GABRIEL’S BODY CUTS through the heat curtain dividing street from arcade. For a moment external and internal are indistinguishable, until all the sounds and scents of the exterior are sucked back into their rightful place.
The drone and chime of conversation and cutlery fill the dome above her, recalling memories of tastes and sensations that become more exquisite with each recollection. Gabriel’s eyes become adjusted to the warm light and focus on the faces of shoppers, rendered beautiful by the carefully created glow. They stroll in calm contentment, with expression of reverence and awe, complimenting and admiring, more like an audience at a great exhibition than consumers in a mall.
Through the delicately wrought iron and engraved glass, Gabriel spies her victim. She eyes her prey, wets her lips and crosses the expanse of jewelled mosaic like a society courtesan making a path through a crowded ballroom to her potential Prince.
The prey, a young man with a touch too much red in his cheeks and his locks too brassy to be those of a classic beauty, is comely enough nevertheless. Track-suited and chain-smoking, he slouches against the wooden-fronted candle shop, a squat shape with a halo of flickering flames. He has as little sense of style as he has of his impending doom.
Gabriel uses her clipboard like an antique fan. The delicate movements of a courtly ritual long dead tug unconsciously at the cultural memory of the youth, for he smiles and bows his head on cue, saying all the right things at all the right moments. Each flutter and tilt of the clipboard beckon him closer to his destruction.
A little polite conversation gives way to a few simple questions concerning his habits as a consumer. Gabriel once again employs her clipboard as a fan, but this time in its more conventional fashion, for she grows warm with anticipation of coming pleasure. The format of the questionnaire you see, and her promises of a reward at its completion are cunningly designed to appeal to all the vices in man, playing on the human frailties of laziness, greed and lust with expert skill, and coaxing white lies from his lips in defence of his frail ego.
Flattered into a sense of stupid pride at his ability to recognize brands of toothpaste by their logo, his good taste in cars and the amount of alcohol-free lager he might consume in a month, the young man’s defences begin to crumble. Vanity parades his vices in an unwitting confession of guilt.
Then comes the invitation, and a promise that he might discover something to his advantage or receive his reward should he follow her. Greed and lust chain him to her, and Gabriel triumphantly trots her mortal specimen out of the centre, through the crowds of consumers and into the night.
The city’s floodlights glow into life at the perfect moment to illuminate the lowering heavens and turn the sudden squall into a crystal light show, immediately the dull pavement becomes a dark mirror to the cityscape. At this impressive piece of celestial stage management, Gabriel picks up the skirts of her coat, deeply inhales the ozone-charged air and flies along the sparkling streets homeward to the Merchant City, her captive in morbid pursuit. The setting is ideal and the atmosphere inspiring, but totally lost on the unsuspecting victim, whose whole being is now focused on the body of his seducer. Nights like this give meaning to her existence, for on a night like this her true genius can reveal itself and her powers of creative destruction flourish.
Entering the hallway of her home, Gabriel sways free of her sable coat. The shock of metal heels on marble is muffled by the shuffle of his rubber-soled Reeboks as the sounds merge high up above the picture rail. A long bronze lady on an onyx plinth obligingly raises a globe of light to the crazed and ancient mirror, her back arched in an ecstasy of lunar worship. Gabriel’s sepia-toned reflection, a Theda Bara in this amber glow, gazes out at the breathless youth on the doormat. As the last sounds of their entrance die away, the muted sounds of a tragic melody filter from the room ahead, Gershwin or Porter, Puccini or Rachmaninov – an irresistible and passionate keening.
Gabriel glides down the long corridor past fatal beauties with sailors entwined in their hair and disarmed knights at their feet: mermaids and sirens and belles dames sans merci. The wan faces of their victims, tragic and lovely, gaze down from the captivity of their picture frames at the unsuspecting youth. Blind with lust and ignorant in his certainty, he takes no heed of their silent warning. Water nymphs lure Hylas to his airless end, while Morgan le Fay eternally bewitches, but they perform their terrible function unrecognized. The young man does not even glance at them.
