Once I had become wealthy enough to buy miracles, I used one to obtain the living head and shoulders of my longtime enemy, Philip Mortensen.
The news services reported that a prominent attorney working behind closed doors had just been found dead in his favorite chair, intact up to the wound that ended his torso just below the collarbone. His two severed arms were found fallen to the floor at either side of him, forming parentheses. An autopsy revealed that all these remaining parts had been completely drained of blood, but was unable to determine what tool had been used to amputate everything above his collarbone. Some stories managed to report that not a single drop had escaped to stain his lush burgundy carpet.
This would no doubt go down in crime history as the most spectacular and baffling unsolved murder of all time, not just a whodunnit but a howdunnit.
Nobody, not the police, not his wife, not his children, and not his secret mistress, would ever know that it was not a murder but a kidnapping.
Mortensen’s head and shoulders became the prisoners of what looked like an oil painting, portraying some jowly, balding man with thin strands of hair floating above the round arc of his skull like cirrus clouds. It was the face of a well-fed man, a contented man . . . even, if you believed Mortensen’s public image, a good man.
It made little logical sense for the landscape behind him to be a stark image of arctic wastes and that nineteenth-century sailing vessel the Erebus, stuck in ice during its journey to discover the Northwest Passage, but I wanted him to begin his time in my possession aware of being cold and alone in a place far from home.
I hung the framed image over the fireplace, in the private study that neither my household staff nor my wife were allowed to enter. I had an excuse for declaring the room off-limits to anybody besides myself. Among my many enterprises were certain highly sensitive projects for the government that required me to keep particular documents of a sensitive nature at home; I even apologized, in full humility, for the necessity. Everybody understood. I was not some capricious tyrant who made that demand lightly. The routine maintenance of this one room, all on my own, was a small matter. Thanks in no small part to early financial reversals fomented by Mortensen’s enterprises, I had spent many of my early years poor enough to need to perform such chores all the time.
The miracle had not cost my soul, an artifact that the provider of miracles had no interest in. The price had been legal tender, cash, a sum greater than the annual budget of some fair-sized cities. It’s a given that I shuddered when I first heard it, an equal given that when I had a little time to contemplate the purchase further, I found that it was a price well worth paying for power over the piece of garbage who had been my chief competitor for so long. Later, I might choose to pay that price again, for a second miracle and maybe even a third—as simply being able to exercise such power over the physical universe had been pleasurable all by itself—but right now, it was difficult to imagine any other I might even desire. I had my health. I had more wealth and power than any man could possibly use. I had a beautiful and obedient wife thirty years my junior, who by contract had to remain married to me for at least five more years in order to escape with alimony. I had a big house, a fine position in the community, a sterling reputation as a captain of industry, and now, a passion: being the personal Mephistopheles to my worst business rival’s eternally damned soul.
A busy schedule prevented me from initiating my fun for a few months, but I did make a point of a weekend aside, late in the fall. That night, I was able to give my beautiful wife a break from the responsibility to pretend that her skin did not crawl at my touch, by telling her I would be working in the study all evening, and indeed that she should not be concerned if I remained in seclusion for several days. She left the house with the credit cards and a visible air of relief. I locked myself in the study, set a fire in the hearth, settled into my most comfortable high-backed chair with a snifter of brandy, and spoke the words that would, by prior arrangement, restore my enemy to awareness of his predicament.
“Hello, Mortensen.”
The figure in the painting blinked, in the stupid way men have when they’re first returning to consciousness and have yet to know that they’ve been taken to a place absent of hope. It was a look I already knew from the faces of any number of other associates facing their last hours in darkened rooms; though their fates had been significantly more mundane than the one Mortensen faced, the principle was the same, and I was able to follow the rapid evolution from confusion to concern to genuine dismay and fear with ease despite the less than five seconds it took the damned man to travel it. “Hello?” he said. And then, rising to a cry: “Hello! Hello! Is anybody here? Hello?”
