by S. T. Joshi
“Not many, I suppose,” he said, putting the book down on the small table beside the tea-tray. “You call this place a chine, then? In the U.S., we’d call it a gully, or maybe a ravine.”
“The island is famous for its chines,” I told him. “Blackgang Chine and Shanklin Chine are tourist traps nowadays—a trifle gaudy for my taste. It’s said that there are half a dozen still unspoiled, but it’s difficult to be sure. Private land, you see. The path isn’t as dangerous as it seems at first glance. Chines are, by definition, wooded. If you were to slip, it would be more a slide than a fall, and you’d probably be able to catch hold of the bushes. Even if you couldn’t climb up again you could easily let yourself down. Don’t try it at high tide, though.”
He was already halfway through his first cup of tea, even though it was still a little hot. He was probably trying to calm his nerves, although he had no idea what real acrophobia was. Finally, though, he pointed at the painting on the wall between the two freestanding bookcases, directly opposite the latticed window.
“Do you know who painted that, Mr. Eliot?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“I knew the moment I looked at it,” he told me. “It’s not on the list I compiled, but that’s not surprising. I knew it as soon as I looked at it—Pickman’s work is absolutely unmistakable.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “If you knew who painted it,” he said, “You might have mentioned that you had it when you replied to my first letter.”
Not wanting to comment on that remark, I picked up The Syphilis Transfer. “It’s an interesting thesis, Professor,” I said. “I was quite intrigued.”
“It was quite a puzzle for a long time,” he said. “First the Europeans argued that syphilis had started running riot in the sixteenth century because sailors imported it from the Americas, then American scholars motivated by national pride started arguing that, in fact, European sailors had imported it to the Americas. The hypothesis that different strains of the spirochaete had evolved in each continent during the period of separation, and that each native population had built up a measure of immunity to its own strain—but not to the other—was put forward way back in the seventies, but it wasn’t until the people racing to complete the Human Genome Project developed advanced sequencers that we had the equipment to prove it.”
“And now you’re working on other bacterial strains that might have been mutually transferred?” I said. “When you’re not on vacation, investigating your grandfather’s phobic obsessions, that is?”
“Not just bacteria,” he said ominously—but he was still on vacation, and his mind was on Richard Upton Pickman. “Does it have a title?” he asked, nodding his head toward the painting again.
“I’m afraid not. I can’t offer you anything as melodramatic as Ghoul Feeding, or even Subway Accident.”
He glanced at me again with slightly narrowed eyes, registering the fact that I was familiar with the titles mentioned in the account that Lovecraft had reworked from the memoir that Edwin Baird had passed on to him. He drained his cup. While I poured him another, he stood up and went to the picture to take a closer look.
“This must be one of his earlier works,” he said, eventually. “It’s a straightforward portrait—not much more than a practice study. The face has all the usual characteristics, of course—no one but Pickman could paint a face to make you shudder like that. Even in the days of freak-show TV, when the victims of genetic disasters that families used to hide away get tracked through courses of plastic surgery by documentary makers’ camera crews, there’s still something uniquely strange and hideous about Pickman’s models...or at least his technique. The background in this one is odd, though. In his later works, he used subway tunnels, graveyards, and cellars, picking out the details quite carefully, but this background’s very vague and almost bare. It’s well-preserved, though, and the actual face...”
“‘Only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear,’” I quoted.
He wasn’t about to surrender the intellectual high ground. “‘The exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright,’” he went on, completing the quote from the Lovecraft text, “‘and the proper color contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.’”
“But you’re a molecular biologist,” I said, as smoothly as if it really were an offhand remark. “You don’t believe in latent instincts, hereditary memories of fright, or a dormant sense of strangeness.”
It was a mistake. He turned round and looked me straight in the eye, with a gaze whose sharpness was worth more than vague suspicion. “Actually,” he said, “I do. In fact, I’ve become very interested of late in the molecular basis of memory and the biochemistry of phobia. I suppose my interest in my grandfather’s experiences has begun to influence my professional interests, and vice versa.”
“That’s only natural, Professor Thurber,” I told him. “We all begin life as men of many parts, but we all have a tendency to consider ourselves as jigsaw puzzles, trying to fit the parts together in a way that makes sense.”
His eyes went back to the painting—to that strange distorted face, which seemed to distill the very essence of some primitive horror, more elementary than a pathological fear of spiders, or of heights.
“Since you have the painting,” he said, “you obviously do have some of the things that Silas Eliot brought back to England when he left Boston in the thirties. May I see them?”
“They’re not conveniently packed away in one old trunk and stowed neatly in the attic or the cellar,” I said. “Any items that remain have been absorbed into the general clutter about the house. Anyway, you’re really only interested in one thing, and that’s something I don’t have. There are no photographs, Professor Thurber. If Pickman really did paint the faces in his portraits from photographs, Silas Eliot never found them—at least, he didn’t bring any back with him from Boston. Believe me, Mr. Thurber, I’d know if he had.”
