The Last Ritual

by S. A. Sidor

  CALvin RiTe

  NinA TArrinGTon ALL Den OAks

  WiLL Die by the HAnd of the ONe who CALLs the FALLing sTAr Thru The GATe

  TwsTer of The CoiL

  The Un-Sun

  yoOYUVABDAA

  I read our names again. It dawned on me that, apart from the random capitalizations, the creature had gotten the spelling of Nina’s first and last names correct. That’s interesting, I thought. Tarrington was the longest word, and the animated clay thing had even managed the double “r” bit, which might’ve meant nothing, of course. He’d succeeded with a series of double “l” spellings in the next line. Perhaps it was random chance; I was looking for clues where none existed. Or maybe he was more familiar with her Boston clan, or a namesake in another city. Or did Nina mean more to him? And to the Twister of the Coil? And the Un-Sun?

  I set aside my ruminations about our names.

  It was the last word that interested me the most. This was the word I heard from the tall monk in the Black Cave. You, you… Va-BaDAAAHHH! Something like it came to Nina and me through the library wall as well. I was convinced I’d heard it at the ritual in Spain.

  But what did it mean? It might have been a kind of prayer or interjection.

  Yet I suspected it was a name. So many of the words in the gargoyle’s message were names: Calvin, Nina, my name….

  The others were less clear: Falling Star, Twister of the Coil, and…

  Yooyu Vabadaa.

  It had to have meaning. Two parts. It felt like a name when I spoke it aloud.

  I wanted to ask Calvin. He was vital to our solution. But where had Calvin gone?

  Since that night we left the bootleggers’ camp, we hadn’t seen him. He never came to New Colony. We certainly weren’t going to return to the docks. Nina tried to persuade me to pay a visit to the Black Cave. I wasn’t ready for that. How could we go there without the risk of being shot by gangsters? I was sure we could find its location. We knew the side of the river it was on and how far from town. It was only a matter of picking the correct dirt road.

  But no, it wasn’t safe.

  Calvin knew where to find us. We simply had to wait for him to make contact, as hard as that might be. I’d shared my idea about Yooyu Vabadaa with Nina. She agreed it sounded like a name. Beyond that we were stuck. Oh, we had plenty to keep us busy. But none of it related to Arkham’s mysterious deaths or monsters. My head was feeling better. I was grateful for that. I had used up the pills Doc Unger gave me.

  Nina and I mostly did what lovers do. Mother called it “playing house.” All I knew was that I was in love for the first time in my life. Every scrap of evidence told me that Nina loved me too. We did make a cute couple, as Preston said. I hadn’t seen Preston either lately, not since our breakfast at the Silver Gate Hotel. Preston never came down to New Colony. He was a silent partner.

  Balthazarr had arrived at New Colony.

  I wasn’t the one who brought him around. He didn’t need a handler. The man made his own way. The whole Colony buzzed with new energy. Our artist-in-residence, Juan Hugo Balthazarr, the Shocking Spaniard, was no wallflower. More like a carnival barker, combined with a one-man band and a living fireworks display. He had the instincts of a master thespian and the charm of a motivated salesman pushing the snazziest, gaudiest product in the world: himself. He knew how to attract attention. His artwork was brilliant, ground-breaking, and relevant to modernity like no other’s, yet he still managed to outshine what he did with who he was, a true celebrity. He gave a few lectures, even taught a class or two. Mostly he talked. During one class I attended, he had us paint a communal painting. Each student added a brushstroke, a color, or a line scraped with a palette knife.

  In the end, the painting itself was abstract. A chaos of styles.

  “Do not think. Create,” he said. “Forget logic… order. Tap into your elemental self.”

  I had difficulties. If I abandoned logic and order, then how could I pick up a brush?

  When it was finished, Balthazarr had us gather around the canvas.

  Around him.

  We sat on the floor – like his worshipful disciples.

  He lit a match and burned the painting.

  I excused myself, suddenly feeling ill. I was back in Spain watching the pyre.

  •••

  Christmas came and went. Nina and I bought a small tree. We tied red velvet ribbons on the branches. Put our wrapped gifts under its pagan branches. We drank eggnog and built fires.

