The Lights of Hell

By Thomas Strandberg

When a Norwegian model disappears in Paris, Johnathen Flynn, a burned-out American photographer, disillusioned by the business that once attracted him, and with not much to lose, makes it his quest to find her. Slowly, Flynn stumbles forward, following a thinly disguised trail that is testament to both the invincibility and arrogance of those who abducted her. He discovers a world in which the laws of civilization are disqualified and the human body is traded as a commodity - and a group of men who are untouchable. Flynn also finds the remnants of a once healthy girl, and with it the realization that he himself has become a target.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jan 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483442976

Book preview

Author

Prologue

The highway leading from Paris to the coast was blocked that Easter evening – blocked by a hundred blue flashing lights that slowed traffic to a trickle. A cop’s arm waving a flashlight kept the automobiles moving as he ushered them toward a column of electric-orange pylons that separated the single remaining usable lane of Autoroute from someone else’s nightmare.

The car lay on its roof. It was white, or rather, must have been before the accident, for there was not much paint left between the many rips and dents of its collapsed body; the windows gone, and the make no longer recognizable, nor of any importance. It had once been the color of the sheets that covered the bodies on the shoulder of the highway, their edges pulling water from wet asphalt still dark from an earlier downpour, which I tried not to look at as I rolled past, but whose image I knew would linger. They triggered anew the thoughts of uselessness and wasted time I had been harboring for awhile, and it did not help that I was on my way to take pictures of pretty girls in pretty dresses at four hundred Euros a page for a magazine that would be outdated just a few weeks after hitting the newsstand. This shoot would be no different from the last, or the one before that. Of course the client would be another, and most of the crew, but they all seemed to come from the same place; some plastic land of candy colors, pop music and mirrored rooms, where everyone was occupied with the same stupid concerns of what to wear, where to go, and who to go there with. The virtuous aspirations that had brought most of us into the business had been, over the years, silently replaced by the realization that money and ego had snuck up to let us become but custodians of an artificial value and creators of the superfluous.

Chapter One

Bianca David is, by definition of most people that have ever worked with her, a cunt. I am not the exception. Senior fashion editor, once gifted, now primarily drunk, she is the result of the wrong men, of age not embraced, and of the rabid bitterness that comes with opportunities known missed and forever lost. Little remained aside from the cultivation of a false sense of importance, and it was no different that morning.

She sent her assistant to summon me from the breakfast room shortly before 6am. It was still dark outside. When I stuck my head through the door of her room she was sitting on her bed between scattered papers and an open laptop, and was speaking to someone on her mobile that must have been in Los Angeles or Tokyo – or at least in a more fortunate time zone than our own. Her outfit was a bit daring for her age, with a hint of brassiere shimmering through the fabric of her blouse, but masterly combined with a grey wraparound skirt, and had she been ten, maybe fifteen years younger, she would have looked stunning in it. A shooting gallery of empty baby champagne bottles flanked the television set that flashed pictures of an exiled prince, rambling into the reporter’s microphone about Jet Set and High Society no longer being one and the same, while stepping from an unethically large sailing vessel at the Monaco Boat Show, and slipping his bare fee back into his loafers. When Bianca noticed me she held up a finger and mouthed the word wait into the space between us while continuing her conversation. Experience told me that someone else’s waiting was no reason for Bianca to hasten. I whispered a quick I can’t – the light and pointed toward an imaginary sky before reversing back out, into the hallway.

Chapter Two

Her body was wrapped in an evening gown of red chiffon by Givenchy, and it lay outstretched between the sand dunes as if she had attempted to flee. The gun rested where it had fallen in the sand between Satou’s face and the camera and, excepting her deadeye stare at a grey sky, she was beautiful. Waves from a distant storm broke ashore in the background.

I knelt before her, my cheek against the camera, looking for the picture - the arrhythmic thumps of the firing strobe lights signaling when I had found something usable. It took maybe ten minutes before I was sure that I had what I was looking for, and when I was finished I got to my feet and handed the camera to Julian, my first assistant.

