City of Saints and Madmen

FEW PAINTERS HAVE RISEN WITH SUCH speed from such obscurity as Martin Lake, and fewer still are so closely identified with a single painting, a single city. What remains obscure, even to those of us who knew him, is how and why Lake managed the extraordinary transformation from pleasing but facile collages and acrylics, to the luminous oils — both fantastical and dark, moody and playful — that would come to define both the artist and Ambergris.

Information aboutLake ’s childhood has a husk-like quality to it, as if someone had already scooped out the meat within the shell. At the age of six he contracted a rare bone disease in his left leg that, exacerbated by a hit-and-run accident with a Manzikert motored vehicle at age 12, made it necessary for him to use a cane. We have no other information about his childhood except for a quick glimpse of his parents: Theodore andCatherineLake. His father worked as an insect catcher outside of the town of Stockton, where the family lived in a simple rented apartment. There is some evidence, from comments Lake made to me prior to his fame, and from hints in subsequent interviews, that a tension existed between Lake and his father, created by Lake’s desire to pursue art and his father’s desire that the boy take up the profession of insect catcher.

Of Lake’s mother there is no record, andLake never spoke of her in any of his few interviews. The mock-historian Samuel Gorge has put forth the theory that Lake’s mother was a folk artist of considerable talent and also a fierce proponent of Truffi dianism — that she instilled inLake an appreciation for mysticism. Gorge believes the magnificent murals that line the walls of the Truffidian cathedral inStockton are the anonymous work ofLake ’s mother. No one has yet confirmed Gorge’s theory, but if true it might account for the streak of the occult, the macabre, that runs throughLake ’s art — stripped, of course, of the underlying religious aspect.

Lake’s mother almost certainly gave him his first art lesson, and urged him to pursue lessons at the local school, under the tutelage of a Mr. Shores, who unfortunately passed away without ever being asked to recall the work of his most famous (indeed, only famous) student. Lake also took several anatomy classes when young; even in his most surreal paintings the figures often seem hyper-real — as if there are layers of paint unseen, beneath which exist veins, arteries, muscles, nerves, tendons. This hyper-reality creates tension by playing againstLake ’s assertion that the “great artist swallows up the world that surrounds him until his whole environment has been absorbed in his own self.”

We may think of the Lake who arrived in Ambergris fromStockton as a contradictory creature: steeped in the technical world of anatomy and yet well-versed in the miraculous and ur-rational by his mother — a contradiction further enriched by his guilt over not following his father into the family trade. These are theelementsLake brought to Ambergris. In return, Ambergris gaveLake the freedom to be an artist while also opening his eyes to the possibilities of color.

Of the three yearsLake lived in Ambergris prior to the startling change in his work, we know only that he befriended a number of artists whom he would champion, with mixed results, once he became famous.

Chief among these artists was Jonathan Merrimount, a life-long friend. He also met Raffe Constance, who many believe was his life-long ro mantic companion. Together, Lake, Merrimount, andConstance would prove to be the most visible and influential artists of their genera tion. Unfortunately, neither Merrimount nor Constance has been willing to shed any illumination on the subject ofLake ’s life — his inspiration, his disappointments, his triumphs. Or, more importantly, how such a middle class individual could have created such sorrowful, nightmarish art.

Thus, I must attempt to fill in details from my own experience ofLake. It is with some hesitancy that I revealLake first showed his work at my own Gallery of Hidden Fascinations, prior to his transformation into an artist of the first rank. Although I cannot personally bear witness to that transformation, I can at least give the reader a pre-fame portrait of a very private artist who was rarely seen in public.

Lakewas a tall man who appeared to be of average height because, in using his cane, he had become stooped — an aspect that always gave him the impression of listening intently to you, although in reality he was a terrible listener and never hesitated to rudely interrupt when bored by what I said to him.

His face had a severe quality to it, offset by a firm chin, a perfect set of lips, and eyes that seemed to change color but which were, at base, a fierce, arresting green. In either anger or humor, his face was a weapon — for the narrowness became even more narrow in his anger and the eyes lanced you, while in laughter his face widened and the eyes admitted you to their compelling company. Mostly, though, he remained in a mode between laughter and anger, a mood which aped that of the “tortured artist” while at the same time keeping a distance between him self and any such passion. He was shy and clever, sly and arrogant — in other words, no different from many of the other artists I handled at my gallery. — From Janice Shriek’s A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.

One blustery spring day in the legendary metropolis of Ambergris, the artistMartinLake received an invitation to a beheading.

It was not an auspicious day to receive such an invitation andLake was nursing several grudges as he made his way to the post office. First and foremost, the Reds and Greens were at war; already, a number of nasty skirmishes had spread disease-like up and down the streets, even infecting portions ofAlbumuth Boulevard itself.

The Reds and Greens as a phenomenon simultaneously fascinated and repulsedLake. In short, the Greens saw the recent death of the (great) composer Voss Bender as a tragedy while the Reds thought the recent death of the (despotic) composer Voss Bender a blessing. They had taken their names from Bender’s favorite and least favorite colors: the green of a youth spent in the forests of Morrow; the red flags of the indigenous mushroom dwellers who he believed had abducted his cousin.

No doubt these two political factions would vanish as quickly as they had appeared, but in the meantimeLake kept a Green flag in his right pocket and a Red flag in his left pocket, the better to express the correct patriotic fervor. (On a purely aural level,Lake sympathized with the Reds, if only because the Greens polluted the air with a thousand Bender tunes morning, noon, and night.Lake had hardly listened to Bender while the man was alive; he resented having to change his habits now the man was dead.) Confronted by such dogma,Lake suspected his commitment to his weekly walk to the post office indicated a fatal character flaw, a fatal artistic curiosity. For he knew he would pull the wrong flag from the right pocket before the day was done. And yet, he thought, as he limped down Truff Avenue — even the blood-clot clusters of dog lilies, in their neat sidewalk rows, reminding him of the conflict— how else was he to exercise his crippled left leg? Besides, no vehicle for hire would deliver him through the disputed areas to his objective.

Lakescowled as a youth bejeweled in red buttons and waving a huge red flag ran into the street. In the wake of the flag,Lake could see the distant edges of the post office, suffused with the extraordinary morning light, which came down in sheets of gold.

The secondary tier of Reasons Why I Should Have Stayed At Home concerned, much toLake ’s irritation, the post office itself. He had no sympathy for its archaic architecture and only moderate respect for its function; the quality of a monopolistic private postal service being poor, most of his commissions arrived via courier. He also found distasteful the morbid nature of the building’s history, its stacks of

“corpse cases” as he called the postal boxes. These boxes, piled atop each other down the length and breadth of the great hall, climbed all the way to the ceiling. Surely any of the children previously shelved there had, on their ascent to heaven, found themselves trapped by that ugly yellow ceiling and to this day were banging their tiny ectoplasmic heads against it.

But, as the post offi ce rounded into view — looming and guttering like some monstrous, senile great aunt — none of these objections registered as strongly as the recent change of name to the “Voss Bender Memorial Post Office.” A shockingly rushed development, as the (great, despotic) composer and politician had died only three days before — rumors as to cause ranging from heart attack to poison — his body sequestered secretly, yet to be cremated and the ashes cast into the River Moth per Bender’s request. (Not to mention that a splinter faction of the Greens, in a flurry of pamphlets and broadsheets, had advertised the resurrection of their beloved Bender: he would reappear in the form of the first child born after midnight in one year’s time. Would the child be born with arias bursting forth from his mouth like nightingales,Lake wondered.)

The renaming alone madeLake ’s teeth grind together. It seemed, to his absurdly envious eye — he knew how absurd he was, but could not control his feelings — that every third building of any importance had had the composer’s name rudely slapped over old assignations, with no sense of decorum or perspective. Was it not enough that while alive Bender had been a virtual tyrant of the arts, squashing all opera, all theater, that did not fit his outdated melodramatic sensibilities? Was it not enough that he had come to be the de facto ruler of a city that simultaneously abhorred and embraced the cult of personality?

Did he now have to usurp the entire city — every last stone of it — forever and always as his mausoleum?

Apparently so. Apparently everyone soon would be permanently lost, for every avenue, alley, boulevard, dead end, and cul de sac would be renamed “Bender.” “Bender” would be the name given to all new-borns; or, for variety’s sake, “Voss.” And a whole generation of Benders or Vosses would trip and tangle their way through a city which from every street corner threw back their name at them like an im personal insult.

Why — Lakewarmed to his own vitriol — if another Manzikert flattened him as he crossed this very street, he would be lucky to have his own name adorn his own gravestone! No doubt, he mused sourly — but with satisfaction — as he tested the post office’s front steps with his cane, his final resting place would display the legend, “Voss Bender Memorial Gravestone” with the words “(occupied by Martin Lake)”

etched in tiny letters below.

Inside the post offi ce, at the threshold of the great hall, Lake walked through the gloomy light cast by the far windows and presented himself to the attendant, a man with a face like a knife;Lake had never bothered to learn his name.

Lakeheld out his key. “Number 7768, please.”

The attendant, legs propped against his desk, looked up from the broadsheet he was reading, scowled, and said, “I’m busy.”

Lake, startled, paused for a moment. Then, showing his cane, he tossed his key onto the desk.

The attendant looked at it as if it were a dead cockroach. “That, sir, is your key, sir. Yes it is. Go to it, sir. And all good luck to you.” He ruffled the broadsheet as he held it up to block outLake.

Lake stared at the fingers holding the broadsheet and wondered if there would be a place for the man’s sour features in his latest commission — if he could immortalize the unhelpfulness that was as blunt as the man’s knuckles. After the long, grueling walk through hostile territory, this was really too much.

Lakepeered over the broadsheet, using his cane to pull it down a lit tle. “You are the attendant, aren’t you? I haven’t been giving you my key all these months only to now discover that you are merely a conscientious volunteer?”

The man blinked and put down his broadsheet to reveal a crooked smile.

“I am the attendant. That is your key. You are crippled. Sir.”

“Then what is the problem?”

The man lookedLake up and down. “Your attire, sir. You are dressed somewhat… ambiguously.”

Lakewasn’t sure if the answer or the comfortable use of the word “ambiguously” surprised him more.

Nonetheless, he examined his clothes. He had thrown on a blue vest over a white shirt, blue trousers with black shoes and socks.

The attendant wore clothes the color of overripe tomatoes.

Lakeburst out laughing. The attendant smirked.

“True, true,”Lake managed. “I’ve not declared myself, have I? I must have a coming out party. What am I? Vegetable or mineral?”

In clipped tones, his eyes cold and empty, the attendant asked, “Red or Green: which is it, sir.”

Lakestopped laughing. The buffoon was serious. This same pleasant if distant man he had seen every week for over two years had succumbed to the dark allure of Voss Bender’s death.Lake stared at the attendant and saw a stranger.

Slowly, carefully,Lake said, “I am green on the outside, being as yet youthful in my chosen profession, and red on the inside, being, as is everyone, a mere mortal.” He produced both flags. “I have your flag — and the flag of the other side.” He dangled them in front of the atten dant. “Did I dislike Voss Bender and abhor his stranglehold on the city? Yes. Did I wish him dead? No. Is this not enough? Why must I declare myself when all I wish is to toss these silly flags in the River Moth and stand aside while you and your cohorts barrel through bent on butchery? I am neutral, sir.” (Lakethought this a particularly fine speech.)

“Because, sir,” the attendant said, as he rose with a great show of exertion and snatched up Lake’s key,

“Voss Bender is not dead.”

He gave Lake a stare that made the little hairs on the back of his neck rise, then walked over to the boxes whileLake smoldered like a badly-lit candle. Was the whole city going to play such games? Next time he went to the grocery store would the old lady behind the counter demand he sing a Bender aria before she would sell him a loaf of bread?

The attendant climbed one of the many ladders that leaned against the stacks like odd wooden insects.Lake hoped his journey had not been in vain — let there at least be a missive from his mother which might stave off the specter of homesickness. His father was, no doubt, still en cased in the tight-lipped silence that covered him like a cicada’s exoskeleton.

The attendant pulledLake ’s box out, retrieved something from it, and climbed back down with an envelope.

“Here,” the attendant said, glaring, and handed it toLake, who took both it and his key with unintended gentleness, his anger losing out to bewilderment.

Bare of place and time, the maroon envelope displayed neither a re turn address nor his own address.

More mysterious, he could find no trace of a postmark, which could only mean someone had hand-delivered it. On the back,Lake discovered a curious seal imprinted in an orange-gold wax that smelled of honey. The seal formed an owl-like mask which, whenLake turned it upside down, became transformed into a human face. The intricate pattern remindedLakeofTrillian the Great Banker’s many signature casts for coins.

“Do you know how this letter got here?” Lake started to say, turning toward the desk, but the attendant had vanished, leaving only the silence and shadows of the great hall, the close air filtering the dust of one hundred years through its coppery sheen, the open door a rectangle of golden light.

From the broadsheet on the desk the name “Voss Bender,” in vermilion ink, winked up at him like some infernal, recurring joke.