I couldn’t tell whether he believed me or not. “Would you be prepared to sell me this painting, Mr. Eliot?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry if that ruins your plan to corner the market—but who can tell what a Pickman might fetch nowadays if one ever came into the saleroom? It’s not as if he’s fashionable.”
The red herring didn’t distract him. He wasn’t interested in saleroom prices, and he knew that I wasn’t angling for an offer. He sat down and picked up the second cup of tea I’d poured for him. “Look, Mr. Eliot,” he said. “You obviously know more about this than you let on in your letters, and you seem well enough aware that I didn’t tell you everything in mine. I’ll level with you, and I hope that you might then be more inclined to level with me. Did your grandfather ever mention a man named Jonas Reid?”
“Another of Pickman’s acquaintances,” I said. “The supposed expert in comparative pathology. The one who thought that Pickman wasn’t quite human—that he was somehow akin to the creatures he painted.”
“Exactly. Back in the twenties, of course, knowledge of genetics was primitive, so it wasn’t possible for Reid to entertain anything more than vague suspicions, but there was a time when colonial America was home to numerous isolated communities, who’d often imported sectarian beliefs that encouraged inbreeding. You don’t expect to find that sort of thing in a big city, of course, but Pickman’s people came from Salem, and had been living there at the time of the witch-panic. The people who moved into cities as the nation industrialized—especially to the poorer areas like Boston’s North End and Back Bay—often retained their old habits for a generation or two. The recessive genes are all scattered now, mind, so they don’t show up in combination nearly as often, but back in the twenties...”
I felt an oddly tangible, if slightly premature, wave of relief. He seemed to be on the wrong track or, at least, not far enough along the right one. I tried hard not to smile as I said: “Are you trying to say th
at what you’re actually looking for is a sample of Pickman’s DNA?” I asked. “You want to buy that painting because you think it might have a hair or some old saliva stain somewhere about it—or even a blood drop, if he happened to prick himself white fixing the canvas to the frame?”
“I already have samples of Pickman’s DNA,” he told me, in a fashion that would have wiped the smile off my face if I hadn’t managed to suppress it. “I’ve already sequenced it and found the recessive gene. What I’m looking for now is the mutational trigger.”
I’d cut him off too soon. He was a scientist, after all—not a man to cut to the bottom line without negotiating the intermediary steps. He must have mistaken my dismay for incomprehension, because he continued without waiting for me to speak.
“We all have numerous recessive genes of various sorts, Mr. Eliot,” he said, “which are harmless as long as the corresponding gene on the paired chromosome is functioning normally. The ones that give us the most trouble nowadays are those that can cause cancer, if and when their healthy counterpart is disabled in a particular somatic cell, causing that cell to start dividing repeatedly, forming a tumor. Normally, such tumors are just inchoate masses of cells, but if the recessive is paired with one of the genes that’s implicated in embryonic development, the disabling of the healthy counterpart can activate bizarre metamorphoses. When such accidents happen in embryo, they result in monstrous births—the sort DeVries was referring to when he first coined the word mutation. It’s much rarer for it to occur in the mature soma, but it does happen.
“Most disabling incidents are random, caused by radiation or general toxins, but some are more specific, responding to particular chemical carcinogens: mutational triggers. That’s why some specific drugs have links with specific cancers, or other mutational distortions—you probably remember the thalidomide scandal. Jonas Reid didn’t know any of this, of course, but he did know enough to realize that something odd was going on with Pickman, and he made some notes about the changes he observed in Pickman’s physiognomy. More importantly, he also went looking for other cases—some of the individuals that Pickman painted—and found some, before he gave up the inquiry when disgust overwhelmed his scientific curiosity.
“People were so anxious to hide the monsters away, of course, that Reid couldn’t find very many, but he was able to observe a couple. His examinations were limited by available technology, of course, and he wasn’t able to study the paintings in sequence, but I’ve got the DNA, and I’ve also pieced together as complete a list of Pickman’s paintings as is still possible, along with the dates of composition of the later items. I’ve studied the progression from Ghoul Feeding to The Lesson, and I think I’ve figured out what was happening. It’s not traces of Pickman’s DNA for which I want to search your canvas—and any other Pickman-connected artifacts your grandfather might have left you—but traces of some other organic compound, probably a protein: the mutational trigger that activated Pickman’s gradual metamorphosis, and the not-so-gradual metamorphoses of his subjects. If you won’t sell me the painting, will you let me borrow it, so that I can run it through a lab? The University of Southampton might let me use their facilities, if you don’t want me to take the painting all the way to America.”
I was glad of his verbosity, because I needed to think, and decide what to do. First of all, I decided, I had to be obliging. I had to encourage him to think that he might get what he wanted, at least in a superficial sense.
“All right,” I said. “You can take the painting to Southampton for further examination, provided that it doesn’t go any further and that you don’t do any perceptible injury to it. You’re welcome to look around for any other objects that take your fancy, but I doubt that you’ll find anything useful.”
