Gathered Dust and Others (14 page)

III.

Max Romp opened his portmanteau, took out his new sketch and placed it on the table before which he and Ada Artemis sat.  “It’s
too
grotesque, not at all my kind of thing.  It’s like something out of Poe, and the style is so bizarre.  Usually my sense of line is strong, but this watercolor is all blur and blotch – there are no solid lines.  Now the hazy cityscape in the background suggests Gershom, but it’s from an angle that I’ve never personally experienced.”

“And you say that you saw this thing in dream?”

“That’s right, the most vivid nightmare I’ve ever experienced.  Usually even my wildest dreams have some root in reality – but this thing!   It’s dark phantasy of the queerest kind.  And that sinister tramp or whatever the hell he is, great gods!  He stands like some symbol of all the world’s outcasts, with his tattered robe and glistening crown.

Ada leaned a little nearer to the work.  “Glistening?”

“It shimmered, but with a dull liquid kind of scintillation, like some distant muted starlight.  And it seemed to move, as if a sentient thing.  Ugh, I need another brandy!”  He stalked to the bar and refilled his empty glass.  “And the queerest thing of all was the sound, like some low moaning; a subterranean wind, perhaps, emanating from beneath the ground.  Actually, when I reflect on the noise, it sounded a lot like that woman’s singing.  You know, young Beardsley’s mophead muse.”

Ada sat back and sipped tea from a delicate china cup, and then she looked up and smiled as Sebastian was let into the room by a manservant.  “Coffee!  Have you any sobering coffee?  Ah, I see it there!  Yes, let me help myself to a cup.”  Ada rose and went to her friend, startled at his disheveled appearance.  Her hand gently touched the tall man’s shoulder, and he turned to take hold of it.  “Sphinx, your hand is hot.  Let me cool it with my kisses.”  He kissed it once and then returned to pouring coffee into a tall cup.  Ada reached for the container of cream.  “No, no, dear woman.  Let us not dilute its potency with cream, nor sweeten it with sugar.  No, let me drink it black and strong, and thus dispel the Morphean lure.”

Max rose to join them, laughing.  “Good god, Melmoth, you’re a mess!  You look like you haven’t slept for days.”

Sebastian gulped a scalding cup of coffee as though it were water and then refilled his cup with the dark brew.  “Sleep!  I have been too perturbed too sleep!  I have suffered the
Napoléon
of Nightmares!  Why is it so somber in here?  We need music.  Why have you no musicians at hand, Sphinx, to soothe the soul and ease the mind?”  He drained the cup a second time and refilled it once more. 

“Hell, Melmoth, settle down.  I’ve had a bad nightmare myself, but I’m not running around all gaga.  Sit down and behave yourself.”

“Spare me your fatuous criticism, Max.  Your nightmare cannot compare to the incubus that sucks my sanity – the little I have remaining.  You have not been walking the streets since midnight, haunting cafés so as not to be alone.  You have not been to St. Expiry to light a candle for your own soul.  I will not sit down and be calm – I will howl with the legion of the damned!”  He gulped more coffee.

“Drink slowly, dear, you’ll choke,” cooed Ada.  “Do not be quick to judge our friend.  His dream has been unusual and drear.”

Sebastian produced a mauve handkerchief and wiped his brow.  “Was it, Maximilian?  Did you see our city from that horrid desolate place just outside its boundaries, looking like a metropolis of the damned?  Did you see the dead trees that
writhed
like semi-sentient things as they hurled their shadows onto your face, your eyes?  Did you behold the Lord of Worms rise from his realm of tarnation, clutching his staff of burnt bone and incinerated flesh, with which he etched your name into the dust?  Great Jesu, did you see all that?”

Huffing, he strode to a chair and sat, wiping at his pale face, glancing for a moment at the upside-down image of Max’s illustration.  Then he froze, and his white face drained to a deeper pallor.  Silently, his eyes filled with fear, he bent to the drawing and turned it around.

“You neglected to mention the sepia moon, looking like a scab in heaven,” Max quietly told him.  “I think I’ll have some coffee after all.   Shall I pour you a brandy, Melmoth?”

“This is uncanny.  You’ve been to this place after all.”

“What place?” Ada asked, kneeling next to Sebastian’s chair and taking hold of his hand.

