The Mephistophelean House (6 page)

6:59.

Chapter 6

The Gargoyles

A gust rocked the cantilever truss of the Ross Island Bridge. The aerial tram swung over the Terwilliger Curves like a drogue in a wall cloud. The cable-stayed pylons of South Waterfront were a menagerie of steel and glass. I pumped the accelerator, looking into the rear view mirror.

My eyes were bloodshot.

The argent yards on Milwaukie Ave were rendered in melting snow. A cab carted hopper wagons and road railers under the Bybee overpass. The bio diesel circled Crystal Springs Lake, the rhododendron gardens and Eastmoreland. The dorms of Carlin College overlooked the parking lot. I parked and followed the path through the trees. Across an embankment was a light. A lamp post illuminated a bridge.

I heard the sound of wings.

I looked up.

Had I been mistaken?

Snow dusted the ferns.

I strained my ears. The lamp post hummed. My eyes grew accustomed to the dark. The flush cuts and root collars of shore pines and vine maple secreted ghastly silhouettes.

A branch overturned.

I could see something moving in the trees.

A pule cut the ruddy pail.

I hurried across the bridge. The path opened onto a dorm block. The dorm block had a Sallyport with iron lanterns. A snouted figure perched atop the cornice with wings like a bat.

“What is that?”

I stood under the Sallyport looking up, razor sharp talons, slits and horns, a trickle of snow melting from its misshapen maw.

“Gargoyles.”

A second gargoyle with pincer-like talons girted a scaly tail. Out of place on the weathered façade the gargoyles were cratered in glass. The quad was empty so I crossed the Sallyport, eager to be on my way. I was about to turn the corner when I heard the same sycophantic pule I had heard in the wood.

The light was playing tricks on my eyes. The gargoyles seemed to be moving, a third facing my way (hadn’t they been facing the other way?) staring down, directly overhead, a fourth and a fifth, runoff blotting the cornice, a sixth and seventh (where had they all come from?), lantern-lit scales and thorny brows bristling, snouts contracting, jaws machinating.

“Oh God.”

One by one the gargoyles turned, pillared in flecks of snow.

The Administration Building was locked. Across from Llyr Circle I spotted the Library.

The library door would not budge.

“Damn.”

An undergrad crossed the commons and slipped a phone over the reader. The library door opened. I followed, the door locking behind me.

No one looked up.

The atrium was sedate. I approached the circulation desk and asked where I might find help locating my title. The student at the desk pointed me to the reference section.

“Excuse me, I’m looking for information on the House on Asylum Road. Two doctors in particular. Here are their names.” I wrote ‘The Narcissus Effect’ and the doctors on an index card and gave it to the librarian.

The library was crowded. Every seat was taken, undergrads hunched over secret treatises, typing on tablets, scrawling line after line just to cross it out and start all over again.

“Special Collections,” the librarian said. “You’ll need a consultant.” The librarian wrote a series of numbers on the back of the card. “It will be about 5 minutes. You have time to find your other titles. Go to the first lower level.”

“Thanks.”

I checked the map before heading downstairs. The first number, a dissertation, and the second, a journal, were in adjacent aisles. I sat down at an empty table. The dissertation was entitled the “Oregon Board of Eugenics.” I turned to the introduction and read.

“‘From 1917-1963, the Oregon Board of Eugenics regularly sterilized epileptics, criminals and degenerates who were deemed to be a menace to society. Native Americans were also sterilized. The Oregon Board, like others across the nation, believed they were protecting the human gene pool by weeding out sub-humans. Bolstered by the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck vs. Bell which legitimized forced sterilization of the institutionalized, nearly 3000 Oregonians were operated upon, many dying from complications, well into 1967. The last forcible sterilization occurred in Oregon in 1981. It is not known how many Native Americans were sterilized in Oregon, but it is estimated to be in the tens of thousands.’”

I flipped to the index. There was an entry for Kilgore. I turned to the seventh chapter and located the reference.

“‘Although common practice in private institutions across the eastern seaboard, the practice of eugenic sterilization in Oregon was pioneered by two doctors, Maximilian Kilgore and Roland Andrews at The House on Asylum Road, a private sanitarium in East Portland. The House on Asylum Road was shut down in 1920. In private institutions like the House on Asylum Road questionable medical practices such as deep sleep theory, insulin shock, and electroconvulsive therapy predicated the rise of state sponsored disease manufacturing in 20th century schools for the handicapped and the clandestine inoculations on U.S. armed forces continuing to this day.’”

“Deep Sleep Theory?”

I set the dissertation aside and opened the journal, flipping to “Eugenics Records Mysteriously Disappear.”

“‘The records of institutionalized patients housed in private and public asylums were destroyed in 2002. All paper documents were shredded. No electronic copies were made. The entire history of 2650 interred Oregonians in mental institutions during the era of the Oregon Board of Eugenics were expunged, along with all State documentation, including the whereabouts of the remains.’”

“What have I gotten myself into?”

The silence was broken by two undergrads in the next aisle.

“Everything in the universe, the planets, stars, and galaxies account for less than 5% of what is really out there. 95% of the universe is a mystery. We say it’s a quarter dark matter, three quarters dark energy, but what does that even mean? What does it mean when we can only describe what is, by what it is not?”

“Are there other universes?”

