Creepypasta Files

A Caress

“WANT TO SEE SOMETHING that will change your life?”

Felix was looking over his wire-rimmed spectacles at me with an intent, piercing stare. I grinned, and took another swig from my beer.

“Always.”

The wrinkles of his face behind his shaggy grey beard folded into a sly, amused smile, and, with a grunt, he heaved himself up from his chair on the porch. “Then let’s go.”

I’ve known Felix for years: ever since I first picked up the tools of my trade, in fact. Felix is a sculptor too. I suppose you could say he’s been kind of a mentor to me, and if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be half the artist I am now. Anything I know about my craft that’s worth knowing I got from Felix. These days we meet up every couple of weeks to drink a few beers, shoot the breeze and wax philosophical about anything and everything. When Felix has something to show me, I know I’m in for a treat.

We trudged through his old house, a warm little nest of a place filled with throw rugs and curios, and Felix led me down into his basement. It was as black as pitch down there, but Felix took me down through the darkness and stood me carefully in a particular spot before turning on the lights.

People usually don’t mean it literally when they say something took their breath away, but I must have stood there simply starting for at least a full minute before I realized I’d forgotten to breathe. Held in a delicate spiderweb of thin steel wires were a number of white marble fragments, each exquisitely capturing a part of a woman’s form: here a tremulous hand, there the soft sensuous curve of the sweep of the back of the neck; a naked ankle, an exposed breast. The wires held each broken fragment in its correct anatomical position, so the overall impression was that of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle, formed as much by empty space and imagination as by the isolated shapes that hung in the empty air.

“Well?” Felix grinned impishly. “What do you think?”

I was utterly spellbound, my attention held fast by this remarkable creation as securely as the stone pieces were by the wires. I had never before seen stone worked as finely as this – it was as if every pore of the skin lived and breathed, as if at any second the figure would sigh and turn away.

I struggled to find the words to express what I was feeling. Felix chuckled to himself.

“She’s quite something, isn’t she?” Felix had a gift for understatement.

“She’s… mesmerizing.” I moved closer, walking around the pieces to examine them more closely in their individual pools of light. “Where on earth did you get her?” Skilled as Felix was, work of this unsurpassed quality could not have been his.

“Here and there.” He looked like the cat that got the cream. “I’ve been slowly tracking down the fragments over the years. In a way, you could say she has been my life’s work.”

I stood eye to eye with the shard of sculpted face: an exquisite eye, framed in a rough triangle of brow and cheek, the first blossoming of the swell of her lips, which abruptly sheared off into nothing, like the memory of a stolen, illicit kiss. “I don’t understand. Why have you never shown me this before?”

“I wanted you to see the whole. Well, as much of a whole as I could manage. I’ve encountered her slowly, made her acquaintance one part at a time – found a sliver of shoulder in a barn in Hamburg, a section of hip in a private collection in Taiwan – I fell in love with her piecemeal. I wanted to see what her impact would be when viewed as a single figure.”

“I’ve never seen anything like her. She’s in a league of her own.”

He gave an excited little clap of his hands. “Isn’t she? I knew you’d appreciate her.”