With only this feeble skeleton of a biography as our background mate rial, we must now approach the work that has becomeMartinLake: “Invitation to a Beheading.”The piece marks the beginning of the grotesqueries, the controlled savagery of his oils — the slashes of emerald slitting open the sky, the deft, tinted green of the windows looking in, the moss green of the exterior walls: all are vintageLake.

The subject is, of course, the Voss Bender Memorial Post Office, truly among the most imposing of Ambergris’ many eccentric buildings. If we can trust the words of Bronet Raden, the noted art critic, when he writes

then the first of Lake’s many accomplishments was to break the post offi ce down into its fragments and recreate it from “romantic ruins” into the dream-edifice that, for 30 years, has horrified and delighted visitors to the post office.

The astute observer will note that the post office walls inLake ’s painting are created with careful crosshatching brushstrokes layered over a dampened whiteness. This whiteness, upon close examination, is composed of hundreds of bones — skulls, femurs, ribs — all compressed and rendered with a pathetic delicacy that astounds the eye.

On a surface level, this imagery surely functions as a symbolic nod to the building’s former usage.

Conceived to house the Cappan and his family, the brooding structure that would become the Voss Bender Memorial Post Office was abandoned following the dissolution of the Cappandom and then converted into a repository for the corpses of mushroom dwellers and indigent children. After a time, it fell into disuse — asLake effectively shows with his surfaces beneath surfaces: the white columns slowly turning gray-green, the snarling gargoyles blackened from disrepair, the building’s entire skin pocked by lichen and mold.

Lakefrequently visited the post office and must have been familiar with its former function. When the old post office burned down and relocated to its present location in what was little better than an abandoned morgue, it is rumored that the first patrons of the new service eagerly opened their post boxes only to find within them old and strangely delicate bones — the bones Lake has “woven” into the “fabric” of his painting.

Lake’s interpretation of the building is superior in its ability to convey the post office’s psychic or spiritual self. As the noted painter and instructor Leonard Venturi has written:

Lake’s representation of the post offi ce is clearly a painting in Venturi’s sense, for the subject is riddled through with wormholes of style, with layers of meaning. — From Janice Shriek’s A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.

Lakelived farthest from the docks and the River Moth, at the eastern end ofAlbumuth Boulevard, where it merged with the warren of middle class streets that laboriously, some thought treacherously, descended into the valley below. The neighborhood, its narrow mews crowded with cheap apart ments and cafes, was filthy with writers, artists, architects, actors, and performers of every kind. Two years ago it had been resplendently fresh and on the cutting edge of the New Art. Street parties had lasted until six in the morning, and shocking conversations about the New Art, often destined for the pages of influential journals, had permeated the coffee-and-mint flavored air surrounding every eatery. By now, however, the sycophants and hangers-on had caught wind of the little miracle and begun to masticate it into a safe, stable “community.” Eventually, the smell of rot — rotting ideas, rotting relationships, rotting art — would force the real artists out, to settle new frontiers.Lake hoped he would be going with them.

Lake’s apartment, on the third floor of an old beehive-like tenement run by a legendary landlord known alternately as “Dame Tuff” or “Dame Truff,” depending on one’s religious beliefs, was a small studio cluttered with the salmon, saffron, and sapphire bluster of his art: easels made from stripped birch branches, the blank canvases upon them flap-flapping for attention; paint-splattered stools; a chair smothered in a tangle of shirts that stank of turpentine; and in the middle of all this, like a besieged island, his cot, covered with watercolor sketches curled at the edges and brushes stiff from lazy washings. The sense of a furious mess pleased him; it always looked like he had just finished attacking some new work of art. Sometimes he added to the confusion just before the arrival of visitors, not so self-deluded that he couldn’t laugh at himself as he did it.

Once back in his apartment,Lake locked the door, discarded his cane, threw the shirts from his chair, and sat down to contemplate the letter. Faces cut from various magazines stared at him from across the room, waiting to be turned into collages for an as-yet-untitled autobiography in the third person written (and self-published) by a Mr. Dradin Kashmir. The collages represented a month’s rent and he was late completing them. He avoided the faces as if they all wore his father’s scowl.

Did the envelope contain a commission? He took it out of his pocket, weighed it in his hand. Not heavy.

A single sheet of paper? The indifferent light of his apartment made the maroon envelope almost black.

The seal still scintillated so beautifully in his artist’s imagination that he hesitated to break it.

Reluctantly — his fingers must be coerced into such an action — he broke the seal, opened the flap, and pulled out a sheet of parchment paper shot through with crimson threads. Words had been printed on the paper in a gold-orange ink, followed by the same mask symbol found on the seal. He skimmed the words several times, as if by rapid review he might discover some hidden message, some hint of closure.

But the words only deepened the mystery:

Lakestared at the message. A masquerade, but to what purpose? He suppressed an impulse to laugh and instead walked over to the balcony and opened the windows, letting in fresh air. The sudden chaos of voices from below, the rough sounds of street traffi c — on foot, on horses, or in motored vehicles — gaveLake a comforting sense of community, as if he were debating the mystery of the message with the world.

From his balcony window he could see, on the right, a green-tinged slice of the valley, while straight ahead the spires and domes of the Religious Quarter burned white, gold, and silver. To the left, the solid red brick and orange marble of more apartment buildings.

Lakeliked the view. It reminded him that he had survived three years in a city notorious for devouring innocents whole. Not famous, true, but not dead or defeated either. Indeed, he took a perverse pleasure from enduring and withstanding the city’s countless petty cruelties, for he believed it made him stronger.

One day he might rule the city, for certainly it had not ruled him.

And now this — this letter that seemed to have come from the city itself. Surely it was the work of one of his artist friends — Kinsky, Raffe, or that ruinous old scoundrel, Sonter? A practical joke, perhaps even Merrimount’s doing? “Invitation To A Beheading.” What could it mean? He vaguely remembered a book, a fiction, with that title, written by Sirin, wasn’t it? Sirin, whose pseudonyms spread through the pages of literary journals like some mad yet strangely wonderful disease.

But perhaps it meant nothing at all and “they” intended that he waste so much time studying it that he would be late finishing his commissions.

Lakewalked back to his chair and sat down. Gold ink was expensive, and the envelope, on closer inspection, was flecked with gold as well, while the paper for the invitation itself had gold threads. The paper even smelled of orange peel cologne.Lake frowned, his gaze lingering on the shimmery architecture of the Religious Quarter. The cost of such an invi tation came to a sum equal to a week’s commissions.

Would his friends spend so much on a joke?

His frown deepened. Perhaps, merriest joke of all, the letter had been misdelivered, the sender having used the wrong address. Only, it had no address on it. Which made him suspect his friends again. And might the attendant, if he went back to the post office, recall who had slipped the letter through the front slot of his box? He sighed. It was hopeless; such speculations only fed the—

A pebble sailed through the open window and fell onto his lap. He started, then smiled and rose, the pebble falling to the floor. At the window, he looked down. Raffe stared up at him from the street: daring Raffe in her sarcastic red-and-green jacket.

“Good shot,” he called down. He studied her face for any hint of complicity in a plot, found no mischief there, realized it meant nothing.

“We’re headed for the Calf for the evening,” Raffe shouted up at him. “Are you coming?”

Lakenodded. “Go on ahead. I’ll be there soon.”

Raffe smiled, waved, and continued on down the street.

Lake retreated into his room, put the letter back in its envelope, stuffed it all into an inner pocket, and retired to the bathroom down the hall, the better to freshen up for the night’s festivities. As he washed his face and looked into the moss-tinged mirror, he considered whether he should re main mum or share the invitation. He had still not decided when he walked out onto the street and into the harsh light of late afternoon.

By the time he reached the Cafe of the Ruby-Throated Calf,Lake found that his fellow artists had, aided by large quantities of alcohol, adopted a cavalier attitude toward the War of the Reds and the Greens. As a gang of Reds ran by, dressed in their patchwork crimson robes, his friends rose together, produced their red flags and cheered as boisterously as if at some sporting event.Lake had just taken a seat, generally ignored in the hub bub, when a gang of Greens trotted by in pursuit, and once again his friends rose, green flags in hand this time, and let out a roar of approval.

Lakesmiled, Raffe giving him a quick elbow to the ribs before she turned back to her conversation, and he let the smell of coffee and chocolate work its magic. His leg ached, as it did sometimes when he was under stress, but otherwise, he had no complaints. The weather had remained pleasant, neither too warm nor too cold, and a breeze ruffled the branches of the potted zindel trees with their jade leaves. The trees formed minia ture forests around groups of tables, effectively blocking out rival conversations without blocking the street from view. Artists lounged in their iron latticework chairs or slouched over the black-framed round glass tables while imbibing a succession of exotic drinks and coffees. The night lanterns had just been turned on and the glow lent a cozy warmth to their own group, cocooned as they were by the foliage and the soothing murmur of conversations.

The four sitting withLake he counted as his closest friends: Raffe, Sonter, Kinsky, and Merrimount. The rest had become as interchange able as the bricks of Hoegbotton & Sons’ many trading outposts, and about as interesting. At the moment, X, Y, and Z claimed the outer tables like petty island tyrants, their faces peering pale and glinty-eyed in atLake ’s group, one ear to the inner conversation while at the same time trying to maintain an uneasy autonomy.

Merrimount, a handsome man with long, dark lashes and wide blue eyes, combined elements of painting and performance art in his work, his life itself a kind of performance art. Merrimount was Lake’s on-again, off-again lover, andLake shot him a raffish grin to let him know that, surely, they would be on-again soon? Merrimount ignored him. Last time they had seen each other,Lake had made Merri cry.

“You want too much,” Merri had said. “No one can give you that much love, not and still be human. Or sane.” Raffe had told Lake to stay away from Merri but, painful as it was to admit,Lake knew Raffe meant he was bad for Merri.

Raffe, who sat next to Merrimount — a buffer between him andLake — was a tall woman with long black hair and dark, expressive eyebrows that lent a needed intensity to her light green eyes. Raffe andLake had become friends the day he arrived in Ambergris. She had found him onAlbumuth Boulevard, watching the crowds, an overwhelmed, almost defeated, look on his face. Raffe had let him stay with her for the three months it had taken him to find his city legs. She painted huge, swirling, passionate city scapes in which the people all seemed caught in mid-step of some intricate and unbearably graceful dance. They sold well, and not just to tourists.

Lakesaid to Raffe, “Do you think it wise to be so… careless?”

“Why, whatever do you mean, Martin?” Raffe had a deep, distinctly feminine voice that he never tired of hearing.

The strong, gravely tones of Michael Kinsky, sitting on the other side of Merrimount, rumbled throughLake ’s answer: “He means, aren’t we afraid of the donkey asses known as the Reds and the monkey butts known as the Greens.”

Kinsky had a wiry frame and a sparse red beard. He made mosaics from discarded bits of stone, jewelry, and other gimcracks discovered on the city’s streets. Kinsky had been well-liked by Voss Bender andLake imagined the composer’s death had dealt Kinsky’s career a serious blow — although, as always, Kinsky’s laconic demeanor appeared unruffled by catastrophe.

“We’re not afraid of anything,” Raffe said, raising her chin and putting her hands on her sides in mock bravado.

Edward Sonter, to Kinsky’s right andLake ’s immediate left, giggled. He had a horrible tendency to produce a high-pitched squeal of amuse ment, in total contrast to the sensuality of his art. Sonter made abstract pottery and sculptures, vaguely obscene in nature. His gangly frame and his face, in which the eyes floated unsteadily, could often be seen in the Religious Quarter, where his work enjoyed unusually brisk sales.

As if Sonter’s giggle had been a signal, they began to talk careers, gauge the day’s fortunes and misfortunes. They had tame material this time: a gallery owner — no oneLake knew — had been discovered selling wall space in return for sexual favors.Lake ordered a cup of coffee, with a chocolate chaser, and listened without enthusiasm.

Lake sensed familiar undercurrents of tension, as each artist sought to ferret out information about his or her fellows — weasels, bright-eyed and eager for the kill, that their own weasel selves might burn all the brighter. These tensions had eaten more than one conversation, leaving the table silent with barely suppressed hatred born of envy. Such a cruel and cutting silence had even eaten an artist or two.

Personally,Lake enjoyed the tension because it rarely centered around him; he was by far the most obscure member of the inner circle, kept there by the strength of Raffe’s patronage. Now, though, he felt a different tension, centered around the letter. It lay in a pocket against his chest like a second heart in his awareness of it.

As the shadows deepened into early dusk and the buttery light of the lanterns on their delightfully curled bronze posts held back the night, the conversation, lubricated by wine, became to Lake’s ears tantalizingly anonymous, as will happen in the company of people one is comfortable with, so that Lake could never remember exactly who had said what, or who had argued for what position. Lake later wondered if anything had been said, or if they had sat there, beautifully mute, while inside his head a conversation took place between Martin andLake.

He spent the time contemplating the pleasures of reconciliation with Merri — drank in the twinned marvels of the man’s perfect mouth, the compact, sinuous body. ButLake could not forget the letter.

