Stephen Hunter was a great poet. A genius. A man who’d felt as deeply, as spontaneously as an oil geyser. He’d flown higher than a parachute jumper on mere thought. He’d filled himself with wisdom and suffering equal to any philosopher, any monarch. Compared to him, Victor was an oversized primate.
Ben relaxed, seeing without sight the figure moving in front of him, as though undressing, feeling the figure reach out and slowly caress him, the multicolored eyes gleaming softly, the mouth working to form wonderfully original phrases of manlove lewdness. The raking gaze swept over Ben’s body like electric fire. Only such a genius could provoke, could produce such utter pleasure, Ben thought—as he gave in.
He was only slightly jolted when Stephen Hunter accepted. The sudden touch was of large, warm hands pressing upon Ben’s spread thighs, the brush of warm skin on either side of his loins, like a large cat. But the tongue that invisibly licked and then engulfed him was that of a man, the long bony nose and unkempt facial hair, when Ben reached down to gingerly touch them, were those of Hunter’s photo image; and Ben knew he had finally found what he had come to Sagoponauk Rock Colony looking for, and why that first sunset had been filled with implications he could not at first decipher.
*
By the end of the summer, Ben was a complete recluse. He had not been seen by anyone in the colony in weeks when most of the members went back to their teaching posts around the country. Joan Sampson and the Ormonds—the last to leave, in mid-September—tried to find him, but gave up after a series of attempts.
But the Ormonds and Victor Giove used their colony houses on a long late-October weekend. The little cottage was empty, although lived in, increasingly messy, dusty, ill cared for. Victor felt guilty about the boy and walked around calling him for a half hour, waiting another three hours one afternoon for Ben to show up, until it was sunset. Victor left notes that were never answered and were never found on subsequent visits.
On the Thanksgiving break, Victor again drove up to the colony, this time to shut off the waterpipes against the winter and to make certain all of the studios and cottages were locked. He once again drove to the little cottage, hoping to find Ben and to talk him out of his foolish decision to remain isolated. He didn’t find the boy, but walking away from the spot, he gasped when he noticed the roof of Ben’s Volvo sticking up out of one end of the pond.
Although the pond was dragged by local and state police for two days, no body was ever found.
Victor relayed the sad, ambiguous news to Frances Ormond, who contacted Ben’s family in far-eastern Long Island. Neither of them heard back from his relatives.
The last two days of the Christmas holidays, Frances Ormond drove up to the colony by herself. She found several studios broken into, cans of tinned food opened, eaten, discarded. She cleaned up, repaired the windows and doors with local help, gathered all the remaining boxed and canned foods in the studios and her own house and dropped it all off in two large cardboard boxes near the little cottage. She never told anyone else she did this. Secretly, she was proud that Ben had gone and done what she’d always wanted to do, live here in the wild all year. Proud of him, and envious too.
It turned out to be an extremely fierce New England winter. Storms raged weeks at a time. All but main highways were blocked by high snow drifts, and after, by ice layers, most of which lasted until late March. Livestock froze in heated barns. Old people were stranded and died. Children and stragglers from stalled cars were lost in blizzards. Many local farmers closed up their houses and went south. Others remained indoors, barely surviving.
Even though they managed to get into the colony by early March, the snow plows couldn’t get anywhere near the little cottage.
Easter brought the first thaw. Victor drove up to the colony, bitterly hoping he would find the boy and that Ben would finally listen to reason.
The door to the little cottage was still iced over and had to be kicked hard to open.
Inside, the main rooms were icily cold. Fires had been built, tins cans charred over the fire. Liters of kerosene and sterno cans littered the living room floor. But Victor couldn’t tell how long they’d lain there—a day? or a month? It did seem as though the boy had gotten through the winter. That was a relief. He’d probably suffered so much that he’d return with Victor to the city without much urging. Victor sat down to wait.
Although it was still cold, something seemed to be missing from the cottage that Victor couldn’t at first define: a disturbance he’d almost subconsciously sensed every time he had come here or stayed here since the day they’d discovered Stephen Hunter’s corpse in the storage closet.
