The Golden Fleece Read online

  Adrian nodded his head, to show that he understood. What man didn’t want to become involved with a woman who looked five, ten or twenty years younger than he was?

  “Ungrateful bitch, aren’t I?” she said. “Four women out of five would kill for my looks, and I just resent the way they define me. I could probably have done with your mentality—but I didn’t have that sort of ability, any more than I could cut it as a painter. I have everything I need to be happy—loving husband, nice kids, more money than Croesus—but I’m not. The fault isn’t in my stars but in me. I hid it away, where Jason couldn’t see it—where no one could see it. But you can, can’t you? And you can’t even lie about it, like a normal person. You had to tell me.”

  “I could never understand how liars kept their stories straight,” Adrian muttered. “It always seemed simpler just to tell the truth. Normally, it doesn’t cause any difficulties.”

  “Bullshit,” she retorted. “In order for it not to cause any difficulties, you have to lead an utterly abnormal life—which yours seems to be, by the way, although Jason has a whole zoo of freaks like you, so you probably feel right at home.”

  “I’m sorry,” Adrian said, flinching under the assault.

  “Well, there’s one lie you’ve mastered,” she retorted, as if by reflex—but then seemed to realize that she was being terribly unfair. “Sorry,” she said in her turn. “Not your fault. Not Jason’s either. All mine. I think I’d like it better, through, if your eyes were clouded with lust, like almost all the rest. Just knowing you can see clearly creeps me out a bit, but when you look right through me like that...you don’t miss it—that side of life?”

  “I just learned to tell myself that it doesn’t matter—that there are other things in life to pursue.”

  A lesser person might have said “Money?” but Angelica knew better, She might not understand him as well as he thought he understood her, because he was a scientist and she wasn’t, but she knew that he hadn’t come to work for Jason Jarndyke for the money. She knew, as her husband did, that he was in quest of a metaphorical Golden Fleece for reasons more intimate than that.

  Instead, she said: “I learned that, at least. Don’t you find, though, that people expect you to be happy—not just to want to be happy, but to be happy? I always feel that I’m somehow letting them down.”

  “I’m not a beautiful woman,” Adrian pointed out. “I don’t have that kind of burden weighing down on me. Scientists are allowed to be eccentric...cynical and miserable, even. Nobody expects them to be happy.”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” she told him—meaning the beauty, he assumed, not the misery and the cynicism, let alone the lack of expectation.

  He didn’t reply—which was probably a tactical error.

  “Come on, then,” she said, making as if to get to her feet, even though she hadn’t finished her coffee.

  “Where to?” He asked, although it was a silly question.

  “The barn, of course. I want you to see it. I need you to look at it.”

  Adrian didn’t move. “Thank you,” he repeated, stubbornly, “but no.” He knew that he wasn’t going to get away with it, but felt obliged to put up a show.

  She arched her magnificent eyebrows. They were phenomenal eyebrows, and they arched with a perfection he’d never seen before. “Come on,” she said. “No more lies—and I know you’re not really a coward.”

  “You shouldn’t have come here, Mrs. Jarndyke.”

  “Why? Because Jason might jump to the wrong conclusion? He won’t. He’s in London. If he finds out—and he probably will, although I won’t tell him—he’ll jump to the right conclusion. And he’ll be glad. He wants me to let someone into the barn: someone who can see. He’s glad that he found you. He’s not in the least afraid that I might be so glad to have found a sight-mate that I’ll screw you.”

  Given that Jason Jarndyke had mentioned that possibility twice, in seeming jest, Adrian wasn’t so sure—but it was a trivial matter. Nothing of that sort was going to happen.

  “You shouldn’t have come, because you shouldn’t want me to see your work,” he explained. “Let anyone else into the barn by all means—but not me. Keep your secret.”

  She pulled a face, without injuring her beauty in the least. “Not the reaction I was expecting,” she confessed. “Aren’t you curious?”

  “Of course I am,” Adrian said. “I’m a scientist. But I’ve seen the direction of your work, from the painting of Jason onwards, all the way to Hell.”

  Her face lit up then, with a peculiar delight. “You figured it out!” she said. “Well done! And you actually think the trick might work? On you!’’

  She had jumped a little too far with that conclusion, but Adrian couldn’t see any point in correcting her.

  “I figured out, even though I didn’t see the start of the sequence, that you must have had high hopes of your children at one point,” Adrian said. “There was a time, I imagine—up to and including the painting of Jason and the Fleece, when you thought that you might one day have an audience—someone with whom to share...but genetics let you down.”

  She threw up her hands in a gesture of disgust. “They’re as bad as Jason,” she said. “I tried to teach them, to show them... but they didn’t grow into it. They couldn’t. Not their fault, poor lambs.”

  Adrian didn’t want to suggest to her that perhaps it had been mistake to marry Jason Jarndyke. She had still been trying to fit in at that point, and even if it had occurred to her, it would have been unthinkable to anyone else that having bagged her multimillionaire, she might turn him down for art’s sake, or even for love. She hadn’t been a gold-digger, though; she hadn’t been thinking in terms of an eventual divorce and a settlement that would make her independently wealthy. She certainly wasn’t thinking about that now.

