Gathered Dust and Others (13 page)

They stepped into the moonlit night and Ada linked her arm with Japheth’s.  The young artist’s sharp features caught in a peculiar fashion the beams of lunar light, and his pale face seemed almost to glow as he led the way.  A heavy gust of winter wind suddenly pushed toward them as it sailed between the city’s tall buildings.

Sebastian hugged his heavy coat closer to his frame.  “Can you sample it on the wind,” he queried, “the taste of doom?  Shall we moan to the half-moon like some pack of underhounds?”

“Let us relish what promises to be a new experience,” Ada answered.

“Ah, Sphinx – ever the optimist.”

They came to Queer Street, and Japheth led the way into a dilapidated house situated between two taller edifices.  Gales of laughter spilled from the doorless entrance as they climbed the steps that led onto a long porch, on which various persons sat at tables, drinking and smoking.  Sebastian took a cigarette from its gilded case and lit up, which made him feel a little more relaxed.  The crowd was mostly young, which pleased him, although he knew that these children had not kept their lives free and inviolate; otherwise they would not dwell within this realm of exile and dispossession, this city of wild unrest.  For a moment he remembered his past life, his glory and fame and freedom, his social conquests and his sexual subjugations wherein he was dominate in all things.  When his secret life had become known by the society he had courted, they hurled him from their midst.  The memory of his rise and fall was his deep-felt damnation; no matter how he reconstructed his former life in this ghastly city, he would never again know the delicious taste of former victory.  He walked this realm of living death, a shadow of what once he was.

“Let us find a booth,” Sebastian commanded.  “I am famished for alcohol.”

They settled into leather benches at a table of substantial size.  “A bottle of absinthe,” Max told their waiter.

“Two bottles,” Sebastian corrected him.  “And I shall have some coffee laced with a liberal dose of brandy.  Anyone else?”

“I’ll try some, I guess,” Japheth said as he scanned the drink menu and studied prices.

“My treat, dear boy,” Sebastian cooed, rewarded with the young artist’s thankful smile.

Thus they drank their sweet coffees and bitter booze and talked of art as the young illustrator allowed them to examine his portfolio.  When the surrounding chatter quieted, Japheth looked up and saw the woman who watched him as she sauntered past their table and walked to where a blind boy sat before a piano.  The room listened as the lad began to play his somber music, and something clutched at Japheth’s heart as Audre Brugge began to sing Baudelaire’s “La Muse malade.”  Sebastian forgot his drink and felt his slow-beating heart grow weighty with woe.  He began to chant the words with whispered voice.

“Ma pauvre muse, hélas! qu’as-tu donc ce matin?”

“Hush, Melmoth,” Max scolded.

“Her voice is like the coming of Death.  No, I cannot listen.”  Sebastian rose and vacated the room, stepping onto the porch and puffing furiously at his cigarette.  His companions sat, transfixed, their eyes and ears bewitched.  The woman’s voice was deeper than Japheth had remembered.  Her eyes, those colorless orbs, penetrated him with their staring, and her perfect mouth made love to the language she uttered.  The artist, his hands itching for his pen, took in her mauve skin, her coils of tawny hair; and he marveled at how luxurious that hair looked in the misty light of the place, how it seemed in his imagination at times to writhe with an almost lecherous sentience.  He watched as her hands trembled to the emotion of her song as they stroked her velvet vest, and he stared at the dark nipple of an exposed breast.  Her song ended, and the room exploded with wild applause.  Japheth blushed as the lithe chanteuse winked at him and licked her lips as she exited the room.

Sebastian Melmoth felt the presence behind him, one that commanded him to turn and acknowledge.  He refused to do so and stared at the yellow moon as if that sphere of dust would grant him inner strength. 

“Have you another cigarette?” a husky voice asked.  He watched as Audre Brugge moved to a lower step and stood before him.  How eerie that the poisonous light of the dead moon seemed to have been transferred to the eyes that held him.  Hypnotized, he reached into his vest pocket and brought forth his golden cigarette case.  He watched as the woman made her selection and placed the reed of nicotine into her mouth; and he trembled as she bent to him and touched the tip to his.  “Your breath tastes of wormwood,” she stated, “lots and lots.”  He detected a Dutch inflection in her accented voice.

