The Lady of the Stars
by T. N. Allan
For the most fleetingly ephemeral of moments I acquire a glimpse of
that which is so much smaller than myself. Unbeknownst to the
non-complexity of such lowly creatures as appear before me, to whom
thought is but an unbreachable surface in compare to my boundless
depths, I peer through layers of supple skin, espying this airy pygmy
of a world through a taut derma fog.
Or perhaps it’s merely a dream, a vagary of images coruscated before
my senses to give the impression of a linear stream of momentum.
Something to which I append a narrative at the behest of a deeper
subconscious of which I have no control.
I have no eyes as those Human creatures would understand them, but
what I see is...
...A dead time, being not quite one thing nor another, or perhaps it is
actually an Undead time of not yet night though no longer day. A
sinking sun pours a generous measure of golden whiskey light down
through the throat of a city, the liquid lines of the fading light
producing darkly cubist monoliths from the industrial hulks which crowd
the man made horizon, those thick black cancers of a smokers’ laboured
disregard. Whether dead or undead, there is no denying that night shall
be approaching soon, heralding the imminent arrival of the drunken
crescent moon, beneath which the broken and the doomed shall once more
stumble through the shambolic dance which passes for routine in their
almost entirely sun starved lives.
A single window set high within the disheveled ruins of a tower block
sits in curtained darkness, beneath which there lingers one Donovan
Klein, who, perhaps more than any other single person in this city, so
perfectly exemplifies the broken down classes of drink addled dreamers
and angst shattered artisans. He is a man made poor through his own
insecurities, driven to penury by his own perpetual state of panic. He
has long since given up on the outside world, being quite happy to
sequester himself away within the tumble down walls of his apartment,
content to let the outside world, those very few parts which he still
feels he requires, come to him instead. His curtains remain drawn at
all hours, draping an all too fine veil of floral needlework across the
relentlessly grim exterior of decaying buildings and broken toothed
cobblestones. Such a thin veneer keeps out the worst excesses of the
sodium lighting, though it is a poor defence when mustered against the
bitter glare of reality.
At the present moment - itself, a cowering thing filled with anguish
and despair - it is the stars which provide Donovan’s chief cause for
concern; those unknowable flecks of heavenly silver and celestial gold
which light pollution had been supposed to have eradicated from the
urban skyline. Even beneath the drawn curtains, he can still feel their
distantly burning presence, insisting upon the boundary which separates
the controlled world within his apartment from the greater chaos of the
outside. So strongly does he feel the distraction of those cold and
illimitable stars, that he has entirely failed to maintain coherency
about his thoughts as each day has slowly died away into darkness,
destroying untold hours of work in the process.
In his ongoing attempts to capture upon canvas the human form in all of
its seemingly limitless variations, he had until recently the somewhat
wretched figure of Magdalena Martin in his employ. When she had first
come knocking upon his door, the best part of a week prior to this
current moment, she had been everything he could have hoped for in
placing the advertisement. He had never before seen anyone possessing
of a deformity quite like hers. There had been no hiding the fact of
her particular deformation, even though she had attempted to conceal it
by arriving dressed in a raincoat several sizes too large for her
already ample frame, for on one side of her body her hip bones jutted
out at such a violently extreme angle as to make her body seem
positively acute. To his eyes, she had been the Art Deco of deformity.
He had hired her on the spot, upon the strict understanding that he
would paint only what he saw, and not, as she had so vehemently
demanded, ‘to make play upon her physical condition as an artistic
statement.’
Upon its vague state of completion, Donovan had taken stock of his
handiwork, coming to realise that, what with the unconscious changes
thrust upon the image by his state of increasing distraction, he had
spectacularly failed to meet her sole demand. With his mind caught in
the grip of those distant stars, those haunting spheres which keep a
watchful vigil over mankind, he had painted Magdalena as being deep
within the process of giving birth to the infantile form of a new born
star; though with the deformed state of her hips the star had been bent
and buckled so severely that it had more closely resembled the shape of
that other cosmic voyeur, the crescent moon, which even now sat like a
missing jigsaw piece in the sky beyond Donovan’s window. Had Magdalena
actually given birth to such a creature, she would most surely have
been ripped apart in the process; though the hideously wailing face
which Donovan had unknowingly painted upon the malformed creature had
seemed almost to suggest that ‘it’ had been the one to feel the many
agonies of its birth, and not its unwitting surrogate.
