Raphael Redcloak Read online

  “Give Stoker some time, Death. It is a gift of no consequence to you, but it has been decreed he has a purpose,” Charles said. “And, it is just.”

  “We are not in the justice business, Charles” Death reminded him. “We leave that to the Angels. Nothing can erase this vicious attack on Stoker or the shame society will gladly heap upon him if the news gets out. The curse of man is his wagging tongue. Even if God comforts the victim, he is still a delectable morsel to hungry gossips.”

  “But the news needn’t get out. A metaphor can hide the fact while still telling the truth,” Raphael protested.

  “Who told you that, Raphael?” Death asked.

  “My Muse. St. Michael.”

  Death contemplated his words for a moment. Raphael was invoking the most powerful source of strength in the universe: God’s Beings. Even he bent his knee to heaven. “Your familiarity with the saints is matter of record, Messenger,” Death conceded. “I don’t dispute the power of Logos to dispense justice or to veil the naked truth. But, as the one Stoker visited in the Spirit World, it’s up to me to choose whether he sojourns here or becomes a writer. You agree?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I do choose him to be a writer. Send him a Muse, Fate. Or give him Raphael! I go to prepare for America’s civil war. With that carnage coming, I don’t need your Stoker. However, you will need this, Messenger.”

  From beneath his robe, which seemed to engulf the room now, Death brought forth a golden sword inscribed with the words In Libros, Veritas.

  He offered it to Raphael. “Keep this at your side, but remember, you are only a Messenger, not inspiration. As for young Stoker, I have a gift for him by way of compensation for the ills Fate has sent. Deliver it.”

  Death handed him a gold box. Raphael took it from his icy hand, and instantly, Death was gone.

  “What is it?” Charles said, as Raphael opened the box and removed a calling card. “What does it say?”

  “Just a word. Dracula.”

  Musing

  For 108 years—but a fortnight in the Spirit World—Raphael haunted Fra Angelico's studio, a room spilled upwards because the fruit trees he cherished grew too tall to harvest easily. From the wood-railed balcony or from shutter flanked windows, all he had to do was stretch forth his hand and capture a ripe peach—or an apple or a handful of cherries. Angelico's brandies were throat ambrosia. Yet, in the midst of friendships' bounties, Raphael remained disquieted. That frightful Death could be kind perplexed him. Still more because five days after his Titanic harvest, Death reaped Stoker almost as an afterthought.

  "Stoker lived long enough to marry and see his tale of the un-dead inspire a renewed fight against evil," Angelico reminded him as they sat amongst canvasses and easels of unfinished work. "Dracula resides with the Villains."

  "But the truth of his origin's languishes in literary limbo."

  "Praise God for that!"

  Raphael examined a particularly succulent peach, feeling its fuzzy coat. "He raised the mountains and dredged the seas. The birds and beasts pay homage to His omniscient imagination. He toys with the storm and lets the trees stand against the wind for a thousand years. The clouds dance and the rivers jump their banks, yet in the cosmos, there is order. Blessed regularity marks our days and nights, and we number our days. "Raphael bit into the orange-pink flesh of the fruit. "We applaud, then die."

  Angelico threw him a newly washed rag to wipe the juice from his chin. "Hell has its rings, Heaven its mansions. The Spirit World has unknown demarcations. In this place where those for whom work is play, we engage in our artistic purposes, for what we know not either except to unfold our perfection."

  "I'm perfectly restless. Stoker's experience is obscured by artifice, hidden by words of poets and historians. People see more than they read."

  "Your restlessness enlivens you, my friend. Your cloak cannot hide your new stature or the cut of your frame." Raphael was hunting for a bin for the peach pit. "You can't hide that ruddy complexion from Charles and you can't pace in my studio. You'll wear holes in my carpet."

  Raphael returned to the eide-filled pillows stacked on the bench beneath the window, and fell into them with an adolescent sigh. "Hold that pose," Angelico said, and began sketching his friend mid-mope with a piece of charcoal. Raphael complied.

  "It's not restlessness that blushes my face. I've been feasting on hope."

  Angelico dropped his charcoal and joined him at the bench. "Oh, then the rumor is true! You've discovered a new genius. Who is it? Tell me, Raphael, is it true one is rising from the oils?"

  Raphael replied with a cryptic smile. "We'll see."

  ********

  For his Master’s of Fine Art project, Albion Rector chose to paint a wall-sized canvas entitled The Cache of the Damned. He watched the Nightmare on Elm Street series, the Psychos, the Saws, the Hannibal Lectors, and all the Dracula and Frankenstein movies he could find, to distill the essence of evil, to “immerse himself in depravity”, as he explained to girlfriend, Madison. His bookshelves were crammed with books about serial killers: Jeffery Dahmer, the Night Stalker, BTK, John Wayne Gacey. From Biblical spectacles to Blacksploitation movies, he spent hours looking at the faces of victims and perpetrators, predators and prey. Nothing, however, prepared Albion for the child rape videos on the internet.

  “You know, if you get caught looking at that stuff you could be arrested,” Madison warned after he described them to her. She refused to look at them the way she refused to see the U-tube videos of the beheadings by jihadists.

