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The Red Lady

by Mob

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Twelfth bell’s chime,
fairest song, and poppy dew.

For the Red Lady,
‘ fore the Red Lady,
stand anew.

Light flowed through the shutters for many hours, its pale fingers raking the room, yet it was an unexpected delivery that finally roused me.

“Parcel for the young Masters.” A faint voice trickled up from the street.

Henri lolled his head towards me from the chaise-longue. His words tumbled out in a drawl. “I do not possess much by way of mastery this morning, might you get the door?”

“Henri, it is the afternoon already,” I said, but went anyway, trailed by his laughter.

Henri never changed, his languid temperament punctuated by spells of artistic frenzy. Skilled before the canvas, and at a multitude of musical instruments, he formed the beating heart of our little group. Indeed, this master’s house in Montmartre was his.

He promised us a retreat, and retreat we did. From the hustle and bustle of the Academy. From our usual haunts in fair Paris’ cafes and bars. Though we’d met through our music, the quiet decadence of the house let loose our greater pursuits. Henri’s painting, Alec and his never-realised path into sculpture, my own writings. What the Academy instilled in skill and rigour, it stole from us in time and breadth of spirit.

Here, we would steal it back.

At the front door, I prepared to greet the messenger—pushing the mop from my eyes and smoothing my shirt. But it was not to be. Outside, a deserted street that faded to fields in the distance. A parcel sat on the step—tall and neatly wrapped, with an envelope twine-bound to its top, addressed only to the house—postmarked Austria.

I returned to the parlour, turning the package in my hands. It was a heavy thing, its contents shifting ever so slightly on the corners. Alec must have heard the door, for now he sprawled on the Persian carpet, boneless and fluid.

“Who has friends from the Austrian Empire? This package travelled far.” I sat it centre stage, to a burst of excitement from Alec.

“Dearest Agata lives in Bohemia. Open it quickly. What’s she sent?”

I handed him the attached letter, and stripped paper by the layer, unveiling a finely-tooled wooden case. Its sides lacked tacks or glue—the seams twisted together through elaborate joinery.

“Republican sentiment is rising once more, and the embers of a nationalist Romance movement are inflamed.” Alec read to us in hushed tones above my tearing. “She sends us this pair of treasures for safekeeping, as they were passed to her from the mystic highlands of the Hyperborean Steppes. She hopes we might find inspiration from them, as they have inspired others.”

The casing fell away as the last of the paper left. Inside, a leather bound manuscript, and a queer plant that spilled from a china pot. Its tangle of crawling vines interlaced in a riot of iridescent green, offset by snarled carmine veins on each stem—bloody and radiant. I half expected them to pulse with life.

“Is there a bud in the centre?” Henri raised himself, squatting beside me, those chaotic shades dancing in his pupils.

There was—it nestled in the centre of the pot, entwined as though by threads. It was ensconced amongst the roiling creepers, unbloomed in the gentle light.

“Alec, did Miss Agata leave instructions for its care?” I turned to him, yet he was still buried in the letter. The expression on his face spoke volumes on the impact she had left.

“Alec, you sly dog, answer the man.” Henri joined with a vigorous grin, spurring Alec to attention.

“I apologise, my friends, I have not seen her in . . . too long.” Alec scanned the letter anew, flicking over a page. He stopped, his lips tracing the words, their edges quirking the further he went. “It is here, right at the end, just the one passage.”

He placed it next to the plant, atop the worn cover of the manuscript, and we craned our heads like nested chicks to read it as one.

Amongst the mystics of those storied lands, this rare poppy is held in the highest reverence. The Red Lady flowers not under the sun’s light, but from the nourishment of music. I know well your skills, Alec, my love, and know you travel with skilled companions. The manuscript holds the key to Her tastes, and should you succeed, She will bless you all with inspiration.

Retreating to the studio, we swore that very afternoon that this challenge would not defeat us. The hours dragged on. We circled about that manuscript, pouring over its labyrinthine passages, arguing over its details. I fear a seed was planted. Born of pride, fed by our foolish resolve, it led us ever onward with the beckoning of the Red Lady.

Sun’s new dawn,
clearest sense of pleasure’s might.
Praise the Red Lady,
raise the Red Lady,
dreamer’s plight.

An alien song. A haunting verse. We traced its shape through the night until a dim glow threatened the curtains. We battled through its cryptic pages. We emerged exhausted, and yet content.

