Mortal Love (2 page)

Swinburne followed, the sound of her feet echoing before him. The alley twisted and twisted; with each turn it grew narrower, darker. The cobblestones gave way to gravel, then packed earth, and finally a mire of mud and dead grass that stank of the boghouse. He was in a tunnel now, a channel through which the New River had once flowed in wooden pipes, supported by an aqueduct that had long since decayed to skeletal timbers and disintegrating mats of weeds. A few feet ahead of him, the woman halted.

“I'll tell her you've come,” she said, then turned and disappeared into a shadowy recess.

“Bumstick!” The poet flailed at the air, cursing and laughing. “Phossy's made a fool of me! Come back, dear—”

He was reaching for his brandy flask when he heard a rustling in the darkness.

“I know the way,” said a soft voice.

The poet looked up. In the middle of the passage stood a man holding a lantern. “Swinburne,” the man said. “I am Jacobus Candell. We have met before, do you recall? Three years ago, an afternoon at my patron, Dr. Langley's. You spoke of swimming in the sea at Padwithiel and nearly drowning.”

Swinburne grinned in delight. “Yes, of course! And you are acquainted with Burton—surely he has arranged this! He—”

“No.
She
has arranged it.”

The man smiled. His overcoat was dirty and opened to reveal an artist's smock beneath, smeared with flecks of eggshell, strings of dried paint, leaf mold. “I know the way. I will be your guide. I have come a great distance to find you.”

Swinburne took a sip of brandy. “Then I am indebted to you, sir. I had understood that you were with your patron, Langley. That you were in Egypt. The Tombs of Sestris…”

The painter stepped toward him. The lantern's glow touched his face: a round, pleasant face, bearded and with wide, pale-blue eyes above a rosy mouth. He was not more than thirty-three or -four, roughly the same age as Swinburne.

“I have just arrived!” Candell gave a small gasping laugh and began to talk excitedly, as though picking up a conversation they had left off an hour ago. “I have come to show you! The tombs were nothing, Egypt is nothing—you will see as I did, the world is beneath us! A tunnel. A—”

He gestured at the passage, mouth working as though he could not recall a word or name. “Her aperture. The mound.”

Swinburne giggled. Candell smiled slowly, a smile of great sweetness, then gently touched the poet's arm. “Such things as I saw.… We spent another week in Alexandria, because Langley wanted to be certain that I had enough time to record his travels properly. There the light is so rich that beggars promise to sell you a quantity of sun for a single mejidy! I paid them, and see, see…”

He held out a filthy hand. “It dazzles you,” the painter whispered, fingers spreading as though he freed a captive sparrow. “But you must accustom your eyes to brilliance, else you will go blind at what we are to see.”

Swinburne let his head fall back so that he could stare into the vaulted darkness overhead. “I see nothing.”

“You will!” insisted Candell. “Wonder. Worship.”

He began to walk away from Swinburne, deeper into the tunnel. “Oh, wonderful. Such brilliance. You will see, we will all see.”

“He knows the way!” the poet exclaimed. He began to run after the painter. “Wait, wait—”

Candell grinned broadly. “Green!” he shouted, his hands outstretched before him as he ran. “Green!”

Swinburne struggled to catch up with him. They were deep beneath the city now. Around them, half seen, were ruins of Londinium. A temple, a brothel, huge polished stones. “He will show us marvels,” Swinburne whispered, squeezing his hands together in anticipation.

“Verdetta, vetiver, woodbine,” said Candell, and groaned. “I
will
see,” he said and, snatching at the air, crushed something between his fingers.

Before them the passage narrowed, ending in an earthen wall. Candell's lantern bobbed as he stooped, then crawled through an opening.

“Oh, glorious lumen. I see light,” said Swinburne, hastening after him. “A crack, a crack!”

He wriggled through the gap, and stood.

They were in a large room or cavern with a rough convex ceiling, composed of stone and mortar. Threads of vegetation protruded from between the stones overhead; as Swinburne began to walk around, small things burst and belched beneath his shoes, tiny conical caps of mushrooms, fleshy green earth tongues, red-tipped fungi that exploded with a scent of apples and kelp. There were heaps of very old brick, marbled with a soft bloom of turquoise mold. The air was sweet with a strange pervasive smell of apples, as though they stood inside an orchard within sight of the sea.

“What is this place?” murmured Swinburne.

Here and there odd relics could be glimpsed amid the detritus of rock and broken mortar: long, slender, smooth green stones shaped by hand, but for what purpose? Bronze arrowheads, lapis lazuli beads, lozenges of variscite no bigger than a pinkie nail. There were piles of ammonites, jet-black, malachite; a few were studded with gems like glittering barnacles.

