Read Gathered Dust and Others for Free Online Page A

quality with clever touches, such as the way in which the trees she had painted contained a kind of sentience, or the way in which shadows seemed to peer from places in the stormy sky.  “I was able to enter it just once, when I was young.  Harrod held a party for budding young artists of the area – he did indeed have an interest in art.  I confess I became obsessed with the house and its neighboring graveyard, both of which have become the repeated topics of my work.  There is a strange appetite for works of the house among locals – strange because we find the place compelling and yet something about it disturbs us.  Perhaps it’s that dead-end street and the fact that the other houses have been vacated, adding to the idea that the area is some kind of shunned locality.  Haven’t you noticed it, how everything seems subtly tainted in the area, touched and twisted by some mysterious force?  A force that attracts as much as it repulses?”
    “What I feel – it’s a force from the past.  Everything there seems rooted to some bygone era, the houses, that bewitching graveyard and those who have been planted in it.  The grave for your distant ancestor, Carter, really affected me, to the point where his persona has invaded my dreaming.  I find it all so strangely attractive.  I hate this unimaginative modern age.  Gawd, the life I was ‘living’ before I came into my inheritance, living in a small yet expensive apartment, slaving away as prep cook and dishwasher at a job that so exhausted me that I had no energy for anything once I got home from work.  It was a non-life.”
    Carter moved away from us as I spoke and went to gaze at another work of art.  “He was a dynamic force, old Obediah – and your conjuring of him is magnificent, dear Julia.”  Miss Warren and I went to join him, and I was indeed impressed and mesmerized.  The painting was a huge life-size representation of the ancient warlock, and the light from the nearest candelabra revealed that the paint was still fresh and wet.  The face was nearly identical to that of the miniature on the tomb, with the one exception of the queer distortion of the right eye.  I thought perhaps the paint there had somehow melted or run amok, but as I stepped closer to the canvas I saw that the disfigurement was deliberate.  “Ah, yes,” Carter sighed, “ the blemished eye .  There have been some few Arkham families that have suffered individuals born with such an eye, linking them to whispers of witchcraft.  Family legend has it that Obediah owned such an orb, although he had the fault corrected in all portraits painted of him.”  I turned and studied Carter’s pale face, the painted lips, the dark spectacles.  Laughing, he removed the eyewear and revealed two normal eyes of pale gray.  “Not a hereditary ailment, I’m happy to report.”  Frowning at the candlelight, he returned his spectacles to his face.  “Anyway, Julia has restored nature and portrayed him with his imperfection.  She’s good, isn’t she?  You should have her paint you, Hayward, a lovely portrait to be used in place of author’s photograph for some future book.”
    “I can see the family resemblance,” I replied as I peered at the painting.  “Despite your ridiculous tresses.  You’re much younger than he is here depicted, far leaner; but it’s there in his expression, a kind of superior cynicism.  What is it that sets your blood above us low mortals, Carter?  What have you personally accomplished in life?”
    He seemed dumbfounded by my sudden criticism.  “I appreciate art and literature.”
    “Is that all?”
    “It’s enough for now.  As you have remarked, I’m wonderfully young, a mere child, really.  Adulthood, from what I’ve seen of it, is hell.  I have decided to live a life that is exquisitely Bohemian.  Like you, I’ve come into my inheritance, and I delight in the freedom it allows.”
    The woman touched my hand.   “It’s nice to