THE TRANSFORMATION OF NICKOLAS CASPIAN
After all the paintings sold in the first five days of the show, I thought the quick sell-through would make the dreams stop but the nightmares got worse as if the malignant ember in my brain was emboldened by my success. “Yes, yes,” I could hear it whisper during the night. “This is the way.”
Which way: Insanity? Suicide?
The voice was never forthcoming with an answer; it continued to stalk me when I slept. I countered by not closing my eyes, by capitalizing on my newfound celebrity. I haunted the party circuit, emblazoned with the seal of approval from both local newspapers (even the mercurial alternative paper confessed—grudgingly—a fascination with my work). I was welcome everywhere, and everywhere offered me alcohol and drugs and groupies from the Cornish College of Arts to keep sleep at bay.
Two weeks after my successful run at the Hole in the Wall gallery, Horace Wall found me on the terrace of a fortieth floor Belltown penthouse. I was staring at the tiny lights of the ferries as they crossed the infinite blackness of the Puget Sound, trying to remember the name of the woman whose breasts I had just been staring at while pretending to participate in the conversation. “You don’t look good, Nickolas,” Horace said by way of greeting. “I hear you’ve been partying.”
I tried for a smile, failed, and settled for leaning against the thick wall of the terrace. The breeze off the bay smelled faintly like rain and the evergreen forests of the Olympic peninsula. “Celebrating,” I slurred.
Horace looked at me closely and I squirmed under his gaze, moving my hands feebly as if, like some arcane prestidigitator, my fingers could weave a spell of banishment. “You should take a break from the celebrating,” he said. “You need to get some sleep.”
“No sleep,” I countered, the threat of a nocturnal visitation putting ice in my spine. “No fucking way.”
“Jesus,” he muttered. “Why do the brilliant ones always have to be crazy?” He put his hand on my arm, squeezing tightly enough to capture my attention. His hair was neatly slicked along his skull, making his face look like the rounded front of a peach. “This probably isn’t the right time,” he said. “I want you to meet someone.”
We weren’t alone on the terrace. The other man was a well-dressed stick of a fellow whose seams and cuffs were financed by old money. He was pale like he summered here and wintered farther north, and his eyes were sharp and restless like chips of glass lit by flickering candlelight. “Nickolas, this is Dalton Hentlock.”
“How do you do, Mr. Caspian.” There was an undercurrent to his voice, a serpentine sibilance that, if I had been sober, would have raised goose-bumps along my arm. As it was, I felt vaguely nauseous like there was an excess of pressure against my eardrums. “Enjoying the party?”
“Trying,” I said. My tongue felt thick in my mouth like it was covered with a fine layer of fur.
“I want to offer you a commission,” Hentlock said, the words reverberating in my head. Horace’s hand was still on my arm, holding me steady as my knees wobbled with liquid uncertainty. “I want you to paint something for me.”
The white object in his hand slowly penetrated the fog in my head: a folded piece of paper that seemed like the only real thing in that moment of fading unreality. I reached for the page, my fingers closing aimlessly on its fine surface. He came to my assistance, unfolding the piece of paper and holding it up to my face.
The cancer in my brain spilled its darkness across the base of my skull. The fog of intoxication and drug euphoria I had been carefully cultivating broke, dispersing like rising smoke. I took the paper from Hentlock’s hand, my grip tight around the single page.
“Do you think you could paint that?” he asked, his tight smile showing the rhetorical nature of his question.
*
I hadn’t bothered to title any of the pictures in the gallery show. “The Naturalist’s Nightmare” was Horace’s idea. The pictures were, he attested on the press release and to any journalist who bothered to ask, portraits of foreign physiology, alien shapes rendered and captured through the filter of the nineteenth century’s understanding of anatomy. They were snapshots of evolution in action, the future shoved into the meat sack of the present.
The subjects of the portraits came to me when I slept. Most artists dream their work—they have lucid moments where the work is realized in their heads—and their method of artistic expression is a matter of getting the immaterial out of their brain and into the material world. Some build artifices of wire and metal, some find their mental images in the natural world and take pictures, others work in soft clay, some express their dreams through notes and sounds, and others use the hammer and chisel to reveal the hidden creatures within marble. Me? I paint. Oils, mainly, and I’ve done a few watercolors in my time but, for the most part, I work with a handful of paint trowels.
My work is heavy; even the smaller canvases weigh more than ten pounds. I use a lot of paint. Some say that I don’t paint so much as carve through the layers of colored strata that I’ve thrown up on a canvas, a sort of topological geographer: the Hand of God moving and arranging the landscape to create the mountains and valleys of the world. I did abstracts for awhile, landscapes of suffused light and radial motion like a heavy-handed version of Turner, went through my portrait phase (though I never managed to reach the plateau that Goya did with the stark terror that he managed to infuse into all of his painted subjects), took a left turn along a poorly kept path started by Pollack, and ended up somewhere within splatter distance of Moreau’s Symbolism and the late twentieth century comic book impressionism of Bill Sienkiewicz and Ashley Wood.
