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The Golgotha Dancers
By MANLY WADE WELLMAN
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales October1937. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Sidenote: _A curious and terrifying story about an artist who sold hissoul that he might paint a living picture_]
I had come to the Art Museum to see the special show of Goya prints, butthat particular gallery was so crowded that I could hardly get in, muchless see or savor anything; wherefore I walked out again. I wanderedthrough the other wings with their rows and rows of oils, their Greekand Roman sculptures, their stern ranks of medieval armors, theirOriental porcelains, their Egyptian gods. At length, by chance and notby design, I came to the head of a certain rear stairway. Other habituesof the museum will know the one I mean when I remind them that ArnoldBoecklin's _The Isle of the Dead_ hangs on the wall of the landing.
I started down, relishing in advance the impression Boecklin's picturewould make with its high brown rocks and black poplars, its midnight skyand gloomy film of sea, its single white figure erect in the bow of thebeach-nosing skiff. But, as I descended, I saw that _The Isle of theDead_ was not in its accustomed position on the wall. In that space,arresting even in the bad light and from the up-angle of the stairs,hung a gilt-framed painting I had never seen or heard of in all mymuseum-haunting years.
I gazed at it, one will imagine, all the way down to the landing. Then Ihad a close, searching look, and a final appraising stare from the lipof the landing above the lower half of the flight. So far as I canlearn--and I have been diligent in my research--the thing is unknowneven to the best-informed of art experts. Perhaps it is as well that Idescribe it in detail.
It seemed to represent action upon a small plateau or table rock, draband bare, with a twilight sky deepening into a starless evening. Thissetting, restrainedly worked up in blue-grays and blue-blacks, was notthe first thing to catch the eye, however. The front of the picture wasfilled with lively dancing creatures, as pink, plump and naked ascherubs and as patently evil as the meditations of Satan in his rareidle moments.
I counted those dancers. There were twelve of them, ranged in ahalf-circle, and they were cavorting in evident glee around a centralobject--a prone cross, which appeared to be made of two stout logs withsome of the bark still upon them. To this cross a pair of the pinkthings--that makes fourteen--kneeling and swinging blocky-lookinghammers or mauls, spiked a human figure.
I say _human_ when I speak of that figure, and I withhold the word indescribing the dancers and their hammer-wielding fellows. There is areason. The supine victim on the cross was a beautifully representedmale body, as clear and anatomically correct as an illustration in asurgical textbook. The head was writhed around, as if in pain, and Icould not see the face or its expression; but in the tortured tensenessof the muscles, in the slaty white sheen of the skin with jagged streaksof vivid gore upon it, agonized nature was plain and doubly plain. Icould almost see the painted limbs writhe against the transfixing nails.
By the same token, the dancers and hammerers were so dynamically done asto seem half in motion before my eyes. So much for the sound skill ofthe painter. Yet, where the crucified prisoner was all clarity, theseothers were all fog. No lines, no angles, no muscles--their featurescould not be seen or sensed. I was not even sure if they had hair ornot. It was as if each was picked out with a ray of light in thatsurrounding dusk, light that revealed and yet shimmered indistinctly;light, too, that had absolutely nothing of comfort or honesty in it.
* * * * *
"Hold on, there!" came a sharp challenge from the stairs behind andbelow me. "What are you doing? And what's that picture doing?"
I started so that I almost lost my footing and fell upon thespeaker--one of the Museum guards. He was a slight old fellow and histhin hair was gray, but he advanced upon me with all the righteous,angry pluck of a beefy policeman. His attitude surprised and nettled me.
"I was going to ask somebody that same question," I told him asausterely as I could manage. "What about this picture? I thought therewas a Boecklin hanging here."
The guard relaxed his forbidding attitude at first sound of my voice."Oh, I beg your pardon, sir. I thought you were somebody else--the manwho brought that thing." He nodded at the picture, and the hostile glarecame back into his eyes. "It so happened that he talked to me first,then to the curator. Said it was art--great art--and the Museum musthave it." He lifted his shoulders, in a shrug or a shudder. "Personally,I think it's plain beastly."
