The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror

A PENTAGRAM FOR CENAIDE by Eddy C. Bertin

JACK MORGAN WAS a painter, or at least that was what he always said, and his close friends — those whose judgment he cared about — agreed with him on that point, so it hardly mattered what the critics said about his work, whenever they did take the trouble to say something. His life had always been a very calm and peaceful one, he liked drinking, but not much more than anyone else, and he had tried a few mild drugs too, and had stayed away from them after a severe headache. He had an exceptional ear for music, and always claimed that he could get high on hearing music, so why spend hard cash for ersatz? He had known, and loved, and hated a few women in. his life, and had left them all behind, or they had left him behind depending on what viewpoint one takes. Time had come for a marriage, which never realized, and time had gone past that point too. Jack also liked laughing, and simple fun as well as enjoy reading Sartre. He had many friends who liked him very much until he needed them, when they always seemed to be just out of reach, but always eager to return when he didn’t need, or didn’t want their help anymore.

He read a lot, from crime novels to Wodehouse, and from the classics to science-fiction, and had a healthy distaste for ladies’ novels, until he fell right into one himself, and gradually discovered that there was no way out. The newly arisen dilemma, which had been there for a long time already if he had only seen it, embittered him at first, and angered him. It came in the way of his work, and in his own way he was a straightforward man who hated dilemmas, which couldn’t be solved, but he also prided himself in this fact, and that was what made him unable to solve his particular predicament. That was when he discovered, surprising himself most of all, that he was in love with his best friend’s wife.

Paul and his wife Cenaide were long time friends of Jack, who used to drop in on him at the weirdest hours of day and night, and he was always ready for them, for a drink, and a chat; besides, he used to visit them quite a lot himself. Cenaide wasn’t exactly a classic beauty, and neither was she a very intelligent woman, but one evening when they had gone to a dance, the three of them, and he took her in his arms, felt the softness of her cheek and the tickling of her hair against his face, the suppleness of her body against his, he suddenly realized that he loved her. He had known love before, and he still remembered how it felt and tasted and then hurt afterwards, so this surprised him, then he found it rather funny, and then it angered him. He had no business being in love with this girl, he told himself. Her hair was too short, he had always liked long hair, and the colour wasn’t right either. Her manner of speech was rude and she spoke with a strong cheap dialect, which she never was able to hide. No doubt she had lots of personal, annoying habits, and she couldn’t even talk about things on his own level of understanding. Above all she was married to his friend, whom she loved very much, of that he was certain. But he loved her with a sudden furious passion, which must have been smoldering in the depths of his mind for some time already, unnoticed. When he began thinking seriously about it later, when he was alone in his room, he recalled the fun they had had just by being together, talking about a lot of stupid unimportant things. He began to remember the peace he had felt, just sitting there and talking to her, knowing that she was near. He began to recall many things, small silly things, but they all added up as he brought them out of their hiding places in his mind, the tingle in his fingers when he touched her hand as she passed him his drink, and the warmth he had felt one evening when she had drunk a few glasses too much of the bottle of wine he had brought with him and had fallen asleep on the couch, and he had looked down upon her relaxed, resting face. He remembered now the sudden flare of anger he had felt one day when Paul had been shouting at her for some unimportant stupidity, and his uneasiness when he had visited them one evening, and she hadn’t been home, arriving very late.

He tried the shortest way out of this silly situation, and stopped visiting them without giving a reason, but they came to him, bewildered, and he never let someone stand before a closed door. He tried to be rude, and only succeeded in surprising and hurting them, but they came back nevertheless, and he couldn’t keep on being rude to her. Then the pain began, and the uneasiness, standing before his window in his empty room, looking out over the rain-shrouded city roofs, smoking a cigarette, the smoke biting in his eyes. He took to taking solitary walks through the empty night streets, alone with his brooding thoughts, and this insane love for a woman who wasn’t his, and who would never be his. But the darkness never gives an answer, and if there were an answer to it, it would have to come out of himself.

He couldn’t work anymore with the accuracy so typical for his fingers, starting three paintings, leaving the first one unfinished, tearing the second apart with his knife, and throwing the third against the wall with such a force that it split. He tried looking at it logically, but refused to come into agreement with himself. At first he viewed it as a friendship’s dilemma, until he discovered that he couldn’t care less. He knew how his friend felt about his wife, a superficial love which had drifted into habit through the years. Paul was no real obstacle, Jack wouldn’t stop because of him. But the real barrier was lying inside Jack himself, and in his guesswork concerning her feelings. He knew for certain that she cared for him only as a good friend, and nothing more, and there wasn’t the slightest chance of a step out of line, because her narrow mindedness on such matters had often before surprised him. Especially as he knew that Paul was far from a faithful husband, and sometimes it was so eye piercing that it seemed almost impossible for Cenaide not to notice it. She didn’t however, or else plainly refused to see things in their true light. She cared a lot for her husband, and would never let him go. Along those lines she also didn’t give a damn for Jack Morgan.

