THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI

by Dennis Weiler

  Claire is shaking where she stands, as though someone’s rattling the floor beneath her: another cheap effect. Thunder on a piece of raddled tin.

  “I don’t—want—to do it,” she husks. “You can’t make me. Please. Please.”

  The doctor lifts a finger, nail the same glaring red as her lips, tainting the air around it with Rotoscoped blurriness into the air around it: blood in the proverbial water, a shark’s narrow Mackie Messer grin. Flicks it back and forth like a metronome, drawing the helpless eye.

  “Ah, but you know who I am, Claire,” she intones, imparting some secret, a ritual call without response. “Claire, I am calling you. Can you hear? Awaken for a moment, from your dark night—”

  Winn barely has time to think Holy shit, that’s from… before Claire shrieks, rusty nails on glass, and throws herself at the doctor. The doctor grabs her by her upper arms, wrestles her back and forth with the broad histrionics of a Star Trek fight scene, face blank and unchanging, like plaster. Both silent now, not even gasps of effort, a trembling dual strain the only indication this might really be happening; it’s like they’re dancing. Struggling to her feet, Winn circles the table, hand reaching for—what, who? Claire’s hair, to tug backwards? The doctor’s fallen chair?

  This is wrong, she hears herself think, as she wavers. A danger, a lie. This is—

  (false)

  (fake)

  Then Claire manages to hook an ankle behind the doctor’s foot; the two tumble over, through the door—behind the door?—and are gone. Winn stands agape, hands out, hovering, nothing but empty air. The chair in which the doctor sat is back at the table, untouched.

  “Claire?” Winn rasps, into the silence, after a long, long time.

  No answer.

  Winn turns, slowly. The jacket Claire flung over the couch is gone. A framed print of some nameless modern painting she hung on the wall after moving in: that’s gone, too. The sink, previously half-full with dirty dishes Winn always nagged Claire about leaving, is empty. Nothing in the place she doesn’t recognize, yet nothing to indicate anyone but herself ever lived here. It’s dark, messy, musty-smelling, like Winn hasn’t left in a year. And all peculiarly... contrived, somehow. Dressed, like a set, not a home; a flawless impression of one, poised under stage lights, bright overhead spots making everything pop.

  And the furniture oddly stretched, at slightly wrong angles. Forced-perspective, trailing away into unseen distances.

  For a moment, Winn has the gut-wrenching feeling that even the wall behind her doesn’t exist—that if she can only turn around quick enough she’ll see the audience waiting breathless before a concealing scrim falls, or the lights go out.

  End act, pause. Strike set in darkness. Begin again.

  She sits down once more, legs suddenly numb, automatically reaching for her paper, the only thing that still feels real. Slides them towards her and lays her head down, pillowed on her own handwriting, her terrible analysis and worse prose. Closes her eyes. Breathes, slowly.

  Dissolve to black.

  ***

  The stark realization brings her up out of—not sleep, exactly, but a kind of drifting doze: Don’t denounce the frame, after all, Winn thinks, sitting bolt upright. Embrace it.

  “Good idea?” Claire asks from the couch, sounding amused. Beyond her, the window’s slice of sky is thick, soft black, a starless velvet drape.

  Forgetting completely that she’s not supposed to be here, Winn turns, gesturing in excitement. “I can make it work,” she tells her. “Francis, in the asylum—it doesn’t undermine the story, it’s the whole point. Because it means nobody gets final claim on veracity, or reliability: the narrator doesn’t get to determine the narrative, not just because he’s the one telling it. So everything is fake, because everything is fake—everything outside the film, everything inside it. The theatre, the audience, the world. Not even the dream is real.” Winn finds herself trailing off, breathless with something she can’t name: joy, awe, horror, dismay. “Nothing is real,” she murmurs.

  Claire hikes an eyebrow, cosmetic-dark against her fair hair. Demanding, as she does: “The fuck are you even talking about, Winona, exactly?”

  More tired than anything else, Winn decides to take this rudeness as affection rather than contempt. “You sound better,” she offers.

  “Yeah—I took your advice.” Claire lies back on the couch. “Got rid of her. For good. Best decision I ever made.” She yawns, red tongue in a red matte mouth; Winn’s smile fades, recognizing the shade. “It was her or me, you know,” Claire tells her, conversationally. “Much longer under that bitch’s tender ‘care,’ and I’d’ve called a padded white room home the rest of my life.”