This, and his growing ennui, led him to direct the conversation toward a more timely subject:

“I’ve heard it said that the Greens are disemboweling innocent folk near the docks, just off of Albumuth.

If they bleed red, they are de nounced as sympathizers against Voss Bender; if they bleed green, then their attackers apologize for the inconvenience and try to patch them up. Of course, if they bleed green, they’re likely headed for the columbarium anyhow.”

“Are you trying to disgust us?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if it were true — it seems in keeping with the man himself: self-proclaimed Dictator of Art, with heavy emphasis on ‘Dic.’ We all know he was a genius, but it’s a good thing he’s dead… unless one of you is a Green with a dagger… ”

“Very funny.”

“Certainly it is rare for a single artist to so thoroughly dominate the city’s cultural life—”

“—Not to mention politics—”

(“Who started the Reds and the Greens anyhow?”)

“And to be discussed so thoroughly, in so many cafes—”

(“It started as an argument about the worth of Bender’s music, between two professors of musicology onTrotten Street. Leave it to musicians to start a war over music; now that you’re caught up, listen for God’s sake!”)

“—Not to mention politics, you say. And isn’t it a warning to us all that Art and Politics are like oil and water? To comment—”

“—‘oil and water’? Now we understand why you’re a painter.”

“How clever.”

“—as I said, to comment on it, perhaps, if forced to, but not to partici pate?”

“But if not Bender, then some bureaucratic business-man like Trillian. Trillian, the Great Banker. Sounds like an advertisement, not a leader. Surely, Merrimount, we’re damned either way. And why not let the city run itself?”

“Oh — and it’s done such a good job of that so far—”

“Off topic. We’re bloody well off topic — again!”

“Ah, but what you two don’t see is that it is precisely his audience’s passionate connection to his art

— the fact that people believe the operas are the man — that has created the crisis!”

“Depends. I thought his death caused the crisis?”

At that moment, a group of Greens ran by.Lake, Merrimount, Kinsky, and Sonter all raised their green flags with a curious mixture of derision and drunken fervor. Raffe sat up and shouted after them, “He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s dead!” Her face was flushed, her hair furiously tangled.

The last of the Greens turned at the sound of Raffe’s voice, his face ghastly pale under the lamps.Lake saw that the man’s hands dripped red. He forced Raffe to sit down: “Hush now, hush!” The man’s gaze swept across their table, and then he was running after his comrades, soon out of sight.

“Yes, not so obvious, that’s all.”

“Their spies are everywhere.”

“Why, I found one in my nose this morning while blowing it.”

“The morning or the nose?”

Laughter, and then a voice from beyond the inner circle, muffled by the dense shrubbery, offered, “It’s not certain Bender is dead. The Greens claim he is alive.”

“Ah yes.” The inner circle deftly appropriated the topic, slamming like a rude, massive door on the outer circle.

“Yes, he’s alive.”

“—or he’s dead and coming back in a fortnight, just a bit rotted for the decay. Delay?”

“—no one’s actually seen the body.”

“—hush hush secrecy. Even his friends didn’t see—”

“—and what we’re witnessing is actually a coup. ”

“Coo coo.”

“Shut up, you bloody pigeon.”

“I’m not a pigeon — I’m a cuckoo.”

“Bender hated pigeons.”

“He hated cuckoos too.”

“He was a cuckoo.”

“Boo! Boo!”

“As if anyone really controls this city, anyway?”

“O fecund grand mother matron, Ambergris, bathed in the blood of versions under the gangrenous moon.” Merrimount’s melodramatic lilt was unmistakable, andLake roused himself.

“Did I hear right?”Lake rubbed his ears. “Is this poetry? Verse? But what is this gristle: bathed in the blood of versions? Surely, my merry mount, you mean virgins. We all were one once — or had one once.”

A roar of approval from the gallery.

But Merrimount countered: “No, no, my dearLake, I meant versions — I protest. I meant versions: Bathed in the blood of the city’s many versions of itself.”

“A nice recovery”—Sonter again—“but I still think you’re drunk.”

At which point, Sonter and Merrimount fell out of the conversation, the two locked in an orbit of

“version”/ “virgin” that, in all likelihood, would continue until the sun and moon fell out of the sky.Lake felt a twinge of jealousy.

Kinsky offered a smug smile, stood, stretched, and said, “I’m going to the opera. Anyone with me?”

A chorus of boos, accompanied by a series of “Fuck off’s!”

Kinsky, face ruddy, guffawed, threw down some coins for his bill, and stumbled off down the street which, despite the late hour, twitched and rustled with foot traffic.

“Watch out for the Reds, the Greens, and the Blues,” Raffe shouted after him.

“The Blues?”Lake said, turning to Raffe.

“Yes. The Blues — you know. The sads.”

“Funny. I think the Blues are more dangerous than the Greens and the Reds put together.”

“Only the Browns are more deadly.”

Lakelaughed, stared after Kinsky. “He’s not serious, is he?”

“No,” Raffe said. “After all, if there is to be a massacre, it will be at the opera. You’d think the theater owners, or even the actors, would have more sense and close down for a month.”

“Shouldn’t we leave the city? Just the two of us — and maybe Merrimount?”

Raffe snorted. “And maybe Merrimount? And where would we go? Morrow? The Court of the Kalif?

Excuse me for saying so, but I’m broke.”

Lakesmirked. “Then why are you drinking so much.”

“Seriously. Do you mean you’d pay for a trip?”

“No — I’m just as poor as you.”Lake put down the drink. “But, I would pay for some advice.”

“Eat healthy foods. Do your commissions on time. Don’t let Merrimount back into your life.”

“No, no. Not that kind of advice. More specific.”

“About what?”

He leaned forward, said softly, “Have you ever received an anonymous commission?”

“How do you mean?”

“A letter appears in your post office box. It has no return address. Your address isn’t on it. It’s clearly from someone wealthy. It tells you to go to a certain place at a certain time. It mentions a masquerade.”

Raffe frowned, the corners of her eyes narrowing. “You’re serious.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never gotten a commission like that. You have?”

“Yes. I think. I mean, I think it’s a commission.”

“May I see the letter.”

Lakelooked at her, his best friend, and somehow he couldn’t share it with her.

“I don’t have it with me.”

“Liar!”

As he started to protest, she took his hand and said, “No, no — it’s all right. I understand. I won’t take an advantage from you. But you want advice on whether you should go?”

Lakenodded, too ashamed to look at her.

“It might be your big break — a major collector who wants to remain anonymous until he’s cornered the market inLake originals. Or… ”

She paused and a great fear settled overLake, a fear he knew could only overwhelm him so quickly because it had been there all along.

“Or?”

“It could be a… special assignation.”

“ A what?”

“You don’t know what I mean?”

He took a sip of his drink, set it down again, said, “I’ll admit it. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Naive, naive Martin,” she said, and leaned forward to ruffle his hair.

Blushing, he drew back, said, “Just tell me, Raffe.”

Raffe smiled. “Sometimes, Martin, a wealthy person will get a filthy little idea in a filthy little part of their mind — and that idea is to have personalized pornography done by an artist.”

“Oh.”

Quickly, she said, “But I’m probably wrong. Even if so, that kind of work pays very well. Maybe even enough to let you take time off from commissions to do your own work.”

“So I should go?”

“You only become successful by taking chances… I’ve been meaning to tell you, Martin, as a friend and fellow artist—”

“What? What have you been meaning to tell me?”

Lakewas acutely aware that Sonter and Merrimount had fallen silent.

She took his hand in hers. “Your work is small.”

“Miniatures?”Lake said incredulously.

“No. How do I say this? Small in ambition. Your art treads carefully. You need to take bigger steps.

You need to paint a bigger world.”

Lakelooked up at the clouds, trying to disguise the hurt in his voice, the ache in his throat: “You’re saying I’m no good.”

“I’m only saying you don’t think you’re any good. Why else do you waste such a talent on facile portraits, on a thousand lesser disciplines that require no discipline. You, Martin, could be the Voss Bender of artists.”

“And look what happened to him — he’s dead.”

“Martin!”

Suddenly he felt very tired, very… small. His father’s voice rang in his head unpleasantly.

“There’s something about the quality of the light in this city that I cannot capture in paint,” he mumbled.

“What?”

“The quality of light is deadly.”

“I don’t understand. Are you angry with me?”

He managed a thin smile. “Raffe, how could I be angry with you? I need time to think about what you’ve said. It’s not something I can just agree with. But in the meantime, I’ll take your advice — I’ll go.”

Raffe’s face brightened. “Good! Now escort me home. I need my sleep.”

“Merrimount will be jealous.”

“No I won’t,” Merrimount said, with a look that was half scowl, half grin. “You just wish I’d be jealous.”

Raffe squeezed his arm and said, “After all, no matter what the commission is, you can always say no.”

However, once we have exploredLake ’s own exploration of the post office as building and metaphor, how much closer are we to the truth? Not very close at all. If biography is too slim to help us and the post office itself too superficial, then we must turn to other sources — specificallyLake ’s other paintings of note, for in the differences and similarities to “Invitation” we may uncover a kind of truth.

We can first, and most generally, discussLake ’s work in terms of architecture, in terms of his love for his adopted home. If “Invitation to a Beheading” markedLake ’s emergence into maturity, it also inaugurated his fascination with Ambergris. The city is often the sole subject ofLake ’s art — and in almost every case the city encloses, crowds, or enmazes the people sharing the canvas. Further, the city has a palpable presence inLake ’s work. It almost intercedes in the lives of its citizens.

Lake’s well-known “Albumuth Boulevard” trip-tyche consists of panels that ostensibly show, at dawn, noon and dusk, the scene from a fourth story window, looking down over a block of apartment buildings beyond which lie the domes of the Religious Quarter (shiny with the transcendent quality of light that Lake first perfected in “Invitation to a Beheading”). The painting is quite massive, the predominant colors yellow, red, and green. The one human constant to the three panels is a man standing on the boulevard below, surrounded by pedestrians. At first, the architecture appears identical, but on closer inspection, the streets, the buildings, clearly change or shift in each scene, in each panel further encroaching on the man. By dusk, the buildings have grown gargoyles where once perched pigeons. The people surrounding the man have become progressively more animal-like, their heads angular, their noses snouts, their teeth fangs. The expressions on the faces of these people become progressively sadder, more melancholy and tragic, while the man, impassive, with his back to us, has no face. The buildings themselves come to resemble sad faces, so that the overall effect of the final panel is overwhelming… and yet, oddly, we feel sad not for the people or the buildings, but for the one immutable element of the series — the faceless man who stands with his back to the viewer.

This, then, is where Lake parts company with such symbolists as the great Darcimbaldo — Lakerefuses to lose himself in his grotesque structures, or to abandon himself solely to an imagination under no causal restraints. All of his mature paintings possess a sense of overwhelming sorrow. This sorrow lifts his work above that of his contemporaries and pro vides the depth, the mystery, that so captivates the general public. — From Janice Shriek’s A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.

Lakeslept fitfully that moonless night, but when he woke the moon blossomed obscenely bright and red beyond his bed. His sheets had become, in that crimson light, violet waves of rippled fabric slick with his sweat. He smelled blood. The walls stank of it. A man stood in front of the open balcony windows, almost eclipsed by the weight of the moon at his back.Lake could not see the man’s face.Lake sat up in bed.

“Merrimount? Merrimount? You’ve returned to me after all.”

The man stood at the side of the bed.Lake stood by the balcony window. The man lay in the bed.Lake walked to the balcony. The man and Lake stood a foot apart in the middle of the room, the moon crepuscular and blood-engorged behindLake. The moon was breathing its scarlet breath upon his back.

He could not see the man’s face. He was standing right in front of the man and could not see his face.

The apartment, fixed in the perfect clarity of the bleeding light cried out to him in the sharpness of its detail, so that his eyes cut themselves upon such precision. Every bristle on his dried out brushes surrendered to him its slightest imperfection. Every canvas became porous with the numbing roughness of its gesso.

“You’re not Merrimount,” he said to the man.

The man’s eyes were closed.

Lakestood facing the moon. The man stood facingLake.

The man opened his eyes and the ferruginous light of the moon shot through them and formed two rusty spots onLake ’s neck, as if the man’s eyes were just holes that pierced his skull from back to front.

The moon blinked out. The light still streamed from the man’s eyes. The man smiled a half-moon smile and the light trickled out from between his teeth.

The man heldLake ’s left hand, palm up.

The knife sliced into the middle ofLake ’s palm. He felt the knife tear through the skin, and into the palmar fascia muscle, and beneath that, into the tendons, vessels, and nerves. The skin peeled back until his entire hand was flayed and open. He saw the knife sever the muscle from the lower margin of the annular ligament, then felt, almost heard, the lesser muscles snap back from the bones as they were cut — six for the middle finger, three for the ring finger — the knife now grinding up against the os magnum as the man guided it into the area near Lake’s wrist — slicing through extensor tendons, through the nerves, through the farthest outposts of the radial and ulnar arteries. He could see it all — the yellow of the thin fat layer, the white of bone obscured by the dull red of muscle, the gray of tendons, as surely as if his hand had been labeled and diagrammed for his own benefit. The blood came thick and heavy, draining from all of his extremities until he only had feeling in his chest. The pain was infinite, so infinite that he did not try to escape it, but tried only to escape the red gaze of the man who was butchering him while he just stood there and let him do it. The thought went through his head like a dirge, like an epitaph, I will never paint again.

