Encounters with Enoch Coffin Page 3

  IV.

  That howl, more lonely than the bleat of a foghorn turned to a deafening volume, cut through the swirling white masses of fog that filled this world. Enoch stood upon one of the hovering blocks of stone and smiled with satisfaction at how much closer he was drawing to that beast on the final block, each time he willed himself into this realm. And each time he came here now, he felt more in control of his abilities, no longer becoming overwhelmed and forgetting himself.

  He could see, this time, that the bandages that blinded and masked the semi-human crouching beast were stained through with spots of blood. Was this a new development, or had he been too distant previously to make out this detail?

  No longer suffering disorientation, he was not surprised when he directed his gaze to the block upon which he stood, and soon saw two vast hands reach out to take hold of it. These were his hands, his godly appendages, and he watched them crush the malleable block between them. One more stone removed from the barrier between him and his prize. One step nearer to what lay behind that gauze, like a corpse’s winding sheet hiding his model from him.

  V.

  Much of the sculpture’s body was complete now, though its copper skeleton was just barely concealed beneath its gaunt form. All that remained, really, was its shoulders and head, which was still only a series of wire hoops. Enoch felt exultant in his work; he could sense the power of the clay as he shaped it in his hands, caressed it smooth with his fingertips. It was the blood that had made the clay more potent. For after he had removed the bloodied material from Ashman’s face and upper body, he had returned it to the batch of clay on his worktable.

  For several days now Enoch hadn’t heard anything from Will Ashman. He was relieved, as he had feared the man would cling to him like an orphaned child after that one feverish night in this loft. On the other hand, he found it odd, and finally a bit worrisome. He hadn’t wanted to acknowledge that he might have played any kind of part in the suicide of Shoshana Ashman, but if her husband were to do himself in likewise, Enoch wouldn’t be able to deny his contribution. And so, reluctant as he was to do so, when he wrapped up work on the sculpture he broke down and phoned Ashman’s office. His secretary, however, informed Enoch that the man had called in sick for three days straight. Enoch next called Ashman’s home, but there was no answer. More reluctant than ever, nevertheless he left his house in the early evening to look in on his former patron.

  VI.

  Enoch Coffin’s house was located toward the bottom of the hill on Charter Street in Boston’s North End, three stories tall including the attic that contained his studio, fronted in weathered dark shingles that looked like bark, and wedged tightly between taller brick row houses. Directly across the street was the extreme tip of Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, the resting place of Cotton Mather. Enoch enjoyed having quiet neighbors, and wished they were all dead on his side of the street as well.

  He had never liked automobiles, and one of the benefits of city life was the public transportation, but as it happened the Ashmans owned a condominium in one of the brick row houses on narrow, one-way Sheafe Street, only a few blocks away. Thus, Enoch thrust his hands into the pockets of his brown suede jacket, the brim of his hat pulled low as if to shade his eyes though it was already dusk, and set forth on foot.

  When Enoch arrived at the building he rang the bell, which he heard distantly inside, and when no reply came he knocked loudly. Again his efforts went unrewarded, so he tried the door and found it locked. Irritated that Ashman followed his own advice, and feeling that he had at least made an effort to look in on the man, Enoch had started to turn away when he heard the door crack open behind him. He looked back and saw Ashman’s eye at the opening, glittering at him in the darkness that had filled this thin alley-like street. Ashman recognized him from his hat, if not the face it shaded, and held the door wider, gesturing for Enoch to enter. If he spoke, it was too faintly for the artist to hear.

  Ashman escorted Enoch into a parlor, and right away the artist could see that his painting of Shoshana was gone from the wall where it had hung. The light in the room was low. Ashman wore a silk kimono-style robe, but its front was open and he wore nothing underneath. It was not just the shadowed lighting, Enoch was sure, that made the man’s ribs stand out like rungs in a ladder, his pelvis jut as if to tear through his dry yellow skin. The man’s cheeks were sunken shockingly, his sockets pools of ink, and whatever good looks he had retained mere days ago had dissipated. The Hebrew word for truth still showed on his forehead, black with crusted blood.

