​Betrayal
 
“I still remember the day after the emperor set fire to my portion of the city as if it were yesterday” – Philippe Rouseff on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday.
 
***
 
I took my wife to Mass more to please her than from any desire of my own.  I watched as the priest lifted the loaf and intoned the words, “On the night in which he was betrayed…” Bile rose up in my throat at the words.  I knew betrayal.
 
The Emperor, one of my closest associates--a cousin even, had struck at the heart my railroad operation in an effort to destroy my family business.  I pressed my lips together to stifle the urge to cry out in anger as the priest held up the cup.  When Christ was betrayed, only one man died.  I wondered how many thousands burned when I was betrayed. 
 
As the faithful shuffled forward to take their bread and sip from the cup, I shifted in my seat and pondered why that bastard crime boss, Wu, a better man than my cousin, had sent his wife to my offices to warn one of the bookkeepers about the impending purge.  As the bookkeeper raced from the building, she screamed, “Fire! The army is coming! Fire! Flee!”  Who else had been warned that the emperor’s army marched against the city?  Who had time to flee? 
 
I had no desire to spend a Sunday afternoon working, but at three in the afternoon, I met with two railroad supervisors to survey the damage to almost a square kilometer of the city.  I expected to find tall burned skeletons of tenement buildings.  Nothing remained but stone foundations and ash. The emperor had been thorough.
 
We drove up to the deserted M’TK station.  Blowing ash shifted and settled after the passage of my car.  My stomach churned wondering how many of my employees’ ashes mixed and blew among the debris of burned buildings.
 
The brick and slate train station still huddled beside the tracks the lone survivor in a wasteland.  Soot now stained the red bricks the same black as the rest of the borough.  We stood and looked over the desolation—nothing moved, nothing lived.  I wanted to hope that some of my people survived, but hope refused to kindle here among the ruins.  The workers were only indigenous northerners, laborers, but they stocked my warehouses and loaded my trains.
 
The Central Region supervisor looked up. “What the hell?” 
 
I followed his eyes and soon made out a string of boxcars pulled by the station’s yard-gerry slowly rolling toward the station.  Filled with the horror that lay around me, I stared transfixed at the approaching apparition.  If I were a superstitious man, I’d have turned and fled in fear of death and ghosts.  I refused to take my eyes off of this small sign of life.  
 
When the gerry with it’s string of boxcars towering above it, rolled to a stop at the station, the operator dressed in railroad coveralls lifted a woman down from the first boxcar.  A young boy about ten jumped to the ground.  This family appeared to be like any other of the northern poor—dirty and ragged.
 
The man introduced himself as the assistant stationmaster.  He unlocked the station for us and assured us that he had locked the station’s ticket money in the safe.  He seemed respectful enough.  He kept his eyes lowered as custom dictated for a man of his station. 
 
I heard the eagerness in my voice,  “Have you seen signs that some of my people survived?”
 
“I haven’t seen anybody within a kilometer of the station.  Wu warned me, so I had time to move the equipment.  I suppose others had time.”
 
I shook off my melancholy for a moment.  “Listen, you saved my equipment and the money in the station.  I must give you a reward.  What do you want?”
 
The man answered immediately.  “The Stationmaster ran away when he heard about the army.  I stayed long enough to save your equipment.  Give me the stationmaster’s job and let me live here with my family.”  For the first time, the man looked me in the eye. The sharp intelligence I saw in the eyes of a northerner surprised me.  The man’s humility returned when he asked for help to assist his cousin from the train. 
 
Curious about the new stationmaster, I helped lift his cousin in a wheelchair from the boxcar.  I almost recoiled from the reek that still clung to the air inside the car.  I recognized the stench that is created when many unwashed bodies are packed close together.  I picked up a small piece of waste paper flecked with fish scales.  The evidence before my eyes and nose told me that many people, probably northerners with their love of fish, had very recently been packed into this car.  In my mind, I saw people filling the boxcars to flee from the fire.  I suspected that my new stationmaster had his own reasons for his secrecy, but the knowledge that some of my workers had survived revived a hope that settled into my heart.
 
I turned to the humble man beside me and forgot a lifetime of lessons about the indigenous people from the north.  I suddenly saw not a worthless, northern laborer but a man created in the image of God.  I saw the man who had saved my people, a man of honor and compassion.  I wondered if he thought of me as just an oppressive Southerner.
 
How did laborers see the elite?   Did they think all of us are as cruel and evil,  as I now saw my cousin the emperor to be? I reached out to shake the stationmaster’s hand, fearful for the first time in my life of being rejected.  –
 
***
This story is told from the perspective of the young boy mentioned here in the book M’TK Sewer Rat: End of an Empire. This is the first record of Mr. Rouseff’s side of the story of the day he met his longtime friend Jacob Jaconovich then the assistant stationmaster. 
 http://www.amazon.com/MTK-Sewer-Rat-Empire-ebook/dp/B00APRA4NG 

 
 
 
 

