A Perfect Canvas

by Kevin Adkisson

  Chapter 16

  Paige half expected the person who’d touched her to be Edward’s grandmother, but it wasn’t. It was a woman though. A woman wearing a thick red cotton robe, her eyes downcast. The hair on Paige’s arms rose.

  The blonde woman’s face was a near perfect pale oval. Her hair swept around her face in a platinum nimbus. It hurt Paige’s sore neck to stare up at her at the odd angle, but she couldn’t look away. A twinge of unwanted jealousy swelled up in her at the woman’s beauty. Then she saw the woman’s eyes. Pale blue, shallow, and dim, nearly lifeless.

  “A drink,” Edward commanded.

  The woman lifted her eyes from the floor to Edward then glided around the table. The edge of her long robe dragged the ground, and her steps were so graceful and soundless, she appeared to float across the floor.

  Arriving at the kitchen counter, she removed a small glass from the shelf then turned and took a plastic pitcher from a cabinet mounted refrigerator. Paige wouldn’t have known it was a refrigerator if she hadn’t seen the woman open it. She filled the glass with what looked like tea.

  “Water from the tap, please,” Paige said. She didn’t want to be drugged again.

  The woman glanced at Edward who nodded. She then emptied the glass into the sink and, after rinsing it out, filled it again, this time with tap water.

  Paige watched.

  Edward watched.

  When the woman returned, she held the glass up to Paige’s lips. The glass quivered almost imperceptibly in her grip.

  Paige didn’t want to know what Edward had done to this woman to make her serve him with such obedience. The whole display sickened her. She promised herself then that no matter what else happened she wouldn’t serve this man, ever. She would die before she would submit to him.

  Looking up at the blonde woman as she drank, Paige attempted to share some non-verbal communication through eye contact, but the woman wouldn’t look at her. She looked at a spot on the floor to Paige’s side. Whatever it was she looked at, if anything, Paige couldn’t see it from this angle. She stretched out her fingers, brushed them against the woman’s robe in order to get her attention, but still she did not respond.

  “Thank you,” Paige said when the glass was empty, her throat feeling much better. “I’m Paige.”

  Edward barked a small laugh. The woman took the glass back into the kitchen, placed it in the sink, and crossed the room to Edward's side. He gripped her by the shoulders, rotated her like a mannequin on a display until she faced Paige. The woman still wouldn’t look at her.

  “Since you refuse to eat, we will talk,” Edward said. “As a student of art, the names Botticelli, Dali, Klimt, and Monet must be familiar to you. But what about Booth, Garza, Ouellette, Steele, or Zpira?”

  Paige was confused. Why was he talking about artists? Surely his whole bit about her running his gallery had been nothing more than a clever ruse. Why continue it?

  “I can see by the look on your face those names aren’t familiar,” he said. “Unfortunately, I can’t say I’m surprised. The elitist non-artists who dominate the fine arts community still predominantly ignore our medium.”

  He ran his fingers up and down the blonde woman’s arms.

  “You asked why I am doing this,” he continued. “And the answer is simple. Because I have to. I understand that may be bit vague and perhaps unbelievable from your current perspective, but you’re an artist. Surely you can understand how art is more a compulsion than an intentional action. Now, let me show you what it is I do.”

  Edward reached up to the blonde woman’s shoulders and slid the robe off her.

  She stood nude and hairless beneath the robe. Large silver studs pierced each of her nipples. Something had been painted on her body: A tattoo-like image of a gleaming copper and red snake wrapped horizontally across her waist and down her leg. Each scale shimmered as she moved.

  Paige gasped. It can’t be. But it was.

  She wasn’t looking at a painted image or even a typical tattoo. This was something much more horrifying.

  The woman’s skin had been cut, scarred, and tattooed. The hundreds of red lines that gave the snake its form and color were actually open wounds. The shadows, ink from a tattoo gun. It was unlike anything Paige had ever seen.

