Gathered Dust and Others Page 7

  The blur of hateful day grew more intense as it blazed from the high wide windows, and the ghouls who were my guardians did not return. More and more, the burning liquid that had been injected into my heart pumped through my veins, and thus I was invigorated. With a sense of doubtful liberation I clutched at the walls of my pit and pushed hands into its sediment, where I found enough of a hold so that I could pull myself onto my knees. My eyes now fully functioned, and with them I scrutinized the floor of earth around me and its other crude pits, some of which were hideously inhabited. There were tables and their implausible instruments, the sight of which brought nagging memory to mind. Of a place where I had labored in stealth, in some secret chamber, combining powders and fluids as I uttered incantations from the Aklo tablets. I saw within my mind’s depths the beings of another realm that had answered my incantations, creatures that were not angelic. These fiends pushed against my moving mouth and stole my mortal exhalation until sensation expired and sentient darkness wove around and through me. Time transformed, and soon I smelled the muted light of new dawn; and lifting my face to that soft light I experienced renewed strength, and crawled out of the shallow indentation into which the ghouls had tossed me. Creeping to a vast wooden vat that squatted on naked earth, I curled my fingers around its rim so as to regain threatened balance; and as I clutched that rim I studied the unnatural blanched pastiness of my hands, soiled as they had been by earth’s debris. I steadied on painful knees and bent over the vat’s wooden rim. I watched the white reflection of the ghastly thing I had become as it wavered in the vat’s liquid, wavered because my shuddering was shaking the wooden tub. I shook because I was a thing that should not – or should no longer – exist. Oh, bleached and bony countenance, what horror you portend, what breach of sanity; for I was a madness out of time, disrupted in my final rest by the fluid that had been injected into my diseased heart. My mouth then found its voice, and I whimpered at my fate.

  Uneasily, I stood. Ungainly, I stalked to a door and shook it from its hinges, then tramped upon it as it crashed onto the ground. Unnaturally, I breathed, and the sound of that exhalation was conjoined with a groan of unutterable misery. I walked until the yellow sky darkened and a bloated moon appeared, a fungal chimera deep within an abyss of night. I walked instinctively, until I found the plot from which I had been robbed. The ground of my grave had been smoothed, its desecration concealed. I tried to speak the name that had been etched onto my tombstone, but naught slipped from my mouth except a gag of woe. When I dropped onto the ground, my fingers found their way homeward into the earth. The smell of displaced sod began to soothe me, and as I worked I tried to sing a memory of magick that was one portion of the Aklo formulae with which, in other existence, I communed with deities of rarest air. And the sound of my strangled voice lifted to the fungal moon, which was soon camouflaged by shapes that were not clouds, fiends that fell to me. They wove around and through me as I reclined within my new-made pit, as I pulled the displaced silt over me, until it covered me completely.

  VIII.

  Looking inward, she saw naught but phantoms – fiends that, churning, laced her heart with doom. She did not mind that this was so; for she had wearied of humanity and its unhappy world, where in delusion its inhabitants danced and warbled of nothing beneath their expiring sun. She loathed them and their senseless frolic, and hated the way their sunlit faces condemned her malcontent. They could never comprehend her, and thus she felt kinship with fiends alone, those things of smoke and madness that churned around her brain and sank into her heart, where they taught that organ deadlier palpitation. And thus she secreted herself in one lonesome place, a place of death where happy mortals were disinclined to play; and there she danced with vines of willow trees and sang to startled bats, and answered the baying that drifted to her on the midnight wind, the howling of some unearthly thing that hungered for blood and tears. She danced, accompanied by her shadowed fiends, those comrades that melted into her heart and taught it deceleration, an alien palpitation that pulsed inside her throat and lifted to the back of her eyes, her eyes to which were revealed an obscure realm where dreams festered and became merrily diseased.