I reached into the painting and slapped him twice, once on each cheek. He gasped. I pulled back my hand and registered not just the pleasant sting of flesh against flesh, but also the impression of the great, indeed inhuman cold of the place where I had trapped him: the kind of environment that would drop an unprotected man in seconds.
I said, “Hello, Mortensen. Can you hear me?”
I had asked the dealer in miracles to arrange for my voice, as heard by the trapped man, to possess the distant but resonant and echoing tones that motion pictures of a certain sort attribute to the Lord God. This was not because I’d ever possessed any fantasies of playing God, but because I’d wanted to amuse myself by seeing whether Mortensen’s first explanation for his plight would involve any of that religious rot.
In this small matter, I was doomed to disappointment. He did jerk as if stung, but a certain animal craftiness entered his eyes as his petty little mind began seeking some means of controlling whatever happened to him. He said, “I . . . I know that voice. I’ve heard that voice. Recently.”
“Please, sir. Until now, we have not been in the same room for five years.”
“Oh, my God. Perkins? It’s you, isn’t it? It’s you, you son of a bitch! What have you done to me? Why can’t I feel anything below my shoulders?”
I grinned at him. “You certainly do have a great number of questions, my good fellow. But I will attempt to provide all the necessary intelligence as expeditiously as I can. First, you are right. I am your old friend, and as for where I’ve taken you, it’s a place that I control utterly. You cannot feel anything below your shoulders because there is no longer anything to feel. I do hope these answers prove a comfort to you, because they are the last comforts you shall ever know.”
He began to scream.
I can afford to be clear on this. I have witnessed any number of enemies taken to dark subterranean places for vicious treatment. I relegated all of them to that fate out of business necessity, rather than the kind of personal animus I harbored for Mortensen. He evaded my wrath for as long as he did because I’d put off dealing with him for the day when I could find means that fulfilled the bottomless depths of my malice for him. But I’d learned a great deal about screaming from the others. I’d determined that screams of anticipatory fear like these were best permitted to go on for however long it took the subject in question to exhaust himself and come to terms with the knowledge that none of this melodramatic fulmination had profited him one iota. This epiphany can arrive in minutes. I’ve seen it take days.
Sometimes, it’s more productive to cut it off at the start.
I went to the dartboard that had until recently been my chief recreation in this room, and plucked one of the darts from the bull’s-eye. It was gratifying to learn that I was still as skilled at the pastime as I had been in college. The dart flew true and embedded its point in the center of Mortensen’s forehead, right above the bridge of his nose.
His reaction to this was instant, disbelieving silence. Blood flowed freely from the point of the puncture, forming a rivulet that split at the bridge of his nose and followed the line of his cheeks toward his jaw. His gaze moved upward, struggling to make out what had just impaled him, just barely managing to pull the stabilizing fan of the tail-feathers into focus. His response reeked of disbelief. “A dart.”
“Yes. And don’t get your hopes up, my old friend. It shan’t kill you. Nothing I will do to you in this room, tonight or in any of the other long nights to come, will kill you. You will stay alive for as long as I wish, enduring all the ways I shall twist your present form to the cause of my own amusement.”
“You’re insane,” he said.
I had, of course, expected precisely that banal observation, precisely this early in our evening together.
“I suppose, on the subject of you, I am. I must confess it, Mortensen. I loathed you from the very first moment I set eyes on you. I loathed you more every time we spoke, every time your enterprises ran into conflict with mine. For decades now, I have had few ambitions that excited me more than the prospect of ensuring that you experience more suffering, at greater length, than any living man has ever known. You have no idea how many plans I’ve discarded because they were not elaborate enough. You don’t know how many times that’s saved you for another day, another year.” I chuckled. “Of course, I am so glad that I held out. This is so much more satisfying than a simple assassin garroting you in the dead of night.”
“But you can’t!” he cried. And then, another sentence I’d known he would get around to, sooner or later. “You’ll never get away with it!”
I laughed again, this time with genuine affection. “Oh, Mortensen.”
I readied a handful of darts.
“You don’t know how fully I intend to test that hypothesis.”
