Encounters with Enoch Coffin

by W. H. Pugmire

  “I’ve never seen their like,” he whispered.

  “Nope, Wizard Whateley was unique. Some old journals of folk that had visited this place before his death said that these things were fastened on some sealed doors in the house and on the old clapboarded tool-house. If you look at them too steadily they find you in dreamin’. Had a shared dream with those folks you met t’other day, and from it we built the one afore the house. Keeping somethin’ out, or somethin’ in, I guess. The hill noises get loud here on the Sabaoths. It’s Roodmas on Tuesday. If you’re interested we can light a fire on Sentinel Hill and such.” The young man looked around and frowned. “Kinda grim in here, ain’t it? Let’s get.”

  Without waiting the lad walked to the wall torch and snuffed it out on the dirt floor, and then held his lantern before him as he ascended the stone steps. Enoch waited for a moment in rich darkness, the one illumination in which came from the lattice designs on the wall. Enoch studied them in fascination, and it came to him that they resembled doors on a fence. He wondered what he would find, should he push one open and peer into the other side. Then the artist cautiously found his way to the steps and climbed toward outer aether.

  IV.

  Enoch, alone in his rooms, sat at the smaller table and sketched onto a pad, trying to recreate the lattice designs that he had seen in the Whateley underground lair. He found it curious how his vision blurred as his mind tried to recall the exact shapes of the designs he had beheld, and how cold his brain felt when he concentrated too fully on remembering. Finally, he gave up and, rising, stretched his arms until his palms touched the low ceiling. Glancing through the ceiling window, he saw many points of light in the black sky. He was restless and a little bored, and so he slipped into his jacket and quietly walked down the steps to the lower room, where Xavier was sleeping soundly on the sofa with one lowered hand resting on his dog’s head. The animal did not move as it watched Enoch go to the door and step outside.

  His truck sounded loud when he switched on the ignition and drove slowly down the rutted road to Devil’s Hop Yard. The artist stopped his vehicle and stepped onto the road, sneering at the odorous Dunwich air as it crept into his nostrils and tainted the taste in his mouth. The desolate field was acres long and absolutely barren, and he hesitated for some few moments before finding the nerve to step onto its precinct. Bishop Mountain loomed above him, beneath moving clouds that were lit up by soft moonlight. Yes, this was cursed sod, and Enoch muttered protective spells as he trod its wasted demesne. Finally, he knelt and placed his hands on the surface, flatly, trying to sense what, if anything, was held beneath the ground.

  “Perhaps a drop of witch blood will awaken you,” he whispered as he took his switchblade out of his pocket and opened it. Holding the steel blade to moonlight, he made signals to the sphere’s dead light, and then he quickly sliced the blade through an index finger and watched the dark liquid spill onto the dirt. A sound arose from beneath him, a faint rumbling that grew into a kind of cracking or quaking; and then a current of chilly air poured down the great round hill, to him, air that babbled senselessly at his ears. The earth below him trembled as from other distant hills came a response of other rumblings. “Gawd, what visions would you plant if I slumbered on your sod?”

  He then reached into another pocket and brought forth the ancient golden coin that he had pilfered from the Whateley warren, the metal of which felt weirdly hot in his hand. He raised the coin to his mouth and kissed it, and then he used one side of it to etch a diagram into the dirt. Chanting, he dug into the earth with the hand that held the coin, burying it as deep as he could burrow. All around him, the noises silenced. Enoch spat into the small dark area of his bloodstain and then staggered to his feet. How heavy were his limbs, as if some force below were trying to coax him underground. Like a clumsy drunk, he lurched from the Hop Yard to the road and his truck. He frowned at the blurriness of his vision and drove extremely slowly to the Aboth homestead. Entering the house, he found the living room vacant of man and beast. Heavily, he climbed up the steps and sat on his bed.