Where I thought we stood at the far end of the gallery, a wide corridor now opened in front of us, lit by smaller chandeliers, and like the corridor downstairs, a current pulled us into the middle of it. Instead of art, this hall contained a clutter of market stalls and tents like an oriental souk. Color and glitter and the smell of sweets made me dizzy. I wanted to stop and study everything, and Owen paused to let me get my bearings.
Jewelry glittered with gold and silver and colored stones, and my fingers itched to run over silk the color of blood or sky or morning mist.
On a puppet stage, a punch and Judy act played in which Punch, hardly looking like a puppet at all, savagely murdered the other characters one after the other, and the blood looked and smelled real.
 People browsed feverishly from stall to tent to table, touching, smelling, searching as if they desperately needed something they couldn’t name.
“Would you like to stay a while?” Owen asked in my ear.
For an answer, I pushed into the crowd, driving forward down the middle of the wide corridor. I didn’t see vendors in the stalls. Whoever took payment from the shoppers remained in shadow or they were only shadow to begin with. “There’s no money,” I said. “They’re not paying.”
“Oh, they pay.” Owen chortled. “Just not in coins.”
“In starving souls?” I asked.
“Just so.”
“What good are they to you?”
“There’s power in vanity.”
“What do they get out of it?”
“The memory of something only a very few have ever seen. Some come once and are content. Others return over and over, trying to recapture that first rapturous moment of satisfaction.”
“Like addicts.”
“As you like. You don’t want to pause a moment and look? Does nothing appeal to you?”
I wanted to stop at every stall and touch and look and buy. Fabrics and scarves and fans and ornaments and talismans and sweets and all for the price of a tiny piece of soul that I would never miss. “Are you trying to tempt me?”
“Are you tempted?”
“No,” I said, and if it was a lie, it was only a small one.
The light began to fade gradually from the hot yellow of candles to a colder shade. The crowd grew thinner and the booths and tents further apart until the light of the chandeliers faded, replaced by the smoky light of torches mounted on the stone walls.
We passed ghosts—hollow, near translucent people trudging down the corridor in the same direction as ourselves. They saw Owen, and their haggard faces lifted, but they faded from sight behind us as Owen whisked me by at a pace they couldn’t match, though I didn’t feel that I was walking very fast at all. An old woman raised her hand as if she meant to stop us. I looked over my shoulder at the place where she had been.
“On their way to bargain with the king,” Owen said. “They would ask me to intercede for them, but I’m on a special errand tonight.” His hand squeezed mine against his arm. Without the massed candles overhead, his touch chilled me again.
“What do they want?” I asked, staring at a child who looked twelve but had old, bitter eyes.
“Youth, age, fortune, fame, love, revenge. All the momentary things you people think you must have at a wish. That child has lived for ninety years. He had a wish granted to return to the moment when his life went wrong and fix it. Now he regrets his choice and would beg the king to reverse it, but like your brother, he no longer has anything to offer us.”
“What did he give for the first wish?”
“Everything he accomplished in his first life.”
The walls turned to stone, and we kept walking. They went from stone blocks to the walls of a cave, and I began to shiver between the cold of the cave and the cold of Owen’s touch.
My teeth had begun to chatter when I saw the great golden doors four or five yards high at the end of the hall. The grotesque in the center matched the one on the doors downstairs. The portals opened at our approach, and we stopped in the doorway.
Dim yellow light fell from arched windows in high walls, and though I had entered the hotel in full night, the light from the windows suggested day.
The walls themselves were too deep in shadow and the ceiling too high to reveal details. The only clear object in the room was a throne. Heaps of pottery and statuary, instruments and books and jewelry cluttered the five stairs around the dais of the throne. On its seat towered a figure in long gold robes embroidered in red and green. A wreath of holly and mistletoe circled his brow, and above it, a crown of white bone rose from his forehead. He wore over his face a golden mask, the gaping visage from the doors. Swags of greenery draped his chair and his shoulders and fell over the floor.
I would have stepped forward, but Owen held me back. A man knelt at the foot of the heap of treasures, leaning forward, speaking to the indifferent king. The petitioner raised a flat square shape. Recognizing the object as a canvas, I recognized the petitioner as Briar. He extended it toward the figure on the throne.
Owen shook his head. “My king can’t give him what he wants no matter what he offers in return.”
At a sharp word from the king, Briar dropped the painting and offered another, but the king waved a black-gloved hand in dismissal.
Briar cried out as if he had been cut, and I jerked my hand, trying to go to him, but Owen restrained me. Briar said something, pleading, but the king rose from the throne. He must have been taller than any man I had ever seen, taller even than the viking in the lobby. He repeated the sharp word and pointed at the door.
Briar staggered to his feet. Head down, he tottered toward us.
“Briar,” I said.
He raised his head and saw me in the doorway. His mouth fell open. “What are you doing here?”
Then he saw Owen, and his face tightened with anger. “What are you doing with him?”
I reached out to him, mirror and opposite of the gesture of the king, but he didn’t see me.
“Not so special as you thought, Briar?” Owen said, but he didn’t say it cruelly.  “Go home, clever twin. The wiser twin has her own business with the king.”
Briar recoiled, his face twisted between despair and shame and betrayal. “Go ahead,” he snapped at me. “Make a deal and see what it gets you.”
Owen shrugged. “You made the deal and took the gift. You still have some left. Use it to create a few more great things and be content when it is gone.”
Briar hissed a curse at both of us and blundered through the doors and down the hall. I called his name, but he disappeared like the shadow people.
“It isn’t release that he wants,” Owen said. “Do you still want to make your bargain?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“As you like.” He led me down the center of the room toward the throne. The king had resumed his seat. His black-gloved hands rested on the arms of his chair, and he watched our approach, impassive in his mask.
Owen halted at the foot of the tall throne and bowed his head. “I found a kitten lost in our halls, my king. What should we do with her?” He curled his sidewise smile and looked up at the king from the corner of his eye.
A voice grated from behind the mask. “Is this one more amusing than the brother?”
“Infinitely, my king.”
The mask turned toward me. “Persis Mitchell, we know you,” he grated. “What do you want from us?”
I raised my voice. “I want my brother back.”
The black-gloved fingers played the arms of the throne. “We do not hold him.”
“I want you to reverse what you did to him.”
“We cannot restore what is already used.”
“Then give him back what’s left.”
“He already has it.”
“Give it back to him the way it was. He’s paid his end of the bargain. He gave you thirteen paintings.”
“And one of those of unusual value,” Owen put in.
The king growled like stone grating against stone. “What do you offer in return?”
Owen made his eyes wide. “Can you ask, my king? You have seen the painting by the clever twin.”
“To reverse my own gift is not small.” The king leaned back and played his fingers on the arms of his throne again. A moment later, he leaned forward. “One service.”
“What?” I asked.
“What service, my king?” Owen said, which wasn’t what I meant.
“To be called for at my choosing,” the king rasped. “One service in the real world where I and my agents cannot go.”
Owen slitted his eyes. “The service asked may not, in itself, be in opposition to the laws, moral or physical, of the real lands.”
The king leaned back. “Acceptable.”
“Nor, in itself, perilous to Persis’ life,” Owen added.
The king made the grating sound again. “Am I the custodian of mortal things?”
“I remind you the favor you would grant is but a small thing in the great scheme.”
The king inhaled a raw, wet breath and let it out with a rasp. “I accept both terms, but I will bargain no further. She will perform a service to me at a time of my choosing under the constraints my servant has named, and we will reverse the gift we granted her brother. He will have only what is naturally left to him of his potential. Do you bind yourself to these terms, Persis Mitchell?”
I nodded.
Owen said, “Persis Mitchell declares the terms, including the constraints added by herself, to be acceptable to her, and she binds herself to them.”
The king leaned back in the throne. “The bargain is made. Your brother is as he was.”
Owen bowed his head. “Thank you, my king. I’ll leave you to your meditations and disturb you no more.”
He hustled me out of the chamber. Outside in the corridor, the golden doors swung silently shut until they met in the middle of the gargoyle face.
I turned to Owen. “That’s all there is to it? He says Briar is back to normal and he is?”
“Would you like me to steal upon your brother while he sleeps and drop on his lids the nectar of a flower that grows nowhere but at the furthest end of the world?” Owen drew me away from the doors.
In this place, I supposed it made as much sense as anything for a curse to be ended in a moment without ceremony. “What kind of service does he want me to do for him?”
He squeezed my arm under his. “No telling. He might want an object or a piece of information, or a message carried to someone he can’t reach. When he does, he’ll send me to you. I told you I’m his lackey and running boy, and I can go about a bit in the real world on fleeting errands.”
“Then what does he need me for? If he wants something fetched and carried, he can send you.”
“Not me,” he said. “I have no power in the real world. A messenger I can be, to one of his agents, but not an agent myself.”