* * * *
The outside world continued to turn in the manner it always has. Empires rose and fell. Mortensen’s supposed death became one of those notorious mysteries that vanish in the tabloid press when new atrocities arrive to supplant them. I arranged various entertaining fates for his wife and children, and brought the news back for Mortensen to enjoy. Some of the details would have been enough to drive most men in his predicament mad, but there was no pleasure to be had in tormenting a shattered soul. I’d therefore denied him the respite of madness.
My associates took note of how much time I spent ensconced in my study. My wife, acting out of the need to document that she’d noticed, remarked that I hadn’t spent any time with her in three weeks. My board of directors told me that I needed to attend more corporate functions. My friends said that they missed me at the club. I obliged the wife with a night plying her erotic trade and an increase in her allowance sufficient to mollify her for what I expected to be a number of additional months of neglect. I fired three members of the board and gave the others a detailed business plan for the next year. I went to the club and spent a fine evening trading industry gossip that included extensive speculation over the leftist conspiracy behind the strange assassination of poor Mortensen. I did a quick run around the world and returned to the one room in my home—and by extension, the one place in the entire world—that held any interest to me.
Outside my study windows, it was the height of summer, the golden rays of the sun casting their blessed light on a countryside overflowing with life’s wondrous bounty. Inside the frame, it was still arctic wasteland, the air so frigid that if I did not use the paints I’d been provided to maintain the image as only I could, Mortensen’s skin turned black with frostbite, and his eyes froze shut beneath blindfolds of pure ice.
Have I mentioned that I was once quite the talented painter of portraits, in my university days? It never took any real time at all to retouch his skin and undo whatever the climate had done to him, restoring to his jowly features to the very pink of health . . . which, of course, the frigid air never wasted any time ravaging again. This did, of course, involve more and more effort the more time I spent away, and on this particular occasion, I’d just returned from a two-week industrial conference in Rotterdam. The wind-rotted fissures in the flesh of his cheeks had grown so ravaged that it was now, in spots, possible to see the teeth behind them.
I removed his painting from the wall and set it against my easel. “You’re not looking well, Mortensen. You should take better care of yourself.”
“P-please,” he begged. “Enough . . . is enough. In the name of decency, please stop.”
“I told you, my old friend. In a relationship such as ours, begging only increases the pleasure taken by the one wielding the power.” I dabbed my brush in some jet-black paint and touched the bristles to his forehead. A few simple movements and I had added a tick to his forehead: a swollen, gruesome, blood-saturated blot of a thing, with a proboscis sunken deep into his flesh. It was my will that the thing be venomous, and so the flesh around the spot began to pucker, to swell, to grow rank and infected. “For instance, that. Do you have even the slightest idea how satisfying I find that?”
“What do you need me to say to you? I’m sorry, dammit! Stop!”
Of course, I would not. I had grown quite adept at adding and subtracting elements from his tightly circumscribed world. I had subjected him to plagues of ants and scorpions, to needles peeling his skin from his skull, to broken glass in his eyes, and to a great number of foul substances erupting from between his lips; I had also recast his features in the most delightfully comic ways, blacking out his teeth or adding pendulous tumors to his cheeks or creating unbroken expanses of skin where his mouth or his eyes should have been. Always it had been delightful to watch him writhe in full awareness of his obscene new incarnations before I demonstrated divine mercy by restoring the portrait to its prior, unsullied state.
The only time he had ever come close to endangering me was one occasion when I had been having some fun covering his lips with leeches. He had clamped down his teeth and managed to catch the tip of my index finger. I’d cursed, pulled away, and for the rest of the day, visited upon his eyes and forehead cruelties that I would have thought beyond even my motivated imagination. Since then, I’d taken special care when touching up his mouth.
In any event, the tick was just a warm-up for today’s fun, the first stage of a brand-new project.
“Do you know, Mortensen? I have found that I have empathy for Satan’s dilemma.”
The swelling had spread to his right cheek, making his voice sludgy. “Go t’ heh!”
