The Dreadful Doctor Faust by K. H. Koehler

by K. H. Koehler Books

  Saleisha fell back, blinded by a sheet of excruciating blood.

  She was wrong about Bastion’s girl, she decided. The music box girl slowly killing her was gorgeous in her own horrible, impenetrable way. As she spun round and round, strength flowed out of her like darkness cast out of a lit room. Beauty truly was in the eye of the beholder.

  Then the blaze of the scalpel cut across Saleisha’s vision and she saw only darkness.

  4

  Saleisha woke in a cold, damp room with silvery walls.

  She felt sore and her eyes felt sewn shut like she had fallen asleep in her mascara. She blinked and sat up. She instinctively touched her eyes. Across the room, someone strange and yet familiar jerked in response to her.

  No, not someone. Herself.

  She recognized the mirror-Saleisha immediately. In fact, the whole wall of the tiny room was mirrored, like something in a funhouse, with dozens of mirror-Saleishas staring back at her with both curiosity and horror. She sat up creakily on the edge of a gurney and touched the bandages binding her face. There had been an accident, obviously, yet when she cast back in her memory for the exact chain of events, all she could recall was the demonic dancing ballerina—then the scalpel flicking out as brightly as the sun touching off the horizon…

  She made a pained animal noise under the bandages. She pressed her fingers against her eyes. Her eyes…had been cut…

  Yet, through the slits in the bandages, she saw.

  She made little noises in her throat, and as if in response, a door, also mirrored, opened inward, a surreal portal of darkness. Even the ceiling and the floor was mirrored, she saw. Watching the door open was like seeing reality bend.

  A man stepped into the chamber. He was long and spare and dressed entirely in black. His face was similarity bandaged. Saleisha was very happy to see him. To see someone, anyone. Yet his blackened presence offered no real comfort. It was suggestive of death, Nazis, ravens. He folded his hands before him. They were large and rawboned and heavily ringed. He seemed human, yet his eyes looked no more real than the dead eyes of the music box girl.

  She tried to groan out questions.

  “I am the Doctor,” the man informed her. “And please do not struggle, Ms. Fontana. You are still healing from your injuries.” He inclined his head as if with shame. “My assistant was…overzealous. You sustained a perforating trauma to both eyes. However, I fixed those for you.”

  Again she touched her eyes. She wanted to approach the man in black, the Doctor, to ask him why she was here, what had happened, why all this was happening to her, but she was suddenly afraid. He was not a man one approached without invite. She realized that instinctively. So she simply mouthed the words Thank you to him.

  “It was my pleasure,” he answered. Without further ado, he went out of the room, closing the mirror-door behind him.

  She glanced around in wonder. Were the mirrors part of some new therapy? And the bandages…had he also fixed what that stupid cow had done to her face? The horrible unzipping of her flesh…

  Her face, ah Christ…her face…

  She scraped at the bandages until she found a catch somewhere, then began ripping at them manically with her long clawlike nails. There was a solid, unyielding horror in the pit of her stomach. She fully expected to see scars. She had already begun to outline the various procedures she would need to fix them. But as the bandages fell away and the chill of the room brushed her face, she realized how far beyond the merciful scalpel of a surgeon she truly was.

  Saleisha screamed. She screamed long and hard, screamed until her throat tore. She screamed until all she tasted, all she knew, was her own blood, and she could scream no longer. And then she screamed some more.

  All the faces in the mirrors surrounding her were naked of flesh. All of the faces in the mirrors glistened. She saw a dozen tragic ruby-red faces like a legion of Halloween masks on display. There were no doorknobs, no breaks in the walls, she saw. The Halloween Saleishas mocked her from every angle.

  But unlike Jerry Pacino, whom she did not know and would never meet in this world, Saleisha Fontana did not accept her fate so easily. When it became apparent that she would not die of her injuries, nor of thirst or starvation, she grew frantic, then enraged. It took some time for her to develop the strength—how much, she could not say, weeks, perhaps years, because time meant so little here—but eventually her relentless impacts against the funhouse walls of her prison managed to crack one of the mirrors.

  She spent an eternity of cutting injuries digging through the glass to find some relief from the horror of her constant companion, her reflection. But in the end it was an exercise in futility.

  Not until she had broken away a huge shard of glass with her bare hands did she find the second layer of mirrors lurking beneath.

  5

  A second envelope, identical to the first, was deposited in the old man’s mailbox the day after Saleisha Fontana went missing in New York City, never to be seen again, even by FBI agents and a legion of forensic scientists. Like the first, it carried a postal mark from New York and bore a single sheet of paper with typing upon it.

  But the old man was not there to collect it. The envelope sat amidst the other cluttering flyers and mail for a very long time. The first envelope had been enough to summon him.

  THEN

  1

  The Below existed like another planet, set deep within the earth, a core unfound even by scientists and clever explorers.

