Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts Page 6

  ***

  The day after the estate sale, I got a package in the mail from Derek, postmarked the day that he’d killed himself. I called the post office, and they said he’d left instructions to delay postage. They’d assumed that it was a birthday present or something.

  Inside there was no note, no explanation. Nothing to clarify the nightmare jumble of his death. Just one object, carefully wrapped and sealed, something that hadn’t been listed on his exhaustive collection manifest. A single white opera glove, with a brownish-red stain around the cuff.

  That night, I had a dream. In it, I watched myself sleeping from a vantage point somewhere up near the corner of my ceiling. From there I couldn’t see the glove extract itself from its nest of packaging on my kitchen table, but I heard the rustling and I saw it appear like a plump, pale spider in my bedroom doorway. Bodiless as a dreamer, powerless to intervene, I watched it creep across the floor and up my sleeping body. When it fastened itself around my throat I felt its grip, dry and smooth.

  That was the last night that I slept. I spend a lot of time now sitting and looking out my own window at the street below, waiting for a familiar shadow to cross my path. In life I was fascinated by Derek Midwinter. In death, he terrifies me. I guess maybe now he’s become the monster after all.

  Author’s Notes:

  When Ross Lockhart approached me to contribute a story to Tales of Jack the Ripper, I was happy to oblige, though I wasn’t sure what I could add to the vast tracts of fiction, nonfiction, and Gull chasing that had already been written on the subject. After circling it a few times myself, and going back to some classics like Alan Moore’s From Hell, I was finally inspired by the quote from Candyman that opens the story, to write a tale speculating on the nature of the lasting appeal of Jack, and why no theory or explanation as to his identity would ever suffice, even if we were to strike upon one with sufficient substance to actually qualify as proof.

  The story’s ending scenes owe a substantial debt to a great Fritz Leiber tale called “The Glove.” This is one of a handful of stories I’ve written set explicitly in Kansas City, and the little Kansas town of Cherryvale, where the Bender Museum once stood, is a real place where I’ve spent the night a few times, though sadly the museum was already gone by the time I went there.

  Walpurgisnacht

  On the train, Nicky told me about the Brocken Spectre. “It’s a sort of optical illusion,” he said, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. Nicky was younger than me, and prettier, and his dark hair fell in front of his face whenever he slouched, which was often. “The sun casts a giant shadow of you on the clouds below, right, and your head gets this prismatic halo. Like an angel.”

  “I hear the sun only shines here like sixty days a year,” I said. “Besides, it’s night.” I was only half-listening anyway, my head lolling against the cool glass of the window. I’d had more than a few drinks at the airport bar, and I could feel a headache trying to force its way out past my eyes. Outside, I could see our destination looming up out of the darkness, the two towers of the Sender Brocken, old and new. Like Tolkien’s Minas Morgul and Orthanc. The sun was still going down, and the towers stood out like shadows against the gloaming, their lights already on. Gleaming yellow ones in the windows of the old tower, now the Brocken Hotel, and blinking red ones to warn planes away from the new tower, a candy cane-striped lance that jutted skyward from the peak.

  “It doesn’t look terribly inviting,” Nicky said, noticing my inattentiveness and nodding at the towers.

  “Now to the Brocken the witches ride,” I intoned, and then, without bothering to glance and see his puzzled expression, explained, “It’s Goethe. From Faust.”

  That was why we were going, of course. It was Walpurgisnacht, the night when the witches and devils gathered on the crown of the bald mountain to welcome the spring. Nicky and I, and whoever else was on the train with us, were the witches in this equation, and we were all gathering on the Brocken to kiss the ass of a black goat.

  ***

  We met Henri at the Steadman Gallery. Nicky had some of his photographs there, as part of a show called “The New Decadence.” From his “Conqueror Worm” cycle—my name—all graveyards and ossuaries, done in lots of blues and greens with the occasional splash of red or yellow. A leaf, a salamander. They were good pictures, some of Nicky’s best, in my opinion, and I guess Henri thought so, too.

  I don’t remember the other stuff in the show, but I remember Henri. Tall, old-fashioned handsome, Van Dyke beard, clothes like a Vincent Price villain. He carried a cane that was pure affectation, black wood with an amethyst top. He was a regular in the galleries, though word was that he spent more time in Europe than the States. Why he was in New York that year, I never learned, just as I never learned his real name. DuPlante was the most common surname associated with him, but how accurate it was, I can’t say. Henri kept as much about himself veiled in mystery as he could, kept himself interesting.

  Even before we’d met, I’d heard about him. Rich, listless, a Decadent of the old school. He was known for throwing wild parties with strange themes, and for occasionally throwing large wads of money at young artists who caught his fancy, which meant that Nicky and I were of course very happy to make his acquaintance, to catch his eye.

  Where exactly all his money came from was the subject of some speculation. One story went that his father was a lord, another that he was heir to a fortune in pornography. Some said that he’d been some kind of wunderkind and had invented some patent as a child and still lived off the dividends.

