Encounters with Enoch Coffin

by W. H. Pugmire

  “A magician like your ancestor, are you? A witch?”

  Mason winced. “Such an ignorant term, Mr. Coffin, please. ‘Witch.’ It’s no better than ‘Devil.’” He then turned to confront the closed attic door, and spread the fingers of both hands in such a way that the lines on his digits matched the angles of certain lines on the symbol painted on the wood. When he pressed his hands to the surface, the red pigment there took on a fiery glow. It was a seal. A seam of weird red light now shone under the door, accompanied by another cold draft that speared into the room.

  When Mason bared his black teeth in a smug grin, as if waiting for Enoch to show fear, the artist merely asked instead, “Where is your uncle?”

  “Not far.”

  “Indeed.” Enoch then whirled and with his arm swept most of the candles from the top of the steamer trunk. When he threw the lid open, the rest of the candles clattered to the floor. Red light burst up into Enoch’s face, but it wasn’t that which caused him to stumble back and shield his eyes with his arm. It was the frigid blast of arctic air that had been released. Still narrowing his eyes lest the icy air freeze them into balls of glass, he peered over his arm into the maw of the trunk.

  Through plumes of churning vapor, which caught the ruby glow emanating from the impossibly deep throat of the trunk, Enoch made out a weirdly bent figure that appeared to be floating in a vividly red sea. Throughout this sea were strung a countless multitude of black cables, but the thickest cables appeared to pulse as if they were something organic. The pathetic figure snared in this black web and thus suspended in the crimson void was a nude elderly man, his mouth wide in a silent shriek and his eyes bulging in terror. Enoch knew that Samuel Corwin was still alive, trapped in that web like a fly, and staring back at him in helpless horror.

  Mason came toward him and kicked the lid of the trunk shut. In doing so, the hem of his black silk robe rode up and his foot was revealed. It was a cloven hoof, tufts of black fur about his ankle.

  “That will be quite enough of that,” Mason said mildly. “Let’s not be rude.”

  “You’re being rather rude to your uncle, don’t you think?”

  “He’s not my uncle. He’s the descendant of one of those who persecuted my true ancestor, Keziah.”

  “I thought you said we mustn’t judge old Jonathan Corwin too harshly because we aren’t sure how much he had to do with the fates of the accused.”

  “Well,” Mason chuckled, “just in case. Anyway, I had to have somewhere to stay; rents are expensive in this part of town.”

  “And why did you need to find a place in this particular town?”

  “I had no choice; this is where I found myself. Thanks to you. It was your dreams that summoned me at first, Mr. Coffin -- beckoned me to the window, if you will. Then you cinched it when you drew that.” He pointed to the artwork in Enoch’s hands. “You pulled me through the weave, along the lines and curves. You, playing with magic you only half understood, hooked me like an unwary fish and drew me into your wretched, limited mortal plane.”

  Enoch turned the drawing around in his hands to squint at it. Particularly, at the vague ant of a figure in its center. “So that’s you.”

  “Yes. An unintentional portrait. Here.” Mason moved to a crude shelf and took down a magnifying glance. As he returned to Enoch he continued, “It took me a number of days to follow the scent of your drawing, once I manifested in this realm from which my ancestor was spawned. When I tracked the energies to their source and viewed your creation, I understood how I had been brought here.” He passed Enoch the magnifying glass.

  Enoch accepted the implement and studied his own handiwork through its lens, but the figure was not that much more distinct: just a few strokes of his nib, a splotch of India ink, with a tiny open area suggesting where a white face would be. And yet, even as Enoch watched, he saw the rudimentary figure’s long hair streaming as if blown in an arctic wind, its long black robe visibly stirring as well.

  “What is it you want from me now,” he asked, looking up, “that you feel compelled to seal me in this room with you?”

  “I need you to reverse your artistic spell. I only want to return to my own realm and those who are like me -- such as Keziah, who still lives and dwells in those other spaces. Unlike her, I was never part of this world, never fully human, nor would I want to be.”

  “You need only have asked. You didn’t have to try to trap me here like you did your poor faux uncle. Just tell me what to do.”

  “As I say, you must nail your drawing at the nexus of my formula. I’ll help direct its placement.”

