The Mephistophelean House Read online

  Logic painted a precarious causeway over a chasm of despair. The overcast sky stretched infinitely overhead. I stepped on the gas, rub strip skirting the freeway wall, accelerator curling like an adder, the engine cutting in and out, wheels losing momentum, emergency lights on, the gauge at 300 degrees.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  I pulled into Laurelhurst. Smoke wisped into the cabin. I got out and popped the hood. The engine block was cracked. The bio diesel would have to be towed.

  Drizzle eroded the last remnants of white on Cesar Chavez Avenue, the golden Maid of Orleans buffeted in rain. An adumbrate penumbra buried Belmont Square and the old church, a bitter chill descended still enshrouded in a mist, Hawthorn thorns, and black acorns, the windows empty and forlorn, I climbed the stairs into despair’s capricious moldy gut, and opened the unholy door and stepped with fear inside, waiting for the Mephistophelean House to seethe my soul awry, but nothing came from in the House and at the door I stood, wishing I had moved into another neighborhood.

  The Deerhound was waiting.

  “Calapooya?”

  It perked Its head.

  The white door unbolted.

  “Jonsrud? Is that you?”

  The Deerhound tramped into the kitchen.

  The white door was open.

  I called at the top of the stairs.

  “Jonsrud? Is this some kind of joke?”

  Paws crossed the floor. Water trickled down the wall. The pump whirred. I poked my head under the flue inside the windowless chamber.

  The Deerhound was gone.

  Water spilled from the trough. The floor was dry. The black X and pink circle shone like a bloody sun. I studied the upside-down numbers on the wall, 174 lines repeated over and over.

  “174, 174, where have I heard that number before? Shouldn’t have come down here. Shouldn’t have come back at all. X marks the spot. The Doctor’s private trust...” I reconsidered. “Quantum interference, like a stone in a pond. The ripples are the borders between that which happened and all the things which could of happened, but didn’t.”

  I stared at the black X and pink circle. The black X marked the spot on the wall where the two sides came together. If I stood a little closer to the wall, the black X superimposed the pink circle. If I stood in front of it, the black X and pink circle came together.

  I stood in the windowless chamber, though it would have been difficult to call myself me. Pieces of a mirror lie on the floor.

  “The mirror. The red box. Wait. The red box. It’s gone. The red box isn’t here.”

  It was like a dream. Upstairs was bright and new. I went into the hall. The front door was open. Main Street was abandoned.

  The Deerhound yowled under the Walnut tree. A pigeon fluttered in the grass. The other pigeons looked down at it pitilessly.

  It had a broken snout.

  The horse rings on Main were hitched to their roundings. Slush melted in leaf-packed puddles. Chimneys pitched columns of ash. I followed the Deerhound up the hill. There were no people. Some houses I recognized. Some were dark. Some were empty.

  The Deerhound ducked into an alley. Goatsbeard and Grape Holly choked the cinder cone spillway. The Deerhound pulled farther and farther ahead. I fell farther and farther behind. The alley opened onto 55th. A barbican permitted access to a promontory with hemicycles and apses, the outline of a byzantine presidio visible through the hedge. The Deerhound passed through a metal turnstile with a cornerstone which bore the nameplate, ‘The House on Asylum Road.’

  “The House on the Hill.”

  I fell on the bank.

  “I am dead.”

  The clay eroded. Rain spilled into a sinkhole. I lay by the sinkhole on the edge of an endless reservoir of tears.

  “Quantum interference. All the things which never happened. That’s why It follows me wherever I go. The black X and pink circle are a nadir.”

  Could I return through the nadir?

  Back through the black X and pink circle?

  I stared up at the House on Asylum Road.

  Rain beat on the corrugated roof of Northgate. A guardhouse commanded the interstice. Inside the guard house an ugly man sat on a stool, staring through the grill.

  “Hello?” I rapped. “I’m…er…here to see the Doctor.”

