Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (34 page)

Arabella licks at her thin, dry lips and grips the edges of the table by the open window.

-And in the dreamlands, past the seventy steps and through the wild, enchanted fungal woods that lie just beyond the Gate of Deeper Slumber, past the River Skai and the narrow, cobbled streets of Ulthar and across the shimmering sea in the onyx: city of Celephais, the priests within the sixteen-sided Temple of the Elder Ones pause in their prayers. Even after so many centuries,
they
have not lost all connection to the nameless red book, and in those hours when it works its deceits in the waking world, they bleed a foul, caustic ichor from their palms and the bottoms of their feet. Far below the Temple, in the catacombs that once imprisoned the tome, one among their number has been chained in its place, as a constant reminder of their inexcusable failure. This unfortunate, become a sort of willing surrogate, bears the greater part of their conjunction with the escaped book. The martyr’s tongue was cut out, that he might never utter the fell apparitions the book reveals to those waking women and men who, like Arabella Hopestill, have become catalysts for its depredations. What the chained priest bleeds is not to be described.

Arabella stares
into
the page, while the red book stares into her, and by way of its immemorial sorceries she feels every bit of the maiden’s hurt and terror and humiliation, her outrage and despair. But Arabella Hopestill
also
is given access to all the sensations and sentiments of the unicorn. She tastes the violated woman’s blood upon its tongue, and grows drunk with waves of triumph and boundless cruelty that infects all immortal beings. She perceives the unicorn’s every violent thrust, but is no less the victim than the rapist, no more the ravager than she is the ravaged, broken maiden. And she would have it no other way. The experiences the book bequeaths to her would be incomplete and entirely unsatisfying were she given only one half of any of its tableaus (or, in other, more elaborate cases, were she given only a third,or a fifth, or one fiftieth).

Arabella shudders and comes, even as the unicorn comes. She finds the strength to glance away from the page for a moment, trembling and listening to a mockingbird running through its repertoire of borrowed songs. Its impossible to be sure if the bird is in that meadow within the book, or somewhere just outside the open window. The breeze through the window reeks of the exhaust of passing automobiles, and Arabella realizes that she’s bitten her tongue hard enough that it’s bleeding. With an unsteady hand, she wipes blood and spittle from her lips and chin, and laughs nervously. Already, the ecstasy is fading quickly from her mind and body, as are the torments visited upon the maiden, those vales of anguish and degradation she has known now as though they were her own. Arabella looks back to the book, and already the page is growing murky around the edges.

“As long as I live,” she whispers, “I will guard you. As long as I live, I will keep you safe.”

At the edge of the brook, the maiden lies shattered, a wreck of: meat and golden cloth. Her green-brown eyes are not lifeless, but they seem as empty as the glass eyes of a porcelain doll. The roots that held her have retreated back into the muck.

“As long as I live,” Arabella whispers.

The unicorn uses one cloven forefoot to roll the woman over onto her back, and then stands perfectly still for a moment, motionless and white as a figurine carved from alabaster or bone. And then it turns and walks, unhurried towards the shelter of the towering oaks and spruces. Arabella knows everything the beast knows, and the unicorn is quite entirely certain that the woman lying in the mud will bear it a daughter, and that the child will come shortly after the first winter snowfalls smother the meadow and the brook has frozen over.

And then the page is only a blank and brittle page again, and, with trembling hands, Arabella Hopestill closes the red book and sits watching the ears coming and going on the street below her apartment.

Far down in the dreamlands, the hands and feet of the priests who kneel inside the Temple of the Elder Ones cease to display that vile stigmata, and the sacrifice chained far below them finally stops fighting against his unbreakable bonds. As the sun rises over the ebony towers of Inquanok, pushing the night away, that madman slips away into the nightmares that visit the inhabitants of this land, and dreams his bitter, splintered dreams within dreams.

1.

