The Mephistophelean House (12 page)

What if I didn’t have the right key?

One by one the keys didn’t work.

Down the corridor I could hear the mortise lock.

The ironclad door opened.

The guards were returning.

I dropped the keys.

“No!”

Before I knew it I had snatched the ring off the floor and inserted another key. The lock unbolted and I stepped onto a cellblock, slamming the door behind me.

It was as hot as hell. A maniacal ensemble of despondency and despair cased holding pens like animals in cages, alerting one another to my presence.

It was as if they were expecting me.

“Heretic, Heretic!”

“My eyes! My eyes!”

“What I wouldn’t give to meet you face to face!”

To cross the module I had to pass through the holding pens. Each pen had a chuck hole, vestibule, and flume. I passed the first pen. Instinctually I stepped back, and not an instant too soon, for two arms shot through the bars and wrapped around my neck.

I fell backwards.

“Almost got you, Doc.”

“Doc,” I choked. “Me?”

“Of course your honor.”

An albino with tattooed jowls cracked his knuckles.

“You mistake me for someone else.”

“You’re an infernal bastard but I love you none the less. Listen Doc. You got to let me go. I’m on your side. You were right. Everyone here is nuts.”

“I’m trapped here, just like you.”

The albino jeered.

“Come on Doc. Give me a shot before you put me in the hole.”

“Let me alone.”

“Leaving well enough alone lent itself well enough. I’m a dissenter.”

“Let me pass.”

“One shot is all I ask. Bring one up from the hotel. We can have some fun. Some good, clean fun.”

I left the albino in the pen. Fungused fingernails tapped the bars of the next pen.

“Afternoon, Governor.”

I shivered.

Jackleg forearms collared the chuck hole.

“Purple Face and I we’re wondering if you could settle an argument.”

“I’m sorry, I…"

“Don’t walk out on me,” the forearms lunged.

I jumped.

“Didn’t mean to be antisocial, Gov. I can barely control myself. It’s a sign of the times. A sign of the times. Reason with me Gov. If each person is a product of their environment, why am I held responsible for that which the environment produced? Am I on trial?”

“Here,” I vouchsafed, “we are all on trial.”

“I guess that makes you judge, jury, and executioner.”

I flinched, and not a moment too soon.

I was missing a piece of my hair.

“Purple Face and I have our disagreements, but there’s one thing we can agree on.”

“You are mistaken. I’m not who you think I am.”

“If Purple Face is a product of his environment, is it fair to condemn him for what he will become?”

“What’s that smell?”

In the adjoining pen a figure sat in a chair. The figure didn’t move.

A fullered seax lay at its feet.

The ash was streaked in crimson.

“Oh my god…”

“You could say I talked him into it. But he didn’t need much convincing. Good old Purple Face, a sign of the times, Gov, a sign of the times. The thing I want to know is, if Purple Face really is a product of his environment, why is he being held responsible for factors beyond his control?”

I was sick.

“A sign of the times, a sing of the times. Might be tempted to do it myself. Mind you he knew what crimes he was committing. We’re all guilty of something. No one is without sin. Look at how he displeases himself in his own image. A crime against nature, for what criminals are worth, a dime a dozen I daresay, consider yourself, Governor, locking me in this cell, next to Purple Face, you maniacal, bloody bastard!”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” I pleaded, “you mistake me for someone else.”

“Purple Face and I are Devil’s Advocate. For us there is no common ground. He says one thing, I say another. He’d say I’m upside down, I’d say he’s inside out.”

Flies buzzed. The heat was incapacitating. The odor of purification made me wretch. A pale spot of light illuminated the next pen. A man was bolted to the wall.

I seized the bars.

“Can you hear me?”

The figure twitched.

“He’d say I’m up in arms, I’d say he’s checked out. He’d say I’m spinning yarns, I'd say it's in doubt. But there was one thing, one thing, Purple Face and I could always agree upon. Know what it is?”

Jonsrud wasn’t anywhere. The cellblock ended and I came to another locked door.

“Take a guess, Gov.”

I looked over my shoulder.

“He said you’ll pay for what you’ve done.”

A key from the ring unbolted the door to a Penrose staircase. A sign was affixed to some bricks in the wall that were moldered and had been replaced.

F3 Administration

F2 Records

F1 Holding Cells

B1 Bolgia 1-10

B2 Operating Theatre

“The Operating Theatre. That’s it.”

A knob shot off a radiator, hitting me in the face.

“Damnation!”

The knob clattered down the staircase.

Tungsten jets cast an uneven, sickly glow over the corkscrewing steps. I tried to keep pace but my feet were too big. The risers were pitted in knots and cavities cut in the mineral rift, the olivine wedges and quartz framework grains receding back into the cliff. Newel posts cast toxic shadows across the sandstone wall; I lost my footing on the tread and began to slip and fall.

“Argh.”

Vortex streets and strange attractors blocked the long descent, a conic helix winding down the deeper that I went. After what seemed an eternity of paradox and peril, a lancet door was reinforced and hewn into a carrel.

F3 Administration

F2 Records

F1 Holding Cells

B1 Bolgia 1-10

B2 Operating Theatre

“This must be the way to the Operating Theatre.”

I inspected the ring.

