And now that their own miniature pageant seems to have reached its peak, I think the time is right to awaken this mob from its hypnotic slumber and thrill the daylights out of them. It is time for the chime.
There is indeed a back stairway just where the boy indicated, one which leads me to a back hallway, back rooms, and finally a back door. And all these backways lead me to a vast yard where a garden is silhouetted beneath the moon and a small wood sways in the distance. A thick lawn pads my footsteps as I work my way around to the fine façade of this house.
I am standing on the front porch now, just behind its tall columns and beneath a lamp hanging at the end of a long brazen chain. I pause for a moment, savoring each voluptuous second. The serene constellations above wink knowingly. But not even these eyes are deep enough to outgaze me, to deceive the deceiver, illude the illusionist. To tell the truth, I am a very bad mesmeric subject, unable to be drawn in by Hypnos’ Heaven. For I know how easily one can be led past those shimmering gates, only to have a trap door spring open once you are inside. Then down you go! I would rather be the attendant loitering outside Mesmer’s Maze than its deluded victim bumbling about within.
It is said that death is a great awakening, an emergence from the trance of life. Ha, I have to laugh. Death is the consummation of mortality and—to let out a big secret—only heightens mortal susceptibilities. Of course, it takes a great master to pry open a pair of post-mortem eyes once they are sewn tightly closed by Mr. D. And even afterward there is so little these creatures are good for. As conversationalists they are incredibly vacant; the things they tell you are no more than sweet nullities. But there is not much else you can do with them, they are so hideous and smell to high heaven. So mostly we just talk. Sometimes, however, I recruit them for my show, if I can manage to get their awkward forms out of the mausoleum, hospital, morgue, medical school, or funeral emporium I have deviously insinuated my way into. But there is one great problem: You just can’t make them beautiful. One is not a sorcerer!
But perhaps one is a mental prestidigitator, an unusually adept whammy artist. One may make an audience think them beautiful, mistake them for spellbinding, snake-eyed charmers. One can do this at least, and loves to.
Even now I hear them still laughing, still dancing, still making a fuss over my charismatic doll of the dead. We showed them what you might be, O Seraphita, now let’s show them what you really are. I have only to press this glowing little button of a doorbell to sound the chime which will awaken them, to send the toll rolling throughout the house. Then they’ll see. They’ll see the sepulchral wounds: your eyes recessed in their sockets, sunken into mouths—those labyrinthine pits! They’ll wake up and find their nice dancing clothes all clotted with putrescent goo. And wait’ll they get a sniff of that stiff. They will be amazed.
Eye of
the Lynx
NO ARCHITECTURAL go-betweens divided the doorway—a side entrance off a block of diverse but connected buildings—from the sidewalk. The sidewalk itself was conjugally flush with the curb that bordered a street which in turn radiated off a boulevard of routine clamor, and all of this was enveloped by December’s musty darkness. Sidewalk doorway, doorway sidewalk. I don’t want to make too much of the matter, except to say that this peculiarity, if it was one, made an impression on me: there was no physical introduction to the doorway, surely not in the form of a little elevated slab of cement, certainly not even a single stair of stone. No structure of any kind prefaced the door. And it was recessed into the building itself with such deliberate shallowness that it almost looked painted directly onto the wall. I looked over at the traffic light above the intersection; it was amber going on red. I looked back at the door. The sidewalk seemed to slip right under it, urging one to step inside. So I did, after noting that the wall around the doorway was done up, somewhat ineptly, like a castle tower flanked by toothy merlons.
Inside I was immediately greeted by a reception committee of girls very professionally lounging in what looked like old church pews along an old wall. The narrow vestibule in which I found myself scintillated with a reddish haze that seemed not so much light as electric vapor. In the far upper corner of this entranceway a closed circuit camera was bearing down on us all, and I wondered how the camera’s eye would translate that redly dyed room into the bluish hues of a security monitor. Not that it was any of my business. We might all be electronically meshed into a crazy purpurean tapestry, and that would have been just fine.
