Succumbing (Sinful Submissions Book 3) Page 15

  “Just find me an assistant. I don’t want to have to talk to lots of people. I want to work. Find me someone that can help.”

  It wasn’t easy finding someone suitable. Lots of people initially sounded willing to work with Antoine but balked when they realised what the work would entail. He had no interest in being surrounded by anyone that might want to talk about it to the media. The work that went on in his studio had to be kept secret. Until Gautier judged the time was right to let slip and arouse curiosity.

  Antoine’s new assistant was called Walter. He wasn’t an artist. Gautier had been responsible for hiring him. He had no family, his parents had died in a fire when he was a child. He had been raised by two maiden aunts, who had died the same day of heart attacks when he was just starting his training.

  He had previously worked in funeral homes and had experience of the treatment and preservation of the dead. He was cold and peculiar and showed an unhealthy interest in some of their subjects but he was skilled at the work that was required and had none of the disgust for the dead that the rest of the candidates had exhibited when faced with it first hand.

  Gautier had added a couple of the pig sculptures to the décor in his office, and when discussing the requirements of the job would present the interviewees with a preserved trotter. The other candidates had look nauseated. Walter had been fascinated.

  He was even happy to live on-site, pending certain refits to provide him with decent living quarters. He had already been interviewed several times by Gautier and his assistants before Walter was allowed to visit the studio.

  He was quiet and attentive and though obviously appalled by Antoine’s messy approach to the subject, he was able to adapt and induce a more orderly approach to their work. It was Walter that made it a scientific as well as artistic endeavour.

  He was also able to specify the required improvements, additional plumbing and lighting, and the appropriate surfaces to handle the volume of unpleasant chemical and bodily fluids that gathered. Before it had been a dank mess, now there was gleaming white tile-work and stainless steel surfaces.

  “What a wonderful place.”

  Walter seemed very pleased with it when it was finished.

  In time through working with Walter, Antoine was able to improve upon the techniques of LeConte, enabling the preservation to become selective. He developed works that displayed different aspects of the whole, skin removed, muscles removed in part, revealing the tragic beauty that lay hidden under the skin of every person, a beauty that before had been death’s secret, something few could ever hope to glimpse.

  A major aspect of the preservation technique was the injection of certain compounds into the tissue. Once prepared the body was suspended in a giant glass tube that was filled with chemicals. Different mixes of the chemicals could be used with injections into different places to modify which parts of the body would be preserved and which would dissolve away. The complete process took about six months, a wait which invariably proved interminable for Antoine but he knew he had to accept it.

  He had adapted and advanced the techniques of Dr. LeConte to an unbelievable level. Interest had already been expressed by many medical organisations that wanted to adapt his methods for producing teaching specimens.

  It was tiring laborious work that involved spending many hours surrounded by decaying flesh and pungent chemicals. The warehouse carried a hideous smell that deterred casual visitors.

  His first two works had been his lovers, now he was working on people that he hadn’t known when they were alive. He didn’t even know their names and in a sense this freed him from worry about representing who they had been when they were alive. They were just his raw material and he was free to be guided by what he was presented with, to let it tell a new story that wasn’t concerned with what had come before.

  One of them was a young woman named Sally, a junkie slut who embraced her demise eagerly. He could deduce much of her history from the scars that it had left on her young body. Who could fail to notice the violet track-marks on her greying skin?

  He was able to use his skills to let people see past the tragedy, to the beauty beneath. Flensed of flesh and scars, she was a rare beauty, posed to entice. Her name from before was forgotten, now she was Venus.

  His love for Venus was different than his love for Adrienne and Lucille had been. Their corpses had been the broken remnant of a love. Venus meant nothing to him personally. She was a blank canvas, a muse for him to work from.

  Though controversial, Venus and his other works were well received and profitable and they spurred Antoine to complete the work that had been in the back of his mind since mastering LeConte’s methods.

  To the media and general populace it seemed that it was the canvas of his work that was significant, not what he had wanted it to convey. People didn’t have to understand much about art to react strongly to his work.

  For the next five years he worked on it. It would be his greatest work yet. This was not to be just a single piece, a tragic memento of a lover. This was to be a series of works that told the very story of life in all its emotional turmoils, its unblemished glories. A story told purely by the dead. He was going to need a lot of corpses.

  This time every step was taken to ensure that it was all legal and approved before. Written consent was granted and authorised before he so much as touched the bodies. There was still talk around his work of the vileness of what he did. Many could never approve of him treating the dead in such a way but more people complaining about it meant more media attention which Gautier ensured meant more money.

  It was clearly art that Antoine was creating and art required the challenging of such petty ideas of morality as respect for the dead. Anyway, whatever else he did, Antoine had respect for his subjects. He loved them all as he worked on them.

