The Mezzotint Chapter 8 Revelations

Creest made his way from the campus and walked slowly down Gower Street towards his hotel.  He always booked the Russell when in London.  He loved the ‘au lait’ terracotta exterior.  It looked like a wonderful huge biscuit.  Inside the building he would indulge in stroking the marble columns and gliding his hands along the fabulous staircases.  He only ever took the lift if he had been allocated a room above the fifth floor. 

Creest loved London but in the way that most people do who never have to live there.  His time in the city always allowed for good walks.  As commuters, shoppers, students, parents and schoolchildren combined to form a melee that seemed to move in swarms around the public transport system, he revelled in the freedom of the basic form of transport.  He thought it indefensible that the inhabitants either had little time to or were simply blasé to the extraordinary art that enveloped them, but Creest had shed the raiment of residential city life a long time since and always brought a rustic eye to the city.

That day the only ‘art’ that concerned the professor was the mundane depiction of his cottage that he was holding in his right hand as far from his body as was reasonably practicable without looking ludicrous.  Despite Brevocet’s plausible narrative Creest would rather have left it with him then take it back.  Reluctantly he agreed to play the game to disprove the hauntings were only a malicious deception, nevertheless the latter consequence, though not as mentally disturbing, may represent a bigger physical threat.  August was convinced that once the scheme had unravelled the conspirator, if not unmasked, would at least relinquish his or her vengeance.  Creest was unconvinced.  He felt that if the intriguer could not satiate his retribution by vicarious means they would quickly resort to more direct methods.    

In Montague Place a section of the pavement had been cordoned off and a huge builder’s skip was resting against the kerb.  The workmen were dismantling a nearby wall and at irregular intervals brick and concrete slabs crashed into its belly.  The sudden temptation to slip the canvas inside the skip overwhelmed him.  ‘Destroy it’, he thought, ‘there’s no black magic here.  A child could’ve painted it.  Throw it away.  Crush it underneath the weight of all that debris.  That will end it, not some silly ploy’ 

Insentiently he stepped out into the road.  Half way across a black cab came hurtling out of Malet Street to his left, forcing Creest to jump back to avoid it.  As the taxi sped away a face appeared in the rear window.  The head was beautifully sculpted but unbecomingly decorated at either side by pigtails. Creest knew that winsome smile emanating from behind the glass.  She mouthed something and continued to stare at him until the cab swung into Bedford Square.

His heart had somersaulted at seeing Hope’s wonderful yet devilish face.  The urge too, to destroy what she had created, however inexpert, dissipated in equal measure.  She wanted him to have it, that’s what she had said inaudibly: ‘It’s yours, from me.’  The builders too, having heard the screech of tyre behind them, were looking at Creest in the middle of a busy wondering why an old fool would choose to cross a road towards a point with no pedestrian access at all.  That decided it.  He turned around and continued toward Russell Square.          

In his hotel room he placed the painting in his cupboard and lay down.   He slept fitfully and woke in the early hours.  A shaft of light from the bathroom was eking through in a diagonal shaft and lay across the wardrobe in the corner of the room.  Creest could see the door was open despite him closing it securely when he had set the painting inside.  The sound of running water alerted his ears.  Like the light, it too was coming from the bathroom and Creest rolled out of the bed and crouched down at an angle peering inside.  He could see nothing.  He rose and was suddenly aware that his legs and knees were shivering with trepidation and his eyes were watering.  He was actually crying, weeping because he, at once, knew it was a dream and how real it would seem.  How long would this torture continue?  Like a dream he was meant to endure it and follow its illogical format until that point where the terror overcame the dreamer and jerked him awake.

Barefoot he stepped inside the bathroom.  He assumed the steady drip was a tap left on but both hot and cold were off.  Abruptly the drip increased to a torrent.  Creest looked behind him and could see that the shower cubicle was misted over.   He could make out a shape within.  At his feet lay a set of clothes: a pleated uniform skirt, a white tee-shirt, a pair of white pumps with socks tucked inside, a small bra and a pair of small, thin panties.  He slid back the door.  The person showering had their back to him.  It was beautiful.  The skin unblemished like ivory or marble without a freckle or wrinkle as if Michelangelo had sculpted it.  The figure turned to face him.  He stood unable to manufacture any physicality beyond the movement of his eyes.  It was, as he feared and prayed for, Hope Lincoln but not the woman he had first encountered in Greeven.  Her breasts were smaller and her vagina was shorn of hair.  It seemed to be a younger incarnation of her and yet the potency was magnified.  She smiled as a child would smile given a sweet and then looked gave a coy look towards his crotch. Creest looked down at himself and saw that he was naked and his penis was erect, enlarged even.

