Classics Mutilated

by John Shirley

  Jim crouched, eyes closed, head down, and went to his refuge.

  This memory/fantasy … looking at the Indian’s soul: a lizard-shaped thing of light, slithering across the blacktop. Jim watched it all the way, its tail swishing heavily, its spines fully erect. He could hear, from amidst the chaos, a baby crying, and a young man screaming. Blood ran across the highway and the morning sun painted everything bronze.

  Another camera flash, lighting the alleyway like fire. The hands continued to grab at him, but softer now, and fewer of them.

  “And all my days are trances,” a soft voice spoke from somewhere in the alleyway. “And all my nightly dreams/are where thy dark eye glances/and where thy footstep gleams.”

  Jim’s heart ran harder, but he wasn’t afraid. It was adrenaline, icy and crystalline—a sense that something life-altering was about to happen. He watched as the soul-lizard crawled steadily toward him, its claws clacking and scratching on the road. Would it simply disappear … to the place where souls float freely? Jim shook his head; he knew what was going to happen. The soul-lizard stopped a short distance in front of him, lifted itself to its rear legs, and suddenly sprang. A cool flash of light, and Jim felt it penetrate his vulnerable body. He held out his arms and stared at the scrubbed blue sky.

  CHANGE.

  CHANGELING.

  I am the Lizard King.

  Jim stood and opened his eyes. No cameras, no grasping hands. It was, once again, an alleyway of old brickwork, flooded with lambent fog. The raven had disappeared, but ahead of him—not twenty feet away—glimmered a streetlight. Like the sign, it was archaic in design, emitting a plush yet tasteless glow. It was not, however, the streetlight that demanded Jim’s attention, but rather the individual standing beneath it.

  Jim blinked sweat from his eyes, took a deep breath, and started toward him.

  “There is a gentleman,” the individual said, “rather the worse for wear.”

  “I guess I was born that way,” Jim said, drawing nearer.

  The man laughed—a dry sound, like splitting wood. He was of slight build, with a wave of black hair and a full mustache. His eyes were dark, yet penetrative, sparkling beneath a well-formed brow, and his clothes were as old-fashioned as the streetlight he stood beneath. Jim—a disciple of the written word—knew exactly who he was.

  “How shall the burial rite be read?” the slight man inquired. He pulled a watch from a pocket in his vest and flipped it open. The ticking sound grew loud again. Not booming, like before, but loud enough.

  “The solemn song be sung?” Jim added.

  The man nodded approvingly. “The requiem for the loveliest dead/that ever died so young?”

  Jim took another step forward. “This is the craziest trip yet, man.”

  The man smiled and glanced at his watch. “A trip, you say?”

  “Yeah … I say.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  Jim laughed. His chest ached with the force of it. “Yeah, I know. You’re the Acid Man, the King of Trips. Nothing more than a long, prolonged derangement of the senses, inviting me—as ever—to obtain the unknown.”

  “Am I real?”

  “You’re real in my head,” Jim replied at once. “So yeah … that makes you real.”

  “And if I were to inform you that I am real outside your head?”

  “You’re Edgar Allan Poe,” Jim said, smiling. “You died in eighteen forty-something.”

  “Nine,” Poe said.

  “Yeah … nine. You can’t be real outside my head.”

  “But if I am?”

  Jim smiled again, but his eyes dulled with uncertainty. “Then I would say that on this occasion … I really have obtained the unknown.”

  “The unknown,” Edgar Allan Poe said, and his dark eyes danced. “Welcome to my world, James.”

  “Oh the bells, bells, bells/what a tale their terror tells/of despair.” Poe let the watch swing, pendulum-like, from its chain. “How they clash, and clang, and roar/what a horror they outpour….”

  Jim cocked his head, listening to the watch’s infinitesimal cogs strike unnatural sounds in the musty air. It sounded more like a heartbeat, he thought. His own, perhaps, thumping life into this esoteric body. He shuffled forward, standing now in the stale glow of the streetlight. A single glance upward, looking for the raven, expecting to see its ghostly radiance high above, like the moon behind cloud. But there was nothing. It was just him and the man.