He could not get away. He could not get away.

Lake’s hand began to mutter, to mumble…

In response, the man sang toLake ’s hand, the words incomprehensible, strange, sad.

Lake’s hand began to scream — a long, drawn out scream, ever higher in pitch, the wound become a mouth into which the man continued to plunge the knife.

Lakewoke up shrieking. He was drowning in sweat, his right hand clenched around his left wrist. He tried to control his breathing — he sucked in great gulps of air — but found it was impossible. Panicked, he looked toward the window. There was no moon. No one stood there. He forced his gaze down to his left hand (he had done nothing, nothing, nothing while the man cut him apart) and found it whole.

He was still shrieking.

In “Invitation to a Beheading,” the sorrow takes the form of two figures: the insect catcher outside the building and the man highlighted in the upper window of the post office itself. (If it seems that I have kept these two figures a secret in order to make of them a revelation, it is because they are a revelation to the viewer — due to the mass of detail around them, they are generally the last seen, and then, in a tribute to their intensity, the only things seen.)

The insect catcher, his light dimmed but for a single orange spark, hurries off down the front steps, one hand held up behind him, as if to ward off the man in the window. Is this figure literallyLake ’s father, or does it represent some mythical insect catcher— the Insect Catcher? Or didLake see his father as a mythic figure? From my conversations withLake, the latter interpretation strikes me as most plausible.

But to what can we attribute the single clear window in the building’s upper story, through which we see a man who stands in utter anguish, his head thrown back to the sky? In one hand, the man holds a letter, while the other is held palm up by a vaguely stork-like shadow that has driven a knife through it. The scene derives all of its energy from this view through the window: the greens radiate outward from the pulsing crimson spot that marks where the knife has penetrated flesh. Adding to the effect,Lake has so layered and built up his oils that a trick of perspective is created by which the figure simultaneously exists inside and outside the window.

Although the building that houses this intricate scene lends itself to fantastical interpretation, and Lake might be thought to have recreated some historical event in phantasmagorical fashion, the figure with the pierced palm is clearly a man, not a child or mushroom dweller, and the letter held in the man’s right hand indicates an admission of the building’s use as a post offi ce rather than as a morgue (unless, under duress, we are forced to acknowledge the weak black humor of “dead letter office”).

Further examination of the man’s face reveals two disturbing elements: (1) it bears a striking resemblance toLake ’s own face, and (2) under close scrutiny with a magnifying glass, there is a second, almost translucent set of features transposed over the first. This “mask,” its existence disputed by some critics, mimics, like a mold made from life, the features of the first, except in two particulars: this man has teeth made of broken glass and he, unlike his counterpart, smiles with unnerving brutality. Is this the face of the faceless man from “Albumuth Boulevard?” Is this the face of Death?

Regardless ofLake ’s intent, all of these elements combine to create in the viewer — even the viewer who only subconsciously notes certain of the more hidden elements — a true sense of unease and dread, as well as the release of this dread through the anguished, voiceless cry of the man in the window. The man in the window provides us with the only movement in the painting, for the insect catcher, hurrying away, is already in the past, and the bones of the post office are also in the past. Only the forlorn figure in the window is still alive, caught forever in the present. Further, although foresaken by the insect catcher and pierced by a shadow that may be a manifestation of his own fear, the light never forsakes or betrays him.Lake ’s tones are, as Venturi has noted, “resonant rather than bright, and the light contained in them is not so much a physical as a psychological illumination.” —From Janice Shriek’s A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.

Lakespent the next day trying to forget his nightmare. To rid himself of its cloying atmosphere, he left his apartment — but not before receiving a stern lecture from Dame Truff on how loud noises after midnight showed no consideration for other tenants, while behind her a few neighbors, who had not come to his aid but obviously had heard his screams, gave him curious stares.

Then, punishment over, he made his way through the crowded streets to the Gallery of Hidden Fascinations, portfolio under one arm. The portfolio contained two new paintings, both of his father’s hands, as he remembered them, open wide like wings as a cornucopia of insects— velvet ants, cicadas, moths, butterflies, walking sticks, praying mantises — crawled over them. It was a study he had been working on for years. His father had beautifully ruined hands, bitten and stung countless times, but as polished, as smooth, as white marble.

The gallery owner, Janice Shriek, greeted him at the door; she was a severe, hunched woman with calculating, cold blue eyes. This morning she had thrown on foppishly male trousers, and a jacket over a white shirt, the sleeves of which ended in cuffs that looked as if they had been made from doilies. Shriek rose up on tip-toe to plant a ceremonial kiss on his cheek while explaining that the short, portly gentleman currently casting his round shadow over the far end of the gallery had expressed interest in one of Lake’s pieces, how fortunate that he had stopped by, and that while she continued to enflame that interest — she actually said “enflamed,” much to Lake’s amazement; was he to be some artistic gigolo now? — Lake should set down his portfolio and, after a decent interval, walk over and introduce himself, that was a dear — and back she scamper-lurched to the potential customer, leaving Lake rather breathless on her behalf. No one could ever say Janice Shriek lacked energy.

Lakeplaced his portfolio on a nearby table, the art of his countless rivals glaring down at him from the walls. The only good art (besides Lake’s, of course) was a miniature entitled “Amber in the City” by Shriek’s great find, Roger Mandible, who, unbeknownst to Shriek, had created his subtle amber shades from the earwax of a well-known diva who had had the misfortune to fall asleep at a cafe table where Mandible was mixing his paints. It madeLake snicker every time he saw it.

After a moment,Lake walked over to Shriek and the gentleman and engaged in the kind of obsequious small talk that nauseated him.

“Yes, I’m the artist.”

“Maxwell Bibble. A pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise… Bibble. It is exceedingly rare to meet a true lover of art.”

Bibble stank of beets.Lake could not get over it. Bibble stank of beets. He had difficulty not saying Bibble imbibes bottled beets beautifully…

“Well, you do… you do so well with, er, colors, ” Bibble said.

“How discerning you are. Did you hear what he said, Janice,”Lake said.

Shriek nodded nervously, said, “Mr. Bibble’s a business-man, but he has always wanted to be a—”

Beet? thoughtLake; but no: “… a critic of the arts,” Shriek finished.

“Yes, marvelous colors,” Bibble said, this time with more confidence.

“It is nothing. The true artiste can bend even the most stubborn light to his will,”Lake said.

“I imagine so. I thought this piece might look good in the kitchen, next to the wife’s needlepoint.”

“ ‘In the kitchen, next to the wife’s needlepoint,’”Lake echoed blankly, and then put on a frozen smile.

“But I’m wondering if maybe it is too big… ”

“It’s smaller than it looks,” Shriek offered, somewhat pathetically,Lake thought.

“Perhaps I could have it altered, cut down to size,”Lake said, glaring at Shriek.

Bibble nodded, putting a hand to his chin in rapt contemplation of the possibilities.

“Or maybe I should just saw it in fourths and you can take the fourth you like best,”Lake said. “Or maybe eighths would be more to your liking?”

Bibble stared blankly at him for a moment, before Shriek stepped in with, “Artists! Always joking! You know, I really don’t think it will be too large. You could always buy it and if it doesn’t fit, return it — not that I could refund your money, but you could pick something else.”

Enough!Lake thought, and disengaged himself from the conversation. Leaving Shriek to ramble on convincingly about the cunning strength of his brushstrokes, a slick blather of nonsense thatLake despised and admired all at once. He could not complain that Shriek neglected to promote him — she was the only one who would take his work — but he hated the way she appropriated his art, speaking at times almost as if she herself had created it. A failed painter and a budding art historian, Shriek had started the gallery through the largesse of her famous brother, the historian Duncan Shriek, who had also procured for her many of her first and best clients.Lake felt that her drive to push, push, push was linked to a certain guilt at not having had to start at the bottom like everyone else.

Eventually, asLake gave a thin-lipped smile, Bibble, still reeking of beets, announced that he couldn’t possibly commit at the moment, but would come back later. Definitely, he would be back — and what a pleasure to meet the artist.

To whichLake said, and was sorry even as the words left his mouth, “It is a pleasure to be the artist.”

A nervous laugh from Shriek. An unpleasant laugh from the almost-buyer, whose handLake tried his best to crush as they shook goodbye.

After Bibble had left, Shriek turned to him and said, “That was wonderful!”

“What was wonderful?”

Shriek’s eyes became colder than usual. “That smug, arrogant, better-than-thou artist’s demeanor. They like that, you know — it makes them feel they’ve bought the work of a budding genius.”

“Well haven’t they?”Lake said. Was she being sarcastic? He’d pretend otherwise.

Shriek patted him on the back. “Whatever it is, keep it up. Now, let’s take a look at the new paintings.”

Lakebit his lip to stop himself from committing career suicide, walked over to the table, and retrieved the two canvases. He spread them out with an awkward flourish.

Shriek stared at them, a quizzical look on her face.

“Well?”Lake finally said, Raffe’s words from the night before buzzing in his ears. “Do you like them?”

“Hmm?” Shriek said, looking up from the paintings as if her thoughts had been far away.

Lakeexperienced a truth viscerally in that moment which he had only ever realized intellectually before: he was the least of Shriek’s many prospects, and he was boring her.

Nonetheless, he pressed on, braced for further humiliation: “Do you like them?”

“Oh! The paintings?”

“No — the… ” The ear wax on your walls? he thought. The beets? “Yes, the paintings.”

Shriek’s brows furrowed and she put a hand to her chin in unconscious mimicry of the departed Bibble.

“They’re very… interesting.”

Interesting.

“They’re of my father’s hands,” Lake said, aware that he was about to launch into a confession both unseemly and useless, as if he could help make the paintings more appealing to her by saying this happened, this is a person I know, it is real therefore it is good. But he had no choice — he plunged forward: “He is a startlingly nonverbal man, my father, as most insect catchers are, but there was one way he felt comfortable communi cating with me, Janice — by coming home with his hands closed — and when he’d open them, there would be some living jewel, some rare wonder of the insect world — sparkling black, red, or green — and his eyes would sparkle too. He’d name them all for me in his soft, stumbling voice — lovingly so; how they were all so very different from one another, how although he killed them and we often ate them in hard times, how it must be with respect and out of knowledge.”Lake looked at the floor. “He wanted me to be an insect catcher too, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I had to become an artist.” He remembered the way the joy had shriveled up inside his father when he realized his son would not be following in his footsteps. It had hurtLake to see his father so alone, trapped by his reticence and his solitary profession, but he knew it hurt his father more. He missed his father; it was an ache in his chest.

“That’s a lovely story, Martin. A lovely story.”

“So you’ll take them?”

“No. But it is a lovely story.”

“But see how perfectly I’ve rendered the insects,”Lake said, pointing to them.

“Yes, you have. But it’s a slow season and I don’t have the space. Maybe when your other work sells.”

Her tone as much as said not to press her too far.

With a great effort of will,Lake said, “I understand. I’ll come visit again in a few months.”

The invitation to a beheading was looking better toLake all the time.

WhenLake returned to his apartment to work on Mr. Kashmir’s commis sion, he was decidedly out of sorts. In addition to his disappointing trip to the gallery, he had spent money on greasy sausage that now sat in his belly like an extra coil of intestines. It did not help that the image of the man from his nightmares blinked on and off in his head no matter how hard he tried to suppress it.

Nevertheless, he dutifully picked up the pages of illustrations he had torn from discarded books bought cheap at the back door of the Borges Bookstore. He set about cutting them out with his rusty paint-speckled scissors. Ideas for his commissions came to him not in flashes from his muse but as calm re-creations of past work. Lately, he knew, he had become lazy, providing literal “translations” for his commissions, while suppressing any hint of his own imagination.

Still, this did not explain why, following a period of work during which he stared at the envelope and the invitation where it lay on his easel, he looked down to find that after carefully cutting out a trio of etched dancing girls, he had just as carefully sliced off their heads and then cut star designs out of their torsos.

In disgust,Lake tossed the scissors aside and let the ruins of the dancing girls flutter to the floor like exotic confetti. Obviously, Mr. Kashmir’s assignment would have to await a spark of inspiration. In the meantime, the afternoon still young, he would take Raffe’s advice and work on something for himself.

Lakewalked over to the crowded easel, emptied it by placing four or five canvases on the already chaotic bed, pulled his stool over, retrieved a blank canvas, and pinned it up. Slowly, he began to brushstroke oils onto the canvas. Despite three years of endless commissions, the familiar smell of fresh paint excited his senses and, even better, the light behind him was sharp, clear, so he did not have to resort to borrowing Dame Truff’s lantern.

