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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 1903666" data-attributes="member: 2">GalleryAutumn 2004 Round 4-1: Firelance vs. PiratecatHe sniffed. “You’re plebian, incompetent, and an absolute wretch. You lack a sense of perspective. How you haven’t been fired yet, I have no idea.”She would have given him credit for a good vocabulary, but he’d had a lot of time to think of the insult since they’d started to disagree ten long hours ago.  Celia silently counted to three. “Jay. . .”“Mondarian! I told you, first names are bourgeois and I will only be known as Mondarian. That’s assuming that you even retain enough creative integrity to recognize an artistic statement.” Sniff.  “I have my doubts.”“Do you?” Her inflection made it clear that she wasn’t actually asking a question. It had been a long and trying day.“I do.” He sniffed again. It was either a coke habit – so eighties  – an incipient head cold, or a sign that his head had been shoved as far up his ass as a year of successful critical acclaim could push it. “I am sure that you hate me. You are no doubt jealous.”No doubt, and she tried to hide a bitter smile. She’d known Jason Mondarian for almost a decade. Back then he was known as Jay. He had flunked out of the same art school she’d graduated from with honors, but recently his sculptures had caught the eye of a wealthy society family and it had given him delusions of competence. Celia had been running the Stanhope Gallery for eight years now, and it wasn’t usually a thankless job. She normally loved the rambling old mansion nestled in the deep woods of western Massachusetts.  She loved the quiet winters, the rooms filled with art, the mixture of traditional antiquities and cutting edge new artists, the heavy air of history that lay over the gallery and the grounds. The only time this wasn’t true was when she had to deal with artists like this one.Mondarian had caught her half-smile.  “You laugh!” His eyes grew wide and he threw open his arms, as if preparing for crucifixion. “You laugh at me! That’s it, I will cancel the show! You will allow this piece to be shown, and you will apologize, or the show will not occur.” Sniff. He crossed his arms and turned his back. The winter wind howled outside. It was late at night and Celia had been hoping to finish the installation long before now. Lighting technicians were scheduled to be in early tomorrow morning to properly illuminate all the pieces, assuming they could get through the snow. For that to happen, though, the damn artiste would have to stop micromanaging every placement in the gallery of high-ceilinged rooms. She’d be lucky if the roads were even passable by the time they finished tonight. Time to be diplomatic. Deep breath, another three count, and go. Ramp up the bullshi. . . excuse me, professionalism. She’d dealt with worse. She just couldn’t remember when.Her voice was carefully modulated to be respectful without sounding obsequious. “Mondarian, I’m tired. Please forgive me.  I certainly understand how much you value your work, and as gallery manager I want you to be completely satisfied with the installation. It must speak to our audience.”  In this case, Celia thought to herself, it was going to say ‘Look at me! I’m a bright orange life sized paper mâché sculpture of a rutting pig. A large pig. Making it with Fidel Castro. Oooh, but I’m not complete and utter pretentious rubbish because I’m art. Honest.’ Sometimes she lost her patience with modern art. “I just think that this particular creation is beyond most of our guests. I’m sure that the impact will be diluted if we place it as the first thing people see when they walk through the door. It spoils the mounting tension that your works create. People will talk about this, and ignore everything else that you’ve created.”Mondarian looked mollified. He turned slightly, still pouting. “Indeed. It is meant to be symbolic, a paean to the creative urges. A tactile symphony of desire! Do you really think it undermines the other work I’m doing?” He sniffed.“Oh, yes. I’d hate for you to lose sales because of it.” She gave him a calculated smile of professional respect, hitting him where she knew it would hurt the most. “But you know, I have just the showcase for it at the back of the house. It’s a room that we only use for the crowning jewel of a particular exposition, a venue that rewards those guests who have the tenacity to truly explore the limits of an artists work. Come and see.”  I knew that getting that closet refinished was a good idea, she thought.“No,” he declared. <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17620" target="_blank">He cupped his hands</a> in front of him and ostentatiously blew across them, as if dismissing an annoying piece of dryer lint. His eyes bulged. “I give you no choice, so you must agree. It will stay in the entrance hall, where all will marvel. We will bring it there now, or I and my sculptures will leave.”There was a buzzing whine like an angry insect, and the lights went out.They weren’t supposed to. The lights were never supposed to go out. It was specified in old Mrs. Stanhope’s will that had turned her ancestral home into a private museum and gallery of eclectic art. If the power ever failed – and it had, four times in the years she’d been there – a backup generator in the basement was supposed to kick in. If that failed, a second generator was supposed to pick up the load. The house was always supposed to be lit, to the extent that certain sections didn’t even have any light switches.  