Doctor Sax (23 page)

And Doctor Sax, weakly smiling, held a long pale hand over his heart, where the vacuum ball was pocketed–and waited.

Now a mighty sigh rose from the Pit, it grew in size, rumbled, shook the earth–a great stench rose, all the noblemen covered their noses and some turned away and some ran out the door. The horrid stench of the ancient Snake that has been growing in the world-ball like a worm in the apple since Adam and Eve broke down and cried.

“No need to save your little flijabets–Nature’s got no time to dally-hassel with its insects—” sneers the Wizard. The stench of the Snake reminds me of certain alleys I’ve been in–mixed with a horrible hot scent that no bird has ever known, comes up from the bottom of the world, the middle of the earth’s core–a smell of pure fire and burning
vegetables and coals of other Epochs and Ages–the brimstone of the actual brimstone underground shelf–burning now but in the nibble of the Great Snake of the World it has acquired a strange reptilian change–the blue worms of the underworld devoured and sending up their flaw– I didn’t blame some of the Noblemen becoming disgusted even with a spectacle for which they’d waited years. Great clouds of dusty mud fell from the invisible living ceiling of eyes and souls–in a phpping rain–when the ground shuddered again, the Snake had inched his hour. Now I knew why there had been earth tremors at Snake Hill. I wondered if this had anything to do with the crack I had seen in the park–and with the dream of the Cannibals rushing over the brow of the hill–the strange afternoon in which I saw all that, and the afternoon just passed when I lay looking at the golden clouds of yesterday-today fanning in solemn mass across the afternoon balloon-

Suddenly there was a new commotion among the Noblemen not Sax, I or the Wizard could fail to notice– Boaz Jr. had instructed nearby guards to capture Amadeus Baroque in a sensational
coup
that was the climax of weeks of plotting and chawing over logistical problems of nonsensical action. I recognized Boaz Jr. from his long black shoes. One day that past summer, not long after the treeing of Gene the Moon Man, on the night I’d first seen Doctor Sax in the shroud of the sandbank, we’d made a trap, a hole in the sand, six feet deep, with twigs across, a newspaper, and sand– Doctor Sax came very close to falling in, he later confessed. But Boaz Jr. who (as I now learned) was stalking around the neighborhood looking for talent for his puppet
show, fell in–half in–lost a shoe (long, long black shoe, when I saw that thing I shuddered) and ran off red with embarrassment into the night … went back to the Castle, was curt to his father and went immediately to bed with the bats in the attic. He was a young man who wanted to be a vampire, and wasn’t, but was trying to learn–he took instructions from several ineffectual Black Cardinals, the Spider Committee would have nothing to do with him, so he adjusted himself to deep mystical studies, long conversations with the brilliant Condu–and at first was a close friend of Amadeus Baroque who was the only occupant and emissary of the Castle from the city of Lowell. But Boaz Jr. who was ambitious, began to suspect Baroque of Dovist tendencies– Dovism was the idealistic left of the Satanic movement, it claimed that Satan was enamored of doves, and therefore his Snake would not destroy the world but merely be a great skin of doves on coming-out day, falling apart, millions of come-colored doves spurting from it as it shoots from the ground a hundred miles long–most Dovists in fact were impractical and somewhat effeminate people–that is, their idea was absurd, the Snake was real enough– They finally had to go underground when the Wizard issued his Black Decree the year the Gnome Miners revolted but were subdued by Blook the Monster and his trained corps of Giant Jnsect Men–trainers, with sticks and antennae, they lived in huts along the underground Jaw River, next to the insect Caves–giant Spiders, Scorpions, Centipedes and Rats too. The Black Decree forbade Dovism and poor hapless Dovists (including La Contessa it turned out) were rounded up and sent to live on rafts
in the Jaw River moored to the huts and insect caves. There the helpless innocent Dovists wept in an eternal gray darkness and mist. Boaz Jr., in his disappointment at not being able to be a vampire, since he wanted none of his evil
literal,
turned to a black art–he kidnapped boys and paralyzed them from a freezing drug that turned them into puppet dolls–an old secret learned from one of the Egyptian Doctors in the Castle. With these puppets (he shrunk them in a shrinking furnace to proper doll size) he presented his own gala Puppet Show to anybody who wanted to watch–built his own stage, sets and drapes–but it was a horrible and obscene performance, people walked away in disgust. Never the success he wanted to be, Boaz Jr. turned to anti-Dovism and was now having Baroque arrested at the crucial moment to prove to the Wizard that he was a great Solomon statesman and should at least be made his secretary–especially now with the Snake thundering to rise. He had also a tremendous vengeance to pay Baroque–Baroque, early an idealist in his first efforts to get into the Castle among the Wizard’s Forces after that initial discovery of an innocent Doctor Sax manuscript in the winter night that led him, by speculation and investigation, to further discoveries–Baroque became disillusioned and a Dovist, when he saw how really evil some of the Evilists were– Finally when he learned how Boaz Jr. got his puppets he revolted and had the news brought to the Wizard. The Wizard wearily ordered a stop to the puppet shows —Boaz Jr. had by this time finally wormed his way into an amateur show at the Victory Theater on Middlesex Street near the depot and was being booed off the stage by the parents
in the Saturday afternoon audience as he snickered in his long black shoes at the footlights, tall & strange–Dicky Hampshire was the usher– Things were thrown at him, he had to run: the little kids who’d been in other acts of the amateur show with him were now running into the audience to join their parents. And that was when the news came that the Wizard was giving orders: no more puppet shows–so Boaz Jr. plotted the end of Baroque– His next plan was to make blood illegal so the Vampires could be jailed to make it ten years’ mandatory sentence for possession. The commotion we were now witnessing was the culmination of Boaz Jr.’s first great triumph– But soon it was apparent that none of this would matter, up heaved the parapet of the pit as an earthquake seemed to strike the Castle and Snake Hill.

