Make Something Up (23 page)

Yet, and yet Felix waved for the man to join him and signaled for the barkeep to serve them. As the stranger took occupancy of a chair within whispering distance, Felix noted that he was not ill-formed. Albeit disheveled, his costume suggested a dissolute gentleman. The man's untidy, shoulder-length hair hinted at a desert prophet lifted from some verse of the Old Testament. Felix steeled himself for
disappointment:
He'd come to consider himself a connoisseur of the grotesque, and the stranger's promise would most likely amount to hyperbole. At best, the bargain would reveal something along lines similar to Barnum's Fiji Mermaid: the taxidermied torso of one unfortunate victim grafted onto the legs of another, with the talons of an emu drafted to serve as arms, and the ears of a fox sewn to the head of a long-expired chimpanzee.

Nevertheless, Felix M—— knew that his genius relied not so much on what was shown him but on his skill at depicting it. No matter how makeshift and mundane the actual horror, he could bring it to greater life on the page. He would provision this wag with ale and take the short walk to witness his so-called monster, but whatever was revealed would never surpass the image already taking shape in Felix's imagination. There, the cast-aside product of a mentally deficient whore and her physically deformed attacker, the child of violence was merely a bolus of flesh with features scarcely recognizable as human. In the notes Felix jotted, the monster was already dragging its boneless self across a filthy basement floor. The abandoned creature survived by any means possible. It survived like a stray cur that fed on the feces of other animals. It supped on spilt acts of onanism, so much like curdled milk or viscous egg whites. For sustenance, it gummed rags saturated in stale menses, and when the sewers overflowed, that was the occasion for Felix's monster to feast.

Oh, as the stranger led him from the tavern, Felix vowed silently that he would make much of this monstrous child. It would serve him as the centerpiece of his taxonomy, and he would mount a cause célèbre for its redemption. Subjected to his account, no feeling heart would be left unscathed. To perpetrate such a coup, the possibility beguiled him. The public sympathy would be greatly aroused. A rescue campaign, mounted at his insistence. But no monster would ever be located, at least none to rival the monster put forth by Felix's mental faculties.

Leading him along passageways and mews flooded with puddles of corruption, the stranger said, “Avaunt, good sire.” These low byways of the city were well known to Felix from his months of traipsing. He'd grown to be an authority on the tunnels and warrens which formed a city beneath the city.

A heavy snow was falling. The swirls of white turned each of the district's few streetlights into a tall bride draped in a long wedding veil. A sarcophagied quality characterized the dark. The trickaricious crumbling down of snowflakes. And as the pair trod along, a sepulchrious quiet jellied around them.

Felix M—— gave a warm thought to his wife, asleep, her body poured out of milk.

Advancing upon each gas lamp, their shadows fell behind them, and while taking leave of each their shadows fell before them. In this way, each measure of the journey marked a false day with the rising and setting of each flickering sun. Through this succession of seeming weeks did they continue to walk until arriving at the terminus of a blind alley. There a forbidding wall defaced with graffiti blocked their progress. Thick was the work of vandals: their painted opinions and signatures, opinions layered over opinions, filling the wall and succeeding one another with such vigor that the very stuff of the wall was obliterated. Whether it consisted of brick or wood, of mortared stone or troweled plaster, Felix could offer no guess. So thick was the application of paint, and so hectic the effort to obliterate the competing brushwork, that no clue remained as to the wall's purpose or belonging.

So dense were the painted outcries that none were legible. Were these words of warning? In runny scrawls were all the words obliterated in ruddy hues of blood and tar.

Even at this impasse, the stranger did not stop but reached forward toward the commingled curse words and profanities. His fingers found purchase around something invisible among the blasphemies whose paint censored earlier blasphemies. Felix watched the man's wrist twist and heard the clack and drag of a bolt being drawn aside. A dark crack opened in what had been a solid wall of words. The crack widened, as the stranger drew open a door. Yes, Felix marveled, before them stood a door so layered over with competing spatters that no one might ever discover it.

