Alive in Shape and Color

by Lawrence Block

  No one wishes to penetrate the mystery of le grand chalet despite rumors that have circulated for decades in such European capitals as Paris, Berlin, Prague, Rome. No one has the courage to confront Master, to risk Master’s wolfhounds and servants and throw open the locked doors of the house, to release Master’s girl-captives from their misery.

  Help us! Please help us.

  Release us from Master. . . .

  In the most notorious of the dungeon rooms girls have died in their chains, their bodies shriveled like the corpses of the elderly. These were once living girls, girls with pretty-doll faces and coppery-colored, wavy hair, withered to the size of four-year-olds.

  We who are still living beg for food which Master’s servants give out grudgingly for Master is very clever, and very cruel, restricting the household food so that the more that is given to the girls, the less the servants will have for themselves.

  Like all tyrants, Master knows how to set individuals against one another—It is a finite universe in which we live. The more you give away, the less you will have. Give away too much, and you will starve.

  I am ashamed to say, Daddy—at the very start I was ignorant, and naive, and had no idea what lay in store. As a new arrival I was treated like a princess, and so I took pity on some of the other girls, who had been here longer, and seemed to be less favored than I was; I gave them food of mine, for each of my meals was a small feast, and I could not finish so many delicacies. You know, we can be generous when our bellies are stuffed, and so I was generous, but this did not last beyond a few months. It would not have seemed possible that Master would so turn against me, after he had so flattered me. This was my error, Daddy. But having come here at all, having lingered so long in front of Les beaux jours until one day I found myself inside the painting, in the drawing room with the blazing-bright fire, giddy with happiness—already that was my error, for I could not so easily crawl back out of Master’s house and into my old, lost life.

  You begin by being adored. In Master’s adoration, you bask in your power. But it is a short-lived power for it is not yours, it is Master’s. That is the error.

  And then one day a camera crew arrives at the chalet in a modern-looking vehicle—a minivan. Strangers from London are welcomed into the chalet. There is a silken-voiced interviewer, himself a celebrity of the art world.

  How renowned Master has become! How many honors has his art garnered! Major museums have hosted major exhibits. His name is “known”—by the discerning few, if not the multitudes. He has outlived all of his great contemporaries—he has outlived many younger artists, whose names will never be so extolled as his; he is an elderly man revered like a saint. With age his face has only grown more beautiful, and what is aged in his face—discolorations, lines—can be disguised by makeup, that makes of the sallow skin something marmoreal; his somewhat sunken eyes are outlined in black, each lash distinct. His thinning silvery hair is combed elegantly across his high skull. In his black cassock of the finest linen Master is a priest of art—the highest art.

  Master says—But we live for our art. There is no life except our art.

  The interviewer says—Excuse me, sir?—I think I hear something—someone . . .

  (For the interviewer has heard us. He has heard us!)

  But Master says laughingly—No. You are hearing just the wind, our perpetual wind from the mountains.

  (Wind? These are cries, and not the wind. Not possible, these cries are but wind.)

  The interviewer hesitates. The silken-voiced interviewer is at a loss for words, suddenly chilled.

  Master says more forcibly, though still laughingly—This is a remote region of Europe, mon ami. This is not your effete “civilization”—your Piccadilly Circus, Hyde Park, and Kensington Gardens. I am very sorry if our melancholy wind that never ceases distracts you and makes you sad!

  Master is so very charming speaking with a mock British accent, no one detects the quaver in Master’s voice that is a sign of incipient rage; but the interviewer exchanges glances with his assistant and does not pursue this unwelcome line of questioning.

  It is so: Master is a great artist. A great genius. To genius, much is allowed.

  As other interviews have proceeded at le chalet, this interview proceeds without further interruptions: just one hour, but a priceless hour, to be scrupulously edited, and not to be broadcast on the BBC without the approval of Master and Master’s (powerful, Parisian) gallery.

  But the silken-voiced interviewer disappoints Master by declining his invitation to stay for tea, pleading exhaustion. And he and his crew must hurry away in the minivan, to catch a flight back to “effete” London.

