Bohemians of Sesqua Valley (19 page)

“Eldon has been swallowed by the Hungry Place. His last request was that you make a marker to his memory.”

“Ah,” the other fellow uttered, “do we know his birth date? No matter, we shall record the day of—well, one cannot quite call it extinction, from what we know of our fate beneath the Sesquan sod. You were there?”

“Yes.”

Arthur tilted his head and regarded me queerly. “I’ve heard about you, Hobbs. You like to dwell in the dangerous places. I’ve heard you’ve actually ascended Mount Selta and swam in one of its sequestered pools.”

“There’s only one pool, inside a cavern of crimson rock. Yes, I found it curious, that a mountain with so white an exterior should have scarlet walls within. But you’ve journeyed yourself,” I countered, holding up the snapshot. “You’ve found a way into the dreamlands.”

He laughed. “No. The gaunts may be summoned if one knows the art. They love the light of our plump moon on their rubbery hide, and to feel the reflection of our faces on the surface beneath their horns.” He noticed my expression and laughed again. “You’re beguiled, Hobbs, and so you should be. The entire idea of a dreamland is hypnotic. How did such a realm come into existence? Is it formed of mortal dreaming, or is it the weave-work of some elder gods? Can we enter it as phantoms only, leaving behind our husks of flesh and bone? The night-gaunts are decidedly physical, and yet one senses that they are elementals of nightmare. So many scrumptious questions, so few boring answers.”

I touched my free hand to the canvas on which the oblique silhouette of the depicted creature swam in gathered shadow. “Is this in preparation for a work in stone? I thought sculpturing was your forte.”

“No, this is just an idea I had. I’ll give it to you once it’s finished. You obviously have some kind of affinity with night-gaunts. You should see your face, Jonas—you’re caught. Maybe they’ll lure you to their ghoul-haunted woodland and let you cross over.”

I didn’t know how to answer him, for something in his words, and in the image on canvas, had indeed “caught” my imagination. He smiled at me as I opened my mouth to reply, and then he laughed out loud when the words caught in my throat. I had given the artist my message from the man who had been sifted through the cemetery loam, and my errand thus accomplished I made my escape. Night’s wind had picked up considerably, and I raised my hands to push hair from my eyes; and I saw that I still held Arthur’s photograph of his perplexing model, the silhouette of which looked different in the moonlight. Pushing the print into my pants pocket, I scanned the sky at the place where Marceline had conjured forth the horde of winged night-beasts, and then I followed the road away from Sesqua Town, toward a wooded area. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the moon as an enormous disc just over the twin-peaked mountain.

I entered the silent woodland, escaping wind and starlight. The place seemed preternaturally hushed, and of a sudden some lines from a poem by Wilde oppressed my memory:

“To outer senses there is peace,

A dreamy peace on either hand

Deep silence in the shadowy land,

Deep silence where the shadows cease.”

I wandered into deeper gloom, into a dreamy peacefulness. Although the place was dark, my vision had adjusted to my surroundings, and cool verdant shade soothed my eyes. As I marched along the path I could feel the photograph in my pocket as an entity near my inner thigh. My fancy dwelt on the fabulous creature, the night-gaunt of dreamland; and as I imagined it I held my arms aloft, as if perhaps I could sense the other realm with fingertips, for certainly its air would be of a different chemistry. I sought the essence of that incorporeal aether with my mind as my mouth hungered to gulp it, deeply.

I sensed another occupant of woodland, and looked about me until I saw the ghostly silhouette, the lissome outline, the phosphorescent eyes. Young Cyrus reached out to me with anxious hands, which I clutched. “You’re crazy to be out here alone at this hour. What the hell are you about?”

“I seek the dreamlands.”

He shook his head ruefully. “Damn, you’re crazy. Come on, let’s return to town.”

“No. Hang you, boy, I’m being called, compelled to find that other sphere. It summons me just as surely as Sesqua Valley once did.”

“Jonas, you’ve been bewitched by magick, that is all. You’ve been staring too deeply into arcane lore, your eyes have drunk too deeply of sigils and schema. The beast of Sesqua Valley has corrupted you. I know too well that shimmer in your eyes, which is the sign of an intoxicated soul. I’ve witness it on Simon’s insane eyes many times. Your quest is folly, my friend. You could never find the dreamlands.”

