The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

LADY’S PORTRAIT, EXECUTED IN ARCHAIC COLORS by Charles M. Saplak

Cerulean blue is the color of a cloudless sky.

Sandra watched the sky lighten over the city. She struggled to keep from feeling depressed these days. It was getting near the end of March and spring was late in coming. She would be thirty-five this spring.

“You’re young,” she said to herself, out loud. “Cheer up, you big baby.” Still, when she looked at the sky, she got that feeling, as if she should cry. The sky here was the same sky that people were looking up to in China and Africa. Over the royal family in England and orphans in Vietnam, it was the same sky.

Only a few windows in the buildings she could see showed lights. A lot of the apartments had curtains drawn. She was used to seeing the city wake up as she got ready to sleep. She’d been on the night shift at Sacred Heart for the past four months, where she was an ICU nurse.

Her attention was drawn to one large square of light in the building directly opposite hers. In one of the top floor studio apartments a man worked at a canvas on an easel; directly across the room from him a woman sat on a sort of stool or chair over which a dark cloth was draped.

Sandra was by no means prudish, nor was she a voyeur, but she couldn’t help but be fascinated by this tableau before her. The man was frantically painting; from palette to canvas his arms made broad, bold gestures. Sandra watched for a few minutes before she noticed that the woman was totally naked.

As the morning sunlight hit the window directly, it created a glare through which Sandra could no longer see. She stood for a moment, then stepped well back from the window to remove her own clothes, to prepare for bed. As she undressed she looked back to the window, reassuring herself that no one could see in. Visible to her through the window at this angle was nothing but the cloudless sky.

Red madder is extracted from fields of flower.

The city has a population of approximately one hundred and twenty-six thousand, including homeless and transients who do not appear on any census, voters’ register, or tax roster. Also included are an undisclosed number of criminals whose dealings are mainly cash, designed to leave no traceable records.

The population of the city fluctuates. The Hopeful arrive. The Disillusioned leave. Births. Deaths. This cycle of population is somewhat like the breathing of a tremendous sleeping beast, like a biological cycle of an animal.

In any given day apartments are left vacant; families are seemingly deserted; automobiles are abandoned to rust and vandalism; houses are left filled or half-filled with belongings. People seemingly vanish.

Some of these disappearances create quite a stir, depending on the visibility of the vanished, and upon the intricacy and depth of their relationships with those they left behind.

The people of the city enjoy a sort of privacy in numbers, a sort of chosen anonymity.

As that winter turned over to spring, numerous single, “unattached” women disappeared, relatively unnoticed.

Ochres harmonize a scene through their dulling qualities.

The intensive care unit at Sacred Heart has the qualities of a chapel, a sepulcher, a spacecraft module, a mortuary, a medieval prison. The ward has room for eight patients. The patients are separated by opaque curtains of off-white; the ceilings, walls, and floor are coordinated in the most neutral tones of beige, ecru, ivory.

Some of the patients hallucinate and frequently speak to dead friends or relatives. Others are not conscious. Some are attended by their own watchful friends or relatives in three-minute periods every two hours. Still others are alone. Most are attached to machinery designed to monitor, regulate, control, or even stimulate anatomical functions of living.

Sandra moves among these people every night. She is competent and professional, and she often reminds herself of the necessity for compassion, the importance of maintaining perspective in difficult situations.

She sometimes cries without knowing it.

She is meticulous and conscientious in matters of recordkeeping and maintenance.

Often her work causes her to touch people, making skin-to-skin contact, as they die.

Viridian is somewhat transparent, but withstands the ravages of light as it ages.

By accident, Sandra met the painter soon after that. She had stopped off in a coffee shop near her apartment, and there he was, sitting at one of the booths. She couldn’t have explained exactly how she knew it was he; she just knew. He had greenish eyes and hair of an indistinct color which was thinning, but which was thinning all over, not in the usual pattern. He had a sketch pad open on the table top in front of him. A cup of weak-looking tea sat cooling near his right hand; the morning light passed through faint vapors of steam above the cup. His hands were exceptionally slender and his fingers exceptionally long. His right hand was poised over the blank page of the sketch book, and his ring finger was bent so that the pad of the fingertip could rest on the paper. He moved his finger in a lazy, slow, delicate circle, over and over.

“I recognize you,” he said.

Sandra realized that she had been staring. Her eyes met his and she was ready to turn away in embarrassment, but something stopped her. His face was so open and relaxed, so natural, he was like a sleepy child.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and smiled back.

“Don’t apologize. Sometimes that’s what life is like. Recognition. The statue hidden within the stone, the spirit hidden within the body. Or the picture within the page.”

He held up the sketch pad and Sandra saw that there was a picture there, a woman unclothed, totally without tension, more like a spirit than a person, but just as the woman’s body was uncurled and open, so was her face unlocked, and her eyes open and streaming tears. But actually, as Sandra blinked, she saw that the page was in fact blank and held no picture there. Undoubtedly the previous six hours at Sacred Heart had made her susceptible to imagination.