GABRIEL, COATLESS, is dressed to kill. Her body is a metronome that swings hypnotically before him to the throb of the melancholy music, accompanied by the murmur of velvet on silk as her skirts sigh against her stockings. Gabriel leads the man along the endless corridor of panels and paintings, exhaling myrrh and spices and charging the air with rich scents and ozone. She leaves a trail of musk that the man must follow. At last they reach the door at the corridor’s end. Gabriel glides a hand over her waist and hips and waves the prey into her room. She strolls in behind him, eager to embark on her fatal labours.
The light in the room is cool silver and blue. The stormy night, viewed in panorama through the room’s enormous windows, is huge and indigo. Despite the casements flung wide, the air is heavy with the scent of three great lilies.
Gabriel takes a liquor glass, silver vines entwining its stem, and pours a slick of noxious liquid into it. It shines with emerald light. The stupid youth takes the glass without a question, bewitched by the ruby, amethyst and jet that are her lips, eyes and hair. As he sips the poison and inhales its fumes, he does not notice its bitter taste, for his senses are dazzled into dullness. Gabriel looks on in satisfaction and drapes herself in ecstasy over the vast blue velvet sofa.
The youth falls helpless into her arms and she absorbs all the life from him, drinking in his strength and watching all that disgusted her seep slowly away. At last he is no longer an uncouth sinner. He has become her object. An object with more potential than she ever imagined on first setting eyes on his rough, unrefined form. He will make a most beautiful corpse, and his death will be magnificent.
SHE CARRIES the senseless young man into a high-ceilinged bathroom of dolphins and sea nymphs and, despite his weight, glides effortlesly over the floor. She undresses him slowly and carefully, and places his limp, damp clothes in the fire of the fire of the polished copper boiler. They hiss disagreement before bursting into flames. Gabriel then takes a gleaming silver blade from the bathroom cabinet, a bottle of peroxide, some scissors, scented oils, a razor, soap and a shaving brush, and lines them up on the shelf beside the great cast-iron bath. While she runs the water she cuts the young man’s hair into a tousled cap of curls. She then undresses and steps into the steaming, scented water with her victim in her arms.
Gabriel washes away all traces of his mortal life – the stale stench of cheap deodorant and sweat, and the rancid smell of smoke in his hair. Unable to move or speak, only the look of terror in the dying man’s eyes show that he has any awareness of his situation. Gabriel runs her hands over the hard muscle and taut sinews, stroking and massaging his malleable form, then shaves his entire body. She applies the peroxide to his brassy locks and, while she waits for it to take effect, she glides the silver blade across each wrist and lies back to watch her terrible bath turn red with the blood of her victim. The life pours out of him and she captures a little of it in a small glass vial. He labours to breathe his last, succumbing to the poison and the loss of blood. Gabriel feels an involuntary spasm in the walls of her stomach as he releases his final sigh. She rinses the chemicals from his now silver hair, and after wrapping his body in great warm towels she moisturizes the smooth, white skin.
Gabriel dresses the beautiful corpse in a pure silk shirt, voluptuous in the generosity of its cut, and a pair of high-waisted trousers of the finest fabric. She applies kohl to his lids, mascara to his lashes and a wine-coloured stain to his lips. She carries her beautiful work out of her room, along the endless corridor and out into the city. In her pocket is the vial of blood and beneath her coat are white narcissus and orchids. She passes unhindered through the sleeping city and enters its cultivated parkland. The storm is over, the night is still, crisp and clear. A huge pewter moon illumines a dark sapphire sky and lights the way to the final resting place.
GABRIEL LAYS HIM gently in the frozen fountain at the centre of the botanical gardens. In a pose of carefully engineered disarray, his head rests casually on one arm, the limbs draped over the marble, everything arranged to the greatest aesthetic effect. Only one task remains. She plunges the gorgeous blade into the heart of the dead man, between the folds of his shirt. She arranges the narcissus and orchids about his body, placing one in his dangling fingers and others around his shining hair and at his feet.
She drips a little of the contents of the vial around the bloodless wound in his chest, perfectly choreographing the trickle of blood so that it curves delicately over the line of his pectorals. She places a single drop at the corner of his burgundy lips and delicately strokes a wisp of platinum hair from his heavy blue lids. She lingers a moment to gaze at her work, gleaming white against the moonlight, the perfect man reclining on a crystal throne, shimmering with purity, untainted by life, released from bestiality for a brief moment, before the sun rises, melts the fountain and sets the machinery of decay into motion.
Gabriel records the scene in her memory and disappears back into the city.