The Cup of Life

The Cup of Life - 3

The place we walked into was like, well... the only word that came to my mind was maze. Not that there was anything in the construction of the rooms in front of me to suggest it—the floor plan was as open and spacious as any well-designed gallery should be. The exhibits, too, looked at first glance like they could just as well be upstairs: statues, sculptures, paintings and sketches. The biggest difference was that every single object in here was inside a large glass box lit from above, with only a few narrow paths left between them for people to find their way inside; the walls were painted a deep blue, like the bottom of an enormous lake, and everything was utterly still.

I turned to look at the nearest exhibit; it was a painting of the Minotaur and Theseus, with the creature sneaking behind the hero in a narrow corridor of the labyrinth. The entire picture was done in harsh shades of red and a deep, inky black, with jagged brush-strokes and exaggerated, splintered shapes that evoked R'lyeh more than they did Crete. The closer I looked, the more it seemed to me that the reds had the glistening texture of raw flesh.

The Minotaur's eyes shifted in their sockets to focus on me. I looked away.

"That's Pursuit by Eloise Ives," Emma whispered behind me, and I tried not to gasp. Her breath tickled the small hairs on the back of my neck.

I stepped aside. "I thought that painting was destroyed in the Blitz," I whispered back.

"It should have been," Emma said, her dark eyes cold and hard like the earth in January.

"What about that one?" I asked, and nodded at a clumsy still life of a glass pitcher full of milk. "I'm not familiar with it."

"One of my art surveyors snatched it from an abandoned property last year," Emma said with a shrug. "Sometimes, the pitcher fills with blood. If the painting isn't stored upright, it spills from behind the frame... which we found out because it was hanging askew on the wall. The room it had been left in was quite disgusting, as you can imagine."

"Quite," I muttered, suppressing a shudder. I looked around, peering into the gloom as far as my eyesight would go.

It seemed as though a microcosm of the country's art world was looking back at me—cow-eyed saints, landscapes, tall metallic sculptures and art installations I couldn't even guess the purpose of, a serene Venetian mask in one of the glass cages, naive, kitsch, pop art, forgotten Romantics. All of them several feet below ground in this chilly crypt of a room, never to be seen by the public. I thought for a moment about walking through the silent gallery on my own, with nothing but these painted and carved faces to see me move between them.

Hell no.

When Emma touched my elbow, I almost jumped. Almost.

"Come on," she whispered, giving a dark look to a suffering Christ on a cross who didn't look too upset about his suffering. If anything, he seemed almost gleeful to be hanging up there. A bad artist, or a bad artwork? "We shouldn't linger. The longer a person is inside this room, the stronger they get."

I glanced one last time at the bleeding pitcher, then turned and followed Emma out of the entryway and to the left, down a long, winding corridor. Each footstep of ours startled a motion-sensor light to life with a small click, chasing the dim stillness of the gallery from my mind. "Are you sure—" My voice rasped and broke. I cleared my throat and continued at a normal volume. "Are you sure it's a good idea to keep so many of these things in the same place? Don't they... feed off each other somehow?"

Emma turned on her high boot heels to look at me. She was almost a full head shorter than me, but her straight posture and her steely expression made her seem like she was meeting me at eye level. "My family worked for three generations to develop the best storage method for these things, Miz—"