The Sculptor of Lyon

CW: body horror, gore.

Jacques heard someone enter his 5th floor studio, heard the heavy groan of the old wood door, heard the tired thing thunder back into place, slamming with a finality that said ‘no more’, and it was the only thing that stopped him from pitching forward from his balcony into the street below.

Rich heels snapped against the scuffed parquet floor, and the boards underneath strained against the weight of every step the stranger took.

“Hello?” came a man’s voice.

Jacques relit his cigarette for the fourth time and looked out over Lyon. His studio was the top floor of a tower, sitting in the crook of the Saône, and he had a lovely view of the Pont de la Feuillée. They still called it ‘the new bridge’ even though it had been reconstructed nearly a decade ago, in 1841. He could just see one of his lions from this angle – a stoic beast, carved of marble, watching over the people of the city as they crossed the bridge. One of his first commissions.

“Hello?” came the man’s voice again. It was curious but calm, familiar but unrecognizable. A voice that tugged at his memories and hid at the corner of his eye.

Jacques huffed. If he should fall from his balcony, he’d tumble five floors and strike the cobble below. With luck, head first. But, it would leave a mess for his landlady. And besides, he had company. Ah, but the Pont de la Feuillée – if he snuck out at night, he might throw himself to the mercy of the Saône, and let it wash away the greyness of his life.

“Hello? Jacques?”

“Out here.” He flicked the last of his cigarette over the railing. “On the balcony.”

The steps drew close, and only once Jacques felt the presence of another beside him did he turn. And Jacques startled.

Beside him stood a man dressed head to toe in rich reds and blacks, accented with gold buttons and chains and jewellery. His boots were buckled with gold, his hands were covered in black satin gloves, and upon his head sat a broad-rimmed hat with a white feather in the band. The clothes screamed wealth, if not style – though perhaps they whispered a style to come.

“M. Desrosiers!” Jacques cleared his throat. “Pardon me, sir, but I was not expecting you.”

“No matter.” M. Desrosiers smiled and patted Jacques on the shoulder. “I’ve come to take a look on my commission.”

Something cold shifted in Jacques’ bowels. The commission: it was the one thing he didn’t want to think about, and the one thing he couldn’t stop thinking about. It was beautiful, it was hideous, and for better and worse, it was the only thing that kept him alive.

If it hadn’t been for the chance encounter with M. Desrosiers three months ago, on a moonless foggy night, when Jacques planned to get well drunk and then to go looking for trouble, whether in the dark alleys of Lyon or in the waters of the Saône or by means of the loaded pistol he kept in his pocket, he might finally have been done with it all. But when they ran into each other just outside Fournier’s, M. Desrosiers insisted they enter the bar and share wine. And when Jacques told him of his misery, of his heartache, of giving up, M. Desrosiers insisted further.

“I can’t do it anymore,” Jacques said. “Every breath I draw is torture. All I want is to hold her again, to feel her skin against mine.”

“There’s no greater pain, than that of the heart,” said M. Desrosiers. “But this is the well, from which we draw art. Tell me, what do you intend to do with the piece?”

“I don’t know. I will smash it.”

“Impossible,” M. Desrosiers said. There was no alarm in his voice, just a statement of fact. “I’ll not hear another word. I’m commissioning you to finish it.” And the price he offered, coupled with the wine, was not something Jacques could refuse.

Jacques lit another cigarette. “This way, sir.” He took his patron to his workshop, a dusty place filled with statuettes, busts, blocks of various stones and wooden frames, a place dominated by a column, of a man’s height, covered by a white cloth that promised severe edges. A stool sat before it, and hammers and chisels littered the floor, scattered like afterthoughts.

“Show me,” said M. Desrosiers, circling the covered statue.

“It’s not finished.” It cannot possibly be finished.

“Art never is. Reveal it.”

“It’s grotesque.” A cruel mockery.

“Impossible. Your hands are magical – they sing to the stone. Come, do not keep me waiting.”

Jacques tarried only a moment longer, and then listlessly he pulled at the cloth.

There was a radiant gasp. “Marvelous,” said M. Desrosiers. “She’s simply magnificent.” He touched the cold marble, placed his hands on the midriff, ran his palm up the perfectly smooth abdomen. Cupped an ice cold breast.

Jacques felt his throat harden.

“Mm,” said M. Desrosiers, his thumb and forefinger cradling a nipple. “Such attention to detail! So like the real thing!” His hand slid to the abdomen again, and then began sliding lower, following her contours, following the map of her muscles and flesh, lower, ever lower–

“Sir!” Jacques grabbed the other’s hand. “Sir, please. It’s unfinished. Very delicate.”

M. Desrosiers locked eyes with him for just a moment, but then a wide grin bloomed on his face. “Of course! Of course! How boorish of me to interfere with the genesis of art. But I tell you, you have made an exquisite piece here. It’s so like life.”

Jacques felt the cold in his guts roil. He beheld the work that consumed him: the statue of Camille. The torso of Camille, rather. She stood on the stumps of her hips and she had no arms. Neither had he been able to bring himself to carving her head, her precious face. Not yet. Not ever, perhaps.