  Adrian knew that he ought to be saying something else, in an attempt, however desperate, to lead the conversation on to less dangerous ground, but he didn’t know what to say, even to slow her down.

  “Now,” she said, “you have to see it. Even if I have to kidnap you, tie you up and drag you—which I don’t have to do, as you know. All I have to do is whisper in Jason’s ear. He wants you to do it—and you can’t refuse him. He owns you. Wouldn’t you rather do it now—-just the two of us, in private? I really can’t believe, you know, that you’re actually scared. I’d love to think that you ought to be, but you can see, damn it! You can see!’’

  Adrian realized that Jason Jarndyke had been right. His wife did lack faith in herself, and she really did need the testimony of his eyes even to begin to believe. Perhaps she knew that she wasn’t mad—she did not seem ever given in to that suspicion— but she didn’t know that her witchcraft would actually work. Now, she had a chance to find out, or at least to get the opinion of an understanding eye. She really did need his opinion, no matter how resentful she might be of her own need.

  And Jason Jarndyke, who hadn’t the slightest idea of what his adored wife was up to, would gladly serve as her accomplice. All she had to do was whisper in his ear, and he would grant her wish. He could deliver, because, in every meaningful sense of the word, he did own Adrian. Adrian had sold himself into that tacit slavery.

  In any case, Adrian thought, wasn’t Angelica right? He could see, and he could understand. There really wasn’t any reason for him to be afraid. He didn’t believe in magic. He was a scientist.

  Somehow, though, Professor Clark’s words were still echoing faintly in his ears—not just “Watch out for Medea” but “lamb to the slaughter.”

  It didn’t matter. He had no alternative but to bow to the inevitable. And Angelica was right about that, too—better now, with her, in private, than on a Sunday afternoon, under Jason Jarndyke’s beady eye.

  “You win,” he said, getting to his feet. “I’m being silly. I ought to be grateful for the opportunity—and I am.”

  By the time they had reached the top of the hill, he had almost talked himself into it.


  ~ * ~

  Like the Rothkos in the chapel, Adrian hadn’t been able to see Angelica Jarndyke’s depiction of Hellfire in its religious context—but that didn’t matter at all, because she had wrenched it out of its religious context, or restored it to a context of more primal fears. As he’d pointed out when confronted with the painting, you didn’t have to be a Christian to understand the ideas of sin and guilt, and the imagery of eternal punishment; pagans could appreciate that just as well—and atheists too. It was an unsettling picture, even for people who didn’t believe in God. That was the whole point of it.

  The difference between himself and Angelica, Adrian knew, was that he’d never hesitated for a moment over the explanation of his superpower. He’d always taken it for granted that it was something natural, something explicable in terms of sense-organs neurons and the properties of mind, something that bees could do. He’d never thought of it as a kind of damnation, a kind of curse. A freak he might be, but that was merely a matter of statistical oddity and genetic coincidence. He had always known that it wasn’t magic, and every action he had taken in consequence of his perceived freakiness had confirmed and elaborated that conviction. He had explained himself, and he had set out to exploit himself.

  He had never thought in any other terms than trying to market his knowledge, not in the vulgar sense of making money from it—what was the point of money if it couldn’t buy him love?— but in the sense of making use of himself, of giving people what they wanted: of feeding the appetites that their brains had but their consciousness didn’t know how to feed. Color matters, he had said to Jason Jarndyke. Appearances control attitudes, manipulate affections, and—ultimately—influence behavior. Clothes maketh the woman and man alike, and if people couldn’t dress themselves to maximum effect then they had to look to others to help them out. What Adrian hadn’t said, because he didn’t think it necessary, was that color sense was good; that esthetic sensibility was good—because they enabled people to make the best of themselves. They were empowering. In pursuing the quest for Jason Jarndyke’s Golden Fleece, and his own, Adrian fully believed that he was on the side of the angels.

  But he understood now, never having thought about it before taking ship aboard the Airedale Argo, that someone else with his clear sight might have gone the other way. Someone else might not have been able to accommodate the idea of uncanny sight to sensory apparatus, neurons and the capabilities of consciousness. That hypothetical other might have jumped to the conclusion that it was magic, that she really was a witch—and every further investigation she had made, in that context, might have served to make that conviction stronger and more elaborate. If that hypothetical other had then gone to art school—whether or not it involved turning down a modeling career in order to pursue her hopes—she would have realized soon enough, that she was capable not merely of adding a suggestive edge to orthodox imagery, but of hiding imagery away from ordinary sight, of rendering it occult, in every sense of the word.