“But how can you have witnessed my dream?  We have been bewitched.  Beardsley’s harpy has worked some necromantic foolery over us.”   He turned to Ada.  “The place is just beyond the city.  You know I have never left the city in the three decades that I have dwelt here – except for the few times that I have visited the Isle of Moira, wherein the dead are interred.  I was bold enough to follow Beardsley and his witch to this place, but I panicked and fled.  Your blurry rendition of its ruins is quite haunting, Max.  I’ve never known you to depict places – you must have felt its spectral power when you were there.”

“I haven’t a clue what you’re muttering about, old boy.  I haven’t set foot out of this city since stepping off the train seven years ago.  I would never hike outside its boundaries.  I am metropolitan to the bone.”

“And you, Sphinx – have you dreamt of this place?”

“You forget, dear friend – I never dream.”

“I know that you have told me so, but I never believed it.  I prefer my sad dreams to no dreams at all.   But this vision that Max and I have shared --
that
I wish I had never beheld.  It is portentous, and nothing good can come of it.  I must warn Beardsley.”

“Stay and warn him in the morning.  Look, the winter darkness comes so early, and I can tell you haven’t eaten.  Dine with us and sleep here until morning, and then together we can see your friend.”

Sebastian rose to his unsteady feet.  “How wise you are, dear Sphinx, and kind; but I cannot rest until I have warned my young friend.  We have been given a premonition of some evil thing, but it merely brushes us with its wings.  The beak is pointed toward a young man’s heart.  He sits in lamplight, and the daemon that is dreaming spills its shadow over him; and if I do not save him now, his soul from out that shadow will be lifted – nevermore.”

IV.

Japheth awoke to the ringing of the bell.  Drowsily, he walked down the steps and opened the building’s door.  Sebastian clasped his shoulders with shaking hands.  “Thank the gods that you are here!  I’ve been ringing for five minutes.”

“Settle down, Sebastian.  Good lord, you look awful.   Come in out the cold.  I’ve been sleeping; soundly, I guess, if I didn’t hear your ringing for so long a time.”  He shut the door and led the way to his dark room. 

“Sleeping – perchance to dream?”

“Huh?  I don’t recall.  I think I’m still waking up.  Sorry it’s so chilly in here, my fire’s gone out.  Let me tend it.  Have you eaten?  I’m going to heat up some wonderful soup.  You look in need of nourishment.”

“Bother nourishment.  I’ve come to warn you of the thing that is feasting on your soul – that harpy!”  He pointed to where the painting leaned upon its easel and saw that the canvas was covered with a piece of black velvet.  “That’s a good sign, Japheth, to hide her from view.  But it will be better still to destroy her image.  There, your palette knife – it will serve our purpose.”

“What on earth are you babbling about, Sebastian?  No, put down the knife and answer me!”

The young man was not quick enough to stop the elder fellow from reaching for the black cloth and ripping it away.  The knife fell from Sebastian’s hand as he saw the thing that mocked him with its baleful eyes.  Was it the same painting?  He thought that it was, although it had been horribly altered.  The creature’s flesh shimmered with a kind of liquid coating that glistened in the glow of yellow moonlight.   The coils of hair had been altered and did not cover any of the woman’s face, the face that was no longer beautiful.  Sebastian did not know what he feared the most – the twisting lips or the cruel eyes.  He marveled at how the artist had caught an aspect of serpentine movement in the ropy tangles of coiled hair.  Behind the creature, in the distance and almost completely hidden in darkness, was another figure, barely discernable.  Sebastian knew that the thing wore a tattered robe and crown of worms.

“I’ve added your moon, per your suggestion.  It brings the thing to life, doesn’t it?  God, I’ve been working on it all night, right after I awakened from the dream.  Little wonder I’ve slept like the dead.  I knew when I awakened that alterations were required.   Dreams can be so instructive, don’t you find?  I’ve never been able to capture grotesquerie so infallibly.  I am nothing if I am not grotesque.  What a muse she has been for me!”

It came to them, from outside the window:  the harsh low singing.  The lad smiled and kissed Sebastian on the mouth, and then vacated the room.  Sebastian fell to his knees and would have moaned if he were not too frightened to utter sound.  Timidly, he crept to the window on hands and knees, trying to fight the fear that labored to prevent his peering into night.  By the time he found the courage to push aside the curtains, the two retreating figures were far away.  The poor old fellow clasped his hands together and prayed to the moon.

They walked through winter’s chilly air to the ruins outside the city.  Hand in hand, they climbed up the slight gradient that led to the ruins.  Japheth smiled at the three-headed beast that stood as sentinel before the archway; but then his face grew somber as he looked beyond that archway to the circle of stone -- to that which stood thereon.  His companion wrapped her arms around his waist and kissed his ear.

