by Tanith Lee

Two short story collections by Tanith Lee, Tempting the Gods and Hunting the Shadows, were published last year by Wildside Press. A third, Sounds and Furies, was recently released by Norilana Books to coincide with the 2010 World Horror Convention, where Tanith was a guest of honor and where she received a Grand Master of Horror award. Tanith’s new tale for us, about the meeting of the world’s most uncollectible artist and a rich man who will stop at nothing to possess some of his art, would be a fine addition to the author’s next book of short stories.

Beauty must die.—The Beast, Eric Sarusande

It was the thirteenth month and Christmas this year fell on the 23rd of Endember. On Christmas evening Aamon took his favorite mistress, Jacinte, to dinner at his preferred restaurant.

Once they had been seated in the golden half-light—the restaurant maintained a deliberately rustic air—she began to notice how alert and excited he seemed. Was it something he was dying to tell her, or something he was determined to keep to himself?

“You look very tired, Aamon,” she therefore perversely said, sipping the champagne. “It’s always so nice to see you, but please, never put my pleasures before your own good health.”

Aamon smiled, and ate an olive and a chestnut.

He said, “In fact I’m not tired at all. I am wildly elated.”

“Mmm?” she asked with an indulgent smile.

“I shan’t tell you in here. Wait until we have our coffee on the private terrace.”

Aamon van Glanz was a multinaire. He was worth, so far as she knew, uncountable amounts of wealth, mountains of which floated, in several staunch currencies, inside the ghostly spaces of the financial web. Additionally he was quite good-looking, and a tolerable lover. She had been delighted when, three years before, he met her at a theatre party in the Old District, and began to show an interest. He never took up too much of her life; he usually retained five or six women at a time. His gifts to her were excellent, and occasionally savagely expensive.

They ate their leisurely meal, talking of other things. At about 11:30, going out to the private terrace, with its pleasant divans, coffee, liqueurs, chocolates, and a (quite fake) utterly convincing view of the heavens free of all interference, and alight with slowly wheeling planets and cascades of brilliant rhodium stars, he shut the door and locked it and said to her, “My love, have you ever seen any of the work of the sculptor Torhec?”

Jacinte had not. She had this in common with a great many billion people. Although, in the “civilized” world, most people had heard of his work, and certainly knew his name.

“Torhec, of course. But I’ve never been to one of his exhibitions.”

“I’d have thought you might. If not for the preliminary art, for the subsequent violence, at least.”

Jacinte looked deliberately vague. Here and there she had experienced—as now—a strange impression Aamon might be getting at her in some obscure, self-amusing, unusually clever way. Which was probably absurd.

“Well,” he filled in, “I have. I have been to the very latest show of his, at the Gloewar Gallery. In all I went twice. Once at the opening in November, and again last month, when it ended.”

“Was it good?”

“Oh, yes, beloved. Very very good. It was superb.”

“Which part did you prefer? The sculptures—or . . . the destruction?”

“In an odd way, both. I rather respect what he seems to have said. I can see the point of it.”

“But surely,” she murmured, “if everyone behaved as Torhec does, or is said to—nothing would be left.”

“But that is his point. Nothing is left, ever, or ultimately can be.”

Jacinte pulled an involuntary face and quickly pulled it back to charming creamy sweetness. “Suppose Leonardo da Vinci had thought the same,” she added teasingly, wistfully, “or all of the great geniuses. No Leonardos then, no Michaelangelos. No Picassos or Kentys or Marlettes—”

“But in the end, the end, dear Jassy, those artworks too will be gone. They’ll finally rot or crumble, or in the case of Marlette’s glass—break. Or, if all else fails to spoil them, they’ll melt or fry when the earth at last drops into the sun—or freeze and shatter when the sun goes out—whichever theory one subscribes to. Even the photographs or movies or holograms made of them will be lost.” He gestured expansively to the recreation of space beyond the terrace. “Even that wonderful vista out there, and I don’t mean just a replica, will one day dissolve into non-being. It all gets lost. Even us, or what’s left of us. Nothing, ultimately, can remain of anything. That is precisely Torhec’s point.”

Jacinte raised her glass of wine, and stared into the tiny distortion of her mirrored beauty. And I too? One day I will be old, one day I’ll be dead. I must, thought Jacinte with optimistic revival, get someone really good—and sane—to paint me, and film me, as soon as I can.

When she surfaced from this reverie, she grasped quite some time had elapsed. Aamon now seemed only ordinary. His excitement had either been dissipated, or suppressed, and she felt a sharp twist of curiosity after all. He had been going to tell her something? Or only this news of seeing an exhibition, followed by his little lecture on the nature of decay and transience. Reluctantly, at last she said, “But what was the secret you were going to reveal to me, Aamon?”

He seemed bemused. “Was I? I wonder what I meant? There’s nothing, Jassy . . . Unless, perhaps, this,” he concluded, placing before her the gift box in which lay a flawless diamond choker.

* * * *

To return to his second visit to the Gloewar, multi-rich Aamon had easily acquired a ticket. And though there were always crowds both at the opening and the close of a Torhec exhibition, Aamon was positioned on a plush chair in the front row, accompanied only by his bodyguard, Brack. Like everyone else they were then issued with goggles; others had requested and received full-face, head- and/or body-shields. Twice, before such precautions had been put in place, people in the audience were wounded at the climax of the show.

