"AKELDAMA"

by Richard Behrens

---

"Inside the museums

Infinity goes up on trial"

Bob Dylan

i

Sheldon spent his childhood watching the balloons fly, the flickering fires at dawn heating the massive billowing cloth bodies as they drifted across Harvestville Landing, their guide lines dragging across the fallow fields, churning the earth like surreal airborne ploughs. He would race across the pitted ground, attempting to keep up with the lines, but would soon run out of breath and lie flat, watching the sky and the strange beasts that drifted through the clouds.

Eagle Town was a tiny insignificant circle on a map of the Sirian Empire, unassuming and humbly silent, outside of its name possessing only one singular attribute to the outside world: a balloon manufactory. The air crafts that were produced by the Eagle Town balloon shops were used by the Papist Army in their many forays into foreign lands to conquer non-Christian heathens. They had been particularly effective in the Darsh Wars where the semi-barbaric people of the Southern Darshlands thought the balloons were the ghosts of enraged ancestors and surrendered their weapons sooner than face the wrath of their airborne forefathers.

Sheldon’s father worked as a glue boiler in the Number Four Eagle Town Balloon Factory, a petty man in a petty job, but it paid the bills and gave the family a sense that they were performing a duty that benefited the Empire. Far from being a Papist, Sheldon’s father didn’t believe in any one religion as revealed truth, but kept silent due to the strictly enforced heresy laws. He would come home from work, his forearms covered with a sickly black substance that would stick of burning leaves, and collapse on the living room coach, his face puffed and bruised, his eyes hallowed and blank. Sheldon, fearing his father like he would a dark apparition in a haunted forest, would curl up on the coach with him, drawing closer to feel his body heat, as if to reassure himself that the person sitting next to him was indeed his father and not a hell-spawn monster.

“Another day,” his father would moan, and collapse into a deep sleep. Sheldon would sit for hours waiting for him to rise, perhaps hoping that once refreshed he would become a warm and caring parent. He never failed, however, to be one full of anger and frustration.

“Damn Papus!” his father would shout, shaking a fist at empty air. “Without his ignorant meddling I would be working in the Republican Government House like I was trained!”

When he was very young, Sheldon would cringe at the sound of the word ‘Papus.’ He knew that Papus was a person, that he had somehow become king or something, that the very day that Sheldon was born, Papus had led an army on New Sirius City and seized possession of the Empire. Outside of that, he knew that his father despised the man. As a matter of formality, Sheldon would keep asking, “Who’s Papus.”

His father would lower himself to his son’s eye level, his weathered face coming in large and heavy. “Papus is the son of bitch who got up all into this mess! Him and his Neo-Catholic Church! We all have to worship him as vice-regent of God on Earth! My God! In my day, if anyone claimed that title, they would throw them into an insane asylum at best! Damn that Italian peasant to Hell!”

Sheldon’s ears always perked up. “Daddy, where’s Hell?”

His father would stiffen, stare into space, then wave a blackened hand about the living room. “Hell is all around,” he would say. “You just have to use your eyes.”

Use your eyes. Those were the directives that Sheldon’s father urged upon him over and over. Don’t accept what is told to you by the local priest, by the papal administrators, by the schoolteachers who were so afraid of their own hides being tortured for heresy that they spouted off to the children any rambling nonsense that had been state approved, like Sexton Papus IV, the Empirical Pontiff of the Sirian Empire, was God’s vice-regent on Earth and that his word and will was divine word and will, that the Empire itself was the body of God and its health and vigor determined the health and vigor of the Divine Body. These fragments of theological inanities were drilled into the heads of Sheldon and his schoolmates more than the more practical teachings of mathematics or geography.

Sheldon tried to use his eyes. He watched everything around him, the balloon workers crossing the rail tracks at day’s ends, their bodies exhausted; the evil twitch in the left eye of their local preacher when he spoke lies about religion and God; the sadness in the slackened jowls of the teachers forced to teach imperfect versions of recent history; the fear in the faces of the old farmers who remembered the glorious days of the Republic and all its liberties but now feared torture and death at the hands of the Papal Office of Theological Correction.

Hell is all around. This was young Sheldon’s theology: Hell strained through the eyes of an atheist. The blackened face. The guide lines churning the earth at dawn.

ii

The bottom-heavy sun was sinking behind the gray bricked apartment towers. Sheldon stood on a traffic island, his smile flashing white teeth and dry lips. He was twenty-one years old, tall and angular, his posture uncertain, his hair tousled with the winds of transport.

By his side: a mammoth green portfolio sheath held together with frayed twine and awkward splotches of electrical tape. A leather suitcase, road weary and filthy, in his left hand. A long frock coat covered his knees and shins and was buttoned to his youthful chin. He resembled a pillar of black salt.

As the horse-pulled drays and sputtering automobiles took their turns around his small piece of elevated asphalt, he raised his eyes and watched the azure sky which glistened like a pearl. Its glorious evening color was stained only by a single vagabond cloud that drifted against the twinkling star light.

He had never been to the capital before, this New Sirius City, the heart of the Empire. Since early childhood, when he used to sit with the freemasons at the quarry office, listening to the older men who had been raised in a very different political climate, he had heard tales of this ancient city where the Pontiff reigned from his stone tower and his Dark Vicars administered half the known world. Sheldon had been born twenty years earlier, on the very day that the Neo-Catholic Church had been declared and Sexton Papus, the man known as the Pontiff, the Italianate General from the ravaged lands of Southern Europa, had seized power and overthrew the last remnants of the Europan Republic. Sheldon had never known a world without the Pontiff.

Here in residence in New Sirius City were most of the giants of the art world, drawn from their respective regions and country haunts by the lure of the big money that was available for any talent willing to paint portraits of aging Imperial aristocrats or study at the university with great masters like Merveille and Cotuard. Sheldon would have crossed a desert just to catch a glimpse of either of those men as they passed in a crowded street. And now he was in their city. The capital of the Sirian Empire.

Sheldon's callused fingers scratched his flanks; he felt the heated rush of inspiration coming down the nerves of his trembling arms. His heart murmured lonely whispers of his country town where the amber tinged crops swayed under the puff-ball clouds drifting through the white skies. He could still see in his mind's eye the crimson cheeks of the farmers as they whipped their lazy cows.

Down below the square, a strange crew of maniacs crawled across the granite, their felt hat brims covering their eyes. A wild-faced flitterbit crooked an eerie eye at Sheldon. "You lost something, mister?"

Sheldon jerked to attention and looked at the crazed messenger boy. "Yes, I need to find my way to the University?"

The boy's face was covered with a yellow pitch and his eyes circled with thick greasepaint. They narrowed and stared deep at Sheldon's nose. "You are an outsider?" he inquired ominously.

"Yes," Sheldon exhaled.

"Always travelers! Why do they come here?”

Sheldon puffed up his chest. “I am an artist and I’ve come to practice my craft with Merveille and Coutard.”

“Who are they?” the flitterbit said with a sneer. In his hand he held his sheaf of telegrams like they were desperately needed money.

“They are great portrait painters,” Sheldon replied. “They have captured with the magic of paints, the inner light of each individual soul.”

“Yeah, well, what’s it to you?”

Sheldon blinked. “It is my life, to paint. They will teach me their craft.”

“Painting?” the flitterbit snorted. “Painters are dime a dozen in this town. I’m surprised Papus tolerates their hogwash. Where you from?"

Sheldon pointed a stocky finger into the air. The boy looked up at the darkening sky. “That’s a funny place to come from, unless you’re an angel. You’re not an angel, mister?”

“I’m afraid to disappoint you.”

“Well, don’t disappoint many people around here. You may get the Point. That’s where Papus dumps his prisoners. They go in, but they don’t come out. No one’s come out. Especially artists.”

Sheldon peered down at the manic boy. “How can one group of people who never came out of jail NOT come out more than another group who never comes out.”

The boy waved his hand of dispatches. “Don’t confuse me, just listen: you abide by the rules and you may get to go home one day. Otherwise, this city’ll gobble you whole and digest you. Take care and watch out for the Eyeballs.” He jerked a thumb towards the crowded concourse. Standing on the asphalt curb was a strange looking creature, a humanoid with an enormous helmet on its head. The visor on the front appeared like a giant cyclopean eye.

“What in the Lord’s name is that?” Sheldon shuddered.

“Eyeball,” the flitterbit explained. “No one knows how they are created, but don’t cross one. It has the strength of twenty men. And if you do manage to short circuit one, don’t try to open its head. They explode, you know.”

“I’ve heard of such things.”

“Take it seriously. Well, got to be off. My mercurial duties call me.” He waved the telegrams so emphatically that one fluttered like a falling feather, unnoticed, to the ground. “Official government business, very hush hush. Anyone crack these codes, I’ll be on the chopping block at the Point. Good luck, Man From Above.” And the flitterbit hopped off down the street like a crazed gelding and disappeared behind a wall of slate gray horading, leaving Sheldon to his ministrations. From across the street, the Eyeball stared ominously at the newcomer, its metallic face gleaming in the light from the street lamps.

Sheldon left his position on the traffic island and stepped out before a barreling ambulance. The panicked faces of the drivers flashed for an instant, their cheeks flushed with despair and rage. On the sidewalk, small children in burlap pants and shredded shirts drew cryptic designs on the sidewalk with their crayon sticks.

"What you got there?" Sheldon said, peering down over their shoulders. At first he was delighted to see anyone so young attempting to forge a creative expression, even if it was just a crayon drawing on the dusty ground; but upon closer inspection, the drawings turned out to be huge monstrous faces with bleeding fangs, imprinted over the sidewalk cracks. The kids lifted their deadened eyes and hissed like gila monsters.

“Oh dear,” was Sheldon’s critique. Privately he thought, “Do they have the sight?” and waved a diffident hand in their direction.

Sheldon went on his way keeping his attention fixed fast to the kinescope advertisements that were posted on every available space of blank wall, flapping in the evening breeze. A bizarre parade of images: handsome men with mustaches poked gun nozzles between the legs of comely women...maniacs with knives chased young boys through dormitories...motor vehicles crashed in flames over precipices. Sheldon could only look so long at the loudly colored posters before he sensed vertigo rising in his stomach.

