The Venetians appreciated the performance, too. They cheered, encouraging, enthusiastic, but not with the hysteria that Alondra had witnessed so many years ago. Casio’s sonic magic was working.
Alondra didn’t understand the finer points of the electronics, beyond that Casio’s recorder analysed the frequencies of the vocal performance, graphing them as it committed them to memory. Simultaneously, his sound generator flipped the frequencies and broadcast their inverse through the public address system.
The audience could hear the Siren’s voice, lovely as it was, but the extra-auditory control frequencies—the tones beyond hearing she used to manipulate her listeners to despair and suicide—were cancelled out. Alondra could not have been more pleased. She’d staked too many lives, her own included, on the recording engineer’s skill.
Alondra lifted her opera glasses to study the Siren’s gold brooch. As she’d suspected, the tightly coiled spiral unravelled to reveal a mermaid with a sinuous tail. And the Siren was the exact same woman Alondra had seen twenty-five years ago: un-aged, undiminished, her hair as luxuriant and black.
The Siren lifted her gaze. A smile flickered across that cold, self-assured face. Alondra nodded, acknowledging the recognition.
The Siren sang the same programme as before. The audience grew increasingly impressed, although without histrionics. Amused, the Siren added extra flourishes, additional arpeggios. In contrast, her accompanist struggled and sweated, pressed to the limits of her skill to keep up.
At last the performance ended. The Venetians’ ovation thundered back from the domes. La Sirena inclined her head and did not move from the stage. When it became clear she would grant no encore, the Venetians turned their boats and filed out through the basilica’s doors, taking their torches with them into the deep black night.
Alondra ignited her flashlight and crept carefully down the stone stair from the women’s gallery. Paolo’s boat was not waiting at the foot. She sat on the steps, unconcerned. He and Casio probably had equipment to pack up.
The ancient basilica reverberated with the lapping of tiny wavelets against its marble-faced walls. Alondra had the sense that something moved in the night, but it was not the malevolence she remembered. This was melancholy embodied. Snuffing her light, she crab-walked back up the stair, out of reach of the water.
“I’m the last of my kind,” the Siren said from somewhere below, her Italian strangely accented. “You have murdered me.” She sounded perversely glad.
“I don’t require you to follow the ancient ways,” Alondra told the darkness. “All I ask is that you cease your vendetta against the people of la Serenissima.”
Something large splashed in the cavernous basilica. The echoes took forever to subside.
Moonlight filtered through the windows in the domes, reflecting cold radiance from the spectacular golden ceiling. Alondra shivered in the damp old church, which—though it appeared to be vacant—was not quite empty.
The long cold night gave Alondra plenty of time to think. Over the years, she had set foot inside many churches. She’d dealt with a spectrum of Christians, even loved a few. Their faith told them that sometimes a witch could work God’s will. She had seen nothing to disprove that, but she wasn’t comfortable being used by anyone, even a god.
When dawn finally came, Alondra found four bodies floating in the hip-deep water inside the nave. The Siren and her accompanist she expected. Casio did not surprise her—listening to the recording had been too much of a temptation for the sound engineer. Unfortunately, Alondra had needed him too much to tie him to the mast.
Paolo’s death saddened her, though. He still wore the headphones Casio lent him, plugged into the recorder. Like Odysseus, Paolo chose to hear the Siren’s voice unmasked. Knowing what she was, what she wanted, hadn’t protected him.
Four dead, rather than a hundred, and these would be the last: that counted as a triumph.
Alondra waded through the chilly waters, careful not to slip on the submerged floor. She fumbled the Siren’s corpse into Paolo’s little motorboat.
As she motored back to the mainland, Alondra paused halfway. She weighted the Siren’s corpse with Casio’s electronics and dumped the creature into the lagoon. The others would be discovered by police on their daily patrols.
She would never know the source of the vendetta.
