The Lord Of Thunder
"Of course it’s unfinished", he said, flapping with a muscular hand and brawny forearm towards the squat, square outline of the stone figure which stood in the approximate centre of his lawn, "but with Johnny’s stuff who could ever tell?"
His chuckle died half-formed, to be replaced by an inward sigh at the same look of frosty disapproval which had seized the pretty face in front of him at his every attempt thus far at either humour or flirtatiousness. "God," he thought to himself, "this woman is a pain!"
He’d forgotten all about her visit. He’d been drowsing in a garden chair, eyes half-closed under the shadow of a straw hat in the blazing hot July mid-morning, when the mobile phone resting next to the jug of iced Planter's Punch on the table at his side had sheared through his reverie. He’d picked it up, and before he’d even managed to utter a sleepy "hello" a young but clipped feminine voice had announced "Laurence Maynard? Laurel Taylor here. I rang last week about the article I’m writing on your brother’s work. I’ll be there in an hour."
"Fine," he’d said, his mind struggling to retrieve the forgotten appointment from his memory, but even as he’d said it he’d realised he was talking to a dialling tone.
And now here she was: a soft, sundressed vision of loveliness sitting in the garden chair opposite him; a golden-haired, sensuous-lipped angel from a wet dream but cursed with the warmth and charm of a regimental sergeant major: Johnny would’ve loved her, he thought grimly. She aimed her digital recorder at him in a manner that suggested it concealed the power to blow his head off.
"Unfinished?", she queried in a tone that indicated that he was both too stupid to understand his brother’s work, and unworthy of discussing it. In fact, it had not taken more than a couple of minutes of her icy company for Laurence to gather that Ms Taylor not only regarded his brother as the greatest sculptor of the twentieth century - and some kind of saint to boot - but also that she regarded the fact of his having had siblings as being an offence against his uniqueness.
"It was the last of the ‘New Gods’ series," he replied with as much grace as he could muster, referring to the realisation in stone of his brother’s own personal mythology. "Johnny always stopped work for a few months on each figure just before it was completed. You see he actually believed that the act of carving the stone planted the seed of a god in it, that it had to gestate before he could give birth to the god by adding the finishing touches to the statue. This one" - he waved a hand once more in the direction of the figure - "he named ‘The Lord of Thunder’, but he died on the very day that he stopped working on it to allow the god time to grow inside the stone." He sighed. "Frankly, Ms Taylor, my brother was a nutcase."
She flinched, and her eyes snapped at him. "Your brother was a genius! A true artist! A man of real passion, not a shallow, vain, empty-headed pig like you. He wouldn’t have spent an entire hour wasting my time with lewd comments and willing me to take my clothes off!"
That did it! Nothing provokes fury quite like being found out, and Laurence’s temper gave way.
"My brother," he spat, "was a lunatic who murdered his wife and then killed himself! He earned a fortune from his art and spent most of it on fortune-tellers and phoney mystics. He rattled with tranquillisers and anti-depressants and he kept a whole raft of psychiatrists and psycho-analysts in business all on his own. He thought he was the Messiah of a new religion, but he pissed on the floor and wandered naked in the street. He was a great artist, Ms Taylor, but he was also a grade one certifiable fruitcake! And I’d be grateful now if you’d leave..."
***
After she’d flounced out Laurence made himself another jug of punch - with a rather higher rum content than the previous one - and settled himself back in the garden seat. For a while he sourly contemplated the statue.
"I’m glad I killed him," he thought.
A little more than nine months ago. How quickly time passes. He remembered the day well: chilly and dank as autumn slyly drew back the curtain on an early winter. But he’d been sweating up there in his brother’s bedroom, his back glistening as he forced his prick into his sister-in-law’s arse and she moaned face down into the pillow.
