Chapter Twenty One
Martin peered into the shadowy room. Once again, apart from the mess he had made in his desperate attempt to break the glass, the room looked as unassuming and without threat as it always had. He gingerly stepped into the room and his attention was snatched by the sound of a fit of scampering from behind the sofa. Martin navigated to the French doors by going around the outskirts of the room and gave the sofa a wide berth.
Checking around him to ensure that he was immediately safe, he planted the point of the knife against the window and drew the rolling pin behind him to strike. White fire tore through his mind causing his aim to shift. He smashed the solid pin against his own hand, but the pain in his head anaesthetised him against the blow. He knew the head pain meant remembrance but he did not want to remember. He rushed through the tapestry of memories he had used before, took dizzying turns in the corridors of his mind. Childhood. Family. Adulthood. Adolescence. Work. Friends. The pain lashed whip-like across the tender tissue of his brain, forcing him to his knees. All corridors seemed to lead to the same place, but he persevered. Family holidays. Dusty Sunday school song books. Giving lectures…
Following Ebony’s command to leave, Martin reached the front door. He realised he had now been in both reception rooms on the ground floor of Ebony and Ivory’s home and he couldn’t recall seeing a workshop in the garden from the rooms he had visited. Ebony’s workspace had to be upstairs. With little thought Martin ran up the staircase, narrowed from its use as shelves to support books and papers, while Ebony bellowed for him to stop over the cacophony of Martin’s feet against the bare wood of the stairs. He lanced his staff through the banisters to trip him. His reflex had been quick, but Martin was three steps ahead and climbing two at a time. “Curse you!”
Martin threw open the first door that he found on the gloomy drab landing, but guessed from the layout that it would be the bathroom and although he was glad of the cleansing daylight that spilled out from within, he didn’t hesitate to study it. He threw open the second door and plunged into the room. The soft yellow light that filled the room fled from him and circled around him chasing the shadows. He knew in that disorientating moment, that although this room was not what he had expected, he had found what he had been searching for. He caught his breath from the sudden climb, and the nerves of the candles that were scattered throughout the room settled from Martin’s explosive entrance and returned to a steady soft glow.
The room was gloomy and had no window, like the hall and landing it held books and parchment filled with sketches and notes, except these were not stacked one on top of the other but laid out for easier access on shelves of bookcases, among jars of powder and liquids, or were in use and spread out on the large work bench that ran across the far wall. The bench held intricate mechanical pieces in various stages of construction and scattered tools suited for detailed works. A bubbling sound undulated in the air from earthenware cauldrons that stood on the desk or were held in wrought iron stands, their milky contents boiled – strangely without any source of heat, and filled the air with mists and curious earthy odours.
The floor was bared uneven boards, while the walls looked to be in bad shape with the plaster blown or missing and baring the bricks beneath. Much of the walls were covered by book cases that ran to the ceiling or were patchily papered with large anatomical sketches of skeletons and musculature, of a similar nature to Grey’s anatomy or Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. The ceiling held racks of stored jars and scrolls that could be winched down on pulleys, and were hung with tools and larger more complete mechanical structures.
From the middle of the ceiling, muslin or mosquito netting hung down to the floor and surrounded the dark shape of a raised bed. Ebony’s heavy footfalls pounded up the stairs and a sense of urgency conspired with Martin’s sense of discomfort that had settled its weight upon him from the claustrophobia of the cluttered room. Martin reached forward to a gap in the drapes with a hand that trembled, not for fear of Ebony’s impending arrival but at what he might see beyond the veil. He pulled it aside and peered within.
Ebony bundled through the door as Martin recoiled from the gauze curtains, acid burning at the back of his throat as his stomach reflexed at what he had seen. “What is this? What the fuck is this!” he wretched.
“The truth,” Ebony announced with dark solemnity.
“Murderer!” Martin cast his eyes back to the shroud, illuminated from within by candles that were set into the earth that filled the raised wooden bed as though it were a makeshift shrine.
