Gathered Dust and Others Read online

  “It’s been in my family for generations, on the Wotten side. I never told you that I am descended from aristocracy on my father’s side. The painting is a family curiosity, a damaged thing kept in attics for decades, discarded and forgotten. My great Uncle Sebastian, after whom I am named, was especially obsessed with it, so family legend relates, and used to sit in a small dark room talking to the thing. I have told you of him, Ada, the uncle who went mad and spent his final years in an asylum. On the evening of his last madness, for which he was confined, he was found shrieking at the painting and slashing at the figure’s breast with a silver dagger. Seems the thing was giving him bad dreams. No one bothered with repairing the canvas – indeed, the family took an active dislike to the thing and kept it hid, perhaps linking it to the mental destruction of a once-beloved relation.” Sebastian shrugged. “It eventually came to me, and I had it repaired. The original frame has been lost, no doubt having been used for some other work while this delightful boy was doomed to collect dust in tiny hidden rooms. I brought him with me when I first came to Gershom. I have yet to find a frame suitable for so perfect a representation of youthful beauty. His expression – it breaks my heart. Such a wistful look, almost touching on some vague sadness. What do you think, Sphinx?”

  Ada walked to the painting and stood directly in front of it. As a painting it was superb, but she did not care for its subject. There was, beneath the boy’s sad eyes, a taint of peevishness; she did not care for the way the fingers of one hand curled, imagining that she saw in them something cruel and clutching. Ada turned to the divan, but before she could disappoint her host with her reply, a young man rushed into the room, hastily removing hat and coat and handing them to the servant who followed him, but keeping a small leather portfolio that he gripped in one long hand.

  “Sorry I’m late, Sebastian. I had a sudden brainstorm and got lost working on a new illustration, and that always makes me lose track of time.” He then noticed the others in the room who were observing him and became silent, a bit of color coming to his complexion.

  Sebastian rose from his divan and went to embrace the boy. Turning to the others he said, “I introduce Japheth Beardsley, a new resident to our city, whom I observed sketching at his table in the Café Regal, much to the chagrin of his maître d’. The sketch was quite grotesque, and very fine. I immediately introduced myself, and we became instant friends.”

  The others looked at the young man, taking in his threadbare clothes, his gauntness, the hatchet face below the oddly cut chestnut hair. Finally, Ada moved from the painting, approached Japheth and took his hand. “We’re pleased that you could join our little soirée. I am Ada Artemis. Sebastian says you sketch.”

  “He has a remarkable talent for diabolic scenes,” Sebastian crowed, “which got him into a bit of trouble in his hometown. Thus he has found his way to Gershom, where he will find neither judgment nor condemnation.”

  “You exaggerate, Sebastian, as always,” said Max, who strolled to the boy and introduced himself. “You’ve only just criticized my art!”

  “What I mean is, we do not critique personality. We do not hound or harass because one’s art is morbid. We do not moralize; we know that art can express anything.”

  “And have you been hounded?” Ada asked the young artist.

  Japheth laughed lightly and ran his exceedingly long fingers through his hair. “My first exhibition caused a bit of a scandal,” he replied, smiling sheepishly. “I did some panels based on Baudelaire, which some found too – risqué. I found it all rather hypocritical; and so I’ve come to your city, the legend of which is whispered among various artistic circles with whom I am acquainted.”

  “I have seen his various fleurs du mal and they are quite poisonous,” Sebastian said as he lit another cigarette. “Will you have some sherry, dear boy?” He waved toward the table and its decanter.

  “Yes, thank you.” He glanced about the room and then started as he saw the full-length portrait that had been their topic of discourse. He stepped to it and stared, and then he reached to touch one of the painted hands. Sebastian approached him and lightly touched his shoulder, and then handed him a glass half-full of drink.

  “What a wonderful expression haunts your eyes, dear boy. You are enraptured.”

  “It’s just so strange – to see her painted as a young man.”

  “Her?”

  “Audre Brugge, the Belgian girl who sings French songs at Café Bacchus. Perhaps you don’t know it; it’s a bit of a dive.”

