The Mephistophelean House Read online

  F3 Administration

  F2 Records

  F1 Holding Cells

  B1 Bolgia 1-10

  B2 Operating Theatre

  “This must be the way to the Operating Theatre.”

  I inspected the ring.

  “The key to the gate, the key to the cell, the portcullis, blivet and post. How many keys have I used? How many remain?”

  One by one the keys were unsuccessful.

  I inserted the second to last key.

  The lock engaged.

  The door opened.

  I had a terrifying thought.

  Door after door, lock after lock, the keys spun around the ring. But one key remained. I could unlock one more door. What if I used all my keys and came to a door I couldn’t unlock, having penetrated the perfect prison, only to find myself locked inside?

  Chapter 13

  The Bolgia

  Ten pens numbered one to ten decocted a zoo of the irredeemable, tourniquets of torture, contraptions of debasement, widgets of grief and despair, jiggers of hopelessness, anguish, and throe sweltering in charcoal air. Like ditches of stone that were splintered in bone the Bolgia were blighted and bare, the interred locked inside left to claw out their eyes while reciting in vain the Lord’s Prayer. Arches and dikes of livid stone projected a field malign, an iron well and a bottomless pit demarcated a strike-slip line.

  In the first Bolgia, eyes cast down, were wielders of the lash, caching perfect human forms into the gall-flecked fetid ash. Inside Bolgia two a man was buried in ordure, a stream of falsely metered words recurred an addlepated curse. Bolgia three was breamed in screams, a man housed in a block, his soles poked holes in beds of coals, his knees cut on the rock. He leaned against the block to cut the pressure on his spine, but fell back onto the hot coals screaming each and every time.

  I rattled the bars.

  It was no use.

  There was no way out.

  "I have to find Jonsrud."

  A form distorted chin to chest inside Bolgia four had a torso wholly turned awry with eyes that blinked no more. So dark it was I barely saw the outline of his face, disconnected from his body and then put back in its place. The shoulders arched grotesquely forward, body in a brace, the inverted torso's sunken sockets staring into space.

  “How has he done it, what purpose does it serve, to break a man in two, only to set him in reverse?”

  I pitied the multitude. Unable to quell my lingering suspicions I foresaw Jonsrud bound in some similar, inconceivable deprivation.

  Bolgia five was limed in pitch and red hot grappling-irons, an unctuous wight of lofty height was wrapped in metal wires.

  “I know it’s my turn to burn in the urn, but explain this to me this, my one final concern.”

  “Final concern?"

  “Why do I belong next to him?”

  He pointed to the face-backwards thing.

  “Don’t ask me about the logic of this place!”

  “Don't you know who I am? I am the one who cleared the land and brought you here in my name. I buried the stories that you told your babies, replaced your old laws with laws of my own. The words that you used are all lost and forgotten like fruit in a tree that's already rotten, the eye on the pyramid belongs to me, and the bones in the base are what you will be.”

  I pressed the ring against my belt.

  “Open the door. Let-me-go!”

  I did not pity the soul inside Bolgia five.

  Bolgia six was empty. Bolgia seven housed victims of botched surgeries, amputations, collections of missing parts. Bolgia eight housed by all appearances someone who should not have been there.

  I reached through the bars.

  “What is the reason for your internment?”

  “I don’t know why I’m here, though I tried to be God to myself. I persisted in trying to make my own way, but got stuck on the hook when I went for the bait.”

  The heat was atramentous.

  “Where am I headed next?”

  Bitterly I asked myself.

  “I am lost.”

  “We are all lost.”

  A prostrate form lay on the floor inside Bolgia nine. Cuts and scars and strange burn marks ran up and down his spine. Bolgia ten was another double pen, a man lashed to a rack. A torturess in surgical dress drew black lines down his back. The short hand of the torturess was delicate and merciless, inscribing sharp-tongued smoking steel filleting strips across his chest.

  My momentum expired.

  I could go no farther.

  The torturess japed.

  Bolgia ten opened.

  I must go on, I told myself.

  I must go on.

  A mutilated keyway was fixed under a louvered track.

  One key remained.

  I had come to my destination.

  I fit the final key in the lock.

  The door opened onto an antediluvian blastway, arcs of heat radiating into the throat of the cone. A chilled, ice tempered expanse was devoid of sound and color, moonmilk and frostwork glinting like jewels on a rimstone dam. Unsure of my footing I skirted the chasm, erasing the momentum of fear building up inside me. The freezing gallery narrowed and I found myself at a dead end. A familiar impression was fixed upon the gallery wall.

  F3 Administration

  F2 Records

  F1 Holding Cells

  B1 Bolgia 1-10

  B2 Operating Theatre

  Jonsrud lay on the table.

  He was still.

  A blood spackled garment hung on the wall.

  “What has he done to you?”

  There was a scalpel on the tray.

  I picked it up.

  “An eye for an eye, a soul for a soul, a part of the whole with a heart of coal.”

  “And what would you know of the human soul,” Doctor Maximilian Kilgore threw a saw in the sink.

  “Doctor Maximilian Kilgore.”

