Encounters with Enoch Coffin Read online

  “She?”

  “The previous owner. Your lover? Mother?”

  “No, it’s none of mine.”

  “But she’s followed you here, can’t you smell her? She reeks like moist cold clay. I thought it was you, but your only stench is your nasty breath. She’s here, tugging.”

  “Why are you here?” His question came suddenly from him and surprised her.

  She shook her head and moved away, going to gaze out the window at the moon.

  “What brought you to my room tonight?”

  “I have a little yen for danger and thought maybe I’d find it here. God, I’m bored. My brother likes to pretend that it was his idea to bring you into our realm, but the inspiration was all mine. He described your painting of our ancestral tree, and I’m curious as to what inspired your interest.”

  “A friend in Arkham did some paintings of it when she was very young, and they caught my fancy when she showed some few of them in Boston. She explained the legend of your family, the legend that you seem not to want to be conjoined to. After hearing your intriguing myth, it was startling to find Randolph at my Boston opening. And then he came to me, with his queer request.” His smile, when he offered it to her, was a wicked thing. “Danger, if that’s what you require, is easily applied. Rise, Rebecca, and sit here on my bed as I move to kneel before you. No, don’t resist me as I lift your length of dress. There. Ah, your legs are smooth.”

  Her sudden laughter was strident. “You were expecting me to be some kind of missing link? The servants have told me some of the stupid legends concerning me in town, of how I’m bent and brutalized and bestial, a hobgoblin who hides from society. No, my face is my one ‘misfortune.’ Are you satisfied with my legs?” She moved one leg slightly toward him so as to allow her toes to frolic with his prick.

  “They’re nice, but I don’t want to admire them. I’m going to mar them. Do you enjoy pain?”

  “I’ve rarely experienced physical pain, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Ah, but mental anguish is another matter.”

  “No. I’m too complacent to care what people think of me, and we are now so secluded that the other world rarely touches us. My life isn’t hot or cold – just very bland and safe. What’s that?”

  “It’s my exacto knife – an artistic implement. Yes, it’s deadly sharp, don’t press your finger too keenly against the blade. The aluminum handle is quite solid and I work it deftly, as you see. Ready? Let me just recall your brother’s limb.” The artist closed his eyes and conjured an image in his brain, and it always thrilled him that his memory was so keen and its images so lucid. Enoch pressed the blade’s point against the skin of the woman’s leg and, with eyes still shut, began to etch. Rebecca made no sound but watched the sigil that began to form in her flesh, a replica of one of the esoteric symbols that had been carved into her brother’s faux leg. She watched, as Enoch took a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and dabbed at the blood that began to spill down her limb, and then he kissed the aesthetic wound and licked the residue of blood away, revealing the symbolic white scar. “Grab some of those Kleenexes or whatever they are from that sachet and press one here while I work.”

  The artist continued his labor until there were three nice scars etched into the woman’s leg. Rebecca ran one hand over the pale etchings and then lifted both hands to her veils and smoothed them. “What are you laughing about?” she queried.

  “You and your brother pretend to have no interest in your sinister ancestry, and yet you are both so infested by it. Why do you pretend to disown it?”

  “I don’t, that’s him, and he’s so boring about it. He’s grown conceited since his book was published. I think he secretly wants to go into the world and ‘be’ someone, but then the idea frightens him, we’ve been so out of the world our entire lives.” She strolled past him and went to a bell pull, which she yanked, and soon an elderly man crept into the room, looking surprised to find his mistress in the nude stranger’s boudoir. “Prepare the lighting in the grotto, Upton. That’s all.” The gentleman genuflected and escaped the room.

