The Gothic Study
She lay upon a couch of deeply tufted leather; leather dyed a color darker than spilled burgundy, lighter than clotted blood. Although the air in the study was almost chilling, a thin film of perspiration formed on her back, buttocks and thighs. This effect, more of adhesion than lubrication, held her transfixed to the smooth leather, somewhere behind her the mechanical punctuation of a pendulum clock monotonously accented the silence.
Through slats of eyelash she saw a muraled ceiling arrayed high above her in curving panorama. The scene, an innocent harvest festival, where frescoed nudes of fat, jolly Rubenesque proportions once reveled, was now overlaid by grime. Decades of ill trimmed wicks and poorly laid hearth fires transfigured maidens and nymphs into hags and crones, and corrupted a naïve Saturnalia into an obscene witch's Sabbath - a Faustian Walpurgisnacht. The cheerful pinks and blues the artist once tinted into summer were hoar-frosted over by beady, gray-green hues she associated with lichens, or the backs of toads.
A shadow imposed across the ceiling and her eyes followed intemperately, opening perhaps a millimeter.
"You are awake at last." The cello voice of the shadow caster resonated in the room.
"Am I alive?" Her voice hung in the air. "Why am I so cold?"
"What a poor host I must seem. I am standing between you and the fire."
He moved to her feet, draping one arm languidly over the marble shoulders of a Greek statue, his pose a study in conviviality.
