The Singularity Cycle 02 Song of the Death God Read online

  He apologized to Renaud, saying he was only here to allay the fears of the workmen, to reassure them the paintings were just paintings. Renaud was secretly relieved when he arrived with the workers, knowing he was a rationalist first and a man of God second. But when the priest emerged after viewing the canvases, he was ashen and shaking. When the workmen dispersed and they were alone, he told Renaud the works were neither haunted nor Satanic, but something else altogether. He told Renaud what he already knew in the core of his being. These murals were not the presence of the Devil; they were the absence of God.

  ***

  Renaud was pacing and talking to himself still, so occupied with his internal dialogue he barely noticed Wilhelm walking up. But when he did, he was taken aback by the new contrast between them. Where he felt like he was coming apart at the seams, Wilhelm had never appeared so clear and present as today.

  He smiled and flicked his French cigarette into the gutter. “Renaud, you look troubled. What’s the matter?”

  Renaud wanted to punch him, but he held back. “The paintings are exactly what you said, Wilhelm. They’ve scared off every workman I could hire.”

  Some kind of relief seemed to pour over Wilhelm. He actually appeared excited. “Renaud, there is more than we could imagine between what we know and what we don’t know. I believe, no, I know that my answers are in those canvases.”

  Renaud just looked down and shook his head. He wanted to cry or scream or both. “Wilhelm, those images are just wrong. I’m not a superstitious man, but if those compositions hold the key to finding your lost week in Munich, you are better for never knowing what happened.”

  Wilhelm looked at Renaud with shock and hurt in his eyes.

  “How could you say that, Renaud?”

  Renaud answered, “I’m sorry, my friend, it’s been an awful few days.”

  Wilhelm smiled and grabbed Renaud’s shoulders. “This will all be over soon, Renaud. I’ll have my answers and your gallery will be the talk of the town! Now, let’s go look at them.”

  Renaud nodded solemnly. He wondered if Wilhelm would still be smiling tomorrow.

  ***

  Wilhelm lay staring at the wall where the device cast its shadows. His breath came in short jerky spasms, his lips and chin covered with a dried crust of vomit. His muscles were clenched, corded, straining to move, but could not. He was transfixed. His body was here… but his mind was there. He’d been in this position for hours.

  Renaud let him in, set up the device, and told him to lock up when he left. He looked aged, haggard. Wilhelm understood. Even though he had seen Lombard’s paintings and the one of Uli’s, he hadn’t seen them all together, had never been under their collective weight.

  Wilhelm bid Renaud adieu, told him to go get some sleep, that the next days would make his efforts worth it. He locked the door behind him. Renaud had left the electric lights on, and even from a distance, Wilhelm felt the power of the paintings. They were a black cloud of jagged angles and dissonant hues. And there were a lot of them, the larger works lining the walls and the smaller canvasses set up in rows, forcing the viewer to walk through them, to be surrounded, enveloped by them.

  From his one experience with Uli’s painting, of remembering fragments of his missing week in Munich, he knew this would be overwhelming. He took a deep breath and a big draught from his flask. Then he saw the sign.

  The Twin Angels of the Apocalypse, The Mysteries of Uli Ernst and Gilles Lombard. Uli Ernst July 6 1862 - August 15 1887. Gilles Lombard September 8 1861 - August 15 1887.

  Uli and Gilles Lombard died on the exact same day.

  He told himself to breathe. He said a silent prayer to whatever god would listen, to give him the strength and courage to follow this through. He put one foot in front of the other and stood before the first of his brother’s paintings.

  His stomach twisted and a gout of acid blasted up his trachea, filling his mouth. He put his hand over his lips and swallowed. His mind whirled back to the day he found the bizarre letter to Carsten. Why did he immediately run home to view the painting by Gilles Lombard? The answer was right in front of him. This painting could have been done as a collaboration between Uli and Gilles. It was the painting of Carsten and the carriage driver Karl walking out of a burning building into an alley. Good god! He remembered! He saw this painting in Uli’s room! Uli told him he’d painted it with his own blood, shit, and semen!

