Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (26 page)

“You knew Richard Upton Pickman,” I said, blundering much too quickly to the point, and, immediately, her expression turned somewhat suspicious. She said nothing for almost a full minute, just sat there smoking and staring back at me, and I silently cursed my impatience and lack of tact. But then the smile returned, and she laughed softly and nodded.

“Wow,” she said. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. But, yeah, sure, I knew the son of a bitch. So, what are you? Another of his protégés, or maybe just one of the three-letter-men he liked to keep handy?”

“Then it’s true Pickman was light on his feet?” I asked.

She laughed again, and this time there was an unmistakable edge of derision there. She took another long drag on her cigarette, exhaled, and squinted at me through the smoke.

“Mister, I have yet to meet the beast – male, female, or anything in between – that degenerate fuck wouldn’t have screwed, given half a chance.” She paused, here, tapping ash onto the floorboards. “So, if you’re not a fag, just what are you? A kike, maybe? You sort of look like a kike.”

“No,” I replied. “I’m not Jewish. My parents were Roman Catholic, but me, I’m not much of anything, I’m afraid, but a painter you’ve never heard of.”

“Are you?”

“Am I what, Miss Endecott?”

“Afraid,” she said, smoke leaking from her nostrils. “And do
not
dare start in calling me ‘Miss Endecott.’ It makes me sound like a goddamned schoolteacher or something equally wretched.”

“So, these days, do you prefer Vera?” I asked, pushing my luck. “Or Lillian?”

“How about Lily?” she smiled, completely nonplussed, so far as I could tell, as though these were all only lines from a script she’d spent the last week rehearsing.

“Very well, Lily,” I said, moving the glass ashtray on the table closer to her. She scowled at it, as though I were offering her a platter of some perfectly odious foodstuff and expecting her to eat, but she stopped tapping her ash on my floor.

“Why am I here?” she demanded, commanding an answer without raising her voice. “Why have you gone to so much trouble to see me?”

“It wasn’t as difficult as all that,” I replied, not yet ready to answer her question, wanting to stretch this meeting out a little longer and understanding, expecting, that she would likely leave as soon as she had what she’d come for. In truth, it had been quite a lot of trouble, beginning with a telephone call to her former agent, and then proceeding through half a dozen increasingly disreputable and uncooperative contacts. Two I’d had to bribe, and one I’d had to coerce with a number of hollow threats involving nonexistent contacts in the Boston Police Department. But, when all was said and done, my diligence had paid off, because here she sat before me, the two of us, alone, just me and the woman who’d been a movie star and who had played some role in Thurber’s breakdown, who’d posed for Pickman and almost certainly done murder on a spring night in Hollywood. Here was the woman who could answer questions I did not have the nerve to ask, who knew what had cast the shadow I’d seen in that dingy pornographic film. Or, at least, here was all that remained of her.

“There aren’t many left who would have bothered,” she said, gazing down at the smoldering tip-end of her Gitane.

“Well, I have always been a somewhat persistent sort of fellow,” I told her, and she smiled again. It was an oddly bestial smile that reminded me of one of my earliest impressions of her – that oppressive summer’s day, now more than two months past, studying a handful of old clippings in the Hope Street boarding house. That her human face was nothing more than a mask or fairy glamour conjured to hide the truth of her from the world.

“How did you meet him?” I asked, and she stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray.

“Who? How did I meet who?” She furrowed her brow and glanced nervously towards the parlor window, which faces east, towards the harbor.

“I’m sorry,” I replied. “Pickman. How is it that you came to know Richard Pickman?”

“Some people would say that you have very unhealthy interests, Mr. Blackman,” she said, her peculiarly carnivorous smile quickly fading, taking with it any implied menace. In its stead, there was only this destitute, used-up husk of a woman.

“And surely they’ve said the same of you, many, many times, Lily. I’ve read all about Durand Drive and the Delgado woman.”

“Of course, you have,” she sighed, not taking her eyes from the window. “I’d have expected nothing less from a persistent fellow such as you.”

“How did you meet Richard Pickman?” I asked for the third time.

“Does it make a difference? That was so very long ago. Years and years ago. He’s dead and buried. “

“No body was ever found.”

And, here, she looked from the window to me, and all those unexpected lines on her face seemed to have abruptly deepened; she might well have been twenty-seven, by birth, but no one would have argued if she laid claim to forty.