As time passed, Jack’s mind slowly turned into a chaotic labyrinth through which he walked without Ariadne’s thread; there were nights when he drank too much just trying to set his mind at peace and have a clear look at things, because contrary to most people, an intoxicated state sometimes did give him a better insight into himself and other people’s behaviour; but not this time. Reality was turning into a nightmare, his thoughts swarmed through his skull as dark night moths, he couldn’t grasp them or bring any order in them, they kept on escaping him, leaving him in his confusion. They went out together more often, but though he danced many times with the girl, there never was a real contact between them though their bodies touched. Her back always seemed rigid against his hands as a strained spring; her goodnight kisses cold, hurried and impersonal.

He often desperately thought of simply telling her he loved her, but he didn’t dare risk their friendship. He was practically certain that she’d refuse him, maybe even be horrified at his feelings, and in any case he would never see her again then. He couldn’t risk that, but neither was he able to reject his own feelings. Of course there were always other ways out, but Jack didn’t want to take those. He had never been a violent man, and murder just didn’t appeal to him. Not counting the fact that it would all have to be worked out in elaborate detail and executed in cold blood, something which he wasn’t sure he was capable of, there was always the chance that Cenaide was one of that type of women who prefers to remain a suffering widow for the rest of her life. So Jack tried the other way out.

He had always been fascinated by the strange and the occult, and a long set of tomes on witchcraft and sorcery was among his books. For fun they had even once tried to hold a séance, but except for the nuisance of a poltergeist — all too clearly created by Paul’s knee below the table — they hadn’t been able to get any results. So the group had discarded the supernatural, but it had kept on fascinating Jack. He didn’t exactly believe in the "supernatural" in the popular sense of the word, and he still thought that the general uprising of interest in the so-called "old sciences", in astrology, spiritualism and erotic orgies poorly disguised as witchcraft were mainly a reaction against the materialistic world image, a protest against the real sciences which were being blamed for the kind of world we live in. He knew a few practising witches, and even a medium of two, and he realized that some of them at least really believed in what they were doing. Their belief was genuine… but were the results? Some of them seemed to be, but were they really brought forth by something from the beyond, or was there a more materialistic origin to be found? Jack refused to believe in a heaven and hell, and in a horned and tailed Satan, but he did believe in the human mind, and in its unused potential. He believed in elemental forces, existing in nature since the beginning of time and only waiting to be discovered, elemental forms of energy of which we are yet unaware, and which can sometimes manifest themselves as an "evil" or a "good" force, not because they are good or evil, but because of the way they are invoked and used. It seemed much more likely and logical than imagining some "beyond" where bodiless spirits are eternally imprisoned, waiting from some rich and bored idiots to start playing with fake spiritualism, just to get a few silly messages.

Now it stopped being a pastime, and Jack began studying the occult in dead seriousness. He started by discarding the general works on magic, and began searching for the rare books, the real books that had not been written with a sensation-hungry public of laymen in mind. What he needed were works written by people who really knew what they were doing. He spent a lot of money, and quite some time hunting them down, but obtain them he did, and study them, through the lonely hours of dark nights, while slow rain drizzled down from a leaden sky. He didn’t paint often anymore, there was no time for that, but he kept on seeing Paul and Cenaide, though every second he was close to her hurt him, and every evening after they had separated there was an empty hollowness in his brain.

Then, when he thought he knew enough, and he had obtained all he would need, he drew a pentagram for Cenaide.

First he took an empty canvas, and drew the pentagram on it, with strong strokes of black paint. Then he drew the bigger pentagram on the floor of his study, placing the canvas in the center of it. He made the five marks on the corners, and wrote the formulas, feeling silly all the time. It was the only way, however, he had found of making direct contact with the elemental forces, no matter what form they would take. Much of it was maybe folkloristic and unnecessary for his means, but there was no way to find out what was really needed and what not, except by trying it out. Then he spoke the spells, reciting the difficult words in a soft sing-song voice, and burned the needed ingredients inside the pentagram.

Something came.