  I noticed the chronic lesions of sarcoidosis, a hyperkeratinised scar running from crown to ear. Tiny puncture wounds dotted the superior and inferior temporal lines of his left parietal bone.

  “I said I’m here to the see the Doctor.”

  “Doctor!” the ugly man drooled.

  “Yes.”

  I waited.

  “Doctor?”

  “That’s what I said. The Doctor.”

  The ugly man was impish.

  If I wasn’t allowed in, why was he just sitting there? Why didn’t he do anything? Why didn’t he say something?

  I waited.

  It was as if the ugly man forgot I was there.

  “Forget it.”

  I followed the hedge down Madison to 55th. At the barbican an armed guard hailed me.

  “Sir!”

  “I’m here to see the Doctor.”

  “Sir!” the guard squinted.

  “I have an appointment.”

  “I’m sorry, Sir?”

  “I said I have an appointment.”

  “Let me ring the office,” the guard ducked inside the barbican. Ringed by a row of Hemlock the ornately landscaped park fronted a flute shafted mansion with horseless carriages.

  The guard popped out.

  “I'm sorry, is this some kind of joke?”

  “Some kind of joke? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m sorry Sir,” the guard stepped into the barbican. “Someone will escort you up directly.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you want to wait inside?”

  “No. I’ll only be here a moment.”

  “Sir?”

  “I said I’ll only be here a moment.”

  Burly guards with straight sticks donned the off-white garb of the institution, one clean shaven, the other with a long ropy beard.

  The gate opened.

  “For God sakes, I’ve been standing out here for an eternity,” I shouted.

  “Sir?” the ropy bearded guard stammered.

  “I said I’ve been out here for an eternity.”

  The guards looked at one another.

  “Errrr, this way,” the clean shaven guard pointed through the trees. The ropy bearded guard unlocked the front door of the mansion. We entered a narrow hallway just as a long case clock stuck the quarter hour. A woman with a yellow shawl sat at a typewriter. The shawl fell on the floor. She picked it up. As we climbed the staircase I got a look at her hands.

  They were claws.

  The guards escorted me to the end of the corridor.

  “Come.”

  The clean shaven guard opened the door.

  “We have a visitor, Sir.”

  “So far so good."

  “Sir?”

  “I might throw you a curve ball.”

  “Yes Sir!!"

  I was ushered into a scholarly apartment expecting to see Doctor Maximilian Kilgore. The door closed and I found myself ensconced in Chesterfields, book cases, artifacts, and an alabaster bust. In a locked glass case was the red box.

  “The red box.”

  I put my hands on the glass. The red box was an ultraviolet catastrophe, a schism riveting the dimensions of the room, the windowless chamber magnified a thousand fold, the source of the quantum interference, the sound of rain, the red box, locked inside a simple glass case, if I could only get something to smash the glass…

  “Looking for something?”

  A Faustian figure in a brocade tailcoat pulled on a half bent taper. I was about to say something when the fog lifted and I could see down the valley.

  Portland was gone.

  “Look upon The City of Pain.”

  The Faustian
figure thrust open the casement. A verdant forest stretched down the slope, columns of rain spilling as far as the eye could see.

  “What happened,” I gasped.

  “Tell me. What do you see?”

  I righted myself.

  “Doctor Maximilian Kilgore.”

  “You know me?”

  “I know you like I know myself.”

  Guilds Lake, Douglas Firs, Ponderosa Pines, a foundry of coal smokestacks, the Oregon Electric Railway line.

  I was beginning to understand.

  “Ogemtel,” I said.

  “Reversal is the first symptom.”

  “Symptom?”

  “Repetition is the second. Super diseases, government treasons, foretelling future hotter seasons.”

  “What makes you think…”

  “Think of mixing sinners with an protected soul, a defenseless true believer left to dig a deeper hole? And think to whom god hath bequeathed the role of slave and lord. How could a race of godless fakes keep Satan from its door? The sinners would invariably mix, a horror we could never fix, but if we move to seize the day, there might just be another way.”