  “Can she do that?”

  Claire snorts grimly. “You know she could.”

  (But: I don’t know what I know, Winn thinks.)

  Then glances back down at her manuscript, only to reap another shock—no slow jolt of dread, this time, but a spike of ice punching quick through her gut. Because there are words there she knows she didn’t write, hastily scrawled, in a hand that isn’t hers. They say—

  Claire is not who she seems. Stall her.

  Give no sign you understand.

  I will get help.

  Thanks a lot, doctor.

  I’m on my own, Winn thinks, smiling vaguely as she tries to come up with something more to say but can’t, while Claire slyly pretends not to notice; “Only problem is, I don’t know what to do next,” she continues, a monument to bad liars everywhere. And peeps up at Winn through flyaway blonde hair, head rotating mannequin-style under a fiberglass wig, with every part of her rendered abruptly unfamiliar—even her nose looks off, suddenly. Was it always that big, that crooked? Did it always come with that smear along its bridge and down both sides at once, like some ill-conceived attempt at contouring?

  Knits her hands like a little girl and pouts, ignoring the obvious bloodstains under her nails, ill-concealed dark splotches flaking away as they dry. And implores, with a little vocal tremble: “What do you think, Winn?”

  “Maybe a nap?” Winn finally suggests, inanely.

  Claire nods slowly, sketches a yawn; “Maybe,” she agrees, folding her murderer’s hands on her breast and letting her eyes droop closed—tics her head sideways and goes still, breaths slow and even through the nose, a clunky middle-school pageant Sleeping Beauty. A bad parody of slumber.

  This isn’t real, be careful; no time for mistakes. Help is on its way, supposedly, if she trusts the doctor or her note—what she can only assume is her note. That nameless, faceless, oddly persuasive doctor with her hypnotic voice, her impossible-to-recall eyes. Which… to be frank, Winn really, really doesn’t.

  She can’t afford to.

  Winn rises, carefully, own gaze kept locked on her roommate’s “sleeping” face. Steps as quietly as she can to stand above Claire, one hand snagging a kitchen counter knife on the way; scans her up and down, examining the evidence. But even this close, she still can’t tell if the dark stuff on Claire’s hands is blood. Her hands work the knife’s handle, shifting their grip, sweat-slickening.

  And: “One of the therapeutic side-benefits, with hypnotism,” the doctor explains, from Winn’s elbow, startling her so badly she almost drops her weapon right on Claire’s head. “Sleep comes quick and deep. Some people respond so well they don’t even require surgical anaesthesia.” She smiles down at Claire’s somnolent form, caressing her face. “It makes them dangerously vulnerable, of course. But that is the risk, when digging out the Stone of Folly…”

  Winn surprises herself by recognizing the allusion. “Bosch,” she says. “Hieronymous Bosch’s painting, ‘Cutting the Stone.’ A doctor in the funnel hat carves into his patient’s skull, while a woman with a book on her head watches.”

  “Yes, exactly. Renaissance philosophers hypothesized the Stone as a physical growth, ei
ther causing or caused by madness, the extraction of which might ease a sufferer’s self-destructive passions. As if thoughts could turn so unnatural they might literally thrust themselves from the flesh, like tumours.” Her gaze turns melancholy, still fixed on Claire. “Wouldn’t it be lovely if it were so easy, hm? A quick wrench, one brief moment of pain, then gone...”

  Winn nods. “But that’s not the process, is it? Nothing’s ever cured. Nothing’s ever over.” Then, turning towards the doctor: “And what were you supposed to do with it afterwards, anyway? Throw it out? Keep it?”

  “Grind it to a lens, through which to view the world without comforting illusions?” The doctor smiles faintly. “I don’t know, dear. Any or all of the above.”

  Winn narrows her eyes. “And we only assume the guy in the painting’s a doctor, because of what he’s doing, but that hat—a dunce’s cap, if ever I saw one. One fool operating on another.”

  “An entirely plausible interpretation. Even with the best will in the world, sometimes conflicting imperatives render fighting damage with yet more damage… inevitable. The only merciful option.”

  She nods to the knife in Winn’s hands, then back at Claire. Winn’s mouth drops open.

  The doctor lifts a hand, forestalling her. “Claire’s already made her choice, Winona—either of us could be her victim, next time. And this is your chance to make a different one, expediting the inevitable. To prove you’re willing to cooperate in your own recovery, however drastic the requirements.”