  Sebastian exhaled a plume of perfumed smoke. “Ah yes, the speakeasy on Queer Street. I was there once – the food was awful. I think I know of whom you speak, a pale mulatto wench with polypoid hair. I merely glanced at her, and did not like her voice when she began to warble. I have never heard such a sepulchral sound: it was like the voice of one who has tasted death and understood the meaning of that taste. I do not like to think on matters in extremis. How you can compare her with this Adonis I cannot comprehend. She was swarthy and alien – and he! He is composed of milk and rose leaf. He is Hyacinthus, beloved of Apollo, and I worship him.”

  “How are they alike?” asked Ada.

  “Their faces are identical, uncannily so. Wait.” Japheth drained his glass and set it on a nearby stand, and then he opened his portfolio and rummaged through various papers until he found the desired item. He handed the sheet to Ada, who examined the portrait that had been sketched onto it.

  Max joined her and studied both sketch and painting. “Yes,” he said, nodding, “she could be Viola to this portrait’s Sebastian. Youth is often delightfully androgynous. But what odd hair she has, like coils flowing from the domes of Ceto’s daughters. I’m quite intrigued. Does she perform tonight? Shall we go and listen?”

  “Don’t be absurd, Max,” Sebastian huffed. “You haven’t finished working on your sketch.” He turned to Japheth. “Max is doing my portrait in lithograph.”

  “I have enough of it to work on – and I have my living model. Come on, this is too fantastic, to find a twin to your ancestor’s mysterious portrait. How can you resist?”

  “‘No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

  Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine.’”

  Ada turned to face their host. “I, for one, am intrigued. Let us go. Japheth will act as our Charon, our son of Night.”

  Max clapped his hands excitedly. “We shall share a bottle of Artemisia absinthium and drink in honor of your sister, Luna,” he told Ada excitedly. “Come on, Melmoth, don’t be a bore; do join us.”

  Sebastian yawned dramatically. “Oh, very well. Let me find a book that will be suitable for reading aloud during bad music.” He stalked to a section of poetry, scanned the titles and pulled out a volume of Chants de Maldoror. “Yes, this will do for so delirious an expedition.” Stepping to his closet, he pulled out the long and antique fur coat that was his favorite possession and flung it over his shoulders, and then he held out his hands in a gesture of ushering his company from his rooms.

  They stepped into the moonlit night and Ada linked her arm with Japheth’s. The young artist’s sharp features caught in a peculiar fashion the beams of lunar light, and his pale face seemed almost to glow as he led the way. A heavy gust of winter wind suddenly pushed toward them as it sailed between the city’s tall buildings.

  Sebastian hugged his heavy coat closer to his frame. “Can you sample it on the wind,” he queried, “the taste of doom? Shall we moan to the half-moon like some pack of underhounds?”

  “Let us relish what promises to be a new experience,” Ada answered.

  “Ah, Sphinx – ever the optimist.”

  They came to Queer Street, and Japheth led the way into a dilapidated house situated between two taller edifices. Gales of laughter spilled from the doorless entrance as they climbed the steps that led onto a long porch, on which various persons sat at tables, drinking and smoking. Sebastian took a cigarette from its gilded case and lit up, which made him feel a
little more relaxed. The crowd was mostly young, which pleased him, although he knew that these children had not kept their lives free and inviolate; otherwise they would not dwell within this realm of exile and dispossession, this city of wild unrest. For a moment he remembered his past life, his glory and fame and freedom, his social conquests and his sexual subjugations wherein he was dominate in all things. When his secret life had become known by the society he had courted, they hurled him from their midst. The memory of his rise and fall was his deep-felt damnation; no matter how he reconstructed his former life in this ghastly city, he would never again know the delicious taste of former victory. He walked this realm of living death, a shadow of what once he was.

  “Let us find a booth,” Sebastian commanded. “I am famished for alcohol.”

  They settled into leather benches at a table of substantial size. “A bottle of absinthe,” Max told their waiter.

  “Two bottles,” Sebastian corrected him. “And I shall have some coffee laced with a liberal dose of brandy. Anyone else?”

  “I’ll try some, I guess,” Japheth said as he scanned the drink menu and studied prices.

  “My treat, dear boy,” Sebastian cooed, rewarded with the young artist’s thankful smile.

