The Mephistophelean House (8 page)

I checked the barn.

The dogs were gone.

I walked over to the arena.

The palomino drank from the trough.

“Where in the hell did everybody go?”

The air was stagnant.

The trees were still.

I could not remember.

I went back to the house.

I sat in the great room.

Jonsrud did not appear.

“I can’t remember!”

I looked at the floor.

The sofa did not cast a shadow.

Nor did the table.

The hutch, recliner, and shelves were shadowless.

Not even I cast a shadow.

The ashes in the hearth rustled.

“The poker. Calapooya…”

Light poured through the window.

“I brought It here, with me...”

The evergreens swayed on the hill, just as they always had. Just as they always would. In the evergreens I stood next to a pond, holding a stone.

“Let me go.”

In a white room with a white carpet, it is easy to see when something is out of place. Especially when there is a shadow on a day when no shadows are cast.

“Wherever I go.”

“Whatever I do.”

“I'll never be free.”

“You'll be there too.”

The surface of the pond was still.

I could see my reflection.

It was there.

Behind me.

It was reaching out.

I grasped the stone.

“There are a lot of things in the basement that need to go.”

“Knickknacks, keepsakes, even a couple of cans of gas.”

I had nothing to lose.

“It’s so nice to come to Home to a fire…even when there isn’t a fireplace.”

A hellish scream riled the horses in the field.

The bio diesel accelerated down the dirt road past the clipped signpost, tailpipe burning a bio-chemical trail through Sublimity. A colorless sun hung over the Willamette Valley. I-5 topknotted the Marquam Bridge and merged onto the Banfield. I drove in a stupor, planning my next move.

“It knows I’m coming. I have to be quick. No milling about. I’ll get what I need, pack the car, set the house on fire…”

I looked in the rear view mirror.

“If I lost control, and something else was pulling the strings, would I know? If IT was me, and I was a stranger to myself, at what point did It take over? When did I stop calling the shots? Why go back? Isn’t that what It wants? Isn’t that what It’s wanted, all along?”

Logic painted a precarious causeway over a chasm of despair. The overcast sky stretched infinitely overhead. I stepped on the gas, rub strip skirting the freeway wall, accelerator curling like an adder, the engine cutting in and out, wheels losing momentum, emergency lights on, the gauge at 300 degrees.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

I pulled into Laurelhurst. Smoke wisped into the cabin. I got out and popped the hood. The engine block was cracked. The bio diesel would have to be towed.

Drizzle eroded the last remnants of white on Cesar Chavez Avenue, the golden Maid of Orleans buffeted in rain. An adumbrate penumbra buried Belmont Square and the old church, a bitter chill descended still enshrouded in a mist, Hawthorn thorns, and black acorns, the windows empty and forlorn, I climbed the stairs into despair’s capricious moldy gut, and opened the unholy door and stepped with fear inside, waiting for the Mephistophelean House to seethe my soul awry, but nothing came from in the House and at the door I stood, wishing I had moved into another neighborhood.

The Deerhound was waiting.

“Calapooya?”

It perked Its head.

The white door unbolted.

“Jonsrud? Is that you?”

The Deerhound tramped into the kitchen.

The white door was open.

I called at the top of the stairs.

“Jonsrud? Is this some kind of joke?”

Paws crossed the floor. Water trickled down the wall. The pump whirred. I poked my head under the flue inside the windowless chamber.

The Deerhound was gone.

Water spilled from the trough. The floor was dry. The black X and pink circle shone like a bloody sun. I studied the upside-down numbers on the wall, 174 lines repeated over and over.

“174, 174, where have I heard that number before? Shouldn’t have come down here. Shouldn’t have come back at all. X marks the spot. The Doctor’s private trust...” I reconsidered. “Quantum interference, like a stone in a pond. The ripples are the borders between that which happened and all the things which could of happened, but didn’t.”

I stared at the black X and pink circle. The black X marked the spot on the wall where the two sides came together. If I stood a little closer to the wall, the black X superimposed the pink circle. If I stood in front of it, the black X and pink circle came together.

I stood in the windowless chamber, though it would have been difficult to call myself me. Pieces of a mirror lie on the floor.

“The mirror. The red box. Wait. The red box. It’s gone. The red box isn’t here.”

It was like a dream. Upstairs was bright and new. I went into the hall. The front door was open. Main Street was abandoned.

The Deerhound yowled under the Walnut tree. A pigeon fluttered in the grass. The other pigeons looked down at it pitilessly.

It had a broken snout.

The horse rings on Main were hitched to their roundings. Slush melted in leaf-packed puddles. Chimneys pitched columns of ash. I followed the Deerhound up the hill. There were no people. Some houses I recognized. Some were dark. Some were empty.

The Deerhound ducked into an alley. Goatsbeard and Grape Holly choked the cinder cone spillway. The Deerhound pulled farther and farther ahead. I fell farther and farther behind. The alley opened onto 55th. A barbican permitted access to a promontory with hemicycles and apses, the outline of a byzantine presidio visible through the hedge. The Deerhound passed through a metal turnstile with a cornerstone which bore the nameplate, ‘The House on Asylum Road.’

“The House on the Hill.”

I fell on the bank.

“I am dead.”

The clay eroded. Rain spilled into a sinkhole. I lay by the sinkhole on the edge of an endless reservoir of tears.