  “Your office said you were sick,” Enoch said. “Get thee to a doctor, man.”

  “A doctor?” When Ashman spoke, it was in a cracked wheeze. “It isn’t illness at work in me, or even grief, and you know that, Enoch; I can see it in your face. It’s your black magic at work in me.”

  “I performed no black magic on you. I took pity on you with a little nonsense – no more.”

  “You pity me, do you?” Ashman sounded like he wanted to sob but hadn’t the strength. “Everything is just material for your art, isn’t it? Love. Blood. The soul. Just things you take and use without regard for their source.”

  “What can I do to help you?”

  “It’s that statue in your den of sin, isn’t it?”

  “You didn’t mention it before.”

  “But I understand now. I see that wire figure in my dreams. It turns its empty head toward me, and looks at me without a face, and reaches out to me. I know what it wants. It wants my flesh.”

  Enoch could say nothing to deny Ashman’s words.

  Ashman continued, “What can you do for me, you ask? You can destroy that monstrosity.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t, or you refuse?”

  “I refuse to destroy my art.”

  “Then you’ll destroy me.”

  “Nonsense. I’ll take you to a doctor myself. Come and stay with me until you’re well. Sleep and food will do you good, and I’ll keep you away from the drink that’s turning your mind to mush.”

  Ashman chuckled, a sound like broken bones clattering in his throat. “Ah, good doctor Enoch. Always the best of friends!” He gestured to the wounds on his forehead. “I’m Jewish, so I know that a golem is brought to life with this inscription. But do you also know how to shut the golem down? You erase one of these symbols and change the word ‘truth’ to the word ‘death.’ Did you know that part, too, Enoch? Did you?”

  “I told you, it was only meant as play.”

  “Play, hm?” Ashman dipped into the shadows beside a sofa, and when he straightened he held a shotgun in both hands.

  Enoch took a step back. “Will, don’t be crude – this is beneath you.”

  “Home defense,” Ashman explained. “To protect my art collection, of course.”

  “You know I can’t destroy my artwork, but I’ll help you in any way I can.”

  “Well, I admire your dedication to your craft. I guess you not only value it above the lives of your friends, but above your own life as well. Then the only other way you can help me is to get out. Get out, Enoch. You’ve cursed me enough.”

  “Will…”

  “Go!” Ashman rasped, thrusting the shotgun barrel toward him.

  So Enoch Coffin backed out of the room, and Ashman didn’t follow. Before he let himself out into the narrow brick chasm of Sheafe Street, Enoch heard a pitiful wailing sound come from within the depths of Will Ashman’s home, and its strange familiarity made him shudder.

  VII.

  The creature poised in the center of the attic studio, thin as a weirdly anthropomorphic greyhound and crouched as if to spring upon its prey, was now fully clothed in its meager flesh of clay. Except, of course, for the face. Even the back of the misshapen, hairless head was covered, but where a face should have been there was still only a gaping, empty hole. A void.

  Yet last night, Enoch had stood upon and crushed the penultimate block; the last block before the one to which this unta
med aspect of the Faceless God had been exiled, stranded as if on a lonely island in that former archipelago of clay.

  Tonight, Enoch Coffin was determined, when he sent his consciousness, his vital essence – his very spirit -- into that realm of mist, he would join the avatar on the same block it perched upon. Surely it couldn’t deny him. In that imprisoning pocket universe he had demonstrated the power of a god himself. It had nowhere to flee when he reached out to unveil the howling thing’s visage.

  As he sat at his worktable with a blood-impregnated lump of clay resting before him, however, and began the mental exercises for sending his astral self into the beyond, he found himself distracted as if an insect buzzed at his ear. That nagging insect was Will Ashman. He hadn’t heard from Ashman since he had gone to his home several days earlier, and he had made no further effort to contact the man himself, either. Enoch had tried to help the poor fool, and Ashman had rejected him. What more could he do for him -- aside from destroying his art, which again was out of the question?

