Bohemians of Sesqua Valley Read online

  Bohemians of Sesqua Valley

  W. H. Pugmire

  First eBook Edition

  Bohemians of Sesqua Valley © 2013 W. H. Pugmire

  Introduction © 2013 Jessica Amanda Salmonson

  Cover Art, Signature Sheet & Interior Artwork © 2013 Gwabryel Brechet

  Copyediting by Robert Mingee

  In Memoriam: Robert Nelson (first published in Lovecraft eZine June 2012)

  The Strange Dark One (first published in Strange Dark One: Tales of Nyarlathotep by Miskatonic River Press 2012)

  This edition © 2013 by Arcane Wisdom an imprint of

  Bloodletting Press

  Arcane Wisdom

  P. O. Box 130

  Welches, OR 97067

  www.miskatonicbooksblog.com

  www.miskatonicbooks.com

  [email protected]

  Book Design & Typesetting by Larry L. Roberts

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  Dedicated to Niels S Hobbs, Esq.

  &

  NecronomiCon Providence 2013

  Introduction

  Jessica Amanda Salmonson

  There are really only two living authors I believe took a lot of what they learned from H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, then made those lessons into something strictly their own—emotive, decadent, lonesome dark jewels. One is W. H. Pugmire, the other is Tom Ligotti.

  In both cases, having read their stuff before they were published anywhere but the amateur press, I felt they were probably too original for popular success. The public likes crap, and preferably particolored unoriginal crap. And here were depths of darkness and sorrow and disturbing moments of humor and grotesquerie that seemed to have seeped from bleakly loving souls, broken rather than twisted, broken by an ugly world perhaps, manifesting in our material world like diamonds of jet.

  To my surprised delight both men were found by devoted followings, each achieving a comprehending audience. It restores somewhat my faith in humanity that the truly strange, the truly beautiful, and the completely individual can be met with delight by a visible number of deeply dreaming readers.

  In Wilum’s case I am additionally privileged to call him brother, of the kindred soul kind, having known him since our wondrously ill spent days of youth. I dare say I survived the ‘seventies because of his friendship and concern, whether he knows it or not, and I suspect he knows since I lingered at times on the precipice of a suicidal depression, from which he refused to let me fall.

  Once when I was staggeringly unable to cope with the next minute of existence, a knock came to the door, and when I opened it, there stood a traditional party clown with huge red lips and clad in motley.

  Now “normal” clowns are frankly creepy, but the delightful thing about Wilum doing the bright and cheerful type is that his usual character was the vampire Count Pugsly, promotor of Jones Fantastic Museum. Caped, fanged, and green of complexion, he made the sinister a joyful terror. He made darkness gleam by his character performance, with the same seeming ease by which he does it with his fiction.

  I’d never seen him do his Regular Clown before, but I knew the figure’s history, in that this very Clown had formerly arrived at a hospital to cheer up a terminally ill friend. And who is to say my own exhausting depression wasn’t about to be terminal for me.

  At sight of this apparition of alleged happiness I was supremely startled. My knees weakened and I fell on the floor, at the same time laughing hysterically. Here was the Good Clown, the Clown of Light, who had formerly brought joy to the dying, and had risen anew to restore life to the emotionally dead.

  That’s just an impressionistic view of a complex moment in a complicated year. I don’t understand, even now, how Wilum could devote so much of his love and energy to seeing me through it. Depressed people are so wearying, worrying, ultimately even stupid and selfish, and I must have had long patches of being impossible to bear.

  I tell you this in part in case you thought these tales of terror, or shock, even of grue, lack a humane impulse. Those of us who have dwelt with darkness do not just laugh at the haunted, the humiliated, the maimed. We see into our own injured places, and find hope in tales that on the surface are against hope.

  Overt tales of hope are always lies; we must look at our own terror more honestly than that. We’re all doomed; our shared fate is to be extinguished. And to have this single universal fact of our existence illuminated really does bring light where otherwise there might be none.