  Enough had heard of his work and the tragic love that drove it that he was now supplied with his materials by willing volunteers. Those who knew that they were faced by their own death seemed willing to give themselves to Antoine that he might be able to make something greater of their mortal remains.

  The lives of his subjects didn’t have to matter any more. What they were in death and what he could make them become in his own special form of immortality was what drove him. He sought to make them a part of something greater in death than they could have been in life. They may have failed in their ambitions while still mortal but as his works they could be eternal. All had something special inside them that he could find a way to show to the world. Each of them had something to tell him of life, and each of them became something new in death. He found ways to use them each that suited what they were, lovers and fighters, poets and traders.

  The full exhibition was entitled simply Life, and it comprised of more than fifty corpses, some standing alone as individual works, others were pieces working together. The centrepiece of the new exhibition was a tableau constructed from seven corpses. It told a story of a moment in life, frozen eternally in time. In a sense these sculptures represented death’s abandonment.

  It was these works that enabled his artistic career to surmount his individual successes with Adrienne and Lucille. In time they would be looked back upon as the faltering and clumsy first steps on this road, the idle splodges of a dabbling toddler against the skilful strokes of a master.

  When a piece was completed it was solid and unbending. The remaining flesh was plastic. The corpse became an unchanging moment captured forever in defiance of death and time.

  Where once the pieces were an attempt to maintain the semblance of original life while concealing the taint of death, his skills now permitted him to dissolve the skin, or the fats or meat of the body. His pieces were radiant and colourful in a way that transcended their mortality. His techniques allowed the hidden marvels of the body to be revealed. Nobody could think the same way about even their own bodies after seeing the glories that were concealed beneath their skin.

  Gautier was forced to enlist designer
s to figure out the logistics and plan how the pieces could be shown to their best effect. Fortunately, interest in Antoine’s work was still high and jealous corporations were on hand to vie for the pieces. Gautier negotiated payments for the pieces, conditional that they be free to tour galleries for a year before delivery. In large part the sales were used to fund the complexities of the tour.

  Antoine had become even more withdrawn and had to be coaxed into even visiting the galleries where his works were being displayed when they were closed to the public. Of course he cared about their situation and presentation but he found public places ever less pleasant to be in. He was happy living apart from people, surrounded only by the dead, and Walter, who had much of death in his manner as well.

  Though he had supplied detail of the manner of their presentation, it still struck him when he saw them complete and in situ before the exhibition first opened.

  This exhibition was to be a sensation, whether or not Antoine could stand to be seen with it. His name on it was enough to attract people’s attention. Millions had already seen Lucille and not even the exorbitant price of entry to the gallery would put them off.

  On their rare meetings Gautier told him about the sums of money that his work was generating and of which the agent was taking a very healthy proportion for his own expenses and remuneration. What was left was more than Antoine could even conceive of ever needing. He didn’t want anything any more. As long as he had the tools and materials for his work it didn’t matter.

  When Life toured the world Antoine closed himself off from the outside.

  Gautier had suggested strongly that Antoine should leave the warehouse and take a few months to rest away from the smell of chemicals and the dead. Antoine seemed disinterested. He barely even noticed the smell anymore.

  When Antoine dismissed Walter’s services it seemed unexpected, but he only did it so that he could have the privacy he needed to embark upon his greatest work. He had said that he was going to take some time off from work, so Walter was not needed. Walter had already been well attended to financially and accepted the dismissal cheerfully. For his labours over the years it had taken to complete the work required for the pieces in Life Walter had received enough that he would be able to establish his own business doing what he loved, tending to the dead.

  With Walter gone few had reason to visit the studio. Gautier had always found the place deeply unpleasant and didn’t spend more time there than he could avoid. Anyway, Antoine had said he was taking a break to think about his next project, something that he had to work on alone, something that would become his greatest work.

  How, Gautier wondered could even so artistic a soul as Antoine exceed the masterpiece of Life? What greater depth of art did he have it in him to expose? And what greater art could there be than the display of the artist himself in the medium that had made him so famous? The most literal of self-portraits, he chose to become his own art.

  Antoine had probably been in the tank for days by the time they found him. He was definitely dead. The chemicals had already started to dissolve his skin and pieces of it were flapping loose. The experience of injecting himself with the preservatives must have been agonising, crippling, but somehow he still managed to plunge himself into the tank.

  A ladder, knocked onto its side close to the tank hinted at his method.

  Normally bodies would be supported in the tank, suspended to maintain whatever position was required. Lacking support, Antoine was slumped in the bottom of his tank, his head thrown back and his mouth open in a perpetual scream. His arms were reached out, pressing against the limits of his confinement.

  Presumably he had drowned on the choking chemical fluids as his sinews had been hardened from within by the preservatives that he had pumped into his own flesh. The chemicals were highly toxic and if Antoine’s posture and expression were anything to go by, extremely painful to be exposed to in such a manner.

