The Mephistophelean House (9 page)

“You’ve got it all backwards.”

I backed out of the room. “Uh…do I make my own way out, Doctor?”

“They always say that, too.”

“?”

“You can get him now.”

The door opened.

“This man,” the Doctor pined, “chimes like a chimera. He will stop at nothing to escape. Pay him no heed. He will try to convince you he is sane, and that it is you, in reality, who are mad.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Take him to Andrews. Prepare the operating theater. Then we may begin the…metaphysical” the Doctor cracked a rictus. “There is a new experiment I’ve been meaning to try, a rather grisly procedure I'm afraid, with negligible chance of success, but it seems fate has gifted you, gifted me, gifted us both with this opportunity.”

“Yes, Doctor!”

The guards parlayed me downstairs. I went limp, picturing myself strapped to an operating table.

“Gentlemen, there must be some mistake! Look at me. I’m not crazy. I demand a phone call.”

“Who are you going to call? Krazy Kat?”

The yellow shawl lie on the carpet. The woman carped, gouged eye slits revealing putrescent orbs, a forked tongue lashing rotting teeth, claws rapping metal keys, the pendulum swinging back and forth.

“Gentlemen.”

“You're mistaken."

“There’s nothing gentle about us.”

The guards eschewed me outside.

A red brick path led up the hill.

“Sirs, then. You’ve got to listen to me. I’m not crazy. The Doctor was referring to someone else.”

“He was pointing at you.”

“Sirs,” I pursued, “don’t hurt me.”

“We won’t."

"Now, what the Doctor does on his own, well, that’s his business.”

“Are you all mad?”

“I don’t like this,” the clean shaven guard said. “He’s got a wild look in his eye.”

We halted under the archivolt.

I could feel their grip loosening.

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know.”

In the downpour the archivolt afforded a glimpse of Northgate. A carriage passed by the interstice, driven by a man with a French Fork.

I sensed my opportunity.

“‘Deep Sleep Theory,’ remember?”

“Yeah, I remember. But I don’t get it.”

“You don’t have to get it. You just have to do it.”

“Right.”

“Who are we to question? We do what we’re told.”

“You have free will," I interrupted. "Set me free. Let me go.”

“All right. That’s enough.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Doctor’s orders.”

“Please,” I implored, “where are you taking me?”

The clean shaven guard chuckled.

“To a nice dry place.”

“This is all a misunderstanding. A big mistake. I’m not crazy. I’m not who you think I am! I’m really someone else!”

“Now that’s enough. The Doctor was right."

The guard’s vice grip capitulated.

I was free.

“You’ll fit in here nicely, madman.”

Northgate was just across the pond. If I could scale the hedge I could return to the Mephistophelean House and the windowless chamber, back through the black X and pink circle. Before I could make it two steps a brawny arm hoisted me by the collar, brushing the stains off my pants.

“Now that’s enough.”

The guards escorted me up the hill. The Flemish gable of a refectory poked through the trees. A red brick path cut along the hedge and lead to a courtyard with Palladian windows. The clean shaven guard unlocked the door and we entered, shoulder to shoulder.

A man with pitted cheeks banged on the gate. The ropy bearded guard dragged him by the collar and whiplashed him into the backboard.

Teeth ricocheted across the floor.

I looked down.

There were a lot of teeth.

The gate opened.

A whale of an attendant took the man away.

The clean shaven guard confronted me.

“That’s what you get for opening your mouth around here.”

The guards escorted me to a gate where I was straight-jacketed and left half-sitting, half-leaning against the wall in a padded cell, a posterior restraint chained to a chord on the floor.

I waited. Having lost all circulation in my arms I concentrated on the window slit, fingers curling like rotting petals. Time was insignificant. I lost consciousness, only to awake minutes later thinking I had slept for hours. Finally the gate unlocked. The door opened. A hulking giant entered. On his belt was a ring of keys.

Chapter 9

The House on Asylum Road

“Ogemtel!”

“Have pity on me. What are you? Man or ghost?”

“Not man, though once I was. Let me go.”

“Let you go?”

“Yes. Let me go.”

“But why would I let you go?”

The hulking giant brown studied his placket front.

“I was the one that brought you here.”

“You?”

“Name the man who’s mad who doesn’t think that he is sane who declares the dereliction of the melancholy brain. We call this place a mad house but we mean it makes men sane. Wouldn’t that corrupt a world bent on that which one attains? What if what was, and the things that one does, turn out to be echoes of that which soon comes?”

“Ogemtel...”

“That is not my name.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Andrews.”

“Doctor Roland Andrews?”

“Yes. Doctor Roland Andrews.”

“Why did you say your name was Ogemtel?”

“The name of the curse, said in reverse, is all that I said to you.”

“The curse,” I reversed. Ogemtel. O-G-E-M-T-E-L. TEL EM OG. LET-ME-GO.

Let me go.

“What’s happening to me?”

The hulking giant glowered.

"What happened to Matthew? And Jonsrud? What did you do to my friends?”

“He's beginning to realize what I’ve done, what I had to do, to end this.”

I cringed.

“If you speak out of turn, make amends or affirm an insidious quip or remark, it’s your soul in a hole you’ll be left to unfold and live out in a haze for the rest of your days.”

“No...”

