The Painted Frieze - Chapter 3

The old woman looked up at her, an expression of concern on her wrinkly face, a lilac cardigan on her back. She looked harmless enough.

“Listen to me. There isn’t much time. You must-"

“Who are-"

“Listen. The counterman has betrayed you. He’s one of them.”

She could hear a commotion coming from the shop front.

“Ignore that. One of my colleagues is faking a heart attack. We’re buying you what time we can. Listen to me. The door to my left leads down to the cellar. Go down the stairs, and you will see a large red door. You can’t miss it.”

“But—“

“Listen! Go through the door and turn right again. Follow the passageway past four doors. The fifth door will be silver. Go through it. There should be help of some kind waiting for you. Can you remember these instructions?”

“Yes, I think so. Look, who are-“

“Go.”

“ Thank you. Who-“

The old lady more or less shoved Lucy’s mother through the cellar door.

“I am Mrs. Anderson. You won’t see me again. Good luck.”

Mrs. Anderson shut the cellar door behind Lucy and her mother. The lock clicked into place. Lucy’s mother shuddered, adjusted her daughter and carefully walked down the stairs in the near darkness. As her eyes slowly accustomed themselves to the murk, she perceived a slight greenish glow. It wasn’t much to see by, and the light had a slightly flickery quality that seemed formulated to make one queasy, but she supposed it was better than absolute darkness.

As she stepped down the last step onto the cellar floor, she stifled a gasp as her foot was submerged in two inches of cold fetid water. She hesitated to think in what order of filth she was now ankle deep. The stench of mildew, sweet decay and filth (filth, she thought, is what they say in old-fashioned books when they mean shit) crawled its miasmic way up her nostrils, lodging in her sinuses making her gag.

Lucy wrinkled her tiny nose and whinnied. As promised, the large red door was straight ahead. She sloshed over to it, no longer caring about the noise, just desperate to escape the smell and the damp.

She reached the door, kissed Lucy’s forehead, took the large rod-like handle in her right hand and made to turn it. Nothing happened. She tried rotating it up, towards the ceiling, still nothing. Tears sprung in her eyes. “I will not cry, what’s the use?” She splashed back to the stairs. She made her slippery way back up them, panting, her mind willfully blank, a wave of exhaustion hitting her between the eyes with a dull, painful thud. She turned the knob of the cellar door. Nothing. Locked.

She sunk down on the top step and held Lucy close to her breast, shutting her eyes tight, stifling a sob, frustration battling fear for precedence. Standing up and breathing shallowly through her mouth, she trudged back down into the stink. She stopped on the last step before she would have to put her foot into the black wetness. She looked around her, the pale walls of the passageway glistening. To her surprise, she discerned the faint tracings of what might once have been a painting or a frieze. She saw the faint outlines of a ship, with a high prow and three masts sailing jauntily across the dirty wall. She saw another ship (or was it the same one?), this one with two masts broken, men jumping into the ocean to what must have been certain death, large tentacles grasping the prow. Lucy’s mother couldn’t see what came next in the green half-light, so she stepped into the flooded floor, barely flinching. This time, instead of going right, towards the locked red door, she walked straight ahead, closely examining the nautical frieze. It was finely and skillfully painted, though now faded and in some places chipped and obscured.

The third panel showed a disturbed sea, no ship in sight, rubble and bodies surrounding a large-eyed Kraken, screaming men gripped in three tentacles. But then, slightly farther along, a dinghy, containing what looked like a woman. Strangely, the woman looked neither sad nor frightened, but triumphant and, although Lucy’s mother knew she was being silly, wicked. The next painted episode in what was obviously a narrative was very odd. The Kraken was underwater surrounded by fish and seahorses, his many tentacles entwined with the limbs of a human female figure. It was hard to tell if it was supposed to be the woman who was escaping the torn apart ship as the head had been scraped away viciously, with deep scratch marks in the wall. It was a faintly disturbing painting, one Lucy’s mother would have found interesting if she had seen it in a well lighted museum or gallery, a card with useful information and the catalogue number tacked to the wall, but here, with the smells and green light and locked doors, she didn’t like it much.

The passage faded away into darkness. She decided she hadn’t much to lose at this point and walked ahead into the black.