A fair-haired girl in denim slacks and leather jacket stood up and approached me. In the present light her blondness was actually more a murky tomato soup or greasy ketchup than fresh strawberry. She delivered a mechanical statement that began “Welcome to the House of Chains,” and went on and on, spelling out various services and specific terms and finally concluding with a legal disclaimer of some carefully phrased sort. “Yes, yes,” I said. “I’ve read the ads, the ones set in that spikey Gothic type, the ones that look like a page out of an old German bible. I’ve come to the right place, haven’t I?”
“Sure you have,” I thought to myself. “Sure you have,” echoed the blonde with blood-dyed hair. “What will it be tonight?” I inwardly asked me. “What will it be tonight?” she asked aloud. “Do you see anything you like?” we both asked me at the same time. From my expression and casual glances somewhere beyond the claustrophobic space of that tiny foyer, she could see right away that I didn’t see anything, or at least that I wanted her to think I didn’t. We were on the same infra-red wavelength.
We stood there for a moment while she took a long delicious sip from a can of iced tea, pretending with half-closed eyes that it was the best thing she’d ever washed her insides with. Then she pushed a button next to an intercom on the wall behind her and turned her head to whisper some words, though still keeping those violent eyes hooked on mine.
And what did those eyes tell me? They told me of her life as she lived it in fantasy: a Gothic tale of a baronness deprived of her title and inheritance by a big man with bushy eyebrows, which he sometimes sprinkles with glitter. (She once dreamed that he did.) And now this high-born lady spends much of her time haunting second-hand shops, trying to reclaim her aristocratic accoutrements and various articles of her wardrobe which were dispersed at auction by the glitter-browed man who came out of the forest one spring when she was away visiting a Carmelite nunnery. So far she’s done pretty well for herself, managing to assemble many items that for her are charged with sentiment. Her collection includes several dresses in her favorite shade of monastic black. Each of them tapers in severely under the bustline, while belling-out below the waist. A bib-like bodice buttons in her ribs, ascending to her neck where a strip of dark velvet is seized by a pearl brooch. At her wrist: a frail chain from which dangles a heart-shaped locket, a whirlpooling lock of golden hair inside. She wears gloves, of course, long and powdery pale. And tortuous hats from a mad milliner, with dependent veils like the fine cloth screen in a confessional, delicate flags of mourning repentance. But she prefers her enveloping hoods, the ones that gather with innumerable folds at the shoulders of heavy capes lined in satin that shines like a black sun. Capes with deep pockets and generous inner pouches for secreting precious souveniers, capes with silk strings that tie about her neck, capes with weighted hems which nonetheless flutter weightlessly in midnight gusts. She loves them dearly.
Just so is she attired when the glitter-browed villain peers in her apartment window, accursing the casement and her dreams. What can she do but shrink with terror? Soon she is only doll-size in dark doll’s costume. Nevertheless, quivering bones and feverish blood are the stuffings of this doll, its entrails tickled by fear’s funereal plume. It flies to a corner of the room and cringes within enormous shadows, sometimes dreaming there throughout the night—of carriage wheels rioting in a lavender mist or a pearly fog, of nacreous fires twitching beyond the margins of country roads, of cliffs and stars. Then she awakes and pops a mint into her mouth from an unravelled ro
ll on the nightstand, afterwards smoking half a cigarette before crawling out of bed and grimacing in the light of late afternoon.
“C’mon,” she said after releasing the button of the intercom. “I think I can help you.”
“But I thought you couldn’t leave the reception area,” I explained, almost apologetically. “Of course, if I’d known...”
“C’mon,” she repeated with both hands in her jacket pockets. And her loud heels led me out of that room where every face wore a fake blush.