  “Put some clothes on, I’m going to take you on a little journey.” Then she, too, stepped out of the room and haunted the hallway as he quickly dressed. Stepping from the room, he stopped and gazed at the strange woman in her black attire and veils. She did not look at him as she raised her hand and motioned like some eerie harbinger that ached to announce some secret thing. He followed her quietly down the stairs and through a dusty hallway, and then through a doorway that led to a flight of rough stone steps that took them into a place beneath Arkham’s earth. Enoch noticed the odd blue lights that had, here and there, been embedded into the rough-hewn walls of rock, supplying feeble light. The place to which he was led was indeed a small grotto, but instead of being filled with religious icons he saw that it contained a number of very ancient-looking spinning wheels, all of which were coated with filigrees of dusty webs. The dirt floor looked smooth, but some portion of it must have been recently dislodged, for Enoch smelled a nasty residue of upturned earth. He listened as, standing close behind him, the young woman inhaled the stench as well.

  “What is this place?” he asked her, placing a hand upon the gritty surface of the spinning wheel that was nearest him.

  “I come from a family of weavers, witches who made their own clothing into which they embedded signs and sigils.” She floated to one wheel that looked less antique than the others. “My mother used this to make my gowns, lots and lots of them that would see me into maturity, gowns into which she sewed protective charms. She must have been plotting her suicide even then. It was she, you see, who – but that’s not important. Funny, she didn’t teach me the art of the wheel, as has been our ancestral tradition. But I taught myself a bit of it.”

  Enoch watched as she sat at the wheel and began to work it, but he couldn’t see any material with which she labored. And then he noticed the shadow on the floor of earth – or, rather, the shadow that seemed to swim just beneath the surface of hard sod. And he smelled the increasing stench of death’s debris that accompanied the moving form, the silhouette that wound around Rebecca’s form and touched what might have been a phantom’s head to the charm that Enoch had given the young woman. Ghastly laughter, soft and low, issued from the face concealed behind its veils as Rebecca shuddered and rose, and he tried to ascertain the thing that she held onto so delicately, her work of weaving. As she held it before him he thought it was a curious mask composed of cobwebs and shadow, and he did not move as Rebecca pressed the topmost portion of it to his temple and let the ghostly fabric fall so that it covered his face. No, he did not move, except to shudder slightly as the monster moved her hands to her own veils, which she lifted so as to reveal her face, the unholy mouth of which she pressed against Enoch’s own.

  IV.

  They scuttled to him through web of dreaming, the denizens of the portraits on the stairway of the great house; and they seemed to split their mouths as if in calling, yet it was not the artist they sought. Pale fog, spilled from phantom mouths, filled his dream with rotten reek. The phantom portraits sank from sight as Enoch rose from slumber. He slipped into stained work clothes and strolled down to the lower level, to the neglected and unfinished conservatory near the back of the manse. It was there that Enoch had wanted to paint the lady’s portrait, for the light was very good, and the inoperative fountain in the middle of the room would serve as a baroque background before which Rebecca could pose. Dirt and cobwebs were everywhere, and the room’s floor was smooth packed earth onto which the artist had set up his easel and stool. The morning light was a soft haze that filtered through the many windows and gently warmed him; he raised his face to it, smiled and shut his eyes as an aged servant crept into the room with a tray of tea and buttered scones. The raisins and cinnamon in the scones proved a pleasant counter to the room’s rancid air and odious smells. The stale, lifeless odors of the place reminded Enoch of his fantastic dream and gave him pause. When
at last he opened his eyes his gaze met that of Randolph’s.

  “I hate this place,” the young man whispered as he limped to the tray and took up half a scone. “Haven’t been in here since that final leg was adjusted.”

  “What?” The artist watched as the lad lumbered to an oblong box, coffin-shaped, that sat on the floor of dust and dirt. Undoing a latch, Randolph opened the container’s lid, and going to stand beside the boy Enoch saw the assembly of artificial limbs of various sizes. Enoch’s large hand took up one prosthesis and held it to the room’s good light, and he ran his other hand over the symbols chiseled thereon; and then, strangely, he tilted his head to the limb, kissed it and uttered weird words. The boy beside him gasped. “What?”