As he progressed,Lake did not know the painting’s subject, or even how best to apply the oils, but he continued to create layers of paint, sensitive to the pressure of the brush against canvas. Raffe had forced the oils upon him months ago. At the time, he had given her a superior, doubtful look, since her last gift had been special paints created from a mixture of natural pigments and freshwater squid ink.Lake had used them for a week before his first paintings began to fade; soon his can vases were as blank as before. Raffe, always trying to find the good in the bad, had told him, when next they met at a cafe, that he could become famous selling “disappearing paintings.” He had thrown the paint set at her. Fortunately, it missed and hit a stranger — a startled and startlingly handsome man named Merrimount.

This time, however, Raffe’s idea appeared to be a good one. It had been several years since he had used oils and he had forgotten the ease of creating texture with them, how the paint built upon itself. He especially liked how he could blend colors for gradations of shadow. Assuming the current troubles were temporary — and that a drop cloth would suffi ce until that time — and even now giving a quick look over his shoulder, he worked on building color: emerald, jade, moss, lime, verdigris. He mixed all the shades in, until he had a luminous, shining background. Then, in dark green, he began to paint a face…

Only the Religious Quarter’s evening call to prayer— the solemn tolling of the bell five times from the old Truffidian cathedral — rousedLake from his trance. He blinked, turned toward the window, then looked back at his canvas. In shock and horror, he let the brush fall from his hand.

The head had a brutish mouth of broken glass teeth through which it smiled cruelly, while above the ruined nose, the eyes shone like twin flames.Lake stared at the face from his nightmare.

For a long time,Lake examined his work. His first impulse, to paint over it and start fresh, gradually gave way to a second, deeper impulse: to finish it. Far better, he thought, that the face should remain in the painting than, erased, once more take up residence in his mind. A little thrill ran through him as he realized it was totally unlike anything he had done before.

“I’ve trapped you,” he said to it, gloating.

It stared at him with its unearthly eyes and said nothing. On the canvas it might still smile, but it could not smile only at him. Now it smiled at the world.

He worked on it for a few more minutes, adding definition to the eyelids and narrowing the cheekbones, relieved, for now that he had come around to the idea that the face belonged in the world, that perhaps it had always been in the world, he wanted it perfect in every detail, that no trace of it should ever haunt him again.

As the shadows lengthened and deepened, falling across his canvas, he put aside his palette, cleaned his brushes with turpentine, washed them in the sink across the hall, and quickly dressed to the sounds of a busker on the street below. After he had put on his jacket, he stuck his sketchbook and two sharpened pencils into his breast pocket — in case his mysterious host should need an immediate demonstration of his skills — and, running his fingers over the ornate seal, deposited the invitation there as well.

A few moments of rummaging under his bed and he had fished out a collapsible rubber frog head he had worn to the Festival of the Freshwater Squid a year before — it would have to do for a costume. He stuffed it in a side pocket, one bulbous yellow eye staring up at him absurdly. Further rummaging uncovered his map. Every wise citizen of Ambergris carried a map of the city, for its alleys were legion and seemed to change course of their own accord.

He spent a nervous moment adjusting his tie, then locked his apartment door behind him. He took a deep breath, descended the stairs, and set off downAlbumuth Boulevard as the sky melted into the orange-green hue peculiar to Ambergris and Ambergris alone.

We find this quality of illumination in almost all of Lake’s paintings, but nowhere more strikingly than in the incendiary “The Burning House,” where it is meshed to a comment on his fear of birds — the only painting with any hint of birds in it besides “Invitation to a Beheading” and “Through His Eyes” (which I will discuss shortly). “The Burning House” blends reds, yellows, and oranges much as “Invitation” blends greens, but for a different effect. The painting shows a house with its roof and front wall torn away — to expose an owl, a stork, and a raven that are burning alive, while the totality of the flames themselves form the shadow of a fire bird, done in a style similar to Lagach. Clearly, this is as close to pure fantasy as Lake ever came, a wish fulfillment work in which his fear of birds is washed away by fire. As Venturi wrote, “The charm of the picture lies in its mysteriously suggestive power — the sigh of fatality that blows over the strangely contorted figures.” Here we may hold another piece of the puzzle that describes the process ofLake ’s transformation. If so, we do not know quite where to place it — and whether it should be placed near or far away from the puzzle piece that is “Invitation to a Beheading.”

A less ambiguous link to “Invitation” can be found in the person of Voss Bender, the famous opera composer nee politician, and the tumult following his death — a death that occurred only three days beforeLake began “Invitation.” In later interviews, the usually taciturnLake pro fessed to hold Voss Bender in the highest regard, even as an inspiration (although, when I knew him, I cannot recall him ever mentioning Bender). More than one art historian, noting the repetition of Bender themes in Lake’s work, has wondered ifLake obsessed over the dead composer. Perhaps “Invitation” represents a memorial to Voss Bender. If so, it is the first in a trilogy of such paintings, the last two, “Through His Eyes” and “Aria to the Brittle Bones of Winter,” clear homages to Bender. — From Janice Shriek ’s A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.

The dusk had a mingled blood-and-orange-peel scent, and the light as it faded left behind a faint golden residue on the brass doorknobs of bank entrances, on the coppery flagpoles outside the embassies of foreign dignitaries, and on the Fountain of Trillian, with its obelisk at the top of which perched a sad rose-marble cherub, one elbow propped atop a leering black skull. Crowds had gathered at the surrounding lantern-lit square to hear poets declaim their verse while standing on wooden crates. Nearby taverns shed music and light in equal quantities, the light breaking against the cobblestones in thick shafts, while sidewalk vendors plied passersby with all manner of refreshments, fromLake ’s ill-starred sausages to flagrantly sinful pastries. Few outside of Ambergris realized that the great artist Darcimbaldo had created his fruit and seafood portraits from life — stolen from the vendors, who arranged oranges, apples, figs, and melons into faces with black grapes for eyes, or layered crayfish, trout, crabs, and the lesser squid into the imperious visage of the mayor; these vendors were almost as popular as the sidewalk poets, and had taken to hanging wide-angle lanterns in front of their stalls so that passersby could appreciate their ephemeral art. Through this tightly-packed throng, occasional horse-and-carriages and motored vehicles lurched through like lighthouses for the drunk and disorderly, who would push and rock them at every opportunity.

Here, then, in the flushed faces, in the mixing of dark and light, in the swirling, shadowy facades of buildings, were a thousand scenes that lent themselves to the artist’s eye, butLake, intent on his map, saw them only as hindrances now.

And more than hindrances, for the difficulty of circumnavigating the crowds with his cane convincedLake to flag down a for-hire motored vehicle. An old, sumptuous model, nicer than his apartment and prudently festooned with red and green flags, it had only two drawbacks: the shakes — almost certainly from watered down petrol — and a large, very dirty sheep with which he was forced to share the back seat.

Man and sheep contemplated each other with equal unease while the driver smiled and shrugged apologetically (to him or the sheep?), his vehicle racing through the narrow streets. Nonetheless,Lake left the vehicle first, deposited at the edge of the requested neighborhood. The nervous driver sped off at top speed as soon asLake had paid him. No doubt the detour to deliverLake had made the sheep late for an appointment.

As for the neighborhood, located on the southeastern flank of the Religious Quarter,Lake had rarely seen one grimmer. The buildings, four and five stories high, had a scarcity of windows that made them appear to face away from him — inward, toward the maze of houses and apartments that contained his destination. Such stark edifices gaveLake a glimpse of the future, of the decay into which his own apartment building might fall when the New Art moved on and left behind only remnants of unkept promises. The walls were awash in fire burns, the ground level doors rotted or broken open, the balconies that hung precariously over them black with rust. In some places,Lake could see bones worked into the mortar, for there had been a time when the dead were buried in the walls of their own homes.

Laketook out his invitation, ran his hand across the maroon-gold threads. Perhaps it was all a practical joke. Or perhaps his host just wanted to be discreet. He wavered, hesitated, but then his conversation with Raffe came back to him, followed by the irritating image of Shriek’s face as she said, “Interesting.”

He sighed, trembled, and began to walk between two of the buildings, uncomfortable in the shadow of their height, under the blank or cracked windows whose dust-covered panes were somehow predatory.

His cane clacked against rocks, a plaintive sound in that place.

Eventually, he emerged from the alleyway onto a larger street, strewn with rubbish. A few babarusa pigs, all grunts and curved tusks, fought with anemic-looking mushroom dwellers for the offal. The light had faded to a deep blue colder in its way than the temperature. The distant calls to prayer from the Religious Quarter sounded like the cries of men drowning fifty feet underwater.

By the guttering light of a public lamp,Lake made out the name of the street — Salamander — but could not locate it on his map. For a long time, the darkness broken by irregularly-posted lamps, he walked alone, examining signs, finding none of the streets on his map. He kept himself from thinking lost! by trying to decide how best the surrounding shad ows could be captured on canvas.

Gradually, he realized that the darkness, which at least had been broken by the lamps, had taken on a hazy quality through which he could see nothing at all. Fog, come off the River Moth. He cursed his luck.

First, the stars went out, occluded by the weight of the shadows and by the dull, creeping rage of the fog.

It was an angry fog, a sneering fog that ate its way through the sky, through the spaces between things, and it obscured the night. It smelled of the river: of silt and brackish water, of fish and mangroves. It rolled throughLake as if he did not exist. And because of this, the fog madeLake ethereal, for he could no longer see his arms or legs, could feel nothing but the cloying moisture of the fog as it clung to and settled over him. He was a ghost. He was free. There could be no reality to this fog-ridden world. There could be no reality to him while in it.

Lost and lost again, turning in the whiteness, not sure if he had walked forward or retraced his steps. The freedom he had felt turned to fear — fear of the unknown, fear that he might be late. So when he became aware of a dimly bobbing light ahead, he began to fast walk toward it, heedless of obstacles that might make him turn an ankle or fall on his face.

A block later, he came upon the source of the light: the tall, green-hooded, green-robed figure of an insect catcher, his great, circular slab of glass attached to a round, buoy-shaped lantern that swung below it. As with most insect catchers, who are products of famine, this one was thin, with bony but strong arms. The glass was so large that the man had to hold onto it with both gloved hands, while grasshoppers, moths, beetles, and ant queens smacked up against it, trying to get to the light.

The glass functioned like a sticky lens inserted into a circular brass frame; when filled with insects, the lens would be removed and placed in a bag. The insect catcher would then insert a new lens and repeat the process. Once home, the new catch would be carefully plucked off the lens, then boiled or baked and salted, after which the insects would hang from his belt on strings for sale the next day. Many timesLake had spent his evening tying insects into strings, using a special knot taught to him by his father.

Steeped in such memories and in the fog, his first thought was that this man was his father. Why couldn’t it be his father? They would be ghosts together, sailing through the night.

His first words to the insect catcher were tentative, respectful of his own past.

“Excuse me? Excuse me, sir?”

The man turned with a slow grace to peer down at this latest catch. The folds of the insect catcher’s robes covered his face, but for a jutting nose like a scythe.

“Yes?” The man had a deep, sonorous voice.

“Do you know which way toArchmont Lane? My map is no help at all.”

The insect catcher raised one bony finger and pointed upward.

Lakelooked up. There, above the insect catcher’s light, was a sign forArchmont Lane.Lake stood onArchmont Lane.

“Oh,” he said. “Thank you.”

But the insect catcher had already shambled on into the fog, little more than a shadow under a lantern that had already begun to fade…

From there, it was relatively easy to find45 Archmont Lane — unlike the other entrances to left and right, it suffered few signs of disrepair and a lamp blazed above the doorway. The numerals “4” and “5” were rendered in glossy gold, the door painted maroon, the steps swept clean, the door knocker a twin to the seal on the envelope — all permeated by a sudsy smell.

Reassured by such cleanliness, Raffe’s advice still whispering in his ear,Lake raised the doorknocker and lowered it — once, twice, thrice.

The door opened a crack, light flooded out, andLake caught sight of a wild, staring eye, rimmed with crusted red. It was an animal’s eye, the reflection in its black pupil his own distorted face.Lake took a quick step back.

The voice, when it came, sounded unreal, falsified: “What do you want?”

Lakeheld up the invitation. “I have this.”

A blink of the horrible eye. “What does it say?”

“An invitation to a—”

“Quick! Put on your mask!” hissed the voice.

“My mask?”

“Your mask for the masquerade!”

“Oh! Yes. Sorry. Just a moment.”

Lakepulled the rubber frog mask out of his pocket and put it over his head. It felt like slick jelly. He did not want it next to his skin. As he adjusted the mask so he could see out of the eyeholes that jutted from the frog’s nostrils, the door opened, revealing a splendid foyer and the outstretched arm of the man with the false voice. The man himself stood to one side and Lake, his vision restricted to what he could see directly in front of him, had to make do with the beckoning white-gloved hand and a whispered, “Enter now!” He walked forward. The man slammed the door behind him and locked it.