So it was, I grew aware as I looked at it again. "And the Museum hasaccepted it at last?" I prompted.
He shook his head. "Oh, no, sir. An hour ago he was at the back door,with that nasty daub there under his arm. I heard part of the argument.He got insulting, and he was told to clear out and take his picture withhim. But he must have got in here somehow, and hung it himself." Walkingclose to the painting, as gingerly as though he expected the pinkdancers to leap out at him, he pointed to the lower edge of the frame."If it was a real Museum piece, we'd have a plate right there, with thename of the painter and the title."
I, too, came close. There was no plate, just as the guard had said. Butin the lower left-hand corner of the canvas were sprawling capitals,pale paint on the dark, spelling out the word _GOLGOTHA_. Beneath these,in small, barely readable script:
_I sold my soul that I might paint a living picture._
No signature or other clue to the artist's identity.
The guard had discovered a great framed rectangle against the wall toone side. "Here's the picture he took down," he informed me, highlyrelieved. "Help me put it back, will you, sir? And do you suppose," herehe grew almost wistful, "that we could get rid of this other thingbefore someone finds I let the crazy fool slip past me?"
I took one edge of _The Isle of the Dead_ and lifted it to help him hangit once more.
"Tell you what," I offered on sudden impulse; "I'll take this _Golgotha_piece home with me, if you like."
"Would you do that?" he almost yelled out in his joy at the suggestion."Would you, to oblige me?"
"To oblige myself," I returned. "I need another picture at my place."
And the upshot of it was, he smuggled me and the unwanted painting outof the Museum. Never mind how. I have done quite enough as it is tojeopardize his job and my own welcome up there.
* * * * *
It was not until I had paid off my taxi and lugged the unwieldyparallelogram of canvas and wood upstairs to my bachelor apartment thatI bothered to wonder if it might be valuable. I never did find out, butfrom the first I was deeply impressed.
Hung over my own fireplace, it looked as large and living as a sceneglimpsed through a window or, perhaps, on a stage in a theater. Thecapering pink bodies caught new lights from my lamp, lights that glossedand intensified their shape and color but did not reveal any newdetails. I pored once more over the cryptic legend: _I sold my soul thatI might paint a living picture._
A living picture--was it that? I could not answer. For all my honestdelight in such things, I cannot be called expert or even knowing asregards art. Did I even like the Golgotha painting? I could not be sureof that, either. And the rest of the inscription, about selling a soul;I was considerably intrigued by that, and let my thoughts ramble on thesubject of Satanist complexes and the vagaries of half-crazy painters.As I read, that evening, I glanced up again and again at my newpossession. Sometimes it seemed ridiculous, sometimes sinister. Shortlyafter midnight I rose, gazed
once more, and then turned out the parlorlamp. For a moment, or so it seemed, I could see those dancers, so manydim-pink silhouettes in the sudden darkness. I went to the kitchen for abit of whisky and water, and thence to my bedroom.
I had dreams. In them I was a boy again, and my mother and sister wereleaving the house to go to a theater where--think of it!--RichardMansfield would play _Beau Brummell_. I, the youngest, was told to stayat home and mind the troublesome furnace. I wept copiously in mydisappointed loneliness, and then Mansfield himself stalked in, in fullBrummell regalia. He laughed goldenly and stretched out his hand in warmgreeting. I, the lad of my dreams, put out my own hand, then wasfrightened when he would not loosen his grasp. I tugged, and he laughedagain. The gold of his laughter turned suddenly hard, cold. I tuggedwith all my strength, and woke.
* * * * *
Something held me tight by the wrist.
