Cosmocopia (3 page)

As expected, Malaspina’s husky digitized voice recited merely her name before the chime. But even that tinny mechanical reproduction of her voice almost unnerved him. After some stuttering, he got his request across.

“Velly, my sweet, my forever girl. I need to see you. For both our sakes, for the art we made between us, please come to my home. You know the way. Tomorrow night, if you can—if I ever meant anything to you.”

Lazorg terminated the call before he got maudlin, or more so.

He strode boldly to the easel holding his final canvas and unconcealed it. Under the influence of the drug, the mere penciled lines grew luminous and summoned up the tactile sensations of caressing Malaspina’s curves.

She would come. Tomorrow. He knew it with certitude, before all certitude drained away for another day.

The next evening, Lazorg began consuming the drug as soon as Mrs. Compton had shut the door behind her. He knew now, he thought, how to pace himself for the optimal effect. But desirous of attaining the ultimate edge of his performance, he added a grain or two beyond the previous trials.

The extra jolt had him pacing irritably through the forequarters of the big house for hours, awaiting the inevitable ringing of the front doorbell.

Midnight came and went, and no Malaspina. Lazorg bolstered himself again and again with crumbs from the crimson cake, beyond all previous usage.

She must come! She must!

At two AM the bell sounded.

Lazorg composed himself with some effort, then went to receive his muse.

An autumnal blast sneaked past the visitor first, chilling Lazorg’s old bones. Then Velina Malaspina half tumbled across the threshold, caught herself with giggles, finally straightened. Her familiar vanilla-based scent bore grace notes of metabolized booze.

The woman was bigger than Lazorg, always had been, a Juno. Masses of black curls, wide mouth, pert nose, dark eyes. Buxom, well-padded, ripe for grabbing. Tonight she spilled out of a frothy party frock and open-toed shoes, a gape-fronted abbreviated fur coat her only concession to the November chill.

Her voice when it came from her frogmouth was hoarse from smoke and liquor, her words sloppy.

“Well, well, well, the creature walks!”

In her overwhelming presence at last, Lazorg strove to ignore her insult. “Yes, Velly, I walk and talk—and even paint again!”

Malaspina dropped awkwardly into a chair, splaying her legs immodestly. Her oblate white thighs channeled Lazorg’s attention to a glimpse of her bare origin of the world.

“Why’d you make me come here tonight, Frankie? I didn’t really want to. After the way you looked in the hospital—But your voice—It had some of the old magic and force in it.”

Lazorg stepped closer to the chair, so that he could presume to touch her bare wrist. She allowed it. “You’re right, dear. I have my skills back, my strength. We can finish our last project together. It will be a masterpiece, I know it!”

Puzzlement clouded Malaspina’s features. “Our last project? What was it?”

Lazorg was hurt and stunned. “You—you really don’t remember? My
Origin of the World
…”

Velina Malaspina brushed away his concern with a sloppy wave of her hand, breaking contact with Lazorg’s fingers on her wrist. “Oh, that was all so long ago! And you know I could never keep all your silly titles straight.”

“Well, come to the studio and I’ll show you then.”

With more giggles and some little effort, Malaspina managed to stand. Lazorg offered her his arm, but she jerked away.

“You’re not getting back into my pants, you know. That’s all over with now!”

“I’m sad, of course, but I understand. Even before my stroke, I sensed our relationship changing. But I’d be happy if you just consented to model again for me.”

Malaspina began to trot in a wavery fashion on her high heels down the hall, taking the familiar path to the studio. “Let’s see this unborn masterpiece!”

As she approached the studio, Malaspina said, “What’s that funny smell?”

So used to the aroma of the vision scarab powder, Lazorg had to think a moment to catch her reference.

“Oh, just a new pigment I’ve been experimenting with.”

“Smells like burnt hair and witch hazel to me.”

Lazorg caught up with her at the studio door. While he fumbled with the light switch, Malaspina had already crossed the room and whisked the cloth off the easel.

Together they contemplated the embryonic painting. Lazorg hoped she would see in it all the potential he saw. But even to his eyes now, under the force of the judgmental presence of an additional witness, the barely commenced painting looked abortive. If only he dared take another flake of drug to reaffirm his vision! But he had already had too much. …

Malaspina turned to confront Lazorg, her back to the canvas.

“Why do you have to paint me so—so jagged and chopped up! No one will even be able to tell it’s me! You might as well be using a side of beef with a hole gouged into it for your model!”

