Yet these flights of stairs, which from above described a perfect vertical shaft, soon began to wander. They led him into unfamiliar regions of the building without offering a means of escape, only of retreat. And when he paused a moment to survey the dark and doorless world around him, he heard the echoing voices.
“Mister Fizzle,” they shouted at him in unison.
He proceeded to descend the stairway and resigned himself to whatever destination it would lead him, always moving with that irresistible rapidity which had possessed his body and confused his thoughts. The echoes of other footsteps were now in pursuit. They appeared to catch up to him as small and barely visible objects, soft and irregular spheres that tumbled past him on the stairs and then faded before his eyes. Soon the others would be able to see him, soon they would reach him.
At last there came an end to the prodigious stairs, and he arrived at the abysmal fundament of the building. The ground upon which he now stood seemed to be of raw clay, cold and tallowy. Ahead of him was a crude passage, nearly a tunnel, which dripped with something that gave off a grayish glow. And there were other passages and also doors within the damp walls. It seemed he had no choice but to hide within one of these rooms. For upon that slippery ground he could no longer move with the same speed that had brought him there.
He turned down one passageway after another. By then the others were with him in those dim catacombs. It was time to take refuge behind one of the doors, each of which perfectly withheld the secret of whatever lay behind it.
The room in which he closed himself was lit by a dimmer light than that of the passages outside. It was an oily and erratic illumination which seemed to emerge from thick pools and patches of corruption that mottled the greasy clay of the floor. An atmosphere of filth and decay occupied the room, a rank presence that was the soul of slaughter. Indefinite in its dimensions, the chamber seemed to be a place of disposal for a kind of fleshy refuse. He was about to seek a more tolerable sanctuary when two figures stepped out of some dark recess within the room.
“Mister Thump,” one of them said without the slightest movement of his thin mouth. So it was not they who spoke, but something else which spoke through them, something which practiced a strange ventriloquism.
When he turned to try and escape through the door, he found that it was stuck, jammed within its frame by shadows clogging its edges, oozing out like black suet.
“Thump, thump, thump,” whispered the voices approaching him.
An interval of oblivion passed, and it was an entirely different room in which he awoke. This was a small, bare cubicle lit only by a peculiar radiance which shone through a narrow slot in the large, locked door. There were no windows in the room. The floor felt gritty and vaguely shifting, as if he were being supported by very loose sand. He lay against a wall in darkness, with only his thin legs projecting into the strip of light cast upon the floor.
A voice was whispering to him from somewhere. Slowly the words gained force, yet somehow they remained an abstract sound which merely flirted with messages, never really cohering. The voice seemed to be reaching him through the wall, for he was alone in that room. And still the tones were emphatic, even piercing, as if unaffected by the dulling interference of a barrier.
“Listen,” the voice said. “Are you listening now? I am also a prisoner, but it is not the same for me. Things have changed in this place. I know that you wonder about those ones who brought you here, and about other things. Are you listening? Someone made them, you know. He is the one who made them, he could do such things. And he did something else, something that he is still doing. For he could never truly perish. Things have changed since he came to this place. He came here with strange dreams, and things began to change. He hid himself here and practiced his dreams. Bones and shadows, are you listening? Pale bones and black shadows. And now he is gone but he is not gone. I know my voice is not the same, if you are listening. It is only an echo now. I have heard so many voices, and how could I not become their echo? The echo of dreams, dreams of bones and shadows together. Do you know the shadows I mean? They draw you toward them, they take you into their blackness. But that is where you would go. Something in the very bones reaches out to the shadows and their blackness. He dreamed about this, and he practiced this dream. The bones themselves are only pale shadows, the dust of shadows. Where they are gathered, so are shadows gathered there. And they are dreamed together. These dreams have not gone from this place. Everything is the subject of shadows, everything serves them and their blackness. The bones are silent because the shadows have taken their voices. He dreamed about this. Now we are all servants of shadows, and they have taken voices from the bones to join with their blackness. The shadows have taken these voices now. And they are using them, listen to my words. Things have changed but everything continues as he dreamed it would be. Everything continues but is not the same. And are you…”
But the words were interrupted when the door groaned and swung slowly toward him, flooding his cell with a confusing radiance. In the open doorway were two figures which stood lean and dark and without features against the flaring incandescence. Yet they were not hindered by the brilliance and moved toward him with a mechanical efficiency. They positioned themselves on either side of his slouching form, then lifted him easily off the floor. He struggled awkwardly, at last gripping one of their pale hands and pulling on it. The skin slipped back from the wrist and bunched up like a glove; underneath was revealed a kind of stuffing composed of pale chips and slivers that cohered within a thick black paste.
