The edifice did not so much collapse as disintegrate. It was as if time had been carefully storing up the ravages of decay for decades, holding them in miserly suspension in order that they might be released all at once: a hundred years of corruption and corrosion crammed into a single second.
By the time the Prefect’s men arrived, swarming out of the myriad hiding-places in which they had surreptitiously taken up their stations, there was nothing left for them to do but pull a single corpse out of the ruins. It was that of the English actor, Hood—the final victim of Erich Zann’s posthumous orgy of murder.
No trace of the seeming child’s body was ever found. It was if it had simply evaporated, or as if it had been consumed as a tasty morsel and serenely digested by Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, the essence of unwholesomeness.
“Are you hurt?” the Prefect asked us, having come in person to make sure that the story reached a fortunate conclusion—for such dramas always need a connoisseur audience if they are to prove truly satisfying, in human terms.
“Only slightly,” I assured him, as I slowly came to my feet.
“I think my dignity has suffered some distress,” Dupin admitted, while still sprawled on the ground, “but in myself, I feel quite well.”
“Did you manage to save the Stradivarius?” asked Monsieur Groix, ever the practical man.
“I’m afraid not,” I said. “It must have been smashed to matchwood.”
“There is no loss to mourn,” Dupin, ever the stern rationalist, assured us. “It was a wretched instrument, forever going out of tune. It proved, at the end of the day, not to be fit for purpose.”
THE TRUTH ABOUT PICKMAN
The doorbell didn’t ring until fifteen minutes after the time we’d agreed on the telephone, but I hadn’t even begun to get impatient. Visitors to the island—even those who’ve only come over the Solent from Hampshire, let alone across the Atlantic from Boston—are always taken by surprise by the slower pace of life here. It’s not so much that the buses never run on time as the fact that you can’t judge the time of a walk by looking at the map. The map is flat, but the terrain is anything but, especially here on the south coast, where all the chines are.
“Do come in, Professor Thurber,” I said, when I opened the door. “This is quite a privilege. I don’t get many visitors.”
His face was a trifle blanched, and he had to make an effort to unclench his jaw. “I’m not surprised,” he muttered, in an accent that was distinctly American but by no means a drawl. “Who ever thought of building a house here, and how on Earth did they get the materials down that narrow track?”
I took his coat. There were scuff-marks on the right sleeve because of the way he’d hugged the wall on the way down rather than trust the hand-rail on the left. The cast-iron struts supporting it were rusted, of course, and the wood had grown a fine crop of fungus because we’d had such a wet August, but the rail was actually quite sound, so he could have used it if he’d had the nerve.
“It is a trifle inconvenient nowadays,” I admitted. “The path was wider when the house was built, and I shudder to think what the next significant landslip might do to it, but the rock face behind the house is vertical, and it’s not too difficult to rig a block-and-tackle up on top. The biggest thing I’ve had to bring down recently is a fridge, though, and I managed that on the path with the aid of one of those two-wheeled trolleys. It’s not so bad when you get used to it”
He’d pulled himself together by then and stuck out his hand. “Alastair Thurber,” he said. “I’m truly glad to meet you, Mr. Eliot. My grandfather knew your...grandfather.” The hesitation was perceptible, as he tried to guess my age and estimate whether I might conceivably be Silas Eliot’s son rather than his grandson, but it wasn’t so blatant as to seem impolite. Even so, to cover up his confusion, he added: “And they were both friends of the man I wrote to you about: Richard Upton Pickman.”
“I don’t have a proper sitting-room, I’m afraid,” I told him. “The TV room’s rather cluttered, but I expect you’d rather take tea in the library in any case.”
He assured me, quite sincerely, that he didn’t mind. As an academic, he was presumably a bibliophile as well as an art-lover and a molecular biologist: a man of many parts, who was probably still trying to fit them together neatly. He was, of course, younger than me—no more than forty-five, to judge by appearances.
