Something Wicked #19 (March 2012)

by Something Wicked Authors

  I haggled my dealer down on the price out of principle. The book was not especially valuable, but I still cherished the notion that it might yield a few nuggets of unexplored scholarship.

  At first I paid it little thought, as my wedding drew near. I had banished Denton from my life, and his words still galled me such that I did not miss his friendship. It did not help that Catherine’s shy mirth in my presence had been replaced by a kind of dutiful terror. She was pleasant, to be sure, and always mindful of my wishes, but I could read in her hesitations, her white-knuckled grip on the tea service, that my presence filled her with a mortal dread.

  “I know I am not young and fair,” I said, “but I will be so good to you, my Catherine. Do give me a chance.”

  The look she gave me said what she could not. I was an ogre in her eyes, a loathsome beast, hell-bent on stealing all that was beautiful in her life.

  The wedding that should have been a culmination of joy, uniting my love of the ancient and pure world of ideas with the perfection of youth and the physical world, was instead a grueling affair with all the joy of a funeral. The only ones in attendance were Catherine’s father and a few of my friends from the book circle.

  My chambers in London were not roomy enough for us both, so we took up residence at my family’s estate. Catherine was at first taken in by the beauty of the countryside and the tumbledown charm of the old manse. It made me indescribably happy to see even a faint smile on her face, but when I reflected on this later, it left me with gnawing bitterness. Could this be the love to which the classical poets had devoted their genius?

  I supplied my Catherine with the books she liked, instructed the cook on her favorite dishes, and led her on pleasant country rambles. I even purchased her a fine, chestnut mare for riding. None of it brought more than a wan, passing smile to her lips. The woman was a Chinese puzzle-box, each layer containing nothing but another layer beneath it. Frustrated, despairing, I threw myself into my work, and found the book there, waiting for me.

  The first manuscript bound within the book of love was a stale imitation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria by a decidedly less talented Roman poet. The second text was one of those Renaissance grimoires purporting to teach secrets of the starry spheres and metals of the earth, or some such nonsense. It began predictably enough, detailing methods for distilling lead from gold and the creation of homunculi. The spells and occult treatises grew direr as one progressed: a spell to take the life of an enemy, a means of consorting with certain ‘nameless angels,’ a spell to command true love. If only such a thing were possible.

  What the third manuscript contained I still cannot safely say. It shared the title Liber Amoris with the other two, with the subtitle Parting of the Veil. It was in worse condition that the others, and older, and it appeared that in places the text had been deliberately cut, burned, or otherwise obscured. I shudder to recall it now, but at the time I dove in with a sick curiosity. What I found was madness.

  In the house of [ ] all delights are known, and in the flaying gardens where each form becomes a blossom of its inner glory. [ ] is the eye and the garden. [ ] is noumenon, dweller in-between.

  All forms will become known to it, and all shall be embraced by its boundless LOVE.

  Seek the name in the spaces between. Seek [ ], and be filled with LOVE…

  The letters in the book seemed to swim before my eyes, or scatter like frightened insects. I have difficulty recalling exactly what I read in it, and that is for the best. The book referred to a particular name over and over, but I could not find it clearly printed anywhere – it was cut or burned from the pages, or drowned in thick smudges of ink. Nor could I establish with any certainty whether it was a person or a place, or something entirely different. The book claimed to speak of a pervasive and all-encompassing love – at first I took it for the ramblings of some obscure Gnostic madman – but something about it made me profoundly uneasy, as if love were a code word for something I could not comprehend.

  Yet even as the text’s meaning seemed to deliberately elude me, I was compelled to keep reading it as if frozen to the spot. The sounds of the country outside my study faded to an indistinct hum, while the page before me blurred. I felt that I was still reading the book, even though my eyes could not perceive it clearly. Then from the hum, I began to hear a voice, faint at first, but growing ever clearer. It was my Catherine’s.

  “Another dreary day,” she said, or rather her voice spoke within my thoughts. “I should keep a record with notches scratched on a wall, as prisoners do.”

  I felt a chill come over me. The whole experience was like being submerged in icy water. Her surface thoughts flowed over me in a torrent – her lonely malaise, her pitiful desire to scratch marks in the wall to enumerate the days of her perceived imprisonment, the way an ivy-decked stone arch reminded her of childhood, and a childish wish to escape through such a door into faerieland. All of these flooded me in a babble of voices, moving faster than I could make sense of. I feared I might go mad with the echo of Catherine’s thoughts, but I sank deeper, and her waking mind became a distant hum, as of the ocean in a seashell, as I descended to the dark recesses of her soul.

