The Portrait of Damian Black
by Tim Newton Anderson
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
“You haven’t brought that thing with you, have you?” Simon asked. The HEAD was quite lifelike, for it was based on the appearance and voice of a Norwich historian. Pulling it out of a bag in the middle of a cafe would cause a bit of a stir.
“Better than that,” Tom said. “It designed itself an app for my phone and got some hacker in Russia to produce it, so the HEAD could buy it through half a dozen firewalls and proxy servers over the dark web.”
“Doesn’t that breach all sorts of security protocols?” Simon said.
“Absolutely,” said Tom, “but the HEAD is able to close all of them down and make it look as if the app never existed.”
Tom took his phone out of his pocket and tapped the screen. The HEAD’s strange sense of humour had been in play again, because its appearance on the app had been modelled on the computer avatar in the 1980s TV show Max Headroom, complete with stutter. Simon wasn’t sure whether the sense of humour was a natural stage of development or whether it was imitating Tom’s bad puns and joking cultural references.
“Hello, S-s-simon,” it said.
“What have you managed to find out about the shop?” Simon asked.
“It’s fascinating,” the HEAD said. “It seems to be owned by someone who doesn’t exist. The rents, business rates and utilities have been paid out of the same bank account for the last thirty years, but the person named on the account isn’t in any other records, and the address on the account is the shop. Money is paid regularly in cash to cover the bills, but the business isn’t registered for VAT or anywhere else in the system. If it wasn’t such a small concern, the police would be after it for money-laundering.”
“What’s the name, then?” Simon asked.
“Patience,” the HEAD said. “You have no sense of dramatic timing. I’ve been watching thousands of old films and television shows to understand how you are supposed to behave as a detective, and I have to say you and Tom are doing it all wrong. No sense of style or atmosphere.”
“HEAD,” said Tom. “Do me a favour and just tell us what we need to know.”
“Tom fed me the information on the body in the church,” it said.
“Did you know about the other six bodies?” Simon said. “All with the same facial distortion.”
“I presume there was evidence of magical activity?” the HEAD asked.
“It wasn’t that obvious for most of them, because it had been too long after whatever had happened for us to detect anything,” Simon said. “If this was a working through the Collective Unconscious to make the victim’s own body change its appearance, we would be able to detect it only while the victim was alive, and if it is an even more powerful spell affecting the physical universe at a quantum level, you would be able to spot it only within an hour or so until the pattern changed back.
“Luckily, although not for him, one of our agents was near enough to the seventh victim to feel his pain through the Collective Unconscious and got to him a few seconds before he died from the trauma of trying to reshape his own face by force of will. Definitely magic.”
Tom and Simon had learned when they were inducted into the LIP after becoming involved with the Abbey operation in Norwich that there were several levels of magic. The easiest was done by adepts’ harnessing the powers of their minds through rituals that allowed them to make changes in their bodies. With more skill, they could tap into the Collective Unconscious and affect other people’s minds and physiologies.
Then there was a smaller number who could affect changes in other life forms through the Gaea consciousness and the Morphic Field. Finally, there were those who could manipulate information down to the quantum level to make changes to non-living material. Each progression took greater and greater accumulations of psychic energy to power them and higher levels of control to achieve the changes.
The job of the LIP was to manage the balance between the three types of worldview in the collective unconscious — the scientific, the religious and the occult — so evolution could progress towards the Omega point without one group steering it for its own advantage. This could be as simple as managing information that people got from the news and other sources or as dangerous as combating the worst excesses of the occult or extreme religious groups.
“There was no obvious link between the victims apart from portraits of Damian Black,” Tom said. “From image of the portrait in the gallery you sent through, that was who their faces were changing to resemble.”
“And if we believe my informant Andrew’s late friend, someone who painted self-portraits over and over again,” Simon said. “Although we don’t know if their facial changes are part of a deliberate scheme or just a side-effect of proximity to the pictures.”
“You will be wanting to get in to see the picture in the gallery, then,” the HEAD said.
“That’s why we asked you to track down the owner,” Tom said. “You were going to tell us his, or her, name.”
“It is a Dr M Night,” the HEAD said. Its avatar was smiling. “As I’m sure you know Damian is the patron saint of doctors, so this is an obvious alias.”
“Isn’t Black supposed to be dead?” Tom asked. “How has he managed to keep depositing cash if he’s not alive?”
