From Black Rooms (6 page)

switched back to even, fluid French to pacify him. Yes.
My name is Natalie Lindstrom, and I hope we can work
well together despite--

"A
mirror." Munch stood with Natalie's arms held out
from her torso, as if they were drenched in muck that he did not want to smear on the man's dress shirt she wore.

"G
ive me a mirror."

If she had had control of her lungs, Natalie would have sighed. Monsieur Munch, I real y don't think-"A mirror! Now!" Her voice grew shril with his eagerness, his dread.

Natalie weighed her options. She had deliberately avoided including any reflective surfaces when

outfitting the makeshift studio, in hopes that she could delay the shock her gender might have on the artist. To fetch the mirror Munch demanded, she would have to permit him to leave the locked garage. If Dad and Cal ie came home while the crazy Norwegian was wandering the house in her body...

It's still early yet, she told herself even though it was
actual y quite late. Natalie knew that if she alienated Munch he might refuse to col aborate with her, and she couldn't afford to lose this commission.

All right, monsieur, she said in French. Please do as I
say...

She instructed Munch on how to find the dead-bolt key, which she'd hidden beneath a coffee can fil ed with paintbrushes on the workbench. When he'd unlocked the door, Natalie guided him out of the garage and up the condo's stairs to the master bedroom, which had a ful -length mirror mounted on the closet door. She hoped that being upstairs might also give her a couple of minutes to get rid of the painter if she heard her father and daughter come through the front door.

As part of her effort to minimize the impact of her appearance, Natalie had dressed androgynously in an untucked white business shirt she'd borrowed from her dad and a pair of baggy gray slacks. Although she'd switched back to her shoulder-length, dusty-blond wig--the one she always wore at home, because it was the closest to her natural color--she'd tied it back into a bun to make it feel less feminine. But judging from Edvard Munch's husky breathing as he switched on the bedroom light and advanced toward her reflection, she might as wel have been wearing a French maid outfit. It occurred to Natalie that, since he'd only been permitted to work with male Violets, she was probably the first live woman he'd seen since his passing.
Oh, swell, she thought. He's gonna lose it.

In the mirror, Natalie saw her eyes and mouth widen with his fascination. Her hands trembled as he raised them to the level of her chest, the palms hovering a few inches away from her slight bosom as if held at bay by repulsive magnetic force. "P-pardon me,

mademoisel e," he stammered. "M-may I...?" Her fingers quivered over the buttons of the shirt she wore.

Natalie tensed. The last thing she wanted was a dead perv groping her to get his jol ies. The Lord is my
shepherd, she began instinctively. I shall not want--
As his control began to slip, Munch raised her hands, struggling to speak with lips that were growing numb.

"N-nno! Puh-puh-please...I m-mean no offense. I-I-I w-want to draw you."

The promise of new artwork made Natalie break off the protective mantra. Wouldn't it be worth giving the crazy Norwegian a cheap thril just to get a picture out of him? It was fifty grand, after al .

You're thinking with your pocketbook again, she
groaned to herself, but resumed her spectator mantra. Her violet eyes became half-lidded as Edvard Munch watched in the silvered glass while he undid the shirt's top buttons with her thin fingers. Natalie had considered leaving her bra off because of its unmasculine

constriction, but was glad she'd chosen to wear it, particularly when she heard the ragged sigh Munch exhaled as he exposed the cleft of her decol etage. Quivering, Munch grazed the swel of one breast with her fingertip, a demure gesture that triggered a flood of associations that nearly subsumed Natalie in their tide. She cowered with him in humiliation at the Parisian prostitute who laughed at the adolescent ineptitude of his lovemaking, shook with his rage at the cruel

dismissal of Eva Mudocci's insouciant smile, shared the claustrophobic revulsion as Tul a Larsen wrapped him in her desperate, clinging embrace. His lust for the female form he saw in the mirror only incited memories of how such objects of desire had betrayed him in the past.

