The Hermaphrodite's Curse

PART ONE -- LONDON

- 3 -

Gabe sat at his desk with his laptop open, staring blankly at the screen. His mind was still far away. He couldn't help thinking about the previous morning and now his thoughts were not all fantasies of love goddesses. His mind was just starting to process properly that he had seen a woman killed right in front of him.

For some reason, the fact that he had watched the whole incident through the viewfinder of his bulky camera made it easier to cope with. It was almost as if viewing things through the camera made it feel like they were happening a long way away to other people, like watching the images on the news. He had heard that this was how photographers were able to operate seeing traumatic things in war zones, by hiding behind the camera to document events then it would seem like they were never really there at all. That was how Gabe had been all his adult life, concealed and detached behind his camera while the world went on around him. He had realised that this was the best way to avoid any pain to his sometimes over sensitive spirit, and he had resigned himself perhaps to not being truly part of anything but always to observe from the sidelines.

He began to upload the pictures that he had taken at the National Gallery onto the computer and they flashed up on the screen, quickly cycling through the events of the day. Starting with shots of pleasant, calm landscapes, the photos quickly became a document of the bloody scene that was on all the news channels.

Now that they were on his screen, Gabe could not look away. He was hooked. He felt that he had to try and understand what he had seen. Looking with the detachment of seeing a photograph on a computer screen, he could take himself away from having actually been there and examine the murder as a puzzle to be solved. He had turned copies of the pictures over to the police but a part of his mind, the part that liked to absently daydream, wondered if he could solve this mystery first. Anyway, it would be a good way to take his mind off the sickening reality.

Now that frail feminine body stretched out on the floor, blood stained body barely covered by the white shift, became like the victim in a mystery show on TV rather than a traumatic personal memory. Gabe began to study the picture closely, the arrow stuck from the back of her neck and there was a pool of blood all around it. She had slumped awkwardly on the floor but this was not the pose the photo had caught her in. Her arm was outstretched and her hand stained dark red with the blood from her own neck wound. Something had compelled her to use her very last breath to write on the wall in her own blood.

Gabe switched to the next photo, a close up of the bloody symbol on the gallery wall. The simple shape seemed to have a certain familiarity to Gabe but he couldn't quite place where he might have seen it before. He knew he had seen a circle with a cross or an arrow like that, but he just couldn't place it. He knew it had to be important, however. He wondered if there was any connection between the symbol and where it had been drawn, whether the renaissance masterwork had any link to the shocking modern murder.

The young woman had seemed to rush with purpose. She seemed curiously out of place on a wet, grey London day, without shoes or many clothes. It was almost as if she was escaping from something and yet the National Gallery seems a strange place to go if you were trying to escape. She seemed to have headed there for a purpose, perhaps this particular painting had something to do with it. The arrow in her neck seemed a curious choice of weapon, belonging to a different age and, perhaps, with a symbolic significance of its own. The painting, the symbol, the arrow, all of them seemed parts of a puzzle that Gabe could not fit together.

He decided to change his focus. Staring at the symbol was getting him nowhere, there must be something else to consider, another clue that could be the key to revealing the secrets behind the other mysteries as if when that one thing was discovered everything else would just fall into place and the whole affair would seem so obvious that he would wonder why he hadn't thought of it in the first place.

He began to think about what else might have made that space in the gallery particularly unusual on that day. Maybe the painting had nothing to do with it. Naturally, he began to consider the possibility that the Rokeby Venus was not significant in and of itself, but could perhaps have been a meeting point. The dead woman could have had something that she desperately needed to say or to pass on before whatever it was that was chasing her caught up with her.

Scanning the crowd gathered round the body in his many photos, Gabe searched for anyone who seemed slightly out of place in a normal gallery visiting crowd. A rather doughy looking security guard bent over the body with an expression on his face that conveyed more frustration at this inconvenience than shock at the murder. Although that seemed a little callous, Gabe considered that the presence of the guard was certainly not unusual in the gallery.

An elderly woman, her milky white eyes glaring through thick glasses, looked on disapprovingly, at the gawping crowd that prevented her from getting to the painting, at the messy pool of blood and the symbol defacing the wall. She looked like she thought that the sudden and brutal murder was simply a sign of declining moral standards in the young. Gabe guessed there was nothing all that unusual in that either. None of these people seemed to view the corpse stretched out in agony on the floor with anything more than a dispassionate sneer. They couldn't have had any personal connection with the strange events.

