Songs_of_the_Satyrs (30 page)

His mother, slightly mad, had hinted strange things about his own relationship with the creatures of myth, at times bending to kiss him just above his double sex. Before she had lost her leg, she used to climb with him in times of twilight to the attic, her special realm. Her artistic gifts, which she had bequeathed to her delicate offspring, had been put to particular use in the attic, the ceiling of which had been studded with tiny points of phosphorescence that caught and held light once the source of radiance had been extinguished, and thus after the attic lights had been switched off it appeared that the ceiling was covered with a multitude of tiny stars. Between the slanting walls of the peaked roof, his mother had fastened crude wooden rails, from which she hanged a series of the puppets that were her source of livelihood, except that these puppets in the attic were quite different from the beautiful and harmless creations sold to the public; for these puppets represented the creatures that had captivated her lunatic mind, her replications of Cerberus and Charybdis, of Medusa and Lamia. When she opened the three attic windows and allowed the night wind to rush into the attic room, she would dance with the wind-tossed figures, sometimes tilting so as to kiss the wings of Sphinx or hoof of goatish Pan.

The masked hermaphrodite remembered that distant time when his
mère
had first insisted he follow her up the ladder to the trapdoor that opened into the attic space. Dusk had fallen, and she had carried a candle with her. He watched as she pushed open the trapdoor with the back of her shoulders, and as he crept into the dusky place the woman scampered so as to light other candles. He studied the incredible creatures that hanged on their strings and began to move as his mother pulled open the room’s small windows. And then the woman reached toward a ball of twine that rested on an antique table, and he marveled at how whitely his mother’s teeth gleamed as they tore into the twine so as to produce four strips of lengthy cord which she dangled in the air as she tiptoed toward him. He wanted to please her (she was his only love), and so he joined in her madcap laughter as she tied the ends of cord to his ankles and his wrists. She tugged in time to her tapping feet, and he moved as her living marionette. How heavily she breathed as she helped him to pirouette. He laughed and looked up at her as his cords began to tangle, and the luminosity of her eyes astounded him, they looked so like the eyes of a Grecian goddess.

Languidly, the masked one pushed himself out of the bed and found the footwear that he had fashioned from bits of wood and leather, the outlandish espadrilles that resembled cloven hooves. He had used some of the cord from the attic to construct the soles and found the shoes easy to walk in despite their width. He stood for a moment to listen to the heavy evening wind that had awakened him from dreaming, the wind that reminded him of how long it had been since he had visited the shadowed attic. Stepping into the darkened hallway, he drifted to the ladder and clutched its frame. A mere silhouette in deeper darkness, he lifted his feet off the floor and began to ascend the ladder, until his masked head touched the trap door. One frail hand pushed above him and felt the movement of wood, and a smell of neglected things rushed to him. He pulled himself up into the familiar space and reached for the pull cord that activated electric light. Long fluorescent tubes hummed and blinked on, but their glare was far too brilliant and he quickly pulled the cord again. One thousand white points shone on the peaked ceiling, one thousand new-born stars; and beneath them hanged diminutive creatures of Grecian myth, the creations of his mother, his stillborn silent siblings.

The wind sounded outside the windows of the room, those windows that seemed alive with swaying nebulous shapes. His eyesight had adjusted to the darkness, and so he crept to the windows and opened them. Ah, the fragrant wind! It hastened past him, into the room of puppets, those creatures that began to sway and jostle. Laughing, he hopped into the madness of movement, spinning around, around, while the figures knocked against his head. He whirled in the wind until vertigo oppressed him, sending him to the floor in a heavy fall that split the surface of his mask. His monstrous countenance fell from him, and the myriad points of light fell on his beauteous face. Wearily, he shut his eyes and called a woman’s name. How strange, to hear his own name echoed so manifestly on the wind.

The hermaphrodite opened his pale eyes and saw how the sky above him was like a funnel in which a multitude of stars revolved. Swimming among the stars he beheld an artificial fraternal horde. Puppets no longer, they moved their sentient arms and beckoned him. And then she appeared, out of darkness, into starlight. Her beauteous eyes were those of a goddess, as he had always suspected them to be. Her enchanting hands moved with significant motion, and he felt his wrists and ankles lift. He paid no attention as his hooves and clothing fell from him, revealing the glory of his double gender. He rose, into the funnel of shifting starlight, toward the hungry mouth that ached to kiss him once again.