Ahead, through glass paneled doors,Lake saw a staircase of burnished rosewood and, at the foot of the stairs, a globe of the world upon a polished mahogany table with lion paws for feet. Candles guttered in their slots, the wavery light somehow religious. On the left he glimpsed tightly stacked bookcases hemmed in by generous tables, while to the right the house opened up onto a sitting room, flanked by portraits. Black drop clothes covered the name plate and face of each portrait: a line of necks and shoulders greeted him from down the hall. The smell of soap had faded, replaced by a faint trace of rot, of mildew.

Lake turned toward the front door and the person who had opened it — a butler, he presumed — only to find himself confronted by a man with a stork head. The red-ringed eyes, the cruel beak, the dull white of the feathered face, merged with a startlingly pale neck atop a gaunt body clothed in a black-and-white suit.

“I see that you are dressed already,”Lake managed, although badly shaken. “And, unfortunately, as the natural predator of the frog. Ha ha. Perhaps, though, you can now tell me why I’ve been summoned here, Mister…?”

The joke failed miserably. The attempt to discover the man’s name failed with it. The Stork stared at him as if he came from a foreign, barbaric land. The Stork said, “Your jacket and your cane.”

Lakedisliked relinquishing his cane, which had driven off more than one potential assailant in its day, but handed both it and his jacket to the Stork. After placing them in a closet, the Stork said, “Follow me,”

and led Lake past the stairs, past the library, and into a study with a decorative fireplace, several upholstered chairs, a handful of glossy black wooden tables and, adorning the walls, eight paintings by masters of the last century: hunting scenes, city scapes, still lifes — all genuine and all completely banal.

The Stork beckonedLake to a couch farthest from the door. The couch was bounded by a magnificent, if unwieldy, rectangular box of a table that extended some six feet down the width of the room. It had deco rative handles, but no drawers.

AsLake sat, making certain not to bang his gimp leg against the table, he said, “Who owns this house?”

to the Stork’s retreating back.

The Stork spun around, put a finger to its beak, and said, “Don’t speak! Don’t speak!”

Lakenodded in a gesture of apology. The master of the house obviously valued his privacy.

The Stork stared atLake a moment longer, as if afraid he might say something more, then turned on his heel.

LeavingLake alone in his frog mask, which had become uncomfortably hot and scratchy. It smelled of a familiar cologne — Merri must have worn it since the festival and not cleaned it out.

Claustrophobia battled with a pleasing sense of anonymity. Behind the mask he felt as if he would be capable of actions forbidden to the arrogant but staidMartinLake. Very well, then, the newMartinLake would undertake an examination of the room for more clues as to his host’s taste — or lack thereof.

A bust of Trillian stared back at him from a far table, its white marble infiltrated by veins of some cerise stone. Also on this table lay a book entitled The Architect of Ruins, above which stood the stuffed and bejeweled carcass of a tortoise. Across from it, upon a dais, stood a telescope which, in quite a clever whimsy, faced a map of the world upon the wall. Atlases and other maps were strewn across the tables, butLake had the sense that these had been placed haphazardly as the result of cold calculation. Indeed, the room conveyed an aura of artificiality, from the burgundy walls to the globe-shaped fixtures that spread a pleasant, if pinkish, light. Such a light was not conducive to reading or conversation. Despite this, the study had a rich warmth to it, both relaxing and comfortable.

Lakesat back, content. Who would have thought to find such refinement in the midst of such desolation?

It appeared Raffe had been right: some wealthy patron wished to commission him, perhaps even to collect his art. He began to work out in his head an asking price that would be high enough, even if eventually knocked down by hard bargaining, to satisfy him. He could buy new canvases, replace his old, weary brushes, per haps even convince an important gallery to carry his work.

Gradually, however, as if the opening notes of a music so subtle that the listener could not at first hear it, a tap-tap-tapping intruded upon his pleasant daydream. It traveled around the room and into his ears with an apologetic urgency.

He sat up and tried to identify the source. It came neither from the walls nor the door. But it definitely originated from inside the room… and, although muffled, as if underground, from somewhere close to him. Such a gentle sound — not loud enough to startle him, just this cautious, moderate tap, this minor key rap.

He listened carefully — and a smile lit his face. Why, it was coming from the table in front of him!

Someone or something was inside the table, gently rapping. What a splendid disguise for the masquerade.Lake tapped back. Whatever was inside the table tapped back twice.Lake tapped twice, answered by three taps.Lake tapped thrice.

A frenzied rapping and smashing erupted from the table.Lake sucked in his breath and pulled his fist back abruptly. A frisson of dread traveled up his spine. It had just occurred to him that the playful game might not be a playful game after all. The black table, on which he had laid his invitation, was not actually a table but an unadorned coffin from which someone desperately wanted to get out!

Lakerose with an “Uh!” of horror — and at that moment, the Stork returned, accompanied by two other men.

The Stork’s companions were both of considerable weight and height, and from a certain weakness underlying the ponderous nature of their movements, which he remembered from his days of sketching models, Lake realized both were of advancing years. Both wore dark suits identical to that worn by the Stork, but the resemblance ended there. The larger of the two men — not fat but merely broad — wore a resplendent raven’s head over his own, the glossy black feathers plucked from a real raven (there was no mistaking the distinctive sheen). The eyes shone sharp and hard and heavy. The beak, made of a silvery metal, caught the subdued light and glimmered like a distant reflection in a pool of still water.

The third man wore a mask that replicated both the doorknocker and the seal onLake ’s invitation: the owl, brown-gold feathers once again genuine, the curved beak a dull gray, the human eyes peering out from the shadow of the fabricated orbits. Unfortunately, the Owl’s extreme girth extended to his neck and the owl mask was a tight fit, covering his chins, but constricting the flesh around the neck into a jowly collar. This last detail made him hideous beyond belief, for it looked as if he had been denuded of feathers, revealing the plucked skin beneath.

The three stood oppositeLake across the coffin — the top of which had begun to shudder upwards as whatever was inside smashed itself against the lid.

“What… what is in there?”Lake asked. “Is this part of the masquerade? Is this a joke? Did Merrimount send you?”

The Owl said, “A very nice disguise,” and still staring atLake, rapped his fist so hard against the coffin lid that black paint rubbed off on his white glove. The thrashing inside the coffin subsided. “A good disguise for this masquerade. The frog, who is equally at home on land as in the water.” The Owl’s voice, like that of the Stork, came out distorted, as if the man had stuffed cotton or pebbles in his mouth.

“What,”Lake said again, pointing a tremulous finger at the coffi n, “is in there?”

The Owl laughed — a horrid coughing sound. “Our other guest will be released shortly, but first we must discuss your commission.”

“My commission?” A thought flashed across his mind like heat lightning, leaving no impression behind: Raffe was right. I am to paint their sex games for them.

“It is an unusual commission and before I give you the details, you must resign yourself to it with all your heart. You have no choice. Now that you are here, you are our instrument.”

Raffe had never suggested that he must become part of the pornography, and he rebelled against the notion: this was too far to take a commission, even for all the money in the world.

“Sirs,”Lake said, standing, “I think there has been a misunderstanding. I am a painter and a painter only—”

“A painter,” the Owl echoed, as if it were an irrelevant detail.

“—and I am going to leave now. Please forgive me. I mean no offense.”

He began to sidle out from behind the coffin, but stopped when the Raven blocked his path, a long gutting knife held in one gloved hand. It shone like the twin to the Raven’s beak. The sight of it paralyzedLake. Slowly, he sidled back to the middle of the couch, the coffin between him and these predators. His hands shook. The frog mask was awash in sweat.

“What do you want?”Lake said, guarding unsuccessfully against the quaver in his voice.

The Owl rubbed his hands together and cocked his head to regardLake with one steel-gray eye.

“Simply put, your commission shall be its own reward. We shall not pay you, unless you consider allowing you to live payment. Once you have left this house, your life will be as before, except that you shall be a hero: the anonymous citizen of the city who righted a grievous wrong.”

“What do you want?”Lake asked again, more terror-stricken than before.

“A murder,” croaked the Raven.

“An execution,” corrected the Stork.

“A beheading,” specified the Owl.

“A murder?”Lake shouted. “A murder! Are you mad?”

The Owl ruffl ed its feathers, said, “Let me tell you what your response will be, and then perhaps you can move past it to your destiny all the quicker. First, you will moan. You will shriek. You will even try to escape. You will say ‘No!’ emphatically even after we subdue you. We will threaten you. You will weaken. Then you will say ‘No’ again, but this time we will be able to tell from the questioning tone of your voice that you are closer to the reality, closer to the deed. And then the cycle will repeat itself. And then, finally, whether it takes an hour or a week, you will find yourself carrying out your task, because even the most wretched dog wants to feel the sun on its face one more day.

“It would save us all some time if you just accepted the situation without all the attendant fuss.”

“I will not.”

“Open the coffin.”

“No!”

Lake, his leg encumbering him, leapt over the coffin table. He made it as far as the bust of Trillian before the Stork and the Raven knocked him to the floor. He twisted and kicked in their grasp, but his leg was as supple as a wooden club and they were much too strong. They wrestled him back to the coffin. The Stork held him face-down on the couch, the frog mask cutting so painfully into his mouth that he could hardly draw breath. The Raven yanked his head up and held the knife to his throat. In such a position, his eyeholes askew, he could see only the interior of the mask and a portion of the maroon-gold leaf ceiling.

From somewhere above him, the Owl said, with almost sensual sloth, “Accept the commission, my dear frog, or we shall kill you and choose another citizen.”

The Stork, sitting onLake, jabbed his kidneys, then punched in the same spot — hard.Lake grunted with pain. The Raven bentLake ’s left arm back behind him until it felt as if his bones would break.

He shrieked. Suddenly, they were both off of him. He flipped over on his back, adjusted his mask, and looked up — to find all three men staring down at him.

“What is your answer?” the Owl asked. “We must have your answer now.”

Lakegroaned and rolled over onto his side.

“Answer!”

What did a word mean? Did a single word really mean… anything? Could it exile whole worlds of action, of possibility?

“Yes,” he said, and the word sounded like a death rattle in his throat.

“Good,” said the Owl. “Now open the coffin.”

They moved back so that he would have enough space. He sat up on the couch, his leg throbbing. He grappled with the locks on the side of the coffin, determined to speed up the nightmare, that it might end all the more swiftly.

Finally, the latches came free. With a grunt, he opened the lid… and stared down at familiar, unmistakably patrician features. The famous shock of gray hair disheveled, the sharp cheekbones bruised violet, the intelligent blue eyes bulging with fear, the fine mouth, the sensual lips, obstructed by a red cloth gag that cut into the face and left a line of blood. Blood trickled from his hairline where he had banged his head against the coffi n lid. Strange symbols had been carved into his arms as if he were an offering to some cruel god.

Lakestaggered backward, fell against the edge of the couch, unable to face this final, dislocating revelation — unable to comprehend that in deed the Greens were right: Voss Bender was alive. What game had he entered all unwitting?

For his part, Bender tried to get up as soon as he saw Lake, even bound as he was in coils of rope that must cruelly constrict his circulation, then thrashed about again when it became clearLake would not help him.

The Raven stuck his head into Bender’s field of vision and caw, caw, cawed like his namesake. The action sent Bender into a hysterical spasm of fear. The Raven dealt him a cracking blow across the face.

Bender slumped back down into the coffin. His eyelids fluttered; the smell of urine came from the coffin.Lake couldn’t tear his gaze away. This was Voss Bender, savior and destroyer of careers, politicians, theaters. Voss Bender, who had been dead for two days.

“Why? Why have you done this to him?”Lake said, though he had not meant to speak.

The Stork sneered, said, “He did it to himself. He brought everything on himself.”

“He’s no good,” the Raven said.

“He is,” the Owl added, “the very epitome of Evil.”

Voss Bender moved a little. The eyes under the imperious gray eyebrows opened wide. Bender wasn’t deaf or stupid — Lakehad never thought him stupid — and the man followed their conversation with an intense if weary interest. Those eyes demanded thatLake save him.Lake looked away.

“The Raven here will give you his knife,” the Owl said, “but do not think that just because you have a weapon you can escape.” As if to prove this, the Owl produced a gun, one of those sleek, dangerous-looking models newly invented by the Kalif’s scientists.

The Raven held out his knife.

Senses stretched and redefined,Lake glanced at Voss Bender, then at the knife. A thin line of light played over the metal and the grainy whorls of the hilt. He could read the words etched into the blade, the name of the knife’s maker: Hoegbotton & Sons. That the knife should have a history, a pedigree, that he should know more about the knife than about the three men struck him as absurd, as horrible. As he stared at the blade, at the words engraved there, the full, terrible weight of the deed struck him. To take a life. To snuff out a life, and with it a vast network of love and admiration. To create a hole in the world. It was no small thing to take a life, no small thing at all. He saw his father smiling at him, palms opened up to reveal the shiny, sleek bodies of dead insects.

“For God’s sake, don’t make me kill him!”

