Ivory (25 page)

Ebony clasped
the top of his staff in a grip that creaked with its tightness,
either because he was being pressed for answers or with the
revelation that he had been followed. “Lust and love are potent
magics we all find ourselves slaves to,” he snapped.

“
No. This is different. I think I would destroy myself to keep
feeling this.”

“
Others have destroyed themselves to keep from feeling it,” he
cautioned. “Iris, an associate of mine, an oracle – a psychic in
your words, she predicts that many will destroy each other for her
beauty.”

“
Iris was the woman you asked after at the shop?”

Ebony cocked
his head in surprise at just how much Martin had gleaned from
following him. He gave Martin a measuring look as if wondering how
far Martin would be prepared to follow Ebony. “She is more than a
mere woman, but yes.”

“
And there are tensions between you and this Iris?”

“
Iris and her followers have dogmatic views concerning good
and evil. They see them as diametrically opposed. Things are black
or white, light or dark, they do not recognise the grey shadow that
permeates my work. Iris gave me this staff: a work of beauty for a
blind man who was given a vision of the darkness, but wouldn’t
believe.” Ebony proffered the staff but retained a firm two handed
grip that instructed Martin it was being offered for examination,
not for taking. Now able to study it directly he could see that it
was carved from bottom to top, the relief and detail greater nearer
the thicker top end. The seemingly Celtic interlacing pattern was
actually carved representations of men and women, not in orgiastic
embrace as it might have appeared, but in a struggle, pushing,
pulling and clawing one another away from an inlayed slither of
bone-white ivory detailed as a woman. The grain of the wood was
darker around her, tracing over the contours of the naked men and
women in their fight like blood.

“
And you believe that Ivory has some hold over men?” Martin
was unsure if he was challenging Ebony or his own eager clutch at
the possibility of there being a spell that could erode his will
and his responsibility for his actions.

“
Men and women.” Ebony left the stairs and joined Martin in
the hall. “Her influence knows no convention or boundaries. It is
prophesised that man and woman will turn on each other to claim
her, and from the bloody chaos darkness will come.”

Martin’s heart
fluttered at the mention of the word ‘prophecy’, but ignored it,
preferring the safer indignation at Ebony’s insulting explanation.
“Do you belong to a cult? Is that it?” His lips snarled around the
question as if it tasted foul. “You have brought Ivory up and
turned her to prostitution to try and fulfil some insane religious
predictions?”

“
Ignorance still! On the brink of enlightenment the fool fails
to see the path to truth,”

“
Fool?” There would be no arguing with a religious zealot.
Disputing faith was a circular argument.

“
The journey of the fool in the tarot.”

“
I want to understand… but I don’t want to be made a fool of.”
Ebony could keep his faith if Martin was given some answers that
satisfied him. “Let me see some of your work, let me understand why
all that money is needed.”

Ebony’s brow
shrugged in evaluation of the request and he moved towards the
first door in the hallway, turned the handle and swung the door
wide open.

Martin
silently questioned the gesture at first, but stepped into the room
being offered to him. The sitting room was larger than the one he
had been in before with Ebony, the dainty flower patterned paper on
the walls looked as old as the house itself but was in better
condition than the hall, the wrought iron fire place and wooden
surround with integral age-glazed mirror were also original. “What
is this?” Every surface of the walnut furniture, from the large
table that dominated the space between the two antique queen Anne
sofas, to the low level cabinets against each wall were covered
with curiosities.

“
Things that I have crafted.”

Martin heard Ebony’s words;
“Things
that I have crafted,”
as clear as when he
had heard them yesterday, but the mention of ‘things’ conjured a
fear within him that brought down the curtain on the stage in his
mind and grounded him in the present. Finding himself suddenly
transported from the spacious room in Ivory’s house to the narrow
hallway of his home was more disorientating than the last
flashback. His memory had proved so powerful that he could taste
the dusty air of Ebony’s house on his tongue even now. The pain in
his head had subsided into dull aching throbs and he took careful
steps down the hall towards the kitchen, keeping his head steady as
if his brain might spill out. He locked the kitchen door and peered
into the back room.

Satisfied that
nothing was waiting for him in the open and that everything seemed
in its natural order he entered, he didn’t bother pulling the door
away from the wall to trip the light switch and check if the room
had power, he had given up on that hope. He crossed from the door,
passed by the glass coffee table to the large French doors between
Jenny’s armchair and the PC desk in the alcove. The sky was still,
the clouds now fixed in place as a simmering ceiling flickering
with coruscating yellow energy at its depths. The bushes and shrubs
that separated the patio from the lawn trembled and swayed under
the relentless torrential downpour giving the impression of things
disturbing the branches and leaves. The outside world appeared just
as frightening as the confines of his home. He reasoned that at
least the outside had infinite opportunities of escape and would
ground him in sanity.

He knew that
the weak point of the double glazed doors was the corner of the
glass, but it had to be struck by something with a point. Martin
scoured the room for something weighty and pointed, wary of what
else he might find lurking in the gloom of his surroundings he
stayed in the middle of the room. After several grunts of exertion
and several swings at the glass, a table lamp, wooden sculpture and
a heavy pot plant sat demolished at his feet and the glass remained
unbroken. The portrait of Ivory stared down at him mockingly with
its black eyes following his despair. Had she sent the ‘things’ to
get him? Or had they tracked him down somehow? Was she even aware
of them?