Or so the critics have been saying.
Like I said, I paint what comes into my head and lately I don’t think the dreams have been entirely mine.
The images felt like modern-industrial Gothic, shot through with the bleak nocturnal despair of Romanticism, as if William Blake was reincarnated as the lovechild of HR Giger and Floria Sigismondi. There was always alien architecture in the background, half-realized monoliths of twisted geometries with windows that looked like ragged mouths and doors that opened onto abattoirs and charnel pits. The subjects of these pictures invariably had too many bones as if I couldn’t quite decide what sort of mammal skeleton I wanted to drape a human skin across. They lay on their sides or hunkered down on their misshapen feet, staring out of the canvas with blank eyes. Their lost faces stared accusingly at the audience with pained expressions as if by looking at them—by painting them—I had made them the way they were.
Maybe it was the symbols inscribed on their skin. Maybe they could read the letters I drew on their flesh, the words running up their arms and down their legs, the phrases imprinted across their shoulders and hidden on their backs. Maybe they knew how I named them with these words and they hated me all the more.
I didn’t understand the script. It was as alien as their shapes and the landscapes. I thought it was just as much a project of my fevered imagination as the rest.
Until Dalton Hentlock handed me a photocopy of a drawing covered with those same arcane symbols.
*
It took five days for my hands to stop shaking, the persistent remnants of my debauchery slow to relinquish hold on my nerve endings. I spent those days as a guest at Hentlock’s mansion in Montlake. In the morning, I sat on the veranda, shivering in the brisk morning air as I drank cups of black coffee and watched the continual stream of traffic across the floating bridge on Lake Washington; during the afternoon and evening as my brain cleared, I stayed in the library on the second floor, working on preliminary sketches for the portal.
Hentlock wanted me to draw him a door, an exact replica of the illustration from his dusty book. The tome was a heavy bastard, each page had the thickness of a quarter and was made from some material that was too greasy to be paper. Most of the pages were covered in a minute scrawl that looked like a shorthand used by astrologers and alchemists. The illustrations were all marked and annotated by the symbols that had been invading my dreams.
The history of the manuscript, as Hentlock liked to tell it, was ripe with all the trappings of a good nineteenth century horror story: a vanishing monastery, a cache of ancient and forbidden texts, an insane monk who babbled foreboding prophecies, and secret societies dedicated to the preservation of illicit knowledge. The story goes back to the fourteenth century and a Cistercian monk named Chiotraczh. The book is supposed to be a transcription of his ravings as written down by agents of his order. Apparently, as the story goes, the knowledge hinted at in the text caused one of the transcribers to lose his sanity and he killed both his fellow agent and the raving monk before vanishing with the manuscript. Hentlock’s text was a sixteenth century copy that had been specially inscribed by a Bohemian alchemist to obscure the mystical details that broke one’s brain and to more accurately illustrate the diagrams described by Chiotraczh.
I had half-hoped to find some answer in the back, a cipher key left by the alchemist that would have allowed me to decode the symbols and render them intelligible. If there was such a key, it was buried somewhere in all the tiny shorthanded script.
The illustrations were drawn in a silver ink, glittering contrast to the dull black lines of the other pages. The ink made the drawings shimmer as if there was heat coming off the page and, at first, the pictures weren’t getting any clearer. I had to squint to see them clearly and, even under hard white light and staring at the page from several different angles, I wasn’t sure of the finer details of the drawings.
Hentlock was frustrated. On the night we met, even in my desultory state, I could tell there was something hard and unyielding caught in his ass. It became apparent that he, too, had the same difficulty with the pages: they just refused to stay in focus. It had been his hope that an artistic eye would be enough to cut through the haze.
“You can’t make out the details, can you?” he asked after watching me doodle in my sketchbook for almost a week.
I shrugged. “I can see it.”
“But not well enough to capture all the details?”
“All of them?”
He sighed and put his hand to his forehead. “Yes, Mr. Caspian, all of them. That is why I hired you. I want an exact replica of that drawing put on the wall downstairs. Can you do it?”
“It all depends on how you define ‘exact,’ I suppose.”
“You disappoint me, Mr. Caspian.”
“My mother said the same thing to me on my eighteenth birthday,” I said.
He hesitated, his head cocked forward as if he was about to offer a verbal riposte, and then he decided to swallow his reply instead. His throat worked heavily for a second and then he left the room.
