I was just beginning to gain on her when I turned a final corner. I had reached the centre of the maze, but it was not a small, confined space as I had expected but a great oval area of grass, the size of a football pitch, dotted with cypress trees through which a stream flowed. The water sprang from a little rocky outcrop on a mound at the far apex of the oval. On the mound above the spring was what looked like an altar of white marble and behind it stood my mother. She had turned towards me but her head was veiled. In a gentle, almost imperceptible breeze little gusts of Je Reviendrai blew in my direction. There was sound too, also slight, of the clear blue water as it wandered slowly between the melancholy trees. I felt reassured, calm and now utterly without conflict as I walked towards my mother.
Now I stood before her, at the foot of the mound, just to the right of the spring which gushed from a cleft in the rock beneath her. She looked down at me, still veiled; I looked up. The altar behind which she stood was decorated with carvings in low relief of the masks of comedy and tragedy. The masks had features which could be identified. They were my own. I stood and waited. I longed for her to speak but she did not; she merely pointed to the crystalline waters as they came from the rock. I tried to speak, but nonsense came from my mouth. I knew what I should say, but nothing coherent came out. I started to babble the lines that I had spoken in the theatre even though that was the last thing I wanted to say. She did not respond by so much as a twitch; she merely pointed to the water.
At last, almost as if by some process of intellectual elimination, I knew what she wanted. She wanted me to drink. For a while I resisted. The sweet silence and calm of this place was a pleasing thing and I sensed that if I drank, that might be broken. At the same time I knew that this was the only way I could restore my waning faculties: I had lost the ability to read, and then to speak, what more before a final dissolution? She continued to point until I knew I must obey, and so I knelt down and scooped up some water with my hands and conveyed it to my mouth.
It was ice cold but tasteless; I felt it flood my veins with an electric force. A flash of lightning split open the sky and a clap of thunder nearly pierced my eardrums. Great sheets of water began to fall from the sky. I looked up and saw an ocean descending on my head. I knew I must find shelter and began to run.
I thought no thoughts except those of escape and I ran blindly. How long it was before I reached the door in the tower again I do not know, but I managed to shut the door behind me just as a wave of water beat against it, nearly forcing it off its hinges and driving me headlong down the spiral stairs. I descended a long way. I only know that my clothes were dry by the time I had reached the bottom of the spiral staircase.
I emerged into a corridor with a glass roof through which a white light filtered. One side of the corridor was, as usual blank, and painted with the same glossy cream paint as all the other corridors, on the other side were a number of doors, but less frequently distributed than on the lower levels.
From one there came a murmur of several voices. Reluctantly, but with desperation now prevailing, I tried the door and it opened. Within was what I recognised as a chorus dressing room, long, almost infinitely long, with dressing tables and mirrors surrounded by bulbs all along one wall. Against the corridor wall were racks of costumes, and within the body of this room was a crowd of men, all chattering, all in various stages of dress or undress, and all of them had my face, or rather the face of Romeo Cavendish. I was looking at upwards of a hundred replicas of myself.
The conversation died, the room fell silent, and I stood looking at a staring crowd of men who were me, and yet not me. One was completely naked except for one white silk stocking which he was in the act of putting on. That creature filled me with revulsion. Above the panic and confusion of this still moment what I felt most of all was mounting rage. I was me. There must be nobody else who was me except myself, Romeo. The silence and the stillness continued. The almost naked man, the only one who was not motionless, began to put on a second white stocking, still making no effort to cover myself. There was something defiant, almost aggressive, in his exposure.
It began to feel like a test of nerve. Whose would break first? The naked man bared his teeth in a grin and a kind of laugh began to come from him, though, as his face and jaw made no further movement, it was hard to tell. I could stand it no longer. I broke and made for the door. There were a few hideous moments when my sweat-slicked hands could find no purchase on the round brass doorknob and then I was through, back into the corridor. A shout came from behind me and a thunder of feet.
I did not dare to turn round because I knew now as I ran that I was being pursued by a hundred half-dressed men who all looked like me. Some objective element within me recognised the absurdity, the impossibility of the situation, but terror was sweeping all aside. In my panic I missed, or thought I missed the stairs which were my only certain means of escape.
At the end of the corridor there was a door on the stage side. I opened it without considering where it might lead, anxious only to get away from my pursuers. I closed the door heavily behind me. It clanged shut and I leaned against it breathing heavily.
At first I thought I had stepped into complete darkness, as the light in the passageway from the windows had been brilliant if not warming. I listened at the door but heard nothing beyond it and no-one was trying to open it. Small patches of light began to manifest themselves. I stamped on the ground, felt around me and discovered I was on a metal walkway high up in the theatre’s fly tower. My hand reached out to grasp an iron railing.
Now far below me through a latticework of gantries and forests of dangling ropes I could see the stage, deserted, but still lit with a golden glow. Music rose from the orchestra pit, full of scurrying strings and elaborate arpeggios. Like music in a dream, it gestured and struck attitudes but never resolved itself into a melody or a developing sequence. The door behind me began to rattle. My pursuers were on to me.