“There is no evidence of his death,” the HEAD said. “Just no evidence he is still alive. I’ve tried to track down CCTV of any of the deposits but they are at a different, older, smaller sub-postoffice each time. And he always wears a black hoodie and keeps his face away from the cameras, so we don’t know if that is Damian Black or someone else.
“Interestingly, there is no evidence of Black’s birth, either. Or schooling. He appears on the art scene in 1969 with people talking about his paintings, but only the odd, blurred reproduction of them in small circulation journals. There are no gallery shows and no gallery sales. He becomes a legend, but no-one knows where he comes from or where he lives. He just turns up to things. The only property he has ever been linked to, even by an alias, is the shop, and there are no other payments from his bank account, even for food.”
“Andrew said he was supposed to have had a studio near Liverpool Street,” said Simon. “Is there anything like that in the area? Not necessarily in his name.”
There was a few seconds pause while the Max Headroom avatar spun round and video-stuttered.
“A dozen artists’ studios, mostly in warehouse or office buildings, three of which are still in use. Rising rents have driven the rest out. I’ve checked out the occupiers for the past thirty years, and none of them matches the description of Black. They’ve all had some kind of exhibition or magazine write-up and their photographs look nothing like him.”
“If he’s an adept powerful enough that his pictures make people distort their own features, he could easily cloud people’s minds to see a face different to his real one,” said Tom.
“That wouldn’t account for the photograph Andrew remembered or the self-portrait,” said Simon.
The HEAD made Tom’s phone ping as if he was getting a new message. Another of its little jokes.
“I don’t know if this is of interest,” it said, “but there is a back alley behind the shop with no CCTV near it. You could get over the back wall and break in without anyone seeing.”
Tom grinned. “I’m game if you are. You’ll have to give me boost over the wall, though.”
* * *
As the HEAD had said, it was easy to slip down the back alley unseen at dusk. Simon stirruped his hands for Tom to climb up and then grabbed his friend’s hand to join him. There were no lights on in any of the surrounding windows, so they scuttled across the yard to the back door, where Simon used a set of skeleton keys to open the deadlock.
The only window in the back room had been blacked out by a sheet of plywood, Simon felt safe to switch on the light. As the HEAD suggested, the power was still on and the bare bulb in the ceiling illuminated a largely empty room covered in a couple of years’ worth of dust.
“Do you notice anything, Simon?” Tom asked. “The spider webs are absolutely symmetrical in shape. Something operating at the Gaea level has been running here to cause that.”
Simon nodded. His friend had no natural ability to feel the Collective Unconscious, a side effect of his being on the autistic spectrum. Simon, on the other hand, had a high degree of natural atunement, especially after his possession by Gurgunt. Even though no-one seemed to have been in the building for years, he could still feel a powerful spell operating.
Tom wandered over to a number of dust-covered paintings leaning against a wall. “The same sort of secondhand tat you can see through the shop window,” he said. “Even if the shop were open, I can’t see anyone coming in to buy this rubbish.”
“The magical effects are secondary in here,” Simon said. “The power is coming from the main shop.”
He led the way to the door, got Tom to switch the light off, and walked into the gallery, seeing by the light from the street lamps outside.
There was no missing the source of the magic. The self-portrait of Damian Black. If what they had learned about Black was correct, this was definitely his work. There was an almost palpable feeling of evil power emanating from the picture. It almost glowed with magic.
As he started to move towards the picture, Tom’s phone rang and the HEAD’s avatar appeared.
“Danger, Tom Robinson,” it said in the voice of the robot from Lost in Space.
Simon had turned towards his friend when the phone rang, but out of the corner of his eye he saw a rapid movement. One of the paintings had come off its easel and was flying towards him. He ducked and it crashed into the far wall, but immediately three more flew at him from separate parts of the room. He may have been able to avoid one, but not all three. A split second behind them were half a dozen bits of glass, brass and ceramics.
If anyone had been standing outside of the window looking in, they would have seen Simon’s body light up and be surrounded by the image of an Iceni warrior brandishing a four-foot sword. With battle-honed muscles and skills, the sword swept around, slashing the pictures and antiques to pieces.
Tom ducked under the counter as object after object flew towards his friend, only to be destroyed by the whirling blade. The pieces of the paintings and other stock would flop in a half-life on the floor like wounded animals before becoming still again.
