Good. She could feel it coming. Through a series of methodical contortions, Brichard flattened himself and enveloped Polly’s head. Infantile Ideas churned inside her and he grimaced at their purity. Straining against the emissions, Brichard sealed her dome, one quadrant at a time. Meanwhile, Goin and Sprocket gnawed away and, apparently, hit a nerve as a plume of shame burst inside her. She was still feeling guilty about her flirtation at the gym and, to help matters, wondering if she’d been too strict with the boys.
Polly stared at the blank page, the mill wheels of her mind grinding, and then shifted in her chair and exhaled sharply.
Someone cheered inside her.
“Mom,” Nathan called from his room.
She murmured something, pushed away from the computer and marched to Nathan’s room. “What is it?” Polly stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, deflecting pangs of despair. “I told you I’m doing something and don’t want bothered.”
Nathan sat on his bed amidst scattered drawings and sketchbooks. Suddenly, Polly’s tension evaporated. Brichard rolled his eyes in an attempt to see what had happened. She stood looking at one of Nathan’s old drawings.
“What are they, Nate?” She held the picture up and studied it. “These . . . fairies?”
“Muses, Mom. I used to have a book on mythology. Remember?”
She peered at the pencil sketch. “It’s up there on your shelves.” Prying herself from the picture, she crossed the room and began scouring through the books. Finally, she extracted a large, gold-embossed volume and blew the dust off.
“Muses made people creative—happier, remember Mom?” Nathan took the book and browsed several pages. “Without them, people were kinda plain.” He looked up, eyes sparkling. “Do I have a muse?”
Polly stood, momentarily fixated, then returned to herself. “You know what, Nate—you probably do.” She patted his head and hurried out of the room.
“Tighten up!” Brichard exhorted, fearing the worst.
Adrenaline skittered inside her, inducing gooseflesh, and he grimaced in its wake. Polly‘s hands trembled as she poured another glass of apple juice and walked briskly to her desk. But as she set the glass down and grabbed the notepad, her elbow jabbed the flowerpot and sent it careening off the desk. It struck the hardwood and shattered, sending soil and shards of pottery exploding across the floor.
A collective cheer peeled in her noodle.
Polly burst from her seat, aghast, and heaved an exasperated sigh. “Forward! Forward!” Brichard thundered. “Into the breach!”
A torrent of lies—such as the Grimpkin had never managed; a confluence of such splendor he was tempted to pause and behold its beauty—crashed against the bulwarks of her will, threatening to collapse the flimsy scaffold of her aspirations.
But as the tumult raged, Polly suddenly bent down and scooped the daffodils in her hands. As the soil touched her skin, Brichard flinched. The Elements! Sweet Satan, no!
She wavered there and with her contemplation came a dreadful hush. Then she lurched forward and wove her way through the house with the bulbs cupped in her hands. The Grimpkin futilely attempted to steer her to the trash, to discard the cursed blossoms, but her mind was made up. She nudged the back door open with her elbow and stepped outside. Fresh air struck her nostrils with such ferocity she stopped in her tracks. Oxygen! Brichard quavered and Goin and Sprocket began wriggling free.
She strode onto the flagstone walkway toward the river rock planter. “I’ve got just the spot for you,” she said. Settling the daffodils next to the agapanthus and impatiens left over from last summer, she knelt on the grass and rolled up her shirtsleeves. Damp earth and decaying leaves whet the yard with their fragrance. Overhead, birds chattered in the camphor tree—sparrows squabbling over an earthworm or crust of bread. Polly peered into the dancing branches. The scent of orange blossoms and the droning of bees reminded her of winter’s passing. Sunlight filtered through the aromatic umbrella and its dappled fingers caressed her bare ankles.
Then he heard it, distant but true, a chorus rising in the abyss. It was hooves and trumpets, the strain of songs and celebration. Her fetters unraveled as Polly cupped her hand, aimed, and burrowed it into the soil.
Brichard wailed and snapped free from her skull. He landed atop Goin and Sprocket who lay sniveling, pale and battered.
