The Sketcher's Mark (Lara McBride Thrillers Book 1) (28 page)

Guillotine reached the outer door of the barn and turned back to Claude and was no longer himself.  He had Become.

“It’s time,” he said and opened the door.

Chapter Fifty Nine

Lara saw the room light up around her and instinctively ducked, pulling the pistol up and aimed for the doorway. There was nobody there.  She went to the window and saw that the light was coming in from outside from the extreme floodlights fixed on top of the barn. She could see two figures at the barn door, just black silhouettes that melted inside the building.  The phone receiver was in her hand and she put it back to her ear.  The Police Operator had taken the call.

“Hello?” she heard a female voice say.

“My name is Lara McBride, I’m working with Inspector Brouchard and the Tactical Team assigned to him.  I need you to trace this call and send emergency units immediately to this location.  The Tactical Team have me a GPS transponder so get word to them that I still have it on. Now, please.”

She set the receiver on the desk, heard the Operator still talking as she crossed the room, headed for the front door.  She stopped, finding her eyes drawn to the computer on the table across the room.  She saw that it was logged on to an Internet website with CCTV views that showed nothing on their displays.  A counter in the bottom left was ticking over, as more people appeared to be logging in and joining the site.  It was strange, but she had little time to give it more thought.  She had to get to the barn.  But even as she left the room, something tugged at the back of her mind about that website.

She cautiously stepped outside and felt the chill night air biting at her skin.  She approached Claude’s car, checking to see if there was anybody else inside, someone they may have left behind to keep an eye on the perimeter.  The car was empty. She looked over to the barn.  In her mind, she saw the ribbons fluttering out of the door, calling her, then went rigid and pointed inside like arrows.  The final destination.  His lair.  Everything had led here and now it was time to finish it.

She sprinted across the field and did not stop until she got to the outer door. She took a few seconds, catching her breath, her heart beating fast.  She waited for anyone to approach, try to take her by surprise but nobody came. She took a deep breath, readied herself and opened the door, stepping inside the barn. 

She saw that she was in an outer section of the building; any further entrance was blocked by what looked like a long steel door that ran the full length of the building.  It was not just a door.  It had been used as the canvass on which had been hand painted the most magnificent painting she had ever seen.  The colors, the clarity, the vividness made her stop in shock because of its sheer size and overwhelming beauty. 

It was a rendition of heaven.  The blue of the sky was a deep rich color, the azure blue of a flawless ocean surface in late afternoon.  Clouds were so brilliantly white it seemed that every part of them must have been cleaned multiple times a day to keep them so blindingly crisp and perfect.  Angels were placed in various poses all around the scene of heaven.  Their faces were drawn in such acute detail.  They seemed to live and breathe on this steel canvas, every pore on their had been etched, the eyes had life and their hair had a real and sensuous texture.  For a moment, she thought she was looking at real people staring out at her with beatific smiles, welcoming her.

Janelle’s face was that of the Angel in the very centre of the painting.  He had told her that.  She was his “centerpiece”.  Lara’s heart sank and she felt rage begin to claw its way up through her stomach and she gripped the pistol tighter.  There she was, her little sister, stood so delicately atop a small perfect white cloud, radiating health and some kind of majesty Lara had never seen in her before.  She looked over and saw a lever on the wall.  It would take some force to move it but it seemed this was the mechanism to open the door and get deeper inside the barn.

Lara put the pistol in her jeans to use both hands on the lever.  It took all her strength to pull it down and, after throwing everything she had in to it, the painting of heaven suddenly imploded on itself and disappeared with a large metallic thunk and a grinding of metal as the painting revealed itself to be a door made of large vertical panels that turned inwards, providing gaps wide enough to allow a person to step between them and in to the main area.  She palmed the pistol and stepped through.

The interior of the barn was massive and opened out before her.  It was bathed in rich red lights that he had arranged around the room.  Lara’s mind raced to process what she was seeing and stay the sheer horror of it all from her senses.  What he had done in here was beginning to numb her body from the legs and threatened to shut her down from a shock as severe as being suddenly dropped in to Arctic water.

He had built a split level, the lower area taking up the first half of the barn, then the upper level taking up the rest. Upon each level, he had created the opposite rendition of the heaven scene on the outer door.  This version was its twisted mirror image- hell.  She saw now what he had done with the Angels and why he had needed them.  Why they had been so carefully selected.  Why he had kept them alive.

Guillotine had made a living version of his painting of hell and had populated it with his stolen Angels.  The girls were alive, emaciated and weak.  A living art installation using real people as its components.

Cages hung from the ceiling, Angels imprisoned visibly within them.  There were Angels hanging from chains, tied to posts, crucified.  Such pain.  Such cruelty.  On the lower level, flanking everything, were two pits that he must have dug by hand, around fifteen feet deep with enormous impaling spikes that looked hundreds of years old, something he had imported from another time, an era of pain that must have fascinated him so, assimilating it in to this one.  They reached up out of the dirt like bony fingers grasping for a way out. He had lashed Angels to them who hung like pitiful broken creatures waiting for death.  The Angels were shivering in fear and pain.  They were malnourished, starved and sunken versions of once healthy, glowing women whose real likeness he had painted on the outer door. Some of them were moaning, a low rolling sound that seemed to bounce off the walls and infect her ears like an airborne poison.  He had soundproofed the room to enhance the acoustics and amplify the effect it would have to anyone who listened.  The ground was covered in hay, under which fresh dirt provided an earthy smell.  Lara McBride, repulsed as she was, could not take her eyes away from the sight; it was so overwhelming in its obscenity.

