Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts Read online

  Though she was constantly aware of the danger, she’d never felt unsafe in the city. She was always conscious of the proximity of so many other people, and it comforted her. The country was the place she couldn’t abide, where emptiness stretched out around her like the cold vacuum of space. Here, though, standing outside of Gorman’s building, she felt that same loneliness, felt cut off from all the souls that she knew inhabited the city in which she lived.

  As she was thinking of that, the door suddenly disappeared from beneath her hand. She made a startled sound, a squeak, and was instantly annoyed with herself. It was, of course, just Gorman, towering in the now-open doorway. She took him in with a glance. There’d been the occasional picture in the papers, but they didn’t capture him. Didn’t capture his height, the distinctness of his moon-shaped head, his forehead and chin so prominent as to be called jutting, his eyes dark and small, like beads set in his face. His hands were big and strong-looking. Sculptor’s hands, she wanted to think, but strangler’s hands is what her mind supplied instead.

  “The paper sent you?” he asked before she could speak. She nodded, then fumbled her notepad and held out her hand to shake.

  He ignored her proffered hand, appraised her obviously with his gaze, not in a sexual way, she didn’t think, not at all the way she was used to being appraised by men, but like he’d just been asked to judge the value of an antique clock, or the health of a stranger’s horse.

  “Watch your step,” he said, disappearing back into the dark.

  Just inside the metal door was a concrete hallway, bare and unlit except for what illumination straggled in from outside, and what fell down the metal stairs that Gorman was already halfway up by the time her eyes adjusted to the dimness. His footfalls were surprisingly quiet on the stairs, and she winced at each clang her own shoes made as she followed him.

  The entire top floor was the studio. It was dark, drenched in shadow. Though the back wall was all windows, drapes were pulled closed across them, letting in only a shaft of gray light. Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling, but they seemed small and insignificant in the gloom of the place. Yvonne wondered how Gorman managed to work there at all.

  But work he must, because the room was filled with pieces. She counted quickly as her eyes skimmed over them. She couldn’t be sure, but she knew there had to be more than a dozen, all covered in white sheets, like the furniture in an old castle in some movie.

  “Are these all recent works?” she asked, but he didn’t respond. “What’s your medium?” she tried again, but he simply waved his hand, as though her questions were of no importance. Yvonne shook her head, thinking that she was wasting her time, that this was going to be a very disappointing assignment after all. Then Gorman pulled the sheet off one of the figures in the middle of the studio.

  In the red forest there is a red church

  After that first meeting with Gorman, she had a dream. She was walking through what looked like a forest at night, only it also didn’t look like a forest. The ground beneath her feet was as white and featureless as a sheet of paper, the night solid black and bereft of any star or cloud. The trees that grew up everywhere around her were red from trunk to tip. They appeared to be denuded of leaves, but their red branches split and split again until they became too small to see, until they became like a red cloud filling the air above her head.

  ***

  She woke up in bed, Dale breathing easily beside her, and she realized that she couldn’t remember the sculpture that Gorman had shown her. She tried to call it back to memory, but her mind kept playing tricks on her, replacing it with constellations of glowing light or masses of moving feathers. After he’d shown it to her she’d made her mumbled apologies, to which he had seemed almost pleased, as though this was the reaction he’d intended, and then she’d stumbled down the metal steps and, with their clangor still resounding in her ears, had been sick next to her Malibu.

  When she’d looked up, there’d been two men standing across the street, next to the concrete wall around the substation, their hoods pulled up against the spattering rain, staring at her. They’d stood there, unmoving, until she’d wiped off her mouth and driven away.

  It scared her that she couldn’t remember the sculpture. The next morning, she drove down to the offices of The Current and sat at the curb with her engine running for twenty minutes, trying to work up the nerve to go in and tell her editor that, no, she wasn’t going to be able to do this Gorman story. Or even a lie, that Gorman had refused the interview. In the end, she didn’t do either, just drove away.

  She didn’t go back to Gorman’s that day. She went out to lunch, even though it was barely ten, and then drove all the way down to the Plaza and walked around looking in windows until one o’clock. She kept telling herself that she was going to go to Gorman’s, that she was just putting it off because he was an artist and they kept weird hours, that he probably wasn’t even going to be awake before noon anyway. That excuse worked for awhile, and then she went to a movie, some light, romantic comedy that she barely remembered, something that was supposed to be funny but that she couldn’t laugh at, and then she went back to the apartment before Dale got home. She ordered Chinese for dinner, and then was startled when the doorbell rang.

  When Dale got home from work and asked how her day had gone, she found herself lying and telling him that Gorman hadn’t been in when she went by. “He’s probably trying to make himself seem mysterious,” Dale said, and she just nodded.

  Whatever she may have dreamed that night, she couldn’t remember it upon waking.

  ***

  The next day, she felt stupid about dodging work the day before. She drove first thing down to The Current, and made a big show about rooting around in her desk, picking up files, letting anyone who saw her know that she was on the job. Then she drove back over to Gorman’s.

  The factory was open again. It was a cold day, not raining this time, but windy enough that she clutched her notebook to her chest when she got out of the car. There was no one out on the loading dock smoking in the wind, but she felt eyes on her from the dark doorways, though she told herself that she was just being paranoid.