Molemin barreled out of the root cellar. “They’re f-f-free! F-f-ree!” He circled the troops, babbling, as the four muses busted out of the basement in full bloom. Cecly rose from the group and ascended in a great arc. Then she paused at its apex and plummeted to Polly, leaving behind a trail of kaleidoscopic vapors.
The Grimpkin recoiled from the Spark.
Staggering to his feet, Brichard watched as armies galloped through Polly’s brainways—multitudes with colorful attire spawning stallions and riders across vast, exotic plains. Alongside came trolls and dragons, lords and rogues. And behind the pageantry, tales unfurled with casts in queue.
Polly patted the daffodils into place, stood and brushed her hands off. Then she hurried inside, barely wiping off her feet. By the time the Grimpkin got there, she was pecking away on the keyboard, flinging crumbs of soil to floor.
They slumped in the shadows, shamed into compliance, as the muses flitted through the house exchanging celebratory gestures. Cecly encircled Polly, smirking at the Grimpkin. Compounding their misery, Garland walked in from the garage, his face smudged and nails grimy, with Zephyr overtop. “Hey, boys,” he called. “You wanna go for a walk?”
“We had ‘er,” Goin grumbled. “Maybe I shoulda been in charge.” Sprocket hung his head. “I guess this means we aren’t getting a promotion.” The air tingled.
“Promotion?” Pederman appeared behind them and stood with his arms folded, watching the twits fly about the place. He curled his lips in disgust. “I’ve got the perfect coal mine for you.”
Polly finished the apple juice and turned back to the flatscreen, hands poised over the keyboard. She glanced at the certificate over her desk, paused to pray, and then Brichard winced as she attacked the keys. The Fourth Annual Gumtree Writing Contest, it said, and she’d almost completed a full page. At this rate, nothing could stop her.
As they prepared for deportation, Brichard gazed across the battlefield one last time. His eyes riveted on that single page, the culmination of her Brainstorm—now his epitaph. She had entitled it, “Polly’s Muse.”
GARGOYLE
J. MARK BERTRAND
Robin Roddick saw it first.
He was the last of the art professors—the vice-chancellor having finally whittled the department away—and this was the last walk-thru before the opening of the last senior art exhibition. He made his rounds, making sure everything was in place: the student paintings hung between the gallery’s gothic windows, the pottery display, the curious assortment of found objects welded randomly into ambiguous forms. The art department was housed in what had once been the university chapel, but the stone arches and faux-painted, cob-webbed vaults reminded Roddick of a dilapidated opera house. To make this final showing a memorable one, he and Murray, who’d taught sculpture up until the semester before, had transformed the place by mounting a host of track lights along the ceiling, bathing the exhibits in warm light while cloaking the rest of the gallery in shadow.
It looks good, Roddick thought. The bastards will never forget this one. Already, the opening night crowd awaited just outside the entrance. In the past, these shows had gone largely unnoticed, but people realized this one was special. With Roddick on his way out, they knew this show constituted a statement. Faculty and students alike had turned out, but Roddick wanted to be sure everything was perfect before opening the doors.
At the back of the gallery, the room branched off into a pair of side chapels. One had been closed off years before and now served as a storage closet, but the other had become a favored display space thanks to an impressive round window set high in the wall. This is where he and Murray, wit
h some help from the students, had placed the sculpture installations, some of the most impressive work in the whole show. Roddick hoped that, after making their way through the main gallery, visitors would turn into the side chapel and stop, awed by the sight. He made the journey himself, trying to pretend he’d never seen the installations before, so his reaction would be pure.
He turned, and there in the center of the side chapel, just at the spot where sunlight gathered during the day, Roddick came face to face with a three-foot stone gargoyle perched on a fluted pedestal.
He jumped.
Crudely formed, its surface weathered and pock-marked to simulate age and exposure, the gargoyle gazed at him. The density of the stone was offset by a kinetic urge sculpted into the creature’s flexed limbs. Wings raised above its shoulders, horns budding along its brow, the gargoyle’s narrow hands rested on its knees—not in repose, but in readiness, as if it might spring forward any moment.
