“Holy shit…”
The strip was called Stephanus. It wasn’t signed, but the artist had executed a what I guessed was intended to be a self-portrait in the first panel, depicting himself dangling naked in a dungeon, nailed to an overhead beam by a single spike through both wrists. The face was round, soft, and boyish, with dark, tangled hair and huge dark eyes; the expression one of absolute, wrenching despair and bewilderment. He looked a little like Dondi, the war-orphan from that sappy newspaper strip, only older—Dondi grows up and goes to Hell, I thought.
It got worse. Blood streamed down his emaciated body and pooled in a patch of light several inches below his feet, where rats gathered to drink. The blood became a river, pouring along the margins and into the next panel. Monsters swam in it, devouring escapees from burning ships. The ships themselves were shaped like idiotic, vacuous human faces, or like cupped hands or severed, upside-down feet. Menacing, dark cities loomed along the river’s banks, rooftops silhouetted against background fires, the flame-lit streets crammed with absurdly hideous images: Burning heads on spikes over doorways, their features stapled or safety-pinned into happy-face smiles. In a public square, a cute cartoon duck in a sailor suit was being broken on the wheel by masked executioners, while kiddie ducklings writhed in a semi-circle around them, impaled up the anus on spears.
Rat-faced citizens fornicated on rooftops or in upstairs rooms, but always with malicious intent, sometimes devouring one another. One male-thing had apparently achieved simultaneous climax and death by chopping off its lover’s head with a cleaver, then burying its face so deeply in the spurting neck that it drowned. Meanwhile, a cartoon bomb covered with lipstick kisses fizzled away under the bed. Human and rat children alike cut their parents (and infant siblings) apart with chain saws or drove spikes through their eyes. In a hospital maternity ward, one rat mother sat up in bed, flaying her newborn with surgical knives, without even detaching the umbilical cord first. In the background, a nurse went from crib to crib with a smoking pot, ladling hot oil on the screaming infants.
“This guy is really sick,” said Joe Meese.
“Yeah, but he’s great,” I said.
Imagine Hieronymous Bosch as a follower of Robert Crumb, and you’ll begin to understand what I held in my hands. It must have taken the artist weeks to create all this: elderly humans naked but for funny hats like something out of Dr. Seuss, chained waist-deep in rain barrels of fly-swarming offal; rat-things vomiting from the city wharfs. The bloody river flowed on into the final panel—a huge, half-page vertical—and there splashed over the pearl-encrusted slippers of a monstrous rat in royal robes with a wreath of thorns growing out of its head. In one hand, the rat king held a scepter—on which the artist’s gaping, hopeless face was again reproduced—and in the other, a dripping severed penis.
At the bottom of the panel, in big, ragged letters: NEXT WEEK! MORE HOLIDAY FUN IN THE INFERNAL REPUBLIC OF CHORAZIN!
“I mean, fucked up,” said Joe Meese, in tones of awed admiration.
This was, after all, the age of underground comics: Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Vaughn Bode, Gilbert Shelton, and the rest. If Zap Comics could run Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates, we could run Stephanus.
So we did, and a day later the college president had the whole lot of us in on the carpet. Our academic careers hung in the balance. Fortunately no one took a bold stand for freedom in the arts just then.
No further installments appeared. Somehow the artist must have known what was happening, because he didn’t submit any more. He did leave a note, though, asking that his originals be left in a specific locker in Bartley Hall. He provided a lock, opened, to which he presumably had a key. Nobody even suggested staking the place out to find out who he was. We all had a sense of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.
That might have been the end of that, but a week later I was in the remotest recesses of the periodical stacks of the college library, the part you can only reach through a door behind an enclosure on the first floor. The place has little cubbyhole desks, but the light is dim and no one ever studies there.
I chanced to peek over the top of one of these cubbyholes and saw an open page of a sketch book. Then a pale face looked up at me, startled. The sketch book slammed shut. The owner started sweeping pens, rulers, books, into a bag with frantic haste. He stood up, and I recognized him immediately, of course, from his drawing. The name on the notebook read STEPHEN TAYLOR in block letters.
