Zealia B. Bishop

“ I made it clear—as if from distant but authentic reports wafted among friends—that if anyone was to blame for the trouble at Riverside it was the woman, Marceline. She was not suited to Missouri ways, I said, and it was too bad that Denis had ever married her.
More I did not intimate, for I felt that the de Russys, with their proudly cherished honor and high, sensitive spirits, would not wish me to say more. They had borne enough, God knows, without the countryside guessing what a demon of the pit, what a gorgon of the Elder blasphemies, had come to flaunt their ancient and stainless name. ”

“ Decay had only increased the utter hideousness of its wicked symbolism and diseased suggestion; for the parts most affected by time were just these parts of the picture which in nature—or in that extra-cosmic realm that mocked nature—would be likely to decay or disintegrate.
The utmost horror of all, of course, was Marceline; and as I saw the bloated, discolored flesh I formed the odd fancy that perhaps the figure on the canvas had some obscure, occult linkage with the figure which lay in quicklime under the cellar floor. ”

“ For a supposedly sophisticated person you surely do hang on to some of the crudest claptrap that ever escaped from the dime novels. With art at your elbow, you have to think of the moon! Or perhaps it makes you think of the Roodmus dance around the stone pillars at Auteuil; hell! how you used to make those goggle-eyed yaps stare! But no, I suppose you've dropped all that now. No more Atlantean magic or hair-snake rites for Madame de Russy! I'm the only one to remember the old things, the things that came down through the temples of Tanit and called on the ramparts of Zimbabwe. ”

“ And there was something else about the creature which I could not fail to notice—something which de Russy had not been able to put into words, but which perhaps had something to do with Denis' wish to kill all those of his blood who had dwelt under the same roof with her. Whether Marsh knew, or whether the genius in him painted it without his knowing, none could say. But Denis and his father could not have known till they saw the picture.
Surpassing all in horror was the streaming black hair, which covered the rotting body, but which was itself not even slightly decayed. ”

“ Marsh slept in the attic next his studio, and had begun to keep such late hours that he was seldom up till noon. About ten o'clock the pain got the better of me, so that I took a double dose of my opiate and lay down on the parlor sofa. The last I heard was Marceline's pacing overhead. Poor creature—if I had known! She must have been walking before the long mirror admiring herself. That was like her—vain from start to finish, reveling in her own beauty, just as she reveled in all the little luxuries Denis was able to give her. ”

“ But the scene wasn't Egypt—it was behind Egypt; behind even Atlantis; behind fabled Mu, and myth-whispered Lemuria. It was the ultimate fountainhead of all horror on this earth, and the symbolism showed only too clearly how integral a part of it Marceline was. I think it must be the unmentionable R'lyeh, that was not built by any creatures of our planet—the thing Marsh and Denis used to talk about in the shadows with hushed voices. In the picture it appears that the whole scene is deep under water, though everybody seems to be breathing freely. ”

“ I had the deaths of Marsh and Denis reported during the war, and later said Marceline had entered a convent. Fortunately Marsh was an orphan whose eccentric ways had alienated him from his people in Louisiana. Things might have been patched up a good deal better for me if I had had the sense to burn the picture, sell the plantation, and give up trying to manage things with a shaken and overstrained mind. You see what my folly has brought me to. Failing crops, hands discharged one by one, place falling to ruin, and myself a hermit and a target for dozens of queer countryside stories. ”

“ You can, in a way, see for yourself presently; though time and dampness have done their work. I don't think it can hurt you if you want to take a look, but it was different with me. I knew too much of what it all meant.
"Denis had been right—it was the greatest triumph of human art since Rembrandt, even though still unfinished. I grasped that at the start, and knew that poor Marsh had justified his decadent philosophy. He was to painting what Baudelaire was to poetry, and Marceline was the key that had unlocked his inmost genius. ”

“ Well, it was in one of those morning talks on the veranda that Marsh made the proposition which brought on the end. I was laid up, but had managed to get downstairs and stretch out on the front parlor sofa near the long window. Denis and Marsh were just outside; so I couldn't help hearing all they said. They had been talking about art, and the curious, capricious environmental elements needed to jolt an artist into producing work of merit, when Marsh suddenly swerved from abstractions to the personal application he must have had in mind from the start. ”

