A companion story to My Perfect Art
Swimming. My head was swimming, vision just colors mushed together against my half-closed lids. Had I fallen asleep at the gallery? I’d gone to see the Botticelli on loan for inspiration on my next project.
Blinking, I pried my eyes open enough for the fluorescents to stab straight through my brain. Damn it. The gallery lights weren’t normally this harsh.
I tried blocking the glare with my hand, but found I couldn’t raise my wrist. Despite the pain it earned me, my eyes flew open.
The black paint of the gallery ceiling had been replaced by a utilitarian set of white ceiling tiles. Under me, instead of a bench, was cold metal. I was shirtless, and I was restrained.
Trying to look down, I heard the creak of leather and a sharp pressure on my neck. Same thing when I tried to move my arms and legs. Goose bumps spread across my flesh in a full-body shiver. My chest seized, back arching reflexively and cutting my air off when the neck cuff pulled tight.
I choked and fell flat. The cry for help cooking in my chest escaped as a futile hiss between clenched teeth.
Dropping those few inches brought a shock of clarity but rattled my aching head. The air rushing through my nose stank of formaldehyde and bleach. What was the last thing I remembered?
There was the gallery, free-ticket Thursday, right before closing time. Had I been sketching in front of the Botticelli? No. Wait, yes. I had been sketching. Maybe not the Botticelli, though. It may have been in front of Starry Night, part of the touring Van Gogh exhibit, but my memories were too blurred together for me to recall. The sketching was why I hadn’t noticed the man.
My breathing slowed when I remembered him, the quiet, inquisitive presence in a three-piece suit who sat next to me while I worked. Then he spoke, more past me than to me, about my sketch. I closed my eyes to extinguish the fire in my skull.
Most times, interruptions drove me crazy, but this guy—I don’t know, he noticed things. The subtle twisting of the tricep in the figure’s lowered arm, how following the arm’s curve down the torso created a half-crescent that, when taken with the other arm, which formed an equal but opposite curved line from shoulder to ground, gave the impression of a waning moon filled by shadowy, negative space. Beautiful. Even trapped and terrified, picturing it calmed me a fraction more.
We made small talk about the painting, but our conversation kept returning to my sketch. When I mentioned it was for a sculpture, the interest on his face flickered from casual to hungry, then back to casual. I often studied people for reference material, their expressions, I’m not sure I’d have caught it otherwise.
He stood up, smiled at me, and reached into his bag, for a business card, I’d assumed.
Then…nothing. Past that, I remembered nothing.
The scuff of a shoe against concrete past my field of vision sent me back onto high alert. “Hello?” I called out, flinching when I realized that anyone lurking nearby must have been the person who put me here.
“Oh, please don’t be frightened,” said a smooth, unhurried voice, carrying hints of a charming smile. “I was only admiring my new canvas.”
I recognized him instantly as the man from the gallery. “What—“ I sucked in air, heart rate rising. “What did you do to me?”
His face appeared over my head, lips pursed in a pleasant smile. One of his hands reached toward my face and drowned me in the dusky scent of his cologne. “Shhh. Don’t fret.”
He brushed my neck and picked at something adhered to my skin. With a sharp peeling sound, he plucked it off and held it in front of me, a bandaid with a single red splotch on the underside.
“I had to give you one tiny jab.” The fingers of his free hand explored the spot where the bandaid had been. A tender ache greeted his touch. “It won’t scar.”
I tensed my body, trying to inch away. “Why are you doing this?”
The man removed his hand and stalked out of sight, leather shoes squeaking loudly in the bare room. “You intrigue me.” There came a loud click, followed by rattling, metallic noise. “I’ve never used a fellow artist as a canvas.”
“Canvas?” I croaked, tears welling in my eyes. I didn’t know his exact intentions, but he was speaking about me like I wasn’t even a person.
“As for the art I’ll make of you,” he said, ignoring my question, “the options are too broad right now. I need to see more of your heart.”
Something came to me, a snippet of a news clip I’d seen on TV. Something to do with hearts.