Okay, I said, letting those standing around know that we were done, releasing them to depart the set.

One of his assistants helped Satou to her feet while Mauritte, the stylist, wrapped an overcoat around her shoulders as belated protection against the morning chill. They lifted the bottom of the gown to prevent it from dragging across the sand as they walked away, and the others too, gathered their colors and brushes and spray cans, and headed back down to the parking lot.

In the tent behind me, the digital technician displayed the images we had just shot across the screen of a large monitor. Small printouts of the pictures taken earlier that morning had been pinned to a sheet of cardboard in the order of their appearance in the story. Although the death scene we had just photographed was not a particularly difficult shot, Satou looked like a convincing and exceptionally beautiful corpse in what would later be the closing picture of the editorial spread. I marked a few of the images on the monitor and had the digital technician make prints. The story was beginning to show.

By the time I got back to the parking lot myself, the crew had divided itself between two motorhomes, of which the larger contained wardrobe and functioned as a kind of central command while the smaller was primarily for the transport of crew and equipment.

It was Easter weekend and the bathing season on France’s Atlantic coast was still months away. Winter’s sand drifts littered the giant parking lot’s tarmac and, with the exception of my car and the production vehicles, it was abandoned. A constant slamming of doors as people moved back and forth between the two motorhomes was all that interrupted the stillness.

I had almost reached them when I was struck from behind. Something slammed into my back, and while clinging to my neck, cut off my breath and yelled into my ear.

Baby-Love, Teddy Bear!

I’m not easily irritated, but also not terribly fond of physical contact, and any other male voice hanging from my body, well, it just wouldn’t have been good

Get the fuck off of me, Mauritte. Who gave you coffee?

He released his grip and slid to the ground.

I don’t need da coffee ‘cause I got da love! he almost yelled in his Brazilian streetwalker dialect, stretching the words as if not wishing the sentence to end. A group standing outside the vehicles gave us their full attention as Mauritte positioned himself before me with his head thrown back and hips pushed forward. On a normal day he was already a woman trapped in the wrong body, but in a moment like this, when an audience was not far, Mauritte became a drag queen sans costume. He was Bianca’s alter ego – her softer side, and they all knew that his exceptional creativity was one of the main reasons the magazine was as good as it was. What most of them did not know, however, was that while he let her appear in a good light now, it had been Bianca who had given Mauritte his first chance when he was new in Paris and just a strange little man with no friends.

A longer look at him, in a rare moment when he was holding still though, gave much away and unveiled his cheerful energy to be a deception. Mauritte’s face became the map of a long and pathetic journey that had begun in the Favelas of Rio at birth. Only he knew exactly when that was, but when he had arrived in Paris many years ago, he already had the exhausted look of someone whom the journey had cost as much or more than that, which he had been fleeing from ever would have. Every stop of his trip, every abusive lover on his way, and every cent collected in return had brought his inner conflict, his self-loathing, closer to the surface, until seemingly held inside only by the finest layer of taught skin, stretched so tightly over the bones of his face that it appeared close to the point of ripping. For Mauritte, fashion was but a colorful place in which to hide, and it was this, his near indifference toward the industry and its rules, that became the trademark of his quality, and for whatever twisted reason, the cause of an affinity I but rarely developed for other people.

The heat from inside the motorhome hit me like bathwater when I pulled open the door. Kelly and Satou stood in the middle of the room, each in a different state of undress, and looked stunning. Helmut and Victoria – hair, and make-up, respectively - had done their jobs well, for Kelly and Satou were not recognizable as the girls in jeans and sneakers I had seen in the hotel that morning. Looking at the two of them right then, however, I also saw how terribly displaced they were. Hours earlier I had stood in the doorway of Helmut’s room, watching as the last of Satou’s freckles disappeared under his sponge of base foundation, simultaneously transporting her to a parallel world. Youth was left far behind in favor of an artificial perfection that, in its effect, was not dissimilar to that of a Roman soldier donning glossy armor.

