Three new paintings by von Kreitz himself were to form the central elements of the exhibition, which would include a number of new works by Ayling, Prooder, Heathman, and Turling—among them, Ayling’s latest painting The Gathered Clan, a portrait of the Haywards that had been commissioned by the Baroness. The exhibition was to be held in Blane’s orangerie, a large, vaulted space that had been added to the south façade in 1802. Originally designed as secondary gallery by Baron Hayward’s father, the orangerie was some hundred feet in length, with six large windows on the exterior wall and fruit-bearing orange trees in planters positioned in the spaces between them.

  The exhibition at Blane was to have included the following works: von Kreitz, The River-Bank; Nightfall, Krankhelm Island, Fog, December, 1867; and The Contents of Forthold’s General Store, Ebbe, Krankhelm Island, February, 1870; Turling, Mrs. Shell, With Shears, Study for A.H., and In Esteemed Company; Heathman, Over, Behind, Beneath and Rampant; Prooder, The Tyranny of Time, The Emperor of the Unseen, and Our Lady of Sorrows; Ayling, The Gathered Clan.

  Several firsthand accounts of the exhibition from local guests who visited Blane while the work was still being hung refer to a “drastic and impatient” style, a tone that struck most commentators as “angry, even rude,” and distortions of perspective that seemed forced and unnatural. “Are these faces, approaching us in the island’s fog?” asked a local writer, Benedick Worsthorne. “It is tempting to take these worn, indistinct visages as mere swirls of vapor, or as those of figures more spectral than human.” Arnold Trump, a critic from the Kentishman who had come by for an early look, wrote, “Mr. von Kreitz drains all substantiality from his paints, leaving us to discern what strange and ill-meaning symbology lurks upon his canvases. His island’s emporium seems empty of all goods but for the mute yet wailing shades they left behind.” Of The River-Bank, Nightfall, a local clergyman, the Canon Arthur Summerson, had this to say: “Despite the grave innocence of its subject matter, the painting feels like a pasteboard mask, which at any moment threatens to peel away, revealing a terrifying vista of debasement.”

  The Second Fire

  At approximately 12:45 p.m. on Saturday, October 13, 1889, the day after an unofficial reception for the Haywards’ inner circle, a fire broke out in the orangerie. The “Second Fire,” as it came to be known, killed von Kreitz, Prooder, Turling, and Heathman, along with two of the Haywards’ servants. It destroyed a third of the house, including the orangerie, and consumed the entire collection of Das Beben paintings housed there, with the sole exception of Ayling’s The Gathered Clan.8

  Excerpt from The Art of Rumor’s Legends, Burton Purddry, (Calais, VT: Ashton Press, 1927):

  The eccentricities of von Kreitz’s “New Tremor” disciples supposedly extended to the impossibilities of their effects. In their hands—those of Heathman and Ayling at any rate—objects and persons are said, as had earlier been claimed of paintings by von Kreitz and Klappenbug, to be capable of movement. George Heathman’s Rampant, a canvas of unusual shape, was described by a servant who assisted in the mounting of the exhibition as “akin to the mail-slot of the greatest post-box ever seen, nearly half a metre in height and two in length.” (Letters from Persons of Various Stations Resident at Blane, ed. Harald Hayward, Comfort Blanton, 1936.) Across the painting’s length was depicted a misty day in a seaside village (thought to be Heathman’s hometown, Folkestone); a brisk wind billows a series of tradesman’s awnings bearing the names of various shops. The servant claimed that this painting caused him feel “all swimmy” whenever he looked at it. Two days after the fire, local writer Arnold Trump, ever the faithful diarist, recorded (in tones of amusement) that an elderly female Hayward relative who was visiting Blane had taken him aside to complain that a “horrid force” had threatened to thrust itself from between the awnings depicted in the painting. “It wishes to be free, and it intends us all great unhappiness!” she claimed.

