Encounters with Enoch Coffin

by W. H. Pugmire

“You and your friend are close enough that he knew this thing might appeal to you?”

  “She,” Dane corrected, “and yes, we are. Close enough that she would accept a generous payment for the sample she salvaged, and for claiming to her superiors that all of the mysterious globster disintegrated.”

  “So it’s only been a month since you learned how to command that thing, and devised your performance?”

  “Strike while the iron is hot, I say. Who can tell when the fragment of the creature I own might also sicken and die?”

  “Or regenerate to full size,” Enoch warned.

  “Coffin, you’re just jealous that I’m doing this and you aren’t. Look, I know you despise me. But even you have to admit that I’ve achieved brilliant results controlling this creature, without the use of telepathy as some of their masters are alleged to have employed.”

  “I won’t say I’m not impressed. And whether I despise you or not, it doesn’t mean I want to see that thing twist your head off. I’ll have you know that’s said to be their signature means of killing.”

  “Yes, yes,” Dane waved at the air, “I’ve read all that.” He sipped his coffee, eyeing Enoch intensely over the rim of his mug. When he set it down, he said, “I still think that you sabotaged my work last night.”

  Enoch sighed and wagged his head. “Look, as I say, your audience has no idea your performance wasn’t meant to end the way it did, and you can always stage more of your…shoggoth art down the road.”

  “Oh, you can be assured I’m not done with my little pet. But you can also be assured you won’t be appearing at any future presentations of mine. You can deny it all you like, but I’m sure you caused the beast to become recalcitrant, and then you made a grand gesture of saving the day by banishing it back to its container. Bravo, Enoch, bravo.” He clapped his hands. “Perhaps we should simply become collaborators, hm?”

  “Dane, I’m telling you, it’s dangerous thinking believing I caused the creature to become uncooperative.”

  “Of course you’d try to dissuade me, being so afraid that I’ll outshine you, and all.”

  “Gawd, you think you matter so much to me, but I’m done wasting my time on you, believe me. I’m going to enjoy my stay a few days longer and leave you to your own devices. You can take all the chances you like -- though I pity the people around you. I hope a week from now I don’t see newspaper reports of a whole troop of vengeful protoplasmic monsters emerging from the sea to reclaim their lost sibling.” Enoch forked the last bit of pancake into his mouth, washed it down with a final sip of coffee, and dug out his wallet to pay for their meal. “Now, if you’ll excuse me I’ll take my leave. Good luck to you, Dane. I’d watch out, if I were you.”

  Dane nodded, smiled, and said, “You might want to watch out, too, Enoch.”

  IV.

  That afternoon Enoch drove his pickup into Acadia National Park and left it in a parking lot, walked down to Jordan Pond with its lovely view of the humped twin mountains called the Bubbles, then went on to the Jordan Pond House restaurant, where he sat out on the lawn drinking more coffee and enjoying the popovers the place was famous for. While partaking of this light lunch he wrote notes to friends on several postcards he’d bought in the restaurant’s adjacent gift shop. When he was finished, he decided he’d like to hike some more, so he continued along the trail that looped the water’s edge, slouch hat clamped on his head and walking stick in hand.

  Afternoon advanced, the lowering light slanting in through the trees in dazzling fragments, the air refreshingly brisk. Enoch had hiked a good distance, and thought it best to pick up the pace so as to return to his vehicle and leave the park for his bed and breakfast in Bar Harbor, not wanting to be out in a pitch-black forest when evening fell. He wasn’t sure how prevalent they were or where they were dispersed, but he knew there were black bears and bobcats within the park’s limits.

  Because day was on the wane he encountered fewer people; now, only one couple walking in the opposite direction, and one pair of bicycles shot past him. Even still, several times he was compelled to stop where the trees thinned at the pond’s edge, and admire the thousands of small fish that seemed to hang suspended in the clear, clean water.

