The Night Lies Bleeding by M. D. Lachlan

Author:M. D. Lachlan [Lachlan, M. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Fantasy
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2017-12-30T05:00:00+00:00

24 An Artist in Residence

The door opened on to a cramped hallway. The house bore all the signs of disuse – no carpet on the floor, only scraps of newspaper. There was very little light, but Craw’s eyes needed hardly any. He breathed in. There were two people inside: Arindon and one other. Then he noticed another note in the smell. No. There were more than two people. There were others, too, encased in a sediment of fear – sweat, blood, piss and shit. They, though, were not alive.

There was a coat in the hall. He touched it, drank in its psychic residue. Longing, despair, frustration and envy seemed to drip from it.

Craw walked down the hallway, not bothering to tread carefully under the noise of the blitz. To his left was a doorway. He looked into a room. Even to his eyes the room was dark. The shutters had been put up with the blackout in mind and the only light came in obliquely from the front door, which he had not closed behind him. Craw suddenly remembered he’d taken the lighter from Jacques. He took it from his pocket and sparked the flame into life. He could see the room was clearly the business part of the former artist’s supplies shop. There were shelves stacked with papers and paints and there was a counter. Clearly it hadn’t been used as a shop very recently, because a large desk with a drawing board on it had been placed in the public area. Someone was using it as a studio.

An explosion near the house seemed to shake it to its foundations and, for a second, Craw had the sensation of being at sea, like when a boat unexpectedly strikes a sandbank. He went into the room and looked about him.

The room was disordered, with the remains of dinners and half-drunk cups of tea lying around on the floor, along with papers, discarded bills, an umbrella, cardboard boxes, old paintbrushes in jam jars. Craw shivered, with the revulsion of his centuries of fastidiousness. The emotion came back to him as if muffled. Operating in his conventional human reality was possible but difficult for him, a sensation like listening to music underwater – some aspects quieted, some oddly amplified.

His wolf nature was rising up in him and the smells of the night were livid in his mind. They seemed to unlock a hoard of memories inside him. He saw cities burning in his mind, heard the laughter of girls, recalled Yale and Cambridge in the smell of chalk. Everything in the world now related directly to him. He was the beast, the creature that relates only to himself, and the odours of the night pulled colours from his mind – the bright shields of his kinsmen, gold, nights that blazed with fire and days in the blinding ice. It was as if all that he had done and seen was rising up in him as the final expression of his dying humanity, just as the buildings around him blazed red and green in their own moment of change.

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