He’d loved that, fucking his brother’s wife. Of course she was beautiful - he did have his standards after all - but it was who she was that mattered the most. It was a little revenge for all the years during which his poor, sickly younger brother had had all of his parent’s attention and Laurence had been frozen out: ignored, or punished when he reminded them that he still existed; revenge for the fact that although he’d been the one who’d gone to art school his brother had turned out to be the one with talent; revenge on him for being the humourless, prudish, puritanical git that he was. Revenge...
Of course Amelia had had her reasons for the affair, too - and Laurence was not the first of her lovers by any means - but revenge had not been among them. She’d genuinely loved her austere, distant, crazy husband but, as she’d confided more than once to Laurence, he could rarely be aroused to sexual passion, and he was as stiff and unsatisfying as a lover as Laurence had always felt him to be as a man.
And it was there that it happened. Laurence never knew what warned him - certainly Amelia, her face buried in the pillow, was oblivious to anything but the delicious pain between her buttocks and the nails that tore at her shoulders - but he looked up just in time to see the shining arc of the knife and the thin hand that held it, just in time to catch the wrist as it swung down towards him.
Even given the advantage of his position, poor scrawny Johnny was no match for his brother. Levering himself up from the bed Laurence forced the blade back against Johnny’s throat and let the years of resentment tell him what to do with it, while all the while his brother spat into his face.
After Johnny fell to the floor Laurence turned towards the bed and saw the hatred there in Amelia’s eyes. It was too late, he saw, for soothing words; too late to wriggle out of this one. While the shock still held her he took a tissue from the dressing table, wrapped it around the handle of the knife he took from his brother’s hand and allowed her to die for her love.
He’d placed the knife back in his brother’s hand, showered the blood from his chest and feet, reclaimed his clothes and left the house as discreetly as he could. He’d never had the slightest illusion that a thorough investigation of the deaths would not have led the authorities inexorably to him, but his brother’s madness had served him well: no-one had questioned the apparent course of events.
As the sole surviving relative his brother’s estate had passed to him. The sale of the house and statuary - except for the one piece he kept - had paid his brother’s many creditors and even left him with a little profit. All in all he felt well rewarded for the years of neglect.
Laurence settled back in his chair and allowed the afternoon and the rum to sink him into dreamless sleep.
***
He awoke to the sound of distant thunder. The sky was thick with purple cloud and the air had become moist and oppressive. He saw that his shirt was soaked with sweat. His legs felt numb and his mind was slow and confused.
He struggled to rise but his legs were uncooperative, his feet sliding uselessly over the grass, flattening it as the sky opened and an ocean fell down on him.
Laurence was instantly drenched. The sheer weight of water pushed him back into his seat and held him there, helpless, while he gasped for breath. He tried to rise but found himself flopping about in his chair like a landed fish.
The thunder roared again - this time closer - and then again and again, each time louder, until the world filled with its roar, and each clap was like the hammering of spikes into his ears. Then there was a clap that seemed to slice his head in two from ear to ear, and his ear-drums burst and little streams of blood trickled down his cheeks and were washed away by the rain. And even through the terrible pain the silence that followed was blessed.
Then came the lightning in jagged forks that seared the grass, stalking him, teasing him, closer and closer, so bright that he could see it through his closed eyelids, so close that he could smell the ionised air of its passage. And he struggled against the rain, and silently whimpered, and prayed to a God he did not believe in, until his world became filled with a light that was the essence of pain.
The lightning struck the metal frame of the garden chair and stayed. It pulsed like a living thing for seconds, then minutes, as the plastic of the seat melted and bubbled and burned away his clothes to form a second, obscenely liquid skin on his back and his buttocks and his thighs. It stayed while his eyes popped out of their sockets and dangled on his cheeks. It stayed while the hair on his head - even in the midst of that colossal downpour - burst into flames. It stayed while he burned inside, and he opened his mouth and smoke poured out.
And then it went, save for a single brief flickering reprise that struck the rain-soaked statue and caused a few chips of stone to fall to the ground. In its wake the terrible downpour slackened.
Underneath Laurence the chair toppled and he fell on his back amidst the ashes that were all that remained of the grass that had surrounded him.