“That,” I said warmly, “happens to be a most germane suggestion. Because this is your personal Hell, and I your personal eternal demon, I am forced to contemplate the difficulty all such demons must face not long into their stewardship of such damned souls as yourself: to wit, just how much novelty can one keep bringing to the task of rendering any given soul’s torment unendurable, even when the power at hand is infinite and the possibilities for fresh punishment limited only by the boundaries of one’s imagination. To a horned imp inflicting all the horrors of the nether regions on some sinner of merely human capacity to feel it, is it not an occupational hazard to run into the torturer’s equivalent of creative bankruptcy? To have reached the limits of one’s personal imagination and find that all that remains is derivative hackwork?”
The venom must have spread to Mortensen’s airways, because he was no longer attempting to answer me but instead purpling as he struggled to breathe.
I applied paint remover to the tick, repaired the physical damage to Mortensen’s face with some dabs of paint appropriate to his skin tone, and gave him time to recover.
Once he had breath again, I said, “So, where was I?”
“You said . . . you were running out of ideas.”
I chuckled and painted an oozing sore on the tip of his ear. “I’m an imaginative man, Mortensen; I have enough ideas to keep this going not just for the rest of my life, but also for the lives of the talented artists of the grotesque I had hoped would take over your punishment after I’m gone.”
His next suggestion was a pathetic effort to be helpful. “You could wish for extended life for yourself.”
“Oh, I could. And I have. You will be happy to hear that you and I will now live in health, or what passes for health in your current condition, decades longer than I ever would have expected. Beyond that, the price of the miracles necessary to keep me going increases past what even I could afford. In fifty years or so, I may need to renegotiate.
“But it occurs to me that even if I live forever, or secure your fate as a commissioned legacy lasting generations, then the creative well will still someday run dry; the ideas will stop coming, or the will to continue will fade to nothing.
“So, what I need, really, is a way to make the process self-perpetuating for all eternity.
“I need a demon.”
I mixed my pigments until I found myself with the perfect shade of awfulness, and touched the tip of my brush to the canvas. This time, unlike any of the previous times, I didn’t make any adjustments to Mortensen’s face or figure but instead applied my skill to the landscape behind him, where the ship remained frozen in arctic ice.
Mortensen flinched as I drew near, realized that nothing was done to him directly, and turned his eyes as far as they would go, but no will he could muster could turn his head all the way around and grant him what he most feared and craved: a clear view of what I was adding to the background art.
He cried out, “What are you doing?”
I began to hum Beethoven’s Fifth.
“You son of a bitch! You sick, sadistic son of a bitch! Tell me!”
I hummed the symphony in its entirety while continuing to work.
* * * *
Another year passed in this fashion. It is remarkable how much I learned of the fine art of oil painting in that time, how much further I was able to refine the skills that turned a few swabs of pigment into nightmares beyond Mortensen’s imagination. Of course, business continued to make its serial demands on my time, and I sometimes had to leave the poor soul unattended for days or weeks, with nothing to do but contemplate ominous scraping sounds behind him—but that, I found, added a delicious additional dimension to his plight; alone in the cold and dark, savaged by the elements, he was left no alternative but to deeply miss me, both the company I provided and the first aid my brushes administered. His demeanor, whenever I returned with apologies, often included a pathetically grateful measure of relief, relief that I took care to betray with grotesque adjustments to his features before I left him behind and turned my attention back to the evolution of the growing awfulness behind him.
Near the end, I grew so enamored of the work that I abdicated my other responsibilities in order to work on the painting all my waking hours. I granted my wife a divorce along with a settlement grand enough to ensure that I never needed to see her again. I resigned the board and sold off all my shares in the enterprises. I stopped sleeping in the bedroom and instead took my rest on the couch in the study, leaving that room only to bathe and to eat. The servants thought I didn’t hear them whispering that the old man had gone mad. I cared not. For the first time in my life, I understood the obsessive quality that can overtake an artist working on his masterpiece. The view out the window revealed winter, then spring, then summer again, but the work on the grand picture continued, the awful sounds of grinding teeth and rumbling growls grew louder, and finally came the day when I put my brush aside and said, “Mortensen?”