I returned my attention to the sketchbook. Contrary to my attitude towards my benefactor, I was fascinated by the drawings in the manuscript. They were external validation that I wasn’t been losing my mind, and since my arrival at Hentlock’s mansion, my sleep had been dreamless. There was still a sense of black water in my head, a gravid pooling of darkness in the back of my skull. It didn’t intrude upon my sleeping state—it kept out of my dreams—but it was still there because every time I looked at the silver symbols on the page, I felt something waiting to be unlocked in my head.
Something, waiting to be let out.
Hentlock returned with two friends, big men that looked like scarred linebackers from some European rugby league where the winning team ate the losers. He held a narrow cedar box in his hands.
Apparently, my tenure as Artist-In-Residence was over.
I put the sketchpad and pencil down as the two security thugs crossed the room and put their hands on me. I figured they were going to eject me from the house and I hadn’t planned on making a big deal of the expulsion. All good things pass. Instead of lifting me off the couch, however, they pressed me firmly against the leather cushions. “Hang on,” I started before the air was forced out of my chest by the sudden pressure of a heavy knee against my rib cage.
The guy with the hard thigh put his other leg across my lap, narrowly missing my crotch with his knee. I got the hint that it wouldn’t take much squirming on my part for him to shift his weight to my privates. The other one worked his arm about my shoulders so as to hold my upper body against the rounded edge of the couch. He put his meaty hand on my forehead and pushed my head flat against the armrest. I stared at the ceiling, my insolence reduced to a series of rapid eye movements.
Hentlock leaned over the couch, his long fingers reaching out to stroke my hair. “I had hoped you would have been successful, Mr. Caspian.” He sighed and then turned the expulsion of air into a giggle. “But not all defeats are failures. It’s a matter of perspective, isn’t it?”
He took off the lid of the cedar box and showed me its contents. Cradled in a bed of dark red velvet was a long vial of a slightly luminescent yellow liquid and a large syringe. “I’ve been looking for an excuse to try this, looking for the right test subject.”
He drew off an amount from the vial, the yellow filling the clear syringe slowly like partially solidified amber. It twinkled in the afternoon light as if there were tiny metal fragments in the solution.
Hentlock tapped the side of the syringe three times, flicking the long vessel with his forefinger. With each tap he whispered some word, a mouthful of consonants that sounded like he was spitting chips of wood.
The guy holding my upper body shifted, putting his face close to my neck. I could smell his breath, heavy on the garlic and onions, and his palms were starting to get a bit slick. My heart picked up its pace as I realized the shift in Onion Breath’s pulse came from apprehension and not excitement. I struggled a bit more, causing the other guy to lean more heavily on my chest and waist.
“Hold still,” Hentlock said leaning over me. The long needle hove into my field of vision. The fine point of the needle was almost invisible until he brought it extremely close to my face. I started blinking rapidly as if the fluttering motion of my eyelids would create enough of a wind to push him away.
Hentlock put his hand across the bridge of my nose and forced my left eye open wide, pinning back my eyelids with his manicured fingers. “This will only hurt for a second,” he said.
He stuck the needle into my left eyeball and depressed the plunger on the syringe. I started screaming.
It hurt a lot longer than a second.
*
I’ve done acid, part of the collegiate rebellion where we all run to the opposing arc swing of the pendulum from our parents. My parents weren’t entirely ’60s suburban nuclear family cut-outs: they protested the Vietnam War, and my mom may have even burned her bra once or twice at rallies; Dad still used the word “groovy” in conversation, and I know he smoked the last bag of weed he confiscated from my room before I left for college. They were good-hearted, honest citizens who had no need for pharmaceutical enlightenment. They understood the world, and while they might occasionally escape from it, they saw no need to poke around behind the curtain.
Not like their son.
Okay, I did a lot of acid. Most abstract painters do at one time or another. It helps the creative process; dropping LSD helps unlock the artistic mind and shuts down the negative editorial voice that can kill an abstraction dead before it gets from brain to brush. We—oh, yes, I was a social user—dropped acid during gallery openings, while painting, while fucking, while wandering lost in the desert, while climbing fire escapes and hanging over the unstable metal railings. We took tiny vials of liquid acid with us to laser light shows and sat in the front row, passing the eyedropper back and forth. Taking acid straight off the eyeball is a much faster high, a kaleidoscopic rush of color and texture that explodes on your iris and threatens to overload your retina. Our brains aren’t really ready for that sort of systemic sensory shock and more than one of us stopped doing art after taking a hit on the eyeball.
Not me. I was in it for the long haul. I could handle the colors and the shifting lights and the way the landscape morphed under my feet and under my touch. I could walk through the unreality of the acid-induced landscape and not lose my footing.