  There were lots of stories about Henri, many of them contradictory, but he seemed to welcome all of them. There was only one that I had ever known him to actively refute. Supposedly he had an older sister, one whose tastes made Henri’s seem positively Puritan by comparison. Some people claimed to have met her, though never in his company. They always described her the same way, which was odd. Tall, dark hair, stylishly dressed. Always named Alexandria. I was so bold as to ask Henri about it once, but he replied, with uncharacteristic clarity, “I’m an only child.”

  “Maybe she was an old lover,” Nicky hypothesized once. “Somebody who just pretended to be his sister.” It was certainly kinky enough.

  Real or imagined, Henri didn’t like to talk about her. The subject made him visibly uncomfortable, was maybe the only subject I’d ever come across that did.

  Luckily for him, I was less concerned with stories about where Henri’s money came from, and more concerned with where it went. The fact was, he spent it like water and never wanted for more, and Nicky and I had expensive tastes and no inclination to a hard day’s work, so men like Henri were bread and butter for us.

  At the Steadman Gallery, he kissed Nicky’s hand but shook mine. He struck me then as I would continue to think of him throughout our acquaintance: as a spoiled dandy who enjoyed playing the beast because it amused him, more than because there was much actual beast in him.

  Aside from his money and his interest in the arts, he was known mostly for what he called his “revels.” “Party,” he said to me once, “is far too small a word.” I don’t remember how many of them Nicky and I attended in the years that we knew Henri. Nicky always brought his camera, and he got a couple of decent series out of them, neither of them half as good as the work he was doing when we met, but then, booze and drugs and other temptations flowed freely at the revels, and Nicky was no less susceptible to them than I, and they took their toll on both of us, in different ways.

  How to describe one of Henri’s revels? He once told a reporter, “I take intent, and marry it with time and place.” Which isn’t really very helpful, either. I guess that fundamentally they were just parties, on a grand scale, complete with the kinds of party games that would have shocked and titillated Victorians, but Henri saw them—or maybe he just sold them—as something more like performance art. A séance held at midnight in a haunted hotel. A black mass in the catacombs under Paris. Diversions for the bored and the
rich and the morbid. Nicky and I were two of those, and Henri was rich enough for everybody.

  This one, though, the one atop the Brocken, on Walpurgisnacht, was supposed to be different. More intimate, more personal, and his last. That’s what the invitations had said. Henri had supposedly discovered a rare film print by Eadweard Muybridge, something suitably infernal, not just studies of animals in motion, and he was going to screen it for a few dozen of his closest friends at midnight, “in its native habitat.” There was to be a small chamber orchestra, and Henri had reserved the entire hotel, so we wouldn’t be disturbed. “Unless of course some other witches decide to drop in.”

  ***

  When the train pulled up to the station, Nicky and I got out, along with a few others that I recognized from Henri’s inner circle, and still more that I didn’t. Maybe new additions, maybe lapsed recruits pulled back in for one last hurrah. I helped Nicky shoulder one of his camera bags, and we all walked down to the cars that were waiting to take us the rest of the way to the top of the mountain.

  We shared our car with a girl who looked young, and too thin for my tastes. She was wearing a black dress, with diamonds glittering at her wrists and neck, and silver hair that was probably a wig but might have been some impressive dye job. Nicky pulled out his camera and held it up, giving her a quizzical look to which he received a nod and giggle. He snapped several photos on the car ride up, flattering her, I’m sure, but I knew that he was just warming up, getting ready for the main event.

  Would I have accepted Henri’s invitation, if it hadn’t been for Nicky? I don’t know. We’d not had the best time at the last of his revels that we attended, in some hunting lodge in some godforsaken part of Washington state, and it had left a bad taste in my mouth. I couldn’t really remember why, too much booze turning the filmstrip of my memory into a series of disassociated snapshots. Something about sitting in the dark by the fire, after the meat of the party was over, playing some idiotic child’s game called “Something Scary.” I’d never heard of it, but apparently Nicky played it when he was a kid, with his abusive father, the one he never talked about. He told me so afterward, on the car ride home, and he cried and shook in his sleep that night, and didn’t say why.

  Everything else was blurred, just a bad, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, but enough that I might have thrown the overwrought bit of paper—with its wax seals and calligraphic script—in the trash, had it not been for the mention of Muybridge. The old photographer fascinated Nicky, and I was happy for anything that got Nicky’s attention onto something I found interesting.

  The cars deposited us on the foot of the steps leading up to the Brocken Hotel. The building had once been a TV tower, maybe the oldest one in the world, built before World War II. It had transmitted the first live broadcast of the Summer Olympics in Berlin. The war didn’t do it any favors, and when the new tower was built they converted the old one into a hotel. The only thing left to mark its former function was the golf ball-like radome that crouched on the roof and held air traffic control equipment.

  The lights that had looked so tiny from the train were dazzling up close, but the tower that rose above us, with its tiny windows and the radome on top, reminded me of something from a futuristic prison. Not terribly inviting, as Nicky had said.

  Inside, however, the hotel proved to be as luxurious as it had appeared Spartan from without. Red carpets, crystal chandeliers, gilt everything else. We were shown into an enormous ballroom where a projector and screen were set up in pride of place, with couches and divans arrayed for our viewing pleasure. The artwork that normally hung along the walls had been removed, and in its place were easels draped in black cloth. All part of the night’s festivities, I assumed.

