The Last Ritual Page 3

  I completed more paintings there than I had in three months at Cannes.

  While they were good, they lacked something almost palpable, as if the real subject had wandered away just before I started to paint. Haunted by absences. I put them away.

  Preston was accurate when he alluded to my lack of artistic progress. It was true. I hadn’t had an exhibition in ages. I had reached a point of stagnancy, a sluggish creative limbo where my talent and I sat together like a stale married couple who lacked the energy to argue. The truth about my artistic gift is that if I had been born a little better or a little worse, then my life might have been easier. I was never going to be one of those artists who sit in tattered overcoats selling their paintings at weekends on the street in the South Shore of Kingsport. I had no hustle, no salesmanship. I was born rich, so there was always money. Slumming seemed false. My skills revealed a mastery of technique. What I lacked, and what I desired, was originality. I was a copier, an imitator of the painters who came before me with superior vision. I felt like a fraud. I had concluded that the malady I suffered from was an absence of inspiring subjects to paint. Determined, I left Arkham bound for Europe. Once there, I was drowning in history, museums, and galleries, cloyingly surrounded by other artists doing the same thing I was. What new contribution might Alden Oakes possibly make? Where was my vision? It was a self-pitying view, I know, and like all self-pity it quickly grew tiresome.

  Even to me.

  So I brooded.

  I painted realistic representations of fields, forests, and seashores. Though technically excellent, my work was hollow. I hated each of them, piling the canvases in the corner of a shed I rented from a peasant farmer, only to find later that it had a leaky roof and the paintings I stored there were ruined. There seemed no rush to produce more. I avoided the company of other artists and found myself forsaking the smoky coffeehouses and noisy, cheap cafés. Preston was right about the parties, but I didn’t go any more. Still, I held out one last hope of discovering an ideal subject that would unlock my inner potential. The world would have to pay attention. Finally, they would see that I had something unique and powerfully beautiful to contribute to the world.

  Such were my daydreams.

  One day I decided to leave the village and venture south to Barcelona.

  Did I ever get to Barcelona?

  I don’t think so. I know that sounds peculiar, but I’ve mentioned my horrible sense of direction. I might have reached the lesser known outskirts of the city, or gotten myself sidetracked into an oddly secluded neighborhood. I saw no La Rambla, no Gothic Quarter, or Basilica de La Sagrada Familia, in fact no famous landmarks at all. It occurred to me that I might have mistakenly paid a visit to a completely different town. The architecture had an overcrowded ramshackle quality, not at all what I anticipated seeing. I had gone to the place where I expected Barcelona to be. But no signpost told me definitively whether I ever arrived there. The streets through which I drove had the industrial character of a metropolis. One bizarre thing was this: whichever road I took, I always sensed I was driving downhill. Even when I attempted to backtrack, the Renault pitched downward as if I were trapped in a funnel.

  I saw lots of soldiers.

  They marched past me in groups, or they lingered in pairs. I never spotted one out walking alone. Their uniforms were tannish yellow, and they wore soft peaked patrol caps with maroon armbands. I couldn’t tell how the civilians felt about them, but they made me nervous with their blank expressions and casually thuggish attitude. I looked for a friendly, clean-looking hotel. Everywhere I stopped I was told, “No vacancies.” When I asked for recommendations, the clerks indicated there were no rooms to be had in the city.

  I parked in front of a bank, thinking I might go inside to exchange some francs and ask the teller to recommend a hotel. I’d enquire offhandedly if this branch was indeed in Barcelona proper. I never had a chance; when I tried the doors, I found them locked.

  I cupped my hands to the window.

  Deserted, lights out. Nobody home.

  It was a weekday. I was sure about that when I left the fishing village.

  I lit a smoke and took a stroll. Noting the particularities of the street, I made sure I’d be able to find my car when I returned. Three roads met, forming six corners. A star-shaped island with a dry fountain occupied the center of the intersection.

  I went up for a closer look.