  Irritated, Enoch tried to put the man out of his thoughts, and then to put irritation out of his thoughts as well. He must obtain a clarity of focus, a purity of concentration and purpose. Distraction wouldn’t do, not when the object of his quest was so close he could almost touch it.

  VIII.

  Mist billowed around him, so thick it was as if he were blindfolded, and he felt that he shouldn’t move an inch lest he step off the platform upon which he had found himself and plummet. But plummet where? What lay below him? Perhaps only a yawning infinity of nothingness. Nothing but this white ethereal fog.

  Then came that howl, that despairing wail of unfathomable pain, and even though it shocked Enoch – particularly since it originated from directly in front of him – at the same time it oriented and grounded him. The terrible cry even seemed to dispel the mist that separated him from its source. As the fog parted like ectoplasmic curtains, the creature was revealed hunkering just a few paces in front of him.

  The avatar was not colossal after all, but only the size of a man. Or was he the size of a god, himself? It rested on all fours, the bony tips of its long fingers curled into the very material of the greenish-gray block they shared.

  The thing’s cry was sustained in a single ear-shattering, mind-blasting note of suffering. Under the bandages that completely obscured the front of its ovoid head, there was an elongated depression that was possibly a mouth gaping impossibly wide. The gauze was stretched across this opening like the skin of a drum, and it vibrated with the beast’s noise. Furthermore, whereas on his most recent visits the gauze had only been splotched with blood, now the entire front of the bandages had been soaked through with dark red ichor.

  Enoch had been riding on increasing waves of confidence each time he ventured into this little oblivion that had been created to hold the beast, but now that he was only steps away from it he felt as close to a feeling of fear as he would ever admit to. Who was to say the entity would indeed be as cowed and humbled as he had imagined it would be, once he stood directly before it, as if it might view him as its new master?

  And now, too, hadn’t he thoroughly freed it from its bonds? If it didn’t destroy him, might it at the very least spring past him, finally liberated, and plunge through the mist into a different plane? Perhaps even the plane in which Enoch’s own reality existed? If the beast escaped now because of him, would the Faceless God that had caged it here seek to punish him? Imprison him, next, in his own little oblivion?

  He had come too far to worry about that now; the time for doubt had gone, back when he crushed that first block engraved with its binding spell. And the best way to deal with his fear of the creature was to ignore that fear altogether. So before his nervousness could increase, and his resolve waver, Enoch Coffin strode boldly forward, reached out his hand toward the bandage wound around the head of the skeletal being, and wrenched it away in one sharp motion.

  With the blood-saturated bandages drooping from his hand like a flayed skin, Enoch Coffin stared at the visage revealed before him and cried out, “No! No!”

  But it wasn’t horror that had made him cry out, cry out so that the creature’s own howl abruptly ceased and his took its place. No, it was anger he felt. Fury at being cheated of his prize.

  He had hoped to prove that the Faceless God, at least in this bastard incarnation, did indeed possess a face but that no mortal had ever glimpsed it before. So, it was a face he had anticipated uncovering. But not this face.

  Back in his studio he had been distracted. His focus had been compromised. He had polluted the manifestation of this realm with his distorted vision, just as his friend’s blood had polluted the clay and not enhanced it after all.

  For the countenance that he had revealed, staring back at him with hopeless eyes in a shockingly skeletal yet still recognizable face, a face with the Hebrew word for “death” inscribed on its forehead, was that of his friend Will Ashman.

  IX.

  Enoch Coffin was wrenched so abruptly from the fog-filled purgatory that he had to sit at his worktable for a while until he felt less feeble and nauseated. From the corner of his eye, the nearly finished sculpture appeared to twist toward him slightly on its pedestal, but when he looked at it directly it was still, of course.