“The man is dead,” she said flatly, then added, cryptically. “And if by chance he’s
not,
well, we should all be fortunate enough to find our heart’s desire, whatever it might be.” Then she went back to staring at the window, and, for a minute or two, neither of us said anything more.

“You told me that you have the sketches,” she said, finally. “Was that a lie, just to get me up here?”

“No, I have them. Two of them, anyway,” and I reached for the folio beside my chair and untied the string holding it closed. “I don’t know, of course, how many you might have posed for. There were more?”

“More than two,” she replied, almost whispering now.

“Lily, you still haven’t answered my question.”

“And you are a persistent fellow.”

“Yes,” I assured her, taking the two nudes from the stack and holding them up for her to see, but not yet touch. She studied them a moment, her face remaining slack and dispassionate, as if the sight of them elicited no memories at all.

“He needed a model,” she said, turning back to the window and the blue October sky. “I was up from New York, staying with a friend who’d met him at a gallery or lecture or something of the sort. My friend knew that he was looking for models, and I needed the money.”

I glanced at the two charcoal sketches again, at the curve of those full hips, the round, firm buttocks, and the tail – a crooked, malformed thing sprouting from the base of the spine and reaching halfway to the bend of the subject’s knees. As I have said, Pickman had a flair for realism, and his eye for human anatomy was almost as uncanny as the ghouls and demons he painted. I pointed to one of the sketches, to the tail.

“That isn’t artistic license, is it?”

She did not look back to the two drawings, but simply, slowly, shook her head. “I had the surgery done in Jersey, back in ‘21,” she said.

“Why did you wait so long, Lily? It’s my understanding that such a defect is usually corrected at birth, or shortly thereafter.”

And she almost smiled that smile again, that hungry, savage smile, but it died, incomplete, on her lips.

“My father, he has his own ideas about such things,” she said quietly. “He was always so proud, you see, that his daughter’s body was blessed with evidence of her heritage. It made him very happy.”

“Your heritage – ” I began, but Lily Snow held up her left hand, silencing me.

“I believe, sir, I’ve answered enough questions for one afternoon. Especially given that you have only the pair, and that you did not tell me that was the case when we spoke.”

Reluctantly, I nodded and passed both the sketches to her. She took them, thanked me, and stood up, brushing at a bit of lint or dust on her burgundy chemise. I told her that I regretted that the others were not in my possession, that it had not even occurred to me she would have posed for more than these two. The last part was a lie, of course, as I knew Pickman would surely have made as many studies as possible when presented with so unusual a body.

“I can show myself out,” she informed me when I started to rise from my chair. “And you will not disturb me again, not ever.”

“No,” I agreed. “Not ever. You have my word.”

“You’re lying sons of bitches, the whole lot of you,” she said, and with that, the living ghost of Vera Endecott turned and left the parlor. A few seconds later, I heard the door open and slam shut again, and I sat there in the wan light of a fading day, looking at what grim traces remained in Thurber’s folio.

7. (October 24th, 1929)

This is the last of it. Just a few more words, and I will be done. I know now that having attempted to trap these terrible events I have not managed to trap them at all, but merely given them some new, clearer focus.

Four days ago, on the morning of October 20th, a body was discovered dangling from the trunk of an oak growing near the center of King’s Chapel Burial Ground. According to newspaper accounts, the corpse was suspended a full seventeen feet off the ground, bound round about the waist and chest with interwoven lengths of jute rope and baling wire. The woman was identified as a former screen actress, Vera Endecott, née Lillian Margaret Snow, and much was made of her notoriety and her unsuccessful attempt to conceal connections to the wealthy but secretive and ill-rumored Snows of Ipswich, Massachusetts. Her body had been stripped of all clothing, disemboweled, her throat cut, and her tongue removed. He lips had been sewn shut with cat-gut stitches. About her neck hung a wooden placard, on which one word had been written in what is believed to be the dead woman’s own blood:
apostate.

This morning I almost burned Thurber’s folio, along with all my files. I went so far as to carry them to the hearth, but then my resolve faltered, and I just sat on the floor, staring at the clippings and Pickman’s sketches. I’m not sure what stayed my hand, beyond the suspicion that destroying these papers would not save my life. If they want me dead, then dead I’ll be. I’ve gone too far down this road to spare myself by trying to annihilate the physical evidence of my investigation.