Howling roars from the snake pipes rose.

GREAT MOLE CAME FARTING FROM THE GROUND.
Everybody ran. Milky white horror flowed in the air. Only Sax wasn’t afraid. He ran back to the parapet, which was now uptilted, and stood gripping one crazy rail and reached for his magic herb powders. All the whiteness vanished when Sax jolted that vacuum ball–normal gray of the world returned. It was like walking out of a technicolor movie and suddenly on the gray suit grit of the sidewalk you see small shining bits of glass in the neon lights of disappointed Saturday night. Screech went a wild honk, it rose like a siren from
the hot pit, there was an answering deeper rumbling subterranean honk, more like a burp of heavy sounding hell in his Huge Goop– Some courtiers flung anguished hands across their eyes to hear the Snake make voice. It was a tremendous experience full of shuddering and general horror in my bones and in the stones of the Castle. The earth swayed. I wondered what all Lowell was doing–I saw that it was daylight. Sunday morning, the bells of Ste. Jeanne d’Arc calling Gene Plouffe, Joe Plouffe and all the others-There were no explosions in Pawtucketville Peaceful Sunday Morning–impossibility in the choked out grass outside the church where the men stand and smoke after Mass–Leo Martin comes up to St. Louis the Shadow who’s been saying his Rosary with his hawk lips, says “A
tu un cigarette?”
(Got a cigarette?)

But Doctor Sax stood at the Parapet, leering down with an insane laugh–his cloaks were black again, his figure was half hidden in the gloom. “Ah priests of the hidden Gethsemane” he was shouting. “Oh molten world of jaw-fires drooling lead–Pittsburgh Steelworks of Paradise–heaven on earth, earth till you die– Law’s amighty as they said in Montana–but these old Doctor Sax eyes do see a horrid mess of snapdragon shit and pistolwagon blood floating in that wild element where the Snake’s made his being and drink for all nigh on ta– Saviour in the Heaven! Come and lift me up—”

He sounded delirious and incoherent even to me.

All the guards and Noblemen who a moment before had been wrangling around the arrest of Amadeus Baroque were now lost in swirls of crowds of them, it amazed me to
see the extent and numbers of the Wizard’s Evilist Colony.

Then I heard the screams of thousands of gnomes in the unbelievably immense cellar beneath the Castle, a cellar so enormous, so full of coffins, and levels, and shaftways that you try to crawl out of and they get increasingly narrower —there were gnomes dying down there.

The Parapet heaved up farther, it was about to gulp itself up, rocks and dust and sand flew, Doctor Sax took his suction cups and climbed the sheer wall of the Parapet and came to the edge howling.

