“But the Creator’s taste for the unreal has required something to be real in the first place, and then to wither into ruins, to fail gloriously. Hence—the World. Extend this premise to its logical conclusion and you have—curtain!—the Creator’s Great Design.” And as the curtain slowly began to rise, the scientist backed away and said in a giddy voice: “But please don’t think that when everything caves in there won’t still be muuusic.”
The auditorium went black, and in the blackness arose a hollow and tuneless melody which wandered to the wheezing accompaniment of a concertina, a pathetic duet belonging to a world of low cabarets or second-rate carnivals. Then, on either side of the stage, a tall glass case lit up to reveal that the two atrocious musicians were in fact life-size automatons, one of which pumped and pulled the snaking bellows of a concertina with a rigid motion of his arms, while the other scraped back and forth across the strings of a violin. The concertina player had his head thrown back in a wooden howl of merriment; the violin player stared down in empty-eyed concentration at his instrument. And both appeared lost in a kind of mechanical rapture.
The rest of the stage area, both above and below, also seemed to be occupied entirely by imitations of the human image: puppets and marionettes were strung up at various elevations, relieved of their weight by fragile glistening threads; manikins posed in a paralyzed leisure which looked at once grotesque and idyllic; other dummies and an odd assortment of dolls sat in miniature chairs here and there, or simply sprawled about the floorboards, sometimes propping each other back to back. But among these mock-people, as became evident the longer one gazed at the stage, were hidden real ones who, rather ably, imitated the imitations. (These were persons whom Dr Haxhausen recruited, at fair recompense, whenever he entered a new town.) And forming the only scenery beyond both the artificial and the genuine figures of life was a gigantic luminescent mural in shades of black and white. With photographic accuracy, the mural portrayed a desolate room which might have been an attic or an old studio, and which contained some pieces of nondescript debris strewn about. A single, frameless window set into the torn wall at the rear of the room looked out upon a landscape that was still more desolate than the room itself: earth and sky had merged into a gray and jagged scene.
“You see how things are, ladies and gentlemen. Whereas we have been dreaming so long of creating perfect life in the laboratory, the Creator holds sacred only the crude facsimile, which best echoes or expresses His own will. He has always been far ahead of us, envisioning a completed work at the end of history. And He has no more time to linger over the vital stage of universal evolution. Because no truth or life can exist in us as we are, for truth and life can only exist in the mind, the will of the Creator—and we have stubbornly made it our business to do nothing but oppose that mind, that will. We are simply the raw material for His beloved puppets, which reflect to perfection the truth of the Creator and are the ideal dwellers in His paradise of ruins. And after His chosen ones are triumphantly installed in that good place, the Creator has some wonderful stories to tell as a way to pass the hours of eternity.
“And we may be among those in paradise, this is the great news I bring to you tonight. We may take our place among the puppets, as the tableau you see before you will serve to demonstrate. For at the moment there are certain faces insinuated within this elect company that do not…belong, that stand out in an unpleasant way. How to bring them into the fold is the question. And the answer, if you will turn for a moment and direct your eyes toward the balcony, the answer—spotlight!—is the puppet machine.”
Turning their heads as instructed, the audience saw the object which, under the sharp spotlight, seemed to be resting on nothing, as if secured to the darkness itself. Some of the more observant members of the audience noticed the shining waxen faces whose eyes looked back at them from within the bizarre contraption. Set in motion by the remote control device in Dr Haxhausen’s coat pocket, the machine noisily elevated its stovepipe neck and pointed its single, iridescent eye at the figures upon the stage.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I mentioned earlier that winter is the sacred state of things, the season of the soul. But that is not to say that the definitive winter we are approaching will be without all the colors of the rainbow. For it is the frigid aurora of the Sacred Ray, the very eye of the Creator, that will bring about the wondrous conversion of all things. As you can see, the design is His own. And, by means of modern assembly techniques, a sufficient quantity may be produced to serve the world, bathing every one of us in the garish radiance of our destiny. The effects? If you just keep watching your fellows upon this stage.
“There. See how the shafts of color pour down upon this stark scene, overlaying surfaces with an uncanny kaleidoscopic tint. It is the old surfaces that must be stripped away and disposed of. Time to leap from that summit of illusion our world has achieved, a glorious plummet after so many centuries in which we erred on the side of excellence. When all the Creator had in mind was a third-rate sideshow of beatific puppetry. But our strainings for progress were not useless; they were simply mistaken as to their ultimate aim. For it is modern science itself which will enable us to realize the Creator’s dream, and to unrealize all the rest. See for yourselves. Look what is happening to the flesh of these future puppets, and to their eyes: wax and wood and shining glass to replace the sad and cumbersome structures of biology.”
In the audience a few low sounds propagated into a network of obscure whispers and murmurings. Faces leaned toward the spectacle of crazy puppets painted with light, Dr Haxhausen’s tableau mort. Some persons betrayed their cautious temperaments by dropping down in their seats, expanding the distance between themselves and the stream of colors that flowed over their heads on its way to the stage. Dr Haxhausen continued to preach above the shapeless, droning music.