  Thus they drank their sweet coffees and bitter booze and talked of art as the young illustrator allowed them to examine his portfolio. When the surrounding chatter quieted, Japheth looked up and saw the woman who watched him as she sauntered past their table and walked to where a blind boy sat before a piano. The room listened as the lad began to play his somber music, and something clutched at Japheth’s heart as Audre Brugge began to sing Baudelaire’s “La Muse malade.” Sebastian forgot his drink and felt his slow-beating heart grow weighty with woe. He began to chant the words with whispered voice.

  “Ma pauvre muse, hélas! qu’as-tu donc ce matin?”

  “Hush, Melmoth,” Max scolded.

  “Her voice is like the coming of Death. No, I cannot listen.” Sebastian rose and vacated the room, stepping onto the porch and puffing furiously at his cigarette. His companions sat, transfixed, their eyes and ears bewitched. The woman’s voice was deeper than Japheth had remembered. Her eyes, those colorless orbs, penetrated him with their staring, and her perfect mouth made love to the language she uttered. The artist, his hands itching for his pen, took in her mauve skin, her coils of tawny hair; and he marveled at how luxurious that hair looked in the misty light of the place, how it seemed in his imagination at times to writhe with an almost lecherous sentience. He watched as her hands trembled to the emotion of her song as they stroked her velvet vest, and he stared at the dark nipple of an exposed breast. Her song ended, and the room exploded with wild applause. Japheth blushed as the lithe chanteuse winked at him and licked her lips as she exited the room.

  Sebastian Melmoth felt the presence behind him, one that commanded him to turn and acknowledge. He refused to do so and stared at the yellow moon as if that sphere of dust would grant him inner strength.

  “Have you another cigarette?” a husky voice asked. He watched as Audre Brugge moved to a lower step and stood before him. How eerie that the poisonous light of the dead moon seemed to have been transferred to the eyes that held him. Hypnotized, he reached into his vest pocket and brought forth his golden cigarette case. He watched as the woman made her selection and placed the reed of nicotine into her mouth; and he trembled as she bent to him and touched the tip to his. “Your breath tastes of wormwood,” she stated, “lots and lots.” He detected a Dutch inflection in her accented voice.

  “Yes,” he replied. “One must imbibe to fulfillment. The first glass will show you things as you wish they existed; and the second glass gives you a glimpse of things as they are not. The third glass of absinthe -- reveals the truth behind the mask of reality, and that is the most horrible of revelations.”

  “And what do you see behind my mask?”

  He sucked deeply on his bit of nicotia and exhaled a patch of scented fume that floated as curtain between them. “Nay, Medusa, your alchemy cannot touch me. My heart turned to stone ages ago.”

  Secretly she smiled, licked her mouth and walked away.

  II.

  Sebastian sat on a large gold armchair and looked around the dreary room. Why were the dens of artists always so cluttered? Such disarray disconcerted him – he wanted to call for servants. In fact, he was trying to avoid glancing at the large canvas on which Japheth was working at his new project, a life-size portrait of the gorgon that had so beguiled him. But Sebastian could not keep his eyes away, for the artistic process fascinated him. Striking a gold-tipped match, he lit a cigarette and waved it toward the canvas.

  “The skeletonic tree is quite good, especially the way it subtly imitates her stance. Of course, you need a moon casting its dead light upon her coils of hair; and the moon must not be white, but rather it must reflect the tainted color of her curious flesh, her reptile hide. Jesu, how like a lamia she looks! She makes one want to quote Keats:

  ‘Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,

  Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

  Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

  And leaden-eyed despairs…’”

  “Why does she affect you so, Sebastian? I thought you treasured beauty and youth. Look at her eyes – so clear and ethereal. How could such eyes fill you with despondency?”