  She missed her brother terribly, and I was consumed with both numbing waves of her loneliness and my own burning jealousy, and I wished to do something nasty to Denton. His image drifted so frequently through her mind – nearly every moment was the seed of a memory of him. He was as much father to her as brother, it seems. Her own father cast a cold shadow through her life, a void of cruel distance – almost an absence. The worst of it was that I beheld my own image intertwined with that of the old man. I had never been anything but sweet and loving to her, and yet her mind conflated me with this joyless specter. Deeper still within her I sensed the stirrings of primal fears, night terrors that sent her running to her brother’s side; the drunken ravings of her father and the beatings he gave her brother; the horrid image of her mother, consumptive and near death, demanding her young daughter embrace her.

  Deep in the abyss of her mind, I beheld a knotted core of buried passions, wild fantasies that bore little semblance to mundane biology – a world of hazy, mingled flesh and warring shame and pleasure. My Catherine’s imaginary incubus had many faces – most I did not know, (though one I could swear was my gardener’s son) but not a one of them was mine.

  I confess, a terrible desire took hold of me then. I longed for the ability to give my face to the fleshy hydra of her inmost desires. I wished to sow seeds of myself within her mind, and grow to eclipse her brother and all others in the garden of her love. At that moment, my Catherine’s mind faded from me, and I felt myself terribly, crushingly alone. Except, there was something there, even then – something that whispered that it could make my wish come true…

  It was after this that my dreams became strange.

  Each night as I slept, I wandered through a garden of sumptuous beauty, filled with exotic ferns and strange, luminous orchids. Walls of carved marble peered out from beneath carpets of vines. I sensed there was a pattern to it, yet it constantly eluded me, and I could divine no grand plan or significance from its layout, only interlocking gardens of ever-increasing complexity. As I penetrated deeper, I could not shake a pervasive sense of unease. Things moved in the hedgerows, obscured by darkness. Strange symbols were carved into the rock, half hidden by creeper vines – the language was unknown to me, but something in it chilled me. In the distance, I heard what I thought at first were bird calls, until they began to sound, faintly, like cries of human agony. Disturbing shapes hovered at the corner of my eyes, only to vanish when I turned frantically to look.

  By day I felt I walked through a fog, barely able to focus on the details of my business. I sold few pieces in that time, and I could scarcely rouse myself to search for new acquisitions. My morning ramble through my family’s gardens, once a source of pleasure, now threatened to take my dream into the waking world. I feared I would turn a corner in those pleasant greenways and arrive
in the dream garden.

  I confess I was hesitant to confront my Catherine as well. After peering through her mind, it was somehow difficult to look at her. Our hasty and awkward meetings accomplished nothing, and I could not very well accuse her of phantom unfaithfulness in her mind, could I? Perhaps my experience had been nothing more than drowsy fantasy?

  The book was another matter. It beckoned to me, and I wondered if I could once again immerse myself in Catherine’s mind – to read her like an open book, as they say. I resisted as long as I could, troubled by that terrible dream-garden, but I have never been a man who could keep himself away from books. And so, on an idle, sunlit afternoon, I parted the covers once more, and was confronted by the same scarred and impenetrable text. On its face, the book was meaningless – it seemed to be some sort of code, hinting at and implying things some imagined reader would be knowledgeable enough to recognize. Perhaps things one did not wish to speak openly.

  As before, the letters began to swim before my eyes, darting from my gaze and lingering at the borders of my vision, recombining to form strange new words I did not recognize. But before this could drive me mad, I felt the tide of Catherine’s surface thoughts engulf me.

  This time was different – her mind was fixed on something, returning to it with every spare moment: a letter, given in secret to one of my own servants. What was this? As I focused on the letter, her mind led me back through the channel of its writing and gestation in her thoughts, and its contents were revealed to me. She planned a secret meeting with her brother, whom she’d entreated to take her away and secrete her far from my sight in some French convent – anywhere I was not likely to track her down. She wrote of growing feelings of fear, strange dreams, the menacing shadow of my figure – I, who adored her! I could taste with bitter irony all of my Catherine’s revulsion at me, and all of her longing for the safety of the wretched Charles Denton.

  Then, as if in a dream, the book stood out sharply before me. I do not know if I beheld its physical form in my study, or in my mind’s eye, as I had seen Catherine. Perhaps it does not matter. The letters once again scattered like insects from my eye, gathering and coalescing in strange patterns – but then they re-sorted themselves, and the book took shape as something I could comprehend…

  I can give you the love you desire. I can plant the seed of devotion in your Catherine’s mind, and enthrone you as emperor of her heart. All you must do is open the way for me.

  “Who are you?” I asked, though my lips did not move.

  A friend. Someone who loves you. Do what I ask, and let me in, and what you desire can be yours.

