1. Murdering the Madhouse
We have gathered to watch the madhouse die, to see it be devoured by waves of cold white fire.
The execution will occur at dawn, or so Desdemona was foretold by the entrails. She discerned in them a great rupturing star and an edifice that toppled as sharply as a house of cards. To my eyes it was but a tangle of steaming viscera, but then I do not have Desdemona’s gift.
Each of us possesses an inborn skill, a talent for which mastery was possible provided we submitted ourselves to the rigours of training. Helene is able to speak in symbols; her murmurs are as a living Tarot. My own knack is for tracking, for hunting.
These skills are varied, and on their own they tended to cause each of us pain. But then we came together. It was then that our talents began to make sense. They were pieces of larger whole. We are shards of a broken mirror, Melanie once whispered to us in the sleep hall one midnight, and now we’re putting the mirror back together. Soon we’ll be able to see.
They are my kin, even if our bloodlines tell otherwise. Our bond is taut and unshakable, our trust mutual and implicit.
By way of Desdemona’s oracle we have been forced to accept that the sun is doomed to part, to pour molten blood from its wound. It shall incinerate Caligari’s bedlam. So the Manifest decreed it, so it shall be.
On my command we came crawling to the asylum grounds on our bellies, wearing only mud, steak knives clenched in our teeth.
2. Snake Pit
Future historians will regard this era with a certain drooling fascination. These unspeakable years when our people were forced to endure until our insurrection will one day be just another bloody footnote in the book of life; a few lines written deliciously enough to raise the brow and hurry the blood of the morbidly curious. I accept this. I have done it myself in fact; with the lore of heads lopped under the guillotine’s angled blade, the lynching of rustic witches, the romantic art of the adept poisoner. But for me, for us, here and now, the events are too personal. Our wounds are still raw and weeping.
The stories from the Snake Pit are legion. I could tell you of the things I witnessed there; the routine, almost methodical violations of the women and girls; the patients sedated until they became human slugs lying in the great concrete chamber, garmented only in their own waste; the illicit lynching parties that occurred in the great stairwell at the asylum’s rear.
Oh so many horrors. I will restrict this telling to my own.
My misfortune, my fate, was to come of age during the ashen years of the Occupation, when the Manifest evolved from smallish rallies and social media groups to marching through the streets armed with bayonets and automatic rifles. Their militias did not so much overthrow our governments as merge with them. Causes, whether radical or moderate, all come down to questions of degree. All ambitions can be blended like molten metals in a furnace. The end result is always the same: something that is hard, cold, and unyielding.
They shut us out of the education system the year I turned twelve. The schools were then transformed into full-blown academies where the future soldiers of the Manifest movement could sculpt their bodies and hone their fighting abilities while the State moulded their minds and aborted their souls.
The temporary privileges that our ancestors had died to bequeath us were reneged almost immediately. We lost our right to vote, to drive, to own property. Those of our spouses and relatives who were still recognized by the Manifest were appointed to be not our partners and our kin, but our keepers.
A nationwide curfew followed not long after this. We were forbidden from straying outside our homes, first after nine p.m., then at dusk, and finally altogether. But even this purging was not thorough enough for the Manifest. It was decreed that none of us should be visible through the windows of our keepers’ houses. I was cloistered in an attic room with my mother and my younger sister. Mother did her best to keep things cosy and cheerful for my sister’s sake. With me her tone was always dire and urgent. She knew it was only a matter of time.
And so she began to train me. All home-schooling routines were abandoned (except when we mimicked them for my father, or for a surprise home inspection by the Manifest) in favour of practicing how to tiptoe through the house without causing any of its ancient floorboards to creak. I learned how to conceal myself completely upon the beams of the attic’s ceiling. I was able to inhale and exhale without moving or making even the slightest noise. All of these skills were to serve me well, but in a way that I would have never wished them to.
The Liquidation was ordered. It spread virally. The keepers were commanded to rid the world of their own undesirables. Refusal to do so was punishable by Liquidation. My father was such an insurgent. But his efforts, while valiant, resulted in a massacre from which I escaped only because my mother managed to get me to a hidden hatch door before the Manifest gunned her down.
Her final word to me was “Run,” and I heeded. I looked back only once, but it was enough to see all the houses on my street being swallowed by flames.
For months I scraped by in one of the last scraps of surviving wilderness, eking out an existence, living off whatever garbage I could find. It was during this time that construction on the great pillars began. Fields of them were erected, seemingly overnight. The crews were vast and they worked around the clock. Like crops of concrete and steel, the pillars loomed over the city, encroaching closer and closer to the shrinking tangle of woodlands where I hid.
The Manifest began widening their nets. They performed almost hourly sweeps in which no proverbial stone was left unturned. They were hunting for anyone of my kind. In time they found me. Assessments were not a consideration and a trial was little more than a wish.
