Bohemians of Sesqua Valley Read online

  Our lady stumbled to the archway, and through it, beneath the sky that blackened with breaking storm; and as the rain began to pounce upon her she pirouetted to one ancient tree and bent so as to scoop up the kitten and shelter it in her warm limbs beneath the spread of leaves and branches. She listened to the soothing rainfall and grew drowsy, and leaning her back against the tree she lowered to a sitting position as the deluge and its lullaby coaxed her toward slumber. In soggy dreams she saw seven shrouded figures that moved in ceremony around her, and she could sense the vibrations of their chanted song on the air before their hooded faces; but the sound that awoke her was one single peal that issued from the cracked bell of the ruined edifice. Our lady rubbed her eyes and let her hands fall to her lap, where they touched the stiff dead thing of fur that nestled there. And it confused her when, gradually, she heard an apparition of sound, a ghostly mewing from some nearby place; and she pondered, as she lifted her face and glanced toward the ancient archway, why the wee puss was there, however insubstantially. Our lady watched as the playful sprite ran in circles for some moments and then rushed through the archway, to the feet of one shrouded figure that motioned with an arm that lacked a hand. And so our lady lifted out of her drowsy husk of flesh, which stayed in place against the tree that sheltered it; and she drifted to the archway, and through it, to the ones awaiting her.

  III

  I found the bottle as I walked along the shore and was surprised by its chilliness as I plucked it from the waves. The object intrigued me with its black-green sheen and queer metallic stopper, which had been shaped so as to resemble a macabre siren’s portrait. I held the thing up to the misty sky, where the sun was a whitish ghost behind crawling clouds, and thought it unusual that I could almost see through the murky glass and detect the thing inside the bottle; and this made me smile, because as a child I had been entranced by tales of treasure maps secreted inside flasks that were tossed into the sea. Using my strength, I pulled the stopper from the bottle’s neck, but I was clumsy and the stopper fell out of my hand into the waves wherein I stood. I watched it move beneath those waves for a few seconds and wondered why it seemed to mutate with growth and move its mouth as if in speech. Loquacious bubbles floated to the surface as the stopper became lost in shifting sand.

  What an unwholesome stench escaped from the murky bottle, like some festering remnant of discarded flesh. I peered through the neck and saw the bleached scroll inside, then turned the flagon over and shook it vigorously as I walked beyond the waves, to shore. The object inside refused to budge, and so I pressed the container’s opening against my lips and blew my living aether within, but the stench inside the thing pushed at me with renewed nastiness and I had to take my face away. I tilted the bottle and tapped its opening against my palm, and after much effort one end of the scroll dislodged and peeked out. I pinched it with my fingers and frowned, for the nasty thing was unpleasant to my touch. Parchment should not be so spongy, unless perhaps this scroll had somehow been tainted by sea water. I unrolled the cylinder and was startled to find that it was not a written record at all but rather a sordid mask, its only openings being the places where a face would own a pair of eyes. I dropped the flask onto the sand and held the mask up to the whitish sun so as to judge its texture; but suddenly my arms began to ache, grew heavy, and without warning they lowered so that the mask covered my face, to which it clung. How curious one’s imagination can be, for I half-fancied that I could detect the texture of the mask stitch itself into my flesh. How unfathomable, the way the night tide air tasted as it filtered through the place that ensconced my mouth. The stars looked especially bright, and this confused me because I had not realized that night had fallen—surely there had been muted daylight moments before, when I had first discovered the bottle while wading through the waves. What a curiosity the mortal world can be.

  I walked toward and into the city, into a portion of it that I had never known. How ancient and acrid the air seemed as it brushed my faux mouth, against which I pressed my hot tongue as I babbled incomprehensibly to darkness. An elderly light fell from tilted street lamps to the dusty street as infants with mature faces seeped from a decrepit building’s doorway and encircled me, returning my gibberish. They danced around me and called me by some strange name, and then these imps scattered as a tall black woman encased inside a tight yellow gown stalked to me beneath the myriad stars. Rising tempest played with her length of burgundy-colored hair.