“Maybe I’ll paint you someday,” he said.

“Stranger things have happened,” Sandra answered, and it wasn’t a yes and it wasn’t a no, but after eight years in this city—this city of rapists and con artists—she was surprised to hear herself say it.

She turned back to her toast and apple juice, and felt his eyes on her back, but it wasn’t exactly an unpleasant sensation like it could have been, so she turned back again, and of course he was gone.

Indigo is obtained from roots of the plant of that name. It fades.

“That corner is having a bad night,” her supervisor, Nurse Mitchell, says, glancing at Sandra over her hornrimmed glasses. “She may not last.”

Sandra nods but thinks: That woman is not “that corner.” She is not “bed number eight.” She is not “the subject.” She is not the three-hundred-and-forty dollar per day Medicare payment. She has a name, a life. She still has a name, a life.

That night Sandra adjusts a heparin lock on the wrist of that woman. She moves with sure, gentle motions. Even through the narcotics the wrist and arm respond to pain. In the dim fluorescence Sandra notices the ancient skin. Sandra notices the pigmentation which looks dull but in fact contains myriad colors of the spectrum, the purplish bruise, bluish veins, the pale white of scars, the dull pink of feminine skin, and as the needle of the IV is seated within the lock the plastic tube is momentarily touched with the deep night indigo of human blood.

I will be alone in a bed like this someday. This will be me.

She may not last.

Umber is important for shadows.

In the bathroom in his apartment, Sandra undressed. As a nurse, Sandra had seen nude people hundreds of times. She hadn’t imagined that she would feel so uncomfortable removing her clothes here and putting on the chenille bathrobe he had advised her to bring for covering up when taking a break.

He was standing by his easel when Sandra entered, laying out tubes and jars of paint, arranging rows of brushes, glancing into the canvas. He mixed some tubes of pigment in with binders which reminded Sandra of thick lymphatic substance. She pulled back the shoulders of the robe, pulled it off completely, folded it and set it away from where he had an off-white cloth draped over a small padded chair.

With her clothes off, in the warm room, she had the fleeting sensation that her breasts were inadequate. Whenever she had undressed before a man for the first time, she had been very conscious of her breasts. All the hideous, silly teenager thoughts—will he think they’re too small, too large, the “right” shape?—all of these melted away as he looked at her. She somehow knew that in his eyes, she just was.

He took up some paint on a palette knife and started on the canvas. His arm moved with bold, confident strokes. She sat still, and when he looked at her again she said, “Do you want me to sit like this?”

She struck a pose which she imagined to be a painter’s subject’s pose—chin tilted slightly upward, shoulders back.

He smiled, but he seemed to be a little distracted. He was like a doctor involved with a patient, lost in that sort of concentration. “Oh, you don’t need to sit still. I’m not putting you in any sort of pose. I’m looking at you for reference, but I’d prefer that you move, that you act natural. Otherwise, it’s too much like painting a corpse. And you also need to, um…” He gestured at her waist with his brush.

She stood up. She normally wore cotton, but for some reason today she had worn a ninety-ten orlon/spandex blend. She liked the feel of it. She kept her eyes on him (he stared into the canvas, seemingly oblivious) and reached behind her midriff. She slipped the middle and ring fingers of each hand into the waistband of her panties and smoothly slid them down off her backside, down her thighs and shins, and stepped out of them. Between some people there are no secrets.

After about twelve minutes of sitting there in the mid-morning sunlight she said, “Have you ever done that?”

“Done what?”

“Painted a corpse.”

He kept his eyes on the canvas. He swiftly moved the brush back and forth from the canvas to the palette. The brush held an umber and gray blob of paint. She wasn’t sure if he was going to answer or not.

“Yes,” he said.

Chrome yellow, in its original form, is exceptionally brilliant—as in Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”—but with the centuries it transmutes to a macabre greenish-black.

The boy was carried by wagon to the castle of the Count.

The castle was a stone and beam tower surrounded by a wall. It dominated the hillside and was silhouetted in the dusky light like a brooding, armored and cloaked figure.

Count Senescau had had once been described by his official chroniclers as “Senescau the Great, Father to Orphans, Patron to Widows, Eye of the Blind, Foot of the Lame.” But he had traveled to the Orient during the Crusades, and when he returned he was said to be suffering from some rare unspeakable disease, some disorder which beset him during campaigns in the Balkans and Carpathians.

It was whispered that the Count was blind; it was rumored that he was decomposing and could not tolerate sunlight or fresh air; it was feared that he had become mad and had abandoned Christian philosophies and beliefs for Eastern occult practices.

The boy was admitted into the castle. He trembled. He thought that he would die there.