“Quantum mechanics predicts the many-worlds interpretation. There are an infinite number of increasing, divergent realities for everything that has, is, and will happen. Roll a die and create six alternate realities, the one that came up, and the five that didn’t. Imagine how quickly the possibilities stack up.”

“But if that is true, and there are alternate universes, then there must be an infinite number of alternate universes.”

“Possibly.”

“Do they all share the same laws of physics?”

“In a way. The structure and the constants are the same.”

“What I really mean is, is it possible to travel from one universe to another? For example, could I travel to an alternate reality?"

“All universes are connected through quantum interference.”

“What’s that?”

“Quantum interference is a force, like entropy, emitted by each universe upon the next. It is like throwing a stone in a pond. The pond is the multiverse, where all universes, all realities, come together. Cast a stone. The ripples are quantum interference, the borders of different universes, one inside the other.”

“All universes are connected through quantum interference?”

“Yes.”

“Our idea of time, and history, is corrupt, then, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like a stone in a pond. That which happened meets that which didn’t?”

“Well…”

“Instead of physics think of history. Now, as we know it, isn’t really a result of the past, is it? Now is the quotient of quantum interference.”

“I’m not sure what you mean...”

“What if that which never happened exerted a heavier force, a greater quantum interference, upon now, than what occurred? What if now was the product of all the things which never happened? Your 95%. The force of quantum interference is the result of all the sides not rolled on the die, the things which never occurred, the eventualities which never took place. Look at the ripples in the pond. See the circles expand, over and over, like history repeating itself? Our idea of now, the present moment, our place in history, is just a ripple on the pond, a disturbance where alternate realities coincide the moment they diverge.”

“Well, I...”

“If all the things which never happened directly influence that which is happening now, how could there ever be such a thing as free will?”

“You cast the stone.”

“What happened to your eyes?”

Something clawed my shoulder.

I jumped.

A nefarious librarian harkened down the aisle.

“The viewing area is this way.”

The librarian proceeded down an unlit hallway and swiped a key card. A heavy metal door opened. A reading room was framed in manuscripts, historical leaflets, woodcuts, and daguerreotypes. The librarian unlocked a drawer and set a small, hardbound edition on a table.

“This,” the librarian lowered, “is not a book that sees the light of day. They consolidated before the purge. This is all that remains of a private trust.”

“A private trust?”

My throat tightened.

"But you know all about that…"

The netherworldly volume sat on the table, deckle edges tinged in gold. On the cover, emblazoned in ink, was the Weeping Tree.

The metal door slammed shut.

“Argh.”

The volume clattered like a block of lead flipping open to the title page.

The Narcissus Effect

A Study in Human Nature

1908

Doctor Maximilian Kilgore

Will Science bring us closer to God, or God closer to us? God created us in His own image. How may we recognize him, reflected in ourselves? As good and evil rage their war inside the human soul, alliances of Sin and Science rush to fill the hole. Medicating symptoms proffers broken guarantees; that which plagues us as a race is far worse than disease.

Excise the individual. Another is infected. Contagion spreads. We are left with plague. There is no shortage of individuals. A billion souls now roam this world at war. Imagine a world twice as crowded. What potential for violence would eviscerate the spirit of the times? A world twice as crowded, again? Perpetual war? A war that never ends? Just as there is no shortage of men, there is no shortage of Sin. Consider the metaphor of the diseased mind. Were the world the mind of a psychopath, would not each individual person represent a passing mania? Each face, the face of madness? Such an unchecked, consensual reality is the scourge of Man and the fate of the individual.

Unless we operate.

But how to operate upon the soul of man?

This study identifies a series of procedures to be implemented in Institutions of Public Health across the nation in order to address fundamental moral phenomena in a systematic undertaking. Operate upon a man, does he not bleed? Operate upon the soul of man to solve the riddle of his bleeding. Evil conspires to subsume the human soul. Science prevails a new City of God. Tangled are the webs we weave inside the human mind. What horror might befall us all, deep and dark inside? Where is soul, where is disease, that which makes us ill at ease, when one peers in a mirror has there ever been one dearer, an invention of one’s mind, a distant find drawn ever nearer?

In my mind Doctor Maximilian Kilgore addressed the Infernal Legislature, beaming like a beacon in mankind’s darkest hour, the world at war, the Infernal Legislators cloying, the gavel falling, the assembly rising out of their seats, boisterous calls from both sides of the aisle for the esteemed Doctor to chair the Oregon Board of Eugenics, protestations of delight and affirmation, compacts of solidarity, the Doctor echoing across the capitol dome, “but my friends, my colleagues, my brothers in arms, fear not, haste hath dutifully been employed. Work has already begun.”

The netherworldly volume rested on the table. The brown dust jacket was unscuffed, dentelle trig and true, the offset print and bastard title bounded in fresh glue; although the book was very old the textblock case was new, the untrimmed leaves in mint condition, endpaper see-through.

“I've got to get out of here.”

Flurries of snow pocketed the quad outside the library. Something was missing from the dorm block. The Sallyport was pockmarked, dappled abrasions cutting the length of the cornice.

The gargoyles were gone.

Had I imagined the whole thing?

I heard the rustling of wings.

I looked up.

The lanterns on the Sallyport cast transmogrifications over the dappled maculation. The light played tricks on my eyes.

I followed the path through the wood and was about to cross the bridge when I noticed a gargoyle on the post.

“I don't remember…”

The wood was silent.

The gargoyle rose on its haunches.

The lamppost hummed.