THE COLLECTED CONNOISSEUR
by
Mark Valentine
and
John Howard
Tartarus Press
The Collected Connoisseur
by Mark Valentine and John Howard
First published by Tartarus Press, 2010 at
Coverley House, Carlton-in-Coverdale, Leyburn
North Yorkshire, DL8 4AY. UK.
All stories copyright © Mark Valentine and John Howard.
Illustrations © R.B. Russell.
This edition copyright © Tartarus Press.
The authors and publisher would like to thank Jim Rockhill for his help in the preparation of this volume.
The Connoisseur by R.B. Russell
Contents
Introduction
The Effigies
After the Darkness
The Paravine Cries
Pale Roses
In Violet Veils
The Lost Moon
Café Lucifer
The Craft of Arioch
The Secret Stars
The Hesperian Dragon
The Lighting of the Vial
The Nephoseum
Sea Citadel
The Prince of Barlocco
The Black Eros
Mad Lutanist
The Mist on the Mere
The White Solander
The Last Archipelago
The Rite of Trebizond
The Serpent, Unfallen
The Temple of Time
The Descent of the Fire
Acknowledgements
About Tartarus Press
Introduction
From my earliest reading, I remember two books that made a strong impression on me: a collection of wonder stories called Tales of Long Ago; and a stout, silver-grey volume of supposedly true hauntings, Elliott O’Donnell’s Casebook of Ghosts. So when I started to form my own taste, I was naturally led towards similar books. I got the idea that there were five great writers in these fields: Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, Walter de la Mare and William Hope Hodgson; and I searched out and read their books with zest and delight. They have been lifelong companions. Others have joined these household gods, of course: but none can ever quite ascend to the high pantheon of the original quintarchy.
Not long after, I became interested in the writers of the 1890s, starting with the wilting but incantatory verses of Ernest Dowson, then the precise, tinted realism of Hubert Crackanthorpe’s short stories and vignettes, and the arcane and superbly ornate prose of M.P. Shiel. These, then, the wondrous, the spectral and the aesthetical, were the airs floating around me when I began to think whether I could go one step further than reading, and try writing, the sort of fiction I enjoyed. The psychic detective form was a particular favourite, especially Shiel’s Prince Zaleski; Machen’s Mr Dyson; and Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. To me then, oddly as it may seem now, it was the most natural thing in the world to try to write something that I might fancy was a bit like their adventures.
I had already had a go at this with a little booklet of tales featuring Ralph Tyler, a Northamptonshire supernatural sleuth who smoked foul cigarettes and lived in a tower block. But the ideas I was getting for further episodes didn’t seem somehow to belong to him: and one day, on a walk in an avenue of old beech trees, great and grey, the title, character and first two tales of The Connoisseur came to me almost all at once. Jeff Dempsey and David Cowperthwaite gave the new character his debut in their fine small press magazine, Dark Dreams.
Still, it took quite a while to compile a volume—and then, a slim volume—of his adventures, which Tartarus Press recklessly published: this was In Violet Veils (1999). The episodes in The Connoisseur’s career began to get a little fuller and perhaps more various in a second volume, Masques & Citadels (2003), and at this point I was fortunate to enlist the help of a good friend of many years in fantastic literature, John Howard. This began a collaboration which has carried The Connoisseur on for a sufficiency of further tales, some becoming distinctly more prolonged and peculiar than the original vignettes. A few of these were kindly taken up by the new Ex Occidente Press of Bucharest, Romania, and published in a third volume, together with other material, as The Rite of Trebizond (2008). The Connoisseur acquired a few allies along the way: and many of these are gathered to aid him in meeting perhaps the grandest piece of devilry he has to face, in ‘The Descent of the Fire’, which first appeared in Strange Tales (2003) edited by Rosalie Parker.
All these stories should be regarded as votive candles at the shrines of those literary gods I first revered so long ago. And whatever there is in them of curious light is a glimmer from these great idols: and whatever there is of restless darkness is cast by their long shadows.
Mark Valentine
Kildwick, Yorkshire
January 2010
The Effigies
The Connoisseur, as I must call him, lives in modest rooms in one of our quieter cathedral cities. He is by no means very wealthy, but he supplements a decent inheritance with a salary from regular, if uncongenial, administrative work; and since he shuns many of the contrivances of modern living, he is enabled to indulge his keen pleasure in all the art forms. His taste is so fastidious that it would not be apt to call him a collector. He does not amass pieces from the mere impulse to acquisition and accumulation; he chooses with a very personal discrimination. Thus it is that he is known amongst his friends by the nickname I have given: yet I do not think many can be aware, as I am, that he is also, in his way, a connoisseur of the curious, of those glimpses of another domain which are vouchsafed to certain individuals and in certain places. With his conditional consent—dependent upon anonymity and all necessary discretion—I intend to retell some of his encounters with this realm.
I had often noticed on my friend’s mantelpiece, a dark earthenware jug of quite perfect form which, from time to time, was filled with water, although I never saw it graced with flowers. The Connoisseur must have observed my puzzled glances at it, for one evening he told me how it came into his possession.
