Encounters with Enoch Coffin

by W. H. Pugmire

  “Let’s violate this mystery and debauch this box with our hot hands.” His eyes blazed with a kind of madness, and his lips were moist. Rising, I took hold of the ornamental box and watched his eyes as Enoch worked at the stiff latch, and after much swearing the fastener moved. Strangely, at that same moment the fog lifted and moonlight illuminated Enoch’s sinister face. He sucked in the evening air as if it were an element of marvelous bouquet and lifted the necklace out of the box, and then he held it before me. I didn’t move as his other hand combed my hair and began to unbutton my blouse. Cool evening air touched my breasts, as did his mouth. I laughed at his cunning smile as he erected himself and did not shut my eyes when he took the necklace in both hands and placed it over my head, guiding it onto my neck until its amulet nestled at my bosom. He moved a few steps away and regarded me with his artist’s eyes. “Yes, it’s quite superb, certainly worthy of the midnight visions it evokes. Why I’ve dreamed of it so curiously is a thing I do not yet understand. Why have those visions been planted into my brain – by whom?”

  I heard his words but had trouble concentrating on them because my psyche was trying to decipher the effect that tainted my core being, an effect that impregnated me when the amulet touched my breasts. I imagined that I could still feel Enoch’s cold mouth and rancid breath on my skin, although he was far from me; and as my senses drank in the weird sensation the air before me blurred a bit as if something from another dimension was stretching toward the necklace around my neck. That chill breath moved upward, kissed my eyes, until my vision smudged, an effect that allowed me to see more distinctly the phantom before me, a woman who gradually disintegrated and disappeared. I peered into Enoch’s eyes to see if he had shared my vision, but he continued to concentrate on the necklace until, at last, he wafted to me and handled the ornament around my neck.

  “Will she like it,” I pondered.

  “That’s immaterial. It will add an esoteric touch to the painting because it’s unusual and compelling. People will ponder its origin and significance. It will enhance her mystery.”

  I chuckled. “Her mystery needs no augmentation, as she is never without her veil. It wouldn’t surprise me if she wears it always in the mansion.” His enigmatic smile was his only reply. “Will she and her crippled brother really attend the opening?”

  “Of course they will, that was one of my demands when they engaged me. They’ll stay one hour exactly, and then they’ll return to their secret lives.” His smile was laced with cruelty.

  “The real mystery is why she wanted to be painted.”

  “No,” he spoke in his low-toned voice, “it was he who requested the canvas.” His lips twitched, and I took this as a sign that he was tempted to tell me more but wanted secrets of his own. His cool hands caressed my breasts as he brought his face near to the necklace, and I thought perhaps he was studying his reflection on the smooth surface of the polished glass amulet. Then I felt him shudder and heave a little moan. I moaned with him, as his mouth moved away from the necklace and found my flesh.

  II.

  Having been erected in 1905, the manor house in which Randolph and Rebecca Lorne existed was not old by Arkham standards; but it was certainly an establishment of rich witch-town mystery and myth, legend that had reached its epitome with its current inhabitants. Enoch Coffin swung open the gate of the black wrought-iron fence and passed through onto the private land, but rather than going straight into the mansion he stopped and peered about, and then he stepped to a place that caught his weird sensibilities. He saw the circle of diseased ground and knew this it was the spot where the tree of legend had once towered, the tree from which Randolph Lorne had fallen as a child, an accident that necessitated the removal of a dead leg so as to save the boy’s life. Oscar Lorne, the boy’s bizarre father, had felled the tree and used portions of its wood to construct a series of artificial limbs that allowed his child the ability to stand and walk, and Enoch had heard the whispered lore of the arcane symbols that had been etched onto those imitation limbs. He raised one hand and moved his fingers strangely in an attempt to touch the magick and madness of the place. An influence pulled his hand toward the house, and to that edifice he stalked. The building was certainly innocuous in appearance, with its clean cream-colored wood and small-paned windows, its balconies and widow’s walk. It looked a perfectly peaceful habitation from the outside, and it wasn’t until one walked into the house that its sinister aspects became discernible. One passed the threshold and walked into a dark domain, a place that breathed of the past with its antique furnishings, its old oak paneling, its dead silence. The muted light kept things in semi-dusk, but as Enoch climbed the stairway he stopped to study some few of the large framed portraits that hung on the ascending wall in the poor light. It humored the artist that this family celebrated their sinister nature in the way they clothed themselves and the attitude expressed in crafty physiognomies. Each portrait had a small plaque fastened to it with the name of the person portrayed, but none had dates so as to provide the era in which the painted figure had existed; and the clothes donned by each individual were often so bizarre and inimitable in style that they offered no clue as to the decade in which a certain portrait had been executed. Enoch considered the defiance in the painted eyes and the subtle perversion expressed with curling lips, and then he touched a pair of frozen lips as if the smiling portrait might whisper some secret word into his hand. Yet the lips before him remained sealed, and so Enoch whispered an arcane word himself, an utterance that seemed to shape itself as darker air that sighed from out his mouth and floated upward, to the top of the stairs where another portrait peered at him with darksome eyes.

