Bohemians of Sesqua Valley (18 page)

“I can explain everything,” I assured them. “You see, Adam just procured this delightful edition of Wilde’s poetry, and I was contemplating its title poem as I passed by. And life, poor shoddy thing, imitated Art—for as in the poem the narrator passes and is perplexed by a room of inhuman dancers, so I became aware of your footfalls on this floor, and I was tempted to watch. I can resist everything except temptation, as you well know. I am human, all too human.”

I turned to acknowledge the creature at my side and saw that she was not native of the valley. Marceline Dubois smiled at me, her eyes of altering shade set within the magnificent ebony face. I could smell the fragrance of her red tresses and for one moment disregarded all else. She turned to kiss the corner of my mouth and one breast brushed against my chest. I watched, as she moved away from me to the center of the room and raised her arms. Someone in the pack produced a flute and began to play a haunting melody, to which the sorceress moved. Other pipes were pressed to inhuman mouths, and the intoxicating noise drew me to the center of the floor, where I raised my arms and joined in the danse. The seductive music wrapped around me, and I knew that I wanted to be clothed in nothing else. Kicking off my shoes, I unzipped my trousers and let them fall to my ankles. Some kind creature helped me out of them and took my book as I began to unbutton my shirt provocatively, as though it were one of seven veils. I wished for a glass of scarlet wine to spill onto the floor, so that I could dance in its ruby pool.

The music ceased, and I wearied of my waltz. Laughing magically, Marceline helped me to retrieve my clothing, although I did not bother to don them. Nude, I allowed her to guide me from the room and down the bare steps, onto the moonlit road. I suppose I had suffered (happily) a kind of delirium and had no notion as to where I was being escorted until I saw the pale and mammoth monster. I opened my collection of Wilde’s verse, but could not find “The Sphinx;” and so I racked my fevered brain and spoke one remembered line:

“A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me through the shifting gloom.”

Dropping everything except my trousers and books, I slipped into my pants and leaned my torso against the statue’s moon-kissed stone. “Perhaps I’ll go into the Hungry Place and dream of dead things.”

“Whatever are you muttering about?” the black goddess asked me.

I blew air. “Oh, I’ve been reprimanded about dreaming; or, rather, about influencing Cyrus to dream fantastic things, to dwell in vision as I sing to him the language of arcane tomes. It’s absurd, such caution and propriety. Adam lectured me after he gave me this book. ‘Dreaming opens portals, Jonas.’ Bah! He treats me as though I were a clueless clown.”

“You are impulsive, and not wholly sane, Jonas Hobbs. Exactly the sort of fellow we like in Sesqua Town. But Adam is correct. One must use caution in evoking dreams. We dwell in close proximity to the dreamlands, a realm from which influences may leak.”

“The what? Dreamlands? This is the first I’ve heard of it. Simon’s never mentioned it.”

The sorceress laughed. “He abhors the things utterly denied him. The dreamlands would never allow Simon access—he’s too poisonous, too polluted from having memorized every known edition of Al Azif.” She buzzed the title rather than articulating it as humans would.

“I think you’re familiar with this place, this dreamlands. I think you’ve been there.”

She bowed her head to acknowledge that I was correct. “It is where my Elder Brother dwells.”

“Who’s that?”

“The Strange Dark One.”

She narrowed her eyes as I burst out laughing. “If you’re trying to dissuade my interest, you’re going about it ass-backwards. My brain itches with intrigue. How can I summon this realm?”

“One does not beckon the dreamlands. One enters into it. There is a place in the valley where Sesqua’s woodland conjoins with the dreamland’s forest. Oh dear, what dreadful curiosity shimmers in your mortal eyes. You’ve been tainted by the beast, and tingle for arcane manifestation.” Ah, her sinister smile. I watched as she raised one sable hand to Luna and made a curious sign, a sign that I carefully observed and memorized. I listened, as a breeze began to blow, an element of which was caught within Marceline’s magical hand. She tilted her head slightly and smiled at me in such a way that my blood prickled in its veins. Playfully, she moved her closed fist before my face, then took it away as I tried to kiss it. Finally, she blew into that hand and released the mingled air. I watched her fingers open, like petals of some obsidian bloom, and then I looked upward to watch the moon darken as it was covered with what I imagined was a spread of molten shadow.