  Once more the letters spun before my eyes, but they did not coalesce as before. Still, images began to take shape in my mind, and I knew what I would have to do. A name rose up in my thoughts – a name I cannot now recall, for it seems an unpronounceable blur, but then I knew exactly how to say it. It seemed such an absurdly simple thing, the task that appeared on the pages before me… speak certain words at a certain time beneath certain stars – the easiest thing in the world…

  It was simpler than I thought to imprison Catherine for her disobedience. She swore innocence, of course, and my fool heart almost succumbed to her pleas, but I knew the truth, and I made sure she was safely locked away. What I was to perform that night was not magic; the book had assured me of this, as if it had anticipated some latent superstition I had not known I possessed. It was nothing more than an invitation, such as I would extend to a friend. After all, an invitation is necessary to any event of importance. I merely spoke the name and bade it enter, beneath the open sky – my gaze fixed on Catherine’s window, and my mind focused on her heart. It is strange, I can barely remember that night… but I remember my sleep was peaceful, untroubled by anxious dreams, and I awoke to a sunny morning, eager to see if there had been any change.

  When I unlocked the door to Catherine’s chamber, she flung herself upon me, embracing me tightly and declaring how she had missed me, how glad she was that at last I was by her side again. Such a joy it was, in those few moments, to be loved so. I had never known affection like this, even in my dimly-recalled childhood.

  She would not leave my side all day. When we walked together through the garden, she took my hand, gripping it as if she expected me to drift off into the clouds. The way I felt that morning, it seemed a real possibility.

  “My dear,” I said to her, “I hope the rest of our lives can be this perfect.”

  “Is it everything you wanted?”

  Those eyes, when she said this, were not my Catherine’s… and her mouth… such a terrible, wolfish smile I have never seen. In that moment my happiness crumbled to despair and a terrible, nameless dread. She had the same perfect green eyes and dainty mouth, but they seemed a twisted mockery of what they were – the trappings of humanity, worn like a hollow mask by something that was not human.

  “Who are you?” I said, pulling instantly away.

  “Who could I be, but the one you love?”

  “Yes, forgive me. Something strange came over me.”

  I let her take my hand again. Her grip was iron, and her flesh was so cold.

  “I hope it isn’t serious. I don’t want anything coming between us today.”

  For a few moments I had kissed the greatest joy in life, and it had fled in an instant, replaced by desperate, animal fear. A fear I could not show. When I could first excuse myself without arousing suspicion, I made arrangements with a servant to ready my coach. I dared not risk confronting Catherine directly, or giving her any intimation of my fears. She had to know, though – she must have seen it in my face. I wondered if the thing that was once my Catherine could slip inside my mind, as I had done with hers. I tried my hardest that day to think of obscure origins of words, a catalog of the species of local butterfly, anything but Catherine, anything but my wounded heart, or my desperate thoughts of escape.

  I had no appetite for anything at dinner with Catherine. She, on the other hand, savored each morsel slowly, as if she had never tasted it before, but her eyes never left mine, and as I watched her chew each bit of food, I shuddered at what lay behind those eyes. The way she looked at me… I felt like prey.

  When she tired of the charade of dinner, she got up and boldly announced she would be waiting for me in her bedroom.

  Just a few hours earlier, such a thought would have flushed my face and filled my heart with secret joy – but now the thoughts it inspired were grisly and fearful. I told her that I would join her momentarily. As soon as she was out of sight, I made hasty preparations to leave. My coach was already prepared. As I raced from my chambers, I caught sight of the book, its battered cover leering at me. The last thing I did before setting off into the night was to cast it into the fire. I had never dreamed of destroying a book before, but I could not wait to be rid of this one. Alas, this brought me no relief.

  I rode to London, but I dared not stay in my apartments long. I sold what pieces I could quickly, made arrangements to rent my rooms, and booked passage on a ship for the continent. I needed answers, and I feared for my life. The dreams had returned, and I felt each night not only the fearful presence of the garden, but the dreadful, unshakable feeling that something scratched and pawed at my mind.

  In Paris, I tracked down the dealer who had sold me the accursed book. I found I could barely stomach the man now – my past enthusiasm for the wonders he had provided had blinded me to his grasping, loathsome greed. I now had little doubt that he moved in the worst sort of circles.

  In Cairo, I found the Arab who had sold my contact the book. The man was shrewd, no doubt, and learned, but he was used to selling ancient Egyptian forgeries to the credulous, and was surprised to hear the book was anything genuine. From Cairo he directed me to Athens, where I traced the book to a ring of thieves and forgers. One of these men, when plied with drink and the promise of easy money, related to me that he had absconded with many books from an island monastery, the well-meaning monks of which had been fo
olish enough to offer him food and shelter.

  Being well rid of the ruffian, I set sail for the secluded monastery he had described, my mind reeling with the thought of humble, holy men unknowingly harboring such a loathsome evil in their midst.

  The monastery was a cloud of white marble above red crags and dark blue water, a sight that would have stirred my soul in happier times. I felt no joy at seeing it, however, beyond the faint hope that it might offer answers and some hope of relief. Each night, and now even in daylight, I felt the dull scratching of that thing at the borders of my mind. Sometimes, when I opened doors, or looked around behind me, I beheld the most fantastic, inviting garden path open before me, laden with rich aromas and lush blossoms – an enticing mystery I knew to resist with every fiber of my being. If only Catherine had known this as well – I had no doubt that this was the means by which she had been ensnared.