I saw the mad frustrated puppeteer with the long black feet running under falling boulders. “There must have been a lot to what Doctor Sax said if
he
used to stand in the door of the Castle bowing from the waist,” I said to myself in a daze. Boaz Jr. went up, climbed several balconies: he was safe, sitting on another parapet with old shriveled Wizard with his white hair. An updraft from the Pit made all their hair stand wild and flamelike.

Doctor Sax was bellowing in the fury “And now you will know that the Great Snake of the World lies coiled beneath this Castle and beneath Snake Hill, site of my birth, a hundred miles long in enormous convolution reaching down into the very bowels and grave of the earth, and for all the ages of man has been inching, inching, inch an hour, up, up, to the sun, from the unspeakable central dark depths to which originally he had been hurled–now returning and now only five or four minutes from breaking the crust of earth once more and emerging in the breaking boil of evil, full flaming fury of the dragon into the golden sunshines of Sunday morn as bells of men ring around the
countryside, to crawl across the land in a path of fire, destruction and slime, to make horizons blacken with his huge and horizontal crawl. Yah, mad shriveled wizard that falmigates around the Cee–famous fuckface of history-come back from detestable grave to gather vampires, gnomes and spiders and committees of the black mass ecclesiasts and werewolves of the soul aspiring to destroy mankind again with evil, final evil,— Yaah fiend of dirty fires—”

The gnomes below began to crawl out of the Pit in groups like cockroaches running out of a hot stove–years of labor, awful drudgery in secret barges and tiny dirt-carts in the undergrounds of Old Swift Waters Merrimac —the whole thing exploding now in their faces.

Now more than ever I saw there were an infinite number of levels in the Castle, millions of candles which I now saw were held individually each one by gnomes, no end to those, and various levels above the parapet that had rows of black-garbed figures of the Wizard’s mad and evil church, heretics in black smoke, on other levels there were women with wild scraggly hair, on other levels spiders with funny eyes looking down almost human–the whole mad gallery swaying in the demented gloom. There were things going on I couldn’t fathom, a big slide of some sort, a rack of neckties hanging–the enormous complexity. Just one level above the parapet where we were I saw a boat floating by, and people on it sitting in easy chairs under reading lamps talking. And they had no idea what was below. It was like old women rocking on the porch in New England, who don’t realize that the goddam
thing is underneath the earth, placidly reading the
New England News.
And I saw everything, I saw a colored porter cleaning out ashtrays, cutting along and taking a nip out of a bottlè in his backpocket and disappearing thru the swinging doors. He didn’t know where he was. Farther up I saw distant parapets that were so far away and so far up I doubt that the people up there could see as far down as to see the Snake, or see anything but a blur or maybe they were able from that great height to see that it was a Snake’s head better than I could– I wondered that the people of Lowell had thought this an abandoned Castle–I looked far down the hall, and couldn’t see across, except for vague movements like parades in India bringing up the incense for the Wizard– I called to Doctor Sax “Is this the Castle of the World?”

“It is fitting for the snake of the world, yes,” he said, —”My son, this is judgment day.”

“But I only started to stand on the sandbank–I didn’t want no JUDGMENT DAY!” Everything else was vibrating as I said these words–I wanted to grab Doctor Sax’s cape, hide myself, but he was up on the parapet furying and waving his arms in the fires of hell.

I saw distant moilings of activity of other kinds, and the light increased. The Wizard’s face was paling as he prayed in the big moment, arms aloft showing incredibly skinny wrists and little waxy stick hands trembling with ague.

I heard the word dawn, and there was a clamor, and a great crack appeared in the side of the bulging parapet. And a Roar overtook the scene, mountainous rocks began
to fall from the roof of the Castle down in the Pit to hit the Snake. Doctor Sax braced himself with a suffering cry: “The rocks will enrage it! O Wizard, Idiot, Fool, King!” he was screaming.

“O Doctor Sax,” the Wizard was hallooing faintly from the other side of the Pit. “Poor innocent Sad, go crawling around don’t you with your little ideas of this and that and destiny, believe in dreams come true– Agonies of the mad!”

“O Wizard,” replied Sax–a greater, now agonized roar rose. “Wizard Wizard maybe so–but mindful I am … of the sleep of little infants … in their fleecy beds … and of their lamby thoughts–something so far from snakes —something so sweet, so downy—” And the Great Snake sent up screams. And steam hissed and billowed from the pit. “—Something so angelic–something something something!” Sax was screaming in the steam–I could see his mad red eyes, the glint of the vial in his hand.