Work Text:
In such moments he felt himself a real artist. Everything preceding them was merely a necessary process of preparation and a way to draw inspiration. At least, for the last few years (how many, six? seven?) it seemed to him that this was the case. He took a deep breath filling his lungs with air already saturated with a brackish scent having a racy tinny flavor.
Hair. A broad stroke depicting soft curls. Too ragged to give a true view of the reality, but still too smooth to blame the author for dislike of his model.
Face contour. He worked in gloves not just for fear of mucking his hands, not at all. At some moment he had just realized that the softness of these lines required something equally soft for their creation, something different from his own coarse fingers.
Having drawn his hand aside from his improvised canvas he gave the latter a critical look. A decade ago, when his signature was faceless and he put it there only to jeer again at those who would’ve found it, – then he could have allowed himself to work fast and the aesthetic aspects of this work to recede into the background. But everything had changed when the TV screen showed him a face which fitted these, still lifeless, contours so perfectly. Perhaps, anger and desire to teach a lesson were by no means the main reasons for what he soon had done to the owner of these contours. Oh, no. There was only one main cause: to attract and capture the attention of this perfect sitter whom he seemed to be looking for all his life. It was afterwards when their peculiar remote communication had become a monstrous cat-and-mouse game, whereas back then speaking in him were only feelings of an artist who had finally found his muse and – as it turned out to be – Nemesis, all in one.
Eyes. Barely looking he dipped his fingers into the thick red liquid and ran them over the wall leaving two slightly curved traces. These eyes haunted him even in his sleep. Generally, he didn’t see any dreams, and this possibility to let his mind rest if only at night was probably the only thing that prevented him from going mad – in that sense he himself put into this phrase and not that psychiatrists implied and according to which he should have been now in a tightly locked room with high ceiling and felt-lined walls for quite a long time. It could be said that he inured himself not to see dreams. But on those rare nights when his rest nevertheless was disturbed by dreams suddenly invading his consciousness, he woke up with a harsh breath and had been sitting on a bed for a long time while still seeing those very eyes in front of him and fearing to blink and let this vision fade like a spot left by the sun on the retina. After another one of such nights he realized he could not bare it any more and, breaking all the rules he himself had set, arranged an unscheduled meeting with his inspirer. After all, if this impudent stare had once become a cause for a murder, then why couldn’t he now arrange another murder to see this stare again? Such interchange of causes and effects seemed fair and quite logical to him. As well as the stare which he was prevented to meet by the mask covering his face still seemed provoking and burning through despite the fear clearly showing through it. “Tyger, tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night...” He moved his lips silently repeating the lines that had sunk into his mind long ago, and once again critically looked over the rough strokes from the ends of which down the wall there already crept, like bloody tears, red streaks.
Smile. Today it was particularly wide. As if it was meant to make up for absence of the one on his muse’s face. Oh, no, Patrick Jane smiled often. But never – in his presence, whether visible or not. Neither would he smile this time after discovering another masterpiece left by a generous artist as a keepsake. From the corner of the mouth – in that point where his finger had paused for a moment before getting off the surface – a heavy drop started its way down flowing into the rows of thin trickles and completing the overall picture.
He swept his eyes over the room once again and nodded slightly, satisfied with what he’d seen. Everything was perfect. The pose of a girl on the bed in the corner, few already browned stains on the floor, marking his way from the body to the wall opposite the door, and, finally, the proportions of lines having been trued over the years and now decorating this wall. He stepped back and, still admiring his work, skinned a stained rubber glove off his right hand, turning it inside out and exposing another one, thin and transparent: he still did not have any intention to leave traces that could easily lead guardians of law to him. That is why time and again he confined himself to leaving ephemeral messages to only one of them. On the doorstep he turned and looked again at the portrait he’d painted. Polyethylene covering his fingers glided softly over the handle and then, with the same softness, he himself slipped out of the room. When closing the door, Red John was smiling.