Encounters with Enoch Coffin

by W. H. Pugmire

  “What is it?” Enoch asked. The woman was visibly trembling now.

  “It is evil, what Shun did. Evil, what you did, too.”

  “Look, Jiao, I’m sorry you don’t approve of what I’ve done for my art, or what your father did for his own purposes. Not that I ever understood all his purposes. I thought you might carry on in his footsteps. If I was mistaken, and you’d rather not sell me any of the materials from this cabinet, then I’ll go.”

  “Now I understand everything,” Jiao said as if she hadn’t heard him, sounding close to tears. “Now I know what went wrong.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I should show you. Come with me.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Jiao pointed above her. “Upstairs.”

  III.

  The apartment upstairs, when Jiao had unlocked it and let him inside, proved even gloomier than the one below, but as if to compensate for this there were other stimuli to assail Enoch’s senses. A profound heightening of the odd, unpleasant odors he had detected downstairs, and a distant, pitiful moaning. He supposed it might be a human being making that sound.

  Jiao led him through the apartment, and he shuffled along carefully lest he bump his shins or trip in the dark. The moaning, increasing in volume though still muffled, seemed to guide them. Were there garbled words? Why was the voice so horribly, inhumanly wet-sounding?

  They came to a short hallway, and Jiao positioned herself to one side of a closed door, into the wood of which a narrow horizontal gap had been sawed out, at face level. Enoch noted another modification to the door: a hasp screwed into the wood, so that the door could be padlocked from the outside.

  In the murk, he couldn’t make out Jiao’s face as much more than a ghostly smear, but Enoch felt the weight of her stare. “Look inside,” she told him in a flat voice.

  As if reluctant to turn his back to her, Enoch hesitated, but then moved to the slit cut into the door. Warily, he leaned his face close to it. He held his breath against the stench.

  The small chamber was no doubt intended as a bedroom, though it was empty of furnishings aside from a bare mattress on the floor. Boards had been nailed over the single window, so that only a few chinks of light penetrated the gloom. But as Enoch peered at a pale, indistinct shape sprawled on the mattress, his eyes became a bit more acclimated. And as if the shape on the mattress had just awoken and seen his eyes at the slit in the door, it suddenly stirred with weird, agitated movements.

  “Good Lord,” Enoch muttered.

  The thing that rose up, as best it could, from the foul mattress was without clothing, and Enoch wasn’t sure if he was grateful for the darkness that obscured the thing’s form, or more unnerved by the fact that he couldn’t quite make sense of what he was seeing.

  It should have been a human, that much was certain, but it had either been altered from that state or had never been able to achieve it. Half the chest was missing, and one arm with it, the creature so shockingly compromised that it should not even be alive. Its pelvis was askew, its legs disproportionate, one skeletal and the other a bloated knobby mass, apparently with no foot at its end. And the head…if that translucent, gelatinous blob could be called a head…

  The monstrosity hobbled toward the door with a awkward limp, rushing at Enoch as if it meant to burst straight through the wood to get at him. He backed away, and a moment later it thudded into the door and rattled it in its frame. Fingers curled in the slit, but the pulpy hands were too swollen to squeeze through.

  Just before backing away, Enoch had caught a glimpse of the thing’s visage. Only a glimpse, and yet he had the keen eyes of an artist. That face, though it seemed to have lost one eye under a bulge of its lumpen head, was the same face from the black and white portrait on the altar downstairs.

  “That photo I asked you about,” Enoch said. “You said it was your husband. Is this creature your husband, then?”

  “I lied,” Jiao replied. “My husband was Shun.”

  Enoch switched his gaze from the fingers scrabbling in the peephole, to the woman standing opposite him. “Shun wasn’t your father?”

  “My husband, Mr. Coffin. Over forty years ago, during the Cultural Revolution, I met a handsome young artist named Song Yi. He was a beautiful soul -- nothing like my cruel husband. We fell in love. He painted me, as you have asked to do. You briefly charmed me with your request. You reminded me of him. And yes, he painted me in the nude. One day, my husband discovered this painting hidden amongst my things.”

