The Rosy Veil
1
I first met Philippe on a train.
He was sitting across from me, wearing a worn, gray flannel suit. The first thing I noticed was his hands holding the morning paper. They were large yet beautiful, like the gentle camellias that bloom north.
They were a pair of hands that belonged to an artist, a sculptor in wax. Being an apprentice, I could tell at a glance.
Philippe was on his way back home.
Some time ago, he'd published a collection of papers on cranial phrenology and toured an exhibition of his wax figures around the world. He attracted numerous admirers. As an apprentice wax carver, I was a great fan.
"But I've had to cut short my tour this time. My younger sister has fallen ill. She sent me a telegram..." he told me, "I know the family doctor will look after her until I get back. Though she does complain about the herbal tea he gives her..."
"Maybe she's not sick." I remembered my own sister faking illness just so she could drink honey water. "Maybe she just misses you and wants you to come home."
We had a long and pleasant conversation in this manner. And, by the end, he agreed that maybe his sister was just playing a prank.
2
Three months later, I bid my uncle's family farewell and took a position as a senior apprentice at Philippe's Art Gallery.
He was in mourning for his sister—the tragedy of her death had shocked the whole city. People gossiped about how Philippe must have felt when he found his sister in the bathtub filled with wax on his return home.
The killer was still on the loose, and the city was in a panic. There were rumors that the culprit had fled to the countryside and that it was a woman... The telegram was full of feminine phrases. The killer might have sent it to lure Philippe back home. It was hard to imagine anyone killing an innocent girl by suffocating her in a bath of liquid wax alive.
When I arrived at the gallery, a nobleman was inspecting some wax figures he reserved. A servant was packing them up in a brown wooden box. The man paid his respects to Philippe as he parted, voicing his regret at the death of his sister.
I lived with four other apprentices in the workshop behind the art gallery. We had a living area on the second floor and our workshop on the first floor. Philippe never went up to the second floor, but he would often oversee our work in the workshop.
I always thought he took a bit of a shine to me, but perhaps I'm just being sentimental. But, as he said himself, he was a very sentimental person.
"You're still in mourning. It's been six months." I commented one day.
He bent over the wax figure, making a tiny adjustment, and replied, "Does it bother you?"
It wasn't just us apprentices who noticed. Some of the visitors at the gallery were also beginning to talk about his attire. With his pale face, deep-set features, and black mourning clothes... if you saw him late at night, you'd think he was one of his own wax figures come to life.
Philippe was in the habit of coming to the workshop late at night.
The apprentices applied most of the finishing touches to the waxworks during the day. Late at night, Philippe would shut himself up in the inner room of the workshop, sometimes until dawn, working away on those mysterious custom pieces for his distinguished clients.
I once asked him about his commissioned pieces. Philippe smiled as he wiped the wax residue from his scraper, "Those commissions feed us. They're worth a lot of money. Some of these nobles like to build up collections of... they have very particular tastes. We'd get into terrible trouble if these things got out. A lot of people would find them... blasphemous."
Was a hierophant committing bestiality with a griffin? Or was the jester riding the king like a pony? I assumed it must be something like that.
Some time after this, a curious young apprentice managed to pick the lock of one of the boxes holding a commissioned piece.
No one knows what he saw. The young man was traumatized, he shivered all night, and the next day he packed his bags and left without a word.
3
Only one client ever let the public see the pieces he'd commissioned from Philippe. He was nobility, of course. The figures were on display in one of his castles. He paraded them in a group of twelve; they were of a very different style to Philippe's former work, contrary to his exquisite touch.
These figures looked as if they existed on the threshold between life and death. They each seem tortured as if they were experiencing a painful death at that very moment.
I couldn't imagine what kind of genius could create such work. Only Philippe.
He named the series The Sinners. Each wax figure looked as if it had committed a thousand sins. According to Philippe, the work was based on his research into cranial phrenology, in which a person's likelihood of committing a crime is predetermined. This science maintains that a person's criminal probabilities can be predicted by measuring cranial proportions.
I was inquisitive about all of this. I wanted to get a closer look at his creative process. The workshop's inner room was not accessible to the apprentices, and all I could do was peer through the keyhole once he'd gone inside.
Yet, I couldn't see anything—except once. I saw something hideous and red, like someone's bloodshot eye looking at me from the other side of the keyhole.
After those wax figures had been made public, Philippe locked himself away in that inner sanctum. There was a lot of criticism. The church labeled his works a sacrilege.
The royal family underwent a coup, and the people felt lost between the old and new regimes. If the old laws were reinstated, Philippe was at risk of being executed.