  Edward turned the woman until her back faced Paige.

  The snake image spiraled up and around the woman’s body in a lusty embrace with the head resting between and just above the woman’s shoulder blades. The snake’s forked tongue flicked up at her neck. There were ridges over the snake’s eyes. Something had been inserted under her skin to raise it up. They looked similar to keloids, but that wasn’t what they were. Each bump was too perfectly shaped.

  “Beautiful,” Edward said. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Paige didn’t know what to say. The disgusting display of mutilation appalled her. It had to be written all over her face. She was thankful the woman wasn’t looking at her, that she couldn’t see her reaction to what Edward had done to her body, and she wished, for the woman’s sake, that she’d had the forethought to suppress her gasp. The woman didn’t need the additional slap to her self-image. Paige understood that kind of slap all too well, and this woman had been through enough by suffering the disfigurement alone.

  There wasn’t any doubt left in Paige’s mind that Edward had long left the world of the civilized to join the ranks of scavengers on the outer edges of humanity.

  He was beyond psychotic.

  “One of the purposes of art is to change our perspective,” he said. “This art form is called scarification, although extensive flesh removal and tattooed shading were also involved.”

  “You are one sick crazy fuck,” she told him.

  He smiled with bright cruelty. Clearly her reaction had pleased him.

  “This form of art has been around for thousands of years. The patterns can have both deep spiritual and symbolic meaning. I call this work Sacred Lébé. It’s a blood python.”

  “Why? Why would you do that to someone?”

  Edward put the robe back around the woman’s shoulders, and she slipped her arms inside.

  “You are so naive. It’s really quite charming,” he said. “I have a three-year waiting list of clients eager to receive my designs, and they pay very well. It’s never been much of a problem for me to find someone willing to receive an image. The problem has always been one of artistic choice.”

  His eyes regarded her with an icy interest.

  “You see,” he continued, “artists in nearly every medium have the opportunity to select the object that will receive their work. We, in this medium, rarely have that luxury. Clients often demand a specific design and pick the placement of the image. This is especially the case for new artists. Of course, once you’ve gained some notoriety, along with a list of people waiting to receive the work of your hand, you can be more selective.”

  He gestured toward the table, and the blonde woman spooned rice, green beans, and fish onto his plate.

  “You can, on occasion, even demand a specific location,” he said. “But even then you are forced to deal with constraints. Clients are often already adorned with various works from other artists or have marked their own body in some act of self-mutilation. Even if you find a client devoid of markings and willing to completely submit to your artistic will, you still have to deal with issues such as skin pigment, appearance, body shape, size.”

  Edward sat back in the chair and the blonde woman fetched him a glass, filled it from the pitcher.

  “Do you have any idea how difficult it is, even with a long list of clients, to find the absolute perfect canvas for my work?”

  Edward cut his fish into small squares, took a bite.

  Paige looked down at her chest, at the bandage covering the cuts he’d made. A dark wonder passed over her like a dizzy spell. Her heartbeat accelerated. She sucked in deep breaths of the warm air. She
was going to faint. He meant to do to her what he’d done to the woman. He meant to scar her, and he’d already started.

  “Now do you understand?” Edward asked, his voice low, excited. “I chose you because you have the right temperament, because you have the right look, because I thought you would be the perfect canvas for my greatest work yet. I believed you were special.”

  “No,” she said, more to herself than to him. “No. No. No.” She wouldn’t allow it.

  “No? You think you have some choice in this?”

  “Wait.” It was as if her mind were absorbing his words at a slower rate than her ears. “You said, you thought I was the perfect canvas. Now you don’t?”

  Edward didn’t answer.

  “Because I’m already scarred? What are you going to do?”

  He tilted his head, looked at her strangely, the gleam gone from his eyes.

  “And that’s the real question, isn’t it? What to do with you. I had hoped to save you. But perhaps I should just end your suffering.”