Gathered Dust and Others

by W. H. Pugmire

  A wooden mouth pressed against my hair, and then my ear, and heaved in an artificial voice my lover’s name; and yet I could not turn my eyes away from the phantom image in the fountain, and so I saw the dead bloated face arise and open its mouth, from which a stream of slime escaped. And I became furious; for I had escaped into the House of Shadows so as to escape sordid reality, yet here it was before me, risen as a swollen corpse that hungered for my kiss. I backed away from the cruel fountain and pushed the handsome dummy from me, and then I rushed to the doorway and fled the monstrous chamber. I ran, up carpeted stairs, into an upper region where I encountered a soft golden radiance that was like nothing known in harsh actuality. I sighed to that happy light and followed it into another room that was furnished with exquisite antiques. Smiling, I approached one upright mirror and winked at my image that was cased within the arch of golden filigree into which the mirror had been fitted. Foolishly, I began to caper before my double, wincing only slightly at the recurring throb of pain in my wounded heel when it struck too haughtily the floor. Yet I could not dance for long, because I grew so easily exhausted; and this perplexed me until I peered again into the pool of glass and saw my withered eidolon. How could the aged, decrepit creature in that mirror be me, with those bags below its rheumy eyes, its sagging flesh and scarecrow hair? I could not comprehend it.

  And then my reflection did not dwell alone; and I sensed the form beside me, no longer a drowned and bloated husk of tiresome flesh, but a chilly solid reality that touched its hands to my hair. I watched in the mirror as his mouth kissed my hair, my throat, my breast. He lowered to his knees and kissed my foot, at which his fingers worked until, smoothly, he plucked the sharp sliver of wood from my heel. And then he rose before me one last time, the boy I had once adored and ruthlessly debauched, and a lovely little smile played on his lips, and he touched those lips to mine as he pushed the sharp, sharp splinter through my chest, into my heart.

  XIII.

  I disengage from legion and swim through black clouds to where the woman hangs, the crone who adored me with magick and mayhem before her filthy murder. She dangles, now, from length of hempen rope, as below her, in semi-circle, bay the green-eyed ghouls who were her pack. I used to hear her croon to them, in my spaces between the stars, and watched her share in their ghastly repast. I saw her kiss their eyes, those moonlit eyes that were of a similar shade to her green orbs. I float before them now, her wide and lifeless eyes, and kiss them with my devil breath, an exhalation to which her dead mouth lifts; and as her lips begin to curl with reanimation, the fire from my eyes cinders the rope on which she hangs. From some distant place behind me the scene is ruptured by a flash of false light, an element that I do not understand. No matter; the fire from my eyes has flayed the hempen rope from which she hangs, and thus she sallies from the gallows, to the ground and they who reach to catch her. I drift to her as cloud of daemon-smoke, and I melt into her flesh and find new compartment in her heart, which beats to the rhythm of my enchantment. For there are times when we insubstantial freaks of alien dimension long to dwell within a mortal form, and we have found the easiest to reanimate are they who hang from gallows, or from isolated limbs in hidden forests, or from suicidal rafters in dreamer’s attic. And thus we slip through elements beyond mortal imagination, to blend our spectres with this corporeal clime, and find the dead eyes of criminals and suicides, of they accused of witchcraft and other petty sins; and we evoke our reflected essence on those eyes until they blink and water with our alchemy, with life-in-death; and thus we teach stiff limbs to walk the earth again, to dance beneath the ghastly moon, as she dances now among her brood of ghouls.

  The noisome pack arises so as to lick her gnarled hands and lift paws with which to soothe her broken neck. They do not seem to comprehend that it is another being that peers at them with her wild eyes. When at last I speak, it is with her harsh voice; and I lift her gnarled hands so as to make esoteric signals to the moon and bend the element of air. I have not forgotten that queer electric flash that rudely infiltrated the place earlier, and I am aware of the semi-human eyes that observe us from some hidden place, and I cackle as I use my alchemy so as to smooth and heal the hag’s broken neck. I raise her reanimated eyes to the gallows on which she was murdered, and I spit my daemon fire to that gibbet and then dance with my ghouls as it is reduced to cinders. How delicious it was, to have a material body of mortal flesh, to no longer be a thing of daemonic aether, and to feel upon my newly-inhabited form those aspects of this physical plane, the heat of flames with which the gallows had been destroyed, the chilly expulsion of canine breath from the mouths of my ghouls as they licked me, the taste of carnage on those fiendish mouths as my pack kissed me. I rubbed my desiccated hands over my arms and pinched so as to feel the bone beneath. I sensed the world with mortal eyes and worked the brain within its cranium; and from that brain I culled the wise woman’s esoteric knowledge, her craft, with which she had been able to evoke storms and make herself invisible. It was this latter art that most intrigued me, and so I shut my eyes and spoke her remembered spell, and my ghouls bayed when I vanished from their view. With invisibility came another aspect, an enhancement of being one with earthly elements; and so I conjoined to rising gale and floated to the hidden place, wherein I found the one who was concealed.

