The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [40]
It was less a book than a bound album containing small original drawings and photographic reproductions of larger pieces, perhaps fifty pages covering a period of nine years. The first piece was a startlingly life-like pen-and-ink portrait of a woman, hair upswept, chin haughty, eyes sparkling with laughter. There was love, too, in those eyes—love for the artist—but it might explain why Holmes had never shown me this album.
The woman was Irene Adler.
The date in the corner was 1910. Damian had been sixteen years old. She died two years later.
There followed a series of small sketches of French streets: a market, the Seine as it went through Paris, an old man snoozing on a park bench. Three of the five were dated, all of them before Irene Adler's death.
Then came the shock: With one turn of the page the viewer stepped from an empty street with interesting shadows to a front-line trench under fire. The trench walls loomed high and threatening, as if the pit were about to swallow the figures within; the moon high in the heavens seemed to taunt. At the centre, a man cowered, wrapping his body around his rifle like a terrified child embracing a doll; the man beside him gripped the brim of his helmet with both hands, as if trying to pull it down over himself; to the right of the drawing stood a young man, head thrown back and arms outstretched in a stance that could have been sexual passion or the agony of crucifixion. The paper the scene had been drawn on was grimy with dried mud and held together by gummed tape.
There were seven war-time drawings in all. Although none were dated, their order was easy to determine, because the style grew increasingly precise as time passed. The last one, a close study of the upper half of a naked skull emerging from the mud, possessed the finely shaded detail of a photograph.
In all of the war-time sketches, the perspective was odd, the objects to the sides tending either to loom up, or to curl in towards those in the centre, as if the artist saw the entire world as threatening to engulf him.
The page following the skull was startling in a different way, being in colour. It and the rest were all photographs, most of them coloured, of paintings, bearing dates between 1917 and 1919. The quality and uniformity of the photographs suggested that all had been made at the same time. Probably, I thought, either at the instruction of Mme Longchamps, or by another following her death.
I had thought the bee tea-pot unsettling: It was nothing compared to these images.
The thirty or so pages remaining in the album, a closer examination showed, were taken from only nine originals. Each sequence began with the complete painting, the size of which seemed to vary, followed by several closer-up parts of the whole.
Some of the paintings were violent, showing dismembered bodies and wide pools of blood, every glistening inch painted with loving detail. Others were nightmare horrors: a woman with full breasts, delicious skin, and an oozing sore for a mouth; a child clutching a human heart, its veins and arteries trailing to the ground. A painting done in June 1918 showed a room in what could only be the mental hospital where Damian had been treated: a study in pallor, white-grey beds, white-pink curtains, a man with white-brown skin wearing a white-blue dressing gown, a patch of white-yellow sun hitting the white-tan floor: The painting felt like the moments under ether when consciousness fades.
All the paintings felt tortured. All were disturbing. The earlier ones had more overt depictions of the macabre, the latter images felt as though a horror lay just outside the room, but each painting seemed to be holding its breath in dread.
The last painting was a family portrait: father, mother, child. The mother, in the centre, was Irene Adler. The child on her left was a thin boy with