  Poe.

  “Time is running slight,” he said, snapping the watch closed and dropping it back into his vest pocket.

  “Same for everyone,” Jim said.

  “But it ticks so loud for you,” Poe said. “Jangling and wrangling. So close.”

  Jim raised one eyebrow. “Should I be afraid, Mr. Poe?”

  “What is there to fear?”

  “You tell me,” Jim replied. “Your watch stopped ticking over a hundred years ago; I would expect you to have all the answers.”

  Poe nodded. He leaned against the streetlight, casting no shadow.

  “We are very alike, James,” he said. “Both of us flexing—raging—from our dark, internal corridors, largely condemned and misunderstood. We are children of arcane verse … American poets.”

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  Poe held out his hands. “You brought yourself.”

  “I followed your bird. Your soul.”

  “Drawn by the unknown … testing reality.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, like me, you’re curious. You seek truths in untoward places.” Poe pushed away from the streetlight. He took two silent steps toward Jim. The fog swirled around him—odd, dancing shapes. “I understand you, James, like no one else. I know how your mind works, and what you desire. We’re quite the same, you see.”

  “Really?”

  “Indeed. Like you, I’ll always wander this dark path. I’ll always be a word man.”

  “Better than a bird man,” Jim said.

  The fog curled and waned, and Jim could see, behind Poe, a wooden door. His mind continued its trickery; the door was not part of any building, or built into any wall, but stood alone, rather plain, appearing to hover in the thinning fog as if some divine brush had painted it into existence. Jim took a step toward it, half-smiling.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  Poe looked from Jim to the door, and then back to Jim. The watch thumped in his pocket, and Jim’s heart kept time.

  “The Door of Perception,” Poe replied.

  “I would think, Mr. Poe,” Jim started, “that you could be more original.”

  “I may surprise you yet.”

  A legend had been inscribed upon the door—neat little letters. Jim had to step closer to read them:

  Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin;

  Who slayeth the dragon; the shield he shall win.

  Jim felt a runnel of sweat trickle from his hairline, into the hollow of his cheek. He looked at Poe, searching his eyes for some suggestion of unreality—a frailty in the seams, perhaps, where imagination had hurriedly put him together. But Poe showed no such weaknesses; he appeared as real as anything Jim had seen.

  I need to come down, Jim thought. I need to escape. He reached out and touched Poe, then turned and touched the door. Both solid. Both there.

  The ticking sound continued to make the air shudder. Jim was no longer sure if it was the man’s watch, or his heartbeat.

  He touched the door again. “Where does it lead?”

  “The Other Side,” Poe said, smiling.

  “Naturally.”

  “Time is running slight, James.” Poe touched the door and with a childlike cry it swung inward. Jim’s gaze was dragged to the opening: a rectangular rift in the fog. He could see nothing of the Other Side, only darkness: a bed of black fuel waiting to be ignited.

  “It’s a grave,” Jim said. He tried to inch away but could not. “If I step through that doorway, all of this becomes real. I’ll never wa
ke up.”

  Poe raised his eyebrows. “How much of the unknown do you truly wish to obtain?”

  “I’m not afraid.” But his heartbeat suggested otherwise. Like the watch, it clashed and clanged and roared. Disorientation swept over him and he staggered either forward or backward, his legs buckling, the fog whirling in his brain. He remembered the arms that had thrust from the alleyway walls, and wished that he could feel them now. They would grab and scratch and make him bleed, but they would hold him upright and keep him from falling into that terrible doorway.

  “Come, James,” Poe said, stepping toward the darkness.

  “I think I’ll stay here,” Jim said, trying to back away, but the doorway inched toward him. He turned around, his breath catching in his throat, and then the doorway shifted—to the side, and then in front of him again.

  “Truths and answers abound.” Poe’s eyes glistened like the raven’s feathers.

  “I think I’ll just wake up now.”

  “Come …” And with a single step Poe disappeared into the darkness, leaving nothing but his voice, spiraling in the air, as thin as candle smoke: "Come … follow me down.”

