22 Baz
22
Baz
On the drive back to Charleston, I do some reading about the leannán sídhe on my phone.
I’ve looked up my people before, but it’s been a while, and my research then was half-hearted, hampered by grief. I figure it’s time to refresh my memory and maybe learn something new. Especially since today Dorian is going to show me the portrait my ancestor, Basil Hallward, painted of him back in 1886.
The portrait is the dread relic of a magic Basil didn’t understand at the time. And even after he found out, there must have been some unbreakable law of silence handed down to his progeny. From what Mom told me, our family has suppressed this power and kept it secret for generations. She didn’t explain why or how it started, beyond the mention of Basil Hallward’s name. But now I have the chance to connect all those dots.
Everything I read aloud to Dorian in the car confirms what Lloyd-Henry said—that my family is different from other leannán sídhe . In Celtic lore, the leannán sídhe were muses who inspired bards, poets, storytellers, and artists, but they also fed off the creative passion of those humans. It was a mutual exchange of energy, harmless in most cases, though I found some stories of leannán sídhe who drained the people they were meant to inspire—sucked all the humans’ motivation into themselves, leaving the humans dull and dry.
“That’s interesting,” Dorian says slowly. “There were several artists in our circles who quit painting or sculpting around the same time I met Basil. They said they might as well not try to compete with such brilliant work as his.”
“Maybe Basil was meant to inspire other artists, but instead he took up the brush himself,” I say. “Maybe he started to drain the creative life from others. Only when he came to you, it was like a hunter meeting a gorgeous stag in the forest. You were not only handsome; you were a musician, an artist in your own right. He was mesmerized by you. Totally obsessed. So he managed not to drain you of your vitality. Instead he preserved it, captured it, protected it within the painting. He did all that without realizing what he’d done until you told him.”
Dorian nods. “It makes sense.”
I settle back against the seat and read through a few more websites, but none of them add any information to what we already have. I’m not sure anyone will ever know why our line diverged from a muse’s role of inspiration into this perverted kind of soul capture. But I have a weirdly intense desire to see the painting that started it all.
Lloyd’s penthouse is empty when we return. I pace the living area while Dorian showers and changes out of his sandy clothes. Thankfully, I had a pair of flowered shorts and a white lace tank top in my overnight bag.
I stare out the wide windows at the blue ocean, the bridge, and the strip of land beyond. My hands are still bandaged, but the sting of the burns isn’t too bad.
Dorian appears at the mouth of the hallway, wearing dark slacks and a crisp white dress shirt. I don’t know why he’s so dressed up, but I don’t question it.
“Ready?” He sounds a little breathless, and his tight lips barely move over the word.
“I’m ready.”
“Come on, then.” He spins on his heel and leads the way down the hall.
I haven’t seen his room until now. It’s luxuriously furnished, of course, in a more old-fashioned style than the rest of the house. But it doesn’t feel like him. He’s only a guest here, after all.
Dorian goes to a massive wardrobe and slides a nearly invisible panel upward along its side. The press of a fingertip and a quick code makes the giant, heavy piece of furniture detach from the wall with a grinding clunk. When it swings slightly outward, I see a safe behind the wardrobe—a big one.
“Lloyd arranged this hiding place for me the first time I came to visit him,” Dorian says. “I usually prefer more security. At my house in Nashville, I have a much better vault for it.”
He’s entering another code, pressing his finger to another scanner. The door to the safe clicks, and he opens it.
Inside is a hard-sided container about the size of a big suitcase. “Fireproof and bulletproof,” Dorian says. He places it on the floor, kneels beside it, and spins the dials on the case’s latch, entering the combination to unlock it.
I glance at the bedroom door, even though there’s no one in the penthouse but the two of us. All these layers of security are ramping up my nerves, driving my pulse higher.
Dorian opens the lid of the hard case. There’s a velvety scarlet cloth inside, with a transparent corner peeking out from beneath it.
“This is Level 3 bulletproof acrylic. Absolutely impenetrable. The only way to get into it is this titanium combination lock and the fingerprint scanner.”
