The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror (12 page)

The acceptance was the hardest of all, because it felt as if he was cutting away part of himself, accepting the cold fact that she would never love him. He couldn’t think clearly for some time, it dampened the lights around him, took away the beauty of music, seemed to cover the paintings on his walls with greyness.

Then he began concentrating on the portrait. If he couldn’t have her, he could give to her. The portrait became an obsession, just as the girl had been, as he transferred all his feelings onto the canvas. He made the painted blue eyes cry for him, made the small fresh mouth without traces of lipstick smile for him. He put it all in the portrait, all the months of yearning, the nights of waking, the tears he had never
cried, he gave them flesh and blood in his portrait. He was no longer painting a woman, he was painting the image of love, the essence of the phenomena of love, not sexual attraction or desire, and not intellectual contact or sympathy or pity, but the very spirit of unexplainable love, without thinking, without conditions. He painted it with the colours of hope and yet of sadness, with bitterness and melancholy, with dreams and nightmares. The same nightmares which swam through his mind at night, when he was tossing on his bed, trying to get some sleep, and also trying to shut the living darkness out of his sight.

Finally the painting was completed, and he asked them to come over in the evening and see the finished product. That day he corrected the last minuscule details, a final line here, a last shade of paint there, and all the time the air itself around him seemed to be alive, full of strange moving things, which he couldn’t see and couldn’t understand. Sometimes he feared he was going insane.

They couldn’t speak when they saw the portrait, that evening. Cenaide said in a hushed voice that it was… beautiful, more beautiful than any face she had ever seen, and surely this couldn’t be HER face he had painted? Of course it was her own face, and it had to be beautiful, but for the first time she was seeing herself as Jack saw her, covering all mediocrity with the radiant colour of love, which he would never see on her real features.

He laughed at their sincere admiration, and listened to them proclaiming a great future for him as a portrait painter, knowing that he would never be able to do it again. They had brought a few bottles, which were opened and emptied, and there was a lot of joking and small talk before they finally left.

After they had gone, he locked the door carefully behind them, then turned and confronted the picture. The eyes of the painting seemed to be following any movement he made. ‘Now, at last, we’re alone, my love,’ he whispered softly.

Again he drew the big pentagram on the floor of his room,
then placed the painting in the centre of it. He lit the five strangely wrought candles at the five corners of the star, and burned the ingredients he had prepared. A strange but not exactly disagreeable odour began to spread through the room. Darkness came, not gradually as when evening falls, because it was night outside already, but sharply; an alien darkness which began seeping down from the ceiling where it had started as a black spot, growing till it reached the walls. Long black fingers began crawling down the four walls, and there they touched the other paintings and objects on those walls, the dark took their colours from them, they faded, became grey and then disappeared, swallowed up by the descending black shroud. As the unearthly darkness deepened, grew thicker as some abominable fog, the colours of the portrait seemed to sharpen, to radiate almost. It was as if the face of the girl began to spread a strange light of her own to counteract the growing darkness. Then he stepped inside the pentagram and spoke the last words. Only the big circle of the pentagram was lighted now, the room outside it seemed to have disappeared completely. It had been absorbed by thick string of almost material darkness, an obscurity which seemed in a frightful way to possess a private life, which seemed to be watching him constantly though it had no eyes.

He was looking at the painting. The very air around it seemed to shiver, as if acted upon by heat from some unknown source. Cenaide’s face seemed to shrink until it was like a jewelled flower in the middle of a pulsating circle of black light. He stretched out his arms towards the shrinking face, and they seemed to grow and grow, his hands blossoming at their ends as alien flowers. Then her face expanded again, filling the whole picture. Her eyes were looking at him, blue shards of sparkling glass, burning with a deep fire which reached right through his head into his brain. He thought he saw himself approaching in those eyes, very small and distorted. As he was looking, the hidden fire came through her eyes, burst through her pupils and came swirling at him in threads of burning light, as a spider’s web suddenly catching the sunlight of autumn and shining silvery. It exploded in all directions, beyond the pentagram, shivering as a silver maze, before the darkness outside absorbed it too.

It was as if the colours of the painting detached themselves from it, changing into alien, moving shapes of things for which there were no names, crawling and shrieking, blasphemous monstrosities moving inside the pentagram, before they too were taken by the darkness of the room. The darkness seemed closer, as if it was trying to edge inside the protecting pentagram; it was everywhere around him, circling him like a cocoon. Jack didn’t notice it.