‘I don’t suppose,’ he began, ‘you will remember the sudden fashion which brought to the fore the ceramic work of Austin Blake. Pottery has long been a poor relation of the arts—I call it more than a craft—and it is unusual for any of its practitioners to achieve renown. But Blake was a young man of uncommon skill. He created elegant amphorae and delicate vessels which some said had no equal save from classical times. After a few years of unheralded work, Society at last caught up with him and for a time it was simply “the uttermost thing” to have an Austin Blake piece in one’s drawing room. He became the darling of the chattering classes and in a brief burst earned more—much more—than in all the lean years beforehand. But Blake was never at ease in cocktail parties and art salons, so when the furore began to dampen down, he used some of the proceeds of his recognition to acquire a secluded cottage in Herefordshire, and converted part of it into a studio, where he could work undisturbed.
‘Then there was a long silence. I, who had followed his work from the first, noticed this, I think, before most others. Auctioneers and agents kept the public supplied with Blake items, but I knew them to be earlier work now re-circulating. The months passed and there was nothing new from his hands at all. I almost began to think—shamefully, I admit—that he was taking part in some elaborate ploy to create an artificial scarcity and thus induce a new stimulus to the curiosity and cupidity of collectors. My letters to him went unanswered.
‘Finally, I relied upon my early acquaintance with him to violate his rural retreat by more-or-less forcing him to accept a visit from me. I invented some excuse to be
in his region and said I would call—he agreed, with obvious reluctance, to let me stay for a short while.
‘The journey toward his hermitage took me along the gentle, dreaming Golden Valley, but not long after I passed the slender spire of Peterchurch, his directions required me to turn down a tangle of narrow lanes lying in the shadow of the Black Mountains. After several twists and turns, I came upon his cottage, standing quite alone beside a dense wood. Its whitewashed walls and renewed appearance ought to have been quite cheering: yet there was a dismal air about the place I could not help noticing. He had told me it had been unoccupied for quite some time, and I think perhaps it was this lack of a “lived-in” feeling that I missed. It was as if the house had never quite got used to people …
‘He greeted me kindly enough, but at first I could gain no clue as to the sudden dearth of his work. He gave me a guided tour of the cottage, which was so remote as to be without most amenities—there was a rudimentary electricity supply, but no gas: water was piped from a local well; there was no telephone. I could see how this might have a desolate charm for Blake, and could not understand why it had not inspired him. The studio he reserved to the last, and barely allowed me inside, but I saw the unmistakable signs of recent work, for tools and materials lay all about, and the wheel was still wet; yet the kiln and some storage cabinets were all closed and, I was surprised to see, padlocked. I made some light remark about the value of his work now requiring extra security, but he did not rise to this.
‘We seemed somehow to be playing a game of mental chess in which every move I made to enquire about his work in progress was thwarted by an adroit shift of subject or outright evasion. Finally, as evening began to descend, I produced a gift I had brought—a brace of bottles of an old brandy he had once admired—and I began to ply him diligently with this. Then I reproached him for living on his laurels. I said I had once taken him for a true artist, who creates only because he must, knowing no other motive. But what was I to make of his apparent retirement? That he was a spent force? Or simply wallowing in his new wealth?
‘At first he took this for mere chaff and banter. So I became solemn and stressed I meant what I said. I goaded him by wondering whether he kept his wares for rich clients and no longer had a use for old friends. My rather cynical ruse worked. He became animated and his auburn hair, always rather shock-headed, became positively volcanic. He fulminated against my bad faith. Then, he subsided, and a heaviness descended upon him. He stared at me and muttered:
‘ “I would have spared you this; but I see you mean to get at me; so you shall know the truth.”
‘And he lurched towards his studio, strode in, snapped open a padlock and flung wide a cabinet door. Shelf upon shelf was stacked with the work of many hours—yet these were not the lucent, lovely creations that had earned him such fame, but withered black abstracts which each seemed a cruel mockery of the human form in torment; dark, foul knots like the twisted boughs of trees which shun the sunlight or the dank eruptions of fungus. They were shapes such as a madman might make who is beyond cure; or, rather, the stumps a demi-urge might leave who had grown tired of trying to create perfect evil.
‘I stared at Blake.
‘ “You see?” he whispered. “You see?”
‘I closed the door and refastened the padlock.
‘ “Why?” I could only ask.
‘ “Why? Why?” he burst into a wild, derisive laughter. “I wish I knew why.” He shrugged, and poured more brandy. “Every time I return to the wheel, it is not my hands which form the clay. The slime itself makes its own shapes. Again and again I have gone back, tried all I can to take control—always the work is formed in its own image. I have tried changing the clay. It makes no difference. And when those—deformities—come from the kiln, they are all, no matter what I do, stark black. Yet I cannot stay away. It—they—won’t let me …”
‘ “They?”
‘ “Yes. I have even begun to see these infernal creations in the shadows that fall at evening. I hear them, too, in the call of the rooks and the cry of bats, and I smell them when the earth is rank before rainfall. Do you understand, dammit? It is as though they have got inside every single sense of me—even the very water tastes of them.”