  There were dry concrete tunnels that rattled ominously but never collapsed. Louise assumed these ran parallel to the subway, or perhaps beneath them. There were reservoirs of water, and crates and barrels left daily in strategic common rooms that had been dug from the New York bedrock by time, water, and perhaps human hands. There were hovels. There were people. The Homeless, mostly, the shade-like people she often skirted on the street going to and from work. Once, long ago, their hallowed faces and muttering voices had frightened her as badly as any childhood monster. No more. She was now one of them.

  She learned that some lived on the river bank under the Brooklyn Bridge. Others lived deeper in the earth, untouched by either sun or sky, like the Doctor. All had their reasons. All seemed to know him—or, at least, of him. All regarded him with an unsettling mixture of awe and fear.

  Louise slept in great swaths of time in the golden chamber, beneath the canopied bed. She was still healing. But sometimes she grew restless and explored the room. She found trunks of antique trinkets, old books, and a wardrobe full of dresses. She was unsurprised by the fey, antique fashions. Eventually she came to wear them, long dresses with bustles and subdued lace, tea gowns with tiny patterns, pleats and flounces. There were shoes, as well, in her size, but the strange, pointed walking boots were too intimidating to wear at first.

  Once dressed, she sometimes walked a little ways along the tunnels, leaning on two canes, but never wandering very far from the Doctor’s lair. There were people all up and down the tunnels, ragged people in castoff clothes and greasy faces. Some turned to greet her; others stood silent. Some spoke softly of devils and demons. Some were, she found, impossibly insane.

  Once, feeling brave, she went up and up, and emerged into the shattered, bonelike remnants of an old church. The church worried her, creaking the way it did, like an old dinosaur that had been eaten out by a fierce predator. And there was something else about it, something familiar and aching that chilled her bones. Beyond it she could hear dogs baying in primal hunting packs. She quickly retraced her steps.

  She meant to discuss the Below with the Doctor. But, somehow, that never happened.

  In the evenings she dined with the Doctor in his cavernous hall of hewn rock, the walls as golden as an egg and lit by a hundred votive candles. They spoke of history. The Doctor must have studied it extensively, for he knew a great deal. Sometimes they discussed music. He had Mary put on records while they dined. The Doctor taught her the difference between Richard Wager, Johann Strauss and T
chaikovsky. She enjoyed the Tchaikovsky ballet music. Once he told her a story about Paganini and his haunted violin.

  Slowly, as time wore on, courage seeped into her. She described her music to him, though she felt foolish talking about the Pussycat Dolls, Nine Inch Nails or Captain Hollywood. They did not seem very sophisticated compositions compared to his music.

  “This music—you danced to it,” the Doctor said one evening. With her his voice had grown soft and somnambulistic. Sometimes he spoke in mere whispers behind the bandages and she was forced to listen carefully before answering. But the steel within remained, eyes and voice.

  “I was an exotic dancer,” she said, “before.” She twisted the prim cloth napkin in her lap. “I danced in a club in the Bronx.”

  “You were a burlesque performer.”

  She frowned at him.

  “A stripper.”

  “Yes.”

  She waited for his admonition, his disdain for such a lowly profession, but he said only, “Perhaps you will dance for me one day. To your music.”

  “Or to yours,” she answered brightly, pleased that he chose not to judge her.

  “When you are strong, Poppet,” he said dismissively.

  One time, long after dinner (he called it tea) she walked through a twist of tunnels and found herself in a balcony suspended over the muted, underground theater where the Doctor did his work. A homeless woman had come in earlier, thin and starved and miserable, near fainting in agony.

  Louise watched through an observation window high above as he worked.

  Unlike the rest of the Below, the operation theatre was outfitted with the most modern tools and furnishings available. Everything was shining and sterile, no different than in any hospital.

  Gowned and masked in white, the Doctor worked quickly and with a disconnected efficiency. He slid his scalpel through the wall of the woman’s abdomen as Mary, similarly gowned in white, fed him tool after tool, sometimes not quickly enough for his liking. In seconds he had peeled back the woman’s flesh like a set of pale lips, and blackish blood came frothing out. Reaching deep into the wound, he retrieved a gnomish child and the ropes of the afterbirth and drew them both out, then deftly sewed up the mouthlike wound.

  Louise waited to be sick, but nothing happened. Gradually, her hands migrated to her abdomen. There were no more dull echoes of pain. The Doctor’s work had been just as efficient.

  Back in the sumptuous bedchamber she tried not to look at her own body, but there was a full-length mirror hanging on the inside of the armoire, and the mirror made her look, made her see. Her flesh was as firm and unmarred as that of a young child. No scars remained. She touched her slim white body and the immaculate, high breasts the Doctor seemed to admire and which gave her, at least, some small pride in her former self. She was beautiful, finally. Even the miscast eyes.

  But then, she was constructed for him, by him, as the rest of this wayward world was.

