Gathered Dust and Others (12 page)

“I know.”

He shrugged.  “It’s cool.  I like crazy.  I like Alex, but he’s into some weird shit.  He’s giving me an education.  Funny, though, I can’t seem to shake off this weird feeling of doom.”  He tried to laugh, as if making a joke, until he saw my expression.  I took his hand and touched it to my mouth, kissing the stains on his fingers.

“Not to worry, Thomas.  I’ll look after the both of you.”  Yet even as I spoke the words I shivered with chilly uncertainty.  I, too, had a sense of foreboding.

A few weeks later the disaster struck.  I heard from my bedroom window someone weeping in the garden.  Looking out, I saw Alexander lamenting over the body of his friend.  I fled my room and rushed to my brother’s aid, but he pushed me away violently.  I sank to bended knee and stared at the vomit on which the boy had choked to death, his face now resting in its squalid pool.  My bones began to shake as Alexander wailed in woe. 

We buried Thomas in the burying ground where outsiders to the valley are interred.  Alex seemed lost and more unhinged than ever, and I realized for the first time how much his love for the city lad had meant to him.  He began to spend much time in the old brick tower which serves as athenaeum for Simon Gregory William’s extraordinary collection of arcane lore. It was a place that Alex had visited with father when our mad sire lived.  Against better judgment, I stepped one moonless night through the tower’s threshold and climbed the worn stone steps to its spacious circular room.  I could hear my brother’s uttered chanting.  I found him sitting in a circle of candlelight, a book of magick in his lap.  I watched as he sliced with ritual knife the flesh of his palm, etching into the ripped flesh an alchemical signal that he copied from a chart in the book before him.  Quietly, I hunkered to the floor and shuddered at the expression on his face, at his twitching lips, at the heavy glaze of his eyes. 

“What are you doing, brother?”

“Hush!  Can you hear it?”  He waved his bloody hand toward the woodland that surrounded the timeworn edifice.  “The trees breathe uneasily tonight.”  He held his hand to me and chuckled.  “We’re in luck.  The Old Ones smile on us, granting boon.  Say his name with me, girl.  Thomas, Thomas, Thomas.”  I rose on shaky limbs and vacated the place.  Leaning against a heavy tree, I wept in darkness as valley wind rose in power.  Beneath the noise of storm I thought I detected father’s mocking laughter. 

Afterward, Alexander began to sit in the garden at evenings, knitting needles in hand, a ball of yellow yarn in his lap.  I could hear his whispered mantra carried to me on the wind.  Occasionally he would dig with one needle into the symbol carved on his palm, and then hold that palm to heaven and bring a strand of dark hair to it.  I watched as he drenched the hair with his gore.  I listened as he spoke his lover’s name.  Finally, one evening, I went out to the garden and observed his ritual.  I was surprised by his kind smile.  The ball of yarn lay next to him on the bench, and in his hand he held a thick strand of human hair.  Seeing me stare at that hair, he giggled.  “It’s amazing what a little corpse hair can accomplish.”  Leaning to me, he thrust the hair beneath my nostrils.  “It smells of him, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”  He took it from me and picked up the thing he had been making, his doll of yellow yarn.  I saw the strands of bloodstained hair that had been twined into the tiny thing.  “I’m weaving a conjuration of memory, sister.  I’ll share it with you once it’s completed.  You loved him too, I know.”

I stared into his moonlit eyes and did not recognize the one before me.  Seeming to sense my distress, his eyes grew wild.  Suddenly, he held one of the knitting needles threateningly before my eye.  A low growl issued from some deep place in his throat.  And then his body convulsed and contorted.  Madly, he stabbed the needle into his stained palm.  Gasping, crying, he held that hand to starlight and chanted again and again his dead one’s name.  I saw the moon’s refracted light darkened in my brother’s eyes, and so I raised my eyes to heaven and watched the purple clouds that formed before that satellite of dust, as Alexander’s chanting seemed to echo in the gulf of night.  And then I heard my brother’s cry, and looked on him with horror as he jabbed the needle’s point into his neck, savagely, repeatedly, until he dangled on his knees like some frail puppet.  I tried to catch him as he tilted in death, but horror had weakened me and so I let him fall to earth as his blood bedewed my garments.