Frustrated, Gabe cycled back through the earlier shots, the ones he had taken around the gallery before the murder. Suddenly, something caught his eye. A picture that he had taken of the room in which he just happened to catch the bare footed woman in her last living moments, standing exhausted, staring at the painting of the beautiful goddess lounging with her back to the rest of the room. It was not the victim, however, that Gabe's eyes were drawn to. No, it was another woman who he had not noticed from any of the other pictures.

That in itself would be enough to throw Gabe's suspicions on the mystery woman. She had been in the gallery before the murder had happened. She had witnessed it and then disappeared. Surely, Gabe reasoned, the natural thing to do when something like this had occurred would be to stick around and see what would result from it, at least see if the woman was indeed dead. However, Gabe's curiosity was really aroused by the fact that the mystery woman and the soon to be victim were looking right at each other as if the barefoot one had something she was desperate to say to the other.

Finally, the woman's very appearance marked her out as that unusual, out of place thing that Gabe had been scanning the other photos for, although Gabe didn't really know where this woman would be in her right place. Amidst the smart, grey, unremarkable art-appreciating crowd, this young woman stood out a mile. Gabe's eyes were instantly drawn to her hair, the brightest thing in the room. It was cut in a savage bob and died a bright purple colour that simply invited people's attention and, quite probably, their disapproval. Gabe could guess that this was a woman who took great pleasure in being quite confrontational, maybe even violent. Her face glinted with piercings, one in her lip, a stud in her nose and a row of them around her ear lobe.

She was wearing a very short black mini-skirt that barely extended below the array of studded belts and chains around her waist. Gabe knew that the skirt was designed to draw attention to her legs in torn fishnets but he couldn't help his eyes from travelling just there. With her small stature, her giant footwear looked slightly comical, a pair of huge black platform biker boots with a series of glinting buckles up the side. Looking at the combination of sexually provocative fishnets and tough, practical boots, left Gabe convinced that this was perhaps a rather confused young woman.

The whole effect of the outfit, hair and piercings was enough to make Gabe both a little scared and fascinated. He tried to imagine what sort of woman would want to stand out so much. He pictured someone barely out of their teens, a little lost and alienated and ready to join in with any group or ideal that would have her, someone whose tendency towards aggressive, confrontational behaviour could be harnessed by someone older, wiser, more manipulative. Gabe knew that such a person could prove dangerous, could be mixed up in something pretty nasty.

Of course, these were just guesses but Gabe was the kind of guy who sometimes let his imagination run away with him. This wasn't the first time during his life as an aspiring photographer that he had tried to identify a whole personality and life story from a blurry image in one of his photos. Still, he became increasingly convinced that the young punk woman was the key to this mystery. Zooming in closer on the section of the photo that contained her image, Gabe became more and more convinced by this until he saw something that left him in no doubt.

The woman's arms and upper body were decorated with a variety of tattoos that became clearer as Gabe zoomed his image browser to focus on her and her alone. One very quickly caught his eye as it instantly reminded him of a design he had seen before, and not all that long ago. He could only see part of the design, the top half was obscured by the sleeve of her t-shirt, but that was enough for Gabe. The curve of the bottom half of a circle with a cross on the underside, hanging beneath the circle. He knew just where he had seen that before. It was the same as the symbol painted in blood on the gallery wall. Now Gabe knew there must be some connection between the two women.

He gasped a sharp intake of breath. It was one thing suspecting something, but it was quite another to be confronted with the evidence. His head felt light. Suddenly, there was a sense that he had grasped some thread with which he could unravel the whole confusing web. The mystery had completely sucked him in by now. He was totally absorbed in it so his mind could barely think of anything else.

Breathing heavily and excitably, he managed eventually to calm himself down. So, he had a clue, some evidence, what could he do with it? Once his initial thrill had gone, Gabe had to admit that the discovery led him no nearer to solving anything. The woman, despite how much Gabe might study the one blurred image he had of her, remained a complete mystery. Without her, he realised, he was still stuck at square one.