We passed through the market. The shoppers had turned from browsing to snatching and pawing like the diners at the feast. I glimpsed Briar ahead, shoving through the crowd, his face raw with desperation and bitterness.
"He doesn’t look any different,” I said to Owen.
“He might stay until dawn when the doors close on the real world, but when he leaves us, or we leave him, he will be at home asleep, and when he wakes, he will be just as you have asked us to make him.”
Emerging from the market, we came out on the gallery overlooking the ballroom and the tree alight with candles. I didn’t see Briar anywhere.
Owen’s cold breath froze my ear. “What about you, Persis Mitchell? Will you stay and dance down the dark with us?”
And like before, I found myself dancing in his embrace with holly in my hair and mistletoe in his.
“Stay like the rest of them?” I asked, trying to stop my feet and shake the holly off my head.
“Are you like them, Persis Mitchell?”
I freed my hand and threw the prickling holly from my head. “I have to go.” I wanted to get away from him and the starving, bottomless souls and get home and find Briar and see if he was really back to normal.
He pouted and sighed. “Well, we’ll dance again at the equinox when the world balances on its axis. The doors will open across time and space, and I’ll save one especially for you.”
He freed me from the dance and pulled my arm through his again, and we started down the stairs.
“I have what I want,” I said. “I don’t need to come back.”
He clicked his tongue. “You have a debt to the king. You would show good faith by visiting us, if only when we are dancing.”
The gallery corridor below was empty. All the masquers had arrived and gone inside. I saw Briar’s portrait of me, and this time, the under-image was stronger, and she seemed to look straight at me. I looked aside. “You said that was the only time people could get here.”
He tilted his head. “I also told you I could come and go in the real world a bit, and though I don’t have power there, I can still open a door.”
We had come to the outer lobby, the dark little antechamber with the broken balcony rail. The only sign of the unreal world was the great door with its gaping masque amid carved vines. As he spoke, Owen had laid his hand on the door. His clothes had reverted to denim and cotton, but he still wore the mistletoe wreath.
He leaned close to my cheek, and his breath was cool but not freezing. “I do like you very well, Persis Mitchell.”
Then he took my hand and opened the door, and although we were back in the real world, I was dancing again without knowing how it happened, and as I spun under his arm, I stepped through the door and it closed behind me.


I found myself standing in the dark under the viaduct feeling unnatural and unreal. I looked back at the single front door and its plain latch. Through the window, the broken banister hung over the empty lobby—no Owen, no Briar, no chandelier, no costumed dancers. I had been in a hurry to leave. Now I felt like a moth when the candle’s been snuffed.
I trudged through the thick drops of sleet back to Briar’s studio where I had left my car. I let myself into the building and climbed the stairs. Briar hadn’t been back since my first visit, but a few things had changed.
The seashore painting on the easel was still as good as anything he had ever done, but it lacked the depth and intensity I had first seen in it. It was Briar’s typical work, the sort of thing people want to hang on their walls. I opened the drying racks and looked at the pieces there. All Briar’s work—good, pleasant, skillful, but not brilliant.
I left the studio and found Briar in his apartment, sound asleep on top of his blankets. I  shook him awake, and he raised his head.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He rubbed his hand through his tangled hair and looked around as if he didn’t know where he was. “What time is it?”
“It’s four in the morning. Where have you been?”
He flopped back on the bed. “Right here. I came home after you left the studio.”
“You didn’t go somewhere else first?”
“Right, I forgot. I went to Seattle Center to get a prostitute. She’s around here somewhere.”
I didn’t want to be the first to bring up the hotel or the king. “You don’t remember seeing me?”
He draped one arm over his eyes, got a whiff of himself and made a face. “Of course I remember seeing you. I just said I came home after I saw you at the studio.”
I chewed the inside of my lip. “Where have you been for the last three months?”
“Do you have butter in your ears, Perse? I told you I’ve been getting ready for the new show at the gallery.”
No, he hadn’t said anything about the new show, but he thought he had been getting ready for it, and the pictures had changed.


I think the normal reaction would have been to dismiss the night in the hotel as a dream, but maybe I wasn’t quite as normal as I had been. I never doubted it had really happened. Even when I left Briar’s apartment and spent an hour walking up and down under the viaduct without finding the hotel, the memory felt perfectly natural, as if people regularly stumbled into supernatural masquerades held on midwinter night in derelict hotels.
Briar, on the other hand, seemed to have no memory of midwinter night or much of the months leading up to it. At least if he did, he wasn’t admitting.
Briar brought Gracia to Christmas dinner with our parents. I watched him twining his fingers through hers. She looked down at their linked hands with an expression of dazzled bemusement behind the rims of her big round glasses.
Over turkey and gravy, Briar announced that Gracia had gotten him a commission to do cover art for a small book publisher based in Seattle.
“They’re thrilled to get him,” Gracia squeaked.
Dad nodded enthusiastically. “Great to have something steady to fall back on.” As if Briar hadn’t been supporting himself comfortably without “something steady” for the last ten years.
Did he have enough talent left, I wondered. I said, “I thought that kind of thing wasn’t real art.”
Mom made an urgent, for goodness’ sake shut up face.
Briar shrugged and reached for more sweet potatoes with the hand that wasn’t holding Gracia’s under the table. “So what?”
I picked at my turkey. A week ago, my brother would have snapped the head off anyone who suggested working on commission.
Mom asked Gracia if they were finding enough things for the new show.
Gracia straightened, her pixie face lifting as she launched into her favorite subject. “Oh, lots. The stuff he’s been doing lately is just wonderful, but of course, it’s all brilliant. It’s just a matter of choosing a theme…”
Gracia could go on praising Briar’s genius for half an hour at a time.
“Have you been painting this week?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Too busy.”
I picked through the rest of my dinner with a weight on my chest. The king had apparently filled his part of the bargain. He had reversed whatever had made my brother paint so many brilliant, haunted canvases and given him back whatever was left of the talent he had been burning out, but the result wasn’t exactly Briar. I wondered if I would ever be able to look at my twin without feeling I had stolen something from him.


Briar never gave his own paintings as Christmas or birthday presents, but when it came time for him to distribute his gifts, he said, “I found this at the studio. I don’t remember when I did it, but I thought you’d like it.”
He handed me a flat oblong wrapped in glitter-dusted paper. Opening it, I looked down at a portrait of me. It wasn’t the one from the gallery in the hotel. This was Briar’s ordinary work again. It showed me wearing a circlet of holly around my head. Snow dusted my hair and the shoulders of my red wool coat. In the background, ivy grew over a dark wall. The Persis in the painting frowned at the artist as if she couldn’t understand why he was painting her.
I tilted the canvas to catch the light squarely, and in the moving shadows, a gaping gargoyle masque seemed to glance out of the wall among the vines and disappear. I blinked and turned the painting again, trying to catch the light at the same angle, but the illusion didn’t reoccur.
“When did you paint this?” I asked.
He had been whispering something in Gracia’s ear that made her cheeks flush. He raised his head. “I don’t know. I found it in the middle of a stack of canvases I haven’t looked at in years.
“But this is my red wool coat.”
He snorted. “You’ve always had a red coat. Every time you wear one out, you get a new one just like it.”