“Brain, tongue, teeth, feet, then left for dead at the side of the street. It’s a daemon this Doctor, this Doctor a daemon, a pontifex preaching of Science, but careful unless you mistakenly lapse non-compliance or open defiance. He wants to cut out the erroneous people in order to build corrupt mercantile steeples, and all that remains of the children of sun will be lost in exhaust and forgot and undone.”

“What do you want from me?”

The hulking giant was explicit.

“Take the executioner’s mask and fit it on your face, end this madness lest he deign to doom the human race.”

I closed my eyes. The padded floor was cement. The straightjacket was gone. The cell was gone. I lay on the floor of the windowless chamber under the black X and pink circle. I recognized the upside-down numbers on the wall. They repeated, over and over, every 174th line.

I blinked. For every event, past, present and future, there was an alternate outcome, a divergent reality that occupied the same space, the same water in the pond. Reality, a ripple in the pond where that which happened and all the things that didn’t, awaited me on the other side of the black X and pink circle.

All I had to do was cast the stone.

“Shhhhzzzzz,” the hulking giant harkened to the window-slit.

Someone was standing outside.

“Follow me.”

The hulking giant knocked on the door.

The cell opened.

The felt faced rube entered.

“This way.”

Blood rushed to my head. The hulking giant escorted me to the gate. As the rube unclasped his key ring I snuck a peek inside the next cell.

It was Jonsrud.

“Ben?”

Jonsrud jumped to his feet.

“Is it you?”

“It’s me.”

“Are we in hell?”

“No.”

“This is hell, isn’t it?”

“No. Listen...”

“Ben, you’ve got to get me out of here. I failed the metaphysical. They’re going to have to operate.”

The hulking giant tapped my shoulder.

I whispered.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be back.”

“This way,” the rube reprimanded. I looked over my restraint.

Jonsrud pawed the window slit.

Was he right?

Were we in hell?

We crossed the exedra. Pandemonium broke out, bandages on shaven heads stained with blood and marking pens, men on gurneys, twins in chairs, dented heads with chopped off hair, screaming came from down the hall and touched off screaming from them all till white coats burst onto the scene and clubbed the screamers into dreams.

I kept my mouth shut.

The rube brandished his straight stick, cleaving a man’s jaw and hoisting him across his back. The twins circled the man with big ears fleeing the clutches of a whale. The hulking giant ushered me through the checkpoint down an anterior walkway back out in the storm.

It was raining so hard I had to shout.

“Who are those people?”

“Dullards. Cripples. Epileptics.”

“You lock them up just because they’re different?”

“They are wards of the State.”

The red brick path linked the refectory to the building with Palladian windows. The asylum was a castle in a cloud, quoins and tourelles, double pitched roofs with gabled dormers, copper hips and iron cresting, eyelid garrets and corbeled gambrel.

“Where are you taking me?”

“They have to believe I’m taking you to the Bolgia.”

We walked brusquely. The straight jacket cut into my skin like a drowning sack. Runoff spilled from the Pent roof of the refectory, fog swallowing the asylum in a cauldron of mist. The broad slope swelled, the brick path welted in phantasms. Adjacent the hedge I could see Northgate. In my straightjacket I could cause a disturbance at the turnstile, but with no way to operate the controls, I had no way out.

What if I did escape?

What if I returned to the Mephistophelean House?

A high wall was barbed in wire coping. We followed the red brick path to a little door between the refectory and hedge. The hulking giant unlocked the door and pointed to a boiler room.

“It’s safe to talk here.”

Rolled plate boilers roiled wrought iron vents. High pressure steam fueled fulsome sulfur jets. There was a cot, locker, and mirror. The hulking giant sank on the cot, looking like a man possessed.

“Now is the time. We must strike before he is the wiser. Although he is beginning to piece it together, he does not recognize you. I’ll expedite you to the Bolgia in a rigged jacket. It is our only chance. Once he’s gone, we can get the key.”

“The key?”

“To the red box.”

“The red box?”

“Don't concern yourself with the red box. Remember, he is a tempter. He is not to be trusted, even for an instant. He will tempt you with the red box. It is the source of his power. Do not look inside, even for an instant.”

“The source of his power?”

Quantum interference issued from the very same red box I had seen in the Doctor’s study and the windowless chamber. It was the source of the nadir.

And my absolution.

“What's in the red box?”

“A cathexis. It is like a mirror. Once you look into it, you see things as they really are.”

“What do I do?”

I hesitated, trying to envision myself strapped to the Doctor’s operating table.

The hulking giant drew to his full height. “The scourge of man, he works alone inside the Operating Theatre. Wait until he turns his back. Then strike. Be careful, though. Don’t listen to what he says. In devils haven you must sojourn, lock the door, and make him burn.”

“How can I trust you?”

“How can you trust yourself?”

The mirror hung on the wall.

The straightjacket dripped on the floor.

“Take off the restraint.”

The hulking giant was right.

How could I trust myself?

“There are nine wards here at the House on the Hill, nine levels of hell just to face him still. A forest of sand and a skeleton key unlocks the box to the Weeping Tree.”

“The Weeping Tree…”

“But if you listen to the lies that he will tell about himself, you will wake up in a dream believing you're somebody else. Do not listen to the things he says, pay his words no heed, for your parts won't fit together and your eyes'll start to bleed."