wytchcroft

part two:

Things have a way of coming at you sideways on Mars, and that includes Martians.
“I’m sorry,” I heard myself say, “what?”
“Only you’re standing in my light d’you see?” said the Martian.
“What?” I said again, somewhat stupidly, and turned around. The Martian was looking at me intently and with a slight frown. The skin of his face was as white as the wreckage of his architecture; his eyes were a luminescent gold that I remembered all too well.

I nodded my head as calmly as I could, ignoring the hair on my neck and arms as it stood on end. Dammit! I had expected this after all. “Greetings,” I said forcedly, “it is good to actually see you.”
“And you are still standing in my light,” replied the Martian testily. “Please don’t be offended,” he added, “only it is rather hard to paint with a shadow blotting the canvas.”
“Oh,” I shuffled awkwardly to one side, “oh, yes – of course.”
The Martian scrutinized me, determining I felt, whether or not I was in fact a cretin.
“Thank you,” he said, and then catching himself once again he said, “Mr?”
“Oh - John,” I shrugged, “just John.”
The Martian’s cretin scan did not waver. “Thank you… er, John.” He spoke slowly as I moved a little closer. “I’m curious,” I said.
“Yes?”
“As to what you’re painting.”
Here the Martian looked unexpectedly sheepish. “Ah,” he said, dropping his gaze for a moment, “I’m rather afraid it’s you,” he said.

I smiled at him then.

“You don’t seem very… disturbed,” the Martian noted, “I would be, I think.” He waved a hand abstractedly and I could almost see a brush, almost.

“Where did you..?” I mirrored his gesture.
“In my mind…” he replied, “yes, frequently, as many of us have started to do. Not just you – we see, we glimpse, different people. But even the most vivid of impressions fades…”
“And so you decided to commit me to canvas.”
“Mmm… something like that.”
“May I see?” I was - I mean, I am, curious as I’ve mentioned. The Martian looked rueful, or at least I think that was his expression.
“I suspect, John,” he said, “that the real question is CAN you see.”

A fair point; “Where are you?” I asked. He had risen as I spoke and gestured with his arms, described a space I could only guess at. “I am in my house, on a beautiful morning. Two days ago was the high sun celebration and the decorations are still hanging from the walls. There are ribbons of silver in the water. Today many great ships will pass by on the yearly pilgrimage to Sryama, great ships, John, with rubies and emeralds like giant barnacles upon the hulls. They are a rare sight for few sail the waters now. I will leave my house and go out onto the causeway to greet them.” And the glitter in his eyes looked, to me, to be more than their natural colour.

I was reminded again of Spender. Spender who had seen for himself. “There were so many things done here, John,” he had told me, his voice throbbing with the emotion of his discovery. “Streets and houses and books and big canals and clocks and places with names - things that were used and touched for centuries.”

And the Martian was still talking. “Already the bridge is full,” he was saying.”I can hear the chattering voices on the wind, they have set up a market and I shall visit that too and buy something for my wife whom I love dearly. Do you love your wife John?”
I smiled at that. “Yes I do, very much.”
“And your people, you love them also?”
What’s left of them. “My people are my family, yes I love them too.”
“That’s good John, a man should love his people.”

What was he trying to tell me?

“So then you’re celebrating,” I said, choosing my words carefully.
The Martian nodded, “Yes indeed. Can you not hear the music?” another dumb show, his hands miming some sort of device.
“Faintly,” I said, it was there in the wind after all, that shimmering sound of bells or tiny cymbals, “perhaps. I wish I could hear it more clearly.”
The Martian looked amused. “But I fear you would not like it John, our music is very precise – it is all mathematics, angles and elisions.”

I smiled.

“And is my picture also a part of that celebration?” I asked, trying not to sound too interrogative.
The Martian paused. Eventually he said, “I have done many paintings of you… and I am not alone.”
“I’m flattered.” The wind had picked up, thin and cold. The Martian seemed oblivious. I needed to go so very carefully with him – I knew, I sensed it. Playing for time, I said “You know, back on my world there was a story written that a man with such a painting could live almost to be almost immortal. Live a life and not bear the scars, sounds good huh? The painting absorbs all the traces.”

If I had hoped to make the Martian smile – or change conversation, I failed.
“Yes,” he said, ”I can imagine many such paintings – and mine may be one.”
So much for trying to be subtle, “But why,” I asked directly, “The Martians – you – always feared the Earth. You killed the first expeditions out of fear.”

“Did we?”
The shear white robes of the Martian seemed to flutter then, to change colour with his mood, a red pulsing. “Are you sure it was not also – love? It is common is it not, such a fascination.”
I gave a small nod. “Maybe, but I've a hunch that's not quite it...”

“And you are right, John, of course.” The brightness of him was beginning to hurt my eyes. “You are Hth’kytal the dark seed – you are,” he eyes closed slowly then re-opened, “Shiva, you are Kali the destroyer.”

He had taken that from my mind. “We are indeed,” I agreed – the cinder hanging in the west of the sky was proof enough. “And,” the Martian continued;”you are savage – wicked, in our eyes, your history – as a tribe and as individuals. Oh we could not tolerate such an existence. Not here. We are… an orderly people.”

I ran a hand through the curls of my hair the wind had begun to tug at. “But you murdered,” I pointed out. The Martian’s robes were scarlet now and livid. “That was the first infection, the first sign of our corruption. We struck from fear, revenge, jealousy, petty motives disguised as protection. Our doom was inevitable, because for the first and only time we acted like humans.”

And yet here he was, here they were – the Martians, scattered ghosts in pockets of time that clung to the planet. They could be found in the interiors of their fractured dwellings – or on causeways such as this. They remained. “And you are still painting my picture,” I said out loud.

The glow of the being had almost completely obscured his shape by now, his form. But his voice was hard and clear. “Yes, I paint your picture John – though it shocks my wife and my family, and yes I am here and now and talking to you – and yes, there are others like me, we cannot let go of you John, we cannot look away from the Earth and the lives of its people.”

Finally I had found the sense I had sought for – the itch was being scratched.
”You will always be fond of me.” Did I pronounce it like a curse, prophecy? I don’t know. The Martian had said doom after all. “I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
“We hated you for that,” the Martian said.
“And so you killed us.”
“Yes.”

The sun had slipped low by now and the wind picking up was beginning to bite now at me through the thin air-force jacket I was wearing. The strongest light was coming from the Martian. “And so I paint your picture,” he said, “and believe me John, it is a fine work, faithful and exact. And I will place the painting on the wall of my study and I shall pick up my mask and after the boats have gone, I shall go down into the town and meet with the elders… and tomorrow the same, and tomorrow – unto eternity or until I finally fade altogether. “

He was beginning to fade in fact now, before my eyes, the light of him becoming misty and opaque.

“Then the story was right,” I said, “and you have made me immortal.”

But he had gone. There was no trace left of his, no mark, no footprint, no souvenir. Turning slowly I began the dusty walk back to my vehicle straining to hear the sound of bells in the wind. I would hear them again sometime, of that I had no doubt.

the end.

.........................................................

thanks again to GH and Beshter. the prompt in question was from The Picture of Dorian Gray;
"”You will always be fond of me.I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."

this story has been inspired by Ray Bradbury's novel The Silver Locusts and by the TV series The Martian Chronicles, apologies to Ray!