  Dunwich was dead silent, and he was sleepy. He reached down so as to remove his shoes, and as he held the heel of one his hand was littered with the debris that clung to it – the particles of soil from Devil’s Hop Yard that he had carried with him. Mumbling incoherently, he removed the other shoe with his other hand, onto which other particles of dirt adhered. Enoch clapped his hands but the soil would not fall from them, and so he cursed and ran his fingers through his hair and over his face. Granular fragments fell onto his eyes, which he rubbed wearily, thus pushing the substance into the choroid. Something beneath his face tickled him, and the artist laughed as he pulled off his shirt and reclined on the bed.

  The artist raised his face to eerie amber moonlight as he danced upon a gravesite. Below him, the rumbling from some deep place underground kept rhythm to his movement, and when he bent his head so as to watch his happy feet, he saw that he was frolicking upon the grave of the stranger whose dissolved corpse had been found atop Sentinel Hill. What a lonely little grave, the artist thought, and how wretched must be the solitude within the pit of death.

  He knelt and moved his hands into soft earth, and when his hands found the flimsy object he pulled it up and out of earth. The skeletal mouth was open, and some dried fleshy substance still covered one eye socket. The artist reached into his pocket for the golden coin, with which he would cover the other socket, and he was mystified to find the coin missing. No matter, he could still entertain his captive; and so he lifted the thing in moonlight and wondered at the way some of the bones had been deformed with melting, as if kissed by acidic lips. He brought the creature’s skull close to his face and tried to imagine the countenance that had once covered it.

  They pirouetted among the other gravesites until he heard the baying of a winged thing that sallied to him through the mist of moonlight. The hound-like thing was familiar, for he has seen its likeness in the Necronomicon. He did not like the way the beast leered at his partner’s skull as heavy liquid slipped from bestial tongue, and so the artist placed his hand protectively over the cranium. Yet the beast was not to be deprived, and it bayed again as it stretched its liquid tongue to the artist’s hand and licked it; and as the rough member lapped at his flesh, the artist saw that skin slip from his appendage and cover the skull, which took on fleshy form in which boiling black liquid, churning inside sockets, formed new orbs that blinked and laughed, and new mouth that breathed upon him.

  Enoch groaned in slumber and pushed away the canine head that nuzzled his hand as the young human mouth so near to his breathed language onto his eyelids.

  V.

  He awakened to find Spider reclined on the floor next to the bed and studying him with poignant eyes. Smiling, Enoch called to the dog and clapped his hands, to which the dog responded by leaping onto the bed and licking one hand happily. “Your tongue is smooth, not rough like the feline variety,” the artist said, to which the beast tilted its head as if attempting to contemplate the spoken sound. Now fully awake, Enoch pushed out of bed and slipped into clothes, and then he was preceded by Spider down the steps, to the living room where Xavier and the girl Alma Bishop smiled at him. Enoch thought he could detect the tang of new-shed orgasm in the air, but it may have been mere fancy. Smiling at the couple, he sat at a small table at which Xavier had been working and on which sat two piles of paper. In the shorter pile, the paper was filled with the poet’s minute handwriting, and in the other pile the paper was blank. Unable to resist, Enoch slipped a blank sheet near him and picked up a pen, and then he began to sketch. The youngsters did not move as they watched the artist work, aware that they were posing. After twenty minutes, Enoch smiled and stood, handing the sheet to Alma, who murmured appreciatively as she saw the drawing in which she and Xavier were expertly portrayed.

  Outside, Enoch raised his face to the sun and felt its welcomed warmth as he ran his hands through his hair, in which he still felt particles of Hop
Yard grime. He moseyed to the small well and, yanking its rope, raised a sunken wooden bucket out of semi-clear water; and then he set the bucket on the well’s stone ridge, cupped his hands into the liquid and then raised those expressive hands so that the water spilled over his hair. He dipped his hands into the bucket again and lowered his face into the cupped water. Wiping his eyes, he caught sight of his battered pickup truck, which he had seldom seen in daylight. The pickup had belonged to an artist chum who had committed suicide, and it was usually kept hidden in a rented garage – Enoch preferred the keen pleasure of riding on trains to that of driving the vehicle. Yet he confessed to himself that he had enjoyed driving it around Dunwich, had enjoyed a sense of freedom of movement that it had given him.

