by Del Howison
“But let us leave all that aside, shall we? I have a feeling that what we are about to see here will be well worth the ordeal of the journey!”
He increased his stately downward inclination farther until his wide pink face almost touched Barstow, and stared closely at the artist with an odd look of crafty affection.
“Am I right, Kevin?” he whispered. “Do I really smell a breakthrough? Dare I hope that the potential I have always sensed in you has finally started to flower?”
The skin of Barstow’s face gave little mouselike quivers under the impact of Ratch’s breath and he smiled up at Ratch as a frightened child might smile at a Santa Claus who had actually, terrifyingly, climbed out of the family fireplace.
“I think so!” he whispered back. “I really do!”
Ratch regarded him for a long moment before letting go of the artist and then pointed to the open door of the studio with a flourish.
“Then lead on!” he said.
Without any further discussion, the three of them immediately absorbed themselves in the business at hand, with Barstow gently and unobtrusively guiding Ratch and Ernestine from one work to the next, always moving quietly, always keeping just a glance or two ahead of the art dealer as the large man stepped thoughtfully and elegantly from painting to painting.
Skillfully, like an acolyte, Barstow unobtrusively carried the works to a back wall once they had been observed by Ratch and then gently moved forward the ones he wanted him to look at next.
A clammy—he hoped not very noticeable—sheen of sweat now covered Barstow’s face and hands, and occasionally a tremor ran the length of both his arms as he leaned a painting against the leg of an easel or delicately adjusted the positioning of several connected works in a row. It took him an enormous effort to keep his breathing steady and inaudible.
So far he could not determine exactly how positively Ratch was reacting to these new works, but he found himself becoming increasingly hopeful. Though he had made no spoken comment since starting his slow march through Barstow’s domain, the artist was encouraged to observe the obvious depth of the dealer’s absorption in the paintings.
It was an enormously good sign that Ratch sometimes paused silently before one or another of them for long, thoughtful moments. But when he stripped off his gloves and stuffed them into a pocket of his astrakhan coat so that he could reach upward with his thick but sensitive fingers and tug delicately at the sensuous pout of his full lips, a great beat of triumph throbbed through Barstow, for he knew, from long years of experience, that this was always a foolproof sign of great approval.
After a full hour that seemed to last at least a century, Ratch came to a halt before the grand finale, an enormous painting of a gigantic female nude gazing through what was recognizably the studio’s main window at pigeons milling on its sill.
He stood absolutely motionless and expressionless for a very lengthy time and then a satisfied smirk curled his lips and slowly spread into a smile that grew broader and wider and more open until Ratch turned toward Barstow with a full display of his famously fearsome toothiness and violently broke the long silence with an enthusiastic clapping of his hands.
“Bravo, Kevin, bravo!” he cried, spreading his arms like the ringmaster of a three-ring circus and gazing happily at the multitude of paintings about him. Ernestine, who up to now had tagged along behind her employer in quiet watchfulness, vouchsafed the first sure indication that the project would successfully advance by drawing a notebook from her carrying case and from that moment on jotting down in shorthand every word said that might be of historical or legal import.
“Thank you, Max,” said Barstow. “Thank you so much!”
“Ah, no, Kevin, ah, no—thank you!” said Ratch, waving a huge paw in an elegant sweep around the room. “Not only have you assuredly made both yourself and my gallery a very large amount of money, I am convinced you have guaranteed yourself everlasting fame and glory.”
The blood rushed to Barstow’s head, and for a moment or two he was terrified that he would actually faint for joy. The art dealer had always been supportive, occasionally even highly encouraging, but this was a level of praise dazzlingly higher than any that had ever been granted before.
In a giddy daze, he watched Ratch almost waltz from one of the paintings to another, gently patting their tops or stroking the sides of their stretchers and sometimes even stopping to inhale the perfume of their paint.
“This is the work you were born to do, my friend,” he said. “Everything you have done before has only been a promise of what was to come—merely the tiniest hint!”