  On one of these occasions when he turned to gaze into the pond, he caught a glimpse of a larger dark form passing below the surface, but decided it must only be a dense shoal of those little fish, or a distortion of the shifting water. He had had the impression of a shark cruising along, but that was impossible in land-locked Jordan Pond.

  The artist had walked a bit further on when a burbling disturbance of the water to his side actually startled him, and caused him to stop and study it again. The splashing eruption quickly subsided, but it left him unsettled…until he realized that this unsettling feeling also had to do with the tickling sensation deep within his right forearm.

  Enoch swiftly rolled back his sleeve to see that the black alien matter fused with his flesh had once again extended a tendril, which wiggled in the air like a hair-thin finger -- pointing toward the water of Jordan Pond.

  “That bastard,” Enoch murmured, turning away and hastening his pace along the trail even more. Black bears and bobcats were now the least of his worries.

  Ahead of Enoch, from behind a tree, a man stepped onto the trail directly in his path.

  With evening imminent, the figure was merely a silhouette, but Enoch knew that tall frame, the sharp shoulders of its expensive black suit, the post-goth spiky hair.

  “Sorry, Dane, but I forgot my six-guns today,” Enoch said. “Or do you care to duel with paintbrushes?”

  The figure did not answer with words. There was, however, another kind of response. A green orb of light opened in the center of its chest. A moment later, several others surfaced across the shadowy form. More and more followed. And yet the figure had not advanced…yet.

  “So Dane wanted me to see the intended ending of his show, eh?” Enoch said to the phantom. “His self-portrait. And it’s a fitting one -- as black as his tiny soul.”

  Now, at last, the human-like outline took a step forward, but when Enoch raised his walking stick before him it stopped in its tracks.

  “Be gone, poor creature,” he commanded, using the walking stick like a sorcerer’s staff to draw a series of runes in the air, including that which conveyed the “Dragon’s Tail.” “You don’t really have any beef with me. I’m not the one who’s enslaved and degraded you, and you know it.”

  Enoch was certain that the shoggoth cells wired into his own substance added to the potency he needed. And sure enough, the green eyes glowing like a constellation of fungous stars upon the surface of the figure one by one blinked out of existence. Then the featureless obsidian figure turned and dashed into the forest, rather than return to the water of the pond. In the deepening gloom, it instantly slipped from view.

  V.

  The following evening, in the Bangor Daily News, Enoch read that local artist Dane van der Sloot had been discovered dead in his home by a female friend who worked as a researcher at the College of the Atlantic. Nothing had been stolen, apparently, but the home was found in great disorder as if a desperate struggle had taken place from room to room. The artist had been beheaded, but the details of this matter were not divulged, except to say that his head had not yet been recovered.

  “Oh how terribly predictable,” Enoch sighed, folding the paper away and reclining on the comfy mattress in his room at the bed and breakfast. “You should have admitted it, you sad fool; you just can’t compete with me.”

  After the threat that Dane had directed at him in the park, he felt no sympathy for the artist’s fate. In fact, he would have gladly paid admission to attend Dane’s final performance: scurrying about his beautiful house like a small white mouse pursued by a starving rat.

  Fearless Symmetry

  I.

  (From the personal journal of Enoch Donovon Coffin)

  I was not at all pleased when the journalist from the monthly Bos
ton arts scene magazine -- covering my little exhibition -- gave a smarmy smile as he suggested that I was patterning myself after Richard Upton Pickman.

  The gallery in question is a wee thing located in the narrow brick chasm that is one-way Prince Street, in Boston’s North End…just a few small rooms that were once an apartment, their walls painted cream and the floorboards polished to an amber gloss. The gallery owner also owns the Italian restaurant next door, needless to say one of numerous in this neighborhood. I frequent her eatery and her art showings alike, and she has taken a shine to me; hence the invitation to exhibit my own work. She also offered to hang my paintings on the walls of her restaurant -- that is, until she viewed my art for the first time and wisely decided against that concept, lest she discourage her clientele’s appetite. She’s a cute enough little dumpling, but doesn’t stir my own appetites.