  The young couple came outside and the girl kissed Xavier goodbye, then turned to smile at Enoch. She held the sketch in her hand as she wandered from them down the road. Xavier strolled to where Enoch stood, dipped one hand into the bucket and brought water to his mouth.

  “You did a strange thing last night.”

  “No I didn’t. Your work is about the land, the land I need to become intimate with. I need to eat it with my eyes and taste it with my hands, get the feel of it underneath my skin and in my blood. Such a rich mythic land, darkly fertile.” He stepped nearer to the boy. “I appreciate it. I like its inhabitants. I’m going to start working on your portrait tonight, per your request that an illustration portray you rather than a photograph.” His hands lifted so as to explore the young man’s visage. “I like your face, with its length of nose and compressed lips. You keep your mouth so tightly clamped, as if afraid of spilling secrets.”

  “We’ll have to do that project before nightfall. It’s Roodmas. I’ve got somethin’ to do atop Sentinel Hill.”

  “I can sketch ye up thar.”

  The boy laughed. “Nah, I don’t think so. Your hands will be occupied with – other things.”

  They parted, and Enoch, feeling restless, took his sketchpad as he walked for hours so as to investigate some bridges. He enjoyed drawing the ancient structures, which were becoming rarer in New England as they were replaced with modern structures. On one bridge he found a particularly enticing lattice diagram that had been worked into the structure with newer wood than that with which the bridge had been constructed, yet as the artist tried to draw the graph he experienced an aching behind the eyes. He rubbed his eyes with his fingers, and then worked those fingers in an attempt to ape the diagram on the bridge; but as he did this his hands became sharply chilled, kissed with occult frigidity, and his witch-blood advised him to desist.

  The sun was sinking behind the hills by the time he returned to the house, and he was surprised to find Alma there again, sitting at the hearth with her arms around Spider’s neck.

  “Ah, good,” the poet told him. “I thought you’d miss it. Do you want to drive? Okay, hang on a tick.” Xavier went into the kitchen and opened a cupboard, from which he took a small jar that was filled with pale powder. He signaled with his eyes that he was ready, and together the men walked out and into the pickup. They drove through the decadent Massachusetts countryside as sunset deepened into dusk, and the silent boy scanned heaven in search of birth of starlight. Enoch parked his truck just in front of the large lattice diagram that had been erected before the ruins of the Whateley farmhouse, and getting out of the truck the artist went to handle the joined sticks.

  “This is a bit different from the others on the bridges, a bit simpler in motif. Is this your work?”

  “Hell no. We learned it from that worn by Wizard Whateley. The others are inspired by dreams and all, and they’re true as far as they go; but they’re mostly for water and what it calls with flowin’. This one is more – cosmic.” The lad smiled at the use of what he considered a sophisticated word.

  “And where is Wizard Whateley, Xavier?”

  Coyly, the lad smiled and nudged his head toward Sentinel Hill. “Up thar.” Holding tightly to the jar of powder, he moved toward the incline, and Enoch followed silently. Strangely, as they walked over stones and high grass that led into woodland, the boy began to sing.

  “An’ un day soon ye day’ll come

  When heav’n an’ airth’ll drone as un,

  An’ chillen o’ Dunnich hear ye cry

  O’ eld Father Whateley from all sky.”

  They tramped through the woodland, and out of it, toward a twilit sky, toward the round apex of Sentinel Hill and its rough-hewn stone columns, its large table-like altar, its tumuli of human bone. Enoch knelt beside one pile of reeking remains and noted how some of them were oddly deformed, seemingly melted at places – and this reminded him of something he could not quite recall, a dream perhaps. As he was hunkered by the bones, Xavier stepped to a brazier and took a box of wooden matches from an inner coat pocket. One struck match was tossed into the brazier, which exploded into soaring flame. Enoch arose.

  “Over here,” the boy called as he moved over the coarse ground to a place when a length of oblong stone lay flatly on the earth. Had it been composed of wood the object might have served as lid for a small coffin. Enoch studied the symbols that had been etched into it, most of which he recognized from having studied them in tomes of antique lore. “Help me shove it a bit,” the boy instructed. “I could do it alone, but it’s best to have an assembly. Just this top part here, yeah, there ya go. Phew, you never get used to the stink. Funny that he should smell still, havin’ been gone so long; although, of course, it ain’t all him that’s reekin’.”

