“Loneliness,” he said, “can drive a man into mental regions of extreme strangeness.”
I nodded absently. I had found a small box and, on opening it, my excitement mounted. It contained a sepia-coloured photographic portrait of Lilith Blake, dated 1890. It was the first I had seen of her, and must have been taken just before her death. Her beauty was quite astonishing.
Muswell leaned forward. He seemed to be watching my reaction with redoubled interest.
Lilith Blake’s raven-black and luxuriant hair curled down to her shoulders. Her face was oval, finished with a small pointed chin. The eyes, wide apart and piercing, seemed to gaze across the vastness of the time that separated us. Her neck was long and pale, her forehead rounded and stray curls of hair framed the temples. The fleshy lips were slightly parted and her small, sharp teeth gleamed whitely. Around her neck hung a string of pearls and she wore a jet-black velvet dress. The most delicate and lovely white hands that I had ever seen were folded across her bosom. Although the alabaster skin of her face and neck was extremely pale, her hands were paler. They were whiter than the purest snow. It was as if daylight had never touched them. The length of her graceful fingers astonished me.
I must have sat there for some time in silent contemplation of that intoxicating image. Muswell, becoming impatient, finally broke my reverie in a most violent and unnecessary manner. He snatched the photograph from me and held it in the air while he spoke, his voice rising to a feverish pitch:
“Here is the hopeless despair of one haunted by the night. One who had gone down willingly into the grave with a black ecstasy in her heart instead of fear!”
I could only sit there in stunned silence. To me, Muswell seemed close to a complete nervous breakdown.
Later, Muswell must have helped me to sort through the various papers in the trunk. I remember little of the detail. I do know that by the time I finally left his rooms and found my way back to the square through the snow, I had realized that my research into Blake’s work would be of the utmost importance to my academic career. Muswell had treasure in his keeping, a literary gold mine, and, given the right handling, it could make my name.
After that, my days were not my own. Try as I might, I could not expunge the vision of Blake from my mind. Her face haunted my thoughts, beckoning me onwards in my quest to discover the true meaning of her work. The correspondence between Muswell and myself grew voluminous as I sought to arrange a time when I would be enabled to draw further on his collection. For a while he seemed to distrust my mounting interest, but at last he accepted my enthusiasm as genuine. He welcomed me as a kindred spirit. By a happy chance, I even managed to rent a room in his building.
And so, during the course of the winter months, I shut myself away with Muswell, poring over Blake’s letters and personal effects. I cannot deny that the handling of those things began to feel almost sacrilegious. But as I read the letters, diaries and notebooks I could see that Muswell had spoken only the truth when he described Blake as supreme in the field of supernatural literature.
He would scuttle around his library like a spider, climbing stepladders and hauling out volumes from the shelves, passing them down through the gloomy space to me. He would mark certain passages that he believed furthered a greater understanding of Blake’s life and work. Outside, the frequent snow showers filled the gap between his basement window and the pavement above with icy whiteness. My research was progressing well, my notebook filling up with useful quotations and annotations, but somehow I felt that I was failing to reach the essence of Lilith; the most potent aspect of her vision was eluding my understanding. It was becoming agonizing to be so close to her, and yet to feel that her most secret and beautiful mysteries were buried from my view.
“I believe,” Muswell once said, “that mental isolation is the essence of weird fiction. Isolation when confronted with disease, with madness, with horror and with death. These are the reverberations of the infinity that torments us. It is Blake who delineates these echoes of doom for us. She alone exposes our inescapable blind stumbling towards eternal annihilation. She alone shows our souls screaming in the darkness with none to heed our cries. Ironic, isn’t it, that such a beautiful young woman should possess an imagination so dark and riddled with nightmare?”
Muswell took a deep drag on his cigarette and, in contemplating his own words, seemed to gaze through everything into a limitless void.
Sometimes, when Muswell was away, I would have the collection to myself. Blake’s personal letters became as sacred relics to me. Her framed photograph attained a special significance, and I was often unable to prevent myself from running my fingers around the outline of her lovely face.
As time passed, and my research into Lilith Blake’s oeuvre began to yield ever more fascinating results, I felt that I was now ready to afford her the posthumous attention that she so richly deserved. Whereas previously I had planned to merely include references to her work in my lengthy article on supernatural fiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I now realized that she had to be accorded a complete critical book of her own, such was the importance of the literary legacy I had stumbled across through my association with Muswell. It seemed obvious to me that the man had little real idea of the prime importance of the materials in his possession and that his reclusive lifestyle had led him to regard anything relating to this dead and beautiful creature as his own personal property. His understanding was hopelessly confused by the unsubstantiated assertion that he made of the importance of the “work behind the works”, which I took to mean some obscure mystical interpretation he had formulated in his own muddled, ageing brain.
One afternoon he came across me working on my proposed book and took an apparent polite interest in my writing, but mingled in with that interest was an infuriating sarcasm. I voiced my contention that Blake deserved a much higher place in the literary pantheon. The only reasonable explanation for the failure of her work to achieve this was, I had discovered, the almost total lack of contemporary interest in it. I could trace no extant reviews of The Reunion and Others in any of the literary journals of the time nor any mention of her in the society columns of the period. At this statement Muswell actually laughed out loud. Holding one of his cigarettes between those thin, gloved fingers he waved it in the air dismissively, and said:
“I should have thought that you would have found the silence surrounding her person and work suggestive, as I did. Do not mistake silence for indifference. Any imbecile might make that erroneous conclusion and indeed many have done so in the past. Lilith Blake was no Count Stenbock, merely awaiting rediscovery. She was deliberately not mentioned; her work was specifically excluded from consideration. How much do you think was paid simply to ensure that she had a fitting tomb in Highgate Cemetery? But pray continue, tell me more of your article and I shall try to take into consideration your youthful naivety.”
As I continued to expand on my theories I saw clearly that Muswell began to smirk in a most offensive fashion. Why, it was as if he were humouring me! My face flushed and I stood up, my back rigid with tension. I was close to breaking point and could not tolerate this old fool’s patronizing attitude any longer. He took a step backwards and bowed, rather affectedly, in some idiotic gentlemanly gesture. But as he did so, he almost lost his footing, as if a bout of dizziness had overcome him. I was momentarily startled by the action and he took the opportunity to make his exit. But before he did so he uttered some departing words: