Eddy, hollow-cheeked and poorly dressed, seemed twenty years older. He wore a moustache now. Hendrik thought his pale face might be powdered. He was living in Richmond, travelling North to deliver lectures on 'The Poetic Principle', reciting his own modestly famous verses.
Over the years, Hendrik had sought out Eddy's work, imagining in the fever dreams and horrors paraded across the page what the poet must have seen through the spectacles. His tales were crammed with the unquiet and unforgiving dead, with vast and malignant cosmic entities, with plague and premature burial. He had to admit Eddy hardly seemed the cheeriest of souls in the pieces published
Eddy, for his part, had followed the careers of the Brothers Shatner. Several times, he admitted, he had felt the impulse to light out for the Josephite Settlement.
Again, Hendrik asked Eddy what it was he saw.
The poet shrugged.
'I believed I beheld the face of the worm. Or the mechanicals of the cosmos. I cannot be sure. The lasting impression is philosophical, not visual. I have come to think we were subject to some trickery of the light, some distortion of the glass, but that a deeper truth was poured into our souls. Not one day has passed but that I have not shuddered at the memory of that accursed night.'
Hendrik confessed to a similar affliction.
Eddy was struck with a fit of coughing. Hendrik realised the poet was sorely ill.
'It tore the heart out of me,' Eddy managed to say. 'Since then I have walked with the dead. I cannot look upon the face of a loved one without seeing the worms burrowing beneath the skin.'
Hendrik surveyed the well-lit room. There were several black hats, bobbing behind the sea of faces. The noise of people was oppressive, and the heat, contrasting with the chill of outdoors, hard to stand. The revellers' coats steamed.
'They are here,' Eddy said, blankly. 'The conquerors.'
Faces flowed into one another. The crowd grew thicker. Steam spotted the ceiling. The noise increased. Hendrik tried to stand away from the bar but the press was impossible. More and more people, many in black, poured into Gunner's Hall like sand. He was wedged tight. Smoky yellow light flooded the room. Hendrik blinked, water in his eyes.
He still struggled and listened. The noise was a babble; no matter how he tried, he could not focus on any one voice, or discern any actual words. The sound was human and yet not language, an alien hubbub akin to the rhubarbing of minor stage players called upon to simulate background noise. But this was not background, this was deafening.
Eddy tried to speak, but his words were lost, drowned. Hendrik's ears hurt and his body was pressed against the rail of the bar. Looking into the mirror behind the bar, he saw the crowd had coalesced into one mass, clothed in a vast patchwork of materials. The morass was dotted with distorted heads topped by familiar hats. The crowd, one creature, flowed all around, washing against the corners of the room like water, climbing the walls. Bodies stretched like rubber and merged like melting wax. The level was above the waist already.
Blood trickled from one of Hendrik's ears. Eddy was being sucked under, a checkered tide slipping around him. The noise, a painful yammering, smote Hendrik like a cudgel. He could not fill his lungs. His mouth was full of the taste of sickness. His ribs strained and threatened to stave in.
The mirror bulged outwards, unable to contain such a living mass, and exploded into a million fragments.
The noise shut off and Hendrik was released, falling to the floor. A spittoon overturned, spilling tobacco slime under his palm.
Wiping his hand on his trousers, he stood.
Eddy, coughing still, clung to the bar as if it were the wheel of a ship in a storm.
They were alone with a roomful of statues, looking out through the smashed mirror onto a familiar plain. A thin horizon separated white land from white sky. The remaining spears of mirror fell out of the frame and scattered across the plain, sucked by an unfelt wind.
The tavern doors pushed inward and the company was joined. A man, his head hooded, staggered in, arms stretched out, and wound a way between the statues. The dummies represented the drinkers who had been in Gunner's Hall when Hendrik first entered, posed in attitudes of revelry, grins painted on their faces, prop tankards lifted.
The newcomer's head lolled unnaturally and Hendrik recognised his brother. Joseph reached up and snatched off the hood. His face was discoloured and the top of his spine poked out of the skin under one ear. A waxy mould spread under his face and a red rope-weal ringed the stretched neck like a cravat. The apparition, its voice-box crushed, could not speak. It staggered towards the bar and came to a halt, eyes swivelling between Hendrik and Eddy.
Another had slipped into the room. It was the Ute, dressed as a Josephite Elder, eyes reflecting in the shadow of his hat-brim.
'Not enough blood,' the Ute said to Hendrik, 'not nearly enough…'
Hendrik knew he was entrapped again, that he must return to the Path of Joseph. He stood away from the bar and Joseph clapped a cold hand on his shoulder.
He surrendered his purpose.
Eddy stayed by the bar, turning to look at the Ute. The mock Indian took off his mirror glasses and held them out again. Eddy was trembling throughout his body. A tiny dribble of blood emerged from between his lips.
Hendrik saw the Ute's broad, black-covered back as he faced down Eddy Poe. The poet looked at the offered spectacles, then up at the Ute's face. His trembling froze.
'Friend,' Eddy said, 'what can be discerned with these adornments is as nothing set beside what I see in your eyes.'
Eddy turned away and the Ute put his glasses back on. The dummies moved again, voices buzzed all around.
Joseph and the Ute were gone. Hendrik was jostled.
'Eddy…?'
The poet shook his head but would not turn. In the intact mirror, Hendrik saw Eddy's stricken face. He looked worse than the apparition of the hanged Joseph. Hendrik backed away, with increasing haste. People got in the way and he could no longer see Eddy. He turned and ran from the tavern. The icy rain outside washed away his fear.
A Josephite party would be gathering soon to leave for the Settlement. He would return to the Path. Only blood could free him.
X
He pulled his bowie out of the Gentile's neck-vein and was blinded by the burst of blood. Hendrik shook his eyes clear and looked into the dying face. He saw nothing he had not seen before. He scored a deep line across the settler's forehead with his knife-point, then lifted the hair. It came away in a ragged cap. The light went from the Gentile's eyes.
Hendrik gave voice to a shout of savage victory.
Eddy Poe had been discovered in Gunner's Hall, having been missing for some days, by an acquaintance who surmised he was deathly sick. He wore ill-fitting clothes believed not to be his own and was in a semi-conscious state taken for severe intoxication. Conveyed to the hospital of Washington Medical College, he babbled constant delirium, addressing spectral and imaginary objects on the walls.
All around. New Canaan burned. Hendrik had lost count of those he had sacrificed this morning. His painted skin