  He had left his brother in disgust and drank wine. He was trying to cut back, to just drink wine because… he got the idea to just drink wine, to stay away from the hard stuff from Carsten. But what did they talk about? He was breathing hard now. He had to keep his wits about him. There were a lot of paintings and all of them could show him dark truths.

  The next painting was a scene viewed through a keyhole. A crowd of well-dressed people, among them Uli, Greta, and Karin. They sat in rows in a small room before a beautiful woman with long black hair looking directly at the viewer as if she had caught them spying. Her eyes glowed golden brown. It was an odd subject, yet nothing scandalous. But it was still a corruption of angles and geometries and unsettling colors.

  The next painting was of Uli hanging upside down, arms spread and eyes in holy rapture. He hung mid-air above what looked like their mansion in Munich, but ancient. It was like an Ascension, except he was upside down and naked, a stream of blood flowing from his genitals. Wilhelm first thought this was a sacrilegious statement, but it wasn’t. This was some sort of epiphany.

  Even more unsettling, the house in the painting wasn’t in Munich. It was on a completely bare stone plain taken straight from Gilles Lombard’s minimalist landscape phase. There was even the solid black ceiling of turbulent clouds hanging above it all!

  Wilhelm shook and felt his knees going weak. A memory came back of a deathly Uli in his darkened room crying, “time was different there” and he’d “been there for an eternity.”

  Oh, God. Wilhelm remembered. He ran into Uli’s room and dragged him from his bed and threw him hard onto the floor of the hallway, but couldn’t remember why. He carried Uli back to his bed; he was as light as a feather, emaciated. But why was he carrying Uli? What did Uli mean? Where had Uli been? Where was time different?

  Wilhelm shook his head and moved on to the next painting. The subject was a pale man in a suit and top hat with large circular spectacles made of black glass. Wilhelm was curious. He could swear he was in the crowd in the first painting. He went and checked. Yes, indeed, this man was in the crowd, or at least a man in the exact same attire with the same black glasses. Behind him was the beautiful girl from the first painting, but her eyes weren’t glowing. She was saying something, instructing the viewer to do something…

  The next painting was of a small dog, dead and decapitated, lying on a silver tray on a floor covered with a pattern drawn in white powder. While this was horrible enough, the dog’s legs were moving, its jaw flexing, trying to bark. It was wretched and terrible, but its eyes were the worst thing. They begged for comfort, for explanation, for reassurance that would not come. It spoke of nothing but suffering and torment.

  Something about the pattern drawn on the floor, a circle inside a triangle… something was familiar here, something about this was important. He remembered walking behind the house at night, walking through the garden, towards the old servants’ quarters, trying to be quiet. He saw light coming from underneath the door. He leaned down to peer through the keyhole… then nothing.

  Was something in there? It was just used for storage. Why was it so important? Why was it in the painting hanging above the mantel where his grandfather’s painting was?

  Then, Uli whispering in his ear, “It’s different there; time is different. Before, after, all exist at the same time; it does, but it doesn’t…”

  He leaned over Uli, listening to his dead brother speak. “Why are you there, Uli? Why is the painting of Carsten’s little house there?”

  And Uli answered, “Because that’s where it starte
d. He put me in there.”

  Wilhelm collapsed to his knees in front of the painting. He vomited, splattering the front of his shirt. He knew they would tell him what happened that week. He wanted to face the guilt of drinking while Uli was consumed by his demons. He wanted to face this guilt, but discovered something else. There was more than just a family rotting from within, more than just his drinking.

  Carsten did something to Uli…

  Carsten was doing something terrible in the old servants’ quarters…

  Wilhelm’s mind hit a brick wall and his consciousness cracked against it. His vision constricted to a narrow tunnel and he crawled through the aisle of paintings, leaving a trail of vomit and piss. He wept because he had failed. He didn’t know how, but he’d failed. He didn’t know why, but he was drawn to the rear of the gallery, drawn to the device the psychic medium told Gilles Lombard to construct, an atrocity that cast shadows to guide the hand of the painter.