It was 1921. The image in Harley Warren’s hands was carved from a strange dark wood and polished to a soft gleam. His fingers traced the contours of wooden hips and thighs, exploring crevices and curved protuberances, grasping the shape of the thing. The wood felt alternately rough and smooth beneath his fingertips. A thrill passed through him.

“What is that?”

Warren looked up from the image, blinking in momentary confusion. He smiled a moment later, placing the image down on his desk. “Back so soon, Carter?”

“Regrettably so; I wasn’t able to find any of the items you asked for. I say again, what is that?” Randolph Carter said, gesturing.

The two men were a study in contrasts. Carter was tall and lantern-jawed, with a goggle-eyed New England face. He dressed primly, in an almost archaic fashion.

Warren, on the other hand, was dressed in an open opium-smoker’s robe and silk Ottoman trousers. He had handsome wide features that nonetheless could be disturbing in the wrong light, and a mane of too-long honey-colored hair.

“What is what?” he said, sitting back in his chair.

“That. That!” Carter’s gesture became sharper. Warren looked down at the image in his hands as if surprised to see it there.

“This?”

“That,” Carter said. “It’s hideous.”

“It’s a woman,” Warren said, quirking an eyebrow.

Carter shuddered. “Not any woman who ever existed, thank God,” he said.

“Your worldliness is exceeded only by your open-mindedness, my friend.” Warren put the image onto his desk and idly rubbed the steel rings that occupied four of his fingers.

Carter frowned, but didn’t rise to the bait. He had shared Warren’s Charleston home for close to three years now and had become used to his friend’s acerbic commentary. “I take it that it only recently arrived?” he said instead.

Warren pulled a cigarette case out of his dressing gown’s pocket and flipped it open, taking one for himself and offering the case to Carter, who demurred.

Lighting the cigarette, Warren said, “Special delivery from a friend in Massachusetts. It was found in an estate sale. It’s a curious thing, eh?”

“Yes,” Carter said, looking at the image more closely. It had been carved from a single piece of wood, and with great skill and patience, that much was obvious. But the shape it had been carved into . . . curls of carven hair and ivy sprouted from the sloped skull, showering back in a shaggy mane, from which a quartet of curving horns projected. Instead of legs, the jointed hairy limbs of a goat, with heavy hooves that provided sharp contrast to the almost delicate hands, which were clasped between the ankles.

Despite Warren’s earlier assertion, it was no woman. It was feminine, true, but to such a degree as to be too much of a good thing, with too many soft curves. The face was almost featureless in its perfection, with eyes that seemed to pull at him for all their sightlessness. They were just wood but they seemed darker, somehow, than the rest. The image smelled of—what was it?—something familiar, and his extremities tingled.

“Briggs’ Hill,” Warren said.

Carter looked away from the image, blinking. “What?” he said.

“Briggs’ Hill. Near—ah—Zoar, I believe the town is called.” Warren sucked on his cigarette thoughtfully. He ran a finger across the length of the image. “The owner died, and her belongings passed into the hands of her creditors.”

“Where it should have stayed,” Carter said. “It’s horrible.” He shuddered again, rubbing his arms.

“Matter of opinion, I expect,” Warren said.

Carter looked at him, frowning. “Why did you want that thing?”

Warren shrugged. “Why do I want anything?” He indicated the rest of the closed-in porch that served as his office. Freestanding shelves, overstuffed with books and folios of all types. The floor was covered in yet more books, piled haphazardly. Statuary and iconography from one end of the globe to the other occupied what free space remained—African hate-fetishes and Auckland grindlywags competed for space with Catholic saints painted in the colors of the Loa and Inuit whalebone statues.

Warren hunted the unknown through yellowed pages and across rolls of papyrus and cowhide, looking for any gleanings of old knowledge left behind. He looted tombs—or paid others to do so—and collected the detritus of centuries with compulsive glee.