I have never been much for the movies, preferring, instead, to take my entertainment in the theater, always favoring living actors over those flickering, garish ghosts magnified and splashed across the walls of dark and smoky rooms it twenty-four frames per second. I’ve never seemed able to get past the knowledge that the apparent motion is merely an optical illusion, a clever procession of still images streaming past my eye at such a rate of speed that I only perceive motion where none actually exists. But in the months before I finally met Vera Endecott, I found myself drawn with increasing regularity to the Boston movie houses, despite this longstanding reservation.

I had been shocked to my core by Thurber’s suicide, though, with the unavailing curse of hindsight, it’s something I should certainly have had the presence of mind to have seen coming. Thurber was an infantryman during the war—
La Guerre por la Civilisation
, as he so often called it. He was at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel when Pershing failed in his campaign to seize Metz from the Germans, and he survived only to see the atrocities at the Battle of the Argonne Forest less than two weeks later. When he returned home from Prance early in 1819, Thurber was hardly more than a fading, nervous echo of the man Id first met during our college years at the Rhode Island School of Design, and, on those increasingly rare occasions when we met and spoke, more often than not our conversations turned from painting and sculpture and matters of aesthetics to the things he’d seen in the muddy trenches and ruined cities of Europe.

And then there was his dogged fascination with that sick bastard Richard Upton Pickman, an obsession that would lead quickly to what I took to be no less than a sort of psychoneurotic fixation on the man and the blasphemies he committed to canvas. When, two years ago, Pickman vanished from the squalor of his North End “studio,” never to be seen again, this fixation only worsened, until Thurber finally came to me with an incredible, nightmarish tale which, at the time, I could only dismiss as the ravings of a mind left unhinged by the bloodshed and madness and countless wartime horrors he’d witnessed along the banks of the Meuse River and then in the wilds of the Argonne Forest.

Rut I am not the man I was then, that evening we sat together in a dingy tavern near Faneuil Hall (I don’t recall the name of the place, as it wasn’t one of my usual haunts). Even as William Thurber was changed by the war and by whatever it is he may have experienced in the company of Pickman, so too have I been changed, and changed
utterly
, first by Thurber’s sudden death at his own hands and then by a film actress named Vera Endecott. I do not believe that I have yet lost possession of my mental faculties, and if asked, I would attest before a judge of law that my mind remains sound, if quite shaken. But I cannot now see the world around me the way I once did, for having beheld certain things there can be no return to the unprofaned state of innocence or grace that prevailed before those sights. There can be no return to the sacred cradle of Eden, for the gates are guarded by the flaming swords of cherubim, and the mind may not—excepting in merciful cases of shock and hysterical amnesia—simply forget the weird and dismaying revelations visited upon men and women who choose to ask forbidden questions. And I would be lying if I were to claim that I failed to comprehend, to suspect, that the path I was setting myself upon when I began my investigations following Thurber’s inquest and funeral would lead me where they have. I knew, or I knew well enough. I am not yet so degraded that I am beyond taking responsibility for my own actions and the consequences of those actions.

Thurber and I used to argue about the validity of first-person narration as an effective literary device, him defending it and me calling into question the believability of such stories, doubting both the motivation of their fictional authors and the ability of those character narrators to accurately recall with such perfect clarity and detail specific conversations and the order of events during times of great stress and even personal danger. This is probably not so very different from my difficulty appreciating a moving picture because I am aware it is
not,
in fact, a moving picture. I suspect it points to some conscious unwillingness or unconscious inability, on my part, to effect what Coleridge dubbed the “suspension of disbelief.” And now I sit down to write my
own
account, though I attest there is not a word of
intentional
fiction to it, and I certainly have no plans of ever seeking its publication. Nonetheless, it will undoubtedly be filled with inaccuracies following from the objections to a first-person recital that I have already belabored above. What I am putting down here is my best attempt to recall the events preceding and surrounding the murder of Vera Endecott, and it should be read as such.