Two women, loose and fluttering, lifted their oval cheeks to the street lamps. Their smooth skin gleamed, but their eyes were hallow and dark as if they were in the last stages of some awful disease. Sheldon realized that the girls were Siamese twins joined somewhere along the midriff; a drapery of red cloth covered their deformity. They glanced in Sheldon's direction and giggled in unison.

“Ladies,” he said, tipping his hand across his chin. The sisters giggled again and disappeared into the bustle of the street as dream-like as they had appeared.

There were pork butchers, shoe vendors, cake peddlers, strange dog catchers, and a clown balanced on a tall pair of silts. A woman in tin armor holding aloft a blazing sword (perhaps an advertisement for a lantern company, Sheldon reckoned), and a dance troupe of little people singing pornographic vaudeville ditties in a church doorway. Sheldon withdrew a draft of paper from his pocket and jotted down a curious notation:

in this carnival

felt hats

fall like rain

in

despair

It was his first poem since arriving in New Sirius City and he read it silently to himself as he glided along the cobblestone streets of the old neighborhood. The stones buckled under his feet like bread sinking in a soufflé. He stopped and looked close at the bubbling concrete but then pushed on, deciding not to appear curious.

He couldn’t help but notice that everyone he went, on every street corner, nailed to each lamppost, stapled to the wooden shafts of telephone poles, hanging from each brick wall and building-side, were little framed portraits of Sexton Papus IV, Empirical Pontiff of the Sirian Empire. It had been two decades since the day of the Advent, when Papus had rode his mighty Arabian horse, Azreal, in through the gates of the city with his officers-in-command, and personally executed, with sword blades to the neck, the President and Vice-President of the defeated Republic. Twenty years since the Republican consuls and Senators had been driven into slavery and exiled to the wastelands of the Wargonian desert. Papus had seized absolute command and had crowed himself the Papus, the Supreme Pontiff of New Sirius. Now his visage gleamed down from every wall and post, his face young and vigorous, his shoulders broad, his epaulettes gleaming with the seven-pointed star emblem of the Neo-Catholic Church. The face was long with a peaked forehead and a beak of a nose. The hair receded back with a respectable bit of gray and his cheeks were painted pastel-pink. The entire portrait was an obvious Coutard plagiarism, a third-rate attempt to recreate the style of the master.

The eyes of the Papus, Sheldon noticed, were blue and sparkling, but also stark-raving mad. He could see it clearly, he could recognize it. He took out his notebook and jotted down a variation on something he remembered from his early childhood:

the clothes

have

no

emperor

Also scattered about the walls were posters of Eyeballs. Their helmeted heads were presented in a stark minimal manner, no text or explanation, as if the sheer presence of their faces – if faces they could be labeled – were enough to drive pedestrians into a cloud of paranoia, as if their every move was being monitored with hidden recording devices. In a surreal bit of metaphysical horseplay, a real-life Eyeball – if “real” or “life” can be applied to these creatures – stood before one of the posters, watching Sheldon in his course, the glistening head appearing life-sized next to its mirrored representation on a poster. It looked like a thing with two metal heads.

Sheldon stopped at a postcard vendor whose stall was decorated with colorful paintings and photographs of different buildings around the city. Also in his collection were dozens of oval shaped frames sporting the Papus, the same pastel-colored portrait that graced the street corners. The vendor had an awkward wart on the end of his nose, which sprouted thick hairs.

"You have a handsome collection," Sheldon assured him.

"I done most of the paintings myself," said the vendor proudly.

Sheldon pointed to a drawing of a sleek cow chewing grass in a solemn field. "That's a pretty bovine; you do it from life?"

"I grew up on a milk farm." The vendor spat onto the ground and continued to chew something unknown between his teeth.

"My name is Sheldon. I'm mighty proud to meet you, sir!" He couldn't keep his eyes off the wart with its thick hairs.

"You from out of town?" the man asked, his eyes dimming.

"As a matter of fact, I've been selected by lottery to present my application to the University art school."

"What you do?"

"Painting, sir. Just like yourself, oils and charcoal and whatever else would pay the rent."

"You gonna starve paying the rent."

"Not me, my good man. I have a commodity most artists lack."

The man spat a purple wad onto the concrete squares. "What's that, pray tell me, Man from Outside?"

Sheldon thumped his chest. "I have vision."

"I hope so; your eyes look in good shape."

"No, I mean I'm a visionary. I see things in things."

The vendor scratched his brittle hair. "You see things in things. Aye, that's a new one. I'll have to tell that to the Dark Vicars."

The two men froze in their tracks. The dark looming Eyeball had approached the stall and was staring straight at Sheldon. It’s metallic head whirled with the sound of camera shutters, clacking and ticking with what seemed like multiple interior mechanisms. Sheldon shuddered and sucked in his stomach to announced: "Well, tell whoever has ears. I am proud to declare my profundity."

"And what kinds of things do you...uh...see...in things?"

"What others cannot. I mean to paint them, too."

The vendor nervously perused the Eyeball and then opened his arms wide. "What do you see here, for instant, Mr. Man from Outside? You got vision enough to see this here Papus Square?"

Sheldon looked at the flow of traffic, the passing shadows and the concrete island in the center of the square where a marble obelisk towered three stories tall, topped with an imposing Christian cross.

"Sometimes," he said peering, "it takes a minute to adjust." As he spoke, the obelisk turned into a wobbling, throbbing male sexual organ. It dribbled rivulets of semen down the purple veined sides. "Oh," he muttered. "I'd best keep this particular vision to my private."

"I declare you a fraud, then!" the vendor spat. "You see only the inside of your own skull. Be on with you, sir."

The wart began to swim over the man's face, darting about the eyebrows and cheekbones, then spinning in frantic circles, getting wider and wider until its was a flat black ugly mask over the man's entire face.

Sheldon rubbed his eyelids and turned to the street.

"You sick or something?" the vendor asked. When Sheldon looked back at him the wart was in place on the end of the nose.

"I'd best push on," he said, waved farewell, then crossed Papus Square. The Eyeball did not follow, but watched him recede. He walked along Broad Way until he arrived at another intersection of cast iron buildings and traffic islands. In the center of the open space was an austere state statue depicting an old man in a banker's uniform seated behind a desk. Sheldon had never seen a banker's desk portrayed on a public square before and marveled at the uncanny likeness of the dictaphone, memo pad, and ink well.

The man's eyes were wide with flaring brows; the jaw was tight, the eyes wide, the fingers clenched; his thick hands rested before him in a state of tension. On the pedestal, in proud stone relief, was the single word: McINCH.

But it was the crowd of women flocking at the base of the statue who appeared most beautiful to Sheldon. They didn't have the sunken eyes or the darkened lids of the other women on the street. Their faces were oval and smooth, the eyes almond shaped, shaded and beckoning. He thought of the Madonna, instantly, and jotted down on his crumpled piece of paper:

The virgin mother

sits wistfully in her garden

as her only other

lover dies

He closed his lids and saw a painting emerging on their inner surfaces - sweet and filled with delight. The backdrop of the Madonna and Child was to be a cascading waterfall coming down metamorphic rocks. The rocks were red and stained like rust. The waterfall wasn't water at all but liquid fire.

The Madonna was smiling smartly but the Child looked confused.

iii

Before his descent, he had scanned the travel brochures for New Sirius City and marked off some of the more affordable rooming houses. These were close to the abattoir and as he approached the lofty facades and iron grilled front gates, the stink of viscera leapt over the yard fences.

The house he had pegged for his sojourn stood drab and gray off a side street, but the upper apartments opened up onto cozy little balustrades that promised sparkling and inspiring views of the city.

Sheldon rang the buzzer of the landlady, Mrs. Shambles, who appeared at the door with a wrinkled face and marble cold eyes. The brochure had described her as a patron of the arts who rented most of her rooms out to students who couldn't afford some of the more affluent hotels near the government buildings.

"Cheap rooms?" Sheldon asked, peering down at the balding spot near the top of her head; he feared that it would start to sway in the breeze of the corridor ceiling fans.

“So late,” the woman said, lifting the tin flap of her porch lamp. She froze when she saw an Eyeball standing in the road, watching Sheldon. “You got one on you,” she said, gesturing towards the creature.

Sheldon shrugged. “They have been on me all evening. I have nothing to hide. Let them watch.”

"You a student?" she asked, poking a bony finger towards his portfolio.

He smiled and patted the heavily roped handles. "The children of my passion," he exhaled. "Alas, I am an artist."

"My Hector was a painter," she said sadly. "He's buried in the backyard."

"Oh," said Sheldon.

There was silence for a pace as the notion of Hector the Dead Husband hung like a vapor cloud between them. Then she said, “We’d best get a move on. These Eyeballs don’t enter through closed doors, somehow.”

He followed her up a pair of worm-eaten stairs to the upper story flats. He counted five oval portraits of Sexton Papus along the wall. That amounted to ten eyes altogether.

Mr. Shambles’ buttocks stretched under pant bottoms and Sheldon couldn't help but think of the primal earth mother, a subject he longed to paint. Her face was the intersection of wobbly ass cheeks; when she sits down, she must flatten her nose.

The staircase led them to a stuffy landing where a thin planked door sat closed as tight of a virgin's legs. "I think you'll like this city," Mrs. Shambles said in a lilting voice that soothed Sheldon's nerves. "And this house would be nice and quiet, perfect for an artist like you."

Along the wall molding were framed prints of sketches by what looked like the same artist. There were scenes of baptisms and coronations, bishops and kings at their dinner tables clutching mutton legs from a time forgotten feast.

There was a Madonna and Child but the mother looked less oval-faced than Sheldon's conceptions and more like a wealthy back bay woman posing on a beach, luxury hotels lining the coastline behind her. The Child was distinctly risto school with the large penetrating eyes of his caste.

The closer Sheldon looked at their faces, the more they seemed like large pancakes dewed with maple syrup. He had to look away.

"Oh, all these belong to me," Mrs. Shambles explained. "I mean, I don't paint; they were given to me in lieu of rent by Mr. Joe. He's a darling of a boy, a student at the medical college but also a fabulous artist. He's a distinguished gentleman you know. He's well known and his paintings can fetch a hefty sum at the investment auctions."

"I would like to meet this Mr. Joe," Sheldon muttered absently.

"Aye, he's a treasure house of images, Mr. Joe."

"His technique is indeed impeccable."

