999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [106]
She looked so vulnerable. I put my hand on the side of her neck. “What mistake?”
She was trembling a little. “The paintings and the beast are intertwined. You can’t see one without encountering the other. She thought she could take you directly to the paintings, that she could somehow circumvent the beast. But she was wrong.”
“You keep talking about a beast, but what exactly do you mean? To my knowledge there are no beasts in Leicestershire, or for that matter anywhere in England. Large predators are extinct here, as they are in most of Europe.”
Her eyes searched mine. “Vav didn’t explain?”
“If she had I wouldn’t be asking you, would I?” I said softly.
“It’s an exercise in futility. You won’t believe me, I promise you.”
I kissed her cheek. “You mean you won’t even give me the chance?”
This seemed to give her pause. I could sense that she was coming to a decision she would rather not make. “It’s best if we keep moving while we talk.”
I nodded and let go of her reins, following closely as she veered at an acute angle across the cool blue grassland into the inky shadows of the forest.
“The beast is a creature born of chaos,” she said at last. “It hardly thinks as you or I know it; you can’t reason with it or come to a compromise, but its reactions to stimuli are appallingly quick. It is pure evil.”
“It attacked Vav before I could even take a breath.”
“Poor Vav. She didn’t have a chance,” Gimel said in an odd tone of voice, as if she were speaking to herself. Then her gaze met mine across the short distance between us. “As I said, I won’t make the same mistake.”
I wanted to ask her what she meant, but all at once, inside the forest, everything changed. I don’t mean the oak trees, or the coolness of the evening, the rich earthy smells or the very strong sense of being in this place. I don’t quite know how to say this, but it was as if from the moment I had run out the back of Helicon I had been balancing on a taut wire. Now that wire had broken, and I was falling. Not literally, you understand. But figuratively I felt as if I were tailing from one reality—or rather my perception of reality—into another. A bubble had burst and I suddenly found myself beneath the skin of the universe. I was inside looking out at the surface—the bright, shiny, all-too-familiar shell—of every mundane thing we take for granted. Now everything looked different to me. And with that feeling came a ripple of recognition, like the déjà vu of a vivid dream, of the unfinished paintings I’d seen in Vav’s atelier. For just the briefest instant I glimpsed beneath their conventional Impressionist surface to what they were about. It’s nothing to do with me, Vav had said in speaking about the exhibition. I hadn’t understood her then. How could the exhibition not be about her? I had wondered in Paris. She was the artist. And yet now I was beginning to understand what she had meant. The paintings were what was important. Who had painted them was in a very real sense of no import.
“Wait!” I called out to Gimel. “Hold on a second!”
She whirled her horse around. “What is it?”
I was already dismounted. “There’s something about this place … something familiar.”
She jumped off her horse, and as it turned I saw attached to one side of the saddle an old-fashioned longbow—not one of those space-age-material composite bows hunters use nowadays—and a quiver of arrows. She came toward me with a pronounced limp, as if one leg were shorter than the other. Then I saw that her left leg was narrower and smaller than her right, withered like a dried stalk of wheat.
“Perhaps you have been to this part of the Charnwood Forest before.”
I shook my head. “I’ve never been outside of London. But even if I had, that isn’t what I mean.” I was walking around the small glade. “What I’m feeling … It isn’t as simple as that.” She regarded me calmly, albeit with a certain degree of curiosity.