In the donjon Jews and children were held. Hooded men worked with flaying tools and pinions. None of the cries pierced the stone floor.

The boy was led into a great hall. Count Senescau sat upon a throne carved of ebony and bone. The throne was carved with draconian motifs of claw-and-ball feet, heavily tendoned and scaled reptilian arms, with a riser back on which was carved in bas-relief the screaming face of a dragon.

Two distant torches illuminated the great hall. In their flickering light the Count appeared to be eaten by the shadows, appeared to be a skeleton gauzed in a greenish-black skin.

The Count spoke. His lips barely moved and his eyelids were merest slits through which the boy could see coal-black eyes.

“My clergy tells me that you were caught in a sunflower field with a girl from the neighboring farm. True?”

The boy nodded.

“And she was naked? You looked upon her? Learned her… secrets?”

He nodded again.

A slight smile played over the Count’s face, although it could have been a trick of the lamplight. As his lips parted slightly, the boy saw cruel teeth. The Count reached beside the throne and picked up something to pass to the boy. It was a leaf of hand-pulped and pressed rice paper, a crow quill, and a cork-stoppered jar of ink. (Or was it ink? It was a fluid which reflected the torchlight in glittering scarlet and indigo highlights.)

The Count spoke. “Draw my castle. Draw it from memory. You saw it as you rode up. Draw it. Pour your soul and your will and mind into that quill; place them outside your body for me to see. Your success or failure at this will determine your fate.”

The boy took the tools and crouched on the stone floor before the Count. The lamps failed to cast enough light for him to see the paper. It didn’t matter.

Occasionally the Count leaned forward to stare into the paper over the boy’s shoulder. The scratching of the pen on the grainy tooth of the rice paper was like the scrabbling of myriad tiny claws within the stone walls.

Later, the lamps weren’t burning as brightly and the shadows had deepened. The air in the reception hall had chilled. The boy set down the pen and leaned back away from the paper. The Count reached down and took up the sheet.

He stared into it for a long time. The castle was rendered in perfect detail, but the boy had betrayed himself. The buttresses and parapets of the tower gave the structure the subtle but distinct appearance of a man in aristocratic armor and cloak. The castle walls were cross-hatched to a shade of black similar to an etching, and embedded in the crosshatch patterns were dark and twisted forms, like the insides of a slaughtered animal.

“Don’t you wish that you could capture it all, boy? Don’t you wish that you could somehow go beyond the limits of ink and paint and paper, that your eye could see the Beyond, that you could reach through the Illusion into the Truth? It can be done, boy, and you can have it, at a price…”

The Count somehow—the boy saw no spark or torch nearby—set fire to the sheet, and held it in his hand while it burned.

As if that were a signal to some hidden attendants, tapestries were pulled aside and women padded into the hall. Unseen instruments which the boy couldn’t identify began a throbbing, Oriental song of hypnotic complexity. The women were naked except for various bracelets of gold around their wrists and ankles, and necklaces inlaid with darkly gleaming stones. Some of the jewelry was fashioned with staple loops, as if the jewelry was designed to double as instruments of forcible restraint. Most of the women were anointed and oiled and perfumed so that the hair on their bodies glistened with beaded droplets like delicate flowers or spider webs coated with hot morning dew. Pungent spicey scents from the women curled to the boy’s nostrils like invisible snakes.

The women began to dance.

The boy watched, his body responding. The Count leaned forward with a rusting sound and whispered into the boy’s ear. “What do you see? What do you see?”

He couldn’t answer. The women were exquisite beyond words.

“Man’s confounder?” the Count suggested.

“Luscious sin?

“Mad beast?

“Stinking rose?

“Sweet venom?

“Sad Paradise?”

Black, obtained by burning organic substances to render pure carbon, is not recommended for the painter’s palette. Black effects will better be gained by mixtures of complementary colors.

The form on the canvas stunned Sandra. The painter smiled at her as he looked at her face. “Like it?”

“It’s marvelous. It’s me. It’s like a photograph.”

He grimaced from where he stood straightening up his brushes and palette. “Photography? I always said that won’t last.”

“But I mean it’s me, it’s like looking into a mirror. That’s amazing.”

“Just good draftmanship,” he said, shrugging.

“I have one question,” Sandra said. “Why is it all black and white and gray?”

He looked back at the picture and then to Sandra. He looked into her eyes briefly and she noticed that he could well have been very old. He seemed vital and spry, but he also seemed dignified, and somewhat weathered.

“That’s an underpainting. I do your form in the minutest detail, completely. Then in the next two sittings all of the color will be added, and that’s when it will come alive.”

Sandra couldn’t take her eyes from the canvas. It was her. It was realistic, and showed her every fold and curve and nuance. She had lately started to think of herself as unattractive, but she realized as she looked at the picture that that wasn’t so, that she was beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than she had ever been or had ever hoped to be.

