Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You’ll read them – or they’ll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.

  Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they’ll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.

  And I think I have accomplished nothing more than this, in my recounting of Endecott’s rise and fall, drawing attention to some of the more melodramatic and vulgar parts of a story that is, in the main, hardly more remarkable than numerous other Hollywood scandals. But also, Fort would laugh at my own “pallid data,” I am sure, my pathetic grasping at straws, as though I might make this all seem perfectly reasonable by selectively quoting newspapers and police reports, straining to preserve the fraying infrastructure of my rational mind. It’s time to lay these dubious, slipshod attempts at scholarship aside. There are enough Forts in the world already, enough crackpots and provocateurs and intellectual heretics without my joining their ranks. The files I have assembled will be attached to this document, all my “battalions of the accursed,” and if anyone should ever have cause to read this, they may make of those appendices what they will. It’s time to tell the truth, as best I am able, and be done with this.

  5.

  It is true that I attended a screening of a film, featuring Vera Endecott, in a musty little room near Harvard Square. And that it still haunts my dreams. But as noted above, the dreams rarely are anything like an accurate replaying of what I saw that night. There was no black pool, no willow trees stitched together from human bodies, no venomous phial emptied upon the waters. Those are the embellishments of my dreaming, subconscious mind. I could fill several journals with such nightmares.

  What I did see, only two months ago now, and one month before I finally met the woman for myself, was little more than a grisly, but strangely mundane, scene. It might have only been a test reel, or perhaps 17,000 or so frames, some twelve minutes, give or take, excised from a far longer film. All in all, it was little more than a blatantly pornographic pastiche of the widely circulated 1918 publicity stills of Theda Bara lying in various risqué poses with a human skeleton (for J. Edward Gordon’s Salomé).

  The print was in very poor condition, and the projectionist had to stop twice to splice the film back together after it broke. The daughter of Iscariot Snow, known to most of the world as Vera Endecott, lay naked upon a stone floor with a skeleton. However, the human skull had been replaced with what I assumed then (and still believe) to have been a plaster or papier-mâché prop that more closely resembled the cranium of a mandrill, baboon, or some malformed, macrocephalic dog. The wall or backdrop behind her was a stark matte-grey, and the scene seemed to me purposefully under-lit in an attempt to bring more atmosphere to a shoddy production. The skeleton (and its ersatz skull) were wired together, and Endecott caressed all the osseous angles of its arms and legs and lavished kisses upon its lipless mouth, before masturbating, first with the bones of its right hand and then by rubbing herself against the crest of an ilium.

  The reactions from the others who’d come to see the film that night ranged from bored silence to rapt attention to laughter. My own reaction was, for the most part, merely disgust and embarrassment to be counted among that audience. I overheard, when the lights came back up, that the can containing the reel bore two titles, The Necrophile and The Hound’s Daughter, and also bore two dates – 1923 and 1924. Later, from someone who had a passing acquaintance with Richard Pickman, I would hear a rumor that he’d worked on scenarios for a filmmaker, possibly Bernard Natan, the prominent Franco-Romanian director of blue movies, who recently acquired Pathé and merged it with his own studio, Rapid Film. I cannot confirm or deny this, but certainly, I imagine what I saw that evening would have delighted Pickman no end.

  However, what has lodged that night so firmly in my mind, and what I believe is the genuine author of those among my nightmares featuring Endecott in an endless parade of nonexistent, horrific pictures transpired only in the final few seconds of the film. Indeed, it came and went so quickly, the projectionist was asked by a number of those present to rewind and play the ending over four times, in an effort to ascertain whether we’d seen what we thought we had seen.

  Her lust apparently satiated, the actress lay down with her skeletal lover, one arm about its empty ribcage, and closed her kohl-smudged eyes. And in that last instant, before the film ended, a shadow appeared, something passing slowly between the set and the camera’s light source. Even after five viewings, I can only describe that shade as having put me in mind of some hulking figure, something considerably farther down the evolutionary ladder than Piltdown or Java man. And it was generally agreed among those seated in that close and musty room that the shadow was possessed of an odd sort of snout or muzzle, suggestive of the prognathous jaw and face of the fake skull wired to the skeleton.

  There, then. That is what I actually saw that evening, as best I now can remember it. Which leaves me with only a single piece of this story left to tell, the night I finally met the woman who called herself Vera Endecott.

  6.

  “Disappointed? Not quite what you were expecting?” she asked, smiling a distasteful, wry sort of smile, and I think I might have nodded in reply. She appeared at least a decade older than her twenty-seven years, looking like a woman who had survived one rather tumultuous life already and had, perhaps, started in upon a second. There were fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth, the bruised circles below her eyes that spoke of chronic insomnia and drug abuse, and, if I’m not mistaken, a premature hint of silver in her bobbed black hair. What had I anticipated? It’s hard to say now, after the fact, but I was surprised by her height, and by her irises, which were a striking shade of grey. At once, they reminded me of the sea, of fog and breakers and granite cobbles polished perfectly smooth by ages in the surf. The Greeks said that the goddess Athena had “sea-grey” eyes, and I wonder what they would have thought of the eyes of Lillian Snow.