  Wilhelm could barely see, barely breathe, barely stand as he lit the candle and an imperceptible breeze began to turn the jagged array of angles in its frame and the shadows danced on the wall behind.

  Wilhelm collapsed to the floor, and everything he didn’t remember came back to him all at once.

  ***

  Wilhelm stood on a plain extending in all directions to the horizon. Flat, featureless, stone. He was alone here. Above him, the sky was a perpetual black, boiling sea of clouds. They churned, whipped by winds he couldn’t see or feel. No breeze, no sound, no smell, only a vibration in the earth.

  He put his ear to the ground. It sounded like words, repeated, chanted, by a multitude on the other side of a thick stone wall. He listened intently, trying to hear what they said, trying to know who was speaking. He knew these words. He heard them the night Uli died, when he snuck out to spy. Carsten spoke them. It was another language. Ava was there lying on the floor…

  The chanting in the earth stopped. Lightning exploded out of the sky and a monstrous roar filled the world. Something on the other side of those clouds had spoken, responding to the chanting in the deep of the earth.

  The black clouds whipped into shapes, long, extended, reaching… and formed into vast impossible tentacles. Miles in length, emitting a furious screaming sound, lashing back and forth, grasping for…

  He stood up. He looked around. Things appeared that were absent just moments before. There was a woman suspended like a statue several meters off the ground. It was the beautiful, black-haired woman from the painting, or one who looked exactly like her. She stared in terror, frozen in time, being drawn towards some point behind him.

  He turned around to see her destination. It was the house in Munich. Old, ancient, but still intact, as it appeared in Uli’s painting, where he was hanging upside down. The front doors were thrown open and darkness waited inside. It was a darkness he could never imagine, draining the light in the world right out of the air. It was not the absence of light; it was the death of light.

  He turned back around to look at her. She wasn’t moving.

  “It’s different there; time is different. Before, after, all exist at the same time…”

  He looked up, above the house. Just as he expected, Uli was hanging there, not ascending, but descending to the house. But he was frozen in time, too, just like the black-haired woman. He heard Uli’s voice in his head. “Because that’s where it started. He put me in there.”

  Lightning crashed again, contacting the earth, striking where Carsten stood. His eyes were closed, and he was smiling in rapture just like Uli. He spread his arms wide as if waiting for divine ascension…

  A screaming filled the air, and one of the tentacles exploded out of the sky down at Carsten. Wilhelm yelled, but no sound came. He tried to move towards Carsten, to get him to wake up, to open his eyes, but he couldn’t move. He was seeing something that had already happened. Time is different there.

  Like an enormous snake, the black tentacle enveloped Carsten until all Wilhelm saw was his face. In that last instant, he opened his eyes to Wilhelm and smiled in pure ecstasy.

  The tentacle retracted up, miles into the sky, taking Carsten away into the tarry depths of the black maelstrom, and when it did, the entire world began to shake, the earth cracking and splitting. There was a titanic groaning as the plain heaved. In the distance, pieces of the plain tilted upward along the fissure lines, extending into the sky like the prow of enormous ocean-going ships as they begin their final journey to the bottom.

  He looked at the house. It alone was a fixed immobile point in a world coming apart. He ran towards the wide open doors into the beckoning blackness, knowing his memories would be inside waiting to tell him their secrets.

  “Wilhelm! Wilhelm! For God’s sake man, wake up!”

  Renaud shook his shoulders violently, practically lifting Wilhelm off the floor.

  Wilhelm opened his mouth and a fountain of putrid vomit blasted upward, almost hitting Renaud in the face. It smelled like whiskey and the acid fear of animal panic.

  Mon Dieu! Renaud grabbed Wilhelm’s head and turned it to prevent the man from choking to death on his own vomit.

  Renaud had lain wide awake tossing and turning, his muscles refusing to release and let him rest. He reflected that many men tossed and turned the nights before they made their fortunes. He knew the crucial days before were always stressful, but in the last few days, the events themselves had conspired against him, fighting his efforts to have nothing more complex than an art showing.

