Encounters with Enoch Coffin

by W. H. Pugmire

  “I’m just about to lock up. I shall be leaving for a brief holiday, as my partner returns tomorrow to tend the shop. I have a present for you, to repay you for your company. I don’t have many who dwell with me as consistently as you have. I’ve enjoyed your company.”

  “Shucks, the pleasure has been all mine.” I watched as she went to a desk and took a woven shoulder bag from it, which she presented to me. The workmanship was exquisite, and the mauve material soft to the touch. The bag was weighty with whatever had been slipped inside, and I peeped into it and nearly fainted. “You can’t be fucking serious.” The first edition of Yeats’s The Trembling of the Veil was inside the bag.

  The crazy lady shrugged. “I purchased it, I shall do with it as I like. Ah, the wonder of your wounded eyes – how priceless.”

  I was shaking, trembling like a pup in love. This was too rich a gift. As I stood there, she went to a place on the wall where her hooded robe hung. Removing it from its peg, she donned her mad apparel, and then she motioned to the door and escorted me outside.

  “Let me walk with you a while, or better yet let me treat you to a little feast. What’s the best place for fine dining?”

  Miss Olney shook her head. “I have no appetite – of that kind.” Her eyes moved upward. “Look, the mists begin to assemble near the strange High House. Ah – the air

  up there is sweet and outré – how the lungs tingle as they breathe it in. Delicious, delicious.” She was very near to me and peered at the scratched area of my forehead; and then she kissed her hand and pressed it to the emblem that had been etched into my flesh, as if I were some weird mezuzah. Lowering her lips, she kissed my mouth – the sweetest kiss that I have ever tasted. As she moved from me I could not help but follow.

  I can’t quite remember where we walked or what we passed. We were near the wharves for a while, and the mist over the water was beginning to thicken and spill toward land. We followed a road along the harbor and then traversed a bend that took us to an incline, which we ascended. The way grew steep and stony, and I grasped my staff more securely and let its properties strengthen my limbs exponentially. Time ceased to exist as we trod over tall grass and beneath giant trees; and then the trees disappeared, replaced with steep naked rock. I chanced to turn my head at one point and glimpsed Kingsport far below us, cloaked in whorls of mist and shadow. Had it grown so late? Where was the sun? Indeed, where was the sky? All I could see above us were banks of gathered cloud and the dark shapes concealed within them. We climbed out of a kind of chasm, through vapor and up steep stone, in a realm between earth and sky; and then, suddenly, the venerable dwelling came into view. Gawd! Who could have built such a strange house? How had they managed to bring the needed supplies to this fantastic height? It seemed insane and esoteric. I clutched tightly at my staff and muttered verses beneath my breath, patting the shoulder bag that swung beside me and feeling the treasure inside it. The clouds crawled chaotically around us and the house, humming in accompaniment to my whispered poetry. Patricia Olney pulled the cowl over her head as she passed by the silent house, with its peaked roof of worm-eaten shingles that met the rocky ground. I heard what might have been a north wind's howl as my companion reached the edge of the crag that stretched out to the macabre mist.

  She turned to me, and my heart shrank at the sight of her burnished eyes, those glowing orbs. She held out her naked hands to me and bade me join her, but I couldn’t move my feet, and so she floated to me and touched my face with her hand’s tapered nails. “Come,” she commanded, “feast upon my eyes. Thus will your own be healed and rectified.” Tilting to me, she kissed my eyes and then offered me her own. I was filled with sudden craving. My tongue stretched to her smooth waxen visage and licked the liquid of her iridescent eyes, and then my ravenous teeth chewed into their jelly. Oh, the ecstasy of her moan. When I moved away, I saw that her eyes had altered and appeared more human; but the sheath of semi-flesh that was her face had slipped a little. Smiling apologetically, Miss Olney lifted her delicate hands to her countenance and straightened it. Without turning away from me, she pulled the cowl over her head so that it completely covered her face, and then she held up her arms as if in anticipation of some happy crucifixion and began to walk backward, toward the edge of the mist-drenched crag. Without hesitation, Patricia Olney moved off the earth, into the roiling clouds. I watched those billowing bodies welcome her, as the monstrous phizogs within those clouds leered at me and laughed.