I ran along the walkway, my boots clanging loudly so that the whole upper part of the theatre seemed to echo with my stride. Then I came to some steps down to a lower level and I took them. There was no other way but down. Through the pierced metal of the steps and walkway I could see the stage below slowly coming closer. There was no way for it: I would have to brave the stage again.
As I clattered down the steps towards the stage, I could hear the orchestra getting closer and its stuttering rhythms appeared to be in exact timing with my own rushing feet. When I halted for breath, the music halted, when I ran on so did the music. From above, there was a faint hubbub. I looked up and saw that the creatures with my face were in pursuit, albeit clumsily, stumbling along the walkways and down the stairs, sometimes tripping over each other and falling together in a heap at the bottom of a flight. It was almost comic. This meant, at least, that they were not gaining on me.
I was returning to the stage from which I had fled so ignominiously, but there was no alternative. Down the clanging metal flights I came, fleeing from the multiplications of myself. It was the sense of what I was that was under attack, that sense which, in spite of everything, had been so strong through the years. Had it been too strong? Was that why I was now in Hell, or something very like it?
I did not feel like a disembodied spirit—not that I knew what a disembodied spirit should feel like. My body ached with physical exertion and my legs felt rubbery and uncertain from fear. I even touched my cheek to see if my sensations were authentic. They were all too real. In fact I had never been more conscious of my physical being. There were moments when I thought I could feel the blood pulsing through my veins. Above me the crowd of my own clones—or ‘clowns’ I called them in a moment of wild, spontaneous wit—were making their way down towards me, all now murmuring in chorus:
‘Many men, many men, many men, men, men!
Many men, many men, many men, men, men . . . .!’
And the orchestra seemed to be accompanying them.
I at last reached the stage where
I paused to gasp for breath, not caring a jot now for the audience or its derision. I stared out. Beyond the orchestra pit where the musicians were busy sawing away at William Tell, and all of them for some reason in white clown masks and Pierrot costumes, I saw again the audience. But something had happened to it. Those grinning elastic faces in their thousands, rank upon rank of them, tier upon tier had begun to merge. In twos and threes their faces began to glue together and the faces became more and more amorphous, mere stretches of undifferentiated flesh, creased and striated with lines of senseless mockery. The sound of laughter had turned into a series of crackles and wheezes, barely human, barely even animal. The bodies merged too into corpulent bulges of black cloth, like elderly opera singers in the last stages of their obese celebrity. Now the whole of the stalls wobbled and crepitated as one. And in the higher reaches of the theatre, the circle, the gallery, the gods, the upper gods and beyond, the crowds of onlookers were congealing and merging. My mind was spinning but a centre somewhere kept its reluctant control.
Behind me the chorus of clones, still babbling, had reached the stage level. I saw myself trapped and in a world that surely must be an extension of my own troubled mind. And at that moment the urge merely to give in to my own madness, to renounce any strength I had left and curl inwards into a closed dark space of oblivious regret was almost overwhelming. And yet something within me held out.
I saw no way back, but now that the audience had merged into a disabled blob I saw a way past it. Behind me the clones were preparing to charge, to seize me and carry me away into themselves.
I took one step back and then ran at full tilt towards the edge of the stage, taking a leap which carried me almost over the heads of the clown orchestra. My right foot clipped the brass rail that separated the conductor’s podium from the auditorium and I fell sprawling onto the front row of the stalls.
As I was getting to my feet I touched the mass of amorphous flesh that now composed the audience. It was damp and sticky and smelt of decaying fish. I reeled with horror against the conductor’s rail and my throat was seized by a violinist whose red-lipped mask grinned into my face. With the strength of desperation I twisted myself round and broke free. There were two narrow aisles between the centre block of seats and the blocks to the left and right. I took the left hand aisle and began to run. My heart was now pounding, my rubbery legs threatening to collapse at any moment, but I pounded on. Behind me the whole theatre was roaring. The sound felt like a great wind at my back.
At the back wall of the auditorium, red as the inside of a flayed body, I saw a set of double doors with two panels of bevelled glass set in them through which I could see a flicker of yellow light.
In another moment I was through the double doors and into a glittering hall. Onyx columns with gilded Corinthian capitals supported painted vaults from which hung crystal chandeliers and on which painted putti played fatuously among shining clouds.
I stood on a balconied landing carpeted in scarlet, spangled with silver stars. Before me was a flight of marble steps which led down to a vast floor in chequered black and white marble. Behind me the double doors groaned and I saw something vast and fleshy trying to burst its way through.
I took to the stairs rapidly and did not look behind me, but by the time I had gone down twenty steps and was on a second carpeted landing I heard a noise behind me half way between an explosion and the sound of a bag full of offal bursting on a stone floor. I took the second flight and as I did so I noticed something oozing down the marble stairs beside me, a viscous semi- transparent fluid in which floated grey rags of flesh and gristle. I tried not to rush my descent in case I fell, but something monstrous was behind me, unseen because I did not dare to look.
Now I was at the bottom of the steps, of which there had been scores, hundreds. There was no time to admire the chandeliers, the onyx columns, nor the ten foot high marble statue of— Athena was it? It looked like a man in a dress and the features of the face were curiously familiar. They were my own. But there was no time. The thing that I dared not turn round to see was behind me. Something sticky lapped at my heels. I took a plunge towards the double glass doors in front of me and the next moment I was outside.
