Encounters with Enoch Coffin

by W. H. Pugmire

  Frowning as he sat up, Enoch rubbed one hand against his face and felt the scars near his eyes. “I did have dreams – of your poem and its tunnels.” He knocked upon the ground. “But this place is free of ghouls, unlike Arkham and Copp’s Hill.” He sniffed at the air. “There is something in this elemental aether that ghouls find fearsome, far-fetched as that may seem.”

  “Did your dreams tell you this? Yes, there are tunnels under this hill – they connect with the ones in the old churchyard. You read that poem? I recited portions of it at a little public reading before Sally published my little book, and the reaction from some of the old-timers was fascinating. I stirred ancestral memories and dreams with that one. The legend is well-known locally, but no one likes to mention it. I found an account of it in an old diary at Olney’s shop. There used to be a kind of Festival held here in ancient times. I showed the passage to Patricia Olney and she found it captivating. She’s a bit of a wanker, really. After I showed her that passage she designed a kind of hooded robe exactly as it was described as being worn by the queer old folk of Festival. Caused quite a panic when she first strolled through town wearing it, ha ha! The old-timers won’t step inside that bookshop when she’s there. She shares ownership with an old gent who is always away on book-buying trips. She likes to thumb her nose at local legend, but her boldest act was to climb up Kingsport Head and mingle with the occupant in the house up there. That really got local tongues wagging.” He laughed again.

  “So what are you doing up here?”

  “Walking off a gnarly hangover. I’m using your cane, it’s nice.” He glanced at the walking stick that he had given to Enoch. “You been conjuring more madness out of time?”

  “I think so. Winged things in the sky with queer faces,”

  “Ah, the psychopomps. I’ve known others who have encountered them. Not a good sign, buddy. To see them means that you’ve encountered the darker mists of Kingsport, with their shadows of dead and dreaming things.”

  “For someone who ain’t ‘into’ the weird shit, you sure know a lot. Where is this haunted churchyard and its tunnels? Take me there.”

  “The one from my poem? I don’t know, the way you’ve been calling to the darkness I don’t think it would be wise to take you there.”

  The artist grabbed his walking stick and struggled to his feet. “Fine, I’ll find it myself. I know it’s here on Central Hill. Shouldn’t be too difficult to find, there won’t be many antediluvian houses of worship still standing.”

  “Oh, they tore it down over a decade ago. I don’t know what the city was planning on doing with the land. There was the problem of the churchyard and its tombs, so eventually whatever they had planned was abandoned. It’s a forlorn old site. Well, if you’re so insistent on seeing it I’d better go with you and be your voice of reason. The way you’ve been behaving you’ll decide to take a nap in the pool. Come on.”

  Enoch stood for a moment on the hill and gazed down to the city below, with its colonial roofs, its twisting lanes, and its sleepy harbor. It was a beautiful old town, exquisitely charming in a quaint way, and Enoch loved how it evoked a very real sense of the past, which he so loved. The sea was free of mist, but Kingsport Head was enshrouded in thick clouds. He nodded to Scot and they walked to the bending path that led to the street below. What a comical sight they made, two unsteady gentlemen of middle-age tapping their walking sticks on the ground and creeping to their destination. Scot observed his companion and witnessed Enoch’s strength grow more assured the longer he grasped the Terrible Old Man’s staff, and after a while he had to increase his pace to keep up with the artist, who seemed to sense the way they were to wander. He smiled, amused, as the visitor strode exactly to the site they sought.

  “Man, this looks desolate,” the artist sighed. “It must have been a magnificent old edifice, the white church.”

  “Yes, it was white…”

  “And betimes the great orange star in the zodiac constellation of Taurus would seem to balance itself on the building’s spectral spire. And they would trail over the crest on moonless nights so as to partake of Festival each hundred years, their lanthorns in their grasp.”

  “Um, that is the legend. Wow, your eyes have really darkened. Can you see?”

  “I have never seen more clearly.”

  “Great. I don’t have my ‘lanthorn’ with me, but I’ve got this powerful LED flashlight.” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced the small aluminum instrument. “Now, this is where the pews were, probably, and just beyond them – here we go, the trapdoor to the vaults.”