"I cannot speak for his craft, but the feelings I get when I look at his heavenly scenes..." She raised a handkerchief to her eyes; the cloth had a purple stain in the center. "And he's a good Christian, too! Look at the eyes of our Lord. It makes me want to cry on poor Hector's grave."

Sheldon smiled as he reached for his doorknob - the lid of a coffin beckoning him into a steam bath interior. The room was small, with three dormer windows along two walls and a sloping ceiling. There were fragments of paper stapled to the wooden walls. A lumpy bed with a brass frame dominated the center but there was an airy space by one of the windows where Sheldon could set up his easel.

"Once I buy an easel," he said.

"Whatiz?" Mrs. Shambles blubbered.

"I was thinking of where I would work."

"Yes," the landlady nodded. "And what are you working on, if you don't mind me nosing around in your creative life?"

"Fear not, I am mighty proud to discuss it. I am only penciling sketches at the moment, but when I have the funding and the position at the art school, I will embark upon a three paneled oil painting of Hell."

Sheldon propped his portfolio against the cold metallic radiator and looked sadly at the stitches splitting on the sides.

Mrs. Shambles sounded perturbed. "Hell?"

"Yes, Hell."

"You mean the real Hell, like down there?" She wagged a finger towards the floorboards.

"Yes, the Hell down there."

"Is that so?"

"Yes." He unraveled the leather straps and buckles at the top of the folio.

"It's going to measure 50 by 10 meters. These are only my charcoal sketches."

"How delightful." Her face was blank and eyes watery. "I see you also like to do Biblical studies."

He let one side of the folio flop to the floor, the other he held with a stern hand. Somewhere in the bowels of the radiator a blast of hot air and gas sputtered into life, sounding like a wounded dog whimpering with its tail between its legs.

"Funny you should mention Hell," Mrs. Shambles said with renewed interests. "I have a theory about poor Hector."

"And what may that be, my dear landlady?" Sheldon murmured as he drew the coal stroked sheets from his file.

"Well, the poor man was not exactly a Saint. He was involved in all sorts of monkey business I blush to even think about. There was a lot of money floating around and...well, you know landlords, Papus help them."

Sheldon smiled forcefully and slapped some sketches down on the table. Mrs. Shambles craned a neck to see the representation of heads, garbled faces, twisted in fierce agony. All of the heads ended at the neck where the muscles were strained and the veins protruded from their resting places.

"Anyway, I'm fairly convinced that the good Lord doesn't see fit to take his soul, so he must have gone to that other place, you know what I mean?"

"Mostly likely, Mrs. Shambles. A lot of people go there."

"Yes, most unfortunate. He's probably there now shoveling coal into some burning furnace while a forked-tongue demon sticks a pitchfork up his whatyamacallit and makes him wail for all his sins."

"A slipshod eternity, to be sure."

"Poor dear, he was always sensitive to heat."

"I'm sure the Devil is keeping him nice and warm."

Sheldon turned up a sketch of a man's face. Barbed hooks dug into the cheek flesh, pulling it free from the skull. Fingers were embedded into his eyes while another hand ripped the scalp from his headbones.

"Ooooh," Mrs. Shambles echoed. "Do you suppose that is happening to poor Hector even as we speak?"

"Why don't we go ask him," Sheldon suggested. The woman started to cry; her teardrops were pearls of poison falling onto her flabby cheeks, staining them a deep purple.

"Bless your heart, Mr. Sheldon," she said, touching his arm. He kept smiling, but he was feeling a burning flame sear his flesh. It stopped when she removed her fingertips.

They descended the several flights to the ground floor, walked along a sagging corridor lined with a moldy red carpet, and passed through an iron gateway into the backyard. One look at the sad flowing flower bed and the red painted back fence, and Sheldon had an idea for another panel of his oil work. The garden was a delightful representation of the primal graveyard where all the souls fall through the bottoms of their tombs and osmose through the dank and murky soil, below the roots and tubers, right down to the solid molten core of the earth which is, as everybody knows, the Gateway to Hell.

Hector Shambles' grave was a small affair by the wilting primroses and overshadowing hawthorn bush. A wooden tombstone was already worn and fading, streaked with acid rain and tilted to one side as the earth soaked up the water and pushed the shallow stone aside.

The fading etched letter read:

HECTOR SHAMBLES

LORD OF THE LAND

Mrs. Shambles drew out her handkerchief and blew hard into the embroidery. "Oh, Hector! I'll have to straighten your stone again, Lord, Lord, Lord!"

Sheldon put a palm on one of her sweaty shoulders. "Good or ill, Mrs. Shambles, he's well taken care of, in this world or the next."

"I suppose you're right. He's only a few feet under, you know. That's what makes it so confusing. All these years I thought of where in Hell he was living, as if I could send him a letter. Doesn't that sound preposterous? Do you suppose that Hell has different zip codes?"

Sheldon grunted and stared down at the headstone.

"Then I say to myself, Agnes, you silly dear, he's right here after all, just a few feet under bits and scrapping of mud and rock bits you've shoveled yourself, you foolish little girl."

Overhead a cloud passed through the dark starry sky and Sheldon could swear he saw a demon's face lurking behind one of the billowing puffs. Whoever it was, he was laughing and revealing sharp talons. Sheldon looked towards Mrs. Shambles to see if she saw it too, but her face was bloating into a large, screwed-up, white toned and red lipped clown's head, bursting into a chaos of laughing tearful sobs.

Tears fell from her eyes and exploded in the moldy earth.

iv

New Sirius City University sat dull and squat under a darkening sun as Sheldon walked along the Boulevard, the bulging portfolio in his arms. He followed lines of sullen faced students along streets paved red brick; the houses were stunted as if frightened to rise to full height.

Sheldon always felt uncomfortable with fellow students; he was convinced they came from another planet, for they were physically awkward. Some were misproportioned in limb, fumbling as they sauntered with an air of artificial self-sufficiency. Some had large warts and moles on their faces; tuberous hairs sprouted with vegetable intelligence. They were bug eyed, flat footed, their hair tousled, looking mean with superior eyes at Sheldon who, sauntering with a well-proportioned bone structure, must have looked alien in their midst himself.

Sheldon was a great lover of female beauty, but the women he saw on campus that day were no Venuses. They had an earthy look, with wide hips and buttocks that rippled with flab; they glanced under wing tipped wigs at Sheldon: "What do you want? Leave us alone with your rampaging eyes!"

He knew that if he was accepted to the Art Department, he would have to walk among these people, socialize, even worse: defend his art. There was nothing more horrifying to his senses.

The College of the Arts and Humanities nestled atop a high plateau of tiled marble and porphyry that spread over a large courtyard. The gates were of cast iron and the legend over the vaulting arch was a Latin inscription that Sheldon immediately translated as: "Work Means Freedom!"

In the center of the courtyard was an obscure object that caused him much consternation. The display was apparently a piece of work commissioned by the college by one of the more prominent alumni who was now working as a Architect for the Burrow and Dunhap Firm: a large pulsating orb made from some crystalline substance that Sheldon had little words to describe; a strange inner light, obscured by layers of mucous wads floating in a gel solution, fought its torturous way to the tensile surface. Sheldon pondered the physics involved in such a construction.

Students mulled about this structure with indifference, but its blobbing nature gave Sheldon a shudder up his spine; he couldn't fathom its meaning or even its inner structure. As he looked closely into the floating mass of blobs, white and scintillating, he had the urge to fly from the spot and hide his head in a bucket. There was something growing inside and the movement of the light was its birth pangs.

A man in a stovepipe hat and an age weary face approached and nodded his chinless face. "Magnificent work, isn't it?"

Sheldon acquiesced. "It is decorative? Or does it serve a higher purpose?"

The man sighed. "A perfect blend of form and function, deep in its own solitary perfection, the solitude of the protoplasm seeking for its lost Otherness."

"I'm afraid you lost me," Sheldon blinked.

"It is a perfect analog of our city. Watch how the protoplasmic blobs try to touch the surface with pseudopodial anguish. They seek each other but do not trust. They do not believe there is such a thing as Compassion."

Sheldon smiled and moved on, leaving the art critic behind to ponder his protoplasm. He stepped to the front door of the college which was ornamented with panels of religious scenes and settings. There was an emphasis on Moses delivering the Ten Commandments to the tribes in the Wildnerness. High up in the hall was a large hanging portrait of Sexton Papus. His manic eyes glared down at the wandering students with sapient intelligence.

Two liveried midgets ushers greeted him with enthusiastic bows and joyful aplomb. "This way! This way!" they squeaked. "Abandon all hope! These professors are demanding beyond measure!" Sheldon followed them down an elongated arching corridor towards an oaken front desk covered with telephones and stacks of term papers. There he was asked to leave his portfolio by a peevish desk clerk who promised to pass it along to the proper authorities.

The corridor walls were lined with tall oil paintings of distinguished gentlemen of the college with their white combed hair, neatly trimmed banker's suits; each had a left hand resting on an upturned Bible. The backgrounds of these solemn affairs were corded oak panels and bookcases. Sheldon felt like he had walked into an oaken casket buried under the moldering earth.

He was asked to wait in a small room filled with wooden benches and oil paintings of lush idyllic greenlands. The only other inhabitant was a tousled-haired youth with sunken cheeks; the boy compulsively picked at his pants knees and bobbed his head needlessly.

"My name is Conquist," said the lad. "Are you a candidate too?"

"Why, of course," Sheldon announced. "Even as we speak, the scholars are perusing my portfolio."

"I would not be so puff-breasted if I were you; but then again, I'm not you so you blow your horn as often as you wish."

"Are these old deans tough natured?"

The boy's eyes widened. "They are insane!"

"That's a tall order; it's my belief they are the finest judges of art in the empire."

“They are festooned with the trappings of insanity. You cannot hope to win audience with them except by the most powerful luck. And then it is almost impossible to get a grant, for they are commissioned to pass out a certain quota of commissions per year, but they rarely give out a single one. They accomplish this through a very complex means of extending the offers and signing off the first checks, but then incrementally re-evaluating the commission until it is dwindled to a mere fraction of its original proportion. Then, they can withdraw it completely without once offending their original charter’s directions.”

“Do they not value the artistic vision?” Sheldon asked, amazed.

"No, this is the first lesson you must learn at University: artists are one step lower on the social scale than paranoid schizophrenics. This college is less of an institution of higher education and more of a lunatic asylum. But forgive me now--I must communicate with my God."