  The Doctor took off his gloves.

  “You look lost.”

  “I seem to have found my way here.”

  “You certainly have.”

  “Have I caught you at a bad time?”

  “Not at all. And to think, I had the whole place on the lookout, a man on the run, and here you were, all along.”

  The Doctor pointed to the gallery.

  "Shall we?”

  “Of course.”

  “This way.”

  I followed the Doctor. Although he preceded, he had a way of looking behind his shoulder.

  ‘A useful skill.’

  The Doctor drew a flowstone curtain.

  “Where does it lead?"

  I had the distinct impression the Doctor could read my thoughts.

  “The surgery here at the House on the Hill has failure and success, finding what is good in man is an eternal game of chess. A bibliography containing all that's good and bad is exactly what's required to redeem those who are mad. A day will come when what we do will be on a grand scale, a logarithmic multitude, a brand new holy grail. Compendiums of that which happened and that which did not, will awaken what's forsaken in the lies you have been taught. From the tiniest quirk to the man gone berserk, we’ve begun to unwind the mind’s pagan clockwork. At which point does vision come too spliced to see? Do we get what we came for? Do we unearth the key?”

  “After you.”

  “Of course.”

  The flowstone curtain revealed a flight of stairs. As we climbed I laid hold of the scalpel. The Doctor was saying something but I didn’t pay attention. I could feel quantum interference. Far above a particle of light pierced the gloom, a jewel atop a ladder of thorns. The Doctor pointed to an acropolis. A door opened. Thunder and rain hammered the casement. Tulip glass shades and brown leather chaises adjoined a mahogany breakfront. Pembroke tables with lacquered drop-leafs, Chesterfields with studded rings, the locked glass case and alabaster bust, red box in its center.

  The Doctor opened a folding bar.

  “May I offer you some respite?” />
  “Of what?”

  “Rotgut.”

  “Rotgut?”

  “It means, ‘good red.’”

  The Doctor extended a glass.

  “To your health,” the Doctor offered.

  “Yes. To my health.”

  I drank to my health.

  I could not say what the Doctor drank to.

  “You think I poison you?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  The Doctor took the glass.

  “You’ve seen what we do here?”

  “I’ve seen enough.”

  “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

  The Doctor set the glasses on the drop-leaf. My gaze shifted to the case. Quantum interference rent a schism in the dimensions of the room. The red box irradiated a cross polarized field, base caps over crown molding, the ceiling inside out, everything in two places at once. I could feel the Doctor’s stare on the back of my neck.

  “What’s inside the red box?”

  “The red box?”

  “The red box, Doc, the red box. What’s inside the red box?”

  “The red box, like you and me, is a probability calculated in a field.”

  “That’s all you've got?”

  "When you witness an event, does not being there in and of itself alter the conditions of that which occurred?"

  I couldn't take my eyes off the red box.

  The Doctor’s words were narcotic.

  “In a time when the sane seem mad and mad seem sane, it falls on us to prescribe the blame.”

  Rain pattered the casement. My stomach congealed. The Rotgut was a pool of ambrosia, the Doctor's teeth, grinder blades.

  “The red box, the red box,” the Doctor contemplated, “what’s inside the red box? A piece of the hole inside your soul you’ve found by yourself that you can’t control. Narcissus nevermore, may I implore, what it is, that you thought, that you came for?”

  I dehisced.

  Corpuscles clouded, fanned by unseen wings.

  “Call me an Opportunist.”

  “An Opportunist?”

  “Yes. And what do you call yourself?”

  I winced.

  What could I share?

  When should I lie?

  I had to get my hands on the red box.

  “The red box, Doc, the red box. You were getting to the red box.”

  The Doctor stretched the height of the chamber unfurling gigantic wings, a phantasm hovering above my head inside the corpuscle cloud.

  “Wish to glance inside the glass, to look no more, but know at last, the true form you’ve been undermining, masking, hiding, coinciding?”

  “You speak in riddles, Doctor. I have seen your nine wards. Here you lord like a fallen angel over a frozen sea."

  “Do you know yourself like you know your fellow man? Are you aware of the human condition? What awaits you when you die, on the other side? Could you say with any certainty what sort of man you were? How would you pass judgment on yourself?”

  The scalpel slipped.

  “Don’t you want to know? Don’t you want to splice in time, see what things its shows? Don’t you want to take a chance and glance inside my looking glass? Just once, to see yourself, as you really are?”

  “The mirror?”

  “For the first time.”

  I had to chance it.

  I had to look inside the red box.

  “What sort of hell have you created?”

  “Isn’t there a piece of hell that's hidden in us all, a number stamp marked on your soul that you can't uninstall? A unique number branded and encoded on your being and you're left to wander purgatory looking for its meaning. God's cow, bag of bones, guts are made of sticks and stones, a piece of offal granted life you yearn for peace but live in strife. Clueless what it's all about you realize there's no way out. You're trapped inside an empty shell that's nothing more than organelles and just too late you comprehend you're nothing more than odds and ends.”

  “There is such a thing as free will.”