  The Police initially insisted that the body should be withdrawn from the tank and a post-mortem undertaken to establish the cause of death. Gautier dissuaded them. There was no evidence of foul play and Antoine had sufficient forethought to leave a note explaining what he was doing. The tank was covered and left for six months. What else could they do?

  When Antoine was finally removed from the tank he was presented to the world as the last and greatest work by a true artist. The sculpture that he had made of himself toured the world attracting crowds who were fascinated to view the final fate of a man who had caused such stir with his work.

  In the absence of any input from Antoine as to what the presentation of this piece should be, Gautier improvised. Even though the piece was itself not so very big it needed to be viewed in isolation to be appreciated. It should stand alone in the centre of a large, white room. The approach should be open enough that tantalising glimpses of it could be caught through the crowds that he imagined flocking to it.

  The piece became known as “Antoine’s greatest work”. The tour visited major art galleries all around the world. How much simpler it was touring with this one piece alone rather than the morbid carnival that had been the last one.

  There were many in the art world who voiced opinions as to what the message of the piece was supposed to be. Was it one man’s howl against harsh reality? Was it a statement of the ability of our society to commodotise everything into neat chunks?

  In time when the excitement had started to diminish, Antoine was sold for a substantial amount of money. His body was to be left as a permanent installation, the centrepiece in the foyer of a new complex of high-class shops and apartments. Thousands of people would walk passed him every day, growing increasingly inured to what he was and what he had meant. But he probably knew that that would happen.

  Antoine created things with his life that transcended mortality, his own and those of his loves and the other people who made up his materials. He never meant to fall in love with death, but as death consumed the girls that he loved, it consumed his very love itself.

  Epilogue by the narrator

  Non draco sit mihi dux

  And now we are once again faced with the termination of this spell and I must bring my telling to an end. We have shared a journey through dark and beautiful places and seen things that few have the chance to.

  We have heard of lives different and similar, of the loves of Hannah, the cruel studies that led to the techniques that would centuries later make Antoine famous, and how he used them to create art from the tragic death of his love. All tales add to the tapestry of their world, each thread affects those it contacts.

  For all our sakes I can only hope that exposure to such things is for general benefit, that in seeing what people are capable of we can learn more about ourselves and put the knowledge to use in avoiding the mistakes that others have made before us.

  Many value ignorance, but I am not among them. Knowledge may have incipient dangers but it should be sought, even when the knowing may hurt. Blissful ignorance may sound positive but in truth it is a deathly state, free of vital curiosity.

  Of lessons we may draw a few, that it is better to manifest love and lust honestly than to hide it and let it become twisted perversion. That our lives are our own and we make our own choices. While the scenery may be forced upon us, our actions are our own and life is what we make of it. Ultimate responsibility is to the self and it is through harmonising with what we are that we can be best at it.

  Lest any have taken our author too seriously when in his grumpier and paranoid moments he has hinted at underlying malevolence in my actions, I can only say that whatever scary stories people may have heard, there are no dark forces at work in what occurs here. Sharing stories and quanta of wisdom is the only desire here. I know many stories like these and it pleases me to get this chance to share some of them. Perhaps I will be given that opportunity in another volume.

  Afterword by the author

  Love is the law, love under will.

  And with that, I will
close this chronicle, and consign it to the world that it may pass its own judgement. It is late on the thirtieth night and I am tired. I feel drained and sick, the forces that I have allowed myself to be exposed to for the last month have taken their toll on me. Perhaps I was naïve in my assumption that I could endure the month without any ill-effects. It doesn’t matter now. I need to sleep. All I know is that midnight fast approaches and the dawn brings with it the opening of a new decade for me and I would rather face it well rested.

  Before I can permit myself sleep, I should at least have the courtesy to take the time to express my thanks to those who have assisted in their diverse ways in the creation of this present volume, as well as in the development and publication of this and the previous volume, Sinful Submissions:

  Emma Farrell, Stephanie Austin, Craig Bunce, Joe Hockaday, Rebecca Lubin, Sean Sansom, Rob Searle, Keith Sheppard, Jonathan Kelley, Roger Southgate, Wayne Street, Rebecca Holbourn, Emma Jarrett, Cheryl Brown, Anna Nickolls, Carrie Harris.

  This book was written amongst the populace of NaNoWriMo in Wales, though less time was spent in Shot In The Dark this time round, it was still an essential venue for writing on occasion.

  The Catullus translations that begin and end this volume are my own, and while they are not a direct part of the text, to me they seem to belong with it.

  For the unfamiliar, Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Roman of the late Republic (roughly 84-54BC). He was very influential on later Classical poets but was often considered too obscene by Christians. Carmen 16 in particular was widely known but not published in English translation until the 20th century. His 118 surviving poems have been translated into dozens of languages and he remains one of the greatest writers on the subject of love in all its phases.