by Matt Cardin
The number of viewers interested in Thornton’s work dropped rapidly and sharply. The number of actual buyers dropped even more. This current exhibition, Powers knew, would be the last, though he lacked the heart to tell his young friend.
It was while Thornton was standing self-absorbed in a secluded alcove beside one of his new paintings—an abstract work entitled Foaming Antarctic, composed entirely of white and various shades of pale gray—that Powers decided to inject a bit of cheer into his friend’s evening. A lovely blonde woman in a strapless red dress had been eyeing Thornton all night, but the artist had not noticed. He preferred instead to spend his time staring assiduously at the floor and into empty corners. The drinks were flowing freely. The crowd was loosening up. Someone, inspired by the sheer force of alcohol, would probably decide to buy something soon, and Powers was filled with a sense of compassion for his young friend. Midway through the exhibition, he edged his way over to Thornton and touched his arm.
Thornton turned and looked at the gallery director with eyes that would have appeared desperately sleepy if they had not been so starkly empty. Powers waited for a sign of recognition, an indication that Thornton recognized him and was aware of his surroundings. Receiving none, he almost abandoned his plan, but then decided to go ahead with it, on the grounds that there was nothing to be lost.
“Don’t look now,” he said, “but you’re being watched.” He nodded toward the woman in red, who at that very instant was looking at Thornton from across the room. She gave him a sly grin when their eyes met. Then she turned to examine one of his paintings.
“Are you trying to surprise me?” Thornton asked. His voice came out as a murmur. It was flatter and emptier than his painting of a polar desert, hanging across the room. “She probably wants to sleep with me. Maybe she thinks she can gain something by having sex with the artist.”
Powers grimaced and groped for a response. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with a little harmless pleasure, is there? You make it sound like it’s pointless even to try.”
“Isn’t it?” Thornton asked.
Powers could not think up a reply, so he merely continued to hover beside his friend.
What happened next, Powers could never say. He tried for a long time afterward to piece together what might have caused his friend to exhibit such behavior with no visible provocation. He could never escape the feeling that some nugget of truth was concealed within the incident, and that if he could only uncover it, what he found might clarify what had happened at the final showing of Thornton’s work.
Had he been able to see into the artist’s mind, he would have known that Thornton had glanced at the blonde woman one last time. At that point, he’d been shocked to see a yellow hood take shape around her head. Of course, it was surely nothing more than the form of her coiffure that created the illusion. Still, as Thornton looked at her, a yellow cowl replaced her blonde hair—and then her face disappeared, giving way to pure darkness.
The fact that this thoroughly monstrous figure was planted directly beneath his recent painting, The End of It All, seemed prearranged somehow, as if it were the fulfillment of a prophecy. The two of them, the painting and the hooded figure, were like pieces of a puzzle in Thornton’s eyes, fitted together to form a window onto another world.
Lines of fire began to jet from his paintings, hung all around the gallery. He staggered as they formed an interlaced pattern, ensnaring the guests in a flaming web. Burning yellow eyes flared within the cowl of the figure that had replaced the young woman. The paintings themselves shuddered as their surfaces tumbled inward. Each became a window onto a field of crimson and ochre, bathed in the rays of a black sun. Multiple figures in yellow cowls, all with blazing eyes, peered through each aperture. Within the frame of each former painting, the left eye of every pair trembled and then swiveled slightly inward.
Thornton screamed uncontrollably. The cries were ripped out of his throat and chest from a level of fear beyond conscious thought, a realm of pure terror that bypassed and transcended awareness, where screams were the sole reality. He slammed back against the wall and began to push against it, as if he could escape into the woodwork. The emptiness in his chest had become a bottomless abyss that would eventually swallow the rest of him, leaving only a hungering darkness in the shape of a man. He shook so violently that his teeth literally chattered.
Confused and frightened, Powers leaped away and gaped at Thornton. The guests froze in their places and tried not to appear horrified, an effort at which they unanimously failed. After a petrified instant, universal throughout the gallery, during which Thornton continued to shriek, Powers reached toward him and started to say something, anything. But at that moment, Thornton sprang away from the wall and tore through the gallery, out the front door and into the night, still screaming. The guests nearest the door heard Thornton’s car start with a roar and then pull away from the gallery with a screeching of tires.
Everyone stared at everyone else. Over by The End of It All, the blonde woman in the red dress stood stiffly, immobilized by the same shock and confusion as everyone else. A middle-aged man in a white tuxedo laughed once, nervously, and then stopped.
Fortunately, the clever waiters realized that only booze could salvage the evening. They glided through the room with flutes of champagne, all eagerly snatched up by the rattled guests.
8. The End
The drive up The Mountain was silent and smooth, like a sled sailing over the frozen surface of a polar desert. The night outside the vehicle’s windows was pitch-black except for the stars, glittering overhead past the tops of the pines. Thornton again had the sense of exiting one dream and entering another. The cold light of the stars, gathered into constellations that seemed strange and alien, goaded him with pinpricks of silvery terror. The forest rushing past on either side was an impenetrable jumble of monstrous shapes.