  Randolph had gone very white, but his eyes were dark and troubled. “I – thought I felt something – on my limb. Something tugged it…” He then seemed to hear what he was saying and laughed unconvincingly. “I think the wretched ventilation of this lair is getting to me.” But then his eyes looked startled again as a figure glided silently into the conservatory. She was dressed in the maroon gown that Enoch had brought for her to pose in, and her face was unconcealed. The ruddy relic that had been found beneath cemetery sod was worn so that it rested at her bosom. Enoch’s eyes slid to observe the brother, and it was obvious that Randolph had not seen his sister unveiled for a very long time, if ever, his expression of horror was so intense.

  Rebecca laughed at the expression on her brother’s face. “Behold the beast,” she sang as Enoch stepped to her and took up her naked hand to kiss. The flesh he pressed against his lips was soft and firm, and he smiled as he turned that hand over so as to play a finger through the fur that sprouted from its palm. Yet the artist could not keep his gaze from rising so as to linger over the creature’s monstrous pate, and yet to observe it was to experience an overwhelming vertigo and sharp pain behind the eyes. The contour of her enlarged square head was not fixed but rather subtly altered in outline, shrinking and expanding. The wide mouth could not comfortably fit over the enlarged flat teeth and portions of the lips had been continually chewed into. The black eyes were liquid pools sunk into pits of blue and purple flesh. The mouth exhaled thick breath. “Come, sirrah,” the fiend commanded. “Come kiss me sweet and twenty.” Enoch made a monstrous sound as he took Rebecca into his arm and smashed their mouths together. When he moved his lips away he could taste the blood that spilled from where they had been bitten. He tried to gaze at the grotesque face before him, but the way its shape seemed to seethe with subtle reshaping hurt his eyes. “I’ve forgotten my effect,” she whispered. “Does it give you pain to look on me?”

  “Yes, delectable pain. My eyes, mostly. Looking on you is like peeping past some preposterous alien dimension into which one might plunder. You’re ghastly.”

  The young creature howled merriment. “It will be a challenge, then, to paint me. You were going to do just a charcoal outline this morning, yes?” She looked away from him to her brother and the crate beside him. “Ah, brother – your remnants. I don’t see the one I damaged not too long ago, when I came at you with that little hatchet, remember? You were taunting me by placing a shawl over your head and aping my veils. I cured your cruelty that day, brother.” She turned her sable eyes to Enoch. “Do you understand this gift you’ve given me?”

  “I realized that the sigils had been first applied to a sentient limb, the living tree. This is where your sire’s divorce from dark arts did him an injustice. But of course he wasn’t your father in fact, as you are an element of the Goat with a Thousand Young. Perhaps that’s what initially triggered his antipathy toward alchemy, pathetic mortal jealousy. He recognized the potency of the sigil’s magick and followed an ancestral instinct that led him to carving them on his son’s artificial limbs, not understanding they would be impotent.”

  Rebecca sighed happily. “They are potent indeed.”

  “What the hell are you two babbling about?”

  “No, no, young Master,” Enoch remonstrated. “There is no confusion in our discourse. We know the power of esoteric language, and its purpose. We comprehend the power of occult sigils etched onto a living surface, such as the daemon tree from which your false limbs have been fabricated. And yet your pappy was not completely mistaken – for alchemy can often transform one thing into another. Water becomes wine. Copper shines as gold. Extinction rises as existence.”

  “Your slices into my skin have spilled ability to my clumsy tongue,” the young mistress sighed. “I felt the tugging in my brain earlier, you must have spoken the sigils for one brief moment. Let me utter them now, at length.” She opened her mouth and began to chant, and as she did so she lifted the hem of her gown so as to expose the etchings on her leg, those living symbols that pulsed as conscious scars. She ignored her brother’s sudden screams as he tumbled to the ground and writhed. Enoch watched as the objects inside the oblong box next to which Randolph collapsed began to tremble. The boy did not seem to notice, for he was too occupied with ripping his ersatz appendage from where it was fastened to his form. Randolph finally freed his false leg and threw it from him, and Enoch chortled as he watched the surface of the wooden leg ripple and grow supple. The crate finally exploded as its contents, pulsing with resurrection, crept toward the boy’s discarded leg. Randolph stifled his screams as he watched in horror at the transformed legs that began to conjoin and spread roots into the earth. Unable to stand, he pushed away along the dirty ground, toward the young woman who cooed at him and held out her sisterly arms. Weeping and confused, the boy dragged himself to her and buried his face into the folds of her gown. Rebecca wove her fingers into his hair and then closed them, tightly.

