Gathered Dust and Others (11 page)

“Oh sure.  She’s here, you know – somewhere…”  He glanced around the room with intoxicated eyes.  Kissing his cheek, I bade him adieu and went to wait for my cab; but as I took my seat and buckled up, I had a sudden impulse, and I gave the driver an address that was not my own.  I had the cabbie drop me  off some ten blocks from the church. 

“You gonna walk around this neighborhood dressed like that?”

“I am indeed,” I responded, giving him a handsome tip.  “Happy Halloween.”  He shrugged and shook his head, and then drove off.  I coughed at the expulsion of exhaust that billowed from his departing vehicle.  The moon, half full, was accompanied by many points of starlight, and the sight so enchanted me that I began to whistle as I walked.  I held Miss Rableau’s book to the half-moon’s glow and spoke its title to the stars.  There was no cosmic response.  No one was around, which I thought odd, it being a big party night.  But as I looked around and observed the state of the houses that I passed, I decided this was an extremely poor neighborhood, and perhaps a dangerous one as well, and that street life was kept to a minimum.  It was a cool autumn evening, but I was so overdressed in my Poesque costume that I was quite comfortable, and I grinned at the idea of someone encountering me on the darkened street and their possible reaction to my guise.  I reached out at the high fence of black iron that I passed, through which I could see a little courtyard and its fountain, and then I stopped.  Before me, a figure reclined on a rough-hewn stone bench.  He was dressed in rags and shivered slightly as he slept, and I couldn’t comprehend why his face looked so odd until I stepped nearer and saw the pennies that had been placed over his eyelids.  I silenced my tune and shut my mouth, but after a little while the gentleman’s lips compressed, and he himself began to whistle.  Something about the sound filled me with slight panic, for in my wild imagination it seemed that the fellow wasn’t whistling – I imagined that his sound was meant to serve as signal to some unseen thing.  And my blood iced when, from some distant place, there came a low response of something howling to the moon.

“You come to take me home?”

He had lifted himself onto one elbow and now held his pennies in one palm.  “I beg your pardon?”

“I never seen you as dressed in red, thought you’d be all black.  Where’s your coach?”

I understood.  “No, dear fellow, I am not that grim escort.  I’m merely in costume, for a party I attended.  I am Plague, Death’s predecessor.”  I heard the trickling splash of fountain water and began to move away so as to enter the quadrangle. 

“Take this,” he called, handing me one of his pennies.  “Make a wish.”

Accepting his alms, I muttered my thanks and stepped into the courtyard, wherein the moon seemed subtly brighter, so that my flowing shadow preceded my stride.  Floating to the fountain, I lowered onto its circular edge and peered into its pond.  How strange that the mutated shadows of clouds floated beneath the water’s surface, and how queer that one of those shadows looked familiar as it paused in its route to watch me.  It was blacker than night, that sphere, and from one end a filigree of stringy crimson vines wavered in the water.  Setting down my book, I removed my scarlet gloves and reached into the water.  The thing I extracted from the depths was chilly to the touch, and disturbingly soft; and I did not fancy the way its flow of tendrils wrapped around one finger.  I held her black visage to moonlight as it dried in risen wind, and I almost brought the faux mouth to my own.  She was beautiful, and beguiling; and I could not resist bringing the mask of Marceline Rableau to my face and pressing its underside to my flesh, to which it sensuously cohered.  The moon darkened in the gulf of night as from some distant place a thing bayed to blackness.

XVI.

He approached the Cyclopean building and drank its quality of bizarrerie, entranced by the wisps of thick mist with which the building was sheathed.  Lifting his eyes, he peered through the eye-openings of his mask and studied the black tower at the building’s height, which had not been repaired from the storm damage that had resulted in the destruction of the church steeple.  A back door, unlocked, led him into a spacious cellar that was crowded with many disfigured and discarded statues of what he supposed were saints.  They were a motley assembly now, with hands pressed together in prayer beneath faces that had in many cases been shattered by some degree of violence.  He climbed the worn wooden steps that took him upward, pushing aside the cobwebs with which the cellar was festooned.  Reaching the ground floor, Koffen ignored the impulse to check out the nave and sanctuary and found the spiral staircase that took him up to what he imagined to be the bell tower.  He absentmindedly noticed that this section of the building was free of grime and spider mesh, and he wondered why the temperature so increased as he climbed.  Now and then he passed by murky windows, through which he glanced so as to view the hill on which he had an apartment from which, in twilight’s violet half-light, he could see the church and its ruined tower.  He could see nothing now except a vague hint of blurring points of electric light in the distance. 