Torhec, however, had entered the room clad only in shirt and pants, the shirtsleeves rolled up almost to his shoulders to reveal the muscular arms of a dedicated sculptor. His feet, large yet shapely, were quite bare, and nothing protected his valuable eyes at all. That too was, perhaps, in keeping with his beliefs.

His eyes, this way readily visible, were large and of a deep brown. His hair, thick and very dark, was complemented by his long eyebrows, and the short, trimmed, dense moustache and beard which inked in his jaw and uncompromising mouth. In build he was stocky and tall, evidently immensely strong, his skin brown and here and there lightly scarred, most noticeably on his right cheekbone. His hands, like his feet, were large but beautiful, his most handsome features other than his eyes.

Glancing once at the audience, he lifted his right hand in a polite and peaceful gesture that was also incredibly dismissive. It had one extra quality: it seemed to draw across the huge room, dividing himself and his creations from all else, a transparent wall of damage-proof glass. Naturally this was not to protect anyone. It was merely to distance and keep others out. Aamon had heard, in fact, that several times at early displays of this “closing ceremony”—as the media had lately come to call it—maddened enthusiasts had rushed forward, attempting to prevent the final act. Gallery police had stopped these interventions, but clearly Torhec had perfected an added precaution of psychic room-division. It was a sort of magic, and no doubt he placed his faith in it. Certainly that evening it worked. No one rose to object. Only a few cries rang out at the commencing carnage. Then there was total quiet, but for the blows and their results, and occasional involuntary human noises—a cough, a grunt—and afterwards, when all had been done, hearty applause. Aamon had not joined in either outcry or congratulation. He preserved, as did the seven-foot, stoical Brack (and Torhec himself), utter silence throughout.

Behind the non-actual glass shutter, Torhec at first paused briefly. Various people claimed he did this in order to bid grim or fond farewell to the fruits of his talent. Torhec himself had never, in any interview or other communication, endorsed this theory.

Aamon marked the little lacuna. It took, he noted, less than fifteen seconds.

Then Torhec picked up the hammer from the bench.

In size it was substantial, made of sustainable oak, and steel. He hefted it without effort, strong as a bull, high above his raven head.

Originally the works had been ranged all across the room, and some too were displayed in an annex, where a fountain played. Prior to the “closing ceremony” each one had been carefully relocated to half of the room Torhec now occupied. Accordingly they presented a rather muddled crowd of items. (No one who had not previously visited the exhibition would, today, have been able to tell much about them. Approximately one third of the audience comprised just such people. They were only interested in the endgame.)

The statues and statuettes were of differing materials. Some were hewn from stone, some made of plaster; here and there rose a marble form, and there were two of wood. None stood taller than four feet. They were mostly human in type, of both genders, abstractly clothed or naked, but there were too a group of slender, plant-like creations twisted among their own branches, and a single obelisk in reddish burnished stone. Aamon, who had visited the exhibition previously, had then examined each of the pieces with great attention. He had seen each was abundant in the most exquisite detail. All were graceful to an almost supernatural degree, and beautiful, a few in curious, nearly sinister ways—critics had tried to explain them, unavoidably, perhaps successfully, or not. Aamon did not try to explain, even to himself. His victorious life had not been founded on explanations. No sketch, photograph, video, or hologram had ever been permitted of the works of Torhec. Only the fading mental pictures could not be prevented; memories. Inevitably, in the majority of cases, they would be faulty, as are, generally, even those of the grieved-for dead.

The hammer smashed home with its blast of demolition, and the initial brief flurry of oaths and shrieks from the audience. A blizzard of broken white and gray exploded up and scattered down. Once begun Torhec did not hesitate. Inside two minutes five of the smaller artworks had been reduced to rubble. These chunks, even the most shapeless ones, the sculptor continued to mash, until they were only crumbs, splinters, dust. He was immensely thorough. It was his policy to be so. All creatures, things, all beauty—perished, and so should this.

Soon the air was thick with whitish fog. Those who had not requested facemasks, or used other improvised protection, coughed in an intermittent strangled undertone.

Eventually only six figures were left. These were the forms carved from wood, the bigger marbles, and the red obelisk.

Torhec laid the hammer aside and took up the first of the group of flasks also ready on the bench. They contained special mixes of corrosive. As he poured them over the last of his work, the audience watched in wonder as wood and stone bubbled and smoked, curling over, melting, flowing down to unidentifiable puddles on the floor. Torhec finalized things with the hammer, bashing to dust any lingering element. (Later cleaners would come to clear the wreckage, sweep away the smoky dirt and suck up the more glutinous remains. These too, where human, were strictly monitored. Machines watched and ultimately frisked them, since not even a fragment of powder might be saved (filched) from this armageddon.)

At the close, the audience started applauding frenziedly. Aamon and Brack were the only persons who did not applaud.

Torhec took little or no notice of any response. He again confronted the chairs, offered them a curt bow. His face was expressionless. He turned briskly and strode out of the room.

When everyone repaired to the cleared annex with the fountain, where tables loaded with alcohol and delicacies attended on the guests, Brack approached one of the gallery’s aides and presented Aamon’s card for the attention of the management.

* * * *

Aamon van Glanz met Torhec personally late in December.

The venue now was Aamon’s exclusive club on Westnorth Boulevard. In a private coffee-room Aamon had waited—Torhec was rather late—and when the sculptor entered, the entire nut-brown and gilded parlor seemed to shrink and drain of color.