Which is probably the only reason I didn’t completely lose my mind when Hentlock injected my eyeball full of his psychedelic venom.
One of my fellow dopers was a med student and he invariably started rambling on about anatomy as our world became squishy from the drugs hitting our systems. While one part of my brain was busy tripping, there was another section dutifully recording every sensory detail whether I actively pursued it or not. Information is power and all that bullshit. As a result, Dwayne’s endless prattle about anatomic details would surface at strange times as if there was a tiny version of him still living inside my brain.
The eye is a jelly-filled sac, he used to say. It’s a pair of lenses that refract and collect light. All lenses have a focal point, a position in space where the image they are reflecting is in focus. To facilitate this proper positioning, the eyeball is filled with a substance, the vitreous, which maintains this optimal distance.
That’s the way he used to say it. “Optimal distance.” Our eyes are shaped like marbles because of the “optimal spatial arrangement of a pair of lenses is a spherical shape.” They were filled with a gel because that substance, that sort of physical malleability, was the optimal material for the persistence of shape regardless of physical orientation or position of the human head.
Because the vitreous was like jelly and because our eyeballs are soft, you can stand to have a little extra fluid inserted. It won’t kill you. The added material may distort the shape of your eye but eventually it should be absorbed into your system.
Eventually. Should be. Words without built-in time limits that make the process of waiting for them to arrive excruciating.
*
I went away for a little while, drifting in and out of the tiny happy place we all harbor inside ourselves. With the fiery stone of magma smoldering in my left eye socket, however, my fortress of solitude wasn’t a real haven. Thin tracers of crimson chased me. Tiny rivulets of lava ran across the untextured floor, the smooth surface offering no impediment to the narrow streams.
There were other things that came with the red streams, dark blots of shadow that moved of their own volition. I wasn’t alone in my secret fortress and every time I turned my back on them, they shifted, moving into different positions.
I knew this place—I knew all the blind corners and secret holes—and yet, wherever I fled, there was darkness waiting for me. There were cracks in the walls and floors, scarlet tracery that oozed black blood.
At some point you have to stop running, you have to stop and realize that there isn’t anywhere you can go where you’ll be completely safe. You may think you’ve gone away to a mental sanctuary that is safe from physical turmoil, but it is just a shell, a hard blanket that you’ve thrown over your head so that you can pretend that you are secure. It just takes time, that’s all, for whatever is pounding against your shell. Sooner or later, a crack forms.
*
The cracks overwhelmed me finally, disintegrating my shell of security and dropping me into darkness. I turned over once—as if I was rolling over in bed—and found myself on the bank of a dismal swamp. The sky bled rust and the ground was black rock that steamed at the touch. The swamp water was gray and filled with clumps of white strands like bleached hair, and the scent rising from its torpid surface was acrid and sulphuric, like eggs and lemons rotting together in the belly of a dead animal.
I knew this place.
On my left, the ground rose up to a cracked highland, a ridge of blasted stone that had once marked the boundary of some territory, but incredible heat had melted the separate stones of the wall into a slag of molten junk. Arrayed on the edge of the ruined wall were thirteen shapes, thirteen messengers who I had tried to capture on canvas. They were outlined in light, framed by the glow of some monstrous luminescence on the other side of the wall. As I stared at them, the lights began to flicker, pulsating in a strange systolic pattern.
The figure on the right-hand end, the one with the bones of a raven protruding from its lower jaw, stretched its obscene mouth open. Its teeth were broken stumps and its tongue was a short stubby thing like an aborted arm. It screamed at me, its voice a shrill keening sound like metal being drawn across metal.
The others lent their voices to that high note: hooting and shouting, screaming and crying, waving their misshapen arms, putting back their ugly heads and shrieking to the freckled sky.
Something moved behind them; a heavy form darted in front of the shimmering lights. The colored pulses accelerated, a light show of hideous possibilities.
Something was coming. The messengers on the rocks were getting more and more excited as it drew closer. Their voices blended together into a single word, the ululating repetition of a multi-syllabic name.
I put my hands to my face and accidentally touched my left eye. Pain exploded in my head, momentarily turning the landscape into a photo negative, bleaching everything into an inverted line drawing.
The image froze, and when I blinked, it was gone.
*
When I blinked again, I was still lying down, but I was back in the reality I knew. It took me a little while to figure out where: Hentlock’s basement.
The mansion basement was rough and unfinished; the space was little more than a huge hole beneath the ground floor with two load-bearing walls that split the long rectangle into three sections. A tiny niche with a door at one end was a bathroom with the toilet shoved half-way under the sink and the shower stall so narrow I barely had to flap my elbows to touch both sides. The stairs to the ground floor were a wooden afterthought and they creaked and groaned like old men when I put my weight across their backs.