The Connoisseur paused in his narrative, rose from his wing-backed chair and leant upon the mantelpiece, gazing sideways at the fire.
‘That is how he spoke. I seldom saw a man more desperate.
‘I told him he must get away. I said quite bluntly that his sanity would surely be at risk if he remained. He agreed, wearily. But he insisted once more that—somehow—those whose effigies oozed from the clay were also inside him, permeating every faculty.
‘At last, mercifully, the brandy took its toll and he slumped into a deep slumber. I had hardly touched my glass, and felt in no mood for sleep. I brooded over his words, and particularly the futility of all his efforts to break out of the sway the shapes held him under; no matter what clay he used, they made it their own.
‘And then an idea came to me. I retrieved the keys from where they had fallen by Blake’s sleeping form, returned to the studio and unlocked one of the cupboards. The cluster of contorted figures were as if suspended within the frenzy of some obscene rite.
‘Distastefully, I selected one which, though it had evidently been intended as some kind of beaker, had taken upon itself the features of a charred human mouth, gaping in an endless cry of pain. Falteringly, I went to the sink in the corner and filled this leering vessel to the brim with grey water, then drank this in several gulps. I poured another draught and took this too; then I waited.
‘I do not suppose what I eventually saw, or thought I saw, in the darkness of that room was one hundredth of what Blake had been prey to. But I assure you it was quite enough. Simply this: the hideous misshapes he had been compelled to create were as if alive before my eyes, dancing and writhing one into another, as if in a constant act of malcreation, as if they drew strength and power from their dark delirium. And it seemed to me I glimpsed—within that seething, bloated mass—absorbed irrevocably, human faces, human features …
‘I was glad I had not taken more of the water. I spat and retched for all I was worth, but throughout that night, just as I thought my eyes were my own again, I would see once more in some dense shadow another of the cruel figures.
‘When morning came, and Blake awoke from his stupor, I got him to gather together some possessions and drove us both out of that place. I left him at a convalescent home near Hereford, and then motored on to Ledbury, where Father Martindale, that unconventional cleric—you have heard me speak of him—lives in semi-retirement. I told him this story. He nodded his great dome of a head thoughtfully and murmured—“Even the very water tastes of them”—then, more sharply, “Near March Bagot, you say?”
‘ “Yes.”
‘ “Mmm. Yes. Now, let me see.” He rose, and consulted his bookcase. “Hampole, Hedayat, Hope, no, Horne, ah! Howerd; here we are; Nicomedes Howerd, D.D. Yes indeed.” And he showed me the spine of the book.
‘ “Ancient Holy and Healing Wells of Herefordshire,” I read.
‘Then he rapidly scanned the pages until he found the place he wanted and passed it to me.’
The Connoisseur reached into his own bookcase, in an alcove by the fire, and pulled out a notebook which he, in turn, flicked through.
‘ “We would do wrong if we did not admit that some of our sacred wells seem to have acquired repute even before they became associated with the saints … it is idle to deny that some were the shrines of an older faith. Indeed, it is likely some never received sanctification. What, for example, are we to make of the Cursing Well at Oakyard, with its timeworn horned head spout: and how can we account for the insistence of parishioners at March Bagot that a woodland pool in the vicinity is the abode of elves? Such remembrances seem wholly unhallowed.”
‘Father Martindale allowed me to contemplate the full significance of this fragment of folklore for a few mom
ents. Then he suggested that this was an occasion where it seemed we should have to meet fire with fire or, more particularly water with water. “Fortunately,” he added, “Mr Howerd, in his learned work, was admirably circumspect about one of the most venerable wells in his county, whose potency depends in some part upon its seclusion.” Then he solemnly wrote on my behalf to the custodian of the Grail Well, as it is called, whose family have for generations preserved this secret shrine. I made my way to this tranquil sanctuary—it was not distant—and was allowed to take away some of its healing waters. This, I firmly believe, played its part in restoring Austin Blake’s well-being. But I made sure he never saw that cottage again.
‘The well which served his cottage was fed from a subterranean source, of course: the same deep spring, I am sure, which forms a brackish pool in a hollow in the woods nearby, overhung by barren thorns and dense rotting vegetation. It is lined with oozing mud which is difficult to plumb even with a good long staff: where this seeps out at the edges I saw markings which I did not care to examine too closely. Into this mire I flung, one by one, the self-creating idols from Austin Blake’s studio: there I trust they remain.
‘The pitcher you admired on the mantelpiece was one of Blake’s first works following his return to health. You will see that he had not quite regained his old blitheness and brilliancy; indeed, in all his work since there has been a shadow. There are those who say this is a sign of his maturity as an artist, one who senses a recognition of the suffering which is our common lot …
‘Some times I have need of the waters of the Grail Well again, for other sufferers—perhaps I will tell you of these in time—and when I do I deem Blake’s sombre vessel most fitting as a monstrance.’
After the Darkness
The Collected Connoisseur Page 1