  “Yes. But who’s going to know? Look at all the suffering and violence we plaster on every screen imaginable and do nothing about—Saw five?" It was nine o'clock on a Saturday morning and he was already on his second Bloody Mary. Maddie was at the sink pouring the last of the Kamchatka down the drain. He could see oatmeal and toast in his future.

  "I've done some research on this, Boyfriend. Monkey see, monkey do. The same goes for human monkeys." He was right. She was putting water in a pot and the oatmeal box had magically appeared though he'd hidden it behind the salt and other forbidden staples. Yes, that machine she lifted to the counter looked like a toaster she'd found at a yard sale. He'd have a serious breakfast if she was addressing him by his role rather than his name. It meant she expected him to remember his lines.

  "Nobody cares what I see.” Did celery wilt in the presence of demons, or was the stalk he'd used as a swizzle stick just old? Girlfriend didn't look like a demon. That light leaping into the room when she pulled back the kitchen area window drape drenched her body with a sunny halo. He'd have to resign himself to a little mothering if he was to have the love of an angel.

  “You care, if your insomnia's any indication of what’s careening off your brain cells after consuming so much of this garbage.” She gave him a bowl of instant gruel, went to his easel, and stared at the delicate figures taking shape on the canvas. Albion had made their nightgowns look like real cotton, and the fog so light and moist she wanted to dab it with a towel. “It’s so Gothic, Alby. Stark black background, all the children in white and pearl—like a cloudy dream of hell. No fire and brimstone. Just suffering in those innocent faces.”

  “That’s what I see in my dreams. What can I say?” She'd added sugared cinnamon and milk to the pasty chunks and it tasted like childhood.

  “Are you sleeping at all, Boyfriend?” Now she was dangerous. She smelled like the roses in the Immaculate Conception churchyard, and she had her arm around his shoulders. The hand of the other arm picked up the Bloody Mary, and she sniffed the remains. "I'll get rid of this for you," she said and waltzed back to the sink. Does disposing of alcohol that way make the pipes drunk?

  “I’ve laid off the coffee. Dr. Vansandt’s prescribed a sleeeeepppping potion. But I haven’t taken it,” he lied. He'd tried one pill and was zonked for twelve hours when she was visiting the future Mother-in-law.

  “There's a bit of squandered health-care resources. You can’t get hooked
on this new stuff, you know." She headed to the bathroom where the unopened prescription waited near the basin because he'd forgotten to hide it in the medicine cabinet behind the condom box. "It’s not like it makes you dead to the world, either. You’ll still be able to paint.” She had a few pills in her palm and was sizing them up. Yes, they were swallowable. She handed him one with a look that said, take it.

  “Good artists suffer for their craft, Maddie. As long as I keep having my visions, I’ll have grist for the mill of novelty. Not to mention money in the bank.” A spoonful of milk made the medicine go down.

  “Are all the figures going to be tortured children, Alby?” Perhaps she expected an angelic rescuer to appear—the way living victims hoped for divine intervention that rarely happened in real life.

  “There's a reason,” he said. He joined her, and they stood a foot away from the canvas, arms about each other, staring at the picture of a cherub-faced toddler being beaten by a short, dark man in breeches and riding boots. "I haven't finished his body, but I've got the face down. What'dya think?"

  “It’s gruesome. Obscene.”

  “There’s nothing gruesome about a one-man show right out of grad school.” There was an uncharacteristic discordance in his voice. “This is my statement about our modern world.” He kissed her cheek and she tried to shy away from him. He held her tighter. “It’s going to make me famous, and fame is going to make me rich,” he whispered in her ear as he nuzzled a soft lobe. "It means a future for us, Fiancé."

  Madison rested her head on his chest. “What if I asked you—no begged you—not to finish this picture?"

  Albion felt her trembling. “Art is art, Honey. No one takes any of this voo-doo stuff seriously.” His body was beginning to feel heavy. But in a nice, melting jello-y kind of way. He released his embrace and she slipped away from him.

  “I do. I don’t want people saying of you that you created something ugly. I don’t want fame at the cost of cruelty and….evil.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Yes, I am. There’s something too real about this, Alby."

  “What brought all this on? I thought you liked the concept. First Amendment. Absolute truth and all that.”

  “I did like the concept, when it stayed a concept.”

  Albion went to the desk and returned with his sketch book. He leafed through the well-worn pages and spread the book flat on the kitchen table. “Look at these, Maddie. They’re sketches I made when I was in middle school.”

  She came to the table, shrinking back in horror when she saw the drawings of tied up, half-naked women being ravished by pale creatures with long nails and pointed ears. “Nosferatu,” she said.

  “Yeah, only I didn’t know anything about German cinema back then. Hell, I was nothing more than the kid with parents with British accents and not enough money to send me to the video arcade. But I could dream and I could draw. Just look at me now. Look at that picture. Admit it, it's inspired.”

  Madison slowly turned the pages, filled with images of severed limbs and screaming faces. “Who is this?” She pointed to a man grinning up at her from the book, and glanced at the canvas. “They’re the same man.”

  “I don’t know. He’s just a face I once saw.”

