Memory and Dream n-5

by Charles de Lint

  John nodded and she saw that he understood. That he realized how hard it was for her to refuse Rushkin’s bargain. She took a deep breath and wiped her eyes again, then stepped past John into the hallway behind him. She didn’t look back into the room. John regarded the body for a moment, then slowly closed the bedroom door and followed her into the living room of the Waterhouse Street apartment.

  Neither of them remarked on the impossibility of that other bedroom being here in this apartment. By now it was all part and parcel of the strangeness that had overtaken them, from Isabelle looking the way she had twenty years ago—right down to her old monochromic black wardrobe—to the juxta-positioning of the normal relationships of space and time.

  When they returned to Isabelle’s old bedroom, she opened up the closet to look for warmer clothes.

  Black boots. Black parka. Black scarf and gloves. She put the outerwear on mechanically, her attention fixed on some distant, invisible thing that only she could see. John leaned against the wall, watching her dress, concern plain in his eyes.

  “Are you going to be all right?” he asked when she was ready to go. Isabelle responded with a tired look that couldn’t begin to encompass the numb, lost feeling that she held inside.

  “I don’t think of being ‘all right’ as an option anymore,” she said. “All I want to do now is get through this. I want it over with and finished, once and for all.”

  John nodded. “And after?”

  “We don’t know that there’s going to be an after, do we?” she replied. Her gaze settled on his, still lost, still weary. John nodded again, then led the way outside.

  They used the front door of the apartment this time, descending to street level by the stairs. The cold air hit them with a blast of wind-driven snow when they stepped outside.

  “We have to make a stop on the way,” John told her.

  “Whatever.”

  When they moved off the porch, he paused to brush the snow away from the brick border of the small garden that ran the length of the walkway. He kicked at one of the bricks until the frozen grip of the surrounding dirt was loosened enough for him to pick it up. Isabelle watched him without comment.

  On Lee Street, he used the brick to break the window of the door of a pawnshop. Ignoring the klaxon alarm that resulted, he quickly opened the door and stepped inside. He moved purposefully, collecting a handgun and a box of shells from behind the store counter. They were already blocks away by the time they heard the answering wail of a police siren, but neither of them was worried. The wind was erasing their footprints almost as fast as they could make them and they were far enough away that it was unlikely the police would connect them to the robbery and stop them.

  “Will that actually do any good?” Isabelle asked as they paused in a doorway so that he could load the gun.

  John inserted the last shell, then closed the cylinder. He wiped the snow that had collected on the metal against the inside of his jacket before sticking the handgun into the waistband of his jeans.

  “I told you before,” he said. “Rushkin can die here—but only if you bring him into this dreamtime.”

  “You said that before, but I don’t know how to do it.”

  “Concentrate on him. On his being in the studio. Call to him. But be careful not to give away our intentions.”

  For the rest of the way to Stanton Street Isabelle tried to do just that. She ducked her head against the wind and snow and shuffled along at John’s side, trying to disregard the enormity of what they were about to do, to address her attention to one thing at a time. First she’d try to put Rushkin in the coach-house studio, then she’d consider what came next.

  She concentrated on Rushkin, but not on the man she remembered studying under. It was impossible to hide the hatred connected to those memories. She focused instead on the artist who had created The Movement of Wings, the painting that had first inspired her to become an artist herself, to stick with it, despite the obstacles in her path. It was easier to do than she’d expected. Even with all the horrible memories she had of Rushkin, she was still able to divorce the man from his art, the darkness from the genius. She could still call up the warmth and affection she had for his work and then, through it, the artist himself.

  She was so intent on what she was doing that she didn’t realize that they’d arrived at Stanton Street until John stopped and caught her by the arm. She looked up to find that they were in the laneway leading down to the coach house. Ahead of them, through the falling snow, she could see the warm lights of the studio.

  “There’s only the one entrance, right?” John asked.

  Isabelle nodded. “You have to go outside by the stairs to get into the down-stairs apartment.”

  “Wait here,” John told her.

  He slipped away before she could object, moving like a ghost through the blurred curtains of snow.

  She watched him circle the building, looking in each ground-floor window. When he started up the stairs, she hurried to join him. He turned, but the look on her face killed any attempt he might have made for her to wait outside.

  If she was going to be responsible for what happened here tonight, she’d decided, she was going to be fully responsible. There was no more room in what little life she might still have left to once again let someone else shoulder her obligations. She had to be accountable.

  She didn’t have nearly John’s silent grace, but the thick snow on the stairs and the howling wind muffled any noise she made. When they reached the door, John carefully tried the knob. It turned effortlessly under his hand. He looked over his shoulder at her and she nodded to tell him she was ready—at least as ready as anyone could be in a situation such as this. John gave her a look that was meant to be reassuring, to instill confidence, but it wasn’t enough to comfort her. He turned back to the door. Drawing the handgun from the waistband of his jeans, he shouldered the door open and entered fast, crouched low, holding the gun in front of him with both hands and aiming it in a wide sweep across the studio.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said.