  Under a layer of foul green water, coins filled the fountain. Curious, I rolled up my sleeve, dipped my arm into the basin, and scooped up a handful of coins. A film of yellow slime covered the coins, which were unpleasantly warm, like little fingertips grazing my palm. I scraped away a bit of scum with my thumbnail. I’d never seen such strange currency. If these were pesetas, they must have been very old indeed. The coins lacked any numbers whatsoever. The symbols found there were worn smooth and difficult to recognize, but they depicted mythological beasts unfamiliar to me. I dropped them back into the filthy water. Perhaps it was a local custom to make wishes and toss these peculiar old coins. This fountain had a statue in it at some point; now it was missing. Only the empty pedestal remained. Gazing outward from the font, I surveyed my directional choices.

  “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe…”

  I picked one of the six streets and started walking.

  No shops were open for business. I saw few people. When I passed them, they looked away. With regularity along the avenue there appeared large, dangerous, open holes in the pavement; the air wafting out of these pits smelled of sewage. Puzzled and alarmed, I wondered why they were not covered, reminding myself to use caution on my return journey.

  Multiple stairways leading underground offered another clue that I had reached a city center of some size. I assumed they connected to an electrified subway. I knew of no catacombs in this region. But the station entrances bore no names that I could find. The only things differentiating one stairway from another were primitive-looking symbols carved into wooden panels above their subterranean thresholds. Upon closer inspection these hackings seemed to be graffiti, the handiwork of an artistic hooligan with a pocketknife. They reminded me of an exhibit of ancient druidic runes I’d seen once at the Miskatonic Museum.

  Locked iron gates were drawn across the stairways.

  If they were used for transport they, like the banks, were closed.

  The deeper into the neighborhood I explored, the more I noticed the buildings around me falling into obvious stages of disrepair, their architecture looking less structurally sound. Fissures creeping along the buildings’ foundations and cracks in their facades had me speculating that the city had experienced a recent earthquake.

  The entire scene spoke of disintegration. This could not be Barcelona!

  I had arrived during the early evening, and now, a couple of hours later, the sun plunged in the west. Light cut through the alleyways like gold bayonets. I turned at an intersection, always checking behind me to remember a key detail or two. For example, up there was a headless manikin dressed in a red cardigan, leaning forward against a dusty second floor window. Here, glass blocks frame the etched word Farmacia over a doorway. Farther on, rows of brown boots are standing to attention on a rack inside a cobbler’s dimly humble shop. I planned to follow this trail of breadcrumbs back through the urban forest.

  Crimson streaked the bruised sky whose unraveling bandages were merely clouds.

  I heard voices, many voices, talking excitedly.

  So I followed their sound.

  Crack!

  A gunshot?

  I froze.

  Then a volley of loud explosions. A scream. People laughing.

  A woman in a black and white ruffled dress ran diagonally across the street ahead of me. She glanced over her shoulder, smiling, I thought at me, but then a young man with curly black hair and a guitar on his back emerged, chasing after her.

  I ta
iled them to a plaza.

  Here were the dwellers of the neighborhood. Long tables and kitchen chairs ringed the plaza and branched down the intersecting streets. In the center of the plaza towered a pyramid of old furniture, wood scraps, and even an old, peeling door. Families sat around the tables drinking wine and eating. Children ran everywhere. A man touched a fat cigar to a fuse in his fist and tossed the firework high in the air near the pyramid.

  Crack!

  The children screamed, laughing, and ran away.

  It was a summer festival. I had heard about them from associates in France. It was common to see midsummer bonfires around the solstice throughout Europe, dating back to medieval times or, perhaps, earlier. Many had their roots in ancient pagan rituals. Harmless, good-natured fun said to be effective in repelling evil spirits. Who but the bitterest killjoy could argue against burning pyres and drinking through the night with friends until dawn?

