THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI

by Dennis Weiler

  Had the Mayor been correct, that dreams would only be sweet, then things might have been different. But Phemorus had the recurring dream that the ladder rose up from his empty skull, and once leaning against the top of the wall he couldn’t climb it, because even though he had generated the ladder himself the base of it, the root of it, weighed upon him as he supported it. As if it pinned him in place like a bug in a forgotten museum display. And so he did not relive, in dream, his wandering in the red forest, holding the hand of his first lover or of his future bride.

  Therefore, after an unknown passage of time, Dr. Phemorus woke up.

  4

  He woke in a state of confusion. He knew he was awake; he was not under the illusion that he still dreamed. He could not at first understand, however, why he found himself standing in a warehouse in which a variety of makes of doll-faced anthropomorphic custodians stood in two rows of four, at rest. Their hollow open heads reminded him of his dreams of the extending ladder he was unable to climb. Weak, mold-colored light entered through waxy windows, showing him that the joisted ceiling was hung with cobwebs too high for the custodians to reach, if they ever even noticed them during their comings and goings to tend to other, narrowly focused matters.

  Had he been brought here? If so, by whom? Had someone else awakened before him, also discontented with their dreams? Or was it someone from some other place, beyond Ephemera, beyond the expanse of forest, having come alone or with others to intrude upon Ephemera’s coma-like silence? Phemorus even wondered, bitterly, if the Mayor and his cohorts had tricked all the others into entering into deep slumber when they themselves had planned on remaining awake all along. But to what end?

  Finally he settled on the theory that—unhappy with his dreams for some time—he had, without fully throwing off the mantle of sleep, become a restless somnambulist. Sleepwalking, for who knew how long, through the labyrinthine lanes, squeezing through the constricting alleys, that made up Ephemera. Dreaming of the ladder and the unreachable red forest beyond the wall, all the while. Dreaming he was awake, and thus going through the motions of consciousness. It was a wonder to him, then, that he hadn’t awakened standing longingly at the foot of the wall itself.

  He stepped forward creakily, trying not to totter and lose his balance after so long a time without being ambulatory—at least in the conscious sense. A peripheral movement caught his eye and he swiveled his wild-haired head to see a device that looked half like a giant white moth and half like an opened book come fluttering into the room through a black, circular opening in one wall. It flapped awkwardly through the air, indicating that its gears were slowing down after it had made its rounds, its function being to scrape away with delicate forelimbs the grime between the bricks that faced buildings. He watched it return to its station on one wall and skewer itself on a waiting screw that would wind up its mechanism again. Its wings closed like praying hands.

  Even as the cleaner moth went still, all but one of the standing custodians lifted their sagging heads and stepped into motion, as if following Phemorus’s example. He shifted aside to let them pass as the seven automatons filed toward a doorway at the far end of the warehouse room. He watched them depart, then turned his attention to the one that had remained and he moved closer to it.

  This custodian was jittering very subtly, as if shivering with cold. Its eyelids fluttered, their exaggerated lashes like little black wings. It hurt Phemorus’s pride to see that this lone specimen was an early custodian model that he himself had designed before other engineers had come in his footsteps and nudged him aside. He consoled himself that it was no doubt malfunctioning due to it being older than the others that had departed, but he still sought to determine the exact reason for the trouble.

  It didn’t take long to discover something that, while not the cause of the glitch, was nevertheless incongruous. Because the automaton’s head was leaning forward a bit, its chin almost touching its breast, he could readily see into the gap of its skull. In there, a bird—which may have got into the room through the same opening the cleaner moth used—had built a nest of twigs and tatters of cloth. But the nest was very old, the eggs within broken open, the featherless baby birds that had hatched having starved and gone gray and desiccated.

  He scooped out the nest with his hands, set it aside, but the custodian went on blinking rapidly and quivering, its control system actually being within its torso. If he was to repair it, he would need tools. It would be best to take it back to his workshop, adjacent to his living quarters.