“I thought you said the dreamlands can’t be summoned.”

“That is correct; but one may call the things that dwell within its precincts.” The wind grew more vigorous, pushing the sweet scents of Sesqua Valley into my face. Marceline’s magnificent hair billowed in the tempestuous air. “Behold!” she exclaimed.

I raised my eyes and saw the fragmented patches of black cloud that wheeled in distant sky. No, they were not clouds; for clouds are not composed of rubbery texture that catches and reflects dim starlight. Clouds are not horned, nor do they spread membranous wings. I beheld the horde and guessed that they were perhaps fifty in number. I had seen their curious image before, on an antique piece of parchment that Simon had shown me in his round tower. When I asked him what the illustration represented, he tapped the image fondly and chuckled. “Night-gaunts,” he answered.

II

I spent the next three days in Simon’s cyclopean round tower, finding anything I could related to night-gaunts and the dreamlands; but I didn’t know where to look, for his collection of arcane lore was vast and kept in a chaotic lack of order. Books, scrolls, bas-reliefs and maps were scattered everywhere. The circular walls and floor of the mammoth upper room were covered with cobwebs, dust and diagrams in chalk. Such a litter of lore, and yet I could not find the data that I sought. And then I had a hunch, and trotted down the winding steps of the ancient tower. I found one of the queer stone circles that existed in the valley, reclined therein and closed my eyes. I summoned the forest of the dreamlands as new sensation chilled my brain. I sang to valley air and sensed the things that pranced around me, and when I partially lifted my eyelids I witnessed the blurry shapes of dark shaggy creatures of diminutive stature that danced around my circle of chiseled stones. Reaching outward, I touched the tiny paws that pulled me from the circle, and I knew that these wee creatures could lead me to the place where the valley’s woodland met the land of dream. They did not do so; rather, they guided me out of the woods and onto a road that took me to town. Frustrated, I crept to the silent sphinx and violently knocked my head against its unyielding stone. I was about to repeat the action when I saw, through streams of blood and tears, movement in the Hungry Place, the neglected cemetery where outsiders to the valley are oft times interred.

The figure, book in hand, watched me as I entered the somber site, but did not cease his gambol until he noticed that beads of blood fell from my chin, to earth. Using the back of one hand, I wiped away the stream of blood that spilled from where my forehead flesh had torn. Reaching into a pocket, he produced a clean white handkerchief. “Use this. We do not want to titillate this earth with liquid gore. Hello, Jonas.”

“Eldon, whatever are you doing here?”

How extraordinary, his laughter. “I’ve had the most delirious dream, of dancing on my tomb!” His voice was high-pitched; it quivered as it issued from his throat, emotional and mad. This was Eldon Prim, one of the valley’s suicidal poets. That he was still among the living astonished us, for Sesqua Valley has an appetite for those so richly lunatic and plays with them, psychically, as cats play at tormenting mice. Eldon’s supernatural scars ran deep. I saw that he was peering at me intensely, as if to read my mind. Again, his manic laughter. “But we are outsiders, Jonas—there’ll be no tombs for us; there will be this hungry sod, and only that, unless we keep company with whatever crawls beneath it. This is where I’ll be planted, this will be my grave. And so I dance upon it. Whee!”

I felt it then, the suggestion of a pulse beneath my foot, as if some stagnant heart had found resuscitation. Placid dizziness coaxed my knees to bend, and I knelt within the Hungry Place, before the dancing man. The earth on which I kowtowed was soft and enticing, and I pushed my hand into its depth. The mad poet fell beside me and set the book he held upon the ground. I saw that it was the thin hardcover collection of his poems that a friend in Boston had published in a very limited print run. The hand that had held the book grasped my wrist and pulled my hand from earth.