Less than twenty-four hours after I’d been rounded up and sedated I was committed to the Snake Pit. It was as hideous as I’d described. I could not even estimate how long I spent in those windowless halls, but I was certain that I would perish there.
I had become so numbed by the cycles of dim monotony followed by dreamless sleep that when change finally did penetrate my world I scarcely noticed it. It was, I reasoned, my time for Liquidation. By then the bedlams were swollen with undesirables and Liquidations were an almost daily occurrence. So when that portly caricature stopped before my cell, stared at me intensely from above the rims of those large black horn spectacles, and finally pointed a crooked finger and croaked the word “Her” to the guard, I naturally assumed that my time had come.
I did not weep, but instead shuffled silently between the two guards, consoling myself that if there was any truth to the fables my mother used to lull me to sleep at night as a child, I would soon be shed my flesh and would move to the sky to be reunited with her, my father, and my sister.
A woman I’d later learn was Desdemona was ahead of me, leading our sedated march to the Liquidation Room. Two others, Helene and Melanie, were dragged from their respective cells and were ordered to join our fatal parade. Most of the other inmates avoided our eyes. A few of the guards whistled, clapped their hands; one man couldn’t resist swooping in to give Desdemona one last rough, unbidden groping.
The rotund figure headed our precession. Its shapeless coat and a misshapen top hat (both lampblack) conjured in my mind the image of a mummer that was leading us past the Liquidation Room and into the long main corridor.
“You may call me Dr. Caligari,” the doctor announced almost musically. “This way, please, ladies.” A hand was waved toward the asylum’s exit. Caligari’s demeanour was casual, even blasé; as if freeing us from the Snake Pit was the most common thing in the world.
3. White Midnight
How Dr. Caligari came to earn the trust of the Manifest will likely never be known. I have heard lore that suggests the doctor was once a mountebank who travelled to the remotest of villages in order to swindle the rustics by peddling snake-oil medicines and legerdemain, which were passed off as miracles.
Some time ago, just before my first session, I caught Caligari sitting at a large, warped desk, staring fondly at what looked to be an old handbill. A skeletal figure clad in black stared up from the yellowed sheet. What little text I could make out from the doorway said something about somnambulism and The Dream Walker.
This was, I’d presumed, one of the tricks the doctor had spun in order to swindle the foolhardy.
I soon discovered that Caligari was either the most skilful mountebank the world had ever known or an authentic magician. I am inclined to believe the latter. Not because I wish to believe in magic, but because the feats Caligari managed to accomplish in this pale and rigid world were simply impossible.
Take the bedlam as an example. Only one of unworldly cunning and charm could have ever convinced the Manifest to not only allow but actually fund the erection of a madhouse that resembled more a cozy summer house than an institution. But Caligari had achieved this, for when my Sisters and I were allowed to exit the iron truck that transferred us from the Snake Pit, we found ourselves standing in an open garden of bright and fragrant flowers. Benches of carven stone lined the rounded courtyard. This space was domed with wire mesh, but not to prevent our escape. It was there to cloister the variety of delicate songbirds that winged freely about the shaded courtyard. I had not seen growth in so long that I actually forgot what the colour green looked like. Had it not been for the sight of the tall concrete pillars that were visible through the wire mesh and the trees I would have never known about the Manifest beyond those sheltering walls.
The chambers in the bedlam were only locked during inspections by the Manifest, which were seldom. The majority of the time we were free to move about as we pleased. Caligari’s only warning was that we needed to stay inside the grounds for our own protection. We did not need to be told twice.
Dr. Caligari assured us that our ‘sessions’ would begin very soon, but those first few weeks (how pleasing it was to be able to reckon time again) were pure leisure. Caligari assured us that we each had an arduous path ahead of us, so he encouraged us to make the most of this span. We heeded. The cooks tailored the menu to suit our tastes. My sisters and I began to lose the emaciated look we’d gained in the Snake Pit. The sun was lending colour to our skin and we were feeling strong and clean and clear-headed.
I had almost managed to forget how formidable the Manifest was, until they murdered the night.
I’d been sleeping soundly when a blast of light burned through my eyelids and melted my dream. I sat up in my bed and heard a faint commotion from the hall. Though my bedside lamp was off, my room was flooded with harsh light, as searing as sunlight on chrome. I turned to see that even with my window blind drawn the light was still able to illuminate every inch of the chamber.
Dr. Caligari was pacing the hall when I stepped out. The corridor was as irradiated as all the bedlam’s rooms.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“It’s starting,” Caligari muttered, though the words did not seem directed at me.
Desdemona rushed toward me, babbling something about how she had foreseen this, that the Manifest was beginning the next phase of their plan. I dismissed her then, but my view of this changed quickly.
Within an hour or two the blinding whiteness was suddenly extinguished. We all expressed relief, all but Caligari.
“It was a test,” the doctor mused. “Very soon they’ll have it running smoothly. We must begin.
