Encounters with Enoch Coffin
Page 24
He barely heard her, for his senses had been thoroughly debauched by Sesqua Valley’s lunacy. Enoch could feel the valley’s pulse in his flow of blood and smell its essence in his nostrils, a fragrance that coiled to his brain and frolicked there. He did not understand where he was, or why he was reclining onto such a soft surface. He felt the hot tongue that licked his throat and then his face; he felt that muscle stroke his eye with a serpent’s kiss and seem to splice into the tissue of his orb so as to lap his brain. He witnessed eyes that multiplied into one million stars set deep within a black face that expanded as some gulf of night, which he crossed into another pocket of undreamt-of galaxies. He learned how to kneel before a throne of fire as gremlins with outrageous faces pressed flutes to amorphous mouths, and their music was a malfunction in the maneuverings of ordered time and space.
Enoch opened his eyes and found himself wrapped within Marceline’s embrace. From somewhere in the room, a devil played his pipe. Marceline arose and smiled. “Simon – is it time?”
The beast removed the pan-pipe from his mouth. “The moon has risen, but she hides behind a bank of clouds. Perhaps your magick can free her from that prison. I shall meet you there, anon.”
“Meet us where?” Enoch queried as the beast exited and the woman wrapped herself into a robe of black silk that was open at her bosom.
“I want to show you your father’s other piece. It’s quite majestic.”
She held her hand to him; pushing off the bed, he clasped it and allowed himself to be guided from the house and into the weird woodland. Patches of night wore starlight, but the moon was indeed concealed and the woods drank darkness. Enoch saw, for a moment, the shadowed stone of the twin-peaked mountain, and then there was nothing but trees that watched them on their way over the earthen pathway. He lifted his eyes to watch the trees as the woman held his hand and pulled him through the gloom, and then the trees ended and they climbed a low hill to its summit. The artist marveled at the sight that greeted him, the stone arch that rose twenty feet above the ground and into which had been fitted a massive sheet of murky glass. He moved to the length of altar slab that had been positioned before the arch and sat as he continued to study his father’s work. Even without the air of moonlight he could ascertain the various muted colors with which the glass was subtly enhanced – deep reds and blues and purples. And there, at one specific point, was the blur of pale whiteness, the features of which were not discernible because of the lack of light. That did not matter, for he knew instinctively what those features would portray.
Marceline sat beside him on the slab and kissed the back of his neck. “Come, recline. No, don’t undress. We’ve paid enough homage to the Great Old Ones. We’ve had enough of sex. Now I want to help you conjure something far more potent – deep and everlasting love. Come, Enoch Coffin, stretch onto this bed of stone, with your head toward the archway. See there, the coiling clouds that conceal our lunar sister. Raise you white hand and move it with mine own as we make the Elder Sign. Yes! Excellent. See how the clouds move away, more and more – and there our sister unfolds her radiance unto us, her cold refracted glow. See how she enhances the sigils that your clever father, that sorcerer par excellence, had secreted into the glass. Look here, Enoch Coffin, at how those emblems enhance the beauty of my breasts on which they swim.” Fluted music issued from some distant place, and the artist shuddered because he knew what beast haunted the woodland.
Stems of black cloud oozed away from the satellite that hung over the valley. Enoch turned his eyes away from the moon and its enhancement of the stained glass and watched as Marceline slipped out of her robe and let the fabric fall onto the ground. He watched, as the lunar light, revealed more and more as the clouds continued their dissipation, reflected the hidden symbols onto his companion’s black flesh. And then he moaned as the moon, now fully freed from cloud, pierced its brilliance through that portion of the glass that was pale and oval; and he watched as the witch’s dusky countenance turned white and became familiar. He watched her flowing pallid hair move about the visage that was as white as a blank canvas; and when the sorceress opened her eyes more widely he sighed at the beauty of their pink irises.
The woman’s phantom face smiled down on him with a love that he had ached for; and then it lowered to him so as to grant one last compelling gift – a mother’s kiss.
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