The Nightmare Factory (20 page)

Night…after night…after night.

THE TROUBLES OF DR. THOSS

^W
hen Alb Indys first heard the name of Dr. Thoss, he had some difficulty locating its speaker, or even discerning how many voices had spoken it. Initially the words seemed to emanate from an old radio in another apartment, for Alb Indys had no such device of his own. But he finally realized that this name had been uttered, in a rather harsh voice, just outside the corner window, and only window, of his room. After spending the night, not unusually, walking the floor or slumping wide-eyed in his only chair, he had been in bed since morning. Now, at mid-afternoon, he remained unslept and was still attired in pale gray pajamas. Bolstered by huge pillows, he was sitting up against the headboard. Upon his lap rested a drawing book filled with stiff sheets of paper, very white. A bottle of black ink was in reach on the sidetable next to his bed, and a shapely black pen with a sharp silvery nib was held tightly in his right hand. That Alb Indys was at that moment busy with a pen-and-ink rendering of the window, along with the empty chair beside it, was perhaps the chief reason that, very vaguely, he had overheard the words spoken beyond it.

He gave the drawing book a somewhat rough toss farther down the bed, where it fell against a lump swelling in the blankets: more than likely the creation of a wadded pair of trousers or an old shirt, possibly both, given the habits of Alb Indys. The window was partly open and, walking over to it without steadiness, he discreetly pushed it out a little more. They should have been just below the window, those speakers whom Alb Indys wished would go on speaking. He remembered hearing a voice say, “It’s going to be the end of someone’s troubles,” or words to that effect, with the name of Dr. Thoss figuring in the discussion. The name was unfamiliar to him and gave rise to an enthusiasm that had much less to do with hope, which Alb Indys tried to keep at a minimum, than it did with pure nervous expectancy: the anticipation of new and unknown possibilities. But the talking had stopped, and just as he was becoming interested in this doctor. Where were they, those two? He was sure there were two, though there might have been a third. How could so many have simply vanished?

When he fully extended the window casement, Alb Indys saw no one on the street. He stretched forward for a better look and strands of blond hair, almost white, fell across his face, and then by a sudden salty breeze were blown back, thin and loose. It was not a very brilliant day, not one of excess activity. A few silhouettes and shadows maneuvered in the dimness on the other side of unreflecting windows. The stones of the street, so sparkling and picturesque for those enjoying a holiday here, succumbed to dullness out of season. Alb Indys fixed on one of them which looked dislodged in the pavement, imagining he heard it working itself free, creaking around in its stony cradle. But the noise was that of metal hinges squeaking somewhere in the wind. He quickly found them, his hearing made keen by insomnia. They were attached to a wooden sign hung outside the uppermost window of an old building. The structure ascended in peaks and slants and ledges piled over ledges into the gray sky, until at its highest, turreted point swung the sign. Alb Indys could never clearly make out its four capital letters so far above, though he had gazed up at them a thousand times. (And how often it seemed that something gazed back at him from that high window.) But a radio station need not be a visual presence in an old resort town, only an aural landmark, a voice for vacationers signaling the “sound beside the sea.”

Alb Indys closed the window and returned to his thin-lined representation of it. Though he began the picture in the middle of a sleepless night, he did not copy the constellations beyond the window panes, keeping the drawing unmarred by any artistic suggestion of those star-filled hours. Nothing was in the window but the pure whiteness of the page, the pale abyss of unshut eyes. After making a few more marks on the picture, completing it, he signed his work very neatly in the lower right-hand corner. This page would later be put in one of the large portfolios which lay stacked upon a desk across the room.

What else was contained in these portfolios? Two sorts of things, two types of artwork which between them described the nature and limits of Alb Indys’s pictorial talents. The first type included such scenes as the artist had recently executed: images drawn from his immediate surroundings, an immediacy that extended no farther than the sights observable in his own room. This was not his first study of the window, the subject he most often returned to and always in the same plain style. Sometimes he sat in the chair beside the window and portrayed his bed, lumpy and unmade, with occasional attention to the sidetable (noting each nick that blemished its original off-white surface) and the undecorated lamp which stood upon it (recording each chip that pocked its glassy smoothness). The desk-side of the room also received its fair share of treatments: the wall at that end of the room was the most tempting of the four, in itself a subtle canvas that had been painted and pitted and painted again, coated and repeatedly scraped of infinitesimal, seatown organisms, leaving it shriveled and pasty and incurably damp. No pictures were hung to patch either this or any other wall of the room, though a tall bookcase obscured who knows what unseen worlds behind it. Transitory compositions—a flung shoe leaning toe-up against a bedpost, a dropped glove which hazard endowed with a pointing index finger—formed the remaining examples of this first type of drawing in which the artist indulged.