  “You’ve been down there?”

  “Once, with Captain Holt – probably twenty years ago.”

  Enoch tapped on the trapdoor with his walking stick, and then he bent down and took hold of the rusted iron ring and lifted. “Pah!” The stench was indeed foul as it crept into clean Kingsport air. “The pulpit was just there,” he said as he pointed to an area just beyond the hatch that had covered the floor; and then he held up his staff to some absent effigy and muttered a phrase in Latin. Scot hoped it had a Biblical source and was not an evocation from some nameless tome. The artist waited for the poet to lead the way, following close behind as Scot turned on his flashlight and climbed down the worn stone steps that led into an underground crypt. They came upon a second aperture, entered it and descended a narrow spiral staircase that oozed its fetid stench into their nostrils. The rough-hewn stone on which they walked was moist and slippery, yet they were cautious and did not hurry, anxious as Enoch was to see the pool of which the poet had spoken. And then they were there, in a place where pungent seepage dragged downward from the walls of an underworld and kissed the large squalid pool of greenish water.

  “It’s worse than I remembered,” Scot whispered as he shuddered. “We won’t linger, Coffin. This place is diseased.”

  Enoch knelt before the edge of the pool and dipped the tip of his walking stick into the water, moving the staff as if it were a writing tool with which he could etch sigils onto the liquid facade. The two men watched the sea green mist that began to form above the pool’s surface. Enoch sucked in the noxious coils of film that floated to him from the mammoth pond, and he did not shut his eyes as the coils clothed them so as to blend with his transmuted orbs. “Let’s go for a dip,” he told his companion playfully; but Scot did not reply, and so Enoch slipped out of his clothing alone and oozed into the liquid body, swimming some feet away from the rocky earth whereon the poet stayed. And he was confused, when he turned to wave to his cohort, to see that Scot was bending over a sprawling figure whose trunk reclined in the poet’s embrace, a figure that grasped the enchanted walking stick with one hand.

  Then the sound of whining summoned, and the artist revolved in the water to look at another portion of land where stood an eidolon; and beside the figure, squatted at her feet, was an enigmatic shape that pressed a feeble flute to malformed mouth. And as the artist listened to the sound the place in which he found himself began to alter, and his expanse of pool became a sluggish river in which oily things swam by him as the walls of fungoid stone melted and rose again as blackest gulf. He watched the woman, whose only attire was a hooded robe, walk onto the water, to him; and when she reached down to him the artist clasped her proffered hand and rose above the slothful tributary. He scanned the creature’s cowled area that was absent of visage and contained but two smooth and luminous spheres that mocked his mortality. The phantom led him from the water, onto stone, as three winged beasts drifted through green mist and bleakest gloom. Portions of the black gulf beyond him began to shimmer, as did his midnight eyes, those mutated eyes that watched a darker form stalk toward them, a haughty figure that reached into the woman’s cowl and brought forth the smooth and shining mask with glowing eyes. The strange dark one turned to the artist and pressed the waxen veil against the artist’s face, and then the daemon pressed one talon into the artist’s forehead and engraved a secret sign such as had been etched onto the Terrible Ol
d Man’s walking stick. Forcefully, the fiend slapped his ebony hand against the mortal’s face and shrieked his name.

  Enoch Coffin awakened in a darksome place, in Winfield Scot’s embrace, as the poet’s hand struck him once again. “Wake up, damn you!” The artist scrambled free from the other’s arms. “This is one place where you’re not napping! Come on, I can’t fucking breathe. Don’t forget your wizard’s cane.”

  Something in the poet’s alarm caught on, and the two men moved swiftly through the nitrous atmosphere and up the moist stone stairs, not stopping until they stood within the gathering gloom of new dusk, while from the Kingsport Harbor came the solemn tolling of buoys that were moved by the waves that pushed toward rotting wharves.

