Doctor Sax (15 page)

Doctor Sax ran after him to the door, flying and beating his swirling robed shadow:

“He flees! He flees! Heh heh heh! To the vampire mists imbecilic flees! Heh heh heh!”

Doctor Sax paused for an instant at the entrance and surveyed the havoc in the salon with immense delight. Only one young man stood stalwartly swaying, the young student from Boston College. Gleefully, Sax rubbed his cane against a purple jowl; his fire-brows contracted together over a hawkish nose. Tremendously, he began to laugh; there was no end to his joy; his private knowledge of the world pealed forth from purple lips, publishing to all who were aware the secret wisdom, the huge malevolent humour, the undreamed information that crouched concealed in that unholy head beneath that black slouch hat. Then, with a final chortle of glee (and here now, for the first time, one could detect a touch of loneliness in his tone), he spun on his heel and glided forth from Transcendenta merging with the night like night, disappearing in the weird gloom of the thicket, pausing, for just a moment, to laugh once more a great peal of mockery to the world. And he was gone.

Doctor Sax had paid his compliments to Emilia St. Claire and her guests, and, as he had come, so had he left, secretly, with a huge delight that confounded all of the knowledge, reason, and purpose that man had gathered about his life. He knew something that no other man knew; a something reptilian; pray, was he a man?

Through the open door poured a foul moist breeze of fecund, muddy swamps. The moon stared insanely, for an instant, through a cleavage in the March skies. All was silent, save for a few groans from the stricken mortals.

Hee hee hee hee hee!

Doctor Sax had paid his compliments.

Hee hee hee hee hee!

Now they begin to regain consciousness, there is a stirring of stunned minds.

Let us all laugh.

Hee hee hee hee hee!

(finis)

Another strange event and tied up with this, after Emilia St. Claire moved out of Reeves Castle, March (1932), about seven, eight years and four, five months later in the sunk hot bed of July summer by which time the Wizard and his forces of Evil gathered from all over the world (expenses paid) (by Satan below) had had plenty of time to ruin the balance of the world with strokes of good luck, a particularly propitious May (having nothing to do with the sweet rose that flows so merry in the blue night from Weirs of the upper Marrocrock Roil in Manchestaire, the Aristook Falls, up-ledges near great granite Stone Face, Laconia, Franconia, Notch,—not the May of the Odyssey of the Rose but the May of Demter Hemter Skloom crisscrossing in the aerial sky over the gnomic ever-to-be-seen-from-all-parts-of-town Castle like a blue smoke shroud castle in the clear real air of Lowell–I remember opening my eyes from Giant Pillow Sleeps and seeing that gnomic shape atop the far gray river hill as if I could see through
the walls of my bedroom at the river)—their work, so well done, they broke the fancy chain of reality and there was an earth tremor. All Lowell felt it. I was going to store before school in the dewcool March morning and there in the ground of the park where it was flattened from kid scuffle stands and marble piggly was a huge crack jagging across the earth, an inch thick. Up at Snake Hill the crack was three inches thick (by Saints of Red Sun) and almost thicker below– Some of us drove over to see, at the foot of Snake Hill near the old ironpickets and granite gate walls of the deserted castle groups of the Social Club gang huddled around kicking at the crack. Through the pines, up to the castle (in that selfsame door where Condu flew down to the Countess that opening night)—there stands Boaz the old caretaker, he’s turned the main hall of the castle his smoky shack for dogs and soul–huddles over a potbelly stove with wood in it, by the staircase, an old cot along the underpinnings, hanging Arabian Gypsy drapes of old hermit decoration, a Jean Fourchette of the Castle Solitudes instead of dump and smoke wrecks–a Saint, the old man was a red-eyed saint, he’d seen too much, there was a crack down his Tree, a Gulf in his cataracts—that first view of Sax as so ably reported by Sax himself made his hair turn gray overnight–muttering, he stood in the door looking down at Vauriselle, Carrufel, Plouffe and all of us earthquake investigators. No comment.

It was an incident worth noting–that abyss cracking open.