  “Another way?"

  “The afflicted, the sick of mind; a tortured soul isn’t hard to find.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “There are a billion people. The earth is full! A great war looms! A war to end all wars! Can you imagine what would happen if mankind doubled in size? Twice as many caches of sin? What would two great wars look like, then? And twice again? War all the time? Perpetual war? We must poison the weed of sin at its root! Cutting its stalks is not enough. Sever a branch, another checks its balance!”

  “You are insane.”

  “Projection is the third symptom.”

  I swallowed painfully.

  “My only goal is to control the hidden secret of the soul. In what pantopticon of pain remains arraigned inside the human brain a secret box that’s tightly locked bred of sin and human shame?”

  The Doctor gestured.

  “Just look at yourself. You’re afflicted. Sickness has taken hold. But luckily you have come to the right place. I am a Doctor. Fate is a bitter sister, ever since, no such thing as coincidence.”

  “No,” I declared, “you don’t understand.”

  “You’ve got it all backwards.”

  I backed out of the room. “Uh…do I make my own way out, Doctor?”

  “They always say that, too.”

  “?”

  “You can get him now.”

  The door opened.

  “This man,” the Doctor pined, “chimes like a chimera. He will stop at nothing to escape. Pay him no heed. He will try to convince you he is sane, and that it is you, in reality, who are mad.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Take him to Andrews. Prepare the operating theater. Then we may begin the…metaphysical” the Doctor cracked a rictus. “There is a new experiment I’ve been meaning to try, a rather grisly procedure I'm afraid, with negligible chance of success, but it seems fate has gifted you, gifted me, gifted us both with this opportunity.”

  “Yes, Doctor!”

  The guards parlayed me downstairs. I went limp, picturing myself strapped to an operating table.

  “Gentlemen, there must be some mistake! Look at me. I’m not crazy. I demand a phone call.”

  “Who are you going to call? Krazy Kat?”

  The yellow shawl lie on the carpet. The woman carped, gouged eye slits revealing putrescent orbs, a forked tongue lashing rotting teeth, claws rapping metal keys, the pendulum swinging back and forth.

  “Gentlemen.”

  “You're mistaken."

  “There’s nothing gentle about us.”

  The guards eschewed me outside.

  A red brick path led up the hill.

  “Sirs, then. You’ve got to listen to me. I’m not crazy. The Doctor was referring to someone else.”

  “He was pointing at you.”

  “Sirs,” I pursued, “don’t hurt me.”

  “We won’t."

  "Now, what the Doctor does on his own, well, that’s his business.”

  “Are you all mad?”

  “I don’t like this,” the clean shaven guard said. “He’s got a wild look in his eye.”

  We halted under the archivolt.

  I could feel their grip loosening.

  “What do we do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  In the downpour the archivolt afforded a glimpse of Northgate. A carriage passed by the interstice, driven by a man with a French Fork.

  I sensed my opportunity.

  “‘Deep Sleep Theory,’ remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember. But I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t have to get it. You just have to do it.”

  “Right.”

  “Who are we to question? We do what we’re told.”

  “You have free will," I interrupted. "Set me free. Let me go.”

  “All right. That’s enough.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “Doctor’s orders.”

  “Please,” I implored, “where are you taking me?”

  The clean shaven guard chuckled.

  “To a nice dry place.”

  “This is all a misunderstanding. A big mistake. I’m not crazy. I’m not who you think I am! I’m really someone else!”

  “Now that’s enough. The Doctor was right."

  The guard’s vice grip capitulated.

  I was free.

  “You’ll fit in here nicely, madman.”

  Northgate was just across the pond. If I could scale the hedge I could return to the Mephistophelean House and the windowless chamber, back through the black X and pink circle. Before I could make it two steps a brawny arm hoisted me by the collar, brushing the stains off my pants.

  “Now that’s enough.”

