Ivory

by Steve Merrifield

  Martin was paralysed; an insect suspended in amber. All he had to do was keep quiet. That was the plan. The blunted point that Martin was sure could break his skull, challenged that idea.

  “I will not hesitate in the fury of my defence!”

  Martin could escape. Yes, that was the other plan, a plan that was suddenly more favourable. If he got away without uttering a word or being caught Ebony could only guess at who his trespasser was. However the door was not fully open and Martin had his back to it and his footing was misplaced for a quick turnaround. Panic caught him between thought and action and he held his stance, holding his breath back from giving away his presence.

  Ebony flinched, releasing his muscles into his strike. “No! It’s me… Martin…” He relented and his breath shuddered out of him, distorting his words. His eyes clenched against the blow. It didn’t come. Martin opened one eye and saw that Ebony’s grip on his staff had tightened, staying the blow.

  “You. You dare trespass!” His voice was a husky prolonged exhalation, as if the power from his aborted attack was being vented from his chest, ending in a guttural growl.

  “I’m sorry… I’m so sorry.” He pleaded, still facing the end of Ebony’s staff. “I wanted answers.”

  “Your determination is proving to be an annoyance.” Ebony lowered his staff.

  “I knew there was a key here… I had seen Ivory reach in.”

  “I have told her to take care in not being observed,” he said aside to himself, as if being followed was a regular threat for Ivory.

  Remorse at being caught and despair at his actions skewered his conscience. “I have never done anything like this before. I don’t know what came over me…” The tension relaxed from Ebony’s jaw and his eyes softened while Martin felt a tightening of tension across his as he saw the phantom of pity in them. “But, you do though. Don’t you? You know what’s happened to me. What my obsession is. Your friend, the woman at the shop, I followed you there and she told me that I was cursed.”

  Ebony clasped the top of his staff in a grip that creaked with its tightness, either because he was being pressed for answers or with the revelation that he had been followed. “Lust and love are potent magics we all find ourselves slaves to,” he snapped.

  “No. This is different. I think I would destroy myself to keep feeling this.”

  “Others have destroyed themselves to keep from feeling it,” he cautioned. “Iris, an associate of mine, an oracle – a psychic in your words, she predicts that many will destroy each other for her beauty.”

  “Iris was the woman you asked after at the shop?”

  Ebony cocked his head in surprise at just how much Martin had gleaned from following him. He gave Martin a measuring look as if wondering how far Martin would be prepared to follow Ebony. “She is more than a mere woman, but yes.”

  “And there are tensions between you and this Iris?”

  “Iris and her followers have dogmatic views concerning good and evil. They see them as diametrically opposed. Things are black or white, light or dark, they do not recognise the grey shadow that permeates my work. Iris gave me this staff: a work of beauty for a blind man who was given a vision of the darkness, but wouldn’t believe.” Ebony proffered the staff but retained a firm two handed grip that instructed Martin it was being offered for examination, not for taking. Now able to study it directly he could see that it was carved from bottom to top, the relief and detail greater nearer the thicker top end. The seemingly Celtic interlacing pattern was actually carved representations of men and women, not in orgiastic embrace as it might have appeared, but in a struggle, pushing, pulling and clawing one another away from an inlayed slither of bone-white ivory detailed as a woman. The grain of the wood was darker around her, tracing over the contours of the naked men and women in their fight like blood.

  “And you believe that Ivory has some hold over men?” Martin was unsure if he was challenging Ebony or his own eager clutch at the possibility of there being a spell that could erode his will and his responsibility for his actions.

  “Men and women.” Ebony left the stairs and joined Martin in the hall. “Her influence knows no convention or boundaries. It is prophesised that man and woman will turn on each other to claim her, and from the bloody chaos darkness will come.”

  Martin’s heart fluttered at the mention of the word ‘prophecy’, but ignored it, preferring the safer indignation at Ebony’s insulting explanation. “Do you belong to a cult? Is that it?” His lips snarled around the question as if it tasted foul. “You have brought Ivory up and turned her to prostitution to try and fulfil some insane religious predictions?”

  “Ignorance still! On the brink of enlightenment the fool fails to see the path to truth,”

  “Fool?” There would be no arguing with a religious zealot. Disputing faith was a circular argument.

  “The journey of the fool in the tarot.”

  “I want to understand… but I don’t want to be made a fool of.” Ebony could keep his faith if Martin was given some answers that satisfied him. “Let me see some of your work, let me understand why all that money is needed.”

  Ebony’s brow shrugged in evaluation of the request and he moved towards the first door in the hallway, turned the handle and swung the door wide open.

  Martin silently questioned the gesture at first, but stepped into the room being offered to him. The sitting room was larger than the one he had been in before with Ebony, the dainty flower patterned paper on the walls looked as old as the house itself but was in better condition than the hall, the wrought iron fire place and wooden surround with integral age-glazed mirror were also original. “What is this?” Every surface of the walnut furniture, from the large table that dominated the space between the two antique queen Anne sofas, to the low level cabinets against each wall were covered with curiosities.

  “Things that I have crafted.”