  When he had his strength back he rose, but with uncertainty. Should he try calling? And if there were no answer, go to Sheafe Street in person? It was too late to call his friend’s place of work. At last, Enoch decided to give an innocent-sounding call to the police.

  “I’m concerned about my friend, Will Ashman,” he explained to a detective he was finally transferred to. “I know he’s been despondent over the recent suicide of his wife, and he hasn’t answered my calls in days.”

  “Yeah, Ashman – on Sheafe Street, right?”

  “Yes, that’s him.” Enoch was not surprised that the detective knew Will Ashman’s name, or where he lived, and yet he had to know…

  “I’m sorry to tell you, sir, but your friend committed suicide, too, a couple nights ago.”

  The phone to his ear, Enoch turned his body to face toward the clay gargoyle again. “Oh Will. Poor, poor Will.” He sighed. “How did he do it?”

  “You really want to know?” said the policeman. “It was a shotgun. Must’ve put the barrel under his chin. The guys who responded to the call said he blew his whole face right off.”

  Enoch nodded, staring into the abyss that was the visage of the unfinished statue, and knowing that it would never be finished. In fact, just moments after he completed his phone call, Enoch Coffin set about destroying the tainted piece of artwork altogether.

  Beneath Arkham

  I.

  (From the journal of Mona Malais)

  We walked through the queer New England fog that had descended over Hangman’s Hill and entered the forlorn area of Old Wooded Graveyard. It’s funny, the way that fog can illuminate objects rather than conceal them – or maybe it’s just Arkham fog that has such capability. Various pale tombstones almost shimmered as we passed them, although most were so ancient that the names of those buried beneath had been erased by time and the elements. I loved the place and dreamed of it always, and I had made arrangements with some sinister chums that my ashes would be interred here illegally, but I rarely came here at night because it was a place of danger. I watched Enoch as he drifted through the fog like some solid manifestation of a dream – he never looked like he belonged completely to the realm of reality. He moved differently than other people, in a way that is impossible to explain, and here he moved like smoke among the tombs, his eyes shining.

  “Is it as you dreamed it?” I asked.

  “No, in my dream there was an intense…yearning in the air – or maybe it oozed from underground, an unwholesome hunger.” I watched as he held out his arms and moved his large hands through the air as if they were implements of detection with which he could sense unseen things. “It was the appetite of the Other, but I can’t feel it now. We own sen
ses in dream-life that aren’t within us in this mundane reality.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I countered as I raised my hands and tried to grasp the thing we sought. “The waking brain may function differently, but it still holds the elements it may possess in dreaming. I’ve had this recurring dream, although it feels more like a compulsion really, to come to this place and dig into the ground. In my dream I lift something from a tiny cavity in the earth, but I always wake up before I can see what it is I’ve found. And now you tell me that since you’ve been in Arkham you’ve had a similar dream, even though you’re entirely ignorant of Arkham’s dark sites. So here we are, in search of the unknown.”

  He stood suddenly before me, very close. “We need to pool our resources, my dear.” His heavy breath was sour, like the fog, and a new light had infested his eyes. I studied the face in which those blue eyes were set, the features of which were very masculine, except for the womanly mouth. To have him so close and breathing on me was thrilling, but more exciting still was the arcane power that I could sense pumping in his blood, a contagion with which I was intimate. Turning away from him, I raised my hands over the graveyard ground and spilled my mind into that sod. I sensed the buried thing. I fell to the earth, and Enoch fell with me, and together our frantic hands clawed into the dirt and formed a pit, until my hand touched the small metal box. Enoch wanted to disinter the object, but I pushed his hands away and clutched the box alone as I told my companion to erect himself. He rose in the fog, his eyes shimmering. I lifted the container out of our pit and placed it into Enoch’s anxious hands. I actually thought he was going to drool as he made an uncouth sound that might have been a chortle.