by Mark Teppo
I suppose I should have felt some gratitude at that, but my eye hurt and, if I believed Hentlock, the pain wasn't going to go away.
*
The previous week hadn't been spent sucking off Hentlock's hospitality; I had been doing studies of the portal, trying to break it down into a sequence of integrated components. If the task had been to paint an impressionistic version of the portal—an artistic rendering shot through my prism and blown onto the wall in the rainbow of my aesthetic—it would have taken me no more than a few days to paint it. As annoying as it was to admit, however, Hentlock hadn't hired me as an artist: he picked me to be his copyist.
So copy I did.
I stayed on task; there wasn't much else to distract me in the basement. The lights never went out: Hentlock's reminder that I could sleep when I was finished. Three meals were delivered through the slot cut in the door at the top of the old stairs. I measured time by the meals, trying to keep a count between them and I gradually began to feel like they were equidistant.
I slathered a thick base of earth tones on the wall, cutting and spreading with the trowel so as to outline a work space. The portal was almost an arch: two large columns squatted like giant toadstools as anchors to the doorway. The caps of the columns were rounded knobs like swollen penises from which frozen spume extruded like strands of ugly razor wire. Curled around each column was a pair of serpentine creatures with too many blank eyes and too many grasping hands. The eyeball-riddled serpents met at the middle, their rhomboid heads turning inward. Their mouths were stone lines, thin gashes cut across their heads. Stretched between them, held tight at the corners by their stern lips, was a tapestry scripted with whorls and markings and symbols, the Word of some Dreaming God writ large across the firmament.
I painted non-stop for several days. It was, without any doubt, the best work I had ever done. As if my entire career as an abstract painter was a rehearsal for this singular moment of concrete rendering. It seemed backwards, a denial of the intent of abstract painting, but if one can envision the world in an abstract manner—if you can see the cracks and correlations of objects—you can also visualize more exactly how the pieces fit. Painting abstractly—be it as a surrealist, as an impressionist, as a pointillist—is a conscious choice, a backward step from reality wherein you lend your own tint and texture to the world. While paint comes off the brush regardless of the direction of your stroke, its application is the magic, the difference between all things.
How much do we learn about ourselves in those moments when we are painting the “wrong” way? When abstraction is abandoned for real and all your art school pretensions and grubby need for the adulation of the downtown gallery critics is stripped away, what is left? Just you. That's when you are finally making art.
I managed to transfer the diagram from the manuscript onto the wall. The slippery focus problem I had experienced previously with the page was not apparent in the high resolution scanned image.
But, in the end, I got it all wrong. Even as I finished carving the last symbol in the thick layer of paint on the wall, I knew that I had failed.
I had copied the work and, like a first year student with an approximate rendering of an Old Master from the museum gallery, I still had no idea how the original had actually been created. I had connected the dots, I had done the same thing the camera had done—created a snapshot—but I hadn't actually painted a work of art.
*
Hentlock finally admitted to what he had done to me when I told him to bring the physical manuscript down to the basement and I pointed out the colored swirls and hidden patterns on the page that only my malformed left eye could register. They didn't show on the computer monitor because the imaging camera wasn't able to capture the wavelengths of light given off by the page.
The portal wasn't the only page imbued with a spectral layer; most of the drawings had the extra layer of symbol work that flashed like lightning across the page when I pressed against the swollen edge of my left eye.
The poison in the syringe had temporary given me extrasensory vision.
Trade-offs. Life is full of them.
“I paid three million dollars for this manuscript,” Hentlock said, reverently stroking the cover of the book. “Some will say that it is worth ten times that.” His reticence was clear in his posture and his voice: he wasn't entirely sure of my motives. He had given me access to the book when I had just been a hired hand but with the forced incarceration and the stunt with the needle, he was concerned that my interest in the manuscript might not be entirely altruistic.
Rightly so, but I was tired and my eye hurt. I wanted to be done; I wanted Hentlock and his sweating, quivering excitement about an ancient fucking manuscript to be out of my life. “Just give me the damn book,” I said. “What could I possibly do to it?” Well, other than eat it or tear it up or shit on its pages? “Where could I go with it?” I amended, indicating the two goons between me and the stairway. “You can even leave them down here if you'd like while I work. Just as long as they don't say a fucking word.”
That seemed to mollify him. Hentlock sullenly handed me the manuscript. “You need to be finished by tomorrow,” he said, attempting to maintain some control over the project.
“Sure,” I said. “I've got that appointment to keep at the hospital. Right?”
He blinked. “Of course,” he said, trying to smooth over his momentary lapse. “Yes, you are right. The hospital. Tomorrow afternoon. We'll go as soon as you are finished.” He smiled, a thin-lipped 'show your teeth' expression he thought was charming.
It wasn't. I didn't even need the augmented vision of my left eye to tell he was lying.
I smiled back and waited until he realized I wasn't going to get back to work until he was gone. He toyed with the cuffs of his jacket for a minute and then seemed to remember a pressing engagement. He nodded at one of the security men as he left and the guy followed him out, leaving me only one spectator. I waited, staring at goon number two, until I heard the door shut at the top of the stairs.
