Adam suddenly realised that he was standing so close to the painting that he could see every stroke, every mark of paint. Down there in the dark it was practically impasto, as though Trent had layered the paint up and applied the dark tones so thickly. Almost as though he was attempting to reproduce the layers of cloying dark in pigment. The staircase was scraped back with a thin knife, a little lighter tone applied to the edges of the risers. A thin, spiral staircase that was winding it’s way out of the depths of the painting to somewhere unforeseen, as it moved behind the foreground, obscured by decadent clothing in damask folds.
“Fuck,” he breathed. He wanted to see more of it. Wanted to see where it went. What was at the head?
“You see it too. I thought you might.” She was beside him again. The room was fuller now and Adam was aware of all the bodies behind them. Almost seeming to push forward, to press against them both and push them further towards the painting.
“I didn’t at first. I do now.”
He felt something on his lower back, between the chair that he still had over his shoulder
or do I?
and the shirt that was nearly sticking to his skin. Her arm. Her touch cooling him. He flinched a little and she began to withdraw it, yet returned to the hold when he visibly relaxed.
“There’s one in each of his pieces, but not everyone sees them.” She breathed. Her breath smelled of the champagne she had been sipping, and strawberries. It mingled with her perfume. The scent of
far off endless summer in forgotten scorched lands
a summer’s day.
Adam glanced round at her slightly, seeing then just how close everyone else was to them. There was no more conversation. He could hear nothing when neither him nor Daphne spoke. There was no sound. Just silence. This wasn’t habituation, or selective hearing. Because now he was straining to hear. To focus on what he knew must be around him.
Yet there was nothing.
Panic began to swell in his chest, and he pulled away from Daphne sharply. She let out a small exhalation that could have been surprise. He strained to look around, to look over. Everyone was crowding him, pushing against him. She hadn’t taken her hand away from his back, and he realised now he had moved away from her, that it hadn’t been her arm in the first place. Someone else. Someone on the other side of him, but he couldn’t see. It was too dark. He could no longer see the doorway that Mamoulean had walked back through moments before. Everything was suffocating silence.
The arm gripped tighter, pulling him away from Daphne, who - it seemed - had begun to be enveloped by the crowd. Falling into darkness. The last thing he could see was that spotlight and the way it played across her skin, reflecting back at him specularly as though she were soaking wet. His legs felt weak, aware that he was going to lose his balance very soon. He wasn’t good enough on the prosthetics, not strong enough for something such as this. He had barely managed to walk from where taxi had dropped him off, the one that he had hailed from outside the apartment building.
Why am I only know remembering that.
He could walk, slowly, and he could stand. This was something else entirely.
Crying out. Flailing his arms. Making contact with whoever (or whatever) was pulling him to the side. His fist went into something soft and warm. A foul smell suddenly washed over him. He withdrew his hand. It was slick with a gummy substance that stank. Looking around, he sought something, anything, that he would be able to grasp hold of. All he saw was the painting and the staircase. He was falling. From the angle he was going down he could see more of the staircase. Further up the spiral. This was an impossibility that he knew couldn’t be so. The painting was flat, all depth was an illusion. There was no their dimension, and you didn’t simply see behind objects because you changed your perspective.
Rationality in a fleeting thought, but that didn’t help him. There was nothing to grab hold of. There was nothing to stop him.
“Adam, are you okay? Would you like that we took a seat?”
He blinked. She was standing beside him, a few others in the room behind. The hubbub of conversation had returned. He could hear some faint music drifting though hidden overhead speakers.
“Yes, please,” he replied. He felt unsure on his legs. He had to sit.
“This way. Back the way you entered.”
She walked, beckoning him to follow as she placed her empty glass down on the rim of a heavy plant pot by the door. He did as he was bid, giving the painting and the small dark room behind him a cursory glance as he did so.
The stair case was gone. As if it had never been there.
The woman in the painting seemed to follow him out with her eyes. He didn’t know if the subject of the painting was the mysterious Ivy, or if the painting was merely for her. If so, then who was the woman depicted with such strange mechanical constructs emerging from her flesh, and why was this seen as being so important to the mysterious Ivy?
Another dark room, this one larger than the last, a few other patrons milling about, more than one giving Adam an assessment before returning to their hushed conversations or appraisals of the paintings adorning the otherwise blank wall. Just like before, there was a single spotlight shining down on each, the rest of the room devoid of anything that may cause a hazard in the gloom.
