Gathered Dust and Others (22 page)

“Art?”

“Oh, not your kind.  Magick.  You’ll find that Sesqua Valley is a fountainhead of supernatural wonder, as we saw last night.”

“That already seems a dream.”  He frowned, bent his ear as if trying to perceive some sound, and then fell to his knees so as to smooth the soil with his large hands and tough nails.  “Do you feel that?”

Hannah frowned and scanned the barren sod.  “It is the beating of his hideous heart.”  She gazed at the man as if expecting him to recognize the words, and frowned when he did not.  “A portion of Sesqua’s psyche sleeps beneath this place – a very diseased portion of the valley’s heart.  It warps the ground and infiltrates the human mind.  The longer you linger, the more it insinuates itself into your little brain and warps.  It’s the reason we cannot linger long upon this ground.”  She glanced at the moon with worry in her eyes as from place deep beneath them a subtle and muted pounding sounded. 

Richard dug his hands deeper into earth, and shoved his snout into the displaced soil.  “I can taste the corruption of flesh beneath the ground – the appetizing afterward of death.  God, I love it.”

She knelt next to him and pulled his hands out of their shallow holes.  “It’s grown late and we should go.”  But then something in her eyes seemed to alter, and she bent to push one hand into the hole that Richard had produced.  Picking up a handful of silt, she brought the stuff to her nostrils and drank its rank bouquet; and then, lifting her hand above the artist’s head, she let the stuff sift through her fingers, onto him.

He gazed at her with savage eyes and bent to sniff her throat and bite her ear.  “I can hear the blood coursing through your veins – that liquid rush.  But too soon its flow is stopped, and flesh cools and becomes dry and rotted.  And then the feast begins.”  His thick tongue explored her throat as her own mouth found his ear, onto which she clasped her teeth. Richard’s panting orifice slid downward as his hands separated the opening of her blouse.  His mouth tightened around one nipple, and she moaned.  His strong teeth pierced her flesh, and she could feel the velvet trickle of blood slide to her belly.  Her laughter, when it rose into the aether, was demented.

“Hannah.”  They both looked up to study the person who stood near them.

“Simon,” the artist rasped as he looked upon the fellow.

“Hello, William,” the woman corrected.  Pushing Richard from her, she rose and took the fellow’s hand.  He buttoned up her blouse and bent to kiss her eyes, then motioned to the gate, to which she walked and through which she parted, singing to the moon.

Richard steadied himself on his knees and gaped at the fellow whom he had mistaken for the beast – but this gentleman looked younger than Simon Williams, and his hair was darker.  His face, however, was almost identical to Simon’s.  The piercing eyes of that face would not let go of Richard’s own.  “Follow me,” commanded the mellow voice, and Richard rose so as to follow the man out of the Hungry Place.  Once out, the mysterious fellow began to whistle a haunting tune, and the sound sank into Richard’s ears and calmed his confusion. 

And then the artist espied the shapes that were outlined by starlight, the beasts that beat their wings and floated above them in the fragrant air.  There were two of them, and they seemed attracted to the gentleman’s musical sound.  Like shadows in a dream, they drifted to the ground before William Davis Manly.  They took each of his hands and placed them at the place where mouths should have been – but faceless creatures owned no mouths.  And then one creature bent to Richard and ran its talons across his wide dark visage, and he felt that these things were vaguely familiar.  Where had he encountered them, within what realm of fancy?

“They remember you from your dreaming,” Manly said.  “They would have you follow them, through the other forest and into the dream-land.”

“The dream-land.”

“There’s a place where the Strange Dark One stands in effigy, within a ring of stones that ape his courtiers.  It is there that the woodland of Sesqua Valley touches the forest of dreams, when the stars are right.  It is from that region that the Crawling Chaos leaks into this pale mortality and warps its denizens with worry.  And from that dimension of dream these gaunts have sallied, to the enchantment of my calling, and they would escort you homeward, to she who awaits your freedom from the bondage of mortal clay, from the husk of flesh and its streaming blood.  Shall I lead you there, this moment?”

Richard bit into his mouth and tugged at his hair.  Why was everything encountered in this valley so extremely insane?  “Not yet – not yet.  I need to finish Simon’s portrait.”