  Enoch glanced toward the door. It was all coming together now. “The man in the altar photo. That was Song Yi, not Shun.”

  “Yes.”

  “So this creature, in this room…”

  “Shun turned Yi over to the authorities, and after Yi was beaten to death Shun managed to steal his body. He had perfected his evil magic even then. Perhaps it was sheer spite, some malicious gratification, that inspired him to practice his arts on Yi. He reduced my lover’s body down to its Essential Saltes.”

  “And yours, too…am I right, Jiao?”

  “After he strangled me in a fit of rage, Shun told everyone I’d run off and left him. Yes, Mr. Coffin, my husband practiced his alchemy on my dead body as well. Maybe he gloated over the two bottles that contained Yi and myself, in the decades that followed.”

  “So how then did you become reconstituted?”

  “Shun grew old, and perhaps sentimental. As he confronted his own mortality, maybe he felt guilt for what he had done to me. And so, the lonely necromancer raised his wife from the dead.”

  The wet, bestial voice behind its door blurted out an inarticulate cry, as if reacting to her words.

  “So Shun resurrected Song Yi, as well?”

  “No. He sold Song Yi, bit by bit…to you. I had no idea, until this day. Enough of Yi’s Saltes remained that I suspected nothing when I set about resurrecting him myself. Because you see, Mr. Coffin, my husband had trained me to be his assistant herbalist. And his assistant in his demonic experiments, as well.”

  Enoch looked to the peephole in the door and saw one eye there peering out at him. One eye with an Asian epicanthic fold…one eye that hinted at a living, human mind somewhere behind it. An artist’s eye. He could understand why the woman hadn’t destroyed the abomination.

  “I’m sure Shun was secretly amused selling you pinches of my lover’s essence,” Jiao said. “Sadistically amused. But what of you, Mr. Coffin? Didn’t you ever pause to consider your own actions?”

  “My dear, I never thought that anyone would ever want to restore this man.”

  “Perhaps you should have entertained that possibility.”

  “Perhaps I should have,” he allowed.

  Jiao reached toward the peephole in the door, and squeezed her slim hand inside to run her fingertips along the creature’s cheek. It let out a soft, pained groan. It was the first sound this being had uttered…because the moaning Enoch had heard, and which hadn’t ceased, originated behind another closed and padlocked door in the hallway. It too had a slot sawed into it.

  Enoch gestured toward this second door. “And your other tenant?”

  “Who do you think?”

  Enoch stepped to the door and drew close to its peephole. This room too, benefitted from a few slivers of light through the boards covering its solitary window. Here too was only a soiled bare mattress on the floorboards. Here too, an uncanny pallid occupant. But this creature couldn’t rise to its legs, for it had none. It dragged its abbreviated lower half after it, flopping crazily about the room on its misshapen forelimbs as if searching endlessly for a means of escape. Perhaps sensing Enoch at the slot, it whipped its head around and its noises became more plaintive. The artist recognized its wizened face, however distorted.

  “Enoch!” the tortured figure gurgled in its awful voice. He could only just understand it. “Enoch…help me…”

  The ruined thing crawled to the door and thumped its rudimentary, flipper-like forelimb
s against the wood, but couldn’t rise to the level of the peephole.

  “I’m sorry, Shun,” Enoch spoke through the door, “but this isn’t my story. I’m afraid I’m only a customer.”

  “Enoch! Enoch…help me! Help meee!”

  Enoch turned back to face Jiao. “I suppose I should be going.”

  IV.

  The young man whom Jiao had left in charge of the shop in her absence rang up Enoch’s purchases at the front counter. Jiao had disappeared, but just as Enoch was prepared to leave she returned to the shop from outside. In both hands she carried an object inside a plastic shopping bag. It was obviously a container of some kind. A jar.

  She extended it to Enoch, and he accepted it. The beautiful woman with her mysterious, sad eyes explained, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to provide you with any more Essential Saltes in the future, Mr. Coffin, but I’ll give you some just this last time.”