We walked though a pair of swinging doors which met in the middle and were bound like books, imitation leather tightly stretched across their broad boards and thick spines. Title page:
House of Chains, A Romance in Red
Decorated
with
Divers Woodcuts
Page one: Deep into December, as the winds of winter howled beyond the walls, two children, one blond and the other dark, found themselves in the heart of a great castle in the heart of a gloomy forest. The central chamber of the castle, as is a heart’s wont, glowed with a warm red light, though the surrounding masonry was of damp gray stone. A great many people of the court capered about, traveling aloft or below by means of sundry stairways, ingressing and egressing through the queerly shaped portals of shadowed corridors (which seemed everywhere), and thronging here and there as in the curious bazaars of oriental scenes. Uncouth voices and harsh music fell upon the children’s ears.
Decoration opposite opening page: Two children, one blond and the other not; passing through a tunnel of tangled forest which looks as if it’s about to descend and devour them both. The girl, open mouthed, is pointing with her left hand while holding onto her brother with the right; the boy, all eyes, seems to be gazing in every direction at once, amazed at the pair’s wondrous incarceration.
“Can I get the ninety-eight cent tour,” I asked my hostess. “I’m from out of town. We don’t have anything like this where I come from. I’m paying for this, right?”
Half of her mouth found it possible to smirk. “Sure,” she said, drawing out the word well past its normal duration. She moved in a couple of false directions before guiding me toward some metal steps which clanged as we descended into a blur of crimson shadows. The vicious vapor followed us downstairs, of course, tagging along like an insanely devoted familiar.
Surprisingly enough, there was a window in the vaguely institutional basement of the House of Chains (I was beginning to enjoy that name), but it was composed of empty panes looking out upon a phony landscape. Pictured were vast regions of volcanic desolation towered over by prehistoric mountains which poked into a dead-end darkness. The scene was illuminated by a low-watt bulb. I felt a bit like a child peeking into a department store model of Santa’s workshop, but I can’t say it didn’t create a mood.
“Nice painting,” I said to my companion. “Kind of spooky, don’t you think?” I looked at her for a reply to my patter, but no counter-patter was forthcoming. She simply stared at me as if I’d just told a joke she didn’t get.
“There’s not much down here,” she finally said. “Just a couple of hallways that don’t go anywhere and a bunch of rooms, most of them locked. If you want to see something spooky, go to the end of that hall and open the door on the right.”
I faithfully followed her instructions. On the door handle hung a rather large animal collar at the end of a chain leash. The chain jingled a little when I pushed open the door. The red light in the hallway barely allowed me to see inside, but there was little to see anyway except a small, empty room. Its floor was bare cement and there was straw laid down upon it. The smell was terrific.
“Well?” she asked when I returned down the hallway.
“It’s a start,” I answered, winking the subtlest possible wink. We just stood for a moment gazing at each other in a light the color of fresh meat. Then she led me back upstairs.
“Where did you say you’re from?” she asked as that noisy stairway amplified our footsteps into reverberant dungeonlike echoes.
“It’s a real small place,” I replied. “About a hundred miles outstate. It’s not even on the maps.”
“And you’ve never been to a place like this before?”
“Uh-uh, never.”
She stopped at the top of the stairs. “Then before we go any further,” she said, “I want to give you some advice and tell you to go back where you came from.”
I just looked at her, shaking my head slowly and insolently.
“Okay, then. Let’s go.”
We went.
And there was much to see on the way—a Punch and Judy panorama which was staged between the chasmical folds of a playhouse curtain of rich inky red, and getting redder every passing second. Each scene flipped by like a page in a storybook: that frozen stage where the players are stiffened with immortality and around which the only thing that stirs is the reader’s roving eye.
Locked doors were no obstacle.