Torhec, that big man who carried himself, Aamon now saw, always with careless ease, sat down facing him.

“I’m late,” said Torhec. This statement was the only apology Aamon was to receive. Another then, perhaps, who did not build on explanations.

“So you are. Would you like coffee?”

“I’ll take brandy, thank you.”

Aamon, who had researched what was known of Torhec’s preferences, passed him the bottle.

Torhec had shrugged off his winter coat. Underneath he still wore only shirt and pants, albeit different ones. His feet at least had been ensconced in boots, his hands in heavy gloves before he stripped them.

“It’ll be Christmas in less than a month,” Aamon remarked. “Do you have plans?”

“Yes,” said Torhec. He drank some brandy, thought about it, and swallowed the contents of the glass bulb. Aamon leant forward and refilled it. Torhec said, “And the reason for this meeting?”

“Aside from the pleasure of contacting one of our foremost artists?” Aamon smiled. “I’d like to commission you.”

“Really? I suppose that can be arranged.” Torhec seemed not particularly enthused. For two years the public had been clamoring for his skills, in the city, next everywhere in the whole country and beyond. “I’m working,” Torhec said, not touching the second dose of brandy, “on some stuff at the moment. And my next exhibition—”

“Is at the Firecrest Halls,” supplied Aamon, “in January in the New Year.”

“Yes.”

“This commission of mine,” said Aamon, with a lazy calm he did not at all feel, “is something slightly unusual.”

“Oh, yes?” Torhec glanced at him. At no time so far had he properly looked at Aamon. Torhec seemed more interested in the vast views from the side windows. They were real ones, the vista of the Boulevard stretching for miles, railed in either side by the elegant and glassy buildings, and ending in the vanishing point of a winter sky. The sky too was wonderful, changed to royal purple by the morning lighting, and the city’s Climate Control, whose soft wavering rays might sometimes be glimpsed shimmering above like the most self-effacing Northern Lights.

“What I had in mind,” said Aamon, “is to commission from you one solitary piece—the subject to be anything you wish, of course, the choice is yours. And the exhibition, if so I can call it, would take place in my own house, the one here at the Heights. I expect you know the area.”

“I’ve heard of it,” said Torhec. “Very well. If that’s what you’d like. When do you want it?”

Aamon thought, We might as well be arranging a delivery of oranges, or a lawn-cutter. In a moment, he thought, in a combination of rather childish glee and apprehension, I shall wake him up.

“As soon as you could finish it,” was all he said.

“No problem there, then. I have one or two new pieces already done provisionally for January. They won’t miss them. If you don’t care what you get, you can have one of those. My usual price—”

“We’ll come to that,” said Aamon. “Rest assured, the remittance will be extremely high, as befits your genius. And, as I’ve also said, to receive anything of yours will content me utterly. Would tomorrow be possible?”

Torhec abruptly grinned. His teeth were white and strong as the rest of him, as if purposely grown to help him bite his sculptures into being. “Why not. Tonight, if you like.”

“I’d love it. This is splendid.”

Torhec reached out, took the second brandy and downed it. He had half begun to get up again, the proffered financial reward seemingly almost immaterial to him, or else something of more import in the offing.

“Just one more thing,” said Aamon, soothingly. “Perhaps you might sit down again, if you would. There is an additional matter I must put before you.”

“Surely your people can let me know anything else. The payment too. I trust you, Van Glanz. You have a gloriously honest reputation. You’ve no reason anyway to cheat me. Simply get someone to arrange the details. Aside from that, you’re aware of my own method. My work will be yours for one month, or one month and seven days if you want the fullest stretch. Then I shall arrive with my own people and, as always, I’ll break everything up. It goes without saying, if you wish to invite guests also to witness that event, I have no objections. My own gang will then remove any debris. Nothing will mar your house or its furnishings, nor will any mote of my work remain.”

“Precisely,” said Aamon firmly. “Which is why I must enlighten you a little further.”

Torhec sat. His face grew blank, and then a scowling concentration fixed it. For the first time he looked fully into Aamon’s eyes, a disconcerting gaze, stony, Aamon thought, as any statue’s—or a gorgon’s. But the rich man was prepared.

“What I want, Torhec, is to retain your work indefinitely. I want it not to be broken up, as all your work always is broken up by you. By which you demonstrate the transience of loveliness, and life itself, your elegiac and practical reproof to God, or whatever ghastly supreme force makes and breaks all of us, and everything. I understand this, Torhec, and I salute it. But I, Torhec, also want to play at God, or at a god, a nicer one, who tries to save something fine from the wreck and give it—if only temporarily—the immortal life it deserves.”

“No,” said Torhec instantly, hard as a hammer blow.

“Wait,” said Aamon, “let me finish. This exquisite work of yours—unknown by me so far, yet obviously exquisite because you have made it—will be kept in a vault of my house. The house at Heights has several such cellars. They are impenetrable, except by myself, or, in rare cases, those machines I prime with my authority. No one, Torhec, will have access to, or look at, your masterpiece, save me. I will swear this on or by any means you stipulate. If you wish you may examine all the arrangements. Only I, Torhec, ever, will see your work. This single work. I will even, if you wish, limit myself to a certain number of visits to it during any given year. There are ways of ensuring this. And you can check records of my dealings elsewhere. As you yourself have said, I have never reneged on any deal, never broken my word. I am known for that. Only I will ever regard this cherished creation. And, if you like, on my death it can be destroyed—remotely—by a charge laid in the vault.” Aamon took one long, slow breath. He added, coolly, “And in return, I’ll give you two million reulars.”