  The young reporter had given his name as Joel Knox, and in answer to his comment -- or accusation -- I said, “Certainly I have been inspired by that artist. But if I’ve patterned myself after him, then you must also say I’ve patterned myself after Bosch, Bruegel, Blake, Dali, Giger, Beksinski, Kahlo, Bacon, Ernst, De Chirico, Escher, Kubin, Topor…”

  When he saw that I had no intention of stopping this litany on my own, and particularly since I’m sure the smug little ass didn’t recognize half these names, he regurgitated a name he did know. “I’m partial to Pollock, myself.”

  “Hm,” I grunted, “yes…perhaps the best of the chimpanzee artists.”

  “Well, I’m sure you have other favorites, but I mention Pickman because the similarities are obvious. Both of you pursuing your work here in the North End. Both of you seeking to shock your audience with extremely grotesque imagery executed in a highly realistic style…”

  I’m sure I winced. “Shock. You trivialize my work.”

  “Oh, but it isn’t your intention to be shocking, Mr. Coffin? To be controversial? I’m reminded of an artist I did an article on who patches together maps of the USA and the American flag from bits of human skin, taken from people who donated their bodies in good faith to science. But he only uses white people’s skin, because it’s a statement, you see, on America’s sins. He also claims his work is not meant to be incendiary, or sensationalistic.” Knox chuckled. “I’ve never interviewed such a hypocrite. One can’t have their cake and eat it, too. Why not just unapologetically admit, ‘Yes, you bet, I want people to feel a thrill of revulsion. I want to shock the living shit out of people.’ Isn’t there more honor in being truthful to oneself, without any pretentious bullshit?”

  “I trust you’re speaking of this other fellow…not me,” I said calmly.

  “Yes, of course. I’m just making a general observation.”

  “Hm,” I said. “I don’t know or care about this person you mention, who does sound more calculating than corpse artists such as Witkin and von Hagens -- who are, as you say, honest and up front with their morbid and beautiful work. But at the risk of sounding like I’m spouting ‘pretentious bullshit,’ those who work from a darker palette are always going to be accused by some as merely attempting to draw attention through offensive effects. Is von Hagens’ work merely educational? Of course not. Is it meant to provoke? I should think so. Is he having his cake and eating it, too? Maybe. Is that dishonest, or is the work simply functioning on multiple levels? Why not stop putting the artist on trial and focus on the art itself, and what it’s saying?”

  “Aren’t the art and the artist one and the same?”

  “Now that’s a more provocative question than I might have given you credit for, young man.”

  “So what is your art saying, Mr. Coffin? Tell me.”

  “Ask my art, is what I’m telling you. Go on…commune with it.” I waved my arm toward the paintings framed upon the walls around us.

  “Are you afraid to just tell me straight what your themes are? Your aesthetic, your motivations and and intentions and inspirations?”

  “Ahh,” I sighed, “you want me to encapsulate all that into one or two facile lines you can use as a caption beneath a photo of one of my paintings?”

  “If I can find a painting of yours the magazine won’t be afraid to publish a photograph of.” He smirked.

  “Well, let’s just say I’m a reporter -- like you. Does a reporter only impart, ‘Today I saw a puppy frolicking in the summer sun?’ No. Reporters tell us that blood gurgles in the gutter. That brains slide down the windshield…”

  “No, no, no,” Knox cut me off, waving a hand. “We may need to hear that dark events have happened, but we don’t always need someone holding those bits of brain under our nose, and then on top of that trying to convince us there’s a beauty in those brains.”

  “Well as you can see, I sometimes achieve a visceral effect, though I should hope not even you would dismiss me as a gore-hound. But to me, there is undeniable beauty in the knotted form of the human brain.”

  “But it’s how that brain came to be exposed…how it’s presented…”

  “How indeed. I suppose one is either attuned to terrible beauty or one isn’t. Though I should hope you would try to open yourself to such beauty.”

  “I’m open enough to appreciate that your technique is beautiful. Just as Pickman described himself, primarily you’re a realist. Or at least, you pretend you’ve seen some of these things you portray.”