He stared back, his eyes slowly taking on that fine glaze of infinite patience security agencies seem to cultivate in their employees. He was watching me but not really seeing anything. His brain had dropped into a lizard state of receptiveness, watching for any movement that violated the specific parameters of his task: as long as I was working, he didn't give a shit what I was doing.
I opened the book and found the page with the portal diagram. As I had pointed out to Hentlock, the poison in my eye allowed me to see different wavelengths of light and the hidden layers of the manuscript page were as visible as the other ink on the page.
The text was also clearer, cut in starker relief against the puce colored pages. I realized I could understand the shorthand and, while there were certain words that still made no sense, large portions of the text were completely readable.
I put my finger against my eyelid and pressed down slightly against my swollen eye, causing the colors to move faster. The patterns swirled with a kinetic fury as I started to read the dying words of an insane monk.
*
I finished my corrections just before midnight. “It's done,” I told the guard. “Go fetch your master.”
He shrugged himself out of his light trance and focused on the painted wall, his face tightening as he tried to discern the differences. He couldn't see them and, after a few seconds of scanning the art, he lifted his shoulders slightly and left the room.
I figured Hentlock had a camera or two mounted in the corners of the room so that he could keep an eye on me. I had to take the chance that the guard's announcement of my success would distract him for a few minutes. There were a couple of things I needed to do, and the window of opportunity was going to very small.
Finally, I heard the basement door open and the sound of their feet on the stairs. Hentlock swept into the room, dressed for the occasion. He had wrapped himself in a yellow robe covered with fine needlepoint—white inscriptions that ran in par
allel rows up from his knees to his shoulders. His two companions were dressed in similarly inscribed scarlet robes.
“Is it finished?” Hentlock asked. He couldn't see the changes. None of them could; they didn't have my vision.
I nodded. “It is done.”
Something in my voice caught his attention. “You know what it is?”
“It's a door,” I said, keeping my voice dull and tired. “Just like it looks.”
“Exactly,” he said. “A door to some place else.”
I shrugged. I held my diamond-shaped paint trowel loosely in one hand, the fingers of my other hand lightly curled around the wet paint on my palm.
I had left the manuscript in front of the portal, casually open to the page with the drawing of the doorway. Hentlock stepped forward and picked up the heavy book. “I am very pleased, Nickolas. I have waited a long time.”
“I bet,” I said. The two goons were only here for one purpose and, having extrapolated where this whole circus was going to end, I had decided on some changes. As the hard guys came to grab me again, I stabbed the one on the left in the neck with the paint trowel.
He made a thin noise like a balloon animal expiring, his hands jerking to the red gash in his throat. My left eye watched a stream of pale gossamer shoot out from the hole in his neck like strands of spider silk. I whipped the trowel in a backhand motion towards the wall and spattered a fine line of his blood across the painted surface. I shouted a string of words, a line of text I had read in the manuscript. “Talubsi! Adula! Ulu! Baachur!” The darkness lurking in my head guided my tongue, correcting my pronunciation so that the words actually had the proper charge.
I ducked away from the second security guy as I felt the air in the room move, a shift in pressure as if a crack had formed in the firmament.
On the wall, the serpents blinked, the black holes of their eyes pulsating with emerald light. Their mouths closed, pulling the banner tight between them. The symbols snapped into rigid shape and, in my head, all the fire of their shape became argent outlines against the star-lit backdrop of the rising darkness in the pit of my brain.
The banner ripped and, in a radiating flush like a shock wave, cracks began to appear in the wall. Sections of paint dried to dust instantly and flaked off, a snowfall of ash. The snakes began to coil about the columns and the wire fronds of the penis caps began to move and twist, their razor lanyards scattering dust from the untransformed wall. I felt a breeze coming through the cracks, a fetid breath of an alien wind.
According to some esoteric pattern, the center of the painting crumbled, puzzle pieces falling off the wall and piling on the floor like frozen petals. Between the painted pillars, the wall was gone and I could see the foreign landscape of my dreams.
I could hear the raised voices of the heralds, their combined cry rising to an unholy shriek of excitement as the light from this world spilled into the rust-stained twilight of the other place. A low fog crept across the threshold, staining the floor in black and red ink.
Hentlock and the other guard forgot all about me as the door started to open. They grabbed the large rug spread across the center of the room and threw it back as quickly as they could, revealing the arcane circle painted on the floor. As the banner tore and the wind crawled into the room, they stepped into the protective embrace of the circle.
The guard I had stabbed was puddling blood on the floor and there were white strands rising from the hole in his throat, a spectral bleed that only my damaged eye could see. This translucent ectoplasm was beginning to spin a thin form over his head, a two-dimensional self-portrait drawn in a stark Edward Munch style. He feebly tried to grab my legs as I felt under his robe for the keys that would unlock the upstairs door. I hoped they all had a set and was rewarded with a slight metallic jingle as I dug into his left pocket.
Hentlock was reading from the manuscript, his voice rushing over the hard consonants of the incantation that would activate the protective circle. The other guard was cowering behind the yellow-robed figure of his boss.