He reached at last the tower room, a space of fifteen square feet of five walls, and on each wall there was an austere lancet window, the glass of which was so sooty that he could not see through them.  On a table near the entranceway he found an antique oil lamp that lacked its glass chimney, and it thrilled him, as he struck a match and touched its flame to the wick, to see that the old thing still functioned and contained fuel.   In the middle of the room stood an irregularly angled stone pillar four feet in height, on which had been chiseled curious alien hieroglyphs.  On this pillar rested an obsidian statuette of a figure that seemed attired in Egyptian fashion and donned a nemes headcloth such as was worn by Pharaohs.  Peculiarly, the figurine had no face.  He ran a finger against the smooth surface that lacked visage, and realized that he had left his scarlet gloves at the courtyard’s fountain.

Koffen went to the place where a small bookcase leaned, set down his lantern and Miss Rableau’s book.  He frowned at the titles of the tomes he found there on the leaning bookcase, weighty volumes that coated his naked hands with debris when he picked them up.  Most of the titles, such as the
Liber Ivonis
and
De Vermis Mysteriis
defied his comprehension – but one, the
Cultes des Goules
, had sinister connotations.  None of these or the other books on the shelves were in languages that he knew, and so, having retrieved his oil lamp and the woman’s book, he turned away from the nameless library and glanced at the high conical ceiling.  He wondered why someone had fastened, to two crossbeams above the stone pillar, a series of seven spheres that hung over the figurine; and he did not like the way his eyes lost their focus as he peered at those iridescent globes that caught the refraction of the light from his lantern.  Why was the air of the confined room so humid?  He did not like the silence of the place, and so he opened
The Stairway in the Crypt
and found a page from which to read aloud.  He could feel his warm breath hit the hide of his mask and return into his mouth; but his words arose, to the seven spheres of queer radiance, which began to hum as almost indiscernible threads of lightning shot between them. 

Thunder sounded outside the tower chamber, and with it came the smell of storm.  He held his lantern’s glow to one of the tall, lean windows and frowned at the opaque soot with which that window was covered – for the view afforded if he could have looked through it would have been interesting.  He touched a hand to the thick glass and shivered, for unlike the hot room the glass was frigid, unnaturally so.  Inclining to the window, he blew his breath upon it and grimaced as the place his hot inhalation touched grew darker still.  And then he saw the hazy semblance on that pane of murky glass – the smudge that took on form and became what he first mistook for the reflection of his feminine mask.  But when the icon smiled, he sensed that it was other than his false veneer, and when it spoke his name he was certain.  That sound was accompanied with another peal of thunder, and he bent momentarily so as to set lantern and book upon the clean floor of the haunted room. 

He rose and saw that the image on the window’s dusky glass watched him still.  How enticing, her mesmeric mouth.  How evocatively she murmured his name, like some bewitching lover.  How inviting, the mirrored maw.  How could he refrain from touching his lips to hers?  Yet the moment he did so, he realized his error, as his mouth cemented to the ebon window, through which his essence was sucked into the void.

XVII.

I climbed the stony snow-enshrouded steps that led up the incline of Kingsport’s hillside burying ground.  Frigid air stung my ears, but I did not mind; for in this quiet place I found solace and escape.  I was alone in the place as I climbed to the apex and looked down upon the sleepy seaport town, over the roofs that huddled all around, and the small-paned windows that lit up, one by one, as twilight deepened into dusk.  There was no moon, but the gulf of night was a blanket of sparkling stars.  It was as I watched those stars that I noticed the dark ethereal form that crept across the sky.  I caught my breath and felt afraid, for I had seen this shape in troubled dreaming – a daemon that spun like a hungry thing as it coiled nearer to my eyes and stole their light.  I shut my eyes and tried to ease my breathing, and when I scanned the skies again I saw that the daemon had altered in shape and was beginning to break apart.  It was a cloud above me, nothing more.  And I knew in that instant that there were no deities of rarest air, that such things existed merely in the songs of poets, in the ranting of lunatics and fools.  There was nothing but this plot of death, and its quietude, and the unyielding ground on which I stood, as implacable as mundane reality.