“Yes,” he replied.  “One must imbibe to fulfillment.  The first glass will show you things as you wish they existed; and the second glass gives you a glimpse of things as they are not.  The third glass of absinthe -- reveals the truth behind the mask of reality, and that is the most horrible of revelations.”

“And what do you see behind my mask?” 

He sucked deeply on his bit of nicotia and exhaled a patch of scented fume that floated as curtain between them.  “Nay, Medusa, your alchemy cannot touch me.  My heart turned to stone ages ago.”

Secretly she smiled, licked her mouth and walked away.

II.

Sebastian sat on a large gold armchair and looked around the dreary room.  Why were the dens of artists always so
cluttered
?  Such disarray disconcerted him – he wanted to call for servants.  In fact, he was trying to avoid glancing at the large canvas on which Japheth was working at his new project, a life-size portrait of the gorgon that had so beguiled him.  But Sebastian could not keep his eyes away, for the artistic process fascinated him.  Striking a gold-tipped match, he lit a cigarette and waved it toward the canvas. 

“The skeletonic tree is quite good, especially the way it subtly imitates her stance.  Of course, you need a moon casting its dead light upon her coils of hair; and the moon must not be white, but rather it must reflect the tainted color of her curious flesh, her reptile hide.  Jesu, how like a lamia she looks!  She makes one want to quote Keats:

‘Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

  Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs…’”

“Why does she affect you so, Sebastian?  I thought you treasured beauty and youth.  Look at her eyes – so clear and ethereal.  How could such eyes fill you with despondency?”

“They are the eyes of one who preys.  I suppose the face is fine, but how can one admire it when it is concealed behind those cords of mane?”  He stood and looked out of the window, into night.  “This room is really quite depressing.  Let us go outside and bathe in starlight.  You haven’t tried one of my recently discovered cigarettes – they will give you a new sensation.  I
adore
new sensations.  Come, put down your brush and follow me.  Your Medusa will await you.”  Without waiting, Sebastian went to the door and left the room.  Laughing softly, the young artist followed him.  The winter night was chilly, but there was no wind.  Sebastian was waving a cigarette at heaven, where three bats were silhouetted in as they flitted in the lunar light.  “This sky is positively Goyaesque,” he stated.  “Of course, we need owls instead of bats.  Are you familiar with his
El conjuro
?  It would not surprise me to see a pack of disheveled hags hobbling down that street, selling their craft.  But – lo! – see where a witch approaches.”

He flicked the butt of his consumed cigarette into a gutter as Audre Brugge approached them; and for one moment she did seem like something conjured by black arts, with the strange moonlight giving her skin a poisonous viridian tinge.  Japheth saw how her helical hair seemed to move and arrange itself as she advanced toward them – and that was odd, for there was no wind.  She stopped before them.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” she said, one hand holding the bottom of her small shoulder bag.

“My dear Miss Brugge.  How like a viper you look in that tight dress, with its geometric pattern.  Would you care for a new sensation?  I’ve just received these, from a friend in Mozambique.”  Sebastian reached into a pocket and produced a black cigarette case, which he snapped open.  “They will make you dream tonight,” he promised her.

“No thank you, Monsieur.  I want to taste the evening air, it’s so rich tonight.”

Sebastian snapped shut the case without offering a weed to Japheth.  “As you wish.   I shall leave you then, for I too wish to dine on this intoxicating effluvium.  I suppose you wish to be alone in his little room and pay homage to the gods of Art.”

“Actually – no.”  The woman smiled at Japheth.  “There’s a curious place I want to show you, just outside the city perimeter.  I think it will interest you, from an artistic standpoint.”

“All right,” the young man agreed.

“If you’re going to walk the night then I shall follow, surreptitiously and from a distance.  I shall be your voyeur and watch in secret.”

The woman laughed and linked her arm with Japheth’s, and Sebastian slowly followed as they walked beyond the city, to a place of ancient desolation.    Perhaps, aeons ago, it had been some kind of park, although its trees were few and withered, like something found in Casper David Friedrich; and Japheth felt a kind of pity for the barren trees, for their limbs seemed bent with heavy desolation.  Sebastian scowled at the dreary wasteland as he followed the younger mortals up a slight incline to where the remnant of a ruins stood.  Audre stopped before a weathered arch that was guarded by a statue of Cerberus, and she smoothed her hand over one of the daemon’s three monstrous heads. 

