The Redactor, Chapter 07

First Class was worth killing the mortgage.

  I drank red wine before my entree of Ibérico Jamón Crostini with Date and Ricotta, again before my mains of Porcini Mushroom Cannelloni, and again after my dessert of Hazelnut, Coffee and Muscovado Syrup Cake, to bed it all down. And to bed the wine down, a finger of Glenlivet Single Malt Scotch Whisky.

  On the video screen, which folded out from beneath my lounge chair like something from the International Space Station, I watched the movie Twelve Monkeys, the one that proved to me that Bruce Willis can act. When that was done I lay my seat back, closed my eyes, and strafed the radio channels. I found a Sibelius marathon and left the dial there. The music reminded me of our honeymoon. We had played CDs of classical music so loud the hotel management had called. Sibelius had done it.

  That was seven years ago. Hong Kong.

  That’s what I was doing. That was my cover for this ridiculous flight. The story I could quickly own. It was a re-enactment... spoiled only by the cold, empty seat my hand found by my side.

  Eventually I slept, and my dreams were full of Sibelius, and the voice of an announcer who became as God.

  But I must have drifted too deep for the radio to reach me, because I later dreamed of a meeting with Hiero. It was odd because it was simply a memory, with only the slightest embellishment.

  I remembered Hiero telling me he wanted to write a modern Gothic horror. He had written a short story to test the waters, and read it to me.

  His story began with the return of a man’s wife one day from shopping. She had left the house to shop for groceries, but returned with a large, square, parcel wrapped in brown paper, and tied with string. Oblivious to her husband’s questions, she ushered him into their bedroom, laid the object down, and gestured for him to open it.

  Playing along, he began to tear away the brown paper, when through a hole he saw an eye staring back at him. The eye looked human, but its whites were lurid yellow. The shock of that burning gaze upset his balance and he fell back from the object.

  Impatient, his wife tore the remaining paper from the painting, lifted it onto a hook, and stood back to view it.

  “Isn’t it...” she said, but fell silent, lost in the image.

  “What is it?” said the man, sufficiently recovered to appraise the painting in the whole.

  “A painting,” she said.

  “I can see that. But where did you get it? And why? And what on earth is it?”

  “I bought it from little old wisp of a man with a cart. He was parked out front of the mall this morning selling art. He said it is very old. I couldn’t resist—it’s so, so... spiritual.”

  The man agreed it looked old. The oil paint was cracked and crazed, and the wood frame was marred by numerous dents as if it had been dropped.

  The subject was a creature vaguely man-like. It stood in a grotto, surrounded by stunted trees, so gnarled they had dug their crowns into the ground; and rocks that were pitted from wind and rain. The creature’s skin was dull red and raised in knots and marred by burls like scales. From its head sprouted horns like elephant tusks, yellowed by age. They erupted from its head in four directions, behind and before, and either side, and were hung with tatters of rotting velvet, and resembled a grotesque crown.

  But despite the creature’s nightmarish form, it was its gaze that froze the man’s blood. The eyes seemed to burn with a light of their own.

  “How much did it cost?” he said. It was all he could think to ask.

  When his wife appeared not to have heard him, he repeated the question.

  “Two thousand dollars,” she said.

  Anger flushed his cheeks, but something about his wife’s posture stopped his mouth. She stood erect, head canted to one side, gaze fixed on the painting.

  The next morning, after she left for work, he took the painting down, wrapped it in a towel, and drove to the mall. There he hunted for a cart loaded with paintings and a little old man, but found no sign of him. Worse, no one seemed to remember him.

  He returned with the painting, but left it covered by the towel, stowed in the attic.

  When his wife returned to find the painting gone, she flew into a rage. She stormed through the house until she found it and hung it again on the same hook.

  That night as he lay beside his wife, listening for the rhythm of her breathing that would tell him she was asleep, and feeling the eyes of the creature staring at him unseen in the dark, he made a vow. When morning came he would talk to her. Reason with her that something so grotesque had no place in their house, let alone their bedroom. If she forced him to, he would insist.

  He would take the painting down, drive to the dump, and watch it burn.

  He knew better than to speak now, angry and afraid.

  Vow made, he fell asleep. He fell asleep before his wife. Something that had not happened since the first years of their marriage.

  It was the smell that eventually alerted their neighbours, who summoned the police. The man’s decaying body was found in the same position in which he had lain down to sleep.

  His wife was nowhere to be found, and became the prime suspect.

  The second suspect was whoever the artist was who had been commissioned to paint a scene of a grotesque monster, clasped in embrace with the dead man’s wife.

  A judder woke me to semi-darkness and the thrum of the Boeing 777’s turbines. My ears popped with the rising air pressure. We were descending on Hong Kong.

  The last image of that memory-dream to linger was of the creature staring at me past the wife’s tresses. The creature winked.