“Ever the dedicated artist.  That impresses me.  Go then, and finalize your task.  Then you will be led into the other realm, and never more exist within the hateful world of men.”  The weird being began to whistle once again, and the night-gaunts stretched their wings and vanished into the gulf of night.  Richard watched their flight, and then he turned for more conversation with Sesqua’s eccentric hermit; but he was now alone, beneath the bit of moon and blanket of stars.

VI.
(From the Dreaming of Richard Upton Pickman)

I returned to Simon’s small house so as to finish his portrait, and was surprised to find that he was not alone.  Justin Geoffrey sat on the floor before the hearth puffing on some kind of weed that smelled quite vile.  It was not cannabis, nor any substance with which I was familiar; and it was obviously having some kind of effect, for the poet’s eyes were almost as pale as Simon’s.  He peered at me and began to laugh in a low voice.

“You continue to alter,” he choked, coughing.

“What?”

“Your face – by god, you look more like one of the valley’s shadow-kindred than ever!  And your eyes have turned a darker shade of emerald.”

“You have altered as well,” spoke Richard.  “The quality of your eyes isn’t what it was.”

“Nope.  I am to be initiated unto the fold, adopted by the valley and its kind.

And I will see the world with brand new eyes

And listen to the wind with keener sense,

And taste the sweetened wind that will arise

To wash me of mortality’s pretense.

And I will share the essence of the Beast,

And dwell within pure shadow-land anon

As I consume a supernatural feast

Beneath the curved peaks of antique Khroyd’hon.”

Simon curled his lips with satanic pleasure.  “You shall both of you be altered – and set free,” the beast responded.

“Was that why you lured him to this place, Simon?  You never do so unless for some specific reason.  Is Richard to become one with Sesqua’s supernatural essence?”

“No.  His destination lies beyond the woodland of reality.  William saw it in a dream.”

The poet spat into the fire.  “I thought your kind was incapable of dreaming.”

“It is
I
who never dream.  Such a dangerous practice.  I have learned to enter mortal dreaming, and debauch it.  I reshape the elements of nightmare so that they do my bidding.  But I never enter that rare realm myself, nor shall I ever.  William, however, is a fervent dreamer, of mystic ability, there in his sequestered lair within a vague pocket of woodland wild.  It was he who saw this artist in cloudy vision and told me where I would locate him.”

“I met William last night.”

“Indeed?  That is rare.  My brother rarely deigns to shew himself to mortal kind.”

“He does resemble you.”  I forgot about my canvas and went near to the beast, before whom I knelt so that I could minutely study his face and its odd combination of wolf and frog semblance.  As I bent to touch his visage his aroma sailed to me more forcibly, a sweet and cloying fragrance such as lingered on the valley air.  I bent nearer to him and breathed the texture his face.  “Your eyes…”

Tilting to me, the beast kissed my brow.  “Yes,” he whispered, “they are the one element that will not camouflage within your mortal clime.  The rest we can adopt, if we wish, to simulate your form; but our eyes stay as they are in realm of mist and shadow.  They are like the stone with which Selta is composed, for it too is incapable of concealing its fantastic element of otherwhere – you can see it in the specks of outlandish color that swim within its rock, those same flecks that float within mine ghostly orbs.  I refuse to conceal my nature in the outside world of puny men – let them know me as I am.  Let them tremble at my bestial potency.  Now, get thee to thy little stool and complete thy task.  I admire your ability, and I want this thing completed before you are called by Crawling Chaos.”

“What the devil do you mean?”

“Did William explain nothing?  Or could you simply not comprehend him?  Did the gaunts not suggest your inescapable fate?”

“Those midnight fiends?  I’ve seen them before, when dreaming of my mother.”

“Enough.  To work.”

I went to my stool and sat, took up my implements and began to paint.  “That was quite an exhibition in the field.”

Justin began to cackle.  “It wasn’t quite correct.  It was too material, Simon.  The spectre in Hungary is an historical ghost of a thing that lives no more.  The Black Stone has soaked its psychic energy, that is all.  Thus, to sleep near that shaft on Midsummer Night is to nourish the energy of that which is dead-yet-dreaming, and so one pays the price of lunacy.  I knew better than to sleep there at night.  I didn’t mean to nap at all – but the thing has its diabolic influence.  I care nothing for the loss of reason – the thing inspired my finest book.  I confess I ache to look on it again and dream the rare dream.”