And the second type? Was it more interesting than the first? Perhaps, though not where the imagination is concerned; because Alb Indys had none whatever, or at least none that he could readily make use of. Whenever he tried to form a picture of something, anything, in his imagination, all he saw was a blank: a new page with nothing on it, or perhaps a very old page that had retained the nothingness of its original mintage. Once he nearly had a vision of something, a few specks flying across a fuzzy background of white snow in a white sky—and there was a garbled voice which he had not intentionally conjured. But it all fizzled out after a few seconds into a silent stretch of emptiness. This artistic handicap, however, was anything but a frustration or a disappointment to Alb Indys. He did not often test the powers of his imagination, for he somehow knew that there was as much to be lost as gained in doing so. In any case, there were other ways to make a picture, and we have already seen one of them, not a very unusual one. Here now is another.

This second method was a type of artistic forgery, though it might just as well be described by the term which Alb Indys himself preferred—collaboration. And who were his collaborators? In many instances, there was no way of knowing: anonymous penmen, mostly, of illustrations in very old books and periodicals, ones entirely forgotten. His shelves were full of them, dark and massive, their worn covers incredibly tender to the touch. French, Flemish, German, Swedish, Russian, Polish, any cultural source of published material would do as long as its pictures spoke the language of dark lines and vacant spaces. In fact, the more disparate the origins of these images, the better they served his purpose: because Alb Indys liked to take a century-old engraving of a subarctic landscape, studiously plagiarize its manner of suggesting icy mountains and a vast stretch of frozen whiteness; then select an equally old depiction of a cathedral in a town he had never heard of, painstakingly transport it stone by stone deep into the glacial wasteland; and finally, from still older pages, transcribe with all possible fidelity an unknown artist’s conception of assorted devils and demons, making them dance down from the ice-mad mountains and invade the helpless cathedral. This was the typical process and product of his work with collaborators, who Alb Indys thought were actually in collaboration with one another and not with him at all. He was merely the inheritor of lost images; he was their resurrector, their invoker, their medium, and under his careful eye and steady hand there took place a mingling of artistic forms, their disparate anatomies tumbling out of the years to create the nightmare of his art. And it seemed perfectly natural to Alb Indys that, like everything else, even the most inviolable or obscure phenomena eventually find their way from good dreams into bad, or from bad dreams into the wholly abysmal.

At the moment he was working on a new collaboration, but all he had as yet was its barest beginnings: a sickle-shaped scar of moon, a common enough image which Alb Indys wanted to remove from one black sky and fix in another. Its relocation could have provided him with a way to waste the rest of the afternoon. However, the commotion outside the window earlier had upset the pace of his day and given it a new rhythm. Almost any event could do this to an insomniac’s delicate routine, so as yet there was no reason to contemplate the exceptional. An appearance by his landlord, whether rent-hungry or merely casual, sometimes altered his course for weeks to come. Before, his thoughts were of nothing, genuinely; but now old preoccupations had become stirred up and sharpened in his awareness. Was there anything special about this doctor, this Thoss? Alb Indys could not help wondering. Was he like the others, or was he a doctor who would hear, really hear you? Not one had yet heard him, not one had offered him a remedy worth the name.

If there was a new doctor who had set up practice in the seaside town, Alb Indys could encounter none of the man’s cures, either real or pretended, by staying at home. He needed to find some things out for himself, make inquiries, get out into the world. When was the last time he had had a good meal? Perhaps that would be a way to begin, and afterward he could take it from there. One could always get acceptable food at the place right around the corner, no reason to fear they were going to give him poison! Good, he thought. And after he ate he might have a nice walk for himself, gain some advantage from the fresh air and scenery of this town. After all, many people came here for vaguely therapeutic reasons, believing there were medicines dispensed by the very mood of the town’s quaint streets and its sea-licked landscape. It might even happen that his maladies would disappear of their own accord, leaving him with no need for this doctor, this Thoss.