  I met the other Colonists. For the most part they were examples of types, and if you’ve spent any time around artistic communities, you’ll likely know exactly what I mean. There were the brooding loners. You met them once, then saw them only from afar, or in passing. The society-seekers were the opposite, always around, even when you wished they’d stay in for a night. They spoke outrageous things into a crowd and watched to gauge the reactions. Drank too much, ate off other people’s plates, smoked constantly, and you’d better keep a hand on your partner, or you’d find theirs in its place. They broke things, including themselves, and, bright as they were, the shine would not last for too long. This you discovered soon.

  I know I must sound critical, but you misunderstand me if you think I didn’t like the Colonists. They were my people. I was among my own kind. They were the crazy makers of art. Creators whose acts of creation typically involved an equal, or greater, measure of selfdestruction as a price paid. A self-fulfilling myth. They glowed from inside, like hot embers, and whatever color existed in Arkham only existed because of them. For the most part, as cohabitators, they were never easy.

  Take Portia and Delilah, the sculptresses I mentioned before, who were our downstairs neighbors. They fought with each other. Screaming matches we could hear through the walls. At other times, they were so sweet and perfectly fitted to each other, you’d swear they were twins. But twins fight too, I guess. I liked them. Portia’s new gargoyles were better than Court’s.

  “Do you really think so?” Portia asked me one frozen afternoon, while the ladies drank Oolong tea, after I’d returned from the bakery with warm doughnuts and a sour cream pound cake. Delilah and Nina were in the other room slicing up the cake, putting it on plates.

  “That gargoyle could sit atop Notre Dame,” I said. “Très magnifique.”

  Portia nodded and nibbled at her doughnut, unsure whether to believe me.

  That’s one of the big problems with artists. We’re inner people, despite the outer drama and colorful displays. Selfish by nature, consumed with our own visions and dreams. We alternate between delusions of grandeur and crippling self-doubt. It lures people, then drives them away. I love you – I hate you. I love me – I hate me. No wonder the world thinks us mad.

  “I guess it could be turning out worse,” she said. “How’s your painting coming along? Do you have anything to hang in the gallery this weekend for New Colony’s winter show?”

  Balthazarr had insisted that we present our art. Permit ourselves to be judged publicly, so he organized a show. Everyone was thrilled… and equally terrified.

  “I’m working on a couple pieces.” That was all I wanted to share. See? I’m like them.

  I had three completed paintings in Court’s old studio. There was the watercolor I painted at Oakwood of the net blob shambling across the bridge toward me. Since my arrival at the Colony, I’d done two new oils. The gargoyle hopping the train, cackling with its head thrown back and wearing Calvin Wright’s face like a mask. And my latest creation, an interior of the Black Cave: the processing monks in hooded robes carrying me aloft, the chiseled steps and knobby walls cast in a sickly greenish hue. I painted my damaged, bloody head, but my eyes were wide open, staring at the viewer, entranced. In the background, on one of the cave walls, small details: finger-painted symbols – smears of scarlet defacing the rocks – and angular geometric lines cr
isscrossed the landing, half-concealed in shadows. I made some of them look like the gargoyle’s symbols I kept finding. I wasn’t even sure what I’d seen on the walls of the cave. My memory was too foggy, the details already fading.

  I hadn’t shown this painting to Nina. Not yet. I told her it wasn’t ready, but that was a lie. The painting was finished. I wasn’t ready for her to see it, or anyone else. It was still too enigmatic to me. Had I traveled that far into the depths of the cave? Or was this canvas the cryptic hallucination of a shaken brain after it suffered a pummeling with a bat? Who knew?

  I had a fourth painting, an oil I’d begun after the net blob’s portrait, but I had abandoned this work. It showed the inside of the Warren Observatory, the telescope dome. Clark Abernathy’s headless body ceremonially arranged on the floor. Preston and Minnie were there but facing away. I was pointing at the corpse, covering my mouth, horrified.

