Shadow Puppets
I.
Enoch Coffin had met some of these artists before -- unfortunately. He even recognized some of the attendees who were not artists, from other exhibitions, including his own. This being the case, he was forced to put up with much small talk before the night’s event. Repeatedly he was asked what project or projects he was currently pursuing himself. He fended off most of these questions very quickly, as they were largely just obligatory politeness, though he did converse more at length with a few individuals who seemed to hold a sincere interest in his work.
An aged woman with more paint on her face than some of Enoch’s canvases, who had been listening in on his conversation with one of the more tolerable guests, cut in with the admiring comment, “Young man, you put me in mind of that actor…hm…he was in Stone’s film Platoon.”
“Gawd, not that Sheen person, I should hope,” Enoch said dryly, raising his wine glass to his lips.
“No, no…another character in that one.”
“Must be that scar-faced bastard you’re thinking of,” said a voice behind Enoch.
He turned toward the speaker, and molded his lips into another of tonight’s artificial smiles. “Ah, hello, Dane. The man of the hour.”
This evening Dane van der Sloot was artist, gallery owner and host all in one, the venue being his own home in Bar Harbor, Maine. Enoch didn’t think Dane’s income as an artist could account for the impressive house; he’d heard the man was a widower, his wealthy wife having perished in a freak accident a few years back, her heart apparently having given out when she made the odd decision to swim in the chilly waters off Acadia National Park’s Sand Beach, late one summer evening. Odd, because later her family had insisted the woman had never learned to swim.
“Enoch,” Dane said with a nod. “Frankly I’m surprised that you accepted my invitation and came all this way. I feared you’d decline, but thought I’d give it a shot anyway. I’m glad I did…thank you.”
“Mr. Coffin has traveled the world,” said the person he had been conversing with. “Maine isn’t all that far from Massachusetts -- true?”
It was far enough when one’s vehicle -- in this case Enoch’s battered old pickup -- was of dubious reliability, but he didn’t care to divulge such personal details. Enoch replied, “It’s a beautiful area. I’ve been to Acadia National Park in the past.”
Enoch didn’t add, though it might be implied, that he wouldn’t have driven six hours (not counting rest stops) for Dane’s show alone. September was a lovely time of year in Maine, offering a balance of golden warmth and invigorating chill, and past the high tourist season of summer. Still, even now from the pink granite summit of Cadillac Mountain one could count on spotting some large cruise ship or other prowling amongst the Porcupine Islands, their shaggy humps suggesting the backs of a pod of great aquatic animals. Thus, the streets of quaint Bar Harbor would be filled with tourists from the UK and elsewhere. Enoch had detected a British accent or two among tonight’s attendees of Dane’s art presentation.
“Why do you work from Maine, if I might ask?” the painted grande dame asked Dane, now running her wine-lubricated gaze up and down his tall frame, garbed in a crisp black suit and black turtleneck. “Why not someplace more…sophisticated, like New York?”
“Well, I’m from this state originally, my dear,” Dane replied with patient good cheer. “But I did pursue my career in New York for many a year, actually…before they kicked me out.” He laughed to show he was joking, though Enoch knew it was not entirely a joke. “I decided to return to my roots. Where else in the world -- and I ask you this, Enoch, you being the great world traveler and all -- where else can one encounter such a perfect marriage of forest, mountain and ocean? It’s like a magnificent nexus point of all the elemental power Nature could devise. The forces of Earth are pure here, resources just waiting to be tapped into. I am here precisely because it is the antithesis of New York, or Mr. Coffin’s own Boston.”
“But most of the art scene here,” the woman continued, with a bright red sneer, “seems to consist mainly of lobsters and lighthouses painted on wooden plaques for tourists in Bermuda shorts.”
“All the more reason for me to be here!” Dane exclaimed, clapping his large hands together. “To enlighten!”
