Читать книгу In the Language of Scorpions - Charles Allen Gramlich - Страница 9

STILL LIFE WITH SKULLS

There were eyes in the canvas that I had never drawn, desert eyes of bronze, sulfur eyes like cicatrices, and river eyes of green—eyes full of dark wings and teeth. There were round mouths open to the night air, and sanguine tongues whose dance burned with holy words. And in the chiaroscuro wastelands of the unfilled canvas there were ruins whose outlines I could not yet trace. I knew only that they held a bitter rapture and smelled faintly of ashes.

I reached out and lowered a sheeted covering down across that chaos face, knowing that I had not yet captured my piece, thinking that, perhaps, I had captured something else. It seemed suddenly smoky dark when I turned out the light, and the shadows came to gather around my still form as if they were dust and I a statue left long on the shelf.

I sat there for an empty time, listening to the beat of my heart, like hungry baby birds, feeling the breath run out of my mouth and down on the floor as if it were dry ice fog, and waiting for riddles to be answered. No answers formed and after a hollow period filled with early morning silence I went coldly to bed, only to dream of chalk bright skulls with jutting brows and liquid black tongues that tickled at my lips seeking entrance.

The dreams were only harlequin shapes in the clouds when morning came at last. Only their perfume and their laughter remained.

I rose up in that dawn and the sky was like white ashes full of dew-killing heat, like a burnished metal shield on which a fallen warrior is carried home to his pale widow. But the gardens where I walked were cool and shaded, sprinklers drawing rainbows in the quiet air. I had not eaten, for the taste of night still filled my mouth. Nor had I looked closely at my canvas, though the sheet had blown away in the darkness from its sainted and porcelain face. Rather, I let the garden flowers bend their heads to comfort me, their skulls petalled in brittle jewels. Would they shatter at a touch? Should I stroke them and watch them die?

I did not.

Striding along there, the path seemed a desert paved with dunes, the hedges and flower beds a jungle, silent as when stalked by predators. I felt like a god, knowing that should they anger me I could cast among them stillness and lay their bodies to waste.

But again I did not.

For a moment, a stone bench seemed open to me with its silent lion’s mouth at either end, as if here two cats mating tail to tail had been quick frozen and their backs sliced away to provide a seat for a god. It hurt me to see those faces turned up in sculpted agony. I touched them in coolness but they did not change, and, of course, I knew that I was no god to set them free. Instead, I passed them by and came in time to the pool where it waited for me gray-faced.

Why was it that Lovecraft, and Poe, and Chambers wrote so frequently of pools, often black and noisome and writhing as if with life? Why does the frowning of pools stir fear? Even this one, clear and bright as it was, held something in it of death. I knew that should I enter it and stand looking down at my legs they would be broken, as a spoon is broken when it is placed in a glass of water.

Yet, there was something else also in this pool, a beauty that I had first seen many days ago, on the day Alisha—my wife—had left me forever. I had stumbled on it by accident as I watched the slow settling drift of a frost-killed leaf from the surface to the depths. Through tears I had seen the colors fade from the autumn-clothed leaf and swirl outward through the water as if they were liquid soluble paints. Faces had formed there, faces of such utter loveliness that they had ripped me to my knees only to watch them fade into gray steel emptiness as they melted together.

For a week I had been trying to capture those water dreams on my canvas, and it sometimes seemed as if some greater artist’s hand guided my brush. For I could not always remember what it was that I had drawn.

And sometimes there seemed things there that I had not painted.

Still, I had not yet captured the truth of what I had seen. I wept for fear that I had not the skill and each day I came to worship here, praying for guidance.

But Alisha did not come back­.

The faces in the pool, too, remained distant, only faintly echoed in the black map of dead leaves and fishes that coated the bottom. I knelt there for long and long, gazing down to stain my memory with the faint lines, to chisel those traces to the inside of my skull. Only when a breeze came up to swamp those patterns in waves as if they were sunken Atlantis did I rise and go back to my work. The garden was alive around me with calling winds, but I did not listen. I filled my ears up with night songs and passed back into the womb of the house.

My painting was in the sun and two new eyes had grown in one corner of the canvas while I was away, one copper bright like the pennied lids of a corpse, the other hot and wet and crimson like a whore’s tongue. About them were hints of other lines, apparent contours that commanded me to take up ivory and shadowed paints and trace them. Soon, there took shape in that corner, in what had been blighted lands, a hollow-eyed skull with one fair black rose rising up from a blank socket, so shadowy yet, not at all like the neural fires that coated the inside of my own lids.

I could not quite capture it, though I stared at it and stroked it for hours, not stopping to eat. I could not capture it, and I cursed my weak fingers and the dim medium of paints that tried and failed to mirror reality. Screams lifted up into my mouth and I swallowed them down. Sainted ghosts tried to break from my ears and throat, and, failing that, they drove in fangs that bled white into my brain. I threw down the brushes and pulled at my face where they clung with tiny little clawed feet, and at last I rose to rush about, shouting, stalking this way and that on bowed legs, on broken stilts, spinning with fingers speaking runed words while the world slowed and slowed to the speed of a vulture circling on desert thermals.

Only later did I realize that I had been standing still, and I went from there feverish to my bed. Evening was born in that stillness.

That night my dreams were jagged, of white rocks screaming in crimson fields, of ice in chalices that cooled dark wine, of rocks and bones opened by swords. My memories were wrapped in shrouds and buried in the moist earth while mourners stood around with fangs in their eyes and wept that I was not in pain.

And I dreamt of Alisha, whom I loved, Alisha with silver hair and a goddess’s crown. She was lovely, yet her face was distorted as if with agony. She twisted and writhed on a bed of eyes. I kissed her and tasted foulness.

For long I lay among the rainbow dreams while bloody-winged ravens pulled worms from my chest, and only when the moon danced through my window did I wake. When the light touched my canvas a writhing began there, of maggots in open wounds. The wet sheets around me blew away and I went to stand before my work, naked though I did not remember how.

And the twirling winds came crying to me, lifting my hair as they talked their ancient unholy languages. In the wasteland—where all had been empty—a landscape formed, a place of skulls, a Golgotha drawn in pink dawn, filled with empty white crosses. I put my finger to it and felt the paint run over and become a part of my skin until my hand formed the bar of a last crucifix, diamond bright as a ring.

Raging were the teeth there, nipping at my flesh, but they told me by their touch what I must do. So much beauty, so real a face as this could not be captured with mere paints. I took up the canvas and a knife and went to the bathroom. I sat it before me and looked beyond it to the mirror, smiling at the white faces there behind my own.

I did not know that it was dawn until I heard a call. A raven on my shoulder told me that it was Alisha and I gurgled in joy to know that she had come back to me after all. I loved her so. But I did not leave the bathroom yet. In just another moment I would have something to show her. I wanted a finished work and it needed only one more stroke.

But she found me before it was done. I glanced at her and wondered why the birds screamed so loud this morning when for many days there had been none. Alisha’s eyes were strangely wide, pupils drawn like caverns, and I turned back to the mirror to see there the beauty that she must see.

How fair was the bone behind pink vessels, how lovely and crimson the wide mouth with its back teeth open to the air and the skin peeled back like that of a grape.

But—one last stroke.

I reached up fingers to my face and felt the cool sucking sound of opening flesh. Now the canvas was finished.

I handed the eye to Alisha but she was too touched by my gesture to take it.