The lavish painting captured a Viking longship adrift on cerulean waves. Unlike the towering galleons of explorers or modern steamships, its low dragon-prowed hull evoked ancient raids. Passengers clambered playfully on masts, strummed lutes, or roared with laughter—none steering, none rowing, as though the treacherous sea were a placid pond.
Centuries prior, such open boats braved northern seas while even seasoned sailors later faced doom in stormy waters. Thus did Viking ships symbolize rash courage. Yet these figures weren’t warriors. Their manic grins and contorted postures, rendered in feverish brushstrokes, spoke of delirium.
A Ship of Fools.
Before asylums, Europe’s mad were exiled aboard derelict vessels, drifting as “free prisoners” toward oblivion. Medieval artists used this motif to populate ships with sinners—gluttons, lechers, sloths—cloaking moral warnings in dark comedy rather than horror.
Unfinished, the canvas still dazzled with lapis lazuli’s cornflower blues, its costliness explaining why the dealer urged Marino’s completion. Yet it languished under London’s soot, its dusty surface awaiting the artist’s neglected touch.
“What’s this?” asked Yvette.
“Stone’s unfinished Ship of Fools,” Miss Moretti replied, noting Yvette’s interest in A Maiden’s Deliverance. “Notice the ultramarine—pure lapis, no cheap substitutes. Any patron would covet such extravagance.”
“Why abandon it?”
“Hirst, the dealer, balked at wasting precious pigments on ‘lowly’ subjects. Marino—ever the purist—downsized his studio to fund it himself.” Her disapproval tinged the praise. “Supply the lapis, and he’ll finish promptly. He’s obsessed with Stone’s diaries, despite gaining nothing.”
“Stone’s diaries? The deceased artist?”
“Indeed. He’s singularly devoted, even rereading them nightly.”
Yvette handled the paint-smeared journal carefully, flipping past petty squabbles to pivotal entries near her own awakening:
Oct. 2, 1836
Hirst’s demands for noble-pleasing tripe suffocate me. Art belongs to Bacchus’ ecstatic madness, not Apollo’s cold reason! Yet Darlene needs funds for our daughter’s schooling…
Oct. 13, 1836
Burleigh Asylum’s amphitheater staged a failed “ice-pick therapy.” The corpse lies shrouded.
This aligned: cultists acquired the body post-surgery, a day before Yvette awoke in it.
Oct. 28, 1836
Began A Maiden’s Deliverance.*
Months of self-loathing followed as Stone’s marriage crumbled and bills mounted.
Jan. 9, 1837
Madness as sublime power! Patients endure squalor like beasts. Perhaps suffering births genius… Michelangelo’s gout, Beethoven’s deafness…
Inspired, he turned to Ship of Fools, using Hirst’s leftover lapis for tempestuous seas.
Jan. 18, 1837
I AM THE FOOL! Cast adrift by cruel Fate. Madness shields me! Let storms rage—we laugh! I’VE CONQUERED DEATH!
His scrawls dissolved into chaos until a final lucid note:
[Undated]
Found Darlene and our daughter dead. My “conquest” of death a sick joke. Let my corpse hang as art’s ultimate jest—mankind’s folly laid bare.
Yvette closed the diary, the tragedy’s final act already clear.
There could be no doubt—the painter Stone had descended into madness within the latter pages of his journal. True, oil painters of this age often withered under the poison of their pigments—lead and mercury bred delirium, a scourge romantically dubbed “the painter’s malady.” Yet Stone’s sanity hadn’t crumbled steadily. It had shattered in mere weeks. His early entries brimmed with clarity, but the moment he began his second Ship of Fools, his thoughts warped unnaturally. No ordinary affliction explained this. There was darker alchemy at work.
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I must have that painting—and the journal. Yvette’s mind raced. If only Malinor would part with them…
“Pray keep the diary’s contents private,” Miss Moretti urged, noting Yvette’s prolonged silence. “Though society brands artists as eccentric, Mr. Stone’s words… they harbor a deeper despair. Even Hurst insisted Malinor guard its secrets.”
“My interest lies with The Ship of Fools,” Yvette pressed. “What price for its possession?”
“You truly see its worth?” Miss Moretti’s smile lit the room. “A connoisseur indeed! But ultramarine is no trifle expense. Should you commission Malinor to finish the work, an advance for lapis lazuli may be required. The sum? That’s for the artist himself to say.”