  That hypothetical other might have started out the exploration of occult art with a view to finding others of her own elite— others who could see what she saw in her paintings, and would understand and sympathize. Had she been more fortunate, she might have done so, and found a coven. Having failed— perhaps, at least in part, because she had been sidetracked by marriage—she might have begun looking to the future instead, thinking that if she couldn’t discover a ready-made audience close at hand, she could create one. For a while, at least, she might have painted with her children in mind, hoping that they would grow into the ability to see what she was showing them, and that their secret might be all the more precious for being a family affair.

  And if that hadn’t worked either, she might have started thinking along different lines. She knew that there was a potential subliminal effect to what she was doing—that even people who couldn’t see what she was painting could be unsettled and intimidated by the imagery, partly because they couldn’t see it and partly because of what it represented: sinister imagery; menacing imagery; the imagery of witchcraft itself. And that knowledge combined with conviction and frustration, might well have led her away from the side of the angels, in the opposite direction.

  What Adrian suspected—and, in consequence, feared—was that Angelica Jarndyke, a self-confessed unhappy woman, in spite of her material wealth, had begun to paint curses. Having discovered that her art had the power to unsettle, she had decided to concentrate on that aspect of it, to take it as far as she could. If she believed that her power was magical, she might also believe that she really did have the power to injure people by means of her paintings. And even though she was wrong about the magic, wrong about the witchcraft—in Adrian’s scientific opinion—that didn’t mean that she couldn’t...because color mattered; esthetic sensibility mattered. Appearances could affect attitudes, affections and behavior. The knowledge that Adrian was trying to use to empower people to make the best of themselves—or, at least, to empower Jason Jarndyke to sell them the means to make the best of themselves—could, in theory, be deployed to the opposite effect.

  Angelica Jarndyke appeared to believe that the fact that Adrian could see the images in her paintings would insulate him from their effects, as she clearly believed herself to be insulated. Adrian wasn’t so sure—either about his own immunity or hers. She certainly wasn’t mad, or bad—but if she had been living among her painted curses for years on end, they might not have been without effect. How could they be? She might still be dangerous to know.

  At the end of the day, though, Adrian really was fervently curious to see what was in the barn. How would he not be?

  Because it was the end of the day, it was dark when Angelica Jarndyke led him around the back of the Old Manse—walking on the grass so as not to crunch the gravel and attract the attention of the staff. She had no torch, but several of the windows in the house were illuminated, and the light leaking out was adequate to guide them. She took a key out of her pocket and unlocked the barn door very carefully, and then indicated that Adrian should go in.

  She hadn’t switched on the lights, but he was expecting a coup de théâtre of some sort, so he didn’t object. He played the game, and stepped into the darkness, which became complete when she closed the door behind her.

  She pushed him forward—not brutally, but firmly, the nature of her touch making it clear that she was positioning him. She didn’t need light to know how the interior of the outbuilding was laid out. Adrian allowed himself to be maneuvered. When she stopped pushing, he heard her move away, presumably heading for the light witch.

  When the lights came on, they were by no means excessively bright—indeed, they were very subtle, but he still had to blink furiously, struggling to adapt his eyes. It didn’t take long for him he saw, vaguely at first, and then more precisely, and then as precisely as only he and she could see, what Angelica Jarndyke had been working on for the last seven years or so.

  ~ * ~

  The murals were not confined to the walls; they covered the ceiling and the floor as well. There was a surface area within the barn that represented a place outside the vision, a safe place to stand. Adrian realized that he was standing inside a glass cube, within the walls of the barn.

  The barn had a pitched roof on top, with exposed roof beams but the artist’s artifice had abolished the angles; the space within the roof now seemed curved, and the entire configuration of the barn’s inner walls seemed almost spherical. The viewer within the transparent cube did not seem to be standing on the bottom of something solid, even though he knew that he was on a glass plane looking through it at a further floor. Adrian could see the whole spectrum of colors, but when it came to the transparency of optically-perfect glass, he could still be fooled, still subject to illusion. The visual illusion was sufficiently powerful, at least at first glance, to cancel out the tactile awareness of the feet that they were standing on something solid. So far as consciousness as concerned, he seemed to be floating—and Angelica, w
ho was standing between him and the entrance door, seemed to be floating too.

  That illusion, rather than anything painted on the walls, made Adrian glad that Angelica was there—that there was something else he could see as well as the painted imagery. She, of course, had never had that advantage before—but she had built the illusion from scratch, highly conscious of its growth and development, and had spent most of her time outside the glass cube, working on the walls. She was not disconcerted; she was at home. She was not even looking at her own work: she was watching him.

  Slowly, painstakingly, Adrian looked around.

  At first he was disappointed. It was not what he had expected, and he felt that all his anticipations and anxieties had been for nothing, all his hypotheses mere fantasies. There was no Hellfire to be seen there, no witches, no demons, no sinister mythological creatures. Nor, for that matter, were there any vast “splodges” in which figures were lurking, outlined in subtle variations that most human eyes and minds could not discern, although there were several patches of seemingly-limitless darkness, of true unameliorated blackness, including a large rectangular section directly opposite the entrance door, suggestive of a tunnel or an abyss: a portal to oblivion.