  Scot steadied his friend with one strong arm as Enoch caught his breath. “You’ve scratched yourself again.” Enoch did not move as Scot raised a hand to his face and smoothed an area on the artist’s forehead. “Come on, this time I’m making certain you sleep in your own bed.” They moved through gathering mist and violet shadow, watched secretively from above by the winged beasts that floated in the ghostly sky.

  IV.

  (From the personal journal of Enoch Donovon Coffin)

  I woke up to the smell of bacon and coffee, pushed myself up so that I sat in bed, and tried to remember the night before. Winfield Scot poked his plain-faced mug into the bedroom and asked how I liked my eggs. “Sunny side up, with well-done hash browns and buttered toast, no jelly. I like my bacon chewy.”

  “You got it,” he replied and disappeared. I pushed off the bedclothes and saw that I was still wearing my boxers. How many days had I worn them? I pulled them off and sat there naked when Scot returned with a tray of what turned out to be excellent breakfast cuisine. He set the tray on the bed and gave me a look that seemed to dare me not to move so that the juice would spill, and then he picked up my boxers from where I had tossed them on the floor. “Where do you keep your clean underwear?”

  “I’ll attend to that later. My balls need to breathe. Where’d you sleep?”

  “That chair in the living room is extremely comfortable.”

  “Hell, you could have slept here, the bed’s big enough.”

  He kind of smirked. “I don’t swing that way, pardner.” Then he bent to examine my face and frowned. “You look worse than ever. Alchemy doesn’t seem to suit you. Maybe I shouldn’t have given you the old man’s staff.”

  “Bullshit. It’s just this – place, Kingsport. It’s awakened elements inside me that are new, unique. Or maybe it’s you, inexpertly channeling some forces despite your conviction that you’re not into the weird stuff.”

  He bent to my suitcase, which he had moved from the bed to a small chair, and took out a clean pair of briefs. The bloke would have made someone a nice little wifey. He sat on the end of the bed and tossed the briefs at me. “I came here from New York almost thirty years ago, in desperate need of a change. I’d always had this…fantasy…about belonging to an artistic community, but the scene in New York was getting so cliquish and I hated it. The scene here was different then than it is now, not so touristy. I loved it, and I relished the atmosphere of this city with its mists and its memories. Kingsport is like no other place I have known – not that I’ve traveled all that much. I joined a little group that had formed a kind of artistic co-op in one of the old hotels, and it was great for a while, rent was cheap and friendship was easy. I decided to stay, and over time I got to know the city fairly well. I discovered the curious undercurrent of restless fear that one finds among the older fisher-folk. They don’t often express it, but drink sometimes loosens their tongues when you talk to them one-on-one. Then they whisper tales about the mists and about the sea, about things found and things imagined. They tell of enigmas pulled from the depths of water or vaguely viewed in the clouds that gather over Kingsport Head. They warned me against the Terrible Old Man and cautioned me to stay away from his yard and its painted stones. He rarely left his home, usually paid boys to get his groceries and all. He paid well, so that offset the fear the lads usually experienced when in that yard and the old captain’s company. But now and then I’d see him wandering the older sections of town visiting certain reclusive folk, or he’d take the trolley up here to Central Hill and amble through the old cemetery. That’s where I met him, and as we stood side by side and looked down over the roofs and at the harbor, he told me outlandish things as one by one the small-paned windows of the houses lit up all dreamy-like. I was pretty poor, and I had heard about his hoard of Spanish gold with which he bought his supplies; so I offered to assist him with the errands of life and such, and he agreed – said he liked my dreamy face and suspected I was a poet. I took to visiting him at night and reading poetry to him, and the more I was in his company the more I was – seduced, something in his nature was so intriguing and compelling. I didn’t have many belongings, just a few books and things, and so I moved out of the co-op and took to sleeping on the old guy’s porch. He was growing older and feebler, although he seemed to find a fund of strength whenever he went out trekking around town, grasping his old walking stick. He’d make us a weird brew of tea at times, and it’d make me so sleepy drinking a couple cups of the stuff that I’d fall asleep on his floor, where I always sat. I’d wake up and see him at that table, talking to the pendulums in those antique bottles and watching them stir and purr in reply. He’d sometimes tell me that he was depending on me to ‘take care o’ things’ when he was gone, and I thought it was his old age talking. And then he was gone. Some folk said they had seen someone creeping up Kingsport Head toward the crag where the ancient house is usually covered by the clouds. But no one knows for sure. So, yes, I have become attuned to the ‘weird stuff’ – you can’t sleep in that yard, on that porch, and not be. But I don’t put into practice the arcane arts as you enjoy doing. Or, rather, you seem unable to resist their lure.”

