Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson Page 0,33
and cold, and in the center stood a tall frame that looked like an airport metal detector. The frame itself had four spindly metal arms half folded, hanging there like the door expected to defend itself. Tomás looked back at the gurney and pressed a button on the inside of the frame. The frame widened slowly, sliding along tracks in the ground, until Tomás seemed satisfied it was wide enough.
He nodded to the two men and they rolled the gurney the rest of the way, stopped it at the edge of the frame, and slowly removed the wooden cover. Now the five-foot-wide painting lay between the metal posts, naked on the table.
When Tomás touched a button on the side, Alex heard a churning sound and watched as the painting lifted slowly off the table, borne by countless tiny Plexiglas posts, until the painting seemed to float a half inch off the tabletop.
“You’re making a 3-D image of the painting.”
Sangster nodded at Alex’s guess as the robot arms unfolded and began to sweep slowly back and forth, all the way down the table and back up and over, again and again, streams of red laser light faintly visible from the glowing edges of the arms. The arms crawled like a spider over the painting as the frame slowly moved along its tracks.
“We need to know everything,” Sangster said. “What might be painted under it and what might be hidden in it. This is the best way we have of capturing the entire painting.” He turned and pointed to a display screen on the wall behind the frame, which was now showing the entire Triumph of Death at twice its normal size. Alex was once again filled with horror by the images of the people with their mouths open, screaming. But this time he could see the countless brushstrokes.
Alex saw a shimmer coming from the painting again. “You said the guy left a message.”
Sangster nodded and asked Cazorla something, who turned to Tomás. The curator spoke and Cazorla translated as he directed their attention to the screen.
“This is the painting. We can display different layers of it already. We’re just getting more details now.” The image shifted, and the entire painting seemed to lift toward them and away, revealing white and gray pencil strokes underneath. “These are the original pencil drawings underneath, the guides that Señor Bruegel used.”
Now the layer of colors and brushstrokes lowered back over the pencil marks and seemed to recede. A new image came into view in the lower right corner, looking like spray paint on the screen—the mark left by the custodian, a simple X. Tomás fiddled with the controls to sharpen the image. “This is this morning’s addition to the work,” Cazorla said, sounding annoyed.
“We saw it the moment your man ran,” Sangster told Alex.
“X marks the spot?”
“We’ll be able to remove it, gracias a dios,” Cazorla said. “It is a very mild hair spray.”
Alex looked at Sangster. “I don’t get what this is about. The custodian was not one of the Scholomance. Not Hexen. And he wasn’t an amateur. And he left this just as we got here. So what is the message?”
“We’re not sure, but he was careful not to damage the painting,” Sangster said.
Tomás suddenly let out an agitated curse.
The curator waved a hand, looking at a computer screen nearby, and then sent the image to the main screen.
The camera zoomed in again on the corner of the painting below the X, and the X lifted away as the curator dismissed that layer. Now Alex saw two human figures, a man and a woman singing as a skeleton crept up behind them. “No es azul,” Tomás said in what sounded like shock.
“It’s not blue,” Vienna translated from over by the wall.
“What does that mean?” Alex asked.
Tomás spoke rapidly in Spanish, and Cazorla said, “He says there’s a layer of paint, very thin, on the woman’s dress. It’s—you see, it has always been blue.”
“And it is blue,” Alex said, confused, looking at the woman, whose dress was indeed a blue-colored satin.
“But the blue is new,” Minister Cazorla said. “Or, not so new, but newer than the painting.”
Tomás shifted his hand in the air as if estimating and spoke while Vienna translated. “He says it’s a modern pigment, probably less than fifty years old.” The curator tapped a few buttons and, in the computer image on the screen, the layer of blue color on the dress lifted off and away.