He said, “What?”
“This is magnificent. This is absolutely bloody magnificent.”
He seemed less than enthused. “Oh. Please. Don’t.”
Even constant pleas for mercy can become rote. For some time now, Mortensen’s had become almost sarcastic.
I forced some jollity into my tone. “Oh, come now, you don’t want to be like that! You were always an intolerable oaf, even on your best days, but I always credited you with a modicum of intellectual curiosity. You have to be wondering what I’ve been working on for so long! The need to know must be burning in your breast!”
“I don’t have a breast.”
I was mildly surprised. “What an excellent point.”
“I don’t have anything,” he said. “Not family, not friends, not even life. Nothing but my hatred for you.”
“Also an excellent point.”
“Better than you think,” he said. “Because if I have nothing, neither do you. Look at what you’ve done to your own life. You’ve thrown it all away so you can spend all your days and nights harassing me. You’ve made yourself a prisoner too, even if you don’t know it.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “But I can always leave this room when I tire of it. I can always find myself another wife, start myself another company. What choices do you have, Mortensen? Nothing but stoic endurance . . . and I’ll soon be taking even that from you.”
“Fine. Put me out of my misery, then.”
“No such luck. I’ve had too much fun painting you into it. Here. Let me make it possible for you to look.”
I brushed out his eyes and began to construct something else in their place, something that would be capable of the perspective he needed: a pair of long, prehensile eyestalks that were able to loop about and snake around the curve of his hated fat head to garner a clear glimpse of what would soon be coming. I amused myself by making them each a meter long and giving them the muscularity of pythons, so that they had to be coiled on his shoulders like springs, before I bothered to add eyes to the end of them: eyes without lids, that he would not be able to close in order to shut out even the most terrifying sights.
The stalks flailed about in front of his face, some of them emerging from within the boundaries of the frame into the warmer air of the study. “I won’t look, Perkins. You can’t make me look.”
I grinned at him. “Really? Offhand, I can think of about a dozen ways I can force you to look. But I don’t have to. You’ll look within seconds.”
“Never!”
“Really. You’re still human, even if you only possess the pathetic half-life I choose to give you. And human nature works the same way it always does. I know that you’ve heard the inhuman scraping noises behind you. I know you’ve sensed the presence looming in all its awfulness behind you. I know you’ve felt the chills race down the segment of spine you have behind you. Every instinct you have demands that you look. Every moment of the fun we’ve had together dictates that you don’t dare. I’m perfectly willing to sit here and wait for as long as it takes for you to fail the same test that destroyed Lot’s wife. Why not get it over with?”
The trembling of the eyestalks grew more violent. “Because I know it won’t be anything good.”
“Oh, that’s a given. But does that even make a difference?”
For several additional seconds, he kept the eyestalks focused at me, to the exclusion of whatever filled the landscape behind him . . . but for I who had spent so much time orchestrating his misery, it was easy to discern the faltering of his will, the bargaining with the inevitable, the first moment when he thought he could get away with the briefest of all possible glimpses, that and no more. Almost on schedule, the will left his iron features, the defeat defined the set of his jaw . . . and the stalks whipped about to grant Mortensen his first unwilling look at what loomed behind him.
He managed to scream, “What the hell is that?” before all reason fled.
What I’d done was paint him a companion; a creature of limitless imagination and limitless malice, who once freed would be able to devote its immortal existence to tormenting him in a manner far more imaginative than any I had ever been able to muster. I had started, well over a year earlier, by painting a simple multi-tentacled horror of the sort I remembered from the pulp magazines of my youth; and believing those early efforts had not been extraordinarily impressive, I had devoted every day since then to refining its awfulness, adding additional layers to its bottomless evil, putting more intimations of power in shadows that surrounded it and the way the air itself turned unholy colors wherever it moved. It was a sprawling thing too; the ship in the ice, once its home, was now dwarfed by it, a fragile toy in the grip of a god. Even the landscape itself was too small to contain it, as its furthest extensions appeared to curl over the horizon itself, like a veritable mountain range of malice. I had given it a mind of truly limitless intelligence and no agenda other than creating a universe of endless suffering for the tiny human speck before it. I had also ensured that it could not reach Mortensen, not quite, not yet. But one of its tentacles, a quite horrid thing dripping goo from razored barbs, had been straining for his neck for months now.
