Bohemians of Sesqua Valley (23 page)

“I am Khem. Delighted to meet you, Miss Dorgan. I was acquainted with your grandsire.” So saying, he held to her his ebony hand, which she clasped. The man’s skin was soft like silk. April watched as he turned her hand over and peered at her palm, then bent so as to kiss the flesh thereof. She shuddered at the press of his tongue. Releasing her, the dark man bowed to Adam and vacated the club. Once the fellow was gone, April realized that she had been holding her breath.

“That was weird,” she said, blowing air out of her lungs. “He couldn’t have known Grandfather, he’s way too young. Who the hell is he?”

“No one of importance, Miss Dorgan.” The drinks arrived and April sipped at hers without examining its contents. The potion was sweet and smooth as it slipped down her throat.

“Call me April, Adam.” She looked around the room and laughed. “This is the most uptight horde of ‘Bohemians’ I’ve ever encountered. Why is everyone staring at us? God, this town is freakish.” She looked at her hand, to the place that Khem had kissed. Cyrus leaned to her and studied her palm. “His were the softest lips I’ve even encountered. Did you smell his breath? It reminded me of the cassia Grandfather used when making his special brand of pudding.” She looked around the room again. “Isn’t anyone else going to recite?”

“This is mostly a social establishment, Miss—April. I fear our avant-garde must seem rather tame to what you are used to.”

The woman chuckled. “Oh, I’m from a small town, too, you know. We never get quite as wild as they do in big cities. We have a coven, and experiment with sexuality and narcotics. But I have always been a book person, and for me the Bohemian movement, if we call it that, is rooted to literature and art. Trilby is a book that I adore.” She snapped her fingers. “That’s what that guy reminds me of.” She turned to Cyrus. “The effect he seemed to have on you was rather ‘Svengali.’ Who the hell is he?” She noticed the quick look exchanged by the two males.

“You visited Simon’s Cathedral of Art, I hear,” Adam replied. “A fascinating collection.”

This reminded April of something that had been on her mind. “Adam, you said you visited my grandfather with this Simon fellow. Were you here when my grandfather visited Sesqua Valley?”

“Probably, but if so the visit made no impression. Why?”

“Remember when you showed me that entry in Grandfather’s journal about the strange totem? There’s one just in front of the church that resembles the thing Grandfather described. I seem to recall Grandfather being upset that the totem had gone missing from the region. Wouldn’t it be wild if the thing found its way to Sesqua Valley?” She tried to sound innocent and playful so as to conceal her troubled mind and growing sense of unease.

“That would be amusing. I cannot now recall the thing, we have so many such totems and figures that have been created by our artistic denizens and planted in many places of the woodland. Some of them are quite fanciful. Will you have another drink, April?”

“No more whiskey for me, thanks. It was whiskey, wasn’t it? But with something added to it? It packs a punch, I must say.” She laughed at herself and made a silly face. “I think a walk back to the bookstore will sober me up a bit. I haven’t walked so much in ages. I really like it. I feel so far away from everything here. It’s okay for me to leave my car parked there until the morning?”

Cyrus rose. “Yes, that’s fine. Come on, I’ll walk you home. The rain has stopped, I think.”

April stood and felt a moment’s dizziness. She had rarely been drunk, but whatever it was she had imbibed had had an effect. Her head was hot and her eyesight slightly out of focus as she touched the wound that had resulted from her fall in the church. She laughed at herself and then turned to smile at the others in the crowded room, all of whom were watching her. “Good night, my fellows,” she told them, holding up her empty glass and putting it to her mouth one last time. Cyrus took the glass from her and set it back on the table, and then he escorted her out of the building. The air had been freshened by the rain, which had now completely ceased. April peered into the sky and felt another wave of vertigo—for in the dark sky above them she thought she could detect spirals of illumination that reminded her of the designs on the black window. But then the image melted and she could see starlight only.

“How old are you, Cyrus?” she asked as they walked along the wooden sidewalk.

“How old do you think I am?”

