Fear and Loathing in the Shadow Gallery
Rated R for drug references.
Please skip this story if you have strong feelings against the use of lysergic acid diethylamide for therapeutic purposes.
The paintings are visible in the film if you are familiar with their titles. Sebastian is the one GNV is looking at on page 44, a different Sebastian is visible in the film hanging next to the Blake. It really doesn't matter. This story was originally posted on Live Journal in the F For FanFiction Community, where I was able to post images of the specific paintings embedded within the story.
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Moore and Lloyd and WB and I am not a psychiatrist.
So the clock strikes. The time has come. He walks slowly down the hall looking at each painting as he passes. One of them will speak to me. Tonight I need it more than I ever have before. Which one? Will it be you, Lady of Shallot?
He stands before the painting, waiting. What do you have to say to me of prisons? He already knows, but hopes she will speak to him again. "I wish that you could speak to Eve instead, for she does not understand me. Not the way you do," he whispers to the painting. You, who sat ensconced in your prison, satisfied to experience life looking through images in a mirror. Like so many people even now, sitting in their bedsitters looking at life through the images on televisions. And then what happened to you? You saw something, didn't you? You saw something you wanted; and it was no longer enough to see it second-hand in your mirror. You wanted to experience it directly, feel it honestly with both hands. And then what happened to you, my Lady? The mirror crack'd, did it not?
"Will you speak to me?" he murmurs gently to her.
The Lady smiles at him, rises up from her boat. "I thought I would be safe from the curse, here, within my prison. I was not." She reaches her hand to him and he takes it. "I chose the safety of four walls and lived there so long I had not realized I had died within them." V steps into the boat with her. She continues with a sad smile, "I had not realized until I saw him in the mirror. Freedom from Fear, Freedom from Pain, it was not Freedom at all, but merely an enticing mirage."
V sits down in her boat. He says, "And when you reached for him, when you left your prison to seek him out, what did you find?"
"He was a mirage too." Her eyes drip painted tears and he catches them with his finger. "He was gone before I could touch him."
V wipes her tears with his glove. "And these tears? These are real. Not a mirage."
The Lady of Shallot leans forward to embrace him. "Yes, my tears are real enough, as yours will be. I could not touch him, but I can touch you," she says. She kisses him. "You and I are in the same boat. Remember that, my friend."
"Thank you." He touches the mask where her kiss had been. She has not touched me after all. She has touched the mask. He frowns, puzzled
"I will always be here for you, though I am half sick of shadows," she said.
"Yes. Yes," he says. "I feel that way too." He turns away from her and climbs out of her boat. He takes a few steps to the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.
I don't want to talk to you," he says to the painting. You gave in too easily. You let them take you and kept coming back for more. You and your believers think that suffering is good for the soul. It is not. Pain exists so that it can demand our attention lest we rot in our cells like my Lady or like the miserable multitude of bedsitters. What else can forcefully dislodge us from our perception of happiness? What else can shake that insidious complacency but Pain? But once Pain has done its work, there is no glory in it.
"No, you can have nothing to say to me. Nothing."
But Sebastian speaks to him anyway, "You must remember that Winston wanted to tie Julia up naked and shoot her full of arrows. He wanted to tied her up and beat her with a rubber truncheon. Is that not what you did to Eve? Why did you hurt her? Could it be because you cannot have her? Or was it that she was tormenting you? Remember what Winston did. Remember his Fear. He didn't shoot her, V, he didn't beat her. What he did was far far worse."
He covers Sebastian's head with a gloved hand before turning away. "No. Be silent." The mirrors are covered, he reminds himself, they crack'd long ago. But he is feeling a crack right now. Something is beginning to give way.
He feels a terrible need. A hunger for answers. He knows which painting he needs.
Blake. Yes. This is the one. Elohim creating Adam." He touches the painting lightly with his glove. I am always ready to converse with my Maker, and what do you have to say to me tonight? Here we are face to face. You gave us Eden, you gave us happiness, and all we had to do was obey you without question. You used Fear to keep us away from that Tree. You gave us everything, but then you took it all away. You threw us all out. Why? Is it because we wanted more? We wanted to know? To be free? That was too much to ask?