He dressed himself in dark, heavy clothes and made sure to lock the door behind him. But he had forgot to shut the window properly and a breeze edged in, disturbing the pages of the drawing book on his bed, fluttering them against that lump in the blankets.

At the restaurant Alb Indys found a small table in a quiet, comfortable corner, where he sat facing the rear wall and an empty chair. He ordered something to eat from a large board, nicely lettered, which was propped up on an easel at the front of the room. Because of his distance from this board, and a certain atmospheric dimness of the place, only a single word in bold letters was easily readable.

“Fish,” he had said.

“Fish of the day?”

“Yes,” he had answered, mechanically and without a trace of the anticipation he thought he might feel.

But despite his enduring lack of interest in daily meals, he did not regret this outing. A little lamp attached to the wall next to him, its light muffled by a grayish shade of some coarse fabric, created a slightly nocturnal ambiance. If he kept his gaze fixed upon a certain knotty plank in the wall, at a point just above the empty chair opposite him, everything peripheral to his left eye’s vision faded into a dark fog, while the little lamp to his right cast an island of illumination upon the table before him, instilling the illusion that he was lost in some glowing and isolated corner of an endless night. But he could not sustain the illusion: the state of mild delight into which he fooled himself faded, while shapes around him sharpened.

Yet without this sharpening would he have noticed the newspaper someone had left behind on the seat of that empty chair? Messily bunched and repeatedly creased, it was still a welcome sight to his eyes. At this point he needed something of this kind, something to peruse in the rich glow of the lamp that was guiding him through an artificial night, preparing him for the authentic one in which he would have to face the unpredictable verdict which either terminated or terribly elongated his wakefulness. He reached for the pages, rustled them, unfolded and refolded them like an arrangement of bedcovers. His eyes followed dark letters across ruddy paper, and at last his mind was out of its terrible school for a while. When the food arrived he made way for the plate, building a nest of print and pictures around it: advertisements for the town’s shops and businesses, weather forecasts, happenings on the west shore, and a feature article entitled “THE REAL STORY OF DR. THOSS—Local Legend Revived.” A brief note explained that the article, written some years ago, was periodically reprinted when interest in the subject seemed, for one reason or another, newly aroused. Alb Indys paused over his meal for a moment and smiled, feeling disappointed and slightly relieved at the same time. It now appeared that he had been inspired by a misunderstanding, by imaginary consultations with a legendary doctor and his fictitious cures.

Who, then? What? When and why? His name, according to the article, may indeed have been that of a real doctor, one who lived either in the distant past or whose renown was imported, by recollection and rumor, from a distant place. A number of people associated him with the following vague but poignant tragedy: an excellent physician, and a most respected figure in the community, was psychically deranged one night by some incident of indefinite character; afterward he continued to make use of his training in physic but in a wholly new fashion, in a different key altogether from that of his former practice. This went on for some time before, violently, he was stopped. Decapitation, drowning in the nearby sea, or both were the prevailing conclusions to the real doctor’s legend. Of course, the particulars vary, as do those of a second, and more widely circulated, version.

This variant Dr. Thoss was a recluse of the witch-days, less a doctor of medicine than one deeply schooled at forbidden universities of the supernatural. Or was he naturally a very wise man who was simply misunderstood? Histories of the period are unhelpful in resolving such questions. No definite misbehavior is attributed to him, except perhaps that of keeping an unpleasant little companion. The creature, according to most who know
this
Thossian legend, is said to possess the following traits: it is smallish, “no bigger than a man’s head”; shriveled and rotting, as if with disease or decomposition; speaks in a rough voice; and moves about by means of numerous appendages of special qualities, called “miracle claws” by some. There was good reason, the article went on, to put this abbreviated marvel at the center of this legend, for the creature may not have been merely a diabolical companion of Dr. Thoss but the mysterious doctor himself. Was his tale, then, a cautionary one, illustrating what happened to those who, either from evil or benevolent motives, got “into trouble” with the supernatural? Or was Dr. Thoss
itself
intended to serve as no more than an agent of spectral hideousness, a bogie for children and the secluded campfire? Ultimately the point of the legend is unclear, the article asserted, beyond evoking a certain uneasiness in those of superactive imagination.