“Quantum interference. All the things which never happened. That’s why It follows me wherever I go. The black X and pink circle are a nadir.”

Could I return through the nadir?

Back through the black X and pink circle?

I stared up at the House on Asylum Road.

Rain beat on the corrugated roof of Northgate. A guardhouse commanded the interstice. Inside the guard house an ugly man sat on a stool, staring through the grill.

“Hello?” I rapped. “I’m…er…here to see the Doctor.”

I noticed the chronic lesions of sarcoidosis, a hyperkeratinised scar running from crown to ear. Tiny puncture wounds dotted the superior and inferior temporal lines of his left parietal bone.

“I said I’m here to the see the Doctor.”

“Doctor!” the ugly man drooled.

“Yes.”

I waited.

“Doctor?”

“That’s what I said. The Doctor.”

The ugly man was impish.

If I wasn’t allowed in, why was he just sitting there? Why didn’t he do anything? Why didn’t he say something?

I waited.

It was as if the ugly man forgot I was there.

“Forget it.”

I followed the hedge down Madison to 55th. At the barbican an armed guard hailed me.

“Sir!”

“I’m here to see the Doctor.”

“Sir!” the guard squinted.

“I have an appointment.”

“I’m sorry, Sir?”

“I said I have an appointment.”

“Let me ring the office,” the guard ducked inside the barbican. Ringed by a row of Hemlock the ornately landscaped park fronted a flute shafted mansion with horseless carriages.

The guard popped out.

“I'm sorry, is this some kind of joke?”

“Some kind of joke? What are you talking about?”

“I’m sorry Sir,” the guard stepped into the barbican. “Someone will escort you up directly.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you want to wait inside?”

“No. I’ll only be here a moment.”

“Sir?”

“I said I’ll only be here a moment.”

Burly guards with straight sticks donned the off-white garb of the institution, one clean shaven, the other with a long ropy beard.

The gate opened.

“For God sakes, I’ve been standing out here for an eternity,” I shouted.

“Sir?” the ropy bearded guard stammered.

“I said I’ve been out here for an eternity.”

The guards looked at one another.

“Errrr, this way,” the clean shaven guard pointed through the trees. The ropy bearded guard unlocked the front door of the mansion. We entered a narrow hallway just as a long case clock stuck the quarter hour. A woman with a yellow shawl sat at a typewriter. The shawl fell on the floor. She picked it up. As we climbed the staircase I got a look at her hands.

They were claws.

The guards escorted me to the end of the corridor.

“Come.”

The clean shaven guard opened the door.

“We have a visitor, Sir.”

“So far so good."

“Sir?”

“I might throw you a curve ball.”

“Yes Sir!!"

I was ushered into a scholarly apartment expecting to see Doctor Maximilian Kilgore. The door closed and I found myself ensconced in Chesterfields, book cases, artifacts, and an alabaster bust. In a locked glass case was the red box.

“The red box.”

I put my hands on the glass. The red box was an ultraviolet catastrophe, a schism riveting the dimensions of the room, the windowless chamber magnified a thousand fold, the source of the quantum interference, the sound of rain, the red box, locked inside a simple glass case, if I could only get something to smash the glass…

“Looking for something?”

A Faustian figure in a brocade tailcoat pulled on a half bent taper. I was about to say something when the fog lifted and I could see down the valley.

Portland was gone.

“Look upon The City of Pain.”

The Faustian figure thrust open the casement. A verdant forest stretched down the slope, columns of rain spilling as far as the eye could see.

“What happened,” I gasped.

“Tell me. What do you see?”

I righted myself.

“Doctor Maximilian Kilgore.”

“You know me?”

“I know you like I know myself.”

Guilds Lake, Douglas Firs, Ponderosa Pines, a foundry of coal smokestacks, the Oregon Electric Railway line.

I was beginning to understand.

“Ogemtel,” I said.

“Reversal is the first symptom.”

“Symptom?”

“Repetition is the second. Super diseases, government treasons, foretelling future hotter seasons.”

“What makes you think…”

“Think of mixing sinners with an protected soul, a defenseless true believer left to dig a deeper hole? And think to whom god hath bequeathed the role of slave and lord. How could a race of godless fakes keep Satan from its door? The sinners would invariably mix, a horror we could never fix, but if we move to seize the day, there might just be another way.”

“Another way?"

“The afflicted, the sick of mind; a tortured soul isn’t hard to find.”

“I don’t understand…”

“There are a billion people. The earth is full! A great war looms! A war to end all wars! Can you imagine what would happen if mankind doubled in size? Twice as many caches of sin? What would two great wars look like, then? And twice again? War all the time? Perpetual war? We must poison the weed of sin at its root! Cutting its stalks is not enough. Sever a branch, another checks its balance!”

“You are insane.”

“Projection is the third symptom.”

I swallowed painfully.

“My only goal is to control the hidden secret of the soul. In what pantopticon of pain remains arraigned inside the human brain a secret box that’s tightly locked bred of sin and human shame?”

The Doctor gestured.

“Just look at yourself. You’re afflicted. Sickness has taken hold. But luckily you have come to the right place. I am a Doctor. Fate is a bitter sister, ever since, no such thing as coincidence.”

“No,” I declared, “you don’t understand.”