even know where it was. He didn’t go into public places much.
“People don’t like having me around.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I scare them.”
He wouldn’t go in. I ended up sitting on a wall outside, sharing half a hoagie with him. He loosened up a little. He at least pretended to confide things.
“You see that brick over there,” he said, pointing. “That one, down at the corner. That used to be the only thing in the universe I wasn’t afraid of. But lately I’ve come to understand that it is a particularly malevolent brick, worse than all the others.”
Now that was interesting. Some self-consciousness about his own neuroses, and even a shyly expressed sense of humor about them.
He still didn’t show me the contents of the sketch book, not on that day or on several others. We took to meeting on that wall, then in remote recesses of the library when the weather turned cold.
I saw him almost daily. We talked. I lent him books, a lot of them science fiction. I tried to interest him in different things. I may be the only person in the history of the universe to draw Stephen Taylor into a political argument, which must be something of an accomplishment.
In time he did start to show me more of his work, sketches, studies, even a long Stephanus sequence he was continuing to work on without any hope of publication.
I asked him a few naive questions about why he did what he did, and he rolled his eyes and said, “I paint what I see.”
I felt slightly guilty that I was encouraging him, in a way, because it was clear that he was driven to create this material, that he didn’t enjoy it, that he wasn’t after recognition. It was a kind of slavery, depriving him of all social contact other than our meetings. His grades were apparently excellent, but otherwise, when he wasn’t studying, he spent all his time wallowing in this imaginary Hell. I once asked him about his home life. His father was dead, he told me. He wouldn’t say anything about his mother. He clammed up and wouldn’t talk to me for days afterward.
I admit I was very tempted to write him up as some sort of school project for Abnormal Psychology or something, but I suppose some lingering shred of decency prevented me.
Or the fascination. Here was a private window into the mind of the damned. He produced page after page of revolting, fantastic imagery. There seemed no end to it. But I couldn’t tear myself away any more than he could.
Then the bomb shells hit: Everything he drew was true, he told me. Chorazin, the Republic of Pain, was a real place. His father had been ruler there.
“I’ve never told anybody else about this,” he said. “Please keep it a secret between us. But my Dad was Tetrarchon of Chorazin, before he got out and brought me to America when I was a baby. I guess you could say we’re refugees.”
“Tet-tetra—?”
“It means one ruler out of four.”
“Who are the other three?”
He shut his sketch book, closed his eyes, and seemed to be reciting from a long-rehearsed catechism. “Three are the Companions of the Tetrarchon, always walking at his side, his Fear, his Pain, and his Death. Only the Severus knows the true nature and true name of each of them and when each of them shall be made manifest.”
“The who?” Surely this was more of the elaborate Stephanus mythos. I was appalled, but intrigued and admittedly not at all surprised, that he had apparently lost the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
“Here,” he said. “Look at this.”
He got something out of his pocket and handed it to me. I thought it was an arcade token at first, a coin about the size of a half-dollar, bronze-colored, but light as aluminum. On one side was a profiled face, stern and wise, crowned with laurel leaves like a Roman caesar, but wearing an incongruous bow-tie. The inscription read:
DN BERNARDUS T CHOR.
I looked up at Stephen, questioning.
He took the coin and traced the lettering with his finger. “Dominus Noster—Our Lord—Bernardus, Tetrarchon of Chorazin. That’s my Dad.”
He gave the coin to me once more, showing the reverse figure, which could have been a robot seen from the shoulders up, jut-jawed and hatchet-faced, with fierce, glaring eye, one hand holding an upraised rod that might have been a stylized whip. Like the rat king in the comic strip, this one had a crown of thorns growing out of its head. The inscription read: SEVERUS AET. Eternal Severus.
I gave the coin back to him again, uncertain of what to say.
“The name means the Severe One. He punishes everyone for their sins, even the Tetrarchon, whose very existence is a sin, but necessary, a glory and a duty and a disgrace…” He seemed to be reciting again. “…without end. But my Dad thought he could get away.”
Suddenly I realized that Stephen was crying. He squeezed the coin so hard his knuckles went white. He just sat still in the silence of the shadowy library, rocking back and forth, leaning over a desk, sobbing softly.
I put my hand on his shoulder gently.
He jumped as if he’d been stung.
“Don’t! I don’t like to be touched. It hurts.”
Indeed, in his comic strips, no one ever touched anyone except to inflict pain.
I waited for him to calm down. “Maybe we should talk about something else for a while.”
“No. No.” He tapped the coin on the desktop furiously, rat-tat-tat. “No, I’ve got to tell you. Now. It’s too late for anything else. You already know too much. There’s no turning back now, for either of us.”
I felt a certain chill deep inside when he said that. But I didn’t question him, or interrupt.
“You see,” he continued, “my Dad wasn’t as clever as he thought he was. The Severus came for him when I was six years old. I heard it all from my bedroom, the floorboards almost ready to break from the heavy footsteps of the Severus, the iron fist pounding on my parents’ bedroom door, the voice like thunder mixed with a steam-engine hissing, demanding that the Lord Tetrarchon Bernardus appear. And my father came to the door and said to him, ‘I am here and I am alone. I have no son.’ Father went away then. My mother screamed for days and days…and I never saw my Dad again. For the longest time I didn’t understand why he’d said ‘I am alone. I have no son.’ Then I did understand, and my greatest fear was that he hadn’t been believed.”
Never mind the fascination. This had to stop. It was ruining his whole life. “Steve. Don’t. Don’t say anything more.”
“No…I’ve got to finish now. That wasn’t the last of it. You see, every year on my birthday a package came for me in the mail, with stamps on it from Chorazin, addressed to NOBLISSIMUS STEPHANUS; and inside was a piece of my father, a finger, an ear, his nose…anything which could be amputated without killing him. God, do you have any idea what it’s like to get your father’s dick in the mail? Then, when I was fifteen, the box was larger, and where the others had been addressed to Noblissimus Stephanus—Most Noble Child—this one said DOMINUS NOSTER and TETRARCHON, because the box contained my father’s head and I had inherited his titles. I think it was all just to remind me not to run away when my own time came.”
When he had finished, I sat in silence, utterly devastated. He believed every word of this. It was tearing him up. I couldn’t understand him at all. He was more a stranger now than when I’d first met him. Why had he created this endless, masochistic daydream for himself? And what was the meaning of his sole attempt to publish? A cry for help? Or was it an attempt at affirmation, to make it real?
It was all so transparently fake. The coin, well, he could have had it made up somewhere. As for the rest: I’d read Lovecraft. I knew where the “I paint what I see” line came from. And in M.R.