  “Free will is a metaphysical dilemma. There is no reality outside of language. When we destroy something, we do not just destroy it. We create its opposite. The world is not what we’ve destroyed, but that which fills the void. Is it not the same in the soul of man? Would not the destruction of consciousness absolve that which it haunts, creating its opposite?”

  “The opposite of what?”

  “Original sin.”

  “Original sin?”

  “To look inside the looking glass is to see yourself as you really are, not just a number branded on a soul, but a self, a real self, exonerated of original sin. Consider the alternative. Consider a world gone mad. Imagine consciousness perverted. A government that invents the truth, an economy of people raised to graze designer identities. Consider not purgatory but Hell itself. The sins of man gone rampant. Things will grow hotter, will they not? There will be plagues? And disasters? Wars?”

  The margins of the room gyrated. My mouth tasted like metal. I couldn’t feel the scalpel in my hand.

  “There are fish in the sea. Oil in the soil. Beasts in the wilds. What will we do with them? Will we plant the seed for future generations, or, given the chance, will we burn through God's harvest in a generation merely to satisfy our own desire, leaving nothing for the children of our children? Can you imagine a time when there won’t be fish in the sea? Nor metal in the mountain? A time when beasts no longer roam the wilds?”

  I was corrupted.

  The Doctor’s words rang true.

  True to whom?

  A madman such as me?

  Was I mad?

  Was I not mad, after all, for journeying to this place, of my own free will?

  “And all for what? Original lust? Die before trying as a matter of trust, I see with staked hands a man before us, who fixes, and features and burrows a bribe, like a Pallas Athene, a winter-crossed bride.”

  “You reign down upon me a tirade of rhymes just to make me feel less than a bastard-bred child.”

  “You will cease and desist with rhetorical trysts. You are not all you wished that you were. You will bow before me, as a fief to a lord, and then become slave to my word.”

  “It is not for the Hare who despairs of the Fox as its searches for Pieces of Eight to resist what is missed between all that exists while only believing in fate.”

  “You will cease and desist...”

  “You will cease to exist.”

  The Doctor dehisced.

  “You will die like any other, collapsed beneath your House of Usher.”

  Lightning arrayed.

  Sulfur swirled.

  Feeling returned to my extremities.

  The Doctor fumed.

  “I abhor you.”

  “You abhor yourself.”

  “Ignorance is bliss. Time is an ever perfecting clockwork. What happens now will happen again.”

  “There is such a thing as free will.”

  “The stamp mark of original sin is free will.”

  “You lie.”

  “Would you be willing to decide your fate the instant you are born?”

  “You are a liar.”

  “There’s a daemon inside each one of us, just waiting to get out, a piece of hell inside us all, we’d rather do without. If I took you to a special place, a room fixed in the sky, and in the room one man was sane, the other’d gone awry, could you tell me which was which and numerate the reason why and ally with whom you then presume to have seen eye to eye?”

  “If there is such a room, take me there.”

  The Doctor was malevolent.

  “Open your eyes. We're already there. And the measure of your treasure, of your precious ‘Pieces of Eight,’ now lies within your own volition of a chance that came too late.”

  The Doctor’s shadow emblazoned on the wall and I saw the figure in the hail, the reflection in the cooker, the thing at the ranch.

  “It was you.”

  “The
red box has allowed a breach. Nothing is beyond my reach.”

  “The black X and the pink circle.”

  “For he whom time triggers, time is lost right from the start, for time gifts us naught but loss and a re-animated heart, which we try to piece together, but time winds on and on forever, for whatever we endeavor, soon begins to fall apart.”

  Rain hammered the casement. The glass case oscillated, the red box forked in black-bodied cavities, absorbing and re-radiating infinite wave forms.

  “Consider the illusion of free will,” the Doctor said. “Why does History repeat itself? If we know the past, we can change the future. So why, then, does the past rear its ugly head, over and over? It is because of the illusion of free will. You don’t have to be religious to take a leap of faith.”

  “A leap of faith?”

  I spotted my chance.

  “Like the red box?”

  “Yes,” the Doctor agreed. “Like the red box.”

  “Show me. Show me the red box.”

  “Oh, I suppose I can let you take a look inside the looking glass. But don’t blame me if you don’t like what you see.”

  Chapter 14

  The Red Box

  The Doctor fit a skeleton key into the glass case.

  “Ever wonder how you made it here?”

  “Well I…”

  “The institution is impenetrable. Everything's under lock and key. How did you get out of your cell? The exercise yard? And Menos Hall? The Bolgia?”

  “I…”

  “And the people you came across, how did they act?”

  “I…”

  “Did they act suspicious?”

  "Well, they…”

  “Or did they act like you weren’t there?”

  The Doctor picked up the red box.

  I glommed the scalpel.

  “What do you mean?”

  The Doctor opened the balustrade door. Vertical nebulas rasterized the grayscale horizon.

  A fir twisted in the wind.

  “The Weeping Tree...”

  The balustrade was ringed by a parapet. The Doctor set the red box on a plinth, looking over his shoulder.

  “In the end, you and I are after the same thing, you know.”

  “What's that?”

  “The reality behind the illusion.”