“What do you need me to say to you? I’m sorry, dammit! Stop!”
Of course, I would not. I had grown quite adept at adding and subtracting elements from his tightly circumscribed world. I had subjected him to plagues of ants and scorpions, to needles peeling his skin from his skull, to broken glass in his eyes, and to a great number of foul substances erupting from between his lips; I had also recast his features in the most delightfully comic ways, blacking out his teeth or adding pendulous tumors to his cheeks or creating unbroken expanses of skin where his mouth or his eyes should have been. Always it had been delightful to watch him writhe in full awareness of his obscene new incarnations before I demonstrated divine mercy by restoring the portrait to its prior, unsullied state.
The only time he had ever come close to endangering me was one occasion when I had been having some fun covering his lips with leeches. He had clamped down his teeth and managed to catch the tip of my index finger. I’d cursed, pulled away, and for the rest of the day, visited upon his eyes and forehead cruelties that I would have thought beyond even my motivated imagination. Since then, I’d taken special care when touching up his mouth.
In any event, the tick was just a warm-up for today’s fun, the first stage of a brand-new project.
“Do you know, Mortensen? I have found that I have empathy for Satan’s dilemma.”
The swelling had spread to his right cheek, making his voice sludgy. “Go t’ heh!”
“That,” I said warmly, “happens to be a most germane suggestion. Because this is your personal Hell, and I your personal eternal demon, I am forced to contemplate the difficulty all such demons must face not long into their stewardship of such damned souls as yourself: to wit, just how much novelty can one keep bringing to the task of rendering any given soul’s torment unendurable, even when the power at hand is infinite and the possibilities for fresh punishment limited only by the boundaries of one’s imagination. To a horned imp inflicting all the horrors of the nether regions on some sinner of merely human capacity to feel it, is it not an occupational hazard to run into the torturer’s equivalent of creative bankruptcy? To have reached the limits of one’s personal imagination and find that all that remains is derivative hackwork?”
The venom must have spread to Mortensen’s airways, because he was no longer attempting to answer me but instead purpling as he struggled to breathe.
I applied paint remover to the tick, repaired the physical damage to Mortensen’s face with some dabs of paint appropriate to his skin tone, and gave him time to recover.
Once he had breath again, I said, “So, where was I?”
“You said . . . you were running out of ideas.”
I chuckled and painted an oozing sore on the tip of his ear. “I’m an imaginative man, Mortensen; I have enough ideas to keep this going not just for the rest of my life, but also for the lives of the talented artists of the grotesque I had hoped would take over your punishment after I’m gone.”
His next suggestion was a pathetic effort to be helpful. “You could wish for extended life for yourself.”
“Oh, I could. And I have. You will be happy to hear that you and I will now live in health, or what passes for health in your current condition, decades longer than I ever would have expected. Beyond that, the price of the miracles necessary to keep me going increases past what even I could afford. In fifty years or so, I may need to renegotiate.
“But it occurs to me that even if I live forever, or secure your fate as a commissioned legacy lasting generations, then the creative well will still someday run dry; the ideas will stop coming, or the will to continue will fade to nothing.
“So, what I need, really, is a way to make the process self-perpetuating for all eternity.
“I need a demon.”
I mixed my pigments until I found myself with the perfect shade of awfulness, and touched the tip of my brush to the canvas. This time, unlike any of the previous times, I didn’t make any adjustments to Mortensen’s face or figure but instead applied my skill to the landscape behind him, where the ship remained frozen in arctic ice.
Mortensen flinched as I drew near, realized that nothing was done to him directly, and turned his eyes as far as they would go, but no will he could muster could turn his head all the way around and grant him what he most feared and craved: a clear view of what I was adding to the background art.
He cried out, “What are you doing?”
I began to hum Beethoven’s Fifth.
“You son of a bitch! You sick, sadistic son of a bitch! Tell me!”
I hummed the symphony in its entirety while continuing to work.
* * * *
Another year passed in this fashion. It is remarkable how much I learned of the fine art of oil painting in that time, how much further I was able to refine the skills that turned a few swabs of pigment into nightmares beyond Mortensen’s imagination. Of course, business continued to make its serial demands on my time, and I sometimes had to leave the poor soul unattended for days or weeks, with nothing to do but contemplate ominous scraping sounds behind him—but that, I found, added a delicious additional dimension to his plight; alone in the cold and dark, savaged by the elements, he was left no alternative but to deeply miss me, both the company I provided and the first aid my brushes administered. His demeanor, whenever I returned with apologies, often included a pathetically grateful measure of relief, relief that I took care to betray with grotesque adjustments to his features before I left him behind and turned my attention back to the evolution of the growing awfulness behind him.