“The key to the gate, the key to the cell, the portcullis, blivet and post. How many keys have I used? How many remain?”

One by one the keys were unsuccessful.

I inserted the second to last key.

The lock engaged.

The door opened.

I had a terrifying thought.

Door after door, lock after lock, the keys spun around the ring. But one key remained. I could unlock one more door. What if I used all my keys and came to a door I couldn’t unlock, having penetrated the perfect prison, only to find myself locked inside?

Chapter 13

The Bolgia

Ten pens numbered one to ten decocted a zoo of the irredeemable, tourniquets of torture, contraptions of debasement, widgets of grief and despair, jiggers of hopelessness, anguish, and throe sweltering in charcoal air. Like ditches of stone that were splintered in bone the Bolgia were blighted and bare, the interred locked inside left to claw out their eyes while reciting in vain the Lord’s Prayer. Arches and dikes of livid stone projected a field malign, an iron well and a bottomless pit demarcated a strike-slip line.

In the first Bolgia, eyes cast down, were wielders of the lash, caching perfect human forms into the gall-flecked fetid ash. Inside Bolgia two a man was buried in ordure, a stream of falsely metered words recurred an addlepated curse. Bolgia three was breamed in screams, a man housed in a block, his soles poked holes in beds of coals, his knees cut on the rock. He leaned against the block to cut the pressure on his spine, but fell back onto the hot coals screaming each and every time.

I rattled the bars.

It was no use.

There was no way out.

"I have to find Jonsrud."

A form distorted chin to chest inside Bolgia four had a torso wholly turned awry with eyes that blinked no more. So dark it was I barely saw the outline of his face, disconnected from his body and then put back in its place. The shoulders arched grotesquely forward, body in a brace, the inverted torso's sunken sockets staring into space.

“How has he done it, what purpose does it serve, to break a man in two, only to set him in reverse?”

I pitied the multitude. Unable to quell my lingering suspicions I foresaw Jonsrud bound in some similar, inconceivable deprivation.

Bolgia five was limed in pitch and red hot grappling-irons, an unctuous wight of lofty height was wrapped in metal wires.

“I know it’s my turn to burn in the urn, but explain this to me this, my one final concern.”

“Final concern?"

“Why do I belong next to him?”

He pointed to the face-backwards thing.

“Don’t ask me about the logic of this place!”

“Don't you know who I am? I am the one who cleared the land and brought you here in my name. I buried the stories that you told your babies, replaced your old laws with laws of my own. The words that you used are all lost and forgotten like fruit in a tree that's already rotten, the eye on the pyramid belongs to me, and the bones in the base are what you will be.”

I pressed the ring against my belt.

“Open the door. Let-me-go!”

I did not pity the soul inside Bolgia five.

Bolgia six was empty. Bolgia seven housed victims of botched surgeries, amputations, collections of missing parts. Bolgia eight housed by all appearances someone who should not have been there.

I reached through the bars.

“What is the reason for your internment?”

“I don’t know why I’m here, though I tried to be God to myself. I persisted in trying to make my own way, but got stuck on the hook when I went for the bait.”

The heat was atramentous.

“Where am I headed next?”

Bitterly I asked myself.

“I am lost.”

“We are all lost.”

A prostrate form lay on the floor inside Bolgia nine. Cuts and scars and strange burn marks ran up and down his spine. Bolgia ten was another double pen, a man lashed to a rack. A torturess in surgical dress drew black lines down his back. The short hand of the torturess was delicate and merciless, inscribing sharp-tongued smoking steel filleting strips across his chest.

My momentum expired.

I could go no farther.

The torturess japed.

Bolgia ten opened.

I must go on, I told myself.

I must go on.

A mutilated keyway was fixed under a louvered track.

One key remained.

I had come to my destination.

I fit the final key in the lock.

The door opened onto an antediluvian blastway, arcs of heat radiating into the throat of the cone. A chilled, ice tempered expanse was devoid of sound and color, moonmilk and frostwork glinting like jewels on a rimstone dam. Unsure of my footing I skirted the chasm, erasing the momentum of fear building up inside me. The freezing gallery narrowed and I found myself at a dead end. A familiar impression was fixed upon the gallery wall.

F3 Administration

F2 Records

F1 Holding Cells

B1 Bolgia 1-10

B2 Operating Theatre

Jonsrud lay on the table.

He was still.

A blood spackled garment hung on the wall.

“What has he done to you?”

There was a scalpel on the tray.

I picked it up.

“An eye for an eye, a soul for a soul, a part of the whole with a heart of coal.”

“And what would you know of the human soul,” Doctor Maximilian Kilgore threw a saw in the sink.

“Doctor Maximilian Kilgore.”

The Doctor took off his gloves.

“You look lost.”

“I seem to have found my way here.”

“You certainly have.”

“Have I caught you at a bad time?”

“Not at all. And to think, I had the whole place on the lookout, a man on the run, and here you were, all along.”

The Doctor pointed to the gallery.

"Shall we?”

“Of course.”

“This way.”

I followed the Doctor. Although he preceded, he had a way of looking behind his shoulder.

‘A useful skill.’

The Doctor drew a flowstone curtain.

“Where does it lead?"

I had the distinct impression the Doctor could read my thoughts.