“What is this place?” repeated Swinburne. “Why,
I
certainly don't know! Candell?”

“Oh, but see.” At the far side of the chamber, the painter knelt, his back to the poet. As Swinburne turned to look at him, he realized that the light that suffused the chamber did not come from Candell's lantern at all.

His lantern had gone out.

“
Wonder!
” shouted Candell. His head was lowered, his hands pressed against the stone wall as though forcing it apart. “
Open!
”

Swinburne crept up behind him, twittering with laughter. “Tup-penny peep! Let me by—”

He squatted next to Candell, heedless of the damp on his bespoke trousers, and elbowed the painter aside. “Take your turn, gents, take your—”

He fell silent.

In the wall before them was a vertical opening as long as a man's hand and no wider than a finger. Radiance seeped from the crack, emerald green flaring into a white brighter than the sun. Swinburne shaded his eyes. Candell leaned back on his haunches and stared at the opening, his tongue caught between parted lips.

“Let me see,” whispered Swinburne. He pushed Candell away and pressed his face to the stone. “Let me—”

It was as though someone had given him a lens that could miraculously illuminate the sea. Within a green world, prismatic things flickered and flew and spun: rubescent, azure, luminous yellow, the pulsing indigo of a heart's hidden valves. All were so brilliant he could see nothing clearly, yet he sensed—no, he
knew
—that behind the wall was another world: he could hear it, cries like seabirds, a rhythmic roar of waves. He could smell it, too, an odor so fragrant and rich his mouth filled with sweet liquid. His eyes stung; he blinked back tears, pressed his face against the stone with tongue extended, trying to steal some sweetness from the rock.

The painter just laughed and knelt beside him, knocking his forehead against the stone. When the crack closed, they never knew; only knew that the green world was gone and they had been left here, on the wrong side of the dark.

“Wonder,” Candell gasped, licking his dry lips. “See.”

“Cunt!” cried Swinburne; and, arms flailing with excitement, he staggered back to the world above.

CHAPTER TWO

The Trees of the Garden

T
here are no secrets on an
island; only ways of hiding what went wrong. That's what Red always told me, anyway. From his boathouse he watched the lobster boats chugging out across Mandrascora Reach, watched the mail boat come and go, watched the summer people arrive first of June and leave right after Labor Day. Red knew who'd be living on food stamps and government cheese that winter and who'd be buying that new SnoCat, whose kids had to go live with relatives on the mainland after DHS made a home visit.

“There's only one island, really,” Red said. “One island, one story, told over and over again. You just got to figure out where you fit into it.”

Red wasn't a Maine native. He was from away, one of those unreconstructed old hippies who washed up here in the early seventies, one of the ones who stayed long enough to see a sort of reverse evolution at work, as the rednecks and hippies who once despised each other passed through an uneasy truce until now, thirty-odd years and another century later, they'd become almost indistinguishable—same hair pulled into graying ponytails, same beat-up old pickups and bashed-in Saabs, same homegrown seeds carefully culled and saved from one year to the next to be planted out back with the potatoes and peas on Mother's Day.

Red never told me where he lived before Aranbega. He didn't look like the island people, who tend to be small and dark, wiry as wild grapevines, their offspring sour and hardy as wild grapes. Red was tall and thin and fair, with coppery hair and eyes the same shade as Aranbega's legendary fringed gentians; you could pick him out at Town Meeting like a cranberry in a bowl of raisins. The oddest thing about him was his fingernails, which were a strange sheeny blue. Stain from the dyes and wood preservatives he used, he explained. In all the years I knew him, the color never faded. I just figured it was another weird thing about the island.

Because when you're visiting for a month or two in summer, or into the lingering fall, Aranbega seems like a hallucinogenic dream of heaven: sky so blue it burns your eyes, fir-bound hills and pink granite cliffs overgrown with lupines and fireweed, the smell of balsam and the sea strong enough to disturb your sleep.

But then the fog comes in, and you're sitting on a rock for a week. Worse, you decide to winter over and see how the natives do it: get back to that simpler, purer lifestyle, haul your own wood and have your own generator shipped over from the mainland, with plenty of candles and canned goods just in case . . .