  “I understand.”

  “Consider them a gift,” she said, smiling. “With them, I think you could paint a very dark and demonic vision indeed, if that’s what suits you.”

  “Whose are they?” he asked, though he knew he didn’t need to.

  “Unused bits of my beloved husband, of course.”

  Returning to the North End of Boston on the Orange Line that evening, munching some flaky pastries filled with lotus-seed paste from the Hing Shing Pastry bakery -- and with the jar of Saltes in his knapsack with his other prizes -- Enoch Coffin felt regret indeed that his favorite apothecary would no longer make available to him the rarest of the ingredients he favored for his customized paints. But even more, perhaps, he regretted that he had not been able to bring himself to make a request of the apothecary’s new proprietor.

  He had little doubt she would have denied him, yet still he wished he had asked her if he could come back to her home in the future, in order to paint two portraits.

  As striking as Jiao was herself, Enoch’s interest had shifted to two other models even more unique, more remarkable, more in agreement with his taste in subject matter.

  But then, Shun’s establishment had always been a source of terrible wonders -- and one person’s tragic horrors are another person’s exquisite things.

  Impossible Color

  I.

  Enoch Coffin accepted that he must suffer for his art. He also accepted that sometimes other people must suffer for his art, as well.

  Though Trent was an exceedingly handsome young man, with a thick mop of dirty-blond hair spilling across his eyes, Enoch had him posed nude in the most grotesque of positions, looking like a gargoyle struggling against its stony nature in the hopes of flight. Enoch had kept Trent in this pose for over an hour, as he sat in the youth’s favorite armchair sketching him in charcoal. He could have finished long ago, but he was punishing the boy for his insolence. Not that he minded gazing at his uncomfortable model, either.

  “I thought the idea of a sketch is that it’s fast,” Trent complained, without turning his head when he addressed Enoch. The last time he had moved significantly, Enoch had jumped up from the armchair and kicked him in the hindquarters.

  “How would you know anything about sketching?” Enoch replied. “You, whose hand has only ever known the feel of a computer mouse?”

  They were in Trent’s apartment in Brookline, Massachusetts, home of the New England Institute of Art, where Trent was a student. Enoch liked downtown Brookline, with its diversity of restaurants, nice little shops and bookstores, its civilized and artistic atmosphere, but it was in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts that they had first met and struck up a conversation several months earlier. Trent’s father was a successful Boston optometrist, and paid not only for his son’s schooling but this comfortable apartment as well.

  “I think this one’s complete,” Enoch sighed casually, perusing his handiwork.

  “Thank God!” Trent began to rise from his twisted crouch.

  “Wait! I’m starting a new one with a sanguine crayon.”

  “I don’t think so!” Trent said, straightening up with a pained expression, as if gargoyle-like his limbs had indeed begun to ossify. “What’s a sanguine crayon, anyway?”

  “It’s the end of the world,” Enoch muttered.

  “Well, do you know what vector graphics are?”

  “If Goya made do without your vector graphics, I’m sure I can as well.”

  “I tell you, someday digital art will make paintbrushes and your sanguine crayons as obsolete as e-book readers are making physical books obsolete. Really, Enoch, I wish you’d let me show you the art program I use. I think once you got past your inhibitions, you’d be intoxicated by the possibilities.”

  “Inhibitions? You nasty pup -- I should boot your little white ass again.” Enoch set his pad and charcoal stick aside. “I don’t want a computer to cross my doorway, but I’ve seen enough digital art and it isn’t that I haven’t been impressed. As in any medium, some artists are more gifted with these tools than others. But it’s simply not my religion. I need paint on my hands -- I want to smell it. I want to feel clay shaped between my palms. Next you’ll be telling me that internet porn will make sex between two human beings obsolete.”

  Standing naked before the the older man, thrusting his pelvis forward as he massaged his cramped lower back, Trent smiled seductively and said, “Now that’s one thing I don’t want to become obsolete.”

  Enoch rose from the chair to stretch his own body. “So what are you patching together now from the ether?”