When it finally got too cold to stay seated, Victor got up to leave the cottage. He wrote a note to Ben saying he would be at his studio. Ben could find him there. He was about to walk outside when he realized that the bedroom door was closed.
Could the boy be hiding from him in there?
Victor opened the bedroom door and remained still for a very long time.
The nude, emaciated body of Ben Après was stretched out on the bed as though in utter ecstasy. His skin was ashen, pale blue with frost, perfectly preserved down to the frozen splashes of semen that had splattered his gaunt abdomen and hung off the tip of his erection.
Victor understood why he no longer sensed the supercharged presence he’d felt for so many years in the cottage: the insatiable Stephen Hunter had finally found someone worthy of his love.
The Acolyte
1.
It had come upon Edwin Landsdowne so suddenly, and at first blush, so commingled of what he might have most desired, should he have ever dared express it, along with what he was most desperately anxious that none ever intimate, that he could scarcely credit it, when, in regally passing out of the shower-saturated cemetery, thence into a shuttered brougham, Mrs. Van Pryor, the Widow Van Pryor now and eternally, paused in her courtly, her tragic, her umbrella shielded, her manifoldly supported progress, to single him out, to briefly lay a laced glove so raven’s-wing as to gleam purple upon his inky serge-encased forearm and to quietly intone, “Come to me in the morning. I utterly depend on you now.” Scarcely were the fingers gone than she was surging forward, enclosed within the obscured depths, and thence completely out of view.
He could do no more than feebly mutter, as though in entreaty, “Was it myself you so noticed? Are you not perhaps if only a little in error?” when that so recently blessed forearm was taken in a more virile clutch, not to be let lightly go, by his associate of the morning’s melancholy burden, accompanied by another genial limb clasped about his slender waist.
“What have I been prognosticating, my young princeling?” Francis DeHaven whispered. “You are already chosen for the distinguished assignment!”
Brooking no possibility of contention, DeHaven all but carried off Landsdowne to his own splendidly more sportif conveyance, where his driver, the inaptly named Samson, a groundling of lean figure and low demeanor, immediately flogged the horses into a mad splash toward his master’s Leicester Square club. Once settled amid napery, silver service, and the company of gentlemen greater than himself, poor Landsdowne could only submit to his friend’s continued blandishments. That he was the inestimable Anthony Van Pryor’s publisher, coming along, and into, his patrimony only in the last decade of his remarkable elder’s career, and as well as Landsdowne’s own editor, learned cicerone, and literary savior, could only assist DeHaven in his contentions.
The younger had already been previously apprised by his companion that there were certain uncollected papers of a personal character—journals, letters, incunabula, whatnot—the which Van Pryor had maintained in strictest confidence he’d long pledged to compile, left bereft and rudderless with the great man’s sudden leave-taking, papers that would, without question, affix the finest polish to his heretofore altitudinous repute.
“Precisely, she intends your inimitable charm and skill to take the errant pages to hand and ready them as only you could,” DeHav
en assured his friend, waving two uplifted fingers to summon more French champagne. As precisely, Landsdowne perhaps uncharitably mused, was it that those errant pages’ collection and publication under anyone-at-all’s hand would permit many further opportunities for champagne luncheons for his debonair publisher and whoever might happen to fall into his company.
“Still, Francis,” he countermanded, “you are unable not to admit that there aren’t heaps others more advanced in the art and experience who would fare better with the great man’s incunabula. I held him in such estimation, I tremble to impose…my mere person.”
“Perhaps so, my uncommon angel of authorial modesty. But it is precisely those heaps of others’ art and experience that is most unrequired for this most precarious of assignments. Your trembling estimation,” and here DeHaven accentuated his words with an almost amatory look in his olive-green, Italianate eyes and a feather-weight, soigné, yet altogether proprietary contact with Landsdowne’s barely bearded chin, “While your consternation at possible over-imposition will exactly qualify you for the enterprise and for my own poor silly requirements.”