  “I have not been well,” she confided, making the divulgence sound almost like a mea culpa, and those stony eyes glanced towards a chair in the foyer of my flat. I apologized for not having already asked her in, for having kept her standing in the hallway. I led her to the davenport sofa in the tiny parlor off my studio, and she thanked me. She asked for whiskey or gin, and then laughed at me when I told her I was a teetotaler. When I offered her tea, she declined.

  “A painter who doesn’t drink?” she asked. “No wonder I’ve never heard of you.”

  I believe that I mumbled something then about the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, which earned from her an expression of commingled disbelief and contempt. She told me that was strike two, and if it turned out that I didn’t smoke, either, she was leaving, as my claim to be an artist would have been proven a bald-faced lie, and she’d know I’d lured her to my apartment under false pretenses. But I offered her a cigarette, one of the brun Gitanes I first developed a taste for in college, and at that she seemed to relax somewhat. I lit her cigarette, and she leaned back on the sofa, still smiling that wry smile, watching me with her sea-grey eyes, her thin face wreathed in gauzy veils of smoke. She wore a yellow felt cloche that didn’t exactly match her burgundy silk chemise, and I noticed there was a run in her left stocking.

  “You knew Richard Upton Pickman,” I said, blundering much too quickly to the point, and, immediately, her expression turned somewhat suspicious. She said nothing for almost a full minute, just sat there
smoking and staring back at me, and I silently cursed my impatience and lack of tact. But then the smile returned, and she laughed softly and nodded.

  “Wow,” she said. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. But, yeah, sure, I knew the son of a bitch. So, what are you? Another of his protégés, or maybe just one of the three-letter-men he liked to keep handy?”

  “Then it’s true Pickman was light on his feet?” I asked.

  She laughed again, and this time there was an unmistakable edge of derision there. She took another long drag on her cigarette, exhaled, and squinted at me through the smoke.

  “Mister, I have yet to meet the beast – male, female, or anything in between – that degenerate fuck wouldn’t have screwed, given half a chance.” She paused, here, tapping ash onto the floorboards. “So, if you’re not a fag, just what are you? A kike, maybe? You sort of look like a kike.”

  “No,” I replied. “I’m not Jewish. My parents were Roman Catholic, but me, I’m not much of anything, I’m afraid, but a painter you’ve never heard of.”

  “Are you?”

  “Am I what, Miss Endecott?”

  “Afraid,” she said, smoke leaking from her nostrils. “And do not dare start in calling me ‘Miss Endecott.’ It makes me sound like a goddamned schoolteacher or something equally wretched.”

  “So, these days, do you prefer Vera?” I asked, pushing my luck. “Or Lillian?”

  “How about Lily?” she smiled, completely nonplussed, so far as I could tell, as though these were all only lines from a script she’d spent the last week rehearsing.

  “Very well, Lily,” I said, moving the glass ashtray on the table closer to her. She scowled at it, as though I were offering her a platter of some perfectly odious foodstuff and expecting her to eat, but she stopped tapping her ash on my floor.

  “Why am I here?” she demanded, commanding an answer without raising her voice. “Why have you gone to so much trouble to see me?”

  “It wasn’t as difficult as all that,” I replied, not yet ready to answer her question, wanting to stretch this meeting out a little longer and understanding, expecting, that she would likely leave as soon as she had what she’d come for. In truth, it had been quite a lot of trouble, beginning with a telephone call to her former agent, and then proceeding through half a dozen increasingly disreputable and uncooperative contacts. Two I’d had to bribe, and one I’d had to coerce with a number of hollow threats involving nonexistent contacts in the Boston Police Department. But, when all was said and done, my diligence had paid off, because here she sat before me, the two of us, alone, just me and the woman who’d been a movie star and who had played some role in Thurber’s breakdown, who’d posed for Pickman and almost certainly done murder on a spring night in Hollywood. Here was the woman who could answer questions I did not have the nerve to ask, who knew what had cast the shadow I’d seen in that dingy pornographic film. Or, at least, here was all that remained of her.

  “There aren’t many left who would have bothered,” she said, gazing down at the smoldering tip-end of her Gitane.

  “Well, I have always been a somewhat persistent sort of fellow,” I told her, and she smiled again. It was an oddly bestial smile that reminded me of one of my earliest impressions of her – that oppressive summer’s day, now more than two months past, studying a handful of old clippings in the Hope Street boarding house. That her human face was nothing more than a mask or fairy glamour conjured to hide the truth of her from the world.

  “How did you meet him?” I asked, and she stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray.

  “Who? How did I meet who?” She furrowed her brow and glanced nervously towards the parlor window, which faces east, towards the harbor.

