Gathered Dust and Others Read online

  Yon Baleful God

  How pale the sapphire of the central night,

  Wherein the stars turn grey.

  –Clark Ashton Smith

  I sat within a moonlit glade on a summer’s night. The air was very still, and the starlight over Sesqua Valley seemed sad and pale. I was staring into that melancholy light when, from out of woodland shadow, a figure limped toward me. I took in his lean disheveled form, the shock of unruly hair, the emaciated face. How odd that the moon’s glow played strangely on one of his eyes. He knelt in front of me and bent his mouth to mine. The taste of his kiss was familiar. I pulled him to the ground and made love to his throat, his mouth – his chilly cheek. Lifting my head, I looked more closely at the pale dead eye that had replaced his socket’s living orb.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s something I had fashioned in Prague. Oh, Adam, I have found the lair of the forgotten god! I discovered the place where innocence was slaughtered in his name. I found the place where uncanny gems were offered to his mystery. I took one such gem and had it shaped so as to replace the eye that I have sacrificed in his name. There it is, snug in my socket, the jewel that he loved to look at, the surface of which caught his reflection in flickering torch light. His shadow became a living stain that adhered to the gemstone I had purloined. Look closely at that ornament, my love, and see the wonder that it adds unto me. Gaze deeply into its surface, Adam, and you will see him.”

  I touched the stiff and chilly flesh that was nearest to the artificial eye. I leaned nearer to that flesh and kissed it with my hot mouth. My lips touched the jewel’s smooth surface. When I lifted my head and gazed steadfastly at that pale orb, I saw within it a swirling shadow that slowly took on form. I saw the visage that pierced that shadow with its majesty, that broke through and gazed at me with inhuman eyes. My lover raised his mouth to my ear and whispered one unholy name.

  “Tsathoggua.”

  # # # # # # #

  That night, in bed, he spoke of forgotten deities, gods formed in chaos beyond the known dimensions; things that pulsed in alien spaces between the stars. I listened, enthralled. We had spoken often of such things. I had shown him books and sculptures, bas-reliefs and tiaras on which were depicted the likenesses of unimaginable things. He wore himself out with talking that night. The pain in his injured leg began to throb. I held him in my arms and sang him to sleep. His head pressed against my chest, and the texture of the flesh near to the daemonic eye chilled me to my heart. That cold sensation slowed the pounding of my organ and seemed to seep into my veins, where it flowed toward my brain and blessed me with unholy vision. I squatted within a vaulted chamber. Strewn before me were the dry bones of offerings devoured long ago. In lethargy I sat and dreamed, recalling a time when I had known the succulent taste of sacrifice. Near to me was the dry husk of one long-dead offering, its skeletal hand stretched toward me. Within the palm of bone were pale gems that had been offered in obsequious veneration. I discerned upon their smooth surface my hoary reflection. I gazed for an eternity at the semblance of a forgotten god. And when at last I shut my weary eyes, I dreamt of sacrifice, of cindery human substance. And when I awakened it was to the scent of living flesh, which I but vaguely recalled. I gazed at the empty palm of bone, from which my gems had been pilfered. Sniffing air, I found a fragrance of mortal flesh and tangy blood. It brought to my senses a memory of sacrificial slaughter.

  And then the scene melted and became dark. I lay within a shadowed chamber with my lover in my arms, his throat pressed against my mouth. I sucked at his salty flesh and bit into it. He moaned softly as I moved my tongue into the new wound. Outdoors, the night was haunted by the undulate song of numberless toads.

  # # # # # # # # #

  He awakened me before dawn and took my hand. Naked, we walked into woodland, to a ring of sacrificial stones. Legend told that the poet and sculpture William Davis Manly has chiseled the large rocks into the likenesses of things seen in disturbed dreaming, faces that called for blood and death. I had brought my lover to this place when first I lured him to Sesqua Valley and taught him our ways. He had been a dreamy boy, lonely and forsaken by those he loved and on whom he had depended. I nurtured his wounded psyche and taught him of the Old Ones who would not desert him. He did not disappoint me. Alone, he journeyed to the places outside the valley where he could find the arcane things. Now he had returned, to share with me the lore that had educated him.