  Jim tried to—

  WAKE UP

  —convince himself that none of this was happening, and with the same mind-space he fought/thought to resist the doorway. But it pulled him, tempting, like a drug he had already taken. The more he struggled, the closer he got … until finally, with his heart crashing and a terrible moan rising from his chest, he succumbed.

  Darkness: a thousand nights crammed into one tiny space.

  The door slammed closed.

  Ladies and gentlemen … from Los Angeles, California … The Doors.

  He heard the band’s driving intro to "Break On Through" and stepped into the spotlight. The crowd erupted; he could feel the air trembling. Adoration, like a warm sheet falling over his cold body. A pall, he thought, trying to gaze beyond the stage lights, hoping to see their faces. They rippled and flapped and created such a frenzy of sound, but he could see only darkness. He slithered to the mic stand, as he always did, listing slightly, and prepared to sing the opening verse. The lyrics were ingrained in his mind, but the words that came from his mouth were all wrong: a deviant, broken, criss-cross of mad language. Nobody appeared to notice, however; the band continued to play, and the crowd kept cheering.

  “The darkness in my temps âme/mort in le desert….”

  Where’s my head, man? This is wrong, all wrong—

  He could hear ticking, thumping … beyond the applause, the wild, flapping crowd.

  “Beautreillis dreaming/L'enfant cries/le corbeau comes to eat my eyes….”

  Jim screamed into the mic: a blistering torrent of bruised sound. It felt like he was chained to some crazy carnival ride, spinning and flashing while a calliope played. Get me off this thing, he thought. He tried to tilt out of the spotlight, but it followed him across the stage, as close as a tattoo. Get me OFF. The audience flapped their devotion, like the rumble following a thunderclap, and the band played on. Jim turned to them, confounded … only to see a grotesquery so spectacular that all the strength deserted his legs. He fell to his knees—wanted to cry.

  They played their instruments with notable gusto, with normal hands and bodies, but from the collars of their normal clothes sprouted oily, ravens’ heads. Their beaks were long and black, and their round eyes glimmered in the stage lights.

  I’m still tripping, Jim thought, getting slowly to his feet. I didn’t wake up, I’m still—He turned again to the crowd and at that moment the house lights came on. The theater blazed and Jim could see everything: the main floor and balcony, the doors and walls and catwalks. And, of course, he could see his audience … a million thunderous fans.

  Not human—not even close.

  Ravens packed the auditorium. The air was almost solid with them, bursting from their seats, scattering feathers, without room to fully work their wings, sinking down and bursting up again. They cawed and flapped, creating dissonance that sounded like riotous applause. And beyond this sound, beyond the music, he could still hear that ticking; that heartbeat.

  Clash and clang and roar.

  Jim held out his arms, shrieked, and ran to the edge of the stage. He threw himself off, and for a—

  heartbeat

  —moment thought he would fly, but then he was plummeting … through feathers and beaks and claws. The theater floor opened up and he fell for too long. So this is the Other Side, he thought. No one here gets out alive. Laughter touched the edges of his scream, and just as he began to believe that he would fall forever, he landed in a twisted room of Poe’s design, where the sound of his heartbeat shook the wooden floorboards, and where the raven was waiting.

  “Four days prior to my death,” the raven said, “I was found on a street here in Baltimore, in a most disheveled state. I was incoherent … bewildered, having been missing for a number of days. Many questions were asked, not least of them how I came to be wearing somebody else’s clothes. I was hastened to Washington College Hospital, where I regained consciousness only long enough to declare, ‘Lord help my poor soul,' and then I passed into this otherworld … Night’s Plutonian Shore.”

  “Yeah, I remember reading about it,” Jim said. “So much mystery surrounding your death. That’s some way to go, man.”

  The raven nodded. It was perched upon a crooked tower of ancient books, among them Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, Machiavelli’s Belphegor, and Sir Launcelot Canning’s The Mad Trist. Dust puffed rhythmically from between the dry pages as Jim’s heartbeat rolled through the floorboards.

