CHAPTER TWENTY
Willard, a strange and abandoned place, was home to the Wasting Houses—structures wherein its entire population had once been interred for suffering from a mysterious madness. No one knows precisely—or even approximately—the cause for the madness that had drowned the city, but whatever the source, be it supernal or supernatural, its effects cannot be denied their place within the canon of the supremely strange—and the supremely wonderful.
I approached the city like a moth drawing upon the sun, foolish and fascinated. I could feel dangers seething beneath the ground like glowing coals fresh from a fire, just begging to burn. Yet I didn’t—couldn’t—care. Here was the truest freedom, early proof of a world tread upon by dreams.
Madness is the one darkness the light cannot kill—it screws up its face in utter defiance. It’s a nightmare that survives waking, wandering upon bruised feet through the fever heat of blistering white banality. And much like old shadows, madness is often reposed within ancient places, locked up and forgotten, tended only by the wisps of ghosts and whirls of dust. However, it should be noted that madness is only considered such due to the broad consensus of the mad, each suffering equally from delusion. In their superior numbers and broken wisdom, they have concluded that their madness is the one true reality. Poor fools, all.
The place, if indeed it qualified as merely a thing with geographical specificity, slowly became a silhouette against the darkening sky. I could almost hear the din of battle unfolding between the concluding rays of the day and the mad city’s refusal to be revealed by something so paltry as light. Standing so close to Willard, I could appreciate a palpable undercurrent of residual madness, sweeping those with appropriate sensitivities into the gravity of secret worlds, inviting them to take on the burden of forgotten lunatics, to convey a flourish upon the monument to madness. Yet brick and mortar was not my medium of choice, so I declined the invitation, at least for the moment. I rounded a final bend and at last, Willard came into focus.
The city was a material outline of a lunatic’s thought process. It seemed desperate to capture within stone and wood the quicksilver shapes of a madman’s fancy. Houses, gardens, fountains, clock towers and churches rose and fell into and around each other, forming metropolitan entities that seemed to stir—as if the momentum of insanity had yet to exhaust itself, despite the absence of the broken minds that had once called it down from the sky as truly as lightning rods.
The road I followed into the city ended at many an empty residence. The remains of kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms punctuated the distance of my paved path as it transformed into other, more secret paths—tendrils that slithered around thickets and beneath graveyards, through black tunnels and silent crypts. Willard, to be certain, was a great sloughed-off skin that madness had once worn with such pride and glory, rendering even the sun dim by means of its terrible brilliance.
I entered the city in darkness, as was necessary from a hunter’s perspective, to say nothing of that of an outré artist. It was a notoriously strange place filled with the material and quite possibly immaterial articulations of insanity—of men and women who went from raising the walls of their city to being imprisoned by them. Due to the immensity of the population of lunatics, it was determined that their mad city would become a makeshift sanitarium. Almost all those interred here, died here. It was for that very reason I resolved to make my temporary home in the bowels of an abandoned asylum, the same kind of dwelling that once suffered its insane tenants to waste away to the dry whites of their bones. I had hoped to taste a little bit of the madness that might have seeped into the crumbling walls and cracked floors, for no artist is an island—I needed my inspiration, and madness is the greatest muse of all.
I decided to sleep through the remainder of the night and start fresh the following evening. Rats sought me out during my rest, a few even curling up with me. I was thankful for their warmth. I wondered at the number of their ancestors that might have been made fat and happy on a diet of neglected insane, sleeping off their feasts in filthy nests lined with the bones of the mad. Upon waking, I even ate one of my small sleeping companions, so as to share in the human darkness that may have once nourished its family line. After finishing my tiny meal, I rose in search of grander prey.
As I stalked the city, I encountered a great Wasting House that rose and stretched far beyond the scope of any other building I had encountered. It looked more like a castle fit for the king of the mad, for the architectural embellishments affected to its construction made me doubt the completeness of its location within this world. The structure, like all art, was an enemy of solid reality—it seemed to shiver beneath the normalizing dullness of the common sky that crushed in around its silhouette, trying to deny its otherworldly pedigree.