“One day, Geoffrey, I shall have a replica constructed where now that pigmy imitation stands – a duplication that will have in its assembly shards from the original, shards that were the result of stupid men trying to destroy the Black Stone of Xuthltan.  And when the erection of my duplication is realized, we shall build bonfires for the children of men to leap over, and we shall summon the ghost of fabulous darkness and let it sup upon your sanity as we glorify its namelessness.”

“It’s a deal,” the poet muttered, shaking his head enthusiastically.  I bent to my canvas and worked until the day was dead, and when the portrait was completed Simon danced in delight at the power of my art.  It was quite good, my replication of the beast.  I had put much of my own soul into the work, and in one of the shadows that writhe around the daemon I painted a subtle semblance of myself – a smoky presence.  When I left the house, Simon was playing his flute, softly, over the poet who slumbered on the floor.

All of this chatter about the Black Stone influenced where I would wander, and I found the woodland way that took me to the meadow, where I found Hannah Blotch petting the black column and singing to the wind.  “I can’t linger,” I told her as she clutched at my pants leg.  “I need to locate the place where some strange dark effigy stands before a forest of dreaming.”

She shot up to her feet.  “The place where the archway stands?”

“You know it?”

“I know its location.  It’s one of the places forbidden to the children of mist and shadow.  It’s like the Hungry Place – its effect on them is too alarming and so they stay away.  Come on.”

Taking my hand, she led the way through another portion of woodland shadow.  The trees grew so close together that no light could pierce the place from above, and I relished the absolute darkness through which we scampered.  I stopped just once, to study the growth of fungoid moss that adhered to the thick trunk of one patriarchal tree; and I shuddered as the patch of substance, which so resembled a human face, parted its orifice and breathed upon me.  Hannah laughed at my reaction, pulled me to her and kissed my eyes, and then she dragged me away.   At last we came to a clearing, and I moaned as I looked upon the statue within its ring of stone.  I knelt just outside those stones and saw that they resembled small amorphous creatures of diseased delusion, imps that pressed pipes to malformed mouths.  Miss Blotch knelt beside me and sighed to the statue in a monstrous language that sickened my soul by its vulgarity of sound.  She took my hand, and together we crawled to the icon of the Strange Dark One.  My companion rose upon her knees and kissed the statue’s obsidian palm, and then she laughed and, rising, waltzed to the place where stood an archway composed of weathered red stone. 

“Do you know the Elder Sign?”  Her voice was a shriek that sounded like a gale of madness.  Reaching down, she picked up a piece of wood and stabbed it into her palm, then held the bloodstained member to the sky and shouted more of the monstrous language as her fingers worked with signaling.  I gazed in wonder as the trees just beyond the archway began to alter, to melt and reform as another forest composed of stranger elements of shadow.  And in that shade I saw one opaque outline that was a sentient copy of the effigy before which I knelt.  Hannah, seeing the figure, shuddered and wailed, then floated through the aged archway toward the peril that awaited her.  I shivered as I watched the seven iridescent spheres that formed above the daemon and the girl, those unearthly seven suns that churned with cosmic radiance that formed as threads of pseudo-lightning, a light show of dancing electricity that shot between each sphere.  I watched, as the Strange Dark One caught that play of fire and washed it into the flesh of Hannah Blotch – her flesh that darkened and crumbled as ash.  I rose and walked to the stone archway, as the eidolon of dread lifted its facelessness.  Something in the smooth blank blackness that should have contained a countenance seemed to smile at me, mockingly, and then the spectre melted into the gloom of that other forest and its assembly of dark mute trees.  I heard the tempest that lashed those trees, an alien storm that fell onto the pile of ash that had once been a living woman’s flesh.  I saw that ash rise in coils and assemble as conscious outline that formed itself into one with whom I had been intimate – a phantom that kissed my soul with ecstasy and awe.  She held out her dark mutated hands and called my name.  The forest was now completely altered, no longer a place of Sesqua Valley, but of some otherwhere, and I recognized it as a realm that I had known in deepest dreaming.  I saw the dwarfish imps that peeped between the spaces of dark mute trees, as above those trees the faceless gaunts pirouetted in a violet sky, their wide membranous wings outspread.  I saw the seven suns that rose above outlandish peaks whereon the other gods fumbled in their ancient repose.  And I saw she who had been transformed, her naked skin dark and rubbery, her broad hands ending in talons designed for digging in cemetery sod, her ghastly mouth wide and smiling as she mewed my name.   I stepped through the archway of ancient stone and loped toward the woods of dream-land, to where my dam awaited me, and fell into her chilly hold.