Martin’s panicky fumbling fingers unlocked the kitchen door.
An icy draught from the open window curled around him. He had been
right in thinking that it was only wide enough for a child to get
through, but it
was
wide enough for those ‘things’ to get in. He crossed the
kitchen, pulled it closed and turned the handle down to lock it. A
single long white hair trailed from where it had been snagged on
the insulated join. A strand of Ivory’s hair. He shivered against
cold fingers tracing down his spine.

Impossible
. He dismissed
the suggestion that somehow she had managed to
squeeze through, yet he had seen her get her arm into the letterbox
at her house to retrieve her front door key, and he knew how
impossible that was. It gnawed at his rationale. He returned to the
task at hand and rifled through one of the drawers. He clumsily
snatched through the clutter and drew a hard wood rolling pin out
from the tangle of utensils. He scattered spatulas, spoons and a
whisk to the floor as yesterday smashed into his consciousness once
again.

The room that
Ebony showed him within his and Ivory’s house was cluttered with
wooden and brass music boxes, flowers, and birds in cages, busts of
children or scaled down adults, dolls dressed in rich fabric
clothes, their faces and hands made in delicate porcelain their
heads loaded with locks of real hair. “The work is so
intricate…”

“
For a blind man?”

“
Yes.” Martin walked into the room and examined one of the
larger pieces on a cabinet nearest the door. It was the top half of
a child dressed in renaissance clothing of plush browns and reds,
mounted at its waist upon a dark stained wooden box, the front of
which formed a small desk-like ledge. On the desk a blank piece of
white parchment held in place by one of the child’s hands while the
other hand held an antique fountain pen poised to write. Its face
was porcelain and its eyes were glass, but the paint of the skin
had the glow of youth and the iridescent iris caught the light with
a sparkle of life.

“
The work is merely created from patterns of movement well
rehearsed over time and remembered after my sight left
me.”

Martin circled
around the room, admiring the neatly knitted feathers layered over
the body of the caged mechanical bird. The petals of the flowers
were paper thin shavings of wood with colours so softly applied and
graduated across the spectrum, it was as though the colours were
breathed upon them. “It’s amazing.” He crouched to admire a
Harlequin doll on the centre table, the figure was a little over a
foot in height and clad in a suit of burnt orange and charcoal
diamonds with a hook-nosed mask of red and black, one of many
variations spaced around the room amongst other creations, but this
one sat at a perfectly scaled down pianola.

“
You admire the Hellequin? The Hellequins are base creations,
but her favoured works.”

“
This room…”

“
It is a room for her.”

“
Ivory?” The room suddenly ignited with a life of its own. The
carved petals of the flowers unfurled to reveal silken stamen and
brilliant colours, the music boxes clicked and whirred before
chiming into life, the torso ticked and tocked as hidden cogs began
to turn and gears began to creak, the iridium nib of its pen
scratched at the page in fluid movements. The bird fluttered its
wings and its head cocked and jerked in Martin’s direction while it
chirped a sweet song. The harlequin played at the pianola in small
jerky moves and its companions, although without instruments were
just as animated. “What happened?”

“
The machines are hers, gifts of sentiment from me, she loves
them and they love her. They are connected and come to life at her
name or her presence.”

Martin took
his explanation as meaning they were sound and motion activated. He
could see how the magic of this room and the dedication of love
within the gifts would be of comfort to Ivory. “Beautiful. But it’s
quite a leap of medium from oil painting to mechanics.”

“
Paintings were not enough to provide for my wife and I. My
father was a watchmaker and I turned our family skill to toys and
trinkets such as these. Those toys earned me a reputation as well
as a comfortable living.”

“
They are quite amazing – surely in this day they are
electronic?”

“
Clockwork. Self-winding.” Ebony announced, seeming to stand
taller with his shoulders squared and his chest broad as he talked
of his creations.

“
I find it difficult to believe.”

“
Classical legend has it that Herron made the first automaton,
Da Vinci had
his own designs for one. In
the 18
^th
century De Vaucanson created mechanical life in a mechanical
man that could play the flute. In the same century Pierre
Jaquet-Droz and his son made automaton men and women that could
write, draw and play music. Works that inspired your Babbage into
working on his calculating machines. Advances are made in every
field in time, it’s not so unbelievable that almost three hundred
years later their creation would evolve and their movement and
ability would be increased, especially as Babbage’s work was the
basis for the concept of the computer.”

No matter how
fantastic Ebony’s creations were Martin could not reconcile what he
saw as being worth Ivory’s sacrifice. “And these are all funded by
all that money? I would expect there to be more.”

“
This is just a sample of my work – shown to you now to
satisfy your
curiosity. The rest, as I
told you before, is not kept by me. I only have my current work of
creation, and I am sure you understand an artists desire to keep
his relationship with his work sacrosanct until
completion.”

“
Yes… of course. I came here to understand… and you have tried
to explain… Yet I still don’t understand how the end justifies the
means.” Ebony was still expecting Ivory to sell herself to fund his
art.

“
Explanations yes, but justifications, no. I think I have been
gracious enough at this point.” His hard voice turned his proud
standing into a postured warning display of strength.

Martin shuffled uneasily, he had pushed too far and he had
expedited the end of the time that he had been granted. “I just
find it all so difficult to comprehend. I apologise.” He had been
so distracted by Ebony’s mechanical creations he had failed to pay
any attention to the portraits. Each one featured the woman he
recognised as Ebony’s wife from the portrait he had seen
previously. Once again they were painted in an
18
^th
century style that riled Martin’s sensibilities regarding
taste. “The paintings are beautiful. Are they your
work?”

“
Yes, as before they are of my wife.” Ebony’s eyes did not
move from their fixed blind stare but Martin knew Ebony was seeing
the past. “It was painted while she carried my child. We were so
happy then.”