The artist’s throat and lungs were raw from screaming. His cries had stopped as soon as he had driven away from the gallery. The vision of the figure from his dream, multiplied in the frames of his paintings and manifest in the transformation of the young woman, had receded both physically and psychologically, the farther he drove away from the site of its occurrence.
Now he gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles and stared straight ahead at the ribbon of road, his mouth closed and his jaw set. He needed no visual confirmation, no additional apparition. Now he felt the eyes looking at him everywhere, from every direction, from the blacktop, from the trees, from the sky. He could barely bring himself to peer for even a second into the rearview mirror, for fear that he would see the physical presence of the intruder floating behind him.
In time, the iron gate of Tony Anthony’s mansion came into view in the yellow beams of the headlights. It seemed perfectly natural that the gate should swing open, as if on cue. The mansion was lit with a pale yellow effulgence glowing in every window, giving it an appearance of warmth that it had never possessed before.
When he parked and approached the front door, it opened silently by itself. The stars prickled his back until he had stepped inside. It was then, as the door was closing behind him, as he stood alone in the vast foyer, that he wondered for the first time why he had come here, of all places. Here, to the mansion, the locus of the mental and spiritual sickness that had overtaken his life.
He did not have to wait for an answer.
Thumpings and scufflings begin to sound from somewhere in the mansion—whether from above or below, he could not be sure—and in a moment Tony Anthony came around a corner, somewhat abruptly, and stopped to face him. It was not lost on Thornton that around that corner lay the route to the basement.
The wealthy man was dressed all in black, with a platinum amulet dangling from a chain around his neck. The design on the amulet was almost impossibly intricate, so much so that it hurt Thornton’s eyes to look at it.
Anthony stared in crazy-cat fashion at Thornton for a moment. His breathing was labored and his face was
flushed. At last he leaned against the doorframe and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Erik. Didn’t I know you’d come back?”
Thornton could see that he must have interrupted the millionaire in the midst of some sort of strenuous activity, but Anthony did not look the slightest bit irritated.
“I tried to make a point with the extra money,” Anthony said. “But then you’re an artist, aren’t you?” He spoke the word scornfully. The Peter Lorre impression was nowhere to be seen. Anthony’s rich voice boomed out clearly, and his eyes were perfectly aligned. “You take a sense of pride in your work, don’t you? Perhaps you wonder just what I’m planning to do with your paintings, up here at the top of The Mountain.”
Thornton had no voice. He merely stood and stared.
“I could take you down to the gallery, you know.” Anthony removed his hands from his pockets and began to wander idly across the foyer. In Thornton’s eyes, he looked like a snake charming its prey. “I’ve placed your last painting on the wall with the others. It’s the pivotal point of my entire collection. Wouldn’t you like to see how it all fits together?” His voice was thick with mockery. Before Thornton could answer, Anthony stopped moving and fixed him with a piercing stare.
“I’ve uncovered them all,” he said. “All the pieces in my secret gallery. No more sheets. No more hidden wonders. They’re all facing each other now. You should see it! All those lines of sight slicing through the air and weaving a web of fire. It’s miraculous.”
Thornton’s throat worked. He tried to speak, but what emerged was only a strangled croak.
Anthony laughed. “Yes, I can see the fire, too. Don’t worry, you’re not insane. You’ve just been cursed with the unfortunate ability to see more than most.”
As Thornton listened to these shocking statements, his mind began to turn corners faster and faster, trying to backtrack along the way to where he had been, just a few short months ago. But these attempts fell short. The pathways of his memory always doubled back on themselves and inexorably funneled him into the nexus of this impossible present moment.
“I suppose I should explain things to you,” Anthony said. “If your life was a movie, I imagine I would be the villain—and the villain always feels the need to explain his wicked ways.” He wavered slightly in Thornton’s vision, like a reel of film skipping off its tracks. “Should I start by describing a figure in a hood that stares at you with yellow eyes?” He smiled at the effect his words had on his guest. “Don’t ask who he is. That is a question without an answer. You can only know him by what he does. Did you know that everything you do serves him? Your ideas, your thoughts, your words, your actions—they all come from him and point toward him. This is especially true of all your art. It’s all about him. There is nothing you or I or anyone else can do about it. You’re either working for him, or else you’re working for him. How’s that for a raw deal?”
Anthony laughed long at his own words. When he had calmed down, he studied Thornton’s face before continuing.
“I pieced this collection together from all over the world. It was not easy, believe me. Often the owners did not part willingly with their investments. And when I couldn’t buy what I needed, I commissioned new works from new artists. Which is, of course, where you come in.” His lopsided smile no longer seemed to hint at idiocy, but at a deep-seated depravity. “You’re not the first, you know, and you won’t be the last. It’s gone on for as long as there have been people to make art. It’s all a big puzzle, but basically, it’s about creating something. And about opening something—or should I say, somewhere? The whole process involves creating and opening a door to the visions I’ve longed to see for my whole life.” His gaze grew wistful and distant, and his left eyeball began to tug inward. He appeared to be trying to focus on something, some object or vista, that was not perceptible to normal vision.