Yet beneath Munch's loathing lurked tenderness and longing. The somber cast of Natalie's sculpted, oval face reminded him of both his sister Laura, who went mad and died in a sanitarium, and their sibling Inger--an attractive but severe-looking woman who remained his confidante throughout his life. He also saw in Natalie the ghost of his older sister, Sophie--the almost translucent pal or of her skin, the fragility of her wasting frame as she withered from consumption. Even the specter of a mother Edvard could not remember because she died when he was only five resurfaced in the maternal figure frozen in the glass before him. The pathological y shy and sensitive painter yearned for the love of women--for the completion that femininity could give his crippled psyche--but it remained

forever unattainable and alien to him.

Natalie could feel adoration and contempt col iding inside him. Afraid the artist might explode into

violence, she almost launched into her protective mantra again--when her brow suddenly smoothed to

newborn blankness. Munch slowly turned her head

from one profile to the other, waved her hand, undid the bun of her hair, gawping like a monkey in wonder that the reflection mimicked his every movement. For the first time, he viewed the image in the mirror not as an object to be coveted, but as himself. Thinking out loud, he whispered something in Norwegian that Natalie did not understand.

Pardon me, monsieur--what did you say? she asked in
French.

"There is no difference," he repeated in kind for her benefit, his tone stil dreamy with disbelief. "There never was."

It took Natalie a moment to comprehend the enormity of his revelation. The gulf that Edvard Munch had always imagined between the sexes had ceased to exist. Stripped of their anatomy and the attendant societal baggage, the souls of men and women were kindred

spirits, each gender ascribing its own vanities and faults, neediness and selfishness, to the other. Just as dying had cured him of his dread of death, Munch

needed to become a woman to realize that the creature he'd feared was not a vampire or vixen but a projection of his own insecurities.

"Quickly...the easel! I must have the easel here, now!" Munch gesticulated as if he could summon the item by wil alone, for he seemed reluctant to tear his gaze from the reflection.

Natalie hesitated. What time was it? She'd lost track. Seized by obsession, Munch could spend al night

working on a painting once he'd started. Dad and Cal ie might come back at any minute, and the master

bedroom did not have a lock to keep them out.

Why don't we make a sketch today while the picture is
fresh in your mind? she suggested, hoping Munch did
not take offense. Then we can refine it over the next few
days.

He swept the air with her hand in impatience. "Yes, yes! But we must start now."

Without waiting for her consent, he hastened back to the garage and lugged the easel up the stairs along with the sketchbook and a rack of pastels. Natalie barely managed to get him to shut the bedroom door before he commenced attacking a blank sheet of paper with

charcoal slashes of chalk.

Munch darted her eyes between the mirror's reflection and the image forming on the sketch pad, posing her head and shoulders in three-quarter profile and

comparing the tonalities and chiaroscuro of the subject and its portrait. Natalie had no choice but to watch in uneasy fascination as the picture darkened with detail, its features rendered with the expressionist's deliberate harshness and surreal distortion. Of al the artists with whom she'd worked, Munch was the only one who'd

ever drawn her. Except the woman in the picture wasn't her. The face was hers, as was the unbuttoned man's shirt, but the grim set of the mouth and the cold incandescence of the eyes belonged to Edvard Munch. The woman in the portrait curled a hand around the left lapel of the shirt in an ambiguous gesture. Was the artist peeling back his male veneer to reveal to the viewer the femininity beneath, or was he hastening to hide the female heart he had unintentional y exposed to the world's derision?

Natalie was so transfixed at watching the master at work that the sketch was nearly complete before she noted the reflection of the bedroom door in the mirror. She had made sure that Munch shut the door when they came in, but it now stood ajar, with two inches of darkness between it and the jamb.

I think that's good enough for today, don't you? she
interjected, now acutely aware that she stood there with her bra bared for al to see.

Munch spat some Nordic curse from her lips and

slapped the chalk back in the rack. "It is not even close to being finished!" the notorious perfectionist grumbled in French. "We must complete the sketch tomorrow, then begin the painting immediately thereafter."
Of course, monsieur. Tomorrow. The bedroom door
hovered at the periphery of her vision, and Natalie monitored it with apprehension as she recited the Twenty-third Psalm.

The second the protective mantra had swept Edvard Munch from her mind, she held her shirtfront closed with one hand and rushed to yank open the door. The gasp and scuttling footsteps in the hal she heard confirmed her worst suspicions.

