Encounters with Enoch Coffin

by W. H. Pugmire

  “Well, I know you sort of suggested at the gallery that you would rather I didn’t speculate on your family…”

  “I don’t think I ‘sort of’ suggested that; I thought I was quite clear.”

  “But I’m not speculating, Mr. Coffin. I’m here to ask you straight out. Tell me about your father, Donovon Coffin. Tell me about his art, and how it influenced you. You can deny Pickman all you want, but denying your father’s hand in what you do --”

  “Would you like to see?” he cut me off.

  “Hm?”

  “See his art studio for yourself. My own studio is in the attic, and we can look at that, too, of course. But since you’re unrelenting on this topic, I’d rather tell you about him myself than have you pry around clumsily and assemble an inaccurate or unbalanced story. Thus, if you are so determined, let me show you what remains of my father’s workplace.” Coffin drained his coffee, including the sugary sludge at the bottom, and clinked the cup down in its saucer. “His studio was in the basement.”

  VIII.

  (From the personal journal of Enoch Donovon Coffin)

  I led my guest to the door to the cellar, but with my hand on the knob I turned to face him. “Before I show you my father’s workplace, and the culmination of all his skills and efforts -- a caveat.”

  “Which is?”

  “You’re on a path to investigate my father, and so it’s inevitable that in digging deeper you’ll uncover certain facts. Certain…unsavory, scandalous stories. As I say, I fear that in focusing on these details in your article -- taking them out of context, exhibiting them in unfair proportion -- you’ll besmirch my father’s name. And, by extension, my own. But it’s more a matter of a son’s loyalty than an artist’s pride. Otherwise I might not share with you the thing that I’ve decided to reveal. I entrust this experience to you so that you might see my father less as a madman, and more as the tainted genius he truly was.”

  “I appreciate that you’re willing to give me a broader understanding of your father, so I agree to treat him fairly in my article.”

  What a sincere look he gave me. Did I believe him? Not fully, I’m afraid, but all I could do was try to impress upon him my strongly-felt desires. If I couldn’t stop him, I must at least try to educate him. But this family matter touched a vulnerable place in me, one I do not easily share, and I’m not sure if he understood the level of anger I was forcing myself to restrain. I do not like feeling vulnerable or angry, emotions that amount to a loss of self control, and yet I felt myself holding back growling fury like a dog straining at its leash.

  “Before we descend, I’ll tell you what you’d soon enough discover on your own. My father, for all his brilliant efforts, wasn’t satisfied with the outcome of his experiments. One night he stole into the Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, to a plot he felt bore a secret message inscribed in its slate, and began digging in the earth there. Despite the late hour, he was spotted and arrested. He had been arrested briefly for the same crime, once before. This time he was incarcerated at that sprawling monstrosity, the Danvers State Hospital. Father suffered a complete breakdown there. He began to only eat meat…and then, begged for only uncooked meat. He stopped communicating with words, just howled and growled like a wild beast.”

  “Oh my…well, uh, I’m sorry,” my guest stammered uncomfortably.

  “On one occasion he attacked an orderly, biting him quite badly on the face and neck. They put him on certain antipsychotic drugs, and eventually these seemed to be effective. Maybe that caused the staff to become lax in their attention, because ultimately my father escaped from the hospital…and disappeared. There is no official record of his fate beyond that.”

  “Oh! My God, that’s…wow.” Then the word “official” obviously sank in. “The authorities never learned his fate, but do you know where he ended up? What happened to him?”

  I turned the knob, and opened the basement door on its old squealing hinges. “This way,” I instructed, starting down the stairs.

  I led Knox into the basement of my little house, the former house of my parents, with its ceiling of old exposed beams and walls of red brick squeezing out a cake frosting of crumbling mortar. Immediately his attention became focused on the bizarre display featured at the center of the largest room. Overlooked were the various sturdy wooden tables, and the large light table with its milky glass top, upon which my father had worked his craft. The young man also seemed to overlook my own spare easel, which I had left set up here, for I did not exclusively work within my studio in the attic. He was so distracted, he didn’t even acknowledge the unfinished painting propped upon that easel.

  He also didn’t appear to notice the axe leaning against one brick wall, in case of emergencies. I abhor guns.

  “What was this thing originally…a well?” Knox asked, walking tentatively around the low stone base rising from the cement floor.

  “While other families in this neighborhood long ago paid people to cover over the openings in their basements -- especially after strange rumors of attacks and disappearances -- my father actually paid workmen to remove the heavy cap from this ancient well. He had already built his Dream Lens, as he called this construction, so he and the workmen then fastened it in place over the opening.” I didn’t add that my father had directed the operation to take place quickly, before anything below might come through.

  Knox was in the process of taking in the construction that I had called the Dream Lens. It was a convex hemisphere, a web of lead that held in place many individual sections of glass of various sizes and colors, in totality forming no obvious pattern. The hues were subdued, however, not bright primary colors as one would expect in a stained glass composition. Faint, sickly-looking tints of gray and amber and sepia, absinthe green and urine yellow and ghostly blue.