  I spoke, and he rose from hiding and watched as I regained my solid form. I learned from dipping into his psyche that he was an artist of rare talent, and that the mechanical instrument that he wore around his neck was that with which he caught images with a form of modern alchemy. It was the instrument that had produced the rude flash of light that had earlier annoyed me. But more important than any of this were those aspects of his nature that he did not fully comprehend – his deep disturbance by the sight of my ghouls, and the longing that my pack aroused within some secret chamber of his soul. I lifted my withered hand so as to stroke his face, the face on which I saw heredity’s stamp that shewed me what he was, a foundling that, with time, was stepping into genetic mutation of flesh and psyche. I would not explain this to him – he would realize all anon. I would give him but a taste of what in fact he was, what in time he would fully become. Tilting to him, I gave him her kiss, the brush of lips that she reserved for her especial brood. I kissed him as my pack raised their jade eyes (so like his own) and bayed to yellow moon. And I laughed as he, not understanding why, lifted his head to that lunatic satellite and bayed also.

  XIV.

  The party was not his kind of thing, but it was given by his friend and collaborator that All Hallow’s Eve, and so Elias Koffen felt the need to attend, if only for a little while. The party’s absurd theme – everyone had to dress as a character from a Vincent Price film – at first seemed absolutely puerile; but then he realized that he could take advantage of this theme to dress as a character from his favorite author, Poe. He paid an actress friend, who also had a private business as a seamstress, a small fortune to create a robe that was identical to that worn by Price in his beguiling role as The Red Death; and he had decided to wear crimson greasepaint over his face rather than a mask. He found, in a costume shop, an excellent pair of red velvet gloves that would be the perfect final touch. And so he sauntered into the party at 10.33 p.m., and frowned at the array of unimaginative costumes – the one exception being a deliciously masculine woman who looked exactly as Price in his role of Roderick Usher. He danced with her for a little while; but she was obviously intoxicated, and people who drank bored him, so he made his escape to his friend’s small office and its excellent library of weird fiction. He glanced with subdued envy at the titles of those books his friend had written on his own: The Delver Underneath, by Ephraim Kant, In the Valley of Shoggoth, by Ephraim Kant, and so on; for solo production had been a trick that Elias had never mastered, and his one collection of stories written on his own, The Feaster from Afar and Others, had yet to find an interested publisher. He had had some few copies published at his own expense, bound in white vellu
m with title stamped in red, and he reached for the copy he had presented to his friend and cohort. He opened the book to that tale he considered his best, “The Mask of Outer Madness,” and began to read aloud its opening paragraph:

  “During the entire dull day, as he lay within a pile of autumn

  leaves tinted gold, he had scanned the low oppressive cloud that

  seethed above him in the dark sky and imagined that it formed a

  daemon of amorphous dimension. He watched that monstrous cloud

  as the last remnant of daylight expired, and then he lifted out of

  leaves and proceeded on his way to the haunted church whose

  black steeple had been destroyed in last month’s thunderstorm.

  At his first glimpse of it he suffered a pervasive gloom that saturated

  his soul with depression, for the bleak edifice seemed a personal

  comment on his wretched state of loneliness.”

  And then, within the quiet of the room that knew only his whispered language, Elias heard another soft voice continue to speak the opening paragraph of his tale.

  “And so he staggered, past the few white trunks of withered

  trees, with unearthly misery churning his little soul, as the mist of

  the moist ground rose to mask the building before him in a mauve

  haze that, as he breathed it in, seemed the very aether of damnation.”

  He was so startled that he almost dropped the book, and this reaction caused a low, blithe voice to laugh. He turned and whispered “Juliana,” and at the name the beautiful woman genuflected, revealing a peek of the taut black breasts beneath the gown that replicated Hazel Court’s costume in her final scene. Elias marveled at the beauty of the necklace of white gold around the black woman’s throat, at the upside-down cross of darker gold just above the bosom. She did not wear a veil-like headpiece as the actress had in the film, but rather let her abundance of rich red hair fall down past her shoulders, reaching to the small of her back. When she stood erect and gazed at him, the writer saw that her jade eyes were flecked with gold.

  “I’ve startled you,” she sighed.

  “In more ways than one,” he responded. “Were you reading behind my back?”

  “Not at all. I am intimate with your work.” She held out a hand. “Marceline Rableau.” He took her hand and kissed it, then repeated the name in a quiet voice as he tried to recall where he had heard it. To assist him, the black beauty reached to a shelf and pulled a title from it. “You’ve probably not read it,” she told him as she shrugged.

  He took the book and looked at its title stamped in black on the yellow board: The Stairway in the Crypt. “I’ve not read it, but I have noticed it here, among Ephraim’s books, and have actually pulled it down to scan its pages. He is going to loan it to me eventually. I didn’t know you two were acquainted – you’ve not signed it for him.”

  “I never sign my name – an elder superstition. That is my one attempt at a work of length, but I admit it’s a bit disjointed, more of a collection of inter-connected vignettes and prose-poems than an actual novel; yet the theme is consistent throughout.”

  “And is the title metamorphic, and is the crypt in fact a symbol of the human psyche, the depths of which we enter at our peril?”