  The huddled skeletal remains were of a small lean fellow, and although most of the flesh had long erased, one patch of dry hide clung to the skull and formed a kind of face to which a growth of beard still clung. The thing was naked of clothing except for a thick robe of purple thread. What really captured Enoch’s attention was the design of latticed wood attached to a cord that wound the throat. This small item was far more identical to the designs in the underground Whateley lair than any of the others Enoch had seen. He stared at it as the boy next to him sprinkled a little of the powder from the jar over the dead thing’s face and uttered whispered words. Below them, sounds issued from beneath the hill, and the flames in the brazier soared as if they had found new fuel. Enoch stood and sniffed the dark air.

  “Storm’s brewing,” he informed the lad.

  Xavier rose to a standing position and stared at stars. “Nah, it’s them.”

  “Them?”

  “The others – them old ones. They smell o’ thunder. They loom among the stars, and between them.” His eyes grew odd and shadowed. “They sing of deceased glory and show the silhouette of what has gone before, as they bubble between dimensions and weep the antique cry. Let us sing with them now, my brother, as they split the veil and show the thing that was, the thing that is, the thing that will be. They walk supernal among the smoldering sparks above us, craving the scent of mortal blood, which nourishes them weirdly. They form themselves with blood and debris of starlight so as to gibber in the mortal plane. Cthulhu is their kindred, yet Cthulhu sees them dimly. They pulse between the planets and kiss the palms of the Strange Dark One, Avatar of Chaos. We sing for them to unlatch the Gate, so as to usher forth the time of Yog-Sothoth. We see it there, the Gate and Threshold, between dimensions. We call it with our tongues, our hands.”

  The poet raised his hands and latched his fingers together, his digits impossibly aping the design of the dead wizard’s icon. The hill noises escalated, and with each new pulse of sound the brazier flames expanded. Enoch watched what looked like smoke coil among the stars, which extinguished one by one. Xavier stood upright, an elect messenger who held his fleshy signal to the flowing obscurity of the sky. He bleated arcane language to the dark cosmic abyss, and in answer to his cry a pale form began to reveal itself. It was the esoteric lattice design, perfectly formed, fluid and sentient. It was the awesome Gate of Yog-Sothoth, a thing that trembled as it sensually divided itself so as to reveal the eidolons beyond it, the ghosts of th
ey who lived brief mortal lives. There was the frail white-haired woman of fearsome and foolish countenance, and there was one offspring of her loins, a dark and goatish beast. And there – there was the awesome one, the one of such abbreviated promise, with its gigantic face that stretched across the sky, that face of which one half replicated the suggested visage of the interred wizard.

  Enoch watched this display of lost glory and future promise, and knew that he was naught. Shaking uncontrollably, he flung himself before the Messenger with pleading in his liquid eyes. But the Messenger merely glanced for one moment at the frail and puny freak before him; and then in contempt he struck the artist’s head.

  Mystic Articulation

  I.

  He took the train from Boston to Salem, and from there he traveled eastward in a taxi, to Kingsport. He had been to the ancient seaport before, at Yuletide, but this was the first time he had journeyed there in early summer. After his weeks in hospital and then bed-bound at home, recovering from injuries secured during a job-related trip to Dunwich, Enoch Coffin wanted to be somewhere peaceful, lovely, where he could feel far away from mundane modernity. He knew that he had chosen well when the taxi followed the descending road that took him into the well-preserved colonial town and to the agency at which Enoch’s Kingsport chum had left a key to the cottage where the artist would be camping. He paid the cabbie, tipping generously, and then struggled out of the vehicle as he held firmly to the cane he required for walking with one hand and his suitcase with another. His ongoing dizzy spells were mostly a thing of the past, but the cane gave him a sense of security that was more mental than physical. Having got his cottage key, Enoch returned to the street and felt a faint regret that he had sent his taxi away. It would be a half-hour trek to the small house in the Central Hill district where he would be staying, and his earlier certainty that he could make the trek without incident was now not so confident.