It was just one of those things she had started taking for granted.“Well, damn,” said Celia. The darkness was complete.Sniff.“What is it?” asked Mondarian, clutching her arm in the pitch darkness. “Is it a robbery? Is someone trying to steal my masterpieces? We mustn’t let them!” She heard panic in his voice, and he fumbled to draw his ever-present sculpting knife from the sheath at his belt.Celia let herself smile bitterly.  “I don’t think so. Listen to the wind. I think a tree dropped on a line somewhere.” She fumbled for his hand and patted it reassuringly, and together they stood in the gloom and listened to the shrieking of the storm outside. The snow-covered skylight let in almost no illumination at all; Celia suspected that even the parking lot lights were out.  “Well, no need to panic. We have a generator, and I know where the reset switch is. I’ll just pop down to the basement and restart it. Then we can finish up with the last sculptures.”“Mondarian will come with you.” Her eyes were starting to adjust, and she saw his bald head gleaming slightly in front of her. With his black clothing hiding his body, it looked like a floating egg. “You don’t have to.” She fished out her cell phone and pushed a button, lighting the floor around them with a cold blue light.“But I will. You will need my help.” He’s scared of the dark, Celia realized, and lowered the phone so that he wouldn’t see her face. Nodding, she skirted the problematic sculpture and turned away into the darkness. -- o --“Please stand over here against the wall,” Celia instructed. The room smelled like oil and dust. Her nose picked out the acrid scent of something that smelled like burned plastic. “Let’s see if I can get this restarted.”“What, against this door?”“There’s no door there. Against the wall.”“Of course there’s a door here. I can feel it.”Annoyed, Celia turned and walked back, lifting her lit cell phone up high. She could see the faint blue light reflected in Mondarian’s bulging eyes. He stopped her with outstretched hands and framed her dramatically.“I will do a piece of you,” he whispered. “Just like that, carrying the torch of illumination on high. You will pose for me!” His breathing had quickened.Celia blinked, shook her head slightly, and brandished the Nokia. “Sure. I’ve always wanted a sculpture of me with Fidel Castro.”  She raised an eyebrow.  “See behind you?  No door. Just wall.”Mondarian turned around, and his expressive face contorted in confusion. “But I could have sworn. . .” His voice trailed away, and Celia didn’t hear the rest of his sentence as she walked back to the generator.“It’s back!”“What?”“As soon as you turned away. I felt it again in front of me.” He sniffed.She lifted the cell phone over her head and pointed it at him. The light barely carried. “Gone.” She lowered her arm. The artist’s voice was fascinated. “Back! Amazing!”“You’re imagining things.” More likely the sniffing is from a coke habit after all, she thought. She pushed the reset button on the generator. Nothing but a dull click that reminded her of a dead car ignition. Kuh-click. Kuh-click. No rumble into life like the grumbling of giants, no welcome glow of light. She tried the button for the backup generator. Same thing. “Crap,” she said under her breath. Never mind the crazy artist. This meant no finishing the installation tonight, no prepared gallery for the lighting technicians tomorrow, an overtime rush to have the show ready in time for opening, and doubtlessly a huge bill to fix the damn generators. The museum might even lose its funding if the executors found out that the lights had failed. In sharp frustration she smacked her hand down on the restart button one final time, and screamed as she impaled it on a sharp barb of metal jutting out of the plate. She yanked her hand back, and the violence of the movement knocked her cell phone out of her other hand and into the darkness. Even as she felt blood trickling down her palm, she heard the phone hit face down onto a box of tools. The light extinguished with a crunch.She raised her right palm to her lips to check the damage, and tasted the hot copper of oozing blood. She was pulling a handkerchief from her pocket when she heard the sound of creaky hinges behind her.Mondarian’s voice was smug, no trace of the previous fear. He liked being right.  “The door you said wasn’t there? I just opened it.” “What?” She edged forward until her unhurt hand touched the wall.  “This isn’t a bad movie version of Clue, and you aren’t Tim Curry. There aren’t any secret doors to the conservatory in here.” She struggled to control her sudden fear. “Let’s get out of here.”“Oh?” His voice was amused and ten feet farther onwards than it had any right being. She walked forwards and felt her shoulders brush a narrow and crooked doorframe. She walked a few more paces until she bumped into Mondarian’s back. It was colder here, remarkably colder, as if this room was never insulated like the rest of the mansion. There was a smell, too, the odor of a wet shirt left too long in summer. Mildew and decay. Dust. She sensed expectant anticipation, hunger. An icy trickle of sweat trailed down the small of her back.“Do you see?” Mondarian’s voice was reverential, but Celia saw only unremitting darkness. Then as if someone flipped on a light switch, a long and crooked room swam into a soft gray focus. The angles hurt her eyes. In front of her, the artist breathed.  “Art.”And it was. The Stanhopes must have been storing pieces in this archive for decades. Countless nooks hid paintings and sculptures. Celia drew in breath; she had never expected that this existed in the building. Mondarian strode over to a nearby nook, but Celia just stood and wheeled in a circle. The work surrounded her, no one piece dominating the hidden gallery. She walked over to the nearest piece of art and examined it with her curator’s eye.It was a squat and complacent gargoyle, unlabeled and surrounded by dusty plastic plants, the kind of sculpture she would expect to see in someone’s garden. Slightly chipped, nice casting work, worth maybe fifty dollars tops. Disappointing. It looked <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17622" target="_blank">annoyed about something.</a>Not often we get visitors. Hey, you know any good jokes? All the ones I have are played out. “What?” Celia froze, unclear of where the voice had come from. “Jay?” Across the room and staring at a sculpture of a drama mask, Mondarian didn’t respond.Not him, sweetcakes. We’ve been alone since long before the old lady snuffed it. The others won’t shut the hell up. Me, though? I’m patient. I’ve had practice.She stared at the unmoving gargoyle. It seemed to be looking right at her. “What the hell?”Nah. Not even the right neighborhood.Her mouth sagged. “How are you talking to me?”I’ve been stuck in this form since the dark ages, toots. In Rumania originally, although I used to serve as Johann Weyer’s hat rack. Interesting guy. Some friggin’ savages locked me in stone by trapping me in a circle of iron, and I’ve been kicking around ever since. I got picked up by the Stanhopes a couple’a generations back. They let me guard the back garden until the old lady inherited. She wasn’t old then, kinda a looker, but she was on an anti-occult binge. Had a hair up her ass about it or something. Grabbed us up, tossed us in here, and locked away the room to keep out the gentry. Do I ramble? I've been told I ramble.  The voice paused.  Nice ta meet'cha.Part of Celia’s mind reported very clearly and concisely that she was going crazy. Her thoughts reeled. You hurt your hand and got blood poisoning, or you fell and hit your head and are in a coma, or you are dreaming. That must be it. Heck, this thing even looked a little like Mondarian if you gave him a snout. Any minute now I’ll wake up and do my impression of Dorothy at the end of the Wizard of Oz. She clenched her eyes shut and pinched herself.I do NOT. You wound a guy.“What?” Her eyes snapped open.I don’t look anything like egghead over there. He has. . . Oh, crap, the play has him. So much for his sparkling company.  Just you and me and the art objects, now. If he gets tetchy, your best bet is the wooden crate against that wall. He's done for.She looked over and saw the crate, but ignored it in favor of her client. “Mondarian?”  Mondarian was crouching in rapt wonderment in front of a wooden drama mask. The mask was dimly lit by an antique and ornate arc of theater lights. <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17623" target="_blank">In the shadows it seemed frighteningly alive.</a>Celia left the gargoyle and moved over in concern, noting a label that simply said “Theosophical Society, Blavatsky’s Mistake.” The painted mask seemed to jeer at her.  “Mondarian? Mondarian? Jay?” She shook him, and his shoulder was slack.”Bitch.” The word came from Mondarian’s mouth, but it was the mask under the lights that leered at her lasciviously. She recoiled.”He is our stage. It isn’t intermission. You’re not wanted here.”She looked into Mondarian’s bulging eyes and screamed. She saw a play reflected in them, dozens of actors playing out some unthinkable drama on a stage that no one could see. Deep in his eyes a bald figure in black stood on the tiny stage, surrounded by performers that didn’t seem entirely human. From behind her, the gargoyle spoke into her brain. They’re all sentient, lady. That’s what I’m trying to tell ya. Anything magical is. It has needs and wants, and some of ‘em ain’t exactly going to say pretty please.”You know, every minute here is like a year to him. He’s in hell. But we’ll release him if you do what we say.” Mondarian’s voice was hateful, but his face was utterly slack. In the dancing gleam of his eyes, endless indignities occurred in an unreachable theater. The mask winked. Celia choked back vomit.“What?” Her voice shook.”Go see them. They want an agent. You’ll have to do.” Mondarian loosely pointed with a limp hand. Celia looked to the end of the elongated room, where three small arches were backlit inside a nook. Something waited there behind the <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17621" target="_blank">mottled green fabric</a>. With a shudder she realized that the fabric had probably once been white, but the years had stained it the color of misery. This is where the bad smell is coming from, Celia realized. Whatever’s back there is corrupt.She slowly approached and read the label, written in that spidery script that crawled across the tag. “Three Kings. Congo. 19th Century.” She reached a trembling hand towards the small curtains, felt something back there reaching greedily for her in return, and stumbled away from the smell with the curtains undrawn.“No. No!”The room twisted around her. She staggered towards where she thought the door might be. Mondarian was standing now and doing a hideous dance before the drama mask, shuffling his feet in an insane parody of glee. He was sniffling, but only because a vein had broken in his nose and blood was pouring down the bottom of his face. “Look at us, Celia,” he said in a flat parody of his normal voice. “We’re dancing.Celia struck at the wall. Behind her, the possessed Mondarian kept talking. No, not talking, Celia realized sickly. Declaiming. Like he was on stage.  ”Tsk tsk, Celia. You fail. They need an agent. We all do. We’ve been trapped here, away from the world. We haven’t been fed. We’re hungry, girl. And you’re food.” Around her, much of the art seemed to stir impatiently. The hideous smell of sweat and disease seemed to get stronger. For a second Celia thought she could hear the sea. The floor swayed.“So you’re going to help. Do you know what we’re going to do with this body when we’re free? We’re going to perform. Play acting. We’ll still sculpt to keep up appearances, but there will be real bodies beneath the paper mâché. You’ll still get to pose for us. We’ll win acclaim. People will come to see, and perhaps we’ll send them on to those that need them more.” He gestured a languid hand towards the green-curtained nook once again. ”We’re hoping to help one another here. You can help by opening the door and letting us out.” “There is no door!” She tried to buy time, but she was choked by a bubbling panic. Mondarian took a half step towards her, did a little jig, and took another. The unsheathed sculpting knife was in his hands.“Of course there is. You just can’t see it if there’s light in the room.” Another teasing step.Desperate, Celia looked for the light switches. “There’s no way to turn them off!” she screamed. She side-stepped to the corner of the room.“Indeed there’s not. It’s a nice little trap. But you’ll be fine once we carve out your eyes. That should do the trick.” Mondarian’s blank face twisted into a rictus, and Celia knew that the artist was now totally gone.  “Act One, Celia. Curtain rises. Enter girl, blind.” He lunged for her.Celia thrust her hand into the wooden crate.Time stretched and rebounded, like light from a mirror. In an endless second she soared through the thermals of her own breath and she heard a thousand prayers from a thousand lungs. She was the sky, and she was everything that flew in the sky: the plane and the bird and the moth. She was stripped of weighty flesh, and she felt her body twisting with hurricanes and being drawn in by a baby’s first breath. She ran across winter roads and laughed snow.Celia danced across the heavens. <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17624" target="_blank">Celia was the heavens.</a>With part of her essence she read the label on the crate. Johann Reuchlin, 1504. Cabalist. Apotheosis.  She could see inside it; two mirrored spheres squatted atop one another in impossible balance. <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=17625" target="_blank">Quicksilver light seeped from their glass.</a> They were an elemental focus, she somehow knew, letting a person briefly become the element – not a little of it, as if her body turned to air, but all of it and all at the same time. The feeling was indescribable because she saw everything that air touched across the entire planet. Every person and object was set before her like a sculpture in a studio, and she had all the time in the world to examine each and every one before she returned to her body. She did so whether or not her mind was prepared to handle it, seeing and knowing everything at once, and she only took the time to make one change before she returned to her weighty flesh. Mondarian’s body fell over in front of her. His chest heaved, but no noise came out. There was twitching, but no sniffing. No air for you, Celia thought as tears began to roll down her face. No air for the things behind the curtain. Ever. Her form was impossibly bulky. She no longer wanted her flesh. She began to shake. She had saved herself, maybe, but she was still trapped. No way out. She wanted to return to the air. She thrust her hand against the quicksilver sphere again and again, but it would only work once. Too much flesh. She heard the sculptures shifting. There were billions of things she could no longer see. Tears rolled down her face. She considered the knife. She considered all the flesh. The two seemed to be related. She wondered if she had seen enough to last a lifetime.  She wondered how one could tell. She thought about peeling back the layers to find out.Eventually, she wondered why she was thinking crazy talk when she knew where the ventilation shaft into this room went.It took three hours and a lot of skinned knuckles, but dawn was still far away when she pulled herself free. When she left she took the statuette of the gargoyle. She left everything else behind. Celia staggered through the darkened mansion, wondering if there were any more of these hidden doors, wishing she could remember, glad that she couldn't. The first thing she did when she reached the ground floor was toss Mondarian’s favorite sculpture out the back door into a ditch. It sounded like Castro's head split on a rock, and the exuberant pig broke in two when it hit. The crunching sound was rather pleasant.Then she stood out in the black and silent night, breathing deeply, and stared up into the gallery of snow.-- o --atcha.jpg – Mondarian, exhorting a central location for his favorite sculpturegardengoyle.jpg – a resident of the locked roomlightshow.jpg – the occult artifact that captured the artistsomething_green.jpg – the resting place for something exceptionally nastyflight.jpg – apotheosis of airglass.jpg – the quicksilver spheres that trigger Celia’s exaltation</blockquote>

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