* * * * *
In my first half-moment of wakefulness I was aware that the room wasfilled with the pink dancers of the picture, in nimble, fierce-happymotion. They were man-size, too, or nearly so, visible in the dark withthe dim radiance of fox-fire. On the small scale of the painting theyhad seemed no more than babyishly plump; now they were gross, like hugeerect toads. And, as I awakened fully, they were closing in, a menacingring of them, around my bed. One stood at my right side, and its grip,clumsy and rubbery-hard like that of a monkey, was closed upon my arm.
* * * * *
I saw and sensed all this, as I say, in a single moment. With thesensing came the realization of peril, so great that I did not stop towonder at the uncanniness of my visitors. I tried frantically to jerkloose. For the moment I did not succeed and as I thrashed about,throwing my body nearly across the bed, a second dancer dashed in fromthe left. It seized and clamped my other arm. I felt, rather than heard,a wave of soft, wordless merriment from them all. My heart and sinewsseemed to fail, and briefly I lay still in a daze of horror, pinned downcrucifix-fashion between my two captors.
Was that a _hammer_ raised above me as I sprawled?
There rushed and swelled into me the sudden startled strength thatsometimes favors the desperate. I screamed like any wild thing caught ina trap, rolled somehow out of bed and to my feet. One of the beings Ishook off and the other I dashed against the bureau. Freed, I made forthe bedroom door and the front of the apartment, stumbling andstaggering on fear-weakened legs.
One of the dim-shining pink things barred my way at the very threshold,and the others were closing in behind, as if for a sudden rush. I flungmy right fist with all my strength and weight. The being bobbed backunresistingly before my smash, like a rubber toy floating through water.I plunged past, reached the entry and fumbled for the knob of the outerdoor.
They were all about me then, their rubbery palms fumbling at myshoulders, my elbows, my pajama jacket. They would have dragged me downbefore I could negotiate the lock. A racking shudder possessed me andseemed to flick them clear. Then I stumbled against a stand, and purelyby good luck my hand fell upon a bamboo walking-stick. I yelled again,in truly hysterical fierceness, and laid about me as with a whip. Myblows did little or no damage to those unearthly assailants, but theyshrank back, teetering and dancing, to a safe distance. Again I had thesense that they were laughing, mocking. For the moment I had beaten themoff, but they were sure of me in the end. Just then my groping free handpressed a switch. The entry sprang into light.
On the instant they were not there.
* * * * *
Somebody was knocking outside, and with trembling fingers I turned theknob of the door. In came a tall, slender girl with a blue lounging-robecaught hurriedly around her. Her bright hair was disordered as thoughshe had just sprung from her bed.
"Is someone sick?" she asked in a breathless voice. "I live down thehall--I heard cries." Her round blue eyes were studying my face, whichmust have been ghastly pale. "You see, I'm a trained nurse, andperhaps----"
"Thank God you did come!" I broke in, unceremoniously but honestly, andwent before her to turn on every lamp in the parlor.
It was she who, without guidance, searched out my whisky and siphon andmixed for me a highball of grateful strength. My teeth rang nervously onthe edge of the glass as I gulped it down. After that I got my ownrobe--a becoming one, with satin facings--and sat with her on the divanto tell of my adventure. When I had finished, she gazed long at thepainting of the dancers, then back at me. Her eyes, like two chips ofthe April sky, were full of concern and she held her rosy lower lipbetween her teeth. I thought that she was wonderfully pretty.
"What a perfectly terrible nightmare!" she said.
"It was no nightmare," I protested.
She smiled and argued the point, telling me all manner of comfortingthings about mental associations and their reflections in vivid dreams.
To clinch her point she turned to the painting.
"This line about a 'living picture' is the peg on which your slumberingmind hung the whole fabric," she suggested, her slender fingertiptouching the painted scribble. "Your very literal subconscious selfdidn't understand that the artist meant his picture would live onlyfiguratively."
"Are you sure that's what the artist meant?" I asked, but finally I lether convince me. One can imagine how badly I wanted to be convinced.