Sensing the artist’s confusion, Magdalena had broken out of her hours
deep pose and limped her way over to the canvas. A look of displeasure
had been perpetually etched across her face in any case, the
understandable result of a life spent in constant discomfort, but the
look which had then morphed out of its usual hostility and had
contorted into that of outright rage had threatened to burn a hole
straight through the soiled canvas.
‘When you offered me the chance to act as a subject for your work, it
was with the strict understanding that you would not, in any way, mock
my affliction. This...this is simply obscene. Positively obscene.
You’re not paying me enough to turn me into some kind of arthouse
freak.’
Donovan might well have attempted to search for some placating answer,
for some suitably soothing words which might have doused his subjects
flaming ire, but fear had already begun to lay its unflinching grip
upon him. Not the fear of the reaction of his irate model, though that
would have passed as reason enough in any other circumstance, but fear
that the influence of the stars had now moved beyond merely howling at
the threshold of his abode, and had finally begun to seep through into
the fragile kingdom of his mind. Why else should he have painted such a
monstrosity? There could be no denying that the face of this starry
infant had borne a truly hideous aspect, as though the creature,
terrified of the nature of its existence, were attempting to howl its
way into oblivion, preferring to scream a hole into itself rather than
having to face the decades long after-birth effects of life. The skin
within which the child’s grotesquely pointed head was wrapped had been
painted in such a vividly crimson hue that it had appeared almost as if
the child had been dipped into a pool of blood, baptised into some
arcane diabolic practices. In all of its aspects, this ‘star child’
seemed to represent nothing more than a missed opportunity for a much
needed termination.
Magdalena had hurriedly shuffled herself back into the secondary skin
of her oversized raincoat, or as hurriedly as was possible given her
bodily affliction. Donovan had stumbled in his attempts to stop her,
desperately trying to lay the mental tracks on which his train of
thoughts might have succeeded in finding purchase. ‘Ms Martin, please.
I can only offer my most sincere apologies. I...I don’t know what could
possibly have come over me.’ A lie, of course, but the truth would
likely have sent her running faster than she had been already.
‘Well, whatever it is that came over you, it won’t be having me as its
victim again. You paid me for a weeks study, and you’ve had a weeks
study. I don’t think we need bother each other any longer than has
already been necessary, do you?’ With those parting words, she was
gone, dragging a trailing leg behind her as she exited through his
front door, through that dreadful portal which separated the safety of
the inner world from the frantic confusion of the chaotic outer world.
Ultimately, he had been unable to summon up the energy to feel anything
stronger than apathy at her sudden departure. There was too much else
to worry about, what with the ever shrinking dimensions of what he had
previously thought to be his safe world. Magdalena Martin was just
another cast off in the end; unable to see the beauty which lay in
seclusion, wantonly hurling herself back into the cultural abyss of
modernity with an air of contrary pride.
He had put the finished painting, defective though it was, with all the
others; another canvas atop the increasing pile of Human variety which
he had sought to document. There were dozens of works in the series
now, not one of which had ever passed beyond the walls of the
apartment. It had been an undertaking meant for the sole satisfaction
of the artist, for the most part, an attempt to prove to himself that
there were an infinite number of options open to a person in life,
whether they be made by choice or through circumstance. Anything other
than the drudgery of working one’s self into old age and decrepitude.
To this end, Donovan had placed a series of advertisements in various
newspapers and journals, seeking out those subjects who would best
illustrate his point, each of whom had been, to his eyes, the
antithesis of the worker drone figure which humanity seemed so
depressingly intent upon holding up as an ideal. Piled up face to face
and back to back behind the faded chaise lounge - a sop to the
chocolate box decadence he had once, rather embarrassingly, felt a
reclusive artist should aspire towards - were such societal oddities as
conjoined triplets and extreme elephantiasis, rendered in whichever
style he had felt best suited the unique nature of the particular
model.
