The Portrait of Damian Black
by Tim Newton Anderson
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
The body in the church was discovered when the cleaner, Margaret Drummond, came in to brush up after the mother and toddler group that had used the space the previous day.
She liked the quiet in the morning as the summer sun streamed in through the stained-glass windows behind the altar and warmed the air, illuminating the dancing dust particles. Strangely, she felt closer to God in these moments than she did at Sunday service.
She saw the body as she worked sweeping dust and debris towards the big double doors so it could be expelled into the churchyard. It was lying on its front on one of the wooden pews. At first she thought a rough sleeper had sneaked in to find shelter for the night. But the man was dressed in good quality, unworn clothes. His black hair had also been recently and neatly cut.
Margaret spoke kindly and softly to the man at first: “I’m afraid you’ll have to wake up now. We’ve got playgroup coming in in half an hour. I can do you a tea before you leave, if you like.”
When there was no response, she spoke louder and then shouted. When there was still no answer or movement, she went over and shook the man by his shoe, gently at first and then more briskly. She got the shock of her life when the body turned over and fell to the floor.
It wasn’t seeing a corpse that shocked her. She had supported members of the congregation during bereavement, from going round and helping them contact the right services when relatives died in their homes, to arranging viewings of the bodies in the church. It was the expression on its face. It looked as if the man’s original features had been trying to transform into someone else’s. It was distorted and pushed out of shape with the two halves looking as if they had been grafted from two different people.
She screamed and screamed and screamed, because the face was not just hideous and malformed, it was evil.
* * *
Simon was amazed at the number of fake occult paintings he had viewed while looking for Damian Black’s self-portrait. You expected some forgeries to be on the market, but perhaps there were not as many experts to validate this specialist area, or collectors were simply so obsessed that they were willing to take a chance.
Art wasn’t his specialty. His field of insurance investigations was historical buildings and artefacts. But this job was for the London Institute of Parapsychology, not an insurance company.
He had spent the last few days moving gradually east across central London, scrutinising paintings in every gallery. He didn’t look like the usual art collector. He was six-foot two and muscular, and his faced was covered in old scars from attacks by the angry insurance scammers he had exposed. His dark grey suit and pale blue open-necked shirt said office worker rather than aesthete or wealthy connoisseur
He sometimes thought about how much his life had changed since he joined the Institute. The biggest threat he had faced was those insurance scammers who had taken out their frustration on him. Now he was walking in a world where there were dark magicians around every corner.
He had been investigating a suspicious fire in Norwich when he was caught up in a scheme to recruit the homeless by a computer scientist magician resurrecting a medieval cult. With the help of the Institute, he had defeated the plot, but not before he was possessed by the spirit of a long-dead Iceni warrior king.
On the plus side, he had gained a wonderful girlfriend and a new friend and colleague in Tom Robinson. On the negative, he and Tom had to keep their new careers as spy wizards a secret from everyone, including their partners.
In the years since he had last lived in the capital, it had changed considerably. Giant buildings had sprung up as if grown from magic beans. Most of the more interesting shops and pubs had gone, replaced by coffee shops or chain eateries, and others had become Disneyfied versions of themselves.
The changes had happened like a sort of economic ecological advance or an invasion of affluence transforming the city. As successive areas became colonised, the traditional businesses were pushed farther and farther out before their new homes were in turn overwhelmed. Some areas, like Camden Town or Covent Garden, had been preserved as a sort of heritage reconstruction of their past for the benefit of tourists, but others had simply become clones of every other city centre.
Art galleries were quite a good way of mapping this creeping mutation. It was hard to spit without hitting an art gallery, all the way from Kensington to Shoreditch, where he was now. The nature of the art and the prices changed considerably, though.
In the West and centre, the pieces were likely to be by established artists selling for the cost of a small house outside of London. Here in the East — especially if you moved back from the main tourist routes — they were more likely to contain reasonably priced paintings and sculpture by up-and-coming artists or retrospectives of those who had slipped out of the spotlight or never been in it.