“Henri.” My own voice shocked me, husky from our efforts. “I think we have found it.”

He paused, looking back from the fortepiano’s stool. A frown and a smile fought for space. “We are . . . close. The harmony on that last run was nearly perfect. You should stay with the Spanish guitar. But,” he turned, “Alec, could you switch to the fiddle, rather than the flute? I would like to try one final time.”

“Mmh.” Alec rosined his bow, gesturing assent.

The opening refrain started. It pulled us in, stole us. Our bodies moved, and voices interplayed, the lilt and melody slowly giving way to an insistent beat. The song spun about the room, its aura absorbed by the Lady in our midst. She drank it in. For the first time, in the pre-dawn blush, She spread her petals.

I cannot speak for the others, but as that crimson bud burst forth, quivering stamen spilling its fragrance about the room—

I was no longer there.

My body might have been playing, my voice raised in song—a vessel for the manuscript’s contents—but my mind was elsewhere. Unrestrained by minor things like walls or windows, my soul leapt outward across a bridge of scent and sound. I found myself among Her halls.

She noticed me from across the room, turning from the grand piano at which She held court. A playful smile on Her lips, a ruby dress on Her back, She began the next recital.

What insight.

What promise.

She spoke to heart and mind and far beyond the ken of man. She brushed me with Her presence and I fell deeply. That dress—its train pooled on the floor—rose to fill my vision, and I toppled into it, the crowd around Her looking on with glassy eyes. The surroundings unspooled, its threads weaving texture and pattern to a senseblurring wash of scarlet-brushed skin and the taste of half-forgotten dreams. I fell further. Deeper. Through tilted worlds of cloth and elegance. Her performance merged with our song, transforming far past the need for hearing. Lyrics slipped to whispered tracts that danced within my skull. The darkened mirror of Her gaze reflected lit paths of meaning plucked from chaos—deft strokes as fingers upon keys. I drifted amongst them, swathed in the truths spun within, until the echoes of our lives in Paris were but rumours of some distant land.

She blessed me in ways only an artist could know, only a madman could use. She touched upon angles I’d not considered, daring projects I lacked the inhuman wit to conceive.

And as the song faded, I found myself returned.

Perched there on our stools, surrounding the plant, we watched its flower shrink back into a bud as the closing chords faded. We trembled like newborns—slick with sweat, our pupils wide. Our instruments slipped from numb fingers. We ached from the strains of a labour we could not remember.

“Good God, the clock.”

I never knew who spoke, yet as the clock hands sneered at us from the mantle, we all cursed. Our eyes pulsed. Temples throbbed. But it was clear. Our performance had spanned nearly six hours.

A giggle split our silence—raw and trembling. Henri’s crooked smile followed, his voice urgent. “I don’t care. And none of you should, either. Can’t you feel it? Don’t you know? If this is the price to pay for truth, I’ll gladly spend it. Such a perfect muse. A precious gift.”

He rose from his stool on unsteady legs, his eyes over-bright. “I’m not going to waste this. I refuse to lose it. I’m going to my easel, and you both should go to yours. Let’s meet again. When it fades.”

Darkness creeps,
chasing the moon to other shores.
Hear the Red Lady,
fear the Red Lady,
evermore.

We worked as demons, as machines. Scarcely pausing to eat, I confined myself to my bedroom, my notebooks laid carelessly across every surface.

Words poured from me in torrents, though they felt not wholly mine. Days passed without the slowing of the nib. Pots of ink were scrounged and ran dry. The scripts I penned, the novellas building to novels true, they were beyond me. I wrote of worlds above imagination, of characters at once familiar and surely alien. And ever in their shade, peeking from their background, the Red Lady stalked Her halls, and She smiled.

I wasn’t alone.

In the drawing room, pigmented canvases stacked high until they overflowed in great cascades. Their origin was clear. Those complex tones, their dizzying patterns, the eldritch vistas they depicted. Though I had not glanced from the great windows of Her court, it was clear what they must have shown.

Henri’s palette leant toward the vermilion, the garnet, the fiery. His landscapes glowed from within. Smouldered. Their heat spoke of sensual promise, of rapturous delivery.

Out in the garden, Alec worked in a dandruff of rock shavings, and a manic dance of blade and chisel. His sculptures, ever naturalistic, now possessed true vitality. They sprang from the stone in graceful arcs, and breathed beneath his strokes.