  But if he were to expend his efforts on so trivial a matter, it could wait. First, he wanted to know if anyone else were awake like himself, and to see what state Ephemera was in as a whole.

  At one end of the spacious, dimly lighted chamber was a ladder bolted into the wall. He went to this, took hold of a rung and started to climb. He ascended to the ceiling, where a metal hatch was almost obscured by a curtain of cobwebs. He swept this aside and it stuck to his sleeve like a clinging funeral shroud. He reached up and pushed the hatch open on its squealing, rusted hinges, then clambered out onto the building’s flat rooftop.

  He had thought the greenish tint of sunlight through the warehouse’s windows might be due to the age of the glass, but now he saw that the overcast sky was indeed the green of decomposition.

  From up here Phemorus could see over the jumbled and radically slanted, drunkenly keeling rooftops of Ephemera’s dwellings and shops. He stepped to the parapet that edged the warehouse’s roof, and a moment later he gripped it for support, for he felt like swooning. He felt like returning to merciful unconsciousness, if only his dreams had been worth fleeing to. If he had still possessed a heart, it would be hammering in horror and sadness, as he stared across Ephemera and over its surrounding wall toward the great forest beyond.

  He saw, for the first time, that the trees were no longer vibrantly, vividly red. Those leaves that remained fixed to their skeletal branches had gone gray, dead on their stems. The forest floor was thickly carpeted with these gray scales, the oldest leaves to have fallen having crumbled to dust that was stirred up into brief little eddies with the breeze.

  As he gazed at the extinct forest in despair that gradually turned to anger, vibrant and vivid red anger, he saw a giant balloon of mercury float overhead, disgorged from one of the smokestacks behind him. The gas-filled giant orb glided out over the wall, out over the trees, and then finally its weight caused it to drift lower and its belly was punctured on bare claw-like branches. The bubble burst, the gas was released, and a shower of mercury fell down to the mounds of gray leaves below.

  Phemorus could not say he was surprised. He had known that this waste disposal process could not be good for the forest and he had cautioned the Mayor and all of Ephemera about his fears, but he had been reassured that the woods would be resilient. The damage would be minimal and acceptable. And anyway, who would be awake to care?

  But the damage was not minimal. As far as the glass eye could see, there was nothing but gray forest stretching out to the horizon where it merged in a mist with the green sky.

  5

  With a tool he had taken from his workshop, it was an easy matter for Dr. Phemorus to pick the lock of the front door to the Mayor’s house.

  This wasn’t the first place he had gone after climbing down from atop the warehouse, though, and emerging onto the street. Still seething with rage and a sadness keen as panic, he had gone along the lane pounding on doors with his smooth, white porcelain hands, their jointed fingers balled into fists. Wake up! he had cried in his artificial voice, expelled from a miniature bellows in his upper torso. Wake up, you fools! But none of the doors had opened, and after about a dozen he had stopped.

  Was he the only one whose dreams had been lacking, whose dreams had not been narcotic enough to fog the mind, muffle it in layers of deadening cotton?

  He had then found his legs carrying him, as if his mechanical b
ody itself willed them instead of his brain, to the great mausoleum near Ephemera’s crookedly spiraling center. It was a glossy white box with the appearance of having been carved from a single block of marble, like an edifice of organically grown bone. Its metal door had whined piteously as he pushed it open.

  He had found the aisle he sought, its length lined in rows of small dark panels set in the marble. He hadn’t needed to read the numbers stenciled below these panels to locate the right one. He had stood before the panel that represented his departed wife, reached out his white hand and depressed a button beside her stenciled number. A light had come on behind the dark panel, revealing this to be a pane of glass, and beyond it was a tiny box-like space lit by a bulb. The light had revealed a music box that he himself had created for his wife as a present to mark their first anniversary. He had felt proud to see that the minute figure of a ballerina atop the music box was still spinning, spinning, though he couldn’t hear the tinkling music behind the thick glass pane that allowed one to view her cenotaph. Seeing the ballerina still twirling, as if she too was awake, had soothed his anger somewhat and allowed him to think more clearly. He had left the mausoleum with a destination in mind.