  Protectively, I held my staff before me and uttered articulation to the mist, that film in which I saw the churning faces of myth and madness, bearded faces that taunted me with wild laughter, sprites that sang of ancient arcane things. They conjoined into each other and melted into other forms, until all were subsumed by an outline of utter blackness that I remembered from some subterranean vision that I had witnessed in an unearthly spot. I grew afraid, but the only weapon that I had was the staff of the Terrible Old Man. Howling curses in unfathomable language, I hurled that walking stick through the air, into the outline that crawled like chaos toward me.

  A portion of the outline lifted out of itself, shaped as a head of some fantastic beast, into one eye-socket of which my staff had been implanted. Heaven groaned, as in the mist three beasts took form, winged and with pale faces that watched me disdainfully. And then the mist folded within itself and was gone, and I stood beside the strange High House and looked down at sleepy Kingsport and its harbor washed in gorgeous sunset flame. Standing near one window of the dwelling, I pressed my hand onto its diamond-shaped panes where I found my bright reflection. My eyes, no longer wounded, watched me with queer emotion. My mug was unmarred, its flesh smooth and whole. I stared at myself for a little while, until suddenly someone, someone inside the strange High House, unlatched the window from inside. I hurried from the site.

  Every Exquisite Thing

  I.

  For painting in oils, which was his favorite artistic medium, Enoch Coffin preferred not to buy paint in tubes but to create his own. To achieve this, he purchased little jars of dry pigment that he mixed with walnut oil (which cut down on the yellowing engendered over time by linseed oil). But he would also add his own unique ingredients to the recipe, which he felt imparted additional power to his work. Sometimes quite considerable power. Some of the ingredients he required, according to obscure grimoires in his library -- such as a facsimile of the Voynich manuscript -- were for him best found in Boston’s Chinatown district.

  Enoch always made a full day of his Chinatown excursions, riding in early from his home in the North End on the subway system’s Orange Line. He would visit a Vietnamese restaurant for a bowl of pho -- beef noodle soup -- and a cup of strong ca phe sua nong thick with sweetened condensed milk. Or maybe some Chinese dim sum instead. Before the ride home, he’d stop at the corner Hing Shing Pastry bakery for some pastries filled with lotus-seed or red-bean paste. Life was as much for the sensual pleasures of the moment as it was for learning what lay before and after life, and Enoch didn’t believe one needed to starve for one’s art, in any sense of the word.

  Ah, but he loved this little tease of Asia, which reminded him of travels he had taken when his finances, or the generosity of patrons, had allowed. Strolling here past arrays of exotic fruit on the sidewalk, or spying live chickens pacing about in a building’s vestibule, put him in mind of exploring the back streets of Seoul, where someone had once spat blood at him from a balcony, and upon looking up he had glimpsed a furtive figure with the obsidian face of a demon. Up sprang memories of Vietnam -- of riding a ferry across a wide black river in the wee hours of the morning on his way to visit the Phuoc Dien temple complex by the Cambodian border. He had been intrigued to find that young transvestite prostitutes plied their trade on either shore and upon the ferry itself, and in flirting with one of these beguiling creatures he had peeked into its bra to find it stuffed with toilet paper.

  And so it was that Enoch raised an eyebrow in appreciation, albeit tinged with a bit
of confusion, when he entered his favorite Chinatown apothecary and found a beautiful woman tending the back room, instead of the wizened old man who owned the tiny establishment. The stranger stood behind the counter where he had only seen elderly Shun situated in the past. Behind the woman, the small room’s back wall was lined ceiling to floor with wooden drawers labeled in both Chinese calligraphy and Vietnamese lettering.

  The woman’s eyes were already locked on Enoch’s when he entered, as if his arrival had been anticipated, though he never called ahead prior to a visit here. “Hello,” she said in accented but accomplished English, “may I help you?”

  “Ah, I was looking for my friend, Shun,” Enoch explained.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, but my father passed away about a month ago.”

