Hark! the Herald Angels Scream by Christopher Golden

Author:Christopher Golden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

DOCTOR VELOCITY

A Story of the Fire Zone

JONATHAN MABERRY

1

Destroyer stood back from the canvas and he was a perfect study in total disgust.

From the defeated slouch of his shoulders to the self-defiant turn of his hip to the white-knuckled clutch of his fist around the handle of the palette knife, he was a man who reeked of angry despair. He tilted his head this way and that, trying to find an angle from which the painting looked like it possessed intensity and passion rather than desperation and confusion. The colors and movements he saw looked inflicted rather than wrought.

“Pathetic…,” he murmured.

Destroyer’s defeated, disgusted posture was at odds with the music playing from the eight speakers mounted high on the walls of the big loft. The song playing was “Videte Miraculum,” performed by a local group called A Choir of Ghosts. Beyond the wall of big picture windows the night sparkled with holiday lights in bright primary colors. Everyone seemed to have gone out of their way to be ostentatious with them, draping every window, every balcony, and lining their roofs. It all looked so goddamn cheerful. The Italian restaurant directly across from him had so many lights that it was impossible to make out any details of the building’s actual shape. There had to be two or three hundred thousand of them. The less flamboyant French restaurant to the left of it merely had “DITTO” spelled out in white LED lights. It was the only part of the Christmas cityscape that Destroyer did not actively hate. Normally he loved holiday lights, but that was so last year. This year he wanted to burn it all down.

The artist snorted and flung the palette onto a paint-speckled table but kept the knife clutched in his fist, fingering its edge, wondering if there were more constructive uses for it. Such as hacking and slashing the canvas while laughing maniacally. The thought had some appeal.

So did the thought of taking that knife to his own wrists, his throat. Maybe his eyes. Either ending his life or ending his career as an artist. Would either end the pain?

The fact that he could not easily answer that question was the slim tether that held him back from an act of commission.

Destroyer held the knife in his left hand and laid the edge of the blade against his right wrist. The blade looked hungry, felt hungry, as if it—unlike its owner—possessed a true passion, a genuine intensity. It wanted to cut because that would be beautiful to it. The knife would be embracing its own nature, it would revel in the deep and vibrant redness of the ink of his veins. He closed his eyes, looking inward and downward at that possibility. At how easy it would be. At how many problems it would solve. At how much of the pain would drain out of him with his blood.

When Destroyer opened his eyes he expected to see the cut already made, or at least started. That would have shown some passion or intensity, maybe even artistic integrity.

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