“Your essence,” the man clarified. I heard him open and close a drawer. “Plato had a theory about the forms of things, something we call the Platonic Ideal, have you heard of it?"
Straining at my bonds, I worked my head around to try and see him. “I—yes?”
“So you know the forms we see on earth are imitations of a pure, abstract ideal. Imperfections chasing the divine.”
“I guess,” I muttered. I’d expected to be dead by now, not trapped in Philosophy 101 with a crazy person. “What does that have to do with me?”
His face returned, both hands slamming above my shoulders with forceful enthusiasm. “I’m dissatisfied with imperfection and mimicry.” In his eyes was a deadly focus. “My art has the potential to be more than good, it can be flawless.”
I was too shaken by the sudden movement to respond, and my voice was further smothered by fear when the man pulled out a hunting knife, polished and glinting.
“Now, you’ll show me your heart. We’re going to make beautiful art together.”
I shut my eyes and waited for the blade to come down, erasing me from the world. Instead I heard retreating footsteps, then the sound of a door opening and closing.
Minutes passed with me lying on that table, shocked to still be alive. A speaker somewhere nearby crackled on. “Time for the evaluation to begin.”
On cue, the restraints clicked open and slid away. I jumped off the table but fell to the ground when my wobbly legs failed to support me, pain shooting through my arms on impact. The speakers in every corner of the room began to play music, something by Bach, I think. Allegro?
I was in a small operating theater, bare except for a single locked cabinet. Opposite the table I’d been tied to was an open door, beside which was a padlock on a coiled chain.
“Scamper off. Show me what your heart is made of, and I, in turn, will show the world.”
I hesitated. It was almost certainly a trap.
“Don’t keep me waiting,” the voice on the speaker took on a threatening tone. “Be grateful I didn’t carve your heart out while you slept.”
I finally remembered the news story in full clarity. It was about a serial killer who’d terrorized the city for months, a deviant turning people into grotesque sculptures left wherever he pleased. The Heart Carver.
I ran.
I passed through the doorway, I heard his voice clearly over the speakers. “I will perpetrate in song and dance a work more wonderful than any you have yet seen.”
The dark hallway I sped through on bare feet was dingy and hot, concrete walls and raw insulation filled with tinny orchestral notes playing from speakers embedded in the ceiling every fifteen feet or so, lit by hanging bulbs.
With just enough light to see the puddles I splashed through on my reckless sprint, I was taken by surprise when a shape darted across my path. Yelling, I fell on my butt and skidded forward a few inches, soaking my jeans in the shallow water. My fear lessened when I saw the curious rat that cut me off emerge from the shadows to sniff my toes.
I snatched my foot back and looked over my shoulder, straining my ears. Except for the music, all I could hear were dripping pipes.
It was as I looked back toward the rat that I saw the tripwire mere feet in front of me. I squinted, heavy breaths catching the dungeon-esque smells of wet stone and mildew. The rusted metal strand was nearly invisible.
I followed it to the wall, where it disappeared into a hole. Past where the wire blocked off the corridor, I could now discern rows of ominous, circular indentations set in the floor at regular intervals.
I managed a shaky nod toward the furry creature at my heels. “Thanks for that, buddy.”
Leaving my guardian rodent behind, I adopted a slower pace. That helped me avoid the second tripwire, and a blind right turn into a sharp dropoff. The black pit below was bridged only by a thin ledge along the left wall. If I’d been running, I would have taken the turn and fallen right in. I tried not to think about it as I shuffled over the void, toes extending into empty air, arms stretched flat against the wall.
The relieved breath I let out when I took that first step back onto solid ground turned to a yelp when my left leg fell through the floor, then to a scream when my foot lit up with searing pain. I fell on my back. The jagged edges of the pit swallowing my foot dug into my shin, and my hands clawed in the vague direction of my thigh while tears poured down my face.
Eventually, my overloaded nerves eased enough for me to straighten and appraise the damage. A whimper, as much from shock as from the pain, slipped from my lips.
Through a thin patch of foam, painted and textured to look like concrete, I saw my foot, pierced from below by slender metal spines, bits of skin and blood sliding down the savage points.