“Please do not concern yourselves that any lasting conversion is being worked upon the people in this exhibition. I told you earlier that I would do no such thing. In the absence of a willing heart, the conversion you have witnessed would be the greatest sin in the universe, the unpardonable sin. There. The Sacred Ray has been extinguished. Your friends are again as they once were. And I thank you for coming to see me. Good night.”
When the curtain descended and the house lights came on, an elderly woman in the audience stood up and called out to Dr Haxhausen: “The Lord saith, ‘And if the prophet be deceived when he has spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel’.” Others simply laughed or shook their heads in disgust. But Dr Haxhausen remained silent, smiling placidly as the congregation filed out of the theater.
The scientist, it seemed, was truly mad.
A few remarks by way of an epilogue. Although certain people will attach themselves to virtually any innovation of a mystical nature, the prophecies of Dr Haxhausen never found a following. Soon the scientist himself lapsed in notoriety, save for an occasional blurb in some newspaper, a passing mention which often implied that Dr Haxhausen’s later role as a crank doomsayer had, in the public mind, entirely eclipsed his former renown as a man of science. Finally, on a particular evening in December, as a sparse audience populated for the most part by boozy derelicts and noisy adolescents awaited the notorious exhibition in a dreary banquet hall, it seemed that another visionary’s career was destined for oblivion. When the world famous hallucinator did not appear at the publicized time, someone took it upon himself to pull back the makeshift curtain of a makeshift stage. And there, gently swinging from the long sooty gibbet of his fantastic machine, hung Dr Haxhausen. Whether the cause of death should have been deemed murder or the more apparent one of suicide was never discovered. For something else happened that same winter night that threw all other events into the background.
But of course you know, ladies and gentlemen, what it was that happened. I can see by the glitter in your eyes, the flush on your waxen faces, that y
ou remember well how the colors appeared in the sky that night, a fabulous aurora sent by the sun and reflected by the moon, so that all the world would be baptized at once by the spectral light of truth. Willing or not, your hearts had heard the voice of the creature you thought mad. But they would not listen; they never have. Why did you force this transgression of divine law? And why do you still gaze with your wooden hate from the ends of the earth? It was for you that I committed this last and greatest sin, all for you. When have you ever appreciated these gestures from on high! And for this act I must now exist in eternal banishment from the paradise in which you exalt. How beautiful is your everlasting ruin.
Oh, blessed puppets, receive My prayer, and teach Me to make Myself in thy image.
THE STRANGE DESIGN OF MASTER RIGNOLO
It was well into evening and for some time Nolon had been seated at a small table in a kind of park. This was a long, thin stretch of land—vaguely triangular in shape, like a piece of broken glass—bordered by three streets of varying breadth, varying evenness of surface, and of varying stages of disintegration as each thoroughfare succumbed in its own way and in its own time to the subtle but continuous movements of the slumbering earth below. From the far end of the park a figure in a dark overcoat was approaching Nolon’s table, and it appeared there was going to be a meeting of some sort.
There were other tables here and there, all of them unoccupied, but most of the park was unused ground covered with a plush, fuzzy kind of turf. In the moonlight this densely woven pile of vegetation turned a soft shade of aquamarine, almost radiant. Beyond the thinning trees, stars were bright but without luster, as if they were made of luminous paper. Around the park, a jagged line of high roofs, black and featureless, crossed the sky like the uneven teeth of an old saw.
Nolon was resting his hands at the edge of the small, nearly circular table. In the middle of the table a piece of candle flickered inside a misshapen bubble of green glass, and Nolon’s face was bathed in a restless green glare. He too was wearing a dark overcoat, unbuttoned at the top to reveal a scarf of lighter shade stuffed inside it. The scarf was wrapped about Nolon’s neck right to the base of his chin. Every so often Nolon glanced up, not to look at Grissul as he proceeded across the park, but to try and catch sight of something in that lighted window across the street: a silhouette which at irregular intervals slipped in and out of view. Above the window was a long, low roof surmounted by a board which appeared to be a sign or marquee. The lettering on this board was entirely unreadable, perhaps corroded by the elements or even deliberately effaced. But the image of two tall, thin bottles could still be seen, their slender necks angled festively this way and that.
Grissul sat down, facing Nolon at eye level.
“Have you been here long?” he asked.
Nolon calmly pulled out a watch from deep inside his coat. He stared at it for a few moments, tapped the glass once or twice, then gently pushed it back inside his coat.
“Someone must have known I was thinking about seeing you,” Grissul continued, “because I’ve got a little story I could tell.”
Nolon again glanced toward the lighted window across the street. Grissul noticed this and twisted his head around, saying, “Well, someone’s there after all. Do you think tonight we could get, you know, a little service of some kind?”
“Maybe you could go over there yourself and see what our chances are,” Nolon replied.