  Together we knelt within the ring of stones, and he whispered to me the unwholesome name. “Tsathoggua. I can see him, waiting patiently for when the stars come right and he will grow strong and liberated. Ah, how he hungers for cosmic freedom, to seep toward starlight and find his home. But he is weak – only sacrifice will make him strong. Let us assist him, Adam. Look, this discarded stone here, it’s heavy and will do the trick. Hold it high above my head as I lay down my life for the thing that begs for veneration. Let us offer him a new sacrifice, my love.”

  I took the heavy stone from his hands as he reclined upon the ground. His smile was a beautiful thing. I took in his handsome face and then smashed that beloved visage with the weighty rock. Sighing, I took from the remains of his pulp the filthy gem that had usurped a living eye. I gazed hard at the shadow within its pale surface and saw the bestial face that smiled.

  Time of Twilight

  (For Quentin Crisp)

  The small apartment smelled of age. A single window allowed a partial view of a city bathed in mellow late afternoon sunlight. I went to that window and watched the setting sun as the elderly man removed his velvet hat and jacket, his scarf of white silk, his battered cloth shoes. I turned and watched as he stopped before a mirror so as to reapply lipstick to his painted face. He wore his withered beauty well. “This is a wonderful rouge,” he told me, “moist and creamy, and the color stays vibrant for hours. Would you care to try it?”

  I laughed. “No thank you.”

  “Ah, well; your lips wear youth’s beauty, but at my age I need assistance. Not that I wish to look young. I’ve had my sunlit years of golden youth. I’m rather glad to be rid of them. The charm of old age is that one may overact appallingly. One is free of youthful vanity.”

  “Oscar Wilde would disagree. What did he once write, that the tragedy of old age is that one is young?”

  He tossed to me a splenetic frown. “He never lived to see fifty. I’ve never been in agreement with Mr. Wilde. I doubt that he believed half the things he so cleverly uttered. He was performing for an audience that would eventually destroy him, poor sod. He expired because society turned its back to him. I prefer honest rebels, which is why I frequent the youthful society at the club where I encountered you. I see there such honest wildness, an anarchy that I can believe in.”

  “And were you a wild young thing?”

  “I was a rebel, absolutely. In my day it was a scandal for a woman to wear crimson nail varnish, unless she was a punk. For a man to do likewise…” He saw his past in daydream, and then swept the memory away. “I had to pay a price, naturally. All wonderful things demand sacrifice.” Joining me at the window, he studied my face in dying light. “You are quite lovely, dear boy. How I adore you young men who dress in black. It’s my favorite shade, is black. Looks very good on you, with your wild hair and wounded eyes. At times I behold such awesome beauty and momentarily mind that I’m so aged.” He stood back some so as to admire my figure. “Now, what does it say on your tight shirt? I can’t quite make it out.”

  “Thanatos.”

  “How grim. Perhaps it is the name of your favorite band?”

  “It’s my profession.”

  Beautifully, he smiled. ”Ah! I thought I recognized you when I saw you gazing at me through that cloud of cigarette smoke. Well, dear me. The oldest profession in the world – next to whoredom, of course. How delightful. You’ve come at last in answer to mumbled prayer. God knows how often I’ve called to you, kneeling in this squalid den. I always knew that you would be shockingly bea
utiful.”

  I sighed. “Mortals usually fear and loathe me. Rarely have I been so adored. You’ve touched me, and in gratitude I shall bestow upon you my most tender kiss.”

  He gazed beyond me into darkening heaven. “Will it be a kiss of oblivion? I couldn’t stand any kind of eternity. Will you grant me shadow absolute?”

  “Certainly.”

