I had been scouring the Craigslist when I saw it.
“Very old, possibly valuable chair for sale.”
There was a terrible cell phone picture accompanying it, turned sideways to the left, and I had to crane my neck at an awkward angle to see it. Just one picture, damn the guy. I am old, and my neck is not quite as spry as it once was. The image was grainy but there was something grand, almost whimsical about the way the single-piece carved back merged into stiles that then curved out in great swoops.
“Viking,” I cried aloud. “It’s a Viking throne!” A rare and valuable antique, such as I’d only seen in a Christie’s catalogue, and that too when I had been a young man. I was on my feet, reaching for my cell phone, then bent once more to see what the guy was asking. $40 OBO. Ha! The poor sap, he had no idea, no clue.
The house was ramshackle, clapboard and asphalt tile, on a small plot, with poorly maintained landscaping in the poor part of town. The middle-aged gentleman that answered my call was lined and tired-looking, dark hollows under his slightly shifty eyes.
The minute I set eyes on the large chair sitting in the middle of the empty room, I knew it was the genuine article. Twelve-to thirteen-hundred years old, I estimated, hard maple and oak, strong and unyielding as iron. Just like the men from that age. Unbidden, greed flared in my mind and overtook my body as I envisioned myself cleaning it up and selling it for thousands, maybe millions of dollars. An exclusive private sale for tens of millions maybe.
I haggled him down to thirty bucks, but mostly for form’s sake. Every guy on Craigslist expects that. He offered no resistance. I was sweating and red-faced and grinning like a madman as I paid him, unable to hide the pleasure of the incredible deal I was getting.
“The chair wasn’t mine,” the man said as a couple of sullen kids loaded the heavy chair into the back of my pickup. “Belonged to my brother…he passed recently.” He had a peculiar, almost relieved look on his face as I glanced at him in my rearview.
I used my electric winch to unload in my workshop, and settled down to evaluate it in detail. I stripped away the bubble-wrap and rags I had used to protect it along the way. Having spent a lifetime in furniture restoration and antiques, I immediately spotted variations on the original, but there was not doubt about its authenticity or vintage. For one thing, the feet were carved into talons clutching a ball, rather than ending in flat graceless squares, and the snakes carved along the back were more detailed than in my memory. The serpents crossed along the back and recrossed in an evil parody of the Caduceus. They sprang out and curled away dramatically at the top with sharp-fanged open mouths and avid, rage-filled eyes. Hand-beaten copper bands encircled the joints.
I have a mystical bond with all things wooden since childhood when I learned woodworking at my father’s workshop. Wood whispers its secrets to me. I only need touch a piece—a board, a piece of rough lumber, a finished piece of furniture—and concentrate, and I can visualize the tree it came from, when it was cut, how it was made. Sometimes I even see the people the piece was associated with, their stories. Gentle visions float through my mind like an old-time silent movie.
“Dad,” I would say, “a bearded man in a funny hat cut this tree down.” Or, “A big spotted cat used to live on this tree before it became a sideboard.” My father would smile enigmatically and pat my head, and in time I learned to hide my visions from him.
“It’s just a collection of long straws, boy,” he would say. “Nothing but a bunch of really thin straws.”
In the here and now, I composed myself, having no idea what was to come. I placed my hands on the chair.
“Whisper to me baby. Come to papa.”
The first touch was like an electric shock so powerful that it sucked my breath away. My hands on the snake heads were like electrodes on a car battery. I wasn’t in my workshop any more but in a medieval Viking court. There was a soundtrack this time, rushing wind and static, but no dialog.
The grizzled carpenter shook a thick callused finger at an avaricious king and pronounced an ancient curse when he refused to pay for the magnificent throne. In the very next scene, the king’s sibling treacherously murdered him to take the throne. He loomed behind the throne with his knife, one log-like forearm pinning the king down, white teeth flashing, grinning savagely as he pulled the sharp blade across the king’s neck like a bow across a violin. Huge veins popped in his neck and forehead from the effort, and his long dirty-blonde hair flew like Medusa’s serpents. The king’s life-force cascaded everywhere as the valkyries bore him away to Valhalla. The snakes hissed with primal fury and drank deep of the blood. Smell too, I noted in passing, in addition to picture and sound, as the sanguineous metallic odor singed my nostrils.
I saw the new king succumb to his successor, brother killing brother, sister slaying brother, a son his father in an endless orgy of violence celebrated with savage joy. The snakes sibilated in ecstasy with every new act of barbarism but I could not tell if they were celebrating the downfall of the one, the success of the other or if it was merely a perverted celebration of bloodlust. The images continued to roll by me with bewildering speed, atrocity after atrocity, the history and the very grain, every straw of the timber soaked, marinated, impregnated with blood and carnage. Avarice ruled, and it was not limited merely to Northern Europe as the throne changed ownership and eventually made its way across the ocean to America.
I stood there in a virtual reality, transfixed by the images, shaking—yes, I could see my arms, my body, my feet shaking, and in a weird alternate reality, my whole body shaking. I knew I should let go the chair but I could not. Like a man in a dream who wishes to flee but cannot move a limb I held on, helpless, dreading every new vision that flashed in front of me. I wished the gift of this vision gone, the pride in my endowment now bitter ashes of regret, my head bowed in horror but the visions continued. There was no squeezing the images out, no child-like shutting the eyes and making the big bad world disappear.
It was evening when the “highlights” rolled to figures I recognized from more recent history. Finally, I saw the man that had sold the chair to me. The weapon was modern (a gun), but the emotion was the same, greed—raw and naked and urgent, pulsing with an urgency that I could empathize with. After all, I had the same emotions rush through me when I first laid eyes on the accursed piece of furniture. The old house on the wrong side of the tracks was apparently the driving force behind that act of violence. I saw that he had known, at least seen something, in a way not many had before. The way I knew now. He had foolishly thought that by getting rid of the chair, he would escape his fate. Not so, because I saw him beaten, then skewered to death on rebar rods by the very same kids who had helped load the chair. I wasn’t sure if it was still in the future or had already happened.
I thought I understood now how the curse worked. There was perhaps a method to the madness, a one-ness of the chair and the curse to the exclusion of everything else, the two mingled as the yin and yang, like the snakes, inseparable.
As the dusk settled I saw what was to be my fate as well. I saw my two beloved sons gang up on me. Flash freeze images of a chainsaw, blood fountaining, a weighted suitcase, rushing water.
The next morning, I peeked out between the blinds at the two garbage men who stood before the chair I had placed curbside. I had muddied it up and made it look as bad as I could in the night but the chair had resisted me mightily. Despite my efforts, I could see the value of the piece reflected in the face of one of the men. The widened eyes, the parted lips, the covetous grin. I shuddered at my near escape. But had I gotten away unscathed? Would my special gift protect me?
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