“All the same to me,” Grissul insisted, twisting his head back to face Nolon. “I’ve still got my news.”
“Is that specifically why this meeting is taking place?”
To this query Grissul returned a blank expression. “Not that I know of,” he asserted. “As far as I’m concerned, we just met by chance.”
“Of course,” Nolon agreed, smiling a little. Grissul smiled back but with much less subtlety.
“So I was going to tell you,” Grissul began, “that I was out in that field, the one behind those empty buildings at the edge of town where everything just slides away and goes off in all directions. And there’s a marsh by there, makes the ground a little, I don’t know, stringy or something. No trees, though, only a lot of wild grass, reeds, you know where I mean?”
“I now have a good idea,” Nolon replied, a trifle bored or at least pretending to be.
“This was a little before dark that I was there. A little before the stars began to come out. I really wasn’t planning to do anything, let me say that. I just walked some ways out onto the field, changed direction a few times, walked a ways more. Then I saw something through a blind of huge stalks of some kind, skinny as your finger but with these great spiky heads on top. And really very stiff, not bending at all, just sort of wobbling in the breeze. They might well have creaked, I don’t know, when I pushed my way through to see beyond them. Then I knelt down to get a better look at what was there on the ground. I’m telling you, Mr Nolon, it was right in the ground. It appeared to be a part of it, like—”
“Mr Grissul, what appeared?”
Grissul remembered himself and found a tone of voice not so exhausting of his own strength, nor so wearing on his listener’s patience.
“The face,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “It was right there, about the size of, I don’t know, a window or a picture hanging on a wall, except that it was in the ground and it was a big oval, not rectangular in any way. Just as if someone had partly buried a giant, or better yet, a giant’s mask. Only the edges of the face seemed not so much buried as, well, woven I guess you would say, right into the ground. The eyes were closed, not shut closed—it didn’t seem to be dead—but relaxed. The same with the lips, very heavy lips rubbing up against each other. Even complexion, ashy gray, and soft cheeks. They looked soft, I mean, because I didn’t actually touch them in any way. I think it was asleep.”
Nolon shifted slightly in his chair and looked straight into Grissul’s eyes.
“Then come and see for yourself,” Grissul insisted. “The moon’s bright enough.”
“That’s not the problem. I’m perfectly willing to go along with you, whatever might be there. But for once I have other plans.”
“Oh, other plans,” repeated Grissul as if some deeply hidden secret had been revealed. “And what other plans would those be, Mr Nolon?”
“Plans of relatively long standing and not altered since made, if you can conceive of such a thing these days. Are you listening? Oh, I thought you nodded off. Well, Rignolo, that mysterious little creature, has made a rare move. He’s asked if I would like to have a look around his studio. No one’s ever been there that I know of. And no one’s actually seen what he paints.”
“No one that you know of,” added Grissul.
“Of course. Until tonight, that is, a little while from now unless a change of plans is necessary. Otherwise I shall be the first to see what all that talk of his is about. It should really be worth the trouble, and I could invite you to come along.”
Grissul’s lower lip pushed forward a little. “Thank you, Mr Nolon,” he said, “but that’s more in your line. I thought when I told you about my observation this evening—”
“Of course, your observation is very interesting, extraordinary, Mr Grissul. But I think that that sort of thing can wait, don’t you? Besides, I haven’t told you anything of Rignolo’s work.”
“You can tell me.”
“Landscapes, Mr Grissul. Nothing but landscapes. Exclusively his subject, a point he even brags about.”
“That’s very interesting, too.”
“I thought you would say something like that. And you might be even more interested if you had ever heard Rignolo discourse on his canvasses. But…well, you can see and hear for yourself. What do you say, then? First Rignolo’s studio and then straight out to see if we can find that old field again?”
They agreed that these activities, in this sequence, would not be the worst way to fill an evening.
As they got up from the table, Nolon had a last look at the win
dow across the street. The light that once brightened it must have been put out during his conversation with Grissul. So there was no way of knowing whether or not someone was now observing them. Buttoning their overcoats as far as their scarfed necks, the two men walked in silence across the park upon which countless stars stared down like the dead eyes of sculptured faces.
“Don’t just walk stepping everywhere,” Rignolo told his visitors as they all entered the studio. He was a little out of breath from the climb up the stairs, wheezing his words, quietly muttering to himself, “This place, oh, this place.” There was hardly a patch of floor that was not in some way cluttered over, so he need not have warned Nolon, or even Grissul. Rignolo was of lesser stature than his guests, virtually a dwarf, and so moved with greater freedom through that cramped space. “You see,” he said, “how this isn’t really a room up here, just a little closet that tried to grow into one, bulging out every which way and making all these odd niches and alcoves surrounding us, this shapeless gallery of nooks. There’s a window around here, I suppose, under some of these canvasses. But those are what you’re here for, not to look out some window that who knows where it is. Nothing to see out there, even so.”
The Nightmare Factory Page 58