No mere Venus, his visions of beauty took on garish forms, revelling in contrast and emotion. Figures knelt weeping, writhed in orgiastic pleasure, howled in fury.

Mealtimes ran at fever pitch. Great tracts of silence marked only by the clink of cutlery ruptured in bursts of conversation; our ideas, our techniques, our dreams shared as passionately as they were fleeting. Connection simulated, but never made. We’d slink from the table and back to our works, our words left to decay in our wake.

When we were strung out, when ink ran dry and brushes snapped and tools fell from blistered fingers, we met anew. In the studio. In reverent and desperate prayer.

She answered, and we walked Her chambers again.

When first I returned to the court, I found it not as I remembered. Yes, a grand piano stood, now raised upon a dais of stone scrawled with engravings that stole sight and beckoned the mind like an open wound. Yes, the vacant stares of Her courtiers lurked from the shadows. Now they thronged not in crowds but rested like mannequins unsuited for display. In scattered twos and threes they leant stiff-limbed against the walls, or board-straight hung— entangled in drapes of gore-red satin that crawled like veins from the brickwork.

But the Lady Herself had gone.

“Where is She?” I called to those rigid figures.

They would not meet my gaze.

I crossed the room and seized one by its shoulders. Its flesh, if it were indeed flesh, was cold, riddled with unwelcome textures that were not there when I dared to look.

“Where is She?” I called once more.

Its response was far from music.

I threw it aside and seized the next. And the next. I had to hear again that voice of revelation. Had to sense those things beyond my limits. On I went between bodies whose forms blur in my recollection, led one to the other by tongues not formed for speech.

A fresh corridor spiralled deeper from the arches of their unlanguage. Dress fabric was its walls. Its ceilings were high. I suspect I walked much further than I ought. I suspect I met Her in those depths, for Her song was present—its verses truths I once brought back, that now haunted my temples. There were Her convoluting patterns and the unreal taste of dreams it is better not to recall.

Yet when I fell back to earth and found myself in the studio, we three shared a lost and seeking look we once had not possessed. The more we saw, the greater we experienced, the less it sufficed. Our instruments shook in hands exhausted from labour and desperate longing, and we hungered still.

Complexions pallid, our features wan and limp, beside our arts we were beside ourselves. Outside ourselves. Pulled ever onward, with two goals eclipsing our minds—to drown in our projects, and to stand before Her once more.

Her scent clung to our skin and our clothes and the house around us. Her visage wandered through our spirits as we became an extension of Her court. Writhing verse beneath our skins. Glassy eyes, ever watching. We warped to better fit Her image, and we did not care.

By the flat hue of some dusk—or was it dawn, for the meal itself dissolved to fleeting shadows wrapped about our table—we hunched in brittle silence amid the scrape of silver forks on china, and the prodding disinterest of our knives. Perhaps we ate, though I could not picture the taste of any dish, nor feel the chill of metal on my lips.

“I can’t bear the clutter,” Henri said. “There’s too much noise.”

Alec narrowed his eyes, and for an instant the room they reflected was not there in Montmartre. “Then let us quiet it,” he said.

And we did.

First, we covered the mirrors, for fear of catching a glimpse of Her scarlet train behind our reflections. Not long after, we silenced the clocks, as they mocked us with each tick. Time fell away and we lost the love of sun and moon, a living twilight in our endless rounds.

If it was a delusion, some fleeting hallucination, it was shared by us all in turn. But I truly believe She lived with us, stalking that house in Montmartre—somehow present, Her nature beyond comprehension.

Then, at last, Her mercurial tastes perverted our works.

Realisation came as a wave of despair, a blackened sun that broke the fog. I jerked away from my desk. Hysterical. Revulsed at my chapter, snapping the pen and tossing it aside. I did not recognise those words, their hideous cruelty scratched into the paper, pages on pages, the spewing of some wracked devil. I threw the inkwell across the room. Its contents sprayed the walls with dark spots like some lingering infection. And as my fit reached its peak, I tore the covering from the mirror.

A tortured ghoul stared back at me.

Starved, wretched, it stood crookedly on spindled limbs. Veins crept like dismal worms down arms too emaciated to support them— palpated and violet. Pupils burning with fever glimmered beneath a gaunt brow.

I fled.

I sought Henri in the drawing room, yet the red in his palette was no longer paint. His body twisted into galleries of flesh—a living hive to nurture creeping swarms of pigment.