RON WEIGHELL
THE CHAPEL OF INFERNAL DEVOTION
RON WEIGHELL lives in Horndean, Hampshire, with his wife Fran. Individual stories have appeared in many anthologies, including those published by Michael O’Mara Books, Ash-Tree Press, Tartarus Press, Ex Occidente Press and Hieroglyphic Press. Past stories have been selected for Best New Horror and the late Karl Edward Wagner’s Year’s Best Horror Stories.
His published collections include The White Road, The Irregular Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, Tarshishim and Summonings. Two novellas, ‘The Letter Killeth’ and the story reprinted here, have recently been published in the Sarob Press anthologies Pagan Triptych and Romances of the White Day, respectively. He is now working on a third novella, ‘The Asmodeus Fellowship’, for the next anthology in the series.
Other future publications include a story in the forthcoming anthology Booklore, and a short verse tribute to Mervyn Peake for another anthology, Midwinter Entertainment. He is also working, with crossed fingers, towards the publication of a new edition of The White Road.
“‘The Chapel of Infernal Devotion’ is a conclusion to the novella ‘The White Road’,” explains the author, “which was included in the collection of the same name, published in 1997. Both were prompted by the narrator’s hint, in Arthur Machen’s ‘The White People’, that the girl in the story had left other diaries, passages from which I have had great pleasure in concocting.
“Other Machen plot themes that I have continued to explore here include the true nature of the ritual called “The Marriage Beneath the Shade”, and of the Alchemical First Matter in the Lumen de Lumine of Thomas Vaughan, in the light of the myths of metamorphosis surrounding the symbolism of Pan and Proteus in Orphic Polytheism.
“Although the character and music of the fictional Eva Malas has elements of Diamanda Galas, Lisa Gerrard and latter-day Marianne Faithfull, she is inspired in the main by the legendary Nico who, with John Cale, charted strange seas of musical thought in the heady days of the 1960s counterculture.
“The night when things ‘went bad’ in the story once happened pretty well exactly as described, possibly invoked by the first of their wonderful collaborations, The Marble Index.
Then, as now, when the doors of perception are opened, interesting things come in.”
“In this book I will write the most secret things, and some of the words that were taught me at Voor.”
—The White Road
I WAS AT a viewing at Bullinger’s auction house entitled “Original Book Illustrations and Classic Illustrated Books”, where, among a dazzling selection of drawings, paintings and first editions by the likes of Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Harry Clarke and John Austen, I spotted a small pen-and-ink drawing so richly detailed it could have been mistaken for an engraving. It was listed in the catalogue as “untitled”, and attributed to an artist with the highly unlikely name of Adam Midnight.
It depicted, you might have said, some kind of ritualised activity taking place in an enclosed space, but neither the ritual nor the space resembled anything earthly. The location looked unpleasantly organic, a hollow growth, or the intestines of a monster. The congregation appeared to be growing out of, or melting into, the walls and floor, taking root, merging, dividing from some common matter, putrescent but horridly alive. The “Priest” in this “rite”, a quite indescribable creature of insectile, yet somehow semi-liquescent, form, was elevating an object that might have been a drinking vessel of contorted, asymmetrical shape, suggestive at once of a chalice and some soft bodily organ.
That dark corruption of the moral sense long sought by the Decadents had been achieved u
tterly in this tiny drawing. I felt nauseated and seduced in equal measure, making me look too long at details I should not have found so fascinating. And it wasn’t just me. Everyone who looked at it commented how disgusting it was, but it didn’t seem to stop them looking.
That first glimpse should have occurred in devout silence, because I knew I was looking at a little masterpiece.
Even among a roll call of the Golden Age of book illustration, it seemed to me a remarkable piece of work. There was, however, nothing silent or devout about Bill Sherborne, a book dealer who had attached himself to me like a limpet, and who was running off at the mouth about how horrible the drawing was. Like the others, he neither stopped looking nor moved away, so my subsequent memory of that moment was doomed to be played out to the soundtrack of his inane commentary.
