Sandra walked over to where he stood. She reached out to take him in her arms, and did so, but he stood unyielding, and seemingly didn’t even see her. His eyes remained locked onto the eyes of the portrait. He stood as rigid as a corpse and felt cold against Sandra’s chest through the thin material of her uniform blouse.
She let him go. He seemed to be totally absorbed with the portrait. Well, so be it, Sandra thought. Even if that is his sole interest in me, I can live with that. It could be infinitely worse.
She turned away and went back to the subject’s chair. The sunlight gave everything in the room a crisp, almost unreal appearance. “Will we finish the portrait today?” she asked.
When he answered, he answered the portrait. “No. I’m not going to complete you. I will not, I will not…”
Sandra felt as if something was tearing inside. “Please don’t be that way,” she said.
Somehow—Sandra could see no lighter or matches nearby—the painter set the canvas afire by reaching out and touching it.
The effect on Sandra was both horrifying and immediate. She felt as if she were burning from the inside out. She dropped to the floor and clawed at the air. Sharp teeth of flame clamped on every surface deep inside her body. Her skin crawled and ached like water thrown onto a white-hot iron surface. Yet the feeling was an illusion; she could see that her arms, her fingers, her legs remained smooth and unhurt. Knowing this didn’t help her as eldritch pain caressed her flesh.
Her vision clouded to a distant and dignified red, and she watched the next events unfold. She became a passive observer, thinking weakly, I’m going into shock.
The painter took the off-white cloth which he had used for background on his subjects. He spread it on the floor beside her. Then he disappeared into the bedroom, quickly returning with a pair of his trousers. He gently put them on Sandra. She didn’t resist. The pain had subsided.
Behind the painter the easel was a framework of flame, and bits of the canvas had turned to ash and had drifted through the air. On his palette table a container of turpentine or some similar solvent puffed into flame. The ceiling started to blacken as the flames grew.
After he had put the trousers on Sandra, he placed her gently onto the off-white cloth. He wrapped her up, leaving only her face exposed, and lifted her. He appeared to be totally calm. He also appeared to have no trouble lifting Sandra. The studio was now filling with smoke, and flames covered half of it.
He carried Sandra out the door and down the hall to the elevator. He held her while they waited for the car. After the door opened and he set her inside, he looked into her face and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll watch the display from up here and make sure you get to the ground floor. Somebody will get you there. If something happens, I’ll come get you.” He leaned over and kissed her lips.
She tried to speak, thought that she was able to say, “Don’t,” but watched him walk off anyway. As the elevator doors slid shut she saw him walk back into the flames. Alarms were ringing as she descended.
Ivory Black is prepared by charring bones.
The city absorbs strange experiences; the most traumatic and outlandish events are noticed, reported, assimilated, and quickly forgotten. The pressure of human experience, the sheer weight and gravity of human emotion forces individual lives into a flatness, a smoothness of interaction.
A studio apartment is gutted by fire; a crying woman is found wrapped in what appears to be a funeral shroud in an elevator; a mysterious man—reported by some as old, by others as young, by still others as deformed—is seen slinking away from the scene of the fire bent under an immense black silk bundle.
He disappears; she resumes her life; the apartment is repaired.
And the events are forgotten.
Caput Mortuum is a variety of brown which derives its name from some mysterious connection to the skulls of early Christians which have been found in Roman catacombs.
In an ancient land, there is a castle in ruins. It was once a stone and beam tower surrounded by a wall. Now the parapets have been chipped and broken, the buttresses have shifted and now sag, letting some parts of the roof collapse. In the twilight the ruins suggest a cloaked and armored warrior slumping forward, perhaps dying and perhaps already dead.
Within the ruins one immediately has an impression of wrongness, of some small detail being amiss. Eventually it becomes apparent. No pigeons or doves have nested here to paint the stones with their droppings; no lizards scratch or scramble over the rocks; no rats can be seen or heard within the dirty crannies of the place; there are no spiderwebs in these ruins to catch the dew or to close up cracks in the structures like gauzed bandages over wounds.
It’s as if the place were somehow patrolled by some larger predator, or as if the place were somehow shunned.
A man approaches the ruins. He is bent beneath some great burden, carrying an enormous bundle tied to his back. The man looks pitiably small here. He scrabbles over the stones like an insect, perhaps like an ant in the service of its royalty.
The man carefully takes his bundle to the recessed entrance of a corridor leading to the structures beneath the ruins. He descends a long unlit passage of narrow, uneven steps. The walls around him are close and exude a warm, moldlike dampness. The air moves slightly, rhythmically, not unlike the breathing of a sleeping beast.
The man’s feet disturb faded brown chips of some substance which scrape and crunch underfoot.
From the donjon below comes a sound. The man is expected. As he continues his descent, he recognizes sounds of rustling, as if some dried, dessicated thing were resettling, almost collapsing in on itself. There is also the scrabbling of hard instruments, or claws of some sort against damp stone. There is the persistent sound of wheezing and sucking, although it is arhythmic in nature, and thus bears little resemblance to the sound of a living thing.
The man enters a chamber lit by the dim flickering of a distant torch. Somewhere water or some liquid is dripping. The floor is broken, exposing dank earth through which ice crystals often grow in unearthly formations, irrespective of time of day or season of year. The man sets down his burden and removes the black silk wrappings. He glances around as he arranges the stretched canvas squares around the chamber. Although it’s damp and cold, the man sweats.
There is the sound of a great bulk being dragged over stones, and the sound of metallic or bone claws digging into the wet, crumbled floor of the chamber, gaining purchase. The torchlight dims as the space of the chamber is nearly filled with the arrival of the Master.
The portraits arranged around the walls of the room are all of beautiful women. These are undefinable things, products of an unexplainable creation. These portraits show an extraordinarily vivid command of color and light, and portray the wet lustrous eyes and warm pulsating blush and tender, meant-to-be-private nipples and thighs and secrets of these women.
The forms in these paintings are monumental. They portray the curves and nuances of feminine bodies more fully than most people would think that bodies could be captured, even through the normal skin-to-skin-and-beyond contacts of intimacy. The figures give the impression of being full.
The faces can never be seen moving, but nonetheless their eyes, and the tendons of their cheeks, and their lips seem to respond with fear and a sense of entrapment.