  “Master Coffin, have you been absent all night?” The speaker looked little more than a fair-haired child, and although he shared some suggestion of features with the persons in the framed portraits, he looked almost too innocent to be one of the clan. The boy floated down the stairs and stood near the older man, and then he tilted toward the artist and pressed his face against Enoch’s clothes. “Ah, you’ve been at the graveyard on the other side of town. Its clay has a distinctive smell, I find, which may have to do with the ghouls who are whispered to tunnel beneath it. Rather curious, the way a burying ground can infest your imagination and seem to be a place of appetite. It calls for the yet-living flesh that it would have burrow itself into its depths and find a habitat.” Reaching for one of Enoch’s hands, the boy lifted it to his face and studied the particles of silt that stained the artist’s fingernails; and then he pressed the fellow’s hand to his face and ran his moist lips over its tissue as swift air pushed out of the lad’s nostrils.

  Enoch moved his hand behind the young man’s head and wound his fingers into the lad’s thick hair, bending nearer so that their noses touched. “You smell so sanitary, dear boy. Let’s find a plot of earth in which to sully you, and then I’ll lick ye clean.”

  Randolph Lorne pushed the artist away. “It must get tiresome, having to live up to your legend of debauchery.”

  “You’re far more a creature of legend than I’ll ever be,” the artist countered as he touched a hand to Lorne’s stiff leg. The younger chap pouted for one moment, and then he moved away and limped into the spacious drawing room, where he fell onto a sofa and began to roll up his trouser leg enough so that the lower portion of his faux limb was revealed to the room’s soft light. Silently, Enoch entered into the room and knelt before the boy, and then his hand ran along the surface of the wooden leg in which odd symbols had been etched.

  “This is the second one I’ve had at this age. The one before got ruined when Rebecca attacked it with a hatchet during a moment of violent play. Father had a series of them fashioned which were fitted as my body expanded with growth – but I think I’ve reached my final height, so the others will stay in their little box.”

  Enoch’s breath issued as a low-toned whistle. “I have seen these symbols in some few esoteric tomes – and yet there is something unique about these. Were al
l of your faux limbs constructed from the tree on which your ancestor was hanged?”

  “Hanged herself. She wasn’t executed. It’s just a legend, anyway. The sigils are queer, aren’t they? I used to fantasize, when I was a kid, that if I learned their true meaning their magick would transform my dummy leg into a limb of flesh and bone. But Rebecca and I discovered, as we aged, that we didn’t have any deep interest in the old ancestral ways, no taste for alchemy or murder. It all seemed a bit stupid, you know, spells and philters and dancing nude in moonlight. It wasn’t intellectual. It lacked the kind of art that interested us. And it’s so exhausting, our ancestral ways, roaming the globe in search of keener arcane capacity. We wanted to stay here, within our fortress, with our books and dreams.”