But lifelike? Yes, Jacques had to admit that was true. He knew the map of her. His fingers had traced her every path, and he’d drunk deeply of her, gotten lost in her shallows. He couldn’t count the nights they’d spent in soft embrace, or the fervent daylight moments they’d stolen together. There was no greater love, he knew, and she was forevermore his heart.

It was M. Desrosiers that had introduced them. M. Desrosiers, his enigmatic patron, the man who discovered Jacques, who secured his first commissions and helped him build a name for himself. The man convinced of magic hands, convinced that there was nothing they could not sculpt. The man who knew very well what he was doing, when he brought Jacques and Camille together, and then left them alone.

Ah, but this! This cold, dead stone – it merely looked like Camille, once. Looked like her, before her death, before her murder. It was hard and unyielding, and had none of the vibrant warmth of the real thing, of his muse. This – this was a horrid effigy and no more.

“You have outdone yourself,” M. Desrosiers said. “Truly, your work honours my niece.”

“It’s unfinished,” Jacques whispered.

“I have a hunch it soon will be. I’ve a sense for these things, as you know. No magic hands myself, but a sense about art, yes. Now come, we will celebrate your progress and looming breakthrough.”

M. Desrosiers brought libations. They started with wine and moved on to absinthe, and all the while M. Desrosiers talked about his views on art, and how through it, he firmly believed, man could pierce the veil.

“Through force of will alone,” he said, “to create. Like God.” Jacques’ vision swam but M. Desrosiers seemed cogent no matter how much he downed. “But the conditions must be right. We must truly want it, as only the empty heart of the artist wants.”

“Soon,” M. Desrosiers said. “You are my most prized sculptor in all of my stables. Soon, you will prevail. I don’t doubt it. Now, I leave you to it.”

Jacques finished what remained of the bottles after his guest departed, deep in the black of night. The man was strange, and always appeared at just the right time, or just the wrong time. It was M. Desrosiers that introduced him to Camille, and then later, introduced him to the news of her death. It was he that found her. Strangled, they said, among the rose bushes on the family estate. The murderer, never found.

It was he… Jacques didn’t know if it was he. M. Desrosiers was the last to see her alive – that didn’t mean anything. Besides, it was disrespectful to harbour such suspicions about the man who funded him. Besides, it was too terrible to consider, if. If M. Desrosiers had played a role. If instead of doing something about it, Jacques had merely taken those funds.

Jacques downed the rest of the absinthe, and settled into fitful, fanciful dreams. In his mind Camille came back to him. He embraced her statue and in the moonlight, she turned into his lost love. They danced through the night and laughed and he twirled her faster and faster.

A thousand questions filled his mind – how had she returned? What was the other side like? Did she still love him? Did she know he still loved her? – but all were strangled by his pressing need to hold her, to have her. They loved like it was their last day, their first day, their only day; and he fell asleep in her embrace, tangled in sheets, feeling the warmth of her touch once more.

By morning, that touch had grown cold.

He awoke to a piercing headache and found himself draped over the unfinished statue, the headless, faceless cadaver, the armless and legless corpse. The pale imitation of a woman whose voice he could barely remember, whose touch he craved more than breath itself.

Cold, cold, cold.

But soft.

He gripped her shoulder and found his fingers sank into the marble, deformed it like – like skin. Grey skin, pallid skin, and webbed with dark veins, nearly black. He rose to sit, tried to lift her, and found she bent backwards, as though she had a spine. As though she were flesh. Dead flesh.

Jacques recoiled, swore. What was this? he wondered. Was this the drink? Had his mind finally broken?

That was when he noticed himself sinking into his bed.

His sheets, bunched in his tightly closed fist, had themselves grown soft and veiny, and covered in irregular tufts of hair. And the bed – a large slab of fibrous meat, heaved under his weight. His other hand sunk into it and something cracked. He pierced the surface, exposing a shattered, brittle bone, and a gush of foul blood.

Jacques screamed. The bed heaved under him as he leapt to the floor, and the parquet beneath his feet turned almost at once into a meshwork of impossible fingers, too long and too short, with too many joints, fused at all angles, all writhing and snapping and cracking under his panicked retreat.

Every tool he touched turned into a shivering mass of malformed bone and sinew, screaming of wrongness, and every wall he stumbled into blossomed into a rippling bruise, a labyrinthine organ, a tortured thing filled with fluids. The air in his studio grew hot and moist and blood and other things dribbled from a thousand open sores.

His shrieking unending, he charged for his door and the stairway beyond, but no sooner had he placed his hands on the heavy wood than it cracked into a web of ribs, hiding a colossal, misshapen heart of dozens of chambers, each beating a deafening drum and spurting gore everywhere.

Jacques turned and fled for his balcony – too late. The balcony itself became a broad, lolling tongue which rolled back and kept him inside, and thousands of jagged, splintered teeth erupted from both the ceiling and the floor.

The whole tower shuddered, ground against itself, writhed in fury and meaningless pain, and collapsed under its own weight. It pitched forward and splattered into the Saône, with a finality that said ‘no more’.