And reality kicks you in the jaw. You get burned for the firewood, two short cords of birch and green ash instead of seasoned oak and beech. Your neighbor's jacking deer; when he leaves the carcass on your land, the coyotes come and eat your cat. Out on Green Lake, some guy is doing wheelies on the ice in his pickup; the truck goes through and no, the body's never found and no, the DEA won't be there before June, and yes, the leaking gasoline is probably not real good for the water quality. A fifteen-year-old blows his head off with a shotgun in the living room of his stepfather's single-wide. The local constabulary is the same guy who runs the general store and delivers the mail; he also takes care of the summer people's empty mansions and plows your drive, when it gets plowed. If he's busy, you're snowbound.

He's always busy.

See, I'm a Comstock; so I know something about the island, too. If you skirt the southwestern end of Aranbega, past the harbor with its congeries of pleasure boats and working craft, and continue to putter along the coast, eventually you'll see a ragged cuff of boulders and granite cliffs spiked with black firs and driftwood. There aren't any houses here—it's too exposed, the rock face impenetrable until you round the long, narrow spit of Knight's Head and get your first sight of the Maidencliff, a sheer granite crag crisscrossed with fissures so it looks like a giant chessboard. The Maidencliff stretches from the island's highest point, four hundred feet above the North Atlantic, down into a roiling chasm that the locals called “the thunderhole.” When I was six, my older brother, Simon, pointed out to me the wreckage of a Coast Guard cutter that had gone down there in a storm forty years before.

“
That's
what comes of messing around with boats,” he said.

This is where, in 1893, my grandfather Radborne decided to build his great folly Goldengrove, with the apocalyptic crash of waves echoing from the thunderhole and the cliff face crumbling slowly into the sea. He was thirty-three years old, flush with the success of
Johnny Appleseed
and
Babe Ballads,
his wallet fattened still more by an unexpected legacy from an obscure English painter who had died in an insane asylum and, inexplicably, left a small fortune to Radborne. That year my grandfather married a girl almost twenty years younger than he was, a fey Brookline nymph named Honoria Sweet. She died in childbirth along with Radborne's infant son; he remarried eighteen months later, but this bride, too, died of puerperal fever with her child.

To assuage his grief, Radborne threw himself into designing additions to his already vast house: bays and turrets, outthrust porches and stairways that led nowhere, windows opening onto empty air-shafts. Last and most useless of all, he constructed a wooden stairway that descended the cliff face and ended in a wooden platform that stretched out above the thunderhole. The sets of stair risers were held against the ledge by a series of iron rebars bored into the granite, but the entire cantilevered platform was more a test of faith than engineering.

A man died building that stairway. When I saw it for the first time, more than three-quarters of a century later, it had disintegrated into an Escher nightmare of twisted iron and exploded Catherine wheels of rotten wood that dangled from the cliff, splotched with black fungus and flaming-orange
Xanthoria
lichen.

“Manderley on bad acid,” Red used to call it. He was an old drug-dealing friend of Simon's who became Goldengrove's caretaker by default. He was also the closest thing I ever had to a father. I never knew either of my parents. Simon told me that I turned up one day like those babies left on church steps in old movies, although the truth, or what was passed on as truth, was more complicated. Our father was a failed painter who spent his early years trying to replicate his own father's success, before giving up and devoting the rest of his life to drink. He married and divorced three times. Simon—my half brother, really—came from the last of these unions. No one seemed to know or care who my own mother was, although my father dutifully adopted me and changed his will to provide for me.

Good thing, too, since he disappeared a few months after my arrival, when his sloop went down the thunderhole during a Labor Day squall. His body was never recovered, though pieces of the sloop continued to wash up onto Knight's Head for years afterward—mangled spars, a piece of decking covered with thousands of bright-green crabs.

By that time Simon was himself old enough to be my father: twenty-three, in his second year at Georgetown Law School, and utterly disinclined to have anything to do with me. So responsibility for me fell to Red, who by then was living in the boathouse at Goldengrove, keeping an eye on things while supporting himself doing custom carpentry. I grew up among the odds and ends of a woodworker's shop, breathing sawdust, scarring myself from chisels—and Red's absentminded habit of leaving burning cigarettes in peculiar places—sleeping in a futon bundled into a dinghy up on blocks. Summers we'd move up into Goldengrove, with its bizarre gallery of paintings by my late grandfather, keeping the place warm for Simon until he came to visit, usually with a dozen or so friends in tow.

An idyllic childhood, and like all idylls doomed to end. The summer I was nine, Simon's entourage included a rather sweet pedophile, a Harvard classics professor named Harvey Icht, who never laid a hand on me but did encourage me to strike Alice Liddell–ish poses on the gravel beach while he took photographs. This resulted in an alarming discovery for Harvey and worse consequences for me, after Harvey burst into the room where my brother was sleeping and announced that I was not a girl.

