The Language of Bees (15 page)

There were seven war-time drawings in all. Although none were dated, their order was easy to determine, because the style grew increasingly precise as time passed. The last one, a close study of the upper half of a naked skull emerging from the mud, possessed the finely shaded detail of a photograph.

In all of the war-time sketches, the perspective was odd, the objects to the sides tending either to loom up, or to curl in towards those in the centre, as if the artist saw the entire world as threatening to engulf him.

The page following the skull was startling in a different way, being in colour. It and the rest were all photographs, most of them coloured, of paintings, bearing dates between 1917 and 1919. The quality and uniformity of the photographs suggested that all had been made at the same time. Probably, I thought, either at the instruction of Mme Longchamps, or by another following her death.

I had thought the bee tea-pot unsettling: It was nothing compared to these images.

The thirty or so pages remaining in the album, a closer examination showed, were taken from only nine originals. Each sequence began
with the complete painting, the size of which seemed to vary, followed by several closer-up parts of the whole.

Some of the paintings were violent, showing dismembered bodies and wide pools of blood, every glistening inch painted with loving detail. Others were nightmare horrors: a woman with full breasts, delicious skin, and an oozing sore for a mouth; a child clutching a human heart, its veins and arteries trailing to the ground. A painting done in June 1918 showed a room in what could only be the mental hospital where Damian had been treated: a study in pallor, white-grey beds, white-pink curtains, a man with white-brown skin wearing a white-blue dressing gown, a patch of white-yellow sun hitting the white-tan floor: The painting felt like the moments under ether when consciousness fades.

All the paintings felt tortured. All were disturbing. The earlier ones had more overt depictions of the macabre, the latter images felt as though a horror lay just outside the room, but each painting seemed to be holding its breath in dread.

The last painting was a family portrait: father, mother, child. The mother, in the centre, was Irene Adler. The child on her left was a thin boy with grey eyes. The man on her right was Holmes. The figures were posed as if for a conventional portrait, facing the artist, the father standing behind the seated mother, the boy leaning into her lap in a pose that resembled a
pietá
. The wallpaper behind them faded at the top, merging into a dark, starlit sky: Above the man’s head was a tiny sun, weak with immeasurable distance; above the mother rode a gravid-looking moon; over the son flew a streaking comet. At the bottom, wallpaper met carpet, but when one studied the odd colouring and perspective, it suddenly became clear that all three figures had begun to melt into the carpet, the colours of their clothes bleeding into its weave, their shoes no longer even an outline against the pattern.

Its date was October 1919. Damian had painted this after meeting Holmes, and shortly before he had left France entirely.

A celestial family bleeding into the ground: In another hand, it would have been mere Surrealist trickery, but here, one received the
clear impression that beneath the calm of their faces, each of the three could feel what was happening, and that the process was on the edge of excruciating.

I looked out of the window, and saw that the sun had long since set. I closed the book, put it on the shelf, shut the library door, and even rattled the knob, to make sure the latch had caught. If there had been a bar across the door, I would have dropped it into place as well.

The sitting room’s dark corners seemed to crawl with unknown threat. I poured myself a glass of brandy—odd, how much I had drunk the past couple of days—and picked up a travelling rug on my way out to the terrace. The moon would be full tonight, and the sky was so clear, I could practically read a newspaper. I spread out the rug on the deck-chair, and lay back to watch the sky. Perhaps I would see the occasional meteor, trailing after Tuesday’s height.

My mind was both empty and occupied, all of the thoughts buzzing far below the surface. So it was not for some time that I realised that I had come out onto a dark terrace, and that I could not see my feet at the other end of the deck-chair. It was remarkably dark, yet the stars shone. Where was the moon?

I looked to the east, expecting to see its great mass slowly pulling above the horizon, but it was not there. In its place was a slim crescent, perhaps two days old.

My brain felt like a motor slapped abruptly into reverse. But the moon was full. I’d slept on this very spot not two nights past, and it was big and growing bigger, all but perfectly round. How, then—?

It was in the east. A setting sun, with a new moon in the east?