  He had never been inside the Mayor’s abode before, and to the man’s credit it wasn’t especially ostentatious. He supposed it made sense, given that the Mayor’s ultimate desire had been to escape the material world. Phemorus found the Mayor in a back bedroom, his artificial body suspended in a hammock. Not one of Phemorus’s creations, his body was a bit more flamboyant than his home, no doubt because he had had to make an impression in public. His was a portly black machine traced with gold filigree, with a long tapering gold bird beak and a metal top hat fixed to the crown of his black skull.

  Standing over him, staring down at him, Phemorus said, Won’t you wake up?

  He rocked the hammock gently. He watched its movements slow, slow, like the pendulum of an unwound clock losing momentum.

  When the hammock was still again, Phemorus leaned down and slid his arms under the Mayor’s body, scooping it up against his chest.

  6

  Dr. Phemorus found that the Mayor’s metal top hat unscrewed. He removed it and placed it to one side, on his work bench, then turned back to the body stretched before him.

  In a cavity that the top hat had concealed rested the coiled oval of a brain, like an octopus squeezed protectively into a tiny cave. The organ was encased in a rubbery membrane, transparent, with a pale greenish fluid between this casing and the organ to preserve it. He did not yet remove this package from the cavity, however, there being two similarly rubbery connecting tubes at its base that would need to be carefully severed and then spliced elsewhere. The dreaming brain must not die. He was not some crude murderer.

  For now, he switched his attention to the second body he had moved to his workshop, lying atop another narrow table beside the Mayor. It was the malfunctioning custodian from the warehouse, in the empty head of which some bird had once made its nest. A hatch in its chest stood open, revealing its inner workings, but he had not yet tinkered with these to cancel the automaton’s original programming. This he would do now, so as to replace it with a new and rather more simple program.

  To that end, using his dexterous porcelain fingers, he removed several gears, repositioned others. He slid out a number of thin brass cards with holes punched in them. He found some blank cards in his supplies and punched new sequences of holes in them, slotted these into the custodian’s chest. Meanwhile, he located the cause of the machine’s earlier problems: one diminutive cog that had become misaligned. It was a momentary aggravation.

  He didn’t feel as efficient as he once had been. Perhaps he was a bit groggy from only having roused from his sleep a short while ago. He took a break from his work to go outside and see to another matter that needed addressing anyway.

  He waited at a street corner, not far from his home. On the chalky white wall beside him was stenciled a barcode, like a giant’s hair comb with oddly varied teeth. He knew from a clock in a nearby tower, that had continued to do its useless job observed for who knew how long, that it was nearly time for one of the custodians to appear on his street.

  Sure enough, a rhythmic squeaking sound came from the distance. It would pause, resume squeaking, pause, resume squeaking. Finally the source of the sound appeared from around a bend in the narrow street. A tricycle-like conveyance, painted red, ridden by a red-painted custodian with a pointed cardinal-like crest. The wobbly little trike paused beside a barcode several buildings down, and its rider reached out one arm. There was a pop and a bright flash, a little puff of accompanying smoke, as the security custodian scanned the barcode in the course of recording its rounds. Then, gripping the handlebars again, it resumed pedaling in Phemorus’s direction.

  Before the automaton could reach the barcode beside which Phemorus had been waiting, he moved toward it. The custodian was oblivious to him, its bead-like black eyes fixed ahead, even when he reached out and shoved the thing’s shoulders. It toppled off its trike to the buckled and cracked pavement, the trike itself falling onto its side. Before the custodian could get to its feet and reclaim its vehicle, Phemorus rushed forward, righted it, and sat down upon it himself. He pedaled away toward his house furiously, glancing behind him to see the custodian standing bewildered in the middle of the lane, watching him without giving chase or protest.