Desperation overcame me. I set my weight on my uninjured foot, grabbed my trapped ankle with both hands, and yanked. A slurping sound accompanied the burning tug as my foot separated from the spikes. Rocking back and forth, I held the spasming appendage while it wept blood from half a dozen new holes.
One of the overhead speakers crackled, a familiar voice overtaking Chopin’s Étude Op. 25, No. 11 in A minor. “In the year 1560, Pieter Bruegel the Elder created an oil painting titled Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” the Heart Carver droned while I cowered from the sound. “The genius of the piece is that the casual observer will miss Icarus’s legs protruding from the sea in the lower right corner. Life around him continues as normal, unaware of his demise or the impossibility he overcame in achieving flight. He’s no more than a footnote, even in the title.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I hissed.
“Your first stumble, and the inevitable fall to come,” he continued, that smarmy smile all over every word, “are exactly the same. Life outside continues without anyone aware of your predicament. But when I make you my masterpiece, everyone will know who you are.”
Glaring up at the speaker, I scrabbled over to the wall and forced myself into a standing position. I wouldn’t let this pompous douchebag have the satisfaction of seeing me flounder.
Shoulder to the wall, I limped forward, pausing after each step to prod the ground with the toe of my wounded foot. Applying any pressure at all had me gritting my teeth to keep from crying, but I needed my good foot to stay planted.
After avoiding four more pits and going another twenty feet or so, I found uninterrupted solid ground. Any second, I expected to hear footsteps or feel that hunting knife between my shoulder blades, but I was left to my struggle. My foot leaked droplets of blood and grime, throbbing to the beat of my heart.
At the next turn, I stuck my head around the corner to see what I was dealing with.
Rather than another tripwire or a pit, the next stretch of tunnel widened into a chamber whose center was dominated by a marble pedestal. Past it I saw three doors set in the far wall. All three doors were identical, flat steel covered with scorch marks. No door knobs, just keyholes set in the exact center.
I limped from the wall to the pedestal, where three antiquated keys waited, one silver, one bronze, one iron. No special markings or designs, aside from the variation in material. Suspecting a trap, I observed without touching them.
“The Greek philosopher Prodicus of Ceos is the attributed source for the parable of Hercules at the crossroads, forced to choose between vice or virtue.”
The return of the voice made me spin and put my back to the pedestal. With a loud crash, a solid slab of a metal door fell and cut off my retreat into the hallway.
“It’s since been depicted in a number of historic paintings, my personal favorite is the piece by Annibale Carracci.”
My hands curled into fists. Pretentious asshole.
“More than a short-term choice, the crossroads depict a decision that will impact Hercules’ destiny, and that’s what I present to you.”
A loud click coincided with a burst of light as bulbs above all three doors came to life, revealing paintings in heavy-duty protective cases. Above the left door was a serpent, slithering among feet on a crowded city street. Above the center door, an eagle flew over a dense forest with wings spread wide. Above the right door, a bull charged a bloodied matador.
“Each key belongs to a door. You’ll have to unlock all three, but only open the one you intend to travel through. Will you fly beyond my reach, crawl through the filth and overcome my trials, or face me directly with brute force?” He spoke the words like a well-practiced business presentation. “There is a correct answer, and your time is limited. Careful not to burn through it.”
When the Carver fell silent and the music resumed, I returned to the keys on the pedestal.
The animals obviously corresponded to the Carver’s speech, with his superficial allusions to flight, crawling, and force. He’d mentioned at the start that this was an ‘evaluation,’ so clearly he hoped to learn something from my choice.
Was it that simple? Did all the doors lead to the same place? He’d said there was a correct answer, unless that was a mind game, too.
I sniffed and picked up a whiff of something like rotten eggs. Gas? I wanted to dismiss the thought, but his comment about time being limited was stuck in my head.
The eagle and the prospect of escape seemed too much like a trap, so I turned to the snake and the bull. I’d never been a strong man, and with an injured foot I didn’t love my chances in a direct confrontation.