  Genuflecting before me, the woman took my hand and licked it. “We were not expecting you so soon,” she murmured. “Indeed, we had sensed that you had been mislaid between dimensions and unable to come and herald the end of mortal time.” She raised her face and gazed at him with alchemical eyes. “Of all your many masks, this is the most grotesque.”

  I slipped my hand out of her own. “I’m sorry, miss, but you have me confused with another.”

  At this she scowled and writhed with rising. “An imposture? How very vile. We do not take kindly to such trickery, for we are weary with waiting, waiting. How you’ve come to impersonate His aura I cannot comprehend, for this mask is authentic in its way. Let me scald it with my wrath.”

  She raised a hand and made some kind of sign unto the stars, and then she sliced one talon through her lip. I beheld the blood that bubbled from the wound as the creature leaned toward me and pressed her mouth against mine own. I drank her unholy elixir as she spoke an alien and unfathomable language that leaked into my mouth as swallowed bile. I watched her back away from me, not understanding the shadow that encased her, that hard unyielding surface of gloom. Starlight extinguished and the air stifled all about me. I walked toward the surface of rigid shadow and collided with a barrier of smooth glass. I leaned against that incomprehensible wall as the floor on which I trembled began to tip and threaten sane balance. Aware of sudden presence, I looked upward through the lean neck of the container in which I insanely found myself. A dark feminine face peered at me from above, and then its mammoth mouth moved with evocation as it weaved a wicked language into my rancid atmosphere. I watched, helplessly, as that siren orifice wrapped over my container’s opening and sucked.

  IV

  I glanced at the cinders in your burnished eyes and sensed the acidic wretchedness that burned the brain of a forgotten goddess. Those embers in your eyes were gold and orange, yet dull of hue like the mauve and ruddy porphyry with which your sarcophagus had been constructed. Had it always existed, your dwelling of anticipated death? Or did you have it built when, in vision, you beheld the end of your apprehensive adoration? It cannot be an edifice erected for One of Eternal Glory, for it is a place that reeks of extinction and expired dreams. There had been violation here, I sensed, for in your bowl that once held precious gems there was naught but dust and filigree of web. Your mouth was dry, no longer nourished by rich liquid sacrifice.

  Your whispered legend had been discovered in one rare and ancient tome that I had located in a hushed shop in Innsmouth. That seaport reminded me of your legend, a thing of past magnificence and potency that was now mostly dormant yet contained a promise of resuscitated splendor. The air of Innsmouth reeked almost as sourly as the dead air of your catacomb; but whereas your sphere was one of utter silence, Innsmouth seemed never at rest—there was constant sound and movement. My eyes were always returning to the sea and its restlessness, to its waves that wrecked themselves on rocks and against rotting piers. My eyes were entranced by an agitation in the black clouds that crawled in the darkened sky, those clouds that shaped themselves suggestively. My ears could hear the sharp cry of gulls that soared above the agitated water, and I thought that I could detect, just below that ordinary noise, an unnatural ululation that might have been but a tissue of entranced hallucination. I stood in that Innsmouth shop, among fossilized memories, and touched the cool pages of an elder volume; and I was allowed to purchase that book, and I wrapped it inside my coat as I stalked the quays beneath the winged gulls and wisps of black clouds.