Or maybe some "things" came, he couldn’t be sure, except that whatever they were, they were certainly not of this earth. They moved slowly, almost crawling through the darkness which filled the room; and though he sometimes thought something here or there looked vaguely human, he never could be sure, and probably it was his own mind which made it resemble something familiar. He didn’t try to speak to them, for he didn’t think they were really intelligent, or even alive in the strictest sense of the word. They were forces, pure energy, but somehow managed to spread an aura around them which he could only define as purely evil, though this couldn’t really be so. He had prepared himself well however, and slowly began doing what had to be done, putting his own will on the free energy-things, chanting the old words and making the old gestures with his hands. It took a long time, and when he finally released them, and the moving darkness lifted from the room, he was soaked with sweat. The pentagram on the canvas however was no longer black, it was silvery white, and seemed to be pulsating with a strange life of its own. He stood looking at it for a long time, then got his brush and began painting the canvas in grey, until the pentagram was covered completely.

The next day he visited Paul and Cenaide, declared that he had been commissioned for a group of paintings for a future exhibition, and asked Cenaide if she wanted to pose for him. He wanted to try some new ideas, and had decided to stick to portraits for a few paintings at least. She was surprised and flattered of course, and agreed immediately. So the evenings of the next weeks — because she had her daytime job to attend to — were spent in bringing the face, that not so very special face he loved so much, on the grey-covered canvas. He began by sketching her face on the uniform background, as she was posing rather awkwardly. Then he began filling in the background, making it an old wooden table of a country inn, in which she was sitting, looking straightforward. These evenings were heaven for Jack, as she was with him almost all of the time, and as he was painting he drank in her beauty. Sometimes Paul came along also, changing the records on the gramophone, and for the rest just sitting there, watching. But it wasn’t quite as it had to be, there was a strange repellant sensation when he was really close to her, almost as if they were two negative poles rejecting each other. Even when they went out for relaxation, they didn’t seem as close as before. He didn’t sleep easily anymore, it was as if the dark took strange and alien shapes around him, which were always there, mocking him. Weird things began to visit his dreams, and gibbered to him in unearthly tongues which he couldn’t understand, so that he awoke having the impression of not having slept at all, to the contrary, he felt abominably tired.

Then he discovered that it didn’t work. Maybe he didn’t know as much about magic as he thought, or he had done something wrong, but the power of the pentagram didn’t work. The unseen distance between him and Cenaide seemed to be growing, almost as if something was constantly interfering. Anger and bitterness came, and finally, acceptance.

The acceptance was the hardest of all, because it felt as if he was cutting away part of himself, accepting the cold fact that she would never love him. He couldn’t think clearly for some time, it dampened the lights around him, took away the beauty of music, seemed to cover the paintings on his walls with greyness.

Then he began concentrating on the portrait. If he couldn’t have her, he could give to her. The portrait became an obsession, just as the girl had been, as he transferred all his feelings onto the canvas. He made the painted blue eyes cry for him, made the small fresh mouth without traces of lipstick smile for him. He put it all in the portrait, all the months of yearning, the nights of waking, the tears he had never cried, he gave them flesh and blood in his portrait. He was no longer painting a woman, he was painting the image of love, the essence of the phenomena of love, not sexual attraction or desire, and not intellectual contact or sympathy or pity, but the very spirit of unexplainable love, without thinking, without conditions. He painted it with the colours of hope and yet of sadness, with bitterness and melancholy, with dreams and nightmares. The same nightmares which swam through his mind at night, when he was tossing on his bed, trying to get some sleep, and also trying to shut the living darkness out of his sight.

Finally the painting was completed, and he asked them to come over in the evening and see the finished product. That day he corrected the last minuscule details, a final line here, a last shade of paint there, and all the time the air itself around him seemed to be alive, full of strange moving things, which he couldn’t see and couldn’t understand. Sometimes he feared he was going insane.

They couldn’t speak when they saw the portrait, that evening. Cenaide said in a hushed voice that it was… beautiful, more beautiful than any face she had ever seen, and surely this couldn’t be HER face he had painted? Of course it was her own face, and it had to be beautiful, but for the first time she was seeing herself as Jack saw her, covering all mediocrity with the radiant colour of love, which he would never see on her real features.

He laughed at their sincere admiration, and listened to them proclaiming a great future for him as a portrait painter, knowing that he would never be able to do it again. They had brought a few bottles, which were opened and emptied, and there was a lot of joking and small talk before they finally left.

After they had gone, he locked the door carefully behind them, then turned and confronted the picture. The eyes of the painting seemed to be following any movement he made. ‘Now, at last, we’re alone, my love,’ he whispered softly.