At nine o’clock, I stood on the sidewalk with my hand resting on the top of my car. Behind me, Briar and Gracia were still saying goodbye. Mom had realized belatedly that my brother hadn’t brought Gracia as his gallery agent, and she hugged Gracia with the desperate hope of a starving soul.
The front yard looked over Lincoln park, black with the outlines of trees beyond the arc lights. Something had caught my attention among the trees, but I couldn’t see it clearly. I blinked and squinted and shaded my eyes. For a moment, a light seemed to beam out of the forest while spectral pipes and horns and drums played in my ear. As my eyes slipped across it again, the light framed a figure I thought I almost recognized. Then light and music disappeared
I climbed in my car, started the engine and pulled out onto Fauntleroy way. Following the winding street out to the West Seattle Bridge, I tried to recall the figure I had seen for a moment in the light. The only feature I remembered clearly was the wreath it had worn on its head, and I felt almost entirely sure if I had been close enough, I would have seen it was mistletoe.


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​

​I jumped, whirled and almost backed into the wall, but Briar’s dealer, the young man who had examined his paintings, caught my arm and stopped me. “You wouldn’t want to touch anything,” he murmured. His hand felt cold all the way through my coat.
“You didn’t come here for this.” He tilted his chin toward the painting on the wall. The current had stopped for the young man and me for the moment, leaving us alone in our own little backwater.
“These others come to satisfy their vanity. What did you come for?” he asked with the curl of a half smile on his lips.
My mouth felt dry and my arm increasingly cold. “I saw you with my brother.”
The smile stretched to both sides of his face. “The clever twin. The talented twin. The special one.”
My shoulders stiffened. “Where is he?”
The young man pursed his lips. “I couldn’t say exactly. Shall we find him together?” He pulled my arm through his and placed his free hand over mine. The double chill of his arm and hand made my fingers cold. I tried to pull away, but my hand wouldn’t come free. He tucked me closer to his side and began to walk as the cold crept through my coat.
“It’s rather charming to see you,” he said as we floated down a side-stream of our own, separate from the feverish crowd.
“Who are you? His dealer?”
A sidewise look and that curl of a smile. “I’m Owen Smith, Persis Mitchell, and I’m just a go-between and an errand boy, a dogsbody running this way and that at my master’s bidding.” He said it half mockingly as if he were making a joke that might be at my expense or his own.
I snorted. “Smith? Is that supposed to be your real name?”
“One of them. I have dozens.”
False identities confirmed my suspicion that there was something illegal, or at best semi-legal going on. Art fraud or drugs. Drugs would explain the mood of the crowd. Some combination of rave and costume party. My theory didn’t cover the Babel of languages or the transformation of the building. I wondered if I had already been drugged without knowing it. Maybe something on the handle of the outer door, a hallucinogen absorbed through the skin.
“Who is the dealer?” I demanded.
He half-lidded his eyes as if thinking. “I suppose you’ll have to meet him if you want your brother back, but I advise you to reconsider. Your brother has had his heart’s desire. Take him now, and he’ll be as ordinary as you.” He flicked that one-sided curl of a smile again. “Can you think of a worse fate?” He tipped his head toward the wall, and I halted with a gasp.
This was Briar, this modest canvas. I knew his style and hand, but it was also me, my straight black hair, my round face, short nose and fair, lightly freckled skin. Briar had painted me in chiaroscuro, a figure in deep shadow hunched behind the counter at Lost Treasures, frowning down at a ledger like an old-fashioned account book with a quill in my hand and ink on my fingers. In the background, darkened shelves suggested collections of dusty junk. It was the best thing I had ever seen him do, and it was cruel. The expression on the figure’s face told every secret that could be known about me. She was ordinary—not pretty or clever or charismatic, alone in a darkened room with nothing of any value about her.
I tried to avert my face so the young man wouldn’t see the stinging spill of tears down my cheeks, but he took me and squared me to the painting of myself.
He leaned his face over my shoulder, his cold cheek chilling mine and turning tears to frost. “Watch,” he whispered.
The portrait began to change without changing. Now the shadowed shelves behind the figure hinted at grinning totems, bits and pieces of castoff things heavy with history and implication. The figure’s face still bent over the book, but her raised eyes looked out of the canvas from under her brows, and it wasn’t numbers or lists she wrote in the ledger but names and fates.
“There’s truth in the gifts they make for us,” Owen said. He caught my hand again and pulled it under his elbow. “Greater truths and lesser ones.” He nodded toward the portrait behind me. “That is one of the greater truths, I think.”
We had begun to drift again, still in our own sidestream but moving down the hallway. The young man scanned the costumed crowd.  “Most of our guests see only shadows if they see the truth at all. Even your brother sees only the gift of what he could never have been.”
I stiffened. “He’s a great painter.”
“Don’t make him more than he is, Persis,” the young man said. “The clever twin, the talented one, but he never had the sight of a master.”
Another of Briar’s paintings caught my eye, a landscape that made my breath catch. Beside it hung a sketch mounted on board, the simple lines of a nude that seemed to breathe. We passed nine more of Briar’s canvases, all haunted, all breathtaking.
“Marvelous, aren’t they?” Owen said.
The paintings in his studio were good, but not like this. I thought of Briar’s feverish concentration. “What did you do to him?”
“He begged the king for a favor, and the king granted him his wish.”
“What did he wish for?”
“What do you think?” Owen asked in return.
Briar scowling over his canvas, jaw tight, angry, dissatisfied. “To be a genius.”
Owen squeezed my arm in approval. “My king can’t change a duck into a swan, but he can squeeze all the grace of a duck into a moment of swanishness. Unfortunately for the duck, gifts of that kind take a toll.”
“It’s running out. He’s losing all the talent he ever had.”
He shrugged. “Ask him if the price was worth paying. He made us thirteen paintings whose genius surpasses anything he could have created in his own time. He is here tonight to make the same bargain again.”
I could believe it. Improvident Briar would spend a lifetime’s talent in an hour to create a single great thing, then spend his life clawing to regain it.
“What do you get out of it?” I demanded.
“You’ve seen. Thirteen paintings, the best he made, but we would have been content with one.” He curled his mouth and winked at me.
My mouth felt dry. “What do you want a picture of me for?”
He shrugged. “Not the painting itself. From the moment my king saw what the clever twin painted inside your picture, we wanted you.”
“What for?” I asked again. My hand on his arm felt numb with cold, and I had to clench my teeth so they wouldn’t chatter.
He grinned, and I thought for a moment he had the pointed teeth of a fox. “A little of this and a bit of that.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s all the answer there is. Ask me another.”
“What will Briar have to pay this time?”
“An arm, you mean? A leg? A soul?” He laughed. “What he wants, we can no longer give. The king will send him home.”
“It’s not completely gone. You could put him back the way he was. He wouldn’t be as good as he was before, but he would still have something.”
The young man’s eyebrows rose. “You know your brother best. Would he think that was a kindness?”
“Briar doesn’t know what he wants,” I snapped. “He’s a spoiled little prince who thinks he’s entitled to everything he dreams up.”
Owen laughed and squeezed my freezing arm. “Now there’s a truth with two faces. Well, I’ll grant that you know better, Persis Mitchell. If you made a bargain for your brother, what would you ask for?”
Wary, I said, “What would be the price?”
“That would be at the discretion of my king, but he has an interest in you, so I doubt the cost would be fatal.”
I studied his piquant profile for signs he was joking.
He raised one brow. “I’m not the king. I can’t bargain in his place, so there’s no harm in telling me what you would wish for. I could advise you as to the wisdom of your choice.”
“Would you advise me? Or would you trick me?”
“A fair question.” He slitted his eyes in thought. “I think I would deal evenly with you.”
“Would you tell me if you weren’t?”
“No.” He grinned again. “But I find I like you. I thought I would when I saw the portrait, and when I saw you at the window, I knew.” He squeezed my arm. “I like you very well, I think.”
His affection could freeze to the bone. “I want him to let Briar go.”
He clicked his tongue. “Send him back to a life of mediocrity?”
I set my jaw. “Yes.”
“Ah yes, the wise twin, the practical one.”
It stung.
“He could give you that,” Owen said. “The question will be what he demands in return.”
 