All further contention was deemed superfluous as the terrapin consommé a la Madeira arrived, followed by omelets of pigeon eggs and Homard Americaine. He must content himself with lunching sumptuously and allowing DeHaven to show him off to his brother club members, with his customary effusions whenever they happened to be abroad together, embarrassing mots: “Isn’t he a beauty? With talent to burn! And enough morality to raise a Cathedral. Could a DeHaven possibly be luckier?”
2.
A rustling as of the feathers of a multitude of predatory avian life immediately preceded Henrietta Van Pryor’s entry into the dimmed afternoon parlor. Her arrival was rapid and fluttering, yet somehow not exactly equilibrious, as he turned from the shower-speckled glass giving onto the apparently dilapidated garden to salute her with renewed murmurings of regret and sorrow. She was in weeds, as expected of course, profusely so, as though she’d betimes anticipated the mournful state she’d arrived at and had scrupulously yet luxuriantly preselected those ensembles that would best accommodate her face and figure. An ebony exuberance of gauze, crinoline, and organza all but restrained her from settling into a fauteuil, and once ensconced she plied a crow’s-wing of fan, subtly festive with minuscule diamants, that even when wielded to cover half her face did little to distract one from her colossal, her seemingly lubricated eyes, as she thanked him.
She appeared to take inordinate pleasure in the plural possessive when she began to speak: “Our publisher has assured me of your reluctance, your naturally immense admiration, your temerity in the face of such a labor…” She paused. “Which, rather than discommoding me, all the more reassures me that we both have chosen correctly… Francis has conveyed the ‘terms’ and you find them adequate?” she then added rather than asked.
“Adequate” rather than generous, Landsdowne might have responded, had the situation been other than this particular one. For herself, he expected, the “terms” were far more beneficent. But as their publisher had inebriatedly nuzzled Landsdowne’s cheek in parting as he’d mildly nudged him out of the landau following their previous day’s club luncheon, he had also bemoaned the unbearable exigencies, the intricacies of the publisher’s contractual obligations to the recently departed’s estate. As well he had mentioned the “non-pecuniary” compensations Landsdowne might anticipate. Not the least, the future fusion in the reading public’s collective mentality of the immature author of but a single slim edition of critically “auspicious” stories, with a doyen beloved of a universe of booksellers and possessing an oeuvre approaching that of Honore de Balzac: surely, DeHaven entreated, it was a welding powerfully beyond mere nummular value.
“The terms are…acceptable, but my temerity is rather of another order,” Landsdowne managed to utter, the phrases long practiced during the longish Underground journey from Roland Gardens to Mayfair. “Rather it’s of a discretionary nature. I’m to be honored by and then intimidated with diurnal matters of the distinguished one’s personal, indeed private, doubtless singular nature. How am poor I to possibly determine what is to be withheld from more…comprehensive knowledge?”
She fluttered at him now, then gurgled throatily as her enormous eyes deigned to take him in, a speck in their vast, humid domain. “I understand your potential predicament,” she at last allowed, utilizing that slightly guttural custom she had of late adopted, its precise grounds he might only imagine, perhaps as a pre-corrective to those who dreamed she would dare further presume upon the enormous honor of her dispirited predicament. “Save that it is not in any manner to become an issue. Neither yourself nor myself nor anyone not of my late husband’s eminence would be capable, as you so prettily put it, to determine. You must present it all. All as it is written. Every glorious sanctified word of it, every bountiful phrase, every munificent paragraph, every resplendent page! His readers demand all,” she went on to gently assert as though he’d dared attempt to practically challenge her. “Through decades of loyalty, they have after all merited their privilege to postulate it so. What can poor we, merely his providential caretakers, do but provide, provide what is so squarely desired?”
He started to pronounce how munificent she herself was, how compassionate and unselfconscious, when she rose and arranged the jet glitter of her just-shut fan upon that same spot of forearm she’d yesterday alit upon. “Then we are in covenant! Every last word is to be included, collated, and only if required notated and explicated—that the Van Pryor legacy be fulfilled!”
