The thing padded up to him on its quiet feet and sang to him. Because it no longer mattered, Hoegbotton turned to look at it. He choked back a sob. He had not expected this. It was beautiful. Its single eye, so like Rebecca’s eyes, shone with an unearthly light, phosphorescent flashes darting across it. Its mirror skin shimmered with the rain. Its mouth, full of knives, smiled in a way that did not mean the same thing as a human smile. This was as close as he could get, he knew now, staring into that single, beautiful eye. This was as close. Maybe there was something else, something beyond. Maybe there was a knowledge still more secret than this knowledge, but he would never experience that.

The thing held out its clawed hand and, after a time, Hoegbotton took it in his own.

The Transformation of Martin Lake

A fresh river in a beautiful meadow

Imagined in his mind

The good Painter, who would someday paint it

—Comanimi

If I was strange, and strange was my art,

Such strangeness is a source of grace and strength;

And whoever adds strangeness here and there to his style,

Gives life, force, and spirit to his paintings …

—Engraved at Lake’s request on his memorial in Trillian Square

Few painters have risen with such speed from such obscurity as Martin Lake, and fewer still are so closely identified with a single painting, a single city. What remains obscure, even to those of us who knew him, is how and why Lake managed the extraordinary transformation from pleasing but facile collages and acrylics, to the luminous oils—both fantastical and dark, moody and playful—that would come to define both the artist and Ambergris.

Information about Lake’s childhood has a husk-like quality to it, as if someone had already scooped out the meat within the shell. At the age of six he contracted a rare bone disease in his left leg that, exacerbated by a hit-and-run accident with a Manzikert motored vehicle at age twelve, made it necessary for him to use a cane. We have no other information about his childhood except for a quick glimpse of his parents: Theodore and Catherine Lake. His father worked as an insect catcher outside of the town of Stockton, where the family lived in a simple rented apartment. There is some evidence, from comments Lake made to me prior to his fame, and from hints in subsequent interviews, that a tension existed between Lake and his father, created by Lake’s desire to pursue art and his father’s desire that the boy take up the profession of insect catcher.