  The guards escorted me up the hill. The Flemish gable of a refectory poked through the trees. A red brick path cut along the hedge and lead to a courtyard with Palladian windows. The clean shaven guard unlocked the door and we entered, shoulder to shoulder.

  A man with pitted cheeks banged on the gate. The ropy bearded guard dragged him by the collar and whiplashed him into the backboard.

  Teeth ricocheted across the floor.

  I looked down.

  There were a lot of teeth.

  The gate opened.

  A whale of an attendant took the man away.

  The clean shaven guard confronted me.

  “That’s what you get for opening your mouth around here.”

  The guards escorted me to a gate where I was straight-jacketed and left half-sitting, half-leaning against the wall in a padded cell, a posterior restraint chained to a chord on the floor.

  I waited. Having lost all circulation in my arms I concentrated on the window slit, fingers curling like rotting petals. Time was insignificant. I lost consciousness, only to awake minutes later thinking I had slept for hours. Finally the gate unlocked. The door opened. A hulking giant entered. On his belt was a ring of keys.

  Chapter 9

  The House on Asylum Road

  “Ogemtel!”

  “Have pity on me. What are you? Man or ghost?”

  “Not man, though once I was. Let me go.”

  “Let you go?”

  “Yes. Let me go.”

  “But why would I let you go?”

  The hulking giant brown studied his placket front.

  “I was the one that brought you here.”

  “You?”

  “Name the man who’s mad who doesn’t think that he is sane who declares the dereliction of the melancholy brain. We call this place a mad house but we mean it makes men sane. Wouldn’t that corrupt a world bent on that which one attains? What if what was, and the things that one does, turn out to be echoes of that which soon comes?”

  “Ogemtel...”

  “That is not my name.”

  “Who are you?”

>   “My name is Andrews.”

  “Doctor Roland Andrews?”

  “Yes. Doctor Roland Andrews.”

  “Why did you say your name was Ogemtel?”

  “The name of the curse, said in reverse, is all that I said to you.”

  “The curse,” I reversed. Ogemtel. O-G-E-M-T-E-L. TEL EM OG. LET-ME-GO.

  Let me go.

  “What’s happening to me?”

  The hulking giant glowered.

  "What happened to Matthew? And Jonsrud? What did you do to my friends?”

  “He's beginning to realize what I’ve done, what I had to do, to end this.”

  I cringed.

  “If you speak out of turn, make amends or affirm an insidious quip or remark, it’s your soul in a hole you’ll be left to unfold and live out in a haze for the rest of your days.”

  “No...”

  “Brain, tongue, teeth, feet, then left for dead at the side of the street. It’s a daemon this Doctor, this Doctor a daemon, a pontifex preaching of Science, but careful unless you mistakenly lapse non-compliance or open defiance. He wants to cut out the erroneous people in order to build corrupt mercantile steeples, and all that remains of the children of sun will be lost in exhaust and forgot and undone.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  The hulking giant was explicit.

  “Take the executioner’s mask and fit it on your face, end this madness lest he deign to doom the human race.”

  I closed my eyes. The padded floor was cement. The straightjacket was gone. The cell was gone. I lay on the floor of the windowless chamber under the black X and pink circle. I recognized the upside-down numbers on the wall. They repeated, over and over, every 174th line.

  I blinked. For every event, past, present and future, there was an alternate outcome, a divergent reality that occupied the same space, the same water in the pond. Reality, a ripple in the pond where that which happened and all the things that didn’t, awaited me on the other side of the black X and pink circle.

  All I had to do was cast the stone.

  “Shhhhzzzzz,” the hulking giant harkened to the window-slit.

  Someone was standing outside.

  “Follow me.”

  The hulking giant knocked on the door.

  The cell opened.

  The felt faced rube entered.

  “This way.”

  Blood rushed to my head. The hulking giant escorted me to the gate. As the rube unclasped his key ring I snuck a peek inside the next cell.