  Well! There is some laughter. There are handshakes.

  Master has been placated, maybe. But Master is still irritable, and (as some of us know) still dangerous.

  In the nether regions of the chalet we tell ourselves that the celebrity-interviewer from London heard us, and understood—it is not possible that he did not understand. One need only examine Master’s famous paintings to understand. He will seek help for us, he will save us.

  Such tales we tell ourselves to get through the long days and interminable nights in le grand chalet des ames perdues.

  Wind on the moors, wind from the mountains. Perhaps the mountains are not the Alps but the Carpathians.

  It is not so far a distance to come, Daddy! Please.

  It is not too late yet, Daddy. I have not yet been dragged to the lowermost dungeon, where the door is shut upon us, and we are forgotten.

  You have not forgotten me, Daddy. I am your daughter. . . .

  In Les beaux jours you will see me for I am waiting for you there. Come to the museum! Come stand close before Les beaux jours where I await you.

  Help! Help me!—I whisper.

  If I could call out more forcibly I am sure that someone would hear me. A visitor to the museum, one of the vacant-eyed guards. They would wake from their slumber. They are all good people, I know—at heart, they would help me if they could.

  If you could, Daddy. I know you would help me. Will you? It is not too late.

  I have set aside the little hand-mirror. I have gazed enough at the pretty-doll face. Sometimes I can see—almost see—out of the frame, Daddy—and into the museum—(I think it must be the museum: what else could it be?)—in the distance, on the other side in the land of the living—slow-moving figures, faces.

  Daddy, are you one of them? Please say yes.

  If I had my old strength I could crawl out of the frame, Daddy. I would do this myself, and would not need you. I would crawl out of the drawing room, and I would fall to the museum floor, and I would lie there stunned for just a moment, and maybe someone, one of you, Daddy maybe you, would discover me, and help me.

  Or maybe I would simply regain my breath in the land of the living, and my strength, and manage to stand on my weakened legs, and walk away, leaning against the wall—past rows of paintings in hushed galleries—to the familiar stone steps, where Mother would pull Jenny and me, gripping our hands in hers—and I would make my way to the front entrance of the great museum, and more steps, and so to Fifth Avenue and the clamor of traffic and life—if I had my old strength—almost . . .

  Daddy? I am waiting. You know, I have loved only you.

  THOMAS PLUCK has slung hash, worked on the docks, trained in martial arts in Japan, and even swept the Guggenheim Museum (but not as part of a clever heist). He hails from Nutley, New Jersey, home to criminal masterminds Martha Stewart and Richard Blake, but has so far evaded capture. He is the author of Bad Boy Boogie, his first Jay Desmarteaux crime thriller, and Blade of Dishonor, an action adventure which BookPeople called “the Raiders of the Lost Ark of pulp paperbacks.” He shares his hideout with his wife and their two felines. Joyce Carol Oates calls him “a lovely kitty man.”

  Find him at www.thomaspluck.com or on Twitter @thomaspluck.

  La Vérité sortant du puits by Jean Léon Gerome

  TRUTH COMES
OUT OF HER WELL TO SHAME MANKIND

  BY THOMAS PLUCK

  The cracking of the skulls was performed by a practiced hand. The bowl separated from the eye sockets and teeth. These were no virgin cannibals like the lost colonists of Roanoke, with their hesitation marks. Whatever people had done this had done it before, and had perhaps been doing it for a very long time.

  Devin cupped the skull in his palm, reminded of how Danes toasted before a drink.

  Skål.

  It meant bowl, as in drinking cup.

  Emma Frizzell had taught him that. And she had invited him here, ostensibly for his knowledge of the Bronze Age tribes who had pillaged and slaughtered throughout the area, but also for the funding that attaching his name to the dig would bring. Critics, including Emma, claimed Devin’s books contained more cherry-picking and cocktail-party conversation fodder than real science, but they fueled great interest in the field, and with that came grants from billionaires’ pet nonprofits, the lifeblood for a science that generated little corporate funding.