  There’s a fundamental mystic tenet, that darkness is light unmanifest. Such visionlessness is even a comfort, shading us from a truth so bright that we would be blasted as in fire to gaze at it directly without intervening shadow. For me, and I like to believe also for many others, Wilum’s tales are not just clever gloomy poetic scraps of entertainment to be gleaned along the readers’ path, but authentic portraits of the eccentric, the spiritual, the alienated and alone, such as dwells in most of us to greater or lesser degree.

  When first I undertook to write this little introduction I tried not to despair of the fact that I really cannot convey what both Wilum, and his storytelling, has meant to me along the years. But I find myself certain that merely hinting at it will be sufficient, as these tales mean just that much to a sizeable percentage of the readers who come to them not to scoff at the fictionally doomed, but to share that doom via mysterious pools of fantasy, as prelude and etude to the final bargain that awaits us all.

  In Memoriam: Robert Nelson

  W. H. Pugmire

  Under the unmoving cloud, I wait. Still, I taste the nectar of that lake of blood, wherein I washed my innocent hands, and then my face, with gore that spilt from hands that knew no crime as yet. I take up one perfumed blossom from the lake of blood, a bloom wherein is curled a fetid serpent that, rising, kisses my eye. White mist of moon sinks down to copulate with crimson mist of lake, and I rise at last, barefoot, a phantom lost in mournful youth. I creep beneath unmoving cloud, into the woodland of neglected souls, and shake from my splintered skull my crumbled dreams. I drift on naked foot through rotting gloom, beyond joy and sorrow, into a realm of ecstasy and pain. I find the vacant tomb beside the vat of gore, that tub before which kneels a clumsy skeleton that has dropped its skull into the silo’s mess. I push my hand into the thick liquid debris and pluck the skull, but turn my eyes away from its too-wide grin. I walk, barefoot, upon the soft floor of that mephitic woodland, sucking in its fumes, until my calloused toes touch mausoleum marble. How sad the crimson candles look, unlit. I set the skull onto a ledge and place one candle in its jaw. Striking flint, I summon sparks that kiss my eye, that lick the several candle wicks. The tiny scarlet flames are beads of blood on fire. They shimmer as did the lake of blood, and I clutch with innocent hands into the air of carnage. One candle alone remains unlit, reposing in a death’s-head jaw. I strike the flint a second time and wonder why this candle’s flame is black. I feel that glacial flame upon my eye, that eye that peers onto the sharp edge of the flint stones, that hard unyielding edge. I strike that edge against my pulsing wrist and watch the mist of mortality rise from me and conjoin with crimson air. I move my naked foot in pool of blood and peer at that one midnight flame that ushers me, at last, into glad deliverance.

  One Card Unturned

  with Maryanne K. Snyder

  I

  Stanley Kaplan pulled into the rest stop, switched off the car and stretched. Having driven for hours, his back was stiff and his stomach growling. Sighing, he vacated the vehicle, used the men’s room, purchased some deli food and returned to the car, frowning as he opened the lid to what was s
upposed to be a carton of potato salad. Setting aside the food, he picked up the notebook that rested beside him and began to thumb through its pages, finding again the three crudely drawn maps that supposedly led to the valley that was his destination, a place not shown on any regular map of Washington State. Shutting his aching eyes, Stanley sough the memory of recent dreams, visions in which he saw himself driving to Sesqua Valley, the region that summoned.

  He thought again of the curious nature of Kathleen Steelwood’s enigmatic notebook. Mostly, it dealt with a mysterious Tarot deck, called by Kathleen “the Yellow Deck” or “the Sesqua Tarot”. Some of her journal conveyed aspects of the mysterious and sequestered valley, but in a manner that seemed intriguingly distant. Stanley couldn’t ascertain if the woman had actually entered the valley herself. Portions of her entries came to sudden endings, as if the woman were about to reveal some secret but then had second thoughts. What seemed obvious to Stanley was Kathleen’s obsession with the Yellow Deck, with its occult history. He began to read in Kathleen’s journal.

  files of Katherine Steelwood.

