As if reading his thoughts, the docent reappeared at his elbow.
“The ceremonial feeling of this Object is particularly strong, isn’t it?” Her voice was muted and liquid, tinged with some accent he hadn’t noticed before. “Let the design draw your eye upwards…engage with the flow of the piece. It makes all the difference.”
Suppressing a cynical comment, Wayland tried it. At first, he didn’t notice much difference: the design did “flow” towards its delicate apex above the center of the wearer’s forehead, but…
He gasped at a stab of nausea.
What he had taken for several motifs intertwining at irregular intervals was actually one motif, or rather one entity. One grotesque entity. Its face was mercifully obscured by other design elements, but he could still trace the body as it twisted through what had first seemed a stylized undersea forest.
He didn’t need the docent’s encouragement to know what he was really looking at.
Taste of the ocean on her lips…deep night ocean…primal salts and darkness and undying secrets. All the beer and smoke in the world couldn’t wash it away. And when he’d brushed back that curtain of hair and looked into her eyes for the first and only time, he’d seen that she wasn’t young at all, no matter what her body said against his.
Not a drunken, ignorant little townie he’d managed to steer into a convenient bedroom. Not an easy score. What stared back at him was ancient and cunning, inhuman…
Wayland turned away. Cold sweat trickled down the back of his neck as he moved on to another Object, hoping the docent didn’t follow. The room was dank with shadows, but he could still see (imagine, only imagine) those faint lines on the skin of her throat, just above her collar.
Like gills.
Maybe I ought to leave right now, he thought as his feet propelled him through the clinging strands of carpet. The humidity or the lighting or something is getting to me.
Then he stopped and drew a deep breath. Get a grip. These Objects gleaming faintly in their cases (had there been so many, earlier?) were on display as art. Not as triggers for unpleasant recollections, and certainly not as prods for a neglected conscience. He had come here to pass an afternoon admiring some bizarre bits of goldwork, period.
Still, he avoided reading any more labels. The docent was right: if these were true art-forms, he shouldn’t need to. Their craftsmanship and design should speak for themselves.
Faint gleam of gold around one skinny wrist as he pushed her backwards…as he grabbed both those wrists with one hand and pulled them over her head…
He started bypassing Objects with coral in them. The material was too disturbing, triggering fragmentary memories as his eyes slid away. Wayland made himself pause before each of the other cases, though, trying to limit his observations to pure aesthetics.
It wasn’t easy. The style of these pieces—mostly jewelry or small figurines—had a cumulative effect on the imagination. Engaging with the design flow of a single Object sent ice prickles down his spine. Watching that same flow twist and twine between Objects did something else entirely. He became aware how relentlessly aquatic it was, ebbing and pulsing in an ageless rhythm which was subtly wrong. Offbeat from any human rhythm, even that of his heart.
“You’re beginning to feel it now, aren’t you?”
Wayland flinched. The docent’s face, isolated by the general murkiness, floated near his left shoulder. She resembled a swimmer emerging from night water, her eyes bulging with exertion. Lips parted to breathe, revealing…
…white white teeth, tinier and sharper and way too many more than any girl’s…laughing silently at him even as he did what he’d done in anger. What he would deny doing at all later, and later still make himself forget…
“Yes.”
The word emerged without volition. It too floated in the dark between them, confirming something hidden beyond language.
Wayland stared past her at the next case. Staggered glass shelves held half a dozen small white-gold figurines. Any pattern here—of those shelves or of the Objects themselves—would have to be human, the work of some museum employee. Safe.
That security lasted all of two seconds as he took in the details of the topmost statuette.
Then he glanced away, dry-mouthed, for the exit.
“Is there a problem, sir?”
Damn. The docent was still there, goggling at him in the murk. She had remarkably ugly eyes: puglike or maybe froglike, with a flat, cold curiosity.
“Just wondering what time it was getting to be,” he lied. “Seems like I’ve been here a while, and it’s a pretty intense experience.”
She nodded. “There’s one larger piece you ought to see, though. Its design flow is…extraordinary. A multi-figure grouping with complex mythic structure, and the finest coral work in this exhibit.”
Sweat broke on his forehead as she mentioned the coral. Still, there was no turning away from those eyes—or their unspoken challenge. Wayland disliked women who challenged him. Fists clenched at his sides, he asked where this marvelous piece was and why it didn’t appear on the exhibit posters.
The docent shrugged and gestured left toward a deep alcove.
Wayland scowled, annoyed at having overlooked it himself. Without thanking her, he headed for that oblong of darker shadow, trying to ignore his shoes squishing in the carpet.
Wet carpet and damp air, despite the prominent warning on that dehumidifier. Worse, the carpet exuded an unpleasant vegetative smell, like something long dead on a beach. Was the curator an idiot? After he saw this “complex mythic structure,” he was heading downstairs to complain.
The alcove was longer than it had looked from outside—and darker. He squinted around for any sign of another large display case.
When his foot hit the tiny switch concealed by the carpet, it took him a few seconds to connect that click with the rising light up ahead. Not a spotlight, exactly, but a series of tiny recessed spots, each illuminating the target briefly before winking out again. The flickering effect resembled candles seen through water.
Long twining shadows swayed to that same rhythm on all the walls. They urged his attention forward, to the very end of what now seemed more tunnel than alcove.
Wayland gasped.
He’d been wrong about the display case. No glass glinted between him and this last, largest Object. Despite the unmistakable value of the strange whitish gold—and the coral’s fleshy masses—it stood unprotected on a block of dark stone. Raw and unpolished, that base drew the viewer’s full attention upward.
As promised, the sculpture was a multi-figure grouping. And certainly mythic, since it depicted a ritual sacrifice about to begin.
The entity Wayland had first recognized as a design element—the design element—in the misshapen tiara seemed to be the object of that sacrifice. Surging up from the rough stone, it curved its shining, sleek-muscled, and utterly inhuman body over the ritual’s participants. Arms twisted and supple as seaweed spread wide, ending in long-fingered hands with delicate webbing between the digits. Polished black coral nails scythed out from each of those digits. And its face…
Her face…
“You’re allowed to touch this one.” The docent’s voice behind him was muted but insistent, her odd accent stronger in the alcove’s hush. “In fact, you’re encouraged to. It will enhance your appreciation of the design flow.”
Even as some desperate bit of Wayland’s consciousness recoiled, he felt his feet propelling him forward. Strands of carpet clung to his ankles as he reached the base of the massive sculpture.