Gathered Dust and Others (20 page)

“You may be right,” the artist whispered.  “My favorite place on earth is Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, in Boston.  There are shadows in the North End that are like none others – an elder darkness.  I have a private studio there, where I keep the canvases on which I’ve set my fancy free.”  Grimly, he laughed.  “God, if those fools thought my last show was scandalous – they’ve no idea!  It is there, in that sequestered studio, where I feel most at home.  It’s there that I smell most forcibly the past, in all its peculiar splendor.  I let the shadow of old time coat my eyes and churn my brain.  I let it influence my work, yet subtly.  People rarely notice those little touches, they’re too fixated on the faces of my fiends and the ancestral recall thus aroused.  But they’re there – behind the devilish portraits: the spectres of a dead and buried age, revealed in blurred images of brick edifices, old stone, decayed woodwork, another era that I artistically evoke.  A potent past.  The past, the past – it’s all there is!”

“There are, however, other evocations – beyond dimensional time.  And there are a myriad of dreams.  I sensed other visions churning in your skull – dreams of alien landscape and one who awaits you within strange shadow.”  He looked lovingly at the book he held.  “This book is a connotation of the potency of dreaming.”

“And to such things I now leave you, Simon.  My work here is finished for the nonce.  Sweet dreams, sir.”

Simon opened the book and ran tapered fingers across one page.  “No, no,” he whispered, “I never dream.”  But his words went unheeded, for he was alone in his little room.

II.
(From the Journal of Richard Upton Pickman)

I returned to my spacious room above the curio shop and sat in fabulous darkness where I brooded on my plight.  The situation at home had become precarious, with even my father refusing to see me in the end.  I suppose he fancied that I had become enslaved by narcotics and that they had altered my very being.  He was a fool not to realize the facts – for he had always treated me like I was something strange and unwanted, and this suggested that he knew or suspected something about my origin, my smuggle into his household.  We had had one final fight about my mother – I demanded to be told about her, about why she had vanished when I was a boy.  I knew instinctively that she had held the key to my mystery of hatching into this hateful world.  She has visited me, often, in my queerest dreams, and with each visit she looked a little altered. Often she was accompanied by two silent creatures, winged things with flesh as black as midnight, fiends without faces.  The curious thing was that when I looked into the mirror upon awakening, I saw that my mug was changing in a way that matched my mother’s alteration in my dreams.  I am now much distorted.  Just now, returning from Simon’s hovel in the woods, I noticed that I can no long walk like I used to, and I can’t stand erect.  I slump forward, and something about my pelvis has so altered that I lope in a way that isn’t natural.  Lately I’ve noticed the alteration of my hands, and this has really displeased me, because I’m afraid it will affect the way I paint; for my mitts have enlarged, and my nails are strong and square.  No matter, I can still hold a brush as well as ever, and my work on Simon’s portrait is nearly done.  As is this final work that I am completing in this room – this portrait of the artist as a fiend, this artistic investigation of what has become my countenance.  This place is cozy, and I like that it still has an acetylene gas outfit as its light source rather than modern electricity – just like my studio in the North End.  I brought one of my own lanterns from the studio, so I am with familiar things that help give me a sense of being home.

Of course, this valley could never be my home.  I protested to Simon that I need a sense of the past in which to dwell – the ancient buildings and lanes and secrets of New England.  He scoffed at me and said that such things were modern compared to the agedness of this valley and its forest.  He said that the secrets of antique Boston, which were merely a construct of mankind, could not compare to the enigmas of this place.  Bah.  I’ll admit that Sesqua Valley is rather weird.  I don’t like the smell of the air – it has a cloying sweetness that sticks inside my throat.  And there isn’t anything sinister, that I can perceive, in the fresh green shadows of the woods.  I long to return home, however lonesome Boston has become.  The last of my friends dropped me after that final exhibition – but I had a hunch that they would; and, really, that was part of my intention, to shock the community by finally showing some of my secret canvases, the things I had until then kept sequestered in my North End studio.  Roberta suspected the kind of reception the paintings would have, which is why she allowed me to display them in her gallery.  She prides herself on being Bohemian, although most of her pals are merely surrealists.  Well, it tickled her to display my canvases, and I delighted in the demonstrations of shock and dismay, which indeed helped to fuel my hatred for humanity. 