I will place this manuscript, and all the related documents I have gathered, in my safe deposit box, and then I will try to return to the life I was living before Thurber’s death. But I cannot forget a line from the suicide note of the screenwriter Joseph Chapman –
how does a man forget, deliberately and wholly and forever, once he has glimpsed such sights.
How, indeed. And, too, I cannot forget that woman’s eyes, that stony, sea-tumbled shade of grey. Or a rough shadow glimpsed in the final moments of a film that might have been made either in 1923 or 1924, that may have been titled
The Hound’s Daughter
or
The Necrophile.

I know the dreams will not desert me, not now nor at some future time, but I pray for such fortune as to have seen the last of the waking horrors that my foolish, prying mind has called forth.

PICKMAN’S OTHER MODEL (1929)

Here’s another example of my obsession with lost films and films that never were made. Also, it always bugged the hell out of me that we don’t know to whom Lovecraft’s narrator is speaking. This is one of those rare stories that was enjoyable to write despite being very difficult.

PART TWO

Providence

2008 – 2012

Galápagos

March 17, 2037 (Wednesday)

Whenever I wake up screaming, the nurses kindly come in and give me the shiny yellow pills and the white pills flecked with grey; they prick my skin with hollow needles until I grow quiet and calm again. They speak in exquisitely gentle voices, reminding me that I’m home, that I’ve been home for many, many months. They remind me that if I open the blinds and look out the hospital window, I will see a parking lot, and cars, and a carefully tended lawn. I will only see California. I will see only Earth. If I look up, and it happens to be day, I’ll see the sky, too, sprawled blue above me and peppered with dirty-white clouds and contrails. If it happens to be night, instead, I’ll see the comforting pale orange skyglow that mercifully hides the stars from view. I’m home, not strapped into
Yastreb-4
’s taxi module. I can’t crane my neck for a glance at the monitor screen displaying a tableau of dusty volcanic wastelands as I speed by the Tharsis plateau, more than four hundred kilometers below me. I can’t turn my head and gaze through the tiny docking windows at
Pilgrimage’s
glittering alabaster hull, quickly growing larger as I rush towards the aft docking port. These are merely memories, inaccurate and untrustworthy, and may only do me the harm that memories are capable of doing.

Then the nurses go away. They leave the light above my bed burning and tell me if I need anything at all to press the intercom button. They’re just down the hall, and they always come when I call. They’re never anything except prompt and do not fail to arrive bearing the chemical solace of pharmaceuticals, only half of which I know by name. I am not neglected. My needs are met as well as anyone alive can meet them. I’m too precious a commodity not to coddle. I’m the woman who was invited to the strangest, most terrible rendezvous in the history of space exploration. The one they dragged all the way to Mars after
Pilgrimage
abruptly, inexplicably, diverged from its mission parameters, when the crew went silent and the AI stopped responding. I’m the woman who stepped through an airlock hatch and into that alien Eden; I’m the one who spoke with a goddess. I’m the woman who was the goddess’ lover, when she was still human and had a name and a consciousness that could be comprehended.

“Are you sleeping better?” the psychiatrist asks, and I tell him that I sleep just fine, thank you, seven to eight hours every night now. He nods and patiently smiles, but I know I haven’t answered his question. He’s actually asking me if I’m still having the nightmares about my time aboard
Pilgrimage,
if they’ve decreased in their frequency and/or severity. He doesn’t want to know
if
I sleep or how
long
I sleep, but if my sleep is still haunted. Though he’d never use that particular word,
haunted.

He’s a thin, balding man, with perfectly manicured nails and an unremarkable mid-Atlantic accent. He dutifully makes the commute down from Berkeley once a week, because those are his orders, and I’m too great a puzzle for his inquisitive mind to ignore. All in all, I find the psychiatrist far less helpful than the nurses and their dependable drugs. Whereas they’ve been assigned the task of watching over me, of soothing and steadying me and keeping me from harming myself, he’s been given the unenviable responsibility of discovering what happened during the comms blackout, those seventeen interminable minutes after I boarded the derelict ship and promptly lost radio contact with
Yastreb-4
and Earth. Despite countless debriefings and interviews, NASA still thinks I’m holding out on them. And maybe I am. Honestly, it’s hard for me to say. It’s hard for me to keep it all straight anymore: what happened and what didn’t, what I’ve said to them and what I’ve only thought about saying, what I genuinely remember and what I may have fabricated wholesale as a means of self-preservation.