I passed beyond the doors of the structure, eager to know the strangeness pent within. Yet there was nothing strange at all, only a great diffusion of riven corpses. The slaughter resembled the revenge of children, earnest and impulsive. Clearly, my next opponent had not done this, as his tastes ran to the overly neat and tidy. This was someone or something else.
I felt the eyes of a hunter fall upon me. A woman’s voice filled with poison and honey floated into the room. “I’ve been eager to see you again, Vincent. You’ve no idea how often we’ve crossed paths, or how many times I’ve dreamed of you. The end of the Game is drawing near, pulling us together. Our place in the sky is practically assured. And yet, I wonder if you’re as ready as you should be.”
Steel glinted in the darkness, grinning and gliding toward me. My sister smiled back. Sparks exploded over countless corpses, hissing where they fell into pools of cold blood. Our blades unlocked, pinwheeling light throwing shadows across the dead. She quickly receded into the darkness, accepting its embrace. She knew the night as completely as I did—she was gone in an instant. The air tugged at me from her swift departure. Yet I could still hear her, laughing like the distant sea.
When I turned back toward the bodies, they had vanished along with the woman I took to be their maker. Not even a drop of blood remarked upon their previous and substantial numbers. The echoes playing about the now empty room only recalled the sounds of my brazen entrance. Had the woman and her victims all been hallucinated? Was this a residual madness, grown fat and potent upon a steady diet of raw sanity? I couldn’t say anything for sure, which was of course as it should have been.
While it was my calling to outline with my every action the scope of lost dreams, I had become no small scholar of madness along my way. This fact was owed in equal measure to insanity’s kinship with dreams, and my own occasional flirtations with lunacy. Madness was, by its very nature, many different things. Or perhaps, more precisely—it was a thing of many means, all of which eventually arrived at the same conclusion. Madness was a dream that had yet to realize it was dead, and so continued to struggle long after waking. Its war was with windmills, its weapons hawks and handsaws. It was the ghost of art, a freedom recognizable only by its absence. It was the corpse of a lover that still moved, if only by the actions of the insects which feasted upon it. And so it was with Willard—dead but for the lingering madness of lunatics, scavenging for purpose unfathomable and fantastic. All of this was greatly to my liking, as even undead dreams could only sweeten my journey across a listless world of bottommost imagination.
I continued deeper into the structure, where the darkness rejoined the silence beyond the echoes. I encountered many wide empty rooms, most of them hungry. I could feel them yearning to be filled with wheeling delusion and hopeless screams. Starvation had made them desperate, causing them to neglect their tenuous alliance with prosaic reality—they breathed with abject yearning, sweating from years of forced withdrawal, hoping I might cross into their aching bellies by means of open doors. I steered clear of the most famished spaces, choosing my path among the least threatening of passages, those places where hunger had starved them into passivity.
I rose upward via a stairway that swept out from the side of a wall, mindlessly corkscrewing around various statues and pillars. I was eventually led to a room speckled with reedy minarets that stuck up from the floor like jagged teeth. Strangely, the miniature towers were afforded no view of the sky, only a rambling brick and mortar ceiling painted with the likeness of one, spattered with the images of floating semi-human shapes, black against the grey firmament. It was at this point I detected a thick plume of silence rising from a small door. It was an oddly placed door, recessed almost invisibly between a pillar and a statue of a man holding a snake in his left hand and dangling an infant from his right. Inside was a progressively widening passage, opening finally into what appeared to be a library, of sorts. Yet instead of books, there were only shabby moldering journals, each one placed upon the neatly lined shelves with a mother’s care. The room itself was labyrinthine, made from a dark stone and complexed with some type of crystal—possibly the same crystal that was merged with the statues in the lake. The ceiling rose into complete darkness, and the walls of shelving were lined with delicate silver catwalks, made for whatever custodian might see to the needs of the tattered tomes. The contrast between the condition of the journals and that of the facility meant to preserve them was pronounced. A metaphor, perhaps. I moved to a nearby shelf and selected a random digest. This was not my first “secret library,” so I remained vigilant as I thumbed through it.
***
The Journal of Doctor Timothy Jeremias
I must pick my words carefully, for words will carry you along with me, and I will have witnesses to my visions—validation. One word out of place, and your experience is but a permutation of my own—a dream of my certainty rather than the waking truth of my subject. Should I deploy a phrase that confuses, you may approximate its meaning, and Alice from Wonderland will fall down a rabbit hole only to emerge from the tail of a tornado, dressed in ruby slippers and stinking of poppies. Words will deliver us. Trust me.
This journal is held in the near unshakable grip of science—the consensus of old men dreaming of Fields Medals and Nobel Prizes. It will not soon change or be caught unawares by agents of spontaneous combustion or etheric cross winds. It is Custer in the face of Crazy Horse. True enough, my journal must eventually yield to the mounting entropy of molecular friction and God’s good planning, but for now it is peer-reviewed science—proof against the bogyman. But make no mistake—this journal is a nexus of contest, where Schrödinger’s cat rears up against the darkly portentous grin of the purple-striped Cheshire cat, fading . . .
Calling my work a “journal” is a misnomer, as a science journal is a record for the purposes of preservation, or lending to its appropriated subject matter some reliable measure of coherence and intelligibility. More specifically, a journal seeks to classify some quantity or another—snatching out discrete metrics from the swirling maw of chaos. The contents of my pages are no mere collection of thoughts outlined in ink, existing only for the purposes of imposing order and thus clarity. They are thoughts—some of them my own—imprisoned in prose. This book is a barred passage, where vengeful chaos might reach out and take back its numbers. My journal is a doorway and a floodgate—it is holding, if only just—but for practical purposes, I will call it my diary. My Diary of Madness.
***
Having read as far as I cared, and having deduced the essential sentiment contained within, I immediately and enthusiastically destroyed the journal. I waited for a few moments to assess the consequences. Regrettably, nothing transpired.
Something else swallowed my attention whole—a child’s sketchbook-diary. It had my name on it. Vincent Alexander Graves.
I handled it as if it were a sensitive explosive. In a way, it was more than that. Substantially more. My hands had grown beyond the size of a normal man’s, certainly beyond the youthful hands that had once caressed the ragged book—yet they remembered each imperfection etched into its cover. This was the tale of my art, told between dying pages of flax and hemp. I opened to the first picture. The world began peeling back in tandem, to a time dimly remembered, nearly dead and fleshless.
Rivers of red flowed across the pages—in crayon, colored pencil, charcoal, watercolor, oils. Formless and vague at first, the shapes began to cohere from the bottomless crimson, crowding the singular color into narrow streams moving around emergent black figures. My mind mirrored the images with forgotten recollections, and I heard the softest words tumble from the broken spaces that once bridged my earliest memories.
“I’m so sorry, tiny one. But what must be done must be done, and you are a prodigy, this much I can see plainly. I’ve made so many, but they were all just distorted versions of the archetype, the source. You. Clearly, there will have to be others, as I can never be sure, but you are the darkest flower I’ve ever picked. Your eyes are older than the skin that proffers them, burning through the eons, to arrive here, now. Your every bone, each scrap of flesh, each dutiful organ—all for the sake of those black eyes. But I found you first. Poor child. You will never forgive me the terrible things I will do to you. Nor should you. I can barely forgive myself.”
These were primal memories, buried beneath the earth and frozen in stone. And yet here they were, naked and wincing in the light of recollection. These drawings were from the time before she came to me, and yet the voice . . . it was the same, and it wasn’t. The mystery of her was different, sorrowful.
