Pickman's model
told you about. The shack's almost tumbling down, so that nobody else
would live there, and I'd hate to tell you how little I pay for it.
The windows are boarded up, but I like that all the better, since I
don't want daylight for what I do. I paint in the cellar, where the
inspiration is thickest, but I've other rooms furnished on the ground
floor. A Sicilian owns it, and I've hired it under the name of Peters.
"Now if you're game, I'll take you there tonight. I think you'd enjoy
the pictures, for as I said, I've let myself go a bit there. It's no
vast tour--I sometimes do it on foot, for I don't want to attract
attention with a taxi in such a place. We can take the shuttle at the
South Station for Battery Street, and after that the walk isn't much."
* * * * *
Well, Eliot, there wasn't much for me to do after that harangue but to
keep myself from running instead of walking for the first vacant cab
we could sight. We changed to the elevated at the South Station, and
at about 12 o'clock had climbed down the steps at Battery Street and
struck along the old waterfront past Constitution Wharf. I didn't keep
track of the cross streets, and can't tell you yet which it was we
turned up, but I know it wasn't Greenough Lane.
When we did turn, it was to climb through the deserted length of the
oldest and dirtiest alley I ever saw in my life, with crumbling-looking
gables, broken small-paned windows, and archaic chimneys that stood
out half-disintegrated against the moonlit sky. I don't believe there
were three houses in sight that hadn't been standing in Cotton Mather's
time--certainly I glimpsed at least two with an overhang, and once I
thought I saw a peaked roof-line of the almost forgotten pre-gambrel
type, though antiquarians tell us there are none left in Boston.
From that alley, which had a dim light, we turned to the left into
an equally silent and still narrower alley with no light at all; and
in a minute made what I think was an obtuse-angled bend toward the
right in the dark. Not long after this Pickman produced a flashlight
and revealed an antediluvian ten-paneled door that looked damnably
worm-eaten. Unlocking it, he ushered me into a barren hallway with what
was once splendid dark-oak paneling--simple, of course, but thrillingly
suggestive of the times of Andros and Phips and the Witchcraft. Then he
took me through a door on the left, lighted an oil lamp, and told me to
make myself at home.
Now, Eliot, I'm what the man in the street would call fairly
"hard-boiled," but I'll confess that what I saw on the walls of that
room gave me a bad turn. They were his pictures, you know--the ones he
couldn't paint or even show in Marlborough Street--and he was right
when he said he had "let himself go." Here--have another drink--I need
one anyhow!
There's no use in my trying to tell you what they were like, because
the awful, the blasphemous horror, and the unbelievable loathsomeness
and moral fetor came from simple touches quite beyond the power of
words to classify. There was none of the exotic technique you see in
Sidney Sime, none of the trans-Saturnian landscapes and lunar fungi
that Clark Ashton Smith uses to freeze the blood. The backgrounds were
mostly old churchyards, deep woods, cliffs by the sea, brick tunnels,
ancient paneled rooms, or simple vaults of masonry. Copp's Hill Burying
Ground, which could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a
favorite scene.
The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground--for
Pickman's morbid art was preeminently one of demoniac portraiture.
These figures were seldom completely human, but often approached
humanity in varying degrees. Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal,
had a forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The texture of the
majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness. Ugh! I can see them now!
Their occupations--well, don't ask me to be too precise. They were
usually feeding--I won't say on what. They were sometimes shown in
groups in cemeteries or underground passages, and often appeared to be
in battle over their prey--or rather, their treasure-trove. And what
damnable expressiveness Pickman sometimes gave the sightless faces of
this charnel booty! Occasionally the things were shown leaping through
open windows at night, or squatting on the chests of sleepers, worrying
at their throats. One canvas showed a ring of them baying about a
hanged witch on Gallows Hill, whose dead face held a close kinship to
theirs.
But don't get the idea that it was all this hideous business of theme
and setting which struck me faint. I'm not a three-year-old kid, and
I'd seen much like this before. It was the _faces_, Eliot, those
accursed _faces_, that leered and slavered out of the canvas with the
very breath of life! By God, man, I verily believe they were alive!
That nauseous wizard had waked the fires of hell in pigment, and his
brush had been a nightmare-spawning wand. Give me that decanter, Eliot!
There was one thing called _The Lesson_--heaven pity me, that I ever
saw it! Listen--can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless doglike
things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like
themselves? The price of a changeling, I suppose--you know the old myth
about how the weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange
for the human babes they steal. Pickman was showing what happens to
those stolen babes--how they grow up--and then I began to see a hideous
relationship in the faces of the human and non-human figures. He was,
in all his gradations of morbidity between the frankly non-human and
the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and evolution.
The dog-things were developed from mortals!