  “Where?”

  “In a bar. At a circus. Who knows?”

  “I know. Inspiration from hell.” Madison went to the bookshelf and searched until she found a replica of an old, leather-bound police record. She scanned through the pages until she found the familiar face in a photograph. “Here, she said, bringing the book to the table and placing it along side of Albion’s sketchbook. “This is the man in your dream. Pettigrew Simms.”

  "How do you know him?"

  "My Boyfriend's obsessed with crime, remember? What do you think I'm doing while you're lost in your oils? Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. And those forced into boredom watching people do, research. I know many notorious criminals who've lost their notorious-ness because of Marvel Comics."

  Her explanation sounded a lot like he should feel guilty for not taking her out more. How long had it been since they went on a date? Not since they started screwing. Valentine's Day last year. Albion looked at the photograph, then at his painting. “I swear, I never saw this photograph, Maddie,” he said. “I didn’t even know this book existed when I was in middle school. How could I?”

  She read the caption beneath the photograph aloud. “Pettigrew Simms. Hanged for the murder of at least a dozen children in London. Captured with the help of noted writer Bram Stoker. 1888.” Albion ambled to the sofa. It was time to sit down.

  “I have to finish this picture, Maddie. I have to. Maybe this picture is the story of Pettigrew Simms—a record of his sins. Somehow, I know the faces of his victims, and when I’ve catalogued them all, maybe I know I’ll be able to sleep without Dr. Vansandt's happy pills." He extended his arms in a mammoth stretch. "Do I sound crazy to you? I sound crazy to me."

  He didn't hear her say, "Yes, Boyfriend," as she kissed his cheek and contemplated the difficulty of shredding canvass with a steak knife. They were alone, but the room seemed crowded, like a charnel house during a plague. She counted the children in Albion's 6X4 foot painting—twelve.

  ********

  Rafael awoke with self-congratulatory vigor coursing through his body. He didn’t have to sleep—he loved that waking remembering feeling. And, he'd dreamed a way to circumvent the Teflon canvass of a drug-affected brain by painting, not a dream, but in the mind's eye. What the eye sees is indelible. Visuals are always knocking about in peoples' brains, and the visuals he'd shown Rector rose to his consciousness as Raphael had hoped they would. Rector’s work was beautiful. Grotesque. As with all beauty, there loomed potential, and potentially dangerous, madness, but seeing the truth of Simms' destruction of innocence was satisfying. Those who say revenge is sweet have tasted it. The energy and confidence of Rector’s brush strokes, the stark realism in the children’s faces, the color, and arrangement of the characters told him here was an artist for the ages. One with a flair for the fantastic like Vallejo and Beksinski, but with a gauze-like filter like that of Montega’s Dead Christ and the simplicity of DelTufo’s Child on a Cross.

  Sir William Cooper, of the Tate Gallery in London, discerned the influences immediately, and contacted Rector for a first showing of the painting by a brief e-mail: I am not afraid to show your picture. Contact me ASAP.

  "The truth is, there is hope for true art," Raphael said as Angelico served him bread and jam. "Technique, materials, inspiration coming together like a holy trinity, elevating the entertainer to philosopher. If I was Rector's Muse, he'd paint truths as no other living artist, and others would follow. Imagine. The art world reborn!" He held a crystal tumbler to the light and it filled with buttermilk.

  "You words are sweet as the strawberries—Rector could do no better than you for a muse, though he doesn't know it. But Charles regards all his Messengers undeserving until they've been dead for a millennium of centuries. It would be imprudent to request a promotion from Messenger to Muse so soon."

  "Why imprudent? What’s Fate going to do, kill me?"

  Angelico filled his tumbler with tea. "No. But he can distract your protégé 'til he grows too old to realize your ambition. Delay is his favorite form of frustrating the desire of men—deny so long the dream that says I can, and it disappears into the despair of I could have."

  Angelico's words had the sting of reason; neither he nor Rector had the luxury of time. His first inclination had been to approach Charles with the idea of specializing in the dreams of artists, but such a transparent attempt to alter reality by altering vocabulary would anger him. Raphael put the problem in a corner of his mind, a corner that received the light of the impersonal sun so it could sprout solutions without his emotions interfering with good sense, and walked the path through Angelico's vineyard where Credo waited at the edge. He needed guidance. Prayer came naturally to the priest-painter, but words for him
were difficult.

  No matter, Angelico had told him, the measure of faith is not words.

  ********

  “Are you sure this Rector fellow needs a Muse?”

  “I’m sure. Rector has the gift–real talent," he told his temperamental superior. "Evil must be unmasked and recorded if there's to be justice, and Rector’s done just that. His Cache of the Damned, has taken Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Grey out of the attic and shown it to the world. It may be his mission to vindicate forgotten victims of people like Pettigrew Simms.”

  Charles drew his silk lace handkerchief to his nose, and sniffed. “Ummm, maybe. More like your mission, I'm thinking. Artistically, Rector may be competent, but is he emotionally strong enough to shoulder genius?”

  “You tell me. Is he fated for insanity—or worse yet, obscurity?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “He does have Madison to help him carry his burden,” Raphael said offhandedly.