Between the stairs and the bathroom there was a large cabinet pushed up against the wall. It was a utilitarian metal locker with a single combination lock set in the face above the pair of handles.
In the largest space there were three area rugs, faded Persians that had seen the foot-traffic of several decades. They weren’t tossed in the corner or rolled up; they were carefully arranged across the hard floor. I lifted the edge of one and found out the reason for their positioning: there were magic circles painted on the floor.
I dated a woman in art school who was a Thelemite and she used to get off on Crowley: she would paint aspects of the Key of Solomon on her tits and shaved pubic region before we fucked; she insisted on mastering every sexual secret alluded to in his writings; and she would invariably have multiple orgasms if I recited parts of the Book of the Law to her as we rushed towards our mutual climaxes.
Strange girl. We didn’t have much in common, but she liked the way I didn’t pass judgment on her kink, and I found her fascination with the occultist more educational than outré.
A rolling cart with two flat-panel computer monitors sat near the far wall, cables running to a junction box set in the base of the wall on my left. There were a series of lights set into the ceiling that provided a diffuse dome of light overhead, though the three bulbs directly over the wall farthest from the stairs—the south wall, maybe, my sense of direction was fucked like a compass held at the North Pole—were angled to provide direct illumination on the white wall.
Like lighting for a canvas. This was where I was supposed to paint the portal.
One of the monitors flashed, a signal suddenly erupting in its LCD panel. It flickered once, went sallow, and then synced into a color-corrected image. “Ah,” said an overly magnified image of Hentlock. “You’re back.”
My voice was raw; apparently, I had screamed for a long time. “I guess I haven’t been fired.”
A smile ghosted his color-saturated lips. His skin was even paler and waxier than I remembered and the green of his eyes was flecked with orange and brown. The image was hyper-tinted as if the contrast and brightness were set much higher than necessary. “On the contrary,” he said, his white teeth shining from the LCD display, “you’ve been promoted.”
I blinked, and for the split second while my left eyelid dragged across my swollen eye, the colors of the monitor shifted, losing their brilliance and vibrancy.
I put a hand over my venom-filled eye and was so distracted by the ghostly shape of the bones in my hand I forgot to compare the difference in tint and saturation. “What did you do?” I said.
“Gave you a little incentive. A little assistance.” That ghost smile marked his lips again. “Hopefully it won’t be fatal; hopefully you will finish the painting soon enough that we can get you to a hospital and have that eye drained.” He shrugged slightly, the skin around his eyes tightening. “Before there is permanent damage.”
The other monitor flickered to life, displaying a high resolution image of the manuscript page with the drawing of the portal on it. “If you work quickly, Nickolas,” Hentlock said, “you might be able to save your eye.”
“What am I supposed to do for paint?” I asked.
“The cabinet has everything you might need,” he said. He told me the combination, and that was clearly the end of our conversation because his face blinked out, leaving me with just the transmitted image of the manuscript page.
Not only did the cabinet have enough paint, it also held all my tools. While I had been unconscious, they had gone to my studio and gathered all my instruments.
I suppose I should have felt some gratitude at that, but my eye hurt and, if I believed Hentlock, the pain wasn’t going to go away.
*
The previous week hadn’t been spent sucking off Hentlock’s hospitality; I had been doing studies of the portal, trying to break it down into a sequence of integrated components. If the task had been to paint an impressionistic version of the portal—an artistic rendering shot through my prism and blown onto the wall in the rainbow of my aesthetic—it would have taken me no more than a few days to paint it. As annoying as it was to admit, however, Hentlock hadn’t hired me as an artist: he picked me to be his copyist.
So copy I did.
I stayed on task; there wasn’t much else to distract me in the basement. The lights never went out: Hentlock’s reminder that I could sleep when I was finished. Three meals were delivered through the slot cut in the door at the top of the old stairs. I measured time by the meals, trying to keep a count between them and I gradually began to feel like they were equidistant.
I slathered a thick base of earth tones on the wall, cutting and spreading with the trowel so as to outline a work space. The portal was almost an arch: two large columns squatted like giant toadstools as anchors to the doorway. The caps of the columns were rounded knobs like swollen penises from which frozen spume extruded like strands of ugly razor wire. Curled around each column was a pair of serpentine creatures with too many blank eyes and too many grasping hands. The eyeball-riddled serpents met at the middle, their rhomboid heads turning inward. Their mouths were stone lines, thin gashes cut across their heads. Stretched between them, held tight at the corners by their stern lips, was a tapestry scripted with whorls and markings and symbols, the Word of some Dreaming God writ large across the firmament.