‘I love you, Cenaide,’ he whispered. Though spoken so softly, the words seemed an explosion of sound, repeating themselves through endless corridors, as if the dark rejected them and bounced them back along its inner walls. ‘… love you… love you…’

Only the portrait seemed to keep its reality, and the
woman in it, who was looking at him, straight at him with her blue burning eyes. Then her lips parted, ‘And I love you, Jack,’ she said. The colours around her began to change, they seemed to melt though this was impossible, and dripped down from the canvas. Cenaide moved, slowly, deliberately, she stood up. The colours became a cloaking fog through which she came to him, slowly stretching her arms out. The colours were imploding in his brain, he couldn’t think, could hardly react to what he saw and experienced. On the bare canvas, the silver pentagram was pulsating, emitting beams of an unearthly black light. The darkness around the greater pentagram was throbbing as with an immense heartbeat, and slowly the first fingers of the dark began crawling inside the pentagram. But he didn’t see, didn’t hear, except for the face coming to him, the face he had wanted so much, with the eyes burning fiercely into his own; the only clear thought in his mind was, ‘God, if it is a dream, let it continue, let it never stop, if it isn’t real it doesn’t matter!’ And then she was in his arms, soft, warm and very alive for the petrified shard of one second; he felt the silk of her hair, the softness of her parted lips as he kissed her, just before he tasted the bitter staleness of dry paint on his mouth.

After four continuous days of silence, they broke down the door of Jack Morgan’s study, and found him, lying in the centre of his chalk-drawn pentagram, like a crucified spider. Paint was everywhere inside the pentagram, as if a madman, and who else could it have been but himself, had
opened all his tubes and squeezed the paint in all directions. Most of it however, was on Jack Morgan himself, on his chest and arms and face, covering his eyes and
nostrils completely, a thick mass of dried paint. There were severe burns on his face and hands as well, below the paint, but it was not this, nor suffocation which had killed him.

They buried him with the little savings they found in one of his drawers, among some records and old sketches; Cenaide wore a black veil and cried, but then she always had cried easily. There were also some friends, who said some nice words about him, though they would forget him before the year had passed. None of them could explain why the paint of what had been Cenaide’s por
trait had run off the canvas as if completely fresh and fluent as water, so that except for some snatches of background detail, there now only stood a black glaring pentagram.

There was an official investigation, of course, but they came to a dead end when the coroner disclosed, baffled, that suffocation hadn’t killed the painter. None of the experts was able to explain the murderous presence of thick quantities of paint inside his stomach, lungs, brain and heart.

To turn and look upon its face,

Brought fear I’d never known -

The shadow has ever haunted me,

As I walk the earth so alone -

Karl Edward Wagner.

‘C’est de Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!

Aux objets repugnants nous trouvons des appas;

Chaque jour vers l’Enfer nous descendons d’un pas,

Sans horreur, a
travers des tenebres qui puent.

‘Serre, fourmillant, comme un million d’helmintnes

Dans nos cerveaux ribote up people le Demons,

Et, quand nous respirons, la Mort dans nos poumons

Descend,
fleuve invisible, avec de sourdes plaints.’

Baudelaire.
Les Fleurs du mal.

A
S HENRY LAMSON looked from the gate of his brother’s farm on the outskirts of Pire he noticed that someone was walking along the lane in his direction. Although it did nothing to disconcert him at the time, he did wonder, as he bid farewell to the silhouetted figures in the doorway, before setting off for his bus stop, why someone should have been coming back from the moors at this time of the night, especially when it had been pouring down with rain all day.

Shrugging his shoulders, Lamson pulled his raincoat collar up high about his neck against the drizzle and picked his way as carefully as he could between the puddles in the deeply rutted lane. He wished now, as his feet sank in the half hidden mud, that he had thought to bring a torch with him when he came on his visit, since the moon, though full, only faintly showed through the clouds, and the lane was for the most part in shadow.

Engrossed as he was in finding a reasonably dry route along the lane, he did not notice until a few minutes later, when the lights of his brother’s farm had disappeared beyond the hedgerow, that the figure he had seen was nearing him quickly. Already he could hear his footsteps along the lane.

Petulantly pausing to disentangle a snapped thorn branch that had caught on his trouser leg, he turned to watch the hunched figure hobbling towards him. A threadbare overcoat of an indeterminate colour swayed from about his body. In one hand he grasped a worn flat cap, while the other was thrust in his overcoat pocket for warmth.

When he finally succeeded in freeing himself of the twig, Lamson made to continue on his way; the man was obviously nothing more than a tramp, and an old one at that. As he started off, though, he heard him call out in a cracked bellow that rose and died in one breath:

‘’Arf a mo’ there!’

Irritated already at the drizzle that was soaking inexorably through his coat, Lamson sighed impatiently. As the tramp hurried towards him through the gloom, he slowly made out his bristly, coarse and wrinkled face, whose dirt-grained contours were glossy with rain.