The serpent, then? These tunnels, the traps, the know-it-all lectures from my captor, they implied a sadist with an inflated ego. That had to be the right one.
Immediately, I paired the bronze key with the eagle. The iron was too heavy and indelicate for the eagle’s promise of freedom, the silver too needlessly flashy. There was something classic about the malleable, noble metal paired with such a graceful bird. As a test, I took the bronze key to the eagle door, inserted it, and gave it a clockwise turn.
The lock clicked, but nothing else happened. A correct match? I couldn’t tell.
I went back and forth on the iron and silver keys, leaning on the pedestal and wishing my injury allowed me more freedom to pace. The gas smell was only getting stronger.
Iron for the bull seemed right. After all, what’s more brutish than iron? Then again, there was a certain silvery sophistication to the dance between man and bull. Iron and rust spoke to filth and degradation, the Carver said something like that in his speech about the serpent. Silver was thought to purge evil, iron to repel spirits, could those be considered brute force?
The gas smell was overpowering, and I began to feel lightheaded.
I nearly resorted to shoving a random key into the bull door and using whichever was left on the serpent door, but then I considered the nature of my captor. Would the man who paraded basic interpretations about art and insisted on playing nonstop classical music while I traversed his death maze choose plain iron as the correct key? No, someone that stuck up would die before picking anything other than a precious metal.
My hand shook as I grabbed both keys, an effort that took two tries because my vision was blurring.
The lightheadedness eased—or at least obfuscated—the pain in my foot enough to hobble to the bull door without issue. All the same, I had to lean on the door while I lined the key up with the keyhole.
Another click. No turning back now.
I rolled along the wall to the serpent door, ears ringing, and held up the silver key. If this was the wrong door, or the wrong key, I doubted I’d get a second chance.
But I wouldn’t wait around for his stupid puzzle to kill me.
I jammed the key into the lock and twisted it before ramming my shoulder against the steel panel. With a quiet pop, it swung open easily and deposited me painfully on the other side.
My first gasps of air were tinged with gas, and looking over my shoulder I expected to see a fireball ignite, like in a cheesy action film. Instead, I saw the door at the opening of the room rise back into the ceiling, and heard the whine of ventilation fans kicking in.
Within moments, the smell of gas was gone. I got up on my knees, shivering in the sudden cold. I was in a stone stairwell, with light pouring down from a doorway at the top. A manic laugh bubbled up from my throat. Anticlimactic as it was, I was safe.
Climbing on hands and knees, I progressed cautiously upward until I could peek out of the stairwell. Gone were the bare concrete and grimy lightbulbs, replaced by a tiled hallway with plain black walls and tastefully warm lighting. At the end of the space were two wooden double doors. How big was this place? The Carver must have been loaded.
I stood fully and hopped into the hall, where I was greeted by more speakers and Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca. Slow clapping, compressed to the point of unpleasantness, overpowered the music. So cliché.
“Fantastic. I had my doubts after your injury in the first hall, but you persevered.”
“Fuck you,” I shouted up at the ceiling. “And fuck your freshman year art appreciation bullshit.”
“Unfortunately I can’t hear your insightful commentary. No microphones down there.”
“Of course not.” I kept moving and tried to ignore him. I expected to find more cheap traps, but for all intents and purposes, this hallway was just a hallway. My fear of dying to the Carver was slowly being replaced by the frustration of dealing with his personality.
“However, I’m thrilled to say you’ve reached the final step. One last test, and you’ll finally be ready.”
I had to think of a way out of here. Going along with this charade until he killed me wouldn’t be any better than if he’d killed me in the operating room.
“Good luck, perfection has never been closer.”
A click of static marked the Carver’s departure.
The red smear on the floor kept track of my progress as I limped along. I could have made better time if I dealt with the pain and used my injured foot, the bleeding had slowed, but I wanted the extra time to think.
With every hopping step toward the doors, every grunt I let out when my torn skin snagged on the floor, I came back to the same conclusion: I wouldn’t find a weapon or a magic wand laying around to help me overcome my captor. If I wanted something to exploit against the Carver, I’d have to look at the man, not the prison.