The only thing that surprised me was how tiny he was. I was already six-four and pretty big then, but I do not exaggerate by weighing in Stephen at little more than a third my size, maybe five-six and a hundred pounds. He could have passed for an eighth-grader. When he stood hunched-down, he looked even smaller.
He clutched his sketch book to himself protectively, giving me that same wide-eyed, frightened stare he’d drawn so expressively.
“Uh, if I’m in your way…I’ll just go somewhere else.”
I was blocking his escape.
“Please…don’t hurt me,” he said.
That startled me. I put down the big periodical volume I was carrying and pulled up a chair and sat, now deliberately hemming him in. I indicated that he should sit back down. He pushed his chair as far away from me as he could in the tiny enclosure and faced me, sketch book and bag in his lap.
“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” I said gently. I told him that I was Ben Schwartz and, despite everything, still art editor of The Villanovan. “I just wanted to see what you were doing.”
He glared at me sullenly.
“Your work is…unique. I think you’re a genius.”
He was still looking for a chance to bolt. It didn’t take any particular insight for me to recognize that this kid wasn’t, ah, “normal.” I did my best to put him at his ease. I told him I was a history major. The last thing I wanted to do was tell him I was in psych. People always assume that you’re going to analyze them for a class project. That, I was certain, Stephen Taylor would not stand for.
I tried to make small talk.
“I’m a junior. You must be a freshman. Aren’t you?”
He shrugged.
“Well, how do you like Villanova?”
Another shrug. “Okay, I guess.”
“Steve—your friends do call you Steve, don’t they?”
He seemed completely flabbergasted. He groped in the air and pointed to himself and said, “But…I don’t have any friends.”
“Oh, come on now. You’ve been on campus almost three months now.”
“I don’t know anybody.”
“Well then maybe you should meet a few people. Why don’t you come over to the Pie Shoppe and we’ll have a hoagie and I’ll introduce you to the newspaper crowd?”
I pushed my chair back and made to leave. He stood up, still defensive, but when I turned to go, he followed me out of the library and across the campus. The Pie Shoppe was a cafeteria in the same building as the newspaper office, directly below us in fact. It turned out he didn’t even know where it was. He didn’t go into public places much.
“People don’t like having me around.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I scare them.”
He wouldn’t go in. I ended up sitting on a wall outside, sharing half a hoagie with him. He loosened up a little. He at least pretended to confide things.
“You see that brick over there,” he said, pointing. “That one, down at the corner. That used to be the only thing in the universe I wasn’t afraid of. But lately I’ve come to understand that it is a particularly malevolent brick, worse than all the others.”
Now that was interesting. Some self-consciousness about his own neuroses, and even a shyly expressed sense of humor about them.
He still didn’t show me the contents of the sketch book, not on that day or on several others. We took to meeting on that wall, then in remote recesses of the library when the weather turned cold.
I saw him almost daily. We talked. I lent hi
m books, a lot of them science fiction. I tried to interest him in different things. I may be the only person in the history of the universe to draw Stephen Taylor into a political argument, which must be something of an accomplishment.
In time he did start to show me more of his work, sketches, studies, even a long Stephanus sequence he was continuing to work on without any hope of publication.
I asked him a few naive questions about why he did what he did, and he rolled his eyes and said, “I paint what I see.”
I felt slightly guilty that I was encouraging him, in a way, because it was clear that he was driven to create this material, that he didn’t enjoy it, that he wasn’t after recognition. It was a kind of slavery, depriving him of all social contact other than our meetings. His grades were apparently excellent, but otherwise, when he wasn’t studying, he spent all his time wallowing in this imaginary Hell. I once asked him about his home life. His father was dead, he told me. He wouldn’t say anything about his mother. He clammed up and wouldn’t talk to me for days afterward.
I admit I was very tempted to write him up as some sort of school project for Abnormal Psychology or something, but I suppose some lingering shred of decency prevented me.