  “Water into wine,” the woman sighed and shuddered. “Extinction writhes.”

  The smell came then, powerfully, from beneath the Arkham earth. Phantom cracks seemed to split sections of the ground, and from those crevices obscure forms began to lift, dark ambiguous fiends. A sound of buried rhythm pulsed from some deep place, and Enoch watched as the relic worn at the young woman’s breast shimmered faintly in time to daemonic pulsation. The shadows rose and shaped themselves playfully into the portraits that lined the stairway of the mansion, the phantoms that had visited Enoch in vision. Rebecca laughed as her wide malformed nostrils sucked in the fetid aroma of ancient upturned sod in which rank things had been interred. One specter especially caught Enoch’s attention, a woman who shared Randolph’s beauty yet whose face was scarred with sorrow, a woman who wore at her bosom a relic identical to that which now adorned her daughter.

  Enoch watched as the apparitions drifted around the entity of conjoined limbs that had now rooted into the earth and lifted as single entity, its symbols pulsing as sentient white scars upon its husk. He glanced at the magnificent woman as her claws continued to dig into her brother’s scalp, from which minute streams of blood began to leak. And then the diabolic artist lay upon his stomach and began to sketch Rebecca’s portrait in the dust.

  Spectral Evidence

  I.

  Enoch Coffin disliked two things about the “Witch City,” as Salem, Massachusetts referred to itself for the sake of tourism. One was that the city had indeed made witchcraft a source of fame, when that fame was built upon the execution of twenty innocent people. The other thing that soured him was that in more recent times Salem had become infested with people only too eager to identify themselves as witches, who were to Enoch’s mind no more witches than those innocents had been. Fakers, posers, goths, eccentrics. Even earnest and devoted pagans, whom he had more respect for, didn’t seem to understand the sorts of witchcraft he himself had become familiar with, and even utilized, in his travels and in his art. But it wasn’t that he found no charm in the city’s year-round Halloween atmosphere, however tacky it might be. How could someone with his aesthetics be totally unmoved by a city that festooned and bedecked itself with images of death, the macabre, the supernatural? No, things were not always black or white. Not even when it came to ma
gic.

  Enoch didn’t care for cars and avoided driving when he could. North Station was an acceptable distance on foot from his home in the North End of Boston, and from North Station it was only a thirty-minute ride by train to Salem. Along the way, he sketched with a technical pen on a pad open across his knees. His model was an obese man, head shaved entirely bald, seated across the aisle from him, asleep with his head tilted back and mouth gaping wide. Enoch portrayed a monstrous old tree growing from the man’s mouth, from which hung a crop of fruit, each one of them a miniature version of the sleeping man’s face.

  Bah -- uninspired, but maybe he could add it to his selection of pieces on display at his destination today; an art show in Salem limited to the month of October, called Gallery of the Grotesque. He hadn’t visited this place again since he had delivered his pieces to be included in the exhibit, and upon that occasion he had been sorry to even set foot a single time within its rented space. A series of linked rooms, their walls covered with dragons and vampires, zombies and more vampires. At first glance he had felt humiliated to be associated with it. But sometimes a balance had to be struck between art and commerce, and since Enoch was careful how he rationed the inheritance he primarily lived on, his art by necessity supplied an irregular source of additional income.

  He hadn’t really expected any of his pieces at the Gallery of the Grotesque to sell, the way he had priced them -- though he would be damned if he underpriced them -- but one had. And this was the reason for his return to Salem today. The buyer wanted to take possession of the artwork now, rather than wait for the exhibit to end next week, on Halloween. Furthermore, the man wanted to pay Enoch in person, so that he might meet face-to-face the artist who had so impressed him.