  She beat her palm against Gorman’s door and waited. At first there was no sound from the other side, just the dull echoes of her own poundings, and she worried that maybe she had pissed him off by not coming the day before. Had she said she would? She couldn’t remember.

  Then she heard a sound from the other side of the door. A far-off moaning, or a scraping, like something being dragged. The kind of sound a ghost might make in an old story. She leaned forward to press her ear to the door, just as it came open and Gorman was standing there. He reminded her, she realized as she whipped her head back, a little bit of Frankenstein’s monster, with his jutting features and imposing height.

  “You came back,” he said, as though genuinely surprised to see her. “Good.”

  And then he was leading her up the stairs again, just walking away into the dark interior of the building, expecting her to follow.

  The studio was different, she realized as soon as she crested the stairs. Everything had been moved around, and the pieces were no longer draped in their ghostly sheets. Her eyes skimmed them, skipping across each piece and waiting to take them in later, looking for the one she had seen on Saturday, the one she still couldn’t remember, but none of them looked familiar.

  “Are these…” she started to ask, but Gorman shook his head, gesturing around.

  “Look at them first,” he said. “Take your time.”

  So she did, walking from piece to piece, letting her gaze soak up all the details. Though they seemed natural extensions of Gorman’s earlier work, still she’d never really seen anything like them. She’d gone to that Bodies Revealed exhibit with Dale when it came to Union Station, but these weren’t like those.

  She couldn’t tell what they were made of, but they looked real. Human bodies, stripped of skin and exploded, so that their anatomies seemed to be bu
rsting apart. Here was a head, the side flying off, one eye leaping forward, and a glowing lightbulb in the place where the brain should have been. There was a man whose ribcage swung open to reveal organs suspended on wires, like a macabre orrery. Each of them affixed all over with careful little paper squares bearing letters and numbers, figures from the Greek alphabet, and symbols she’d never seen before.

  Of course they couldn’t be real, she knew that, but they looked so real. She reached out to touch one, but her hand paused, hovering just over a suspended heart. “What are they?” she asked, without looking over her shoulder to where Gorman stood.

  “Saints,” Gorman replied. “Angels. Apostles. Boddhisatvas. They come to bring us the word, the light. They go before, to show us the way.”

  That wasn’t really what she’d been asking. Not What do they represent? but What are they made of? Still, it made her remember that she was supposed to be interviewing, made her pull her hand back, fumble out her notepad, her pen.

  Saints, she wrote on the otherwise blank yellow page. Angels.

  In the red church there is a red altar

  The next time she had the dream, she saw a building through the trees. It seemed strange to her, even in the dream, because the building and the trees were the same color, so how could she see it?

  It was a wood-plank church, like the one they had in the town where she grew up, where she couldn’t wait to move away. It had a little steeple and everything, except all the planks were as red as red could be. Maybe, she thought, they were cut from all these red trees, all sawed up.

  In her dream, she walked up to the door of the church. It was black, not a door at all but a hole into the night sky, maybe, and as she stepped through it she felt so cold.

  ***

  Dale woke up that time, followed her to the door of the bathroom where he stood rubbing his eyes while she let the water in the shower heat up. She wanted it hot enough to broil her, to bake her skin red.

  “I’m worried about these dreams,” he said, even though she hadn’t told him about the dreams, not really. “You’re not sleeping.”

  “I’m sleeping,” she said as she stepped into the shower, but even as she said it she didn’t know if it was true. She couldn’t really remember how much sleep she had actually been getting.

  When she’d gotten home from her second attempt at interviewing Gorman, Dale had asked her what his stuff was like. “Do you remember in House on Haunted Hill—the new one—when they go down into the basement? You remember those bodies in the glass cases? They’re sort of like that,” she’d said, even though, as time passed, she thought less and less that even that was quite right.

  “Creepy,” Dale had said, and she’d realized that, yeah, she guessed they were, but the sculptures weren’t what scared her, not after that first session, anyway. What scared her was what she couldn’t remember. She kept her notes carefully hidden from Dale, something that she’d never done before, because they scared her, too. They weren’t like any interview notes she’d ever taken, and she couldn’t remember writing them down. Couldn’t remember what questions, if any, they were in answer to. Couldn’t remember Gorman saying them at all.

  They were just scrawls, the kind of notes she’d write if she were running out to catch a bus, and they said things like Men of science turn their eyes toward the stars in the hopes of finding there the invisible gears that turn the universe, but you can’t see the truth in the largest of things and The human body is a temple, it’s true, but when we go to the temple, we don’t worship out in the street, do we?

  ***

  When she went back the last time and pounded on Gorman’s door, the clouds had gone away and the day was sunny, though a chilly breeze still scudded along the ground, blowing bits of trash and making the tall purple flowers in the vacant lot bob their heads. The men at the factory were standing out on the loading docks again, but this time she welcomed them, welcomed their tenuous connection to the life of the city she usually felt all around her, but from which she felt strangely severed here.

