The doorbell didn't ring until fifteen minutes after the time we'd agreed on the telephone, but I hadn't even begun to get impatient. Visitors to the island — even those who've only come over the Solent from Hampshire, let alone across the Atlantic from Boston — are always taken by surprise by the slower pace of life here. It's not so much that the buses never run on time as the fact that you can't judge the time of a walk by looking at the map. The map is flat, but the terrain is anything but, especially here on the south coast, where all the chines are.
'Do come in, Professor Thurber,' I said, when I opened the door. 'This is quite a privilege. I don't get many visitors.'
His face was a trifle blanched, and he had to make an effort to unclench his jaw. 'I'm not surprised,' he muttered, in an accent that was distinctly American but by no means a drawl. 'Who ever thought of building a house here, and how on earth did they get the materials down that narrow track?'
I took his coat. There were scuff-marks on the right sleeve because of the way he'd hugged the wall on the way down rather than trust the hand-rail on the left. The cast-iron struts supporting it were rusted, of course, and the wood had grown a fine crop of fungus because we'd had such a wet August, but the rail was actually quite sound, so he could have used it if he'd had the nerve.
'It is a trifle inconvenient nowadays,' I admitted. 'The path was wider when the house was built, and I shudder to think what the next significant landslip might do to it, but the rock face behind the house is vertical, and it's not too difficult to rig a blockand-tackle up on top. The biggest thing I've had to bring down recently is a fridge, though, and I managed that on the path with the aid of one of those two-wheeled trolleys. It's not so bad when you get used to it.'
He'd pulled himself together by then and stuck out his hand. 'Alastair Thurber,' he said. 'I'm truly glad to meet you, Mr. Eliot. My grandfather knew your. grandfather.' The hesitation was perceptible, as he tried to guess my age and estimate whether I might conceivably be Silas Eliot's son rather than his grandson, but it wasn't so blatant as to seem impolite. Even so, to cover up his confusion, he added: 'And they were both friends of the man I wrote to you about: Richard Upton Pickman.'
'I don't have a proper sitting-room, I'm afraid,' I told him. 'The TV room's rather cluttered, but I expect you'd rather take tea in the library in any case.'
He assured me, quite sincerely, that he didn't mind. As an academic, he was presumably a bibliophile as well as an art-lover and a molecular biologist: a man of many parts, who was prob ably still trying to fit them together neatly. He was, of course, younger than me — no more than forty-five, to judge by appearances.
I sat him down and immediately went into the kitchen to make the tea. I used the filtered water and put two bags of Sainsbury's Brown Label and one of Earl Grey in the pot. I put the milk in a jug and the sugar in a bowl; it was a long time since I'd had to do
'You have one of my books,' he said, before I'd even closed the door behind me. He'd taken the copy of
'I bought it after you sent the first letter,' I admitted.
'I'm surprised you could find a copy in England, let alone the Isle of Wight,' he said.
'I didn't,' I told him. 'The public library at Ventnor has Internet connections. I go in twice a week to do the shopping and often pop in there. I ordered it from the U.S. via Amazon. I may be tucked away in a chine, but I'm not entirely cut off from civilization.' He seemed skeptical — but he had just walked the half a mile that separated the house from the bus stop on the so-called coast road, and knew that it wasn't exactly a stroll along Shanklin sea-front. His eyes flickered to the electric light bulb hanging from the roof, presumably wondering at the fact that it was there at all rather than the fact that it was one of the new curly energy-saving bulbs. 'Yes, I said, 'I even have mains electricity. No gas, though, and no mains water. I don't need it — I actually have a spring in my cellar. How many people can say that?'
'Not many, I suppose,' he said, putting the book down on the small table beside the tea-tray. 'You call this place a chine, then? In the U.S., we'd call it a gully, or maybe a ravine.'
'The island is famous for its chines,' I told him. 'Blackgang Chine and Shanklin Chine are tourist traps nowadays — a trifle gaudy for my taste. It's said that there are half a dozen still unspoiled, but it's difficult to be sure. Private land, you see. The path isn't as dangerous as it seems at first glance. Chines are, by definition, wooded. If you were to slip, it would be more a slide than a fall, and you'd probably be able to catch hold of the bushes. Even if you couldn't climb up again you could easily let yourself down. Don't try it at high tide, though.'
He was already halfway through his first cup of tea, even though it was still a little hot. He was probably trying to calm his nerves, although he had no idea what
'Do you know who painted that, Mr. Eliot?' he asked.
'Yes,' I said.
'I knew the moment I looked at it,' he told me. 'It's not on the list I compiled, but that's not surprising. I knew it as soon as I looked at it — Pickman's work is absolutely unmistakable.' His eyes narrowed slightly. 'If you knew who painted it,' he said, 'You might have mentioned that you had it when you replied to my first letter.'
Not wanting to comment on that remark, I picked up
'It was quite a puzzle for a long time,' he said. 'First the Europeans argued that syphilis had started running riot in the sixteenth century because sailors imported it from the Americas, then American scholars motivated by national pride started arguing that, in fact, European sailors had imported it to the Americas. The hypothesis that different strains of the spirochaete had evolved in each continent during the period of separation, and that each native population had built up a measure of immu nity to its own strain — but not to the other — was put forward way back in the seventies, but it wasn't until the people racing to complete the Human Genome Project developed advanced sequencers that we had the equipment to prove it.'
'And now you're working on other bacterial strains that might have been mutually transferred?' I said. 'When you're not on vacation, investigating your grandfather's phobic obsessions, that is?'
'Not just bacteria,' he said ominously — but he was still on vacation, and his mind was on Richard Upton Pickman. 'Does it have a title?' he asked, nodding his head toward the painting again.
'I'm afraid not. I can't offer you anything as melodramatic as 'Ghoul Feeding,' or even 'Subway Accident.''
He glanced at me again with slightly narrowed eyes, registering the fact that I was familiar with the titles mentioned in the account that Lovecraft had reworked from the memoir that Edwin Baird had passed on to him. He drained his cup. While I poured him another, he stood up and went to the picture to take a closer look.
'This must be one of his earlier works,' he said, eventually. 'It's a straightforward portrait — not much more than a practice study. The face has all the usual characteristics, of course — no one but Pickman could paint a face to make you shudder like that. Even in the days of freak-show TV, when the victims of genetic disasters that families used to hide away get tracked through courses of plastic surgery by documentary makers' camera crews, there's still something uniquely strange and hideous about Pickman's models. or at least his technique. The background in this one is odd, though. In his later works, he used subway tunnels, graveyards, and cellars, picking out the details quite carefully, but this background's very vague and almost bare. It's well-preserved, though, and the actual face.»
''Only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear,'' I quoted.
He wasn't about to surrender the intellectual high ground. ' 'The exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright,'' he went on, completing the quote from the Lovecraft text, ' 'and the proper color contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.'»
'But you're a molecular biologist,' I said, as smoothly as if it really were an offhand remark. 'You don't believe