As he droned on, I allowed myself to wonder whether the lack of a title, the ridiculously pseudonymous creator and the conventionally repulsive subject matter might conspire to guide it under the radar of the assembled big beasts of collecting, and give me a chance at the auction.
In any case I knew that in the collecting of Golden Age book illustration, ravishing beauty was more often than not the touchstone. Those of us who favoured the truly grotesque were in a minority. Whether that would make what competition there was any less intense remained to be seen.
When the crowd drifted on I looked at the back of the frame, and on lifting a dried-out flap of detached lining paper, made out very faint pencil script along one edge of the backboard. Casually producing my pocket magnifier, I scanned the place as surreptitiously as I could, and made out the words Chapel of Infernal Devotion.
It was a bad slip on the part of Bullingers to list it as untitled. That might, I thought, be just the bit of luck I needed.
On the day of the auction I turned up full of hope, and managed to avoid a place near Bill, who had set his heart on what I thought was an understandably rejected Rackham drawing for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. The illustrated book Mafia were out in force. Thomas Sorbie would be after the Henry Weston Keen entitled Female Nude with Skulls. Paul Appleby nurtured an excessive devotion to Leonard Sarluis, so would target some suppressed drawings for Baudelaire’s Petit poèms en prose. Bidding for some first quality Dulacs and Neilsens would be intense. Attention was definitely elsewhere.
I really thought I had the Chapel drawing. My bid was almost knocked down when a familiar voice from the back of the room attracted the auctioneer’s attention, and I knew my number was up.
It was William Bentliff: with his entry I gave up gracefully and accepted that I had lost the day, and that furthermore I would never see the drawing again. When he bought a work, no one ever did. It would disappear into the oblivion of his private collection of the suppressed, withdrawn, never offered and banned, a Cabinet Secret of Social Taboo. Requests for access from even the most exalted of scholars researching the most noble of projects were always met with contemptuous silence.
I had often pondered how a man could combine such a fine eye for magnificent examples of unappreciated and scorned art with such a mean and selfish personal ethic. He seemed to be on a personal campaign to remove works he considered “corrupt” from the world one by one. Why he was so keen to obtain this disturbing, but hardly erotic, work was a puzzle. He usually sought and gathered in mythological pictures of gods mating with humans, such as illustrated editions of Ovid’s Metamorphosis and so on. He was divorced, lived alone, and was usually described as an angry, antisocial man. The ridiculous prices he was prepared to pay at auctions, and his subsequent secrecy, led to the general conclusion that he had gone bonkers at some point, and was pursuing a private obsession.
None of us could have guessed how right we were.
The disappearance of Chapel meant that I was one of few people who would ever see it. Those moments I had spent gazing at it were therefore doubly precious, if marred by that banal monologue in my ear. What I would have given then for five more minutes in silent contemplation of its wondrous horror.
I brooded quite a bit about the auction in the days that followed. Foolishly I had allowed myself to consider a spot on my wall where the drawing might go, and the empty space shouted at me every time I entered the room.
Later in the week I dropped into the shop of a bookman par excellence, Rupert Gildney. I was wondering about the identity of “Adam Midnight”, and if anyone would know, it would be Rupert.
I could say I was a book runner, but that would flatter me. Book runners are an impressive breed, something of a race apart, widely knowledgeable about a wide range of books and accomplished when it comes to sniffing out the highly collectable. At its height it is an art, and many book dealers wouldn’t function half so well without them.
I was merely an impecunious book collector who regularly came across interesting items outside my own field of interest, and sold them on to Rupert, or someone he recommended. He probably had a few people like me bringing him finds. I could never have made a living from the proceeds, as so many had.
Rupert Gildney was very much of the old school, a gentleman book dealer with the bearing and fruity tones of the classic “actor manager”, a resemblance in no way diluted by his habit of addressing me as “laddie”. It was hard not to imagine him massaging one’s shoulder while asking if “one could possibly find one’s way to cash a small personal cheque”.