#
The crowd had become thinner as we talked as if people had been drifting away, though I had seen no doors on either side, but yellow light began to brighten the hall, and we came to a wide, sweeping stair carpeted in red and gold. The masquers climbed ahead of us in their costumes and their glittering ornaments, laughing and chattering among themselves, their faces flushed with greed.
Owen and I climbed along with them, still at our own pace. The light grew brighter, and I saw ahead a chandelier aflame with candles dripping wax onto the floor. We came to the top of the stairs and stepped onto a broad balcony. I recognized the rail across the front as the same that had hung broken from the balcony above the lobby I had seen through the front window of the hotel, and I couldn’t make out how we had walked such a long way and gone such a short distance.
I pulled toward the banister. Owen kept an icy grip on my hand but let me draw him until I stood at the rail and looked down over an enormous ballroom bigger by a hundred times than the lobby that should have been below.
An evergreen twenty feet tall stood mid-floor, as if it had grown there. It glittered with garland and glass and gold, and candles burned on its branches instead of colored lights. Mirrors hung on every wall from the floor to the ceiling and reflected the tree in an endless forest of light. Above the tree, another chandelier of gilded antlers hung over the ballroom, bigger than the one at the top of the stairs, and the space was hot with candles, hot enough to make the chill of my companion’s touch feel pleasant.
Garland draped the walls and swagged across the mirrors. Dancers reflected in the glass whirled and parted and came together in patterns that made an arcane sense. They danced in mismatched couples, a medieval lord with a Victorian lady, a flapper with a man in a boxy jacket from the nineteen fifties, a Viking with a goth girl, most of them anachronisms in the formal dance accompanied by medieval flutes, horns and drums in a pagan melody older than written history.
In the lilt of the music, I found myself dancing with the young man, my hand in his chill one and his breath cooling my heat-flushed face. I broke away and stood blinking in the spell of light and music and the smell of evergreen and melting wax. Something pricked my head. I pulled off a circlet of holly heavy with red berries which I dropped to the floor, the berries rolling away and disappearing, invisible against the red and gold of the carpet.
Owen’s clothes had changed from jeans and shirt to skin-tight leather pants and a green woolen surcoat over something like a white silk blouse with full sleeves. He wore a crown of mistletoe on his dark head and raised his pointed brows when he saw I noticed.
I scowled.
He took the wreath from his head, spun it once on his finger and flipped it into the air where it disappeared.
I refused to stare or blink at the cheap sleight of hand.
He took my arm in his again, and I was grateful for the icy chill against the heat of candles and so many dancing bodies.
“They’ve come to dance down the dark,” Owen said. He steered me away from the ballroom toward the back of the gallery. “At the turn of seasons, we let them come from wherever and whenever they belong and revel with us.”
“How generous,” I said, meaning otherwise.
That sidewise curl of a smile. “They might return to their own times and places a little thinner than they came.”
I remembered the high color in the people’s cheeks and the hint of hysteria in their laughter, and I didn’t think he meant thinner in a physical sense. “A spiritual weight-loss plan?” I said.
He chuckled. “We give good value for what we receive.”
“Which is?”
He swept a hand around to indicate the people now filing through five pairs of great doors.
We stopped in the nearest doorway where another gallery overlooked a stage on which a single dancer in white glided and leaped and swayed to a melody that made me want to rise up on my own toes. Her grace seemed hardly human as if the dancer had gone away, leaving only the dance itself gliding around the stage among feather-flakes of snow—white snow, white trees, white dancer—the only color on the stage the red of her shoes that left red tracks behind her on the snow-dusted stage.
I studied the faces of the audience. Every eye glittered. Every mouth hung slack, every cheek burned.
Owen guided me to the next door. On the stage, a young man sat under a spotlight, cradling a guitar. The goth girl with the laces up her sides leaned forward in her seat, lips parted, greedy eyes pinned on the boy’s dark face. His fingers moved on the strings, and I shivered as the music pricked up my spine. His voice joined the guitar—plaintive, beautiful and despairing.
Tears blurred my eyes and thickened my throat. I had been alone most of my life, the one forgotten the moment I left a room. The one trying alway to keep up with Briar who hardly knew other people existed without him.
The boy sang all that, but I couldn’t make out the words. If I could understand what he was saying, I could prune away every ordinary thing about me and make myself sleek and interesting, bright and brilliant as my brother. I tugged against Owen’s arm.
He pulled me back. “Lovely, isn’t he?” he murmured. “He was a talented boy, singing on the street for pennies in an old guitar case and aching for something he couldn’t reach.”
My lashes felt heavy with tears, and my face was wet. “Is this what he wanted?” I asked, sharp because my heart still hurt.
“More than anything in life.”
“That’s crazy.” My voice still shook as the song spilled out of the concert hall.
“To the wise twin, perhaps. But to the clever twin?” He shrugged. “So much to capture in paint or music or movement and so little time in a mortal life.”
In the darkened gallery, the goth girl wept, her eyes still riveted on the stage.
Owen strolled me past more doors, more galleries, more stages, more dancers, more music. We passed a library, its shelves disappearing into distance, where readers sat with backs against the shelves, their faces bent over books and scrolls, mouths slack, eyes racing over words as if they must read everything in a single night.
Another door opened on a feast hall, and Owen paused outside. He tipped his head to bid me look. A long table ran down the length of the room, dressed in silver and linen and heaped with food. A boar lay on a huge platter, meat carved away from its bones, the head intact. People in every kind of costume ate as if they had been starved for centuries, snatching at everything in reach, pushing food into their mouths, staining the tablecloth and their clothes, gulping wine and beer and mead and spilling it down their chins. My stomach churned, and I looked away.
Between the doors hung paintings and tapestries. Art stood in alcoves and niches and on plinths, and it all shone with the light of thousands of artists burning out like shooting stars.
The gallery came to an end, and Owen halted, tilting me a measuring look. “You see what your brother begged for. Would you still take it away from him?”
I thought of the boy with the guitar and the dancer with the bloody feet. “Yes,” I said.
“Then you would bargain with my king?”
“Yes.”
He stepped back a bit and studied me. His lips formed a childish pout. “What a shame. And I do like you so very well, too.”
“Trying to frighten me?” I asked.
His little curling sidewise smile. “Bargaining with my King is never safe. Look what it’s done to your brother.” He hugged my arm to his side again. “But sometimes I amuse my king. He might deal well with you for my sake.”