  Sessquaw Tarot aka ‘The Yellow Deck’

  April 30, 1942

  informant: Marta Tzaddic

  Sacramento, California

  verbatim except re:deck from shorthand: see stenobooks

  “There is a deck you must not see and an evil people you must never befriend. The Rom do not say its name, the Black Gypsies will brick dust after you if you inquire. Some call it the Yellow Deck, I do not know why; the back is red with eyes of black. Those that read it have silver eyes. I do not mean grey eyes in the usual way, I mean such silver as that of coins which shines under the Sun’s blessed light—but the Sun does not make these people’s eyes shine nor the Moon—only the pain of men.

  “I tell you this because you are my friend. Heed the warning of your friend.”

  May 15, 1943

  notes: cross-reference with file, “King In Yellow Tarot”

  Marta’s deck description does not match the back patterns of record for the King in Yellow Tarot (1928). Her characterization of the Yellow Deck as an evil deck is consistent with the reputation of the KiYT, but there is no record of the KiYT being in the hands of any readers other than Madame Sosatris nor any mention of “silver eyes”. I could have taken “silver eyes” as a poetic expression of the fact that the KiYT limited print run of 1928 went only to the wealthiest collectors and clients of Madame S. but that Marta was very explicit in her description of it being her first-hand observation of an individual as opposed to repeating a tale or tradition.

  notes: cross-reference with file, “de Laurence decks”

  Marta is very familiar with all of the de Laurence decks available, including the “yellow edition”, so it is unlikely that she is referring to that deck.

  November 2, 1943

  It occurred to me that “Yellow deck” may also refer to the nature of the deck as obscene and the printer as a printer of sexually explicit books or “spicy” playing cards. Universities do not keep bibliographies of such presses. I found that even legal records such as court dockets, transcripts, and even newspaper stories of prosecutions of the makers of “legally obscene” materials routinely fail to mention the presses or the works by name (!) in order to deny them publicity. I did attempt to find and interview collectors of such works; cross reference with “Erotic Card Collectors” list. Details of my lack of success in finding this Tarot will be found in that list.

  “art study” decks would be an interesting line of folkloric research but better handled by a male researcher. Too many doors closed to a woman.

  August 1, 1944

  I have stopped asking about the Yellow deck or individuals with silver eyes, as it most emphatically terminates every interview with both the Rom and the Negro readers. Even a Red Indian (Duwamish) woman refused to speak to me further after I had described the back pattern.

  Marta was also correct about brick dust and the Negro fortune-tellers.

  Cross ref: “Charms and Gestures Against the Evil Eye” file.

  I don’t know what upsets people more: the deck itself, or the people with the silver eyes.

  February 2, 1945

  informant: Maria Tzaddic

  Sacramento, California

  verbatim except re: deck from shorthand: see stenobooks

  “I have heard that you are asking unwise questions. Promise me that you will ask no questions of others, and I will tell you all I know of ‘The Yellow Deck.’

  I agreed. Marta seemed relieved on my behalf, but became more emotional as she related the following:

  “It was when I was young and beautiful myself. I had many clients, even the Mayor’s wife and the wife of the Chief of Police, and we had settled well and were healthy and happy. This was after the Great War, the georgios were making money, all of our children were fat in those days…I had lovely clothes and good manners, the ladies of society came to me.

  “Then the woman with silver eyes came [spits on her thumb at this point] and all my ladies went to her. I met one on the street outside of her parlor, my lady cast her eyes down in shame, for who had been the first to warn her about her husband and give her a charm? None but I...the faithless one, she told me that my rival was more gifted than I, I should try her and see, I would myself agree in the end. Though, as she said this, perhaps I saw a tear fall to the pavement from her eye.