I painted non-stop for several days. It was, without any doubt, the best work I had ever done. As if my entire career as an abstract painter was a rehearsal for this singular moment of concrete rendering. It seemed backwards, a denial of the intent of abstract painting, but if one can envision the world in an abstract manner—if you can see the cracks and correlations of objects—you can also visualize more exactly how the pieces fit. Painting abstractly—be it as a surrealist, as an impressionist, as a pointillist—is a conscious choice, a backward step from reality wherein you lend your own tint and texture to the world. While paint comes off the brush regardless of the direction of your stroke, its application is the magic, the difference between all things.
How much do we learn about ourselves in those moments when we are painting the “wrong” way? When abstraction is abandoned for real and all your art school pretensions and grubby need for the adulation of the downtown gallery critics is stripped away, what is left? Just you. That’s when you are finally making art.
I managed to transfer the diagram from the manuscript onto the wall. The slippery focus problem I had experienced previously with the page was not apparent in the high resolution scanned image.
But, in the end, I got it all wrong. Even as I finished carving the last symbol in the thick layer of paint on the wall, I knew that I had failed.
I had copied the work, and like a first year student with an approximate rendering of an Old Master from the museum gallery, I still had no idea how the original had actually been created. I had connected the dots, I had done the same thing the camera had done—created a snapshot—but I hadn’t actually painted a work of art.
*
Hentlock finally admitted to what he had done to me when I told him to bring the physical manuscript down to the basement and I pointed out the colored swirls and hidden patterns on the page that only my malformed left eye could register. They didn’t show on the computer monitor because the imaging camera wasn’t able to capture the wavelengths of light given off by the page.
The portal wasn’t the only page imbued with a spectral layer; most of the drawings had the extra layer of symbol work that flashed like lightning across the page when I pressed against the swollen edge of my left eye.
The poison in the syringe had temporary given me extrasensory vision.
Trade-offs. Life is full of them.
“I paid three million dollars for this manuscript,” Hentlock said, reverently stroking the cover of the book. “Some will say that it is worth ten times that.” His reticence was clear in his posture and his voice: he wasn’t entirely sure of my motives. He had given me access to the book when I had just been a hired hand but with the forced incarceration and the stunt with the needle, he was concerned that my interest in the manuscript might not be entirely altruistic.
Rightly so, but I was tired and my eye hurt. I wanted to be done; I wanted Hentlock and his sweating, quivering excitement about an ancient fucking manuscript to be out of my life. “Just give me the damn book,” I said. “What could I possibly do to it?” Well, other than eat it or tear it up or shit on its pages? “Where could I go with it?” I amended, indicating the two goons between me and the stairway. “You can even leave them down here if you’d like while I work. Just as long as they don’t say a fucking word.”
That seemed to mollify him. Hentlock sullenly handed me the manuscript. “You need to be finished by tomorrow,” he said, attempting to maintain some control over the project.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ve got that appointment to keep at the hospital. Right?”
He blinked. “Of course,” he said, trying to smooth over his momentary lapse. “Yes, you are right. The hospital. Tomorrow afternoon. We’ll go as soon as you are finished.” He smiled, a thin-lipped ‘show your teeth’ expression he thought was charming.
It wasn’t. I didn’t even need the augmented vision of my left eye to tell he was lying.
I smiled back and waited until he realized I wasn’t going to get back to work until he was gone. He toyed with the cuffs of his jacket for a minute and then seemed to remember a pressing engagement. He nodded at one of the security men as he left and the guy followed him out, leaving me only one spectator. I waited, staring at goon number two, until I heard the door shut at the top of the stairs.
He stared back, his eyes slowly taking on that fine glaze of infinite patience security agencies seem to cultivate in their employees. He was watching me but not really seeing anything. His brain had dropped into a lizard state of receptiveness, watching for any movement that violated the specific parameters of his task: as long as I was working, he didn’t give a shit what I was doing.
I opened the book and found the page with the portal diagram. As I had pointed out to Hentlock, the poison in my eye allowed me to see different wavelengths of light and the hidden layers of the manuscript page were as visible as the other ink on the page.
The text was also clearer, cut in starker relief against the puce colored pages. I realized I could understand the shorthand and, while there were certain words that still made no sense, large portions of the text were completely readable.
I put my finger against my eyelid and pressed down slightly against my swollen eye, causing the colors to move faster. The patterns swirled with a kinetic fury as I started to read the dying words of an insane monk.
*
I finished my corrections just before midnight. “It’s done,” I told the guard. “Go fetch your master.”
He shrugged himself out of his light trance and focused on the painted wall, his face tightening as he tried to discern the differences. He couldn’t see them, and after a few seconds of scanning the art, he lifted his shoulders slightly and left the room.