“Hmm, seventeen or eighteen?” He smiled at her but did not answer. “You ever been in the big city?”

“I’ve visited many cities, with Simon. It was interesting, but there’s no place like home.”

“I don’t feel that, now. I like it here. It feels authentically different. I can’t quite explain it. The crowd I hang out with at home—they try so hard to be radical, but they’re all so very normal and bland. Their radical natures are things they’ve learned from the lives of others, which they try to duplicate; but they aren’t authentic, it’s all just cliche. Now, that crowd back there, they were different. I sensed something that I can’t pinpoint. You have it, too, some kind of secretive nature. Something alien. It’s there in your eyes.” She stopped and placed a hand against his face, which he took, kissing her palm.

“You’re really drunk. Adam must have given you the good stuff.”

“Why is he so uptight?”

“You’re an outsider, but one with whom the valley has some psychic ties. Probably has something to do with your grandfather and Simon and those books, and that place you come from, Rick’s Lake. We don’t get many visitors here. It takes a special soul to find Sesqua Valley. Just the fact that you’re here indicates a lot.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do. You’re not here by accident. You’re here with a purpose. You’re a very bad actress, I must say. Adam’s uptight because he hasn’t yet figured out your agenda. What he doesn’t realize is that you don’t understand it yourself. You came looking for answers, or maybe you came to give substance to questions and confusions. You’ve been touched by Sesqua Valley, and you’ll never be as you were.”

“You’re a spooky boy,” she laughed. “I’ve been ‘claimed,’ you mean? Like you?”

“What?”

“I heard what Adam told that Khem fellow when he went to get you from the stage. What is your relationship with the black man?”

He linked arms with her and led her onto the dirt road. “My only relationship is with this valley, Miss Dorgan. Nothing else can ‘claim’ me.” It was strange, the sensation that suddenly overwhelmed her, of wanting to protect the lad. She put her arms around his waist as they walked toward dark woodland.

* * *

Adam Webster ran his hand over the stone from which the macabre totem had been composed and fingered the symbols that had been etched onto its surface. He whispered the language of those symbols and felt them bend the gentle wind that pushed to him from the woods. The ground on which he stood shook lightly as the white mountain shifted its twin peaks, and Adam moaned at the wailing that sailed from those peaks, ululations of the beasts that dreamt within the mountain’s sequestered places. He felt absolutely his separation from the mundane world of humanity and sensed that his time of mortality was coming to a close—the realm of mist and shadow that was his demesne was calling him home. Would he rebel and resist that call, as Simon Gregory Williams had done for more than a century? Perhaps. He understood more clearly Simon’s refusal to melt away from the mortal world and the confines of Sesqua Valley—the keen desire to protect the valley from that which would harm and corrupt it. Such as the thing that stood behind him now. Adam leaned away from the totem so as to peer at its topmost image—the image of the Faceless God.

“Why does your kind always try to refute me?”

“Who among us has tried? Simon idolizes you, as this edifice testifies. But your concerns are not things that matter to us.”

“Of what do you refer?”

“Humanity, and their fate. We are indifferent about such things.”

“You cannot begin to comprehend cosmic impassivity. You are so much a part of this little terrestrial sphere. The mist and murk of which you are a spawn is earthly product of a supernatural kind—yet of this planet nonetheless. Your nature is rooted to this valley, of which you have always been and will always be a part, for as long as this valley exists.”

“Our realm is beyond the world, like unto the Dreamworlds, that exist in other dimensions of time and space. I suppose that’s why you come to us so often, because of the place where the woodland of dreams touches our own. Simon taught me of it, from the elder lore. He’s taught me many things concerning thee and thine.”