  •••

  I’d pushed Preston’s bachelor party from my mind, when one evening I checked my mailbox at the Colony mansion and discovered an invitation, unstamped, hand-delivered, waiting for me. I tore into the envelope as I climbed the stairs.

  You are cordially invited to a night of debauchery and excess in celebration of the eminent departure of Preston Fairmont from the domain of the unmarried into the bosom of his bride.

  We shall convene in Independence Square at 11 o’clock

  on the night of January 28th, 1926.

  Bring nothing but your imagination. Expect nothing but pleasure and future legendary stories.

  The invitation card was engraved on fine handmade paper. In the lower left corner of the card was a woodcut print that I recognized immediately as a never-before-seen design by Juan Hugo Balthazarr. Another abstract – stark black against the creamy paper – it hinted at the contours of a twisted limb, possibly botanical, but more suggestive of animalistic inspiration. The fleshy tip reached up like a decomposing finger from a cursed and diabolical grave; it sprouted from an ink splat. Looping tributaries leaked off the page. I felt my heartbeat catch. First from seeing an exclusive, obviously very recent, Balthazarr creation, but secondly, something unnamable in the pattern drew my fixation and stimulated a sense of compounding dread in me.

  “You’re not dressed yet?” Nina’s voice startled me from the top stair.

  I nearly toppled backward. Regaining my balance, I quickly covered the invitation with its envelope. I was dressed. I just wasn’t dressed for tonight’s affair. We were headed to the opening of the New Colony’s inaugural Winter Show.

  “I have time,” I answered, composing myself as I mounted to the third floor.

  Nina wore a sleek red dress that clung to her – a second skin, smooth and shimmery as a salamander – radiating the spirit of a creature born in, and impervious to, fire. She tilted her head while affixing a pearl earring. “You’d better hurry. What have you got there?”

  “It’s nothing.” I attempted to pass her in the hall. But the lady was faster.

  While I reached for my doorknob, she darted in a slender hand and snatched the invitation from my grip. A laugh on her face, celebrating her quickness and victory, soon dissolved. She handed the invitation back to me.

  “Do be careful about Preston,” she said.

  “How do you mean?” Was she worried on his behalf, or that he was a threat?

  “Steer away from trouble. That’s all.” She went back into her apartment.

  I went inside mine to get dressed.

  When I came outside again, Nina was there, waiting in her furs.

  She assessed me up and down and smiled.

  “You look smashing,” she said.

  “Likewise. Care to take my arm?”

  She did care to.

  Ours was a short walk in the chilling New England air. The gallery showing was being held in one of the New Colony buildings, down the block from the mansion. This ancient house once belonged to an Atlantic sea captain who was lost, along with his ship and crew, in a freakish storm. Fully restored, the domicile provided a viewing gallery and hosting site for parties like the one we were attending tonight. Someone had lit the path to the front entrance with rows of long black candles set in wrought iron stands. Their flames twinkled brightly in the crisp stillness.

  “How pretty,” Nina said.

  I nodded, gazing at the Indian teak double doors as they parted to receive us. This was my first visit to the “Sea Captain’s House,” as it was called within the Colony. While I had passed it many times, I had never been close enough to notice the detailed carvings on the doors. Now I read symbols there which resembled the spiked crown, the falling star, and the trident fork. Was I seeing these signs everywhere I looked because they inhabited my brain? Or did they encroach upon us?

  I tried inspecting them more thoroughly after we crossed the threshold. But there was a rush to shut the doors against the wintry blasts. Our greeters blocked the carvings in question with their bodies. They asked for our coats. Still, I hoped for another chance to review what I thought I saw. A waiter carrying a tray of champagne swept past. Laws that ordered the outside world seemed suspended in the Colony. Or maybe Preston paid the police to look the other way. Nina captured two flutes, passing one to me. A cluster of artists, mostly other painters I’d met since joining the Colony, pressed in, offering a chorus of warm, boozy hellos and taking us politely, though firmly, by the elbows, ushering us into the confusing warren of rooms that served as the gallery.

  Francine, a miniaturist, led the group. “They’ve done a fabulous job,” she said, showing us a path to the hors d’oeuvres. “I don’t know who ordered the food but it’s the tops, I tell you.”