She turned her back to him again and put out her hands and grabbed the shower coil.  She began to beckon him with a swirl of her bottom to enter her from behind.  He complied but found her vulva tight. After several painful attempts he managed to penetrate her.  Throughout she never flinched but her grip on the coil became intense.  Creest steadied himself by pressing hard on her back and found that he was thrusting with the energy of a younger man.  The heat inside her was extreme.  Creest knew the approaching orgasm would be unlike anything he had ever experienced.  As if she knew his sexual organ as well as her own, Hope moaned, even whimpered, prompting the professor to climax immediately.  His arms went around her midriff holding her for ballast as the semen pumped its way out of him.

As his senses gorged in sublime pleasure a sharp and biting pain struck him in the groin.  It rapidly became excruciating.  He wriggled like a madman to get free of her but Hope’s buttocks had closed in on his member like a vice.  She too was giggling like a schoolgirl as she waved her bottom moving him from side to side.  Desperate he found a last source of strength and detached himself but the pain became even more intolerable.  He looked down and saw the blood gushing from where his penis had been.  She had taken it.  He screamed.

*

An early September sun filtered into his room from the window.   It had been a warm but not spectacular autumn month but Creest lay under his bed clothes shivering with horror.  Until last night the dream s that had plagued him, though terrible, had the quality of all nightmares that their effect on the subject dissipated after a certain distance of time had elapsed.  As he lay in bed quivering Creest could still discern the touch and taste of Hope as if she was lying next to him and knew the sensation would remain as authentic to him in a year’s time as it felt now.  The echo of that racking pain continued to emanate from his groin.  He felt it immediately upon waking and for a few horrifying seconds before he had the courage to search it’s presence out, he thought he’d truly had been emasculated.        

He wanted to cry as he had at the beginning of his dream.  He ached for some kind of cosmic solace to take pity on him.  He would have avowed that his faith as an atheist was unshakable but this morning he felt an urge to whisper some kind of silent prayer.  He resisted believing in one thing: if he were to seek the assistance of one branch of the supernatural it may only serve to intensify the belligerence of the other.    

After an hour the professor’s nerves had settled enough for him to get dressed.  It was still early, around 7.30, but he couldn’t face breakfast nevertheless he wanted coffee and not from a sachet.  He reached out his arm toward the wardrobe handle and hesitated.  The door was shut but there was an object on the floor beside it.  He picked it up.  It was the small remnant of a boiled sweet.

‘They’ve given themselves away this time’ he thought, without considering how an intruder gained entry to a locked hotel room.  He ripped open the cupboard door and removed the canvas from the painting checking the back carefully.  There was Brevocet’s mark exactly as he had made it.  There could be no mistake.  He picked up the sweet and examined it.  It could’ve been easily missed by both him and whoever cleaned his room. 

He threw the painting face up on the bed and went gingerly into the bathroom.  He looked into the shower.  The sensation of touching and being inside Hope was still so vividly tangible that he felt the beginnings of an erection.  He poured himself a glass of water and looked into the mirror above the basin.  The face he saw was blanched, almost grey and the lack of colour only accentuated the lines on his face.  ‘I’ve aged 10 years in the past two weeks’ he whispered.      

Whether it was the golden morning sun or the ambience of his favourite London hotel or both, a surge of resolve rose in the professor.  ‘I have to beat this’ he declared through gritted teeth.  ‘Use my intelligence’ 

He took the glass with him and dropped it as he walked back into the room passing the bed.  It bounced on the carpeting and vomited the liquid in a tongue-like projectile across the room.  Creest’s eyes were inflexibly anchored to the canvas in front of him.  The bedroom window was open again and the hooded figure had reappeared in the middle of the garden.  Creest edged closer.  He could see that the fiend was moving away from the house this time. 

A restricting pain drove into his upper torso from both sides.  The professor leant forward onto the bed for support.  It eased but as Creest tried to stand again the severity of the sting drove him back to the same position.  The picture seemed as if it were inches from his face.  He could see that the shape’s body language was different.  Whereas before there was a purposeful stride to it going towards the house, now it was tentative as if it had something secreted in its cloak and it was being careful to avoid dropping it.  There was a shaft of silver just visible beneath the folds.   

‘Oh my God’ he cried.  The pain intensified and the professor felt as if he were being sliced in half.  He started to hyperventilate but each time he leaned back to draw in some oxygen the agony of doing so drove him back, his movements resembling a macabre mimic of a dippy toy.  His gasping became shorter and louder.  He began to feel faint.  The last physical action he was capable of was to clutch at his chest at his beleaguered chest.  His tenacity of a few seconds ago had been supplanted by a desire for the torment to end and as his legs gave way he welcomed the blackness that swallowed him, the room, and that hideous painting.