Turning the page, I was confronted by a lone shadow, small against the rising tide of scarlet and darkness. Each subsequent drawing showed the red flowing into the tiny silhouette, pouring down its minute throat. Finally, the little thing had taken on the color of pages and pages of straining shapes and the red that drowned them. Of course, the tiny shadow was me. And the red was bloodshed, a sea of it. It had filled me up—become me. Made me.
Suddenly, the room changed, the silence flinched. Something moved against the carefully woven cobwebs that outlined an absence that had endured decades. A voice, distant and diluted, as if being dragged beneath the silence. “It raises the question of freedom, does it not, Family Man? Specifically, that you may never have known it, not really. Not how you’ve figured it, anyway. Were you simply produced, as if from an assembly line, cog after widget? Did she construct you and then simply fill you up with her will? That leaves precious little room for free will, yes?” The voice came from around a nearby corner, where stretched a tall and jagged shadow. I followed the voice around the turn, encountering a massive statue, scraping widely spread, grey wings against the vanishing ceiling, where darkness gathered like crows. The name engraved upon its base read, Deleriael, Angel of Madness.
The statue rose from the floor like piling smoke, pouring upward and outward, feasting upon the plump shadows that hovered closely, chewing their dark secrets to dust. There was no reason to question the source of the voice, as it was surely the towering figure, which cackled at my confusion as if it were a brand of comedy. I chose to address the speaker calmly, remitting the traditional bemusement with which one might feel obliged to repay such blatant oddness. “And so, it must be madness that solely acquits one of oppression, I suppose. And perhaps so. But what is freedom without wonder, angel? No madman ever wondered. The mad only take fantasy for fact, as if pink elephants have been scientifically calculated, genus and species. Theirs is the twisted logic of chicanery, birthing beliefs no less solid for their silliness. I’ve known a great many lunatics, all of them glorious company, but utterly dim to the dreams that begot their terrible freedom, and all of them utterly unwilling to ponder the question.”
At first, the statue stared absently into the never-ending shelves of chronicled madness, although I knew its silence was not from want of response, merely the indolence of endless creatures. I was received of a reply soon enough. “You don’t even know what you’re missing, so who are you to say what madmen do or do not know? You’re a kept animal, grazed and fattened,
awaiting the slaughter. You’re hardly qualified to reflect upon the world beyond the barn.”
“In fact,” I returned, “I am obliged to wonder, as much as apples are compelled to fall from trees. After all, I owe my existence to wander and wonder, despite what children’s journals might say to the contrary. What eye ever glimpsed a wall that the mind had not, rightly or wrongly, already spied beyond? You see, mystery is the music to which our imaginations dance. Thus, the unseen world demands our imagination, if not our attention. I am both the barn and the unknown that stirs beyond its crooked fences, and I accomplish the latter by dreaming.”
“But what is a dream if not sequestered madness, Vincent?” the voice questioned. “Surely, you must see that dreams have never been more truthfully described since William Dement stated, ‘Dreams permit each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.’ We are closer than skin and bone, you and I. Far closer than you and that pretty red woman, in fact. And yet you’ve never once offered me so much as a backward glance. I’ve let you wander and kill to your heart’s contentment, playing at being an artist from another world, a calculated pink elephant if ever I’ve ridden atop one. All the while, I’ve offered you purest freedom, and yet here you are, talking back to me. What a splendid boy, indeed! Mark my words, Vincent of the Dead, you have been duped. You are not free, not yet. And like it or not, you will come to me after this Game of yours has ended. After you see her for true, you will have no choice. And in that moment of reckoning, you too will be revealed. Like the apples of the trees, you will be compelled to fall. Have no worries, however, I will be there to catch you—and eat you. You will have all the delightful freedom a broken mind can know, Vincent, and you will have only me to thank for it.”
The Red Son Page 30
