by Mark Teppo
Hentlock wanted me to draw him a door, an exact replica of the illustration from his dusty book. The tome was a heavy bastard, each page had the thickness of a quarter and was made from some material that was too greasy to be paper. Most of the pages were covered in a minute scrawl that looked like a shorthand used by astrologers and alchemists. The illustrations were all marked and annotated by the symbols that had been invading my dreams.
The history of the manuscript, as Hentlock liked to tell it, was ripe with all the trappings of a good nineteenth century horror story: a vanishing monastery, a cache of ancient and forbidden texts, an insane monk who babbled foreboding prophecies, and secret societies dedicated to the preservation of illicit knowledge. The story goes back to the fourteenth century and a Cistercian monk named Chiotraczh. The book is supposed to be a transcription of his ravings as written down by agents of his order. Apparently, as the story goes, the knowledge hinted at in the text caused one of the transcribers to lose his sanity and he killed both his fellow agent and the raving monk before vanishing with the manuscript. Hentlock's text was a sixteenth century copy that had been specially inscribed by a Bohemian alchemist to obscure the mystical details that broke one's brain and to more accurately illustrate the diagrams described by Chiotraczh.
I had half-hoped to find some answer in the back, a cipher key left by the alchemist that would have allowed me to decode the symbols and render them intelligible. If there was such a key, it was buried somewhere in all the tiny shorthanded script.
The illustrations were drawn in a silver ink, glittering contrast to the dull black lines of the other pages. The ink made the drawings shimmer as if there were heat coming off the page and, at first, I thought it was just a side-effect of my recent alcohol and narcotic binge. Instead, as my head cleared and my sinuses drained, I realized the pictures weren't getting any clearer. I had to squint to see them clearly and, even under hard white light and staring at the page from several different angles, I wasn't sure of the finer details of the drawings.
Hentlock was frustrated. On the night we met, even in my desultory state, I could tell there was something hard and unyielding caught in his ass. It became apparent that he, too, had the same difficulty with the pages: they just refused to stay in focus. It had been his hope that an artistic eye would be enough to cut through the haze.
“You can't make out the details, can you?” he asked after watching me doodle in my sketchbook for almost a week.
I shrugged. “I can see it.”
“But not well enough to capture all the details?”
“All of them?”
He sighed and put his hand to his forehead. “Yes, Mr. Caspian, all of them. That is why I hired you. I want an exact replica of that drawing put on the wall downstairs. Can you do it?”
“It all depends on how you define 'exact,' I suppose.”
“You disappoint me, Mr. Caspian.”
“My mother said the same thing to me on my eighteenth birthday,” I said.
He hesitated, his head cocked forward as if he was about to offer a verbal riposte, and then he decided to swallow his reply instead. His throat worked heavily for a second and then he left the room.
I returned my attention to the sketchbook. Contrary to my attitude towards my benefactor, I was fascinated by the drawings in the manuscript. They were external validation that I wasn't been losing my mind and, since my arrival at Hentlock's mansion, my sleep had been dreamless. There was still a sense of black water in my head, a gravid pooling of darkness in the back of my skull. It didn't intrude upon my sleeping state—it kept out of my dreams—but it was still there because every time I looked at the silver symbols on the page, I felt something waiting to be unlocked in my head.
Something, waiting to be let out.
Hentlock returned with two friends, big men that looked like scarred linebackers from some European rugby league where the winning team ate the losers. He held a narrow cedar box in his hands.
Apparently, my tenure as Artist-In-Residence was over.
I put the sketchpad and pencil down as the two security thugs crossed the room and put their hands on me. I figured they were going to eject me from the house and I hadn't planned on making a big deal of the expulsion. All good things pass. Instead of lifting me off the couch, however, they pressed me firmly against the leather cushions. “Hang on,” I started before the air was forced out of my chest by the sudden pressure of a heavy knee against my rib cage.
The guy with the hard thigh put his other leg across my lap, narrowly missing my crotch with his knee. I got the hint that it wouldn't take much squirming on my part for him to shift his weight to my privates. The other one worked his arm about my shoulders so as to hold my upper body against the rounded edge of the couch. He put his meaty hand on my forehead and pushed my head flat against the armrest. I stared at the ceiling, my insolence reduced to a series of rapid eye movements.
Hentlock leaned over the couch, his long fingers reaching out to stroke my hair. “I had hoped you would have been successful, Mr. Caspian.” He sighed and then turned the expulsion of air into a giggle. “But not all defeats are failures. It's a matter of perspective, isn't it?”
He took off the lid of the cedar box and showed me its contents. Cradled in a bed of dark red velvet was a long vial of a slightly luminescent yellow liquid and a large syringe. “I've been looking for an excuse to try this, looking for the right test subject.”
He drew off an amount from the vial, the yellow filling the clear syringe slowly like partially solidified amber. It twinkled in the afternoon light as if there were tiny metal fragments in the solution.
Hentlock tapped the side of the syringe three times, flicking the long vessel with his forefinger. With each tap he whispered some word, a mouthful of consonants that sounded like he was spitting chips of wood.