Near the end, I grew so enamored of the work that I abdicated my other responsibilities in order to work on the painting all my waking hours. I granted my wife a divorce along with a settlement grand enough to ensure that I never needed to see her again. I resigned the board and sold off all my shares in the enterprises. I stopped sleeping in the bedroom and instead took my rest on the couch in the study, leaving that room only to bathe and to eat. The servants thought I didn’t hear them whispering that the old man had gone mad. I cared not. For the first time in my life, I understood the obsessive quality that can overtake an artist working on his masterpiece. The view out the window revealed winter, then spring, then summer again, but the work on the grand picture continued, the awful sounds of grinding teeth and rumbling growls grew louder, and finally came the day when I put my brush aside and said, “Mortensen?”
He said, “What?”
“This is magnificent. This is absolutely bloody magnificent.”
He seemed less than enthused. “Oh. Please. Don’t.”
Even constant pleas for mercy can become rote. For some time now, Mortensen’s had become almost sarcastic.
I forced some jollity into my tone. “Oh, come now, you don’t want to be like that! You were always an intolerable oaf, even on your best days, but I always credited you with a modicum of intellectual curiosity. You have to be wondering what I’ve been working on for so long! The need to know must be burning in your breast!”
“I don’t have a breast.”
I was mildly surprised. “What an excellent point.”
“I don’t have anything,” he said. “Not family, not friends, not even life. Nothing but my hatred for you.”
“Also an excellent point.”
“Better than you think,” he said. “Because if I have nothing, neither do you. Look at what you’ve done to your own life. You’ve thrown it all away so you can spend all your days and nights harassing me. You’ve made yourself a prisoner too, even if you don’t know it.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “But I can always leave this room when I tire of it. I can always find myself another wife, start myself another company. What choices do you have, Mortensen? Nothing but stoic endurance . . . and I’ll soon be taking even that from you.”
“Fine. Put me out of my misery, then.”
“No such luck. I’ve had too much fun painting you into it. Here. Let me make it possible for you to look.”
I brushed out his eyes and began to construct something else in their place, something that would be capable of the perspective he needed: a pair of long, prehensile eyestalks that were able to loop about and snake around the curve of his hated fat head to garner a clear glimpse of what would soon be coming. I amused myself by making them each a meter long and giving them the muscularity of pythons, so that they had to be coiled on his shoulders like springs, before I bothered to add eyes to the end of them: eyes without lids, that he would not be able to close in order to shut out even the most terrifying sights.
The stalks flailed about in front of his face, some of them emerging from within the boundaries of the frame into the warmer air of the study. “I won’t look, Perkins. You can’t make me look.”
I grinned at him. “Really? Offhand, I can think of about a dozen ways I can force you to look. But I don’t have to. You’ll look within seconds.”
“Never!”
“Really. You’re still human, even if you only possess the pathetic half-life I choose to give you. And human nature works the same way it always does. I know that you’ve heard the inhuman scraping noises behind you. I know you’ve sensed the presence looming in all its awfulness behind you. I know you’ve felt the chills race down the segment of spine you have behind you. Every instinct you have demands that you look. Every moment of the fun we’ve had together dictates that you don’t dare. I’m perfectly willing to sit here and wait for as long as it takes for you to fail the same test that destroyed Lot’s wife. Why not get it over with?”
The trembling of the eyestalks grew more violent. “Because I know it won’t be anything good.”
“Oh, that’s a given. But does that even make a difference?”
For several additional seconds, he kept the eyestalks focused at me, to the exclusion of whatever filled the landscape behind him . . . but for I who had spent so much time orchestrating his misery, it was easy to discern the faltering of his will, the bargaining with the inevitable, the first moment when he thought he could get away with the briefest of all possible glimpses, that and no more. Almost on schedule, the will left his iron features, the defeat defined the set of his jaw . . . and the stalks whipped about to grant Mortensen his first unwilling look at what loomed behind him.
He managed to scream, “What the hell is that?” before all reason fled.
What I’d done was paint him a companion; a creature of limitless imagination and limitless malice, who once freed would be able to devote its immortal existence to tormenting him in a manner far more imaginative than any I had ever been able to muster. I had started, well over a year earlier, by painting a simple multi-tentacled horror of the sort I remembered from the pulp magazines of my youth; and believing those early efforts had not been extraordinarily impressive, I had devoted every day since then to refining its awfulness, adding additional layers to its bottomless evil, putting more intimations of power in shadows that surrounded it and the way the air itself turned unholy colors wherever it moved. It was a sprawling thing too; the ship in the ice, once its home, was now dwarfed by it, a fragile toy in the grip of a god. Even the landscape itself was too small to contain it, as its furthest extensions appeared to curl over the horizon itself, like a veritable mountain range of malice. I had given it a mind of truly limitless intelligence and no agenda other than creating a universe of endless suffering for the tiny human speck before it. I had also ensured that it could not reach Mortensen, not quite, not yet. But one of its tentacles, a quite horrid thing dripping goo from razored barbs, had been straining for his neck for months now.
No subsequent sound that came out of Mortensen’s mouth was at all recognizable as a word. It was just shrieking, anguished and damned and horrified and wonderful: the sound of a man who would never make any other sound, not even if the thing he beheld succeeded in reaching him. There was simply nothing else left. The fear had chased everything else he was from his skull. The tremors rippled up those serpentine eyestalks in waves, almost like somebody had cracked the whip on one end and watched as the reverberations traveled up the line to the other.