With a start she realized that her robe was open, and that her left breast, her belly, the triangle of hair between her legs and her left leg were all in plain view to the painter. Inexplicably, she felt a wave of shyness, and quickly closed her robe. She immediately chided herself for not being logical since he had just been staring at her fully naked for over three hours.

“You know, since I haven’t seen anything else you’ve painted, I guess I was a little afraid that you might be one of those, uh, abstract-type artists.”

“Afraid that I would reduce you to blobs and squiggles? Don’t be afraid of that. I’d never do that; I’m too interested in capturing things as they really are. Those other people aren’t artists, they’re symptoms. They can’t really draw and they’ve cowed blind and insecure people who are phonier than they are into buying into their charade.”

Emotions started to coalesce within her. This man, this older man, said this in such a confident, quiet way, it reassured her. His face, a mix of youthful wonder and an almost ancient maturity, was so contradictory it fascinated her. If there was anything that could be said for certain about him, it was that he knew how to look at a woman. He knew how to see.

She noticed that he rubbed his hands delicately as if they were sore, as if they might be arthritic, or as if possibly his skin was irritated by exposure to the oils and solvents and binders he worked with every day. She felt an almost uncontrollable urge to take his hands in hers.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” he said. “I serve the Old Masters.”

Sepia is extracted as an ink from cuttle fish. It is impermanent.

Sandra, in order to accommodate the painter’s wish for her to sit for her portrait over three straight days in the early morning, had to shift her sleep time to the afternoon. With her shades drawn and the door to her bedroom closed, she lay between the sheets and waited for sleep. She found that she was tired, not just because she’d shifted her sleep time back, but the act of sitting for a portrait seemed to take so much more out of her than she had expected.

As she lay there, she had time to reflect on her life. She sensed that she needed direction, that she had to rethink her purpose. She felt, as sleep started to overcome her, that there was some insight to be had, that the key to her problem was just within her grasp.

In a world filled with people who were tremendously unhappy, people who were miserable, Sandra felt a sort of dull hollowness, and she realized why. She had no standard. Her family, her youth in an ugly little factory town, her divorce, the boyfriends, all started to burn into a sort of colorless past. She had her work now, but she didn’t have any goals there, or any ambitions beyond what she was doing. She couldn’t help but think of herself as a reliable but replaceable part in a machine. She couldn’t stop the parade of death she saw every day, and she had, without knowing it, become resigned to it.

With this insight she gave herself up to a sound, restful sleep. The things she had cut out of her life—religion, ambition, desire, intimacy—could be sources of great pain, but they could also be possible keys to becoming involved again.

In her sleep, she occasionally turned. She reached out with her arm as she turned to her side. She drew up one leg to rest bent on the mattress and support her. Her motions and gestures were such as one would expect from a person sleeping with a companion.

Cinnabar has on occasion remained unaltered for five centuries or more, and in other cases has blackened completely in a matter of weeks.

He spoke as he painted, much more so that second sitting than the first.

“The sad thing about paint is that it fails. It inevitably fails. The work and the painters we admire are special because they are the most spectacular and tragic failures.

“You cannot capture the visual effects of the sun, the moon, or the stars. Light is dynamic and living. Fire or electricity can never be captured onto canvas. These phenomena strike and stimulate the eye with a dynamic play of light which can only be feebly suggested on canvas by pigment in binder. A properly spaced white slash, surrounded by darkness of sufficient richness, may strike the viewer as brilliant light, but the effect will only be a pale imitation of life. The medium fails, even in the hands of the most accomplished master.

“And living things? They can’t be captured either, not by mere paint. The luster of the living, seeing eye can only be adequately suggested by daubs of slick white suggesting a wet surface. With the right interplay of underpaint a woman’s body can be suggested in the mass of the forms, in the glisten of the skin, in the warmth and pulsation of blood beneath the surface, but it’s all just a suggestion, an illusion.”

As he spoke, he furiously looked back and forth from Sandra to the palette to the canvas. He was glazing the underpainting and the brush in his hands looked like a criminal knife as he flashed it through cinnabar, carmine, madder lake, alizarin, and chrome. The reds were affirmation; he balanced them with denials of gamboge, sepia, sienna, mango, and lapus lazuli.

Every motion of his hands over the surface of the canvas was, as Sandra watched him from across the studio, enormously suggestive, and gave her involuntary thoughts. Her skin and the canvas were surfaces which were entirely accessible to him. Could he not notice an unusual pertness in her? Could he not see an unusual glistening, a slickness if he looked closely enough, and in the right place? She imagined that if the sun and moon and stars were all to fade to darkness that he would be able to detect a glow emanating from her and find her in that encompassing night.

When he finally set down his brushes, it was well after noon. He invited Sandra to come look at the result.

