Cosmocopia Read Online Free Page A

reason—”
    “Forget it, Frankie. I’m not interested in modeling for you anymore. I’ve got another gig. I work with someone else nowadays. Someone who makes me look beautiful in his paintings, the way you once used to. Maybe you’ve even heard of him. His name’s Rokesby Marrs.”
    The name of his detested, talentless rival raised a red curtain of blood before Lazorg’s eyes. His thoughts ceased to be intelligible to himself, became a chaotic whirlpool of rage and hatred. Lazorg felt himself frozen in place like one of Medusa’s victims.
    “You’ll never paint me again, Frankie. Never.”
    Those brazenly merciless words shattered his immobility.
    Velina Malaspina was by the studio door now, and suddenly Lazorg felt himself gripping his cane, as if it had leapt from its resting place by the workbench where the brick of powder resided, and into his hand. But he held it by its rubber foot and shaft, not its curved handle.
    Malaspina’s back was toward the painter. She had already dismissed him from her flighty consciousness.
    A sudden access of power, a sudden impulse toward action, surged through Lazorg’s arm, and he swung his cane with all possible force.
    The cane connected with a sickening sound against Velina Malaspina’s head, and she went down to the floor like a chainsawed tree.
    In the welter of his rage, Lazorg was unsure whether she had survived the blow to her skull. But by the time his unseeing fury abated, as he sat straddling her torso, cane pressed two-handed like a bar deeply into the soft, already mottled flesh of her throat, she had definitely ceased to be alive.
    Lazorg struggled weakly to his feet, employing the cane by its blood-slicked handle. He staggered back from the beautiful corpse, found the stool by his workbench. He dropped the accursed cane to the floor, and raised that hand up into his sight.
    The smear of Velly’s blood across his palm triggered in him an abrupt cold epiphany whose dream logic embodied the utmost clarity—at least to Lazorg’s drug-fueled reasoning.
    “You’ll never paint me again, Frankie. Never.”
    The first thing to do was regain some strength. Lazorg ingested a dram of beetle powder. Instantly he felt his world and horizons expand.
    Dragging Velina Malaspina across the room to his broad, waist-high worktable, Lazorg caused her to lose both shoes. But this did not matter, as he needed her naked.
    With no little effort, he contrived to get her slack body up on the hard, paint-spattered surface, scored crazily with shallow cuts from years of matting work. As if undressing a somnolent child, he stripped her of her coat and her dress, into which her bountiful breasts were merely taped.
    Utterly nude, seen from an angle that concealed her wounds, Velina Malaspina looked like a dreaming goddess.
    Lazorg hastened back to his high workbench. He ate more powder. Hurry, hurry! Mrs. Compton showed up precisely at eight every morning. What would happen to him then, he neither knew nor cared. But he must be finished with his task.
    Assembling the necessary materials, Lazorg began to compound a special paint, finally employing the scarab pigment as Fulgencio had wished, for good or ill.
    Lazorg worked the organic pigment into the raw oil base mixture with aching arms, folding it over and over itself to achieve a smooth isotropic shade, like the monochrome sunset of some far-off realm.
    Gorgeous, gorgeous! Never a hue like this before. Almost not part of the spectrum.
    The volatiles in the mixture disbursed the uncanny scent of the powder throughout the room. Merely inhaling this aroma gave Lazorg strength. He hardly needed to ingest the powder, which was well, since he used it all in concocting a huge tub of paint.
    Lazorg paused when the compound was finished just long enough to lick the last grains of powder from the foil wrapper. Then he grabbed a handful of brushes and the tub of paint, and moved to the corpse.
    The paint clung to the brush dipped into it as if