  In Hugo Ayling’s The Gathered Clan, considered by some to be the finest of the “New Tremor” paintings (and their sole survivor), the Hayward family stands posed before the imposing façade of Blane. Behind and to the left of the family, the uniformed staff stands ranked in a wedge. A good distance to the right of the family, there are four odd people in two equal groups. (Many generations of Haywards had been interested in the occult, and these some of the leading figures of the time.) Between the two groups there is a black-hooded figure, moving forward. The same elderly relative reported to Trump that overnight, this figure had moved forward by a quarter of an inch, perhaps a bit more, and that its goal was clearly to move out of the painting altogether. It wished to escape into the world, she was certain, where it would manifest the sickness already to be sensed within the surface of the painting. “What is terrible,” she told Trump, “is that poor, unwell Mr. Ayling possesses a wondrous talent and his painting would be exceeding beautiful—were it not for the moral illness that corrupts the whole.”

  Although Ayling’s masterpiece does survive, we have no opportunity to determine whether the black-cowled figure has indeed escaped the painting. For more than five decades, The Gathered Clan has been locked within a temperature-controlled, light-sensitive vault beneath the Milwaukee Art Museum, the object of an ongoing legal dispute between American factions of the Hayward family.

  Speculation suggested that the blaze might have begun as a result of sunlight, magnified by a pane of glass, falling upon a painter’s oily rag left unnoticed behind an easel. (A servant later claimed she had seen “a sort of rainbow” glinting from an upper window of the orangerie shortly before the fire.) Whatever the cause, the flames spread almost instantly to the entire row of paintings and onto the wall behind them, proceeding rapidly into the scullery and kitchen, then down the hallway, engulfing the ceiling and rising into the floor above. The entire western half of Blane, some twenty-one rooms, was reduced to a mass of charred beams and twisted metal rising out of the wine cellar. The remains of Von Kreitz, Turling, Heathman, and Prooder were eventually found in the ruins of the orangerie.

  Aftermath

  In the wake of the disaster, the Haywards and most of their remaining staff returned to London, taking up occupancy in their residence in Eaton Square, where Baron Hayward immediately began drawing up plans for the reconstruction of Blane.

  Gather, Wren, and Shell all survived the conflagration. As though warned in advance, the three had returned to London only a few hours before the fire started. Without a ripple, they vanished back into the strange London underworld from which they had emerged.9

  Masterless and destitute, Hugo Ayling, the last remaining member of Das Beben, descended quickly into poverty and poor health. In 1894, he was apprehended wandering London’s East End, half-naked and incoherent. Deemed mentally unsound by a court physician, Ayling was dispatched to Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam), an institution for the criminally insane. There, as though by some secret joke of fate, he was given the cell previously occupied by the painter and patricide Richard Dadd.10

  At Bethlem, Ayling painted inoffensive depictions of the sunlight entering his cell through its single windows, remembered landscapes of his childhood, and intricately detailed “portraits,” as he called them, of the large dark individual stones in his cell’s walls. Upon release, Ayling moved into the slums and estaminets of South London, where for the last years of his life he survived in dire poverty, drawing illustrations for broadsides and works of erotic literature published by Pego Press, Peckham Rye. In the first several years of the 20th century, he met and briefly became a mentor to the talented but eccentric young painter Austin Osman Spare. It was at some point during this period that Ayling composed Thoughts in Motley, a small chapbook filled with strange and disconnected ramblings.

  Ayling followed his brethren of the New Tremor into the darkness sometime between 1905 and 1907 (Spare is said to have paid for his burial). Ayling’s single masterpiece, The Gathered Clan, was hung in the restored orangerie at Blane in 1892. It remained in place until 1910, when it was stolen, along with nearly half the family’s valuables, by Baron Hayward’s youngest son Haxton, who slipped away with his treasures to America.11