Two days before, she would have been stunned to see a man pour so much insight, so much vision into mere paint and canvas. Two days before she wouldn’t have believed that anyone would be able to find anything attractive about her, much less be able to look within her and find such solid, absolute beauty. But that was then, and now she knew differently. She looked at herself there on the square of stretched canvas and saw a woman of form and feeling, the black, white, and gray now overlaid with swaths of hue and warmth.

“I’m very impressed,” she said softly.

She had the belt of the robe loosely tied before her. As she turned slightly to face the painter it opened again, just as it had the day before. She knew from the coolness and motion of the air against her skin that she was revealed to him. He was close enough to reach and touch her if he so chose. She didn’t feel any of the shyness she had yesterday, and she didn’t look down at herself but kept her eyes on his, watching for any sign that he was taking advantage of this opportunity for a closer look.

The painter, with his young-old aspect, now looked very tired. He slouched forward a little and his eyes were reddish around the viridian green irises, the skin somewhat dark and encircled around the sockets.

“I’m a little hungry,” she said. “I could certainly do for some lunch.” Please say you’d like to spend some time with me. Please say you want something more from me. I’ve got a lot to give.

But the painter set down his tools and walked away, a little unsteadily. “I’m—I’m tired,” he said. “Very tired. Sometimes I forget that it takes a lot of out of me, too. It’s hard work, although it may not look it.”

“Of course,” she said. She hoped her disappointment wouldn’t show. If anyone can see me, really see me, it’s you!

“Forgive me. Forgive me. I’m tired,” he said, and walked out of the studio to the small back room which held his bed.

Sandra dressed, looking at the portrait. He knows I’m beautiful, but does he want me? She looked into the room where he lay on the bed. She went in to stand over him. He hardly breathed as he lay there. His skin was pale, but a close look revealed that it held a myriad array of colors.

Sandra bent over and lightly brushed her lips against his. Then she left, and didn’t lock the door behind her.

Bitumen, used as an underpainting, enables gleaming heavenly effects, but will bleed and blacken with time, as in the “Black Madonnas” of Czentochau.

That night, two of Sandra’s patients in ICU died.

When the oldest woman there passed away (no, died) she did so with the silent inevitability of a blossom closing at sunset. Only the machines monitoring her vital functions gave any sounds, any external signs. The alarms of these machines Sandra disabled with the simple gestures of flipping switches and depressing buttons.

Later, the second patient expired.

An eleven-year-old boy in a coma, a bicycle accident victim, regained partial consciousness to scream once before his life ended. The scream woke some of the patients who had enough strength and resistance to sedation to hear it. When the boy was pronounced lost (not lost, dead) by the shift physician, Sandra had to place the sheets over his face, a face which now looked both young and old, both wise and yet innocent.

Because there was a wait for the orderly to transport the boy from ICU to the morgue on the basement level of Sacred Heart, Sandra had to pull the off-white curtained dividers around the boy’s bed so that he would be out of the possible fields of vision of the living.

As she did this, she remembered this phrase: “In the midst of life we are in death.” Another time she stood beside a grave as she watched a Christian burial, the interment of a body into sanctified earth. It was long ago. As she stood behind the curtains with the boy’s body, she couldn’t control the memories within and had a heightened ability to recall details of her past. She remembered that the phrase was not from the Bible but from the Book of Common Prayer, and thence not the word of God but the word of men, although she had long ago left the belief system which would make that a relevant point. She felt a momentary urge to bend over and kiss the lips of that dead boy.

Only several hours ago she had slipped into the darkness of sleep and had been comforted by her conviction that there were choices available, choices which would mean life.

Carmine is a calm, dignified reddish tone which requires the sacrifice of various female insects found on thistles.

Sandra left work early that night. With the ICU now more than half empty, the shift could be turned over to one other nurse, and Sandra could be released to be on call. The ubiquitous shift supervisor, Nurse Mitchell, told Sandra that she looked peaked, that she should be concerned with possible anemia. She seemed to be solicitous of the possible emotional effects on Sandra of seeing two patients die.

It was still dark when Sandra left. She didn’t bother to change her uniform in the nurses’ lounge. As she left Sacred Heart, she walked through a night which had become almost supernaturally dark. There was no moon, and no stars were visible. The normal smoggy glow of evening over the city seemed muted.

Sandra felt a sort of exhilaration as she walked away from the electric hum and fluorescent glow of the hospital. She had just watched two people die, had just touched two people who had died, and now she was walking away. She was alive.

When she arrived at her apartment building, she parked in her usual parking spot then, without giving the matter too much thought, walked across the street to the building where the painter had his studio apartment.

She took the elevator up to his floor. The door to his apartment was still unlocked.