  I sat in the yellow glow of my lantern, in my attic study, and tried to read the book; yet it was difficult to follow the lettering that would not be still beneath my moving hand. It is not easy to read faded dark etchings that subtly creep across a page as if to escape one’s touch, like insects that cannot tolerate the violation of hot human hands. Perversely, I placed my fingers over one section of rapacious ink, that ink that was a hungry blackness that did not move away but rather lifted so as to meet my flesh. Ah, what tricks may be played by the etchings of a potent wizard. How adoringly his quill spilled into wordage the story of your legend. You were a rare dream that he almost fancied was his personal perversion, his delirium of diabolic ecstasy. He saw you as some mystic whore crowned with jeweled stars, and he ached to sip the nectar of your pomegranate mouth, misunderstanding the dye with which your lips were stained. Although much mistaken of your nature, he saw enough of your hidden essence that it beguiled his imagination and debauched his dreaming. He wrote of you as one intoxicated—and that psychic inebriation exists still in his monstrous text, that sentient transcript that frolicked before my eyes and realized my hand. Oh, that wizard ink! It slipped inside my pores and spilled inside my veins, evoking you so absolutely that I beheld the foliage that screened your ancient tomb. I dreamed the slaughter within that tomb with which your ghastliness was celebrated, and I tasted gore upon my teeth. When I awakened from strange reverie I found that I had bit into my tongue and imbibed my blood—and yet it did not taste like something of mine own.

  How rare, to have discovered one extraordinary testimony of your legend, recorded by the sorcerer who dreamed you. Although I am no mage, I penned a private grimoire of my own as images were revealed to me in midnight lunacy. I etched your symbols as they were burned into my brain by acidic vision, and I formed the fantastic map that showed me the way to your porphyry tomb. I hacked my way through growth and found your dwelling, and I performed the secret task by which your tomb was opened. I descended the dusty steps that led to where you reclined within your casket as an eikon of ebon stone that had been smoothed by the kisses of your acolytes. I found the ritual dagger, and although its blade was dull I used it with precision; for the sight of your empty bowl was pitiful, and the only gems I owned were my eyes, one of which I dexterously removed so as to place it in your basin. I set it there, inside that sad little space, as an outside wind moaned sorrowfully. But I was happy to hear your whispered sound, the faint vibration that slipped from your firm stone mouth. I felt that sibilant resonance touch my lips, those mortal petals that parted so as to pronounce your name; and, oh, the wonder that I knew, to see the hollow pits that were your eyes begin to smoke, to glow like cinders of some reanimated force.

  The cinders in your eyes are gold and orange, and they are no longer dull like unto the mauve and ruddy porphyry of your nameless tomb. Your lips are black and dry, but not for long—for I shall tilt to you and press my mouth to thine, my mouth that I have split with the rough blade of a ritual dagger. And as I kiss you I will whisper again your name, the sound of which will echo inside your tomb, that forgotten zone where you will claim me as thy newest feast.

  V

  I want to kiss you, devil boy.

  It’s true, I have not bothered to see you since that strange yellow day. I’ve been preoccupied with that house on Benefit Street, and the area adjacent to it. You never mentioned that wooded plot of land, so I suspect you haven’t really investigated the neighborhood of the shunned house. You have been excited by its legend—but it’s just a story for you, not something that dwells and dreams in haunted Providence. I was mesmerized as you spoke of it, that day of yellow light when you playfully described it. I could not resist going to prowl through it after we had shared our little meal. Everyone in the café on College Hill was talking about the yellow day, and we never did discover any explanation for the phenomenon. Do you remember the shadows of clouds on the pavement as we strolled to our rendezvous? Have you ever witnessed such shadows of clouds before? I’ve been aware of shifting light, of brightness darkening into shade as clouds obscured the sun; but this was different, this display we witnessed as it crept before us on the wide pale pavement—those unnerving and grotesque silhouettes of that which skulked across the sky as we inhaled the perfumed air of the yellow day. Do you remember how nervous it made you, to watch those shadows play across the surface of my eyes, so that the substance of my eyes mutated into something new and strange, enhanced by alien element? I laughed at you then, my child, and pulled you to me so that you could kiss my cloudy eyes.