The guy holding my upper body shifted, putting his face close to my neck. I could smell his breath, heavy on the garlic and onions, and his palms were starting to get a bit slick. My heart picked up its pace as I realized the shift in Onion Breath's pulse came from apprehension and not excitement. I struggled a bit more, causing the other guy to lean more heavily on my chest and waist.
“Hold still,” Hentlock said leaning over me. The long needle hove into my field of vision. The fine point of the needle was almost invisible until he brought it extremely close to my face. I started blinking rapidly as if the fluttering motion of my eyelids would create enough of a wind to push him away.
Hentlock put his hand across the bridge of my nose and forced my left eye open wide, pinning back my eyelids with his manicured fingers. “This will only hurt for a second,” he said.
He stuck the needle into my left eyeball and depressed the plunger on the syringe. I started screaming.
It hurt a lot longer than a second.
*
I've done acid, part of the collegiate rebellion where we all run to the opposing arc swing of the pendulum from our parents. My parents weren't entirely '60s suburban nuclear family cut-outs: they protested the Vietnam War and my mom may have even burned her bra once or twice at rallies; Dad still used the word “groovy” in conversation, and I know he smoked the last bag of weed he confiscated from my room before I left for college. They were good-hearted, honest citizens who had no need for pharmaceutical enlightenment. They understood the world and, while they might occasionally escape from it, they saw no need to poke around behind the curtain.
Not like their son.
Okay, I did a lot of acid. Most abstract painters do at one time or another. It helps the creative process; dropping LSD helps unlock the artistic mind and shuts down the negative editorial voice that can kill an abstraction dead before it gets from brain to brush. We—oh, yes, I was a social user—dropped acid during gallery openings, while painting, while fucking, while wandering lost in the desert, while climbing fire escapes and hanging over the unstable metal railings. We took tiny vials of liquid acid with us to laser light shows a
nd sat in the front row, passing the eyedropper back and forth. Taking acid straight off the eyeball is a much faster high, a kaleidoscopic rush of color and texture that explodes on your iris and threatens to overload your retina. Our brains aren't really ready for that sort of systemic sensory shock and more than one of us stopped doing art after taking a hit on the eyeball.
Not me. I was in it for the long haul. I could handle the colors and the shifting lights and the way the landscape morphed under my feet and under my touch. I could walk through the unreality of the acid-induced landscape and not lose my footing.
Which is probably the only reason I didn't completely lose my mind when Hentlock injected my eyeball full of his psychedelic venom.
One of my fellow dopers was a med student and he invariably started rambling on about anatomy as our world became squishy from the drugs hitting our systems. While one part of my brain was busy tripping, there was another section dutifully recording every sensory detail whether I actively pursued it or not. Information is power and all that bullshit. As a result, Dwayne's endless prattle about anatomic details would surface at strange times as if there was a tiny version of him still living inside my brain.
The eye is a jelly-filled sac, he used to say. It's a pair of lenses that refract and collect light. All lenses have a focal point, a position in space where the image they are reflecting is in focus. To facilitate this proper positioning, the eyeball is filled with a substance, the vitreous, which maintains this optimal distance.
That's the way he used to say it. “Optimal distance.” Our eyes are shaped like marbles because of the “optimal spatial arrangement of a pair of lenses is a spherical shape.” They were filled with a gel because that substance, that sort of physical malleability, was the optimal material for the persistence of shape regardless of physical orientation or position of the human head.
Because the vitreous was like jelly and because our eyeballs are soft, you can stand to have a little extra fluid inserted. It won't kill you. The added material may distort the shape of your eye but eventually it should be absorbed into your system.
Eventually. Should be. Words without built-in time limits that make the process of waiting for them to arrive excruciating.
I went away for a little while, drifting in and out of the tiny happy place we all harbor inside ourselves. With the fiery stone of magma smoldering in my left eye socket, however, my fortress of solitude wasn't a real haven. Thin tracers of crimson chased me. Tiny rivulets of lava ran across the untextured floor, the smooth surface offering no impediment to the narrow streams.
There were other things that came with the red streams, dark blots of shadow that moved of their own volition. I wasn't alone in my secret fortress and every time I turned my back on them, they shifted, moving into different positions.
I knew this place—I knew all the blind corners and secret holes—and yet, wherever I fled, there was darkness waiting for me. There were cracks in the walls and floors, scarlet tracery that oozed black blood.
At some point you have to stop running, you have to stop and realize that there isn't anywhere you can go where you'll be completely safe. You may think you've gone away to a mental sanctuary that is safe from physical turmoil, but it is just a shell, a hard blanket that you've thrown over your head so that you can pretend that you are secure. It just takes time, that's all, for whatever is pounding against your shell. Sooner or later, a crack forms.
*
The cracks overwhelmed me finally, disintegrating my shell of security and dropping me into darkness. I turned over once—as if I was rolling over in bed—and found myself on the bank of a dismal swamp. The sky bled rust and the ground was black rock that steamed at the touch. The swamp water was gray and filled with clumps of white strands like bleached hair, and the scent rising from its torpid surface was acrid and sulphuric, like eggs and lemons rotting together in the belly of a dead animal.