They brought him out into the narrow circular corridor, where the brightness of a multitude of hanging lamps eliminated any suggestion of shadows. He noticed, as he hung in the grasp of the two servants, that the neighboring cell had its door wide open and was without an occupant. But when they began to proceed down the corridor there appeared to be something that moved upon the wall of that vacant cell, evading the light. They passed other cells, all of whose doors were open and all of which betrayed a stirring along the walls within that told him they were not wholly unoccupied.
His wordless escorts now pushed him through a peaked doorway cut into the gray inner wall of the corridor. On the other side was a stone stairway which twisted through the heart of the prison. He climbed the stairs slowly and stiffly with long-fingered hands guiding him. And now shadows appeared upon the bending wall, joining themselves into an unshapely creature, a chimerical guide that knew its way and led him to a place high above. There was no variation in the light around him, yet a sense of gradual darkening imposed itself on him with every ascending step. Now he was approaching some vast and massive source of the obscure, a great nexus of shadows, a birthplace and perhaps also a graveyard where things without substance waited, a realm of first and final dreams.
The stairs ended as they emerged through the floor at the center of a great room. And here a new species of illumination—a pale and grainy phosphorescence—could be seen spreading throughout the open space around them. This strange light appeared to emanate from several transparent vessels which were shaped like urns and had been randomly positioned upon the floor or atop objects various in size. Each of these containers seemed to be filled with a colorless, powdery substance from which a cold and gritty glow was sent forth. But this glow, this scintillating gloss, did not reveal the surfaces of the room as much as it coated them with another surface, transfiguring what lay beneath.
For in that troubled glare everything lost the density and presence it might have possessed. Wide and lofty cabinets seemed to waver, barely settled upon the uneven floor. The straight lines of tall shelves took on a slight tilt and threatened to disgorge the countless books so tenuously supported there. So many books were already scattered across the floor, their pages torn out and gathered in ragged heaps that might take themselves into the air at any moment. Located in a far section of the chamber was an armory of curious devices mounted upon the wall or suspended by wires, devices which could ha
ve been hallucinations, phantoms through which one’s hand would pass on attempting to use them as they were designed to be used. And they seemed to have been designed for projects that involved rending and ripping, flaying and grinding. Yet all of these instruments apparently had lain idle for ages, displaying a corrosion which further removed them from their former substance and placed them in a category of phantasmal curiosities. Even the long low table about which these atrocious implements were congregated was dissolving with neglect.
Nevertheless, he was forced by his guardians to lie upon this coarse slab and be fettered by straps so decayed that he could easily tear them off. But the stern auxiliaries did not seem to be aware of the true condition of things: they continued to perform routine tasks that once may have had a purpose before being eclipsed by changes unknown to them.
Through the brittle haze of that room he watched his keepers as they went about some dutiful business, picking up obscure debris lying about the table, remnants of an undertaking long abandoned, or one no longer practiced in the same manner. This material they deposited in a large chest and locked it within. Then, with the studied automatism of pallbearers, they lifted the chest by its handles and carried it away, descending the stairs at the center of the room, their heavy feet scuffing the steps of that great prison tower. And echoes diminished in the depths below.
With the labored movements of a sleeper prematurely awakened, he turned himself from the table. And it was then he saw that the room was provided with a window, a single opening without glass. But so filled was this aperture with the blackness beyond that it seemed to be only a shadow painted upon the wall. He stepped slowly about the mounds of paper and other waste lying about the floor, careful of the deceptions of the room’s fractured light, and leaned over the window’s ledge. Far below he could see two tiny figures with a miniature box bobbing between them. They shrank farther into the quiet distance and finally disappeared into one of those dark hulking structures which were crowded together along narrow streets. So alike were these buildings that he could not keep his fix on the one they had entered, though he had his suspicions. Remaining at the window, he gazed into the great blackness above, which seemed to exert a strange magnetism, a tugging at the tower that rose so near to this mute and lightless firmament. After a few moments he turned away from the window. Now he was alone, with nothing to hold him to that place.
But as he moved toward the stairs to leave, he paused and scrutinized the piles of disjecta about him. Among this scattering of odds and ends there appeared to be something like bones or pieces of bones, broken leavings of some enterprise that had taken place here. And there was also such an abundance of jettisoned paper, pages dark with scribbling and sloughed off in the chaos of composition. Yet as he studied with greater intentness this mass of wild marks, he began to receive a few splinters of its theme, to read the wreckage of an unknown adventure. He seemed to see phrases, incantations, formulae, and almost to hear them spoken by a shattered voice. The pact of bones and blackness, the voice declaimed to him. The collection of shadows…shadows binding bones…skeletons becoming shadows. And he came to understand other things: the land stripped of flesh…the reeking earth ripped clean and rising into the great blackness. This reverberant discourse had made him its student, imparting theories and practice: bones pummeled into purity…parts turned to brilliant particles…the shadows seeded with the voice of skulls…the many voices within eternal blackness…the tenebrous harmony.