The old man stumbled to a halt and raucously coughed a volley of phlegm on the ground. The pale grey slime merged in with the mud. Lamson watched him wipe his dribbling mouth with the top of his cap. Disgusted at the spectacle, Lamson asked him what was the matter.

‘Are you feeling ill?’ He hoped that he wasn’t. The last thing he wanted was to be burdened with someone like this.

‘Ill?’ The old man laughed smugly.
‘Ne’er ’ad a day’s illness in my life. Ne’er!’

He coughed and spat more phlegm on the ground. Lamson looked away from it.

Perhaps mistaking the reason for this action, the tramp said: ‘But I don’t want to ’old you up. I’ll walk alon’ with you, if you don’t mind me doin’. That’s all I called you for. It’s a lonely place to be by yoursel’. Too lonely, eh?’

Lamson was uncertain as to whether this was a question or not. Relieved that the man was at least not against continuing down the lane, he nodded curtly and set off, the old man beside him.

‘A raw night, to be sure,’ the old man said, with a throaty chuckle.

Lamson felt a wave of revulsion sweep over him as he glanced at the old man’s face in the glimmering light of one of the few lampposts by the lane. He had never before seen anyone whose flesh gave off such an unnatural look of roughness. Batrachian in some indefinable way, with thick and flaccid lips, a squat nose and deeply sunken eyes, he had the appearance of almost complete depravity. Lamson stared at the seemingly scaly knuckles of his one bare hand.

‘Have you come far?’ Lamson asked.

‘Far?’ The man considered the word reflectively. ‘Not really far, I s’ppose,’ he conceded, with a further humourless chuckle. ‘And you,’ he asked in return, ‘are you goin’ far, or just into Pire?’

Lamson laughed. ‘Not walking, I’m not. Just on to the bus stop at the end of the lane, where I should just about catch the seven fifty-five for the centre.’ He looked across at a distant farm amidst the hills about Pire; its tiny windows stood out in the blackness like feeble fireflies through the intervening miles of rain. He glanced at his watch. Another eight minutes and his bus would be due. As he looked up, Lamson was relieved to see the hedgerow end, giving way at a junction to the tarmac road that ran up along the edge of the moors from Fenley. The bus shelter stood beside a dry-stone wall, cemented by Nature with tangled tussocks of grass. Downhill, between the walls and lines of trees, were the pinpointed lines of streetlights etched across the valley floor. It was an infallibly awe-inspiring sight, and Lamson felt as if he had passed through the sullen voids of Perdition and regained Life once more.

On reaching the shelter he stepped beneath its corrugated roof out of the rain. Turning round as he nudged a half empty carton of chips to one side he saw that the man was still beside him.

‘Are you going into Pire as well,’ Lamson asked. He tried, not too successfully, to keep his real feelings out of his voice. Not only did he find the tramp’s company in itself distasteful, but there was a foetid smell around him which was reminiscent in some way of sweat and of seaweed rotting on a stagnant beach. It was disturbing in that it brought thoughts, or half thoughts, of an unpleasant type to his mind. Apparently unaware of the effect he was having on Lamson, the tramp was preoccupied in staring back at the moors. Willows and shrubs were thrown back and forth in the gusts, intensifying his feelings of loneliness about the place.

Finally replying to Lamson’s inquiry, the tramp said:

‘There’s nowhere else a body can go, is there? I’ve got to sleep. An’ I can’t sleep out in this.’ His flat, bristly, toad-like head turned round. There was a dim yellow light in his eyes. ‘I’ll find a doss somewhere.’

Lamson looked back to see if the bus was in sight, though there were another four minutes to go yet before it was due. The empty expanse of wet tarmac looked peculiarly lonely in the jaundiced light of the sodium lamps along the road.

Fidgeting nervously beside him, the old man seemed to have lost what equanimity he’d had before. Every movement he made seemed to cry out the desire to be on his way once more. It was as if he was morbidly afraid of something on the moors behind him. Lamson was bewildered. What could there be on the moors to worry him? Yet, whether there was really something there for him to worry about or not, there was no mistaking the relief which he showed when they at last heard the whining roar of the double-decker from Fenley turning the last bend in the slope uphill, its headlights silhouetting the bristling shrubs along the road and glistening the droplets of rain. A moment later it drew up before them, comfortingly bright against the ice-grey hills and sky. Climbing on board, Lamson sat down beside the nearest window, rubbing a circle in the misted glass to look outside.

The tramp slumped down beside him.