She didn’t turn on the lights in his apartment. The muted glow of the city and the reflection of the city’s light on the moist full clouds which blocked the stars served as her only guide. This light shone through the enormous picture window of the studio and illuminated the scene as distant torchlight, giving the easels and stacks of stretched canvases and tabletops covered with paint in tubes and jars something of a menacing appearance, as one might expect from a medieval torture chamber.

Sandra picked her way through these obstacles to the door of his bedroom. This room had no windows, and he apparently had no electric clock or any other possible source of illumination. Still, a dim light plainly showed the painter in repose there, his arm and his leg reaching out to support him lying on his side, in the manner of a person in bed with a companion.

Sandra stood in his doorway, certain that if he woke he would see and recognize her by an unexplainable glow. She wore her nurse’s uniform, and thus was dressed entirely in white. Her skirt and blouse were a crisp polycotton blend, and fit snugly around her hips, waist, and bosom. She wore white panties and white pantyhose, as well as a white lace bra. Standing there she slipped off her shoes, then continued with the rest of her clothes. The clothes were repressive; they hid secrets she wanted to share.

The painter stirred slightly as she stared at him. She was now nude. Could not even a sleeping man perceive when his environment changed with the addition of a living, breathing, warm person?

He did seem to be slightly aware of her, but he stirred a little as if absorbed in a dream.

She stepped forward and slipped beneath the covers. She reached out and touched him with her hands, then closed her eyes and rubbed her palms over him. She felt as if she were entering a secret world; she concentrated her entire being into her hands. She tried to read every sensation there—texture, temperature, shape, the rhythm of his blood, any tiny movements in his musculature, any indications that he felt and was responding to her touch.

He stirred beside her. She moved her face closer to his, felt the warmth there. She softly pressed her face against the side of his neck and jaw, then opened her lips slightly to kiss him. She let her mouth rest there for a few moment, then moved her tongue between her teeth to taste him, tickle his skin.

He awoke and didn’t say anything. He reached for her. Between some people there are no secrets.

With the morning Sandra awoke intertwined with the painter. She rested there for a few minutes, and considered waking him. She decided not to; he looked peaceful. His face seemed less contradictory, less of a combination of the very old and the very young.

She slipped out of bed and put on her blouse. She left the bedroom and pulled the door almost closed behind her, leaving the sleeping painter behind in darkness.

She went to the bathroom and washed her face, then looked at herself in the mirror. And how many days ago had she looked out her window to see this man painting a naked woman? How many days ago had she stared at the sky and felt like crying under the weight of some vague, displaced sadness? She had the sense that her life was made up in fact of many lives, and that she was at a junction where one was ending and another beginning.

Her hair was a mess, and she didn’t have makeup on. (She never wore it to the night shift.) Still, the memories of last night gave her a look of warmth and vitality she hadn’t seen for years.

She left the bathroom and went back into his studio. The place which had looked in the dim light of last night like a torture chamber now looked like a typical man’s workshop. She looked around and felt teenagerlike feelings of infatuation—these are the brushes he takes in his hands; these are the colors he mixes to his liking.

She felt an urge to see his kitchen. She knew she was being silly, moving way too fast, playing little imagination games. She also knew that she deserved it. Her life wasn’t over.

His kitchen was clean. His cupboard held almost nothing, just a few simple juice glasses. They were all washed and set upside down on a square of white cloth. She picked one up, looking for signs of his lips on the glass. She would very much have liked to place her lips on that slick surface where his had been. But the glass (which was curiously colorless, like laboratory glass, unlike the ferrous or gold-based crystal most people used) had been washed spotless.

Sandra found no food in the kitchen, and found the refrigerator unplugged, its door propped open for ventilation.

The most disappointing discovery was that he had no coffee, no tea, nor anything which looked suitable for boiling water.

She went back into the studio. She glanced into his bedroom through the slightly opened door, and saw that he hadn’t stirred. He was worn out, she thought, and blushed.

She looked at her portrait, nearly finished, sitting on the easel. Her experience of looking into the mirror a few minutes before paled beside her sensations as she glanced into the canvas panel. The flesh tone held, upon close scrutiny, myriad colors of the spectrum, blended in swaths of contradiction and complement. As she looked into the eyes she felt a sudden dizziness, as if she had just glimpsed a great distance, or, more accurately, had glanced downward from a great height.

The textures of her body, ranging from the wet slickness of the eyes to the smooth-wool place between her legs, were all captured perfectly. The temperature of a living body, the warmth, was also captured through his cunning use of undertones and glazes. Looking at the large forms and musculature of her thighs, rib cage, shoulders and breasts, one could see that the pulsing internal structures of night blood indigo had been suggested through an unexplainably skillful use of color.

She broke her gaze away from the image on the canvas. She didn’t feel any of the satisfaction, the ability to name and remember, which a person could usually get from studying a picture closely then looking away. She felt as if she still had some bond to the portrait, some need to look at it. With this feeling of some important thing left undone, she walked away from the easel, almost feeling as if the eyes of the picture (her own eyes) were on her back.