The psychiatrist says it’s to be expected, this sort of confusion from someone who’s survived very traumatic events.
He
calls the events very traumatic, by the way. I don’t; I’m not yet sure if I think of them that way. Regardless, he’s diagnosed me as suffering from Survivor Syndrome, which he also calls K-Z Syndrome. There’s a jack in my hospital room with filtered and monitored web access, but I was able to look up “K-Z Syndrome.” It was named for a Nazi concentration camp survivor, an Israeli author named Yehiel De-Nur. De-Nur published under the pseudonym Ka-Tzetnik 135633. That was his number at Auschwitz, and K-Z Syndrome is named after him. In 1956, he published
House of Dolls,
describing the Nazi “Joy Division,” the
Freudenabteilung
, a system that utilized Jewish women as sex slaves.

The psychiatrist is the one who asked if I would at least try to write it down, what happened, what I saw and heard (and smelled and felt) when I entered the
Pilgrimage
a year and a half ago. He knows, of course, that there have already been numerous written and vidded depositions and affidavits for NASA and the CSS/NSA, the WHO, the CDC, and the CIA and, to tell the truth, I don’t
know
who requested and read and then filed away all those reports. He knows about them, though, and that, by my own admission, they barely scratched the surface of whatever happened out there. He knows, but I reminded him, anyway.

“This will be different,” he said. “This will be more subjective.” And the psychiatrist explained that he wasn’t looking for a blow-by-blow linear narrative of my experiences aboard
Pilgrimage,
and I told him that was good, because I seem to have forgotten how to think or relate events in a linear fashion, without a lot of switchbacks and digressions and meandering.

“Just write,” he said. “Write what you can remember, and write until you don’t want to write anymore.”

“That would be now,” I said, and he silently stared at me for a while. He didn’t laugh, even though I’d thought it was pretty funny.

“I understand that the medication makes this sort of thing more difficult for you,” he said, sometime later. “But the medication helps you reach back to those things you don’t want to remember, those things you’re trying to forget.” I almost told him that he was starting to sound like a character in a Lewis Carroll story – riddling and contradicting – but I didn’t. Our hour was almost over, anyway.

So, after three days of stalling, I’m trying to write something that will make you happy, Dr. Ostrowski. I know you’re trying to do your job, and I know a lot of people must be peering over your shoulder, expecting the sort of results they’ve failed to get themselves. I don’t want to show up for our next session empty-handed.

The taxi module was on autopilot during the approach. See, I’m not an astronaut or mission specialist or engineer or anything like that. I’m a anthropologist, and I mostly study the Middle Paleolithic of Europe and Asia Minor. I have a keen interest in tool use and manufacture by the Neanderthals. Or at least that’s who I used to be. Right now, I’m a madwoman in a psych ward at a military hospital in San Jose, California. I’m a case number and an eyewitness who has proven less than satisfactory. But, what I’m
trying
to say, Doctor, the module
was
on autopilot, and there was nothing for me to do but wait there inside my encounter suit and sweat and watch the round screen divided by a Y-shaped reticle as I approached the derelict’s docking port, the taxi barreling forward at 0.06 meters per second. The ship grew so huge so quickly, looming up in the blackness, and that only made the whole thing seem that much more unreal.

I tried hard to focus, to breathe slowly, and follow the words being spoken between the painful, bright bursts of static in my ears, the babble of sound trapped inside the helmet with me.
Module approaching 50-meter threshold. On target and configuring KU-band from radar to comms mode. Slowing now to 0.045 meters per second. Decelerating for angular alignment, extending docking ring,
nine meters, three meters, a whole lot of noise and nonsense about latches and hooks and seals, capture and final position, and then it seemed like I wasn’t moving anymore. Like the taxi wasn’t moving anymore. We were, of course, the little module and I, only now we were riding piggyback on
Pilgrimage
, locked into geosynchronous orbit, with nothing but the instrument panel to remind me I wasn’t sitting still in space. Then the mission commander was telling me I’d done a great job, congratulations, they were all proud of me, even though I hadn’t done anything except sit and wait.

But all this is right there in the mission dossiers, Doctor. You don’t need me to tell you these things. You already know that
Pilgrimage’s
AI would allow no one but me to dock and that MS Lowry’s repeated attempts to hack the firewall failed. You know about the nurses and their pills, and Yehiel De-Nur and
House of Dolls.
You know about the affair I had with the Korean payload specialist during the long flight to Mars. You’re probably skimming this part, hoping it gets better a little farther along.

So, I’ll try to tell you something you don’t know. Just one thing, for now.