I sat him down and immediately went into the kitchen to make the tea. I used the filtered water, and put two bags of Sainsbury’s Brown Label and one of Earl Grey in the pot. I put the milk in a jug and the sugar in a bowl; it was a long time since I’d had to do that. On the way back to the library I had a private bet with myself as to which of the two salient objects he would comment on first, and won.
“You have one of my books,” he said, before I’d even closed the door behind me. He’d taken the copy of The Syphilis Transfer off the shelf and opened it, as if to check that the words on the page really were his and that the book’s spine hadn’t been lying.
“I bought it after you sent the first letter,” I admitted.
“I’m surprised you could find a copy in England, let alone the Isle of Wight,” he said.
“I didn’t,” I told him. “The public library at Ventnor has internet connections. I go in twice a week to do the shopping, and often pop in there. I ordered it from the US via Amazon. I may be tucked away in a chine, but I’m not entirely cut off from civilization.” He seemed skeptical—but he had just walked the half a mile that separated the house from the bus stop on the so-called coast road, and knew that it wasn’t exactly a stroll along Shanklin sea-front. His eyes flickered to the electric light bulb hanging from the roof, presumably wondering at the fact that it was there at all rather than the fact that it was one of the new curly energy-saving bulbs. “Yes, I said, “I even have mains electricity. No gas, though, and no mains water. I don’t need it—I actually have a spring in my cellar. How many people can say that?”
“Not many, I suppose,” he said, putting the book down on the small table beside the tea-tray. “You call this place a chine, then? In the US, we’d call it a gully, or maybe a ravine.”
“The island is famous for its chines,” I told him. “Blackgang Chine and Shanklin Chine are tourist traps nowadays—a trifle gaudy for my taste. It’s said that there are half a dozen still unspoiled, but it’s difficult to be sure. Private land, you see. The path isn’t as dangerous as it seems at first glance. Chines are, by definition, wooded. If you were to slip, it would be more a side than a fall, and you’d probably be able to catch hold of the bushes. Even if you couldn’t climb up again you could easily let yourself down. Don’t try it at high tide, though.”
He was already half way through his first cup of tea, even though it was still a little hot. He was probably trying to calm his nerves, although he had no idea what real acrophobia was. Finally, though, he pointed at the painting on the wall between the two free-standing bookcases, directly opposite the latticed window.
“Do you know who painted that, Mr. Eliot?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“I knew the moment I looked at it,” he told me. “It’s not on the list I compiled, but that’s not surprising. I knew it as soon as I looked at it—Pickman’s work is absolutely unmistakable.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “If you knew who painted it,” he said, “You might have mentioned that you had it when you replied to my first letter.”
Not wanting to comment on that remark, I picked up The Syphilis Transfer. “It’s an interesting thesis, Professor,” I said. “I was quite intrigued.”
“It was quite a puzzle for a long time,” he said. “First the Europeans argued that syphilis had started running riot in the sixteenth century because sailors imported it from the Americas, then American scholars motivated by national pride started arguing that, in fact, European sailors had imported it to the Americas. The hypothesis that different strains of the spirochaete had evolved in each continent durin
g the period of separation, and that each native population had built up a measure of immunity to its own strain—but not to the other—was put forward way back in the seventies, but it wasn’t until the people racing to complete the Human Genome Project developed advanced sequencers that we had the equipment to prove it.”
“And now you’re working on other bacterial strains that might have been mutually transferred?” I said. “When you’re not on vacation, investigating your grandfather’s phobic obsessions that is?”
“Not just bacteria,” he said ominously—but he was still on vacation, and his mind was on Richard Upton Pickman. “Does it have a title?” he asked, nodding his head toward the painting again.
“I’m afraid not. I can’t offer you anything as melodramatic as Ghoul Feeding, or even Subway Accident.”
He glanced at me again with slightly narrowed eyes, registering the fact that I was familiar with the titles mentioned in the account that Lovecraft had re-worked from the memoir that Edwin Baird had passed on to him. He drained his cup. While I poured him another, he stood up and went to the picture to take a closer look.