She flowed toward the parlor door and he pursued her sweeping course to a second floor along dim connecting corridors of the ample dwelling, to another, yet more restricted stair, rising in two increasingly precipitous landings that at long last terminated at a door. She prized it open to a small, crammed room, redolent of ink and blotting paper, tumbled about from every side and possible angle with open-leaved books and bookmarked journals, page-creased periodicals, and yet more volumes amidst a veritable frenzy of unassorted papers. The single mullioned window allowed a compressed and thus all the more perplexingly mutiplex vista of differently colored, jumbled rooftops, accented only by chimneypots of diversifying size and configuration.
This was unquestionably the site, the very altar of the Van Pryor aptitude. Landsdowne could barely collect his breath.
“Here, then, young scribe and devotee,” she spoke with barely concealed vehemence, “shall be your new hearth and habitat! In this demesne shall your spirit guide Anthony Van Pryor’s grand literary scheme to its foreordained conclusion!”
3.
The presence, because despite the gossamer impossibility no other designation could possibly explain what else it might entail, had bided its time, allowing itself to pass unnoticed for more than a month, indeed for that very same duration that had passed as though in the midst of the grandest possible romance, that same period that Landsdowne had been sanctified to labor, beetle-like if not more quiet, ordinarily nocturnal, as he still must labor for his living by daylight, only now and then interrupted by a lower-floors menial asking if he’d care for tea and cake, the which he so often refused, and so colored scarlet in doing so, that the indomitable borough-bred lass now simply carried it aloft unbidden upon an overflowing tray, insistent it would “go to thems scurrying in the wainscoting” if he didn’t partake of it all. She came not at all, or if so, so seldom it was a marvel. Her approach would be signalized by an imperceptible distant fluttering as of poultry shivering off the remnants of a downpour, a nearly silent padded ascension, a shy tap on the ajar door, a murmur: dare she disturb?
Always he rose, paid reverence, osculated the beringed, dimpled fingers, averting whenever possible the overlarge, ever-moist, somewhat accusatory eyes, attempting to decipher within the tissue of civilities that drizzled through the laced intricacies of her omnipresent fan the content, should any be so bold as to represent itself, of her visit, her request. Never her remonst
rance, though in fact certainly he’d sensed that too, hovering ambiguously at all times just beyond his grasp whenever she’d achieved one of her exceptional ascensions to the scene of his nocturnal communion.
No other word could presumably approach the sacerdotal, the hierophantic nature of what he so nightly labored upon than that which delimited the joining together of young acolyte and veteran host. All the more reason, then, to feel amidst the presence of those orphaned instruments of the trade, those excrescent volumes and sundry uncollected correspondent leave-takings of the master’s art not only the sense of a time now vanished forever, but somehow also of an ongathering, onmoving, en point, a virtually present tense.
More than once Landsdowne had attempted to summarize these impressions, restricted as they must be to the Van Pryor workroom, and though his handsome usual companion had donated his fullest, his most cognizant attentions, somehow, each time, Landsdowne realized he had, after all, not at all truly accomplished his end. With the unfortunately crystalline result that the indefatigable DeHaven was all the more conscious of what he designated his younger’s “extreme earnestness of intent.”
What method, if method could be discovered then, to describe the sensations—for literally sensations they must be admitted to be, and not as his publisher would have it, some finer perception beyond the compass of the customary—that Landsdowne had begun to experience with increased frequency within the blessed chamber, especially those moments not strictly restricted to actual transcription but to rumination? Most recently he’d been ambivalently dumbfounded and yet simultaneously gratified to apperceive a sort of riffling, feather-light, yet indisputable, amidst the hair above one temple as he bent to his work, a riffling all the more incomprehensible, as it was non-attributable to any minutiae of a draught or other perceptible material causation. A riffling all the more explicit in that no other portion of his person was affected, as though naught but a pair of incorporeal fingertips had, in passing, extended a vaguely fond salutation. The titillation had continued, had in fact endured minutes beyond the sensation itself, endured and confirmed itself into a tingling of the epidermis as it were, that once initiated, must consummate itself in every nerve-ending, down to his lower portion.
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