Strangely, Elohim does not answer. V touches the serpent instead. And you. I know you all too well.
The serpent raises its head from Adam's body. It speaks, "The price of this knowledge is pain, my friend. You must pay the price. Only then can knowledge and freedom be yours."
"I have paid the price," V responds. "Overpaid, in fact. And Eve has paid the price." But it is not so simple, is it. I don't feel free. And she does not understand.
"Eden was an insidious prison," the serpent reminds him.
"Away with all prisons," V agrees. "Especially the happy ones. I have come to do your work, yet I forced her to take that bite. I crammed the apple down her throat. I denied her the freedom to decide. You didn't do that. You let Eve decide." Why didn't I?
This is the question, isn't it? The question that digs at me every time I think of her now. The reason I touched my tongue to the drug tonight; this first night of her freedom. But who will answer me? I need the answer. Who will tell me? Not the serpent. No. Not him.
There is a sound behind him. He turns and sees Eve in the doorway, her big eyes staring at him. She is standing in her nightgown and bare feet, her shorn head naked like a new baby's. He faces her. She looks different to him. She seems to glow. He is silent. He has no more words for her. What more can I say?
"You are talking to the paintings." She says it accusingly, like talking to paintings is not a normal thing to do.
"No, he answers slowly, "the paintings are talking to me."
"V, I heard you. You were talking to them."
He thinks. "Perhaps I was." He doesn't remember speaking aloud. He could have been talking to them.
"V. You need to sit down. Come and sit down." She makes a move toward him, like she will take his arm and lead him to a chair. Like I am sick. He lets her. She sits him on the sofa and slides in next to him. "Are you alright, V?"
"Yes. I'm fine."
"I don't know. I don't think so. You can't be. I know you're not right. I heard you in the Gallery. Talking to someone. There is no one here but us."
She thinks I'm, how did she put it? A crazy person. She has from the beginning. But now I must say something reassuring to her, for she is looking at me in a way that is quite disturbing.
"I am thinking, Eve."
"Out loud."
"Yes."
"Are you thinking about what you did to me? In there?" She gestured over her shoulder, but would not look at that door.
"I am."
"I still can hardly believe it was you. You were all of them. How could you do such a thing? To anyone?" She shook her head. "You are just as bad as they are."
"No." That can't be true. Can it? "You were living in fear, Eve. You weren't free. Creedy uses fear to break down the person. I used it to break down your prison. Creedy imprisons us with fear. I want to take that weapon away from him. He uses pain to make you a captive; I used it to set you free."
"You only prove my point, V. My point is that both of you use the fear, both of you are manipulators. You are in bed with Creedy and won't admit it. And tell me, V, now that I have this freedom, what am I to do with it? I didn't earn it, you inflicted it upon me. What meaning can it have if I did not create it for myself? Can I share it without having to torture others? What if people do not want freedom? Can you cram it down their throats?"
He glances up at the Blake. The serpent is laughing at me.
She continues. "I've had a lot of time to think in the last few weeks. I will tell you that with freedom lies uncertainty, and if morality is relative then you cannot apply your own morality to others. Morality cannot be legislated, it cannot be coerced, and it certainly cannot be forced. Do you hear what I am saying to you? What you did was wrong, and there is no way you can justify it. You cannot tell yourself that what you did to me in that cell is worth it just because now I am "free". The ends do not justify the means, V. They don't. Ever."
He stares at her. The paintings had been gentler.
The clock strikes the hour. Eve turns her head to look at it. "It's six. I'm leaving, V. I'm going to take a shower and get ready and then I'm gone."
He watches her walk away, tracers follow her, bright ribbons moving with her arms and legs. She looks like a torch. The serpent crawls down from the painting, slithers over the sofa, coils around his legs, its hiss loud in his ears, "Life is a prison. There is only one way out."
References:
The title "Fear and Loathing" wickedly snagged from Hunter S. Thompson
Author's notes:
From comments left at the original site, I know that readers may wonder whether EV is real or a hallucination. She is real, but what she is saying to V is being interpreted by his brain in a more creative way because of the drug. Remember, he asked the Blake painting to tell him what he needed to hear, so that is what he hears from EV. She says she is leaving...he hears the reasons.