Gathered Dust and Others (21 page)

“I don’t belong to any damn movement – and all good poetry is timeless.”

“Then are we all immortal,” Justin slurred, finishing another glass of beer.

The others looked up as someone entered the establishment, and Richard turned to see Simon advancing toward their table.  He was fascinating by the shift of mood and energy in the room:  everyone seemed more alert, and perhaps a bit uneasy.  This made him smile – he liked sinister energy.  The beast stopped at their table and peered at Justin Geoffrey, who regarded Simon with a sloppy smile.  “Sit and join us, beast,” the poet invited, “and I shall summon poesy in your honor.”

“Nay, sirrah.  Your verse annoys me; it has such a diversity of voices.”

“I have a plethora of devils in my skull, each of singular expression.”

“I prefer consistency of voice and vision.  But no matter, I have a small surprise for you, in honor of your escape from that Illinois den.  Come – follow me.”  His eyes, shadowed by the brim of his wide hat, seemed to shimmer with a kind of inner glowing.

Richard was surprised to see that everyone else at the table arose before the poet did, and he stayed seated until Justin finally stretched and indolently vacated his chair.  Simon stayed where he stood and took his black pipe from its inner pocket, and the tune he played stirred Richard strangely.  The tone was very low and soft, a whisper of melody; but it contained a kind of compelling force that made one’s soul ache with longing, and the artist lifted himself out of his wooden chair and followed as Simon finally turned away and exited the place. 

IV.
(From the Journal of Richard Upton Pickman)

It was strange – I felt as if I had fallen into an eerie dream, of which I was a part and yet none of which I understood.  Like the Piper in Robert Browning’s poem, Simon lured us with his music, out of the old building (and it looked very old, that pub, and I will have to return to it anon and smell its secrets) and down the hard dirt road; and in my imagination I thrilled at the idea that he was leading our pack to the mountain and would take us to its secret entrance, where we would encounter a realm of unsurpassed wonder.  Although I had been in this uncommon valley for but a few days, and had spent most of those days transfixed in working on my portrait of the beast in his small dwelling just outside the main section of Sesqua Town, I felt a growing kinship with its astonishing inhabitants.  I relished the idea, after suffering the growing contempt of friends and family in Boston, that I had stumbled upon a society wherein I felt as one.  Simon especially delighted me, for he did not conceal in any way his contempt for all humanity, and I was mesmerized by his sinister aura, by the sense of delicious and playful danger that was triggered at all times in his company.  Being in this crowd, now, and tramping into the woods of the valley, felt like being in a wondrous dream, a dream that had aspects of vague familiarity and aroused an ache to remember some forgotten knowledge.  Simon’s music, for example, as it filtered through the air that night, was like nothing I had ever heard – discordant yet mesmerizing, resembling in its jarring sound an aspect of his personality.  The woods through which we tramped were very dark, and I could not investigate some of the more peculiar trees which seemed so bizarrely twisted and malformed, and on some few of which I could just make out, in places where dim starlight illuminated bark, disturbing patterns of moss that almost resembled semi-human faces. 

The fabulous darkness of the woods was like a shroud of shadow, and I wanted to tighten it around me; and so I was disappointed when we came to an end of the forest and stepped into a rising field, and I wondered at the way Simon’s music softened and became still more strange, as if it were coming from some distant portion of the vaulted sky.  I stopped to gaze at that sky and its stars, but then Miss Blotch linked her arm with mine and pulled me back into the bunch.  I heard Justin Geoffrey utter an odd exclamation as a lean black column some thirty-seven or so inches in height came into view.  At the same time a youngish fellow was coming from another part of the field, pulling a dogcart, and I recognized him as being the owner of the curio shop above which I had my room, a young man named Leonidas.  He took to dressing in Victorian attire that seemed to suit him, and on this night he wore a black Inverness cloak.  His glossy shoulder-length black hair fell from beneath a top hat that was made of beaver fur or some such thing.  Coming to a stop, he held one hand to the quarter moon and made to it an esoteric sign, his sunken eyes flashing with keen expectancy.  A number of people gathered around the cart and took up the queerest looking instruments I had ever seen.  Simon chose a mammoth coiled horn-like thing that looked incredibly heavy, an instrument that reminded me of a shofar blown at Jewish holidays, but it didn’t come from any ram of earthly existence.   Shutting his eyes and pointing the instrument at the moon, he blew on it and filled the valley with what sounded like the death-throes of a bull. 