“No, Jonas, no. You’re not the one who dreamed of dancing in the Hungry Place. It has not summoned thee. ‘Tis not your paltry flesh for which it has an appetite. Nay, remove your mortal hide and let me plant mine own.” He reached into his coat’s deep pocket and pulled out a deadly ritual knife, the very sharp blade of which caught and reflected starlight. Looking up to the stars, Eldon raised one hand and made a little sign unto the sky; and then he rested his hand on the hard surface of his book and, using the dagger, liberated one finger from his hand. An undertone of hilarity issued from some deep place in his throat as he planted his severed digit into the cemetery sod. The valley pulsed more vigorously, and some snouted thing bayed beneath the peaks of Mount Selta. “Arthur Meikle is such a splendid sculptor, have him fashion me a tombstone. Farewell, Jonas Hobbs.”

I stood and watched for just a little while, as the Hungry Place sifted its soil around the lunatic. He laughed, the sinking man, and sang, a noise that served as background music as I exited the place. I leaned against the moon-kissed sphinx until the distant noise silenced, and when I turned to look again into the Hungry Place I saw that it was void of occupant. But then a distant figure climbed onto a far section of the low stone wall that surrounded the cemetery and leapt into the graveyard. I turned away and leaned the back of my head against the smooth stone of the sculpted beast and let the moonlight play upon my eyes, and I wondered again at how singular the moon looked as it floated over Sesqua Valley, how its shadows formed faces and expanded and then melted and then blossomed again as other expressive things.

“Eldon’s gone,” a soft voice told me. I did not regard the young creature at my side. “I found his book in the Hungry Place. Guess I’ll take it to the tower. You have it, don’t you?”

I replied in quotation:

“I hold it in, the hot and frantic breath.

I won’t exhale the words of lunacy.

I won’t pronounce your poison’d shibboleth

And enter custom with insanity.

Remember when you talked to me of pain

And pierced a splinter into my soft eye?

Remember how that splinter sliced my brain

And planted dreams wherein the starlight died?

Peace, peace. Your language is still whispered in the wind.

Silence all the shrieking in my brain.

All your arcane lunacy rescind.

I will not mouth your fatal name again.

I will not move among your nightmare race.

I’ll find deep solace in some hungry place.”

Cyrus nodded. “Weird. He wrote that before he came to the valley.”

“It’s not weird at all, young creature.” I countered. “The valley seeks we who are demented, we who have been tainted by unholy alchemy. It lures us to its confines and sups upon our madness, thus nourishing its own.”

“You’re laughing at me, aren’t you? You like to pose as so superior,” the lad complained.

I shrugged. “For someone born of Sesqua’s shadow, you’re hopelessly innocent. Where is your edge of danger, Cyrus? One would mistake you for human.”

“I’m not—human. Just because I’m not as diabolic as Simon and some others…”

I raised a hand to silence him. “No matter, I’ve been ordered to avoid you. Adam asserts that I’m corrupting your soul.” Slyly, I smiled at him. “Do you shadow-spawn of this haunted valley have souls, I wonder? Or merely appetite?”

“You’re talking a lot of nonsense tonight, Jonas. Leonidas must have slipped you some of his nasty narcotics. As for Adam, he’s not my master, nor our concern. We’ll continue with our studies. Good evening.”

I smiled at the bravado in his voice and watched him walk away. Then I remembered Eldon’s request, and so I sauntered up the road, to the large building that housed an artistic studio that was shared by members of the community. I did not care for the arrogant artist whom Eldon had named, but I knew his craftsmanship was exceptional, and so I entered the building and watched its few inhabitants at work. I was surprised to see that Arthur was working on a canvas rather than devoting his masculine hands to the sculptor’s task; and as I gazed at his painting on its easel my curiosity was piqued, for the ebony beast that was gradually revealed in its dark surroundings seemed familiar. The artist ignored me as I stepped to him until I bent to stroke the piece of paper that had been thumb-tacked to the canvas. When Arthur spoke to me, his voice was low and haunting in its effect.

“They spill like patches of liquid shadow from their realm of fabulous darkness, and they esteem our adoration as our wonder-struck faces are reflected on their smooth blankness.” I uncurled the piece of paper, which proved to be an image of a fantastic fiend. It was winged and faceless and incredibly lean; indeed, there was almost something sinister in its sinewy and compact form, and in its stance, which bespoke of incredible strength. Unpinning it from the canvas, I lifted the rectangular piece of paper to the overhead light and saw that it was indeed a photograph from life.