Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  IV.

  For a brief time Kazoua’s work took on an almost sunny disposition. The effect, while not quite jubilant meadow creatures frolicking beneath some saccharine sun, was still jarring to her few long-time acquaintances she kept contact with and ultimately alienated them even further from her.

  But in her first months there, no one perceived any insurmountable problems in her life or any trace of that sad dementia that was to mark her final days.

  On the weekends, she and Tou Ger took pleasant day trips to nearby cities like Innsmouth or Boston. In particular, they were on the lookout for a good bowl of pho, which was still very hard to come by in Arkham proper.

  Dombrowski took a personal interest in helping the young couple enjoy the city, inviting them to various community gatherings he’d read of in the Arkham Observer. Kazoua and Tou Ger accepted his offers on several occasions, curious to see the local attractions. They even attended a few meetings of the notorious French Hill Art Club, whose members were pleasant enough although not entirely of the kindred disposition Kazoua hoped to find.

  There were, at any given point, ten to twelve members of the French Hill Art Club in attendance. Advancing years kept many of their more prolific members from venturing out with any regularity. A notable standout was the bloated Mr. Thurber, who had the despicable look and decrepit aroma of a dilettante artist, arriving consistently liquored up, his frog-like eyes constantly drifting towards Kazoua’s cleavage like some mad suckling calf.

  Herbert Carter was a little less loathsome, a fragile-featured man who dressed all in white suits during the spring and all in black during the winter, every year without fail. He was a minor Arkham phenomenon as the locals waited to see when the season had changed based on his attire. Thurber often scoffed at Carter, questioning whether he was an artist or a fashion plate.

  Normally a pleasant and polite girl, Kazoua soon tired of regaling traditional Hmong folktales and beliefs at every meeting to the pallid members of the club, who viewed her stories as quaint, exotic grist for their mediocre work. They had all been starving for genuine inspiration for untold ages. Eventually, she politely severed her ties with them, claiming she needed time to focus on her art and studies. Many were tremendously disappointed, and several asked her to keep in touch individually.

  Kazoua became notorious for losing phone numbers during this time.

  It was not long afterwards that poor Dombrowski took ill in mid-July. The constant rain had taken its toll, and his wife found him in the basement delirious, raving incoherent and horrible things about the universe.

  The physicians advised admission to the local asylum, but Mrs. Dombrowski instead had his nearby nephew from Innsmouth, Eric Gilman, come to manage the affairs of the White Rose Apartments. Dombrowski was confined to his bed with sedatives, some small canvases, and some paint with which to pass the time. This ultimately had little effect on Kazoua and Tou Ger, however, who’d begun to have problems of their own.

  V.

  It is from this point that the particulars begin to unravel into an indescribable mess of tangled implications, hearsay, and unreliable accounts, and even the most stalwart investigators will find themselves stymied by the “details” that led to Kazoua’s doom.

  Among the more certain elements was the noticeable presence of vermin within the walls of the White Rose Apartments. Several of the tenants, to Gilman’s dismay, came to complain of the constant scurrying and scratching of the unseen boarders, who were most active after midnight.

  Mr. Von Kempelen on the third floor remarked that these did not sound like common field mice but lumbering Norwegian wharf rats determined to keep him from sleeping soundly. Mrs. Samsa also complained of the rodents and while she had not seen them, had heard them and took solace only in that they had dealt with a peculiar cockroach problem she’d been having. The curious bachelor Trelkovsky spoke of moving, perhaps back to Paris, if matters were not resolved. Gilman promised to look into the matter immediately and contracted Delapore Exterminators to set things aright.

  In a brief visit with his parents, Tou Ger admitted he’d had trouble sleeping that month, no doubt an effect of adjusting to the damp New England climate after so many years in the Midwest. He had vivid nightmares alternating with bouts of insomnia. His mother left him some traditional herbs she’d grown in her garden in Milwaukee as a remedy.