I leaned in close, rested my fingertips on the corner of the frame, and whispered, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Alas, I never should have equipped him with anything so prehensile.
His left eyestalk seized the opportunity to whip away from the horror behind him and leap at the horror in front of him, lashing around my wrist half a dozen times before I had any chance to move.
I tried to pull away, but the coils were stronger than I was and were able to yank my right arm, up to the shoulder, into the frame. Only my exposed hand and the top of my head were able to feel the bitter cold, but it was worse than anything I had ever felt. It was like being flayed with razors. I yelled and the other eyestalk, sensing the opportunity for revenge, whipped around and encircled my neck, cutting off my air and silencing me.
I kicked and the easel went down, painting and all. I was pulled down after it, now waist-deep in the painting, only my legs still thrashing in the real world of the study. Behind Mortensen, my ultimate demon roared in delight at having two treats to anticipate instead of one.
I punched Mortensen in the jaw and he went down—not in the way a full man falls to a powerful blow, but in the way a floating head and shoulders fall when they have long levitated at the height of the man but no longer have the fraudulent perspective of a viewer outside the frame to support them. He landed amputated-side down, his grip on my neck and arm pulling me even farther into the painting.
For a few seconds, I was able to keep my shoes hooked on the frame and maintain a handstand by bracing myself against ice so cold that it felt like fire against my flesh. I was unwilling to fall, because I had no way of knowing if I’d be able to find the frame again, let alone climb back to my study through that window.
Then he snarled at me and yanked harder.
My feet came loose of my shoes and I fell, my skull colliding with Mortensen’s with a force that stunned us both.
His grip on me abated. I fell back against the ice, feeling a terrible cold that the fabric of my pants did nothing to insulate. The sensation ripped all remaining breath from me. I blinked through eyes that were already beginning to freeze up and caught a quick glimpse of Mortensen’s head bobbing toward me at knee level on eye-stalks that he had already adapted for walking.
I had just enough strength left to lunge, grab one of the eyestalks with both hands, and use it to swing his head like a cudgel. Three times, four, I whipped it about at the end of its prehensile ocular chain, building up momentum. Then I let go and it sailed away from me in an arc, slamming into a patch of ice not at all different from any other patch of ice in the arctic waste that surrounded us. I don’t know what I would have done if it had popped back up and started scurrying toward me again, but it made a very loud crack when it hit and then did not move again at all. In seconds, the only sign that it had not been there forever was the redder color of the ice where it had landed.
I stood, hugging myself with both arms, the thin fabric of my socks not preventing the cold of the glacier from piercing all the way to the bone. I saw no sign of the portal back to my study. Perhaps I could find it, given time, but if I did not, I’d be dead in minutes, and the search seemed a minor consideration in light of the tableau that now faced me, in the direction opposing the one in which I’d hurled Mortensen: a sprawling, unspeakable mass of flesh the scale of a mountain range, that was even now dragging itself across the waste to get at me. Perhaps it was able to manage some progress. Perhaps it did not and it only seemed that way, because it was so overwhelming to see it from the perspective of a prey animal on the ground that I could not stop myself from taking a step toward it out of sheer appalled awe.
I did not know what would happen to me now.
But I did know that I was far too talented a painter.
THE CATCH
TERENCE TAYLOR
The boyfriend was too easy.
&
nbsp; He had died slowly, painfully, protested all the way, as they always did. Before I was done with him, the big beefy blond beach boy had wept copious tears, hysterical, and begged as he offered sexual services he would never have considered under any other circumstances. None of which ever appealed to me. There had been nothing original that told me anything new. He’d been the same as every dumb jock I’d slit open in secret since college, long before I’d built my home surgery. All the butch boys bawled like babies, no matter how big a bully. This one hadn’t looked like the brightest bulb in the box when I had surreptitiously watched him and his girl at the restaurant as they fumbled their way through what looked like a first date—and not later as I followed them to their car with my twin Tasers, duct tape, and nylon cable ties.
Even so, he’d been a disappointment.
How many victims had there been? How many of these macho assholes had I silenced by now? There had been a time when I kept a careful list of every instrument used on every last one, details of the stalking, capture, and kill. I had film, videotape, then digital files of all the sessions here in my hidden basement room, carefully organized on paper or hard drives, even an assortment of anonymous and untraceable souvenirs, all rigged to self-destruct in a variety of ways if handled by anyone but me.
Meaningless. I’d grown past that.
It wasn’t about records or numbers anymore. I only cared about what each individual act told me. Killing wasn’t so much an art or obsession now as it was religion, a spiritual quest. Taking life from others as slowly and methodically as I can has become a search for something deep within myself, for the reason I do this if nothing else. I know I’m a monster but still don’t understand why.
What the #@&% Is That? Page 27