I grabbed his coat by the shoulder and shook him. “How do you know? What’s to hinder me?”

He leaned closer to me, and I could smell the fragrant valley on his inhuman hide. “You lack the required innocence,” he stated simply, in his quiet voice.

“You’ve been there.” I had a sudden hunch, and by his air of false nonchalance I knew that I had struck a note. “You’ve been to the dreamlands—you know the way. Admit it.”

He shrugged and grinned. “I admit nothing. Oh hell, follow me.” Surprised, I watched him trot toward a second pathway and vanish from sight. I rushed after him, tripping over small shrubs and almost losing balance. Something tickled my sense of play, and I chuckled gleefully. Running through the woods reminded me of my childhood, when every summer was spent chasing through the mammoth woods of a lakeside park. I would sometime build small altars of twigs within those woods and dance around them; or oft times I would merely recline on supple and aromatic earth and daydream. Some pocket of my soul ached to stop and lay upon this earth—and dream. How dare the child of shadow say that I lacked innocence? At that moment I felt a purity of soul.

The woodland opened up as some gargantuan shape arose before me, and I watched Cyrus dig his fingers into the sharply sloping soil of a colossal mound that rose above the moon drenched trees. Happily, I scampered up the slope in pursuit of my crony, not resting until I reached the mound’s apex. Cyrus sat on the ground, and as I knelt beside him I looked behind me and saw that Mount Selta was far behind us. Distant hills surrounded us, as did the spreading woods.

“There,” Cyrus whispered as he pointed to a far-off district. “Do you see the place where shadows cease, that region of verdant mist that captures moonbeams? Come on, use your arcane senses.”

I strained to see what he could perceive, but it was not to be. A sob of frustration caught inside my throat. Suddenly, the boy’s hand combed through my hair, and then it wound through strands and tugged me to him. I felt his tender kiss upon my eyes. He leaned away from me as I looked again. I saw the eerie region. “The forests of dreamland,” I sighed. Oh, the ache I knew within the pit of my being. I raised one hand as if I might have touched the other place, and the sight of that hand held in the air reminded me of another hand, one that was beautifully black. Memory grew keen, queerly so, and I saw within its depths the movement of Marceline’s hand, as she made weird gesticulations to the sky. I remembered exactly the formation of her fingers.

“What are you doing?”

I smiled but did not look at him, for my eyes were enchanted by remote movement. They rose from out the outlying mist, dark patches of rubbery blackness that caught the sheen of moonlight on their immortal flesh. I stood to greet them as they sallied toward the mound, and I raised my hands to their horrendous beauty as they encircled me in the air. One member of the horde floated to me and hovered just above the ground. I thrilled to the sound of its membranous wings beating in the air, at the rich smell of its ghastly inky flesh. As it hovered close before me rich moonlight fell upon its facelessness, and on that slate of jet I saw a vague reflection of my visage. I welcomed the clawed hands that reached for me, and shouted maniacal hilarity as I was fiendishly tickled. My lunatic laughter seemed to attract others of the flock, and soon I was being lifted off the mound, held by hands that tormented me with their touch. I did not look down as someone shouted my name, and soon I could hear nothing but the beating of leathery wings as I was taken to the other place, as I was ushered into the mist of dreams.

The Strange Dark One

I

I
have looked through black trees to a dry and dead moon,

There in a darkened sky, a place of ultimate omission,

Which expands overhead like some cauldron of nightmare,

An abyss of evening.

Overhead, a yawning universe seethes,

As if to devour this world and we

Who creep insignificantly on it,

We who stumble and find no hold of sanity.

A chill madness seeps down from darkness;

It touches the hoary stones

Of this unholy house in this valley

Where chaos and lunacy dance,

Where they move in an atmosphere haunted

By the mockery there on His mask,

His façade of Imperial Midnight.

He offers His hand to our tongue.