4. Disinterment
The following morning, Melanie, Helene, Desdemona and I were cloistered in a large rounded chamber that bore no windows. The only light came from a pair of torches that had been mounted to the high stone walls. They flickered like a pair of infernal eyes.
Standing between and below them was Caligari.
The doctor beckoned us nearer and then whispered a highly detailed explanation about how the Manifest were using those great towers to forever keep the city alight, to rid the world of outer darkness because that was the next logical step after they had been so successful at “Liquidating the inner night.”
Helene asked the doctor what that meant. Caligari explained how we were carriers of “an inner night” and that this was the root of the Manifest’s hatred. It was, the doctor explained, not something necessarily lavish, but it was essential. For some women this night took the form of an intuition, others it would be an ability to protect with skill and ferocity. But no matter how this inner night worked through us, it was something that we had to dig to discover. Caligari called it “disinterring our buried weapons.” It was to be our first lesson.
That was how I learned I was a huntress, that Desdemona learned that her “hunches” were but a faint trace of her seer’s knack, that Helene’s rich imagination was a code of images that were indecipherable to all but her sisters, Melanie’s empathy kept us earthy, allowed us to remain women even when we were doing things that we’d been taught women should not (or could not) do.
The lighting of the towers was happening with greater frequency. But by the time the Manifest had gotten the light running around the clock, Caligari had already taught us how to dream walk.
The doctor was confident that even with the white lights burning across every inch the city, it would still take the Manifest some time to hammer out the dents in their plan. Their white world would not be without blemish, not at first. Caligari was sure that certain structures and certain moving forms would still cast shadowy blemishes across their pristine light. As a matter of fact, the doctor was counting on this flaw. All of our training was dependent on it.
It was along those thin bands of unwanted shadow that we learned to creep; into attic spaces, into sleep chambers, into cells. Though we had all been taught to hunt, we knew from the inception of our training that we could never overpower the Manifest, not even with our newborn skills.
Instead we set about to recruit. Nightly we could slip out of Caligari’s bedlam and creepy-crawl our way through the city. Silent as sealed caskets, graceful as wind, ferocious as prowling tigresses, we balanced ourselves within and upon the slivers of night that the finest engineering brains of the Manifest had yet to banish.
My first liberation occurred in the bedroom of a teenage girl. Her father had kept her hidden from the Liquidation squads, not to protect her, but so that he could continue to have her whenever he wished.
I made sure I allowed him to see me before I emerged. I enjoyed watching his eyes widen with terror while he tried to convince himself that a body could not be bent and arched in such a way, that a woman could never stare with such bloodlust.
The daughter said nothing when I first lunged. She did not seem at all surprised to see me. Her first words to me were “Let me.” I passed her my blade and allowed her to part her father’s throat.
I carried her to the bedlam on my back. Desdemona and Helene had each brought newcomers into Caligari’s fold that night. Our numbers were slowly beginning to swell.
Two nights ago Caligari brought us into the great round room. We were informed that suspicions from the Manifest were rising, that the doctor’s manipulation was beginning to unravel. We were told that this was an inevitable. It had happened before and would happen again.
“They will soon destroy this sanctuary. You must survive in the wilderness until we can meet again. Let us form Her great circle one last time tonight,” Caligari said. The shapeless black garments and glasses fell to the stone floor.
Only then did I realize that we had also been fooled by the doctor. Her body was as the Venus of Willendorf. We formed the circle and joined hands.
“You are all my daughters,” the doctor said, tears glinting in her large eyes, which, without those masculine spectacles, were deep and beautiful.
The circle was broken when Dr. Caligari released mine and Melanie’s hands and stepped gracefully back toward the wall with its pair of mounted torches. The f
lames were somehow instantly extinguished. When we approached the wall, our mater was gone.
5. Requiem
And so tonight we have gathered to watch the Manifest destroy Caligari’s bedlam, our home, our temple. Their pillars have grown taller and the light these rods cast is now brighter, broader and better able to insinuate itself into every corner of the city. They serve as the new sun that shall soon part and forever drown this city in light.
But our circle has also grown, our skills become more fortified and slippery. Each new sister that we liberate seems to disinter her hidden night with greater and greater ease. We have also learned to strike with increased swiftness. Tonight, for instance, we liquidated the entire crew before even the first victim could cry out.
Their focus is so sure, their pride so vast, the Manifest cannot even sense that these weird bent angles of blackness, the ones that disrupt the symmetry of their world, are in fact occupied.
Were they not so focused on perfecting their future, the Manifest would know from the pages of their history books that we have always existed; as daughters of Diana the Huntress, as the healers and midwives who had mastered the bloody birthing room where none of them would so much as glance. Men once called us the Erinyes. Today we are breathing black angles. We stalk and we protect our kind. We do not fear extinction, for our bloodline has passed through the rise and fall of countless manmade empires.
THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI Page 10