  Enoch removed his pen and ink drawing from its glass-fronted frame, and then brought it to the corner where Mason had nailed his many crisscrossing lengths of wood, marked with their red lines and curves. Enoch knelt down to position the drawing against a broad central plank, and found he didn’t really need Mason’s direction. Painted tracks upon the wood aligned perfectly with certain angles in the drawing, formed by staircases and other architectural details that cut into the image from the edges of the paper. Several curved lines on the wood perfectly continued curves begun in the drawing by an arched doorway or a partially seen circular “rose window,” such as one might find in a cathedral. Enoch could feel in his nerves an inaudible click as the lines of his drawing fell into place and the proper links were connected like electrical currents.

  Holding the drawing against the wood with one hand, he picked up a nail and the hammer his host had indicated.

  “A nail in each corner!” Mason instructed behind him. “Yes! Each corner must be bound!”

  Enoch nailed the upper corners of his drawing to the central plank, and the bottom corners to another, narrower plank running parallel beneath it. He then rose, still holding the hammer causally, though now he had a crude weapon.

  “A pleasure to see an artist such as you at work,” Mason told him. “Despite the inconveniences you’ve caused me, my admiration for your ability is sincere. Now, if you’d kindly move aside.”

  “Don’t you want me to remove you from the drawing? Maybe with a brush and some white correction fluid…”

  “Now that the final puzzle piece is secure, your work is done. At last, I can touch it myself.”

  As Enoch watched, the creature that had taken the name Walter Mason knelt before his strange construction in the corner and carefully positioned both hands over the pen and ink drawing, spreading his ten fingers just so. When he seemed satisfied with their alignment, he pressed his palms forward, making physical contact with the drawing. The red lines tattooed along every digit continued various angles that Enoch had inked in.

  And then, every red line Mason had painted along the wooden pieces began to glow, creating a net of fiery strands so bright that Mason’s form became merely a silhouette. From out of the attic corner came such an intense, blasting cold wind that Enoch involuntarily stepped back and again covered his face with his arm. The wide-brimmed slouch hat he favored was blown off his head and his hair was ruffled by the roaring gust.

  But the arctic wind quickly died away, and the luminous scarlet web dimmed to its natural state. When Enoch lowered his arm, Walter Mason was no longer in the attic room.

  He moved closer to his drawing and crouched down to examine it, having again taken up the magnifying glass. Peering through the lens, he saw that the vague dark figure standing in the center of his drawing of an immense, otherworldly chamber had vanished.

  Enoch turned toward the steamer trunk, approached it and once again opened the lid. There was no longer any red-glowing void, nor icy vapors. The uncanny portal had reverted to a mere musty and empty old steamer trunk. Poor innocent Samuel Corwin was irretrievable now, and Enoch Coffin preferred not to speculate on his fate. It wouldn’t be the first time a miscarriage of justice had taken place in the Witch City.

  He used the claw end of the hammer to pry the nails from the four corners of his drawing, and then replaced it in its frame. He’d bring it home with him
, instead of returning it to the gallery, lest questions were asked.

  Enoch was not rattled by the experience he had just undergone. In fact, he was pleased that today’s excursion to Salem had been rather more interesting than he had anticipated. He was quite gratified that one of his drawings had proved so potent. Though to be honest, he was also a bit relieved that this drawing was the only one in the series of pen and inks in which he had incorporated a figure.

  The three thousand dollars in his pocket wasn’t detrimental to his mood, either, even if it did come from an old man perhaps forever ensnared in the spider web of a vengeful part-human entity.

  Enoch moved to the door upon which the seal had been painted, but the symbol no longer glowed crimson. Red light and a freezing draft no longer seeped in beneath the door. Enoch turned the knob and stepped from the room without any unsavory consequences.

  Once again in the street, and hurrying away lest the neighbor woman notice him again and mention him should there ever be an investigation into the disappearance of Samuel Corwin, Enoch took note of the goth-types he saw walking along Essex Street here and there. Yes, Salem was full of their ilk.

  Yet how many of them, he wondered, had not come here as tourists from other cities or states, but as visitors from someplace much, much farther away than that?

  They Smell of Thunder

  (In memory of Karl Edward Wagner)

  I.