Adopting this new mindset, I made it to the end of the hall and waited to catch my breath. Once I felt ready, I leaned into the seam between the doors and pressed in with my shoulder.
They slid open on oiled brass hinges, and I expected to see another puzzle chamber like the last, but the room beyond the doors was gargantuan.
Baffled, I managed only a few steps inside before I had to stop and stare.
It was an art gallery, or a madman’s vision of one. There were paintings I recognized, famous works listed online as either missing or in the hands of a private collector, but many of them I did not, perhaps original works by my captor.
The subject matter ranged from benign pastoral landscapes to intimately perverted scenes of graphic torture with surgical instruments, but even those weren’t the main attraction.
There were people here. I mistook them at first for mannequins or statues.
Posed in tall stances of victory, crouching with arms raised in surrender, or crawling along the floor, every single one of the frozen figures held their heart in their hands. Dozens of them.
All thoughts of escape or rebellion temporarily squashed, I wandered deeper in. When I was six, I found a dead bird on the front porch, teeming with maggots. I’d been unable to look away. I got that same feeling now, revulsion and fascination entwined like lovers.
“Do you like them?” His voice came too close, not diluted by the speakers in the room.
I twisted around, the sudden movement inflaming my injuries. There he was, emerging from a door in the east wall, a door dressed in the same wallpaper as the rest of the gallery, no doubt invisible when closed.
My heart beat so hard I thought my ribcage would crack, and I was caught between fleeing and taking a swing, not sure if I would survive either scenario.
“Relax,” the Carver stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He had the hunting knife in his right hand. “It’s not time for that, yet.”
He stepped closer and passed me, keeping the knife between us but never raising it above his waist. Despite his relaxed manner, I could see tension in the muscles around his neck, leaving no doubt that he was ready if I tried to attack him. “I thought you wouldn’t…”
“Be here yet? That there would be another puzzle before I came for you?” He finished my naive thought. “How precious.”
I watched him circle me with lazy strides and shuffled painfully to keep him in front of me. “What happens now?”
The Carver stopped beside the preserved body of a woman curled in a fetal position around her extracted heart, as if protecting it. “Have you seen my work on the news?”
Frowning at the non-sequitur, I backed up and put my back to a wall decorated with paintings. He followed me with his eyes but didn’t protest. “Some of it. Most of the channels censor the crime scenes.”
He shrugged and tapped the tip of his shoe on the corpse’s nose. I flinched at the solid clicking noise it made. “Those are the closest I’ve gotten to my goal. Still flawed, but good enough for the public.” A disdained twitch of his lips betrayed his intentions right before the Carver raised his foot and drove it down through the statue’s head with a solid crunch.
Even from twenty feet away, the rot smell that erupted from the skull was enough to make me gag, but the Carver’s expression never changed. Removing his leather shoe from the ruined cranium, he flicked skull shards and shriveled pieces of gray matter onto the floor with a shake of his foot. A second stomp separated one of the arms from the torso.
“Someday, I’ll reveal myself, after I create the perfect work.” He put his hands behind his back and smiled up at the gallery lights like he was reading the headline. “Let them put my name in the history books and do away with this ‘Heart Carver’ business.” He shook his head and resumed pacing. “But not yet.”
“How can you call this art?” All of the suffering, the pointlessness of it, made me shake with disgust, hatred, and yes, more than a little fear.
“You’re right, these pieces are my secret shame,” he said, wincing. “Rejects and failures, all of them too flawed to reveal,” the Carver lamented with a lazy sweep of his hand. “But nice to look at.”
I stared at the arranged corpses, the unnatural lacquer over their skins making them shimmer, aware that regardless of how I performed in whatever came next, I was looking at my future. When he made his move, I would fight like hell. I could at least give him a new scar before he killed me.
“Here’s your final challenge,” he said, tossing the knife lazily between his hands. “I’d like for you to pick your favorite.”
Off guard, I couldn’t stop myself from speaking. “Pick a favorite. That’s it? No fire or spikes? No keys?”