  “They are the eyes of one who preys. I suppose the face is fine, but how can one admire it when it is concealed behind those cords of mane?” He stood and looked out of the window, into night. “This room is really quite depressing. Let us go outside and bathe in starlight. You haven’t tried one of my recently discovered cigarettes – they will give you a new sensation. I adore new sensations. Come, put down your brush and follow me. Your Medusa will await you.” Without waiting, Sebastian went to the door and left the room. Laughing softly, the young artist followed him. The winter night was chilly, but there was no wind. Sebastian was waving a cigarette at heaven, where three bats were silhouetted in as they flitted in the lunar light. “This sky is positively Goyaesque,” he stated. “Of course, we need owls instead of bats. Are you familiar with his El conjuro? It would not surprise me to see a pack of disheveled hags hobbling down that street, selling their craft. But – lo! – see where a witch approaches.”

  He flicked the butt of his consumed cigarette into a gutter as Audre Brugge approached them; and for one moment she did seem like something conjured by black arts, with the strange moonlight giving her skin a poisonous viridian tinge. Japheth saw how her helical hair seemed to move and arrange itself as she advanced toward them – and that was odd, for there was no wind. She stopped before them.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” she said, one hand holding the bottom of her small shoulder bag.

  “My dear Miss Brugge. How like a viper you look in that tight dress, with its geometric pattern. Would you care for a new sensation? I’ve just received these, from a friend in Mozambique.” Sebastian reached into a pocket and produced a black cigarette case, which he snapped open. “They will make you dream tonight,” he promised her.

  “No thank you, Monsieur. I want to taste the evening air, it’s so rich tonight.”

  Sebastian snapped shut the case without offering a weed to Japheth. “As you wish. I shall leave you then, for I too wish to dine on this intoxicating effluvium. I suppose you wish to be alone in his little room and pay homage to the gods of Art.”

  “Actually – no.” The woman smiled at Japheth. “There’s a curious place I want to show you, just outside the city perimeter. I think it will interest you, from an artistic standpoint.”

  “All right,” the young man agreed.

  “If you’re going to walk the night then I shall follow, surreptitiously and from a distance. I shall be your voyeur and watch in secret.”

  The woman laughed and linked her arm with Japheth’s, and Sebastian slowly followed as they walked beyond the city, to a place of
ancient desolation. Perhaps, aeons ago, it had been some kind of park, although its trees were few and withered, like something found in Casper David Friedrich; and Japheth felt a kind of pity for the barren trees, for their limbs seemed bent with heavy desolation. Sebastian scowled at the dreary wasteland as he followed the younger mortals up a slight incline to where the remnant of a ruins stood. Audre stopped before a weathered arch that was guarded by a statue of Cerberus, and she smoothed her hand over one of the daemon’s three monstrous heads.

  “Wait,” Sebastian wailed as the woman walked past the beast and began to descend a set of steps that led to a circular platform of stone. “I have no honey cakes with which to placate the hound. If we step into its lair we may ne’er return!”

  “Be not afraid, Monsieur. I shall be your Aeneas and pacify the fiend.” She held her hand to Japheth. “Come,” she commanded.

  But Sebastian was suddenly overwhelmed with fear. He had not, in all of his years in Gershom, dared to leave the city’s boundaries; being out of it now instilled a kind of panic, a sense of terror. Holding his hand up in protest to the woman’s invitation, he turned and fled.

  Japheth tried to laugh. “He has the oddest habit of fleeing,” he joked; and yet he, too, felt a kind of uncanny fear in the forlorn place. Was it his imagination, of had the atmosphere grown more chilly after they had passed beneath the archway and descended the stone steps? He watched as Audre reclined on the circle of stone and began to trace the shape that was outlined on it with her slim hand. When she reached that hand to Japheth, he took it and lay beside her.

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It must have been part of some antique civilization that existed prior to the city, although heaven knows that Gershom is in itself infinitely old. Perhaps this was their temple – it seems a place of veneration, doesn’t it? And perhaps this figure chiseled into this circle of stone was the thing they worshiped. You can sense how utterly primitive it is, a relic of a forgotten era; and yet how exquisitely it is captured in their art, whoever it was that dwelt here. I knew it would fascinate you, as an artist. Primeval art has always beguiled me. I like to think about the world as it once was, millennia ago. What did they feel, that we can never sense? What did they know, and worship? What were their secrets? We know of the past from what they left recorded – but what were the mysteries unrevealed? It’s funny, but when I lay in this place, beneath the antediluvian starlight, I feel near to a nameless past.”