He paused at the painting of a hunched, grotesque news-dealer peering out bleakly from the small, dark pit of his shoddy sidewalk stand kiosk, plastered with newspapers, bannered with headlines of war and plague, and tabloid magazines displaying gaudy photos of mutilated freaks and sobbing celebrities and smiled benignly at the way the grotesque creature’s fearful, pockmarked face stared out at the viewer with eyes slitted like a lurking crocodile’s.
“The totally convincing way you have depicted the reptilian quality of this wretched fellow, the believability of his actually not being altogether human, is simply astounding,” he whispered gently while stroking the heads of the tacks that pinned the canvas to its frame.
He stood back and continued to survey the painting.
“Forget Bacon, my dear boy. Forget even Goya.”
“Even Goya?” Barstow gasped, then gulped and made his way to a paint-splotched stool lest he indeed fall to the floor. “You say even Goya?”
Ratch grinned down at him and, for the first time in his whole long association with this legendary entrepreneur of art, it seemed to Barstow that the broad white curve of his gleaming teeth seemed to have an almost-motherly gentleness.
“Even Goya,” whispered Ratch, gently patting the artist on his pale, sweat-bedewed forehead. “And all from within this odd little skull of yours. Ah—the sublime mystery of creative talent!”
He stepped to a painting of extraordinary ominousness depicting a neighborhood butcher-store window filled to bursting with glistening red fragments of dismembered animals artfully displayed in order to promote their consumption and with a sly expression began to archly mimic the speech of a museum guide.
“Here you see that the artist has delicately implied—but somehow not directly revealed—that the meat on display may be even more horribly varied than that put on view in the usual butcher’s window. Has this steak with a largish round bone, for instance, come from a lamb’s hindquarters or was it chopped from a neighborhood schoolgirl’s pale and tender thigh? Eh? Eh?”
He chuckled in a sinister, highly theatrical fashion and moved on to a night scene showing a dim and lonely streetlamp only barely illuminating a hunched and frightened old woman in black mourning, making her way along a cracked sidewalk and staring anxiously into the almost-impenetrable darkness of the ancient city street beyond.
“I marvel at the way you’ve suggested … something … on the glistening tarmac of the narrow street approaching the woman from the direction of the other sidewalk!” whispered Ratch in genuine awe. “It is brilliant how the viewer sometimes reads it this way, sometimes that—it is genuine painterly magic, my dear boy! Wizardry! You can rest assured the critics will never be finished writing competitive essays attempting to explain that one.”
He then pointed at a painting of a gaping policeman, his gun still drawn, kneeling in hard, bright sunlight over a man he’d clearly just shot and staring in horror, along with a small surrounding crowd, at the thing that was bloodily tearing its way out of the dead man’s chest and glaring furiously up at the officer.
“But the true underlying miracle of all these new works is their universal convincingness!” he said, patting gently, even lovingly, the glistening face of the entity scrabbling its way out of the corpse. “In spite of myself I find I suspect that this horrible thing may actually exist, that it may even be alive today in a hidden ch
amber of some prison hospital!”
He turned to study Barstow intently and tapped the artist at the exact same spot where the gruesomely productive wound had been painted on the slain man’s chest.
“Somehow, Kevin, you have suddenly developed the ability to present fictitious images that are simultaneously entirely fantastic and totally realistic,” the art dealer intoned with great solemnity. “Never in my whole career as a dealer have I seen such a world of grotesquely macabre impossibilities more believably presented. I am both frightened and thrilled.”
He paused to once again study the gory thing depicted in the painting with undisguised affection and then murmured softly, almost inaudibly, but with enormous pleasure: “We shall become unbelievably rich.”
Then, almost reverently, he returned to the largest and most centrally located painting of all: the one of the pale, elephantine female nude staring out through the studio’s window. The dead-looking flesh of the huge creature’s back was turned to the viewer as she idly observed a crowd of subtly bizarre pigeons milling on the widow’s ledge and the fire escape beyond.