To her left, the wall display held what looked like an impressive array of medieval weapons. Next to that, a dirty stone trough that appeared to be at least a hundred years old and an old sink basin with a rusted brown tap and a broken, dirt crusted mirror sat in the red haze, left untouched like a snapshot from days gone by. Somehow, she instinctively knew he had lived here, probably as a child, kept in the dark to forge his own designs that now displayed themselves before her.

Then she saw Janelle and her resolve was pulled out from her as though the devil himself had kicked her legs out and she fell to her knees weeping.

Chapter Sixty

Guillotine had led Claude inside the barn and was pleased with his reaction.  The whole piece was interactive and Hell would never have the impact he wanted unless the viewer was so beguiled at the beauty of his rendition of Heaven.  He took the remote and clicked the button that activated the CCTV cameras he had set up around the interior.  On his website, had Lara McBride been watching, she would have seen the once black display now showing real time coverage of what was happening in the barn. Art was happening.  History was being made.  Guillotine was its Creator.

“Oh, it is magnificent!”  Claude trilled, looking at the image of Heaven. “So beautiful!  My very heart might burst just looking at it!” Guillotine thought he was not exaggerating.  He had walked to the lever and let Claude drink in the site of Heaven for a few more moments, waited for him to breathe and then he pulled the lever down and revealed Hell.

Guillotine happily watched the color drain from Claude’s fat little face.  The man was suddenly in shock.  Guillotine approached him and gently moved him through the steel shutters in to the main area.  He pulled the lever on the inside, closing the Heaven door behind them and sealing his audience of one inside.

“They… they’re real people…” Claude gasped.

“There are some things the brush and pencil simply cannot capture.  Life.  Death.  I simply changed my medium to the flesh…”

As Claude stumbled around the lower area, looking at the weeping Angels who looked at him helplessly, barely having the strength to move and plead for mercy, he began to cry for them.  Guillotine looked up at the cameras he had mounted on the walls, saw that they were all active, their red lights melting in to the deep red he had cast on the room himself with the artificial lights.  They had been tricky to arrange but he felt confident he had finally got the angles just right to cast the shadows where he wanted them, to give them place a real sense of depth and texture.

On the wall behind him, Guillotine looked at his collection of weapons.  His eyes moved over each one, the axe, the pike, the mace, and the swords as he unbuttoned his shirt and slipped out of his pants.  By the time he had taken the long double edged pike off the wall, he was completely nude, his skin bathed in the rich red light and he calmly approached Claude.

“These are not actors,” the little man was blubbering.  “This is inhuman!”

“This…is…art.”  Guillotine said, holding his arms out and displaying his nude body, rolling on the current of soft low moans coming from his Angels as though he was floating on gently rippling water.

Claude looked at his client and saw that his entire body was covered in the same scars and welts as his face.  Every single part of him had been marked. Guillotine’s body was muscular and solid.  The scars and welts formed one continuous pattern from his cheek down to his feet.  Guillotine’s eyes looked black under the deep red light, gleaming like dark marbles, and he grinned, a jack-o-lantern smile that split across his face like one last wet scar with teeth.

“This is where they sent me to die, Claude. But this where I learned to live.  This was my Heaven and Hell- now it is theirs.”

Guillotine pointed with the pike to a wooden post that was held in the ground with concrete.  Atop it, hanging like rag dolls were the emaciated husks of two women in what looked like funeral hats and veils covering their long rotted faces.  They seemed out of place around the Angels yet Guillotine’s attention to them was even more terrifying to Claude than anything else he had seen in here.

“You see?”  He screamed up at the skeletal remains of Marie and Madeleine.  “This is my masterpiece!  I did not shrivel and die in here like an animal!  I was reborn!!  And now, I am art!!!”

Claude felt his bladder release and warm liquid seep through his pants and down his leg as Guillotine swung the pike around to point at him.

“And now I give my Hell to the world,” Guillotine proclaimed.

“Please, I have been nothing but kind to you…” Claude pleaded.

“Did I mention, Claude, that this piece is interactive?”

Guillotine brought the pike back then whipped it forward, the razor sharp edge slicing through Claude’s shoulder.

Claude screamed in pain.  Guillotine pulled the pike back and whipped it above his head, warming up, laughing, devoured by his own creation.  Claude stumbled back and saw the steps that led to the upper level.  He hurried up them and terror made his feet seem like they weren’t moving at all, but he was making his way to the back of the upper level.  There were shadows here, maybe somewhere he could hide.  Guillotine began the hunt, ascending the stairs with an unexpected litheness.  He could not see the little man and he licked his lips in anticipation of hunting him, finding him.

It was only when he was nearing the back of the platform that he heard the Heaven doors open again with a clang and wondered who had dared invade his domain uninvited.  He knelt low and scurried back to the front end of the platform, using one of the nailing posts as cover.  Looking down, he saw to his surprise and growing delight that Lara McBride had found her way to his sanctuary. 

What a gift! 

He glanced up at the cameras and realized the unveiling of his masterpiece had just ascended to another level not even he could have dreamed of.  It was so exciting- the evolution of art, how it took on a life of its own.  He eased back from the edge of the platform and went hunting for Claude.

Chapter Sixty One

Janelle was secured to the highest post on the lower level.  Hers was the centerpiece and the one to which the eye was drawn because it towered over the others.  She was dressed in white, like the other Angels, her head hung low on her chest.  At first it was hard to see if she was breathing.  Then Lara saw her sister’s chest moving steadily up and down.  She was unconscious, but she was alive.  She got back on her feet and looked for something to cut the ropes with.