MY MOTHER AND I,
bless her soul, raced from that scene of moony death on the damned bridge and rushed home.
“Bien,”
she said,
“c’est pas’I diable pleasant
(Well, it’s not the devil pleasant!)”—”Let’s get out of here”— Corner where that kid Fish had socked me in the face, there it was, ironic rejoinder to skeletal moons– At home my hair stood on my head. Something was somehow wreathy purple and gloomy about our house that night. My sister was in the kitchen, kneeling at the table funnies of dull supper weekdays, my pop was in his chair by the Stromberg Carlson radio (by the driveway, by the dog), the sandbank brooded its Doctor Sax secrets in banefuller night than ever– We told pop about the dying man … gloomy music played in my soul … I remembered the turning Th£r&se statue head, the fish heads cut off in the cellar, doors yawning open in the closet of night, black spiders crawling in the dark (huge black ones) (like I saw at the Castle when everything exploded), fantastic grooking clotheslines whiteshrouded in the night, washlined neighborhoods hung with sheets, ookeries in the elfin celt,
the smell of flowers the day before somebody dies
–the night Gerard died and all the weeping, yelling, arguing in the bedrooms of the Beaulieu Street house in the brown glooms of Uncle Mike’s family (Mike, Clementine, Blanche, Roland, Edgar, Viola, all were there) and my mother crying, in the yard the cousins are setting off our firecrackers against our wishes, it’s midnight my father’s harassed and worried
“Alright Ti Jean and Nin can go to the Dudley’s,” (Aunt Dudley was there too, awful millings of broken relatives and excited-by-death relatives fumigating in the attic row, all the things I had ever missed and never knew to find, the constant fear I had that either or both of my parents would die) (this mere thought was all I needed to know of death)—“Well don’t worry about it,” my father is saying —sits glooming with pouty lips shining in the kitchen lights of 1934 night in summer, expects me– Suddenly we hear a great thud that shakes the neighborhood, as though the watermelon ballooned world huge had fallen in the street outside to again remind me, and I go
“Oook coose que ca?”
and for a moment they all listen with heartbeats like me, and again, it goes THUD, shaking the earth, as though old hermit Plouffe in his cellar on the corner was driving home his secret with explosive blasts of the furnace of hell (could he have been an accomplice of Sax’s?)—the whole house, ground shakes–I know now it is the voice of doom coming to prophesy my death with proper fanfare–

“It’s nothing but old Marquand striking the log with his ax
frappe le bucher avec son axe—
” and it struck,
thud,
we all ealized so it was. But then I swore there was something mighty peculiar about Marquand with his ax this late, I’d never heard him before this late, death had kept him up, he had a contract this night to rhyme his ax with the funerals of my fear, besides of which immediately next to old Plouffe and his house was full of drapes, death, beads, his yard was full of flowers, something I didn’t understand about the smells of other houses and the concomitant doom and dull within–

But suddenly we heard a great moan rising from underground, next door– We all started with fear. “M-o-o-o-o-a-n —

“O-w-w-w-w-” —the goddam Moon Man had materialized himself into husky death in the grain real ground– It was staring me in the face—”Ooooo”—the Man of Death, not content with his bridge, had come spooking after me to moan at my mother’s doormat and haunt the A M R E S Y of the night.

Even my mother–
”Mende moi done, mats cosse quest ca! s’t’hurlage de bonhomme—
(My goodness what is
that
! that howling of old man!)”—for a moment I think it crossed her head too that the man who died on the bridge was still after us–his spirit didn’t want to give up without a fight—craziness crossed her eyes in a flash, in mine it was stuck —I goofed. That whole night I refused to sleep alone, slept with my mother and sister–I think my sister got sick and tired and transferred to my bed in middle of night, I was twelve– In Centralville it had always, I’d every night crawl in between them when the dark made me cry (Ah sweet Christmas midnights when we found our toys richly placed by they now returning from church on the snowy porch as we roll in our pajamas under the carpet tree)—Suddenly in Pawtucketville I no longer feared the dark, nameless religious ghosts of malign funeral intent had given way to the Doctor Sax honorable shroud ghosts of Pawtucketville, Gene Plouffe and the Black Thief- But now death was catching up again, Pawtucketville too was doomed and brown to die–it was only the next day that we learned the horrible moaning had been done by Mr. Marquand
who had a fit in his cellar after chopping wood—he’d got a message of death from the bridge and from me– He died quite recently after that … it always is true, you smell the flowers before someone dies– My mother stood in my father’s room sniffing suspiciously, old Mr. Marquand was sending his roses all the way from next door– In the young you can see the flowers in their eyes.

I lay huddled against the great warm back of my mother with open eyes up-peeking from the pillow at all shadows and leafshades on the wall and at the screen, nothing could harm me now … this whole night could only take me if it took her with me and she wasn’t afraid of any shade.