The boy raised a finger to his nose and stuffed the appendage so far up one nostril that blood trickled down his finger.

Sheldon thought it best to stare at his feet and sulk until his name was called. Conquist, whoever he was, was not in his right mind.

"I suppose you're wondering why I stuck my finger up my nose."

"I was trying to forget the act."

"Well, I am in the mood to converse."

"I shall not listen."

"Regardless, I am talking to you as one artist to another, lost and adrift in this hostile universe of cruel indifference and pitiful abandonment. I became an artist in order to stop my mind from splitting into fragments, like the grain of wood on the planks my father used to beat me with, long ago on a lost Harvestville twilight, as the cows lay down in the fields with contented belches and bellies full of grass; my father tormented my body with wild thrashings that left me, on multiple occasions, bleeding on the kitchen floor and I remember only my mother's face as she stared down, afraid to touch me, ordered by my father to leave me be while I contemplated my wrong. But rarely was there a wrong, oft times it was merely a look of stark terror in my eyes that was misinterpreted as disrespect. This series of events, permeating my childhood, turned me into an artist, for I was forced to derive pleasure not from the warmth of filial communion, but the unheard voices of God speaking through the textural patterns of the world around me, spirals of light, swirls of shades and colors. That was my escape, my only source of comfort. I knew that God was awaiting me on the other side of the canvas and that I needed to create picture after picture until He chose to speak to me and those words I longed to hear were simple and plain."

Sheldon broke his oath of complacency: "So God did speak to you?"

"Ah, that is where the nose picking comes in. It was on a sunny afternoon, just as the sun sank beyond the banana trees and the smell of verbena drifted through the barn where I had my studio, I heard the voice whispering, delicately across the land, coming in from a far point on an unapproachable horizon."

"From Heaven?"

"No, from up my nose."

"What?"

"Up my nose. God was speaking from up my nose. He wouldn't come any closer."

"I'd say being up your nose was very close indeed."

“Too close.”

“So what did he say? What were these words that you longed to hear?”

Conquist paused and thought hard, as if trying to recreate a past moment. “He said, ‘Open season on obelisks.’” Then he leaned back and sighed.

“’Open season on obelisks’?” Sheldon said, befuddled.

“Yes, it was quite a turning point in my life.”

“But what does that mean?”

“How in the name of all that’s Holy am I supposed to know? I have no clue. But it was the Voice of God, and it spoke from inside my head.”

Sheldon scratched his scalp. “Is that a good thing?”

"No, I needed to feel the wind from His pursed lips hot on my ears. I wanted Him to be outside my head where He belongs; because, between the two of us..." he leaned forward and picked furiously at his knees, "...if God appears inside your head, then you are insane."

"Hence you are trying to pick Him out."

"Yes, but I never seem to catch hold of Him. He seems quite comfortable in my sinuses, I may need surgery."

"To remove God?"

"Yes."

Sheldon nodded and then took a deep breath. "May I see a sample of your work?"

The boy grinned, reached inside his dusty waistcoat, and removed a folded slice of drawing paper. He slipped it into Sheldon's hands.

In thick pencil, a figure stood against a wall of brick; his body was wrapped in a black jacket and slacks; his fingers clutched at his face which he was peeling back to reveal broken fragments of bone and gristle, a waggling tongue lost without a mouth, and eyeballs that wobbled on the ends of optic stalks. The entire head was opened like a woman's vagina.

Above the skull was a single eighth note from a musical scale.

"Which note is that?" Sheldon asked delicately.

"C-sharp minor."

"Does that note have any spiritual or symbolic meaning?"

Conquist thought for a moment, muttered, "No, not really," then withdrew a handkerchief and wiped the blood from his upper lip and left forefinger.

The midget heralds beckoned Sheldon to an ornate door that opened onto a large hall. At the end, flanked by tremendous hanging flags of state and the crest of arms of the university was a long dais filled with moldering men. They sat expectedly, their glassy eyes on the doorway, and twitched gray eyebrows at Sheldon's approach. The man in the center scratched a goatee and nodded his chin.

"Young man, have a seat in our assembly," he said, sticking a knobby knuckled finger at a red brocade chair that faced their dais.

Sheldon lowered his limbs then saw the oil painting on the lofty wall behind the dais. It showed a pompously obese man in railroad baron tweeds and smoking an absurdly large drooped pipe; his mustaches bristled before a shock white face; the nose was bulbous and red; the eye brows painted garishly; the hair was red and stringy, sticking straight out like the aftershock of an electrocution.

The President of the College, Sheldon thought amusedly. A Clown.

Of course, Sheldon was the only one to see the clown make-up. No doubt the mummified men at the dais would look up and see healthy flabby cheeks and a creased pink forehead. The paint textures would be so realistic, they would be able to smell the hair spray that matted the sparse brunette locks over the liver spotted scalp. The nose would be bulbous and red, but from nips at the whiskey bottle - not from a slotted bounce ball.

The Board of Trustees shuffled in their seats, sifted through onion skin papers before them with white bony fingers. They muttered into each other's ears, gazed at Sheldon body sitting rigidly at attention. Then the Chairman spoke once more:

"You are a fine young student, gifted and remarkable even by the standards of our art faculty which as you know are the toughest in the Empire."

"Yes, sir."

"The sketches that you have presented to the Scholarship Committee have made a deep impression. But I am sad to say that the impression is one of mixed..." he groped in the air for the next word, then lowered his white eyebrows and sighed: "…evaluations, Praised Be Papus."

Sheldon blinked.

"This is not to say that we have decided against your application for a scholarship; we merely wish to elucidate certain aspects of your work."

"Yes, sir."

The Trustees gave each other a final glance then the Chairman spoke rapidly: “Do you accept the Neo-Catholic Church of the Sirian Empire as the sole source of Truth and religious authority upon the Earth?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you accept Sexton Papus IV as the Supreme Pontiff and Sole vice-regent of God upon the Earth?”

“Most assuredly, yes.”

"Are you now or have you ever been a member of an infernal organization either here or abroad?"

"No, sir."

"Have you ever accepted initiation into any occult societies?

"No, sir."

"Have you ever worshipped by deed, meditation, prayer, or devotion the Dark Lord of Hell, otherwise known as Satan?"

"No, sir."

"Have you ever spoken the Lord's Prayer backwards, or spoofed the words or meaning?"

"No, sir. I have been pious with Holy Writ."

"Have you ever given refuge or aid to any person or persons who have performed any of the preceding activities?"

"No, sir. If I have, it was without my conscious knowledge."

"Have you ever performed Satanic acts without knowledge of their significance?"

"No, sir, not without knowledge of their significance."

“Have you ever performed these Satanic acts with knowledge of their significance.”

“My answer is no, and is even more firm and determined than my last answer which was no.”

"Have you ever, in your heart of hearts, in the depth of your most solemn solitude, petitioned the Devil Satan for aid in any matter, no matter how incongruous or petty?"

"No, sir. Definitely no."

"Have you ever signed your name in blood to any document with or without knowledge of that document's content?"

"No, sir."

"Have you ever taken the Lord's name in vain?"

"No, sir."

“Have you ever held any opinion that was contrary to the Neo-Catholic Doctrine of Transmogrification and the Alienation of Souls?”

“Not with knowledge of their significance.”

“Have you ever held any contrary opinion to the above fore-mentioned Doctrine with knowledge of their significance.”

“My answer is a no that is even more firm and determined than my last answer which was also no.”

The Chairman had worked his way into a frenzy and was, by this point, frothing at the mouth. Spittle flapped from his sputtering pale lips. His fingers rapped the table forcefully.

"Then why in the name of Jesus Christ Almighty are you painting a triptych of Hell?!"

The board burst into spontaneous cacophony. Sheldon heard invectives and irreverent ejaculations: "Who does he think he is? What kind of nonsense is he doing with our money? Damn his arrogant green nosed attitudes? Let him go back to the colonies and suffer amidst God's lost children, that'll put an end to his worship of Satan?"

Sheldon plucked his trouser leg and rubbed his forehead. He stiffened as the Chairman banged his fist on the dais and silenced his fellow members.

"These are grave matters," he begged. "You must explain yourself, Mr. Sheldon."

With a deep sigh, Sheldon leaned forward and stretched his arms, then sank into a relaxed slouch. "I must be given latitude," he said.

"Eh?"

"Please give me freedom to speak my mind?"

"Speak. We will not judge. That is not our role."

"Then hear me: You are great men, reasoned and knowledgeable. News of your great university reached even as far as Eagle Town where I was raised by a pious father, a glue boiler who worked hard to supply his family with food and shelter. With his passing, I have looked forward to see in the faces of you great men, flickering shadows of my father's compassion. I need you to be substitute fathers, to say the least. I want this university to be my second home."

The Chairman furrowed his brow. "The question here is about your triptych proposal, not the buffoonery of a provincial glue boiler."

"I beg your pardon, I must have freedom to speak at my own pace." The Chairman flashed a palm of understanding and Sheldon continued: "My father's death placed a great heaviness on my heart. A dark cloud that could only have been wafted into my Being by the Dark Lord himself. No, I have never worshipped the Devil; but he has invaded my life. I am seeking salvation, sirs. Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and His self-appointed Regent on Earth Sexton Papus is not enough to expel the demons. One must act. My painting is my act."

"But why Hell?" the Chairman groaned, obviously feeling pierced by Sheldon's words.

"I call it Hell for simplicities sake, but that is merely a word. Words cannot do justice to its real nature. Every religion in the history of the planet has used it's own name for the region in question."

The Chairman fumbled for words. "Sir, your statement implies two blasphemies: one, that the ancient religions set up on earth by Satan himself to tempt man away from the Father were in any way comparative to Christianity; and two, that Hell is not a real place."

"Oh, I believe that Hell is very real. I am painting visions of things that exist a priori! I believe we merely conflict over the location of this place called, for convenience sake, by the word Hell."

"And where, in the name of Jesus, do you believe this place to be?"

"Hell is all around us. Those with eyes can see it."

"Eyes?"