 Persis Mitchel is the ordinary twin, the sensible twin, the one forever looking after her feckless, talented brother Briar.
   On Midwinter Night, Briar's agent calls to say that he hasn't been into the gallery for months.  As always, it's sensible Persis to the rescue.
     She finds Briar in his studio--filthy, half-deranged and painting with a genius he has never possessed before.
   Investigation draws Persis into a world of crushing beauty and lingering darkness and a bargain to save her brother that may cost both of them their futures.
 
The sign hung on the front door with the Open side facing inward, turning its Closed back to any holiday shoppers still out in the falling temperature and increasingly icy sleet of a late Seattle evening. Inside, I made a last round of Lost Treasures, checking lights, alarm, register.
I considered shutting off the overhead stereo system with its endless, almost subliminal round of Christmas music, decided to let it run like a bulwark against the longest night of the year. I crossed the shop floor, weaving between shelves and tables loaded with bric-a-brac, each piece with a tiny hand-written price tag. The only really valuable items stayed in a locked, glass-fronted cabinet equipped with its own alarm. Those arrived from a private delivery company in specially packed crates and boxes shipped by the store’s owner from exotic places all over the world.
My phone played the jingling melody assigned to Gracia, the owner of the gallery that showed Briar’s work. I debated whether to answer. My back hurt, and my feet ached from standing all day and waiting on Christmas shoppers looking for one-of-a-kind gifts for difficult relatives.
But if Gracia was calling me, then Briar was acting up or acting out or whatever you called it when artists went creative and childlike and threw self-destructive tantrums.
I rummaged the phone out of my purse and sat down on a vanity chair beside a coffee table with a checkerboard top. “Hi Gracia,” I said.
“Persis? It’s Gracia,” she said automatically.
“What’s Briar done now?” I asked.
“Now? I don’t know about now. Where is he?” Gracia’s squeaky voice was cute in person, but over the phone, it went in my ear and right through my head out the other side.
I moved the phone a little further from my ear. “At home or in his studio. He doesn’t go anywhere else.”
“I’ve been calling him for three days,” Gracia declared. “I leave messages, but he doesn’t pick up. I went to his studio and his apartment. He didn’t answer when I knocked.” Gracia had to be really worried to gather up the nerve to go to Briar’s apartment. 
Icy sleet pelted the sidewalk beyond the shop’s eaves. “That’s not so long.”
“The last time he talked to me, he said hewas working, but he hasn’t brought in anything new in months, and we have a show in six weeks.”
“I thought he just had a show.”
“That was three months ago. We need more stock.”
My brother made a good living off his paintings. “I haven’t heard from him either. He probably forgot to refill his prescription and lost track.”
Gracia confirmed the last suspicion. “He’s lost weight. I tried to ask if he was all right, but he didn’t really answer.”
“ I’ll find him and make him call you.”