“But you’re preaching to the choir, aren’t you, Dane?” Enoch couldn’t resist commenting. “This showing isn’t open to the general public. It’s by special invitation only. So I’d say you must feel we honored guests are already sufficiently enlightened to appreciate whatever it is you plan to reveal to us tonight.”
“Enoch,” Dane returned, his eyes glimmering, “there is always room for further enlightenment.”
“I see. Very well.” Enoch spread his hands. “I await epiphany, then.”
“Oh, I think you’ll find this right up your dark alley, Enoch. We aren’t all that different, you and I, even if I did overhear that you once rather ungenerously referred to me as a ‘sad aging goth’ and a ‘cruel and pretentious boor.’”
The grande dame looked to Enoch with a stifled gasp, as if expecting a fist fight to break out.
Enoch wasn’t about to deny or apologize for his words, so he smiled, sipped his wine again, and said, “A boor perhaps, Dane, but never boring.”
“I’ll accept that as a compliment of sorts, Enoch. But do you still consider me cruel? Isn’t Nature itself cruel?”
The man was undoubtedly cruel, even by Enoch’s standards, and it was his trouble with animal-rights groups and the law that had chased the artist out of New York state as much as any tree-hugging impulse. Even while in New York, Dane’s work had often ostensibly addressed Nature as a theme. The trouble had come from using living things as part of his mixed media. A typical piece would be the The Game of Life and Death, a glass labyrinth containing a single white mouse and a large starved rat, an interactive artwork in which two attendees of the exhibit would slide open or lower in place any variety of partitions, as would benefit the animal they had chosen as their avatar. In Ouroboros, a snake with a live mouse fastened securely to its tail would thus swallow its own tail, finally expiring as a tightened O. Fish, birds, lobsters, and ultimately cats all factored into his artworks. Those who vehemently protested Dane’s work had asked when he would move on to placing human babies in his glass tanks.
“Well,” Enoch responded, “it’s curious to comment on the suffering to be found in the world, by inflicting suffering yourself.”
“Ah, so you came all this way simply to judge me and feel superior. I see. We’ve had a bit of a competitive relationship, haven’t we, you and I? Especially since I began my studies of the occult. I think you felt threatened then, as if you feared I had entered into your own territory…and might outdo you.”
“I understood you were delving into esoteric knowledge, Dane, but I’ve never seen it manifested in your…art.” Enoch placed a derogatory accent on the word “art.”
“Ah, but tonight you will see my new body of work.” Dane pushed back his sleeve to glance at a wristwatch with a black face. “And I had better get ready…the show is about to start.”
II.
The title of Dane’s presentation was Shadow Play, and the reference to “play” made Enoch wonder if this were to be a performance art type of thing. So far no physical art was on display other than the house’s customary collection. The group of attendees had assembled at the circumference of a large room with not a stick of furniture nor a stitch of rug upon its honey-hued floorboards. It would take up too much space for them all to sit down, so they stood in a tight ring close to the equally barren walls. Enoch thought of the O of the dead snake in Ouroboros, and wondered playfully if glass walls might appear out of nowhere as a result of Dane’s outré studies, trapping all his guests and making them into the artwork themselves.
At least that Enoch might have to applaud.
Dane emerged from a curtained doorway, pushing a wheeled cart covered with a black cloth toward
the center of the room. He was not only dressed all in black, but wearing black eyeliner. Enoch muttered to the person beside him, “The eternal goth. Embrace what you are, I guess. Maybe he’s finally ready to be honest with himself, and his art.”
“Shh!” the person shushed him, watching their host raptly.
“Hmph,” Enoch grunted, refocusing on Dane as the man swept the black silk cloth from the cart like a magician unveiling some cheap illusion.
Sitting atop the cart was a good-sized glass fish tank with an open top. Instead of containing water, however, it was filled to the brim with what appeared to be an opaque fluid, black as India ink.