At last he turned his eyes from these words that were not words. Trying to draw away from them, he stumbled toward the stairs. But the voice which spoke these things continued to speak to him. It then became many voices speaking. Things had already begun to change. And now the stairs descended only into blackness, a blackness that was rising into the room as a great shadow around him. Shadows and their blackness and the voices they possessed. The one who had dreamed of bones and shadows—bones and shadows together—spoke in these voices and knew the name to speak, the name that would flay the flesh, the true name that called its bearer into the shadows as folds of blackness fell upon him and wrapped him in their shroud.
Now they had summoned him, now he was with them. Things had changed yet everything continued as before. And he cried out as the shadow sought his bones and as he felt his bones reaching into the blackness. Yet it was no longer his own voice that sounded in the tower, but the echoing clamor of strange shrieking multitudes.
PART 4
Teatro Grottesco and Other Tales
TEATRO GROTTESCO
The first thing I learned was that no one anticipates the arrival of the Teatro. One would not say, or even think, “The Teatro has never come to this city—it seems we’re due for a visit,” or perhaps, “Don’t be surprised when you-know-what turns up, it’s been years since the last time.” Even if the city in which one lives is exactly the kind of place favored by the Teatro, there can be no basis for predicting its appearance. No warnings are given, no fanfare to announce that a Teatro season is about to begin, or that another season of that sort will soon be upon us. But if a particular city possesses what is sometimes called an “artistic underworld,” and if one is in close touch with this society of artists, the chances are optimal for being among those who discover that things have already started. This is the most one can expect.
For a time it was all rumors and lore, hearsay and dreams. Anyone who failed to show up for a few days at the usual club or bookstore or special artistic event was the subject of speculation. But most of the crowd I am referring to lead highly unstable, even precarious lives. Any of them might pack up and disappear without notifying a single soul. And almost all of the supposedly “missing ones” were, at some point, seen again. One such person was a filmmaker whose short movie Private Hell served as the featured subject of a local one-night festival. But he was nowhere to be seen either during the exhibition or at the party afterwards. “Gone with the Teatro,” someone said with a blasé knowingness, while others smiled and clinked glasses in a sardonic farewell toast.
But only a week later the filmmaker was spotted in one of the back rows of a pornographic theater. He later explained his absence by insisting he had been in the hospital following a thorough beating at the hands of some people he had been filming but who did not consent or desire to be filmed. This sounded plausible, given the subject matter of the man’s work. Yet for some reason no one believed his hospital story, despite the evidence of bandages he was still required to wear. “It has to be the Teatro,” argued a woman who always dressed in shades of purple and who was a good friend of the filmmaker. “His stuff and Teatro stuff,” she said, holding up two crossed fingers for everyone to see.
But what was meant by “Teatro stuff?” This was a phrase I heard spoken by a number of persons, not all of them artists of a pretentious or self-dramatizing type. Certainly there is no shortage of anecdotes that have been passed around which purport to illuminate the nature and workings of this “cruel troupe,” an epithet used by those who are too superstitious to invoke the Teatro Grottesco by name. But sorting out these accounts into a coherent profile, never mind their truth value, is another thing altogether.
For instance, the purple woman I mentioned earlier held us all spellbound one evening with a story about her cousin’s roommate, a self-styled “visceral artist” who worked the night shift as a stock clerk for a supermarket chain in the suburbs. On a December morning, about an hour before sun-up, the artist was released from work and began his walk home through a narrow alley that ran behind several blocks of various stores and businesses along the suburb’s main avenue. A light snow had fallen during the night, settling evenly upon the pavement of the alley and glowing in the light of a full moon which seemed to hover just at the alley’s end. The artist saw a figure in the distance, and something about this figure, this winter-morning vision, made him pause for a moment and stare. Although he had a trained eye for sizing and perspective, the artist found this silhouette of a person in
the distance of the alley intensely problematic. He could not tell if it was short or tall, or even if it was moving—either toward him or away from him—or was standing still. Then, in a moment of hallucinated wonder, the figure stood before him in the middle of the alley.
The moonlight illuminated a little man who was entirely unclothed and who held out both of his hands as if he were grasping at a desired object just out of his reach. But the artist saw that something was wrong with these hands. While the little man’s body was pale, his hands were dark and were too large for the tiny arms on which they hung. At first the artist believed the little man to be wearing oversized mittens. His hands seemed to be covered by some kind of fuzz, just as the alley in which he stood was layered with the fuzziness of the snow that had fallen during the night. His hands looked soft and fuzzy like the snow, except that the snow was white and his hands were black.
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