Torhec’s face, which had stayed like rock, now moved. Not only the eyes, but all of it seemed to blink.

He said nothing, but he swallowed. Much louder than when he drained the first brandy.

“Don’t you think you’re worth so much?” Aamon said. “Of course you do. Already you’re becoming a wealthy man. But fashions alter, and even great genius may fall from its pedestal. We need only remember Mozart, or Clemorte Iyens. And too there is the unreliability of the world’s currencies—always a little dubious now. Except the reular, which as everyone agrees, is the only safe monetary unit left. With two million of them, I’d think, you can do exactly as you please for the rest of your long, long extraordinary and creative life.”

* * * *

“I have been asked for this before. Nine times, and always by the very rich. I have always refused.”

“Who offered you two million reulars?” Aamon asked, with the crude finesse of utter truth.

“None. I said, very rich, but not rich in your way, Van Glanz. But really it doesn’t matter. My answer is the same. No.”

They sat then in silence for a few moments. Aamon was more than aware that, despite the refusal, Torhec had not got up again to leave. Surreptitiously Aamon pressed the small button inside his sleeve that signaled to Brack, waiting in the corridor, that all was well. A sudden protective intrusion might be unhelpful.

Aamon tried to analyze Torhec’s bleak and uncommunicative face. The man was staring again from the nearest window, studying perhaps the endless glittering traffic on the Boulevard. Considering?

Finally, Aamon spoke.

“Can I offer you more brandy? Or something else perhaps.”

“Aside from your money.”

Torhec’s tone was oddly bitter.

Wildly Aamon hoped to see in this a chink in the sculptor’s granite walls.

“Unfortunately, my only talent is to make money. I can’t make anything else. Therefore it’s all I can offer, aside from those necessities and luxuries money provides.”

“I remain here,” said Torhec, “because you puzzle me. Why do you want a piece of my work so much, if you propose showing it to no one else? What use is it to you? If you boast you have it, while you never reveal it who’ll believe you?”

“I told you. I respect your wish to reprimand a destructive God by copying Him. I want the role of a god who cherishes.”

“You have a stock of treasures, no doubt.”

“Some. Those I valued and could get.”

“You must rate my work highly,” said Torhec. And then—then he rose again to his feet. He drew on his coat.

“I have one last suggestion,” said Aamon. And he too got up. He was rather shorter than Torhec, as he had known he must be. Next to the other’s great hands his own looked like those of a boy of fourteen.

Torhec stood there. “Well?”

“If you will give me your work, in exchange for my two million reulars, I will agree, and under all former conditions as outlined, not only not to show the piece to any other, but myself not to look at it. Never to look at it. You shall put it in a crate, install a blind of some sort, an anti-X-ray filter to keep the interior of the container unseeable, seal it, lock it, booby-trap it if you wish. Ever unseen then, the contents will remain with me until my death, when—as I promised you—it shall be destroyed. And before that day or night it will, to all intents and purposes, remain invisible—non-existent—destroyed, dead. Like all your other work. No human eye will be set on it. No hand will touch it. I’ll tell no one. Even those professionals who, monetarily, must be involved, will know nothing of the nature of the deal. Only I. I shall only—I shall only know it is there.”

Torhec’s face altered its contours. The most peculiar of smiles had crossed the rock. “Van Glanz,” he said, “I believe you are as mad as I am.”

* * * *

The last month came, Endember, the month of the year’s dying fire. Next came Christmas, and five days after, the New Year. At certain eras of life, both individual and general, time will move very swiftly. Further years arrived and, with their months and festivals, slid away into history. A fifth December ended, a fifth Endember began, just as always. It was once more Christmas Eve.

Veronise, who by then was the leading favorite among Aamon Van Glanz’s seven mistresses, watched him with distinct inquisitiveness, which she did not attempt to disguise.

“You seem very edgy, darling,” she said. “Is everything well with you?”

“Everything in my life is splendid, you most of all.”

Knowing she had been fobbed off, Veronise gave him her wise-cat’s smile.

Later, when they left the ivory-tinted bedroom and went downstairs for supper in the second, dark green, dining room, she was aware whatever it was that excited Aamon had not been quenched by love-making.

She did not question him now. She only went on watching him.

He knew she did this, but her feline gaze had never troubled him.

When they reached the fruits and sweets stage of the meal, he said to her, “Have you ever heard, Vero, of the sculptor, Torhec?”

“Oh yes. I went to one of his shows once. A tiny piece of broken marble hit me in the face. I was only nineteen and I cried. My companion was very angry and afterward he told the officials there that people should be offered facial protection. It didn’t scar me though, as you’ve seen.”

Aamon looked at her consideringly. He was not amazed her main recollection of the event was that she had been hit by flying debris. It was pointless to ask if she had liked the sculptor’s work.

“Five years ago,” Aamon said, “I met Torhec.”

“He was attractive,” said Veronise, “in his own way.”

“Perhaps. I thought him a genius. I still think this.”

“I knew someone,” said Veronise, slyly eating a Chinese peach, “who took a photograph of his statues. But the gallery police confiscated it. He had to pay a fine.”