“I understand what you think you are witness to… but this is not the work of Mort this is the work of beginnings – Genesis.” Ebony was impassioned. He moved into the room, still a powerful obstacle against any escape attempt, and moved a panel of the shroud aside with the tip of his staff.
The body lay before them on the bed of dusty soil that crawled with insects, yet the flesh appeared healthy and unspoilt by their appetite. The naked skin was aglow with the candlelight and held the allure of nude life and not the obscenity of nakedness and death. Yet the face…
“It looks so alive…” Martin made himself look upon its face again, and prayed that it was not alive with the face it had. “Yet it is dead. It couldn’t live like – like that.”
Martin was briefly aware of being on his knees in the back room of his home – the horror of the face in his memory causing him to recoil and not wanting to relive the events that would follow. The whip of pain lashed across his mind, punishing his resistance. A reedy whisper, barely a voice, accompanied the whip. “reeemeeemberrr…”
“Not dead. Simply awaiting life.” Ebony’s passion jumped emotion and became a low growl that caused the briefest of snarls on his face. “My toys and gifts became highly sought after. The ones I had used to barter for shelter and comfort were being tracked down and bought for high prices. Soon I was no longer making toys for the children I encountered. They were being commissioned by wealthy land owners for their already privileged children, and for the entertainment of nobles and royalty.”
Martin doubled over with a griping wretch from the abhorrent ghost-image in his memory of that things face, and stabbed a finger in the direction of the body. “What has your story got to do with that!”
Ebony approached the bed and ran a hand over the arm of the corpse and the athletic muscles appeared strangely firm but supple for a dead body. Martin was disturbed to his core by the pride in Ebony’s face for the body stripped of its face.
“The money was great, affording me the chance to build bigger and greater machines: life-size mechanical men and women who could play simple instruments and imitate life in small ways. They, however, attracted the attention of others.”
“Others?” Cold sweat drenched Martin’s body while his bowels burned with the heat of urgent fear; he was engaging with the ramblings of a murderer. A man who believed he was over three-hundred years old. A blind man who believed he was an artist. A man who had twisted a young girl into his will. A man who had taken the face off a young male and displayed him like a relic in a shrine.
“Yes, others. The ones that brought this form of art to compliment my own.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then understand you will. The success I made was not satisfying. The circles I was moving within led me to lose my connection with the people and villages I was used to – the life I would have had with Emily. I missed the children. Wealth and renown was not what I sought. I decided that my journey was at an end. I tried to take my life.” Ebony stretched his arms out before him and his sleeves slid up to reveal a thin ochre scar across each wrist. “I lay on the floor of my workshop in Prussia, my life draining from me. Then they came as a single pillar of black smoke. Four of them; each distinct in appearance and chilling personality, but taking their turn in possessing just one body within the smoke. Shifting in and out of existence within one silhouette, their skin as white as a burial shroud, their eyes as black as a starless night.”
> “These people you saw, what did they want with you?” Martin asked tentatively, energy that had writhed around his heart during Ebony’s explanation washed over him, running up the hairs of his neck into his hairline causing his jaw to quiver. He wanted to think it was the unnerving experience of talking to a lunatic and engaging in his world, and not a fear born from the consideration that what Ebony spoke of as being real.
“They offered me a deal. They wanted me to live and they would see to it that I did not die from my wounds. They would give me life extended. Free from natural death. I did not want it, but they needed it. For their work to be fulfilled it would take longer than mortal man’s time. They admired my work and they wanted me to continue it for them. However, there was a price for anyone who undertook their work, and for me it was my sight. They took my sight… Only when I worked would my vision return to aid me in my tasks.
“They commissioned larger dolls, but instructed me of strange new substances and materials, either unknown or forgotten to man. The others would provide the missing element that would give my creations life; souls. My creations would become vessels for souls who had been taken before their time was due. In return, when my work for them is over, I am to make one last figure in the form of my wife and they will bring my Emily back to me. I had a purpose again. My sight was a price that I gave gladly if it meant my wife to be reborn.”