  “What dull ideas you have had. So you lived within your safe and silent world of books, and literature lured you enough so that you began to write poetry of your own, such strange evocative verse?”

  Randolph smiled a little. “That’s a recent development. I do enjoy it, though, and I loved working on the design of the book, choosing the soft velvety binding, paper stock, a unique shade of ink, all of that. I wanted the construction of the actual book to be as aesthetic a thing as the writing of my little poems. I should have thought of you when I was contemplating the author’s photograph. We had the photographer age the thing so that it resembled a faded portrait of the past – but how appropriate it would have been had you painted an actual portrait to be reproduced in the book.”

  “We can still do that.”

  “No, I’m not having any further editions printed. Three hundred copies is quite enough. I can’t believe they all sold. Anyway, I didn’t know about you until the write-up in the paper about your exhibition. That gallery has such a sordid reputation that no respectable artist will exhibit there, but their shows always get a little mention in the paper. We don’t get the paper, of course, but some ‘kind’ anonymous person sent a clipping of your write-up with its photograph of your painting. That’s when I decided to attend the opening.”

  “You were impressed enough to hire me to paint your sister’s portrait, although the idea you have for the painting is grotesque and unimaginative. Do you not see that it would be cruel to transform your sibling into a fake resemblance of yourself? For that is what you seem to want from me, a painting in which her fascinating bestial distortion is smoothed into a boring replication of your ordinary beauty. You would turn her into another faux extension of yourself. Bah.”

  The young man did not reply with his mouth, but his eyes were expressive and malevolent. Enoch appreciated seeing the youth’s true nature, if only for a moment. Randolph began to prepare to roll down his pants leg, but Enoch stopped him and bent to further investigate the leg with his fingers. He could tell by touching that some of the sigils were quite old, yet there were other etchings that were fresh. Whatever ritual the symbols were a part of, it was obviously ongoing.

  “You will do the portrait you’ve been hired to produce, certainly.”

  Enoch frowned. “No. I will paint your sister as she is. Get someone else to do your other idea, I can’t be bothered.”

  “You’re bloody insolent. You may remove your hand from me now. Your roguish handsomeness does not allure me.”

  Enoch slapped his hand against the fellow’s other leg of flesh and bone and rose as Randolph rolled down his pants leg. The lad followed Enoch out of the room and to the staircase with its portraits.

  “Look at them, your unholy forebears. You think that you can ignore the sinister nature of your line? Bosh. It is your perverse and wicked nature that led you to me and made you whisper your request for your sister’s portrait.”

  “No, it was your awful painting that brought me out, when I saw it in the article that announced your showing. That was a moment of nightmare, I can tell you. How you knew what the thing looked like – for it was destroyed years ago – I cannot guess.”

  “An Arkham resident sent me a photograph of the tree from which you fell as a child, the tree that has supplied your ersatz limb. The photograph wasn’t clear, of course, so I couldn’t quite make out the symbols that had been carved into the thing’s bark – those esoteric etchings that now decorate your appendage. My friend was familiar with the tree and had made a copy of its symbols before the tree was destroyed; but of course she didn’t need to do so, for I was familiar with the formulae with which your father – I assume it was he – had marked the tree.”

  “No, the tree’s markings had been carved into it before we took hold of the property. Your friend is this Mona something, who then did a series of paintings of the tree? I’ve never seen them, although I hear they were exhibited in Boston. ”

  “Yes, Mona. She was so young when she did those paintings, and she wasn’t quite able to capture the creature’s ambiance as I sensed it from the photograph. Photography can sometimes capture things that elude ink and oil.”

  “Well, what I want from you is pure art. Now, be a good fellow and heed my request. Paint my sister as if she were beautiful. Give her a face like mine own.”

  “There is something rather cruel in your request. I’ve noted a touch of malice in your verse, and I see it darkening your petulant eyes now. What, I’ll paint your sister as she can never be, and my canvas will be a tool with which you’ll taunt her?”

  “Oh, she’s tough.”