Simon was something unsuspected, and at first I loathed his keen interest.  But his suggestion of a temporary escape from everything, in this remote corner of the world, interested me.  And, let’s face it – the paintings no longer sell.  So I packed some gear and drove us up here in my jalopy, and that in itself felt rather wonderful, the thrill of sudden flight, the fun idea of my mysterious evaporation from the Boston scene, and the long drive itself, through unfamiliar country.  I relished it.  Simon proved an amusing companion, and I loved the reaction to his persona when we stopped at the motel.  He laughed when I called him ‘beast’ and said that I was not the first to do so.  I don’t quite understand what’s wrong with his face.  It doesn’t seem like birth defect, but rather some kind of racial thing.  And I’ve noticed, in the small time I’ve been in town, others who share this queer hereditary stain, so it must be some inbred thing associated with this place.  Rather like one finds in the clans of Innsmouth.  I love painting him, as it gives me an excuse to
study
his freakishness.  There is indeed something purely bestial in his cruel features.  At times his mug reminds me of a wolf, or a frog.  It’s his eyes that absolutely captivate, with their silver sheen, like pale nickel; and I’ve noticed, in certain light, a grouping of queerly colored particles floating on the surface of his eyes.  And, yes, as I mentioned above – they are malicious eyes, malignant in a haughty sort of way.  You get the idea that he is plotting on how best to hurt you. 

I had Roberta use my camera to take a series of snaps of myself, close up, just my face.  I like working from photographs.  I like the way they can reveal things that mirrors cannot, how things are captured, subtly.  I’m using them to work on my final . . . 
Why
I insist on thinking of this self-portrait as my
final
work I cannot fathom, but the word comes continually to mind.  Maybe it’s just a hunch that my days as an artist in Boston are at an end. 

Simon mentioned that a group of aesthetic folk meet at some kind of arty club or saloon in town tonight, and he thought it might amuse me to comingle.  I doubt it, but what the hell, might as well see what the locals are like.  It’s weird and rather stupid, to have grown so hateful of humanity, and yet to fight against a kind of cosmic lonesomeness.  The mind of man – who can comprehend it?  Mine remains a mystery.   Take your sketchpad, Richard.  Some of the folks you’ve seen share Simon’s curious features, although none as outlandish as his own.  You may find a slew of future portraits among the happy villagers.

III.

It was not a lengthy walk from his room to the hostelry where the locals congregated, but the artist took his time in strolling to the place.  It was true that this valley town did not have those charms that had so captivated him in Boston, that sense of hoary past; and yet Sesqua Town had her own special appeal – that of an old and isolated haunt.  The sidewalks, for example, were made of planks of solid wood, and none of the roads were paved.  So yes, there was a feeling of the past in this place, but not such a one as could compare to that of New England.  What Sesqua Valley did suggest was the timelessness of nature – and this was something that Boston, with its bricks and warehouses and cobblestone lanes, lacked.  New England’s past was that of man – this valley’s agelessness was outside human design.  He stopped in his walking to look at the titanic twin-peaked mountain, the white stone of which seemed to soak in a quality of the light that shone from the quarter moon, reflecting that light on its shimmering surface of majestic rock.  The artist was utterly captivated by that mountain, for he had never seen such peaks, lean and curved and rising over the mountain at great height, resembling to imaginative souls fantastic wings extending from a daemon’s shoulders. 

A wind arose and pushed against his eyes, and as he continued to gaze at the mountain the artist was suddenly overwhelmed with eerie sensation.  He thought that he could detect within the wind a subtle sound, like a distant siren song that would enchant him toward devastation.  An element of wind seemed to sink inside the surface of his eyes and alter their perception, and he swore that the colossal mountain moved, lazily, and stretched its peaks.  He was overwhelmed with an ache to march to that mountain and climb so as to sing beneath the shadows of those peaks.  Richard began to move toward the thing of shimmering stone, until a hand clutched at his arm and turned him around.  Protesting, he tried to shake free of the fellow and peer toward the peaks once more, but his sudden companion would not allow him to do so.