On the black soil, in the pink cup of his upturned palm, the summer rain jumped and danced.
His chuckle died half-formed, to be replaced by an inward sigh at the same look of frosty disapproval which had seized the pretty face in front of him at his every attempt thus far at either humour or flirtatiousness. "God," he thought to himself, "this woman is a pain!"
He’d forgotten all about her visit. He’d been drowsing in a garden chair, eyes half-closed under the shadow of a straw hat in the blazing hot July mid-morning, when the mobile phone resting next to the jug of iced Planter's Punch on the table at his side had sheared through his reverie. He’d picked it up, and before he’d even managed to utter a sleepy "hello" a young but clipped feminine voice had announced "Laurence Maynard? Laurel Taylor here. I rang last week about the article I’m writing on your brother’s work. I’ll be there in an hour."
"Fine," he’d said, his mind struggling to retrieve the forgotten appointment from his memory, but even as he’d said it he’d realised he was talking to a dialling tone.
And now here she was: a soft, sundressed vision of loveliness sitting in the garden chair opposite him; a golden-haired, sensuous-lipped angel from a wet dream but cursed with the warmth and charm of a regimental sergeant major: Johnny would’ve loved her, he thought grimly. She aimed her digital recorder at him in a manner that suggested it concealed the power to blow his head off.
"Unfinished?", she queried in a tone that indicated that he was both too stupid to understand his brother’s work, and unworthy of discussing it. In fact, it had not taken more than a couple of minutes of her icy company for Laurence to gather that Ms Taylor not only regarded his brother as the greatest sculptor of the twentieth century - and some kind of saint to boot - but also that she regarded the fact of his having had siblings as being an offence against his uniqueness.
"It was the last of the ‘New Gods’ series," he replied with as much grace as he could muster, referring to the realisation in stone of his brother’s own personal mythology. "Johnny always stopped work for a few months on each figure just before it was completed. You see he actually believed that the act of carving the stone planted the seed of a god in it, that it had to gestate before he could give birth to the god by adding the finishing touches to the statue. This one" - he waved a hand once more in the direction of the figure - "he named ‘The Lord of Thunder’, but he died on the very day that he stopped working on it to allow the god time to grow inside the stone." He sighed. "Frankly, Ms Taylor, my brother was a nutcase."
She flinched, and her eyes snapped at him. "Your brother was a genius! A true artist! A man of real passion, not a shallow, vain, empty-headed pig like you. He wouldn’t have spent an entire hour wasting my time with lewd comments and willing me to take my clothes off!"
That did it! Nothing provokes fury quite like being found out, and Laurence’s temper gave way.
"My brother," he spat, "was a lunatic who murdered his wife and then killed himself! He earned a fortune from his art and spent most of it on fortune-tellers and phoney mystics. He rattled with tranquillisers and anti-depressants and he kept a whole raft of psychiatrists and psycho-analysts in business all on his own. He thought he was the Messiah of a new religion, but he pissed on the floor and wandered naked in the street. He was a great artist, Ms Taylor, but he was also a grade one certifiable fruitcake! And I’d be grateful now if you’d leave..."
***
After she’d flounced out Laurence made himself another jug of punch - with a rather higher rum content than the previous one - and settled himself back in the garden seat. For a while he sourly contemplated the statue.
"I’m glad I killed him," he thought.
A little more than nine months ago. How quickly time passes. He remembered the day well: chilly and dank as autumn slyly drew back the curtain on an early winter. But he’d been sweating up there in his brother’s bedroom, his back glistening as he forced his prick into his sister-in-law’s arse and she moaned face down into the pillow.
He’d loved that, fucking his brother’s wife. Of course she was beautiful - he did have his standards after all - but it was who she was that mattered the most. It was a little revenge for all the years during which his poor, sickly younger brother had had all of his parent’s attention and Laurence had been frozen out: ignored, or punished when he reminded them that he still existed; revenge for the fact that although he’d been the one who’d gone to art school his brother had turned out to be the one with talent; revenge on him for being the humourless, prudish, puritanical git that he was. Revenge...