“ I don't think this business made much impression on Denis until the night of the queer ritual at Marsh's rooms when he met the priestess. Most of the devotees of this cult were young fellows, but the head of it was a young woman who called herself Tanit-Isis, letting it be know that her real name—her name in this latest incarnation, as she put it—was Marceline Bedard. She claimed to be the left-handed daughter of Marquis de Chameaux, and seemed to have been both a petty artist and an artist's model before adopting this more lucrative magical profession. ”

“ Burn it with the hangings around it and throw the ashes into the river! Marsh knew—and was warning me. He knew what it was—what that woman—that leopardess, or gorgon, or lamia, or whatever she was—actually represented. He'd tried to hint to me ever since I met her in his Paris studio, but it couldn't be told in words. I thought they all wronged her when they whispered horrors about her, but this picture has caught the whole secret—the whole monstrous background!
"'God, but Frank is an artist! That thing is the greatest piece of work any living soul has produced since Rembrandt! ”

“ Then I saw that blasphemous braid of coarse black hair began to twist and squirm of itself.
"'I might have known it. It was all in the old tales. That damnable hair had a life of its own, that couldn't be ended by killing the creature herself. I knew I'd have to burn it, so I started to hack it off with the machete. God, but it was devilish work! Tough—like iron wires—but I managed to do it. And it was loathsome the way the big braid writhed and struggled in my grasp. ”

“ Then the field hands began talking about the black snake that visited old Sophonisba's cabin every night after midnight. One of them showed me its trail, and not long afterward I found out that Aunt Sophy herself had begun to pay strange visits to the cellar of the big house, lingering and muttering for hours in the very spot where none of the other blacks would go. God, but I was glad when that old witch died! I honestly believe she had been a priestess of some ancient and terrible tradition back in Africa. She must have lived to be almost a hundred and fifty years old. ”

“ I could see Marsh studying her constantly when he thought no one was watching, and I wondered how long it would be that only the artist, and not the primitive man, would be aroused by her mysterious graces.
"Denis naturally felt some irritation at this turn of affairs; though he realized that his guest was a man of honor and that, as kindred mystics and esthetes, Marceline and Marsh would naturally have things and interests to discuss in which a more or less conventional person could have no part. ”

“ There's something more than mortal about that hair, something more than beautiful——'
"He paused, and I wondered what Denis could be thinking. Was Marsh's interest actually that of the artist alone, or was he merely infatuated as Denis had been? I had thought, in their school days, that he had envied my boy, and I dimly felt that it might be the same now. On the other hand, something in that talk of artistic stimulus had rung amazingly true; so that the more I pondered, the more I was inclined to take the stuff at face value. ”

“ The geometry of the whole thing is crazy—one gets the acute and obtuse angles all mixed up.
"And God! The shapes of nightmare that float around in that perpetual demon twilight! The blasphemies that lurk and leer and hold a witches' sabbat with that woman as a high priestess! The black shaggy entities that are not quite goats—the crocodile-headed beast with three legs and a dorsal row of tentacles—and the flat-nosed Ægipans dancing in a pattern that Egypt's priests knew and called accursed! ”

“ Nobody will come around here after dark nowadays—or any other time if it can be helped. That's why I knew you must be a stranger.
"And why do I stay here? I can't wholly tell you that. It's bound up too closely with things at the very rim of sane reality. It wouldn't have been so, perhaps, if I hadn't looked at the picture. I ought to have done as poor Denis told me. I honestly meant to burn it when I went up to that locked studio a week after the horror, but I looked first—and that changed everything. ”

“ Marceline had always lived on flattery and fawning, and the shock of those few blunt words from Marsh was too much for her temperament.
"There was no living in the house with her any more, for with poor Denis gone she took out her abusiveness on everybody. When she could find no one indoors to quarrel with she would go out to Sophonisba's cabin and spend hours talking with the queer old Zulu woman. ”