  She floated on daemoniac tempest which lifted her to a high wall, on which she balanced beneath a foggy violet welkin; and through mists that were the miasmal pants of devils she watched one star, the name of which she might once have known but had forgotten, and thus she could not call to it. Yet still its dim refraction bent the air above her so that shadows, falling, took her hands and guided her along the wall, until they reached a place where a sluggish river wound its lethargic way. Her shadows held her as she jumped from off the wall and landed near the bridge that crossed the river, could cross so as to journey to the distant paddock beneath a violet heaven, and to the antediluvian tower of blanched stone that tilted over that eerie meadow. She skipped across the bridge and danced toward the tower, which rose from earth like some prehistoric relic of bone; and she marveled at how that tower shimmered beneath the violet heaven, as if its substance drank the illumination that leaked from the daemon-star. She smiled and kissed the tower’s rock, and entered the arched threshold that led within the edifice, to circular steps that rose toward violet heaven and its single star. She climbed to the upper reaches and found one large and lonely window, through which she leaned toward chill infinity; and as she scanned the sky her inner-fiends ceased their churning and spilled from out her eyes, leaking into the violet abyss above her, toward the daemon-star, that sphere from which there fell one silver beam that served as path into the gulf of night. And on that path she stepped, dancing toward the star that diffused with the shadows of her fiends, in whose quiet conclave she would find rare dreams and darkness eternal.

  IX.

  Where can I learn the doctrine of the mask? I seem to sense it in voltage of the sky, where fissures of fire split the gulf of night and almost spell your name. I watch the electric show as those streams of lightning fall toward the expanse of water into which I wade, the lightning that flashes so as to reveal your black visage there, where once a moon arose. Innsmouth, with her unnumbered crimes, sleeps behind me. I walk among the antique wooden buoys, those markers on which curious hand-carved faces watch my stride. The green illumination of your eyes is reflected on the water through which I amble, the water that tingles with the kiss of your electric show. Peering into the depths, I see the other eyes of deep things far below, and I see the mouths below those eyes that would part and drag me under with their siren song. Have you devoured the moon, that mistress of the tides? Your black façade is like a magnet to my blood, and I pulled deeper there, into the depths, where your cruel visage is reflected. It drifts to me, on the water, your mask of manifestation; and I would lift it to me, but the liquid of which it is composed spills through my fingers. How can I don the doctrine of your mask and be your child? That is my deepest dream. Perhaps if I sink beneath the surface, just below your veneer of mockery, I can then lift upward, out of water, with your features melted into mine own. But that is a mistake; for as I sink beneath the surface, I hear at last the liquid song of they who hunger for my mortal soul. Their clamor rises, claiming me as a whirlpool of inhuman echo. And you, above, smile and scorn, at the center of the liquid vortex, adored by the chiseled faces of the antique buoys.

  X.

  I thought to adore you, beast of the godless valley, and sing your psalms to haunted shadow – a haunting sound. I am intoxicated by your scent, the cloying sweetness that is a manifestation of this realm, a fragrance that is embedded in your hair, your hands, your mouth. Oh, the hunger you inspire, the rush of blood and quake of bones. Yet you allow me to worship from a distance only, after your initial seduction; and your indifference serves to flame my need, so that I fall onto my knees among the haunted shadow and sink my fingers into the soil that shares your scent. I lift that mud and wash it over my visage, and wear it as a mask of fragrant filth; and that is when you kneel before me, and smile with silver eyes as yo
u whisper secrets to the hungry sky, the sky that clouds with shapes that adore you more than I. And as those airy outlines in the sky sing your psalms with unsubstantial maws, your aromatic hands work the soil of my mask, and it is strange, to be so molded and malformed. I do not mind, for when you grace me with the nearness of your perfumed face, I see what I have become there, on the surface of your silver eyes; and I know that, now adopted by the vale, I shall dwell with you forever.

  XI.

  “To our porphyry tombs, dear Robbie, and to the worm!” We sat in Oscar’s enchanting garden, beneath an autumn moon, and I tapped my glass of absinthe to his.

  “To love – and to its loss,” I countered, and he momentarily frowned, then shrugged and drank the elixir.

  “Love is often a tomb in which the heart is trapped,” he offered, “gnawed by that foul worm, passion. I am happy to be aged, to have put all of that nonsense behind me. How joyous, to peep at that far moon and not have to sigh for romance. What happiness, to feel in one’s heart the chilliness of that supernal sphere of dust and to share in her frigidity, in this eleventh hour of my mortality.”

  “So you say.” He frowned and squinted suspiciously. I smiled. “Yet you still adore the form of youth that drove you to insanity in former days. Or so your recent acquisition would suggest; for there he stands, among the mauve and purple hyacinth, a dark phantom of male perfection.”

  Oscar did not deign to turn and study the object of which I spoke. Rather, setting down his glass, he opened his cigarette case and took up an opium-tainted cylinder of shredded tobacco. I refused when he offered me to select my own. “Yes, he stands there as those lovely flowers dance in this mild autumn zephyr. His figure is sublime – but you have failed to notice his most singular feature.”