Or the fascination. Here was a private window into the mind of the damned. He produced page after page of revolting, fantastic imagery. There seemed no end to it. But I couldn’t tear myself away any more than he could.
Then the bomb shells hit: Everything he drew was true, he told me. Chorazin, the Republic of Pain, was a real place. His father had been ruler there.
“I’ve never told anybody else about this,” he said. “Please keep it a secret between us. But my Dad was Tetrarchon of Chorazin, before he got out and brought me to America when I was a baby. I guess you could say we’re refugees.”
“Tet-tetra—?”
“It means one ruler out of four.”
“Who are the other three?”
He shut his sketch book, closed his eyes, and seemed to be reciting from a long-rehearsed catechism. “Three are the Companions of the Tetrarchon, always walking at his side, his Fear, his Pain, and his Death. Only the Severus knows the true nature and true name of each of them and when each of them shall be made manifest.”
“The who?” Surely this was more of the elaborate Stephanus mythos. I was appalled, but intrigued and admittedly not at all surprised, that he had apparently lost the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
“Here,” he said. “Look at this.”
He got something out of his pocket and handed it to me. I thought it was an arcade token at first, a coin about the size of a half-dollar, bronze-colored, but light as aluminum. On one side was a profiled face, stern and wise, crowned with laurel leaves like a Roman caesar, but wearing an incongruous bow-tie. The inscription read:
DN BERNARDUS T CHOR.
I looked up at Stephen, questioning.
He took the coin and traced the lettering with his finger. “Dominus Noster—Our Lord—Bernardus, Tetrarchon of Chorazin. That’s my Dad.”
He gave the coin to me once more, showing the reverse figure, which could have been a robot seen from the shoulders up, jut-jawed and hatchet-faced, with fierce, glaring eye, one hand holding an upraised rod that might have been a stylized whip. Like the rat king in the comic strip, this one had a crown of thorns growing out of its head. The inscription read: SEVERUS AET. Eternal Severus.
I gave the coin back to him again, uncertain of what to say.
“The name means the Severe One. He punishes everyone for their sins, even the Tetrarchon, whose very existence is a sin, but necessary, a glory and a duty and a disgrace…” He seemed to be reciting again. “…without end. But my Dad thought he could get away.”
Suddenly I realized that Stephen was crying. He squeezed the coin so hard his knuckles went white. He just sat still in the silence of the shadowy library, rocking back and forth, leaning over a desk, sobbing softly.
I put my hand on his shoulder gently.
He jumped as if he’d been stung.
“Don’t! I don’t like to be touched. It hurts.”
Indeed, in his comic strips, no one ever touched anyone except to inflict pain.
I waited for him to calm down. “Maybe we should talk about something else for a while.”
“No. No.” He tapped the coin on the desktop furiously, rat-tat-tat. “No, I’ve got to tell you. Now. It’s too late for anything else. You already know too much. There’s no turning back now, for either of us.”
I felt a certain chill deep inside when he said that. But I didn’t question him, or interrupt.
“You see,” he continued, “my Dad wasn’t as clever as he thought he was. The Severus came for him when I was six years old. I heard it all from my bedroom, the floorboards almost ready to break from the heavy footsteps of the Severus, the iron fist pounding on my parents’ bedroom door, the voice like thunder mixed with a steam-engine hissing, demanding that the Lord Tetrarchon Bernardus appear. And my father came to the door and said to him, ‘I am here and I am alone. I have no son.’ Father went away then. My mother screamed for days and days…and I never saw my Dad again. For the longest time I didn’t understand why he’d said ‘I am alone. I have no son.’ Then I did understand, and my greatest fear was that he hadn’t been believed.”
Never mind the fascination. This had to stop. It was ruining his whole life. “Steve. Don’t. Don’t say anything more.”