Only then did I look back. I stood in an empty grey street and behind me reared a vast structure that I had never seen before but which reminded me of so many buildings that I had except that it was bigger by an almost infinite factor. It was slightly yellowish in colour but with manifold, if rather limited variations on that shade. The even grey light in which I stood did not add lustre to it. It rose in tiers of colonnades, architraves, courses of rusticated masonry, Doric friezes. Rows of pedimented windows, and blind arcades full of niches holding gesturing statuary. The top of the building was obscured by cloud.
I stood on an empty grey pavement among tall buildings every one of which, apart from the theatre was made from the same grey stone on which I stood. It took me a few moments to recognise what was strange about these structures. It was odd that they had no windows, but what was even more curious was the fact that their façades did not resemble ordinary exteriors but rather casts taken of the inside walls of the rooms and passages of which they were composed. Thus the interior of a fireplace stuck outwards while its overmantle was a dark, oblong recess in the wall of the building.
Why this worried me so much I could not say, but it troubled my sensibilities deeply and stole my attention as I stood panting from my exertions in the street. It preoccupied me so much that I failed to notice, or was only dimly conscious at first, of the thing that was emerging from the theatre.
It was something like a bulbous mass of blue-grey smoke that was forcing its way out of the great double doors of the theatre and into the street. It was not quite like smoke because it seemed more solid, and yet not quite as solid as flesh or stone, something between, like the gently yielding exterior of a vast jelly. I began to retreat before it.
Slowly, as more and more of the grey matter emerged from the theatre it began to congregate and build itself up into a form, starting with a pair of ill-shaped feet. Then a pair of bare legs reared up followed by a torso, then a head. Only the genital area remained undefined: I was obscurely grateful for that. The whole was as grey as a storm cloud and utterly innocent of colour. It might have been a statue except that it seemed less substantial and it moved. I was briefly reminded of an opera my mother had taken me to in my youth. Most of it had passed me by but when at the end the stone statue of the Commendatore had come to life I had been mesmerised. It had come on with great heavy steps and when it had seized Don Giovanni in its granite grip I knew that the hero was doomed. Then a trap door opened in the stage, alive with red light, and the demons had dragged the Don below.
I stared up at my own Commendatore, except that this one was unclothed, if not exactly naked. The face too was odd. It seemed to be undergoing all kinds of subtle transformations. At one point it was the head of a baby, then of a very old man, then of an intermediary state between these extremes. Because of these quite rapid changes it was some time before I could identify the features as my own. Then I knew I must run.
I fled him down the grey streets, not looking to see if the Commendatore—as I called it, for fear of something more precise —was pursuing, but knowing it did. I heard a ground-shaking tread behind me. I was in a maze of streets, all grey, all the same, all with grey buildings rearing up on either side of me. Sometimes I would come upon a cul-de-sac at the end of which was a building on which hung a banner, or sometimes an advertising hoarding on each of which was a vast image of myself, well delineated but always grey. Sometimes they were old, and sometimes young, the features of the face clearer than other parts of the body.
Whenever I came upon these, there always seemed to be a side-street down which I could dart, but then I would always emerge on the other side into another great grey street and the pursuit would continue. I only caught glimpses of my giant follower but I never failed to hear the great heavy footstep
s that seemed to me like the footsteps of time.
Then I found that each time I turned away from a cul-de-sac into a side street, the way was darker and narrower. I found myself squeezing sideways down a passage so dark and high that I could barely see the grey light above and to either side. Then half way down I became stuck, unable to move to one side or the other, and it seemed to me that the walls of this deep dark alley were closing in on me. There was a heavy pressure on my chest. With great difficulty, and knowing that I was near extinction I slid my hands upwards and inwards so that, with barely enough room, I managed to cover my face with them.
It was then, I believe, that I faced complete extinction. Well, if I ceased to be, then I ceased to be; that would be it, or so I told myself. There would be nobody to have regrets or feel guilt: what would be wrong with that? This is what reason told me, but something within rebelled violently against the idea. The prospect of non-being sickened me. But why? There would be nothing to be sick about. Some inner force, quite outside all logic and sense, strove to remain conscious and alive, even within this hideous dream or vision of mine. Until that moment, if it can be called a moment, I had not known how strong was the will to live. It was the one small light in this world of surreal misery that I was enduring.
Turning the palms of my hands away from my face, I began to push with all my strength. At first I thought of it as a vain gesture, a mere act of defiance against the inevitable, but slowly I felt the wall opposite me—dark and clammy and covered with some kind of viscous substance, possibly tar—yield a little. I pushed harder until I could get my feet up against the wall and push with my back and feet.
Suddenly I felt and heard something crack and splinter against my feet and the next moment they encountered vacancy. Scrambling painfully to my feet I found myself half in half out of some kind of opening in the wall opposite. Both walls of my passage were now inexorably beginning to close again, so there was nothing for it but to enter the hole I had created.
The Ballet of Dr Caligari Page 14
