“Carrol Ransburg.”
I recited my alter ego’s name to the face in the mirror while pasting down my hair with goo. It was Friday, and I had an eight a.m. date with Marcella Baines. I studied my face: suntanned from fishing, the beard line no razor could completely erase, brown eyes that occasionally scared me with their intensity, as when captured on film by the Mobile Register’s photographer.
What had compelled Trey Forrier to see kindness in such a face?
It didn’t matter; he was mad down to his marrow. Probably saw the world in reverse. The man had a harsh and ugly face, made hideous masks before killing people.
Yet Ava had found something in my face, or seemed to. Her fingers often trailed delicate patterns across my brow and cheek as we made slow and gentle love in my box in the air above an island, the surf rolling against the sand a hundred yards away.
I’d thought those moments but a foretaste of the magic to come, making our way into and through one another’s lives. Jeremy was right in one respect: I believed the feeling to be Love, as I had never known such a potent feeling before. Women had come and gone in my life, delights laid easy and often into my memory, but I had never lost my breath when any other woman walked through the door, had never stared at the phone waiting for a call, had never felt myself one of the chosen.
And then - just like that - she was gone.
“Carrol Ransburg.”
I called out my false name one more time, tightened my tie, and turned from the mirror. I slipped on my suit coat, and headed for Pensacola and my encore visit to Mme Baines’s chamber of horrors.
“I could have been Marsden’s queen, you know,” Marcella Baines whispered. “The Queen of the Final Moment…”
This time Marcella had opened her door not in a pantsuit but a high-slit sheath of white silk, the décolletage cut to her sternum, her low, hard-tipped breasts shivering against the fabric.
“…one of the great tragedies of my life…had I known Marsden was thirty miles north in his studio, I would have been with him…”
There had been no caviar and talk of the weather. She led me straight to the “gallery”, leaning against me on a love seat beneath the twisted photographs. I had maneuvered her into talking about Hexcamp, and she seemed almost hypnotized by her own words.
“I would have been a few years older than the others, but it would have given me an advantage. I would have been his inspiration, his triumph, his glory.”
“I’m sure you would have, Ms Baines.”
Her perfume filled the air. It wasn’t the cloying floral scent of older women, but something tart, youthful. She’d added crimson highlights to her hair, now lacquered in unruly spikes. Iridescent green shadow pushed the boundaries of her eyes. Her lips were the purpled red of venous blood, her teeth wet and somehow obscene.
“He would have died for me, and I for him. That’s what love is, Mr Ransburg.” Her eyes were distant, her words spoken from afar. I wondered if she was using a drug.
“You would have been perfect, Ms Baines.”
When she crossed her legs I noted how high the slit in her dress was cut. One long leg floated before me, blue-green veins visible beneath white hose garter-belted in place. She leaned harder against me, and I felt her hand rest on my thigh.
“Marsden worked only by candlelight, did you know that? He said when you work by fire, the fire reaches inside your work, illuminates it from within. That was Marsden, Mr Ransburg, lit from within, drawing so many beautiful wings to his light.”
“Moths die in pursuit of fire,” I said.
Her hand began crawling upward, her nails red flames on my black suit. “Butterflies, Mr Ransburg. They exalt in the sun.” Her mouth was inches from mine, her eyes glazed. “Where was I at the time? Married to a succession of fools and eunuchs. Hiding in my room with my collections of coins, using them to discover who I was, to make sense of life, find its fire. All the time Marsden Hexcamp was a few miles north, seething with magic, burning with genius.”
“Miss Baines, Marcella -”
Her nails scratched at the top of my thighs. “He had to see them die, you know, see the whole of the final moment. It’s all there if the moment is done correctly, everything is revealed. My fellas, my beautiful boys, they knew that. But they could only enjoy, not create.”
Her hand reached my crotch, began kneading. Her breath was shallow, her face flushed. Her eyes looked through me. “He’s coming back, Mr Ransburg,” she purred. “Marsden’s coming back.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone’s been found.”
“Who?” I gasped, closing my legs tight.
“Someone with the voice to say, ‘Yes, Marsden Hexcamp created this work…it can finally come alive!’”
“Who? Who is this person?”
Her bright nails hissed across the fabric of my pants, burrowed beneath my testicles, squeezed. “It doesn’t matter, Mr Ransburg, it only matters that Marsden will be alive again! Oh my god, I’m about to…”
She grabbed my hand and jammed it under her dress. “I’m flowing like a river,” she choked. “Like a fucking goddamn river.” She clamped her thighs around my hand while hers clawed at my zipper.
“When will…the work…be reviewed?” I gasped. She dropped her huge mouth into my lap and began gnawing and licking. I felt saliva falling from her mouth.
“Ms Baines, I can’t…”
“Don’t fail me, Ransburg,” she grunted, her breath hot against my groin. “I own you.”
I pushed away. Standing on shaking legs, I jammed my shirt back into my pants, retreated to the door. She wobbled erect. Her hair had fallen to one side, her dress clung between her thighs. Her lipstick had smeared to a crimson slash. The glassiness in her eyes was replaced by hatred. Her lips were drawn back and I saw the full fury of her teeth.
I spun wordlessly and escaped from the penthouse, feeling the room about to burst into a black fire kindled long ago.