  She took the book from him and returned it to its place. “In fact, the stairway leads upward, into a little room – in life, I mean, the place that served as inspiration. You know of the shunned church, on the hill?”

  “You mean the one that lost its steeple in that violent storm of last summer? Yes, I can see it, actually, from my study window, although I live a little distance from it on another hill. Ephraim has told me of its haunted legend – well, hinted of that legend merely; I don’t think he knows much about it in fact. But now I understand his comment that had me rather mystified, that he wanted to set a story there but that someone had beat him to it.”

  “He knows that he can still write his little tale, for I invented an alternative setting that no one would mistake for its inspiration. We were going to investigate it together, Ephraim and I; but once we actually stood near it, he became mentally disturbed, spoke of the way the dark vapors of the neighborhood were unnatural and sentient, and that the unwholesome odor of the place reminded him of a smell he experienced in a dream about his own tomb, and other nonsense. So we did not enter in, although I found that a back door was unlocked.”

  “And you did not return on your own?”

  “Never in the waking realm – but I’ve been there, in my haunted dreams. Well, you came into this room to be alone, I think. You are not a social beast as is our foolish friend. Good evening, Mr. Koffen.” He prepared to bow to her, but stopped as he experienced a bizarre and brief hallucination. As he gazed at her, the woman’s face tilted just a little, as if it were a mask that had lost its hold. At the same time the entire room blurred around him, as if it belonged to a different dimension – only the magnificent black woman before him kept a solid form. He shut his eyes momentarily, and when again he opened them Miss Rableau was gone – except for the phantom of her face, an image that seemed stained upon the window in the wall. But as he studied the image, it melted into night.

  XV.

  I cornered Ephraim and told him that I was leaving early due to a headache. He smiled at the lie, knowing my anti-social ways, and thanked me for deigning to show up at all. Holding up The Stairway in the Crypt, I asked if I could take it with me and keep it for a wee while.

  “Oh sure. She’s here, you know – somewhere…” He glanced around the room with intoxicated eyes. Kissing his cheek, I bade him adieu and went to wait for my cab; but as I took my seat and buckled up, I had a sudden impulse, and I gave the driver an address that was not my own. I had the cabbie drop me off some ten blocks from the church.

  “You gonna walk around this neighborhood dressed like that?”

  “I am indeed,” I responded, giving him a handsome tip. “Happy Halloween.” He shrugged and shook his head, and then drove off. I coughed at the expulsion of exhaust that billowed from his departing vehicle. The moon, half full, was accompanied by many points of starlight, and the sight so enchanted me that I began to whistle as I walked. I held Miss Rableau’s book to the half-moon’s glow and spoke its title to the stars. There was no cosmic response. No one was around, which I thought odd, it being a big party night. But as I looked around and observed the state of the houses that I passed, I decided this was an extremely poor neighborhood, and perhaps a dangerous one as well, and that street life was kept to a minimum. It was a cool autumn evening, but I was so overdressed in my Poesque costume that I was quite comfortable, and I grinned at the idea of someone encountering me on the darkened street and their possible reaction to my guise. I reached out at the high fence of black iron that I passed, through which I could see a little courtyard and its fountain, and then I stopped. Before me, a figure reclined on a rough-hewn stone bench. He was dressed in rags and shivered slightly as he slept, and I couldn’t comprehend why his face looked so odd until I stepped nearer and saw the pennies that had been placed over his eyelids. I silenced my tune and shut my mouth, but after a little while the gentleman’s lips compressed, and he himself began to whistle. Something about the sound filled me with slight panic, for in my wild imagination it seemed that the fellow wasn’t whistling – I imagined that his sound was meant to serve as signal to some unseen thing. And my blood iced when, from some distant place, there came a low response of something howling to the moon.

  “You come to take me home?”

  He had lifted himself onto one elbow and now held his pennies in one palm. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I never seen you as dressed in red, thought you’d be all black. Where’s your coach?”

  I understood. “No, dear fellow, I am not that grim escort. I’m merely in costume, for a party I attended. I am Plague, Death’s predecessor.” I heard the trickling splash of fountain water and began to move away so as to
enter the quadrangle.

  “Take this,” he called, handing me one of his pennies. “Make a wish.”

  Accepting his alms, I muttered my thanks and stepped into the courtyard, wherein the moon seemed subtly brighter, so that my flowing shadow preceded my stride. Floating to the fountain, I lowered onto its circular edge and peered into its pond. How strange that the mutated shadows of clouds floated beneath the water’s surface, and how queer that one of those shadows looked familiar as it paused in its route to watch me. It was blacker than night, that sphere, and from one end a filigree of stringy crimson vines wavered in the water. Setting down my book, I removed my scarlet gloves and reached into the water. The thing I extracted from the depths was chilly to the touch, and disturbingly soft; and I did not fancy the way its flow of tendrils wrapped around one finger. I held her black visage to moonlight as it dried in risen wind, and I almost brought the faux mouth to my own. She was beautiful, and beguiling; and I could not resist bringing the mask of Marceline Rableau to my face and pressing its underside to my flesh, to which it sensuously cohered. The moon darkened in the gulf of night as from some distant place a thing bayed to blackness.