I figured Hentlock had a camera or two mounted in the corners of the room so that he could keep an eye on me. I had to take the chance that the guard’s announcement of my success would distract him for a few minutes. There were a couple of things I needed to do, and the window of opportunity was very small.
Finally, I heard the basement door open and the sound of their feet on the stairs. Hentlock swept into the room, dressed for the occasion. He had wrapped himself in a yellow robe covered with fine needlepoint—white inscriptions that ran in parallel rows up from his knees to his shoulders. His two companions were dressed in similarly inscribed scarlet robes.
“Is it finished?” Hentlock asked. He couldn’t see the changes. None of them could; they didn’t have my vision.
I nodded. “It is done.”
Something in my voice caught his attention. “You know what it is?”
“It’s a door,” I said, keeping my voice dull and tired. “Just like it looks.”
“Exactly,” he said. “A door to some place else.”
I shrugged. I held my diamond-shaped paint trowel loosely in one hand, the fingers of my other hand lightly curled around the wet paint on my palm.
I had left the manuscript in front of the portal, casually open to the page with the drawing of the doorway. Hentlock stepped forward and picked up the heavy book. “I am very pleased, Nickolas. I have waited a long time.”
“I bet,” I said. The two goons were only here for one purpose, and having extrapolated where this whole circus was going to end, I had decided on some changes. As the hard guys came to grab me again, I stabbed the one on the left in the neck with the paint trowel.
He made a thin noise like a balloon animal expiring, his hands jerking to the red gash in his throat. My left eye watched a stream of pale gossamer shoot out from the hole in his neck like strands of spider silk. I whipped the trowel in a backhand motion towards the wall and spattered a fine line of his blood across the painted surface. I shouted a string of words, a line of text I had read in the manuscript. “Talubsi! Adula! Ulu! Baachur!” The darkness lurking in my head guided my tongue, correcting my pronunciation so that the words actually had the proper charge.
I ducked away from the second security guy as I felt the air in the room move, a shift in pressure as if a crack had formed in the firmament.
On the wall, the serpents blinked, the black holes of their eyes pulsating with emerald light. Their mouths closed, pulling the banner tight between them. The symbols snapped into rigid shape, and in my head, all the fire of their shape became argent outlines against the star-lit backdrop of the rising darkness in the pit of my brain.
The banner ripped, and in a radiating flush like a shock wave, cracks began to appear in the wall. Sections of paint dried to dust instantly and flaked off, a snowfall of ash. The snakes began to coil about the columns and the wire fronds of the penis caps began to move and twist, their razor lanyards scattering dust from the untransformed wall. I felt a breeze coming through the cracks, a fetid breath of an alien wind.
According to some esoteric pattern, the center of the painting crumbled, puzzle pieces falling off the wall and piling on the floor like frozen petals. Between the painted pillars, the wall was gone and I could see the foreign landscape of my dreams.
I could hear the raised voices of the heralds, their combined cry rising to an unholy shriek of excitement as the light from this world spilled into the rust-stained twilight of the other place. A low fog crept across the threshold, staining the floor in black and red ink.
Hentlock and the other guard forgot all about me as the door started to open. They grabbed the large rug spread across the center of the room and threw it back as quickly as they could, revealing the arcane circle painted on the floor. As the banner tore and the wind crawled into the room, they stepped into the protective embrace of the circle.
The guard I had stabbed was puddling blood on the floor and there were white strands rising from the hole in his throat, a spectral bleed that only my damaged eye could see. This translucent ectoplasm was beginning to spin a thin form over his head, a two-dimensional self-portrait drawn in a stark Edward Munch style. He feebly tried to grab my legs as I felt under his robe for the keys that would unlock the upstairs door. I hoped they all had a set and was rewarded with a slight metallic jingle as I dug into his left pocket.
Hentlock was reading from the manuscript, his voice rushing over the hard consonants of the incantation that would activate the protective circle. The other guard was cowering behind the yellow-robed figure of his boss.
The rich smell of rotting flesh and decaying flowers washed into the room, filling my mouth with such a tactile sensation I almost felt as if I had just bitten down on a piece of bad meat. The wind coming through the gate shifted, currents swirling as they were forced around a large shape.
Hentlock began to talk faster, his words beginning to bump into one another.
An octet of thick tentacles slithered through the open doorway. They were as red as the sky on the other side, ridged with open, sucking mouths filled with short spiny tongues and rows of ragged teeth. One of them snaked across the floor and attached itself to the leg of the dying man.
He shrieked, clawing at the tight grip of the tentacle about his leg. The sucking mouths bit at his bloody hands and he lost a finger before he could get his hands away from the eager teeth. A second tentacle caught his other leg and the pair dragged him across the floor, a long smear of his blood tracking a straight line to the open gate.