I could not moan or move, and so I sat in heavy silence until I heard, faintly, one peculiar whisper of sound.  I sensed weird movement on the earth, next to one of my brother’s hands – the hand that had held his woven representation.  It moved there, in the unearthly mixture of light and darkness that fell from the muttering sky; and then one mauve moonbeam fell upon it, and I crept nearer so as to watch and smell it, the little idol of yarn and blood and dead man’s hair.  I watched it raise one tiny arm toward the sky, weakly, as it trembled like some hatchling fallen from a nest.  The words that were repeated, vaguely, in the sky seemed to form like images within my mind, and I could feel them spill from my brain to my mouth.  Reaching for the needle, I pulled it from its place deep within my brother’s neck.  I touched that needle’s point to nose and mouth, so as to savor carnage.  I plunged that needle, at last, into the thing of yarn that writhed before me on the earth, and I laughed as it shuddered with increase of sentience.

Yes, my brother, I had loved the city lad; and so I removed the needle from the woven thing and lifted the nameless eikon with my smooth and bloodstained hands. I brought it to my mouth and breathed hot living aether onto it.  And I will tend to it, my brother, as you might have done in saner moments had you not perished. I will nourish it with blood and magick, and care for it for all my numbered midnights. 

The Tangled Muse

I.

Sebastian Melmoth lounged on his divan as Max Romp peered at him and sketched impressions onto a pad.  The smoke from Sebastian’s opium-tainted cigarette rose in whorls that shaped themselves suggestively before his large face; and as he studied their cryptic designs his mouth curled as if to suggest some secret amusement in his mind, and then his breath of laughter pushed the haze away. 

“I confess that I’m a bit anxious about your portrait, Max.  Your caricatures are so cruelly honest, so offensively true-to-life.  They show a distinct want of imaginative exaggeration.  You hold your mirror up too close to Nature.”

Ada Artemis stood beside a bronze statue of Bast and admired its inlaid blue-glass eyes.  Her eyes were of a clear and almost-colorless grey; Sebastian had often complained that such eyes contained no secrets, that nothing could be hidden within such pellucid organs.  A woman of few words, she silently watched the scene before her as her hand stroked the surface of the goddess. 

Max set down his pen and pad and went to a table on which there was a decorative decanter of sherry.  Carefully, he filled a delicate glass with the wine and sipped, and then he walked to where a full-length portrait of a beautiful young man sat on an upright easel.  “The same can’t be said for this, Sebastian.  No one could really be that beautiful.  Where did you find it?”

“It’s been in my family for generations, on the Wotten side.  I never told you that I am descended from aristocracy on my father’s side.  The painting is a family curiosity, a damaged thing kept in attics for decades, discarded and forgotten.  My great Uncle Sebastian, after whom I am named, was especially obsessed with it, so family legend relates, and used to sit in a small dark room talking to the thing.  I have told you of him, Ada, the uncle who went mad and spent his final years in an asylum.  On the evening of his last madness, for which he was confined, he was found shrieking at the painting and slashing at the figure’s breast with a silver dagger.  Seems the thing was giving him bad dreams.  No one bothered with repairing the canvas – indeed, the family took an active dislike to the thing and kept it hid, perhaps linking it to the mental destruction of a once-beloved relation.”  Sebastian shrugged.  “It eventually came to me, and I had it repaired.  The original frame has been lost, no doubt having been used for some other work while this delightful boy was doomed to collect dust in tiny hidden rooms.  I brought him with me when I first came to Gershom.  I have yet to find a frame suitable for so perfect a representation of youthful beauty.  His expression – it breaks my heart.  Such a wistful look, almost touching on some vague sadness.  What do you think, Sphinx?”

Ada walked to the painting and stood directly in front of it.  As a painting it was superb, but she did not care for its subject.  There was, beneath the boy’s sad eyes, a taint of peevishness; she did not care for the way the fingers of one hand curled, imagining that she saw in them something cruel and clutching.  Ada turned to the divan, but before she could disappoint her host with her reply, a young man rushed into the room, hastily removing hat and coat and handing them to the servant who followed him, but keeping a small leather portfolio that he gripped in one long hand.

“Sorry I’m late, Sebastian.  I had a sudden brainstorm and got lost working on a new illustration, and that always makes me lose track of time.”  He then noticed the others in the room who were observing him and became silent, a bit of color coming to his complexion. 

Sebastian rose from his divan and went to embrace the boy.  Turning to the others he said, “I introduce Japheth Beardsley, a new resident to our city, whom I observed sketching at his table in the Café Regal, much to the chagrin of his maître d’. The sketch was quite grotesque, and very fine.  I immediately introduced myself, and we became instant friends.”