As far as Carter knew, the knowledge was its own reward. Warren had an obsession with
knowing
, which sometimes drove him to altogether unpleasant lengths.

Still, Warren’s obsessions, though ugly, had their uses. They’d saved Carter’s sanity, if not his life, when he’d come to Charleston, soul sick and half mad, and a half-dozen more times since.

Warren collected the hideous and the beautiful in equal measure, and Carter occasionally suspected that he, too, was a part of his friend’s collection. This latest acquisition was nothing out of the ordinary. And yet the questions arose unbidden to his lips.

“Yes, but why this thing, specifically?” Carter said. “It’s—”

“Intriguing,” Warren said.

“Not the word I would have used.”

“No, I suppose not. A number of unusual rumors abound about Briggs’ Hill and Zoar; the usual strange noises and the like . . . black-winged things flitting across the moon and such.” He waved a hand, adding, “Witch gossip, mostly.”

“But,” Carter probed, knowing Warren
wanted
to be prodded. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

“Well, that depends, don’t it?” Warren smiled. “What do you know of night visitors, Carter?”

Carter blinked. “By which you mean . . .”

“Incubi. Or succubi, in this case,” Warren said. “Night hags, spirits of the quiet moments, bringers of the little death,” he went on, seeming to relish each word.

“I—oh—no, nothing,” Carter said hurriedly, his face flushing.

Warren’s smile grew. “A puritanical upbringing isn’t conducive to certain kinds of knowledge, eh?”

“No.” Carter frowned. “What does this have to do with anything?”

“The men of Zoar fear music and goats,” Warren said. His attentions were back on the grotesque statue. He stroked it affectionately, and Carter’s hackles rose as the light coming in through the window made the icon look as if it were thrusting itself up to meet Warren’s fingers. “Even today they make the lords of old Salem look hedonistic by comparison. But some say this is only a mask—that by night they consorted with—well—” He broke off abruptly and looked at Carter. “You wouldn’t be interested.”

“If you knew that, then why even bother?” Carter snapped.

“Aren’t you snippy this evening.”

Carter opened his mouth to reply, but then closed it. He turned and left the porch, shaking his head.

They ate in silence and retired in the same manner. Carter to his room and Warren to a hammock on the porch. But Carter lay awake, waiting for dreams that never seemed to come anymore.

Sometimes, he was thankful for it. At other times, he wondered whether the bargain he’d made to save his soul had damned him to stultification. His dreams had once threatened to kill him, but Warren’s teachings had helped him to dull his dreaming mind and to lock it away from the greater seas of sleep. Unfortunately, it often made rest hard to come by.

He rolled over, eyes closed, trying to ignore the sound of the night waves slapping against the Battery. Warren’s Charleston home overlooked the sea, and its sound was omnipresent. Carter had a pronounced distaste for the sea, but he was beginning to enjoy its fruits, despite his reservations. Another of Warren’s contributions to what he called his “Carter project.”

Carter opened his eyes, looking up at the ceiling. The cracks there seemed to look down at him, as if they formed the features of a larger face. He blinked. The room was stifling. He sat up and went to the window, wrestling it into submission.

A sea breeze slipped in, curling around him, and he leaned against the frame. A soft rain began to fall, growing harder by the minute. Falling drops beat a stinging tattoo upon his exposed hands and face.

There was a strange smell on the breeze, not the salty taste of the sea, but something else. Carter coughed as the smell grew stronger. He felt flushed and his nightshirt was uncomfortable against his skin.

His bedroom door creaked. He turned as it swung open. “Harley?” he said.

There was the clop of a hoof on wood. The smell enveloped him, pressing on him from every direction. It was a musty smell, like a goat pen on a hot day. And then, it was something else again, something more pleasant and less brutish.

Carter stumbled forward, as if pulled by the scent. He felt intangible fingers drift across his cheeks and jaw, grasping at him, forcing him on. The sound of hooves rattled before him, and he broke into an awkward run, following them.

When he got downstairs, the door to the porch was wide open, as was the door from the porch to the backyard. The latter was a jungle of untended, hardy foliage—kudzu, elephant ears, and ferns, as well as sharp-trunked palmettos. Books lay scattered and open, their pages flipping in the quiet wind.