  Considering the Influence of Das Beben

  It is difficult to determine what sort of yardstick should be used to measure the role that Das Beben played in the history of 19th century painting. The fact of their destruction appears conclusive, and the near-complete expunging of their works from the scrutiny of history would seem to preempt the question of any lasting contribution. And yet there have been ripples, subtle echoes in the subsequent course of events in which might be detected some faint whisper of the “hot wind” of which Frith had written. Despite their secretive nature and the brevity of their two short appearances on the stage of the 19th century, the story of the group does intersect frequently with the lives of better-known figures.12 Clearly, the handful of artists and writers who had the luck or misfortune of beholding the work of Das Beben firsthand retained an indelible impression of the experience—though what effect these impressions were to have on later developments is hard to say. Considered in the annihilating light of events that would soon be ushered into the world with the arrival of the 20th century, it becomes harder not to entertain the notion—if only for a moment—that perhaps Das Beben had, through some undreamt of manner, at least partially succeeded in their goals.

  One passage in Ayling’s otherwise indecipherable book offers a possibly prophetic glimpse of what was to come: “There shall be Wildness, and Colours wrested out of nature & tortured & whipped to their extremes into an extremity of Expression, and there shall be a Torment of Shapes depicted that have no names, but only Colours, and there shall be Images of pure Colour, intense and blazing Colour, Colour floating upon the Void, a blazing Light that Consumes all it touches. In all of these shapes and torments I see the hand of that demon, von Kreitz.”

  Waters Dark and Deep

  Water roaring in her ears, pushing heavy against her ear drums. Hands clawing for purchase, feet kicking, trying to find something, anything solid to stand on, but there’s nothing—nothing but water. She opens her mouth to scream, takes a deep breath first, but instead of filling her lungs with air, liquid rushes down her throat and a shower of bubbles bursts from her mouth. Her lungs feel full and heavy, as if they’re filled with concrete and it’s weighing her down, down, down …

  My camera! she thinks. I can’t lose my camera! Mom and Dad will kill me!

  She looks up, sees a scattered diffusion of light somewhere above her—five feet? Five hundred? There’s no real difference at this point. There’s a whole world of air up there, if only she could reach it. If only she was wearing a life jacket, if only she had learned how to swim …

  A small shape slides toward her through the gray murk: sleek, scaled and streamlined. It’s a fish of some sort. Daddy would know what kind, but she doesn’t. It turns as it nears her face, displaying its flank, a cold black eye looking at her with supreme indifference as it passes, and then it’s gone, returned once more to the darkness it came from, and she’s still going down, down, down …

  “It’s all right! You’re all right!”

  Tina struggled to catch her breath. She was sitting up in bed, covered in sweat, chest heaving. Carl sat next to her, hands firm on her bare shoulders as if he were trying to hold her down. The bedroom was dark; it was still night. The darkness made her think of her dream—of the water—and she shivered.

  “Light,” she managed to gasp out. “Please … turn on the light.”

  Carl removed a hand from her shoulder and leaned over to switch on the nightstand lamp. Soft yellow light illuminated her small apartment bedroom, but the corners remained dim and shadowy. Murky, she thought. Like water.

  Carl began gently kneading her shoulders. “You had a bad dream.”

  Tina’s pulse was racing, and she felt as if she couldn’t catch her breath, but she still managed a soft chuckle. “No kidding.”

  They were both naked; normally she slept in a nightgown, but not when Carl stayed over. The sheet was thrown back, the blankets twisted into knots. She must’ve thrashed around quite a bit before Carl woke her. Without thinking about it, she leaned forward and began straightening the covers.

  “Same one?” Carl asked.

  She nodded. “That’s the third time I’ve had it this week. I don’t know why. I mean, I used to have it a lot when I was kid, but I haven’t had it for ages.” She paused, checked the sheets and covers, gave them one last smoothing with her palm. There.

  “Until now,” Carl added.

  “Yes.” She turned toward him and forced a smile. It wasn’t hard to do. He was a boyishly handsome man who kept himself trim by working out and doing a little body building. Maybe he was no Mr. Universe, but he sure looked good with his clothes off. Besides, she loved him like crazy, which was a good thing considering that they were engaged to be married.