Then Dane swept one hand above the tank, tracing strange symbols in the air. It might seem to the others a theatrical, even ridiculous bit of showmanship, but Enoch recognized one or two of the symbols the artist formed. They were sigils of conjuration…one of them representing the “Dragon’s Head,” or “ascending node.”
Turning slowly as he spoke, so that his eyes might sweep the faces of all gathered around him, the showman intoned, “Are we ape or apex? We are told we should be humble in the face of the Creator, but the Creator is Nature, and humans are the pinnacle of natural creation. Though we started from humble origins…”
A flourish of his hand, and the concentrated black fluid resting in the aquarium shot upwards, hovering in the air. In a mere blink, the inky matter spread outward, became a pulsing elongated shape with a single whip-like appendage. Enoch thought of it as a giant protozoan.
Oohs and aahs from the audience. Dane continued. “Nature flexed her muscles, tested new forms, squeezed them from the air with her sheer force of will.”
The pulsing shape elongated further, coiled in the air now as a gigantic segmented worm. Around him, Enoch was aware that some people were cringing, recoiling, even shifting behind others in fear. He noted now that the floating, pliable black substance held an iridescence like oil.
“Nature realized she was God,” Dane said, “and she found she had a taste for godhood.”
The shape altered, took on the appearance of a man-sized fish swimming in place, but remained entirely black. Even its eyes -- mere representations. Enoch had recognized this material already for what it was, and knew that its own eyes if they were to manifest would be glowing greenish orbs.
Unconsciously he rubbed at an odd tickling sensation on his right arm, that originated down deep in his nerves.
Dane prattled on, but Enoch doubted the others were listening any more closely than he was. They all watched in awe, confusion and anxiety as the levitating black matter changed form repeatedly. Each time Dane made some odd gestures to command or direct it. The fish developed legs and became an oversized replica of a frog, right down to its throbbing throat sack, though none of these animal manifestations uttered a peep. The frog transformed into a lizard, black as a silhouette or a sharply defined shadow, then the lizard into a rat with a furry coat -- each hair an extrusion of that obsidian substance. The rat became a monkey, appearing to sit on its haunches in midair.
It didn’t take a genius to see where this was headed.
“Then Nature,” said Dane, “made Man in her own image. Because all life is her own image. She shaped us…and now with the power she gave us, we shape her. Shape all aspects of this world. We are Nature! We are the Creator!” He wove a mystical sign in the air beside the monkey, like a conductor dramatically orchestrating a crescendo. “I am the Creator!”
The strange niggling sensation in Enoch’s flesh had become a real distraction, and even as he starting rolling up his right sleeve to reveal the spot he realized what was happening. Of course!
Recently he had been to Innsmouth, Massachusetts. There, in an impulsive artistic mood, he had used his switchblade to open an old wound in his arm, a scar that formed a cryptic symbol. One of the locals -- her lineage not entirely human, and thus versed in the arcane herself -- had used a tiny portion of shoggoth matter to heal the wound, leaving a black mole upon his skin there.
Shoggoth matter. It was reacting to the proximity of Dane’s living clay, which was undoubtedly a shoggoth under his enchantment. Shoggoths…the army of the Deep Ones. The servants of the otherworldly Elder Things, servants that Enoch had read had ultimately turned against their masters and annihilated them. And here was Dane, only a fairly recent explorer into esoteric arts, daring to exert his mastery over one of those terrible entities!
By now Enoch had rolled up his sleeve enough to discover more than a mole. The raised black spot had extruded a tiny, thin tendril that wavered in the air, as if reaching out to the levitating, morphing blob.
Dane’s gestures caught Enoch’s attention, and he looked up to find the artist repeating the same motions again and again. And yet, the shoggoth suddenly seemed disinclined to obey him. The monkey had not become a human, which was obviously the intended climax of the performance. In fact, the monkey’s shape was growing unstable, corrupted, as weird and disturbing distortions pulsated across its body. It twitched with terrible spasms, its tail flicking as if it were being electrocuted.
