The Call of Distant Shores

by David Niall Wilson

  She corked it carefully and stood, holding the bottle in both hands and carried it to the altar. It was actually a bar, or had been, but Art had renamed it the altar when Belle began insisting that nothing but her bottle be kept there. The bottle, and the book. Pressed beneath a sheet of glass in an old picture frame, it remained open to the same page that it had been open to for nearly three years.

  Belle whispered softly to herself as she placed the bottle reverently on the bar.

  "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree,

  Where Alph the sacred river, ran,

  Through caverns measureless to man ...

  Down to a sunless sea...."

  She shivered and the bottle nearly tipped as a moment of vertigo shivered through her. She righted the bottle quickly and stepped back. The book and its frame seemed to watch her as she retreated, as she stumbled among the ingredients and tools and notes, as she tripped, finally, dropping to her knees. She cried out at the sharp contact with the floor, but bit the sound off quickly. She wanted no one else in the room. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

  This time, she knew, it would have to be her. Art could not paint this moment. Sammy could not draw it from the strings of her dulcimer, or whisper it from her silent lips. The bottle glittered, and Belle looked away. She fought the urge to drink now, to soar and burn with the deep green liquor sliding through her system. It wasn't time. If she drank now, he might not come. He might never come. He might come, and leave her. It had to be the afternoon. She had to be alone.

  She stacked her papers as neatly as her trembling hands would allow and gathered her tools. She needed to clean up, and to ready herself. The others would have to be told, warned away and far from the bottle, and the room, when the time came. Belle had work to do.

  Without a backward glance, she slipped from the room and into the kitchen. Behind her, the bottle continued to glitter, as if that flickering, captured light dancing along the green glass could watch, or think. Or dream.

  Art didn't want to leave, but he knew from the expression on Belle's face that it was not a request. It was her house, after all. It was her gig, her dream or dementia or whatever you wanted to call it. As much as Art liked to see himself as the other half of a couple involving Belle, he knew it was never going to happen.

  Sammy only nodded, packing up her dulcimer and donning a long, shapeless jacket before slipping out the back door and into the alley beyond. Neither Art nor Belle knew where Sammy went when she wasn't with them. Just that moment, Art would have liked to know. He would have liked to have been invited to follow, to belong somewhere during the period when he didn't belong in his own home.

  It was silliness, he knew, this jealousy he felt toward the bottle. Pointless and foolish. Any other night of the week he would have been up and out and gone without a word, but the thought that he was forbidden changed it all. He hated it, chomped against the invisible bit it implied, and, in the end he grabbed his coat and stomped out into the streets without a word. As he moved steadily down the street and away, he felt the vague flicker of something familiar and distant, and he stopped frowning. He glanced at his hands, then back over his shoulder.

  Very suddenly, he felt like painting. The urge came over him from nowhere, slipped into his thoughts and displaced his anger. He stood, undecided, the scents of oils and canvas wafting enticingly from his memory.

  "Damn," he breathed softly. He knew he couldn't go back. Not yet. Not now. Belle wouldn't even open the door, and if he grew more insistent, she might go to his studio and his rooms and throw his things out the windows. Images flickered through his mind. Belle prostrate, lying back across the floor. Sammy, fingers poised near the broken string, speaking softly, her words palpable in the incense-thick air. The green bottle, pulsing, growing and winding in a coil that reached to circle Belle's prone form. He wanted to capture it, but was forced to memorize, eyes closed, gripping tightly each sinuous roll of what he had seen and refusing to let it fade.

  He would paint. Not now. Not tonight probably, but he would paint, and when he did, he would bring that image to life. If he couldn't give Belle her magic, he could record their combined failures. He could make it so real that the music and the lust burned the edges of the canvas.

  He couldn't shake the image of the coils.

  "Weave a circle round him thrice,

  And close your eyes with holy dread."

  Art whispered the words, and again he shivered. He pulled his jacket more tightly about himself and headed off for Sid's, a club where the music was dark and dreary and the lighting was more so. He wasn't in a mood to dance or mingle, but the nightly call of alcohol rang in his ears.

  "Fuck it," he muttered to no one in particular. "Just fuck it."

  Belle poured the absinthe into a tumbler and set it upon the altar. She knelt before it, trembling, feeling the weight of the empty house heavy on her shoulders. Now that she'd sent the others away she felt vulnerable, fragile and inadequate to the task she had set herself.

  With a reverence that regularly brought scornful comments from Art, she opened her journal. In the pages of this book she'd documented her quest, her dreams, each and every mistake and small success. She had also recorded her research, and it was to this she turned for strength. The words that had dragged her into this surreal otherworld. The history of Xanadu.

  "The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the grounds of any supposed poetic merits. In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, – Here Belle had scribbled a furious note, drawn from other sources - letters and fragments, notes of Lord Byron himself. She had crossed it all out, including the word anodyne, and replaced it with absinthe – from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimage':

  'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall.'