“You mean that you made this? This is one of the creations that you mentioned?” Descartes the philosopher compared the workings of the body with machinery, but Martin was sure that even a great mind like Descartes had not been thinking of this. “Impossible…”
“The face is yet to be completed. Look closely at it.”
Hesitantly, as if he feared the body would spring to life, Martin leaned in closer. There was no definite line between flesh and muscle where the face had been, suggesting that the face had not been flayed or cut and peeled from the head. Where epidermis and corium became muscle the layers were wet and milky in appearance, as if the skin of the face had dissolved, or following Ebony’s explanation, had yet to be applied. Copper thread traced the fibres of the cheek muscle and ran beneath the dermis suggesting that the rest of the muscle beneath was of a similar inorganic and organic composite. “Impossible…”
“I can tell by your voice that your conviction wanes.”
“And when it has a… soul… it will live? and that is why you don’t keep your work?” Ebony’s words had been incongruous before, but now Martin understood. “You set it free…”
“They are born to finish their lives. Each has a curious thirst for knowledge and a will to travel. Few have returned to me. Some have sought each other out and have banded together. They call themselves the ‘Vitruvian Sons’, as like Ivory they are made with a formula of aesthetic and of perfect proportion.”
The copper wire that threaded the muscle was undeniable. “This… and Ivory are like those clock-work toys of yours?”
“Much more complex, thousands of working components… A completely anatomically correct and improved body, capable of full automata animation.”
“And this is why Ivory works the streets? This is where the money goes?” The puzzle had been solved, yet Martin wanted to dismantle it and rearrange the pieces into a pattern that was more satisfying.
Ebony rested his hands on the head of his staff. “The work is lengthy and costly, the personal fortune I have amassed has been depleted for a decade or more now. She is here to fund my work for them. Her memories of any depravity will be exorcised and she will live her own life with any one of my other creations.”
Ebony had been right in his certainty that Ivory had a companion in her destined future, and how could she not fall for one of Ebony’s creations? A being with an athletic aesthetic of Michelangelo’s David and a soul that was deemed worthy of completing its journey by otherworldly beings with the powers of Gods. “And that was her future that you spoke of before?”
“Yes.” The certainty in his answer dissolved from his face. “They are my hopes… Iris believes me naïve and blinded by my longing for reunion, she believes the others have a dark purpose for Ivory.”
Although the ‘thing’ was behind him, its presence was palpable and acted as an anchor keeping him within the reality that Ebony had created. “The ‘prophecy’ that you mentioned earlier?” The sarcasm came defensively to his quavering voice in an instinctive rejection of its possibility, although engaging with Ebony and using a word and an ideology that was not his own no longer jarred his belief system. Ebony nodded an affirmative in answer to Martin’s question. “This is ridiculous.” Another wave of cold energy coursed through him as he realised his panicked denial would be read as disbelief. He studied any flinch in Ebony that would indicate he had antagonised him.
“You go to such lengths to find answers yet when you are given them you can not bring yourself to believe.” Ebony stated without visibly moving a muscle that wasn’t required for speaking. “Has there not been any moment since you encountered Ivory that you suspected something ‘unnatural’ at work?”
Ebony’s eyes narrowed at Martin’s silence in an expression remembered from when he had sight, as if Ebony could see Martin reflecting upon how Ivory had miraculously survived being hit by his car, how the wounds she had sustained healed quickly, the strange howl he had heard when he had driven into her, and again during the violence at King’s flat and the pimps ambush, how her image was difficult to reproduce on paper and could not be captured by camera, and how she managed to get in and out of his locked house. Ebony nodded. “I see that it is so.”
Martin had nothing to say. His sane world, that for so long had had no place for superstition, souls or immortality, crumbled around him. He had been awakened to a new world and he desperately leafed through the fragments of his mind to find pieces that would enable him to escape and clutch at sanity.