(rough draft of a poem by William Davis Manly, left unfinished at the time of his disappearance)

II

There is a place of phantasy and fear, and of sublimity, where things are found in darkness, and sometimes found in dream. April Dorgan found such things within a haunted valley that was surrounded by hills and mountains—a place that beguiled, and mocked, and poisoned. It was an uncanny place, and perhaps that was a portion of its allure; for the young woman had a bohemian nature that perplexed her stolid family, who could not understand the way she dressed, the books she read, the language she uttered. When, in early adulthood, she inherited her grandfather’s bookshop, she turned the place into a gathering of like souls, replacing the majority of the shop’s books for those titles that especially pleased her decadent clientele. There was, however, one room where no one was allowed, and this was the large back room that her grandfather had furnished as his personal living quarters and library. And it was that library that perplexed her just as much as she confounded others in the staid Wisconsin town. The room had a special aura, for it was there, as a teenager, that she would sit with her ailing grandsire and listen to his wild eccentric talk. It was there that he would show her certain books kept behind a locked cabinet; and sometimes he would mumble of the time he spent in the darkest part of Rick’s Lake and of what he imagined he had experienced there. April had resented the way that her mother and uncles had tried to shield her from the old man’s strange tales, as if to listen to such talk would taint one with some kind of mental contagion. Thus she formed a secret bond with her grandfather, and thus he left the bookshop to her in his will; which was just as well, for no one else in the family had shown any interest in the future of the place and would probably have sold it. She loved it. She loved the old house wherein it was located on the first floor, she loved delving into the life of being a bookseller and connecting with other like souls, who, once discovering her especial literary interests, often sent her gifts of the most provocative titles, often in French.

But most of all she loved her grandfather’s study, into which she moved a bed so that she could sleep and dream there, often with one of the old man’s strange books on the bed beside her. She could not remember when she had located the old man’s private journal, in which she had first learned of Sesqua Valley and its weird inhabitants. It was odd: reading that journal brought back memories from her childhood that she had imagined were bad dreams, of sitting on the floor of her grandfather’s shop as a very young girl and looking over large picture books when certain people came to visit her grandfather, persons who were the rare individuals allowed into his private chamber. April remembered the furtive nature of these folk, and something about their appearance that beguiled and unsettled her. One very tall fellow who always wore a wide-brimmed hat especially captivated her, for he would always stop to kneel next to her and ask, “What are you reading today, Miss April?” She had a faint recollection of something strange about his eyes and the smell of his clothing. She also remembered the emotional state her grandfather was often in after having conferenced with these curious visitors. Once, just before the end of his days, when he began to allow her to sit with him in his study and discuss the future of the bookshop, she casually mentioned these customers.

“Ah,” the old man had replied, “Simon Gregory Williams and his brood. Yes, he may show his snout once he learns that you’ve taken over the business. They have an interest in some of the titles I have locked away. You’ll want to have nothing to do with them. They’re some kind of occultists, I think.”

It wasn’t until after her Grandfather’s death that she found, in a desk drawer, one of his private journals in which she found more information, but of a disturbing kind. “I’ve taken some books to Williams in his home of Sesqua Valley. They weren’t the worst kind and he paid a good price. He asked me some perplexing questions concerning Rick’s Lake and Professor Gardner, which I didn’t answer. I had heard, of late, of recent activity at Rick’s Lake; someone has removed the curious small stone totem that stood near the lodge, with its topmost image of the Faceless God. I have my suspicions, but I said nothing to Williams at the time. He asked his usual questions concerning the Professor and I explained again that we did not have actual copies of De Vermis Mysteriis and the Pnakotic Manuscripts but rather photostat copies of manuscript and printed pages taken from those texts. He doesn’t believe me, of course, because he’s glanced at some of the titles that I’ve collected since then, books that I keep under lock and key. He questioned me about my dreams, damn him. How he could know about such things I cannot fathom. There is almost a sensual quality in his voice when he speaks of the ancient texts and their addictive lore. He left me another list of titles in which he had interest, and I wonder if he guesses it is from some of his previous lists that I have found the secret books that I have sequestered in my personal occult library. Some of the titles have proved disturbing, and having them near me has been most unpleasant. Thus I gathered some in a box and drove to Adam Webster’s bookshop in Sesqua Valley. The memory of that place—well, I have no recollection of it! I cannot now remember any detail of my visit there, or of the valley itself. I am left with some vague unpleasant impression—that is all.”