I experienced a sharp pulse of panic, convinced that Damian’s macabre paintings had affected my mind in some profound way. Then I shook myself, and cast around for an explanation that incorporated the customary workings of the universe.

An eclipse.

I had read something about an eclipse recently, but nothing had prepared me for one here. An advert, that had been, for a boat tour to
the eclipse. Why would one take a boat tour when one could sit anywhere in the country and see the moon fade?

I stared up, open-mouthed, as the last of the moon was overcome, and all one could see was a faint circular object in the sky, as much an absence of stars as a presence of a celestial body. It stayed dark for a long, long time, nearly an hour, before a faint suggestion of curve appeared. Shortly after ten o’clock, the earth’s satellite began to move out of the planet’s shadow: a thin curve; a fatter slice; a bulging half-circle; finally, an hour later, it was glorious and round; an hour after that, it was fully brilliant.

As I had felt a primitive’s fear at the moon’s disappearance, so I felt the profound reassurance of its return. Once the moon was securely in the sky, I went inside, less troubled by the images behind the library door. I slept that night, long and deep.

The Seeker (1):
An artist grinds lapis to make blue
,
lead to make white, giving colour and dimension to the
artifice on his canvas. How not to spend his entire career
inventing techniques known by the painters who
have gone before?
Testimony, I:8

D
AMIAN? DAMIAN, WAKE UP! DA—”

“Bloody bastard, watch out for the—oh, I’ll bloody murder you, you son of a—”

“Damián!”

“What? What is it?”

“The light burnt out, you were having a dream. A nightmare.”

“Don’t be an idiot. I don’t have nightmares.”

“Then you were locked in battle against invisible foes. Here, I’ve turned on the other lamp. Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right. I just need some air.”

“The window is open.”

“I have to get out.”

“Damian—”

“If you try and stop me, I’ll hit you.”

“I wasn’t going to stop you. But tomorrow? We’ll divide up.”

“Now there’s a pity.”

“And, Damian? Take your coat. You’re dripping with sweat.”

The Seeker (2):
Every man, however god-like and gifted
,
requires a Guide to set him upon the path, to show him
how other artists have achieved their results, to show how
other Seekers have found their answers
.
Testimony, I:8

F
RIDAY MORNING, I SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, reading Thursday’s papers, drinking strong coffee, and eating slices of stale bread covered with butter and jam—I’
d
become somewhat tired of honey, and had decided that a more substantial breakfast was not worth the effort of clearing smoke and scraping pans. Mrs Hudson would be back tomorrow, and life would return, at least in part, to normality.

I stood at the door looking over the terrace and the Downs, and thought about what to do with my last full day of solitude. There was no telling where Holmes was or when he might appear, but when he did so, it would be satisfying to have solved his mystery for him.

I put on my boots, locked up, and set off once more in the direction of the mad beehive.

Once there, I left my rucksack in the shade of the emptied
Langstroth box and walked due east, going nearly half a mile before turning back to where I had started. I walked slowly, searching the ground, the air, the surroundings in general, to see what was different about this particular hive.

Back and forth I went, my senses open to that one lonely patch of downland. I climbed over stone walls, poked about in holes looking for poison bait, wrote down the name of every plant in the vicinity, the presence of sheep, the lack of trees.

After three hours, the sun was scorching and I was thoroughly fed up with the entire puzzle. I drained my last drop of warm lemonade and tried to put my thoughts in order.

There was nothing I could see that set this hive apart from the others. Except that it was, in fact, apart, this being the furthest of Holmes’ hives. As yesterday’s blistered palms could well testify.

Plenty of food—the honey in the frames had told me that. A fertile queen—any number of fertile queens. So what was it? Why dislike this place? What had so infected the community with alarm and despondency that they had deserted their brood?

With a sigh of resignation at my own unwillingness to let go of the conundrum, I got down on my hands and knees at the front of the hive and picked through the grass with my fingertips.

There were dead bees there, of course—workers only live a few weeks, and a sentimental burial is not in the hive’s interest. Still, I dutifully gathered up those that were not dried to a husk, taking care not to impale myself on the stingers, and folded them into a sheet of paper. Perhaps examination under a microscope would reveal a parasite.