The apartment consisted of the studio, with its enormous windows, and four other rooms which could all be entered from the studio. She had been in the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom, and now there was one door through which she hadn’t walked. For a fleeting moment she felt like a busybody, but she immediately discounted that feeling. She didn’t consider that he might want to keep anything secret from her.

Besides, she wanted to keep occupied until he woke up. They could go out together for some breakfast, or maybe he would want to stay in together for awhile, perhaps even go back to bed, before they started work again on the portrait.

She opened the door to the small room. Her first impression, in the dim light, was that she had entered a room full of strangers. It was as if the light she admitted into the small room (not much more than a walk-in closet, really) startled the people there, revealed them somehow, caught them in some private, not-to-be-shared act. She felt numerous eyes looking at her, expressing an almost unbearable pleading.

But there was nothing strange in that room, nothing for her to fear. There were other portraits, pictures of other women, arranged around the walls and shelves of the small room in rows and tiers, unceremoniously hung or stacked from floor to ceiling. This arrangement was partially to blame for Sandra’s initial impression of entering some chamber occupied by numerous trapped people, the impression of entering a dark prison, of offering pitiful people a glimpse of light and life normally denied them.

“What are you doing in there?”

Sandra jumped, startled. He was awake, and had put on a pair of khaki slacks and an emerald green shirt.

“I was just looking around. How long did it take you to do these?”

He took Sandra by the wrist and—gently—tugged her back from the room and shut the door. As the door closed, Sandra glanced over her shoulder and had the illusory impression that the eyes of the women in the portraits hardened, narrowed with pain and envy. She felt tired and needed some breakfast. It was amazing how susceptible a person could become.

After the door closed the painter led Sandra over to the “subject’s chair.” He looked calm but preoccupied. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I was just looking around.”

She sat down, slipping her wrist out of his grip. “This isn’t a very nice way to say ‘good morning.’ ” She reached out to put her hand on his chest.

He drew away and she had a sinking feeling. It was all wrong. She’d acted like a horny, love-smitten kid, had forced herself on him, and now she was coming on so strong she scared him. Enter love, exit dignity and common sense.

He walked over to the canvas. Sandra had the weirdest feeling that she was unimportant, that his real interest was in the painting. Tears came to her, and with blurred vision she watched the painter speak to the canvas. “You shouldn’t have done it. You should not have done any of it. Forgive me, please!”

Sandra walked over to where he stood. She reached out to take him in her arms, and did so, but he stood unyielding, and seemingly didn’t even see her. His eyes remained locked onto the eyes of the portrait. He stood as rigid as a corpse and felt cold against Sandra’s chest through the thin material of her uniform blouse.

She let him go. He seemed to be totally absorbed with the portrait. Well, so be it, Sandra thought. Even if that is his sole interest in me, I can live with that. It could be infinitely worse.

She turned away and went back to the subject’s chair. The sunlight gave everything in the room a crisp, almost unreal appearance. “Will we finish the portrait today?” she asked.

When he answered, he answered the portrait. “No. I’m not going to complete you. I will not, I will not…”

Sandra felt as if something was tearing inside. “Please don’t be that way,” she said.

Somehow—Sandra could see no lighter or matches nearby—the painter set the canvas afire by reaching out and touching it.

The effect on Sandra was both horrifying and immediate. She felt as if she were burning from the inside out. She dropped to the floor and clawed at the air. Sharp teeth of flame clamped on every surface deep inside her body. Her skin crawled and ached like water thrown onto a white-hot iron surface. Yet the feeling was an illusion; she could see that her arms, her fingers, her legs remained smooth and unhurt. Knowing this didn’t help her as eldritch pain caressed her flesh.

Her vision clouded to a distant and dignified red, and she watched the next events unfold. She became a passive observer, thinking weakly, I’m going into shock.

The painter took the off-white cloth which he had used for background on his subjects. He spread it on the floor beside her. Then he disappeared into the bedroom, quickly returning with a pair of his trousers. He gently put them on Sandra. She didn’t resist. The pain had subsided.

Behind the painter the easel was a framework of flame, and bits of the canvas had turned to ash and had drifted through the air. On his palette table a container of turpentine or some similar solvent puffed into flame. The ceiling started to blacken as the flames grew.

After he had put the trousers on Sandra, he placed her gently onto the off-white cloth. He wrapped her up, leaving only her face exposed, and lifted her. He appeared to be totally calm. He also appeared to have no trouble lifting Sandra. The studio was now filling with smoke, and flames covered half of it.

He carried Sandra out the door and down the hall to the elevator. He held her while they waited for the car. After the door opened and he set her inside, he looked into her face and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll watch the display from up here and make sure you get to the ground floor. Somebody will get you there. If something happens, I’ll come get you.” He leaned over and kissed her lips.