Roddick caught his breath, only to be seized by a wave of outrage. This exhibition was tantamount to a middle finger extended in the vice-chancellor’s face—everyone knew Roddick was leaving in protest—so for someone to sneak this thing, this monstrosity into the show was an insult.
But then he laughed. “Murray, you dog.”
It had to be Murray. No one else had keys to the chapel, and no one else had such a warped sense of humor. He could imagine his friend on some late night expedition to harvest the beast from a local church. Assuming he hadn’t made it himself. Roddick took a closer look. No, there was no question of Murray making something like this.
He still wished the former sculpture professor had let him in on the joke, but Murray was an eccentric. If this was his way of thumbing his nose at the administration, then Roddick wasn’t going to drag the thing over to the closet before the opening.
He stepped back through the gallery, approached the double doors leading into the lobby, and threw them open to welcome the crowd. The distinguished gathering—professors and students, patrons and local reporters, a smattering of tipsy alumni—greeted him with pointed, thundering applause, and it was all Roddick could do to keep from responding with a bow.
“We have a wonderful show for you,” he told them. “And a couple of surprises.”
AS THE BUZZ OF CONVERSATION filled the gallery, Roddick kept an eye on people entering the side chapel. He didn’t like what he saw. People went in witty and energetic, but they emerged with sober, drained expressions. The side chapel exhibits weren’t having the desired effect. As more people progressed through the back of the gallery and took in the spectacle of the gargoyle, the mood of the event shifted.
“It’s like a funeral in here,” someone said at Roddick’s shoulder.
He turned to find Murray, dressed in a corduroy jacket and jeans.
“Your little joke is backfiring,” Roddick said, taking him by the arm. They went to the side chapel, squeezing their way through an unnervingly quiet throng until they stood right in front of the gargoyle. The rough articulation of the toes caught Roddick’s attention, and then he noticed for the first time the porous swell of breasts on the statue’s front—a female gargoyle, then, or perhaps one of those composite monsters assembled from bits of apocalyptic imagery.
“I’ve never seen it before,” Murray insisted. An attractive older lady, her throat cinched with pearls, began to weep.
A white-haired man stepped toward her. “Darling, it’s just a bit of tasteless kitsch.”
She sobbed. Roddick glanced around and saw other eyes clouding with tears, trembling hands raised to mouths. Beside him, a girl in jeans and a tight sweater sank to her knees and her friends had to pull her up.
“I feel this urge,” she whispered. “To lament.”
Such a strange word to use. Lamentation. In the gargoyle’s presence, Roddick felt the same urge, though he could never have found a name for it.
IN PAST YEARS, the opening night of the senior exhibition had been known to last into the wee hours, but this melancholy finale barely made it past ten. Once they’d seen the gargoyle, people didn’t stay around long. It didn’t help when the track lights in the main gallery began to crackle and dim, several bulbs burning out entirely. Roddick and Murray saw the last group out at around ten-fifteen, and then the two of them started locking up.
“Help me get that thing out of here,” Roddick said.
As the two men made their way toward the side chapel, the power in the main gallery went out. They proceeded by moonlight, heading toward the glow issuing from the side chapel, where the lights had not even flickered. “Separate breakers,” Murray said. “I guess the strain was too much in
here.”
When Roddick turned into the side chapel, he saw something move. “Murray—” he said.
But as he spoke, the lights in the side chapel flickered off.
“There goes the other breaker,” Murray said.
Roddick stood transfixed, afraid to move. In the darkness, he felt something brush against him like a drape of cloth, but a constricting tightness in the throat prevented him from speaking. He grabbed his former colleague by the arm and dragged him away, rushing toward the exit with all his panicked strength.
Outside, with the doors locked behind them, Roddick said, “I saw someone.” “Someone where?”
“In the side chapel, just as I turned. Someone in black. And he was kneeling at the gargoyle with his hands raised like this.” He lifted his arms above his head, as if he were reaching toward a tall shelf to grasp something just out of reach.