My attention returned to the drunken poet, who had fallen to his knees before the column and was muttering to himself.  I went to kneel beside him and watched as he ran his fingers over the unfathomable symbols or alphabet that had been chiseled into the stone of the black column.  The thing itself was newly made, judging from the high polish of its smooth surface – and yet the object exuded an aura of unearthly antiquity.  I tilted nearer to Justin to hear what he was mumbling.  “It hasn’t been defaced like the one in Hungary.  See, see – they are all there!  Nothing marred or blotted out.  Look at it!  Gaze and gaze!  What a curious chimera it is, with its hint of semi-transparency – as if it were not wholly of terrestrial realm!” He then turned to me and clutched at my hair, pulling my face closer to the black stone.  “Gaze on it, Richard, it aches for light of mortal eyes!”  His fingers were tightened in my hair to the point of pain – and yet I did not mind the discomfort, for I had been bewitched.  Just as earlier I had been captivated by the sight of the white mountain, now I was completely enthralled with this spectre of smooth sable stone.  I did not want to look away, and I grumbled when some valley folk lifted me to my feet and dragged me into their clamorous dance; for they moved about me now like fools on drugs, banging metal implements together, or pounding queer drums, while Simon continued to rupture the night with his heinous bellowing horn.  It was a din of madness, efficacious in its ability to rupture one emotionally and imaginatively.  My eyes played tricks on me as I looked upward, to the moon, and watched that quarter disc become obscured by nebulous clouds that were not clouds at all, but sprites that billowed evilly above us and wound tendrils between the spaces of the stars.  And then a darker cloud-like shape began to form in a place high above the octagonal black column, and as it coalesced I thought it took on such an outline of some monstrous malformed amphibian.  I felt its shaping of itself upon and beneath my eyes; and when at last the poet, who was staring at the same delusion, stretched his mouth with awful baying, I howled too, like a lunatic, as around us the silver-eyed children of Sesqua Valley continued with their terrible tumult.  I returned to kneel once more beside the lonesome poet, and we curled our fingers into each other’s hair.

A naked figure came into my view – Hannah Botch, striped of clothing and dancing like a heathen around the column.  Leonidas then came into view, naked as well, his body firm and muscular, and in one hand he held a bunch of long fir switches that had been bound together.  He clutched the woman’s hair as Justin had clutched mine, and then he began to lash her naked back with the switches that he bore; and she screamed with a mixture of ecstasy and pain, and then she escaped him and spun with amazing speed in a dance that caught exactly the crazy rhythm of the surrounding clamor.   She spun, and then seemed almost to float toward one figure who, as he stood, bent low and dug his talons into earth.  And then the figure rose and spilled particles of soil over the woman as she fell prostrate before him; and I was shocked to see how the beast, now hatless, had transformed himself, so that as he stood erect and the starlight fell on him I could see how his head had altered and reformed, looking now like a huge wolf’s head horribly compounded of elements both human and bestial.

And the horror in the sky drifted too, so as to spread its aether flesh over the black column before which the poet and I knelt; and I watched as wisps of its airy substance coiled toward us and touched our brows.  And then the scene turned black, as black as the smooth column of stone, and everything faded from me, like a dream.

V.

He awakened to find himself in bed with a prize headache while a naked woman sat on the chair at his desk and studied pages from one of his old sketchpads.  She smiled at him as the red light (of sunrise or sunset he knew not) beamed through the window and tinted her green eyes.  “Is this you?”  She held up the notebook and showed him a page of a self-portrait he had hastily sketched some few years previously.  He nodded, and she squinted her lovely eyes as she scrutinized his face.  “My, you’ve altered.  You’re far more interesting now.  Are you a changeling?”  She shut the notebook and bent to return it to the pile on the floor.

“I beg your pardon,” he groaned as he studied the sway of her ponderous breasts. 

“Were you a foundling?  A waif left on some childless doorstep?”