I knew this place.
On my left, the ground rose up to a cracked highland, a ridge of blasted stone that had once marked the boundary of some territory, but incredible heat had melted the separate stones of the wall into a slag of molten junk. Arrayed on the edge of the ruined wall were thirteen shapes, thirteen messengers who I had tried to capture on canvas. They were outlined in light, framed by the glow of some monstrous luminescence on the other side of the wall. As I stared at them, the lights began to flicker, pulsating in a strange systolic pattern.
The figure on the right-hand end, the one with the bones of a raven protruding from its lower jaw, stretched its obscene mouth open. Its teeth were broken stumps and its tongue was a short stubby thing like an aborted arm. It screamed at me, its voice a shrill keening sound like metal being drawn across metal.
The others lent their voices to that high note: hooting and shouting, screaming and crying, waving their misshapen arms, putting back their ugly heads and shrieking to the freckled sky.
Something moved behind them; a heavy form darted in front of the shimmering lights. The colored pulses accelerated, a light show of hideous possibilities.
Something was coming. The messengers on the rocks were getting more and more excited as it drew closer. Their voices blended together into a single word, the ululating repetition of a multi-syllabic name.
I put my hands to my face and accidentally touched my left eye. Pain exploded in my head, momentarily turning the landscape into a photo negative, bleaching everything into an inverted line drawing.
The image froze and, when I blinked, it was gone.
*
When I blinked again, I was still lying down, but I was back in the reality I knew. It took me a little while to figure out where: Hentlock's basement.
The mansion basement was rough and unfinished; the space was little more than a huge hole beneath the ground floor with two load-bearing walls that split the long rectangle into three sections. A tiny niche with a door at one end was a bathroom with the toilet shoved half-way under the sink and the shower stall so narrow I barely had to flap my elbows to touch both sides. The stairs to the ground floor were a wooden afterthought and they creaked and groaned like old men when I put my weight across their backs.
Between the stairs and the bathroom there was a large cabinet pushed up against the wall. It was a utilitarian metal locker with a single combination lock set in the face above the pair of handles.
In the largest space there were three area rugs, faded Persians that had seen the foot-traffic of several decades. They weren't tossed in the corner or rolled up; they were carefully arranged across the hard floor. I lifted the edge of one and found out the reason for their positioning: there were magic circles painted on the floor.
I dated a woman in art school who was a Thelemite and she used to get off on Crowley: she would paint aspects of the Key of Solomon on her tits and shaved pubic region before we fucked; she insisted on mastering every sexual secret alluded to in his writings; and she would invariably have multiple orgasms if I recited parts of the Book of the Law to her as we rushed towards our mutual climaxes.
Strange girl. We didn't have much in common, but she liked the way I didn't pass judgment on her kink and I found her fascination with the occultist more educational than outré.
A rolling cart with two flat-panel computer monitors sat near the far wall, cables running to a junction box set in the base of the wall on my left. There were a series of lights set into the ceiling that provided a diffuse dome of light overhead, though the three bulbs directly over the wall farthest from the stairs—the south wall, maybe, my sense of direction was fucked like a compass held at the North Pole—were angled to provide direct illumination on the white wall.
Like lighting for a canvas. This was where I was supposed to paint the portal.
One of the monitors flashed, a signal suddenly erupting in its LCD panel. It flickered once, went sallow, and then synced into a color-corrected image. “Ah,” said an overly magnified image of Hentlock. “You're back.”
My voice was raw; apparently, I had screamed for a long time. “I guess I haven't been fired.”
A smile ghosted his color-saturated lips. His skin was even paler and waxier than I remembered and the green of his eyes was flecked with orange and brown. The image was hyper-tinted as if the contrast and brightness were set much higher than necessary. “On the contrary,” he said, his white teeth shining from the LCD display, “you've been promoted.”
I blinked and, for the split second while my left eyelid dragged across my swollen eye, the colors of the monitor shifted, losing their brilliance and vibrancy.
I put a hand over my venom-filled eye and was so distracted by the ghostly shape of the bones in my hand I forgot to compare the difference in tint and saturation. “What did you do?” I said.
“Gave you a little incentive. A little assistance.” That ghost smile marked his lips again. “Hopefully it won't be fatal; hopefully you will finish the painting soon enough that we can get you to a hospital and have that eye drained.” He shrugged slightly, the skin around his eyes tightening. “Before there is permanent damage.”
The other monitor flickered to life, displaying a high resolution image of the manuscript page with the drawing of the portal on it. “If you work quickly, Nickolas,” Hentlock said, “you might be able to save your eye.”
“What am I supposed to do for paint?” I asked.
“The cabinet has everything you might need,” he said. He told me the combination, and that was clearly the end of our conversation because his face blinked out, leaving me with just the transmitted image of the manuscript page.
Not only did the cabinet have enough paint, it also held all my tools. While I had been unconscious, they had gone to my studio and gathered all my instruments.