“No, no, that’s not true! Your essence will come across, your spirit, even though the outer you is distorted and deranged for a good reason—”

“Forget it, Frankie. I’m not interested in modeling for you anymore. I’ve got another gig. I work with someone else nowadays. Someone who makes me look beautiful in his paintings, the way you once used to. Maybe you’ve even heard of him. His name’s Rokesby Marrs.”

The name of his detested, talentless rival raised a red curtain of blood before Lazorg’s eyes. His thoughts ceased to be intelligible to himself, became a chaotic whirlpool of rage and hatred. Lazorg felt himself frozen in place like one of Medusa’s victims.

“You’ll never paint me again, Frankie. Never.”

Those brazenly merciless words shattered his immobility.

Velina Malaspina was by the studio door now, and suddenly Lazorg felt himself gripping his cane, as if it had leapt from its resting place by the workbench where the brick of powder resided, and into his hand. But he held it by its rubber foot and shaft, not its curved handle.

Malaspina’s back was toward the painter. She had already dismissed him from her flighty consciousness.

A sudden access of power, a sudden impulse toward action, surged through Lazorg’s arm, and he swung his cane with all possible force.

The cane connected with a sickening sound against Velina Malaspina’s head, and she went down to the floor like a chainsawed tree.

In the welter of his rage, Lazorg was unsure whether she had survived the blow to her skull. But by the time his unseeing fury abated, as he sat straddling her torso, cane pressed two-handed like a bar deeply into the soft, already mottled flesh of her throat, she had definitely ceased to be alive.

Lazorg struggled weakly to his feet, employing the cane by its blood-slicked handle. He staggered back from the beautiful corpse, found the stool by his workbench. He dropped the accursed cane to the floor, and raised that hand up into his sight.

The smear of Velly’s blood across his palm triggered in him an abrupt cold epiphany whose dream logic embodied the utmost clarity—at least to Lazorg’s drug-fueled reasoning.

“You’ll never paint me again, Frankie. Never.”

The first thing to do was regain some strength. Lazorg ingested a dram of beetle powder. Instantly he felt his world and horizons expand.

Dragging Velina Malaspina across the room to his broad, waist-high worktable, Lazorg caused her to lose both shoes. But this did not matter, as he needed her naked.

With no little effort, he contrived to get her slack body up on the hard, paint-spattered surface, scored crazily with shallow cuts from years of matting work. As if undressing a somnolent child, he stripped her of her coat and her dress, into which her bountiful breasts were merely taped.

Utterly nude, seen from an angle that concealed her wounds, Velina Malaspina looked like a dreaming goddess.

Lazorg hastened back to his high workbench. He ate more powder. Hurry, hurry! Mrs. Compton showed up precisely at eight every morning. What would happen to him then, he neither knew nor cared. But he must be finished with his task.

Assembling the necessary materials, Lazorg began to compound a special paint, finally employing the scarab pigment as Fulgencio had wished, for good or ill.

Lazorg worked the organic pigment into the raw oil base mixture with aching arms, folding it over and over itself to achieve a smooth isotropic shade, like the monochrome sunset of some far-off realm.

Gorgeous, gorgeous! Never a hue like this before. Almost not part of the spectrum.

The volatiles in the mixture disbursed the uncanny scent of the powder throughout the room. Merely inhaling this aroma gave Lazorg strength. He hardly needed to ingest the powder, which was well, since he used it all in concocting a huge tub of paint.

Lazorg paused when the compound was finished just long enough to lick the last grains of powder from the foil wrapper. Then he grabbed a handful of brushes and the tub of paint, and moved to the corpse.

The paint clung to the brush dipped into it as if alive and eager.

The first stroke went across Velina Malaspina’s open sightless eyes, sealing them behind a crimson scrim, turning eyeballs to pupil-less cherries and rendering them more artful than reality.

Lazorg painted the rest of her face with just a few confident passes. Then he went to work on her hair, plastering it with clots of paint to her skull and neck and shoulders. The effect was not ideal, but what mattered was to coat her entirely.

Down her long exquisite body, repairing the wounded neck first, then the chest, the breasts and their nipples, lifting the massive glands to get underneath. Stomach, hips, the corpse all the while assuming an enameled perfection.