  Correspondence between Kazoua and some of her cousins in Albany from the time indicates she too had problems with the pests but was more repulsed by the ineffectiveness of her apartment to let proper natural light in for her painting. An almost obsessive perfectionist when it came to her art, she realized that the angles at which the windows had been set would never allow sufficient light, even on a good day. Instead, a lazy haze perpetually permeated the space, dissipating only with the setting of the sun.

  A review of her letters outlined a particular encounter with Gilman, who apparently knew nothing of this sort of thing, merely shrugging and offering to lend her a few used lamps from the janitor’s closet.

  Exasperated, Kazoua agreed to take them. She accompanied Gilman to the basement, which had recently flooded a few weeks earlier.

  Most of the mess had been cleaned up, but the noxious scent of mildew and mold had begun to seep in. Unlocking the closet door, Gilman intimated he was a superstitious sort, wondering aloud about the wisdom of building the White Rose Apartments on this lot.

  When Kazoua pressed him to explain, he mentioned the Dombrowski family had been Polish immigrants who owned the property at the turn of the century. But the death of a student boarder, Walter Gilman (no relation), and an awful gale in 1931 irreparably damaged the house both physically and in reputation, so much so that his forebears gave up on the wretched building and focused their entrepreneurial attentions elsewhere.

  There’d been some nattering about witchcraft because the supposed witch, Keziah Mason, had once lived there, but that was just fireside nonsense.

  In the early 1990s, several of the Dombrowski brothers, most of whom were now into real estate, looked into building a new apartment complex on the old lot, which had once again gone up for sale. It seemed like karma. It was a second chance for the family, who never forgot their father’s forlorn stories of this failed house, and they cheered their idea as if they were pioneers out to settle the West.

  To them, this lot was a symbol of the American dream. They became obsessive about it. Price was no object, and it was the only time they let sentimentality guide their decisions although it nearly bankrupted them.

  Despite complaints from the anemic popinjays of the Arkham Historical Society, they built a remarkably modern apartment building, banishing the memory of their family’s previous failure to a mere footnote in their fortunes. Construction went surprisingly well, without accident or injury, almost as if the whole project had been blessed from above.

  But in recent months, some great shadow had fallen upon the property, starting with the relentless March rain. Gilman advised Kazoua to avoid extended conversations with Mrs. Dombrowski if possible. Gilman bemoaned his constant bickering over the management of the property with the madwoman.

  Kazoua took her lamps and resolved to avoid all of them except on the first of the month to pay her rent.

  VI.

  Interviews with her neighbors suggest that around late August, Kazoua and Tou Ger began arguing vociferously over the inconsequential. Over the next few weeks, it escalated until the police were called to intercede on September 3, 2001, because of the disturbance they were making.

  According to the police report, Kazoua accused Tou Ger of hiding her art supplies from her and defacing her most ambitious canvas to date, an epic depiction of the first Hmong shaman, Shee Yee, against the malevolent Nzeu Nyong and his hordes of evil spirits. Tou Ger claimed to know nothing about it, calling her an irrational lunatic and a witch.

  Police noted several glasses, eggs, and similar fragile objects had been smashed against the walls in the frenzy b
ut did not feel the situation warranted more than a warning.

  On another note, Kazoua’s sister in Milwaukee, Dia, says her sister was never one to have comfortable sleep. She was a known insomniac, and several of her uncles suspected her of being haunted by a particular long-standing curse on the women of their family.

  During the funeral, Dia mentioned that, while she was alive, her sister would frequently call (lamentably, collect) to discuss the terrible dreams she’d been having, conveying images so awful that Dia had to plead with Kazoua to stop relating them to her.

  Their father, Pheng Vue, wanted a well-known shaman in Rhode Island to come out to help her and exorcise the apartment in the proper custom, which he knew Kazoua and Tou Ger had not done prior to moving in. Kazoua rejected the solution for uncertain reasons.

  VII.

  The last works of Kazoua Vue are described as her greatest and the darkest of her brief career, when she at last began to eclipse mighty Pickman himself. Most survive only in fragments, broken scraps of canvas, or singed sketches, but even these scant pieces tell of a powerful voice emerging from a long sleep.