“Of course he's not a girl.” Simon sat up, annoyed, and tossed me a T-shirt. “For Christ's sake, Val, put something on before you freeze.”

“But . . .” Harvey stared, stricken, at my long black hair and cherubic face. “Look at her. Him. And her name. I thought—”

“Valentine
is
a boy's name,” I shouted, throwing the T-shirt at him. “You asshole pervert.”

“Hey, Val,” Red said mildly from the doorway. “Harvey's not an asshole. C'mon, let's get something to eat.”

After that, Simon arranged for me to go to school; boarding first at St. Anselm's in D.C., where Simon had his practice, and then at Andover. By the time I was thirteen, there was no doubt that I was a boy, tall and gangly and green-eyed, with unruly black hair, features too large for my face, and my father's penchant for booze and women.

The one constant in my life remained Goldengrove. It was the kind of house that looks supernaturally beautiful in the period photographs you saw in the biography of my grandfather Radborne—sky always a blinding, washed-out white, the house not the malign black it actually was but that soft silver-nitrite color you want to swallow, like mercury.

In real life Goldengrove was creepy as shit, especially the yews that shadowed the house's entrance like thunderheads. My grandfather had planted them over a century before. He loved to paint trees, and he had a knack for growing real ones that looked positively demonic. The gardens were filled with them: melancholy crabapples, wind-savaged poplars, stands of birches cancerous with peeling bark.

None were as disturbing as the yews, great tortured-looking trees with red berries that glistened like eyes and blackish needles thatched with spiderwebs. Their branches blocked the sun from my bedroom and knocked ceaselessly against the glass if there was the slightest wind at night. I used to beg Red to cut them down. But he couldn't do that without permission from Simon, and my brother refused.

“Bad for the real estate values, kid. You can always move into another room.”

But somehow I couldn't move into another room. I tried, and lay awake at night listening for trees that weren't there. So I moved back into the room above the front entrance. To protect myself from the yews, I took to drawing them. Red was always good about finding me lost hoards of Radborne's pastels and inks and dried-up oils to use. I became hypnotized by my own pictures, and my grandfather's.

There weren't many of these left at Goldengrove. By the time my father was born, the years of Radborne Comstock's lucrative commissions were long past. Books with pictures were just for children now. The public appetite for wonder and exoticism was sated by the likes of Douglas Fairbanks and Ivor Novello, Theda Bara and Pola Negri.

And so Radborne turned to painting fairy tales. Not for any publisher that I could ever discover, either. I always suspected he just made up the stories himself, stray sentences or characters that served as lightning rods for his weird talent. When I was at Goldengrove, all of the earlier, really famous works were long gone. Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan, Beatrice and Benedick and Prospero from
The Boys' Own Shakespeare
—all had been sold by Simon to pay the mounting tax bills and support his cocaine habit. I knew them only from visits to the National Gallery or reprints of Radborne's classic editions for Stone-bridge Press. All that remained at Goldengrove were his disturbing last works.

In his final years, my grandfather's style grew increasingly inward. From what I read about him in the books and tattered magazines Red assembled for me as a sort of Comstock archive, he was utterly indifferent to the great modernist trends of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Impressionism, cubism, fauvism—all passed him by. And yet in the isolation and encroaching madness of these last years, he began to create things that were truly new and strange. His work began to implode; without commissions or a story to follow, he had no creative compass, nothing to keep him from wandering deeper and deeper into his own nightmarish visions. When I was a kid, Red gave me a book that contained images of Louis Wain's schizophrenic fractal cats. I recognized in them the pattern that my grandfather's late painting followed, nearly photorealistic detail giving way to fancy and, in the end, ferociously fragmented, almost purely geometric images, like the endlessly replicating honeycombs traced across your eyelids during an acid trip.

These were the paintings on Goldengrove's fourth floor: extravagantly detailed canvases filled with trees whose trunks sprouted nests of bees with men's faces, armies of insects, women who rode dogs big as horses. Each canvas was framed with the acorn-and-twig designs that Radborne himself made from autumn gleanings and birds' eggs, the husks of dragonflies and hawkmoths, sea glass and dried fungi. Each bore a small brass plaque stating its title.

I was six when I discovered them. Red was taken up with the renovation of a custom Hinkley for a Boston stockbroker. He had the blueprints laid out on the kitchen table in Goldengrove, the only room in the mansion where you could rely on sunlight. I'd spilled something on the blueprints, which made Red swear for about five minutes without stopping. When he finally caught his breath, he gave me a peanut butter sandwich and my lumpy toy dog and pushed me into the living room.