These paintings, more portraits. Men with blank expressions and an abundance of facial hair. Women with elaborate hair and clothing, jewellery that would make a monarch jealous. All staring accusatorially out at Adam as he walked robotically past. All had the same strange mechanical contraptions erupting from pale flesh. The detail and faith to the real was absolutely staggering, and if Adam hadn’t found his movement so obtusely difficult, he would feel obliged to stop and drink more of the art in with his eyes. It all looked so real. An effect magnified by the lack of anything else of substance in the room. When all you had to focus on was one thing, with only a fallible memory to compare it’s intricacies to, then you began to think of what you were seeing as the new reality. After leaving the room, and the gallery, when he returned outside and to his life, Adam thought that he would see everything vividly hyperreal. It would require another adjustment. Such was the power contained in Trent’s work. To provoke such a visceral sensory changing response. Adam knew that there was never anything he could do facing a tsunami of such talent.
More dark rooms. More paintings. The music began to get louder as they moved towards a source of light that bled through every doorway, becoming stronger and more defined as they made their way near the source.
Adam squinted as they entered next a room so bright that it nearly blinded him. He leant on the doorway, out of breath. He would have to sit, or he would fall.
“Here.”
Daphne took his hand in her own, gripping her cool fingers around his heat, and using him towards the centre of the Raschold Gallery foyer. There were inches here arranged in a quad, each facing out at a different direction.
Adam took a seat on the nearest on, the one that faced the entrance door, and let out a sigh of relief, as subtly as he could. Just because he was on first name terms with his new female acquaintance, that didn’t mean that he wished her to see him in a state of anything other than complete calm control. He would never admit - despite it being so painfully obvious she had needed to guide him to his seat - that he hadn’t been capable.
She let him adjust himself and remove the chair from his shoulder, leaning it against the bench. She checked her watch - a delicate timepiece draped over her slender wrist - and began to murmur something that could have been an apology at the exact time that Adam’s chair slipped from where he had clumsily put it and fell to the floor with a loud bang. The patrons of the gallery that were assembled in the foyer all looked towards him and he felt himself flush. He but over and picked it up, yet by the time he had done so, Daphne was gone.
He was alone.
In no rush to get up - his upper thighs were burning and there was pain developing in his right knee - he instead took in the sights around him. There was an easel beside the entrance, at an angle that he could make out a little of. Typically it was a little note about the exhibition with Trent’s name in suitably understated lettering. The bit that did pique Adam’s interest was he small banner running across the corner closest to him, and what it said. He had to strain a little but unless he was very much mistaken, it announced an unveiling of a new painting, one never before seen bye public eyes. Adam tried to recall if that had been on the invitation but found he could now barely recall the invitation itself.
He let himself look around the rest of the room. A few doors lead off in various directions, a small glass counter over in the far corner form the door with what looked like a few postcards and books over to one side, with the rest of the surface taken up with rows of flutes and short glasses. Behind he counter one of the hied staff stood impeccably attired, with an expression of blank detachment. The guests milling around, sipping from glasses and looking at the non-Trent paintings that adorned the walls here didn’t seem to have very much in the way of something interesting to say, and the few conversations Adam was privy to, seemed so insipid they couldn’t hold his attention for very long.
Suddenly, all the guests that had been in the other assorted rooms began to file in, with the music slowly fading out. Adam could no longer see anything from where he sat apart from an assortment of posteriors and lower backs.
“Welcome one and all!” A loud clear voice rang out and the conversations tailed off immediately. “Thank you each and every one of you for journeying here tonight.”
What Lon Raschold followed with - for it was surely he, and Adam would recognise his voice anywhere - was the usual self congratulatory spiel that was very much his calling card. Ever the humble gallery owner. It wasn’t like he comfortably earned a seven figure salary. Every the consummate gentleman and ever the most ruthless asshole that Adam had ever tried to deal with. Back when he had amassed a folio of work he had been proud of. Lon very much took notes from the Vemier Mamoulean book called “How to Tear Asshole Artists Down a Notch”. He had been boorish, abrupt and dismissive, and that was one conversation that had seared itself into Adam’s brain since.
He forced himself to tune out, wondering again why he came, yet glad he was seated, and couldn’t be seen. The speech went on for an indeterminable amount of time, with sporadic polite applause at various moments. Just when he thought he was going to be seated there for the rest of his life, listening to that same staccato clapping, a mug louder and enthusiastic response erupted from the assembled crowd, before they immediately began to dissipate forwards, through a door to the left of the entrance.
Adam had no intention of following, yet he suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder, then his elbow, guiding him up to his feet.
“You will want to see this,” Daphne said, helping take his weight until he could balance himself. He murmured a thank you and moved forward out of her reach. No weakness. Not from him. Not this night.
“What is it?” He asked her.
“The unveiling,” she replied, as they joined the rear of the crowd that had assemble din heat another darkened room. The far wall was nearly filled with a large red curtain. On either side stood Lon Raschold and Vemier Mamoulean, their smugness radiating out in waves.
Lon raised his left hand, asking silence.
Mamoulean raised his right, and drew the curtain back.
Adam took in what was before him and immediately felt the scream just before it erupted from his throat.
Filling the room with his agony.
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