  “Have I?” Moving out of my chair, glass in hand, I walked down the little path that took me to the spot where the figure had been planted. I assumed it was made of smooth and polished wood that had been stained so as to give it its hue of utter blackness. I guessed it to be five feet in height, and the taut perfection of its figure made clear that its model had been a superb Adonis of an athletic kind. “It is of Greek or African origin,” I told my host. “Its pose is certainly interesting – it seems a haughty stance, and the one uplifted arm rather demands the adoration of one’s mouth, commanding to be kissed. How peculiar that it was left unfinished.”

  My back was to Oscar, and so I could not see if he would rise to join me. I heard his exhalation and smelled the perfumed smoke that drifted to me on the wind. “Why do you assume it is unfinished?”

  I rotated and returned to where he sat. “Because you have always had an obsession for the face of perfect handsomeness – and there is no visage on that effigy of wood. There is naught but a smooth and perfect blankness, a void of features.”

  “Could not such a void prove symbolic?”

  Quietly, I laughed. “Of what?”

  “Did his facelessness not suggest anything to you, dear Robbie?” Snuffing out his cigarette, he rose and wandered to the figure. “Do you not notice how there is an aspect of listening in his haughty tilt of head, as if the void where his face should be is an audient thing that awaits our whispered veneration? And did you not notice the little points of light that play upon his void, almost indiscernible but fathomed nonetheless? When one studies them carefully, one can see that they are reflections of those gathered stars, just there, in the gulf of night – that peculiar pattern of cosmic points that hang so suggestively in night’s abyss.”

  “What nonsense you talk, Oscar.” And then the alcohol got to me, and triggered a dull ache within the fissure in my skull. Silently, my friend observed me, and then he sallied to me and placed his white gloved hand against my forehead. He loved to touch the place of abnormal absence just beneath my face.

  “It feels more pronounced, this split in your frail skull – extending like a fissure on some house of Usher.”

  “Do take your mitten away, old thing. You needn’t analyze my infirmity – I can feel its expansion, from the roof of my dome to the cellar of my soul; for it is more than a physical cleft, and like poor Roderick I can hear its division in my pit of psyche. In time it will grow so wide that my brain will wash its fluid to my eyes, and in that vision I will behold my death. So fill your glass again, my friend, and let us toast our perishability.”

  “Enough. Death is wonderful as a poetic toy – but its reality is too dull for words. Let us not speak of terminations – for that is not dead which may linger for an eternity, beneath the earth, the sea, or deep within some unknown gulf of night. No, do not frown on me with your dark suspicious eyes. I do not jest, nor am I a drunken sphinx with riddles to unravel. You know that I returned some little time ago from Côte d’Ivoire, from which I appropriated yon mythic eidolon. I learned of it in Al Azif, a kaleidoscope of allegorical poetry, the author of which has been deemed ‘mad’ by undiscerning minds. I ascertained where I would find the Faceless Eikon, of which I began to dream. To absorb Al Azif is to realize dreams such as one has never known. And in those visions of this nameless Eikon I saw that it, too, dreamt – of me! Our dreaming coalesced, hideously, and in those visions I heard the song that was chanted to the Faceless Eikon, its psalms of adoration that were mouthed by lesser deities of strangest air. The language of that ritual clings to my brain with such intensity that I feel my skull, like yours, must split. In one queer dream I danced before the Eikon, and from above there issued a panorama of electric streams that, flashing brightly, revealed the forms of faces that blossomed and withered on the surface where the Eikon wore no countenance – and among those fleeting phizogs, momentarily, I beheld your own.”

  “Al Azif – such a queer sound, those words, especially as spoken on your tongue; for you say them as only a poet can, endowing them with potency of language.”

  “Azif designates a peculiar sound associated with nocturnal insects, or what might be mistaken as insects, that is a local legend in the land where the mad Arab penned his lines and diagrams. Perhaps it is a drone that one can only hear in dream – and yet, perhaps, as our reality influences what we dream, perhaps the devils that dream of us influence our existence.”

  “You’ve lost me, entirely, old thing.”

  He shrugged. “Old I am. But there are others, great old things that dream in rare dimension; and in their dreams they smell our mortal blood, that rare elixir that is especially to this globe. They are enticed, by smell of blood and the repast of which it promises. And so they seek us out, in our dreaming and our lunacy, manifesting themselves in secret ceremony and fantastic art. They motivated some savage to sculpt that esoteric Eikon from some trunk of tree.” He looked at me so oddly. “They inspired me to summon you here tonight, so that I may spill into your ear the language of their alchemy.”