  “Well, I again refuse. I’ll pack tonight and be gone in the morning. Really, you’re too insulting. I can make her magnificent as she is, I have that artistic power. I will not debauch her brutal fate by making her prosaically pretty as you are.”

  “God, you’re so superior, judging me as you do. I have my own depths and enigmas. I have this, damn you.” He tapped his knuckles against the surface of his artificial leg. “You’re smiling? Ah, this is a game, and you’ve played me. You desired an emotional rise, and you’ve gotten it. All right, do as you wish. Paint Rebecca as you will, if you think you can study her face and not be tainted by her nature. You know so little. You’ll find her a challenge as you have never known. Good day, Master Coffin.”

  Enoch watched the young man limp into the drawing room and close its doors. Then he turned and climbed the stairs that took him to his room, watched by the frozen eyes of those portraits that he passed.

  III.

  The face within the web watched him from its place in upper darkness. It was a visage almost immaterial, a residue of revenant that hungered for one last gasp of mortal breath. The face moved behind its covering and made a little sound, and Enoch fully awakened to discover that his patch of dream had substance in reality. She stood with her back to the antique upright mirror where her image, silhouetted by the slight slice of moonlight that filtered through thin curtains, was a nebulous blur. She brought a smell with her, like that of upturned old earth, and he breathed deeply as he sat up in bed and drank her strange allure.

  The sound of soft laughter came from behind her layers of veil, and then she gasped as he pushed away the bedclothes with his legs and revealed that he was nude. Flowing toward him like hungry shadow, she stood above him and inhaled deeply. Again, she laughed, and something in the sound hinted of insanity. Enoch raised a knee and clasped his hands around it. “I have something for you,” he said in his low sensual voice. Rebecca gasped softly and backed away as he pushed out of bed and walked to a bureau on which the embellished metal box sat. “Open the curtains there,” he told her, “so that more moonlight can ooze into the room. Excellent. What a wonderful effect of light and gloom, and you look so proper in that duskiness, with your somber attire and air of mystery. Look at the way the design on the container is enhanced by lunar radiance, so lovely. Come here, I’ll just undo this little latch and then we can open it together. Do you always wear gloves?”

  “Never without my armor,” she sighed, in a voice that wasn’t much more than whisper.

  “Does it protect you from the world, or just your brother?”

  “We are rarely in your
world, Mr. Coffin, and I have next to nothing to do with him. Do you want to know my sibling’s great misfortune? He has no real imagination, he cannot think beyond his little self. His little book is nothing but a pathetic personal wail, for which it seems there is some small audience. He doesn’t understand me or the reason that I dress as I do – he thinks it’s a symbol of shame. I feel no ignominy in being bestial, or in the occult madness that created me.”

  “Do you like the dress I brought for you to pose in?”

  “It’s beautiful, such a dark red, like mingled blood and shadow. It fits superbly. Am I sitting for you in the morning?”

  “Do not wear your masks. This is to be a portrait.”

  Her hands went to her veils and smoothed them. “Is that what you call them, my masks? No, I adore the way reality looks through their fabric. They complement my fashion, my mystique. I am a thing of shadow, that’s what Randolph sometimes calls me. ‘O, thing of shadow, come kiss me sweet and twenty.’ To be a thing of shadow gives one immense freedom, I find. I enjoy being kindred of darkness.” She exuded a little laugh and then, kneeling before him, touched the container. “So what is this object?”

  “Come,” he said, taking her hand and guiding it to the hinged lid. Together, they lifted the lid, and she wheezed her little gasp as he took up the necklace and spilled it into her gloved palm.

  “The amulet is so cold. God, look at its shape, like some poor creature’s atrophied heart. The small black pearls look metallic, don’t they? It’s lovely, in an unholy kind of way. I’ve seen it before, I think.” There was a kind of excitement in her chatter, but then it suddenly ceased and she grew still. Enoch took the necklace from her hand and raised it before her chest, and the young lady bent low so that he could slip the necklace around her. He was again aware of her smell, and he wondered why her scent reminded him of the upturned earth of the burying ground in which he and his whore had found the amulet. “Who was she?”