"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?"