Hanging there in my tiny, life-sustaining capsule, suspended two hundred and fifty miles above extinct Martian volcanoes and surrounded by near vacuum, I had two recurring thoughts, the only ones that I can now clearly recall having had. First, the grim hope that, when the hatch finally opened –
if
the hatch opened – they’d all be dead. All of them. Every single one of the men and women aboard
Pilgrimage,
and most especially her. And, secondly, I closed my eyes as tightly as I could and wished that I would soon discover there’d been some perfectly mundane accident or malfunction, and the bizarre, garbled transmissions that had sent us all the way to Mars to try and save the day meant nothing at all. But I only hoped and wished, mind you. I haven’t prayed since I was fourteen years old.

March 19, 2037 (Friday)

Last night was worse than usual. The dreams, I mean. The nurses and my physicians don’t exactly approve of what I’ve begun writing for you, Dr. Ostrowski. Of what you’ve asked me to do. I suspect they would say there’s a conflict of interest at work. They’re supposed to keep me sane and healthy, but here you are, the latest episode in the inquisition that’s landed me in their ward. When I asked for the keypad this afternoon, they didn’t want to give it to me. Maybe tomorrow, they said. Maybe the day
after
tomorrow. Right now, you need your rest. And sure, I know they’re right. What you want, it’s only making matters worse, for them
and
for me, but when I’d finally had enough and threatened to report the hospital staff for attempting to obstruct a federal investigation, they relented. But, just so you know, they’ve got me doped to the gills with an especially potent cocktail of tranquilizers and antipsychotics, so I’ll be lucky if I can manage more than gibberish. Already, it’s taken me half an hour to write (and repeatedly rewrite) this one paragraph, so who gets the final laugh?

Last night I dreamed of the cloud again.

I dreamed I was back in Germany, in Darmstadt, only this time, I wasn’t sitting in that dingy hotel room near the Luisenplatz. This time it wasn’t a phone call that brought me the news, or a courier. And I didn’t look up to find
her
standing there in the room with me, which, you know, is how this one usually goes. I’ll be sitting on the bed, or I’ll walk out of the bathroom, or turn away from the window, and there she’ll be. Even though
Pilgrimage
and its crew is all those hundreds of millions of kilometers away, finishing up their experiments at Ganymede and preparing to begin the long journey home, she’s standing there in the room with me. Only not this time. Not last night.

The way it played out last night, I’d been cleared for access to the ESOC central control room. I have no idea why. But I was there, standing near one wall with a young French woman, younger than me by at least a decade. She was blonde, with green eyes, and she was pretty; her English was better than my French. I watched all those men and women, too occupied with their computer terminals to notice me. The pretty French woman (sorry, but I never learned her name) was pointing out different people, explaining their various roles and responsibilities: the ground operations manager, the director of flight operations, a visiting astrodynamics consultant, the software coordinator, and so forth. The lights in the room were almost painfully bright, and when I looked up at the ceiling I saw it wasn’t a ceiling at all, but the night sky, blazing with countless fluorescent stars.

And then that last transmission from
Pilgrimage
came in. We didn’t realize it would be the last, but everything stopped, and everyone listened. Afterwards, no one panicked, as if they’d expected something of this sort all along. I understood that it had taken the message the better part of an hour to reach Earth, and that any reply would take just as long, but the French woman was explaining the communications delay, anyway.

“We can’t know what that means,” somebody said. “We can’t
possibly
know, can we?”

“Run through the telemetry data again,” someone else said, and I think it was the man the French woman had told me was the director of flight operations.

But it might have been someone else. I was still looking at the ceiling composed of starlight and planets and the emptiness between starlight and planets, and I knew exactly what the transmission meant. It was a suicide note, of sorts, streamed across space at three hundred kilometers per second. I knew, because I plainly saw the mile-long silhouette of the ship sailing by overhead, only a silvery speck against the roiling backdrop of Jupiter. I saw that cloud, too, saw
Pilgrimage
enter it and exit a minute or so later (and I think I even paused to calculate the width of the cloud, based on the vessel’s speed).

You know as well as I what was said that day, Dr. Ostrowski, the contents in that final broadcast. You’ve probably even committed it to memory, just as I have. I imagine you’ve listened to the tape more times than you could ever recollect, right? Well, what was said in my dream last night was almost verbatim what Commander Yun said in the actual transmission. There was only one difference. The part right at the end, when the commander quotes from Chapter 13 of the
Book of Revelation
, that didn’t happen. Instead, he said: