Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“Oh, Jesus,” he said.

The catch in his voice made Isabelle hesitate on the landing. Ahead of her, John straightened up. The hand holding the gun hung loosely at his side. Entering behind him, Isabelle had to immediately turn back outside. She reeled against the banister, scattering clumps of snow from it as she banged into the railing and leaned over it to throw up. The image of what she’d seen was burned into her retinas: a perverted inversion of da Vinci’s famous study, The Proportions of the Human Body, except it was a three-dimensional rendering rather than pen and ink, utilizing a real human being. The man had been nailed naked to the wall, his body slashed and hacked, strips of flesh peeled away to reveal the musculature underneath the skin, blood gathering in a large pool on the floor below the drained corpse.

She vomited until all she could bring up were dry heaves; then she fell to her knees in the snow, head pushed up against one of the railing’s support poles. When John appeared in the doorway, she could only stare at him, the horror of what she’d seen still trapped behind her eyes.

“Who ... who ... who could do such a thing ... ?” she finally managed. But she knew. There was only one true monster in her life, one individual capable of such an obscene act, but she couldn’t even believe it of him. “It’s Rushkin,” John said.

Isabelle nodded; the last lingering tie to her mentor was finally severed. She knew she wouldn’t ever be able to look at The Movement of Wings now, at Palm Street Evening or any of Rushkin’s other paintings, without the genius of the work being overshadowed by his monstrosities.

“I know,” she said. “It’s taken this to show me that he really is capable of anything.”

“No,” John said. “The man on ... the man nailed to the wall. It’s Rushkin.”

Isabelle stared at John as though he’d gone mad. How could the victim be Rushkin? Who could be more monstrous than him? She got shakily to her feet and started for the doorway, shrugging off John’s attempt to stop her from entering the studio again.

“I ... I have to see,” she said.

She kept her gaze on the floor once she was inside and took a long steadying breath before she let it rise to look again at the corpse nailed to the wall. The wind coming through the door behind her dropped for a moment and her nostrils filled with a sharp coppery scent. Her stomach churned, but she choked back the sour acid that rose up her throat. Then the wind gusted up once more, taking the smell of blood away, if not the memory of it. That hung on in Isabelle’s nose and continued to make her stomach do slow, queasy flips.

She did her best to look at the scene with a clinical detachment, the way she’d been able to go to the morgue for anatomy classes during her years at Butler U. The corpse’s features were caked with blood, but she saw that John had spoken the truth. She stared for one long awful moment at Rushkin’s face, then made her gaze travel up. It was hard to make out details on the body because of the abuse it had undergone—she didn’t want to make out details—but she saw enough to realize that the musculature had far more bulk than she remembered Rushkin having the last time she’d seen him. The corpse’s body shape was more like that of the squat, trollish figure she remembered meeting that day so long ago on the steps of St. Paul’s.

She found herself staring at a particularly gruesome wound and suddenly had to turn away. She hugged herself, trying to stop from gagging. Keeping her back to the corpse, she looked at John. He lifted his hand and returned the gun he was holding to the waistband of his jeans.

“This is true ... isn’t it?” she said in a quiet voice. She was surprised at how calm it sounded. “This has really happened, hasn’t it?”

John nodded slowly. “Except we don’t know when it’s true.”

Isabelle gave him a blank look. “What do you mean by ‘when’?”

“He’s like you,” John said, nodding at the corpse. “He’s younger—far younger—than the man we left behind in the Tombs not so long ago.”

Isabelle nodded. She’d felt the same. “So what does it mean?”

As John began to shrug, a familiar voice spoke to them from the far end of the studio.

“It means that a maker should never attempt a self-portrait—particularly not when the individual is as disturbed as was our friend here upon the wall. Who knows what you might bring across?”

They turned and Isabelle thought that she’d finally crossed over into madness, for it was Rushkin they saw walking toward them, the old and wasted

Rushkin they’d seen in the Tombs tenement. John reached for his gun, but Rushkin was quicker. He brought up the revolver that had been hidden at his side and sighted over the barrel at John.

“Tut-tut,” Rushkin said, shaking his head.

John hesitated, then slowly let his hand fall.

“You,” Isabelle began. To the sickness in her stomach was added a sudden disorientation that made her sway dizzily. “You’re one of Rushkin’s numena?”

Rushkin shook his head. “Not anymore. I am Rushkin and I’ve been him for a great many years.”

XVII

Davis had half turned in his seat while Rolanda spoke so that he could watch both her and the street outside his windshield.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “This Vincent Rushkin you’re talking about—do you mean the Rushkin?”

Rolanda nodded and Davis had to think about that for a moment. You couldn’t live in the city and not know about its most famous reclusive artist. There were no pictures of him. To the best of his knowledge, no one had actually seen him in public in twenty, twenty-five years. Davis hadn’t thought the man was even alive anymore.

“How do you know it’s him?” he finally asked.

“I’m sorry?” Rolanda said.

Why did people always apologize when they didn’t hear something? Davis found himself wondering.

“No one’s seen him in years,” he explained. “At least not that I’ve heard. There are no photos of him. How can you be sure that it was Vincent Rushkin who kidnapped your friends and not just somebody calling himself that?”

Rolanda gave him an odd look, then asked, “Does it matter? They’re still being held inside that building against their will.”

Cosette spoke up from the backseat. “It’s Rushkin.” When the other two turned to look at her, she added, “You would know if you saw him. No one else could hold so much darkness in their body and still pass themselves off as human.”

Davis nodded, but it was more in agreement to what Rolanda had said than Cosette’s curious observation.

“Do either of you know where the hell we are?” he asked. “Besides the obvious.”

When Rolanda and Cosette both shook their heads, Davis looked out the window again, trying to find a landmark. He was about to give up when he realized that the taller building behind the tenement with a dozen or so chimney stacks foresting its roofline looked familiar. It took him a moment before he remembered the name of the abandoned factory, then another while he mentally cross-referenced it to the city map he carried around with him in his head. Plucking the microphone from the dash, he radioed in their position and requested backup. When he got an affirmative, he replaced the mike and leaned back in his seat.

“That’s it?” Rolanda demanded when it was obvious he wasn’t planning to take action.

“We can’t do anything else until the backup gets here.”

“They could be dead by then.”

“Look, lady—Rolanda. I have to follow certain procedures.”

“Well, I don’t,” Cosette said.

Before they could stop her, she’d popped open her door and stepped out into the night. Rolanda and Davis watched her scurry into hiding behind the abandoned bus. She studied the tenement for a few moments, crouching in the same spot where Bitterweed and Scara had captured her and the others earlier. When she darted across the street, Rolanda opened her own door.