  He couldn’t sleep, so he stopped pretending it would happen and returned to the Gallerie d’Arte Voltaire. He expected to find Ernst drunk and stupid, but not to find him having an epileptic fit. Ernst was on the floor, flopping like a fish. He had puked, pissed and shit himself.

  Renaud felt strange as soon as the door closed behind him. It was that zoetrope thing, the device. He had seen it in action before, but it was very different this time. The shadows it cast were absolutely mesmerizing. If he let himself stare for just a few seconds, the shapes took on a different aspect. They formed a mass of waving elongated human forms drifting in and out of existence. From the corners of his eyes, the paintings started moving around on the canvas, reaching out hands composed of jagged angles and wrong geometries…

  He turned his head away. His damn fool of a partner was lying on the floor shitting himself like an ape from Africa. On a sick and sardonic level, Renaud was tempted to just let the man continue to convulse and maybe rid himself of this Bavarian pissant once and for all.

  Ernst! Damn you, don’t you dare die! The fucking show is tomorrow!

  Wilhelm gasped in and out, his eyes fixed on sights only he could see. Renaud wondered if he should slap him, but didn’t want to turn this lunatic violent. Wilhelm’s body pulsed in another spasm and the back of his head hit the legs of the table holding the device. The candle flame was already tiny and guttering, and this last motion extinguished it. The device stopped spinning and the shadows fled, running across the walls in all directions.

  Mon Dieu! What was that? But the motion was gone, just an art gallery full of the most disturbing art on record.

  Wilhelm stopped shaking, but Renaud still looked around, convinced that the shadows really had run away, dancing on the wall one moment, gone the next, and now walking around the gallery, just out of the corner of his eye. But that would be crazy, and Renaud was not crazy.

  Wilhelm was lying still, his eyes bulging outwards, but the focus fading.

  Renaud looked to Ernst and back to the wall again. It was just a blank wall. Nothing there, just images from that device and lack of sleep.

  Wilhelm’s breathing was returning to normal. Color was coming back to his face.

  Good Lord, he stinks. If I had not come by, the crowd at the Gallerie d’Arte Voltaire would have been treated to yet another macabre facet to the story of these paintings.

  “Wilhelm? Wilhelm, can you hear me?” Renaud’s face showed concern, but inwardly he couldn’t keep up th
is façade much longer. The stress of this week was too great, and now his partner apparently drank so much he had a convulsion. Idiot.

  “Wilhelm, are you—” Renaud was interrupted by Wilhelm crying out hoarsely, his throat raw as if he’d been screaming for hours. It was not just fear, but sorrow, so much suffering it was hard to comprehend. He slowly turned to face Renaud with an expression he had seen on the faces of soldiers who survived an artillery barrage on the basis of luck alone. The word “shock” was simply insufficient to encompass it.

  Wilhelm was whispering in German. Renaud knew enough to understand the outlines of it.

  “I was in my home… my grandfather and Uli… Ava… taken from the grave and locked in darkness for all eternity… time is different there…”

  Renaud summoned all of the diplomacy he could muster. “Wilhelm, I don’t know what you’re going on about, but this has to stop. We have too much at stake here. Your brother’s memory is at stake. Don’t dishonor him. Pull yourself together, man!”

  Wilhelm stopped whispering, but his petrified gaze still pierced Renaud. It was full of the same terror and suffering, but something else lay behind it, something cold and final.

  Renaud nodded his head. “That’s better, my friend. I’m going to go and get you some water. After that, I’ll help you to the storeroom and you can throw away those soiled clothes. There are washbasins. Then we’ll get you a carriage home.”

  Wilhelm’s gaze fell to the floor. “I’m going to Munich.”

  Renaud said, “Of course you are, after we’re done tomorrow. Now sit still and I’ll go get you that water.”

  Renaud stood up and looked down at Ernst. That man’s mind is gone; he is somewhere else completely. He looked around, telling himself the things slithering around the periphery of his vision were just phantasms of the mind and not shadows acting of their own volition.