Art Room, Middle-Sized House Near Poste de Police, Paris
Claude Perrin sat on a wooden stool in the art room with his hands folded in his lap, staring at a blank canvas and thinking about nothing in particular.
The room was a comfortable disaster around him. Paintbrushes and rollers lay across the tables and floor, drop cloths bunched in corners, paint cans left half-open with their lids balanced on top rather than properly sealed. His wife had given up mentioning it years ago. Claude had given up noticing years before that.
He studied the canvas with his head slightly tilted. His deep blue eyes had begun showing traces of grey at the edges — the cataracts were developing slowly but steadily, and the surgery was scheduled for next week. He was fortunate in that regard. The surgeon was Dr. Murphy House, which meant he was more than fortunate. He was extraordinarily lucky.
Even now, thinking about the man produced a faint sense of disbelief.
Dr. Murphy was middle-aged in the technical sense — the year was there in the records if you looked — but in person he read as something closer to eighteen or nineteen. Golden-brown curls, soft features, a way of standing that was unhurried without being careless. What most people remembered afterward, though, were the eyes: pure white, warm in a way that was difficult to articulate, the kind of eyes that made you feel, without any particular reason, that things were probably going to be fine. Talking to him felt like talking to someone you'd known for a long time without being able to remember where you'd met.
His reputation extended well beyond medicine. He performed surgeries for the poor without charge, gave substantial portions of his wealth to people living in poverty, and had accumulated the sort of goodwill that most public figures spent entire careers trying to manufacture. People in several countries spoke about him as though he were something more than an ordinary doctor. Perhaps they weren't entirely wrong.
He wasn't without his peculiarities. His faith was genuine and deep and, depending on your perspective, somewhat relentless — he spoke about it often and found few conversations where it didn't eventually surface. He made no secret of attempting to bring others around to his view whenever an opening presented itself. And yet very few people actually disliked him, because he applied his principles without exception. Religion, nationality, wealth, status — none of it changed the way he treated people. Everyone received the same care.
Almost everyone. Politicians were the sole exception, for reasons nobody had ever been able to fully explain. He refused to treat them without hesitation, refused their families, refused to acknowledge the considerable sums of money they offered him. Some had tried to soften him through charity work and public displays of good character. This appeared to make things worse. There had even been assassination attempts over the years — several of them — and in each case the assassin ended up dead while Dr. Murphy walked away without visible injury, explaining afterward that he was reasonably good at defending himself. His legal team was reportedly exceptional. Nobody had successfully pressed the matter.
Claude never could have afforded him. Several months ago they'd met at a gathering, and after listening to stories about Claude's years on the force, Dr. Murphy had said, with apparent sincerity, that people who spent their lives protecting others deserved more recognition than they received. Then he'd examined Claude's eyes for a few minutes and calmly predicted that the first symptoms of cataracts would appear within two days.
They did.
He'd offered to perform the surgery himself, without charge, as a gesture of respect. Claude still wasn't entirely sure the encounter had been real.
He shook his head and looked back at the canvas.
After several minutes of quiet thought, an image began forming. A black mountain beneath a crimson sky. A lone warrior walking an empty path with a spear in one hand, long black hair moving with the wind. No destination. No clear purpose. Just the path and the figure moving along it through what the painting would imply was an enormous amount of pain.
The more Claude turned it over in his mind, the more right it felt.
"I'll keep him entirely black," he murmured to himself. "No space for proper detail. But people should still be able to tell he has no expression." He paused. "There's a slight Chinese feeling to it. I like that."
He had always loved art in this particular way — not as a discipline he'd studied or a skill he'd developed with any seriousness, but as a place he went when he needed to think through something without thinking about it directly. When he was younger he'd spent hours in the Louvre doing nothing but standing in front of paintings. The Mona Lisa especially. He could never quite explain what kept pulling his eyes back to it, and he'd eventually stopped trying.
But art was always the hobby. The real dream had been simpler and had arrived earlier: his grandfather had been a police officer, his father an army officer, and Claude had understood from a young age that he was going to spend his life protecting people in one form or another. He'd joined the Paris force and worked his way up steadily until he reached Commissaire de Police. He had a wife and grown children and a quiet life with a clear shape to it. The cataracts were the only real problem on the horizon. Everything else was, by any reasonable measure, fine.
Claude picked up a brush, dipped it in red, and began.
First the sky. Then the mountain, black and heavy at the base of the composition. Then the path running through it, and finally the warrior himself — a silhouette, featureless except for the spear and the hair, the hair he spent the most time on, working it until it looked almost soft, almost like something that moved.
He was preparing to set the brush down when something at the corner of his vision shifted.
A thick crimson liquid was moving along the floor near the baseboard, slow and deliberate in a way that paint spilled from a can never moved. Black particles drifted through it, suspended. It traveled across the floorboards without spreading, gathering itself as it went, and somewhere between one moment and the next it had taken the rough shape of a centipede, legless but articulated, making its way toward the stool without sound.
Claude did not look at it. His eyes were still on the painting.
The thing climbed his leg, crossed his torso, reached his shoulder. Then it entered through his ear, and as it passed inside it lost its shape entirely, returning to liquid and seeping deeper, and Claude's expression did not change at all throughout any of this because Claude had not noticed any of it.
He stretched, feeling the familiar tiredness of an evening spent in a particular kind of concentration, and stood to leave.
At the door he glanced back at the painting.
He stopped.
Something was wrong with it. Not wrong exactly — incomplete. There was a feeling in his chest that he recognized distantly as the feeling of standing at the edge of something, and the painting was on the other side, and the distance between them was unbearable.
He sat back down.
The ordinary paint was wrong. He understood this suddenly and completely, the way you understand something you've always known. His gaze moved across the room and settled on the knife resting on the drawer by the wall, and looking at it, he understood that too.
He crossed the room, picked up the knife, returned to the stool, and without any particular hesitation opened his left hand.
Blood came quickly. Claude watched it with the expression of a man watching something arrive that he has been waiting for without knowing it. The more it flowed, the clearer everything became. He could feel his breathing change. A smile pulled at the corners of his mouth.
He emptied the red paint from the tray.
Picked up the canvas he'd spent the evening on and set it aside.
Found a new one.
And began again, brush after brush, the blood spreading across the surface in slow crimson strokes while something behind his eyes grew brighter with each one, and by the time the laughter came it had been building for a while.
Author's note: The liquid didn't turn or transform itself into a centipede. It "shaped" itself into a centipede.