  It was the yellow light that made you think of the yellow house and its unfathomable aura. You had mentioned it, briefly, once or twice; but on this occasion you expounded on its history and spoke acutely of its place in the history of spectral Providence. You mentioned that Poe had often walked past it on his way to court Mrs. Whitman, or as he ventured to dream in this burying ground to which I have spirited you. Perhaps Poe sat on this very oblong slab on which we are posited. You mentioned the history of that yellow house and told the tale of how two gentlemen entered into it so as to pierce its mystery, with only one of them emerging alive and semi-sane. They had entered the residence with curious scientific expectation, but they were unnerved by the patches of mould that took on the most suggestive of shapes (perhaps like unto the curious clouds that followed us across the pavement on that yellow day). They worked at their task as their health was sapped by the titan thing that burrowed beneath the yellow house, that dead yet dreaming enigma. How enticing your voice sounded as you spoke of it, and how impossible it was for me to resist walking down College Hill after our tête-à-tête, so as to touch my hand to the yellow timber of the lower section of the house on Benefit Street. I did indeed sense something—yet it didn’t surge from the house itself but rather from the adjacent wooded vicinity. I pointed to the little spot and asked you about it, but you merely shrugged and then followed me to the black fence, behind which rose a wooded hillside. I had been instantly drawn to it because woodland had always been a kind of asylum for me from the world of men. And so I stepped through the gate of the black iron fence, onto a small patio of brick. I glanced at the growths of shrub, their large leaves, waving to me in the yellow light of that uncanny day. I saw the pathway of large flat stones, on which I walked to seven lengths of stone steps that took me deeper into the shady area. I glanced beyond my left-hand side, over a wooden fence and into the backyard of the shunned house; and I smiled at the nebulous shadow on the ground there, wishing I could dance in that darkness and drink its essence. You did not want to pause and walked ahead of me, to where the stone steps were replaced by three tilted steps of hoary wood. The pathway curved before us, and we walked upon its sod into a small grove wherein a thick old tree awaited us. How dim the place suddenly seemed, mutely tainted by the jaundiced light of the yellow day; and yet we noticed, at the same time, that other hint of illumination—the phosphorescent growth of mould that blighted the trunk of the ancient tree. How curious, the outline of that fungal stain that seemed to form a monstrous face from which infinitesimal threads of mist emanated. Something in the shape of that pale fungus drew me to it, and as I investigated its texture with the eyes that you had kissed an aroma arose, and I was intoxicated. And the tendrils of mist embraced my nostrils and entered into them, so that I could taste that of which they were composed. And that taste spread to the roof of my mouth, and down my length of tongue, to my hot throbbing throat. I laughed as I devoured. I think it was the sound of my laughter that made you flee.

  But you cannot keep from me, sweet friend, for you have found me on this foggy day in Providence, and taken my hand, and kissed my eyes. I have passed my fingers through your black hair, to the two raised tufts that you had stained crimson and shaped so as to resemble horns. But oh, my love, I will show you something far more satanic than your pose. Do you see it there on the corner of my mouth, one little slice of fungi that awaits you? Come, press your lips to mine and let my tongue
guide yours to that little shred of doom, and then swallow it and join me in my ecstasy of horror.

  I want to kiss you, one last time.

  VI

  We sat, we writers, around our table, satisfied by our Italian meal, lingering over ice cream and coffee. Howard, our eldest member, had wanted us to gather at Angelo’s on Federal Hill, his favorite restaurant; he loved it because it had been in business since 1924, and thus was part of the past era that so mesmerized him and with which he was in love. Having happily devoured his three dishes of ice cream, Howie rose to his feet to toast us with his coffee cup and then pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

  “My new prose-poem,” he announced, “for the little book that I am writing for Larry, whom some of you know. I call this new piece ‘Cinctured by Bright Winds,’ and it is based on a dream that I recently suffered. I say ‘suffered’ because this dream was dark and potent with danger, and yet one could not call it nightmare because there was nothing in it that was solid or clearly seen. It was all daemonic hint, swaying shadow and muted sound that encircled me like some phantom enclosure. It felt almost like dark vision, this dream, like creeping fate that crawled to me, full of promise and presage. Here is my little expression of it.”