The Boy with the Bloodstained Mouth

I saw him in the smoky room, leaning against the pockmarked wall, indifferent to the noise and fumes.  His thick dark glasses hid his eyes.  I do not think he wore them for any reason of fashion; rather, I think they were meant to conceal his eyes.  Oh, how I longed to gaze into those secret eyes.  Ah, what revelations might there be revealed, in the eyes of a beautiful boy?  He turned his face to mine, and I felt certain that he had noticed my fascinated attention.  He smiled as he studied me.  Flames of mad desire consumed my weary soul.

I went to him.

His hair was chaos, a mess of black and crimson rat tails that protruded from pale scalp.

His mouth was stained with wet red blood.

Oh, that crimson liquid!  How it gleamed in the misty blue light of the place.  It clutched my soul.

My fingers caressed his brow, the flesh of which was like ice.  He took my hand in his.  Leaning to him, I kissed his lips.

I kissed the boy with the bloodstained mouth.  I felt nothing as our lips met, no rush of desire, no flame of ecstasy.  And when I backed away, I gasped in confusion.  His expression had not altered; but his mouth, clean and unstained, mocked me horribly.

And when I licked my lips, I screamed with awful horror.

The Woven Offspring

My brother Alexander and I were not native-born of Sesqua Valley, but we had dwelt within her haunted shadow since infancy; we knew her well.  My brother had always been a wild, unruly beast, much like his father before him.  Before father’s early death, he and Alex would often visit the poisoned patch of land near Mount Selta, the place that feels too deeply the shadow of the twin-peaked mountain.  After father’s suicide, my brother would vanish for days at a time, and I knew from the lingering shadows in his eyes that he had been to that site where diseased shadow crept into his pulsing heart and altered his sanity.  I loved my brother dearly, but ours was a relationship built on pain.

We watched our native-born friends leave the valley when they came of age, so as to journey to other places and learn the secrets of the world.  I had no desire to leave the land, and I felt a sense of panic when, in his twenty-third year, Alexander announced that he would be leaving so as to spend time away from home.  He was gone for months, during which time I had no word from him.  Although he was now a man, he acted so like a child, obstinate and with his mental cache of secrets.  I was not, then, surprised when he suddenly returned to Sesqua Valley; but what startled me was that he was not alone, having brought with him a young man named Thomas.  Despite his new friend’s youth, Thomas had about him an authentic and profound world-weariness.  An aspect of pain haunted the lad’s beautiful face, and I knew the origin of the needle marks on his arms.  To see those same marks on my brother’s arm caused me to tremble with subdued hysteria.  I knew that I could say nothing, and when Alex begged for money, I gave it to him.  He and Thomas would leave the valley for a day or two, and then return with more of the stuff that dulled their mental misery.

Thomas
had
been a victim of the world’s cruelty, but my brother’s “suffering” was not authentic.  His madness gave him no pain; he was merely playing a part so as to impress his beautiful lover.  But Thomas was not fooled; he had lived too long among the genuine victims of heartless society.  The young man loved my brother, I suppose, and was certainly amused by him.  However, his real passion was for heroin.  He would sometimes show me a lump of the dirty substance, trying to tempt me to join their ecstasy of habit.  I was never enticed.   The sight of that dry and filthy poison turned my stomach.  I found Thomas, one evening, sitting alone on one of the stone benches in our back garden.  His shockingly beauteous grey eyes were glazed, and I knew that he was, as he phrased it, “smacked out.”  He was gazing unblinkingly at the silver moon.  The long sleeves of his black shirt hid the scars on his arms.  I sat next to him.

“I love how the moon looks over this valley, Alma.”  His low voice spoke in whispered words.  “Over the city the moon looks so dead and ugly, kind of mocking.  I hate it, hate how it watches me and sneers.  But here, damn, it’s awesome; so silver and majestic.  Look at how those soft beams drift to the mountain, at how the white stone seems to drink them in.  So cool.”  Without thinking I ran my fingers through his thick hair.  He took my hand and brought it to his mouth.  I trembled at his tender kiss.  “Your brother’s crazy, Alma.”