  “Looks like you’ve found another unlucky bunch who met my boys the Kurgans,” Devin said, hefting the bone bowl in his hands. He was tall and dusty blond with smooth, telegenic features.

  “We’re not so sure,” Emma said, gesturing at students working with brush and screen and trowel in the neatly dug trenches, staked and lined and flagged. “It’s similar to the Herxheim site and the Talheim Death Pit in some ways, but very different in others. There’s what we call the well, for instance, which is more of a trash midden. It’s unlike anything we’ve found in the LPK sites before. We’re eight layers down and still hitting finds.” The LPKs, or Linear Pottery Culture, had built small agricultural settlements all over Germany. Until the Kurgans found them.

  Emma squinted at the sun’s halo behind his head. She’d sprouted since their time as schoolmates, long-limbed but thick in the hips, dark curls tied with a red bandanna. With her lips drawn back over a cracked front tooth, she resembled one of the skulls herself.

  “Any female victims?”

  “None yet.” Little red flags waved in the breeze, one for each corpse. “All men and boys, killed in the same ritual manner. The bones flensed with knapped chert blades.” Crude-looking neolithic knives, but sharp enough that modern surgery had been performed with them, and sturdy enough to chisel open skulls, with help from a hammer stone.

  “Enslave the women, slaughter the vanquished,” Devin said. “The cannibalism is a new angle, but I’m sure there’s an explanation. A famine caused by drought. Or maybe just to plunder further, they began viewing the conquered as meat on the hoof.”

  The Kurgans were named after the burial mounds they left scattered in their wake, each topped with a man-shaped, carved stone menhir. A single leader buried with his sacrificed harem, his trusty copper blade, and a handful of decorative fetishes to aid him in the afterlife.

  Devin admired their pluck, the first humans to practice tribal warfare. Some theorized that Homo sapiens had dealt it to their bulkier cousins neanderthalensis, but there was no clear evidence. The Kurgans had left plenty: entire villages massacred, with the male bodies strewn about and the women taken. The same old story, still happening today. Less often, if you believed the statistics, which Devin did not. To him, civilization was a thin veneer over humanity’s violent history, and he felt he protected his viewers and readers by reminding them that it was human nature to want what you did not have, and in men’s nature to take it if they could.

  “Professor Frizzell!” A student with a beard stood and waved. “Ade found another one of the, uh, things.”

  Emma bared her cracked-tooth smile. “Tell me what you think after you’ve seen the whole site.”

  “Oh, I will.” He handed her the skullcap. “Skål.”

  The find was not a skull, but a small stone figure. Adriane, a thick-armed woman with Marcia-from-Peanuts glasses, handed it up. “Careful, Bracken.”

  Bracken had runner’s legs and held the fetish in a white gloved hand as Emma brushed the dirt away, baring a crude human figure carved from serpentine. It had a nondescript face, one arm raised, breast jutting below it, the other hand between her legs.

  Devin peered over her shoulder. “Must be a fertility fetish.”

  The brush revealed a leaflike object between the object’s thighs.

  “She’s holding a sword,” Emma said.

  “Looks more like an exaggerated vulva. Wasn’t the Venus of Willendorf found not far from here?”

  “Yes, but it’s dated twenty-five thousand years earlier,” Emma said. The Willendorf Venus had enormous breasts and hips, and gave birth to theories of a prehistoric matriarchal culture. “Look at her pose. One arm thrust high, the other low. Triumphant.”

  Devin frowned. The work was rough, the rock encrusted with dull bloodred. Little florets of bluish stone grew at the gouges for eyes, mouth, and crotch.

  “Red ochre,” Devin said. “That’s usually on . . .”

  “Gifts for the dead,” Bracken said, gently blowing dust from the figurine’s armpit. “To uh, appease them.”

  “I’m quite aware.”

  The hungry dead might mistake it for blood, and be sated. But here, so many had been slain that a little symbolic blood could never please them all.

  Devin reached out. “May I?”

  Emma found him a glove, and Bracken handed him the relic. It was cold from being in the earth. Eyeless, with a hungry red mouth. “This isn’t Kurgan. Or it’s something we’ve never found before.”