“On one of your little visits here, you mentioned Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, how close you were to the truth of your situation. You are the Pygmalion of ancient myth who has fallen in love with the statue of Galatea. Only it is now, after you have fallen in love with her that you find that she was a crafted object of man before she lived.”
Martin snatched up his wits and balled his fists against a tremor that ran from his feet to his jaw. “I don’t – I will not – believe your lies! You are insane. You have brought that girl up within a house of lies, indoctrinated her within your fantasy world, and forced her to sell herself. At best you are a pimp, at worst you are an abuser of an adolescent.” Denial felt safe. Without what Ebony described as the ‘truth’ behind the facts Martin found leverage and calm. He now had an edge against him. “…Things that the authorities frown on; especially with a body on the premises.”
Martin wrestled with the memory of this moment but the reedy voice whispered to him. “remember!” The voice came as a distant breeze but hit him with the power of a gale slamming him back into his memory. “REMEMBER!”
Ebony extended his staff before him lance-like against Martin’s threat, and his voice became an unnatural grumble of thundering cannon balls rolling across the ceiling around Martin’s head. The candles guttered as if Ebony’s words disturbed the air and forced the candlelight to tremble against the menace of the surrounding shadows. “Leave this place. Speak of nothing. Do not return.”
Martin’s resolve gave way to a chilled sweat, although the conviction he had in persuasion of his threat was unshaken there was a tangible dramatic shift of power, and Martin’s defiance that had united his resolve abandoned him. His feet burned with a yearning to walk, a sudden compulsion to leave the house. The threat would still be effective, yet strangely he no longer wanted to play his hand. He didn’t want to talk to anyone about this house and everything connected to it. He never wanted to have to return to this house. A house that challenged his sanity. “I’m going.” Martin wrestled with his courage enough to pause in his newfound urge to leave. “Have you told her that I know that s
he continues to sell herself?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s over then. Now that she knows that I have found out about her continuing to sell herself she won’t be at mine when I get home.” Despite everything, this was the most disturbing thought.
“She will be there as I instructed her to be. The truth has not stopped you wanting her, and the discovery of her deception will not stop you paying for her to return to you.” His voice became commanding again. “Now follow me.”
The memory vision collapsed as Martin dug the tip of the knife into the palm of his hand. With the memory gone he instantly regretted the pain he had caused himself and he clutched the bleeding wound. He rocked back and forth on his knees, close to sobbing for the pain and the memory. He picked the knife up with the hand he was sure was broken from the rolling pin and took hold of the pin in his other hand, he stood up and prepared to make another attempt.
The rain shifted direction and angled against the glass of the French doors in a torrent that turned the outside world into a shifting distortion, as if the very elements would attempt to beat back his escape. He became aware of a creaking noise, lower than the sound of the rain, but in the room with him. Martin backed against the glass doors, and his focus darted from place to place trying to identify the noise, when he saw that the surface of the portrait of Ivory was squirming. The prized image was blurring. The crisp edges of her white skin were becoming fractal, migrating into the dark background. The black of her eyes grew larger and dark veins emanated from them as the paints tracked into one another. Swallowing his fear back into his throat he shuffled himself closer and peered through the gloom at the shifting portrait. The very edges of the canvas appeared to mirror the blurring of the painting as the fibres of the canvas drew themselves apart into a frayed mess. Martin watched powerless as the portrait he had sacrificed his family and morals for was reduced to a molten slag against the wall.
There was no noise, no shadow, no half-caught movement in the corner of his eye, but his attention was drawn to the door by a palpable gravitas. Ivory stood in the hall. Her eyes fixed upon him. He had checked all the rooms in his initial search but realised he had not checked the large walk-in storage area under the stairs, and he could see that the door was wide open behind her. Martin knew that this was not the Ivory he had fallen in love with. Not the Ivory that he had lusted after. This was the Ivory that he had been warned of. This was the Ivory of prophecy.
Ivory Page 19