The pictures were definitely different, every one of them that he could make comparisons for. In the prints he held, the woman and the creatures, both the ones that emerged from the air and the water, were painted as innocents. They had wide eyes, almost perfectly round (
Now, though, that had changed. The woman looked past the viewer, her eyes no longer open wide but narrowed, focused on something over the viewer’s shoulder. The undersea creatures, although not completely anthropomorphic, had flickers of recognisable emotion painted across their features, mouths twisting in anger or frustration, arms and fins and tentacles curling around the woman not in support but in possessive twists, as though holding her back and preventing her from escaping.
The later pictures in the series, the ones with the woman being elevated into the sky and surrounded by things that might have been angels, or man’s better nature freed from the shackles of the flesh, showed the woman still looking back out of the pictures, still staring at something beyond Parry, beyond the Grand itself.
The angels looked cold, emotionless, their hands taut upon the woman’s body but the expressions on their faces supercilious and dismissive.
Parry had reached the end of the corridor, had studied each of the pictures as best he could in torchlight, and he was convinced that they were the work of Gravette. They were technically skilled, full of subtleties and tight, hidden details that only emerged when you looked at them for longer periods, but they weren’t the pictures that had been nailed behind cheap boards of wood fifteen or more years back.
Had the owners pulled some kind of switch? But why? What would be the point, when they could have merely taken the pictures? He’d have to tell Mandeville, let the owners know, assuming they weren’t already aware of the changes.
He made to go back down the corridor when he stopped. Was something moving down there, in the tar-like shadows that pooled along the edges of the floor? And there? There?
Everywhere?
As Parry watched, something glistening detached from one of the pictures and drifted to the floor in the centre of the corridor. It rippled and swelled as it fell, floated really, dancing in the air as more fell from every picture along the corridor.
Soon the corridor was full of the things, gossamer and glimmering. Some of them moved along the floor after they descended, slithering to the edges of the walls and joining the shadows, thickening them, making them pulse and bulge.
It was oddly beautiful, the descents drifting, slow, tracing gentle parabolas through the corridor before alighting with a touch that appeared as delicate as the spinning of feathers or the kiss of elegant mouths.
Soon, the corridor was full of them, pressing out from the walls, swelled by the arrival of more and more of the things.
In the centre of the corridor, the first shape he had seen was now moving, not to the side but away from him, along the carpeted floor towards the stairway. As it went, it coalesced, drawing in seemingly identical shapes that were standing ahead of it. Parry counted three, four, ten, fourteen, and as they merged the remaining moving shape became more solid, more
Parry made out the curve of buttocks, the sway of full breasts, the outstretching of arms, and the opening of hands, and then something else was moving.
A long tendril came out of the shadow by Parry’s side, solidifying as though it was drawing itself together from the thinner shapes, languidly curling in the air above his head. It tapered down to a delicate point, he saw, trembling as though sniffing the atmosphere. As it broadened, became fatter and more solid, pale discs emerged across its underside, shivering and clenching wetly.
It
Where it had been blank before, the wood now contained a carving of a huge jungle cat, not a tiger or a lion exactly, but a creature that was an amalgam of those and others.
His legs were bleeding, although the tears in his skin didn’t feel deep. Mandeville rolled and then stood, unsteadily, leaning on the wall for support.
The panel in the doorway swayed, making the cat’s face emerge and vanish into the bar’s darkness, as though it was rocking back and forth and considering him quizzically.
From below, in the foyer, came the sound of a distant train, the noise ascending, dopplering and then muffling within the space of a moment.
The other two cats were there, and God knew what else. He looked back up at the waving figure; it had emerged and was now standing at the top of the stairs, still waving, beckoning him upwards.
It was the woman.
Even in the grey light filtering through the glass ceiling, she seemed to glow all colours, casting her illumination about her the way great art did. And she was great art, he understood suddenly, perhaps the greatest there was.
He began to move to her, wincing as he climbed the stairs. Where else could he go?
As he approached, she moved back, returning to the corridor where her glow danced about her like distant, guttering flames. As he reached the corridor entrance, he saw movement beyond her.
At the far end of the third floor, almost lost to the darkness that pooled there like spilled paint, Parry was sitting against the wall as a myriad tentacles clenched about him. The largest was wrapped around his neck, was pulled so taut that the skin either side of the tentacle bulged, bloody and mottled.
The air around Parry was filled with moving, darting shapes, fins lifting and dropping and mouths open wide. As Mandeville watched, a larger shape emerged, conical, mouth agape, and tore into Parry’s side, shaking him like a rag doll, tearing a piece from him and disappearing back into the darkness.
Parry twitched spastically, blood spraying from him but not falling to the floor, instead floating around him, breathed in by the fish and the octopuses and squid and the things without names that scuttled and bobbed and feasted upon him.
Parry managed to twist his head, despite the ever-tightening arm of the octopus that was wrapped around his neck and whose bulbous body was drifting in the air above him. For a moment he was looking directly at Mandeville, his eyes desperate, and then the contact was gone as he was twisted further around.
Mandeville didn’t move. After all, what could he do?
There were none of the angels in the corridor, he suddenly realised, and just as quickly the realisation came that they were only metaphors, not alive in the way that the cats, the train that was in fact a prick, the undersea creatures were. They were intellect and spirituality, not flesh and lusts and desires and passions and things to worship. They weren’t alive in the way that
She was standing in the centre of the corridor, her arms outstretched as though to show him the things that belonged to her, and they
She was approaching him again now, moving down the corridor as though carried by currents that he could not feel, moving towards him, beautiful and austere and suddenly he wanted her, was hard and sweating despite