He continued to speak, even with his eyes fixed on an invisible horizon. “When you leave here tonight, close your eyes and see if you do not receive—like some sort of splendid yet horrific gift—a vision of a room filled with the most dazzling array of grotesque artwork you can imagine. A room where the atmosphere bleeds from the slicing wounds of a thousand lines of fire, and where the vague outlines of the impossible take solid shape at last. Then you’ll know whether I’m right or not, and whether you should think of me as a lunatic or a visionary.”
Anthony came back to the room suddenly, with a shiver like a dog shaking water from its pelt. His eyes focused on Thornton again, and he shrugged. “Or maybe it’s not finished. It may well be possible that your work isn’t the final piece of the puzzle. Perhaps it will require another search for another artist, and we will have to play the game again and wait just a bit longer to witness the fruition of this quest. In any case—and I want you to know this above all, so hear me well—your role here is played out.”
He moved toward Thornton then, and raised his arm as if to drape it over the artist’s shoulder. Thornton flinched and feared he might vomit.
“Erik!” Anthony said with a small, soft cry that might have been a laugh. He appeared genuinely surprised, and not a little hurt. “It’s all right, I assure you. I won’t do you any harm. You are simply . . .” He searched for the right word. Then he found it: “Spent. Yes, you are spent, my friend. You’ve got far deeper problems than any possible threat from some crazy, rich eccentric.”
Anthony began to back away. “You know, it just dawned on me: you came all this way to see me this evening, and yet you haven’t uttered a word! Just as well. Even if you had a question, I’ve already answered it for you. So, just go, and try to locate your muse again. Return to that primal question, and ask it deeply: Where does it come from? I promise you’ll fail. You’ll receive no answer. It’s like a door that was always intended for you and you alone . . . but alas, it’s locked from the other side.”
Anthony had reached the doorway to the hall that led to the basement. His breathing, which had calmed during his monologue to Erik, was becoming faster and deeper again in anticipation of his descent into the depths of the house. “You’ve played your role well, Erik,” he said, backing into the hallway with one hand grasping the frame of the doorway. “But it’s over now. The one we both serve has had his fill of you, as have I! Everything you do for the rest of your life will still be from him by him and for him, but your cherished place at the center of his plans is a thing of the past.”
A clock somewhere in a nearby room chimed midnight. The metallic tones only thickened and deepened the dreamlike atmosphere of the mansion. Thornton’s legs felt rubbery, but they carried him well enough toward the front door in a backward stagger. The door swung open to let him out as he backed out onto the front steps.
The last thing he saw before the door closed was Anthony’s face, dominated by those enigmatic eyes. The left one was turning inward again, perhaps in preparation for his descent into the gallery.
Thornton’s imagination placed him momentarily in the center of that gallery. In his mind, he pictured lines of fire erupting from the dead eyes of countless works of art and lancing across the length and breadth of the basement to slice open its atmosphere with seething wounds. Something new was being created, or opened, by those wounds, something wonderful and awful to behold, something that would answer every question he had ever asked.
During the drive down the mountain, he thought more than once about testing Tony Anthony’s dare. He thought about stopping the car, closing his eyes, and finding out if the vision the other man had described, the vision that he could almost, but not quite, conjure up through sheer force of will, was indeed waiting for him in the darkness behind his lids. Perhaps it would feel good to know that he was not crazy, that what he had experienced was real. Or perhaps it would make him feel even better to know that everything Anthony had told him was a lie, that the man was just a raving lunatic who preyed on the ambitions of talented young artists.
But there on the dark road, just past the blackened tree line, be
neath a sky bristling with the silvery teeth of countless stars, he knew the answer would not matter either way. Truth, lies, sanity, madness—what did such things mean anymore? As Anthony had said, Thornton was spent. Used up. Hollowed out. The final answers were inconsequential, meaningless, worthless.
Driving at that late hour, deliberating over his fate, Erik Thornton felt for the last time as if he were suspended between two dreams. One lurked behind him at the top of The Mountain, where something new might be coming into being in the labyrinthine womb of Tony Anthony’s mansion. The other stretched out before him like a barren wasteland of shattered ambitions and hollowed-out hopes. Neither seemed real.
He wished he could stay right where he was, forever. He wished he could remain suspended between the dreams of past and future, riding the crest of the present icy moment in the solitude of eternity, where nothing could touch him, where he could simply be left alone.
But of course, his journey had to end somewhere.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to express his appreciation to the following people for their roles in bringing this collection to life:
To the late Wilum Pugmire for his generosity in sparking the whole project to begin with by establishing a connection with Hippocampus Press.
To Mark McLaughlin for his wit and expertise as a collaborator, not to mention his patience.
To Jon Padgett for serving as a first publisher and editor for three of these stories in the misty past of the late 1990s, and for two decades of wonderful friendship and support.
To Thomas Ligotti for his valuable early feedback on some of the stories herein, and for many years of friendship and literary inspiration.
To S. T. Joshi for his editorial support, and also to Derrick Hussey and the rest of the crew at Hippocampus Press for their epic patience and steadfastness over a span of six years while they awaited the final story.