"C
allie!"

Her nine-year-old had made it as far as the top of the stairs and teetered on the top step as if debating whether to pretend that she hadn't heard her mother's cal . She evidently decided that bolting would only get her in more trouble, so she faced Natalie with her most

winsome expression. "Grandpa sent me up here to look for you," she said quickly, brushing brown bangs out of her violet eyes. "I'l tel him you're busy--"

"Wait." Before her daughter could escape, Natalie stalked down the hal , fumbling to button enough of the shirt to keep herself decent. She knelt until she was eye level with Cal ie. "How long were you watching?"

"I just got here." Her gaze strayed.

Natalie grew stern with her. "Tel the truth. How long?" Her daughter's mouth wriggled. "Only a couple of minutes. Jeez."

"W
hat did you see?"

A worry worse than getting in trouble aged Cal ie's smal , round face. "You were drawing a picture... Natalie felt the stone in her stomach grow heavier.

"And?"

"A Who was inside you." This time, Cal ie peered straight at her mother, eyes bright with anxiety. "It sounded like a bad Who."

Natalie nodded, her head drooping in guilt. Cal ie's favorite storybook had always been Dr. Seuss's Horton
Hears a Who! about the elephant who could talk with
tiny people no one else could see. Cal ie thought of Horton as a Violet like herself, and the Whos were like the souls who knocked and sometimes inhabited her. Not al of the Whos were nice. Some, like Vincent Thresher, were very bad indeed. The serial kil er had only possessed Cal ie on a couple of occasions, but the taint of horror and perversion that he'd left in her mind had driven the girl into counseling with Dr. Steinmetz. Her therapy had lasted three years so far, with no end in sight.

Natalie groped for a way to explain the difference between Vincent Thresher and Edvard Munch. "It was a Who," she began, "but not a bad one."

"Was it someone you know?" Cal ie's face brightened with misplaced hope. "Someone like Grandma Nora?"

"Not exactly." Natalie heaved a sigh. She had gone out of her way to keep her little girl from witnessing her work, hoping that Cal ie might grow up to enjoy a relatively normal existence--one that did not require her to lasso ghosts for a living. In training her daughter to cope with her Violet abilities, Natalie avoided teaching her about spectator mantras and summoning. Cal ie herself had figured out how to cal her dead father and grandmother back from limbo, a practice Natalie had permitted but did not encourage except in cases of emergency. Since Dan had gone to the Place Beyond four years ago, Grandma Nora had been the

only soul Cal ie al owed inside her head. After

forbidding her daughter to summon strangers, how

could Natalie explain why she did so herself?

"Sometimes, honey, people who lived in the past have knowledge or skil s that we want to...bring back," she said. "I make money to pay for our house and food by letting those Whos into my mind so I can talk with them and work with them."

Cal ie's voice became very smal . "Couldn't you make money some other way?"

Natalie grimaced. When she quit the Corps, the

government had blackbal ed her in retaliation, making it nearly impossible for her to get regular employment.

"Maybe, honey, but it's very hard to make enough money, and people pay more when you have a special skil --"

"But you like it. That's why you do it, isn't it?" Though her mouth opened to answer "No," Natalie found she couldn't muster the denial. Like being a freak? Like having dead souls invade her head like poor relations moving in? Don't be ridiculous. It was

horrendous to relive the final agonies of the deceased. Any sensible person could see that a Violet's life was tragic, nightmarish, pitiable...or so Natalie had believed since childhood.

Yet, only a few minutes ago, hadn't she watched,

enthusiastic and enthral ed, while Edvard Munch used her as an instrument to create a new masterpiece more than fifty years after his death? Even when the Corps condemned her to the bleak, gut-wrenching toil of homicide investigations--the daily devastation of sharing murder victims' anguish--hadn't the work

gratified her need for purpose? Didn't she get a

surreptitious thril when she solved a case only she could solve? When she caught a kil er only she could catch?

Did she like summoning the dead? Perhaps not. But it was the thing that made her unique, that shaped her life and gave it meaning. To say that she hated being a Violet was tantamount to saying she hated herself.