Of course Amelia had had her reasons for the affair, too - and Laurence was not the first of her lovers by any means - but revenge had not been among them. She’d genuinely loved her austere, distant, crazy husband but, as she’d confided more than once to Laurence, he could rarely be aroused to sexual passion, and he was as stiff and unsatisfying as a lover as Laurence had always felt him to be as a man.
And it was there that it happened. Laurence never knew what warned him - certainly Amelia, her face buried in the pillow, was oblivious to anything but the delicious pain between her buttocks and the nails that tore at her shoulders - but he looked up just in time to see the shining arc of the knife and the thin hand that held it, just in time to catch the wrist as it swung down towards him.
Even given the advantage of his position, poor scrawny Johnny was no match for his brother. Levering himself up from the bed Laurence forced the blade back against Johnny’s throat and let the years of resentment tell him what to do with it, while all the while his brother spat into his face.
After Johnny fell to the floor Laurence turned towards the bed and saw the hatred there in Amelia’s eyes. It was too late, he saw, for soothing words; too late to wriggle out of this one. While the shock still held her he took a tissue from the dressing table, wrapped it around the handle of the knife he took from his brother’s hand and allowed her to die for her love.
He’d placed the knife back in his brother’s hand, showered the blood from his chest and feet, reclaimed his clothes and left the house as discreetly as he could. He’d never had the slightest illusion that a thorough investigation of the deaths would not have led the authorities inexorably to him, but his brother’s madness had served him well: no-one had questioned the apparent course of events.
As the sole surviving relative his brother’s estate had passed to him. The sale of the house and statuary - except for the one piece he kept - had paid his brother’s many creditors and even left him with a little profit. All in all he felt well rewarded for the years of neglect.
Laurence settled back in his chair and allowed the afternoon and the rum to sink him into dreamless sleep.
***
He awoke to the sound of distant thunder. The sky was thick with purple cloud and the air had become moist and oppressive. He saw that his shirt was soaked with sweat. His legs felt numb and his mind was slow and confused.
He struggled to rise but his legs were uncooperative, his feet sliding uselessly over the grass, flattening it as the sky opened and an ocean fell down on him.
Laurence was instantly drenched. The sheer weight of water pushed him back into his seat and held him there, helpless, while he gasped for breath. He tried to rise but found himself flopping about in his chair like a landed fish.
The thunder roared again - this time closer - and then again and again, each time louder, until the world filled with its roar, and each clap was like the hammering of spikes into his ears. Then there was a clap that seemed to slice his head in two from ear to ear, and his ear-drums burst and little streams of blood trickled down his cheeks and were washed away by the rain. And even through the terrible pain the silence that followed was blessed.
Then came the lightning in jagged forks that seared the grass, stalking him, teasing him, closer and closer, so bright that he could see it through his closed eyelids, so close that he could smell the ionised air of its passage. And he struggled against the rain, and silently whimpered, and prayed to a God he did not believe in, until his world became filled with a light that was the essence of pain.
The lightning struck the metal frame of the garden chair and stayed. It pulsed like a living thing for seconds, then minutes, as the plastic of the seat melted and bubbled and burned away his clothes to form a second, obscenely liquid skin on his back and his buttocks and his thighs. It stayed while his eyes popped out of their sockets and dangled on his cheeks. It stayed while the hair on his head - even in the midst of that colossal downpour - burst into flames. It stayed while he burned inside, and he opened his mouth and smoke poured out.
And then it went, save for a single brief flickering reprise that struck the rain-soaked statue and caused a few chips of stone to fall to the ground. In its wake the terrible downpour slackened.
Underneath Laurence the chair toppled and he fell on his back amidst the ashes that were all that remained of the grass that had surrounded him.
On the black soil, in the pink cup of his upturned palm, the summer rain jumped and danced.
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