And no sooner had I wondered what he made of their own young as
left with mankind in the form of changelings, than my eye caught a
picture embodying that very thought. It was that of an ancient Puritan
interior--a heavily beamed room with lattice windows, a settle, and
clumsy Seventeenth Century furniture, with the family sitting about
while the father read from the Scriptures. Every face but one showed
nobility and reverence, but that one reflected the mockery of the
pit. It was that of a young man in years, and no doubt belonged to a
supposed son of that pious father, but in essence it was the kin of the
unclean things. It was their changeling--and in a spirit of supreme
irony Pickman had given the features a very perceptible resemblance to
his own.
By this time Pickman had lighted a lamp in an adjoining room and was
politely holding open the door for me; asking me if I would care to
see his "modern studies", I hadn't been able to give him much of my
opinions--I was too speechless with fright and loathing--but I think he
fully understood and felt highly complimented. And now I want to assure
you again, Eliot, that I'm no mollycoddle to scream at anything which
shows a bit of departure from the usual. I'm middle-aged and decently
sophisticated, and I guess you saw enough of me in France to know I'm
not easily knocked out. Remember, too, that I'd just about recovered my
wind and gotten used to those frightful pictures which turned colonial
New England into a kind of annex of hell. Well, in spite of all this,
that next room forced a real scream out of me, and I had to clutch at
the doorway to keep from keeling over. The other chamber had shown a
pack of ghouls and witches overrunning the world of our fore-fathers,
but this one brought the horror right into our own daily life!
Gad, how that man could paint! There was a study called _Subway
Accident_, in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from
some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston
Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform. Another
showed a dance on Copp's hill among the tombs with the background
of today. Then there were any number of cellar views, with monsters
creeping in through holes and rifts in the masonry and grinning as they
squatted behind barrels or furnaces and waited for their first victim
to descend the stairs.
One disgusting canvas seemed to depict a vast cross-section of Beacon
Hill, with antlike armies of the mephitic monsters squeezing themselves
through burrows that honey-combed the ground. Dances in the modern
cemeteries were freely pictured, and another conception somehow shocked
me more than all the rest--a scene in an unknown vault, where scores of
the beasts crowded about one who held a well-known Boston guidebook and
was evidently reading aloud. All were pointing to a certain passage,
and every face seemed so distorted with epileptic and reverberant
laughter that I almost thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The title
of the picture was, _Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount
Auburn_.
As I gradually steadied myself and got readjusted to this second room
of deviltry and morbidity, I began to analyze some of the points in my
sickening loathing. In the first place, I said to myself, these things
repelled because of the utter inhumanity and callous cruelty they
showed in Pickman. The fellow must be a relentless enemy of all mankind
to take such glee in the torture of brain and flesh and the degradation
of the mortal tenement. In the second place, they terrified because of
their very greatness. Their art was the art that convinced--when we
saw the pictures we saw the demons themselves and were afraid of them.
And the queer part was, that Pickman got none of his power from the
use of selectiveness or bizarreric. Nothing was blurred, distorted, or
conventionalized; outlines were sharp and lifelike, and details were
almost painfully defined. And the faces!
It was not any mere artist's interpretation that we saw; it was
pandemonium itself, crystal-clear in stark objectivity. That was it,
by heaven! The man was not a fantaisiste or romanticist at all--he did
not even try to give us the churning, prismatic ephemera of dreams,
but coldly and sardonically reflected some stable, mechanistic,
and well-established horror-world which he saw fully, brilliantly,
squarely, and unfalteringly. God knows what that world can have been,
or where he ever glimpsed the blasphemous shapes that loped and trotted
and crawled through it; but whatever the baffling source of his images,
one thing was plain. Pickman was in every sense--in conception and in
execution--a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific _realist_.
* * * * *
My host was now leading the way down cellar to his actual studio, and I
braced myself for some hellish effects among the unfinished canvases.
As we reached the bottom of the damp stairs he turned his flashlight
to a corner of the large open space at hand, revealing the circular
brick curb of what was evidently a great well in the earthen floor. We
walked nearer, and I saw that it must be five feet across, with walls
a good foot thick and some six inches above the ground level--solid
work of the Seventeenth Century, or I was much mistaken. That, Pickman
said, was the kind of thing he had been talking about--an aperture of
the network of tunnels that used to undermine the hill. I noticed idly
that it did not seem to be bricked up, and that a heavy disk of wood
formed the apparent cover. Thinking of the things this well must have
been connected with if Pickman's wild hints had not been mere rhetoric,
I shivered slightly; then turned to follow him up a step and through a
narrow door into a room of fair size, provided with a wooden floor and
furnished as a studio. An acetylene gas outfit gave the light necessary
for work.
The unfinished pictures on easels or propped against the walls were
as ghastly as the finished ones upstairs, and showed the painstaking