  Martin heard Ebony’s words; “Things that I have crafted,”as clear as when he had heard them yesterday, but the mention of ‘things’ conjured a fear within him that brought down the curtain on the stage in his mind and grounded him in the present. Finding himself suddenly transported from the spacious room in Ivory’s house to the narrow hallway of his home was more disorientating than the last flashback. His memory had proved so powerful that he could taste the dusty air of Ebony’s house on his tongue even now. The pain in his head had subsided into dull aching throbs and he took careful steps down the hall towards the kitchen, keeping his head steady as if his brain might spill out. He locked the kitchen door and peered into the back room.

  Satisfied that nothing was waiting for him in the open and that everything seemed in its natural order he entered, he didn’t bother pulling the door away from the wall to trip the light switch and check if the room had power, he had given up on that hope. He crossed from the door, passed by the glass coffee table to the large French doors between Jenny’s armchair and the PC desk in the alcove. The sky was still, the clouds now fixed in place as a simmering ceiling flickering with coruscating yellow energy at its depths. The bushes and shrubs that separated the patio from the lawn trembled and swayed under the relentless torrential downpour giving the impression of things disturbing the branches and leaves. The outside world appeared just as frightening as the confines of his home. He reasoned that at least the outside had infinite opportunities of escape and would ground him in sanity.

  He knew that the weak point of the double glazed doors was the corner of the glass, but it had to be struck by something with a point. Martin scoured the room for something weighty and pointed, wary of what else he might find lurking in the gloom of his surroundings he stayed in the middle of the room. After several grunts of exertion and several swings at the glass, a table lamp, wooden sculpture and a heavy pot plant sat demolished at his feet and the glass remained unbroken. The portrait of Ivory stared down at him mockingly with its black eyes following his despair. Had she sent the ‘things’ to get him? Or had they tracke
d him down somehow? Was she even aware of them?

  Martin’s panicky fumbling fingers unlocked the kitchen door. An icy draught from the open window curled around him. He had been right in thinking that it was only wide enough for a child to get through, but it was wide enough for those ‘things’ to get in. He crossed the kitchen, pulled it closed and turned the handle down to lock it. A single long white hair trailed from where it had been snagged on the insulated join. A strand of Ivory’s hair. He shivered against cold fingers tracing down his spine.

  Impossible. He dismissed the suggestion that somehow she had managed to squeeze through, yet he had seen her get her arm into the letterbox at her house to retrieve her front door key, and he knew how impossible that was. It gnawed at his rationale. He returned to the task at hand and rifled through one of the drawers. He clumsily snatched through the clutter and drew a hard wood rolling pin out from the tangle of utensils. He scattered spatulas, spoons and a whisk to the floor as yesterday smashed into his consciousness once again.

  The room that Ebony showed him within his and Ivory’s house was cluttered with wooden and brass music boxes, flowers, and birds in cages, busts of children or scaled down adults, dolls dressed in rich fabric clothes, their faces and hands made in delicate porcelain their heads loaded with locks of real hair. “The work is so intricate…”

  “For a blind man?”

  “Yes.” Martin walked into the room and examined one of the larger pieces on a cabinet nearest the door. It was the top half of a child dressed in renaissance clothing of plush browns and reds, mounted at its waist upon a dark stained wooden box, the front of which formed a small desk-like ledge. On the desk a blank piece of white parchment held in place by one of the child’s hands while the other hand held an antique fountain pen poised to write. Its face was porcelain and its eyes were glass, but the paint of the skin had the glow of youth and the iridescent iris caught the light with a sparkle of life.

  “The work is merely created from patterns of movement well rehearsed over time and remembered after my sight left me.”

  Martin circled around the room, admiring the neatly knitted feathers layered over the body of the caged mechanical bird. The petals of the flowers were paper thin shavings of wood with colours so softly applied and graduated across the spectrum, it was as though the colours were breathed upon them. “It’s amazing.” He crouched to admire a Harlequin doll on the centre table, the figure was a little over a foot in height and clad in a suit of burnt orange and charcoal diamonds with a hook-nosed mask of red and black, one of many variations spaced around the room amongst other creations, but this one sat at a perfectly scaled down pianola.

  “You admire the Hellequin? The Hellequins are base creations, but her favoured works.”

  “This room…”

  “It is a room for her.”

  “Ivory?” The room suddenly ignited with a life of its own. The carved petals of the flowers unfurled to reveal silken stamen and brilliant colours, the music boxes clicked and whirred before chiming into life, the torso ticked and tocked as hidden cogs began to turn and gears began to creak, the iridium nib of its pen scratched at the page in fluid movements. The bird fluttered its wings and its head cocked and jerked in Martin’s direction while it chirped a sweet song. The harlequin played at the pianola in small jerky moves and its companions, although without instruments were just as animated. “What happened?”

  “The machines are hers, gifts of sentiment from me, she loves them and they love her. They are connected and come to life at her name or her presence.”

  Martin took his explanation as meaning they were sound and motion activated. He could see how the magic of this room and the dedication of love within the gifts would be of comfort to Ivory. “Beautiful. But it’s quite a leap of medium from oil painting to mechanics.”