  He brought the tricycle inside his home, even though he heard a pop and trailing sizzle outside as the custodian scanned that nearby barcode, having come to the mindless decision to continue its duties on foot. Phemorus returned to his workshop.

  Despite working less crisply than once would have been the case, he worked tirelessly, because he had slept enough. He worked through the darkening of the green sky to blackness, and on unto the dawn.

  Then, shortly after the sky had regained its feeble green light, he emerged from his tall skinny house, followed by a figure pedaling the red tricycle.

  The figure riding dutifully just behind him on the trike, as the two of them navigated Ephemera’s maze-like streets, was the formerly gap-headed, baby doll-faced custodian, its eyelids no longer flickering erratically. Rather than look like the crown of its hairless head had been sawed off, it was now fitted with a black metal top hat.

  When they came to the front gate in the high wall around Ephemera, the custodian astride its red trike waited patiently while Dr. Phemorus stepped up into the adjacent gate house. Within, a similarly baby-faced gatekeeper seated at the control levers swiveled its head toward him wordlessly. It looked down passively as Phemorus opened the hatch in its chest. He plucked out three hole-punched brass cards and pocketed them. The gatekeeper stared unmoving at the spot where Phemorus had been a moment before, as he reached past it to throw the lever to swing wide the gate’s double doors.

  He emerged and returned to the custodian’s side. He placed his hand on its shoulder.

  Go, he said, though he didn’t need to give it oral directions. It was all in its programming. Ride the path, and when the path ends, continue to ride. Ride straight away from this gate and keep to that direction the best you can. If your trike topples over rough ground, right it and continue on. If you tumble into a hollow or a brook, climb out the other side and pull your trike out with you. If you come to a ravine or a lake, go around it, but never turn back toward Ephemera again.

  The custodian, carrying the Mayor’s dreaming brain within its skull, did not give a nod or a word in reply; it simply started pedaling forward, past the threshold of Ephemera and beyond, toward the seemingly infinite gray forest. The broad path that led into the woods, which Phemorus had walked many times, was all but lost under the dunes of dead gray leaves and their brittle ash. The custodian pedaled through these powdery heaps with little resistance.

  He watched until the pedaling figure receded and became obscured, until even the bright red tricycle could not be glimp
sed between the trunks and gray foliage, like the last red leaves finally fallen and gone.

  Then Phemorus turned away, stepped into the gate house again, and threw the lever to swing the metal doors shut once more. They locked with a heavy metallic clunk.

  He walked back toward his house, and while doing so he thought of how he might convert old market wagons and other freight vehicles, so that they might be used to transport large amounts of dreaming brains, which must of course remain inside their clear membranes and sustaining fluid so as to stay alive, their many cables connected to some sort of joint support system. His reason being that there were not enough automatons in Ephemera for him to house all the brains of its dreamers, but he would utilize all the custodians he could. Their maintenance and cleaning functions had been an empty gesture in any case.

  The others could follow after their Mayor obediently, as they had done when they had been awake. He would lock the gates behind them, forever. They could go on dreaming in ignorance, or one day awake disoriented and lost, or they could die under showers of mercury. Their helplessness had been their choice; he had tried to warn them. Beyond their expulsion, their fate was out of his hands. They had exiled themselves long before he would do so in the merely physical sense.

  His plans invigorated him as he walked, and he found his pace becoming more robust. It was as if he were brushing off the last cobwebs of sleep, no longer the somnambulist. The great inventor had purpose again.

  He would be the new Mayor of Ephemera, and its sole citizen. He alone, unsleeping.

  Princess Jane outstretched her right arm to the world and it was immediately taken up by her fiancé, Francis. Francis had been her fiancé since her father died and Caligari’s traitorous troops seized the palace and the court’s loyalist troops took it back and everyone decided that Parliament should share power with the court. Jane wasn’t sure exactly how much time all of this had taken, in months or weeks or years. She had shut down about halfway through, and when she finally sat up and looked around, Francis—whom she had known since she was a child because he was always waiting in line to see her father—was her fiancé.