I cursed, mentally, as I saw his gaze move automatically to the bookcases on either side of the painting. He was clever enough to identify the relevant books, even though none of them had anything as ludicrously revealing as a bookplate or a name scribbled in ink on the flyleaf. The painting was almost certainly clean, but I wasn’t entirely sure about the books—and if he really did decide to scour the rest of the house with minute care, including the cellars, he’d have a reasonable chance of finding what he was looking for, even if he didn’t know it when he found it.
“It’s odd, though,” I observed, as he opened one of the glass-fronted cases that contained older books, “that you’ve come all the way from America to the Isle of Wight in search of this trigger molecule. I’d have thought you’d stand a much better chance of finding it in the Boston subway, or the old Copp’s Hill Burying Ground—and if it’s not there, your chances of finding it anywhere must be very slim.”
“You might think so,” he said, “but if my theory is correct, I’m far more likely to find the trigger here than there.”
My sinking heart touched bottom. He really had figured it out—all but the last piece of the jigsaw, which would reveal the whole picture in all its consummate horror. He began taking the books off the shelves one by one, very methodically, opening each one to look at the title page, checking dates and places of publication as well as subject-matter.
“What theory is that?” I asked, politely, trying to sound as if I probably wouldn’t understand a word of it.
“It wasn’t just the syphilis spirochaete that was subject to divergent evolution while the Old World and the New were separated,” he told me. “The same thing happened to all kinds of other human parasites and commensals: bacteria, viruses, protozoans, fungi. Mostly, the divergence made no difference; where it did—with respect to such pathogens as smallpox, for instance—the effect was a simple loss of immunity. Some of the retransferred diseases ran riot briefly, but the effect was temporary, not just because immunities developed in the space of four or five human generations but because the different strains of the organisms interbred. Their subsequent generations, being much faster than ours, soon lost their differentiation. The outbreak of monstrosity that occurred in Boston in the twenties, as variously chronicled by Pickman and Reid, was a strictly temporary affair; it hardly spanned a couple of human generations. My theory is that the trigger lost its potency, because the imported organism carrying it either interbred with its local counterpart or ran into some local pathogen or predator that wiped it out. The reverse process might easily have occurred, of course—at least in big cities—but I believe that there’s a better chance of finding the trigger molecule over here, where families like the Pickmans and the Eliots probably originated, than there is in Boston or Salem.”
“I see,” I said. While he was leafing through the books, I went to the window to look out over the chine.
To the right was the English Channel, calm at present, meekly reflecting the clear blue September sky. To the left was the narrow cleft of the chine, thickly wooded on both sheer slopes because the layers of sedimentary rock were so loosely aggregated and wont to crumble that they offered reasonable purchase to bushes, whose questing roots could burrow deep enough not only to support their crowns but to feed them gluttonously on the many tiny streams of water filtering through the porous rock. Because the chine faced due south, both walls got plenty of sunlight in summer in spite of the acute angle of the cleft.
Directly below the window, there was only a narrow ledge—almost as narrow now as the pathway leading down from the cliff-top—separating the front doorstep from the edge. When the house had been built, way back in the seventeenth century—some fifty or sixty years before Richard Upton Pickman’s ancestor had been hanged as a witch in Salem—the chine had been even narrower and the ledge much broader, but it had been no fit home for acrophobes even then. If it hadn’t been for the vital importance of the smuggling trade to the island’s economy, the house would probably never have been built, and certainly wouldn’t have been kept in such good repair for centuries on end by those Eliots who hadn’t emigrated to the New World in search of a slightly more honest way of life. The bottom had dropped out of the smuggling bu
siness now, of course, thanks to the accursed European Union, but I didn’t intend to let the place go—not, at least, until one landslip too many left me no choice.
By the time I turned round again, Alastair Thurber had sorted out no less than six of Pickman’s old books, along with a mere four that just happened to be of similar antiquity.
“That’s about it, I think,” he said. “Would you care to show me around the rest of the house, pointing out anything that your grandfather might have brought back from Boston?”
“Certainly,” I said. “Would you prefer to start at the top or the bottom?”
“Which is more interesting?” he asked.
“Oh, most definitely the bottom,” I said. “That’s where all the most interesting features are. I’ll take you all the way down to the smugglers’ cave, via the spring. We’ll have to take an oil-lamp, though—I never have got around to running an electric cable down there.”
As we went down the cellar steps, which he handled with rigid aplomb, I filled in a few details about the history of smuggling along the south coast—the usual tourist stuff—and added a few fanciful details about wreckers. He didn’t pay much attention, especially when we went down through the trapdoor in the cellar into the caves. He was a little disappointed by the spring, even though he was obviously relieved to reach the bottom of the parrot-ladder. He had obviously expected something more like a gushing fountain, and probably thought that the Heath-Robinson-esque network of copper and plastic tubing attached to the pumps wasn’t in keeping with the original fitments. I was careful to point out the finer features of the filtration system.
“The water’s as pure as any mains water by the time it gets up to the tank in the loft,” I told him. “Probably purer than much mainland water, although it’s pretty hard. The real problem with not being connected to the mains is sewerage; the tanker that comes once a fortnight to drain the cesspool has to carry a specially extended vacuum tube just for this house. They have to do it, though—regulations.”