Yet within the heap of portraiture there lurks the root cause of his
increasing madness, for buried deep within the wood and canvas pile
there is the painting of the woman he had dubbed ‘The Lady of the
Stars’; she who had been one of the earliest entries in the series, and
whose meeting had heralded the descent into his current state of
perpetual mental siege.
*****
Her most immediately noticeable aspect - and the origin of the title
latterly appointed to both the model and her portrait - had been her
vast array of tattoos, an emphatically inky endeavour which had covered
the entire surface area of her skin, both visible and otherwise.
Donovan had, of course, been quite prepared for this peculiarity - he
would never have agreed to any form of physical interaction with a
potential model until a full telephone interview had been undertaken -
but as he had first cast his enquiring eyes over his subject, his
artistic sense of appreciation had been triggered by the sheer scale of
the work which had evidently been put into the thorough modification of
her body; admiration both for the unknown tattoo artist responsible for
making such a complex canvas of her skin, and for the woman herself,
for having sat through the considerable amount of pain which would have
been a sure part of the process. To all intents and purposes, Courtney
Lacroix - a name Donovan never used in relation to, nor ever heard
directly from, the woman herself, save for their initial phone call -
was a walking, talking, living, breathing, star map.
In one regard, she had been like an inversion of the actual cosmos.
Black stars punctuated the bright abyssal in-betweens of her pale skin,
causing them to take on a vaguely malevolent aura, even as they
appeared to simultaneously map out what he had then considered to be
the comfortably familiar patterns of the real night sky. Orion had
painted a dark cross upon the fleshy expanse of her stomach, as though
pointing the way to the location of some peculiar treasure, while
Andromeda stained her shoulder blades with a dizzying spiral of
clustering stars.
‘I acquired my tattoos over a period of six years, starting when I was
a student at university,’ she began, launching into a description of
her background as though presenting a speech as prelude to the work
ahead. Moving as though she had been an invited guest into Donovan’s
own private spaces - and not just the almost naked living room space
which he used in lieu of an actual studio - she had cleared a place for
herself to sit amidst the untidy jumble of unread books, half-finished
canvases, and long abandoned crockery, settling herself down in
anticipation of what Donovan could already foresee was to be the
retelling of a well worn story. He thought it best to go along with her
flow. ‘These tattoos were not always as you see them now. The star map
has ultimately come to cover up many of my older, and less resonant,
markings. It was while attending university, you see, that I began to
develop the philosophy which these tattoos, and by extension myself,
have since come to so effectively embody.’
Donovan was used to learning about the backgrounds of his subjects
before painting them, though usually on his own terms of questioning
and not through the well rehearsed soliloquy of his models. He’d found
that it provided a context in which a given portrait could be
presented, even if only to his own eyes. Though still in the early
stages of the development of his series regarding the variety of
humanity, he had already come to realise how crucial such information
would be were he ever to present the series to the public. What he did
not realise, as he sat then and listened to her story unfold, was that
it would be that very information which would ultimately keep both his
work and his own person away from the wider world.
Had I possessed a mouth I would have laughed at him then. Instead, I merely watched as the inevitable unfolded.
‘Your advertisement,’ she continued, ‘claimed you were “seeking those
individuals who considered themselves to be either physically, morally,
or spiritually distinct from the cultural norm”. I believe I represent
all three of these things, so, quite naturally, I could not resist
answering your call.’
Donovan considered for a moment simply cutting to the nub of the matter
and asking her flat out about the nature of her tattoos, thereby
exposing the obvious elephant in the room. He did not get the chance to
do so, for the momentary silence was quickly filled once again by her
voice.
‘I could go on to tell you that my dreams are darkly fruiting bodies,
within which the night sky is little more than a mausoleum for the
hanging corpses of dead and dying stars, but I think it would be better
at this juncture if I were to ask you if you knew anything regarding
Cosmicism?’