The black man knelt to the ground and dug with hands into the earth. As Adam finally turned to face the Outer One, he saw that the dirt and grass and sand that had been gathered were being shaped into a ball of debris. Adam shivered as the Dark One blew onto that globe and gave it a semblance of sentience. He watched as the hands moved away from the sphere, which was now green and blue with life as it floated in the air just at the Dark One’s chest. “What do you think will happen to your realm of mist and shadow once this world is destroyed and discarded? What will become of it when I breathe its dust away?” At this the daemon pursed his perfect lips and exhaled. A black cloud sailed from his mouth and enveloped the small sphere, which became a thing of particles. And then, chortling at what he chanced to mould in play, the daemon blew the globe of dust away. Adam looked overhead at the sky, which became darkened and bereft of all illumination. He saw the blackness filter toward the mountain and tarnish its white stone so that it became an obsidian obelisk. The illusion lasted but one moment until the sky and valley assumed their normal semblance.

“Why are you here?”

The Dark One smiled. “I was summoned.”

“Then take her and be gone.”

“In time, child of shadow.” Adam did not watch as the daemon floated past him, into the ancient church. Calmly, he knelt to where the valley had been clawed into. He placed his hands over the place and whispered words, smoothing the sod until its surface was smooth and whole. He could smell the electric charge that filtered from within the building, but he ignored it and walked the earth toward his bookshop.

VII

April found that she was too awake to try to sleep after Cyrus had taken her home, and so she took herself to the main room in the bookshop and found a section of poetry. She sat on the floor and reached for a volume on the bottom shelf, a book that appealed to her because it had been bound in black leather, the scent of which she adored. Bringing the book to her nostrils, she drank in the aroma of aged leather and yellowing pages. The title, in gilt lettering, was The Hermaphrodite and Other Poems. She scanned the brittle pages until coming to a poem concerning Wilde, one of her literary idols. She spoke the poem’s concluding lines aloud:

“There, in the pagan darkness, he

Felt his own radiant agony,

And heard the gods affirm;

‘That which thou soughtest shalt thou find:

Beauty, a breath of wandering wind,

Dust, and the drowsy worm.’”

A shadow of someone standing behind her formed on the wall of books. “What is it you’re reading, Miss April?”

She shivered at the words, and at a memory they stirred. “Um, a wonderful book of poetry.” She stood and faced Adam. “May I purchase it? It’s quite my thing.”

“Let me give it to you as a gift,” the weird fellow answered, his curious mouth forming its strange smile. “Did you have a pleasant walk home with Cyrus?”

“Oh, yes. I quite like him. And the air is so much cooler now.”

“Yes, the valley has claimed its climate once again.”

“Yes. Well, thank you so much for the book. I’ll just go to my room and dip into it. Goodnight, Adam.”

Adam bowed to her, followed her to the hallway and watched her climb the stairs. When she reached the landing, April turned to smile at him; and as she looked at him, standing in the dusky hallway with his silver eyes shimmering within his wolfish face, she sensed that he was not human; but what that meant she could not comprehend. Perhaps she was still intoxicated and her brain was playing tricks, as the light and shadow played on Adam’s bestial façade, teasing her imagination. She entered her room and looked around at the beautiful antiques, the comfortable bed, the soft light and cozy shadows, and she liked it more than ever. The place was beginning to feel so homey and familiar, and she fantasized about never leaving this place for what she realized was her very dull, safe life back in Wisconsin. Sitting on the bed, she opened the book of poetry and read the title poem, stopping when she came to a line about the “unfathomable” Hermaphrodite—and that word hit her with full force; for she had entered an unfathomable realm, something unlike anything she had heretofore experienced—and she was becoming utterly beguiled. Sesqua Valley appealed to her adventurous soul, which had tried to find itself in Bohemian culture. April treasured what she considered “true” Bohemianism, an authentic radicalness; yet she had never truly found it in her small home-town, except for the final two years of her grandfather’s life, when she had often slept in his small extra bedroom and spent many haunted evenings listening to his trembling voice recite the history of the incident at Rick’s Lake and its aftermath. Here, in this uncanny valley town, she had discovered a world unlike any she had known, with creatures that were unworldly. Yes, she was intoxicated, by the valley and her growing sense of it, the wonder and disquiet it inspired.