Aamon said, “I asked Torhec to sell me one of his works. I was willing to pay him two million reulars. Providing I could keep the work.”

Veronise stopped eating. She raised her eyes and stared luminously right into his.

She thought, What should I do to make him offer me such a sum? Perhaps it might be possible.

But she said, “What did he say?”

“He said no,” Aamon replied.

“And did he mean it?”

“Oh,” said Aamon, “he must have. It was against his principles.”

Principles, thought Veronise, What in God’s name are those?

After a lavish cheese board they drank vitreous thimbles of a rare eastern spiced spirit, and returned to bed, this time in the crimson suite.

During the long winter night-morning, after 3 a.m., Aamon lay awake, his own brain ticking with little mouse-like scurrying thoughts, which, luckily, Veronise (a cat) would neither see nor sense.

He was well aware that he had a recurrent compulsion to tell people, occasionally anyone, about the deal he had firstly wanted to make, and then attempted to make, with Torhec. Needless to add that, once the deal was concluded, that end of December five years before, the urge to reveal it all to anyone had dogged him like the phantom hound of some preternatural curse.

Of course, despite constant flirtations, he resisted successfully and always. Part of his off-kilter delight in the deal’s victory was this nagging joy of wanting to fling wide the doors of the secret and let it loose. But he had given his word. And he never broke his word, never betrayed or reneged. Such integrity was one of the huge pillars of his own personal achievement. He could not now afford to blab. Evidently, in the past, he had, with other things, never been tempted.

* * * *

As it had been arranged between himself and Torhec, the maneuver was carried out like a kidnapping, or rather, the resolution of one, when the ransom is paid and the victim restored. Aamon had only obeyed the sculptor in this. Torhec had told him, as they sat again in the coffee-room of the exclusive club, exactly how everything must be done. He—Torhec—might have been planning it for days. Had he? Subsequently Aamon asked himself if that could be so. For Torhec might well have coined such a contingency modus operandi. Others after all had tried to buy the longevity of his work from him. If none offered such a succulent remuneration as Aamon, they had still proved that not even a Torhec might be completely free of pestering. (Every man too has his price. Or so they say. Inevitably the type of price may vary, not only in amount but in scope.)

Torhec outlined the procedure in a few cool sentences.

“One of my people will contact you inside the hour—or your agents, if you prefer. You or they will then meet him in person today—the place to be mutually arranged. Somewhere discreet.”

“Why . . . yes,” Aamon had murmured, docile, almost stunned.

“He will receive your check for the exact sum you’ve stipulated. Two million reulars.”

“A—check—but the usual method of electronic transfer will see the money safely into your account, at any bank or freehouse of your choice, in moments—”

“No. I must insist on a check. Made out by your own hand, and likewise signed. An antiquated format I know, seldom used for over thirty years. But a man of your standing, Van Glanz, should have no difficulty in getting use of it.”

“Yes, certainly then. A check. Why not—”

“Once the check is in my possession, the artwork will be brought to you, by a couple of my work gang. Where do you want to take the delivery? At your agent’s premises or directly at your house?”

“My—” Aamon broke off. His breath had caught in his throat. He cleared it and said, “My house at the Heights.”

“The piece will be invisibly stowed inside an ordinary box, a small wine crate. It won’t look like anything at all. And it will also, in accordance with your promise, be X-ray filtered and sealed fast. You’ve sworn never to look at the piece, and you will be well advised not to try. As you said, you’ll know it is there, an example of work by the sculptor Torhec, for the duration of your life. I advise you again now,” Torhec added quietly, “never to break your word. Never to attempt to look. For your own sake.”

His voice was devoid of any menace. It was flat and remote.

Aamon lowered his head. His wrists were trembling. “Thank you,” he said.

Then Torhec laughed at him. That was all: a brutal trio of barks.

Torhec rose once more, and walked out of the room, and Aamon touched the hidden button in his sleeve in the summoning signal for Brack. By the time, nine seconds after, that the tall bodyguard entered, Aamon Van Glanz seemed quite composed. Within half an hour one of the most colossal freehouse bankers had been contacted. They had plenty of dealings with the Van Glanz corporation, and within a further twenty minutes everything was in motion.

Before the sun had even crossed behind the last quarter of the climate-controlled over-mantle, the large pale paper check, scrawled with jet-black words and numbers, had been couriered, offered, and accepted. Before the sun’s blood-red ball had bounced entirely down under the horizon’s edge, a small, stout wine-crate, normally the carriage for a dozen bottles of Fornian Pinot Blonde, had been unloaded in one of the inner halls of the Van Glanz mansion on Westnorth Heights.

Aamon stood alone with it in this hall for nearly an hour. He stood staring at the crate. Once he walked all round it, and then again: only twice.

Obviously it had been sealed tight, and no doubt rigged with anti-tampering devices. It might even maim him or cost him his life should he attempt to open it. Or it would maim or kill anyone he designated to attempt that in his place. As for a machine making the attempt, doubtless that would result in an uncontrolled explosion, causing untold damage and also loss of life. . . . But this did not even come into it. No, the threat of such a punishment was immaterial. He had given his word. And Torhec had trusted him.

Aamon Van Glanz was the only man, the only human on earth, who would now possess an artwork by Torhec the sculptor.

That must be enough.