  I knew that Henri himself had dabbled in painting once, when he was younger. I’d never seen the results, but I’d heard that at his best he’d mostly just knocked off Goya. At Henri’s one and only gallery opening a critic was apparently overheard to remark, “If you’ve seen everything Goya ever did, and you still want more, then Henri’s the man to talk to,” though whether that was intended as condemnation or praise, I couldn’t say. By the time Nicky and I met him, he’d already given it up, but his passion for the arts remained a constant throughout his life, so I wasn’t exactly surprised to see the easels there.

  The man himself was there too, playing the good host and glad-handing his guests as they entered. He looked much as he had the last time I’d seen him, which was also much as he had the first time I’d seen him, though now his hair and beard were grayer, and the tiredness that was supposedly driving his retirement could be seen in the corners of his eyes, even as they sparkled as ever with his smile. The years had made him seem distinguished, rather than old, as they were kind enough to do for some people, and he wore his age well.

  He kissed Nicky’s hand, shook mine, and then he and Nicky were flirting again—Nicky always was flirtatious, Henri always shameless—and then Henri had drifted away to talk to one of the other guests. “It’ll be some time before the festivities start,” he said over his shoulder as he departed. “The witching hour, and all that. One of the servants can show you to your room, if you’d like to freshen up.”

  The “servants” were men in coats-and-tails, wearing shapeless papier-mâché masks that made them look a bit like disfigured corpses. I knew from previous revels that under the masks I would find invariably young, attractive men, paid well for their forbearance and their discretion.

  One of these broke off to escort Nicky and me to our rooms, which were next to each other and connected by an adjoining door. Henri, gracious and accommodating to the last. The rooms were as sumptuously appointed as one might expect, except for the narrow, slit-like windows that were the lasting testament of the building’s former function. “There’s an observation deck on the roof,” the faceless “servant” told me when he saw that I was eyeing the window with some distaste. “It provides a much better view.”

  I sat down on the bed and kicked off my shoes. The clock on the desk said that I still had almost two hours until midnight, and I was suddenly very tired. The headache from the train was back, and I just wanted to lie down in the dark.

  Nicky came from the adjoining room. “I’m going up to the observation deck before the party starts,” he said, patting his camera bag. “You want to come?”

  I shook my head and lay backward into the softness of the bed. “I think I’m going to take a nap,” I said. “Wake me before you go downstairs.”

  ***

  He left then, and I slept, or I must have, because I dreamed. In my dream, I had gone with Nicky to the roof. He was standing near the railing, trying to see a Brocken Spectre in the mist that had grown up around the hotel. There was a blindingly white light coming from behind us, maybe from the radome, throwing our shadows out like expressionistic paintings on the rooftop, and across the clouds. I wanted to turn around, to look for the source of the light, but I couldn’t. I was staring across the clouds, watching keenly as Nicky tried to position himself to create the halo effect that he was looking for, his camera held up to his face. For some reason, the camera made me uncomfortable. I wanted him to take it down. I had the irrational feeling that he couldn’t, that it was welded there. I saw him as some kind of cybernetic Cyclops, staring out through the camera’s lens at his own shadow.

  I couldn’t speak, and there was a distant roaring in my ears, so that I didn’t hear Nicky, even as I saw his lips moving. We were not alone on the observation deck. There was a third shadow leaping out across the roof of the clouds, one that didn’t seem to shift and move, to jump around as ours did. I tried to turn my head, to see who was standing beside us, but I could only catch a glimpse. It was a woman, straight dark hair, wearing a fur coat, and I knew that it was Alexandria, Henri’s older sister, though in the dream she couldn’t have been much older than Nicky.

  I tried to turn my head, to catch her eye. She was standing behind Nicky, her eyes were dark, holes in a mask that
was her face, and her finger was coming up to her lips, shushing me, as though we were sharing a secret. Her shadow and Nicky’s shadow were the same, stretching long and dark across the clouds, and he was smiling, the halo appearing around the shadow’s head, and the camera snapping and whirring again and again.

  ***

  I sat up in bed. Though the clock said that only a few minutes had passed, a strong wind had come up outside. I could hear it howling against the walls of the building. I turned to look out the window, but the black slit was a mirror against the lights in the room. Still, something was hurtling past through the darkness, something like sparks or embers from a great bonfire, whirled up into the sky in a cyclone.

  I got out of bed and walked over to the window, pressing my face against the cold glass and peering out through cupped hands. The night outside was a black maelstrom. The lights of the hotel were gone, and the red warning lights of the opposite tower were lost in the darkness. The only illumination came from the burning shapes that I had originally taken to be sparks but that I saw now were lanterns, lanterns made from human skulls and hollowed gourds. They were carried aloft by figures, some nude, others shrouded in tattered garments whipped by the wind. Some were young, their flesh milky and smooth, while others were impossibly old, their skin puckered, their breasts withered and pendulous. All rode through that swirling darkness, some astride goats and pigs and cats the size of ponies, some on brooms and benches, some carried by owls and vultures and ravens tied on strings.