Again he drew the big pentagram on the floor of his room, then placed the painting in the centre of it. He lit the five strangely wrought candles at the five corners of the star, and burned the ingredients he had prepared. A strange but not exactly disagreeable odour began to spread through the room. Darkness came, not gradually as when evening falls, because it was night outside already, but sharply; an alien darkness which began seeping down from the ceiling where it had started as a black spot, growing till it reached the walls. Long black fingers began crawling down the four walls, and there they touched the other paintings and objects on those walls, the dark took their colours from them, they faded, became grey and then disappeared, swallowed up by the descending black shroud. As the unearthly darkness deepened, grew thicker as some abominable fog, the colours of the portrait seemed to sharpen, to radiate almost. It was as if the face of the girl began to spread a strange light of her own to counteract the growing darkness. Then he stepped inside the pentagram and spoke the last words. Only the big circle of the pentagram was lighted now, the room outside it seemed to have disappeared completely. It had been absorbed by thick string of almost material darkness, an obscurity which seemed in a frightful way to possess a private life, which seemed to be watching him constantly though it had no eyes.

He was looking at the painting. The very air around it seemed to shiver, as if acted upon by heat from some unknown source. Cenaide’s face seemed to shrink until it was like a jewelled flower in the middle of a pulsating circle of black light. He stretched out his arms towards the shrinking face, and they seemed to grow and grow, his hands blossoming at their ends as alien flowers. Then her face expanded again, filling the whole picture. Her eyes were looking at him, blue shards of sparkling glass, burning with a deep fire which reached right through his head into his brain. He thought he saw himself approaching in those eyes, very small and distorted. As he was looking, the hidden fire came through her eyes, burst through her pupils and came swirling at him in threads of burning light, as a spider’s web suddenly catching the sunlight of autumn and shining silvery. It exploded in all directions, beyond the pentagram, shivering as a silver maze, before the darkness outside absorbed it too.

It was as if the colours of the painting detached themselves from it, changing into alien, moving shapes of things for which there were no names, crawling and shrieking, blasphemous monstrosities moving inside the pentagram, before they too were taken by the darkness of the room. The darkness seemed closer, as if it was trying to edge inside the protecting pentagram; it was everywhere around him, circling him like a cocoon. Jack didn’t notice it.

‘I love you, Cenaide,’ he whispered. Though spoken so softly, the words seemed an explosion of sound, repeating themselves through endless corridors, as if the dark rejected them and bounced them back along its inner walls. ‘… love you… love you…’

Only the portrait seemed to keep its reality, and the woman in it, who was looking at him, straight at him with her blue burning eyes. Then her lips parted, ‘And I love you, Jack,’ she said. The colours around her began to change, they seemed to melt though this was impossible, and dripped down from the canvas. Cenaide moved, slowly, deliberately, she stood up. The colours became a cloaking fog through which she came to him, slowly stretching her arms out. The colours were imploding in his brain, he couldn’t think, could hardly react to what he saw and experienced. On the bare canvas, the silver pentagram was pulsating, emitting beams of an unearthly black light. The darkness around the greater pentagram was throbbing as with an immense heartbeat, and slowly the first fingers of the dark began crawling inside the pentagram. But he didn’t see, didn’t hear, except for the face coming to him, the face he had wanted so much, with the eyes burning fiercely into his own; the only clear thought in his mind was, ‘God, if it is a dream, let it continue, let it never stop, if it isn’t real it doesn’t matter!’ And then she was in his arms, soft, warm and very alive for the petrified shard of one second; he felt the silk of her hair, the softness of her parted lips as he kissed her, just before he tasted the bitter staleness of dry paint on his mouth.

After four continuous days of silence, they broke down the door of Jack Morgan’s study, and found him, lying in the centre of his chalk-drawn pentagram, like a crucified spider. Paint was everywhere inside the pentagram, as if a madman, and who else could it have been but himself, had opened all his tubes and squeezed the paint in all directions. Most of it however, was on Jack Morgan himself, on his chest and arms and face, covering his eyes and nostrils completely, a thick mass of dried paint. There were severe burns on his face and hands as well, below the paint, but it was not this, nor suffocation which had killed him.

They buried him with the little savings they found in one of his drawers, among some records and old sketches; Cenaide wore a black veil and cried, but then she always had cried easily. There were also some friends, who said some nice words about him, though they would forget him before the year had passed. None of them could explain why the paint of what had been Cenaide’s portrait had run off the canvas as if completely fresh and fluent as water, so that except for some snatches of background detail, there now only stood a black glaring pentagram.

There was an official investigation, of course, but they came to a dead end when the coroner disclosed, baffled, that suffocation hadn’t killed the painter. None of the experts was able to explain the murderous presence of thick quantities of paint inside his stomach, lungs, brain and heart.