I lean forward, marveling at the thickness of the acrylic slab, judging from the corner I can see. “Damn, you take this seriously.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Definitely.”
My palms are sweating. I’m about to see his truth, the glutted painting that holds over a hundred years’ worth of debauchery and lies, larceny and apathy, addiction and death. Every wound he has ever suffered during that time, large or small, will be marked in the figure on the canvas. The decay that time should have wrought on his statuesque body will have rotted his image instead.
Dorian reaches for the cloth, his long, pale fingers trembling a little, as if they’re too fragile to bear the weight of this revelation.
“It’s hideous.” His voice is so low I can barely hear him.
“I can handle it.”
“I haven’t shown this to anyone but Basil. Not even Lloyd has seen it.”
The admission makes my stomach dip with mingled delight and horror.
Dorian’s shoulders slump forward, and his fingers curl into the velvet cloth. But he still doesn’t pull it back.
I sink to my knees at his side. “I may as well see it now. I’d have to anyway, if I—” If I decide to break my vow and paint you . “I’d need it in the room with us.”
He drags in a harrowed breath. “You’ll hate me after you’ve seen it.”
“Do you care if I hate you?” As soon as I’ve said it, I realize what a silly question it is. “Of course you care. Because if I hate you, I won’t do what you want.”
His face whips toward mine, anguish in his eyes. “That’s not why I care. Now that you’re here, I—the guilt of it, what I’ve done—I’m ashamed, Baz.” He looks back into the case with a sound that’s half scoff, half sob. “I don’t do shame. Not for anyone. I don’t do fear, and I don’t fucking cry —” He snarls the last word, defiance against everything he’s feeling.
His aura, his emotion—I feel it like a searing arrow in my own heart.
“Dorian.” I take his jaw, pull his face back to me. “I won’t hate you. I might be shocked, overwhelmed. Sad, maybe. But I could never hate you.”
A shadow slithers through his eyes. Something furtive and dark and frightening. A corner of himself he hasn’t revealed yet, one that has nothing to do with the portrait.
“Just wait, Baz,” he says softly. “The man capable of this monstrosity”—his fingers tighten on the cloth—“is capable of making you hate him with every beat of your beautiful heart.”
And he drags the cloth out of the way.
The Dorian in the painting is naked, bloated—skin stretched tight, bursting open in places to dislodge copious floods of yellow bile, dotted with writhing maggots and lumps of shit. Swollen pink sores have erupted on the thing’s drooping ball sack and inner thighs, and the dick is shriveled, leaking pus and urine. All over the creature’s body, from its distended torso to its bony appendages, the wrinkled skin is purpled and blackened with bruises. The tips of broken bones slice through in a couple of places, and several wounds are bleeding openly, heavily, glistening as if someone just painted them. The blood pools in the foreground of the painting, mingling with the bile and becoming a stream that snakes away into the background, into a never-ending river of putrid gore.
The neck and face are shrunken, skeletal, spotted skin stretched over bone, a handful of yellowed teeth still clinging to the gums, a broken grimace. Blisters and lumps crowd around that rictus grin. The lips rotted away long ago.
It’s all painted in horrific detail, all static—and yet, as I watch, I think I can see the worms writhing in the bilious spew from the figure’s belly.
The physical decay is shocking, but the thing that makes bile crawl up my throat is its expression. The look in those puffy, bloodshot eyes is lewd, murderous, ravenous. It’s strange that the eyes are even intact or visible, what with the grotesque decay of it all.
I see the hole, too—about the size of a nickel, blackened at the edges. Irrefutable evidence that this portrait’s existence is finite. That hole will expand until it swallows him, bit by bit, rot and all.
I want to look away. But for Dorian’s sake, I keep staring.
This is Dorian. This lecherous, fiendish, voracious thing is his soul. His soul, trapped in this mess, nailed to this canvas by Basil Hallward’s brush.