The case was borne down into one of the lower vaults. In a previous century it had been a bomb-shelter, and was reached by three individual elevators. The first was beautifully decorated, the second plain, and the third ugly, almost gross, and equipped only with a hideous Everlasting, one of the poisonous and dull light bulbs of that earlier period.

Aamon accompanied the porter robot that held the crate. Aamon oversaw its settlement in the long and narrow sub-basement chamber, whose walls were lined in platinum and lead. It sat there on the dark trestle, in the dull dead twilight, and stared back at him, and for another longish while he stood before it and gazed at its blank and unknowable face.

That night Aamon dreamed he came down in three stages from the mountain, behind Moses, who bore in his strong arms the two mighty tablets of stone on which the Laws of God had been inscribed. But both stones were blank, and Moses’ brown eyes like the eyes of Torhec. So Aamon knew neither he, nor any other, would ever dare to ask, let alone try to decipher, the blank mystery of the Laws of God. They would all have to invent them, and even then they would risk both sanity and life by such temerity.

* * * *

Those five years on, Aamon left the bed in the crimson suite, leaving Veronise, sleeping catlike.

He dressed in the adjacent annex, and went down through the house, got in turn into the three elevators, descending to the vault.

He alone knew the entry code. Even the machine that had first taken the crate there had had that portion of its memory erased.

Everything was just as he recalled. The light, the room, the box. There was no reason any of it should have been altered. But he had not gone back, not once in half a decade since the installation, and somehow he had believed (ridiculously), that some change must have occurred. Or he had only hoped so. Hoped that if he abstained from a visit for long enough, at last the wall of the casket might, spontaneously, have given way, and the wondrous prize be lying there naked, visible.

But the crate was as he had left it, the relatively germ-free moderated air, soured only by the Everlastings, stable and non-destructive to its material. Even the lettering, that told of twelve bottles of a sable-white wine, was pristine as if just printed on.

Aamon paced about the box. Round and round, far more than twice. He recalled the five-year-old dream, which he considered less blasphemous than crass. He thought of the myth of Pandora, who opened the forbidden box or chest or pitcher and let out all the evils of the world which—ever since—talented humanity had been striving to cram back.

And he thought too of the king in the other myth, with the ears of an ass, and of the barber—or whatever he had been—who had learned the secret and had to tell, in desperation whispering it to the river reeds. But ever after when the wind blew, or if any cut a reed and made a pipe, they sang the secret out loud. Asses’ ears, asses’ ears. Asses’ ears.

Shall I tell just one? Aamon asked himself. Not try to look, no, never that—simply . . . confide. But to whom? To that woman upstairs? To some other woman? To a valued employee? To a drunk on the street?

Why did I come down here? I have the damnable thing. That is enough. I swore it would be. It is.

Torhec was by then in some foreign country. He still gave his exhibitions. Was still well-known, feted, scorned, criticized, and adored. Now whole arenas were filled by people on those final days of the armageddons—the “closing ceremonies,” when everything was smashed and melted into crumble and clinker. Huge screens sometimes relayed the proceedings to those outside who had been unable to obtain, or afford, a seat. (The tapes that supplied the screens were always, it went without saying, presently wiped.)

But Torhec would have no need to worry now if ever his prowess waned. A great if eccentric star, he would be safe for the duration of his days, having those riches Aamon had given him. While Aamon himself, of course, had never missed the two million, amid the opulence of his personal fortune.

I have it. I have it. That is enough. There it is. When all the rest is gone, when he has destroyed all of that, this is here with me, while I live. It’s mine.

He went back up through the house, and undoing a high window in a lonely room, whispered into the ecologically selective light snow now spinning down through the climate-controlling waves above, “I have a piece by Torhec, Torhec. Torhec.”

* * * *

Inside eleven further years, Aamon Van Glanz passed from the rank of multinaire. He became a max-multinaire, one of the wealthiest men on the planet.

All that happened without his lifting a finger, accepting a contributory call, scanning an apposite viewer. Without, in a curious manner, his really noticing.

While, in the same way, he began to grow old, also barely noticing.

That is, it crept up on him, his aging. Just as his wealth had done. Two panthers stalking him, the first golden and gleaming, limber and imperious. The second gray, deadly, sad.

That particular Endember, he was at the other, older, northern house, by the sea.

Out in the wilds, there was no Climate Control, except what had been introduced into the building. Heavy snow had fallen, a blazing white even in the gathering dusk, and fringes of the ocean had frozen into a thickly striated weave of ice. Beyond, bluish milk, the water stretched to the matte blue band of vision’s end.

Reflected in a fifty-foot high pane of window, Aamon could see his last mistress, Ezessi, calmly knitting a shapeless mass of coppery wool.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “I think I’ll be returning to the Heights.”

She did not pause. “Of course. Shall I come with you?”

“Yes, please do. It’s much warmer there—I mean it looks much warmer. When I was young, Zess, I used to spend a whole twenty-eight day winter month here, staring out at that view. But now, now . . .” He did not finish.

In the window her reflection glanced up at him, gently, and forbearingly. She was not a vast amount younger than he. Perhaps she understood that, in some incoherent form, he feared the coldness of the landscape, and the sea, might one day trap his ousted soul or personality; he would then wander forever on the frigid shore. He had better be very careful and never die, here.