“ Don't mistake, Denny: your wife is a magnificent being, a splendid focus of cosmic forces who has a right to be called divine if anything on earth has!'
"I felt a clearing of the situation at this point, for the abstract strangeness of Marsh's expressed sentiment, plus the flattery he was now heaping on Marceline, could not fail to disarm and mollify one as fondly proud of his consort as Denis always was. Marsh evidently caught the change himself, for there was more confidence in his tone as he continued.
"'I must paint her, Denny, must paint that hair, and you won't regret it. ”

“ My life since has been nothing but horror and slavery. Always there has lurked the fear of what broods down in the cellar. In less than a month the niggers began whispering about the great black snake that crawled around near the wine casks after dark, and about the curious way its trail would lead to another spot six feet away. Finally I had to move everything to another part of the cellar, for not a darky could be induced to go near the place where the snake was seen. ”

“ I know I must guard the hair in the picture, for if anything were to happen to it, there are entities in this house which would take a sure and terrible revenge. I don't even dare to die; for life and death are all one to those in the clutch of what came out of R'lyeh. Something would be on hand to punish my neglect. Medusa's coil has got me, and it will always be the same. Never mix up with secret and ultimate horror, young man, if you value your immortal soul. ”

“ There came a flare as he lighted a small kerosene lamp which stood on a rickety console table near the foot of the stairs. The feeble glow revealed the stooping figure of a very tall, emaciated old man, disordered in dress and unshaven as to face, yet for all that with the bearing and expression of a gentleman. ”

“ The boy wrote me a good deal about him, and I didn't see any especial harm when he spoke of the group of mystics Marsh ran with. It seems there was some cult of prehistoric Egyptian and Carthaginian magic having a rage among the Bohemian element on the left bank; some nonsensical thing that pretended to reach back to forgotten sources of hidden truth in lost African civilizations—the great Zimbabwe, and dead Atlantean cities in the Hoggar region of the Sahara—and that had a lot of gibberish connected with snakes and human hair. ”

“ Not that I want to take much credit—art creates itself—and this thing had to be done. Just wait!'
"During the next few days I felt a queer sense of foreboding, as if the completion of the picture meant a kind of catastrophe instead of a relief. Denis, too, had not written me, and my agent in New York said he was planning some trip to the country. I wondered what the outcome of the whole thing would be. What a queer mixture of elements—Marsh and Marceline, Denis and I! How would all these ultimately react on one another? ”

“ Old Sophonisba always showed reverence whenever Marceline came near her, and one time I saw her kiss the ground where her mistress had walked. Blacks are superstitious animals, and I wondered whether Marceline had been talking any of her mystical nonsense to our hands in order to overcome their evident dislike.
"Well, that's how we went on for nearly half a year. Then, in the summer of 1916, things began to happen. Toward the middle of June Denis got a note from his old friend Frank Marsh, telling of a sort of nervous breakdown which made him want to take a rest in the country. ”

“ With my curiosity still more heightened, I prepared to take my host at his word, and followed him slowly upstairs when he motioned me to do so. It was very dark now, and faint pattering outside told me that the threatened rain had come. I would have been glad of any shelter, but this was doubly welcome because of the hints of mystery about the place and its master. For an incurable lover of the grotesque, no more fitting haven could have been provided. ”

“ It was a taint that wholesome human blood couldn't bear. There was something else, too—but you'll never know that if you burn the picture without looking. I staggered down to her room with this machete that I got off the wall here, leaving Frank still knocked out. He was breathing, though, and I knew and thanked heaven that I hadn't killed him.
"'I found her in front of the mirror braiding that accursed hair. She turned on me like a wild beast, and began spitting out her hatred of Marsh. The fact that she'd been in love with him (and I knew she had) only made it worse. ”

“ Denis seemed to do so, too, for although I could not catch his low-spoken reply, I could tell by the effect it produced that it must have been affirmative.
"There was a sound of someone slapping another on the back, and then a grateful speech from Marsh that I was long to remember.
"'That's great, Denny; and just as I told you, you'll never regret it. In a sense, I'm half doing it for you. You'll be a different man when you see it. It'll put you back where you used to be—give you a waking-up and a sort of salvation—but you can't see what I mean as yet. ”