"Yes, the two orbs on either side of your nose; they come in useful to ensure that you walk in the right direction, that you anticipate objects hurtling towards your head, that a gourd vendor gives you correct change after a purchase, that you do not say, `Madam' when you are speaking to a man, and that you derive pleasure from the curve of a woman's torso instead of a chimpanzee’s behind. But most of all, your eyes allow you to look for the signatures of God and the Devil as they are carved into the stone, earth, glass, steel, and human flesh about us. The minions of Hell are clambering at the frontiers of our being at all times, trying as you put it yourself to `tempt man away from the Father' and it is important that we learn to recognize these minions, these monsters, that sprout from our skulls, expel from our rectums, tear at our brain tissue, tempting us with madness, the ultimate balm for emotional chaos. It is the importance of my drawings that I provide lost souls with a tourist map of Hell, to familiarize them with the landscapes and the varieties of tortures in order to give them a fighting chance to expel the monsters of the Abyss and bring the love and compassion of the Father back into their lives."

The Chairman was puffing his cheeks with choleric rage. Sheldon could see the crown of his head turning into a discolored orb, purplish and sickly green, flecked with scales that fell about his hairy ears. Sperm cells the length of jump ropes were pirouetting from his head and fading into the dark recesses of the room.

The rest of the Board were sitting in high seats, malformed embryonic creatures raising flabby fingers to their toadish faces. They shrieked, pulled flies from the air with their distended tongues, and urinated an odorous stale gel through the folds of their gray robes.

"Remove yourself from our presence," the Chairman roared. "We will review your application anew based on the unorthodox testimony that you have just presented. For the moment, begone with you, sir! We will contact you in due time."

Sheldon turned and walked the length of the room, exited into the corridor and headed for the front of the building. All about, imps and trolls and goblin jabbered and squawked and bounced about the length of the balcony and in the shadowed alcoves. They blew darts through blow pipes, breathed clouds of poisonous gas, hurled severed heads across the carpeted walkway; but Sheldon, lost in a frenzy of swirling images and flashing lights, tried his best to ignore their invectives.

"You'll never take me alive," he said to Hell which had spread across the corridor like a lolling tidal wave across a tiny atoll.

v

Sheldon ate supper at a side-street cafe on a verandah suffused with gaslight. Fish eyes watched him glumly from his plate and his clear white wine tasted like freshly splattered blood. Several times he had to clutch the table cloth and take deep breaths, assuring himself that the monstrosities emerging from thin air like deep sea creatures were non-predatory despite their fiendish fangs. When he was calm, relaxed and alone in his boarding house room, the demons would subside and leave him in peace.

Across the room an Eyeball clambered to a table against the far wall and clumped down into the seat. It’s single-eyed face turned towards Sheldon and clicked and whirled. Sheldon stared back at it, mouthed with his lips, ‘Love live Anarchy’ and ‘Hell is for Martyrs!’ and then searched about for service.

A waiter with a wobbling handlebar mustache served a tall glass of purple liquid. “Ringo juice,” he announced. Sheldon sniffed it with suspicion. As the waiter knelt to place the glass on the table, his mustache detached from his lip and fluttered towards the ceiling.

"Blazes," the waiter scowled and climbed on a chair to retrieve his disobedient facial hair. He clutched it between two fingers and stuck it back above his mouth. "Will there be anything else, sir?" he said quietly.

"Yes," said Sheldon. "Can you explain what just happened?"

The waiter frowned. “Oh, dear me. Yes, that is rather difficult."

"But can you explain? Please."

"It has a will of its own, I'm afraid."

"Then it really happened?"

"What really happened, sir?"

"Your mustache flew off your face?"

"Sir?"

"I saw your mustache fly off your face."

"That is quite an extraordinary thing to proclaim, sir."

"But...I mean...you even now just told me it has a will of it's own?"

"I was referring to something else sir," the waiter grimaced, pointing down to his trouser leg which was stained heavily with urine.

Sheldon waved the waiter aside then lowered his head into his hands. Flying mustaches were not particularly hellish, so it had been difficult to distinguish the hallucination from true vision. The event had left him in a profound quandary, whether to place the mustache in his grand triptych design.

As he mused, a young woman with short blond hair approached his table and touched her fingertips to his shoulder. "Excuse my intrusion," she said in a crisp voice. "Did I see you on campus this afternoon?"

Sheldon glanced up and felt a glowing radiance warm his skin. Before him was yet another Madonna, fresh faced, smooth skinned, eyes passionate and absorbed; her body, in its plain checkered pull over and faded blue jeans, was thin but overwhelmingly inviting for pregnancy: his first glance at her was drawn down to the triangle made by her pressed thighs and pelvic bone. Then he noticed her slender breasts - the nipples were barely visible against the shifting fabric of her shirt - and long, smooth neck.

Right in the center of her forehead, a maggot burrowed through the skin, erupted through the surface and waggled a single eyeball on the edge of a thorny stalk.

Sheldon hastened to remember her opening question: "Yes, I am an applicant to the Art College."

"Art, right?" she asked. "I saw you enter the Board of Trustees office."

"Yes," he replied, then motioned for her to sit. "Please, I would be honored."

"Thank you, my name is Wendy."

"Sheldon."

"How do you do?" She smiled then slapped the table. "So you want to tell me how your interview went with those crusty old bastards."

Sheldon grinned and sipped his cup of blood. "They were not sensitive to my proposals."

"Sensitive? The Trustees? It will be cold day in Hell when they give any sense of artistic understanding."

"A cold day in Hell," Sheldon mused, scratching his chin. "Are there days when Hell is cold?"

Wendy waggled her head. "I'm not sure, it's just an expression."

"I don't believe I've heard that one. What exactly does it mean?"

"Uh, I guess...something that doesn't happen very often. Probably because Hell is full of flames and it's supposed to be very hot."

"Yes, that much is so."

“And I suppose it would take a titanic event to make it cold. Yes, I think that’s what the expression is supposed to mean. I’m not sure, it’s just something my father used to say while he was combing his hair. ‘It’ll be a cold day in hell!’”

"You're not from around these parts, are you?"

"No, I come from the outerlands, Eagle Town to be exact."

Wendy screwed up her eyes. "I think I have a grand-uncle who was born there. He was a balloon manufacturer."

"Eagle Town is renowned Empire-wide for their balloon manufactory. I myself worked several summers trimming guide lines."

Wendy smiled: "Manual labor for the struggling artist? Were you saving money to come to New Sirius City?"

Sheldon shrugged. "The University means nothing more to me than money and support; I need no ego trip nor am I interested in being around other artists."

"Isn't that a bit harsh; it's very important to be among your peers."

"They offer me nothing. Quite the contrary, they attack my work and my ideas and unsettle the focus I need to achieve. No, Wendy, I'm afraid other artists are a threat to my being. I'll be as polite and sociable as I can, according to my high ethical standards; but I will never accept their advice or share with them my visions. I suppose it will be...a cold day in Hell...when I consent to their company."

Wendy nodded and looked down at her hands. "I'm an artist, Sheldon; will you reject my company?"

"You are young and pretty and I am considering asking you to model for my triptych. Beyond that and a possible friendship, I need you not as a fellow artist."

Wendy brooded. "I'm not of your mind-set, Sheldon. I believe that individuality is meaningless when not related to some sort of community, or common societal goal."

"Ah, but now you are talking like a college student, all head and no heart. That is not what painting is all about."

"What is painting about then, Mr. Sheldon?"

"It's about eyes, seeing. Seeing with the heart through the orbs in your skull."

"The brain plays no role, Mr. Sheldon?"

"What possible role could the brain play in art, Miss Wendy?"

"Discrimination; accumulation of wisdom; intuition channeled through the higher senses, directed towards the outer world and the community we live in." Wendy got to her feet indignantly and wagged a finger pedantically. "Without our brains," she continued, "we would be reduced to the animal body and our appetites would be unquenchable. It is only through wisdom that we learn how to seize control of our bodies, our senses, our minds, and bring us, step by step, to God."

But Sheldon was not listening to Wendy's diatribe; he was staring at the maggot that was crawling across her forehead. It sniffed at her eyes with its own ocular stalk then darted back into its skull burrow.

"Are you listening, Mr. Sheldon?"

"Yes, I hear you. But I still insist that other artists can teach me nothing. Do you hear me, Miss Wendy? Nothing!"

“That’s a very extreme attitude.”

“Perhaps, but I am not my father’s son for nothing. When he was engaged in the activity of producing glue for the balloon manufactory, he presented to his community a proud face, one that was lopsided and near-sighted perhaps, but a proud one nonetheless. He did not let his family starve, even at the expense of being ridiculed by the community.”

“And why,” Wendy asked, “would he be ridiculed if he was so important to the balloon makers?”

Sheldon shrugged. “Perhaps because he believed Sexton Papus to be a petty-minded, ego-maniac of monstrous proportions who had no more access to spiritual truths than a masturbating orangutan!”

“Dear me!” Wendy said, glancing around. She jumped nervously when she saw the Eyeball at the remote table. “You shouldn’t say such things in public!”

“But my father did. He would sit in the town market talking to who ever would listen. ‘Papus,’ he’d say, ‘doesn’t have a key to heaven. The only key he has is to the shit house!’”

“Lord in Heaven,” Wendy gasped, covering her eyes with one fluttering palm. “Keep down your voice.”

Sheldon smiled and sipped from his Ringo juice. “What is this vile brew anyway?” he asked.

She pressed her lips tight and folded her hands. "If that is your opinion,” she pronounced, “then you are in Hell, Mr. Sheldon. Alone and in Hell."

He nodded and sipped from his glass. "You are wrong in only one respect, Miss Wendy: I am not alone. You'll be surprised who is here with me."

He laughed maniacally until she was gone then he finished his supper. As he walked back to the hotel room, he noticed that his heart was racing. Deep inside the chambers of his beating organ, he knew that he had undergone a change, that the confrontation with the Board of Trustees had toughened him. The people about him on the sidewalk squares, the gaunt and sullen faces that bobbed in the gaslight mist, were contemptuous; he desired the power to destroy them, murder each and every one.

Put them out of their misery, he reasoned. Overworked, unfeeling bastards. They are cancerous, they fester.

By the time he arrived at his boarding house, he had tempered his flow of rage. In bed, he scribbled another poem into his notebook:

madonna

births siamese twins

the storm rages

it laughs

Rubbing his forehead, he half expected to feel a maggot crawling across his worry wrinkles; there was only oily skin. From whence were these vision coming? He had never stopped to asked. Perhaps his rage at Miss Wendy had erupted because she was forcing him to consider what he did not want to think about: the source of his pain.