  Some of her iconic language is more easily apprehended—primal spirals, crude stars with flaming eyes, jagged mountain ranges of purple and blue. Others resemble glyphs invoking ancient Egypt, predynastic Qin, or the Enochian script of the mystic John Dee. But some remain far more elusive, indecipherable by coherent minds.

  Not all was abstract: Kazoua created self-portraits akin to a more surreal Kahlo, and a disturbing series of portraits depicting the deceitful Poj Ntxoog “throughout herstory.” Her paintings of this awful creature possessed a terrible verisimilitude. One could scarcely imagine it to be a creature of myth, thanks to her all-too-keen brushstrokes. More imaginative minds might believe the Poj Ntxoog came to pose, but such circumstances would be absurd.

  When asked about her peculiar choice in subjects, Kazoua replied that she saw the deeper symbolic significance of these misunderstood spirits and that Hmong women could learn greatly from the Poj Ntxoog’s example. She seems to honestly have believed the image of the shape-shifting Poj Ntxoog could be rehabilitated through art as happened with ancient Lilith, the Great Mother, Goddess of a Thousand Names.

  Most traditional accounts of the Poj Ntxoog describe them as dwarf spirit women with long, terrible hair and feet that face backwards to fool the unsuspecting. Every now and then, villagers in Asia’s highlands will still report killing a Poj Ntxoog. One account described the creature as having six vaginas, a long, thin neck, deathly-pale skin, and a mouth so dark you cannot see her teeth. The bodies always seem to disappear shortly after death. Others say the Poj Ntxoog consort with tigers and have magic powers, possessed of an inexplicable desire to trick and deceive humans.

  A relative, wishing to remain anonymous, said Tou Ger, upon seeing these portraits, was so repulsed he told her to stop painting the evil things lest they be called forward to admire themselves. Kazoua responded violently, calling him unspeakable things. He was so shocked to hear her speak like that to him that he shrank into the meekest of creatures, avoiding his own wife during all hours except bedtime.

  VIII.

  Around this period, Thurber from the French Hill Art Club came, some suspect courting, Kazoua at her apartment while he checked in on the poor Dombrowskis.

  Thurber had been researching his old notes and found some material of a very special interest to the young aficionado of Richard Upton Pickman. At first, Kazoua expressed little interest but relented, for Thurber offered nothing less than a visit to some of Pickman’s hidden studios both within Arkham and on the North End of Boston. He even had what he claimed was one of Pickman’s original brushes, which he presented to her as a present. It was too tempting to resist, and soon Kazoua traveled alone with him to those sordid locations, which were mostly ruins and dusty boards more than anything these days.

  They would return from their jaunts caked in mud and dirt that reeked of old worlds civilization was all too happy to leave behind. If Tou Ger objected, it is not documented. She became quite spirited during this time as did Thurber. Carter remarked that Thurber seemed quite the cock of the walk.

  On October 30, however, Thurber burst into the evening gathering of the French Hill Art Club, alone and shirtless, gibbering, frothing, and raving. Carter and the rest of Thurber’s peers tried to calm him, but he savagely beat them back. It was a grotesque sight, and they were quite happy when he fled into the dark night.

  When asked about the matter, Kazoua replied simply that they had gone to a studio, and apparently Thurber was discontent with what he’d seen. Kazoua, on the other hand, found it quite pleasant and couldn’t understand Thurber’s response. Carter noticed Kazoua had an odd bruise on her neck but was disinclined to pursue the matter further. Kazoua also noted she would be having no further contact with Thurber as he had behaved in an altogether ungentlemanly fashion unbecoming an artist.

  Thurber was never seen again.

  The French Hill Art Club does keep his name on the members list, however, should he ever turn up although he will still owe the appropriate dues.

  IX.

  Eric Gilman clearly recalls the month of November, 2001, because Kazoua dressed in the elaborate traditional clothing of her people the entire time as if preening for an unknown audience. She did not seem to entertain company, however, so it was quite curious. She was radiant although within her eyes, he noted perhaps the first sign of her coming madness.