The burst of laughter from the Owl, the Raven, the Stork, surprised him so much that he laughed with them. He shook with laughter, his jaw, his shoulders, relaxed in anticipation of the revelation that it was all a joke… before he understood that their laughter was throaty, fey, cruel. Slowly, his laughter turned to sobs.

The Raven’s hilarity subsided before that of the Owl and the Stork. He said toLake, “He is already dead. The whole city knows he’s dead. You cannot kill someone who is already dead.”

Voss Bender began to moan, and redoubled his efforts to break free of his bonds. The three men ignored him.

“I won’t do it. I won’t do it.” His words sounded weak, susceptible to influence. He knew that faced with his own extinction he would do anything to stay alive, even if it meant corrupting, perverting, destroying, everything that made himMartinLake. And yet his father’s face still hovered in his head, and with that image everything his father had ever said about the sanctity of life.

The Owl said, with remorseless precision, “Then we will flay your face until it is only strips of flesh hanging from your head. We will lop off your fingers, your toes, as if they were carrots for the pot. You, sir, will become a bloody red riddle for some dog to solve in an alley somewhere. And Bender will still be dead.”

Lakestared at the Owl and the Owl stared back, the owl mask betraying not a hint of weakness.

The eyes were cold wrinkled stones, implacable and ancient.

When the Raven offeredLake the knife, he took it. the lacquered wooden hilt had a satisfying weight to it, a smoothness that spoke of practiced ease in the arts of killing.

“A swift stroke across the throat and it will be done,” the Raven said, while the Stork took a white length of cloth and tucked it over Bender’s body, leaving exposed only his head and neck. How many times had he drawn his brush across a painted throat, the model before him fatally disinterested? He wished he had not taken so many anatomy classes. He found himself counting and naming the muscles in Bender’s neck, cataloging arteries and veins, bones and tendons.

The Raven and the Stork withdrew to beyond the coffin. The divide between them andLake was enormous, the knife cold and heavy in his hand.Lake could see that tiny flakes of rust had infected the center of each engraved letter of Hoegbotton & Sons.

He looked down at Voss Bender. Bender’s eyes bulged, bloodshot, watery. The man pleaded with Lake through his gag, wordsLake could only half understand. “Don’t… Don’t… what have I…

Help… ” Lake admired Bender’s strength and yet, as he stood over his intended victim,Lake found he enjoyed the power he wielded over the composer. To have such control. This was the man he had only the other day been cursing, the man who had so changed the city that his death had polarized it, splintered it.

Voss Bender began to thrash about and, as if the movement had bro ken a spell,Lake ’s sense of triumph turned to disgust, buttressed by nausea. He let out a broken little laugh.

“I can’t do it. I won’t do it.”

Lake tried to drop the knife, but the Raven’s hand covered his and, turning into a fist, forced his own hand into a fist that guided the knife down into the coffin, makingLake stoop as it turned toward Bender’s throat. The Stork held Bender’s head straight, caressing the doomed man’s temples with an odd gentleness. The Owl stood aloof, watching as an owl will the passion play beneath its perch.Lake grunted, struggling against the Raven’s inexorable downward pressure. Just when it seemed he must succumb, he went limp. The knife descended at a hopeless angle, aided by Bender’s mighty flinch. The blade did only half the job — laying open a flap of skin to the left of the jugular. Blood welled up truculently.

As if the stroke had been a signal, the Raven and the Stork stood back, breathing heavily. Bender made a choking gurgle; he sounded as if he might suffocate in his own blood.

Lakerocked back and forth on his knees.

The Owl said to his companions, “You lost your heads. Do you want his blood on our hands?”

Lakestared at the knife and at Voss Bender’s incompetently cut throat, and back at the knife.

Blood had obscured all but the “Hoeg” in “Hoegbotton.” Blood had speckled his left hand. It looked nothing like paint: it was too bright. It itched where it had begun to dry.

He closed his eyes and felt the walls of the study rush away from him until he stood at the edge of an infinite darkness. From a great distance, the Owl said, “He will die now. But slowly. Very slowly.

Weaker and weaker until, having suffered considerable pain, he will succumb some hours or days hence.

And we will not lift a feather or finger to help him. We will just watch. Your choice remains the same — finish him and live; don’t and die with him. It is a mercy killing now.”

Lakelooked up at the Owl. “Why me?”

“How do you know you are the first? How do you know you were chosen?”

“That is your answer?”

“That is the only answer I shall ever give you.”

“What could he have done to you for you to be so merciless?”

The Owl looked to the Raven, the Raven to the Stork, and in the sud den quaver, the slight shiver, that passed between them,Lake thought he knew the answer. He had seen the same look pass between artists in the cafes alongAlbumuth Boulevard as they verbally dissected some new young genius.

Lakelaughed bitterly. “You’re afraid of him, aren’t you? You’re envi ous and you want his power, but most of all, you fear him. You’re too afraid to kill him yourself.”

The Owl said, “Make your choice.”

“And the hilarious thing,”Lake said. “The hilarious thing is, you see, that once he’s dead, you’ll have made him immortal.” Was he weeping? His face was wet under the mask.Lake watched, in the silence, the blood seeping from the wound in Bender’s throat. He watched Bender’s hands trembling as if with palsy.

What did the genius composer see in those final moments?Lake wondered later. Did he see the knife, the arm that held it, descending, or did he see himself back in Morrow, by the river, walking through a green field and humming to himself? Did he see a lover’s face contorted with passion? Did he see a moment from before the creation of the fame that had devoured him? Perhaps he saw nothing, awash in the crescendo of his most powerful symphony, still thundering across his brain in a wave of blood.

AsLake bent over Voss Bender, he saw reflected in the man’s eyes the black mask of the Raven, who had stepped nearer to watch the killing.

“Back away!”Lake hissed, stabbing out with the knife. The Raven jumped back.

Lakeremembered how the man in his nightmare had cut his hand apart so methodically, so completely.

He remembered his father’s hands opening to reveal bright treasures, Shriek’s response to his painting of his father’s hands. Ah, but Shriek knew nothing. Even Raffe knew nothing. None of them knew as much as he knew now.

Then, cursing and weeping, his lips pulled back in a terrible snarl, he drew the blade across the throat, pushed down with his full weight, and watched as the life drained out of the world’s most famous composer. He had never seen so much blood before, but worse still there was a moment, a single instant he would carry with him forever, when Bender’s eyes met his and the dullness of death crept in, extinguishing the brightness, the spark, that had once been a life.

“Through His Eyes” has an attitude toward perspective unique among Lake’s works, for it is painted from the vantage point of the dead Voss Bender in an open coffin (an apocryphal event — Bender was cremated), looking up at the people who are looking down, while perspective gradually becomes meaningless, so that beyond the people looking down, we see the River Moth superimposed against the sky and mourners lining its banks. Of the people who stare down at Bender, one isLake, one is a hooded insect catcher, and three are wearing masks — in fact, a reprisal of the owl, raven, and stork from

“The Burning House.” Four other figures stare as well, but they are faceless. The scenes in the background of this monstrously huge canvas exist in a world which has curved back on itself, and the details conspire to convince us that we see the sky, green fields, a city of wood, and the river banks simultaneously.

As Venturi writes, “The colors deepen the mystery: evening is about to fall and the river is growing dim; reds are intense or sullen, yellows and greens are deep-dyed; the sinister greenish sky is a cosmetic reflection of earthly death.” The entirety of the painting is ringed by a thin line of red that bleeds about a quarter of an inch inward. This unique frame suggests a freshness out of keeping with the coffin, while the background scenes are thought to depictLake ’s ideal of Bender’s youth, when he roamed the natural world of field and river. Why didLake choose to show Bender in a coffin? Why did he choose to use montage? Why the red line? Some experts suggest that we ignore the coffi n and focus on the red line and the swirl of images, but even then can offer no coherent explanation.

Even more daring, and certainly unique, “Aria for the Brittle Bones of Winter” creates an equivalence between sounds and colors: a musical scale based on the pictorial intensity of colors in which “color is taken to speak a mute language.” The “hero” rides through a crumbling graveyard to a frozen lake. The sky is dark, but the reflection of the moon, which is also a reflection of Voss Bender’s face, glides across the lake’s surface. The reeds which line the lake’s shore are composed of musical notes, so cleverly interwoven that their identity as notes is not at first evident. Snow is falling, and the flakes are also musical notes — fading notes against the blue-black sky, almost as if Bender’s aria is disintegrating even as it is being performed.

In this most ambitious of all his paintings, Lake uses subtle gradations of white, gray, and blue to mimic the progression of the aria itself — indeed, his brushstrokes, short or long, rough or smooth, duplicate the aria’s movement as if we were reading a sheet of music.

All of this motion in the midst of apparent motionless-ness flows in the direction of the rider, who rides against the destiny of the aria as a counterpoint, a dissenting voice. The light of the moon shines upon the face of the rider, but, again, this is the light of the reflection so that the rider’s features are illuminated from below, not above. The rider, haggard and sagging in the saddle, is unmistakablyLake. (Venturi describes the rider as “a rhythmic throb of inarticulate grief.”) The rider’s expression is abstract, fluid, especially in relation to the starkly realistic mode of the rest of the painting. Thus, he appears ambivalent, undecided, almost unfinished — and, certainly, at the time of the painting, and in relation to Voss Bender,Lake was unfinished.

If “Aria for the Brittle Bones of Winter” is not as popular as even the experimental “Through His Eyes,”

it may be becauseLake has employed too personal an iconography, the painting meaningful only to him.

Whereas in “Invitation” or “Burning House,” the viewer feels empowered — welcomed — to share in the personal revelation, “Aria… ” feels like a closed system, the artist’s eye looking too far inward. Even the doubling of image and name, the weak pun implicit in the painting’s lake and thepainterLake, cannot help us to understand the underpinnings of such a work. As Venturi wrote, “WhileLake’s canvases do not generally inflict a new language upon us, when they do, we have no guide to translate for us.” The controversial art critic Bibble has gone so far as to write, in reference to “Aria,” “[Lake’s] paintings are so many tombstones, so many little deaths — on canvases too big for the wall in their barely suppressed violence.”

Be this as it may, there are linked themes, linked resonances, between “Invitation,” “Through His Eyes,”

and “Aria… ”These are tenuous connections, even mysterious connections, but I cannot fail to make them.

Lakeappears in all three paintings — and only these three paintings. Only in the second painting, “Through His Eyes,” do the insect catcher and Bender appear together. The insect catcher does appear in “Invita tion” but not in “Aria… ” (where, admittedly, he would be a bizarre and unwelcome intrusion). Bender appears in “Aria” and is implied in “Through His Eyes,” but does not appear, implied or otherwise, in

“Invitation.” The question becomes: Does the insect catcher inhabit “Aria” unbeknownst to the casual observer — perhaps even in the frozen graveyard? And, more importantly, does the spirit of Voss Bender in some way haunt the canvas that is “Invitation to a Beheading”? —From Janice Shriek ’s A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.

Afterwards,Lake stumbled out into the night. The fog had dissipated and the stars hung like pale wounds in the sky. He flung off his frog mask, retched in the gutter, and staggered to a brackish public fountain, where he washed his hands and arms to no avail: the blood would not come off. When he looked up from his frantic efforts, he found the mushroom dwellers had abandoned their battle with the pigs to watch him with wide, knowing eyes.

“Go away!” he screamed. “Don’t look at me!”

Further on, headed at first without direction, then with the vague idea of reaching his apartment, he washed his hands in public restrooms. He sanded his hands with gravel. He gnawed at them. None of it helped: the stench of blood only grew thicker. He was being destroyed by something larger than himself that was still somehow trapped inside him.

He haunted the streets, alleys, and mews through the tail end of the bureaucratic district, and down a ways into the greenery of the valley, until a snarling whippet drove him back up and into the merchant districts. The shops were closed, the lanterns and lamps turned low. The streets, in the glimmering light, seemed slick, wet, but were dry as chalk. He saw no one except for once, when a group of Reds and Greens burst past him, fighting each other as they ran, their faces contorted in a righteous anger.

“It doesn’t mean anything!”Lake shouted after them. “He’s dead!”

But they ignored him and soon, like some chaotic beast battling itself, moved out of sight down the street.

Over everything, as he wept and burned,Lake saw the image of Voss Bender’s face as the life left it: the eyes gazing heavenward as if seeking absolution, the body taking one last full breath, the hands suddenly clutching at the ropes that bound, the legs vibrating against the coffin floor… and then stillness.

Ambergris, cruel, hard city, would not let him forget the deed, for on every street corner Voss Bender’s face stared at him — on posters, on markers, on signs.

Eventually, his crippled leg tense with a gnawing ache,Lake fell down on the scarlet doorstep of a bawdy house. There he slept under the indifferent canopy of the night, beneath the horrible emptiness of the stars, for an hour or two — until the Madame, brandishing curses and a broom, drove him off.