“No, you don’t want to stare at that white stone.  Ignore its call.  You’re the artist everyone has been chattering about, the beast’s new amigo?”

Richard shook his head as if to clear it, and then he extended his hand, which was clasped by the stranger.  “Richard Pickman, of Boston.  Yes, Simon lured me here to paint his portrait.”

The fellow moved a little nearer, and the artist curled his nose at the stench of booze.  “Justin Geoffrey.  Come on, join me in the pub.  I’m celebrating my sudden demise.”

“Your what?”

“My happy extinction!”  The artist did not protest as the odd man dragged him down the sidewalk planks and into an establishment.  The talking in the room silenced as all eyes peered at the two gentlemen, and Richard noticed that some few pairs of eyes were of an uncanny silver hue.  His companion burst out in laughter and saluted the room with a loud unruly shout.  “Greetings, fiends and friends!  I bring another outsider into your propinquity!  And he is intimate with the first-born beast, so treat him well!”  The outrageous fellow turned to smile at the artist, and Richard studied the handsome if emaciated face, the curls of dark Byronic hair, eyes of palest gray.  The well-formed and sensuous mouth grinned at him and then hailed a woman who arose at one table and motioned that they should join her.  Justin playfully placed an arm around Richard’s shoulder and bent to speak into his ear.  “That girl’s a great fuck,” he said, winking at his new acquaintance.  He then rushed to the table and gave the woman a passionate kiss on the mouth, and picking up someone’s half-drained glass of brew he grinned widely at the crowd and shouted:

“I’m told the tale of some sequestered vale

Where shadow weaves and worms itself between

The spaces of dark trees of ancient girth

Deep-rooted in the supernatural sod.

I’ve stepped between the spaces of dark trees,

My silhouette rooted to secret mud,

And tasted shadow woven of strange stuff

That spills into my mouth and finds my brain

And warps the very marrow of my bone

And freezes ev’ry element of blood

And pumps my heartbeat to a slower pace

Until my pulse is quiet and I pose

As denizen of tomb.”

The artist was astounded at the force and musicality of the voice that chanted poetry, a low clear voice that commanded attention and respect.  It hadn’t been mere performance – Justin Geoffrey had spoken the verse intimately, as if it were something to which his psyche was irrevocably wed.  Although the poet had seemed, upon first acquaintance, mildly intoxicated, his face had taken on an air of sobriety as he spoke, as if some portion of his sleepy brain had been suddenly awakened by the magick of the spoken lines.  But then the elfin playfulness returned to his eyes and he roared laughter, thumping the drained beer glass onto the surface of the table again and again, and joined in this action by others in the room.  Justin motioned for Richard to join them at the table, and then he addressed the onlookers again.  “I present Richard Pickman, late of Boston, here to paint the portrait of our first-born beast.”

“It’s almost finished,” Richard said as he sauntered to the table and was offered a chair by the still-standing young woman.  They sat together.

“You’re staying above the antique shop?”

“Yes – a curious place, that, with a strange assembly of esoteric stuff.”

“Leonidas, the owner, is a fine fellow to know,” Justin informed him, “with a goodly supply of rare narcotics.  Do you imbibe?”

The artist shrugged.  “Now and then – but I prefer to depend on dreams and exploration for my art.”

“Then you’ll find substance here, in this furtive valley, among these children of shadow and lunacy.”

“You’re drunk, Justin.”

“Not drunk enough, my girl,” and he smiled as the barkeep brought a fresh round of amber fluid.  “Don’t forget, I’m celebrating my sudden and spectacular release from mortal clay.”  He laughed at the confused expression on the artist’s face.  “I’ve been confined in an asylum for some time.  Simon and William have mastered my escape, which has utterly perplexed and scandalized those in charge of my far-off penitentiary.  To discourage outrage, it has been reported that I died while raving about mine delusions.  Rather sweet, the entire comedy.”

“Simon and – William?”

“William Davis Manly, my fellow poet.  No, he’s not among us.  He rarely leaves his little hut in the woods.  You’ll not see him.”  He pointed to the young woman beside Richard.  “That’s Hannah Blotch, the imagist poet.  We’ve been trying to convince her that that particular movement has been dead for years, but she is insistent.”