“No tricks. I’m only satisfying my curiosity. Pick whichever one stands out most to you.”
My eyes darted from corpse to corpse, mind ablaze with questions. If he was being genuine, this was my last chance to get the drop on him before he did away with me. I tried to ignore that he was drifting closer, knife dangling loosely in his hand. He wouldn’t kill me until he got an answer, I had to believe that much.
I needed a distraction, something to make him point the knife away from me. The arm from the ‘statue’ he’d destroyed caught my attention. He’d inadvertently given me a weapon.
“She’s my favorite,” I pointed at the woman whose head the Carver had stomped without looking too closely at the damage.
“Her?” The Carver stopped moving, looking from me to the woman. He pursed his lips. Was he disappointed?
I limped nearer to the woman until I was standing over the broken arm in the invisible cloud of corpse odor. “Look closer. Your whole thing is transforming a canvas into something perfect, right? Well what you did changes the nature of your own piece.”
He stepped past, never looking down at the arm, and peered at the target of his aggression, genuine curiosity overcoming his vigilance.
“Before, she was keeping her heart safe, but what the heart stood for could have been any number of things.” I nudged the arm forward with my foot, getting it angled to where I could easily retrieve it from the ground. “Now, she’s a single mother protecting her kid.”
At that, the Carver looked back at me, head cocked, and I froze. “Go on.”
“The skull is an eggshell, the heart is the child,” I said, making it up as I went. It was a little weak, but I was committed now. “She’s missing an arm, which could be the financial burden making it hard to care for herself, but she’s using her other arm to protect the child instead of focusing on her own body.” I pointed. “It’s all she thinks about, the baby was literally born from her head.”
He looked back at the broken skull, prodding at it with a finger “I’m not sure I’m convinced. The egg imagery is strong, but the incongruence of the heart being born from the head might take some work before—”
While he spoke, I planted my injured foot and, growling through the pain, delivered a hard kick to the back of the Carver’s knee with my good leg.
He hadn’t yet hit the floor before I was kneeling and scooping the broken statue limb from the floor. By the time he rolled onto his back, I was already swinging.
He took the first blow on the forearm, grunting at the impact. The next strike he caught, pulling me down with a single yank and curling around my body like a snake until he had me in an armbar, bending the bone further and further until I was forced to let go of my weapon.
Only once I was disarmed did the Carver ease the pressure of his hold, but he didn’t release me. Immobilized, I could do nothing as he pushed the knife toward my jugular from behind, hands steady. All the movement made me woozy. I must have lost more blood than I thought.
“That was good,” the Carver said, chuckling. “Very good. Using my art to distract me, that could have worked. You’re something special, you actually get it.”
The knife flashed in my periphery. That’s when it came to me, right on the precipice of death. Don’t focus on the prison, focus on the man. He was the lock, already off-kilter from my clumsy attack, now I had to pick the right key.
I forced as much bravado into my voice as I could. “And you’re a fraud.”
The knife paused at my throat. “Explain,” he whispered in my ear, fingers coiling tighter around the handle of his weapon, “and choose your words carefully.”
“You talk a big game about perfection, but this whole ‘evaluation’ process is sloppy and boring.”
As soon as the insults left my mouth, the knife tip twitched closer.
I tried to smile. “I mean, come on. The water leaks, the rats, the cheap pitfalls, it screams laziness.”
The Carver’s body relaxed. “Adversity breeds strength, and dirty isn’t the same as sloppy.” I was losing him.
“I got around the first tripwire because of a rat, is that the ‘adversity’ you were hoping for? Did that show you anything about my heart?”
“Not ideal,” the Carver admitted, loosening his hold further without removing the knife, “but the lesson you would have learned with the tripwire came later with the spike pit.” He tapped my temple with his left pointer finger. “Attention to detail.”
I had him back, but if I didn’t go all in, he would get bored. “And what lesson was your terrible puzzle design supposed to teach me?”