Behind one, where every wall of the room was painted with heavy black bars from floor to ceiling, the Queen of the Singing Kingdom—riding crop raised high—sat atop her magic flying leopard, which unfortunately had been recently transformed into a human. And, sadly, the animal had lost one of its paws. What good fortune that it could still fly! But did it want to? Or did it prefer to lumber lamely around its cage, with the Queen herself growing out of its back like a Siamese twin, her royal blood and his beast’s now flowing together, tributaries from distant worlds mingling in a hybrid harmony. The animal was so pleased that it yowled a tune as the Queen beat time upon its flanks with her stinging crop. Sing, leopard, sing!
Behind another door, one with a swastika splashed negligently on its front in such a way that the paint had dripped from every appendage of the spidery symbol, was a scene similar to the previous. Inside, some colored lights were angled down upon the floor, where a very small man, his hunchback possibly artificial, knelt with head bowed low. His hands were lost in a pair of enormous gloves with shapeless fingers which lolled around like ten drunken jacks-in-the-box. One of the numb fingers was trapped beneath the pointy toe at the base of a lofty boot. See the funny clown! Or rather jester in a jingly cap. His ringed eyes patiently gazed upwards into the darkness, attentive to the hollow voice hurling anger from on high. The voice was playing up the moral disparity between its proudly booted self and that humiliated freak upon the floor, contrasting its warrior’s leaping delights with the fool’s dragging sack of amusements. But couldn’t the stooping hunchback’s fun be beautiful too? his eyes whispered with their elliptical mouths. But couldn’t—Silence! Now the little monkey was going to get it.
Behind still another door, which had no distinguishing marks, a single candle glowed through red glass, just barely keeping the room out of total blackness. It was hard to tell how many were in there, more than a couple, less than a horde. They were all wearing the same gear, little zippers and big zippers like silver stitches scarring their outfits. One very little one had an eyelash caught in it, I could tell that much. For the rest of it, they might as well have been human shadows that merged softly with one another, proclaiming threats of ultimate mayhem and wielding oversized straight razors. But although these gleaming blades were always potently poised, they never came down. It was only make-believe, just like everything else I had seen.
The next door, and for me the last, was at the end of an exhausting climb in what must have been a tower.
“Here’s where you get your money’s worth, mister,” said my date, blind to the signs of apprehension—clutching my coat, lightly pawing my cheek—I was beginning to exhibit like an insecure artist about to reveal his unseen canvasses.
“Show me the worst,” I said, eyeing the undersized door before us.
The situation here was as transparent as the others. Only this time it wasn’t pet leopards, pathetic clowns, or paranoid shadows. It was, in fact, two new characters: a wicked witch and her assistant in the form of an enchanted puppet. The clumsy little cr
eature, due to an incorrigibly mischievous temperament, had behaved badly. Now the witch was in the process, which she had down to perfection, of putting him back in line. She swept across the room, her dark dress swirling like a maelstrom, her hideous face sunken into an abundant hood. Behind her a stained-glass window shone with all the excommunicated tints of corruption. By the light of this infernal rainbow of wrinkled cellophane, she collared her naughty assistant and chained him hands and feet to a formidable-looking stone wall, which buckled aluminum-like when he collapsed against it. She angled down her hooded face and whispered into his wooden ear.
“Do you know what I do with little puppets who’ve been bad?” she inquired. “Do you?”
The puppet trembled a bit and would have beamed bright with perspiration had he been made of flesh and not wood.
“I’ll tell you what I do,” the witch continued half-sweetly. “I make them touch the fire. I burn them from the legs up.”
Then, surprisingly, the puppet smiled.
“And what will you do,” the puppet asked, “with all those old dresses, gloves, veils, and capes when I’m gone? What will you do in your low-rent castle with no one to stare, his brow of glittering silver, into the windows of your dreams?” Perhaps the puppet was perspiring after all, for his brow was now glistening with tiny flecks of starlight.
The witch stepped back and whipped off her black hood, exposing blond hair beneath it. She wanted to know how I knew about all that stuff, which she had never revealed to anyone. She accused me of peeping-tomism, of breaking and entering, and of illicit curiosity in general.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer Page 10