Why was he painting Hell? The Trustees had wanted to know the same answer, but they asked the question for a different reason. They were interested in mutilating his vision, not question its validity; their fears of his darkest dreams were even greater than his.

And Miss Wendy, who had no knowledge of his drawings, looked him straight in the eye and acknowledged something the Trustees had missed. You are in Hell, she had proclaimed.

I am not alone, he had responded.

Wendy was there too, as well as the Trustees, and Mrs. Shambles, and the freaks who strutted the avenues of the city looking for their lost ones. They were all in Hell with him.

And yet the questions tore at his brain, kept him awake all night: What if he was alone? What if the maggot crawling from Miss Wendy's head was entirely in his own mind? What if the Board of Trustees...

He felt a tugging at his mind, a drilling like a surgical instrument cutting away at his brain, painfully, inexorably. He wanted to scream, but he could not find his mouth.

Damn that awful woman, she had made him start to think.

vi

There was a bar open all night near the college. As the moon rose over the city, reflecting the slate gray paleness of the walls and streets, Sheldon stumbled deliriously down a back alley before finding the correct doorway.

Inside were scattered customers, barflies and booze hags waiting for deliverance. They picked their hair and slobbered into their drinks. A few businessmen sat in a booth and ate chili peppers, beans and tomato sauce, a large basket of cut fries and pork rinds. They were talking grotesquely about pornographic movies and laughing heartily between belches.

Behind the bar a small man with wire framed glasses spat into a shot glass. There was a strange familiarity about him, in the way the glasses glistened in the overall dangling lights.

Above the bar was a surprising motif, a prairie scene painted with elegant and beautiful swirls of amber yellow, hued with a scintillating paleness from the rising moon on the horizon. Standing around a slate tombstone were two people, a farmer and his young sunken daughter. Both looked subsumed in sorrow and the father's palms rested on the handle of a large shovel.

What a strange scene to hang above a bar, Sheldon considered. The bartender lifted his flaccid cheeks. "What would you what?" he asked.

Sheldon grunted. "Whiskey and soda."

The bartender threw the drink together and slid it across the bar top. Down the way, a gangly preacher in clerical vestments sat on a cracked leather stool and contemplated a mug of beer before him. His fingers lustily caressed the smooth curves of the flue.

Sheldon downed his drink with two gulps and threw some change on the bar. He pushed past some bar hags--their bone structure resembled something arachnoid--and stood beside the preacher.

"Father," he said, sitting down. "Are you busy?"

"Busy?" the man asked sonorously.

His face was pasty white, cracked and lines of theatrical make-up. The side burns were long and seemed detachable as if pads of Velcro were situated underneath. His bone structure was gaunt and the head was covered with what looked like a piece of carpeting cut with shears and pasted awkwardly over his scalp; the sides were frayed and the material painted brown. The eyebrows were slabs of greasepaint caked on with a garden trowel.

"The name is Father Ferrie," he said whimsically. "I don't believe you are a man of the faith."

"How would you know?" Sheldon asked.

Father Ferrie laughed. "You stink like Hell!"

Sheldon tapped the bar with his fingers. "I need you to tell me what you know about Hell, Father."

The painted eyebrows arced. "Saint's alive. You want ME to tell you about Hell. Well, that deserves another drink. Hey, Louis! Let me have another mug of this infernal brew and do it double this time. Well, this is a truly proud opportunity."

Sheldon shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "I'm working on a piece of art; it has to do with Hell. I'm gathering material."

The preacher received his double mug and gulped greedily. His eyeballs glistened. "Well, just relax, son, and I'll recount a parable of Hell that I've been preaching to my congregation the past twenty years. It's an amusing piece of fluff that just might learn you something."

Over in the corner the businessmen belched on their chili peppers. Sheldon kept an eye on their bobbing heads while Father Ferrie wove his tale in a rustic tenor:

"Once upon a time, back in the grand old days of the Republic, there was a rich boy from a good school. He had everything handed to him on a silver platter: the best teachers, the most pin money, the finest suits. He was a true businessman in the deepest sense. But he wasn't happy. And then one day there was a plummet at the stock exchange and his father, being a manic-depressive speculator, lost his shirt. The old man hurled himself from a tenth story window and became a spilled can of red paint on the sidewalk below.

"Then this boy, Donald the son that is, moaned and groaned and went through all sorts of existential despair asking himself for the first time: `What is this all for? People die horribly, little boys grow up to be insane, plants wither when you water them too much, sex never kills loneliness. It's all so upside down.'

"Then he looked deeper into himself and saw this growing darkness at the core of his being. What makes me so different from the crazies on the street, he asked. This is something I must think about.

"Well, he decided to go to a famous necromancer who lived downtown, operating out of a flea bag occult shop that sold all sorts of wanga bags, herbal roots and ritual oils. The name of the necromancer was Herman the Thoth, a miserable demoniac if ever you saw one. He was over eight feet tall and had a gigantic chin.

"Donald, being the good little businessman his father had raised him to be, brought to Herman's store all the money he possessed, which amounted to considerable fortune despite the stock market crash. Herman at first didn't see the bag behind the boy's back and merely asked him what he wanted. They were in the store surrounded by all the implements of Hell: dangling roots, creepy lashes, cat o-nine tails and handcuffs, leather masks and phallic shaped candles. The walls are decorated with pentagrams and sigils of the Dark Lord in all forms from goat to a priest with horns dressed in a red cape.

"`I want to talk with my dead father,' the boy asked boldly. Herman was taken aback; his mouth dropped and then his teeth gnashed just like in the New Testament. He screamed at the top of his lungs, `O, sooner you'd ask me to hand over all the empires of the world and pour into your hands the treasuries of all the nations! Please, please anything simple as that. Do not ask me for the serious price I'd need pay to have one of the dead brought back from the grave.'

"Donald saw Herman's weakness and brought forth his treasury. Out of a burlap sack poured thousands of bills, stocks and bonds, the whole works of his father's streamlined empire. Herman's eyes sharpened and he struck his pointed nose down into the stash. `Well, I see. Yes, there could be a way. I'd need think this over, a mite.'

"So the next day, Donald arrived at Herman's store and the old wizard had rigged the place to look like a demon's sitting room with all sorts of paraphernalia, inscribed pentagrams, candles dripping with human fat, the skulls of sacrificed babies dangling from the ends of swaying chains. Donald's first impulse was to run screaming from the room, but the call of his father's spirit was too endearing. The poor boy shivered and sweated as the weird rites began.

"It is not fitting for a member of my profession to be describing such dark proceedings; so forgive me if I neglect to elucidate the invocations and evocations. As a matter of fact, it is because I knew the intimate details of the rite that I am sitting here now, defrocked and defaced. So to protect yourself as well as my own, I will be parenthetical about the whole affair.

"Suffice it to say that the magic worked and within a few days, Donald's meager investments in the crippled stock market began to show a return. The pallor of the economy brightened. Donald's money was vitalizing medicine to the wounded businesses on the verge of despair. The stocks matured and multiplied, the companies of Donald's holdings made vast progressions towards international monopolies and cartels. Donald was on his way to his first trillion.

"Of course, Herman the Thoth got an agent's fee of ten per cent.

"`But where is my father in all this?' Donald asked the wizard.

"'Patience, boy,' Herman quipped. `Trust the magic.'

"The monopolies grew and before he knew it, Donald was the sole stockholder in third world nations. He was buying and selling principalities and commonwealths on a daily basis. He had to incorporate himself as an international finance company.

"And so the years passed. The stock exchange boomed, making billions and trillions for lucky speculators who just pushed all the board up to their maximum. The games of high finance are a murky field for one such as I, but I could not help but be impressed by the adroitness and skill by which Donald made his fortune, tripling it each day, quadrupling it every other day. Before long, he was the wealthiest man in the world.

"But there was a price. He did not merely accumulate a fortune. He had to trample over most of the human race to get there. Sitting in the oak paneled office of his amalgamated enterprise skyscraper, one hundred and thirty nine stories over the din of the streets, leaving work each day by helicopter which alighted on the front lawn of his upstate mansion, he never got to see most of what is commonly known as the human race. He not only became a prisoner of his own life but he worked hard to make everyone else a prisoner as well.

"Entire populations of cities were put to dig his mineral mines, huge sectors of society were addicted to the opiate drugs he imported from third world plantations. The consumer on the street had psychological addictions to all sorts of his products which flooded the markets, products that are not necessary for survival--like electronic entertainment devices and pornographic magazines.

"So, it came to pass that a lone maniac, lusting for revenge, a homeless waif who had seen his family die of Donald's drugs, his apartment building leveled by Donald's bulldozers, wandered into the amalgamated building one day when the winds on the roof were strong enough to upturn a farmhouse. He snuck up to the roof with cleverly forged clearance cards and waited behind an antenna pylon for the dreaded man to show his face.

"When the zillionaire appeared on the catwalks, the anarchist stepped forward and fired several bullets into Donald's skull. Security agents dove like crazy and in a flash the assassin, without trial or jury, was ripped to shreds.

"All went black for poor Donald. He reclined against a hard hot surface and when he opened his eyes, he was in Hell. The landscape bubbled with molten lava and desiccated bodies marched around mountain crags, holding the boulders of their slave labor on their creaking shoulders.

"And lo and behold, sitting on a rock before Donald, naked and blistering in the heat, was his old man. Donald, for the first time, noticed that his father's breast's hung down and white hair sprinkled the chest of his otherwise hairless body. The old guy looked like a sad shaven ape.

"`Hello,' Donald said.

"`Oh,' the old man stared blankly. `It's you.'

"`I've come a long way to see you and paid a heavy price.'

"`Why?'

"Donald thought for a long time. `I don't know,' he said.

"The two sat there staring at each other, having very little to say."

Father Ferrie finished his tale and scratched his mohair wig. His lips slobbered at the whiskey glass in his shaking fingers.

"Obvious moral," he said. "I need not present an exegesis."

Sheldon nodded and lowered his face into his hands. "I'm a miserable wretch," he stated. "I will most certainly fail."

"Fail at what?" Ferrie cried. "But sir, you have not told me your story? Who are you? And where have you been? Where are you going? What is your goal?"

Sheldon closed his eyes and saw, in a flash, a painting he would sketch as soon as he returned to his boarding house: a beach front, fat businessmen crossing the sands towards the swaying palms and the serrated balconies of the tourist hotels. One of them had a mohair wig and was smiling. Above his head were the words in gothic lettering: "What is your goal?"