During the afternoon Aamon had watched Torhec on the WWV. Sometimes Aamon dialed the searcher to find out where the sculptor was, and now and then had been rewarded, if such was the proper phrase, by a handful of minutes broadcast live from one of Torhec’s “closing ceremonies.” These were the things everyone always wanted to see, although the briefest whirl of images from the latest exhibited and doomed works (under contract all footage to be destroyed less than ten seconds following the hammer blow) flashed by, before the mayhem began.

Torhec too had grown older through the years. He appeared, unsurprisingly, well-off. Yet he was still, both physically and psychically, a carelessly powerful man. A little thickening at the waist, a slight laxness of facial muscle. They did not detract, would only have been truly notable to such a connoisseur as Aamon Van Glanz. The sculptor’s eyes stayed dark and focused. His dark hair merely had been seeded, like the northern ocean, with ice. There was a small thin scar on his other cheek. But his hands carried no spots of age. They remained huge, fine, and lethally capable.

By then, that afternoon, Aamon was so used to watching Torhec’s destructions they had, Aamon believed, slight effect on him. He had never, after the initial visit, gone to any other of the exhibitions.

Ezessi and he dined in the closed dining room, which had no windows, and which played its human occupants Bach. After this they went to their separate beds. It was Ezessi’s company he relished now the most. Should he feel any other need it was more easily satisfied alone. And that mostly to please his physician, who had assured him sexual release was good for him in moderation.

The next day he and she flew out through a white blanket of weather and into a dark, bony evening. By 4 p.m. they were in the mansion at Heights. Real logs burned in the grates. All the lamps were lit.

“Zess,” he said, countless times, always instantly breaking off and changing the subject.

When dinner was done she said to him, “What’s troubling you, Aamon, my dear?”

He had never known with any of his women how sincere they were—generally his common sense had told him: not very. But Ezessi had this unusual sibylline calm. She was very nearly as serene as an icon.

Aamon poured them another aprés-fin and sat down in his chair.

“Some years ago,” he said, looking only into the shallow tulip of green liqueur, “I bought a piece of art from Torhec. You know who I mean by Torhec?”

“Yes, my dear. You’ve told me about him. We’ve often watched him on the world wide view. In fact, just yesterday, we did so.”

“I hadn’t forgotten, Zess.”

“Did I say you had, Aamon?”

“The point is—I kept the work I bought from him. I kept it.” He added, as if to the drink alone, “Kept it.”

“So he didn’t destroy it, as apparently he always must.”

“No, Zess. I persuaded him. We did a deal. But I swore I’d tell no one. Now I have. You.” Aamon waited. She said nothing. Her serene face lured him on. “And anyway, the core of our agreement was that I was never to look at the artwork he’d given me. I never saw it before either. He sealed it in a crate. I suggested it could be booby-trapped. It’s been here, under this house, ever since. About two miles down.”

“In the old bomb-shelter.”

“An iota lower than that.”

“It seems, Aamon, not unreasonable.”

“What do you mean? Of course it’s madness. To have bought it—and never—seen it.”

“Did you never before,” she mildly inquired, “buy something that you did not see?”

“Stocks—economic portals—items of my so-called financial empire. Yes, those. Houses even. This house I bought through an agent, and never bothered to view the report. But such things—in any case, I did eventually see them all, or the results they brought. But the work of art Torhec sold me—sight unseen and never seen. I think now I really must. Tonight. It will be now.”

She appeared to be studying him attentively.

At last she said, “What about the booby-trap?”

“Oh,” he said plaintively. “I sent an expert team in while we were in the north. They checked the crate by machine. Then two volunteers personally tested it. It seems, rather strangely, they’re often asked to carry out such services, test the opening of things without themselves actually breaking the vessel undone. Once or twice members of the team have died, doing such work, but their dependents are always excessively compensated. Besides, they have assured me, Torhec’s crate is locked only with an ordinary electrolock. There are no devices at all rigged on or inside it. There’s only the filter, of course, to prevent anyone seeing its interior through an X-ray camera or similar intrusion.”

Aamon paced about the room. “I could have undone the thing and looked at it at any time during all these—what is it?—fifteen, sixteen years. The very day after he sent it to me. That night. I could have looked then. I never did.”

“Why not?” Her voice was like his own inner voice. It had asked him too: Why not?

As he had answered himself, he answered her. “I’d sworn not to. I don’t break my word. Never have. I’m famous for this. But that wasn’t the reason.”

“What was?”

“I don’t know. Not fully. Why I didn’t look, why I must look now.”

He had reached one of the windows of the house at Heights, and gazed down on the glittering firefly heap of the city so far below. On to this view her reflection was not projected, nor really his.

Softly he heard her ask, “Aamon, are you ill?”

“Oh—no. No, not at all—not yet. But I suppose—getting old has something to do with this. Because he—Torhec—is like God. He creates and mercilessly destroys. I have to have some kind of answer—even though I don’t know what the answer is, or even if there can be an answer.”

She said, “Torhec only reminds me of that priest who sponsored the burning of great works of art during the Renaissance in Italy. I think his name was Savonarola. He called the destruction the Bonfire of the Vanities.”

But Aamon had barely heard her finally. He did not see the room, or his reflection, or the city outside. Already, mentally, he was in the first elevator, traveling smoothly down into the abyss below.