  “What? Oh no…I had no idea. I’m terribly sorry.” Enoch had liked Shun, but he fretted more about obtaining the materials he needed to enhance his paints. “Your father, you say? I never knew Shun had any children. So did he train you in his special craft?”

  “Yes, he did; very thoroughly. I’m sure he sensed the end was coming.”

  Enoch judged the woman to be in her mid to late thirties. She was tall, with wavy black hair framing a pale handsome face. Her long nose, strong jaw and composed mouth gave her an aristocratic bearing, but her eyes struck him as deeply sad. It was the sadness of her eyes that most accounted for her beauty. Enoch recalled that Oscar Wilde had said, “Behind every exquisite thing that exists there is something tragic.”

  He wondered how long she had studied with her father, because he’d never seen her in any of his previous visits to the herbalist. He believed he would have remembered her.

  Enoch said, “Well, what is your name, my dear?”

  “Jiao.”

  He explained in as little detail as possible, feeling a bit self-conscious, how he added special ingredients to his paints to “empower” his art. The woman nodded as she listened, as if this were the most normal of concepts. When he had finished, Enoch said, “So I have a bit of a shopping list today, Jiao.”

  “Please begin.” She smiled politely. Her smile was as sad as her eyes.

  He leaned forward on the counter between them, and one by one related the materials he needed, having by now memorized them. He watched as the woman named Jiao went from drawer to drawer, filling small brown paper lunch bags with dried leaves, seeds, or what looked like twigs and bark. Into one bag she dropped a number of tiny mummified seahorses. She stapled the bags shut when finished, and soon ten of these stood in a row on the counter. She gathered them all into a plastic shopping bag for him.

  “Very good,” Enoch said, watching the woman’s face carefully. “Now, what I need are some of the more obscure ingredients Shun kept upstairs. Such as his ‘Essential Saltes.’”

  Jiao held his stare for several beats. “He brought you upstairs? He gave you Essential Saltes?”

  “Yes. He never told you?”

  “No.”

  “I assure you he did, or else I wouldn’t know any of this.”

  Jiao nodded slowly. “That’s true. What is your name?”

  “Enoch Coffin.”

  “Very well, Mr. Coffin. I’ll take you upstairs.”

  Jiao came out from around the counter, and Enoch followed her into the main part of the shop. She spoke to a young worker in Chinese, and apparently he wasn’t expecting to see her beside him, for he looked around with a startled gasp. Enoch had the impression the lad was afraid of his new boss. Apparently she told him to keep an eye on the back room, and that she was taking a customer upstairs. The boy, whom Enoch recalled having seen on earlier visits, nodded quickly with understanding.

  Then, Enoch was following Jiao outside the shop to the street and another entrance to the building. Within, they found a shadowy staircase and Jiao led him to the familiar third floor, where she unlocked the door Shun had always unlocked for him, no doubt with the very same key.

  II.

  The apartment was murky, its shades pulled and drapes drawn, its air a mix of exotic scents. Incense, yes, but other odors unidentifiable, and not all of them pleasant. As he trailed Jiao into a central room perhaps intended as a dining room, Enoch said, “I need to paint you.”

  The woman stopped, and turned to meet his avid gaze. She was restraining a smile, but was it one of pleasure or derision? She said, “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, aside from the obvious reason, that you’re strikingly lovely, it’s an intuition of mine -- and I’ve come to trust my artistic intuitions more than I trust the rising and setting of the sun.”

  “I see. And I suppose you would want to paint me in the nude.”

  “You mean you nude, or me nude?”

  “Very funny.”

  “I wouldn’t protest if you were willing, but I wouldn’t insist upon it.”

  “Hm. You’re very handsome yourself, Mr. Coffin. Has anyone ever painted your portrait?”

  “Me? Oh no, I’d never permit that. I’m like those savages who are afraid a photograph will steal their soul.”

  Neither consenting to nor declining Enoch’s request, and still holding that enigmatic little smile, Jiao moved across the room to an antique Chinese kitchen cabinet. Normally this would have housed dishes and utensils in the upper section and food in the lower, but instead Shun had stocked the hundred-year-old cabinet with cures, potions and concoctions not available to his common customers.