  Enoch Coffin drove his truck along the rutted road, past the stone wall of what might once have been a habitation, although no house stood within sight. There was just a wide dry field that reached to where the lush forest took over on the rising slopes, with here and there growths of high weeds mingled with the tall yellow grass. The sky was overcast and the weather cool, but Enoch liked the window down when he drove and didn’t mind the chill. “Lonesome country,” he mumbled as his pickup bumped over the road’s furrows, and he cast a backward glance to make certain the artistic gear in the rear cargo bed had remained secure. Further on, the road inclined and he could see the mountains above the dense woodland, and something in the primeval aura of the sight excited him – he felt very far from Boston. As his truck crossed over the bridges that spanned ravines and narrow rocky vales, he studied the curious manner in which some of those ancient bridges had been constructed, how various combined portions of timber seemed emblematic in the signs and sigils they suggested. The domed hills were close now, and he stopped the truck in order to step out and piss; and as he relieved himself he marveled at the stillness all around as his eyes scanned the shimmering line of the Miskatonic River that passed below the wooded hills. As he stood there a ratty jalopy passed him on the road, and he smiled at the way the suspicious eyes of its driver studied him. Whistling, Enoch raised a hand and made the Elder Sign, which the other driver hesitantly returned.

  He drove onward and came to a bumpy riverside road and then drove slowly across an ancient bridge that crossed the Miskatonic, experiencing a sense of nervous expectancy concerning the soundness of the bridge. The structure’s hoary age affected Enoch’s senses and filled him with foreboding – such things should not be, should not exist in this modern age. The artist was delighted that it did exist so as to spin its macabre spell. But the tenebrous bridge was merely prelude. As the pickup truck slowly crossed it, Enoch sensed a change in the air that wafted through his vehicle’s window. The shadowed atmosphere felt, somehow, heavier, and it carried an extremely unpleasant smell such as he had never experienced. Reaching, finally, the other end of the bridge, his truck drove again across a rough road and Enoch laughed out loud at the sight of Dunwich Village before him, huddled beneath what he knew from his yellowed map was Round Mountain. His fingers itched for pen and pad so that he could capture the uncanny sight with his craft. How could such squalid, disintegrating buildings still be standing? In what era had they been raised? Enoch then began to notice some few lethargic citizens who shuffled in and out of one ridiculously old broken-steepled church that now served as general store, and the artist was amazed at how the inhabitants of the village were so in tune with its aura of strange decay. He had entered an alien realm. The fetid stench of the air breathed in was almost intolerable, even to one such as Enoch who relished decayed necromancy.

  He drove for another three miles, checking with the 1920s map that his correspondent had sent him, and stopped at the pile of ruins that had once been a farmhouse just below the slope of Sentinel Hill. He sat for a while in his stilled vehicle and watched the three persons who worked at a curious construction of wood, a kind of symbolic design that reminded Enoch of the patterns he had seen on the bridges he had crossed on his way to Dunwich. Finally, he pushed open his door and stepped onto the dusty road, holding out his hand to the frantic beast that rushed to him and licked his palm.

  “Spider,” a man called to the dog, which moved from Enoch and trotted to his master. The artist approached the stranger and they exchanged smiles. “Mr. Coffin, I recognize you from the newspaper photos. I’m Xavier Aboth.” Enoch reached for and clasped the young man’s extended hand. “You found your way easily?”

  “Oh yeah, your grandpappy’s map served me well. I took very good care of it, it’s so delicate.” He looked to the top of the high hill and could just see some of the standing stones with which it was crowned. “The infamous Sentinel Hill. And this must once have been the Whateley farmstead.”

  “Aye, that it is. We’re just sturdyin’ up the sign here. Hey – Alma, Joseph.” The lad motioned for his friends to join them. “This is the artist who was hired to illustrate my book of prose-poems. Enoch Coffin, Alma Bishop and Joseph Hulver, Jr.”

  Enoch shook their hands as the woman studied him. “Clever of our Xavier, writin’ his own book. Course, he’s been to Harvard and Miskatonic. Mostly them as gone to university never return. We’re glad this one did.” She smiled slyly at the poet.

  “I’ll let you two finish up. The powder is in that plastic bag there. It needs to be sprinkled exactly as ye’re sayin’ the Words.” He turned to Enoch. “My place is up a mile and a half yonder. No, Spider can chase after us on the road, he loves that. Yeah, I walked over, it’s a nice stroll. I like to stop and bury things in Devil’s Hop Yard, over there. You know, things that help enhance the alchemy of the bleak soil.”