#
Briar had a tiny apartment in a subdivided Victorian southeast of downtown. I climbed the stairs and bruised my knuckles on the door. My brother didn’t answer, but I carried keys to both his apartment and studio for occasions like this. The heat hadn’t been turned on, and the temperature must have been around fifty degrees. The overhead light didn’t respond to the switch, but a tiny plug-in night light in the kitchen showed the electricity hadn’t been cut off again. The overhead bulb had burned out, and Briar hadn’t bothered to change it.
I picked my way around furniture toward the floor lamp, picking dirty clothes off the floor as I went and heaping them on the couch. The lamp worked. Stacks of canvases leaned against the walls in every room, even in the kitchen where dirty dishes filled the sink. Raman wrappers, instant soup cups and the used plastic containers from frozen dinners overflowed the trash and covered the countertops. Briar could afford to eat human food, but when he forgot to refill his meds, he didn’t have the patience to make toast much less scramble an egg.
The bathtub was full of canvasses. I opened the medicine cabinet over the sink. The pharmacy bottles were there, three empties, one half full. I discarded the empties, shoving them down into the overflowing wastebasket, and poured the remaining tablets into my palm, counting. I checked the date on the bottle. Briar hadn’t forgotten to refill. He’d stopped taking his meds eight weeks ago. He hadn’t been home in days, maybe weeks. I put the bottle in my pocket.
Leaving his apartment, I drove to the studio. My brother rented space at the top of a flooring store on First Avenue. I spotted the light at the window before I got out of the car. Letting myself in the alley door, I climbed four flights to the top and let myself in without knocking. If he hadn’t been taking his meds, he wouldn’t respond to a knock anyway.
I inhaled the orange-peel tang of artist’s turpentine and saw Briar’s legs in paint-stained jeans behind the canvas on the easel. He had his back to the window, the canvas between himself and the door.
“Briar,” I said.
The legs didn’t move, but I heard the sound of his brush as he pulled more paint from his pallet.
“Briar, Gracia’s been trying to call you for days. You’ve got a show coming up.”
Like his apartment, the studio was furnished in stacks of paintings. Hundreds of canvasses leaned against walls or lay in racks to dry. Between here and the apartment, there could have been over a thousand. I went to the nearest stack by the wall. Briar grouped them by size, but apart from that, he had no organizing system. I looked at the first two canvasses in the pile. Typical Briar—pretty landscapes, portraits, scenes of children playing, couples boating, still-lifes, animal and bird studies. The kind of art people wanted to hang on their walls.
His latest work would be in the drying rack. I pulled out a tray to look at the painting there. Children played in a park with the outline of a city in the background, but it was like nothing I had seen Briar do before. Where his usual pictures were, I would never say it aloud, pedestrian, this had a quality I couldn’t define except that despite its relatively small size, it would overpower any space in which it hung. Even in Gracia’s gallery, it would draw the eye to itself from anywhere in the room.
Then it occurred to me that the children in the little playground weren’t playing. They were stalking an old man I hadn’t noticed at first glance because he sat on a bench in the lower left quarter with his head bent over a newspaper. I couldn’t see his face, but something in the hunch of his shoulders made the corners of my mouth draw down in distaste. I shook the illusion out of my head, and the children were playing tag again around a nice old man who had brought his grandchildren to the park.
I replaced the tray and pulled out the next, a still-life of oblong red fruit heaped in a carved wooden bowl, the colors powerful and subtle. I thought for a moment I smelled something sweet. A single fruit lay beside the bowl on a rough wooden table. The fruit had been sliced open, as red inside as out. A silver knife with a red-stained blade lay beside it. Red juice ran down the wooden table and dripped off the edge like a runnel of blood, and as I studied it, the meat of the fruit looked increasingly fleshy, the hollow where the pit belonged looking more and more like the inner chamber of a heart, and I swallowed a twinge of nausea just as the fruit pulsed with a heartbeat. Then I blinked and saw only an extraordinarily lifelike and tempting bowl of  fruit executed with a sure mastery I had never seen from Briar.
I opened two more trays and found more like the first, a waterfront scene and a child’s portrait, both done with the same authority as the others. The child, a beaming, round-cheeked boy, seemed less and less human the longer I looked, though I couldn’t set my finger to the reason.
In the other one, I recognized the beach at Lincoln Park, children playing with a dog, people strolling or watching the children, waves rolling softly toward the shore. In the distance, a ferry, brilliant green and white, returned from the island with its wake behind it. It wasn’t simply a neat, pleasant scene. Its subtlety went deeper than prettiness.
I waited, dreading. Gradually, the shadows of trees and benches grew darker, blacker, and they twisted, leaning toward the people in the scene, poised only a moment away from snuffing out every living thing on the canvas. I shoved the tray back in its place.
I should have been delighted by my brother’s leap of brilliance. He had certainly put in the hours, painting ten to twelve hours a day unless someone forced him out of the studio, but this felt wrong. Artists didn’t jump from journeyman to master overnight. Then there was that weird effect as if another picture lay under the paint on the surface. I had never seen anything like that in his work before.
Shaking off the eerie sensations, I circled the easel to stand beside my brother and look at the new painting. The seascape forming on the canvas was as good as anything he had done before, as good as the paintings in the racks. As I studied the sand and sea, I felt the floor give way under my feet, and I dropped into quicksand. I twitched with alarm and gasped myself out of the spell, grasping at Briar’s arm for balance.
That finally jarred Briar from his trance. He turned with a snarl on his lip. Then he recognized me. The snarl melted into an impatient frown. “What are you doing here?”
My twin brother looked nothing like me unless it was in his black hair, but I had inherited our Irish father’s straight hair, and Briar had our Greek mother’s curls. Briar had Mom’s Cupid’s bow lips and straight nose, too, and an olive tint to his complexion. His cheeks had hollowed since I last saw him, and he had brown circles under his dark eyes. He hadn’t shaved, and the beard that usually turned his cheeks blue-black by five-o-clock had grown out into four inches of curly mess that obscured the line of his cleft chin. His skin looked more yellow than bronze, and his hair lay tangled over his forehead and down the back of his neck. The smell wafting off him forced me back a step.
“Where have you been?” I demanded. “You look half dead, and you haven’t showered in weeks.” I waved my hand in front of my nose.
“No time.” He scrubbed his forearm over his forehead, leaving a dash of green paint on his ear from the brush still in his hand. “You wouldn’t understand. I was painting art, not this stuff...” He slashed his brush around the room at the canvasses against the walls, and I ducked to avoid getting a swipe of green paint on my blouse.
Briar never denigrated his own painting. He had more than average talent, and he had been honing his technique since we were twelve. He’d studied Fine Arts in college and graduate school, and although he obsessed over the quality of his work, he’d never seemed dissatisfied with its caliber.
He put his brush to the canvas, scowling at the line he was painting, his whole body tense as if he were fighting something that tried to pull away from him.
“When was the last time you took your meds?” I asked.
“Don’t need them,” he muttered, focused on brush and paint.
I looked around the studio. An electric water pot sat on the floor beside a box of Ramen noodles under the sink he used to wash his brushes. A scattering of empty cellophane wrappers meant he might have been eating occasionally.
I went to the sink. No cups. If Briar remembered to drink, he probably sucked it right from the tap. I washed out a bowl with my fingers, filled it, tipped two of his pills into my palm and returned to him. “Here.”
His free hand lashed out and slapped the pills from my hand. “Said I don’t need it.”
I nursed my hand against my stomach, tempted to throw the water in his face and tell him to drop dead, but if I left him alone, he’d continue to deteriorate until the manic spell dissipated and he plunged into depression. This time, the flirting cuts on his forearms might go deep enough to do real harm.
“Briar.” My voice shook. I took a deep breath and relaxed my jaws. “Briar, don’t make me call the hospital.”
He slammed the brush into its tray and turned on me with bared teeth. “Can you not see I’m busy?  Even you should be able to see this is important.”
He was shaking, fists clenched, and his breath came in pants. He had obviously left his toothbrush at home.
“Fine.” I backed away, glaring right back at him. “You can stand there and starve.”
At the door, I looked back. He had returned to his painting as if I had never been there.
Back in my car, I gripped the steering wheel. If he wouldn’t take his meds, I had to call Dr. Spracklin. No, our parents first. If Briar went into a manic rage, Dad was the only one who could restrain him long enough for the doctor to get a sedative into him. The doctor would call the paramedics to get Briar admitted to Highline for evaluation. He’d get the seventy-two hour hold and get Briar back on meds, and he could talk Briar into voluntary commitment until he was level again. I dug my phone out of my pocket.
I hadn’t touched the dial button yet when the alley door opened, and Briar lurched through, awkwardly maneuvering a bundle of canvasses roughly wrapped in brown paper. I forgot to dial. A moment ago, Briar had been snapping and snarling at me for disturbing him at work. Now he was shuffling down the street with several paintings under his arm. He didn’t have a car and never carried his precious art around with him. When he wanted to transport a painting, Gracia sent professional movers to crate it for him—another special service Briar received because he was Briar, a mix of talent, helplessness and entitlement.