I sought Alec in the garden, yet the objects of his carving were no longer rock. They screamed beneath his chisel, unclear fusions of skin and stone that cried bone-white plaster at my passing. I could not meet their desperate eyes.

Shuffling through the familiar turned nightmare, I knew with stark finality what must be done. The barrel of lamp oil was heavy for my weakened frame. But I managed. As the conflagration rose, flames beautiful in crimson radiance, I heard music above their roar. Felt the call.

And stepped in, toward Her court.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod Episode 897

December 15th 2023

The Red Lady by Mob

Narrated by J.S. Arquin

Audio Production by Chelsea Davis

Hosted by Alasdair Stuart

Hi folks, welcome to PseudoPod the weekly horror podcast. I’m Alasdair your host and this week’s story comes to us from Mob. It was originally published in the 2023 anthology Collage Macabre presented by the Future Dead Collective

MOB writes, codes, and boulders. Currently found on The Dread Machine, Metastellar, and Translunar Travelers’ Lounge. Young Mob was a member of a touring orchestra and a jazz band.

Your narrator this week is J.S. Arquin. When J.S. Arquin was three years old, he’d carry a stack of books to the nearest adult and demand they read them all to him. When they finished, he’d fetch another stack. Thus began a lifelong obsession with books and the written word. These days, J.S. is a full time narrator, with over 150 audiobooks under his belt. I guess you could say he’s paying all those green eggs and ham forward. You can find him on Instagram and Facebook as Arquinaudiobooks, and on his website www.arquinaudiobooks.com.

 

So, mail call. We’ve just been sent a true story.

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I think about lenses a lot at the moment, as a critical tool in particular. I’m writing this having just written a piece for The Full Lid, my weekly pop culture newsletter, about how the most recent episode of Doctor Who uses the concept of identity as a lens to explore how the show has changed since the last time David Tennant yelled ALLONS-Y! It’s a good time, the episode and the newsletter, and that particular critical tool remains in my hand here.

To me, an exhausted and traumatised freelancer at the end of one of the toughest years on record, this story feels a lot like it uses the illusory joy of Hustle as a lens to explore obsession and horror. Every creative on Earth does it, that moment where you realize you need to eat but you want to work. We’re wired as a species to push our luck whether through logging a tenth hour on a video game or really digging on a draft even as our eyes cross, the caffeine pill bottle empties and the dawn comes up. There’s a Guy Ritchie quote I think about a lot, concerning B-Movie king Gerard Butler and how ‘he works best when he tastes his own blood.’

I know that feeling. It’s delicious. And unsustainable.

What Mob does here is show us what happens at the end of this trolley problem and what happens is EVERYONE DIES. This line:

 

‘Only an artist could know. Only a madman could use.’

 

In particular really hits home. A writer I used to look up to a lot used to have a sign on his wall saying SLEEP IS THE FUCKING ENEMY and even now I can see why. For the last six months, writers and actors have struck for something approaching a fair and living wage and it’s taken six months for the handful of billionaires who they’ve mildly inconvenienced to mostly acquiesce. Every artist is underpaid, every writer is under appreciated and the tragedy of it is I promise the folks you look at and think ‘I WISH I HAD THEIR CAREER’ feel the same way. Someone once told me Patron is really just the same creatives passing ten bucks between them and they told no lies.

So what else is there? How do you not chase the illusory narcotic high of artistic truth? How do you know but not use?

You stop. You walk away. You walk outside. You hydrate. You meditate. You talk to someone important to you. You see a film. You ground yourself in yourself and in doing so give whatever you’re making the space it needs to settle in your brain.

It is almost impossible to do. It is essential to do. Mob’s vivid, textural descriptions of the mechanics of artistic creation here speak to just how difficult it is to walk away. ‘Swarms of pigment’, the description of the beautiful, cold artistic Valhalla they all dream of. There’s always something better just ahead of you, always more iteration, one more draft. All you have to do is not stop. Ever.

Stop. Please. Your art will be better for it. Better still, so will your life.

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PseudoPod will return next week with It Takes Slow Sips by Michael Wehunt. Your narrator will be Jonathan Danz, your host will be Scott and Chelsea will be on production duties. Then as now it will be a production of the Escape Artists Foundation and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. And PseudoPod wants you to know ‘Art is never finished, only abandoned.’