It is my story, presented with such meager corroborative documentation as I am here able to provide. It is some small part of her story, as well, and over it hang the phantoms of Pickman and Thurber. In all honesty, already I begin to doubt that setting any of it down will achieve the remedy which I so desperately desire—the dampening of damnable memory, the lessening of the hold that those memories have upon me, and, if I am most kicky, the ability to sleep in dark rooms once again and an end to any number of phobias which have come to plague me. Too late do I understand poor Thurber’s morbid fear of cellars and subway tunnels, and to that I can add my own fears, whether they might ever be proven rational or not. “I guess you won’t wonder now why I have to steer clear of subways and cellars,” he said tome that day in the tavern. I
did
wonder, of course, at that and at the sanity of a dear and trusted friend. But, in this matter, at least, I have long since ceased to wonder.

The first time I saw Vera Endecott on the “big screen,”’ it was only a supporting part in Josef von Sternberg’s
A Woman of the Sea,
at the Exeter Street Theater. But that was not the first time I saw Vera Endecott.

2.

I first encountered the name and face of the actress while sorting through William’s papers, which I’d been asked to do by the only surviving member of his immediate family, Ellen Thurber, an older sister, I found myself faced with no small or simple task, as the close, rather shabby room he’d taken on Hope Street in Providence after leaving Boston was littered with a veritable bedlam of correspondence, typescripts, journals, and unfinished compositions, including the monograph on weird art that had played such a considerable role in his taking up with Richard Pickman three years prior. I was only mildly surprised to discover, in the midst of this disarray, a number of Pickman’s sketches, all of them either charcoal or pen and ink. Their presence among Thurber’s effects seemed rather incongruous, given how completely terrified of the man he’d professed to having become. And even more so given his claim to have destroyed the one piece of evidence that could support the incredible tale of what he purported to have heard and seen and taken away from Pickman’s cellar studio.

It was a hot day, so late into July that it was very nearly August. When I came across the sketches, seven of them tucked inside a cardboard portfolio case, I carried them across the room and spread the lot out upon the narrow, swaybacked bed occupying one corner. I had a decent enough familiarity with the man’s work, and I must confess that what I’d seen of it had never struck me quiet so profoundly as it had Thurber. Yes, to be sure, Pickman was possessed of a great and singular talent, and I suppose someone unaccustomed to images of the diabolic, the alien or monstrous, would find them disturbing and unpleasant to look upon. I always credited his success at capturing the weird largely to his intentional juxtaposition of phantasmagoric subject matter with a starkly, painstakingly realistic style. Thurber also noted this, and, indeed, had devoted almost a full chapter of his unfinished monograph to an examination of Pickman’s technique.

I sat down on the bed to study the sketches, and the mattress springs complained loudly beneath my weight, leading me to wonder yet again why my friend had taken such mean accommodations when he certainly could have afforded better. At any rate, glancing over the drawings, they struck me, for the most part, as nothing particularly remarkable, and I assumed that they must have been gifts from Pickman, or that Thurber might even have paid him some small sum for them. Two I recognized as studies for one of the paintings mentioned that day in the Chatham Street tavern, the one titled
The Lesson
, in which the artist had sought to depict a number of his subhuman, doglike ghouls instructing a young child (a
changeling,
Thurber had supposed) in their practice of necrophagy. Another was a rather hasty sketch of what I took to be some of the statelier monuments in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, and there were also a couple of rather slapdash renderings of hunched gargoyle-like creatures.

But it was the last two pieces from the folio that caught and held my attention. Both were very accomplished nudes, more finished than any of the other sketches, and given the subject matter, I might have doubted they had come from Pickman’s hand had it not been for his signature at the bottom of each. There was nothing that could have been deemed pornographic about either, and considering their provenance, this surprised me, as well. Of the portion of Richard Pickman’s
oeuvre
that I’d seen for myself, I’d not once found any testament to an interest in the female form, and there had even been whispers in the Art Club that he was a homosexual. But there were so many rumors traded about the man in the days leading up to his disappearance, many of them plainly spurious, that I’d never given the subject much thought. Regardless of his own sexual inclinations, these two studies were imbued with an appreciation and familiarity with a woman’s body that seemed unlikely to have been gleaned entirely from academic exercises or mooched from the work of other, less-eccentric artists.