Luckily after that, and by unconscious arrangement, in a flu epidemic my mother and I were semiquarantined in bed for a week where (mostly it rained) I lay reading
The Shadow Magazine,
or feebly listening to the radio downstairs in my bathrobe, or blissfully sleeping with one leg thrown over my mother in the night time–so secure did I become that death vanished into fantasies of life, the last few days were blissful contemplations of the Heaven in the ceiling. When we were well again, and got up, and joined the world again, I had conquered death and stored up new life. Beautiful music, regale me not in my bier heaps–please knock my coffin over in a fist fight beer dance bust, God–

MELL, RIVER ROSE, MELL …

The sandbank dipped low at one point, over which we’d rode wild cowboys,— I had a dream of the last houses on
Gershom overflowing to as far as that low dip, full of German police dogs—

There were Saturday mornings when a muddy brown pool was joyous to the test of squatting kids … as dewy and mornlike as brown mud water can get,—with its reflected brown taffy clouds–

The ring closes round, you can’t continue forever—

Dust takes a flyer, and then folds under–

Doctor Sax made a special trip to Teotehuacan, Mexico, to do his special research on the culture of the eagle and the snake–Azteca; he came back laden with information about the snake, none about the bird– In the stately block-walls of the Pyramid de Ciudadela he saw the stone snake heads with Blake sunflower collars leering up from hell with the same coy horror of Blake’s figures, the round button eyes over the prognathic gated jaws, the wulp-hole within, the Leer of the Stone bone–other heads were apparently eagle heads, and had the same beady reptilian nameless horror—(on the windy top of the Pyramid of the Sun, just now, as I looked up from my chores near Mrs. Xoxatl’s washlines waving in the lower levels of the same wind, I saw the tiny movement and drowsy flutter of the priest up there cutting out some victim’s heart to inaugurate another 20-day festival for his rackets, the procession is wind-whipped on the slant waiting for him to finish—blood, a beating heart, is offered to the sun and snake—)

I saw the picture
Trader Horn,
the blackened-by-runners hill in the brown field of Africa–lasi lado, lasi lado, they came running over the round hillside in a fiendish horde all waving their ant spears and screeching in the wild sun
of Africa, horrible black Fuzzy Wuzzies of the bush let alone your desert, they wore dirty bones across their breasts, their hair stuck out a foot like Blake Snake halos and they wielded spears and hung people upside down on crosses in fires–the hill resembled
exactly
the dreaming farm hill on the top of Bridge Street where I saw that Castle rising like a gray smoke–over its bare bald top (in the movie there it was) came this mass of screaming demons with their teeth and bamboos–with their drought– I was convinced the end of the world was coming and these demons were going to come swarming over a sunny hill like that in every town and city in the United States, I thought they were as numberless as ants and poured from Africa in frantic caravans up a wall and down the moiling side–uproars and armies of fiends cataracting across the world howling lasi lado, lasi lado, lasi lado—It seemed to me a drought would come, parch the earth, reduce Lowell and the world to nothingness-parturience with everybody starving and thirsting to death and weeping for rain, and suddenly over that burnt-gold hill under the swarms of puff-white bigclouds leaning over in the blue eternity afternoon that I’d be gazing at from a terrace on the earth on my back with a blade of grass in my mouth … would come the gigantic first rank of the bluggywuggies waving antennae like so many cockroaches, and then the second rank, the solid wave spilling all crinkly over the hill in screeching savagery and black, then the full thing.

This was enough to drive me panicky fullspeed from my own mind–I was a scared kid.

It was therefore easy to see the Castle on that hill, and to prophesy the Snake.

Doctor Sax
(striding in the moonlight with his shroud, an eerie constitutional by the moonbranch, meditatively holding his cane to his jowl) (facing the white horses of the horizon moon night) (the caves of darkness and long hair in the East beyond) “Ah–will my cloak ever flare and flutter in the darkness and great wind of Satan rearing from the earth with his–ugh! Therefore
meet
… that I have dedicated my life to the search and study of the Snake … for no–these mortals who here com-
bat
the hour of their sleep with traditional wings of angels … and moo their caps, or flaps–these Lowell, these mortality-rates–the children, the brown shroud of night–
meet
that I protect them from horrors they can not know–if they
do
know, paff, the angular rides I’ll have to take to simplify myself, end the Mission of the Ideal. No (standing now severe and quiet on second base at One
A.M
.)—Ill simply jump into the pit.