  “We’ve found several. I sent one for spectrum analysis. The blue is vivianite.”

  “Does the water have a high iron content?” Devin asked. Vivianite formed when phosphate-rich flesh bonded with ferrous minerals.

  “Not too much,” Emma said, placing the find in a plastic zip bag. “But blood does.”

  She always had an answer. Devin left her to catalog the find, and climbed the hill that the excavation had cut in half, and watched the little red pennants wave on the stakes that demarked where skeletons had been found. The human body barely held two gallons. But there had been many. Fields of rich green grew between the dig site and the quaint village up the road. Well fertilized.

  Devin wondered if she’d invited him to extend an olive branch.

  In ancient history class, when Dr. O’Dell was off on one of his wild tangents, scolding them for thinking that Vikings wore horned helmets, Devin had tried to score brownie points, repeating what his father had told him after a business trip to Copenhagen: that Danish people cheered with skål, because their Viking forebears had drunk mead from the skulls of their enemies.

  Young Emma had laughed in her little huff, looked up from her book, and said, “Actually, it means bowl.”

  Right, Mr. O’Dell said. The Vikings were raiders, but rape and pillage were not their whole lives. That image came much later, distorted by our own cultural lens. . . .

  Fat little know-it-all Frizzell beamed and went back to her book, showing off that she knew the material and could pick through O’Dell’s scattershot lectures and read at the same time. She stood out as a brainiac in their magnet school. Rumor was she had been accepted at Princeton, but her parents wouldn’t let her go until she was seventeen. The next day she tried to palm off a copy of The Long Ships on Devin and he’d taken it to stop her from yammering and avoiding his eyes.

  The excavation was far from Denmark, though still in Viking country. The bowled skulls and cracked bones of the slaughtered village of Hexenkeller predated Beowulf and his thanes by at least five millennia. The Kurgan hypothesis was O’Dell’s, and as his successor, Devin had championed it with his pop-science books on human prehistory and his lost mysteries show on cable: the Kurgan people had used their technological supremacy to spread their culture, including the language known as Proto-Indo-European—a distant predecessor of modern tongues—across Europe and the subcontinent. It neatly explained the single origin of the root language and the sudden disappearance of the n
eolithic tribes.

  Emma climbed up beside him and pointed to a stake with a blue flag marker not far from the top of the halved mound. “That’s where they hit the first kurgan stone. Fifty yards from the well. This was slated for an industrial park, away from the village. They cut through and hit the gravestones.”

  Seven kurgan stones was another anomaly. They had been removed to a museum, and he’d stopped to see them on the way from Frankfurt in his rented BMW. Typical warrior markers, seven men, each carved with mustache and sword. They should have found a bevy of skeletal female companions. But only men, all but seven stripped of flesh, skulls uncapped. A handful also trepanned, with a hole in the front, as if they had been born with a unicorn horn and had it snapped off.

  “Any weapons?”

  “Seven Kurgan scythes,” Emma said. “The defenders, if that’s what they were, had only chert blades and hammer stones.”

  “And what’s in the well?”

  Emma shrugged. “We’re only calling it a well. We aren’t sure what it is. Organic material, but no bones. The blades are in the climate-controlled shed with the generator.” She showed him.

  The blades had taken damage. If the marks on the skulls weren’t clearly from stone blades, he’d have assumed the scythes had been used on a beheading spree. He snapped pictures with his phone.

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s . . . interesting.” Devin slipped off his brown tweed coat. “I’d like to see the well. Get my hands dirty.”

  “Lani’s got the well, but you can sift.”

  Devin hadn’t worked a dig since college, and it felt good to shake a screen, sifting for beads, teeth, and bone fragments. He found none in the rich soil. After an hour he put down his sifter and looked down the pit. A slender figure squatted at the bottom, troweling dirt into a bucket with a thin rope tied to the handle and leading to the top, where it was slung over a small pulley. The stones of the well’s edge were ragged and unshaped, meticulously stacked together and cemented with daub, a beehive mound with the top cut off.