Le vrai visage de la beauté
A short horror flash by Maggie Slater
Monsieur Poulain was well known for his carnal appetite and unrivaled portraits, but this new series entitled Le vrai visage de la beauté disturbed even his most ardent admirers. One such of these, Mademoiselle Gibault, stood with the tip of her tiny nose almost touching the final small canvas, upon which the portrait’s subject had sloughed off the skin of its cheeks, exposing creamy brushstrokes of bone.
She was a beautiful girl, Mme. Gibault, but the kind average men rarely cast a glance upon: strange cheekbones, angular jaw, hauntingly deep-set eyes, and lank, black hair that would be stunning rendered in ink or charcoal. To the artist, however, with his superior eye, her features hooked his soul and made him hunger for a canvas to catch her on.
“What do you think of it, my dear?” M. Poulain glided up to her elbow, proud that he’d kept the starving tremble of desire out of his voice. He took a drag on the cigarette pinched between his fingers. They itched awfully to trace the line of her neck. “It’s dreadful, no? What did the critics call it? ‘Une horreur.’”
The breath wavered in Mme. Gibault’s throat, and the quick step she took backwards made his head reel as if drunk. “Non, Monsieur. I think it’s the most beautiful portrait I’ve ever seen.”
Her lace-gloved finger rose to hover just a hair’s width from a gob of crusted maroon paint on the canvas. “Just here, where the light catches upon the glistening of the flesh, showing it to be fresh and moist where you’ve pared it back to expose the skull. Or here, where you’ve hinted in the shadows of the dried rivulets of blood seeping from when you gouged out her eyes.”
M. Poulain felt a bird’s fluttering in his chest, and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray at hand. “Mademoiselle, you are mistaken. There was no paring of flesh or gouging of eyes.” He forced a laugh that sounded reedy even to his own ears. “This corpse I acquired from a local physician and rotted away naturally. I merely painted it throughout its decomposition. Unnerving to the public, to be sure, but death is itself unnerving.”
Mme. Gibault stood as still as a professional model, only her dark, hooded eyes shifting to peer at him. “Non, Monsieur. It is you who are mistaken. The bruising is wrong for the death to be long past. The light still lingers in her eyes, just there.” She pointed again to the final portrait, the ravaged face, the waxen girl with her exposed bones and a hint, yes, a hint of terror trapped in her eyes.
A shudder of revulsion rippled through M. Poulain as he withdrew a step. How was it possible to capture such things in mere paint? He trusted his own skills, his eye was impeccable, but the accuracy of the rendering now made him faintly sick to his stomach. If this girl could detect it, could not someone of authority? Someone who might ask unpleasant questions?
“Come,” M. Poulain said, taking the girl firmly by the elbow. “This image has clearly overwrought your delicate sensibilities. There is a chair, just beyond the gallery, that you might rest in.”
Was it his imagination, or did she resist, ever so slightly. But no, she came then, allowing him to guide her through the crowd and into the back halls where there was neither art nor audience. The moment they stepped among the shadows, however, he felt a pinch upon the back of his hand. He jerked his arm away from her with a curse, but was suddenly unsteady on his feet, bumping up against the wall.
“Come with me, Monsieur,” Mme. Gibault said in the pandering voice of a nursemaid to an ancient and demented man. “Steady now. It’s not far.”
She led him to the empty room, and lay him gently back on a velvet-padded bench he had not noticed there before.
“What is the meaning of this?” he croaked, already losing control of his tongue as she picked up a long, curved boning knife.
“What was the meaning in what you did to my dear cousin, Sabine? Do you know how delighted she was to learn that you had chosen her as a model? My poor Sabine, she believed that the face people show the world is always the true one. But people like you and I, Monsieur, we know that is not the case, and I should like very much to expose yours.”
The knife bit into the skin of his jaw, but whatever she had given him made him powerless to so much as lift a finger, let alone scream as she peeled his flesh mask away.
Hi there! If you don’t know me, I’m Maggie Slater. I write speculative fiction of a variety of stripes ranging from outright horror, sci-fi, and fantasy to strange, humorous literary stuff. My work has appeared in genre mags like Apex Magazine, Metaphorosis (and even got translated into Mandarin for Science Fiction World), as well as in literary magazines like Redivider and The Core Review.
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