The hair-like growth reaching from Enoch’s arm, unnoticed by any but himself, was making similar erratic movements.
On a sudden impulse -- an instinctive impulse, as if another force controlled his body -- Enoch stepped forward and waved his right arm in the air, tracing a sigil of his own. It was the “Dragon’s Tail,” or “descending node.” A banishment.
Instantly heeding his command, the shoggoth lost its tortured form and dropped down into the glass fish tank from which it had risen. Once more at rest, it again appeared as a benign black fluid.
Dane glared at Enoch, looking ready to burst into convulsions himself as he fought to suppress his rage, but he covered the aquarium with the black silk cloth again, and in a strained voice improvised some concluding words.
“And what is Nature’s ultimate form -- the apex of her genius? Need I show you, dear friends? You need only turn to look at the person standing beside you. Or you need only look at me. We are the climax of this presentation, my friends…you, and I.”
With that, he turned to push the wagon toward the curtained doorway, while his audience -- freed from their stunned state, and probably relieved that his incomprehensible black putty was being removed -- burst into wild applause.
III.
A short time later Dane took Enoch aside in the kitchen, and in a low voice growled, “Were you trying to make me look like a fool? Steal my thunder, Enoch? I wasn’t finished…you cut me off right at my fucking climax! You interfered in my art!”
“Are you mad? You didn’t see what was happening? Your pet was rebelling.”
“Yes! Because you were commanding it to resist me!”
Not consciously, Enoch wanted to say, but he didn’t care to reveal the truth about the shoggoth tissue wed to his own flesh. He only said, “Nonsense -- it chose to disobey you. Luckily I’ve been at this longer and broke down its will. You should thank me for that; there’s no telling what that thing might have done in a few minutes more.”
“I’ve never experienced any trouble like this until you came here.”
“Per your invitation,” Enoch reminded him.
“You were competing with me!” Dane persisted. “Trying to show me up at my own presentation!”
“What are you talking about? It’s you who’s trying to compete with me -- that’s why you asked me here. To show off. To show me up. Anyway, don’t worry; I’m sure no one but you understands what I did, any more than they understand the nature of your parlor tricks. But I’ll tell you, Dane…you might get off on playing God, but you are in way over your head with this creature. Even with my knowledge I’d never try to master a shoggoth!”
Two other guests drifted into the kitchen at that point. In a more composed tone, Dane asked Enoch to stay on after the others had left. Enoch didn’t care to be alone in that house with the artist and his familiar, though, so he made excuses about being overtired and needing to
get to bed.
“Are you staying here in Bar Harbor?” Dane asked.
“No,” Enoch thought it prudent to lie, “I took a motel room in Ellsworth. It was cheaper.”
“Meet me for breakfast tomorrow, will you?” Dane persisted, some of his polished charm having returned, at least on the surface.
Enoch consented, curious to understand how Dane had summoned this entity.
And so, as agreed upon, the next morning the two artists sat across from each other in a nice little spot in downtown Bar Harbor, both with blueberry pancakes in front of them. Attired all in black as always, and with his hair gelled into careful disarray, Dane revealed, “I have a friend at the College of the Atlantic here in town. Hurricane Irene didn’t do too much damage up this way last month, not like Vermont saw, but after the storm some odd debris had washed ashore on one of the Porcupine Islands. It was spotted from a boat, and so my friend and other researchers from the college went in to investigate. They thought it was going to be a whale carcass. Well, have you ever heard those stories about mysterious ‘globsters,’ as they’re called? Blob-like rotting bodies that wash up and sometimes go unidentified?”
“You mean to suggest those are shoggoths?”
“Well, this one was. It was huge. My friend showed me pictures. You don’t think I could manage to control a healthy, full-sized shoggoth, do you? What I have is the living tissue that my friend excised from the hulk before the rest of it decomposed, broke down without leaving a trace. Why it sickened in the first place, we may never know.”
Encounters with Enoch Coffin Page 19