  “Have you ever enunciated this foreign language?”

  “In dream alone.”

  “And how we speak in dream can be so peculiar. Things happen in a nap, with our eyelids closed, that we think consume a day, yet are the matter of mere seconds. How fanciful earthly time can be, in realm of slumber.”

  “Then let us dream while wide-awake,” Oscar sighed as he took me in his arms. I stood very still as he pressed his lips against my ear, into which he uttered alien lexis. I heard that utterance coil around my brain, and then it seemed to spill from out the fissure in my skull, into the upper aether; and from that height I heard the language spoken by other tongues, as a song of infernal buzzing, and between the phrases I heard the spoken name of “Nyarlathotep,” a name that shook the firmament. And I saw a cloud assemble in the heavens, black and nebulous, shifting its form until it resembled the wooden statue of my friend. It billowed to me from the air, surrounded by its devils, they who buzzed his name in adoration. And then the droning horde fell to me and melted through my face. They found the fissure in my cranium and entered in, and I clasped my hands to ears in an attempt to stop their whirring pulsation. I shut my eyes so as to block
the phantom in the sky and its supernal mockery – but this was a mistake, for suddenly my identity clouded, became doubtful. Was I standing in the garden of my poetic friend, or was I whirling inside my skull with a daemon horde to which I had conjoined? Why did I remember impossible things, alien and incredible scenes beneath the combustion of violet suns, cyclopean cylinders of rotting stone that tilted over fungous vegetation?

  Another devil spoke the majestic name, a rapacious lunatic who usurped my place in infamy. Oscar pushed me from the hand that the fluctuating form of Nyarlathotep was offering me, and as I toppled onto his garden he bent to that cosmic hand and licked it; and then he howled, but only once, for as he wailed his features melted from him, and without his mouth he could no longer utter sound. I watched him fall next to me, into his hyacinths, as his body boiled and burned and blackened; and then at last he extinguished, a black and faceless thing, to which I crawled, and over which I wept.

  XII.

  I crept like a frightened girl on silver-sandalled feet beneath an arc of moonlight, toward the House of Shadows. The street of sorrow on which I tiptoed was as hard as cold reality – I was eager to be off it; and so I rushed to the porch when I beheld it, and hopped onto its first step with a relish of satisfaction. But my pleasure was short-lived, for as I skipped up the wooden steps I encountered a splinter that drove into my heel. Thus wounded, I limped through the threshold, into the edifice. The hallway was very dark, except for sad phosphorescent faces that floated, here and there, along the low ceiling and provided the single source of light. I stopped to rest my stinging foot and leaned against a tall grandfather clock, resting my head against its mirrored door and listening to its pulse; and as I rested I watched the blanched face that, floating to the clock, kissed its own reflection on the polished glass. The ticking from behind that glass extinguished and time became extinct; but then I heard another rhythm that sounded from behind one nearest door. Stepping to that door, I turned its knob and entered into a spacious chamber that vibrated with music that was performed by a band of mechanical grotesques. Masked gigolos moved in solitary dance around a small fountain that gurgled in the middle of the room. I laughed at their clumsy movement, and at the sound of my derision one figured jerked toward me; and as it studied me in the chamber’s artificial light I could see that its whorish limbs were made of wood, smooth and white. Reaching out, I removed its pallid mask so as to reveal the puppet countenance, a physiognomy so smooth and fine and handsome that I could not resist tilting to it and pressing my lips to its unyielding mouth. Lifting the pallid mask above me, I marveled at its beguiling velvetiness, and I could not resist lowering it onto my face and pressing it against my tingling flesh, to which it sensuously adhered. The handsome puppet took my hands and waltzed me to the fountain in the middle of the room, and I laughed merrily until I looked down into the water; for beneath that liquid surface I saw a bloated thing that I recognized as a boy I once had loved then tossed aside. He had been an elf of bewitching beauty, but addiction and ennui had debauched his loveliness and made him dull. I met him one last time on a bridge over a slow-moving river, where I whispered in moonlight that our love affair was over. Turning away from him, I whistled at the moon; but soon I heard a splashing sound. And looking down I saw a white sphere floating beneath the river water, and I knew that it was the submerged and lifeless face of my discarded lover. It bobbed once out of the water, so that his dark liquid eyes gazed at me one last time; and then the current pulled him down and out of view.