As the sun’s wan light infiltrated the city, exposing Red and Green alike, Lake found himself in a place he no longer understood, the streets crowded with faces he did not want to see, for surely they all stared at him: from the sidewalk sandwich vendors in their pointy orange hats and orange-striped aprons, to the bankers with their dark tortoise-shell portfolios, their maroon suits; from the white-faced, well-fed nannies of the rich to the bravura youths encrusted in crimson make up that had outgrown them.

With this awareness of others came once again an awareness of himself. He noticed the stubble on his cheek, the grit between his teeth, the sour smell of his dirty clothes. Looking around him at the secular traffic of the city,Lake discovered a great hunger in him for the Religious Quarter, all thoughts of a return to his apartment having long since left his head.

His steps began to have purpose and speed until, arrived at his destination, he walked among the devotees, the pilgrims, the priests — stared speechless at the endless permutations of devotional grottos, spires, domes, arches of the cathedrals of the myriad faiths, as if he had never seen them before. The Reds and Greens made no trouble here, and so refugees from the fury of their convictions flooded the streets.

The Church of the Seven Pointed Star had an actual confessional box for sinners. For a long timeLake stood outside the church’s modest wooden doors (above which rose an equally modest dome), torn between the need to confess, the fear of reprisal should he confess, and the conviction that he should not be forgiven. Finally, he moved on, accompanied by the horrid, gnawing sensation in his stomach that would be his burden for years. There was no one he could tell. No one. Now the Religious Quarter too confounded him, for it provided no answers, no relief. He wandered it as aimlessly as he had the city proper the night before. He thirsted, he starved, his leg tremulous with fatigue.

At last, on the Religious Quarter’s outskirts, where it kissed the feet of the Bureaucratic District,Lake walked through a glade of trees and was confronted by the enormous marble head of Voss Bender. The head had been ravaged by fire and overgrown by vines, and yet the lines of the mouth, the nose, stood out more heroically than ever, the righteous eyes staring at him. Under the weight of such a gaze,Lake could walk no further. He fell against the soft grass and lay there, motionless in the shadow of the marble head.

It was not until late in the afternoon that Raffe found him there and helped him home to his apartment.

She spoke words at him, but he did not understand them. She pleaded with him. She cried and hugged him. He found her concern so tragically funny that he could not stop laughing. But he refused to tell her anything and, after she had forced food and water on him, she left him to find Merrimount.

As soon as he was alone again,Lake tore apart his halffinished commissions. Their smug fatuousness infuriated him. He spared only the paintings of his father’s hands and the oil painting he had started the day before. He found himself still entranced by the greens against which the head of the man from nightmare jutted threateningly. The painting seemed to contain the soul of the city in all its wretched depravity, for of course the man with the knife was himself, the smile a grimace. He could not let the painting go, just as he could not bring himself to finish it.

Sometimes what the painter chooses not to paint can be as important as what he does paint. Sometimes an absence can leave an echo all its own. Does Bender cry out to us by his absence? Many art critics have supposed thatLake must have met Bender during his first three years in Ambergris, but no evidence for this meeting exists; certainly, if he did meet with Bender, he failed to inform any of his friends or colleagues, which seems highly unlikely. Circumstantial evidence points to the stork-like shadow in

“Invitation…”, as Bender had a well-known pathological fear of birds, but sinceLake also had a pathological fear of birds, I cannot agree. (Some also find it significant that it isLake ’s apparent wish, upon his death, to be cremated in similar fashion to Bender, his ashes spread over the River Moth.) In the absence of more complete biographical information aboutLake following this period, one must rely on such scanty information as exists in the history books. As is common knowledge, Bender’s death was followed by a period of civil strife between the Reds and the Greens, culminating in a siege of the Voss Bender Memorial Post Office, which the Reds took by force only to be bloodily expelled by the Greens a short time later.

Could this, then, as some critics believe, be the message of “Invitation”? The screaming face of the man, the knife blade through the palm, which is wielded by Death, who has just claimed Voss Bender’s life?

Perhaps. But I believe in a more personal interpretation. Given what I know aboutLake ’s relationship with his father, this personal meaning is all too clear. For in these three paintings, beginning with

“Invitation,” we see the repudiation of Lake by his natural father (the insect catcher) andLake ’s em brace of Bender as his real, artistic father.

What, then, does “Invitation” tell us? It showsLake ’s father metaphorically leaving his son. It shows his son, distraught, with a letter sent by his father — a letter which contains written confirmation of that repudiation. The “beheading” in “Invitation to a Beheading” is the dethroning of the king — his father…

and yet, when a king is beheaded, a new king always takes his place.

Within days of this spiritual rejection, Voss Bender dies and for Lake the two events — the rejection by his father, the death of a great artist — are for ever linked, and the only recourse open to him is worship of the dead artist, a path made possible through his upbringing by a mystical, religious mother. Thus,

“Through His Eyes” is about the death and life of Bender, and the metaphorical death of his real father.

“Aria… ” gives Bender a resurrected face, a resurrected life, as the force, the light, behind the success of the haggard rider, who is grief-stricken because he has buried his real father in the frozen graveyard — has allowed his natural father to be eclipsed by the myth, the potency, of his new father, the moon, the reflection of himself: Bender.

In the end, these paintings are aboutLake ’s yearning for a father he never had. Bender makes a safe father because, being dead, he can never repudiate the son who has adopted him. If the paintings discussed become increasingly more inaccessible, it is because their meaning becomes ever more personal. — From Janice Shriek ’s A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.

The days continued on at their normal pace, butLake existed outside of their influence. Time could not touch him. He sat for long hours on his balcony, staring out at the clouds, at the sly swallows that cut the air like silver-blue scissors. The sun did not heat him. The breeze did not make him cold. He felt hollowed out inside, he told Raffe when she asked how he was doing. And yet, “felt” was the wrong word, because he couldn’t feel anything. He was unreal. He had no soul — would never love again, never connect with anyone, he was sure, and because he did not experience these emotions, he did not miss their fulfillment. They were extraneous, unimportant. Much better that he simply be as if he were no better, no worse, than a dead twig, a clod of dirt, a lump of coal. (Raffe: “You don’t mean that, Martin!

You can’t mean that… ”) So he didn’t paint. He didn’t do much of anything, and he realized later that if not for the twinned love of Raffe and Merrimount, a love that he need not return, he might have died within a month. While they were helping him, he detested their help. He didn’t deserve help. They must leave him alone. But they ignored his stares of hatred, his tantrums. Worst of all, they demanded no explanations. Raffe provided him with food and paid his rent. Merrimount shared his bed and comforted him when his nights, in stark and terrifying contrast to the dull, dead, uneventful days, were full of nightmares, detailed and hideous: the white of exposed throat, the sheen of sweat across the shadow of the chin, the lithe hairs that parted before the knife’s path…

The week after Raffe had found him,Lake forced himself to attend Bender’s funeral, Raffe and Merrimount insistent on attending with him even though he wanted to go alone.

The funeral was a splendid affair that traveled down to the docks viaAlbumuth Boulevard, confetti raining all the way. The bulk of the procession formed a virtual advertisement for Hoegbotton & Sons, the import/export business that had, in recent years, grabbed the major share of Ambergris trade.

Ostensibly held in honor of Bender’s operas, the display centered around a springtime motif, and in addition to the twigs, stuffed birds, and oversized bumblebees attached to the participants like odd extra appendages, the music was being played by a ridiculous full orchestra pulled along on a platform drawn by draft horses.

This display was followed by the senior Hoegbotton, his eyes two shiny black tears in an immense pale face, waving from the back of a topless Manzikert and looking for all the world as if he were running for political office. Which he was: Hoegbotton, of all the city’s inhabitants, stood the best chance of replacing Bender as unoffi cial ruler of the city…

In the back seat of Hoegbotton’s Manzikert sat two rather reptilian-looking men, with slitted eyes and cruel, sensual mouths. Between them stood the urn with Bender’s ashes: a pompous, gold-plated monstrosity. It was their number — three — and Hoegbotton’s mannerisms that first rousedLake ’s suspicions, but suspicions they remained, for he had no proof. No tell-tale feathers ensnarled for a week to now slowly spin and drift down from the guilty parties toLake ’s feet.

The rest of the ceremony was a blur forLake. At the docks, commu nity leaders including Kinsky, Hoegbotton conspicuously absent, mouthed comforting platitudes to memorialize the man, then took the urn from its platform, pried open the lid, and cast the ashes of the world’s greatest composer into the blue-brown waters of the Moth.

Voss Bender was dead.

Is my interpretation correct? I would like to think so, but one of the great challenges, the great allures, of a true work of art is that it either defies analysis or provides multiple theories for its existence. Further, I cannot fully explain the presence of the three birds, nor certain aspects of “Through His Eyes” with regard to the ring of red and the montage format.

Whatever the origin of and the statement made by “Invitation to a Be heading,” it marked the beginning ofLake ’s illustrious career. Before, he had been an obscure painter. After, he would be classed among the greatest artists of the southern cities, his popularity as a painter soon to rival that of Bender as a composer.Lake would design wildly inventive sets for Bender operas and thus be responsible for an interpretive revival of those operas. He would be commissioned, albeit disastrously, to do commemorative work for Henry Hoegbotton, de facto ruler of Ambergris after Bender’s death. His illustrations for the Truffidians’ famous Journal of Samuel Tonsure would be revered as minor miracles of the engraver’s art. Exhibitions of his work would even grace the Court of Kalif himself, while nearly every year publishers would release a new book of his popular prints and drawings. In a hundred ways, he would rejuvenate Ambergris’ cultural life and make it the wonder of the south. (In spite of which, he always seemed oddly annoyed, even stricken, by his success.) These facts are beyond doubt.

What, finally, was the mystery behind the letter held in the screaming man’s hand, the mystery of

“Invitation to a Beheading,” we may never know. — From Janice Shriek’s A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.

A year passed, during which, as Raffe and many of his other friends re marked toLake, he appeared to be doing penance for some esoteric crime. He spent long hours in the Religious Quarter, haunting back alleys and narrow streets, searching in the dirty, antique light for those scenes, and those scenes alone which best embodied his grief and the cruelty, the dispassionate passion, of the city he had adopted as his home. He heard the whispers behind his back, the rumors that he had gone mad, that he was no longer a painter but a priest of an as yet unnamed religion, that he had participated in some unspeakable mushroom dweller ritual, but he ignored such talk; or, rather, it did not register with him.

Six months after Bender’s funeral, Lake visited Archmont Lane, new cane trembling in his hand. He found it a burnt out husk, the only recognizable object amidst the ruins the bust of Trillian, blackened but intact. At first he picked it up, meaning to salvage it for his apartment, but as he wandered the wreckage for some sign of what had occurred there, the idea became distasteful, and he left the head in the rubble, its laconic eyes staring up at the formless sky. Nothing remained but the faint smell of carrion and smoke, rubbing against his nostrils. It might as well have been a dream.

Later that month,Lake asked Merrimount — lovely Merrimount, precious Merrimount — to move in with him permanently. He did not know he was going to ask Merri, but as the words left his lips they felt like the right words and Merri, tears in his eyes, said yes, smiling for the first time since beforeLake ’s ordeal.

They celebrated at a cafe, Raffe giving her guarded approval, Sonter and Kinsky bringing gifts and good cheer.

Things went better forLake after that. Although the nightmares still affl icted him, he found that Merrimount’s very presence helped him to forget, or at least disremember. He went by Shriek’s gallery and took all of his paintings back, burning them in a barrel behind his apartment building. He began to frequent the Ruby Throated Calf again. His father even visited in late winter, a meeting which went better than expected, even after the guarded old man realized the nature of his son’s relationship with Merrimount. He seemed genuinely touched when Lake presented him with the twin paintings of his own hands covered with insects, and with thatapprovalLake felt himself awakening even more. There were cracks in the ice. A light amid the shadows.

Yet Ambergris — city of versions and virgins both — did its best to remind him of the darkness.

Everywhere, new tributes to Bender sprang up, for Bender’s popularity had never been so high. It could be said with confidence that the man might never fade from memory. Under the vengeful eyes of Bender statues, posters, and memorial buildings, the Reds and Greens gradually lost their focus and exhausted themselves. Some merged with traditional political factions, but many died in a final confrontation at the Voss Bender Memorial Post Office. By spring, Ambergris seemed much as it had before Bender’s death.

It was in the spring, one chilly morning, thatLake sat down in front of the unfinished painting of the man from his nightmare. The man smiled with his broken teeth, as if in warning, but he wasn’t fearsome anymore. He was lonely and sad, trapped by the green paint surrounding his face.

Lakehad snuck out of bed, so as not to disturb his still-sleeping lover, but now he felt Merri’s eyes upon his back. Gingerly, he picked up a brush and a new tube of moss-green paint. The brush handle felt rough, grainy, the paint bottle smooth and sleek. His grasp on the brush was ten tative but strong. The paint smelled good to him and he could feel his senses awakening to its promise. The sun from the balcony embraced him with its warmth.

“What are you doing?” Merrimount mumbled.

Laketurned, the light streaming from the window almost unbearable, and said, with a wry, haunted grin,

“I’m painting.”