The bar came fading back into view.

"I will fail to open people's eyes," Sheldon explained. "The path taken by Mr. Donald is a solitary one. No one accompanies you into death. You go alone."

"That is sadly true, a lack. I have experienced this despair in my own profession, although I am not an artist."

"You are indeed a master storyteller, for you have opened MY eyes with your parable."

Father Ferries smiled, his eyebrows cracked. "You flatter me; but I am a defrocked man of the cloth who, in his youth, thought I could reveal to my flock visions of heaven and hell. I related the tale of Mr. Donald to accent that we are all alone and remain alone. They drove me from the Church because I could not accept Sexton Papus as the vice-regent of God on the Earth. My Lord, I can barely accept him as a human being with two arms and two legs, far less a spiritual leader. On a dark night, I was tarred, feathered, and hung from a lamppost. Little children spat on my swaying limbs. Today, I preach only to myself, for I remain the only man who will listen to me."

Sheldon slipped from the barstool, patted Father Ferrie on the shoulder and muttered, "Thank you for your tale. It was most illuminating."

"Thank you, sir. Whatever your name and whatever your goal, I applaud you. Years from now I will tell of the day when I entered a bar for a snort and I met the man known as Eye-Opener."

"Thank you."

"Yes, my love to you. May we meet again in the City of Refuge."

Sheldon nodded. "The City of Refuge."

He threw a tip on the bar and fell into the street. His legs took him in a random direction and he was conscious only of red bricked walls, glowing gas lamps, the first wafts of fog from the river front, and pale, sallow faces staring with widened eyes.

A long time ago, he thought, there was a little Sheldon sitting in a baby stool and along came a man with a sardine. The man had a tremendous mustache. His lips were cracked. When he smiled, his eyes became very small.

The baby cried because he was hungry and the sardine looked so good. Perhaps the man with the mustache was Jesus. Or Jehovah. It could not have been Sheldon's father because the man was allergic to fish and would never touch a sardine for fear of his life.

But he remembered the man's face. He was dark and hairy. But he filled Baby Sheldon with great comfort. His body flooded with warmth, shelter, a full stomach, a kiss upon the lips, embracing arms.

He reached into his pocket and wrote the following poem:

i fill my plate

with offerings

while

the man

with the

smiling

mustache

peforms surgery

on my eyes

i would be blind

than live

with this

fish

vii

Sheldon spent the following week alone in his boarding house room, sketching and musing, taking his supper at odd hours in randomly selected restaurants and cafes, listening to opera voices on a run-down Disc-o-phone lent to him by Mrs. Shambles, and patiently checking the mailbox every morning at ten for word from the University.

Occasionally, he would glance out his window down into the back yard and find Mrs. Shambles kneeling amidst the primroses over her husband's grave. She seemed sanguine, contemplative, and never showed any sign of grief; but her obsession with the tomb no doubt dated from Sheldon's arrival at her home and her glances at his sketches of Hell.

Sheldon received his rejection notice on the seventh day and read with trembling hands:

"It is without doubt that you are a talented and creative young man, full of energy and spark; but your choice of subject matter is too delicate and controversial. We cannot risk exposing our students to such visions. We are a Holy institution, dedicated to the promulgation of the Word of God; therefore we have little use for windows onto Hell.

"Further, the sketches that you have filed with our committee for consideration shall be burned immediately in the University incinerator. Consumed in flames is quite appropriate, do you not believe so?

"We wish you the best of luck elsewhere and may God one day find you worthy and purge the demons of Hell from your poor suffering soul."

The notice was signed by the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, New Sirius City University.

Depressed, Sheldon put on his felt hat and stepped out onto the landing. Across the hallway, a door to the opposite flat opened to reveal a white-faced lanky dandy dressed in velvet trimmed vest and pleated trousers. His face was daubed with various pigments and a sickly sweet smell permeated the corridor.

This was Mr. Joe the religiously enflamed painter.

He held a quaint walking stick that was capped with a dusty glass replica of an amethyst. It came down before his pointed shoes and he stood firm in the doorway of his room. His eyes gazed rapturously at Sheldon.

"Are you the student from the university?" he asked in a voice that was too low toned for his flippant countenance.

"I am Sheldon. I presume you are Mr. Joe."

"The same; I don't believe we have yet made each other acquaintance."

"No, I apologize for my hermitage; but I have been working harshly on my projects."

"Please don't apologize, my lad. Being a fellow artist, I can comprehend the need for solitude. But all work and no play makes an artist a fuddy-duddy! Don't you agree? Shall we step into my room for a quaff of the saintly brew?"

Sheldon forced a smile and followed the dandy into the flat which was decorated with flowing silken white sheets on the walls, creamy tan armchairs and a long l-shaped sofa into which Sheldon sank while Mr. Joe poured two mugs of Ringo juice.

"I am informed through my contacts that you are a painter of the infernal," said Mr. Joe wistfully, taking his place on the sofa.

Sheldon gulped at his juice. "I suppose you can phrase it as such."

"That is not to my tastes," Mr. Joe grimaced.

"I am sorry. The infernal is all about us."

"Quaint. You're sense of humor is subtle. I hope, for your sake, that your paintings are as subtle as your humor."

Sheldon then said eagerly, "I draw Madonnas for my amusement." He felt guilty, abandoning his principles and trying to be diplomatic with this undoubtedly well-respected artist. He didn't know why he made no attempt to defend his triptych; perhaps his rejection from the University had unhinged his nerve.

Mr. Joe's eyes widened. "Madonna's! Splendid! Can I see any of these representations? Do you have them in your room?"

"I'm afraid my Madonnas are all aborted creations; the ideal images are on the insides of my eyelids."

"That is an odd retort. I will please ask you to explain."

Sheldon nodded and pressed his fingertips together, trying to come across as stately and wise. "I have attempted to put my visions down on canvas, but the technique to convey such a potent image, one so sweet to my mind and memory, baffles my every attempt."

"Ah yes, the demon lurking at the gate of art." Mr. Joe smiled broadly. "He has a foul stench and is called No Talent."

"Talent? Are you suggesting I lack talent. You have not even seen my sketches."

"A man who cannot paint the Madonna is not an artist. I am adamant! I am firm! I stand my ground tho all Hades is thrown on my lap."

"I have seen your Madonnas. They are hanging from the wall outside your door."

Mr. Joe waggled a limp hand. "Yes, my paltry failed studies which I pawned off on the poor Mrs. Shambles. I do believe she is going insane."

"What's this?"

"All the time she spends her husband's mound. She believes the old toad to be in Hell."

"The women has obviously been traumatized."

"Am I mistaken to think that you have put the idea in her head?"

"Me? I said nothing of the sort to her."

"She said to me just the other day, `All this time I have been admitting, Joe, your angels and saints, I never thought to consider that we are all sinners and the only unearthly beings we are going to meet when we're dead are the ones with barbed tails and nine foot long tongues.' She said, `Sheldon the art student told me that.'"

"She has seen my sketches. I did not mean to make life more difficult for her."

There was a long pause as Mr. Joe scratched his chin then he said sharply, "I don't believe that."

"Eh? What?"

"Any man who waltzed around preaching of the fires of Hell has need consult with an Alienist."

"A what?"

"A head shrinker; one who probes around all the fuzzy memory bits in your brain and finds out why you beat your wife and lose jobs and dreadful things like that. Apparently, they're quite good at discovering unconscious motivations."

Sheldon puffed his breast. "And why must it be me to see this Alienist? Why are you exempt from such need?"

Mr. Joe pointed towards some of his canvases which were stacked together under a window shelf. "Because my art is spiritually healthy, sanely divine you might say. The climes of Heaven are more suitable to my unconscious."

"How can you distinguish healthy from non-healthy art, Mr. Joe?"

"The proof of an artist's mettle is in his images, would you not say?"

"I'd say its in his handling of whatever images he chooses."

Mr. Joe let out with a profound laugh, one that seemed to crack his face in two. He kept laughing, far past an appropriate stopping point. Sheldon got to his feet and approached the canvases which he began to rifle through while Mr. Joe continued with his cackles. The images were indeed much more harmonized, balanced, in tune with a delicate state of being: misty hazes fell over idyllic dells like morning mist, classically proportioned young men and women strode in flowing robes along river fronts, trim-bearded kings sat with their buxom and luscious queens on golden thrones, the sun and the moon followed each other non-competitively over a vast, loving sky.

When Sheldon slumped back to his seat, Mr. Joe was still laughing.

"What I said wasn't so funny," Sheldon moaned.

"Forgive my editorial comment," Mr. Joe said finally. "I just find your hopeless lack of experience with people quite amusing."

"Lack of experience? What people are you talking about?"

"Don't hide behind that farm-boy provincial innocence, Sheldon. You won't get very far with high ideals about the lone artist and his personal visions. That attitude shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire Neo-Christian doctrine, don't you see? When the disciples first gathered after the Ascension, they divided their property amongst each other. Read the Book of Acts, Chapter Two: `And all that believed we together, and had all things common. And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.'"

Sheldon lowered his eyelids. "I am familiar with the passage."

"So you must also be familiar with the fate of Anainias and his wife who bought and sold a piece of land and kept some of the proceeds back from the apostles. The sheer force of hearing his crime spoken out loud caused him to fall dead on the spot."

"I have made no purchasing of land. What are you suggesting?"

"I am suggesting nothing further than fear of the Lord. Your artwork is dangerous, pure and simple. It has already claimed one casualty."

"Who? What?"

"Take a glance out the window down on poor Mrs. Shambles. Your arrival here has unhinged all her fears about her husband who wasn't, as you know, the most ethical of landlords. I overhead the poor women reading from her Bible the other day, the story of the man who purchased a field with evil money. It is written: `He burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out. And the field was known unto all the dwellers at Jerusalem as the field of blood.'"

"I forgot that part," Sheldon sighed.

"You cannot be a renegade outside the circle of society without invoking the scorn of that society, Mr. Sheldon, no matter how crafty your art."

"But I paint only what I see! What is around us! How can people scorn their own reflection in the mirror glass?"

"Who in this city would want to see Hell when they yearn so hungrily for Heaven."

"I walk the streets, I see with my own eyes."

"But they are your eyes. You cannot judge what another man will see, or should see."