  In addition, around the perimeter of the lens were a number of apparatuses on hinged arms. Some looked like magnifying glasses, others like telescopes. Several were strong lamps, with differently colored filters over them to change the tincture of their beams, though presently none of them were turned on.

  “Father tried various combinations of color…of magnification. Different types of crystal for the lenses. And of course, different sorts of spells to imbue the device with outré potency.”

  Knox looked up at me, his expression torn between admiration for my father’s craftsmanship and revulsion at this seeming monument to his insanity. “To achieve what?”

  “Enoch? Enoch, are you down there?” called a familiar voice from the head of the stairs.

  Oh Gawd, when would I learn to lock my front door?

  “Is that Marie Lavoria?” the journalist asked.

  “Yes,” I sighed. “Let me go up there and see what the silly wench wants.”

  “Mind if I stay here and get down some impressions while they’re fresh?” The man had carried his precious laptop downstairs with him, under his arm. He placed it on one of the work benches and opened it.

  “Yes, go ahead. I’ll explain the Dream Lens…perhaps…when I return. I may even let you look through it, on one more condition. That you do not report what you see through it.”

  “What?”

  “If I should permit you to experience my father’s achievements, you must swear to me on your word of honor you will not reveal what the Dream Lens can do, nor what you see.”

  “But…I don’t understand.”

  “Enoch? I hear you down there!” Marie called, sounding agitated. “Please!”

  I groaned, and gestured at Knox’s portable contraption. “Just play with your toy and I’ll be back in two shakes of a Night-gaunt’s tail.”

  “A…what?”

  But I left him to attend to my other unwanted guest.

  ***

  Apparently not content with having admitted to me over the phone that she had spoken with Joel Knox about my parents, Marie had come to apologize in person, bearing the gifts of a bottle of Pinot Noir and a box of the Sicilian cannoli she knew I adored. A
nd no doubt, she hoped, the gift of her own voluptuous self. To spare her further guilt, or perhaps out of some vague premonition, I didn’t reveal to her that the writer was at that moment tapping away at his computer in my very own cellar. I sent her away as quickly as I was able to extricate myself from her moist eyes and babbled apologies, which wasn’t quickly enough to suit me. Naturally I accepted the wine and cannoli, to placate her, and with thoughts of sharing them politely with the arrogant brat in my basement -- to which I finally returned.

  IX.

  (From the personal journal of Donovon Abraham Coffin)

  I have failed in parting the veils, but not utterly. That is to say, I have not opened a gash through which my embodied consciousness might enter into the Dreamlands -- the realm of my beloved. But with my sleeve, so to speak, I have cleaned dirt from the windowpanes of reality. I am sure I have peered into the Dreamlands, but into other planes as well, which I had not intended to gaze upon. Different panels of glass, in conjunction with a variety of incantations and sigils traced in the air, have yielded different results. They are but murky, fleeting visions. One might think they had only imagined they’d seen something, or misinterpreted what they did see. The additional instruments help focus the images somewhat, enlarge or clarify them. I have to angle the lamps just so. And then, if the fates are kind, I am peeping through a keyhole…

  Who could consider this a failure? I will admit with all humility it is brilliance, even when it is accidental brilliance (for what artist isn’t well acquainted with, and reliant upon, pure serendipity?). But it is not the goal I seek.

  …Even as I marvel at the barely discernible yet heart-clenching sight of a prowling shape tall as a mountain, a silhouette against the stars, its twin dog-like heads surmounted by headgear like a bishop’s miter -- surely a scene of the Dreamlands.

  …Even as, holding my breath lest I jiggle the scope just a fraction and banish the image, I spy upon a herd of amorphous black hulks congregated about an underground lake, constellations of green eyes blinking in and out of existence across their heaving, pulsing forms.

  …Even when, through another of the colored windows, acting like a television screen receiving transmissions from some other dimension, I watch a swarm of arthropod beings glide through the infinity of space, their ribbed wings spread wide like sails.

  The cosmos itself taunts me, as if to say: “You think the matters of your puny human heart have any significance in the face of all this?”

  But more men than I have suffered under the magnificence of the stars, for there is a cosmos just as vast inside our puny human hearts!

  These glimpses of alien vistas are failures, I say. Magical, miraculous failures the likes of which other men would sell their souls to achieve. But these visions do not put me in my lover’s arms!

  There has been one serendipitous outcome, however, that granted me an especially remarkable gift. It may be the closest I come to my goal. It may have to suffice…oh, though the word “suffice” rakes its claws through my soul!

  I was gazing through the hexagonal green pane, as viewed through the brass spyglass and with the pale green filter fitted on the nearest lamp. And down there in the tunnel, three figures scuttled into view. Pale as creatures that had never known the light. Naked and furtive, and gazing back at me with wary curiosity. But they were beautiful! They were humans! They were more beautiful than humans…beautiful as gods! And one of them -- yes! -- one of them was my very own Lebanah!

  They peered up at me only a few moments, then shifted position as they meant to scurry away into the tunnel again. I shifted, too, before they could flee. I wanted to call out to her! Tears welled in my eyes!

  It wasn’t the tears distorting my vision, though, that accounted for the change in what I saw. It was moving to another panel of glass that did it -- this one the amber octagon. Through this pane, the effect was entirely different.