  The catch in his voice made Isabelle hesitate on the landing. Ahead of her, John straightened up. The hand holding the gun hung loosely at his side. Entering behind him, Isabelle had to immediately turn back outside. She reeled against the banister, scattering clumps of snow from it as she banged into the railing and leaned over it to throw up. The image of what she’d seen was burned into her retinas: a perverted inversion of da Vinci’s famous study, The Proportions of the Human Body, except it was a three-dimensional rendering rather than pen and ink, utilizing a real human being. The man had been nailed naked to the wall, his body slashed and hacked, strips of flesh peeled away to reveal the musculature underneath the skin, blood gathering in a large pool on the floor below the drained corpse.

  She vomited until all she could bring up were dry heaves; then she fell to her knees in the snow, head pushed up against one of the railing’s support poles. When John appeared in the doorway, she could only stare at him, the horror of what she’d seen still trapped behind her eyes.

  “Who ... who ... who could do such a thing ... ?” she finally managed. But she knew. There was only one true monster in her life, one individual capable of such an obscene act, but she couldn’t even believe it of him. “It’s Rushkin,” John said.

  Isabelle nodded; the last lingering tie to her mentor was finally severed. She knew she wouldn’t ever be able to look at The Movement of Wings now, at Palm Street Evening or any of Rushkin’s other paintings, without the genius of the work being overshadowed by his monstrosities.

  “I know,” she said. “It’s taken this to show me that he really is capable of anything.”

  “No,” John said. “The man on ... the man nailed to the wall. It’s Rushkin.”

  Isabelle stared at John as though he’d gone mad. How could the victim be Rushkin? Who could be more monstrous than him? She got shakily to her feet and started for the doorway, shrugging off John’s attempt to stop her from
entering the studio again.

  “I ... I have to see,” she said.

  She kept her gaze on the floor once she was inside and took a long steadying breath before she let it rise to look again at the corpse nailed to the wall. The wind coming through the door behind her dropped for a moment and her nostrils filled with a sharp coppery scent. Her stomach churned, but she choked back the sour acid that rose up her throat. Then the wind gusted up once more, taking the smell of blood away, if not the memory of it. That hung on in Isabelle’s nose and continued to make her stomach do slow, queasy flips.

  She did her best to look at the scene with a clinical detachment, the way she’d been able to go to the morgue for anatomy classes during her years at Butler U. The corpse’s features were caked with blood, but she saw that John had spoken the truth. She stared for one long awful moment at Rushkin’s face, then made her gaze travel up. It was hard to make out details on the body because of the abuse it had undergone—she didn’t want to make out details—but she saw enough to realize that the musculature had far more bulk than she remembered Rushkin having the last time she’d seen him. The corpse’s body shape was more like that of the squat, trollish figure she remembered meeting that day so long ago on the steps of St. Paul’s.

  She found herself staring at a particularly gruesome wound and suddenly had to turn away. She hugged herself, trying to stop from gagging. Keeping her back to the corpse, she looked at John. He lifted his hand and returned the gun he was holding to the waistband of his jeans.

  “This is true ... isn’t it?” she said in a quiet voice. She was surprised at how calm it sounded. “This has really happened, hasn’t it?”

  John nodded slowly. “Except we don’t know when it’s true.”

  Isabelle gave him a blank look. “What do you mean by ‘when’?”

  “He’s like you,” John said, nodding at the corpse. “He’s younger—far younger—than the man we left behind in the Tombs not so long ago.”

  Isabelle nodded. She’d felt the same. “So what does it mean?”

  As John began to shrug, a familiar voice spoke to them from the far end of the studio.

  “It means that a maker should never attempt a self-portrait—particularly not when the individual is as disturbed as was our friend here upon the wall. Who knows what you might bring across?”

  They turned and Isabelle thought that she’d finally crossed over into madness, for it was Rushkin they saw walking toward them, the old and wasted

  Rushkin they’d seen in the Tombs tenement. John reached for his gun, but Rushkin was quicker. He brought up the revolver that had been hidden at his side and sighted over the barrel at John.

  “Tut-tut,” Rushkin said, shaking his head.

  John hesitated, then slowly let his hand fall.

  “You,” Isabelle began. To the sickness in her stomach was added a sudden disorientation that made her sway dizzily. “You’re one of Rushkin’s numena?”

  Rushkin shook his head. “Not anymore. I am Rushkin and I’ve been him for a great many years.”

  XVII

  Davis had half turned in his seat while Rolanda spoke so that he could watch both her and the street outside his windshield.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “This Vincent Rushkin you’re talking about—do you mean the Rushkin?”

  Rolanda nodded and Davis had to think about that for a moment. You couldn’t live in the city and not know about its most famous reclusive artist. There were no pictures of him. To the best of his knowledge, no one had actually seen him in public in twenty, twenty-five years. Davis hadn’t thought the man was even alive anymore.

  “How do you know it’s him?” he finally asked.

  “I’m sorry?” Rolanda said.

  Why did people always apologize when they didn’t hear something? Davis found himself wondering.

  “No one’s seen him in years,” he explained. “At least not that I’ve heard. There are no photos of him. How can you be sure that it was Vincent Rushkin who kidnapped your friends and not just somebody calling himself that?”