The rich smell of rotting flesh and decaying flowers washed into the room, filling my mouth with such a tactile sensation I almost felt as if I had just bitten down on a piece of bad meat. The wind coming through the gate shifted, currents swirling as they were forced around a large shape.
Hentlock began to talk faster, his words beginning to bump into one another.
An octet of thick tentacles slithered through the open doorway. They were as red as the sky on the other side, ridged with open, sucking mouths filled with short spiny tongues and rows of ragged teeth. One of them snaked across the floor and attached itself to the leg of the dying man.
He shrieked, clawing at the tight grip of the tentacle about his leg. The sucking mouths bit at his bloody hands and he lost a finger before he could get his hands away from the eager teeth. A second tentacle caught his other leg and the pair dragged him across the floor, a long smear of his blood tracking a straight line to the open gate.
A small pressure wave flashed outward as he was taken through the gate and, from the other side, came a series of wet tearing sounds.
The other six tentacles braced themselves against the walls of the basement and pulled hard enough to crack the sheet rock of the walls on either side of the portal.
My ears popped as something heaved itself through the opening. It filled the portal, black mist rising off its skin, and the thick tentacles reared out of its back like the long arms of a squid. It had a flat head, hairless and smooth, and arranged on its skull were six seeping wounds, oozing golden ichor. It had five mouths in its chest and they gasped and puckered like dying fish. Two of the mouths were wet with blood and I could see the smear of the dead guard's diaphanous spirit across the full lips like sticky cotton candy.
Hentlock finished his incantation with a triumphant cry and, closing the book with a resolute thump, pointed at me. “An offering,” he cried, “Blood and bone for my lord.”
Several of the eager mouths started mewling like baby kittens and a pair of the long tentacles slithered in my direction. I held my ground and raised my left hand, showing the monster the sigil painted on my palm, before closing my thumb and pinkie in a circle across the symbol.
The six holes were actually weeping eyes and, at the sight of the protective sigil on my hand, one of the mouths shrieked like an angry monkey and the tentacles recoiled as if I had just touched them with a live wire. I felt some recoil, a psychic wave smacking my skull like a hammer blow. Deep within my brain, a valve closed with an audible click. I nearly closed my hand as the persistent pressure that had been living in my head disappeared. Yes, yes, this is the way. Doors open, doors shut: this is the cycle of the universe.
Hentlock continued pointing at me and shouting, seemingly unconcerned as the tentacles turned their questing attention towards his circle. Of course, he couldn't see the sparking hole in his sanctuary like I could; he hadn't noticed the line I had scraped through the circle with the edge of my trowel. The monster had no trouble seeing the break in the seal and it drove a pair of tentacles into the flaw, raising a shower of green sparks from the contact. The smell of burning flesh coupled with the already thick miasma of rot and decay as the monster wedged its suckered mouths into the hole.
Hentlock stopped yelling about having me eaten when the front edge of his circle flashed a vibrant emerald. He raised his hands in supplication as the monster broke through the circle's protection and wrapped its burning tentacles about him, letting the hungry mouths tear at the yellow cloth of his robe.
The security guard made a break for it, and nearly made it to the door. Nearly.
I tried to block out the noises and the cries as the tentacle mouths tore the two men apart and delivered raw morsels to the hungry monster. I tried to not see how the five mouths on its body keened and moaned for the sustenance like baby birds. The venom in my left eye socket could see the heat waves radiating from the gold flowers on the face of the beast. It couldn't touch me; t
he Elder Sign painted on my palm kept it at bay.
But my safety wasn't assured. As soon as I closed my hand into a fist, the paint would smear. Flesh is too porous a canvas for oil paint—it just doesn't work as a permanent medium. By the time I got to the top of the stairs, the eye was already starting to lose its shape.
I gashed my painted palm with the edge of the trowel, and mixed my blood with the oils. I smeared the mixture on the door, working a five-pointed star onto the wood of the portal. With my thumbnail, I cut the shape of the eye in the center of the star and cleaned up the radiating points of the non-Euclidian starfish.
Would it work? I couldn't be sure. I put the same sigil on the outside of the door and added a line of text below, feeling like I was marking the clubhouse door of my childhood tree fort.
I could feel the monster beneath the floor of the house, its tentacles pressing against the walls and ceiling. The basement door rattled once soon after I closed it and I felt the psychic howl of frustration that came directly after.
The beast tried to touch my brain, tried to insinuate itself in my psyche again, but unlike the previous time when I had just been a dreaming painter with a receptive brain, it found the access points blocked. All the cracks in my head had been sealed.
It would have to find someone else to open the door for it now.
I took Hentlock's BMW—he wouldn't be needing it anyway. I had three destinations in mind as I pulled away from the mansion with the rotting darkness in the basement: the hospital, a tattoo parlor, and the Canadian border. As I came down the hill towards the Montlake Interchange and the University of Washington Hospital, I scratched the first destination off my list.
I would take my chances with my eye. A tattoo of the Elder Sign on my palm would protect me, but it wouldn't do me any good if I couldn't see them coming.
Maybe not the next day, maybe not even in a year. Eventually, though, they would find me.