  His eyes twinkled. “Joyous day! I am your own.” He knelt before me, and his lovely eyes shimmered like a pair of happy stars. I fell to my knees beside him and let my semblance of flesh slip from me. Rapturously, he gasped. I brushed his mauve hair with hands of bone. His liquid eyes were bright with tears. Oh, those eyes! Lovelier than the prettiest of stars. Leaning to me, he kissed my grin. I caught him as he gasped, and held him close. I felt the fleeting tremors of his heart. Raising to me his weary face, he gazed at me with those alchemical eyes. Yes, I would grant him eternal darkness, but I could not surrender his awesome eyes. I plucked them from his nodding head and thrust them into gathering twilight. They sailed beyond the moon, burning with the beauty of his fading soul. Sighing, I wound myself around him, ushering him into the shadow of my eternal embrace.

  These Deities of Rarest Air

  A Prose-Poem Sequence

  I.

  I press my weakened knee upon the ground and cry the call, for I would know your shadow on my brow, blossoming, and sense the arcane things endow my mundane mind with ceremonial task, rich ritual, the pleasures of daemonic design. I cry for they who come to press mouths upon my eyes, beneath which they sink so as to suck my burning brain from out its dungeon, my smooth skull. Allow me to let loose this essence of mortality that welds me to this world, this earth; then let me crawl into some cosmic place where weakened limbs are démodé, where pangs of fleshy pain are but a jest bequeathed by mirthless gods. I will dance as I eschew oxygen for that other element.

  Yet I, still pressed upon this solid ground, cannot ascend unto yon floating clouds, and my one task is to claw into the mud in which I write your immemorial name, the name that once more I call to those dark clouds with mouth that sucks in the current of this paltry age. I ache to suck a rarer clime, where I can drift as acolyte of smoke among the nightmares of an alien dimension, where earth and its happy doom is but a memory that makes me chuckle into the void – the endless abyss in the gulf of night where I would waft with chilly cosmic tempest that is the exhalation from your maw, that mouth with which you speak my mortal name and claim me as your own.

  II.

  I cannot see the flowers at my feet, the emblems of remembrance at my tomb, for smoke and shadow cloud what once were eyes; but I can sense the soft bouquet of rose and smell the wilted lily’s rank decay. I drift through weightless air on buoyant feet until I find again the gems that were your eyes, jewels that burn with self-substantial fire, ignition that pronounces you a god, embedded in your basalt eidolon. I fall to shattered knee on polished floor of one posthumous place, a floor that is littered by the remembrance of flowers from your once-living devotee. She could not last forever. Had I lips I would moan your name as dark psalm, the name I almost seem to recollect, that once I whispered in the realm of life. Although we both are dead, dread lord, I heard your uncanny call in termination’s dusk, and from my final slumber I awakened, to rise from rotted wood and strata of earth, to you and to a memory of life. I thought in death to become a thing of air, lifted from the elements of time; but I am still a creature of debris, transformed into neglected dust and mud. Like you, I am forgotten and bereft. Like you, I find no solace in the worm. To you I would exhale liturgical utterance and clasp my hands in unholy solitude. Yet I am but a puppet of the grave, animated by your alchemy, and all that I can offer you, dread lord, is veneration of a hollow heart, and veneration from a mouth of filth that falls more apart with each impotent whimper, until I am returned to my filthy bed, where I will worship you if I am able, wrapped with worms.

  III.

  I breathe into the fitful air as the alchemy of consumption has begun, as all my physicality wastes away, as I become an element of air until I am an exhalation lifting to the skies, a vapor in a draft of wind. As I evaporate into the clouds, like some meditation on mortality, I take on the aspect of a whispered word that may, by chance, be nothing but a name, a name that one may whisper in a prayer to some strange thing beyond sane dimension, a power pulsing in-between the stars into which my essence is inhaled. I filter through the clouds now wet with rain, like some forgotten word once writ on water, forgotten by the faces far below that open mouths so as to drink the downpour, mouths that cannot remember me with speaking. And thus I drift in anonymous void, like some sad ghost that has lost its earthly hold, and fly toward the thing that, pulsing, sucks me into nothingness divine. And there I am surrounded by rare sparks, ignition that issues from a flaming throne, where chaos chatters idiotically, and the Strange Dark One offers me a pipe, which taking I press to malformed mouth, so as to join the disturbance that makes the dark air tremble, the psalm of sound that will go on and on, beyond the death of time.