  While Jiao opened its cupboards, Enoch turned toward an altar he didn’t recall having seen in the apartment before. It seemed to represent the practice of ancestor worship, featuring as it did a framed old black-and-white photo portrait of a handsome young Asian man, before which were arranged flowers, offerings of fruit, and joss sticks burnt down to their yellow stems. “Who is this dashing young fellow?” Enoch asked his host.

  “My husband,” Jiao replied.

  “Oh -- and here I thought the photo was quite old. I’m sorry to learn you’re a widow. What losses you’ve suffered.”

  “Yes,” Jiao said, facing him now and holding a glass container close to her chest. She had removed it from the cabinet. “You said you needed the Essential Saltes of the con rit?”

  “Yes.” As they had ascended the stairs, he had told her that much. Con rit was the name the Vietnamese had given to a legendary sea creature with a fifty-foot-long segmented body like that of a centipede. A rotting specimen was said to have washed ashore in 1883, and Shun possessed a bottle containing some of that carcass’s distilled Saltes. Enoch told his host, “When painting a seascape, I like to add a touch of the con rit’s essence to the mix. In the same way that, when painting a forest, I mix vegetable matter with my paints, or add cemetery soil to my hues when I render a graveyard scene.”

  Jiao held out the container she carried, and now Enoch could see that it was empty but for a dusty residue. “And my father sold you the Saltes of human beings as well, did he not? Such as these?”

  “I can’t read the label,” Enoch said, gesturing toward the bottle she held, “but yes…yes, he did. Sometimes I add them to the flesh tones with which I portray the living or the dead -- whatever that painting calls for. But also, there are times when I use them throughout the entire painting, whatever its subject, if these Saltes represent the crystallized remains of some great artist or poet, so that their psychometric force might be imparted to my own work. Your father managed to collect quite an array of specimens in his travels. He was a singularly gifted alchemist. As an artist, I am an alchemist myself. He understood my motivations, and my needs.”

  “But did he sell you any of the contents of this jar?” Jiao asked in an insistent tone, further extending the labeled empty container.

  “As I told you, I don’t know. One jar looks the same as the others to my eye. Why do you ask? Whose remains did that contain?”

  Jiao took in a long breath in preparation to speak, but she was cut off by a loud thud above their heads and looked up sharply. Enoch glanced at the ceiling. It soun
ded to him as if someone in the apartment above had dropped something heavy on the floor.

  Enoch returned his gaze to his host, and looking strangely stricken, she resumed, “My father did indeed gather quite a collection of human remains, sometimes already rendered by other alchemists into their Essential Saltes. But most of these remains he himself distilled.”

  “So he boasted to me. As I say, I’m aware he accumulated arcane knowledge.”

  “You are familiar with the Cultural Revolution, that swept my country from the sixties into the seventies?”

  “Yes. It was a terrible time.”

  Jiao snorted a bitter laugh at his understatement. “Theories vary on how many people lost their lives in that time of savagery. I have heard anywhere between one to twenty million lives lost. In Guangxi there were public ceremonies, banquets, in which people were cannibalized. Of course during this dark time, artists were persecuted. Some managed to hide their art under the floorboards of their homes, and return many years later to retrieve it.”

  “It’s all very horrid.”

  “This jar, here, once held the remains of an artist named Song Yi. Yi’s art was not shocking or challenging. He painted simple rustic scenes of people at work, people laughing and living. Lovely portraits. But forty-three years ago, he was handed over to the authorities by a traitor he believed was a friend. This friend told them that Yi was subversive and dangerous, and so at the age of thirty-eight, Song Yi was publicly beaten until he died from his injuries.”

  Enoch said, “Yes…yes, I know. I do know this one’s history.”

  “You do.”

  “Your father sold me some of this artist’s Saltes on several occasions, so that I might use them in my own art. In so doing, I believed some of his essence --”

  The bottle slipped through Jiao’s hands then, struck the floor and shattered into several large pieces.