“When might he rise?”
“He’s likely stirring. He repairs here by four to paint—I’ll rouse him.” With a curtsy, Miss Moretti departed, footsteps echoing down the stairwell.
Alone, Yvette circled the studio, her eyes drawn irresistibly to the macabre canvas.
A storm-lashed sea. A listing vessel moments from foundering. Yet its passengers guzzled wine, danced wildly—a final, feverish blaze before the candle snuffed out.
Once, monasteries displayed such images to admonish: humans shackled to base instincts were little better than beasts. The fools’ contorted faces mirrored animals, not men.
And what of those who transcend? Yvette mused. Their corruption springs not from gluttony, but from older, hungrier powers.
A maxim from the Special Missions Bureau whispered through her thoughts: Knowledge hunts two ways. Some truths are stalked by men; others stalk men, desperate to be known.
The former—mathematics, chemistry, all sciences of reason. The latter—the occult, slithering through shadows, seeding impossibility. Yet fools persist, trusting their paper boats of intellect to brave Lovecraftian seas.
Madness. All of them. Even me...
Had an observer been present, they’d have recoiled at Yvette’s contorted posture: spine arched toward the canvas, feet rooted as if magnetic forces warred for her soul.
Reality dissolved.
Studio. Turpentine stench. Canvases. Gone.
Now: a pitch ocean, starless and depthless. A skiff trembled beneath Yvette, storm-battered.
Something lurked below.
The hull cracked. She plunged.
This sea defied nature—wood fragments sank like stones. Yvette grasped for debris, but planks dove faster than her body.
Down. Down. She clamped her lips, but the ocean pried them open, flooding her throat—not brine, but gelatinous worms, squirming and translucent.
A predator. She understood now. Not water, but a thing wearing water’s guise. A mind-lurker that ensnared Stone, now hungering for her.
Her descent accelerated. Memories unspooled against her will—a thief rifling her psyche.
Enough!
Yet control had fled. Once, such weightlessness had comforted—an amniotic drift toward oblivion. Now, every fiber rebelled.
In that prior fall, she’d perceived.
A voiceless hymn. A primordial radiance—gold laced with arterial crimson. A fissure spanning horizons, glowing like a bisected star. And within, the Sleeper. The Namer-of-Shapes.
As remembrance surged, the spectral sea convulsed. Depth became void. A continent of night yawned beneath.
The fall ceased. Writhing parasites in her gullet stilled. Time fractured—five seconds stretched into eons.
Fools! Waxen wings could never court the sun. They’d mined her mind and struck a lode too lethal.
The Sleeper’s sanctum brooked no trespass. His Name choked lesser tongues. Yet these vermin had dared to pry.
Yvette stared downward. A crimson chasm—kilometers long—unzipped the dark. Something stirred.
Invisible horrors shrieked, fleeing her in gibbering retreat. Yvette sensed ascent, yet the abyss drew nearer—a pursued becoming pursuer.
New gashes sundered the void. The false sea boiled away.
Closer now. Retinal agony. Through blazing light, she discerned a black filament cleaving the golden maelstrom—a dark thread lost in brilliance.
Every luminous rift bore this obsidian cord.
The chasm neared. The formless horde evaporated, unmasked by baleful light. Details sharpened.
Not magma. Sinews of radiance—tendrils converging upon a central rift, their nexus a branching scar.
Recognition dawned. Terror petrified her.
No fissure. No chasm.
An eye. Monstrous beyond measure. Kilometer-long capillaries fired the iris. The central void—a slit pupil, reptilian and pitiless.
New eyes ruptured the dark. The world quaked. Then—silence.
Lids sealed.
Yvette jolted awake in her parlor, clutching a defiled Ship of Fools. Gone: the rich ultramarine. Only fools remained, frozen in revelry.
She retched into a basin.
From her throat slid azure slime, shimmering like pulverized lapis.
How? Whence came this infection? And what specter had piloted her flesh home?
Empty at last, she questioned Alison.
“You returned at twilight, Master. Borne the painting clutched to your breast. You seemed… altered. Subtly.”
Altered.
Had she walked back? Or some hitchhiker wearing her skin?
Was she still Yvette? Did the squirming things linger?
She invented excuses—a brandy’s fickle curse.
Alison accepted this, though troubled. In Albion, a man who couldn’t drain a glass? Preposterous.