Salome and other Decadent Fantasies. Brian Stableford
that you have come into possession of one of the seven stones which he cast up on to the land to make men miserable, but you seek inspiration in it, not despair.”
He nodded his head fervently, and his prematurely grey hair fell untidily about his eyes. “You understand!” he crowed, as if it were a minor miracle. “I am trying to paint the most intimate processes of change. My mission is to confirm and prove the essential flux of things, their eternal becoming.”
What I really understood, of course—or thought I understood—was that the poor fellow was entirely mad. Poverty, misfortune and malnutrition, I believed, had so addled his brain that he thought he heard sermons in stones. Nor were they the virtuous sermons of our own blessed Lord, but the ravings of some unholy pagan deity: some vile member of that host which was cast out of Heaven into Pandemonium, but which had returned to earth by the permission of the Lord in order to tempt and torment the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. Those who resisted such temptation, I knew, achieved goodness through the exercise of their free will, and thus proved themselves worthy of Paradise—but those who could not were damned by their weakness.
I was a charitable man in those days, as I try to be today, and I believed in my heart than many of those who had been burned in time past as witches and sorcerers were merely harmless lunatics. Because of that belief I did not run to any priest with the rumor of Clement Folle’s heretical convictions, nor did I try to keep him from my hearth and my table. I tried as best I could, within my limited means, to be his friend and help him to stay alive. I resolved to try to convince him of the error of his beliefs, but I confess that I did not try as hard as I might have done, for he was impatient with my efforts. I admit that I found his tales quite fascinating in their way, and would have felt myself far poorer had he ceased to relate them to me.
“Ever since I was a boy,” he told me, once he had decided that I might safely be further initiated into the mysteries of his strange art and his peculiar religion, “I have been quite convinced that the world of appearances is only that: an appearance. I do not mean that it is an illusion—only that the semblance which it presents to the eye depends more upon the properties and limitations of the eye than upon its own inherent nature.
“Even before I found the stone, I was convinced that my eyes might see far more, and very differently, if I could only make them adept and sensitive in an appropriate fashion. Certain other creatures, I am convinced, must look upon a very different and perhaps much richer world than the one which is ordinarily available to our over-precise eyes. Where human eyes can perceive nothing but shadow and darkness, others have light by which to see. Where human eyes are ever avid to select out constancy and order, others surely remain content with the gorgeous bewilderments of change and confusion. Where we see those objects and living beings which are ordinary to us, they might see entities whose colors and properties are dramatically transfigured, among which life and inertness might be very differently distributed.
“It was always the primary mission of my life to learn to see things as higher beings than ourselves might see them—and I did not hesitate to use whatever means came to hand towards that end. I was not always as poor as I am now, but the meager inheritance I had was soon exhausted by my quest. I sampled many exotic potions which I bought from hedge-wizards and dubious pharmacists, and attempted many magical rituals that I found in certain tomes in that section of the university library which is nowadays forbidden to students like yourself. Nothing served my purpose, until I finally came upon the stone, and realized what it was. Only then could I begin the work of penetrating the veil, of looking into the worlds beyond the world, into the Protean realm of the Ephemeral.”
As befitted a humble and pious person, I was properly horrified by the revelation that Clement’s madness had led him to dabble in witchcraft and sorcery—but if the truth be told, I found the violence of my reaction to be a rather pleasant and exciting sensation. Far from being intimidated by my horror, I became hungry for more revelations, although I felt it incumbent upon me to make my own reservations perfectly clear.
“I am compelled to believe,” I told him, awkwardly, “that we are made as we are for a reason. We are men, made by God, and were made to see as God intended men to see. What you are trying to do, I fear, is to see the world as demons might see it, and you may be sure that if you make way within the threads and sinews of your being for Satan to control your sight, he will not hesitate to seize the opportunity to steal your soul. I beg you to abandon this quest of yours, before it leads you to a tragic end.”
Clement was not annoyed with me for saying this, but only sorrowful. Needless to say, he entirely ignored my good and heartfelt advice, and his contempt for my opinion renewed the barriers of embarrassment and mistrust which had only recently been lowered. He did not try to shun me, or to hide his paintings from me, but he recovered his discretion, and ceased to speak of Proteus and magic spells. In the meantime, as the harsh winter extended into March, he continued to deteriorate physically. I continued to let him warm himself before my fire, and I gave him the occasional crust or rind of cheese, as common charity demanded, but my own table was by no means so rich that a man might live off its crumbs. I am certain that he had no other resource with which to ward off starvation; his other acquaintances had by now deserted him.
Precisely what happened in Clement Folle’s room on the night of his disappearance, I cannot say. I know that I was roused from fitful sleep by a very peculiar sound, which seemed to me to be like the rushing of a great wind or the roar of a tremendous fire. The thought that the building might be ablaze filled me with consternation; I leapt from my bed and immediately put my trousers on. Then I threw open my door, very fearfully—and was astonished to discover that the noise appeared to be coming from my neighbor’s room.
Perhaps I should have opened his door immediately, but such was the strangeness of that uncanny sound that I dared not. Nor did I return to collect the nightlight which burned by my bed. I only stood in the unlit corridor and called out to Clement, imploring him to tell me what was going on. By the time my courage was equal to the task of opening his door and entering the room, the noise was already fading—fading to a thin keening that was almost plaintive in its tenor.
When I finally looked inside, I could not see anything at all. The room was pitch-dark—but the noise was still perceptible. It did not seem to be emanating from the place where, as I assumed, Clement lay in his bed, but rather from the direction of the window; and it seemed, although I cannot say exactly how or why, to be horribly menacing.
In spite of my terror I stumbled forward in the direction of the bed, reaching out with my hand in order to rouse the man who ought to have been lying there. But when I found the bed, falling to my knees as I did so, Clement’s body was not there.
I groped about the ragged mattress, unable to believe that it was empty. Stygian gloom was all about me, and I was quite blind—until my hand fell upon the stone that ought to have been on the mantelshelf.
I did not grasp the stone or pick it up, but the moment my fingers touched it I felt a horrid thrill travel up my arm, which burst like a Roman candle inside my head. My eyes were suddenly deluged with light. The darkness split, and was instantly dispelled. From the window of Clement Folle’s room, which should have looked out into dark and dismal shadow, there fell an amazing blaze of many-colored light. It was far too bright to permit my startled eyes to see anything through the window, but I had the impression of the fluttering of myriad wings, and of a host of dancing creatures made of pure white flame.
I did not take a single step in the direction of the window; indeed, I put up my arm to shield my eyes from the appalling glare, and shrank back against the frame of the bed. I understood then that when Clement had looked out into the void above the black canal, he had not seen what other man would have seen. Whether it was in truth the gift of Proteus, or of Satan, which had transformed his power of sight, I could not tell—but I had no alternative save to accept that his powers of sight had indeed been strangely augmented.
The glazed window that separated the shadowed room from the brilliant world beyond was not open or broken, but I could not suppress a conviction that Clement had somehow been claimed by that other world, and ripped out of the fabric of ours. If he had been among the fabulous host beyond the window I could not possibly have seen him, nor recognized him,