QR Short Stories: A View From a Hill (Part 2)
After suffering a litany of Patten’s small talk and the pungent nicotine escaping his laboured draws on a smouldering cigarette, he cautiously hauled the contents of his bag onto my cluttered desk. A nostalgic dip into the past, or so I thought, for he had laid before me an ancient vortex reality headset, once popular among painters who wished to make a new study of a long-demolished Roman abbey or medieval cathedral from the comfort of their studio. Cost-effective in its heyday, it consisted of a miniscule vortex manipulator with a complicated arrangement of minute looking glasses which reflected an image of the past into the headset for the eager viewer in the present.
Patten squirmed in his seat as he began his tale. “When we first incarcerated Baxter at the Tower” he stuttered, “we gave him one luxury to occupy him and placate his ego, for in those early weeks we were sure he was going to inspire a riot.” “Never a keen painter, a request for that very same headset that sits before you came as a surprise, and an anonymous, wealthy benefactor was willing to pay for it.” My mouth hung agape as I listened with incredulity. Surely after all that negative press, all that sympathy for those Dohsian victims, no-one on the home world, never mind the colonies, was willing to indulge Baxter’s newfound painting obsession.
Patten shook his head wearily, and with a reassuring drag on his cigarette, he continued. “We restricted his access to a view of his homestead as it was when he was just 10 years old, and he delighted in boasting to the guards that he was going to display it in the National as ‘A View from the Banks of the River Sailé.’ But one turbulent night, the convicts of Cluain Meala smuggled a crate of arms into E-wing in a laundry basket and slaughtered the unsuspecting guards, and as the inmates corrupted our IT system with an imported virus and my battalion were drafted in to suppress the escape attempt, Baxter managed to override his headset restrictions, accessing a view from the Hill at Duneane.” As I gazed with horror, I could see where Baxter hastily tinged the night sky on his canvas a characteristic Dohs purple, populating the warm River Sailé with a more tepid, viscous liquid and bloated Dohsian corpses, reworking it as the jagged gully running along the hillside at Duneane, and extended the eaves of his home cottage to more closely resemble the burnt-out shell of the little church perched atop Duneane.
After a moment’s repose to steady my nerves, I plucked up the courage to question as to how the painting came to be polluting the admittedly musty, but certainly not unfriendly atmosphere of my humble office. “When we quelled the riot, I personally saw to it that Baxter had not escaped in the chaos. All the signs were positive, for the door was locked from the outside. With the electronics scrambled, we kicked the door down, to find this hideous, corrupted, half re-painted canvas and the vortex reality headset on the floor below. Baxter was nowhere to be seen. No way of escape, a sealed room from the inside with no windows or points of access, and when we discovered the camera above his door had escaped the computer virus, we examined the footage inch by inch, with no sign of any movement over that threshold all evening. Of course we had to hush it up.
If the papers got hold of this, it would be misconstrued by the Dohsian ambassador that I had allowed Baxter to escape and all diplomatic relations would be severed. It was only this evening, three months later, in the evidence room at the barracks I remembered that these old headsets retained the last image the painter saw, so that he could start his next day’s painting with the opportunity to make small changes and progress from his work the day before. Take a look for yourself.”
Patten handed the headset over slowly, and holding it up to my face hesitantly, after the familiar period of adjustment, I recoiled in horror.......
By Michael McConway