  IV.

  We climb the haunted hill to its highest tip, to one place where memory is entombed beneath the clouds, those clouds that seem to form fantastic beings who watch our secret play. The thing reclines upon the tabletop tomb where once it ate, where once it had been eaten, long ago. Its hollow bones are blanched by burning sun. We remove the dust of time from off the bones with our unhallowed tongues, the dust that is not bitter to the taste; and we remember, vaguely, the flavor of sweet soft flesh, partaken beneath the silent watchful clouds, the flesh on which we dined so long ago, devoured in remembrance of our gods. The book of ritual is clasped in hand of bone, the book he held at time of sacrifice. You take it from his frail fossilized hand as I move my lips to that cavity that was his mouth and housed the tongue that moved with ours in praise to they who dwell above us in the clouds. You take the book of ritual in hand and speak the words that turn the white sun red, as the bones beneath me crumble into dust, as I recline upon the tabletop slate and turn to gaze into daemonic sky as your sweet mouths clamp onto my tissue and pay homage to our gods

  V.

  An arsenical moon, disrobed of clouds, hangs in suicidal sky, and I drink that moon like laudanum and sprinkle into its nectar crushed pearls of starlight. I take that horned moon and slit the wrist of heaven, and smell the seepage of cosmic blood that taints the scent of night. I conjure forth the wind that soughs through dancing trees and sounds like the rustling of purple satin curtains that hide my antics from the dreary crowd. I seep between those curtains and stalk the night in memory of you, Mateo, beneath that vaulted tomb, the sky. I take your spectral hand, my lovely lad, and kiss it with pale lips on which passion has cooled but that remember still your taste. I pray to you, my deity of love, and dance with memory in the lost places one can only find in dream. Sing to me, Mateo, my deity of sorrow, so that I may follow your voice through mortal air, unto a place of ghosts that know nothing of unwanted passion.

  VI.

  I step into the subterranean place and breathe chthonic air that still contains a memory of that which oozed from your infernal prehistoric lungs. I sense the recollection of your home, that darker planet deep in cosmic void, unadorned by glow of moon or star, from which you fell through non-dimensional space and time to sleepy mud beneath our ancient hill. I find it here, upon your obsidian dais, among the jewels that have never known the light of dawn, and marvel at the expert articulation that may be uttered by an artifact. I shine my torch onto your representation, and sense that you recoil from the touch of ersatz illumination that filters artificially through darkness. I kill the light and see you with my senses, as the gems that are my eyes adjust to darkness, wherein I see things in a different fashion, as I suck in air that reeks of your bequeathed diseases; and as I peer into the air of this dimension, the place begins to shape itself anew, until I understand that I now stand within the ebon caverns of N’Kai, in which I bow my altered form, no longer hu
man now but serpentine, and weep your praises with my dying breath.

  VII.

  How queer, these things that one can sense in darkness. It is not imagination; it is not, I fear, even madness; and memory, or its tatters, is a damnation that threatens to grow unambiguous. I recall the scent of morning, mostly sweet and succulent like meadow dew, yet tainted slightly by an indistinct debauch. I remember my first sight of blurry dawn as weighty lids arose, meekly and minutely. There is recollection of muted yet excited voices, of the faces of men that take on solid outline as the light that spills in through high windows caught the features of these fellows. I did not deign to open my eyes too widely, unused as they were to earthly light, nor did I shift as one of the mortals bent over me with a chilly apparatus, one part of which he placed against my chest as its other end was fastened to his ear. How distasteful it was, to be touched and violated; but my limbs proved stiff and heavy, and would not move in protest beneath mortal hands; nor could I split my mouth in protest as a needle was injected yet again into my heart, as something from within that implement flowed through me, something smooth and cool and sinister. Rough mortal hands clutched at me, and I was lifted from the surface on which I reclined, carried some little distance and then dropped into an uncouth pit from which I could discern the fragrance of freshly violated earth. Words, muttered in discouragement and anger, faded, and I sensed that I had been abandoned in the lonesome place.