  “Paintings were not enough to provide for my wife and I. My father was a watchmaker and I turned our family skill to toys and trinkets such as these. Those toys earned me a reputation as well as a comfortable living.”

  “They are quite amazing – surely in this day they are electronic?”

  “Clockwork. Self-winding.” Ebony announced, seeming to stand taller with his shoulders squared and his chest broad as he talked of his creations.

  “I find it difficult to believe.”

  “Classical legend has it that Herron made the first automaton, Da Vinci had his own designs for one. In the 18th century De Vaucanson created mechanical life in a mechanical man that could play the flute. In the same century Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his son made automaton men and women that could write, draw and play music. Works that inspired your Babbage into working on his calculating machines. Advances are made in every field in time, it’s not so unbelievable that almost three hundred years later their creation would evolve and their movement and ability would be increased, especially as Babbage’s work was the basis for the concept of the computer.”

  No matter how fantastic Ebony’s creations were Martin could not reconcile what he saw as being worth Ivory’s sacrifice. “And these are all funded by all that money? I would expect there to be more.”

  “This is just a sample of my work – shown to you now to satisfy your curiosity. The rest, as I told you before, is not kept by me. I only have my current work of creation, and I am sure you understand an artists desire to keep his relationship with his work sacrosanct until completion.”

  “Yes… of course. I came here to understand… and you have tried to explain… Yet I still don’t understand how the end justifies the means.” Ebony was still expecting Ivory to sell herself to fund his art.

  “Explanations yes, but justifications, no. I think I have been gracious enough at this point.” His hard voice turned his proud standing into a postured warning display of strength.

  Martin shuffled uneasily, he had pushed too far and he had expedited the end of the time that he had been granted. “I just find it all so difficult to comprehend. I apologise.” He had been so distracted by Ebony’s mechanical creations he had failed to pay any attention to the portraits. Each one featured the woman he recognised as Ebony’s wife from the portrait he had seen previously. Once again they were painted in an 18th century style that riled Martin’s sensibilities regarding taste. “The paintings are beautiful. Are they your work?”

  “Yes, as before they are of my wife.” Ebony’s eyes did not move from their fixed blind stare but Martin knew Ebony was seeing the past. “It was painted while she carried my child. We were so happy then.”

  Martin studied each in a display of interest that he forgot was lost on Ebony. “It must have been awful to lose them.” Martin clutched at empathy to stay the execution of his presence.

  “It was. After their deaths I was half the man I was.”

  “Your art is what kept you going?”

  “In a way. I sold my house and travelled Europe, moving from village to village making toys to earn my keep and for the children that gave me their precious time and interest. Seeing the pleasure in their faces was a glimpse of the joy I could have had with Emily. It was enough to keep me sane and alive.”

  In the largest of the paintings, the woman was seated but accompanied by a young black man with a soft slender face and a thin but solid framed body, standing proud behind and beside her. Ebony’s conspicuous chocolate eyes were surreally intense, but their stare was forgotten when he found a carved scrawl in the paint; ‘My darling M. Love, your Ebony.’ “I think you are mistaken though. These can’t be you and your wife – the date on them…” ‘1768.’

  Ebony stood like a statue for some time, leading Martin to question whether he had heard him. “There is no mistake.”

  Martin laughed spontaneously to avoid expressing the emotion that swelled urgently in his chest into his neck and swelling through veins into his temples. “You are expecting me to believe that you are over three-hundred years old?”

  “I expect nothing.”

  Martin clenched his fists to stop them
from trembling and paced from foot to foot, his face burning. “This is ridiculous,” he exclaimed as evenly as he could manage. “You are living in a fantasy world!”

  “Your judgement is not asked for and your understanding is not my burden. You are a trespasser and I demand that you leave my home this moment,” he growled clutching up his staff before him like a brandished weapon.

  “Oh, don’t worry – Ivory has made a joke out of me and now you do the same, so I am going.” Martin stalked towards the door, his sudden movement and direction startled Ebony and he flattened himself against the door to allow Martin to pass. Martin denied a spontaneous urge to sweep Ebony’s creations from the cabinet that ran beside him as he went. It would achieve nothing, except destroy things Ivory cherished. His instinctive concern for her frustrated him further.

  The sudden change from carpet within Ebony’s house to the hard flooring of his own kitchen caused Martin to be unsure about his footing and stagger momentarily across the room, absently punch drunk from his memory’s assault on him. The drawer that was still in his grip came free of the kitchen unit and the weight forced it out of his hand. It cracked the tiles on impact and spilled its contents in a cacophony of noise. He had fought his own way free this time. His memory was playing out yesterday’s events in a linear path that he did not want to follow to its conclusion. The frustration from his encounter with Ebony was swollen within his chest as though he had relived the experience. In the corner of his eye he glimpsed something low to the ground move past the door. In the second it took him to react and look up, there was nothing to be seen. He clutched the rolling pin firmly in his hand and drew the biggest knife from the selection in the block and cautiously headed back into the hall. He was sure the moving shape that he had seen had headed into the back room where he needed to be.