I was answered by a grating laugh. “You could say that,” he said.
I took my flashlight from my backpack, snapped it on, and aimed it into the cellar.
At the bottom of the stairs was one of his paintings.
So at least some of the stories were true. My romantic images flared up again. I imagined him barricaded in his basement after the wolves came, producing what might be his last testament to the world. There would be a canvas down there, a
“I’m coming down,” I said.
I was greeted by damp silence.
I advanced, drawing out my ax. My foot tested each rotting step for strength.
There was a damp, close wall at the bottom of the steps. Against this the painting I had seen rested. The canvas looked old, a study of fruit on a table surrounding a green vase filled with tired daisies. It was not particularly distinguished. It looked like the kind of thing any art student might turn out.
Dusty light filtered in from the cellar windows. At the back of the basement I heard a rattling cough. I advanced deliberately to see a separate room back there, something like my own cellar workshop.
“Where are you?” I said.
“Here,” he answered from the small room. He laughed weakly, breaking into a cough.
I made my way to the doorway.
Another painting rested against a stack of cardboard boxes. It, too, was a still life: apples and a torn loaf of bread arranged on a checkered tablecloth. Completely undistinguished. I began to despair of his talent.
“Coming?” he called.
“Yes,” I said, tentatively.
And then I saw the painting.
It was The Woman. It had to be. A thin, longish face. Serious mouth. The hair, cut in a pageboy style popular in the thirties, emphasized the long, coltish look of the face. The eyes, dark, deep, were knowing, smiling, if wryly, where the mouth was not.
This portrait was just inside the room, propped slightly askew on an easel that had been broken and mended.
The room was crammed with paintings. Another, more surreal version of the woman’s portrait hung on the back wall of the studio, illuminated by a wash of sour yellow sunlight from a dirty basement window. Other frames cut off its lower portion, and canvases nearly blocked the doorway, but the eyes had been enlarged unnaturally and had lost their amusement.
“Come in,” he said.
I stepped through the doorway.
My foot hit something. There on the floor was the body of the wolf he had fought. It was chewed half away. The lower torso was cleaned white bone, the upper fairly intact except for dry gouge marks around the face, and a curiously empty and large wound on the left temple.
“Where are you, Cave?”
“Here.”
He sounded very close. I didn’t see him, but then a hand-like object moved near the back of the room. It looked as though it was covered with a thick black strip of blanket. It was not. What Cave motioned toward me with was his fur-covered front paw.
Brandishing my ax, I moved warily around a stand of blank canvases.
The rest of Cave edged into view.
He was a wolf.
He smiled. It was the smile of a demon held painfully at bay. At any moment, the bright yellow at the edges of his eyes might fill in, sending him from man to animal.
“You’ve fought it,” I said with wonder.
He laughed hollowly. “For a little while.” Each word sounded as though it was battled for. “Don’t worry,” he continued, “I can’t get at you.”
I saw what he meant. He was bound tightly, expertly around the middle and around three of four limbs with wire cable. Only his head and right arm could move. All the roping led back to a thick water pipe behind him.
“It took me the better part of a day to do this,” he said. His slow, bitter laughter came. “I had much encouragement”—he made a movement with his hand, indicating his head—“not to complete the job.”
“It must be horrible,” I said.
“It’s easy,” he said quickly. But I saw the lie in this as his eyes brightened and his breathing quickened; a low guttural sound began in his throat, which he slowly brought under control. After a time his eyes cleared and he regarded me again. “Staying alive is the hard part. Every moment I live I’m afraid of slipping and becoming that thing”—he indicated the dead wolf in the doorway—“again. For even a moment, that would be unbearable.”
His half-mad, half-lucid eyes studied me. “You’re the poet, aren’t you? I knew who you were when you moved in. I’ve read your work.” A bare, distant, fleeting smile crossed his lips. “I remember the day I chased you from my front gate. I even thought of befriending you.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Again the fleeting, human smile. “Impossible. I had a reputation to keep. Besides, could I trust you any more than anyone else?”
I saw a different and completely human form of madness hovering around his face; the madness that had kept him alone since 1938.
My eyes were drawn to the paintings surrounding us. Beauty filled that tiny, damp room and demanded to be attended to.
What surprised me was that there were no more portraits of The Woman. The rest were of natural things: odd, weather-twisted trees, waves of tall grass, the objects on a kitchen table made transcendent by the light and shadow and ingenious use of El Greco-like color he brought to their composition. These were nothing like the two works I had seen outside this little room; I could well understand their exclusion.
My eyes were drawn back to the portrait of The Woman on the back wall. I had noticed the difference in the eyes immediately, but now, an examination of the entire portrait revealed the true differences. The second painting made an odd and chilling pair with the one on the easel. The formal beauty of the latter was mirrored in the waxen shapelessness of the former. The woman’s face had been pulled like taffy, the elongation of her features heightened to an unsettling degree, turning coltishness to monstrous animalism, the baring of the twisted soul, an almost—and this was ironic considering the present circumstances—
“Looks a bit like a self-portrait now, doesn’t it?” Cave said. “But I would have thought you of all people could guess the truth about her,” he said, with a guttural laugh that sounded almost mad.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re an incurable romantic, it seems. You wanted to believe the stories. Bart, the grocery clerk, told me everything I ever needed in the way of gossip, you know. And you swallowed what you had heard from Briggs and the rest of them about my lovely Grace.”
He laughed again, a sound like a file across metal, and his hands clenched and unclenched against his bonds. “I threw her out. My brother never touched her. He was a fool, but not that much of one. She was a beautiful but empty woman. I told her to leave in 1938. I was being sucked into her. I would either devote my life to Grace, and her constant happiness, or to my work. She was purely selfish, Blake. She would not let me have both. That was all there was to it.”
Again, Cave studied me. Then he asked, in a curiously soft tone, “I want you to do something for me.”
“What is it?”
He pointed to the ax in my hand. “I want you to kill me.”
I must have gasped. “I can’t do that.”
“Two nights ago,” he said, “I was working when the sky lit up. I ignored what was happening. When the lights went out I lit a candle. Sometime before morning the thing in the doorway paid me a visit. I killed it, but not before it had clawed away a good bit of my shoulder.
“I want you to understand what happened to me, Blake. I lay recovering from my wound and a curious thing happened. I felt the oddest sensations of my life.”