  The two men entered the pickup, and Xavier whistled to his canine, which barked joyously and ran beside the truck as Enoch drove. As he drove, Enoch glanced nonchalantly at his companion’s dirty clothes and soiled hands. Xavier was extremely unkempt, living up to the image of Dunwich folk that had been related to Enoch by some who learned that he was journeying there. The word about Dunwich and its denizens was that they were little more than ignorant hill-folk who rejected modernity and lived primitive and solitary lives. Rumors of inbreeding were prevalent, and Enoch’s one friend who had visited Dunwich Village complained of the hostility he encountered there from people who mistrusted those who were not kindred.

  Enoch drove for a while and then the road turned and passed near another high hill, below which stretched an infertile hillside that was naught but rocks and corroding soil. The young man leaned out his window and called to the dog. “It’s okay, Spider, jest run.” Then he turned and smiled at Enoch, shrugging. “He gets nervous near the Hop Yard.” The truck continued to follow the road until coming to a small plot of land on which a cottage that was little more than a shack leaned beneath the dark sky. “Go ahead and park next to my old jalopy there.” The artist did so and climbed out of the vehicle, offering his hand once more to the friendly canine. He joined Xavier in taking out some of the gear from the cargo bed.

  “Smells like a storm is brewing,” Enoch said, looking up at the sky.

  “Aye, we’d best get this lot inside.”

  The young man’s language gave Enoch pause: was this the poet who had crafted such beautiful and compelling prose-poems? The lad’s spoken language was simple and at times uncouth. Perhaps returning to this forsaken homeland after spend
ing years away at University had killed any elegance of tongue and returned him to the local patois. He followed Xavier to the door of the house and inside, and was relieved that the place was bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside.

  “I’m givin’ you the upstairs with the bed. I often just sleep down here on the sofa. The light’s real good up there cos I put in a winder in the roof above the library, to help with readin’. I like lots of light when I read. Come on up. Oh, them steps are firm, don’t worry, you just need to balance yourself cos there’s no handrails.”

  They walked up what was a combination of ladder and steps, through a rectangle in the living room ceiling and into a cozy bedroom. Xavier tossed the equipment he was holding onto the bed and stretched as he sauntered into the next room, which proved to be a spacious study filled with books, two tables and three sturdy chairs. The ceiling was very low, just an inch from Enoch’s crown when he stood at full height. He set his gear on the bed next to Xavier’s pile and nodded with approval.

  “This is nice. You’re certain you want to surrender your bed?”

  “Rarely use it. And I suspect you’ll want to work up here. It’s real quiet, not another neighbor for half a mile.”

  As if on cue, a faint sound of rumbling came from someplace outside. Xavier nodded.

  “What was that?” Enoch asked.

  “Oh, that’s just the hills. They get talkative just before a storm.” He raised his face and shut his eyes; he inhaled deeply. “Can you smell the thunder?”

  Enoch’s nostrils gulped the air, as from above the ceiling window electricity flashed. The sky boomed as the deluge broke.

  II.

  Once alone, Enoch sat on the bed for a little while and listened to the storm. He found his host an enigma. Xavier was much younger than expected, and when Enoch reached into his knapsack for his own copy of the boy’s privately printed chapbook of macabre prose poems and vignettes he saw that there was no personal information concerning the lad except that he resided on a family homestead in the town of Dunwich – no age or other biographical tidbits were offered. How could such a simple-minded fellow write such strange and mature work? The artist rose and walked into the other room, the “library,” and sat at the larger of the two tables, the surface of which was littered with piles of books and holograph manuscripts. Nearest him was a tea tin filled with pens and pencils, and next to it were old hardcover editions of the prose-poems of Charles Baudelaire and Clark Ashton Smith. Atop one pile of manuscripts was a chapbook edition of the prose poems of Oscar Wilde, the cover of which was smudged with dirty fingerprints. Moving that, he reached for the topmost sheet of paper and squinted his eyes in an attempt to read its minute handwriting. The sheet was covered with crossed out words and eliminated lines, but with effort Enoch could make out a cohesive text, which he recited in his soft low voice.