  The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. 'A person on business from Porlock' interrupted him and he was never able to recapture more than 'some eight or ten scattered lines and images.'"

  Belle closed the book. She had read the words so many times she could recite them as litany. She had researched and delved into the letters of Coleridge and Byron, certain she would find the answers she sought. Hundreds of lines, reduced to a snippet of rhyme, and still so powerful that movies had been centered around small quotes from the verse, and novels written in the attempt to finish the work. To close the portal, or open it, as Coleridge had seen it. To present to the world the quality that inspired Byron to insist on the publication of a broken poem, as if it were a key. As if, beyond the inspiration of Coleridge himself, Byron alone could see.

  On the altar sat the fruits of years of labor. Belle believed that she knew more of the essence of Absinthe than any living being, and still she quaked at her ignorance. It was a gamble, each time, pouring the essence of each long-dead master's work into her bottles and vials, crashing into the walls of their failures and seeing, just beyond her grasp, the essence, the purity of form that would show her what he had s
een, what he would have written. The essence and completion of Xanadu that would make it real.

  Art had made it surreal. He had grasped the tenuous threads of all Belle had striven for and woven them into an incomplete tapestry that teased her with its borderline truth. She loved him for his devotion and cursed him for the failure, but she knew that the failure was really hers. Sammy haunted her. There was more to the tiny, frail musician than met the eye, but there was no history, no record of things gone and those to come to measure her against. Sammy was as she was, and she, in the end, had failed as well. This one, also, on Belle.

  Now came the test. No conduit. No half-truth or interpretation. Belle, the glass, the deep green magic, and the words. She would find the caves of ice and prostrate herself on their cold, sharp edges until she was accepted, taken or broken, but one with what had been lost. Dark powerful eyes haunted her, tracking each motion and each thought, seeing through flesh and bone and soul. Waiting.

  She took the tumbler gently into her hands. Candlelight flickered about her, and the incense, ever-present, grew cloying and thick, a taste that lingered in the back of her throat, drying her out and reaching to the absinthe for succor and warmth. Belle shivered a final time, so deeply that she shook and nearly spilled the thick green liquid over her hands and the floor. Her knees rattled on the floor, and she gasped.

  Throwing her head back, she brought the drink to her lips and upended it. The heat was intense, the burn glorious and excruciating and powerful, all at once, washing down through her in a burst of fire and dripping behind, bringing secondary sizzle to slowly singe her throat. She did not move, fearing it would be too strong, that she might vomit or pass out, that she might fail herself as so many others who had gone before. They hadn't failed, because they hadn't been reaching out for anything. Only Belle had failed, and as the hot liquor burned down her throat, she knew it was her courage that had been lacking, not the ingredients, or the mix, not the strength of will of another, presented as her sacrifice. Placing the glass on the altar, she glanced at her book – her notes – in scorn. She had been hiding in the research, hiding between the pages, lacking the courage to see. To know.

  She closed her eyes, and the words came unbidden, slowly, then with growing force. She recited in a steady, throaty voice that purred with strength and resolution.

  "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea.

  So twice five miles of fertile ground

  With walls and towers were girdled round:

  And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

  Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

  And here were forests ancient as the hills,

  Enfolding sunny spots of greenery..."

  Belle clamped her eyes tightly, her hands out to her sides for balance. The absinthe leaked into her thoughts and drew her deeper, thickening her tongue as she fought for completion. Images opened in her mind. Art's painting flashed into view, but with details he had never seen. The ice rippled with fire. The ground shook with the marching cadence of a horde of booted feet. The landscape surged with greenery, and huge, spouting geysers splashed into the air and fell to the earth, all in the rhythm of a huge heartbeat, drawing her inward.

  Her body arched once more, prone against the floor, the altar before her and her knees spreading wider, inviting. She wore a short, soft linen dress, nothing beneath, but it didn't matter. The sensations that washed through her had nothing to do with clothing, or the room surrounding her, or the world where she lived and breathed and lusted for ... what?

  "For he on honeydew hath fed,"

  The words seeped up from beneath her, hands fashioned of letters that lifted her and offered her... .

  "And drunk the milk of paradise."

  She saw a young man, long flowing dark hair and a broad nose, dark eyebrows furrowed in concentration. In his hand he held a quill, dark with ink. He seemed to see her in that same instant, studying her, every inch and curve, eyes bright. His hand trembled, and a droplet of ink threatened to fall to whatever surface he penned upon.

  Beside him a bottle sat, aged and crusted with sugar crystals, the cork removed. A crystal tumbler sat beside it, and Belle felt his fingers as he reached for that drink, felt them stroking her flesh and drawing her up, her hips rising to meet the fall of his lips. His eyes never left hers, and the hand that did not hold the quill slid beneath her, curling into the small of her back.