“This must be one of his earlier works,” he said, eventually. “It’s a straightforward portrait—not much more than a practice study. The face has all the usual characteristics, of course—no one but Pickman could paint a face to make you shudder like that. Even in the days of freak-show TV, when the victims of genetic disasters that families used to hide away get tracked through courses of plastic surgery by documentary makers’ camera-crews, there’s still something uniquely strange and hideous about Pickman’s models...or at least his technique. The background in this one is odd, though. In his later works, he used subway-tunnels, graveyards and cellars, picking out the details quite carefully, but this background’s very vague and almost bare. It’s well-preserved, though, and the actual face....”
“Only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear,” I quoted.
He wasn’t about to surrender the intellectual high ground. “The exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright,” he went on, completing the quote from the Lovecraft text, “and the proper color contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.”
“But you’re a molecular biologist,” I said, as smoothly as if it really were an offhand remark. “You don’t believe in latent instincts, hereditary memories of fright or a dormant sense of strangeness.”
It was a mistake. He turned round and looked me straight in the eye, with a gaze whose sharpness was worth more than vague suspicion. “Actually,” he said, “I do. In fact, I’ve become very interested of late in the molecular basis of memory and the biochemistry of phobia. I suppose my interest in my grandfather’s experiences has begun to influence my professional interests, and vice versa.”
“That’s only natural, Professor Thurber,” I told him. “We all begin life as men of many parts, but we all have a tendency to consider ourselves as jigsaw puzzles, trying to fit the parts together in a way that makes sense.”
His eyes went back to the painting: to that strange distorted face, which seemed to distil the very essence of some primitive horror, more elementary than a pathological fear of spiders, or of heights.”
“Since you have the painting,” he said, “you obviously do have some of the things that Silas Eliot brought back to England when he left Boston in the thirties. May I see them?”
“They’re not conveniently stowed away in one old trunk and stowed neatly away in the attic or the cellar,” I said. “Any items that remain have been absorbed into the general clutter about the house. Anyway, you’re really only interested in one thing, and that’s something I don’t have. There are no photographs, Professor Thurber. If Pickman really did paint the faces in his portraits from photographs, Silas Eliot never found them—at least, he didn’t bring any back with him from Boston. Believe me, Mr. Thurber, I’d know if he had.”
I couldn’t tell whether he believed me or not. “Would you be prepared to sell me this painting, Mr. Eliot?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry if that ruins your plan to corner the market—but who can tell what a Pickman might fetch nowadays if one ever came into the saleroom? It’s not as if he’s fashionable.”
The red herring didn’t distract him. He wasn’t interested in saleroom prices, and he knew that I wasn’t angling for an offer. He sat down and picked up the second cup of tea I’d poured for him. “Look, Mr. Eliot,” he said. “You obviously know more about this than you let on in your letters, and you seem well enough aware that I didn’t tell you everything in mine. I’ll level with you, and I hope that you might then be more inclined to level with me. Did your grandfather ever mention a man named Jonas Reid?”
“Another of Pickman’s acquaintances,” I said. “The supposed expert in comparative pathology. The one who thought that Pickman wasn’t quite human—that he was somehow akin to the creatures he painted.”
“Exactly. Back in the twenties, of course, knowledge of genetics was primitive, so it wasn’t possible for Reid to entertain anything more than vague suspicions, but there was a time when colonial America was home to numerous isolated communities, who’d often imported sectarian beliefs that encouraged in-breeding. You don’t expect to find that sort of thing in a big city, of course, but Pickman’s people came from Salem, and had been living there at the time of the witch-panic. The people who moved into cities as the nation industrialized—especially to the poorer areas like Boston’s North End and Back Bay—often retained their old habits for a generation or two. The recessive genes are all scattered now, mind, so they don’t show up in combination nearly as often, but back in the twenties....”