“Wait,” Sebastian wailed as the woman walked past the beast and began to descend a set of steps that led to a circular platform of stone.  “I have no honey cakes with which to placate the hound.  If we step into its lair we may ne’er return!”

“Be not afraid, Monsieur.  I shall be your Aeneas and pacify the fiend.”  She held her hand to Japheth.  “Come,” she commanded.

But Sebastian was suddenly overwhelmed with fear.  He had not, in all of his years in Gershom, dared to leave the city’s boundaries; being out of it now instilled a kind of panic, a sense of terror.  Holding his hand up in protest to the woman’s invitation, he turned and fled. 

Japheth tried to laugh.  “He has the oddest habit of
fleeing
,” he joked; and yet he, too, felt a kind of uncanny fear in the forlorn place.  Was it his imagination, of had the atmosphere grown more chilly after they had passed beneath the archway and descended the stone steps?  He watched as Audre reclined on the circle of stone and began to trace the shape that was outlined on it with her slim hand.  When she reached that hand to Japheth, he took it and lay beside her. 

“What is this place?” he asked.

“I don’t know.  It must have been part of some antique civilization that existed prior to the city, although heaven knows that Gershom is in itself infinitely old.  Perhaps this was their temple – it seems a place of veneration, doesn’t it?  And perhaps this figure chiseled into this circle of stone was the thing they worshiped.  You can sense how utterly primitive it is, a relic of a forgotten era; and yet how exquisitely it is captured in their art, whoever it was that dwelt here.  I knew it would fascinate you, as an artist.  Primeval art has always beguiled me.  I like to think about the world as it once was, millennia ago.  What did they feel, that we can never sense?  What did they know, and worship?  What were their
secrets
?  We know of the past from what they left recorded – but what were the mysteries unrevealed?  It’s funny, but when I lay in this place, beneath the antediluvian starlight, I feel near to a nameless past.”

“This is an odd figure,” he conceded, fingering the thing that was engraven on stone.  “It looks like a king, or ruler, by the way it’s outfitted in that robe, and by the staff or whatever it is it holds.  Can’t really tell its gender, but the haughty stance seems belligerently male.  It’s really weathered here, at where it wears a half-crown or whatever it is.  It’s superb, certainly.  It has an aura of – power.”  He gazed into her clear eyes, the eyes that held him in their bewitching splendor.  “Do you c—come here often?” he stuttered.

“Mmm, yes.  It’s a great place to lay still, to dream.  Will you dream with me, Japheth?”  She leaned toward him and briefly touched her mouth to his.  “Be still.  Here, let me rub some of this onto your temples.”  She retrieved a tiny jar from her bag and turned open its lid.  “It’s something I discovered in Tibet.”  He watched as she dipped two fingers into the jar’s gelatinous stuff and sighed as she anointed him.  Her mouth was at his ear, sighing strange language that he could not comprehend.  He wanted to kiss her eyes but found that he could not move his heavy limbs.  No matter.  It was wonderful enough to be still and let her love him.  She was on top of him, unbuttoning his shirt, and then her nails were etching signals into his chest.  When she finally pressed her lips onto his eyelids, he was able to move a little.  His opened his eyes, and his hands were on her heavy breasts.  She pulled him on top of her and began to hum a strange melody as she allowed him to kiss her mouth, her neck, her nipples. 

And then he knew that he was dreaming, as something wet and thin below her breast wrapped around his finger.  “It is a gift from him – the Master,” she sang in her queer low voice.  “It is his reward to his anointed.”  He moved his head beneath her breast, to where the worm grew from out her flesh, at the place where her diabolic heart pumped.  He touched the worm with his mouth, his mouth that opened as the thing stretched its elastic body and slipped between his lips.  He sucked as the creature tickled the back of his throat, and when at last it removed itself from his orifice, he tasted the musky slime that coated his stinging lips.

Japheth awakened to the soft moaning of morning wind; he saw the mist above the ruins wherein he lay, in that cold and lonesome place.  The siren had deserted him, he was alone; but she had left him with a souvenir.  He brought the strand of coiled hair to his nostrils and drank its weird perfume.