Immortality

***
Eighteen

The bed was warm and soft and he lay sprawling in it, under the heavy sheets and blankets. He stretched, hearing several satisfying cracks from various body parts, and then he opened his eyes; he’d woken in such a good humour, but that was wiped from him immediately. He remembered where he was.

He hauled himself up in the bed, until he was sitting up, leaning back against the pillows and the headboard behind him, and almost wheezing, breathless from the effort. Obviously there was no waking with gloriously heightened senses this time, just the weakness that he understood came from the bite and the subsequent blood-loss. He did *not* want to think about where that lost blood now was.

The curtains were drawn back and the room was bathed in that same flat grey light to which he was fast becoming accustomed, let in from the overcast sky by the room’s one long, high window. It looked wrong for the room, strangely out of place, that of course being if anything about an icy fortress to where an unholy creature have been banished could be consid thd the norm. He looked around, his neck aching, and he had a good though thoroughly appalling idea why. He found Dorian sitting there, by the door.

Dorian’s presence there still seemed odd and inexplicable, but he waswly wly getting used to it. In fact, the strangest thing about him being there that day – he couldn’t tell if it was the morning or the afternoon but it was definitely daytime – was that he was sitting on the floor. He had his long legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankle, his back pressed against the wall and his nose in a book; apparently he’d finished reading Dante’s Inferno, as Gabriel could just make out that this new book was the second part, Dante’s Purgatorio. Gabriel watched as he read the next two pages, feeling just a little too weak to do much else, and then he slipped a silver marker between the pages and looked up, shutting the book with a snap.

“Well, it’s about time,” he said, setting the book down on the stone floor beside him, in front of something there leaning up against the wall. “You’ve been asleep for hours.”

Gal frl frowned. “What time is it?” he asked, almost surprised at just how normal his voice sounded, not weakened at all.

Dorian plucked his watch from his waistcoat pocket. “Almost eleven o’clock,” he said. “I’ve been sitting here waiting for you to wake since six.”

“Excuse me if I don’t give a damn.”

Dorian smiled suddenly, apparently amused by this, all white teend tnd that false impression of youthful innocence that was so very deceptive. “I suppose that I asked for that,” he said. “But I didn’t come here to apologise to you.”

“I didn’t expect you to.”

“Then that makes things easier. But just so you know, Gabriel, though I stand by everything that I’ve done, that does not mean to say I do not have certain… regrets.”

“My heart bleeds.”

“I expect that it shall, when the count has tired of you.” Dorian sighed, smoothing his hands doverover his thighs. “But I came to tell you a story. I don’t expect that you’ll believe it, and I don’t expect you to comment; all that you have to do it lie there and listen, and considering your current condition, you would most likely find it difficult to do much else.”

Gabriel made no verbal reply but glared slightly in response. Dorian smiled, that same familiar and disarming smile.

“Then I’ll begin.

“I was little more than twenty years old when I met Basil Hallward. He was an agreeable sort of man and I liked him – I suppose that even at the worst of time I liked him, though at the end he seemed a nuisance and a monstrous bore. I don’t suppose that he could help it.

“But despite his faults, I did like Basil. He was an artist, a painter, and he was really quite good in his way, though it seems to me that all great artists must in turn be rather mediocre people, whose art reflects the life that they *don’t* live. That may be why, though I am an adequate pianist, I can never be *great* - I live my life aloud, Gabriel, and so my music will remain forever mediocre. Unlike dear Basil’s art.

“It seemed that all his life Basil had been lacking just that extra something that would make his good art great, and then he met me. I don’t mean for it to sound so vain as that, but when we met his art did change; it seemed that he’d been lacking a muse, and whether I should be ashamed of the fact or not, I found that I was it. He loved to paint me, and though at the tI waI was little more than a child and perfectly immune to his flattery, I posed for him. His painting improved markedly. Everyone who saw it said so.

“And then came his masterpiece; he never painted anything quite like it before or after that. It was my portrait, and when I looked at it that afternoon… I won’t try to explain how it looked because it is much simpler to say that it looked just as I do now, the picture of youthful innocence just awakenedthe the knowledge of its own beauty. I knew that I would never be so beautiful as I was then, and the unfairness of it struck me brutally. My picture would never age, but I would; I would wrinkle and fade, my face a catalogue of all my years and all my sins.

“I think you can see where this is going, Gabriel.

“You asked me in Berlin how I came to be invulnerable as I am now. The simple answer is that I asked for it. I asked that my picture age instead of me, and it has. For years now, *years*, and I still appear as I did that day, even after all this time and all the things I’ve done. My soul is in that painting. I’ve killed to protect it, lied, stolen. Through that picture I’m immortal.”

Then he stood, and straightened out his jacket, adjusted his necktie, and didn’t take his eyes from Gabriel for a second. “Dracula took the painting,” he said. “Had I not done exactly as he asked and brought the book to him, he would have destroyed it, and me with it. Obviously I could not allow that to happen.”

He sighed deeply, leaning back against the wall, and Gabriel frowned, not quite willing to mention what he now knew about the book.

“But I don’t want you to think that I’m a good person, Gabriel,” Dorian continued, his gaze drifting to the window. “You always knew that I wasn’t, and I’m not. I’d have betrayed you soonr lar later even had Dracula not stolen my painting.” He glanced back at Gabriel, then back to the window. “As I said, I don’t expect you to believe me – who would? It’s such a fantastic story, and you’ve no memory to speak of. But perhaps…”

He stooped, picked up the thing that had been resting beside him; it was the size and shape of a picture, and he held it with the front to his chest. “I have something to show you.” He turned and propped the thing against the wall. Then, with one last glance in Gabriel’s direction, he strode off to the door. A brief knock, then he was gone. And Gabriel was alone with the painting.

For a moment he just couldn’t look at it, and lay there in the bed with his gaze averted. But his eyes were drawn to it, over the floor and the walls and the few items of furniture until at last he saw it. It was everything that Dorian had promised.

It was, perhaps, the single most terrible thing that Gabriel had ever seen. The face in the painting was gnarled and ancient, glaring out at him with tired, hateful eyes. There werewordwords to describe it, except that he knew, *knew*, that this terrible thing was what should have filled that void inside Dorian where his soul should have dwelled. This twisted, hideous thing *was* Dorian’s soul. It seemed so dreadfully familiar. And he couldn’t look away.

He had no idea how long it was that he stared, picking out in that picture every shade of sin the world had ever known, marking the face already ravaged by age. He stared. He wished that he could look away, but he could not. He wished that Dorian would reappear to take it with him – why had he even left it there with him, if harming it would harm *him*? Gabriel could tear it, smash it, throw it from the room’s high window, and that would be the end of Dorian Gray. Except, of course, for the fact that he could barely move for his infuriating leaden limbs.

So he lay there and stared, understanding somehow that everything that Dorian had said to him was true, knowing somehow that those bloody stains on the portrait’s hands were from the blood of Basil Hallward. Dorian had always liked him, even at the worst of times. He wished he knew how it was that he knew. He wished that he could look away.

And then Dorian returned. He strode back into the room, lit all of the torches and drew the curtains, picked up the book that he’d left there and tucked the painting under his arm. He didn’t say a word or even glance in Gabriel’s direction until he reached the door. Even then he didn’t turn to him.

“He’ll be coming soon,” he said, and slipped from the room; the door locked behind him.

It was strange, but knowing that the count was coming to him seemed considerably less chilling this time.

***