  Belle cried out, trying to close the eyes that had opened when she clamped her own shut, trying to avoid the intensity, the absolute pleasure and terror and impossibility of that touch and that moment, but she could not give voice to the sound, or, if she did, she could not hear it. Nor could he.

  He leaned closer, and she knew him, from portraits and descriptions, from the twist of the lips that would one day sneer at his own work, questioning its value and releasing it only at another's whim. Those lips so close his breath, hot-sweet with absinthe, brushed her thighs. Belle's entire being clenched.

  The air shattered with a sharp sound. Belle clamped her eyes more tightly still, concentrating, but the moment was shattering around her, falling away. The sound repeated, and she cried out. She arched so violently that her back crackled, spine rearranging to try and compensate. She ground her head into the floor, feeling the tug and tear as the motion pulled against her hair. His face had faded and though the heat remained between her legs, the touch had never come. The ice had faded to molten carpet that burned her as she stroked against it, and again, the sound, and again, blaring and bursting through her thoughts.

  Then there was nothing.

  Art turned his key in the lock at last, determined, if this was his last night in the house, that he would spend it painting. He could not block the images, and though he'd poured drink after drink down his throat, doubling the shots when the first few rounds failed him, his heart pounded and his head spun, not with drunken stupor, but with the images, drawn from the memory of Sammy's voice and the faces floating in air, the words and the incense, and the failure. He had painted, but now he knew that he had not been true to himself, or the images. He hadn't failed, he'd been a coward. He knew, and he wanted to share that knowing, but the only way to do it was the painting.

  He opened the door and burst inside, and he found her, Belle, prostrate on the floor, bent nearly double and writhing against the carpet. The incense was so thick he could barely make out the bar beyond the altar. He saw the bottle sitting there, and a glance at the floor showed the empty tumbler.

  Belle was unconscious. He didn't know why, or how, but he knew she was breathing. Art lifted her in his arms and carried her to his room. He placed her on his bed, covered her tortured features with his sheets and blankets and turned away. She was alive. She was safe. He had to paint.

  Art never knew when Sammy returned. One moment he was lost in the painting, and the next he realized he was lost in the painting and the sound. She had entered, opened the case, pulled out her dulcimer, and she was playing, matching the notes to his motion, or was he matching his motion to the sound? It didn't matter.

  As he neared completion, he was aware of something more. Belle had risen, first to sit on the bed, staring at him in wonder, then to rise and slip closer, molding herself to his body and pressing closer. Other times, other worlds, and he would have worried that she would jostle him, drive him from the images or vice versa, but it was right. Each counterbalance she caused brought the brush closer to perfection, and she held tightly. The eyes glared back at them from the canvas, the ice glistened, and the heat throbbed.

  Sammy began to sing along with the tune she was playing, the words distant and familiar, though neither Art nor Belle had ever heard them spoken. The final words of the poem passed, and the milk of paradise ran green in rivers flowing from Art's brush. The eyes of Samuel Taylor Coler
idge glistened with longing as he watched them, lost in a corner of the canvas, as they passed. Beyond, seated in a garden, beneath lush fruit trees and near a fountain another sat, also watching. Again they passed, and as they did, the man's tortured eyes slid over Belle and he whispered:

  "She walks in beauty, like the night."

  But they were gone.

  The words, so long forgotten, whispered over Sammy's lips, softer and lighter, fading to the sound of traffic passing on the street beyond. The smoke of incense wisped about the room. On the floor, soaked in deep green paint, the brush lay still, soaking its contents to the carpet. The painting was spectacular, image torn from image, blended to other worlds and back.

  The room stood empty.

  In the next room where she'd left it closed, Belle's book fell open silently. The candles burned low, but the light was bright enough for reading. Leaning low, a long-haired, oddly dressed man gripped the volume, holding it up and apparently marveling at the binding and the lined paper within. The book had fallen open to a page etched with verse, and he read. His eyes filled with an odd pain, then he placed the framed book on Belle's altar.

  Before him on that altar, sat the bottle. One final shot remained within. He lifted it, took a whiff of the contents, and smiled. He knew that scent, one thing very familiar in a world suddenly gone mad. Without thought, he poured the last of the absinthe into the tumbler, closed his eyes, and poured it down his throat.

  Lifting the pen, he stared at the paper, mouthing the final words.

  "And drunk the milk of paradise."

  Slowly, mind awash with images, he began to write.

  You Lookin' For Herb?

  It was getting dark, and the road ahead was fading quickly to shadows. Dave looked about himself nervously, hoping against hope that he'd see something familiar, something that would let him know he was on the right track. For about the thousandth time that hour, he cursed himself for forgetting to bring Beth's phone number.