  “I’m sorry,” I replied. “Pickman. How is it that you came to know Richard Pickman?”

  “Some people would say that you have very unhealthy interests, Mr. Blackman,” she said, her peculiarly carnivorous smile quickly fading, taking with it any implied menace. In its stead, there was only this destitute, used-up husk of a woman.

  “And surely they’ve said the same of you, many, many times, Lily. I’ve read all about Durand Drive and the Delgado woman.”

  “Of course, you have,” she sighed, not taking her eyes from the window. “I’d have expected nothing less from a persistent fellow such as you.”

  “How did you meet Richard Pickman?” I asked for the third time.

  “Does it make a difference? That was so very long ago. Years and years ago. He’s dead and buried. “

  “No body was ever found.”

  And, here, she looked from the window to me, and all those unexpected lines on her face seemed to have abruptly deepened; she might well have been twenty-seven, by birth, but no one would have argued if she laid claim to forty.

  “The man is dead,” she said flatly, then added, cryptically. “And if by chance he’s not, well, we should all be fortunate enough to find our heart’s desire, whatever it might be.” Then she went back to staring at the window, and, for a minute or two, neither of us said anything more.

  “You told me that you have the sketches,” she said, finally. “Was that a lie, just to get me up here?”

  “No, I have them. Two of them, anyway,” and I reached for the folio beside my chair and untied the string holding it closed. “I don’t know, of course, how many you might have posed for. There were more?”

  “More than two,” she replied, almost whispering now.

  “Lily, you still haven’t answered my question.”

  “And you are a persistent fellow.”

  “Yes,” I assured her, taking the two nudes from the stack and holding them up for her to see, but not yet touch. She studied them a moment, her face remaining slack and dispassionate, as if the sight of them elicited no memories at all.

  “He needed a model,” she said, turning back to the window and the blue October sky. “I was up from New York, staying with a friend who’d met him at a gallery or lecture or something of the sort. My friend knew that he was looking for models, and I needed the money.”

  I glanced at the two charcoal sketches again, at the curve of those full hips, the round, firm buttocks, and the tail – a crooked, malformed thing sprouting from the base of the spine and reaching halfway to the bend of the subject’s knees. As I have said, Pickman had a flair for realism, and his eye for human anatomy was almost as uncanny as the ghouls and demons he painted. I pointed to one of the sketches, to the tail.

  “That isn’t artistic license, is it?”

  She did not look back to the two drawings, but simply, slowly, shook her head. “I had the surgery done in Jersey, back in ‘21,” she said.

  “Why did you wait so long, Lily? It’s my understanding that such a defect is usually corrected at birth, or shortly thereafter.”

  And she almost smiled that smile again, that hungry, savage smile, but it died, incomplete, on her lips.

  “My father, he has his own ideas about such things,” she said quietly. “He was always so proud, you see, that his daughter’s body was blessed with evidence of her heritage. It made him very happy.”

  “Your heritage – ” I began, but Lily Snow held up her left hand, silencing me.

  “I believe, sir, I’ve answered enough questions for one afternoon. Especially given that you have only the pair, and that you did not tell me that was the case when we spoke.”

  Reluctantly, I nodded and passed both the sketches to her. She took them, thanked me, and stood up, brushing at a bit of lint or dust on her burgundy chemise. I told her that I regretted that the others were not in my possession, that it had not even occurred to me she would have posed for more than these two. The last part was a lie, of course, as I knew Pickman would surely have made as many studies as possible when presented with so unusual a body.

  “I can show myself out,” she informed me when I started to rise from my chair. “And you will not disturb me again, not ever.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Not
ever. You have my word.”

  “You’re lying sons of bitches, the whole lot of you,” she said, and with that, the living ghost of Vera Endecott turned and left the parlor. A few seconds later, I heard the door open and slam shut again, and I sat there in the wan light of a fading day, looking at what grim traces remained in Thurber’s folio.

  7. (October 24th, 1929)

  This is the last of it. Just a few more words, and I will be done. I know now that having attempted to trap these terrible events I have not managed to trap them at all, but merely given them some new, clearer focus.

  Four days ago, on the morning of October 20th, a body was discovered dangling from the trunk of an oak growing near the center of King’s Chapel Burial Ground. According to newspaper accounts, the corpse was suspended a full seventeen feet off the ground, bound round about the waist and chest with interwoven lengths of jute rope and baling wire. The woman was identified as a former screen actress, Vera Endecott, née Lillian Margaret Snow, and much was made of her notoriety and her unsuccessful attempt to conceal connections to the wealthy but secretive and ill-rumored Snows of Ipswich, Massachusetts. Her body had been stripped of all clothing, disemboweled, her throat cut, and her tongue removed. He lips had been sewn shut with cat-gut stitches. About her neck hung a wooden placard, on which one word had been written in what is believed to be the dead woman’s own blood: apostate.