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Deathglass
by Lee Killough
This story copyright 1999 by Lee Killough. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use. All
other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

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Since our father's death, my siblings and I have looked out for one another with fierce protectiveness,
but the bonds are more than blood and our common love of glass. There is also shared terror. The public
remembers Joshua Benet as a name synonymous with fine glass, like Tiffany, Gallé, and Lalique, but it is
his death I cannot forget, ten years of descent into raving madness, lurching and twitching and screaming
paranoid accusations until nothing remained of the father Claudia, Garrett, and I had worshiped. Nothing
but the legacy of his genius in our hands, and cold-sweat dread of the time bomb in our genes.
So it was no surprise to have Claudia calling me during the day at Johns Hopkins, where I blew glass
apparatus for research projects. "Dane, someone has to talk to Garrett. He's taken up another of those
religious cults, a pagan one this time, I think."
Hardly a reason for so much concern that I could see. Garrett had been religion-hopping since he left
home for college. "He's a grown man, Claudia."
I could see her at the other end of the line, calling from her studio filled with stained glass, and leading,
and the largest privately-owned inventory of vitamins and health foods in the hemisphere. We each had
our defense against Fate. I could not see that Garrett's was any more ridiculous than Claudia's.
"Why not let him live the way he wants?"
Her breath hissed over the wire. "In the first place, this time the high priestess or whatever has actually
moved in with him-- Aletheia, she calls herself, no last name, just Aletheia-- and... she's not content with
just taking his money. Obviously you haven't been to his new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art."
"I haven't even talked to him for a month."
"There's an article in Newsweek. You'd better read it."
I remembered a copy of the magazine in the lounge. I ran down the hall after it, then pawed through to
the Arts page.
"Benet à la Bosch," the headline read. I have no idea what the writer thought about the exhibit; I never
saw the text. Color photographs of three pieces in the exhibit illustrated the article, and for me, nothing
else existed on the page. Garrett had made his reputation on glass portraits and sculptures that seemed to
defy gravity, crystal thread spun into dreams of moonbeams and starfire. But the pieces in these
pictures... A chunk of lead crystal like a fragment of glacier trapped some creature frozen in a moment of
desperate struggle. A fairy palace light and frothy as cloud cast a twisted, demonic shadow. The third
photo showed two views of the same vase. Seen from the front it seemed no different than his usual
work, but the fresh young girl's face within the glass became that of a toothless hag when the light shone
through it.
I stared at the photographs. Could a cult really have influenced Garrett to start producing pieces like
these? Perhaps he had just gone commercial. The Beautiful People lost in the ennui of sunning and
gambling in their villas in Saint-Tropez and Monte Carlo would love these. The novelty, the duality of
ugliness in beauty, would bring them flocking from the galleries of now commonplace sonic and tropic
sculptures, from the holosymphony performances and the boutiques of chamelemode clothing and
silicivitae jewelry.
But I could not help remembering something else, something Claudia had either overlooked or chosen
to ignore, that Father, too, had changed his style as deterioration swallowed him.
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