Not that Rupert was really questionable in his finances. He was highly regarded in the trade for knowing not just the price but the value of everything, and for pitching his prices at that magic point where his customers never felt alienated, his business flourished, and his stock rotated with the effortless regularity of seasons and planets. The generosity with which he shared his knowledge extended to largesse in the matter of the best cups of tea I have ever tasted, made only with “white tips” purchased at eye-watering expense from Harrods.
I had barely got through the door of the shop before his voice boomed out. “Commiserations, laddie. I hear you’ve been Bentliffed! Nil carborundum illegitimi, as they say. It’s happened to us all at some time. If you hang around illustrated book auctions long enough, you lose your virginity eventually. I’ve been Bentliffed so often I’ve stopped going to them altogether. I leave a bid and hope for the best. At least I don’t have to see his gloating face.”
Before long I was absorbing steaming cups of white tips, and inside information about Adam Midnight.
“Your assumption is wrong, as it happens. Midnight is a real enough name. I’ve known a couple of Midnights in my life, and like the equally real Midday, the name probably originates in the exact time of an ancestor’s birth. However, rather annoyingly, you are right in this particular case. It is a pseudonym used by Phillip Youlden. No, I don’t suppose you’ve heard of him. An obscure artist, but born in Gwent, and a devotee of Machen’s work, which once proved a useful qualification.
It was the main reason he was chosen to illustrate a projected deluxe edition of Arthur Machen stories planned by John Lane in the 1920s. Machen’s work had something of a resurgence at that time, here and in America, and Lane had the idea of following up his Harry Clarke-illustrated Selected Poems of Swinburne with the Youlden Machen. Then there was some unpleasantness. Lane thought one of Clarke’s drawings, for the poem ‘Aholibah’, too erotic, and left it out of the published volume without even telling Clarke. In case you don’t know, it depicts a demon getting very intimate with a naked woman. Clarke was naturally hurt about not being told, and harsh words were probably spoken. Right after, Lane was shown the Youlden drawings for the Machen, and had kittens. They evidently made the Clarke drawing look quite mild by comparison. He’d had enough trouble, I suspect, and eventually dropped the Machen project. I don’t think Youlden’s career ever recovered.”
I told him about my discovery of the title. He didn’t seem surprised.
“Yes, Bullingers can be sloppy with their examinations at times. It isn’t their first mistake by any means. They once des
cribed an Austin Spare pastel depicting someone who looked like a heavyweight boxer as a “self-portrait”! Chapel of Infernal Devotion isn’t a known Machen title, though Youlden could have given it that after the project was dropped. It does sort of resonate with some of Machen’s subject matter, I suppose.
“Just imagine if Lane had continued with the project, though. Full vellum, hand-made paper; that lovely Machen signature done with a fountain pen that sometimes bled a little into fine soft surfaces! I can just see it, can’t you?”
I raised my empty tea-cup.
“To books that never were.”
Rupert took the hint and refilled the cup.
“Harry Clarke’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” I offered, “put paid to by fire in the Easter Uprising in Dublin.”
He nodded. “And the books he wanted to do but never did: Jekyll and Hyde, the Arabian Nights, À rebours, The Turn of the Screw, and of course Dracula! Did you know he longed to illustrate Dracula?”
Rupert loved Clarke’s work as much as I did. The very idea of this had him channelling Vincent Price.
“God in Heaven! Dracula! Think of his illustrations for Faust and Poe, and imagine it. ‘Holy was the grave to him, saintly its darkness, pure its corruption’. There would have been nothing to touch it, nothing! The rats and the abominations, the brooding darkness and the hungry corpses; the walking corruption and the beauty of decay. Clarke was born to do it. I would have given my blood to see his Dracula!”
“You should have seen that Youlden!”
He looked at me strangely, but said nothing.
“So the Lane Machen didn’t even get to the proof stage?” I prompted hopefully.
“I can assure you that it did not.”
“If that Chapel drawing was anything to go by, it would have been something.”
“Yes, but unlike the equally alluring Austin Spare de Sade, it doesn’t exist.”
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