She mixed me another highball, and a short one for herself. Over it shetold me her name--Miss Dolby--and finally she left me with a lastcomforting assurance. But, nightmare or no, I did not sleep again thatnight. I sat in the parlor among the lamps, smoking and dipping intobook after book. Countless times I felt my gaze drawn back to thepainting over the fireplace, with the cross and the nail-pierced wretchand the shimmering pink dancers.
After the rising sun had filled the apartment with its honest light andcheer I felt considerably calmer. I slept all morning, and in theafternoon was disposed to agree with Miss Dolby that the whole businesshad been a bad dream, nothing more. Dressing, I went down the hall,knocked on her door and invited her to dinner with me.
It was a good dinner. Afterward we went to an amusing motion picture,with Charles Butterworth in it as I remember. After bidding hergood-night, I went to my own place. Undressed and in bed, I lay awake.My late morning slumber made my eyes slow to close. Thus it was that Iheard the faint shuffle of feet and, sitting up against my pillows, sawthe glowing silhouettes of the Golgotha dancers. Alive and magnified,they were creeping into my bedroom.
I did not hesitate or shrink this time. I sprang up, tense and defiant.
"No, you don't!" I yelled at them. As they seemed to hesitate before theimpact of my wild voice, I charged frantically. For a moment I scatteredthem and got through the bedroom door, as on the previous night. Therewas another shindy in the entry; this time they all got hold of me, likea pack of hounds, and wrestled me back against the wall. I writhe evennow when I think of the unearthly hardness of their little grippingpaws. Two on each arm were spread-eagling me upon the plaster. Thecruciform position again!
I swore, yelled and kicked. One of them was in the way of my foot. Hefloated back, unhurt. That was their strength and horror--their abilityto go flabby and non-resistant under smashing, flattening blows.Something tickled my palm, pricked it. The point of a spike....
"Miss Dolby!" I shrieked, as a child might call for its mother. "Help!Miss D----"
The door flew open; I must not have locked it. "Here I am," came herunafraid reply.
She was outlined against the rectangle of light from the hall. Myassailants let go of me to dance toward her. She gasped but did notscream. I staggered along the wall, touched a light-switch, and theparlor just beyond us flared into visibility. Miss Dolby and I ran in tothe lamp, rallying there as stone-age folk must have rallied at theirfire to face the monsters of the night. I looked at her; she was stillfully dressed, as I had left her, apparently had been sitting up. Herrouge made flat patches on her pale cheeks, but
her eyes were level.
* * * * *
This time the dancers did not retreat or vanish; they lurked in thecomparative gloom of the entry, jigging and trembling as if musteringtheir powers and resolutions for another rush at us.
"You see," I chattered out to her, "it wasn't a nightmare."
She spoke, not in reply, but as if to herself. "They have no faces," shewhispered. "No faces!" In the half-light that was diffused upon themfrom our lamp they presented the featurelessness of so many hugegingerbread boys, covered with pink icing. One of them, some kind ofleader, pressed forward within the circle of the light. It daunted him abit. He hesitated, but did not retreat.
From my center table Miss Dolby had picked up a bright paper-cutter. Shepoised it with the assurance of one who knows how to handle cuttinginstruments.
"When they come," she said steadily, "let's stand close together. We'llbe harder to drag down that way."
I wanted to shout my admiration of her fearless front toward thedreadful beings, my thankfulness for her quick run to my rescue. All Icould mumble was, "You're mighty brave."
She turned for a moment to look at the picture above my dying fire. Myeyes followed hers. I think I expected to see a blank canvas--find thatthe painted dancers had vanished from it and had grown into the livingones. But they were still in the picture, and the cross and the victimwere there, too. Miss Dolby read aloud the inscription:
"_A living picture_ ... The artist knew what he was talking about, afterall."
"Couldn't a living picture be killed?" I wondered.
It sounded uncertain, and a childish quibble to boot, but Miss Dolbyexclaimed triumphantly, as at an inspiration.
"Killed?