  Before they disappeared into the darkness of their honeycomb beneath the city, I saw the three figures in their true form. This time, the green blotches of mold on their white flesh. Their animal-like countenances. Their glowing feral eyes.

  I fell against the Dream Lens, embracing it with my spread arms, wracked with sobs.

  “Come back!” I sobbed. “Come back! Let me see you a minute longer!”

  Why didn’t she stay, so that I might gaze upon her at greater length? Does she love her tribe more than me, now?

  No, I don’t think that’s it. The thing is, she doesn’t realize I unwittingly imparted this occult attribute to one section of glass. She doesn’t realize that through it, I can see her and her fellows as they once were.

  She is ashamed that I should see her as she is now.

  But she must come back -- she must! For I am a failure…a failure…and a view of my darling through the keyhole is all that I have left of her. This illusion, this lie, this teasing memory.

  No! I will not let that suffice.

  Even if I have to return to Copp’s Hill with my shovel, and again seek my path through the realm of the worms.

  X.

  (From the personal journal of Enoch Donovon Coffin)

  When I reentered my basement, it was to be confronted with a tableau that was for a moment too much to process. Multiple details clamored for my attention. There was Joel Knox’s laptop computer, open on one of the work tables with its screen glowing and covered in text: his article in progress. Not far from that, also open upon the same table, was my father’s journal, and I cursed myself for forgetting that I had left it there.

  I had left the Dream Lens’ lamps turned off, but I saw that one of them had been switched on…the one with a green filter, positioned above one particular panel of glass that was also tinted pale green, and hexagonal in shape.

  When he had first circled the Dream Lens, examining it, Knox must have noticed that at its base the dome was hinged on one side, and locked in place with two bolts on the other. I knew he had noted this feature, because the Dream Lens now stood open like a large hatch. Knox had undone its bolts, which I myself had never dared attempt.

  Finally, there was Knox himself, standing before the opened hatch defiantly and gripping the long handle of my axe.

  “You evil son of a bitch!” he spat.

  “I am something of a son of a bitch, in ways you may not know, but I’d advise you to clear away from that hatch and let me lock it again.”

  “The hell I will, you bastard!”

  “What are you saying, Knox? I tell you, move away from that opening!”

  “I read a little of your father’s diary. All insanity. There, I said it -- insanity! An insanity you’ve clearly inherited. But I thought I’d have a look anyway…and that’s when I saw your prisoner!”

  “My…prisoner?”

  “How long have you had that poor girl in that pit, you psychopath? I’m going to call the police down here and get that wretched creature out of there!”

  Terrible awareness had dawned, and I took a step toward the young journalist. “Knox, get away from there!”

  “No!” He brandished the axe threateningly. “One more step and I’ll put this in your skull!” His eyes were wild. “You imprisoned her so she could model for you, huh?” He nodded toward my painting on its easel. At some point he had noticed it, after all. But one thing he hadn’t done was call the police already. His cell phone was still in the pocket of his jacket, which he had left upstairs in my parlor.

  “Knox!” I shouted.

  “All your noble talk about art,” he raged. “Now I understand you, and your sick father, too!” He demanded: “What did you intend to do to her when the painting was complete? Kill her? Chop her up with this axe? Eat her, you monster?”

  I lunged forward then, in an attempt to seize the axe’s handle and grapple for it.

  I was too late. I don’t know if the creature sprang upward on its own, or if another one or two of its kind gave it a boost, but I saw a pair of unnaturally white, simian arms like those I had re
ndered in my painting The Dig reach up from below and grasp Knox’s ankles. He was wrenched off his feet, falling in such a way that his belly slammed hard against the rim of the hatchway. The force of impact caused him to let go of the axe, which clattered to the floor. He scrabbled to hold on to the rim, and for a moment his eyes locked on mine in a horror so profound I wish I had captured it in a photograph. I would have loved to paint it.

  Then, he was dragged below, and I heard a frenzy of high-pitched screaming, and the deeper tones of savage snarling. Finally, the shrieks gave way to a ghastly gurgling, as one hears from a man choking on his own blood.

  I scooped up the axe, dreading that I might have to use it, but the beast below was satisfied with its prey and didn’t make a second leap. I took hold of the lifted hatchway and eased it back down to its base, then shoved the two strong bolts in place.

  I fell away from the Dream Lens, panting. As infuriated as I had been with my guest, I hadn’t wanted this to happen. If he had sworn himself to secrecy, I had thought to tantalize the writer with a glimpse into the Dreamlands, or one of the other alien worlds my father’s device could penetrate, but I hadn’t planned on showing him the creatures that dwell below these streets. Perhaps the familiar, tinted light of the lamp had attracted them. Attracted her.

  Having regained my composure, I went to bend over the fellow’s computer and read the last words he had written:

  ‘…if you are so determined, let me show you what remains of my father’s workplace.” Coffin drained his coffee, including the sugary sludge at the bottom, and clinked the cup down in its saucer. “His studio was in the basement.”’

  “Sugary sludge,” I muttered. “Ever the disapproving wretch, this one.”