I felt an oddly tangible, if slightly premature, wave of relief. He seemed to be on the wrong track, or, at least, not far enough along the right one. I tried hard not to smile, as I said: “Are you trying to say that what you’re actually looking for is a sample of Pickman’s DNA?” I asked. “You want to buy that painting because you think it might have a hair or some old saliva stain somewhere about it—or even a blood drop, if he happened to prick himself white fixing the canvas to the frame?”
“I already have samples of Pickman’s DNA,” he told me, in a fashion that would have wiped the smile off my face if I hadn’t managed to suppress it. “I’ve already sequenced it and found the recessive gene. What I’m looking for now is the mutational trigger.”
I’d cut him off too soon. He was a scientist, after all—not a man to cut to the bottom line without negotiating the intermediary steps. He must have mistaken my dismay for incomprehension, because he continued without waiting for me to speak.
“We all have numerous recessive genes of various sorts, Mr. Eliot,” he said, “which are harmless as long as the corresponding gene on the paired chromosome is functioning normally. The ones that give us the most trouble nowadays are those that can cause cancer, if and when their healthy counterpart is disabled in a particular somatic cell, causing that cell to start dividing repeatedly, forming a tumor. Normally, such tumors are just inchoate masses of cells, but if the recessive is paired with one of the genes that’s implicated in embryonic development, the disabling of the healthy counterpart can activate bizarre metamorphoses. When such accidents happen in embryo, they result in monstrous births—the sort DeVries was referring to when he first coined the word mutation. It’s much rarer for it to occur in the mature soma, but it does happen.
“Most disabling incidents are random, caused by radiation or general toxins, but some are more specific, responding to particular chemical carcinogens: mutational triggers. That’s why some specific drugs have links with specific cancers, or other mutational distortions—you probably remember the thalidomide scandal. Jonas Reid didn’t know any of this, of course, but he did know enough to realize that something odd was going on with Pickman, and he made some notes about the changes he observed in Pickman’s p
hysiognomy. More importantly, he also went looking for other cases—some of the individuals that Pickman painted—and found some, before he gave up the enquiry when disgust overwhelmed his scientific curiosity.
“People were so anxious to hide the monsters away, of course, that Reid couldn’t find very many, but he was able to observe a couple. His examinations were limited by available technology, of course, and he wasn’t able to study the paintings in sequence, but I’ve got the DNA, and I’ve also pieced together as complete a list of Pickman’s paintings as is still possible, along with the dates of composition of the later items. I’ve studied the progression from Ghoul Feeding to The Lesson, and I think I’ve figured out what was happening. It’s not traces of Pickman’s DNA for which I want to search your canvas—and any other Pickman-connected artifacts your grandfather might have left you—but traces of some other organic compound, probably a protein: the mutational trigger that activated Pickman’s gradual metamorphosis, and the not-so-gradual metamorphoses of his subjects. If you won’t sell me the painting, will you let me borrow it, so that I can run it through a lab? The University of Southampton might let me use their facilities, if you don’t want me to take the painting all the way to America.”
I was glad of his verbosity, because I needed to think, and decide what to do. First of all, I decided, I had to be obliging. I had to encourage him to think that he might get what he wanted, at least in a superficial sense.
“All right,” I said. “You can take the painting to Southampton for further examination, provided that it doesn’t go any further and that you don’t do any perceptible injury to it. You’re welcome to look around for any other objects that take your fancy, but I doubt that you’ll find anything useful.”
I cursed, mentally, as I saw his gaze move automatically to the bookcases on either side of the painting. He was clever enough to identify the relevant books, even though none of them had anything as ludicrously revealing as a bookplate or a name scribbled in ink on the flyleaf. The painting was almost certainly clean, but I wasn’t entirely sure about the books—and if he really did decide to scour the rest of the house with minute care, including the cellars, he’d have a reasonable chance of finding what he was looking for, even if he didn’t know it when he found it.
The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Page 12