  “Maybe it’s just stress. You’ve got a lot going on in your life: your job, getting ready to start on your MBA…”

  She smiled. “And don’t forget our impending nuptials.”

  A flicker of something passed across his face, a hint of an expression that was gone before it could be fully born. It was his turn to smile then, but it was a thin smile, one that hardly counted as a smile at all, really.

  A second passed, then another, before he answered. “Right.” The word seemed toneless and devoid of meaning, like it had been emitted from a computer speaker rather than the mouth of a man she intended to marry.

  She wondered if something were wrong, if she should ask him if everything was okay, but then she glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand and saw that it was sixteen minutes after four in the morning. He was probably just tired and out of sorts from being woken by her thrashing about. That’s all.

  She snuggled into his arms and they lay back on the bed, holding each other.

  “You know what I say about stress.”

  He sighed, but smiled. “‘Pressure makes diamonds.’ I think you’ve attended one too many corporate training seminars.”

  She ignored the dig. “It’s all a matter of whether you let things get to you or not. Anything can be controlled—including stress—if you work at it hard enough.”

  “It’s a good life if you don’t weaken, eh?” He kept one arm around her as he rolled halfway over and reached for the lamp.

  “Carl? Could you … leave it on? Just for a little bit, until I fall asleep?”

  He hesitated, but then said, “Sure,” and rolled back over to kiss her. It wasn’t a quick kiss, but it wasn’t exactly a lingering one, either. “Night.” He disengaged from her and turned over on his side, his back to her. She felt hurt, even though he slept like that a lot of the time. But after the nightmare she’d had, she could’ve used a little extra TLC.

  Her lips were still moist with his saliva, and it felt … funny, thicker than it should, cooler. She touched fingers to her lips, brought them to her nose, sniffed—

  —and smelled the faint, brackish odor of lake water.

  Tina hoped she wasn’t sweating too badly. It was late June, and in southwestern Ohio, that meant high humidity. She could feel moisture being sucked out of her pores with every clack of her high-heel shoes, and she wished she hadn’t worn her blue blazer and skirt today. The fabric was way too heavy for summer, but it was the nicest outfit she had, and she wanted to make a good impression on the doctors at this practice. Maybe free samples were what really sold pharmaceuticals—and her case was bulging full of those today—but looking good in the bargain sure didn’t hurt. Especially when the practice was staffed by all male doctors, like this one.

  As a pharmaceutical sales rep, she was always careful not to park too close to the entrance of a physician’s office. Docs hated it when you took up spaces they thought should be reserved for their patients. Ordinarily, it wasn’t much of a hassle, but the office park was crowded today, and she’d been forced to park her Geo Metro in front of an orthodontist’s the equivalent of city block away. The way she was sweating, by the time she got inside, she’d be lucky if she didn’t look like a drowned rat.

  She remembered the dream she’d had last night, and despite the heat of the day, she felt a chill ripple along her spine. Maybe drowned rat wasn’t the best choice of image for a simile.

  Tina heard a soft squeeek-squeeek-squeeek of turning wheels. She turned toward the sound and saw a small woman—really small, so tiny she looked more like an ambulatory doll than a creature of flesh and blood—pushing herself across the parking lot on a stainless-steel scooter. Tina wondered if there were something wrong with the woman’s legs, if they were too weak to support even her minimal weight and she needed the scooter to get around.

  The woman had blonde hair down to the center of her tiny back, and she wore a white dress and shoes that were so small they looked like they belonged on a doll rather than a person. The woman’s head was out of proportion with her body, so much so that it seemed she might topple over any moment, her head dragging the rest of her body down to the blacktop of the parking lot. She was so small, so thin, that Tina imagined she wouldn’t make much of a sound when she hit, no more than a child’s stuffed animal dropped onto carpet. The little woman held onto the handlebars with stubby sausage-link fingers as she half-walked, half-scooted toward Tina, wheels squeeeeeking softly.