His body positioned so as to bar the entrance, the stranger spoke. “Prithee pay heed, the first-most rule regarding the monster is thee must nevermore speak of meeting the monster.”

The stranger continued to speak thusly in the stilted, archaic parlance of his forebearers a century ere. “The second-most rule regarding the monster is thee must nevermore speak of meeting the monster.” Then, only when Felix had agreed to those terms did the stranger move aside with a welcoming sweep of his arm, and Felix stepped into the void beyond the mysterious door. No more than a stride within, a narrow set of stairs descended into still a more-lightless realm.

Together, the two men descended stone steps in near-total darkness. They navigated along branching shafts that ramped steadily downward, scented with the drippings from the cemeteries below which they passed. They stumbled along underworld galleries as dark as catacombs. Progressing below the seepage of cesspits, they passed through stenches so bilious that Felix feared his lungs might be poisoned. During these episodes he took to breathing through a sleeve of his coat.

Every age brought its specific terror. As a boy, Felix had lain awake, afraid the house would burn down. As a youth, he'd dreaded bullies. Later, it was conscription into the army. Or the fear of not learning a trade. Or never finding a wife. After school, his career. After his son was born, he feared everything. His secret dream was to face down such a horror that it would leave him inoculated. He'd never suffer fear of anything, ever again.

These tunnels proved older than he'd thought possible. To judge from the marks cleaved by primitive implements, these walls had been ancient when the cornerstone had been laid by Babylonian magi for the great Cheops of Lethe. Buried thusly, these rank pavements predated the sad jungle-engulfed dilapidation of the fabled Moon Temple of Larmos.

The mud, confirmed by the blatt and klosp of each mugrubrious footfall.

At this juncture Felix took note of a strange effect. A faint luminescence glowed from the stranger's lengthy hair. Likewise, an orange light seemed to emanate from the exposed skin of the man's hands and face, a pale shade of the same manic orange that distinguished his fevered eyes. This glow, another detail with which to embroider his future account.

Anxious of becoming lost, Felix had taken to tearing small bits from his notebook and dropping them to blaze a trail for his return. These were nothing vital, not at first, just blank pages. When those were exhausted, he tore out only single words. No word was so important, he reasoned, that its loss spoilt the entire book. Between fits of coughing, he asked, “Is it far?”

“Yon monster? 'Tis it nigh?” the stranger echoed, always a few steps ahead.

“Have we far to go?” asked Felix, ready to turn and retrace his steps. By now he had enough of a monster in his head to surpass anything he might be displayed.

As if reading his thoughts, the stranger asked, “Plan ye to tell the world of my monster?” The echo of their footsteps served as the only clue of more open tunnel ahead. His voice taunting, the stranger asked, “Plan ye to write of it in thine book?”

His sense of the way had failed Felix. Every step felt more foreign. In desperation, he felt in his coat pocket and found a box of matches. He struck one and in the moment of its burning saw that the stranger had outpaced him, and that tunnels shunted off to the side in every direction. The match died, and Felix scrambled to strike another. With it, he saw his guide had pulled even farther away and seemed at risk of outdistancing him forever. When Felix hurried to catch up, his increased speed snuffed the match prematurely. He sprinted a few strides before lighting the next only to see his luminous host almost gone in the narrowing distance. To extend the life of his match light, he put flame to a page of his notebook. It hardly mattered, one page. He could re-create the lost bit from memory. Put to the test, he was confident he could recount all of his excursions through the years into the morass of the underworld. Holding the small torch aloft, he called after the distant figure, “If I lose you, then how am I to find the monster?”

Once more, the flame failed and he was plunged into pitch dark. The stranger's orange glow was no more.

These stony ways, he recognized, had stood antique before the great Onus of Blatoy. Since even before the ante-Druidical, before pagans had erected the Altar of the Cymric Cleoples. In his astonishment, Felix put flame to still another page of his musings so as to catch one more glimpse of these aged, mesoesomerical surroundings.