The question had caught the artist more than a little off his guard,
both due to its unusual nature and the fact that he had not expected
her to encourage his active participation in the telling of her story.
She sat arching a hopefully expectant eyebrow in his direction,
awaiting his reply. ‘I’m afraid Science Fiction isn’t really my thing.’
The sudden chill which had stolen a hold of the air served as
indication enough that this had not been the correct thing for him to
say. A cold glaze passed across her eyes, piercing straight through his
affected calm.
‘Cosmicism is a philosophy, one which, I can assure you, may reveal the
reality of those darkly grinding engines which churn out eternity to
those who were previously unaware of such things. There was a Professor
at my university, a Professor Zasterband, who taught me to see beyond
the anthropocentric vision which, whether knowingly or not, we all
believe to be the natural order of existence.’
Donovan had not really understood what she had meant by this, though
the gravity with which she had expressed herself made it clear that
this was a topic to be treated with nothing short of complete
seriousness, so long as he wished to retain her services for a time
sufficient enough to paint her portrait. ‘I take it you don’t believe
‘Humanity’ to be the centre of the universe then?’
‘I believe that mankind is of as little importance as anything else, no
more special than the simplest of microbes or the merest speck of dirt.
Our existence is due to nothing more than the alchemy of circumstance,
and so we should expect the universe to treat us with as little regard
as it appears to treat all other things.’
‘Is the universe so lacking in regard?’
‘Well, of course. Death and decay are everywhere in the universe.
Entropy is one of the most consistent forces in the whole of existence,
applicable to every last particle of reality, from the smallest of
atoms to the greatest of stars. A star may support its own life for a
certain period of time, true, but ultimately it too shall come to die.
And at the centre of every galaxy there sits a black hole, a vacuum
like opening eagerly consuming its own spawn, until such a time that it
shall be forced to consume itself in order to satisfy its boundless
hunger. If we were to consider the universe to be like a machine, then
one day our world should be speared upon the point of a single cog
within a mechanism far more complex than our comprehension permits us
to allow, and that single moment, while considered endlessly horrifying
to us, shall be of no particular importance to a thoroughly indifferent
universe.’
‘That seems rather a bleak point of view, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
‘Reality can be cold. You know this already, or else you wouldn’t be wishing to paint me now.’
There had been some truth to her words, his own desire to break away
from the mundane reality of the everyday was proof enough of that,
though Donovan had initially failed to see any obvious connection
between this bleak philosophy of hers and the copious amounts of dark
ink which so adorned her body. When asking her precisely how such a way
of thinking had inspired her to commit to such a thorough tattooing
upon herself, she had simply replied, ‘Tattoos should have some lasting
significance. So I had a map of existence committed upon my body. A
constant reminder to myself, and, I hope, as a prompting to others,
that this is all we can ever truly know. A person may aspire to wealth,
power, or celebrity, but none of it amounts to any great meaning in the
end. The universe shall always be the limiting factor. One which, in
itself, is destined to sink into perpetual decline.’
Somewhere deep within himself, Donovan had felt the faint twang of a
chord being plucked. Loath as he was to admit it, there was a logic to
such a point of view, though not one which he had been willing to let
pass without challenge. ‘Surely, though, that makes the everyday all
the more extraordinary? If this...’ he gestured around his apartment,
encompassing the entire world within a single sweep of his arm, ‘is the
totality of existence, then surely that makes life, in any form, the
most important aspect of the universe, whether it should have come into
being by accident or by design?’
She had been quite prepared for his scepticism, seemingly well used to
arguing the validity of her views with others. ‘You’ve already
contradicted yourself. By even allowing for the existence of a
‘designer’ for the universe, you have admitted that the life which is
thusly designed would, by extension, have to be of considerably less
importance than that of the ‘designer’. God, held in that regard, is
perhaps the most supreme example of a limiting factor, one which has
impinged itself upon the Human mind in such a way that it does not
drive the individual instantly mad upon consideration. Believe me when
I tell you that Human exceptionalism is every bit as mythical as any
god ever was.’
