Jamie leaned back in her seat, folding her arms and making a great show of sighing like a queen in a palanquin. Whether her grin was for him or the guy who’d grabbed the steering wheel, Kellen had no idea. The guy hadn’t let go, and Kellen remained pinned in place.
What was it about Italian men that made him want to sprout horns and butt something? “I say again,” he murmured to Jamie. “Kaput?”
“It’s one of those universal words, ol’ pal. Like diesel.” Then she was lifted out of the car.
Even Jamie seemed taken aback, and made a sort of chirping sound as the throng enveloped her. “Bella,” Kellen heard one guy coo, and something that sounded like “Assistere,” and some tongue-clucking that could have been regret over the car or wolfish slavering over Jamie or neither. Kellen didn’t like that he could no longer see her, and he didn’t like the forearm stretched across his chest.
Abruptly, it lifted, and he wriggled out fast and stood. The man before him looked maybe forty, with black and grey curly hair, a muscular chest, and Euro-sandals with those straps that pulled the big toes too far from their companions. He said nothing to Kellen, and instead watched Jamie slide sunglasses over her eyes, whirling amid her circle of admirers with her skirt lifting above her knee every time she turned. Back home, Jamie was borderline pretty – slim, athletic, a little horse-faced – at least until she laughed. But in Italy, judging from the response of the entire male population during their week in Rome and Tuscany, she was a goddess. Or else all women were.
Ol’ pal. That’s what he was, now.
Almost seven o’clock, and still the blazing summer heat poured down. Two more miles, Kellen thought, and he and Jamie could at least have stood in one of Rome’s freezing fountains while they waited for the tow truck. Jamie would have left her loafers on the pavement, her feet bare.
“It’s okay, thanks guys,” he said abruptly, and started around the car. Digging into his shorts pocket for his cell phone, he waved it at the group like a wand that might make them disappear. “Grazie.” His accent sounded pathetic, even to him.
Not a single Italian turned. One of them, he noticed, had his hand low on Jamie’s back, and another had stepped in close alongside, and Kellen stopped feeling like butting anything and got nervous. And more sad.
“All set, guys. Thanks a lot.” His hand was in his pocket again, lifting out his wallet and opening it to withdraw a fistful of five-Euro notes. Jamie glanced at him, and her mouth turned down hard as her eyes narrowed. The guy with the sandals made that clucking sound again and stepped up right behind Kellen.
For a second, Kellen went on w
aving the money, knowing he shouldn’t, not sure why he felt like such an asshole. Only after he stopped moving did he realize no one but Jamie was looking at him.
In fact, no one was anywhere near them anymore. All together, the men who’d encircled Jamie and the sandal guy were retreating toward the toll gate. Catching Kellen’s glance, sandal guy lifted one long, hairy arm. Was that a wave?
Then they were alone. Just he, Jamie, the cars revving past each other as they reentered the laneless superstrade, and the other car, parked maybe fifty feet ahead of them. Yellow, encased in grit, distinctly European-box. The windows were so grimy that Kellen couldn’t tell whether anyone was in there. But someone had to be, because the single, sharp honk that had apparently scattered their rescuers had come from there.
“What was that bullshit with the money?” Jamie snapped. “They’re not waiters. They were help—”
The scream silenced her. Audible even above the traffic, it soared over the retaining wall beyond the shoulder and seemed to unfurl in the air before dissipating. In the first instant, Kellen mistook it for a siren.
Glancing at Jamie, then the retaining wall, then the sun squatting on the horizon, he stepped closer. He felt panicky, for all sorts of reasons. He also didn’t want this trip to end, ever. “Got another one of those universal words for you, James. Been in the papers all week. Ready? Cadaver.”
“Cadavere,” Jamie said, her head twisted around toward the origin of the scream.
“Right.”
Together, they collapsed into leaning positions against their rented two-seater. It had been filthy when they got it – cleanliness apparently not the business necessity here that it was back home – and now sported a crust as thick as Tuscan bread.
“Well, you got that thing out.” She was gesturing at the cell phone in his hands, and still sounded pissed. “Might as well use it.”
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