No subsequent sound that came out of Mortensen’s mouth was at all recognizable as a word. It was just shrieking, anguished and damned and horrified and wonderful: the sound of a man who would never make any other sound, not even if the thing he beheld succeeded in reaching him. There was simply nothing else left. The fear had chased everything else he was from his skull. The tremors rippled up those serpentine eyestalks in waves, almost like somebody had cracked the whip on one end and watched as the reverberations traveled up the line to the other.
I leaned in close, rested my fingertips on the corner of the frame, and whispered, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Alas, I never should have equipped him with anything so prehensile.
His left eyestalk seized the opportunity to whip away from the horror behind him and leap at the horror in front of him, lashing around my wrist half a dozen times before I had any chance to move.
I tried to pull away, but the coils were stronger than I was and were able to yank my right arm, up to the shoulder, into the frame. Only my exposed hand and the top of my head were able to feel the bitter cold, but it was worse than anything I had ever felt. It was like being flayed with razors. I yelled and the other eyestalk, sensing the opportunity for revenge, whipped around and encircled my neck, cutting off my air and silencing me.
I kicked and the easel went down, painting and all. I was pulled down after it, now waist-deep in the painting, only my legs still thrashing in the real world of the study. Behind Mortensen, my ultimate demon roared in delight at having two treats to anticipate instead of one.
I punched Mortensen in the jaw and he went down—not in the way a full man falls to a powerful blow, but in the way a floating head and shoulders fall when they have long levitated at the height of the man but no longer have the fraudulent perspective of a viewer outside the frame to support them. He landed amputated-side down, his grip on my neck and arm pulling me even farther into the painting.
For a few seconds, I was able to keep my shoes hooked on the frame and maintain a handstand by bracing myself against ice so cold that it felt like fire against my flesh. I was unwilling to fall, because I had no way of knowing if I’d be able to find the frame again, let alone climb back to my study through that window.
Then he snarled at me and yanked harder.
My feet came loose of my shoes and I fell, my skull colliding with Mortensen’s with a force that stunned us both.
His grip on me abated. I fell back against the ice, feeling a terrible cold that the fabric of my pants did nothing to insulate. The sensation ripped all remaining breath from me. I blinked through eyes that were already beginning to freeze up and caught a quick glimpse of Mortensen’s head bobbing toward me at knee level on eye-stalks that he had already adapted for walking.
I had just enough strength left to lunge, grab one of the eyestalks with both hands, and use it to swing his head like a cudgel. Three times, four, I whipped it about at the end of its prehensile ocular chain, building up momentum. Then I let go and it sailed away from me in an arc, slamming into a patch of ice not at all different from any other patch of ice in the arctic waste that surrounded us. I don’t know what I would have done if it had popped back up and started scurrying toward me again, but it made a very loud crack when it hit and then did not move again at all. In seconds, the only sign that it had not been there forever was the redder color of the ice where it had landed.
I stood, hugging myself with both arms, the thin fabric of my socks not preventing the cold of the glacier from piercing all the way to the bone. I saw no sign of the portal back to my study. Perhaps I could find it, given time, but if I did not, I’d be dead in minutes, and the search seemed a minor consideration in light of the tableau that now faced me, in the direction opposing the one in which I’d hurled Mortensen: a sprawling, unspeakable mass of flesh the scale of a mountain range, that was even now dragging itself across the waste to get at me. Perhaps it was able to manage some progress. Perhaps it did not and it only seemed that way, because it was so overwhelming to see it from the perspective of a prey animal on the ground that I could not stop myself from taking a step toward it out of sheer appalled awe.
I did not know what would happen to me now.
But I did know that I was far too talented a painter.