“Who lives?” Henri asked, putting up his brush.
“He! He! Who do you think? The Colorman. I can feel him. I have to go.” She rustled around his studio, shrugging off the kimono and gathering her clothes from the floor, where they had been thrown in the passion of the night before.
“But, ma chère, I watched him burn.” Henri was distressed at the idea that the Colorman might be alive, but also that she had broken the illusion they had been sharing. Yes, he knew that she was possessed by the muse, but she was his Carmen, shy, sweet, rough at the edges, raw and tired from a life of hard work, and not at all like Lucien’s Juliette other than she was a masterful model. “Please, Carmen.”
“I have to go,” she said. She snatched her bag from the shelf by the door, then stopped and returned to him, looking at the small canvas on which he’d been working. “I’ll need this.” She took it from him, kissed him on the nose, and bolted out the door.
He wanted to follow her, but he, too, was wearing a silk kimono with a floral pattern, and a wig pinned up with chopsticks. He would need to change before going out into the street and she’d get away, but he had some idea of where she might be going.
Quickly, he gathered his clothes.
MORNING TWILIGHT OVER MONTPARNASSE. THE COLORMAN STUMBLED OUT of the Catacombs a blackened, broken, twisted thing, and while alive, he was not completely recovered from his latest death, and great chips of blackened skin crackled and flaked off him as he limped through the alleys of Paris.
Well, if Bleu was going to keep killing him, he was going to kill her right back. The baker and the dwarf didn’t have the stones to follow him to his cache of paintings and attack him—to burn his paintings. They would have required inspiration, and that was her raison d’être. She had used them as her weapons.
He would kill her quickly, then slowly and painfully—no, better, he would ravage her Juliette body first, then kill her. Then ruin the body and resurrect her as a ferret. She was strong, but he was stronger. He would do it. Kill her, then ravage her dead body, then call her up, then tell her that he had ravaged her until she screamed with rage, then kill her again and laugh at her when she came back as a ferret. Yes, that’s what he would do. But he’d have to make the Sacré Bleu. He needed the Sacré Bleu to resurrect her into a new body, and he needed the Sacré Bleu for himself or he would remain a blackened, crispy thing for some time. The old paintings had protected him, but he’d had to wait, first for a rat to stumble into the tarry puddle of his remains, then for Étienne, lost in the dark, to come to him. It was his faithful steed who had provided the life that had gotten him this far, but without more painting, he couldn’t make himself heal any more. It was a good thing he didn’t have to take a new body, like Bleu, though. He would have been a rat, or just as bad, Étienne. He had never told the donkey, but he hated that fucking boater hat he had worn. Still, that was a penis that you could frighten some girls with. He sighed a sooty sigh of a dream denied.
As he passed through the Latin Quarter, he found some clothes hanging from a line between buildings. They were far too large, so he rolled the sleeves and trouser cuffs, but they cut the cold somewhat.
For once, the nosy concierge at his building was sleeping, and he had remembered to find his keys in the mess of his charred belongings before making the long crawl out of the underground city. He wasn’t even sure how he had found his way. It was as if he had been given new strength from long, long ago.
Where he’d gotten it, of course, was from the intense ultraviolet light bathing his paintings at Pech Merle. Until Dr. Vanderlinden had lit his arc light, those powerful talismans had never seen daylight, never emitted their full power.
“Aha!” he said as he burst through the door. The Juliette doll was standing there in the dark, in her pretty periwinkle dress, doing nothing more than blinking. She turned to look at him but registered no recognition. She blinked. It was wildly unsatisfying. He would have fired his pistol for emphasis, but he had left it in the Catacombs because he had no more bullets for it.
“Aha!” he said again. And again, Juliette blinked.
She had her hands tucked into the small of her back, as if she was about to curtsy to her dance partner before beginning the minuet.
The Colorman limped to her, reached up and grabbed the ruffles on the bodice of her dress and tore it across the front. She blinked.
“I’m going to ravage you, then kill you,” he said with a charred leer. “Or vice versa!” He dropped his oversized trousers, then cackled at her.
She blinked.
He sighed. A key was clicking in the door and a redheaded woman burst in.
“Aha!” said the Colorman. “I’m going to ravage and?—”
“Where have you been?” said Bleu. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“No you haven’t.”
“Look.” She held up the Toulouse-Lautrec painting. “And there’s a completed Seurat, too. We need to make the color. I’m feeling weak.”
“You got Seurat to finish a painting?”
She gestured to the canvas that was leaning against the wall by the divan. Small for a Seurat, dynamic for a Seurat, but a Seurat nonetheless.
“What were you doing to Juliette?” she asked.
“I was going to kill and ravage her—I mean, you.”
“Oh, then proceed,” said Carmen. And then Bleu jumped bodies.
“You’ll be needing this, Poopstick,” said Juliette as the Colorman turned to her.
Her hand came around from behind her back in a great arc, holding the black glass knife. She struck him deep in the side of the neck and his head flopped to one side; on the return arc she struck again and his head plopped off onto the carpet and rolled to the wall with a thump, while his body crumpled into the pile of oversized clothing.