  I must’ve stumbled upon a local custom, I thought. Before I could question it further, the young woman in the black and white ruffled dress offered me a glass of sangria, which I accepted, as her beau whisked her away to listen to him play his guitar in the shadow of the pyramid. I noticed the soldiers mingling with the civilians. It seemed they came from these families. The resemblances between them were undeniable. So any worries I had about civil unrest died there, as I sipped my sangria and smoked, wishing I’d brought a sketchpad and my pencils. Someone offered me a chair. As I sat down, I discovered my glass being refilled. Such hospitality! Waiting for night to fall and the festivities to begin… that is when I first heard mention of the name Juan Hugo Balthazarr. Oh, I didn’t hear it strung together like that, but in whispers, an insectile buzz that infected the crowd. “Balthazarr, Balthazarr, Balthazzzaaarrr….”

  Could they be speaking of the most shocking living painter in the world?

  No, I told myself. It must be a common name in these parts.

  Yet I wondered…

  Juan Hugo Balthazarr was a Spaniard, born in Barcelona. He was rumored to live there still, inside the walled, crumbling ruins of a Gothic monastery. As I looked around, I convinced myself some of these people at the tables might be his relatives. But no, it couldn’t be.

  Could it?

  Balthazarr was acknowledged, most notably and boisterously by himself, as a genius destined to save the twentieth century from irrelevant art. Renowned as a relentless experimenter, he drew, painted, and sculpted with incredible energy and stamina, often said to spend days, or even weeks, without sleep in order to complete one of his outrageously fantastical visions. Critics either hailed his works as revolutionary or vehemently despised them, but all agreed his creations were as breathtaking as they were indescribable. Yes, there was something of Goya in them, and of those medieval painters who conjured torturous scenes in Hell. But Balthazarr’s influences remained hard to pin down. Gustave Doré’s woodcuts and engravings. The Dadaists and Cubism, of course. Currently, he was a major force in the Surrealist movement. But he was always his own artist. Incomparable, prolific, and a young man, barely older than I was. How I envied him! If only I could harness the talent I felt I had within me, if only I might push it into the world with such confidence, style, and gusto.

  People were turning their chairs to stare down one of the streets.

  I looked too.

  I had seen only one photo of Balthazarr who, despite his growing worldwide fame, disliked having his picture taken. He was tall and well-known for his athletic physique and long forked beard. I glanced over the heads of the festivalgoers but saw no one resembling Balthazarr. What a shame! If there was one artist in the world whom I admired, it was him.

  They said he painted portraits of his darkest dreams. He possessed a perfect memory of everything that ever happened to him, both awake and asleep. Some claimed he was a seer.

  Others derided him as the Devil incarnate.

  I met a man in Paris, an English muralist, who swore Balthazarr kept him hypnotized for three whole days. Eventually he woke from his trance standing naked on the ledge outside a Moroccan hotel room window with a scorpion in one hand and a bag of semiprecious gemstones in the other. He dropped the scorpion and traded the gems for money to buy a ticket back to London. When I asked him if he held a grudge against the painter he laughed, saying it was the best weekend he couldn’t remember in his life. Then he told me that Balthazarr still followed him.

  “How do mean ‘follow’?” I said.

  “Oh, I see him, usually in reflections. Mirrors or windows, the surface of a pond. Never straight on, mind you. Always behind me, he lingers. That beard, and those eyes! When I turn, he’s gone. I don’t think he’s menacing me. He’s keeping me company. I only wish he’d stay.”

  I thought of no reply at the time.

  The muralist seemed a bit mad. He had taut, unhealthy yellowed skin, and I noticed he wore two different shoes. One brown, the other black. His fingernails were overgrown and stained from nibbling red pistachios which he kept in every pocket of his jacket and trousers. I heard later that he’d been found drowned in the Seine. But I don’t know if that was true. He might’ve gone home to England. He was quite a character. The kind you might believe anything about if someone told you. Anyway, he insisted that Balthazarr was a mesmerist and he could, if he chose to do so, bring a roomful of people under his power without them knowing it. Part of me loved every wild detail, and didn’t care if they really happened or not.