"If this happens, you must sketch from the sidelines. I want my face recorded as I die from torture." Then he joked. "It'll be a fantastic debut—you'll be famous the world over."
During that year, I was in charge of passing messages between the workshop and his residence, where he was being kept under house arrest. I was his connection to the outside world. He still wore his mourning clothes, and everything in the mansion remained under black shrouds.
During this period of seclusion, he seemed to return to his old self. He looked relaxed, even. Once, an angry mob surrounded his house, shouting horrendous insults about Philippe and his sister. The windows were smashed daily.
This nightmare lasted a whole year until the city was brought back to order.
I went to inform him of the news. Philippe was in the living room sketching, his eyes bright as if a flame burned deep within. "Stoke up the fire, melt some wax... I've got the inspiration for a new Sinners series—The Rosy Sinners."
The sketches showed men writhing in agony. Philippe had tinted the sketches pink to smooth out all their vile imperfections."
He suddenly sounded vindictive and cynical. This teacher, my mentor, who had been in mourning for well over a year, was now showing a sadistic side.
4
As luck would have it, the newly appointed mayor was a big fan of Philippe's, buying many of his pieces. He approached Philippe in person, hoping that the Art Gallery would design the decorations for the first Ball in the City Garden.
"The city's crime rate has hit rock bottom this year—it's dropped by ninety percent! We've decided to lift the curfew and restart the nightly balls..." He showed Philippe the map of the park, "The city wants to order thirty wax figures, and I've been thinking about the theme of ancient Greek maritime history. What do you think?"
"Greek heroism." Philippe nodded as he signed the contract.
"Exactly! Heroism, like Prometheus and Apollo and all that..."
"It will be expensive, and I'll need a deposit. Apollo's chariot will require gold-infused wax..."
It was incredible. No waxwork exhibition had ever cost so much—we ended up with an order for sixty wax figures of ancient Greek heroes, each one twice the size of a regular man. They were giants...
All of us apprentices were caught up in the excitement. Philippe remained unruffled, forever tweaking his sketches with his now-familiar wax-like appearance.
The Ball was a rager. Half the city gathered at the site—they'd flocked to those huge wax figures. The patrolmen on horseback tried to compare their height with the imposing statues.
The police were still baffled by the plummeting crime rate. They'd stepped up their search for vanished fugitives, but none came to light.
I was trying to ignore all the revelry; I had other ideas in mind. There was something I wanted to do, but I'd never worked up the courage. The heady mix of cocktails, perfume, and fireworks had fueled my desire to get into that inner room.
I was desperate to see how my teacher created those amazing figures.
5
The cupboard was crammed with sculpting supplies. Rose essential oil, nitrate powder, mercury...
Hidden in the cupboard, I barely managed to keep my head straight from the alcohol. It was my private midnight vigil as I waited for Philippe to appear.
I am drunk out of my mind. You'd have to be blind drunk to do something so stupid. What if he didn't come back? What if he decided to drink all night like the crowds in the city?
—then I heard the sound of a key in the lock. The man in mourning entered his inner sanctum.
But he wasn't alone.
He was half-carrying a man. The man seemed drunk, as drunk as a skunk, as Philippe dragged him in.
Was it a friend of his? Philippe dumped the man on the floor and stoked up the fire under the wax pot. The white wax soon bubbled up to the boil, hotter than boiling water.
I felt as if I'd stopped breathing. I maneuvered myself to get a better look through the gap in the cupboard door—how did he make those pieces?! That twisted expression froze at the moment between life and death...
Philippe pulled the drunk up from the floor. I wasn't sure what I saw next... my eyesight was blurred from drunkenness. Philippe heaved the man on the workbench then began spraying the liquid wax on his torso. The man's body was soon covered in a thick crust of wax.
Alcohol was acting as an anesthetic but not completely… the body jerked violently as the pain shot through his nervous system. The wax shell that encased the man's body began to solidify as if it had been set in stone.
His screams were smothered beneath a thick layer of wax. Three tubes were fixed to the body to drain the man's blood and replace it with liquid wax colored a grisly pink.
Philippe smiled in the glow of the fire as he watched me run out of the cupboard and out of that hellish room. Lying on the workbench, the man's agonizing visage has been preserved at that moment between life and death.
I stormed out shrieking, yet no one heeds my cries for help. The whole city was in a frenzy, indulging in alcohol.
The alcohol in the air fanned the flames of the torches throughout the City Garden, setting the exhibition ablaze. The drunken mob ignited the wax figures, turning them into torches that illuminated the night sky...
The wax figures melted into a grotesque sludge of bones and flesh emulsified with bright pink wax.