  She handed me a crab pastry.

  Nina picked out a skewered meatball dripping with gravy, popping it into her mouth.

  “The bar’s through there.” Francine gestured to the next room, its wallpaper crowded with tropical fruit and exotic birds. “There’s a harpist plucking away upstairs, and a man playing pan flute. It’s so luxurious I might die. Oh, get me a mint julep will you, dear?” She waved to Oscar who threw enormous pots on his potter’s wheel, decorating them with ferocious jungle cats and popeyed monkeys swinging by their tails. Oscar waved back. “There are people with money here tonight.” Francine jerked her head toward a couple in the corner, conversing with Dexter, an experimental sculptor. He liked to glue string to objects, layering the strings, varying colors and thicknesses. I doubted they would buy anything from him. I’d gone to prep school with the male of the pair, and he was strictly a fan of realism and female nudity. However, his wife I didn’t know. The room was crowded. Overcrowded. I fought off a surge of claustrophobia.

  “Quite a group,” I said over the noise of multiple conversations going on at once.

  “Lots of money,” Francine said. “Hear it? Chang, chang… pockets of gold.”

  I turned to ask Nina if she could hear the money, but she was gone from my side. When Francine paused to accept her mint julep from Oscar, I slipped out into the foyer and spotted Nina’s red curves halfway up a winding staircase, leading to the house’s second story. She was smoking a cigarette and talking to someone. A man. She laughed at something he said, nodding dramatically and resting her hand on his arm, which in turn leaned casually on the banister. As Nina inclined to take a sip of her cocktail, I wondered briefly how she’d gotten a drink so quickly when the bar was packed, but then I saw the man had the same drink in his hand. I realized both that he’d offered the sip to her and that he was Juan Hugo. When he saw me looking up, he motioned for me to join them.

  “The man I wanted to talk to,” he said. His beard looked longer than the last time I saw him. It split at the end into two dark wedges. It was hard to keep from staring.

  “Why are you looking for me, Juan Hugo?”

  “Because you have the most beautiful date, and I must tell you I intend to steal her.�
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  I said nothing.

  He turned to Nina, white teeth smiling. “I think he believes me.”

  Nina held her chin up like she was balancing a china cup on her head. Amused or embarrassed? I couldn’t tell what she was feeling. She took the glass from Juan Hugo and drank.

  “I never believe anything. It’s the key to my happiness,” I said, taken by surprise.

  Nina frowned.

  Juan Hugo broke into laughter. “I am joking. Not about this woman’s beauty but my intentions. I want to talk to you about your paintings, Alden. I’ve seen them. They are hanging in a room upstairs. Can we go there now?”

  “We are free,” Nina said. She didn’t look at me, but she held out her hand. I took it.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Excellent!”

  Usually the crowd followed Juan Hugo wherever he went. They hung on his words for sustenance. Engaging him in conversation elevated anyone’s status in the community. To have his full attention the way we did was the envy of every artist in the Sea Captain’s House. It seemed peculiar how empty the upstairs hallway was; almost as if the others had been told beforehand to stay away, to keep their distance while Juan Hugo talked with us. It was crazy to think you were the center of everyone’s awareness, that you as a couple were objects of their total absorption. Why did it feel slightly sinister? Even conspiratorial?

  Yet that’s precisely how it felt.

  Balthazarr guided us to the room.

  “This must have been a bedroom, no?” He considered the chamber. The walls and floorboards were strangely blacked. Shutters sealed off our view from the only window.

  But it was the paintings we had come for.

  My three paintings were the only artworks on display in the room. They were large, but still they seemed to float on the otherwise barren walls. Each painting positioned alone.

  Every other room was a shared exhibition space. I didn’t know if I was lucky or not.

  Balthazarr approached my watercolor portrait of the net blob. He folded his hands across his chest and stroked at his beard with the fingers of one hand. “Here.” He pointed to the blob. “Yes, yes…” He stepped back and took me by the shoulders, positioning me directly in front of my work. “What you did here, Alden, is extraordinary. I have never seen anything like it before.”