“No…I’ve got to finish now. That wasn’t the last of it. You see, every year on my birthday a package came for me in the mail, with stamps on it from Chorazin, addressed to NOBLISSIMUS STEPHANUS; and inside was a piece of my father, a finger, an ear, his nose…anything which could be amputated without killing him. God, do you have any idea what it’s like to get your father’s dick in the mail? Then, when I was fifteen, the box was larger, and where the others had been addressed to Noblissimus Stephanus—Most Noble Child—this one said DOMINUS NOSTER and TETRARCHON, because the box contained my father’s head and I had inherited his titles. I think it was all just to remind me not to run away when my own time came.”
When he had finished, I sat in silence, utterly devastated. He believed every word of this. It was tearing him up. I couldn’t understand him at all. He was more a stranger now than when I’d first met him. Why had he created this endless, masochistic daydream for himself? And what was the meaning of his sole attempt to publish? A cry for help? Or was it an attempt at affirmation, to make it real?
It was all so transparently fake. The coin, well, he could have had it made up somewhere. As for the rest: I’d read Lovecraft. I knew where the “I paint what I see” line came from. And in M.R. James’s “Count Magnus” the Satanist title character takes the “black pilgrimage” to unholy Chorazin, which is a place cursed by Jesus in the Bible for impenitence. Severus was the name of a whole gaggle of Roman emperors. The rest was…for lack of a better term…comic-book stuff. Anybody could invent a term like “tetrarchon.” For all I knew, it wasn’t even grammatical Greek.
“Stephen,” I said at last, as gently as I could, carefully weighing each word. “Don’t you think your life would be…happier…if you explained all this to a doctor?”
I have never seen such a look of hurt and hatred as came over his face in that instant. Our friendship was dead, I was sure. He felt I had betrayed him, more vilely than could be put into words, drawing all his secrets out of him just to ridicule his pain.
In an incredibly frigid tone he said, “You think I’m insane, don’t you Ben?”
I could only sigh. Now I was the one who was weeping, out of sheer frustration. I was at the end of my resources. “Frankly, yes,” I said at last.
“Then goodbye.”
He packed up his things and left. I guess he must have quit school, because I didn’t see him again for twenty years.
* * * *
In the autumn of 1993 a small parcel arrived at my office, addressed very carefully by hand in block
letters: DR. BENJAMIN C. SCHWARTZ, PH.D., DEPT. OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT IRVINE, etc. I knew the handwriting at once, of course. How ironic, I thought, that the one initial lie I’d told to win Stephen’s confidence had turned out true. Shortly after he left I switched my major to history, and here I was, a professor. Probably he’d followed my career with even greater diligence than I’d followed his.
Of course his entire Stephanus of Chorazin sequence was eventually published to considerable controversy and critical acclaim, and has achieved a place on that small shelf of “serious” graphic-story work, somewhere between Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Eli Needleman’s The Hell Book.
And now, for some reason, he’d chosen to contact me.
I opened the parcel with no little trepidation and found inside the coin of Bernardus of Chorazin, plus a round-trip plane ticket flying me first class to Philadelphia the following weekend, and a simple note:
Ben,
We have much to talk about still. Come at once. I need you.
Your friend,
Steve
Somehow—at least I imagined—he knew my wife was off with her mother to London for two weeks, and that the semester break was about to start. I could come.
It was an awesomely powerful temptation. Every memory of Stephen came flooding back, as if I’d last seen him in the university library only yesterday. I guess I was more obsessed than I’d realized.
After considerable thought, I decided I had to go.
I spent the flight leafing through my copies of his books. (Should I be silly enough to ask him to autograph them? Was that being silly?) I rehearsed in my mind what I was going to say to him, what approach I’d take, for all I didn’t know anything about his life in the intervening two decades save that he must be at least minimally functional, having managed to stay out of jail and the nut house, and in the good graces of his publishers. But beyond that, I drew a blank.
The taxi let me off in front of his house, a tasteful, small pseudo-Tudor on a back street in Wynnewood, no more than five miles from the Villanova campus. I rang the bell and the door opened, but he was behind it, so I didn’t see him until I was inside and he’d closed the door.
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack: 25 Weird Tales of Fantasy and Horror Page 7