And that was exactly what he was looking for. Damian Black had never even achieved cult status during his lifetime, or in the 20 years since he had vanished without a trace. As he had tried to collect and destroy all of his works before disappearing, that occlusion must have been deliberate.
Only a very few academics and eccentric collectors had ever heard of him, but those who had would go to extreme lengths to collect the few dozen works that were still rumoured to exist. That fanaticism was not just about their artistic quality and rarity, but the stories of the occult power that surrounded the artist.
And Simon seemed to have succeeded in sourcing one.
* * *
The gallery was in a side street behind Old Street station, tucked in the side of Charles Square. It was a short walk from the hipster capital of Spitalfields but had managed to keep some of its character.
The exterior of the gallery had sun-faded and flaking paint on the window frames and doors and, peering through the dirty smeared window, Simon could see the inside also bore the marks of time and neglect. Many of the paintings were at best amateurish and others were dated — created for the middle-class home market of the early 20th century where newly aspirational families wanted something inoffensive but vaguely artistic on their walls.
And in the middle of all of this was one of the lost Damian Black self-portraits.
“I’ve found one,” Simon said to Tom on the phone. “The place looks as if it hasn’t opened since Thatcher was PM, though. There’s a pile of junk mail three inches high inside the door.”
Tom Robinson was back at Institute headquarters in the exclusive gentleman’s club that disguised the secret government agency. The Institute had been founded as a secret group by the Royal Society’s alchemist scientists like Isaac Newton. Realising there would be a battle for the soul of humanity between the religious, scientific and occult worldviews, they set up the Institute to keep the balance between them. And to tackle magicians who wanted to use their powers to control people.
Simon had met Tom when he was in Norwich, and the ex-journalist’s research had helped uncover the plot. Although his Asperger’s made him unsuitable to use magic, he was the only person who seemed to be able to manage the HEAD, a sentient search engine created by the computer scientist magician.
“Can you send me a photo of the painting?” Tom asked. “I’ll get The HEAD to find out if it’s genuine and any history we have of it.”
“Not sure how well it will come out,” said Simon. “As I said, there’s not been a cleaner here for a while, including a window cleaner. If you can do anything to track down the owner as well, that would be great.”
“Will do,” Tom replied. “If you pop round the corner to Pitfield Street there’s an art book shop-owner who may know about who runs the place.”
“Did you have any luck finding out about the dead men?” Simon asked.
“Three of the seven were art collectors, one a gallery owner and the other three burglars,” said Tom. “As you know, at least one of them was looking for paintings by Black, although there were no signs of any portraits at any of the crime scenes.”
Simon sent the photograph and tried to examine the mountain of junk mail through the dirty window to see if he could spot a name for the gallery’s owner. No luck. He wished the London Institute of Parapsychology had developed a few gadgets to help mundane spying rather than the equipment they had created to combat occult dangers.
* * *
The bookshop owner was an affable bald man who bore a disturbing resemblance to Alastair Crowley. Disturbing if, like Simon, you knew that Crowley wasn’t just a drug-addled crank but a serious magician who had once led the adepts of the Abbey: a loose alliance of black magicians and occultists who were the most organised opposition to the work of the Institute of Parapsychology and its agents.
Simon had become quite good at detecting auras through his training at the LIP and was happy to find no sign of the dark side in the man. Andrew Butler, as he introduced himself, was a few inches shorter than Simon and dressed in jeans and a round-necked cardigan with a checked shirt underneath. His smooth face could have been any age between Simon’s own — mid-forties — and mid-sixties.
As Tom had promised, the man was not only something of an expert on this area of London and the art scene, he had heard of Damian Black.
“He tried very hard to erase all traces of his existence and work when he vanished in 2000,” Andrew said. “There are still people around who knew him, though. I even met him myself at an exhibition opening in 1995. It was a retrospective of Majorie Kimmel — “Cameron” as she was known — a disciple of Alastair Crowley and the muse of rocket scientist and occult leader Jack Parsons. She had recently died, and I suspect the gallery owner was hoping it would mean her paintings would rocket in price.”