  “Under a false name I entered and crossed my rival’s palm with silver. It was well that I had not taken time to curse the coin, for then it truly would have gone ill with me for such effrontery.

  “She looked at me and smiled, the smile of a sow that has eaten her own litter, that one. She set aside the cards on her table. ‘I knew you would come. You, you deserve a different deck, a most special deck.’ and she opened a wooden box and unwrapped the Yellow Deck. I saw the backs of the cards their wicked eyes unblinking at me. I crossed myself. My mothers had told me of this deck, ‘No thank you, ma’am.’ I said, ‘I don’t want special treatment, I can’t afford to pay you more,’ and she laughed.

  “‘You were right to say no to me. I know who you are and I know you have come upon harder times recently. It will go harder still if you stay. Leave me these fat pigs, I’ll walk them to their fates gracefully, with art. You would be too kind.’

  “‘I can’t promise you that we will leave, that is for all of us to decide,’ though in truth, all the men would have taken my counsel without question, but I was only a young woman and my mothers would have been angry if I had bound us with a promise out of my place.

  “So I took very polite leave of her, shaking my shoes.

  “We did not depart. My mothers did not want to leave so fat a place. If the society ladies had left us, that was poor fortune, but their husbands and sons still came to our men to dice and play at cards and to buy remedies and charms. Perhaps the Silver Eyed One would get bored and leave,or be driven out, who knows?

  “Then the men and children and horses got ill. They fevered and shook in their beds, they were marked with strange markings of spots and stripes and letters we did not know. The mothers sent me back to her with our finest white horse to say we were leaving and beg her mercy.

  “She took the horse and said to me, ‘I am in a generous mood today. Today is your day of good fortune. I will make a pact between yours and mine, mine of Sessquaw Valley, you will know us by our eyes, from now until the falling of the stars: when one of mine enters a town on one side, you and yours will leave by the other without hesitation or pause. Swear to this and your men and your children and your horses will be well.’

  “‘I am most expansive. I will tell you something else, my sister in the Art. These cards, had you seen them all, you would have died. The eyes of your spirit would have been opened far beyond your capacity to understand and you would have gone mad, then, weak, then fallen dead in a world you could not recognize without its falsehoods intact.’

  “We packed our wagons and left within the h
our. On the road before our eyes the markings faded, the fevers broke, we cried and hugged our babies but did not stop for a moment our travel away, not for at least seven nights, and we have never gone so far North again.

  “That is my story. It is all I know of those people and those cards. It is all I need to know. My oath has bound me and mine; you are not of us so it does not bind you and it does not protect you. Do you understand? I cannot protect you.”

  My question: “If it is dangerous to see all the cards, how is it this woman could read them?”

  Marta gave me a pitying look. “Surely you have come across decks of cards missing the Ace of Spades?”

  Indeed I have and Marta knew it. She was referring to the custom of the wholly commercial fortune-tellers to remove the Ace of Spaces (the Death card) from their decks so that the card would not come up in a reading and frighten customers; Marta herself was above such chicanery. Marta’s implication was that the student of such a dangerous deck could remove one card and set it aside never to be seen, thus preserving her life at the expense of the accuracy of her readings.

  June 22, 1947

  informant: Marta Tzaddic

  Sacramento, California

  (verbatim except re: deck from shorthand: see stenobooks)

  notes: Marta looked older than her age would suggest. The Rom have lost many in the war.

  “We will continue as a people, God will see to that and I trust God. I must tell you, do not become complacent, I have never again seen a man or a woman with silver eyes but I know they are not gone. Their numbers have not been diminished by war nor tyrants. Their numbers grow slowly. They travel widely, every one of them. You must not seek them. I know, you have not been asking unwise questions, that is good, but your heart still burns with curiosity. It is who you are. Let not curiosity kill the cat! [a nice pun on my name]