In appearance, Kelly was the exact opposite of Satou, with very dark, almost black hair, and skin so light it appeared translucent. They did have one thing in common though, and that was that they were both a long way from home as they stood there in fake beauty so perfect it made them appear untouchable: Satou with her arms stretched high as two styling assistants attempted to lower a gown over her head without damaging the hair-do, and Kelly standing next to her in pantyhose and skin colored brassiere, awaiting her turn.

Do show me, Johnathen…

I could not claim that it was my favorite, but it was the voice that was paying the bills; loud, nasal, and penetrant – any one of the characteristics was enough to set her apart from the rest of those present. She was sitting in a corner on the far side of the room, wrapped in an overcoat, with a plastic cup, half full of white wine, and an empty coffee on the table before her, and she was the obvious reason for the overheated motorhome. I did not answer immediately.

The pictures, Johnathen, or how else have you been spending your time in this lovely, little parking lot?

Bianca had not come to the location in the dunes all morning, which was probably due in equal parts to the outside temperature and the couple of hundred meters she would have had to put back on the soft sand in a state that did not favor such discomfort. I walked over to where she was sitting, removed the stack of prints from my pocket, and handed her the picture we had just shot. Then I placed the rest of the images from earlier in the morning on the table in front of her.

It was a simple story with a twist, whose inspiration had come to me one night while sitting in a bar not far from the Opéra National in Paris. Amongst the formally dressed crowd that arrived after the performance was an attractive woman with a scar that ran down, across a good length of her face. Had she been in a car accident, I wondered, or cut by a venomous boyfriend perhaps, or had it just been something as banal as a household accident or the family dog as a child? I knew that I would never find out and it did not matter, but aside from the fact that the scar suggested a depth to her personality that she possibly did not possess, it looked mesmerizing on her pretty face over the black evening gown, and I spent the rest of my drunken stay searching her out of the crowd, and had later never forgotten her. It was her look that had prompted the idea behind the story of two women fighting over a man by means of a modern day duel.

Bianca leaned forward, picked up the prints, lined up the edges to form a clean stack, and looked down at the first picture: four points of light under a dark sky; the headlights of two cars crossing the parking lot in the remnants of night. She put the print aside. The next image was again of the two automobiles, but closer, and now recognizable as a Cadillac Fleetwood and a Mercedes 600, both from the 60’s and both very large, dark, and quite threatening in appearance as they shot past under a high camera, trailing thick clouds of dust.

Oh, this is wonderful… Bianca said with enthusiasm as she placed her manicured finger on the picture and held it up to make sure that I saw what she was looking at. How did this come about?

We used a flash and shot from the Range Rover’s sunroof, I answered.

Brilliant, it really does have that Paparazzi, breaking-news kind of touch, doesn’t it?

She placed it aside and looked at the next image in which the cars had come to a stop and were parked diagonally next to each other. An early morning mist, fresh out of a rented fog machine, hung over the scene. Two male models costumed in chauffeur’s uniforms stood outside the cars, holding the rear doors open for the girls. Satou stood just outside the Cadillac’s open door while Kelly, with the assistance of her driver, was in the process of disembarking the Mercedes. It was barely daybreak when the picture was taken and the girls had frozen horribly in their sheer evening gowns with the antiquated heating systems of the old cars having been no match for the outside cold.

The next shot showed Kelly and Satou in the dunes. Dressed in fresh outfits, they stood before an androgynous, very pretty man acting as a weapons keeper who offered them the contents of a richly ornamented box in which lay two handguns. Bianca flipped through a few variations of the motif and placed them on the table. Then she held the final image in her hands: Kelly and Satou back to back, ready to walk their paces with their weapons held before their faces as if in prayer. Satou wearing a shoulder-less Marc Jacobs evening gown in deep black and Kelly in a Valentino robe of the same color with silver embroidery that matched the chrome finish of her .45 caliber so well that the weapon appeared a perfect label accessory.

When it was time to continue. I turned to the others and left Bianca behind with the pictures. Kelly