Ahead of him, from ahead and behind and around, distorted by echoes, Felix heard the stranger laugh. Likewise, from every direction, the man's voice assured him, “Ye must not worry.” A duration of silence went on, counted out by dripping sounds and nothing else. Felix struggled to strike another match.

To break the seeming infinity of waiting, the man's voice spoke, adding, “Methinks the monster will quickly find thee.”

When a new match was successfully lighted and a new page of the notebook sacrificed, Felix lifted it and found himself alone. Fully, totally, and unmistakably abandoned. The light guttered and sputtered out, but he resolved not to waste another match on a page until he'd gathered his thoughts. Anger would serve him as a better ally than panic, and Felix pictured a scene in the not-so-distant future when he'd enter a bar to discover the man who'd led him on this fool's errand. This was hardly new territory for him: Once more, he'd been discarded, rejected, left behind. He'd survive. If need be, he'd retrace every footstep. Circumstances had forced him to blaze his own path through every lonely, difficult day of his life. Since childhood nothing had been given to him and nothing had been explained, and this empty bequest had built in him a great faith in his own ability. He'd never lost hope. If anything, adversity had only tempered his determination.

This miasmire.

The polystenchous vaporous streamings.

The lack of any sound was so weighty it seemed to press against his eardrums the way water would at a great depth. The silence began to smother him.

Felix M—— found his hands balled in fists. His breathing fast and shallow. A temper tantrum threatened to overwhelm him. The sensation seemed a third-generation echo of scurrying to keep pace with his own father, so long ago, this entire situation evoked a rage he hadn't suffered since becoming an adult.

“Go then,” Felix shouted after the phantom. “Let me be rid of you!” He shook his notebook above his head in the dark. “You will suffer all the more in my retelling of this.” The stranger's name remained a mystery, and he cursed himself for not having asked. “It's twenty years since I've sought my way without an advisor of any sort, as my own apprentice, with none but my own
encouragement.”
He would not be defeated so easily. He was shouting now, his curses sounding the length of every tunnel contiguous with this. He railed about his father's departure. He ranted over the bullied years of his boyhood. Thrashed, he had none to teach him how best to conduct or defend himself.

Despite the grim diamonsity of predicament, he would not fall prey to nervous ideas. Fear stalked him, only an arm's length away in the dark, and panic lurked immediately behind that. Left with no point of reference in space, Felix focused on the comforting glulubrious flavor of his own tongue.

To be a boy without a father is to grow guns in place of arms and a loaded cannon for a mouth. Always, at all times to be under siege with no
reinforcements.
To sprint at full speed into the pitch dark with fury trumping your fear, not aware that what you actually want is to hit a brick wall, or stumble into a pit, to find some limits, some restrictions and discipline. A broken leg. A concussion. Punishment from a surrogate father, even if that father is merely physics, to slap you down and make you toe some ultimate line.

Since boyhood, fury had become his father. His older brother. His only protector. Fury gave him strength and courage and spurred him to always move forward despite always getting things wrong and always failing and no mentor there to help him or teach him and everyone always laughing. Anger delivered him from catastrophe. Rage kept him from going under. It had come to be his greatest asset and only strategy.

His life was powered by a battery with loneliness at one pole and rage at the opposite and Felix existed, suspended between the two, helpless. His father never knew the bitter raging woman Felix's mother had become. How, as a boy, she'd lectured him on the weakness of his papa. She'd drilled him to recite this catechism of venom. And as he'd grown to become a mirror of her missing husband, she'd begun to subject Felix to the fullness of her scorned fury. His impossible task, Felix's trial had been to make a life in this seething home where every slice of bread was buttered with disdain.

Felix hated his father for relinquishing him to her sole abusive custody. He hated them both, loved and despised them with a passion that dwarfed and colored all else in his life.

To escape, he'd married a woman who already counted her affections by the pfennig and dealt them out as a miser, as scant wages for those behaviors she wished to cultivate in husband and son. Even in the merriest circumstances, Felix's wife could surrender herself to an unhappy mood. These attributes he recognized, too late, she shared with his mother. Not impossible was the idea that he was acclimatized to finding comfort in such familiar discomfort.