Jack groaned sorrowfully and leaned away while still grasping her at the waist. His eyes were pink, puffy. He looked devastated, sad.
“You never understood this picture at all, did you?” he asked.
“What do you mean? Of course I—”
“No one does. It’s a nightmare. Someday, Lord willing, they will see what I’ve done, and they’ll see that I closed the gap. That pictures don’t have to exist on the other side of the screen, separate from the people who see them. That the darkness in them — in all of us, Gracie, in you and me — is what binds us to art.”
He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and shuddered. The movement went from his hands into her body, and she stifled a cry.
“Only we can do this, Grace,” he said, opening his eyes and staring hard into hers. “You, and I. The artist and his subject. No one else can help us. And no one else can know.”
“Know? Know what, Jack?” She struggled and he moved to grasp her roughly by the arm. “Know what?”
37
I said, “Oh my God.”
“What the shit, man?” Marky responded. “What the shit is this?”
I couldn’t answer him. I was choked on my own quiet sobs.
Probably I knew it all along, or at least suspected it. I’d read that she was present at the film’s abysmal premiere, but I knew now that could not have been true. Because Grace Baron was dead by then. There could be no doubt about it. I was watching her die.
Not Clara — Grace. I was watching Grace Baronsky die.
The thing was so clumsy it looked more like behind-the-scenes footage or a home movie than a scene from the brilliant production I’d just seen. The camera shook as it was positioned, already rolling, and in flashes bodies moved in the periphery of the frame. I longed for impossible sound, to hear what was happening just off camera, but it became clear soon enough.
Though the framing was off and the lighting bright and ill-designed, if indeed designed at all, once the camera was steady I watched as a man in a rumpled tuxedo dragged a struggling woman to the same cemetery set from Angel of the Abyss and threw her down, violently, upon the sacrificial tomb. Her gown was torn and her makeup streaming down her still unbelievably angelic face — Grace. Grace Baronsky from Idaho, the starlet who never was.
She lunged up, swinging at the man with an open hand, but he was quicker than she and put down her rebellion with a close-fisted punch to the jaw. Grace rocked back and the man climbed atop of her, planting a knee on her chest. He tore her gown open, right down the front, and when he moved aside again, she was exposed to the waist.
“Is this for real, bro?” Marky said, his voice uncharacteristically quiet.
I said, “It’s for real.”
Grace lolled on the fake tomb, raised her hand to her face and stretched her mouth open wide. Whether she was screaming, or crying, or making any noise at all, I couldn’t tell. I cried for her. I think maybe Marky did a little, too.
The man went off screen for a moment while she lay there, stunned. When he returned, he was pulling himself into one of the long cloaks, the costume of the sect who killed Clara in the picture. He then went back to the camera, his body filling and darkening the frame for several seconds. When the light came back, he had moved it, set it up to angle down at Grace, at her anguished face and exposed torso. He tore the gown the rest of the way down, and off. I felt awful watching — disgusting, down to the pit of my stomach — but I somehow knew I had to. I had to bear witness to this. It was eighty-seven years too late, but it had to be me.
I wiped my eyes on the back of my hand and forced myself to keep looking. And that was when the man showed the dagger to the camera.
38
“Jack,” she pleaded, her voice wet and slurred with pain. “Please don’t. Please, Jack.”
“Clara doesn’t speak in this scene,” he said. “You know that. Be quiet.”
“I’m not Clara. Jack—I’m not Clara. It’s Grace. Please, it’s Grace you’re hurting. I’m real. This is all real…”
He spun around, the hood of the cloak falling from his head and his teeth grinding with anger.
“Of course it’s fucking real!” he roared. “Don’t you think I know that? Why else would I bother? Can’t you even try to imagine the impact had Eisenstein actually shot those people on the stairs? Had he actually had them slashed and stomped down? The curtain would be torn down, damn it! Art and life! Cinema and death! Human darkness, just as I’ve been saying all along. For Christ’s sake, Clara—Grace—can you see now? Can’t you finally see?”
Jack moaned and swung around to kick over an adjacent gravestone. Grace whimpered, started to rise from the tomb. Her vision blurred and her jaw throbbed, but she pushed past it, lifted her weight and tried to focus on the door leading out. It seemed miles away.
“No, Clara!” Jack shrieked.
Grace cried out and tumbled off the tomb, rolling away from the set. The cold floor of the studio slammed against her naked body, and she got to her knees, ready to leap up for the door, for escape. But he was upon her before she could move another inch, slinking his arm around her neck and dragging her back. Back to the set. Back to the tomb. To her final performance.
Fighting for breath, Jack Parson lifted her kicking from the floor and threw her down, a second time, on the tomb. She yelled out and he drove his fist into her diaphragm, knocking the wind out of her lungs in a prolonged gasp. The studio spun like a merry-go-round and she saw the glint of the blade and she knew it wasn’t a prop, it wasn’t the spring-loaded, retractable dagger the day players used to act out her demise weeks ago.
No fake knives. No more acting. After all she’d done, all she’d survived for the privilege to perform on celluloid, Grace Baron was going to die for art.
Jack snapped his head to look at the camera. The machine was still rolling, with only a few minutes left in the reel. He turned back to Grace, wheezing under him, her eyes wide and mouth set tight.
“For history,” he said, calmly. “Thank you.”
And then he raised the blade.
39
The blood welled up, impossibly dark and thick, like oil. The dagger only sank so deep, about three-quarters of the blade, where it stopped. And the man — Parson himself, of that I was sure now — held fast to the handle, permitting the wound to pour, Grace’s life to leak out from between her breasts in what was now scratchy, flickering black and white. It spilled down her side, following the groove of her ribs, and pooled beneath her still white body on the fake tomb. And there the reel ended, leaving nothing on the warehouse wall but a bright square of light as the projector continued to turn and click, the only thing making my soft, hitching sobs inaudible.
“Turn it off,” Marky said, his voice low and grim. “Turn that thing off, man.”
“I think it happened here,” I said, half to him and half to myself.
“What’choo mean, it happened here? That murder? That’s what that was, isn’t it? A murder?”
“It was. And I think this place used to be the movie studio where that happened. The movie before, and then that. Grace Baron’s killing. It happened right here, and…Jesus. That’s what this has been about all along.”