* * * *

Above him, on the ceiling of that first elevator, when physically he reached it, was painted a sunshined summery sky. Never before had this struck him as incongruous; no doubt he had not been paying attention. Oddly, now his concentration seemed fixed like steel elsewhere, he did take in everything rather sharply. For example the swift glide of the first lift’s motion down, and the somewhat slower gait of the second. The third and last went extremely quickly. It made his stomach churn a moment, or that was only perhaps his nerves.

Once in the under-room, bathed in the awful Everlasting light, Aamon approached the box rapidly. Those others, sanctioned by him, frisked by the new bodyguard, Slait, monitored by robots, had used the lifts and entered here not long ago, to perform their tests. But even now the space seemed undisturbed, and on the side of the crate, black as if just applied, the spurious identity: Pinot Blonde (Zibeline Blanche) 12.

A suitable key to the electrolock had already been extrapolated from the lock template, fashioned, and left for Aamon’s collection in a robotic safe that would reply only to his thumbprint. Now it did so, its mindless penetrating eye gleaming.

For a second then, holding the key, he faltered. He was not afraid, he discovered, not excited. He was anxious, and—deeply unhappy. Oh, not because of any guilt, not because he broke his oath. Be damned to that. He was allowed, surely, one blot on his inconsequent virtue. What was it then? Standing with the key, which winked its own wicked little white light, leaden sorrow washed through him.

He would be disappointed, that must be it. He was having a premonition of seeing, in the opened crate, some unimportant work Torhec had palmed off on a rich idiot. Or of abruptly realizing, after all the years of spellbound recollection, that after all Torhec was now hopelessly behind the times, or—worse—had never been any good. In the box then would be an inferior lump of rubbish, retained so long, and in such mesmeric captivity. As if Aamon had bravely swarmed the castle of the Sleeping Beauty, only to find an unexceptional if rather coarse female, snoring, or more repugnantly waking up, and reaching out demanding hands.

Aamon shrugged off the weight of all this, the unease, the superstition, and his grief.

With due care he applied the key to the lock.

Which gave a caustic little click.

Perhaps, despite everything, the crate would now explode.

But the crate did not do anything save give the slightest quiver. The near side of it slipped about a quarter of an inch out of the securing groove. It was open. From the narrow line of darkness, caused mostly by the X-ray-deterring filter, came a faint walnutty smell, and a whisper of the filmiest particles—dust.

Then he felt he could not move. Then, unavoidably, he moved.

Aamon Van Glanz wrenched out the side panel of Pandora’s Box (wood splintered, the filter cracked), and the drizzle of the miserly Everlasting light soaked in.

Staring at his revelation, the max-multinaire said—thought—nothing. Only after a while he burst into a bellowing shout. When the shout ended, once again he stood entranced. It was very likely another hour before he leant forward and reached inside the crate.

* * * *

Aamon woke Ezessi in the long winter night. He did this with apology, and a bottle of vintage champagne the color of mercury. She knew it was not sex he required. Those nights had passed.

“My dear, what is it?”

“Oh. It’s victory, Zess.” She waited. He said, “For something.”

They drank the first glass. There was plenty. It was a jeroboam.

“I went,” he said, “to the crate. I opened it.”

“Yes,” she murmured when he stopped, as if seeming to wait for her avowal of remembering. And next, when again he seemed to await her prompt, “And what was there? Was it—beautiful?”

“Yes, it was quite beautiful, in its own terrible, horrible, cruel, and heartless way.”

“He had—” even she hesitated, “he had somehow arranged that it be destroyed when you undid the crate?”

“No, my love. He’d destroyed it even before it went into the crate. He knew—he must have known—he knew what I did not know then—that one day I must look. Such was his power over me. And so he arranged it that, if I should look, I would find only the destruction. Demonstrably, if I’d kept my bloody word, I would never have known what lay inside the box. I could have retained my peerless illusion instead that I possessed one isolated masterpiece which had survived his onslaught.”

They drank a second glass, very slowly.

He asked her, “Aren’t you curious as to what it might have been? I mean, what the rubble amounted to—powdered stone, or chips of wood, or the stain of acid.”

“Please tell me, Aamon,” she said, patiently.

Now he felt himself so alone, Aamon did not find her patience either irritating or consoling.

As if randomly he said, “It occurred at once to me that I do in fact possess one of Torhec’s masterpieces, since I have the remains of something he destroyed. Normally every bit is cleared away, disposed of. But for this he’ll have worn gloves. Or even—my God—even made someone else complete the job. Yes. That’s what he’d do. So not a print, not a trace of DNA is there. Nothing of his. Nothing. Yet too I know this thing, even in its ruin. Frankly it wasn’t really his, though it would have been. I’d seen it once. Sixteen years ago. He hadn’t made it.”

She watched him. Was she startled? Aamon closed his eyes. He continued. “They’re unusual, of course. But I’ve used them, here and there. It was my check to him, you see. The check that paid him for his work. Torn into two million pieces, one for each of the reulars—or so it looked. That’s what was in the crate.” Observing him now, Ezessi saw his face had voided all expression. How empty he seemed. His was a mask she had glimpsed occasionally on the WWV, the face of a man whose skull had been smashed, still alive yet lobotomized, feeling nothing, and never to feel much ever again. He put down his glass and said, in a sort of clockwork voice, “One day Torhec himself will vanish. Like all of us. They’ll find his debris. It will be laughing. He, if none of the rest of us, has understood the joke.”