  She steps back.

  Winn knows now what Claire felt, before she tried to attack the doctor; she trembles as though someone’s shaking her, unable to keep her own body still, to stop what’s coming. To not turn, lifting the knife, gaze riveted to the doctor’s face, approval-seeking: that fixed, red smile, skin greasepaint-white, eyes like staring marbles. Winn imagines plunging the knife into her instead, feeling dusty cloth give way, a dummy spilling stuffing. But the blade pulls at her with a will now, sharp steel-edged, like iron to magnet. It can’t be stopped.

  None of this can ever be stopped.

  Not ‘till Winn brings the knife down hard as she can, at least, in that very last moment, twisting her wrists to plunge the blade deep as humanly possible into her own gut.

  ***

  Then: Claire is gone. The doctor is gone. The knife is gone. Winn’s midsection aches mildly from the impact of empty, fisted hands on flesh, sudden to be sure, yet hardly painful enough to make her gasp. Around her, the dark apartment is empty too, walls, floor and ceiling all stripped bare, with even the table she once though she wrote at missing and the window invisible under a drawn blind, air smelling of turpentine and dust. No paper, when she looks down. No pen.

  Nothing.

  Not sure if she wants to weep or sigh with relief, Winn steps to pull the blind, flipping it up like a lid. The sky beyond is grey, stained, a clumsily-applied coat of primer, seemingly close enough to touch. In the glass, she sees her own face dimly reflected, pale cheeks and dark eyes void-set and floating, a flat mask. Brings her hands up to touch, first just lightly, then progressively harder, grinding heels and palms alike over her cheeks. Feels something smear and distort under that pressure, like wet clay, before she finally claws her fingers and starts to scrape as the reflection in the window warps, features mashing unrecognizably.

  Still somehow able to see what she’s doing, Winn peels and peels ‘till this painted mockery of a face she wears comes away entirely, in sections. Her mind stays empty as she does so, clear like water, undisturbed. And beneath it all there is nothing but a blank space, an empty hole, a single, solitary loop. A bare strip of translucent film with the emulsion scraped away, through which light streams.

  As she watches, that light first brightens, blurs, then darkens—turns amber, turns brown. It sticks in the frame, catches fire, melts. Runs and runs ‘till the whole world’s unseen motor burns itself out, at which point it disappears, a blown candle-flame. A single thought in blackness.

  Iris shut. Clack, and gone.

  The frame shifts, pops like a reel-end trailing sparks, before winking out forever.

  And then—

  My thxxxxXxxxxxxxxxXxx

  To Kat! !! For always believing; even when I don’t. And for her German eyes!

  To the DERANGED Duo, Dennis Weiler and Dwayne Olson, for going for it and fulfilling a longstanding dream, my name on a book from F&B.

  Thanks to Harry O. Morris and Gahan Wilson for the art!

  To Nick “The Hat” Gucker for being a sweetheart and a genius!

  To all the creators of the original film, for the hours and hours of pure wonderment, and the inspiration!

  To In the Nursery and Supersilent for making me return to the power of das kabinet, time and time again.

  To Lena Griffin for her breathtaking composition, “The-Somnabulist-Dreams” (the soundtrack to my intro and the book trailer)!

  To Robert Bloch for setting me up for MADNESS! !!

  To Michael Waltz, our wonderful designer!

  To Mike Griffin, S.P. Miskowski, Anna Tambour, Damien Angelica Walters, and Dominique Lamssies, for their comments.

  To David Robinson, Siegfried Kracauer, and Mike Budd, for the facts and theories.

  To Brendan Petersen for the book trailer!

  AND MOST OF ALL, my deepest thxxxxxxxxxx to the WONDERFUL WRITERS… who were crazyenough to bring their exhibits to the fun-fair! !!

  The Madness of Dr. Caligari

  First Digital Edition

  2016

  The Madness of Dr. Caligari was edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  and published by Fedogan & Bremer, 3918 Chicago St, Nampa, Idaho, 83686.

  Fifteen hundred copies of the trade edition hardcover, and one hundred copies of the limited edition hardcover have been printed from Century Old Style.

  VISIT US AT FEDOGANANDBREMER.COM to see our durable hardcover editions.

  Select paperback editions coming soon—starting with THIS book!