“This, as I am sure you are well aware, is the supreme work of the exposition,” said Ratch with great solemnity, and then he turned to look at the artist curiously. “Have you given this painting a name?”
Barstow nodded.
“I call it ‘Louise,’ ” he said.
Ratch nodded sagely.
“As though it was the name of an actual model,” he said approvingly. “And so enhanced the ghastly notion it might actually be the depiction of a living monster.”
Ernestine, on the other hand, had begun to show signs she had at least momentarily lost something of her customary professional detachment and was regarding the painting with undisguised repulsion.
“My God,” she whispered. “Look at the thing’s hands! Look at its claws!”
Ratch gazed at the unmistakable fear in his assistant’s eyes with enormous satisfaction.
“You see?” he crowed. “Even my cool Ernestine is very seriously disturbed by our monster.”
A sudden spasm crossed Barstow’s face at Ratch’s second use of this description.
“I do not think of her as a monster,” he said.
Ratch regarded the little artist first with some surprise, and then with dawning understanding.
“Of course you don’t,” he said, and then he waved in an oddly gentle sort of way at the paintings grouped around them. “Nor do you regard any of the creatures depicted in these other works as monsters. As in the work of Goya, one can tell that they are sympathetically, even affectionately observed. That is the secret of their beauty.”
Then, after a thoughtful pause, Ratch turned back to the paintings and began to walk among them as he softly dictated observations and instructions to the now-partially-recovered Ernestine. Barstow stood by and watched them at it until he caught a flickering to his side. He turned and his eyes widened when he saw that a great crowd of pigeons had assembled on the window’s outside sills and the old ironwork fire escape beyond.
Quietly, unobtrusively, he made his way over to the windows, and though some of the birds flopped clumsily off at his approach, most of the creatures ignored him.
They were a much more varied group of pigeons than those one would ordinarily observe in, say, Manhattan. Not only were their markings extraordinarily colorful and individual—ranging from playful Matisse-like patterns of stars and spiralings to blurry Monet-style shadings to stern geometric blockings of black and gray and sooty white highly reminiscent of Mondrian’s abstractions—their bodies were also quite remarkably unlike one another.
The pigeon pecking at the sill just to Barstow’s left, for example, was almost as big as a cat and sported a spectacular hunch on its back; the one next to it was extremely narrow and so thin that the rest of its body seemed an almost snakish extension of its neck; the one next to that appeared to be little more than a feathered pulsating blob with wings and an oddly skewed beak.
Barstow stole a quick look behind him to make sure both Ratch and Ernestine were absorbed in their cataloging and calculations. When he looked back outside, he was alarmed to see that one of the pigeons had wandered off from the sill and begun to march awkwardly but casually up the dirty pane of window with its fat, gummy feet clinging to the dirty glass. Another, after alternately extending and shrinking the length of its body in a series of odd, painful-looking little heaves, was working its way along the underside of the railing of the fire escape, for all the world like a beaked, glittery-eyed worm.
Barstow hastily threw another glance back at his guests to make absolutely certain they still hadn’t noticed any of these goings-on and then he executed a series of violent and abrupt gestures that, much to his relief, successfully startled all the pigeons into clumsily flying away from the sills and fire escape and out of sight.
Eventually, after what seemed to be eons of discussion and planning, Ratch and Ernestine and their summoned chauffeur descended in the creaking elevator, along with a very sizable selection of paintings, leaving Barstow with his triumph and a great exhaustion.
He made his way to the stool by his easel and sagged onto it with an enormous sigh. It would be a while before he’d have the energy to stir.
He heard the soft opening of a door behind him and smiled as the studio’s floorboards groaned nearer and nearer under Louise’s enormous weight. When she leaned over him, Barstow gratefully and deeply breathed in the spicy, slightly moldy air that wafted out from her body.
He felt the hugeness of her breasts resting on his shoulders and shuddered with pleasure when she cooed something not quite words and stroked the top of his head with a sweet tenderness that was truly remarkable, considering the potential brutality of her huge paws.