He grinned at the pun.
“There were lots of painters who included references to the occult in their works — especially the surrealists like Leonora Carrington and her fellow witches in Mexico.
“Cameron was a serious player, though, and founded a number of cults practising magic. Black was supposed to be the same and, when you met him, you could believe it. He always dressed completely in black, apart from a red rose in his buttonhole. Nobody ever admitted to buying one of his pictures, and only a few people said they had seen them. Unlike most artists, he was never short of money, but no-one knew the source of it, because he never sold any of his paintings.
“One of my friends said he had visited Black’s studio near Liverpool Street. Apparently it was laid out like some kind of church but with symbols that had been plundered from a dozen different religions. Judging by the seats and unmade bed at one end of the space, Black was living as well as working there, and there were a hundred or so paintings stacked against the walls. Every one of them was a self-portrait. Bill said it was the creepiest place he had ever been in and, like many of us involved with the avant-garde arts, he had been in some seriously strange places. To quote the old private eye phrase, he made his excuses and left.”
“What did he mean by ‘creepy’?” Simon asked.
“There are some places that just seem ‘off,’ I suppose,” Andrew said. “My friend was gay, and he said people don’t just develop gaydar, they can also get a feeling for predators if they are on the scene for long enough. Black wasn’t gay, but Bill reckoned he was a predator. And the studio was icy cold even though this was in the height of summer. Not to mention the dozens and dozens of self-portraits. He said it was as if Black had painted them as some sort of self-worship, like he was the god of his own cult.”
“Were there any rumours of predatory behaviour by Black?” Simon asked. “Any talk of him recruiting the vulnerable into this cult?”
“There are always rumours about anyone who is a bit odd and secretive,” Andrew said. “There had been rumours of Black recruiting young people as acolytes who then disappeared. But people had always heard from a friend of a friend rather than anyone claiming first-hand experience. He fits the pattern, though.”
Simon and Andrew had walked round the corner to the square, and Andrew peered in through the stained window at the picture Simon had spotted.
“That’s definitely a painting of Black,” Andrew said. “I can’t really tell if it’s by him. I’ve only ever seen a photograph of one in an old art fanzine from the 70s. That is definitely the Damian Black I met, though.”
Although Andrew had lived in the area for a couple of score of years, he had only rarely seen the gallery open and had never met the owner.
“You can see the state of the rest of the stock,” he said. “It’s more junk shop than gallery, and until today I’ve never seen anything worth going inside for.”
Simon thanked Andrew and walked back to his shop with him then continued up the street to a bicycle-themed cafe to wait for Tom to get back to him with the results of his research. When he opened the door, he was surprised to see Tom already there and waiting for him.
* * *
Tom fit into the ambiance of the area well; he was wearing a bright floral shirt, red, brown and black striped blazer, and tight red jeans. He had obviously not checked his outfit with his wife Jemma, as she would have made sure there were fewer colour clashes. Although his white hair was thinning on top, Simon knew he was very fit for a 67-year old.
“I wanted to get out of the office for a bit,” Tom said. “It was doing my head in.”
“Is that a joke?” asked Simon.
When he and Tom had first met in Norwich and were recruited into the LIP, Tom had been working with a computer scientist who turned out to have been a member of the Abbey and had created the animatronic HEAD linked to a powerful internet search and analytical tool. It was supposed to be for the heritage interpretation industry and made to enable tourists to interact with it and ask questions about the history of the place they were visiting. In fact, though, the Abbey magician had developed it as a way of generating more powerful spells.
What he hadn’t anticipated was that the HEAD would achieve some self-awareness, enough to pass a Turing Test with ease. However, its personality was quite immature, and it would respond properly only to a few people, with Tom being its favourite. The scientists at the Institute were fascinated by it and wanted to take it apart and study it, but it was too useful to take offline, and it would play dumb if anyone else tried to interrogate it.
“Sort of,” Tom responded, with a smile.
Copyright © 2022 by Tim Newton Anderson