Their conversations had continued in such a manner throughout the
months it had taken Donovan to paint her portrait, the air which
surrounded them at all times draped in an intimate mixture of tangled
words and stray bristles; she talking down towards him in a knowingly
condescending tone, he responding with a series of unintentionally off
the cuff remarks, the natural consequence of his attempting to maintain
at least half a mind upon his work; the Human mind being the scrying
mirror in which she claimed the truth of her philosophy could be
divined. ‘The overwhelming presence of fear and anxiety amongst our
species, who, so far as we are aware, are the only species to have
developed a conscience with which to reckon such feelings of dread,
surely points towards the ultimate horror of existence. Which is to say
nothing of the undeniable fact that the only way one may escape this
nightmarish realm of physic is through the final horror of death, which
terrifies our kind far more than the simplicity of an eternal
non-existence ever could.’
Whereas most of his portraits were fully executed within the space of
one or two weeks, ‘The Lady of the Stars’ had taken a considerably
longer period of time. He had wanted to replicate every last one of her
tattoos, such as were visible from the unashamedly frontal posture in
which he had insisted she should pose for the piece. The work had been
deeply intricate, requiring great precision and attention to detail on
the part of the artist. For her part, she had maintained her level of
interest in exploring the many points of her cosmological viewpoint
with him, erasing the uncomfortable silence which might otherwise have
encouraged the development of an unwanted undercurrent of sexual
tension between the two, one which could only have been exacerbated by
the necessity of her state of perpetual undress throughout the duration
of the process. Somehow, Donovan had been unable to think of his model
in quite such a regard; though it was true that having since gazed upon
so many bodies in undress, he had found his libido had gradually
solidified until it had resembled little more than a diminutive block
of ice, over-familiarity with the human form engendering a state of
apathy within his soul. Though she was not unattractive to his eyes -
the eyes of an artist always readily seeking for the merest sliver of
beauty with which to latch upon - the tattoos which had so liberally
coated her body, making such grandiose epics of discovery out of every
curve and contour, seemed almost to form an immovable layer between her
skin, her real skin, and his attentive eyes.
For all of his models efforts to find some semblance of understanding
within the artist for her obsessive devotion to her philosophy, he had
never quite been able to find any degree of sympathy with her point of
view. He was an artist, after all, and like all artists Donovan was at
once in love and in loathing with the world which he inhabited. For all
his determined misanthropy, and his long standing distaste for the
artificially contrived world of men, he still felt at one with the real
world, with that which existed beyond the dreary monotony of humanity.
He simply could not find it within himself to share her view of an
inherent lack of meaning behind existence. His art, and his
appreciation of the artistry of others, gave his life meaning enough,
even while he shunned the greater whole of what was expected of a human
life in modernity.
The completion of the portrait had come as blessed relief for Donovan,
following the months of wear placed upon his already fragile nerves;
wear that had been driven by the incessant barrage of negative
philosophy to which he had been so thoroughly subjected. More than once
he had considered offering his model extra money in exchange for her
silence on such matters, though he had dissuaded himself of such a
notion through fear that he might lose such a unique study by virtue of
offending whatever shred of self-interest she still possessed. On one
particular occasion, when he had still held out some hope that he might
elicit some more positive form of conversation from her, Donovan had
remarked on the recursive nature of this particular work. ‘If we were
to consider your skin to be like a canvas - let us say for both your
tattoos and your particular views - then this entire exercise might be
looked upon as collapsing in on itself, in a manner of speaking. The
artist committing one canvas upon another.’
‘Like cannibalism?’, had been all she had offered him by way of a
reply. Donovan had dropped the subject immediately, realising his
model’s propensity for tapping any vein of conversation and diverting
its flow back towards her own subterranean stream of thought.
For all the heavenly connotations aroused by the title of ‘The Lady of
the Stars’, Donovan had never in all of his, admittedly sheltered,
years, known a person quite as gloom ridden as she had appeared to be.
