Deathscape by Dana Marton Read Free Book Online Page A

you’re doing?”
    “ Checking myself out against medical advice.”
    The man stepped in to block the way, clamping a restraining hand on his arm. “I realize it can be difficult to talk about a traumatic experience—”
    Jack put whatever strength he had into making sure his voice was strong and clear, glancing down at the hand holding him back, then back up into the shrink’s pale eyes.
    “ Not as difficult as wiping your broken nose with a broken arm. Step aside,” he said and didn’t give a damn that his words would be quoted in his psychiatric evaluation.
     
     
     
    ~~~***~~~
     
     
    Chapter Three
     
     
    That Jack Sullivan still lived filled him with fury. He’d been careless. He wouldn’t be careless with the detective again.
    His art was more important than a handful of lives. Art at the level where he practiced it had to be protected.
    He was living his dream at last, living to his full potential, and nobody was going to take that away from him. He’d always wanted to be an artist.
    His father hadn’t approved, had refused to pay for art school. And the art school hadn’t given him a scholarship, unable to understand his art. He’d accepted then that they couldn’t have taught him anything anyway.
    In hindsight, the rejection had been lucky. Anyone could be trained to a fair level of competence in anything, but creative genius was born. Structured instruction would have imposed restrictions on his vision.
    The old fan chugged on in its valiant effort to distribute the heat from the antique woodstove in the corner. He didn’t really feel the cold. Creating always filled him with fire.
    He manipulated the small engraving drill to draw his complicated design onto bone, working in his basement studio, pleased as his composition took shape. He didn’t have to worry about the neighbors hearing the drill, or the hammer when he was assembling larger pieces. They hadn’t heard Sullivan’s screams. The basement was soundproofed.
    He’d learned how to do that and all kinds of construction tricks from his father, who’d built houses for a living, the same path he’d chosen for his son.
    His father had said art was for liberal loafers who lived on the government tit and did nothing but do drugs and fornicate with each other. Art was for the gays. Art was for the kind of women who would neglect their families for their own entertainment.
    A real man built things with his two hands, big, sturdy things, manly things like houses. The family tree was full of carpenters.
    Yet even now, in the corner of the basement studio, stood his great-grandfather’s walking stick with the whalebone handle he’d carved himself. Art.
    Carving was the first art, practiced by the first men who first used tools and wanted to decorate them. The carving of bones was elemental, the highest form of art. It needed the highest-value medium.
    He’d tried stone. He didn’t like it. Stone was dead. Bone was alive.
    These days he no longer used cat and dog bones like he had for the art school projects that had been rejected. If they could see him now…
    They still wouldn’t understand him, he thought with irony as he worked, creating yet another piece for his latest installment, a statue of shards, every inch intricately carved, his skill bringing the pieces back to life. The beautiful bones of a beautiful woman, being made into something sublime. Women were special.
    He hated his father, but he’d always loved his mother. Women were his connection to the elemental, to Mother Nature, to Mother Earth. Someday, a more enlightened world would understand the profound symbolism of his art. Someday.
    He would never sell his work in his lifetime, he knew that, had accepted it years ago. This wasn’t for some rich collector anyway, to lock away. He created for all humankind.
    So he got a job that paid the bills, played the dumb everyday man people were comfortable with. Small-town folks, especially, didn’t have the first idea what to do