  “My wife, Virginia, died,” the raven said, “and my world turned to darkness. No—an unimaginable blackness. Take a knife to darkness, cut it, and it would bleed the stuff of my world. Of course I turned to the demon drink—prolonged my senses to obtain the unknown. I believed in a between-world wherein Virginia lay as pale as cloud, her eyes open, her sweet heart moving. I strived to reach this world by way of alcohol … and sometimes I did; I held my dearest Virginia, in reverie, and my tears fell into her open eyes. Such ardor affects one’s state of mind, and mine deteriorated quickly. My life was in pieces, and so I sought, in my delusion, to obtain another.”

  The raven flapped its wings. The tower of books creaked, and with a little snap of sound the bird hit the air, to alight, moments later, upon a bust of Pallas. Jim followed its short flight with glazed eyes. He sat against a stone wall and waited for this to be over.

  Was there a quicker way out? Jim glanced around Poe’s room. It was a grand space, confined by the detritus of creativity: the books and the bust, of course, along with crates and coffins that spewed exoticisms: an angel of the odd; the musings of Thingum Bob, Esq.; an oblong box; a loss of breath. The crates were stacked to the vaulted ceiling. There were window ledges, but no windows, only the shapes of windows carved into the stone. Likewise there was no door. The wooden floor ticked and thumped, and oval portraits (depicting yet more oddities) trembled on the walls.

  No way out.

  The raven rapped and tapped upon the bust, demanding Jim’s attention.

  “Thought I,” it said, “that a man whose coat is worn and frayed will simply acquire a new one. Could the same not be done with a man’s life … to cast aside the cracked shell and inhabit one of fortitude? My diminished mind certainly believed so, and thus began my peculiar endeavor.”

  Jim looked at the shapes of the windows, seeking some seam of light, something he could rift. There was nothing. He studied the gaps between the floorboards, which sighed with every frantic crash of his heart.

  Rap-tap upon the bust again.

  The raven ruffled its feathers. “It was a desperate period for me—seeking a new body, one not so forlorn, so broken. For the simplest transition, I sought an individual not unlike myself, slightly younger, perhaps, but ablaze with the fire of creativity. In time I made the acquaintance of a brilliant young poet named Christopher Reynolds, and through wile, dev
ice, and dementia attempted to possess his physical form.”

  Jim looked at the raven. He imagined souls floating in the breeze, a glowing menagerie, seeking some warm place to land.

  “You have to remember,” said the raven, “that I was very sick … confused.”

  “That’s what happens when you crawl back in your brain,” Jim said.

  “For several days we struggled, clawing and biting. I assumed his clothing, but nothing more; Reynolds’s soul was lion-shaped and it bested me. He threw me—shattered and delirious, still dressed in his clothes—to the cold streets. The fight was over; I had lost. My life was finished. In the passages of delirium before my final breath, I realized my mistake, and vowed that it would be different next time. ‘Lord help my poor soul,' I uttered, and turned then to my raven form. And for these last one hundred and eighteen years I have flown Night’s Plutonian Shore—an ancient lunatic—waiting for the right soul … the right poet … so that I might swoop and live again, young and beautiful, infinite with creativity, as dark as sin.”

  Jim tilted his head and blinked. His heart thumped harder.

  “And here you are,” the raven said.

  “Except none of this is real,” Jim said.

  “If that’s true, you have nothing to fear.” The raven bristled, its feathers so slick they looked wet. “I’m taking your life, James. That’s why you’re here.”

  Jim got to his feet. He pushed away from the wall and took two sideways, unsteady steps. “You’re just a dream. Or some freight train of hallucination barreling through my consciousness. I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Think of me as an angel,” the raven said, “with wings where I had shoulders …” It held up one talon. “… as smooth as these claws.”

  “I want to wake up now,” Jim muttered.

  The raven cawed and, once again, rapped its hooked beak upon the bust. Cracks appeared in Pallas’s smooth white eyes. “I’ll not make the same mistake again, James. The eyes, you see … the eyes are the windows to the soul. This time I know the way in.”