  She struck the door three times, and on the third blow it simply swung open, like the front door of some haunted manor in a bad movie. She stepped inside and called Gorman’s name up the stairs, but he didn’t answer. She stood at the bottom, uncertain, and for a moment she considered walking down the cinderblock hallway, seeing what was on the bottom floor of the building. Probably nothing, she had always told herself before. Boarded-up storefronts or whatever. But today, standing there without a guide, she was suddenly curious.

  She strained her ears, listening for any hint of movement, any indication that Gorman was waiting for her at the top of the stairs, that he might descend at any moment and catch her in her trespass. All she heard was a low, distant hum, coming from down the dark hallway.

  She didn’t follow it. She took a step in that direction, two, and then she looked up at the top of the stairs again, at the doorway there. She could imagine Gorman standing silently in it, watching her with his moon-face, and she shook her head and ascended the stairs instead.

  Gorman wasn’t there. She looked in every corner, behind every sculpture. She pushed aside the drapes that blocked off his cot, and peered into the bathroom, but he wasn’t anywhere to be found.

  On her second visit, she’d pulled out a camera and tried to snap some photos, but Gorman had stopped her, held his hand in front of the lens and shaken his big head slowly back and forth, as though he was disappointed in her. “These aren’t ready to be shown,” he’d said.

  But he wasn’t there now, and she pulled the camera out of her bag and began taking pictures of the sculptures, hurriedly, furtively. The lighting was bad so she had to use the flash, and every time she raised her face from the viewfinder, every time her eyes adjusted to the light, she expected to see him standing there, ready to admonish her, to snatch the camera from her and smash it on the concrete floor, she wasn’t sure what. But he never appeared.

  Her illicit photography made her feel giddy, and when she ran out of space on her memory card she stumbled to the stairs and down them, her shoes clattering on the metal steps. As she reached the bottom, a sound came from down the dark hall at her back that stopped her in place, froze her blood. A moan. Not ghostly this time, not the sound of an unused door, but a gurgling, pleading sound. A sound that had blood in it, and pain.

  She ran.

  Outside, the day was still blustery, still sunny, but the men at the factory had disappeared. There was nothing anywhere that told her that the city she stood in the middle of was inhabited at all, anything but a carcass now, bereft of whatever life it had once possessed. Far off in the distance she could track what she thought was a single car moving along an overpass, but it might have been her imagination, or a trick of the light. For the first time in her life the idea struck her that maybe the city was empty, that all the windows looked in onto cobwebs and dust.

  She got in her car and drove until she saw people.

  Later on, she explained the moan she’d heard a million ways. Guilty conscience, overactive imagination, the wind. And even if it had been a human voice, as some tiny, inside part of her knew it had, then there were a hundred reasons for it, reasons that were none of her business, that she was better off leaving unexplored.

  She went to the office late, after she was sure that her editor and anyone who knew her would be gone, and pulled up the photos on her computer. As she scrolled through them she expected, as each new image materialized, to see Gorman there, hidden by shadows, just the edge of his profile illuminated by the camera’s flash. But he never appeared. Just his sculptures, their details painted in exquisite relief, every vein, every ridge of muscle preserved, captured. They’re so real, she found herself thinking as she printed off the best of the pictures.

  But they couldn’t be real, could they?

  And upon the red altar there is a red knife

  Inside, the church was bigger than it had appeared from without. The walls were vaulted, and th
ey alternated stripes of black and red. It was, she decided, like being in the belly of a whale, like in Pinocchio, as she watched the walls expand and contract, expand and contract, as though with breath.

  There were scattered pews on either side of her, and ahead, where the altar and the cross would have been in the church back home, there hung a huge heart, suspended in the air and connected to the walls and ceiling by a network of branches, all beating in time to the expansion and contraction of the walls.

  ***

  When she woke up, she slipped out of bed as slowly as she could, so as not to wake Dale, then locked herself in the bathroom and looked through the photos again. She’d taped one to her notepad, a picture of a torso with its chest removed, its innards spilling out, its organs floating up from it on wires. Beneath it she had written—in dark, repeated strokes—This is a map of the universe.

  Of course, she couldn’t remember writing it.

  The next day, after she kissed Dale goodbye when he left for work, she sat at the computer and read about Gunther von Hagens and his plastination method, which had yielded up the Bodies Revealed exhibit that she and Dale had attended, and others all over the world. She looked at picture after picture of human bodies, plasticized and exploded, and she held the photos she’d taken in Gorman’s studio up next to the screen. Gorman’s were different, yes. Different in tone, different in style. But in detail, in execution?

  She shook her head. No way. No way he’d been plasticizing real people, real bodies, and no one had heard about it.

  There was a lot to read about von Hagens, and her searches also led her to the wax anatomical sculptures of Gaetano Giulio Zumbo and to images from the vaults of the Hunterian museum, with circulatory systems shellacked to wooden doors. Before she knew it, darkness had fallen outside the apartment and rain was slashing against the windows. Thunder boomed and rattled the glass, and she looked up to see that her phone showed that she’d missed a call. It was set on vibrate, but she’d been so absorbed in the macabre images she hadn’t seen it light up, hadn’t noticed it moving.