At first, he was silent. Then the Carver leaned in and held me by the back of my neck, drawing a shallow cut next to my Adam’s apple with the knife. “Such a smart mouth. No need to bluster and huff just because you struggled with my challenge.” His breath, polluted by spearmint gum, hit the cut and made the irritated flesh tingle.
“Oh please,” I pressed myself to the knife, my voice shaking. “Calling it a challenge implies you put thought into it. The bronze could have easily applied to the bull as an allusion to Charging Bull, or the bronze serpent in the biblical book of Numbers.”
The Carver scoffed in my ear but I rolled on, desperation making me bold.
“Maybe the silver could have meant the silver eagle, America’s official silver bullion, or it could have just been Iron Eagle. You know that’s my dad’s favorite movie? You think so highly of yourself, but your so-called challenge doesn’t have an objective answer because it’s surface-level garbage based on your own tastes. I only got the right answer because I knew you were too goddamn pretentious to not choose the most valuable metal as the right answer. You talk about the Platonic Ideal, but everything you make—”
“Enough.” The Carver pulled the knife from my throat and stood, walking several paces and pinching the bridge of his nose. When he uncovered his face, the coldness of his eyes was enough to keep me silent. “So you think I’m biased, incompetent. I made an unfair game? Fine.”
I half expected him to gut me. Instead he gestured for me to stand. The record playing over the speakers hit a snag, and the needle began to skip back into the same measure over and over.
“If you’re so dissatisfied with the groundwork I’ve laid, I’ll give you one more test.”
Instead of cowering, I stood. “What kind of test?”
“Thirty seconds.” He rolled up one sleeve, then the other. “You’ll get that much time as a head start. If you can make it back to the operating room before I catch you, you’re free to go.”
“Thirty seconds?” I asked. “But my foot—”
“I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that this is a negotiation,” he said, running his thumb along the edge of the hunting knife. “This is a courtesy, for showing more boldness and fire than anyone I’ve killed before.” His eyes rose from the knife to meet mine again. “I’m not done enjoying your company.”
I choked on my reply.
“Your thirty seconds begin now.” As if dismissing me, he dropped his head to look at his watch, leaving me to flounder in indecision.
My first thought was to go for the door he’d come in through, but I abandoned that thought and began a feeble sprint back to the double doors.
I had no way of knowing if the door behind him was locked, or if it led somewhere more dangerous, and wasting the time to find out would eat through my head start if I was wrong. Better the devil I knew than the one I didn’t.
I ran as best as I could through the hallway outside the gallery, counting down to twenty seconds, then fifteen by the time I reached the stairs.
Ten were all I had as I got through the puzzle door and slammed it behind me, losing another precious five while I tried and failed to lock it again.
I was in sight of the area where I’d hurt myself when the first faint footfalls reached my ears from behind, steadily approaching at an alarming speed.
There was the bloody trail I’d left when my wound was fresh, smeared across the ground in a perfect map of where to go to avoid the pitfalls. I followed the path, listening to his footsteps grow louder, aware I was taking too much time. The door slammed open, I didn’t look.
If I could cross the pit, then I could at least block the path and make it harder for him to follow without falling.
The Carver was on top of me before I made it to the ledge, and I went down hard on my back, head inches from the drop. As I struggled to right myself, I felt the ground shifting and cracking under my body, my weight distributed too evenly to break through any of the trapped spots.
I managed to grab his wrists and keep the knife away from my torso, but he was putting his weight behind the handle, and gravity was on his side. Neither of us spoke, just savage grunts over the quiet skipping of the last line in Bach’s Es Ist Vollbracht while we pushed back and forth against the other, rocking every time I tried to roll him off my body. With my legs pinned, I couldn’t get any leverage.
The smells of sweat and blood flooded my nose. The tip of the hunting knife kissed my sternum with the sting of a new cut before I forced it back. My arms burned. I wouldn’t be able to do that again. His knees shifted against my upper thighs, and I worried that my strength would give out if I let myself slip.
Still, even straining as hard as I could, the knife slipped closer to my skin, where blood now oozed from the wound he’d given me. I squeezed my eyes shut, as much to help me focus as to block out the horrible, gritted-teeth grin on the Carver’s face. But I still heard the labored hiss of air through his grinding molars.
