I get on my knees and grope around under the bed. My hand connects with what feels like material wrapped around something harder, wood maybe, and I just know I’ve found something significant. I get a hold of the whole lot, pull it toward me. A piece of gray material falls open to reveal a ragged pile of artists’ canvases, slashed and torn into pieces. So much mess and chaos compared to the rest of the room.
I look more closely at the material they were wrapped in. It’s a gray T-shirt with Acne on the label, an exact match for the ones in Ben’s cupboard. I’m sure it’s one of his. It even smells like his cologne. Why has Mimi been keeping her art stuff in one of Ben’s T-shirts? More importantly: why has she got one of Ben’s T-shirts at all?
“Jessie?” Victor calls. “Are you OK, Jessie?”
Shit. It sounds like he’s getting closer.
I start trying to fit some of the scraps of canvas back together as quickly as I can. It’s like doing a really messy jigsaw puzzle. Finally I’ve pieced enough pieces of the first one together to see the picture. I stand back. It’s a really good likeness. She’s even managed to get his smile, which others have called charming but I’d definitely tell him makes him look like a smarmy git. Here he is, right in front of me. Ben. Just as he is in life.
Except for one terrible, terrifying difference. I lift a hand to my mouth. His eyes have been removed.
“Jessie?” Victor calls again, “où es-tu, Jessie?”
I fit the next image together, and the next. Jesus. They’re all of him. There’s even one of him lying down and—Christ alive, that’s way more of my brother than I ever needed to see. In every single one the eyes have been destroyed, punched or torn out with something.
I had a feeling Mimi was lying about knowing him the first time I met her. I suspected she was hiding something as soon as her wine glass hit the floor in Sophie Meunier’s apartment. But I never expected anything like this. If these are anything to go by—if that nude painting is any clue—she knows Ben very well indeed. And feels strongly enough about him to have done some pretty serious damage to these paintings: those tears in the fabric could only have been made with something really sharp, or with a lot of force—or both.
I stand up but as I do a strange thing happens. It’s like the whole room tilts with the movement. Whoa. I go to steady myself against the nightstand. I try to blink away the dizziness. I take a step backward and it happens again. As I stand, trying to get my balance, it feels like the ground is rolling around under my feet and everything around me is made of jelly, the walls collapsing inward.
I stagger out of the bedroom, into the corridor. I have to keep a hand out on both sides to stop myself from keeling over. And then Victor appears, at the end of the passage.
“Jessie—there you are. What were you doing?” He’s walking toward me down the dark corridor. He smiles and his teeth are very white—just like a real vampire. My only way out is past him; he’s blocking my escape. Even with my brain turned to syrup I know what this is. You don’t work in twenty different divey bars and not know what this is. The drink some guy’s offered to buy you, the freebie that is anything but. I never, ever fall for that shit. What the hell was I thinking? How could I have been so stupid? It’s always the pretty ones, the seemingly harmless ones, the so-called nice guys.
“What the fuck was in that drink, Victor?” I ask.
And then everything goes black.
Monday
Mimi
Fourth floor
Morning. I’m sitting on the balcony watching the light seep into the sky. The joint I stole from Camille hasn’t helped me relax: it’s just making me feel sick and even more jittery. I feel . . . I feel like I’m trapped inside my own skin. Like I want to claw my way out.
I hurry out of the apartment and run down the twisting stairway to the cave, not wanting to meet anyone on the way. It’s full of the detritus from the party last night: broken glass and spilled drinks and dropped accessories from people’s costumes—wigs and devil’s forks and witches’ hats. I normally like it better down here, in the dark and the quiet: another place to hide away. But right now I can’t be here either because his Vespa is there, leaning against the wall.
I don’t—can’t—look at it as I pull my bicycle from the rack beside it.
He always went out on that Vespa. I wanted to know about his life, I wanted to follow him into the city, see where he went, what he did, who he met with, but it was impossible because he used that bike to go everywhere. So one day I went down into the cave and I stabbed a small hole into the front wheel with the very sharp blade of my canvas-cutting knife. That was better. He wouldn’t be able to use it for a few days. I only did it because I loved him.