He spread her cooling, stiffening legs and painted all her sex and crotch. Wherever the paint flowed, it assumed a coherent shell-like quality, as if he were not merely coating the women but embalming her like some Egyptian technician.

After Lazorg had devoted care and reverence to each toe and the soles of her feet, he realized he would have to turn Velly over to finish the job. She’d smear, but he’d repair that.

So with immense struggle, splotching his own clothing and exposed skin with paint from her body, he flipped her, and began painting her dorsal side, the well-defined blades of her shoulders, the roundels of her buttocks.

Again, the struggle, the awkward moments when she painted him with her body, and now she lay again on her back.

Lazorg fretted that now the coat of paint on her back would be mussed, but there was no getting around that. For a brief moment he contemplated flipping her in an endless loop, painting and repainting what was marred each time from his bottomless bucket until he died of inanition. But in the end he contented himself with merely touching up her front, rendering her a perfect candy-apple eidolon.

His task finished, Lazorg suddenly felt all the accumulated weight and stress of his mad exertions. He dropped bucket and brush, staggered backwards a step or two, then sideways, then forward, to fall upon his final masterpiece in a last embrace.

Lazorg anticipated the feel of the tacky paint, beneath which rapidly coarsening flesh would resist his fall.

But he never received these sensory impressions.

Instead, he found himself dropping onto and into a woman-shaped hole, an anthropomorphic crimson portal that opened into an infinite crimson tunnel, down which he plummeted forever, too stunned even to shriek.

PART TWO

2. Dweller in the Bonecellar

CRUTCHSUMP KNEW THAT A TROVE of valuable fresh bones awaited her on the Shulgin Mudflats at the edge of Sidetrack City, where the metropolis met the waters of the Rodinian Sea. The myriad shimmering shifflets would have mortally spawned by now, as they did every year at this time, and their exhausted luminescent flesh would have quickly evanesced, leaving behind their delicate skeletons. These lightweight traceries of calcium and rare minerals awaited any bonepickers experienced enough to navigate the sinkholes, grapple-gnaws and mockmucks of the flats.

Normally, Crutchsump would have already shared the generous harvest with three or four other veteran bonepickers, laboriously earning a minim toward her continued sparse survival.

But not this season.

This season, the Shulgin Mudflats were haunted.

Haunted by an otherworldly monster.

Few had actually seen this beast up close. Yet its presence was incontestable.

Mournful wailings issued from the Mudflats by day and by night, solemn heart-rending ululations. From Huid Avenue, separated by a labyrinth of tall pouf-topped reeds from the Mudflats, passersby at night had witnessed the silhouette of a naked shambling figure—face-naked as well as body-naked!—crashing aimlessly through the reeds. The fruit and gorgit vendors along the Golden Boardwalk reported inexplicable thefts of their wares, victuals doubtlessly stolen by the hungry monster.

All these manifestations of something uncanny kept people away from the Mudflats—not that many had cause to trespass there in the best of times, save in search of bones or other natural materials, driftwood and miscellaneous seawrack. The Mudflats produced nothing wholesome by way of foodstuffs.

But forbidding monster or no, Crutchsump was, day by depressing day, nerving herself up to attempt the shifflet harvest.

Her expenses and her depleted savings drove her to such a risk.

Not that her lifestyle was extravagant. Far from it.

The monthly rent on her three shabby basement rooms amounted to only thirty scintillas. She subsisted contentedly on a simple diet of quorn and livewater. Her clothing consisted of various ragged garments secured from several charities. She boasted only a single caul—an unfashionable model several years old, its formerly rickracked eyeholes all frayed—which she washed daily and mended as needed. As for Pirkle—well, her pet managed quite well on alley scavengings and handouts from local merchants.

Now, however, Crutchsump had reached the limits of her economy. All the bones she had of late managed to accumulate from the streets of Sidetrack City—haunting abbatoirs, rummaging through mucky waste tips, cadging at back doors of diners—had been cleaned and sold to the wholesalers in the bone trade, the businessmen one level up from freelancers like Crutchsump, those who sorted and classified and packaged the osseous relics for subsequent sale to manufacturers of various stripes: the glue and gelatin factories, the corset- and button- and armor-makers, the producers of oil, char, ash and meal. The room where normally Crutchsump stored her haul was empty now, only greasy floor and walls and a fading redolence left behind to denote its function, while the tools of her trade—wire brushes, delicate picks and awls, a colony of hungry carrion ants—gathered dust.