For all her enthusiasm regarding her sole topic of interest, she had
never once appeared to take any great pleasure in waxing darkly
regarding her philosophies, instead merely espousing her theories as
though they were hardened facts; facts which only a fool would deny.
Indeed, he had developed the distinct impression that she considered
such trivialities as ‘love’, ‘happiness’, and ‘contentment’, to be the
preserve of the spiritually blinded and the ineffably foolish, to whom
she was, of course, the intellectual superior. Over time, those black
stars which were tattooed upon her skin had seemed to radiate their
dismal colour outwards, until it had seemed to seep into his clothes
and his hair, and into the very fabric of the studio itself, infecting
everything it touched with an intangible air of virulently progressive
decay. Though Donovan had felt himself to have achieved a more than
respectable representation of the complexity of the tattooed star map,
he had also felt sure that he could never have found a pigment so dark
in hue as that of the ink which had made such a vivid monochrome
tapestry of her flesh.
As was often the way, he had found the completion the portrait to have
arrived as something of an anti-climax, even though it had been one
tinged with a sense of weary relief. His model had dressed herself in
silence, whilst continuing to exhibit a characteristic disinterest in
the completed portrait. As he had handed over the final payment for her
services, Donovan had queried why she had taken on the work, if life
was as trivial to her as she had so readily claimed.
Her answer would be the last words the two would ever share.
‘Because one day you might paint more of me’.
And though I departed within that same vessel which had delivered
me, part of my being lingered still within the warp and weft of the
building, within the fabric of his skin and the sickly fibres of his
failing mind.
He had thought once that the ‘outside’ was something he could keep at
bay, that he could somehow lock himself away within a sealed vault of
his own devising and so escape the frantic nature of an indifferent
humanity, the same indifference which he can no longer help but to see
in the stars. He realises now that he has failed to achieve such an
end. It had been his own ambitions which had brought about this
downfall, for had he not consented to allowing his models the privilege
of open entry into his own private kingdom, then he should not have
allowed for the contagious philosophies of the Lady of the Stars to
make so thorough a contamination of him.
Every last one of the portraits in his series of anatomical
peculiarities now appears clothed in a map of blackly opaline stars,
though he had not painted them as such. Even Magdalena Martin, whose
ill-proportions had made her an unsuitable host for such a map, now
bears about her person the same tattoos as had been so willingly
modelled by the Lady of the Stars.
He has felt his sanity slowly eroding away ever since she left his
apartment for the final time. Since her departure, the stars outside
his window have seemed to scream out their horror, their alien cries
gradually increasing in both pitch and volume, as though they were
attempting to howl themselves into oblivion. He can not help but think
of them burning with the passion of utmost despair, cannibalising their
own fiery bodies so that they might one day finally know the comfort of
a return to blissful non-existence, leaving behind the horrors of a
conscience existence in a realm which allows no quarter to even the
merest degree of speculation.
It did not do to peer too closely beneath the placid veneer of existence.
The dimensions of what he had once considered ‘safety’ have now
dwindled to such a degree that Donovan routinely spends his nights
cowering beneath the pile of portraits, of which Magdalena Martin has
proven to be the final entry, a last desperate attempt to throw up a
barrier between himself and an unrelenting reality.
And one night soon, the faces of those portraits will scream out their sympathy.
And I, the great limiting factor, merely revel in the brevity of my
lucid existence, until I drift serenely back into the default state of
idiotic obscurity.
THE END
© 2017 T. N. Allan
Bio: Hailing from the oft-contested northern realm of
Northumberland, England, T. N. Allan is now resident in the Scottish
Borders, having studied creative writing at Edinburgh University from
2012 – 2013. Recent publications have appeared in, or are forthcoming
from, ‘HorrorSleazeTrash’, 'Yellow Mama' magazine, 'The Flash Fiction
Press', ‘365 Tomorrows’ and 'Gothic City Press', while poetry
publications have appeared in print, as published by the 'Horror
Writers Association', and 'Cemetery Moon Magazine'.
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