"I admit that I fear the lose of my faculties, but it was not so back on the farm."

"And you think this city has unhinged your mind."

"I have seen things that are there...that others do not see."

"And that is why I am the superior artist. You give them things that you and you alone see. I give them what I know they want to see."

"That doesn't make you the better artist, it makes you the better marketing man."

"An artist is one who creates for others. You create only for yourself. New Sirius City has no use for your balderdash."

Sheldon's attention was drawn to the ceiling which swirled into a large pool of water; it coalesced about the center and became a puckering eyeball. The pupil was dark and immeasurably deep; it lowered itself towards Sheldon's face.

"I believe your ceiling is going to devour me."

"Another vision that you and you alone can see. It will just land you in the mental hospital, beware."

"I cannot stop it. It comes quicker and more violent." Sheldon fled from his position on the sofa and upset an end table which crashed to the floor, spilling a vase of roses. The petals scattered and layered the floor like red kidneys bloated and heaving with blood pulses.

"Bowels," Sheldon shrieked.

"What's this?" Mr. Joe asked.

"My bowels are being ripped asunder."

"Come, Mr. Sheldon. Perhaps you have a case of diarrhea."

Sheldon shrieked and lurched about the room knocking the framed paintings from their wall nails. Their creator sat impassively on the sofa watching with prurient interest.

"Remove these lies," Sheldon pleaded.

Mr. Joe rubbed his chin. "And pray tell, for what reason?"

"Hell is all around."

"I do not see it."

"You refuse to see it."

"I do not even know that it is there. I am in Heaven."

"I am losing my mind."

Mr. Joe mumbled grievously and disappeared into the bathroom. He emerged a moment later and offered Sheldon a cube of white sugar. "Here, I don't know why I'm being so nice today but I have something to make the hallucinations go away."

Sheldon frowned. "Go on," Mr. Joe insisted. "Just a drop of synaptic suppression on pure cane sugar. It's harmless."

Sheldon dissolved the cube on his tongue and swallowed the sweet, pleasing saliva. For a moment, he could feel his mother's nipple on his puckering lips and a wave of security passed deep within his body cells.

"The walls are starting to get back their shape," he noted.

The artist raised an eyebrow. "Then it works, but we don't have much time. We need to get you to a hospital."

"No, they will diagnose me as insane."

"But that is precisely the point, my boy. You are insane."

"I refuse to believe that; I am merely standing with my eyes open and this medicine you have given me has closed them once more."

Mr. Joe shook his head sadly and pulled Sheldon to the window. He pointed to the yard below where Mrs. Shambles was busy dusting filth from her husband's headstone.

"If your eyes are closed, then tell me what you see. Perhaps I can share in your delusion."

For the first time, Sheldon could see the awful pain and hopeless endurance etched on the woman's brows. Her hands were fragile and shaking. Through his mind's eye, which still gave him flickers of the liquid reality that haunted his dreams, Sheldon could see her grievous heart, pulsing irregularly and crying out with almost audible anguish for her husband.

"Dear God," Sheldon breathed. "I have taken heaven away from her and given her hell."

"She's better off," Mr. Joe sneered. "She knows the truth, is that not so?"

"My truth, not hers."

"Tell me, Sheldon. Why did you come to New City?"

"

To paint for people, to make them see."

"To see what?"

Sheldon felt his tongue pressing against his windpipe, stifling the opening; he breathed in heavy gasps to get out his next words. "The blood in the streets, the corpses in the flower shop windows, the torsos hanging from the lampposts!"

"And what else?" Mr. Joe snapped. "You wanted them to see what else?"

Sheldon gasped. "My mental illness. That's all it is. The sickness inside my head."

Mr. Joe put a tender arm around Sheldon and tightened his fingers. "And you will paint it, but New Sirius City will not allow its citizens to see your illness. You are wasting your breath and whatever talent you possess on the wrong eyes. Perhaps you are even wasting your soul."

Sheldon nodded and turned to look into the eyes of Mr. Joe. They were soft now, tender, even compassionate. "What do I do?" he asked.

Mr. Joe thought intently then shrugged.

"I'm not an alienist," he explained.

Sheldon turned and withdrew from the apartment. Out on the landing, he stopped to look at Mr. Joe's Madonna and Child. The boy was relaxed, at ease, much like Sheldon as the synaptic suppressant traveled through his blood stream. In the child's eyes, Sheldon could see a knowledge of the darkness, a deep familiarity with the hellish climes and all its tortures.

After all, Sheldon spoke to him silently, you too will die on the cross and feel your body eaten by demons. But you have remained intact. Your soul has remained intact.

Sheldon descended the creaking staircase of Mrs. Shambles rooming house and exited through the back into the yard. He found the landlady standing passively before her husband's stone, fondling a ring of rosary beads. She turned tear-stained eyes towards her tenant.

"Oh, Mr. Sheldon. I'm quite pleased to see you. I was meaning to ask you..."

"Yes, Mrs. Shambles."

"Did you ever figure out in what part of Hell my husband is suffering. I'd be anxious to know so I can seek him out when I get there."

Sheldon stared at his feet, then said slowly, "Mrs. Shambles, there is a special quadrant of hell reserved exclusively for evil landlords. It's called the Field of Blood."

He turned to leave, not even noticing his landlady's reaction. From behind, he could hear her sobbing, deeply and violently.

viii

Off Papus Square, by a row of commercial stores, a peevish man in white overalls solemnly painted a picket fence. The red paint came off the wide brush head in creamy stroke lines. Sheldon came to a halt and inspected these lines.

It seemed to Sheldon like a preparation for a theatrical affair. A streak of white in the hair of the painter looked like stage make-up; his eyebrows were clipped and stylized with points moving towards a wigged scalp. The wig was made of monkey hair.

Behind Sheldon was a loud slapping noise and he spun around in time to see a fat pork butcher slamming a disemboweled pig onto a metal slab. The blubbering flesh slapped hard on the metallic surface then the sweating butcher dug hooks into the pink and prickly flesh. Genitals wobbled obscenely.

A helicopter whirled overhead, some children careened on plastic skateboards, shadows came and went in the hot afternoon. Then, Sheldon felt a vortex of dizziness centered around the disemboweled pig, the slapping sound against the metal, the swish of the paintbrush, the brightness of the crimson paint. His head spun like a faucet being drained, going down, down, down. There were red clouds in the sky and the apartment buildings were jagged cliff faces. Naked victims sat on the rock shelves with iron rods piercing their limbs and chests. A bucket poured red rain over the land. Sheldon covered his eyes with his palms; the synaptic suppressant was wearing off.

All the machinery of Hell was starting to grind into infernal motion. The sun, which had been pleasant, like a drop of golden gell in the pearly sky, now burned and the sidewalks buckled, the tar bubbled and boiled.

Looking at the pig, he saw the cloven hooves, the little face: the snout with the sprouting hairs and the jagged fangs pressing against lip folds. If he pushed the nose it would feel rubbery and bend with his fingertip pressure. But as it hung on the metal hooks that grabbed its innards, it was also an apprehended highwayman hanging from a town square gibbet. He had been tarred and feathered and sacrificed, hanging by his legs from a lamppost gibbet.

Sheldon thought of all his sketches at home, scattered about his flat, decorating the window shelves and table tops. Run home, he thought, tear them to shreds, burn the shreds, bury the ashes. They mean nothing. They were created before his vision. Now, he saw clearly, the machinery of hell grinding and grinding, revealing itself in all its horror to his sun-eclipsed eyes. He was seeing the Darkness Visible, the Pit of Sin, unveiled.

To hell with the academy, he thought. The students, the critics, the public...they can all fly to hell. For me, there is much work to be done.

As he set forth to return to his apartment, he stopped to tweak the nose of the gutted pig. The gibbet chains groaned under the weight as the beast swayed like a tortured criminal.

"My friend," he said out loud, startling the butcher. "You shall be my first portrait: the crucified pig savior suffering the flames of Hell. I will pour you from the inside of my skull onto a canvas where you shall be reserved for my eyes alone. Perhaps, in my solitude, I shall be an artist after all."

The butcher stared at him with blubbery cheeks. Sheldon withdrew in a panic and scurried down Broad Way until he reached his rooming house. The front door was open and through the front hallway he could hear Mrs. Shambles shrieking in terror. As he rounded the bottom of the staircase to the upper rooms, he saw an Eyeball, tall and metallic standing at the head of the stairs. He stood like a dime-store Clown, his hands raised before him like he was praying, the fingertips touching each other.

“The Eye of God,” Sheldon muttered. Then the Eyeball clicked and whirled and a ray of light emerged from its single mysterious pupil. The light expanded at it came down the stairs and by the time it hit the wall by Sheldon’s head it had become a picture, a kinescopic picture, just like in the theaters. The Eyeball head was projecting a kinescope on the wall.

Sheldon scratched his chin and inspected the moving image. It was himself, seated in the café with Wendy the art student. It was the first time that Sheldon saw himself on film and he noticed that his nose was sharper than he remembered from shaving glasses, and his eyes were manic, beyond crazed. They looked capable of murder.

The Eyeball raised a white gloved fist and hit itself in the chest. There was another set of whirls and the sound started up, as if some inner mechanism had been triggered by the fist thumping. The sounds were Sheldon and Wendy speaking. At first it was disruptive, jarring and out of synch with the images, but after a few sentences they came together.

Sheldon was giving his speech about Papus. “…Sexton Papus to be a petty-minded, ego-maniac of monstrous proportions who had no more access to spiritual truths than a masturbating orangutan!” he was saying.

Sheldon looked up at the Eyeball.

“Yes,” he said.

A few minutes later, Sheldon was picked up by the Papal police and escorted unresistingly to the big stone house at the edge of the city that the children stayed away from, the place that people went when their minds were torn.

For years, he spoke no words but drew endless pictures in the dust, his fingers dragging like the guide lines of a hell-bound balloon.

The End

---

Ó 2000 by Richard Behrens. RICHARD BEHRENS has published fiction, poetry and essays in magazines as diverse as Parabola, Blue Light Red Light, Planet Magazine, Dark Planet, Bogusbooks, Chakra, Cinemaphobia, Forbidden Lines and Morella among others. He is a native New York living in New Jersey with his wife Sandrea and son Kristopher. His long term goal is to become the person he was when he was 25. He hopes to achieve this goal by age 50.