She tried to speak, thought that she was able to say, “Don’t,” but watched him walk off anyway. As the elevator doors slid shut she saw him walk back into the flames. Alarms were ringing as she descended.

Ivory Black is prepared by charring bones.

The city absorbs strange experiences; the most traumatic and outlandish events are noticed, reported, assimilated, and quickly forgotten. The pressure of human experience, the sheer weight and gravity of human emotion forces individual lives into a flatness, a smoothness of interaction.

A studio apartment is gutted by fire; a crying woman is found wrapped in what appears to be a funeral shroud in an elevator; a mysterious man—reported by some as old, by others as young, by still others as deformed—is seen slinking away from the scene of the fire bent under an immense black silk bundle.

He disappears; she resumes her life; the apartment is repaired.

And the events are forgotten.

Caput Mortuum is a variety of brown which derives its name from some mysterious connection to the skulls of early Christians which have been found in Roman catacombs.

In an ancient land, there is a castle in ruins. It was once a stone and beam tower surrounded by a wall. Now the parapets have been chipped and broken, the buttresses have shifted and now sag, letting some parts of the roof collapse. In the twilight the ruins suggest a cloaked and armored warrior slumping forward, perhaps dying and perhaps already dead.

Within the ruins one immediately has an impression of wrongness, of some small detail being amiss. Eventually it becomes apparent. No pigeons or doves have nested here to paint the stones with their droppings; no lizards scratch or scramble over the rocks; no rats can be seen or heard within the dirty crannies of the place; there are no spiderwebs in these ruins to catch the dew or to close up cracks in the structures like gauzed bandages over wounds.

It’s as if the place were somehow patrolled by some larger predator, or as if the place were somehow shunned.

A man approaches the ruins. He is bent beneath some great burden, carrying an enormous bundle tied to his back. The man looks pitiably small here. He scrabbles over the stones like an insect, perhaps like an ant in the service of its royalty.

The man carefully takes his bundle to the recessed entrance of a corridor leading to the structures beneath the ruins. He descends a long unlit passage of narrow, uneven steps. The walls around him are close and exude a warm, moldlike dampness. The air moves slightly, rhythmically, not unlike the breathing of a sleeping beast.

The man’s feet disturb faded brown chips of some substance which scrape and crunch underfoot.

From the donjon below comes a sound. The man is expected. As he continues his descent, he recognizes sounds of rustling, as if some dried, dessicated thing were resettling, almost collapsing in on itself. There is also the scrabbling of hard instruments, or claws of some sort against damp stone. There is the persistent sound of wheezing and sucking, although it is arhythmic in nature, and thus bears little resemblance to the sound of a living thing.

The man enters a chamber lit by the dim flickering of a distant torch. Somewhere water or some liquid is dripping. The floor is broken, exposing dank earth through which ice crystals often grow in unearthly formations, irrespective of time of day or season of year. The man sets down his burden and removes the black silk wrappings. He glances around as he arranges the stretched canvas squares around the chamber. Although it’s damp and cold, the man sweats.

There is the sound of a great bulk being dragged over stones, and the sound of metallic or bone claws digging into the wet, crumbled floor of the chamber, gaining purchase. The torchlight dims as the space of the chamber is nearly filled with the arrival of the Master.

The portraits arranged around the walls of the room are all of beautiful women. These are undefinable things, products of an unexplainable creation. These portraits show an extraordinarily vivid command of color and light, and portray the wet lustrous eyes and warm pulsating blush and tender, meant-to-be-private nipples and thighs and secrets of these women.

The forms in these paintings are monumental. They portray the curves and nuances of feminine bodies more fully than most people would think that bodies could be captured, even through the normal skin-to-skin-and-beyond contacts of intimacy. The figures give the impression of being full.

The faces can never be seen moving, but nonetheless their eyes, and the tendons of their cheeks, and their lips seem to respond with fear and a sense of entrapment.

The Master, the Count, drags himself around the chamber to each one of the portraits in turn. His slick eyes drink in the color and form of the women. His gaze profanely burns the spirits there in those pictures. Some of the portraits are tweaked and ever-so-lightly torn by the razor tips of his bone claws. Others are clouded by his acrid breath. Still others feel the rasp of a meaty thing which had once been a human tongue.

After he looks at each of the portraits in turn, the Count drags himself to where the painter genuflects on the stone floor. Segmented sections of the Count’s body wrap around the painter, claws decorated with jagged hooklike scales press cruelly against the painter’s old skin. The painter smells air which is not quite breath, but which nonetheless has been expelled from deep within the body of the Count.

“I know that there’s one missing. Can you explain yourself, boy?” the Count says.

The painter looks up and locks his fullest concentration on the light, which is so dim as to almost be lost.

“Some things even you are denied, Master,” he said.

Dragon’s Blood is exceptionally sensitive to light.