  I finished eating and sank back into my pillows. “I love it, true, as an aid to my art. I live for artistic experience and expression – it’s the very air I breathe. But I am a realist in my craft. I capture a dark actuality and express it with authenticity.”

  “You’ve been seduced, Coffin, however grand you want to paint it. I’ve seen it time and time again, the allure of what is called, around here, the Outside. It’s got you by your balls.”

  I scratched my scrotum and then slipped into my briefs. “I’ll return the old codger’s cane if you want me to, but I’ve grown rather fond of it. I want to study its symbols some more.”

  Scot laughed. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about – you’re fixated on the occult. Yeah, sure, keep the staff. I’ve done my Florence Nightingale duties, I’m outta here. Take my advice and get some real rest, you look like crap.”

  I chuckled as he picked up the tray and took it to the kitchen, and then I closed my eyes as I heard him exit the house. I did feel ragged, but I had no intention of spending the day in bed. What I really needed was a shower, so I pushed out of bed and staggered to the bathroom, where I stopped at the sink and let cold water fall into my hands and then threw it on my face.

  The face that looked back at me in the mirror was shocking. I used to scratch myself during sleep when I was a kid, but it hadn’t happened for decades, and it was not cool to see the marks around my eyes and on my forehead. I vaguely remembered one weird dream about birds or weird winged things that feasted with sharp mouth on elements of my eyes, and I figured the dream had been inspired by the sensation of my nails on my face as I slept. The mark that had been engraved on my forehead was another matter. It resembled one of the marks that had been etched onto the old man’s walking stick, and I recalled having seen it in the Necronomicon, although I couldn’t remember its significance – something about dreams, perhaps, and the things that can be evoked from them.

  I washed cold water over my face again and then slipped out of my newly-donned briefs and ran a shower. Man, it felt good, the rush of hot water and the soapy wash cloth rubbing all
over. I decided not to shave because I didn’t want to look at my face again. There were clean jeans in my suitcase and I slipped on the warm sweater that I had worn the previous evening. I felt good. Maybe at this time of day the pub would be free of the pretentious imps I had encountered at Scot’s reading, and the idea of simple bar food and cold beer was especially appetizing, even though I had just devoured a large breakfast. Maybe I’d take my time walking into town and work up further appetite. Yeah. And stop at Olney’s book shop and scout for another volume of verse. Hell yeah, that was the plan.

  I grabbed my wallet and walking stick and beat it, and it felt good to move along the lanes and descend the hill toward downtown. Kingsport charmed me as never before, and I took curious turns and walked past venerable residences and over quaint wooden bridges that crossed streams. The harbor spread below, filled with crafts of all kind and with just a faint blanket of mist rising over it. It was like a charming picture-postcard come to life, haunted by the far-off cry of gulls and toll of buoys. Perhaps I would investigate the wharves after I spent some time in the bookshop.

  I really did feel great, clean and invigorated, clutching the cool old stick of polished wood and strange inscription. Got to the main street and was surprised to see that the bookshop door was shut, but the knob turned easily in my grasp and I entered in to find the lady at her spinning wheel, dressed in a long black gown and modest black sweater that showed off her still-youthful figure. Her gray hair had been brushed back away from her face, and the soft light of the room seem reflected in her weird shimmering eyes.

  “Mr. Coffin,” she said in her low-toned voice, and that was kind of strange because I didn’t remember ever telling her my name. Guess I was getting forgetful in old age.

  “Hey,” I saluted, and then I walked to the shelves of poetry and scanned the titles, stopping to pull out a volume of Swinburne.