  Her hair grew increasingly long and wild, and her voice took on a strange melodic quality, ethereal and remote. Humans may as well have been ants to her. She grew paler as the month went on.

  Although Gilman now believes he misheard it, when he called out her name one evening upon meeting in the hallway, she corrected him that it was “Keziah.” Given the tonal language of the Hmong, most concur she was merely correcting the way to pronounce Kazoua as was often her habit with the Dombrowskis when they’d first met.

  Mrs. Samsa complained of strange laughing and an eerie, almost inhuman whooping coming from the Hmong couple’s apartment, especially late at night. Gilman was reluctant to approach Kazoua and drafted a note he slipped under her door. For a time, the noise stopped.

  In November, Tou Ger was cleaning for the holidays alone in the apartment. He made the dreadful mistake of disturbing a massive rat warren. Many must have just given birth to their litters, for that is the only reason to explain the savage ferocity with which the pests attacked him so mercilessly.

  The vermin had scurried away to the safety of the shadows by the time Trelkovsky broke open the door to assist his pitifully screaming neighbor. Kazoua arrived minutes later. She’d been out visiting one of Pickman’s old studios. They found Tou Ger on the floor, a whimpering lump of flesh with terrible gashes across his entire pathetic body.

  Trelkovsky suggested taking him to the hospital, but Kazoua dismissed the idea because the couple had no health insurance. It was nothing a few bandages and some traditional Hmong herbal medicine could not cure. She thanked Trelkovsky for his help and walked him to the door.

  Tou Ger was put to bed, and few heard from them for a while. On December 23, 2001, as Kazoua was traveling to Boston, an awful commotion came from the apartment—unearthly screaming and that strange shrieking, whooping, and wailing. The violent sound of breaking furniture in the apartment prompted neighbours to call the police.

  As Gilman hastily opened the door for the officers, witnesses in the hallway report they saw a strange swirling swarm of brown-furred things unlike any rodents they’d seen in their lives; slithering, writhing, and nipping at Tou Ger Khang, who blinded in agony, accidentally stumbled through the fragile window of his apartment to his death, his face half-torn away from the gnawing and scratching. No one could get in touch with Kazoua until Monday morning.

  Arkham police later concluded the creatures to be nothing more than common rodents, however peculiar their behavior, and encouraged everyone to put speculation to rest.
They claim the ultimate cause of Tou Ger’s death was a virulent viral hemorrhagic fever from his earlier rat bites. Mrs. Dombrowski and Gilman lowered the rent for Kazoua in consideration of her loss.

  In a decision that greatly upset everyone, Kazoua had Tou Ger’s remains cremated quickly and without consultation. It was an unbelievable break from Hmong tradition. She said cryptically it was for the best and he deserved a chance for his soul to rest. She then withdrew from the outside world, and it isn’t until March, 2002, that any further details of her life can be spoken of with any certainty.

  X.

  The evidence is supposed to speak for itself. But what was going on then? As with many of the great mysteries surrounding the lives of troubled artists like Modigliani, Lautreamont, and the like, the complete details can only be speculated at and the strangest elements become only so much trivia when they do not fit into a tidy, comprehensible explanation.

  In March, 2002, an ambulance was summoned to the apartment of Kazoua Vue. Many expected the worst, but the EMTs emerged, not with Kazoua, but an elderly Hmong man she identified at the time as her uncle, who was having tea with her and inexplicably collapsed from a severe stroke in her living room.

  Other Hmong knew him as a prominent shaman renowned for his healing skills. Animists in Providence recall he once defeated a Poj Ntxoog near the village of Sam Neua and attributed many other incredible feats to him. Kazoua invited him over to help her artistic research regarding more esoteric elements of Hmong spiritualism and was deeply saddened by his seizure. It was a great loss for the community.

  On April 12, 2002, Gilman needed to discuss repairs with Kazoua to fix all of the rain and snow damage the White Rose had suffered in the year prior. And this was when he made the terrible discovery.