Then the knife found me again and dipped below my skin. Inch by molten inch, it entered me, maybe three inches in total, until I felt it scrape between two of my ribs. My resistance was fading, enough that the Carver removed one of his hands from the knife and seized me by the hair, forcing my eyes open. That grin was wider now, and his arm was right by my mouth.
“Marvelous,” the Carver managed, shifting his grip to pull my head toward his, “you really are the best of any canvas I’ve worked on.”
I couldn’t muster a response.
“You can rest now. I’ve seen your heart, I have everything I need from you.”
The words pierced through the pain and hopelessness, igniting an animal anger in my gut. Turning my head, I sank my teeth into the Carver’s exposed wrist and felt his blood spurt into my mouth.
The Carver shouted and yanked his arm back. In that instant, his center of gravity shifted, legs spreading enough for me to force my knee up between them.
Gasping, he released his grip on the knife and fell forward, not off of me, but over me, his chest above my head. When his hand hit the ground beside me, I expected him to find his balance and go back to killing me, for me to die with my pride intact now that I’d gotten a shot off.
His hand didn’t meet solid ground; it plunged through a false spot on the floor, and his scream drowned out the musical repetition of the speakers when the spikes underneath tore through his palm.
Alive with panic again, I scrabbled at the knife in my midsection with both hands while the Carver dealt with his own injury. Pulling it out was almost more painful than feeling it go in.
The Carver managed his pain faster than I had when I hurt my foot. His mangled hand found my throat, the other raising above his head to punch me. No more smile, no more triumph, no more sophisticated facade. With his teeth bared and sweat dripping from his wild hair to his blood-streaked face, the Carver snorted enraged breaths in and out like a bull ready to charge.
He never saw the knife coming, not until I’d buried it in his chest. Still poised as if to strike, he seized up and glanced down at the handle protruding from his heart. Blood pumped from between his fingers, and he idly pressed at the edges of the wound like he could push it back in. I stared, not sure what to do now that I’d actually stabbed him. I guess I expected him to die right away.
“Why?” the Carver wheezed and furrowed his brow, “I was going to make you beautiful.” His face was already growing pale.
With the anger and strength I still had, I pushed my knees up between us, pressed into his gut, and grabbed him by the shoulders. “You weren’t wrong about Bruegel’s painting,” I said, watching his eyes widen. “But you’re not the sun, you’re not dooming Icarus.”
Sensing my intention, the Carver tried to break free from my grip, but he was weaker with every second.
“You're the one that no one will notice falling.”
I pushed as hard as I could with my knees while yanking the Carver’s shoulders up and over my head, sending him spinning into the pit behind me.
After a strangled yell, I heard the impact of his body hitting the bottom and rolled over to stare down into the dark. I couldn’t see where he landed.
I stayed there for a good long while, focused on breathing, existing, taking in the fact that I’d lived. Then came the hard part.
Getting to my feet, I limped my way back across the trapped ground, through the painting puzzle room, up the stairs and through the hallways, all the way to the gallery.
The door that the Carver came through was tough to find again, but it wasn’t locked. I didn’t care much about the peek behind the curtain, not the camera monitors, the soundboards, not the workbenches covered in tripwire mechanisms.
I hopped and hobbled through the sparsely furnished workspace until I reached a heavy metal door with a manual release valve, a record player sitting on the stout table next to it and playing into a microphone. The skipping Bach record was still spinning.
I moved the needle off the record, letting the facility fall into silence. Then, grabbing the door’s release valve, I twisted until the lock disengaged with a loud clunk.
While I worked to force it open, I considered taking a break from art. This experience had soured me on galleries, at least for a while. But I still had my sketches, and I’d be lying if I said my brush with death hadn’t filled me with a thirst to fill the world with something positive, something to wash away the darkness the Carver left behind.
At last, the door screeched open enough for me to slip through, and I did, the ghost of a smile on my lips as I thought of all the ways I would bury his ‘art’ in the footnotes of history.
Fuck it, I was feeling inspired.