  Now it was my turn to smile. “What makes you think any of these images are pretend?”

  For a beat or two the journalist almost looked afraid, as if he were willing to open himself just a little more and believe me, but then up came the protective screen of his grin. “Anyway, so you’re sensitive to the comparison with Pickman. It hit a nerve. You want to be known as an individual. Well, not to offend, but I still say it’s plain to see. Look at these, for instance!”

  He pointed to a nearby pair of oils. The painting on the left was rendered during a trip to Vietnam, extrapolated from a battered old photograph I was shown. It portrays three Viet Cong soldiers glaring back at the viewer, behind them an opening into a tunnel network of the type employed throughout the war. Lying at their feet is a nude albino carcass, shot a number of times. With its canine aspect the corpse suggests a large hairless baboon, and yet the feet appear to be oddly hoof-like. The gallery card accompanying this piece gave its title: The Tunnel Rat.

  On the right, a painting entitled The Dig. The name refers to Boston’s disastrous “Big Dig,” the costliest highway project in the history of this country, which even resulted in a number of well-publicized deaths. Less well known is that one worker vanished during the project, leaving his family to wonder if he was accidentally buried alive, or if he ran away to start a new life somewhere. My painting depicts a terrified worker in a hardhat being pulled into a rough opening in exposed ancient masonry by several pairs of unnaturally white, simian arms. The faces of his attackers are mostly obscured in the shadows, but their eyes glow like those of hyenas caught in infrared light.

  One of the visitors to my exhibition had praised me for my political metaphor…he seemed quite proud that he had gleaned a statement in my painting about the whole Big Dig debacle; its consumption of time, money and blood. I have been accused of cruelty by more than one acquaintance, certainly by more than one lover, but I could not divest this poor chap of his satisfaction, and so I’d thanked him for his insightfulness.

  But my current and less enthusiastic companion asked, “These paintings in particular aren’t influenced by Pickman?”

  Perhaps out of mounting defensiveness I spoke too freely. “They are influenced by my living across the street from Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. By living above a system of obsolete tunnels that most people in this city would never suspect the existence of. Pickman did not invent those tunnels, and they and their inhabitants are not his alone to represent.”

  “Inhabitants?” The fellow wagged his head. “Mr. Coffin…I’m not trying to be antagonistic, here, but the similarities between you and Pickman can no
t be denied! Come on now, what else do you have in common with him? I heard he had a strained relationship with his father, who lived in Salem. What was your upbringing like?”

  “I can’t vouch for what you say about Pickman and his father,” I replied evasively. “Of course the father might have been disturbed by his son’s art -- but then, why would he take possession of such infamous pieces as Ghoul Feeding after his son’s disappearance? Perhaps you’re only speculating unfairly about Mr. Pickman.” I took a step closer to the man, and he took a step back, his shoulder nearly brushing one of my framed works. “And it would be unfair, and unwise, to speculate on my own family matters.”

  “Sorry,” Knox stammered, “I didn’t mean…” But his words trailed off when he looked over his shoulder, saw the frightful visage of one of my typically outré portraits only inches from his nose, and jerked away from it with a little gasp.

  I snorted with amusement. Yes, I had to admit, if only to myself…there is something to be said for the shocking.

  That evening when I returned to my nearby house on Charter Street, my encounter with young Joel Knox stuck with me. As if still debating with him in my mind, I thought of Blake’s words: “What immortal hand or eye/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”

  If one believes in a Creator, then one must recognize Him as an artist of many terrifying works. Fearful things that one would think He created quite fearlessly.

  My young critic was blinded by morals, I felt, and morality has no place in art. Would he object to a painting of a tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night? Ah, but a tiger has no morals. A tiger is a work of terrible beauty. Should other creatures that rend and feast on flesh not be considered manifestations of terrible beauty, just because they are more obscure?

  The little puke did hit a nerve with me. But not so much about Pickman, as about my own father.

  II.