He wasn’t going toward the gallery. What was this? Drugs? Was he trading or selling paintings for something that affected his work, that blend of brilliance and underlying ugliness?  
Slipping out of the car, I shut the door softly behind me and waited until Briar turned the corner onto the street, then I ran after him. I followed my brother for blocks. Hardy Seattle residents hurried, head down under the icy rain, most eschewing umbrellas. Half the shops were still open, their windows decorated with lights and garlands. Fragments of holiday music came and went as I passed.
Down Seneca to the avenue under the Alaskan Way Viaduct, east until we came to a narrow building squeezed in between a shop basement and an apartment building dating from the thirties. Briar turned inside.
I ran to catch up and peeked in the tall front window.
Briar stood in the middle of the small lobby or showroom or whatever it had been when the building was in use with a shorter, compact man dressed in jeans and a loose shirt.
No decorations here. No yellow light defying early nightfall, but illumination came from a faint light on the second floor where a balcony overlooked the lobby. The broken balcony railing hung over the unfurnished room below.
The paper had been torn from the two biggest paintings, and the stranger examined one, stepping back to study it, cocking his head from side to side like a bird to take it in. In doing so, he glanced at the window, and one side of his mouth seemed to curl like a conspirator’s smile directed straight at me.
I recoiled, waiting for Briar and the stranger to burst from the door and accuse me of spying on my brother. They didn’t. I glanced again, but neither man paid any attention to the window. The stranger held a smaller painting at arm’s length, turning it to catch the light from the balcony. He shook his head.
Briar said something, leaning toward the other man, who stepped back but didn’t seem intimidated. He had probably just got a whiff of my brother. Finally, the dealer—whether drugs or art or both—shrugged and took up the smaller paintings. Briar gathered the two big ones, and the two men turned away from the window. Just before they turned, however, I thought I saw the stranger look straight at the window and wink with that conspirator’s smile curling half his mouth. Then the men carried the paintings through an open, unlit doorway, and the dark swallowed them.
For my brother out at night, carrying his own paintings and showing them to a dealer, this had to be at the root of what had changed Briar and his work. I took hold of the ornate latch of the door, and it opened at a tug. I bolted inside, determined to catch up to my brother and demand an explanation, but surprise stopped me just inside.
A crowd of chattering people blocked my way, filling the bright, hot room under a branching candelabra of gilded deer antlers. The parking lanes outside under the viaduct had been empty when I opened the door. Now someone bumped me hard from behind, and a thick hand on my upper arm steadied me. I half-turned and looked up at a huge man with thick, red-gold fur on his forearms. He wore his beard in two plaits, and his hair fell to his shoulders and mingled with the brown fur that draped his neck. He smelled of blood and goat. He said something brusque in a language I didn’t know and moved me forward, away from the door, almost lifting me off my feet.
A woman in a gold-brocade surcoat and red velvet kirtle squeezed through the door behind the viking on the arm of a much-older man dressed for the same era. She chattered breathlessly and stared around her, taking in the giant without a blink. Behind them came a short girl with long blue hair, wearing a shoulderless black leather catsuit laced up the sides from her ankles to her armpits, which were also dressed in long blue hair. She noted the bizarrely-dressed crowd without surprise or apparent interest. She traveled with a pack of similar vampire goth teenagers—girls and boys in black lipstick and creative piercings, all their cheeks flushed with excitement that didn’t match their attempts to look world-weary and disinterested.
Bewildered, I saw flappers clinging to the arms of young men in boater jackets and double-breasted suits, Victorian ladies and gentlemen, people in Medieval costumes. Some others just wore hooded cloaks of black velvet or silk. I glimpsed carnival masks under some of the hoods. That explained it, I thought. They were in costume for a masquerade. If only the Viking didn’t smell so much like goat.
The crowd surged and swept me up with them, forcing me further from the door through which I had come, and I just had time to look back and see it shut out the parking lot under the viaduct. When it closed, a pair of doors stood where the original had been. Their edges met down the center of a grotesque face wearing a gaping scowl amid carved vines and leaves. I recognized the form as a variation on the pagan Green Man worshiped by the pre-Roman celts.
The Viking’s hand fell away, and he moved on ahead of me, head and shoulders above most of the crowd. I tried to turn around and go back, but either the press of bodies pinned me in place, or something else prevented me because no matter how I tried to brace my heels against the flow of the crowd, I continued to glide forward with them deeper into the inexplicably large and bright building.
I tugged the sleeve of the woman in the Medieval dress. “Excuse me. Is there another way out?”
She snapped, “Álynnest,” and jerked her arm free.
I blinked at the almost-familiar word, then recognized it as Medieval English. Let go. Now that I listened, I realized most of the crowd spoke languages other than modern English. I wasn’t fluent enough in anything to understand what was happening to me, but I recognized smatterings of Germanic, Frankish, what must have been original Latin from the period when it had been a living language. Modern languages—Swedish, Russian, Mandarin.
Now I shoved in earnest, frantic to get out of the press and get my bearings. I stepped on the medieval woman’s kirtle and ignored her exclamation in Old English. I tried to reach the Goth girl. She and her friends would understand me, and they seemed to know where they were and what was happening, but pushing across the current caused something like a backflow or an eddy that trapped me long enough for the Goth teenagers to disappear ahead of me.
The crowd pushed me toward the high opening through which Briar and the other man had disappeared back when the lobby had been small and dark and empty. The arch seemed much further away than it had been when I saw it through the window. Bigger, too, I thought, when the mouth of the corridor took me in.
The crowd attenuated. No longer pushed and jostled elbow to elbow with strangers, I tried to stop and turn, but however I tried to change direction, I continued to walk forward. I could now work my way sideways toward the outside of the procession until I reached the verge and had a little room to breathe as I was pulled along. Now that I had space to think, I put aside the question of languages and the inexplicable alteration of the building. I could sort that out later. Briar had gone this way, and there would be an exit somewhere.
I passed a plinth against the wall on which stood a lacquered urn painted with human figures in gold around its circumference. Further on, a small painting hung on the wall, a portrait of an Elizabethan woman with a high, shaved forehead. Nothing like Briar’s work. So I had stumbled into a gallery. Briar must be showing some of his paintings here, cheating on Gracia after everything she had done to promote him in her gallery and on the internet. Without her, he’d be living at home with Mom and Dad, painting in their garage, too feckless to sell his own work.
Swags of greenery and holly draped the walls, and more art appeared out of the dark and faded behind. Statuary large and small, metal and stone and glass. I recognized the Greek and Roman styles, then something much older and stranger. The statues retained the brilliant paints their creators had given them, the colors unmarred by time. Tapestries hung on the wall along with masks and fans and fabrics hand-woven and embroidered, all as good as any museum had to offer and so much better, if I could judge accurately.
Paintings on canvas, leather or wood, on sheets of ivory too big to come from any creature I could imagine. I identified pieces from long before the Common Era up to the present moment. A section of the wall became stone, painted with hieroglyphs that didn’t contain any of the symbols or stylized figures of the Egyptians. The lines broke into staves, and I realized I was looking at a poem, unreadable to anyone for ten thousand years or more. As I looked, however, the hieroglyphs began to make sense, and as the first line formed into meaning, I jerked my head aside.
There were no tags to identify the artists, but I had studied enough to know Matisse and Vermeer, Picasso and Chagall, all from the original hands, I was sure of it, but every piece unknown to the art world, and each one far beyond the known work of the creators, pieces of mastery that beggared everything that came before them, and as I paused to look, before the corridor swept me downstream, I saw that each one had the same quality that imbued Briar’s new works—the eerie implication of something underneath the paint.
I wondered if the others saw it. If so, they made no effort to look away from the objects on display. Some studied the artwork in open fascination, clutching their companions, chattering in breathless voices. Others put on expressions of mere casual interest to convey that they had visited the gallery too often to be impressed, but they breathed high and hard with excitement, and their half-lidded eyes glittered.
As I studied a Cole landscape that began to look more and more like a desolated hellscape, I felt a chill breath on the back of my neck, and a low voice said, “Do you like it?”
End of Part 1.
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Treasure hunter Audette Godfrey has gone everywhere and done everything. Now she's after one last treasure--the one that will take her where no-one has ever gone before. All she has to do is reach it before the cultists, who want it for their own terrible purposes, and evade the bounty hunter on her trail.
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