  The sound of drums echoed from one of the narrower streets, growing louder. People rose from their chairs and formed a circle in the plaza around the pyramid of items to be burned in the bonfire. I went with them. The noise was deafening as the drummers entered the plaza. They wore rustic costumes. Though simple, they were effectively frightening, a combination of hooded robes and masks made from human hair, dyed red yarn, and grotesquely painted smears of silver, copper, and gold on rough, blackened wood. It was surprisingly easy to believe that instead of people, the drummers were subterranean goblins. The sort of creatures that might’ve lived down wherever those iron-gated stairways led! They must’ve worn stuffed gloves to make their fingers appear so crookedly misshapen.

  The crowd cheered and clapped.

  Round and round the drummers circled the pyramid.

  Finally, a tall figure in a silvery robe emerged holding a torch.

  “Balthazarr! Balthazarr! Balthazarr!” the crowd chanted.

  Caught up in the spirit of things, I joined them. A group rushed in from the rear, blocking my view. Feeling annoyed, I shouldered my way through the throng. “Excuse me. I’d like to see,” I said, in English and to no effect. They refused to step aside. I pushed harder, not caring.

  “I want to see Balthazarr! Let me see!”

  Finally, I broke through to the front.

  There was no way of telling who the tall figure really was, because over its head it wore the most startling full-head mask, fashioned like a black sunburst. Each of the daggerlike rays sparkled silver, as if dipped in stardust. The face was round-cheeked and grim, its mouth and eyes thin slits through which the wearer could observe without their identity being revealed. My pulse quickened. Deep interest and anxiety mixed in my blood.

  The mask must have weighed an absolute ton. Yet the wearer bore it naturally without a sign of physical strain or restriction.

  The robe, I realized, was composed of small mirrors, each no bigger than a playing card, and shards of broken glass secured with wire twists sewn onto a background of dark material. They flashed as the tall figure turned, bending at the waist and touching its torch to the base of the pyramid. The wood pile had to have been soaked in gasoline. That was the only logical explanation for the roar and explosion of flames that climbed higher than any of the buildings in the little street plaza. The tall figure tossed its torch into the conflagration.

  The heat caused me to back up and shield my face. />
  But the other revelers drew nearer.

  I don’t know how they stood so close.

  I felt my skin tighten as it does after a bad sunburn. The drummers marched and banged their instruments louder than before. The crowd swayed and began a chant in a tongue I did not recognize, but it certainly wasn’t Spanish.

  “Ebuma chtenff! Gnaiih goka gotha gof’nn! Fm’latgh grah’n ftaghu grah’n!”

  Over and over they repeated… I dare not call them words, but these gross utterances.

  “Balthazarr! Hafh’drn!” someone cried out.

  The tall mirrored figure lifted its arms.

  I do not know if I am particularly sensitive to heat. Never had I noticed any delicacy in my skin or nerves. Yet, in this plaza, at this moment, I became terrified that I might begin to burn. That my flesh might melt, sliding off my bones. It sounds ridiculous, but the pain transfixed me. My spine felt as though it were hardening, the fluid inside converting to steam. My marrow bubbled. My panicked brain kicked like a lobster dropped into a pot of boiling water.

  Did I hear my bones snapping? Or was it the sound of firecrackers?

  Firecrackers, it must be. I watched a belt of them writhe on the plaza floor. A second team of performers entered the circle around the flaming pyramid. This group was nimbler than the drummers. They frolicked and skipped, running up to the crowd and touching them. Why did it make my stomach lurch to see this? The nimble goblins brandished spinning sparklers held aloft on long pikes. As they approached me, I saw the ends of the pikes were three-pronged forks like the one Preston scratched with his toe in the sand under the table. White-sparking wheels spun on the tips of the prongs. I could not move or look away.

  A goblin pushed a wheeled cart to the tall figure who stooped, picking something up.

  Two puppets?

  They had to be puppets, or large floppy dolls. The first was dressed as an adult man and the other as a woman. What unwholesome effigies!