It was only a few minutes later that the glow around Simon faded, and his normal body could be seen. The sword had vanished. The floor around him was littered with piles of broken objects and sliced-up paintings - the only object in the shop still in one piece was Black’s self-portrait.
“I never get used to that,” said Tom as he emerged from under the counter. “What does it feel like when Gurgunt possesses you?”
“It doesn’t really feel like possession,” Simon said. “I can feel him in my unconscious, but more as a part of me than someone separate. Despite the Institute’s training, I still can’t manifest him at will, but it happens more and more easily when I need him. I suppose it’s a bit like Bruce Banner and the Hulk.”
The two friends turned towards the portrait of Black. It still almost visibly throbbed with power and felt to Simon’s mind to be glowering in rage and disappointment.
“Not the most attractive chap, was he?” said Tom. “Mono-brow, jowls like a turkey and really bad acne scars. His face looks like a second-hand dartboard.”
Simon sensed a pulse of anger from the picture.
“This wasn’t just some preset trap,” he said. “The painting seems aware of what is going on around it.”
“So it’s one of those magically charged items like a ritual dagger, or a Stone Tape?” said Tom. “I wonder if the effects were more intense because you are a magic user. The seven corpses may just have been scared away and then died later from its power.”
“Exactly,” said Simon. “But why guard an empty shop? There’s no reason to have left it here at all if that’s all it was doing. A burglar alarm would work just as well, not to mention the deadly effect of exposure to it.”
He walked cautiously over to the picture and brought a magnifying glass out of his inside pocket. The painting was done in oils and was obviously the work of someone who knew the craft. But there seemed to be malice in every brushstroke. Simon didn’t know that much about art, but he knew what he didn’t like, and this was it.
On closer examination, he could see that the picture was a palimpsest. There was another painting underneath and, if he stood at one side, he could identify a mass of slightly raised mystical symbols beneath the image of Damian Black. That close, he could also smell something. He took a knife and carefully flaked off some of the paint. Holding it to his nose, the smell was unmistakeable: blood and faeces. Black had mixed human matter in the paint, whether his or someone else’s was difficult to tell without taking it to the lab.
Tom was scanning the room and the fallen paintings and objects with his phone, presumably for the benefit of the HEAD.
“Remind me again why we started this quest for Black’s pictures?” asked Tom.
“The monitoring equipment showed spikes in magical activity linked to mentions of Black on a number of social media posts,” said Simon. “They were traced back to a previously dormant account on a server on the Isle of Dogs that self-destructed after posting them. Black hadn’t really been on the Institute’s radar for years until then. He’d been filed away as just another cultist who hadn’t been linked to any real magical workings.
“Then the owner of a gallery that had advertised a Black painting for sale was found dead in a church with his face malformed. It seemed to have been trying to transform into the image of Damian Black, and when that was triangulated with the social media posts, Haverford West thought it was worth checking out.”
“The HEAD may have found a fascinating link,” said Tom. “The other paintings in the shop seem to have been done deliberately badly by someone who was actually quite skilled, if you analyse the brushstrokes. The buildings and areas are also interesting as they feature a couple of dozen places where there have been break-ins over the past six months. Nothing valuable seemed to be missing but, in every case, the burglars entered the attic space before taking small amounts of jewellery, cash and electrical goods. Perhaps some of the burglaries were done by three of our corpses.”
“So the HEAD suspects the burglars were after something else hidden in the attics,” said Simon. “Something the owners didn’t even know was there.”
“Yep.”
“I think we need to call in a specialist team to get this portrait back to headquarters,” said Simon. “I don’t want to risk setting off any more magical traps.”
He took his phone out of his pocket and dialled the Institute’s secure number while watching the picture. He had heard of the eyes of portraits seeming to follow you around the room, but could feel Black looking at him even if he closed his own eyes.
He had just gotten through to the duty team when he felt another spike in magical activity, and the face of Black changed. The lips curled back in a snarl, and the whole painting exploded in flames. The burst of fire scorched his face and hair in a sudden conflagration far more intense than natural for something that size. He dropped to the floor to avoid the blaze and, when the heat vanished a second later, he looked up to see the whole picture and its frame had crumbled into black dust and the easel on which it had rested was smouldering and smoking.
“I was going to ask you to pick up a magical picture for analysis,” he told the Institute officer on the end of the phone, “but you’re going to have to settle for sifting some ashes.”
* * *
Copyright © 2022 by Tim Newton Anderson