“He liked them,” murmured Barstow, relaxing back against her vast belly. “He’ll buy all the work I do from now on. We’ll be rich, Louise, you and I. And millions will adore your painting. Millions. And they will see how beautiful you are.”
She cooed again, carefully retracted her talons, and began to knead the tension from his narrow shoulders.
DARK DELICACIES OF THE DEAD
RICK PICKMAN
“They’re after the place. They don’t know why, they just remember … remember that they want to be in here.”
–PETER IN GEORGE ROMERO’S DAWN OF THE DEAD
“When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will rock the earth.”
–ELECTRIC FRANKENSTEIN, DAWN OF ELECTRIC FRANKENSTEIN
IT WAS REALLY too bad that the biggest signing in the history of Dark Delicacies had to turn into a terror-filled nightmare of apocalyptic mayhem.
And it had started so well, too.
The occasion had been set up in honor of the first of the Dark Delicacies Presents films from New Line Cinema, starring the store’s co-owner Del Howison as “Dark Del,” a Cryptkeeper-ish host with a wry sense of dark humor. In honor of the release of the film Del and his wife Sue had assembled an astonishing 49 authors, 24 artists, 4 editors, 6 directors, 10 actors, and 3 people who no one was quite sure what they did, but they’d sign anything put before them. By the time all 96 signers had been placed in the small confines of the store, Sue and Del had realized, to their chagrin, that there was virtually no room left for customers. Sue had stationed one son—Scott—at the door to allow one customer in each time the previous customer left; her other son, Jason, was behind the front counter with her, handling the phone and questions. The line outside extended nearly four blocks; hundreds of horror fans clutched their books, posters, and DVDs, waiting with growing impatience. Sue and Del’s black canine half-breeds, Morticia and Gomez, watched the whole mess warily from behind the screen that caged them behind the front counter.
Of course, most of the fans were there for only a handful of the guests. Sue and Del had managed to score a few big names for this one. There was Clyde Woofer, the staggeringly handsome British author who had exploded on the horror scene twenty
years ago by virtue of being … staggeringly handsome; the fact that he was also witty, amiable, and wrote stories with lots of freaky sex hadn’t exactly hurt his career, either. There was Richard Grove, a classically trained star of bad B movies who had catapulted to fame with his performance in the first science fiction film adaptation of Shakespeare, Mechbeth, and who was now starring in Dark Delicacies Presents: Screams for Sale. And there was the legendary Ray Beaumont, who at 112 was still happy to smile up from his seat at his legions of fans and tell them about his boyhood in Illinois. It was too bad—he thought he was actually currently living his boyhood in Illinois.
The first sign that Something Was Wrong came at approximately 3:30 that afternoon. It was late September, a clear, bright day, and the sun was still high, beating down on Southern California with 85 degrees of heat. Scott was waiting for the most recent customer to finish up so he could wave another in when a scream sounded outside.
“What now?!” Sue asked, harried behind the register as she rang out a Goth girl with black hair, black nails, black eyeliner, and unbelievable amounts of Daddy’s cash.
Scott tried to poke his head out and around the corner of the store. “I dunno. I think somebody just found out they had to buy Clyde’s book here to get it signed.”
The current customer finally finished, and Scott motioned to the next, a man wheeling a small hand truck loaded with boxes of books.
Del looked up from schmoozing with the famed British editor Steve Smith and frowned as he caught sight of the man, an ugly middle-aged guy with bad hair and a smarmy manner. He excused himself and stepped up as the guy started unloading crates. “Barry Craven, right?”
The man turned to him, all unctuous grin and outthrust hand. “Hey, Del, how ya doin’?”
Del didn’t take the hand. “You gonna buy anything, Barry?”
Barry lowered the hand and looked abruptly defensive. “C’mon, Del, you know I buy books here all the time—”
The shout came from behind the front counter. “Out!” Sue ordered.