  Rolanda gave him an odd look, then asked, “Does it matter? They’re still being held inside that building against their will.”

  Cosette spoke up from the backseat. “It’s Rushkin.” When the other two turned to look at her, she added, “You would know if you saw him. No one else could hold so much darkness in their body and still pass themselves off as human.”

  Davis nodded, but it was more in agreement to what Rolanda had said than Cosette’s curious observation.

  “Do either of you know where the hell we are?” he asked. “Besides the obvious.”

  When Rolanda and Cosette both shook their heads, Davis looked out the window again, trying to find a landmark. He was about to give up when he realized that the taller building behind the tenement with a dozen or so chimney stacks foresting its roofline looked familiar. It took him a moment before he remembered the name of the abandoned factory, then another while he mentally cross-referenced it to the city map he carried around with him in his head. Plucking the microphone from the dash, he radioed in their position and requested backup. When he got an affirmative, he replaced the mike and leaned back in his seat.

  “That’s it?” Rolanda demanded when it was obvious he wasn’t planning to take action.

  “We can’t do anything else until the backup gets here.”

  “They could be dead by then.”

  “Look, lady—Rolanda. I have to follow certain procedures.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Cosette said.

  Before they could stop her, she’d popped open her door and stepped out into the night. Rolanda and Davis watched her scurry into hiding behind the abandoned bus. She studied the tenement for a few moments, crouching in the same spot where Bitterweed and Scara had captured her and the others earlier. When she darted across the street, Rolanda opened her own door.

  “Now, hold it,” Davis said, grabbing her arm. “We can’t all just go off half-cocked like a bunch of—”

  Rolanda pulled free of his grip. “Do what you like,” she told him, “but don’t try to tell me how to live my life, okay?”

  Stepping out of the car, she hurried after Cosette. Davis slammed the ball of his palm against the dashboard.

  “Shit!” he muttered.

  He reached under his seat and pulled out a shotgun. Once he was outside, he stood listening, but the night air didn’t bring the welcome sound of approaching sirens. Davis sighed. He gave it another minute; then, against his better judgment, he followed Rolanda and Cosette into the derelict building across the street.

  XVIII

  Isabelle stared at Rushkin’s numena, this creature he’d made the mistake of calling across from the before with a self-portrait, and tried to make sense of what she was seeing. She had to ask herself, had she ever met the real Rushkin? Would she even know the difference? The Rushkin who stood here threatening them with his revolver was the man she remembered, the man she knew. He had the same features, the same voice and the same eyes. He carried himself with that familiar arrogance, and she soon discovered that, just like the Rushkin she’d known, he loved to hear himself talk. So how could she think of him as anything but Rushkin?

  Rushkin, for his part, seemed particularly intrigued by John’s presence. That puzzled Isabelle until she realized that, insofar as Rushkin knew, he’d already killed John.

  “I have to admit that I am curious,” Rushkin said. “How did you survive?”

  John shot Isabelle a quick warning glance before replying. Isabelle understood. Rushkin knew nothing of Barbara’s abilities and that was the way it should stay or Rushkin would turn to her next.

  “It’s no real mystery,” John said. “We foresaw it coming to something like this, so we had Isabelle make a copy of her original painting, one that opened the gate only a crack—enough to give you a taste of the before, but no more.”

  Rushkin regarded them with an admiration that made Isabelle want to crawl
under a carpet, out of his sight.

  “Now that was clever,” Rushkin said.

  John acknowledged the comment with a nod, then lifted his hand to indicate the corpse hanging on the wall behind them. Rushkin’s index finger tightened slightly on the trigger of his revolver, relaxing when he realized the innocence of the gesture.

  “When did you kill him?” John asked in a quiet voice.

  “We disagreed on my existence—he had a conscience, you see.” The smile that touched his lips was as feral as Scara’s had been. “But it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it? It was too long ago to make any difference to us now.”

  Isabelle shook her head. “How can you say it doesn’t make any cliff—”

  “To all intents and purposes,” Rushkin broke in, “I am the only Rushkin now. The only one you have ever met.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Isabelle said. “We know that numena can’t harm makers.”

  “They can here,” Rushkin told her. “In dreamtime.”

  That gave Isabelle pause. Of course. Why else had she and John come here to the coach-house studio?

  “So you lured him here and then you just killed him,” she said.

  She found it hard to put much conviction behind the accusation, since she herself was guilty of attempting to do the same. The only difference was that the Rushkin she’d come to kill wasn’t an innocent.

  Rushkin shook his head. “No, I followed him here. A small point, I realize, considering that the end result was the same.”

  “But all those paintings. I saw them being done right in front of me.” Anger flashed in Rushkin’s eyes.

  “The talent belonged to me more than it ever did to him. I, at least, had the courage to use it.”

  But not to show it, Isabelle thought. She’d give the creature this much: he did have talent. The work he had produced was stunning, but he hadn’t had the confidence to put it under the scrutiny of the academic art world where someone might have been able to debunk it. The only ones he had shared his work with were the hapless students such as herself who were too overawed by his presence to ever think of questioning him. And then there was the whole question of bringing across numena.