He looked into himself.  “I’ve often wondered.”

“You’re not completely human, that’s obvious.  There’s a – smell – it clings to the texture of your skin and links you to carnage, to that which is decayed.  And there’s an element in your eyes that separates you from ordinary men.  That’s probably why Simon brought you to the valley; it’s so unlike him to do that with just anyone.”

“I had something I knew he would desire – a family heirloom; and he said he wanted his portrait painted.  He attended my last show in Boston and was impressed with my work.  I’ve become fascinated, of late, with the art of photography, and I thought some studies of him in that medium would prove exceptionally absorbing; but he would have none of.  ‘A pox on that neoteric flashing of false light and the flat image it produces,’ he bellowed.  ‘Give me
real
art, produced of pigment and sweat of brow – or none at all.’”

She laughed.  “Yes, that’s him exactly.  So you just packed up and departed with him?”

“I saw no reason not to.  I was in need of a violent change.  What was your name?”

Smiling, she rose and joined him in bed.  “Hannah.”

“Oh, yes – the imagist poet.”

“Among other things,” she answered as she ran a hand over his furry chest.  “You do like girls, don’t you?”

“I don’t like anyone.  ‘Richard Upton Pickman is an enemy to humanity.’  That’s from a review of my last exhibit.  It’s true enough.”  He could smell her now, and bent to kiss one breast.

“What excites you?”

“The victorious past – the human past, as it can be sensed in New England, and its present-day survival in this unimaginative era.  I like its smell, and its darkness; I relish its secrets and the dangers those secrets cloak.  I love the madness out of time that, when sensed by the modern brain, can lead to lunacy and fear.”

“And yet the work of yours that I’ve seen, in those notebook sketchings and on some of the few canvases you’ve brought with you, are all portraits.  You’re obsessed with your own alteration, and with its linkage to another colony.”  Pushing off the bed, she went to a corner where some small canvases were stacked against a wall, and she took up one of them and held it to him.  “You also love graveyards.”

“I’m fond of that particular burying ground, in the North End of Boston.  It’s the place I miss intensely.  Are there any ancient graveyards here?”

“We have the Hungry Place, where outsiders are dumped.”

“That sounds ominous.  Take me to it.”  He glanced out the window and saw that the red light had been replaced with twilight.  Rising, he joined the woman in dressing, and then followed as she led the way outdoors.  “What’s your story?” he asked, inhaling the scented wind that brushed them.

“Grew up in a pious family in Montana.  Became a rebel and moved to New York, fell in with various Bohemian cliques and began to write poetry.  Journeyed to England with a boyfriend and got involved in a Golden Dawn group, which led to darker practice.  Met Simon and was lured to the valley, where I’ve been ever since.  It’s an excellent place in which to dwell, as you’ll discover.”

“It’s friendly, certainly – but I’ve had my fill of the society of men.”

“It’s friendly only to a few.  You don’t need to be social at all.  You could live as a total hermit, like William Davis Manly.”

“Ah, the mystery man that Justin mentioned last night.”  They came to a low stone wall, and looking over it the artist saw a field of tombstones.  “Here we are.  What did you call it, the Hungry Place?  Why is that?”

“You’ll find out.”  He climbed over the wall easily and waited for her, but she did not seem anxious to join him on cemetery sod. 

“What’s the matter?  Here, take my hand.”  He reached for her, and she finally clasped his hand and climbed over the wall, then walked beside him as he led the way and examined a row of markers.  “This is strange – a lot of these don’t have dates, just a first name.”

“They are the graves of outsiders, people who have been lured here or found this valley by accident and were too entranced to escape.  This is where I’ll be buried – someday.”

“So is there a section for the valley’s special clan?”

“Excuse me?”

“The freaks with silver eyes.”

“Only outsiders are buried here.  The children of the valley . . .”

“Yes?”

“They return to shadow.  Sorry, I can’t explain it further; I don’t really understand what it means.  There’s a place in the forest that they return to, never to be seen again.  It doesn’t happen often, they tend to stick around forever, most of them.”

“A singular habitat, Sesqua Town.”

“Hell yes.  Oh, here’s Leonard’s grave.  He was a chum.  We practiced some rare art together.”