“We’ve taken a fancy to you.  We love your dreaming.  It is said that Gershom is a godless place, and perhaps that’s true; but there was once religion here, of an ancient kind.  We are its avatars.  Come, join us.  Go to him, Japheth, and kiss his staff.”

She released him.  Japheth walked down the steps and knelt before the moonlit deity.  He could smell the diseased flesh of which the Old One was composed.  When he lifted his face to the thing’s dark eyes he beheld the crown that was composed of lengthy nematodes, their hermaphroditic bodies knotted as they moved through the Old One’s dome.  The demigod touched a rotted hand to Japheth’s head and pushed his face toward the carrion staff.  The young man pressed his lips to the charnel thing as the hand that touched him worked over his tingling flesh.  He felt the woman’s hands ripped at his clothing and knead his flesh, the flesh that began to alter, to shrivel and grow moist.  Naked, he buried his face into the woman’s moving hair as his flesh began to secrete its slime, the viscous substance that Audre Brugge lapped voraciously as his human body continued to wither and shrink with transmutation.

Dead moonlight cast its diseased illumination upon the Old One, the thing that placed its new acolyte into a writhing crown.

Let Us Wash This Thing

I brought my treasure, wrapped in plastic, to Wormhead’s lair and set it before his folded hands. 

“Been excavating again, have you?” he queried, not moving to touch my offering.  “I cannot say that it is wise, to frolic in the places outside Gershom.  The landscape is so unruly.”

“Danger gives me a tingle,” I answered.

He sighed and grimaced.  “You see everything as sexual, harlot.  How blasé.  The erogenous zone is often such a bore when it is merely appetite.”

“It need be nothing more.  It serves its purpose.”

“Rather philistine, your approach to life.  However you were drawn to Gershom I cannot fathom.”

“We can’t all be poncy aesthetes.  Some of us like to have a bit of backbone.  And there are no rules about wandering outside city parameters.  I don’t believe in restrictions, and that’s exactly why I’ve settled in this depraved city.  Are you going to look at the damn thing or not?”  I took a cigarette from its packet and lit up.  The freak finally unraveled his ugly hands and daintily worked the plastic from the relic, and I smiled at the way he sneered in dismay at the object’s coat of filth.  Still, there was thralldom in his eyes as he was dominated by intense interest, even though he couldn’t bring himself to touch the hand of stone.  “Well?”

“‘Tis certainly absorbing,” he lisped.  Snapping fingers, he summoned one of his lingering acolytes.  “Bring a basin of warm water and some liquid soap.  Let us wash this thing.”  I watched in agitation, and when the basin and brush were brought, I plopped the relic into the water, added the amber soap and worked at cleaning the artifact.  Wormhead couldn’t refrain from panting as I toiled, and I used this moment to get as near to him as he ever allowed me to, so that I could smell and study him.  His stench was similar to butyric acid, an acrid smell that yet contained an ingredient of syrupiness, sweet and cloying.  His dark features and swarthy flesh suggested an element of gypsy in his genetics.  But what really captivated the attention was the work of art that had been surgically embedded into his dome, a reed-like garland made of brass forged to resemble an assembly of conjoined worms that wove into and out of his flesh.  This funny fellow was one of Gershom’s elder residents – indeed, no one, not even those older folk who had lived here most their lives, remembered a time when Wormhead wasn’t an inhabitant, and many speculated that he was the only known native of this city of exiles.  His art, such as it was, was the art of sorcerer.  That’s what put the idea into my head when I first found the artifact buried in a field outside the city. 

One of Wormhead’s little aides handed me a towel, with which I dried the artifact, the thing of dark beauty.  The obsidian hand had been superbly sculpted and was a work of smooth ebony.  Upon one extended finger it wore a ring of white gold, and on its palm was an opal diagram that caught the light with refractions of myriad colors.  Having thoroughly dried it, I placed the article on the table before the freak as the basin was removed.  Wormhead touched one finger to the hand and shuddered.

“Its two extended fingers form the Elder Sign, such as one finds in diagrams in ancient tomes.”  His eyes glimmered as he turned the thing over and ran one talon across the palm.  “The insignia there is one I do not recognize.  How its colors pierce one’s eyes!  The ring is a thing of perfect exquisiteness.  I have a tiara that is composed of comparable metal.  How well did you hunt for the rest of the statue?  Surely this was broken from some amazing icon.”