Encounters with Enoch Coffin
W.H. Pugmire and Jeffrey Thomas
head was covered, but where a face should have been there was still only a gaping, empty hole. A void. Yet last night, Enoch had stood upon and crushed the penultimate block; the last block before the one to which this untamed aspect of the Faceless God had been exiled, stranded as if on a lonely island in that former archipelago of clay. Tonight, Enoch Coffin was determined, when he sent his consciousness, his vital essence – his very spirit -- into that realm of mist, he would join the avatar on the same block it perched upon. Surely it couldn’t deny him. In that imprisoning pocket universe he had demonstrated the power of a god himself. It had nowhere to flee when he reached out to unveil the howling thing’s visage. As he sat at his worktable with a blood-impregnated lump of clay resting before him, however, and began the mental exercises for sending his astral self into the beyond, he found himself distracted as if an insect buzzed at his ear. That nagging insect was Will Ashman. He hadn’t heard from Ashman since he had gone to his home several days earlier, and he had made no further effort to contact the man himself, either. Enoch had tried to help the poor fool, and Ashman had rejected him. What more could he do for him -- aside from destroying his art, which again was out of the question? Irritated, Enoch tried to put the man out of his thoughts, and then to put irritation out of his thoughts as well. He must obtain a clarity of focus, a purity of concentration and purpose. Distraction wouldn’t do, not when the object of his quest was so close he could almost touch it.
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