  “Patching together,” Trent snorted. “What I’m into now is ‘forbidden colors.’”

  “Forbidden Colors -- the novel by Mishima?”

  The younger artist laughed. “No. They’re also called ‘impossible colors.’ They’re colors that supposedly can’t be seen under normal light conditions, because of the way our brains process information from our rods and cones, which is called the opponent process. But under certain experimental conditions that challenge this process, test subjects have been able to see colors they couldn’t name -- like yellow-blue. Not yellow and blue blending into green, but a color that looks both yellow and blue at the same time. And the same with red and green, which are two other opponent colors. Imagine a color that appears both red and green.”

  “Are you sure you’re talking about real colors, and not just tricking the eye with illusion?”

  “Aren’t all colors illusion? Just frequencies of light…immaterial things?”

  “So you’re trying to create such an impossible color on your computer?”

  “Yes! It’s my obsession now. Imagine being the first artist to render a work of art in colors no one has ever seen before! Maybe you can’t achieve this with your old smelly oil paints, Enoch, or else it would have been done centuries ago, but with new technology why shouldn’t we be able to figure out how to teach the eye to see new colors without test conditions?”

  “Teach the eye? The eye is a machine. Can you teach your hand to feel scent?”

  “Oh Enoch, and here I thought you were a true adventurer of the arts!”

  “It’s one thing to talk, brat, and another to achieve. Anyway, to me you’re still talking about earthly colors. Red. Green. Red and green. How about a color that has nothing analogous, nothing to compare it with at all?”

  “Sure, why not?” Trent agreed enthusiastically. “That too. Maybe that can be achieved. That’s what I’m after.”

  Enoch shrugged. “Well…it is an exciting concept, certainly.”

  “Here, let me show you my latest test.” Without bothering to don his clothing again, Trent moved to a desk upon which his computer system was set up, and leaned over it to tap at his keyboard. Enoch came to stand beside him.

  On the computer’s monitor, against a black background standing shoulder-to-shoulder, were two identical human silhouettes, one red and one green. Trent explained, “The red and green have to be the same brightness, and just the right opposing hues. I’ve been trying this with a white background, too,
to see if it makes any difference. Anyway, you see that white X on their chests? Now, if you cross your eyes and combine those two Xs…”

  Enoch barked a laugh. “Cross my eyes? My dear, do you really expect people to come into a gallery and cross their eyes to view a piece of art? Maybe if they stand on their head it would work even better.”

  Trent turned to glare at his guest. “Fuck you, Enoch. I would never laugh at any artistic project of yours. This is just a test! Maybe you’re intimidated by my ambition. Or too proud to open that dusty old mind of yours.”

  “Pah.” Enoch strode across the room, retrieved his sketch pad and his slouch hat, and fitted the latter on his head. “Cross your eyes now, my boy, and you’ll see two of me leaving. But I’m afraid we’re both composed of the same hues.”

  II.

  It was three months before Enoch Coffin heard from the art student again. By that time he’d put Trent out of his mind altogether, engrossed as he was in his own art projects. But then one night, while he was working on a painting in the attic studio of his narrow little house on Boston’s Charter Street, Trent called. Enoch hated being disturbed while working, and always screened his calls, but when he heard Trent’s excited tone he couldn’t help himself. And it was the words even more than the tone that made him pick up, for what Trent had said was: “Enoch -- I think I’ve found my impossible color!”

  ***

  “I’ve always got my antennae up,” Trent said. “Always trawling the net.”

  “Of course. You and your precious internet.”

  Trent ignored the older man’s disparagement; they’d been over such things before, tiresomely. “I found out about this estate sale…an eccentric old character in Swampscott named Charles Gardner. A real hoarder, but instead of hoarding piles of newspapers and worthless shit like that, this guy collected all kinds of weird antiques, rare books, artwork from obscure artists all over the world. They said his house was floor to ceiling with his treasures; there were just barely paths through it all. And what first caught my eye was that this guy’s family originally came from nearby Arkham. And you know all those stories out of Arkham…”