He rubbed his chin, the lip biting now chronic.
‘Have you ever felt rain before it starts? You know, smelled it or tasted it on the air, and just knew?’
‘Of course. Hasn’t everyone to some extent?’
‘It feels like that, like something is coming, only it isn’t rain.’
He fell abruptly silent after that and Mabeth was glad to be rid of his company the instant she was finished. Levio gave a curt wave as she took her leave, a vacant look in his eyes not so different from Gethik. He looked almost hollow.
Something is coming… only it isn’t rain.
The words followed her after she left the murder scene, and so too the scent of lavender, faint on the air. Levio must have smelled it too, but neither spoke of it. To do so would only make it more real.
The paintings would be her salvation. The restoration of the saints, and the cleansing of her soul. She returned to her domicile, the idea of indulging in such pious work soothing.
‘No interruptions,’ she ordered, and Gethik nullified the fonogram before retreating into his alcove.
Mabeth set to work, revivifying old pigment, giving it vibrancy and depth. Purification through art. The brush paused in her hand…
‘I have to know,’ she murmured as a deep obsession took hold.
I am a sailor, and they the siren. I shall go gratefully to their rocks.
A scalpel replaced the brush, and Mabeth’s attention turned to the as yet unrevealed and the promise of the unknown, the image in pentimento. She worked feverishly, almost in frenzy, the scrapings like flecks of skin flayed from a corpse. Mabeth barely noticed. The work came easily, paint peeling away without resistance, as if what lay below wanted to be found. She would let it. She wanted it, too. More than anything.
After several hours, a fresh vista began to materialise beneath the veneer of the first. Not bones, but an Eden of lush and exotic flowers, of strange crystal and dappled sunlight… And something her eyes did not want to acknowledge. And in that stark moment of revelation, a sudden inertialess lurch seized upon her and she realised her mistake, her terrible mistake.
It was…
‘Paradise…’ rasped Mabeth, and fell into a deep, fathomless dream.
She is walking barefoot, the dew cold and refreshing against her skin. A grove had risen up around her, swollen with strange trees that are ripe with luscious, heart-shaped fruit. She is tempted to take a bite and reaches for the branch’s bounty, but something stops her…
In the distance, thunder, or what sounds like thunder. And a white-noise susurration, like a cataract rushing over a cave mouth. She turns, a prey animal alerted to the scent of a predator, and sees him.
In shadow at first, the strange scented arbours of the forest hide him from her sight and she has to twist to see.
He is naked, apart from the modesty cloth around his waist. A study in anatomical perfection, almost deific. Unreal, a statue given perfect animation. His muscles are carved as if from pink opal, and a mane cascades around his shoulders like spun silver. Violet eyes glint and flash, alive. Amused? Desirous? She flushes at the thought, terror and arousal warring like belligerent nations.
In that instant of connection, she knows him. Or rather, what he represents.
He is the paragon of pleasures, a lord of excess, and he is here for her. I know you, he says, though his lips are unmoving. I am you. And for a moment, it is bliss… until the blades unsheathe and the hooks unfurl and she is pinioned and torn. Undressed of her skin, it flutters away like taffeta, like flightless wings.
And he smiles that over-wide smile, his teeth like pearls, and the scent of lavender overwhelms her…
She doesn’t scream, she can barely breathe. Something heavy is pressing against her chest, a noose taut around her throat. She thrashes. A lamp shatters as she kicks it. Absinthe spills in a milky flood. The drapes tear at her grasping fingers and the sunlight crashes in.
Am I dying?
A hot poker in her chest, jabbing at the coals of her organs.
Please…
Then relief, her bindings loosed in an instant. The pain gone.
Mabeth stares, blinking in the harsh red morning. Its light brings revelation. The paintings are not three, they are one. Where the obfuscation of newer paint has been excised to reveal the old, she sees paradise stretched over each canvas. A triptych of pulchritudinous gardens. Vigorous, staggering, like a foreign country to her senses…
Seeded with bones and nourished with blood, Eden springing vibrantly from the slaughter.
The juxtaposition is so incongruous as to be almost indiscernible.
A familiar grove stands out, partially revealed beneath flaking pigment. Its strange trees are burgeoning with heart-shaped fruit. No, not fruit. Hearts. Living, beating human hearts. And they are not trees, they are people, rooted and cruciform.
Mabeth recoiled, the scalpel she didn’t know she was still holding clattering to the floor as she shuffled away on her backside, kicking madly, arms scrabbling. The wall was solid at her back, and she could flee no further. Her gaze was transfixed on the paintings, at the parts still to be scraped away. At horrors yet unknown.
For three days, she didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t sleep.
Until Levio contacted her again.
Fires lit the city, the smoke thick but unable to hide the blood-red sky. It had turned a deeper crimson with the onset of night and echoed with the shrieking of desperate men.
Mabeth did her best to avoid the crowds. After alighting from the maglev, she and Gethik took side streets and lesser known byways. It scared her, the rioting, but that fear had been dulled by something darker. It called still, but she ignored it. An effort of will she could not sustain.
Levio looked skeletal as he waited with two armoured peacekeepers beneath the sepulchre’s portico. Deep rings sunk his eyes, like small pebbles at the bottom of a well. He finished a smoke stick, crushing it beneath his heel where it joined