SARTON, THE VICE-CHANCELLOR, had no intention of visiting the exhibition himself, but he read everything he could find in the daily papers. He stared at the massive photo of the gargoyle on the Sun’s front page, with an inset of Robin Roddick proclaiming the show’s success. Something must have gone wrong on the presses, though. The gargoyle came out as a black smudge, its features barely discernible. Sarton studied the picture for several minutes before putting the paper aside, only to come back to it later with a magnifying glass.
The next day, both the Sun and the Courier ran gargoyle stories, talking about the record crowds the exhibition was drawing. Later in the week, Sarton read a feature on one of the student artists, a young woman in her early twenties with all the usual piercings, who claimed to have sat at the gargoyle’s feet two days running. She’d experienced an “intense inner peace” during this vigil, she told reporters.
While he examined the accompanying photos, Sarton heard a soft knock at his office door. Ruiz, the dean of students, poked his head in and coughed politely.
“Have you seen the student paper? They put out a Gargoyle Edition.” He passed a photocopy across Sarton’s desk. Sure enough, the under-ground rag—published anonymously so that its student editors could take potshots at the administration without reprisals—was chock full of grainy photos of the exhibit, along with a semi-literate article and a collection of student poems.
“At least there’s nothing in here about me,” Sarton said. Since his decision to cut the art department, the underground paper had branded him a villain.
It didn’t matter that the move was reluctant, forced on him by a board looking to make cuts. Sarton had simply chosen the department with the fewest majors.
“Actually,” Ruiz said, “it’s on the back page.”
Sarton turned and there it was: a triumphalist paragraph about how the success of the last senior exhibition prove conclusively that the vice-chancellor was an idiot.
“I’d like to get a look at this gargoyle thing,” he said, “but I’ll be damned if I give them the satisfaction of seeing me at the gallery.”
The thought of it made him so angry he forgot to take his pills that morning.
THE DREAMS BEGAN later that week.
A freckled economics major told peers in her language lab that for two nights running she had heard a voice calling to her, urging her to leave the dorm and come at midnight to the art building. The gargoyle, with the warm radia
nce of a fertility goddess, extended its hands to her in sleep.
“It kind of turned me on,” she said.
One of the men on the baseball team reported a similar dream to his coach. The gargoyle’s voice, he said, was like a woman’s. In his dreams, it sang to him. Hearken to my siren’s song and succor at my breast. Incline thyself at my bosom and I will bend thy knee. It talked funny like that, but the player wasn’t sure he’d remembered the words right.
“It really freaked me out,” he said. It freaked the coach out, too, though he dismissed the dream as one of the pitfalls of a liberal arts education.
Stories like this reached Sarton on a daily basis. He’d been elevated to his current position after decades in the psychology department, and this struck him as a fascinating example of mass hysteria. He regretted not being able to document the phenomenon in greater detail, but his responsibilities coupled with declining health made it all but impossible. His pills, which he kept forgetting to take, hardly made a difference anymore.
The week after the opening, Sarton found two of the religion professors—Boyer and Nighworth—waiting outside his office for an audience. In the past, these two had caused him plenty of trouble. In spite of their academic credentials, they were both half-convinced of the truth of their respective faith traditions, and it seemed the Jew was always stepping on the toes of the Episcopalian and vice versa. This time, though, they presented a united front.
“Something has to be done about this gargoyle,” Boyer said.
Nighworth clenched his fist in the air. “Something has to be done immediately.”
“Take it to Roddick.”
“We would if we could find him,” Nighworth said. “He’s missed most of his classes in the past week, and when I spotted him from a distance on the quad and called out to him, he actually ran away.”
Sarton grinned at the mental image of Roddick in flight.
Boyer slumped into a chair in front of Sarton’s desk, running a finger along the line of his comb-over. “Over the weekend there were . . . developments. The interfaith alliance students somehow got a key to the gallery and held some kind of service in the gargoyle’s presence.”
MIdnight Diner 1: Jesus vs. Cthulhu Page 9