Dorian didn’t choose this, not at first. His soul was sucked out of him and trapped without his knowledge or understanding. But he made a million terrible choices after it was already done.
I peer into the eyes of the portrait, searching for anything I recognize. Without thinking, I reach out, my hand hovering above the bulletproof acrylic.
A faint hum of energy tantalizes the skin of my palm. It reminds me of the energy I felt when I touched the door of the abandoned building. Except that energy felt enormous and alien, and this energy feels smaller, more condensed. It flutters, quivering at my presence, responding to something inside me—the power I inherited.
As I stare at the portrait, something changes.
The eyes blink.
For a half second, that hideous, devouring gaze shifts to something desperate—something weary, wretched, agonized by guilt, lacerated with sorrow.
I could swear I hear Dorian’s soul screaming, faint and faraway, in the back of my mind.
A tear splashes onto the acrylic, and I startle out of the moment, brushing away the dot of liquid with my hand.
“I’m sorry,” I gasp. But more tears are welling from my eyes; I can’t stop them.
To clear the blur, I blink, and then I see Dorian—beautiful Dorian, with his hollow blue eyes.
“Why are you crying?” His voice is tight as skin over bone.
“Your soul,” I whisper. “It’s in so much pain. The things you’ve done to it, this unnatural prison. Oh god.” I cover my mouth, stifling a sob.
“I’m not worth crying for, Baz,” he says. “There is no part of me that deserves your tears.”
“You’re wrong.” My breath hitches. “You’re still there, you—” I reach out and place my hand over his living, beating heart. “You’re tethered to it. Corruption breeds corruption, and I’m guessing the longer you’re trapped in it, the worse you’ll get. Eventually every good part of you will be drowned, and then, Dorian, you’ll become something so much worse—a serial killer, a rapist, a dictator—I don’t know. I have to get you out of there.”
“Yes,” he breathes, collecting my hands in his. “Yes, Baz.”
“I need to put your soul back in your body.”
His eyes widen, rage and alarm clashing in them. “But then I’ll age. I’ve told you, I don’t want that.”
“Dorian, everyone gets old. It’s natural. Part of life.”
“But it doesn’t have to be.” He scrambles to his feet. “I don’t understand why you’re like this. You can save me, and you’re choosing to be willfully obtuse and selfish. I’m this ”—he gestures to himself—“so why should I age like everyone else?”
“That’s the rot in your soul talking.” I rise, too, tilting my chin up defiantly. “You’re not exempt from the normal human experience. I mean, you have been, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to do it again.”
He gives me a fiendish glare. “And you know best, of course. Like Basil, you think you can decide my fate for me.”
“I’m not like Basil.”
“You’re acting exactly like him.”
“Fuck Basil, and fuck you.”
I turn away, but he catches my wrist. His eyes are pleading now—the lovely, innocent eyes of a man who has never done a wrong thing in his life. I almost laugh, because he’s so damn good at this, changing his mood in a moment, just to manipulate me. But I see through him. Somehow I’ve always been able to see through him, since the moment he sauntered into my studio.
“Darling, I don’t think you fully understand what you’re asking of me,” he says. “Before you make your final decision, I have one more thing to show you. Please.”
I hesitate, not because of the obvious manipulation but because I know there’s part of him—in his body, in the portrait, or somewhere along the tether in between—a remnant of him that’s still sweet, generous, and truly lovable. I’ve seen flashes of that submerged self. I heard the cries of the frantic soul drowning in Basil Hallward’s hideous painting.
The things Dorian has done with me, for me can’t have all been selfishly motivated.
Besides being physically stunning, he’s smart, talented, well educated, charismatic—and none of that is because of any portrait. It’s just him .
Maybe if I hear him out and let him show me this one last thing, whatever it is, I can convince him to try things my way. It’ll be risky, attempting to pull his soul out and restore it to his body. But I can’t help staring at that rotted hole in the portrait. Threadlike cracks branch outward from it, and one of them has snaked dangerously close to the crooked feet of his monstrous self.
“Fine,” I say. “You can show me one last thing.”