A small pressure wave flashed outward as he was taken through the gate, and from the other side came a series of wet tearing sounds.
The other six tentacles braced themselves against the walls of the basement and pulled hard enough to crack the sheet rock of the walls on either side of the portal.
My ears popped as something heaved itself through the opening. It filled the portal, black mist rising off its skin, and the thick tentacles reared out of its back like the long arms of a squid. It had a flat head, hairless and smooth, and arranged on its skull were six seeping wounds, oozing golden ichor. It had five mouths in its chest and they gasped and puckered like dying fish. Two of the mouths were wet with blood, and I could see the smear of the dead guard’s diaphanous spirit across the full lips like sticky cotton candy.
Hentlock finished his incantation with a triumphant cry and, closing the book with a resolute thump, pointed at me. “An offering,” he cried, “Blood and bone for my lord.”
Several of the eager mouths started mewling like baby kittens and a pair of the long tentacles slithered in my direction. I held my ground and raised my left hand, showing the monster the sigil painted on my palm, before closing my thumb and pinkie in a circle across the symbol.
The six holes were actually weeping eyes, and at the sight of the protective sigil on my hand, one of the mouths shrieked like an angry monkey, and the tentacles recoiled as if I had just touched them with a live wire. I felt some recoil, a psychic wave smacking my skull like a hammer blow. Deep within my brain, a valve closed with an audible click. I nearly closed my hand as the persistent pressure that had been living in my head disappeared. Yes, yes, this is the way. Doors open, doors shut: this is the cycle of the universe.
Hentlock continued pointing at me and shouting, seemingly unconcerned as the tentacles turned their questing attention towards his circle. Of course, he couldn’t see the sparking hole in his sanctuary like I could; he hadn’t noticed the line I had scraped through the circle with the edge of my trowel. The monster had no trouble seeing the break in the seal and it drove a pair of tentacles into the flaw, raising a shower of green sparks from the contact. The smell of burning flesh coupled with the already thick miasma of rot and decay as the monster wedged its suckered mouths into the hole.
Hentlock stopped yelling about having me eaten when the front edge of his circle flashed a vibrant emerald. He raised his hands in supplication as the monster broke through the circle’s protection and wrapped its burning tentacles about him, letting the hungry mouths tear at the yellow cloth of his robe.
The security guard made a break for it, and nearly made it to the door. Nearly.
I tried to block out the noises and the cries as the tentacle mouths tore the two men apart and delivered raw morsels to the hungry monster. I tried to not see how the five mouths on its body keened and moaned for the sustenance like baby birds. The venom in my left eye socket could see the heat waves radiating from the gold flowers on the face of the beast. It couldn’t touch me; the Elder Sign painted on my palm kept it at bay.
But my safety wasn’t assured. As soon as I closed my hand into a fist, the paint would smear. Flesh is too porous a canvas for oil paint—it just doesn’t work as a permanent medium. By the time I got to the top of the stairs, the eye was already starting to lose its shape.
I gashed my painted palm with the edge of the trowel, and mixed my blood with the oils. I smeared the mixture on the door, working a five-pointed star onto the wood of the portal. With my thumbnail, I cut the shape of the eye in the center of the star and cleaned up the radiating points of the non-Euclidian starfish.
Would it work? I couldn’t be sure. I put the same sigil on the outside of the door and added a line of text below, feeling like I was marking the clubhouse door of my childhood tree fort.
I could feel the monster beneath the floor of the house, its tentacles pressing against the walls and ceiling. The basement door rattled once soon after I closed it, and I felt the psychic howl of frustration that came directly after.
The beast tried to touch my brain, tried to insinuate itself in my psyche again, but unlike the previous time when I had just been a dreaming painter with a receptive brain, it found the access points blocked. All the cracks in my head had been sealed.
It would have to find someone else to open the door for it now.
I took Hentlock’s BMW—he wouldn’t be needing it anyway. I had three destinations in mind as I pulled away from the mansion with the rotting darkness in the basement: the hospital, a tattoo parlor, and the Canadian border. As I came down the hill towards the Montlake Interchange and the University of Washington Hospital, I scratched the first destination off my list.
I would take my chances with my eye. A tattoo of the Elder Sign on my palm would protect me, but it wouldn’t do me any good if I couldn’t see them coming.
Maybe not the next day, maybe not even in a year. Eventually, though, they would find me.
Chiotraczh’s manuscript lay on the seat next to me, its thick cover stained with Hentlock’s blood. I needed to find a place to hide, a place where I would have time to learn the rest of the manuscript’s secrets.
I wanted to be ready.