The others looked at the young man, taking in his threadbare clothes, his gauntness, the hatchet face below the oddly cut chestnut hair.  Finally, Ada moved from the painting, approached Japheth and took his hand.   “We’re pleased that you could join our little
soirée. 
I am Ada Artemis.  Sebastian says you sketch.”

“He has a remarkable talent for diabolic scenes,” Sebastian crowed, “which got him into a bit of trouble in his hometown.  Thus he has found his way to Gershom, where he will find neither judgment nor condemnation.”

“You exaggerate, Sebastian, as always,” said Max, who strolled to the boy and introduced himself.  “You’ve only just criticized my art!”

“What I mean is, we do not critique personality.  We do not hound or harass because one’s art is morbid.  We do not moralize; we know that art can express anything.”

“And have you been hounded?” Ada asked the young artist.

Japheth laughed lightly and ran his exceedingly long fingers through his hair.  “My first exhibition caused a bit of a scandal,” he replied, smiling sheepishly.  “I did some panels based on Baudelaire, which some found too – risqué.  I found it all rather hypocritical; and so I’ve come to your city, the legend of which is whispered among various artistic circles with whom I am acquainted.”

“I have seen his various
fleurs du mal
and they are quite poisonous,” Sebastian said as he lit another cigarette.  “Will you have some sherry, dear boy?”  He waved toward the table and its decanter. 

“Yes, thank you.”  He glanced about the room and then started as he saw the full-length portrait that had been their topic of discourse.  He stepped to it and stared, and then he reached to touch one of the painted hands.  Sebastian approached him and lightly touched his shoulder, and then handed him a glass half-full of drink. 

“What a wonderful expression haunts your eyes, dear boy.  You are enraptured.”

“It’s just so strange – to see her painted as a young man.”

“Her?”

“Audre Brugge, the Belgian girl who sings French songs at
Café Bacchus
.  Perhaps you don’t know it; it’s a bit of a dive.”

Sebastian exhaled a plume of perfumed smoke.  “Ah yes, the speakeasy on Queer Street.  I was there
once
– the food was awful.  I think I know of whom you speak, a pale mulatto wench with polypoid hair.  I merely glanced at her, and did not like her voice when she began to warble.  I have never heard such a
sepulchral
sound:  it was like the voice of one who has tasted death and understood the meaning of that taste.  I do not like to think on matters
in extremis
.  How you can compare her with this Adonis I cannot comprehend.  She was swarthy and alien – and he!  He is composed of milk and rose leaf.  He is Hyacinthus, beloved of Apollo, and I worship him.”

“How are they alike?” asked Ada.

“Their faces are identical, uncannily so.  Wait.”  Japheth drained his glass and set it on a nearby stand, and then he opened his portfolio and rummaged through various papers until he found the desired item.  He handed the sheet to Ada, who examined the portrait that had been sketched onto it. 

Max joined her and studied both sketch and painting.  “Yes,” he said, nodding, “she could be Viola to this portrait’s Sebastian.  Youth is often delightfully androgynous.  But what odd hair she has, like coils flowing from the domes of Ceto’s daughters.  I’m quite intrigued.  Does she perform tonight?  Shall we go and listen?”

“Don’t be absurd, Max,” Sebastian huffed.  “You haven’t finished working on your sketch.”  He turned to Japheth.  “Max is doing my portrait in lithograph.”

“I have enough of it to work on – and I have my living model.  Come on, this is too fantastic, to find a twin to your ancestor’s mysterious portrait.  How can you resist?”

“‘No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

   Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine.’”

Ada turned to face their host.  “I, for one, am intrigued.  Let us go.  Japheth will act as our Charon, our son of Night.”

Max clapped his hands excitedly.  “We shall share a bottle of
Artemisia absinthium
and drink in honor of your sister, Luna,” he told Ada excitedly.  “Come on, Melmoth, don’t be a bore; do join us.”

Sebastian yawned dramatically.  “Oh, very well.  Let me find a book that will be suitable for reading aloud during bad music.”  He stalked to a section of poetry, scanned the titles and pulled out a volume of
Chants de Maldoror
.  “Yes, this will do for so delirious an expedition.”  Stepping to his closet, he pulled out the long and antique fur coat that was his favorite possession and flung it over his shoulders, and then he held out his hands in a gesture of ushering his company from his rooms.