  2

  There was an outbreak. Cholera. The Doctor was gone for several days to the shantytowns strung along the riverbanks. It was like something from an old historical novel, one where the heroine dies at the end.

  He did not take Mary, saying it was too dangerous for her, at her advanced age. Of course, he did not take Louise. He did not say that it was too dangerous for her, only that she needed more time to mend, on the inside, if not out. But he must have sensed her inner panic, because he gave her the key to his private library.

  It was terrifyingly vast, a sheer vault full of books. There were crude shelves, though most of the books were carelessly stacked into walls and altars. They were not very dusty—she thought he must visit them often. There were candles and lanterns and, on an enormous dark oaken desk, a banker’s lamp that must have been powered by a generator. Or perhaps the power was somehow cleverly siphoned off from Above. She would not put it past him.

  There were medical texts and reference books and mildewing classics and bundles of yellowing paperbacks from the 1950’s with bold, adventurous titles. They both looked and smelled intriguing, and she soon lost all sense of time, spending hours alone at the big antique desk, turning pages, until Mary came to fetch her for supper or to bed. She gave up her reading time only reluctantly. She had grown apart from books in the last few years, and now she was rediscovering an old friend.

  Anyway, it was better than spending time with Mary. Mary was old and crooked, with bad, sunless skin and white hair pulled back in a severe manner Louise had recently read about in a novel about a woman who wore her hair just so as to produce an “Essex facelift” and make her seem younger to the duke she admired. In some ways, Mary reminded her of Saleisha, her old roommate in the Village, though they had absolutely nothing in common.

  She was careful with Mary. She would not make a mistake like that again.

  In the evenings, after dinner/tea, she walked the tunnels, growing stronger. She used only one cane now. And she no longer fled those who greeted her. Now she greeted them back. Once, she saw the woman from the operation theatre, nestled on a warm grate in the tunnels, nursing her baby. “He saved me and he saved little Matthew,” she said, showing Louise the furiously suckling infant. Her eyes shone with divine worship. “He’s like a god on earth.”

  “Who is he?” Louise asked. Matthew looked like a baby, finally, hardly like the alien thing the Doctor had pulled from the girl’s body.

  The girl couldn’t have been much older than she. She said, “I think he might be the devil. Or he sold himself to the devil so he could perform miracles. Like in the stories of Faust.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  The girl looked sad, resigned. She did not argue. Like everyone else, she was hopelessly in love with the Doctor. Or, at least, in thrall of him. “When you find his Gallery, you’ll know what he is,” she said.

  And so began Louise’s quest to find the Gallery. She went over the whole of the library, every inch, trailing her fingers through dust and over books and cold, wet bedrock walls. She even examined the floors beneath the Oriental carpets.

  But she did not find the Gallery until later, after much had come to pass.

  3

  “Poppet, if you stay in bed reading all day, you will never grow strong.”

  She was startled by the sound of the Doctor’s faint, mocking voice.

  He was standing in the shadows of her bedchamber. He had come to her as he usually did, soundlessly, like the cats. She had a fantasy of him gliding ghostlike up through the floor from some lower, hellish level where he made pacts with devils. But that was absurd.

  She had stayed in bed today. She was curled around a large leather-bound book she had borrowed from the Doctor’s library.

  He stepped to the side of her bed and took the book from her, examining it. “The Great Gatsby,” he said. “Are you enjoying it, Poppet?”

  “No,” she told him. It just bothered her.

  “Yet you seem enraptured.”

  The book was about a man who moved to the big city to become someone else. But nothing changed. Nothing worked out right. The man was a fool to think anything would be any different. She thought about saying these things to the Doctor, but he seemed to understand them instinctively.

  “Not a favorite of mine,” he admitted. “James Gatz attempted to change the world, instead of himself. An unfortunate man.” He sat down on the edge of her bed. He had never done that before. Always he hovered properly, dourly, or sat in one of the opposing cane chairs. Strangely, he looked bruised and smashed, though no wound was apparent on him. It surprised her.

  “Doctor…” she said.

  “I am very tired,” he answered her worries immediately. “The treatments took days.”

  She wondered if he had seen people die, or if he had saved them all. She thought about the girl and her infant, Matthew. She thought about what she had said about the devil. “Are the people still sick?”

  “The people are well, Poppet.”

  She waited. She felt
a quick stab of fear. Something had changed between them.

  Would he throw her out? Make her leave the Below? She was healed and could walk unassisted now. He had fixed her, as he had fixed the people.

  It was done, she realized. He would take away the books, the music, the safety of his inner world. She thought about the world Above, but it was now as alien a landscape as another planet. She had no place in it; it had no use for her. She had not known books or music in it. She had known only pain.

  But if he told her she must leave, then she must. He was king here.

  She began to cry. Like James Gatz, she was a fool.

  He watched her wordlessly through the slits in the bandages. She almost felt that he was conducting some kind of inhumane experiment.