My expression must have betrayed my feeling to some extent.
“Pretty strong work, aren’t they?” said Cyprian, in a loud, vibrant voice, with a note of harsh pride and triumph. “I can see that you are surprised—you didn’t look for anything of the sort, I dare say.”
“No, candidly, I didn’t,” I admitted. “Good Lord, man, you will become the Michelangelo of diabolism if you go on at this rate. Where on earth do you get such stuff?”
“Yes, I’ve gone pretty far,” said Cyprian, seeming to disregard my question. “Further even than you think, probably. If you could know what I know, could see what I have seen, you might make something really worth while out of your weird fiction, Philip. You are very clever and imaginative, of course. But you’ve never had any experience.”
I was startled and puzzled. “Experience? What do you mean?”
“Precisely that. You try to depict the occult and the supernatural without even the most rudimentary first-hand knowledge of them. I tried to do something of the same sort in sculpture, years ago, without knowledge; and doubtless you recall the mediocre mess that I made of it. But I’ve learned a thing or two since then.”
“Sounds as if you had made the traditional bond with the Devil, or something of the sort,” I observed, with a feeble and perfunctory levity.
Cyprian’s eyes narrowed slightly, with a strange, secret look.
“I know what I know. Never mind how or why. The world in which we live isn’t the only world; and some of the others lie closer at hand than you think. The boundaries of the seen and the unseen are sometimes interchangeable.”
Recalling the malevolent phantom, I felt a peculiar disquietude as I listened to his words. An hour before, his statement would have impressed me as mere nebular theorizing; but now it assumed an ominous and terrifying significance.
“What makes you think I have had no experience of the occult?” I asked.
“Your stories hardly show anything of the kind—anything factual or personal. They are all palpably made up. When you’ve argued with a ghost, or watched the ghouls at meal-time, or fought with an incubus, or suckled a vampire, you may achieve some genuine characterization and color along such lines.”
For reasons that should be fairly obvious, I had not intended to tell anyone of the unbelievable thing at Toleman’s. Now, with a singular mixture of emotions, of compulsive, eerie terrors and desire to refute the animadversions of Cyprian, I found myself describing the phantom.
He listened with an inexpressive look, as if his thoughts were occupied with other matters than my story. Then, when I had finished:
“You are becoming more psychic than I imagined. Was your apparition anything like one of these?”
With the last words, he lifted the sheet of burlap from the muffled group of figures beside which he had been standing.
I cried out involuntarily with the shock of that appalling revelation, and almost tottered as I stepped back. Before me, in a monstrous semi-circle, were seven creatures who might all have been modeled from the loathly gargoyle that had confronted me across the folio of Goya drawings. Even in several that were still amorphous or incomplete, Cyprian had conveyed with a damnable art the peculiar mingling of primal bestiality and mortuary putrescence that had signalized the phantom. The seven monsters had closed in on a cowering, naked girl, and were all clutching foully toward her with their hyena claws. The stark, frantic, insane terror on the face of the girl, and the slavering hunger of her assailants, were alike unbearable. The group was a masterpiece, in its consummate power of technique—but a masterpiece that inspired loathing rather than admiration. And, following my recent experience, the sight of it affected me with indescribable alarm. It seemed to me that I had gone astray from the normal, familiar world into a land of detestable mystery, of prodigious and unnatural menace.
Held by an abhorrent fascination, it was hard for me to wrench my eyes away from the figure-piece. At last I turned from it to Cyprian himself. He was regarding me with a cryptic air, beneath which I suspected a covert gloating.
“How do you like my little pets?” he inquired. “I am going to call the composition ‘The Hunters from Beyond’.”
Before I could answer, a woman suddenly appeared from behind the Chinese screen. I saw that she was the model for the girl in the unfinished group. Evidently she had been dressing, and was now ready to leave, for she wore a tailored suit and a smart toque. She was beautiful, in a dark, semi-Latin fashion; but her mouth was sullen and reluctant, and her wide, liquid eyes were wells of strange terror as she gazed at Cyprian, myself and the uncovered statue-piece.
Cyprian did not introduce me. He and the girl talked together in low tones for a minute or two, and I was unable to overhear more than half of what they said. I gathered, however, that an appointment was being made for the next sitting. There was a pleading, frightened note in the girl’s voice, together with an almost maternal concern; and Cyprian seemed to be arguing with her or trying to reassure her about something. At last she went out, with a queer, supplicative glance at me—a glance whose meaning I could only surmise and could not wholly fathom.
“That was Marta,” said Cyprian. “She is half Irish, half Italian. A good model; but my new sculptures seem to be making her a little nervous.” He laughed abruptly, with a mirthless, jarring note that was like the cachinnation of a sorcerer.
“In God’s name, what are you trying to do here?” I burst out. “What does it all mean? Do such abominations really exist, on earth or in any hell?”
He laughed again, with an evil subtlety, and became evasive all at once. “Anything may exist, in a boundless universe with multiple dimensions. Anything may be real—or unreal. Who knows? It is not for me to say. Figure it out for yourself, if you can—there’s a vast field for speculation—and perhaps for more than speculation.”
With this, he began immediately to talk of other topics. Baffled, mystified, with a sorely troubled mind and nerves that were more unstrung than ever by the black enigma of it all, I ceased to question him. Simultaneously, my desire to leave the studio became almost overwhelming—a mindless, whirlwind panic that prompted me to run pell-mell from the room and down the stairs into the wholesome normality of the common, twentieth century streets. It seemed to me that the rays which fell through the skylight were not those of the sun but of some darker orb; that the room was touched with unclean webs of shadow where shadow should not have been; that the stone Satans, the bronze lamias, the terra-cotta satyrs, and the clay gargoyles had somehow increased in number and might spring to malignant life at any instant.
Hardly knowing what I said, I continued to converse for awhile with Cyprian. Then, excusing myself on the score of a nonexistent luncheon appointment, and promising vaguely to return for another visit before my departure from the city, I took my leave.
I was surprised to find my cousin’s model in the lower hall, at the foot of the stairway. From her manner, and her first words, it was plain that she had been waiting for me.
“You are Mr. Philip Hastane, aren’t you?” she said, in an eager, agitated voice. “I am Marta Fitzgerald. Cyprian has often mentioned you; and I believe that he admires you a lot.
“Maybe you’ll think me crazy,” she went on, “but I had to speak to you. I can’t stand the way that things are going here; and I’d refuse to come to the place any more, if it wasn’t that I… like Cyprian so much.
“I don’t know what he has done—or what has been done to him—but he is altogether different from what he used to be. His new work is so horrible—you can’t imagine how it frightens me. The sculptures he does are more hideous, more hellish all the time. Ugh! those drooling, dead-grey monsters in that new group of his—I can hardly bear to be in the studio with them. It isn’t right for anyone to depict such things. Don’t you think they are awful, Mr. Hastane? They look as if they had broken loose from hell—and make you think that hell can’t be very far away. It is wrong and wicked for anyone to… even imagine them; and I wish that Cyprian would stop. I am afraid that something will happen to him—to his mind—if he goes on. And I’ll go mad, too, if I have to see those monsters many more times. My God! No one could keep sane in that studio.”