He was dismayed when, in the smoke-staled air, the smell around the old man became even more noticeable than before, whilst his cold, damp body seemed to cut him off from the warmth he had welcomed on boarding the bus.

Apparently unconcerned by such matters, the tramp grinned sagaciously, saying that it was good to be moving once more. His spirits were blatantly rising and he ceased looking back at the moors after a couple of minutes, seemingly satisfied.

In an effort to ignore the foetor exuded by the man, Lamson concentrated on looking out of the window, watching the trees and meadows pass by as they progressed into Pire, till they were supplanted by the gardened houses of the suburbs.

‘’Ave you a light?’
The frayed stub of a cigarette was stuck between the tramp’s horny fingers.

His lips drawn tight in annoyance, Lamson turned round to face him as he searched through his pockets. Was there to be no end to his intolerable bother?
he wondered. His eyes strayed unwillingly about the scaly knuckles of the man’s hand, to the grimily web-like flaps of skin stretched at their joints. It was a disgustingly malformed object, and Lamson was certain that he had never before seen anyone whose every aspect excited nothing so much as sheer nausea.

Producing a box of matches, he struck one for him,
then waited while he slowly sucked life into his cigarette.

When he settled back a moment later, the tramp brought the large hand he had kept thrust deep in his overcoat pocket out and held it clenched before Lamson.

‘Ever seen anythin’ like this afore?’ he asked cryptically. Like the withered petals of a grotesque orchid, his fingers uncurled from the palm of his hand.

Prepared as he was for some forgotten medal from the War, tarnished and grimy, with a caterpillar segment of wrinkled ribbon attached, Lamson was surprised when he saw instead a small but well-carved head of dull black stone, which looked as though it might have been broken from a statue about three feet or so in height.

Lamson looked at the tramp as the bus trundled to a momentary stop and two boisterous couples on a night out climbed on board, laughing and giggling at some murmured remark. Oblivious of them, Lamson let the tramp place the object in his hand. Though he was attracted by it, he was simultaneously and inexplicably repelled. There was a certain hungry look to the man’s face on the broken head which seemed to go further than that of mere hunger for food.

Lamson turned the head about in his fingers, savoring the pleasant, soap-like surface of the stone.

‘A strange thing to find out there, you’d think, wouldn’t you?’ the old man said, pointing his thick black stub of a thumb back at the moors.

‘So you found it out there?’ Somehow there was just enough self-control in Lamson’s voice to rob it of its disbelief. Though he would have wanted nothing more a few minutes earlier than to be rid of the man, he felt a yearning now to own the head himself that deterred him from insulting the tramp. After all, there was surely no other reason for the man showing the thing to him except to sell it. And although he had never before felt any intense fascination in archaeology, there was something about the head which made Lamson desire it now. He was curious about it as a small boy is curious about a toy he has seen in a shop window.

Intent on adding whatever gloss of credibility to his tale that he could, the old tramp continued, saying:

‘It were in a brook. I found it by chance as I were gettin’ m’self some water for a brew. It’d make a nice paperweight, I thought. I thought so as soon as I saw it. It’d make a nice paperweight, I thought.’ He laughed self-indulgently, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his coat. ‘But I’ve no paper to put it on.’

Lamson looked down at the carving and smiled.

When the bus drew up at the terminus, Lamson was surprised, though not dismayed, when the tramp hurriedly climbed off and merged with the passing crowds outside. His bowlegged gait and crookedly unkempt figure were too suggestive of sickness and deformity for Lamson’s tastes, and he felt more eager than ever for a salutary pint of beer in a pub before going on home to his flat.

Pressing his way through the queues outside the Cinerama on Market Street, he made for the White Bull, whose opaque doors swung open steamily before him with an out blowing bubble of warm, beery air.

One drink later, and another in hand, he stepped across to a vacant table up in a corner of the lounge, placing his glass beside a screwed-up bag of crisps.

A group of men were arguing amongst themselves nearby, one telling another, as of someone giving advice:

‘A standing prick has no conscience.’

There was a nodding of heads and another affirmed: ‘That’s true enough.’

Disregarding them as they sorted out what they were having for their next round of drinks, Lamson reached in his pocket and brought out the head. A voice on the television fixed above the bar said:

‘You can be a Scottish nationalist or a Welsh nationalist and no one says anything about it, but as soon as you say you’ re a British nationalist, everyone starts calling out “Fascist!”’

Two of the men nodded to each other in agreement.

Holding the head in the palm of his hand, Lamson realized for the first time just how heavy it was. If not for the broken neck, which showed clearly enough that it was made out of stone, he would have thought it to have been molded from lead. As he peered at it, he noticed that there were two small ridges on its brows which looked as though they had once been horns