Doctor Sax (22 page)

The usually blue windows of Boott Mills in the night are now piercing, heartbreaking with a blue that’s never been seen before–terrible how that blue shines like a lost star in the blue city lights of Lowell–yet even as I look, slowly the night turns red, at first a horrible red suede red with evil shitty river and then a regular deep profound night red that bathed everything in dim soft restful glow but very death-like,—Doctor Sax’s vacuumed powders had created an Ikon for the Void.

And he sat glooming. “No, ‘tis and will be true, the Snake can’t be real, husk of doves or husk of wood, it will swirl from the earth an illusion, or dust, thin dust that makes the eyelids close–I’ve seen dust gather on a page, ‘tis the result of fire. Fire won’t help the heat of embarrassment and folly. Foo-wee–what shall I do?” He mungled with his ponder fists. “I’ll go through the motions … because this sad rain that now gathers to its intensity …patting the solaced but not chastised river with its manifold spit-hands you might say–no, the Snake’s not real, tsa husk of doves, tsa tzimis, tsa rained out. I talk-how? howp?” He looked up distracted. “But I’ll go through the motions. I’ve waited 20 years for this night and now I don’t want it—’tis the paralysis of the hand and mind, ‘tis the secret of no-fear… Somehow it seems the evil thing should take a care itself, or be rectified in organic tree of things. But these deliberations ah-vail not my old Sprowf Tomboy Bollnock Sax–listen to me, Jacky, kid,
boy that comes with me–though doubts and tears are roused up by the rain, wherein I know the rose is flowing, and it’s more natural I lay me down and make peace with bleak embattled eternity, in my rawer bed of dolors, with eyes of the night and soul shrouds, to keep my balanced fingers in–among the shades of arcade shafts, friends and fellow Evangelians of the Promised North–ever promised, ever-never-yielding North shroud ghost of upper snow, rale of snowy singers wailing in the Arctic-speared, solitude night–I go and make my mention, I go and seek my tremble.”

WE WENT ON TO THE CASTLE.

Everything began to happen to prevent us from reaching our goal, which Doctor Sax said was the
pit—
“The pit, the pit, wha do you mean the pit?” I keep asking him as I race after him with more and more fear. I feel like I did on the raft, I can jump or I can stay. But I don’t know how to construe the simple action of the raft with these powders and mysteries, so foolishly I grope along in black life and folly my Shadow. I yearn for the great sun after all this doom and night and gloom, this rain, these floods, this Doctor Sax of the North American Antiquity.

We start up a narrow alley between two sudden stone walls in the yards–rain is dripping from the rocks.

“The sun worshippers go through dank caves for their
snake-heart,” cries Doctor Sax, leading far ahead with his hood. Suddenly at the end of the stone alley I see a huge apparition standing.

“It’s Blook the Monster!” cries Doctor Sax coming back my way in the narrow alley and I have to flatten to receive him. Blook is a huge bald fat giant somewhat ineffectual who cannot advance through the alley but reaches over his 20-foot arms along the wall tops like great glue spreading, with no expression on his floury pastry face–an awful ugh–a beast of the first water, more gelatinous than terrifying. Sax joined me in his Shroud and we flipped over the wall in the wink of a bat-wing. “He’s mad as hell because we caught him burying an onion in the garden!” Blook emitted a faint, thin whistling noise of disgust that he missed us. We ran like hell through a drippy bush wet garden, over rills, mud hamps, rocks and suddenly I see a huge spider like four men tied to each other at the back and running in the same direction, a gigantic beast, running like mad across the glow of the rain.

“There’s one of the Mayan spiders that came with the Flood. You ain’t seen nothing till you’ve seen the Chimu centipedes in the dongeons of green bile, where they threw a couple of Dovists last week.”

“Yock! Yock!” cried a strange thing that suddenly dove at our heads from the rainy air. Sax waved aside with a claw of his great red-green fingers in the general reddish dark of everything– It was like Hell. We were at the portals of some awful hellhole full of impossible exits. Straight ahead, was our Pit,—in the way, a hundred annoying
barriers. We even came to a giant scorpion that lay scat on a wall big and black red, full six feet long, so that we had to go around—”Came with the Flood,” explained Sax, throwing his head over to me with a smile like a young secretary explaining to the visiting boss on the Set.

Suddenly I see Doctor Sax’s red eyes shining like wild buttons in the general river night, and loops of red shrouds around his hidden face. I look at my own hands … I can see the red veins threading through my flesh; my bones are black sticks with knobs. All the night, drowned blood red, is relieved by the angular black framesticks of the living skeletal world. Great beautiful livid orgones are dancing like spermatazoa in every section of the air. I look and the red moon’s come out from the rainclouds for an instant.

“Onward!” cries Sax. I follow him as he barges head first straight through a green pile of moss or green grass of some kind, I bowl through after him and come out on the other side covered with bits of grass. Down a long hall, I realize with horror, stand a long file of gnomes pointing spears alternately at us and then at themselves in a solemn little ceremony– Doctor Sax emits a wild “Ha ha!” like the jolly Principal of a Parochial Boarding-school and dashes capes-a-flying along the wall beside them as they melt to one side in sudden fear with their spears–I dash after, I pushed the wall and it caved in like paper, like the papier-mâché night of cities. I rubbed my eyes. Suddenly we were exploded into a golden room and ran screaming up a flight of stairs. Doctor Sax struggled
with a moss-covered trapdoor in the dripping gray stone above our heads.

“Look!” says Sax pointing at a wall–it’s like a cellar window, we see the ground outside the Castle illuminated by some kind of oil lamp or flare near there–just the ditch along the cellar stone–thousands of slithery little garter snakes are tumbling in a shining mass in the half grass half sand of the cellar ditch. Horrible!

“Now you know why it was known as Snake Hill!” announces Doctor Sax. “The snakes have come to see the King of Snakes.”

He heaves up the terrible trapdoor, dropping mud and dust, and we climb up into an intense black. We stand for one whole minute not seeing or saying anything. Life is actual: darkness is when there is no light. Then slowly a glow emerges. Were standing in sand like the beach but damp, thin, full of wet sticks, smells, shit–I smell masonry, we’re underground of something. Doctor Sax knocks against a wall of stone as we pass. ‘There’s your Count Condu, across these rocks, his bloody sleeping box–by now it’s night, he must be off shenanigansing with his little beastly wing.” We pass a great under alleyway. “There’s your dungeons, down there, and entrances to the mine. They succeeded and dug the Snake out a hundred years before its time.” How milky-soft the blackshrouds of Sax! —I’m hanging on to them, filled with sadness and premonition.

The ground shuddered.

“There’s your heaving Satan now!” he cried, raspy and
whirling. “A procession of mourners in black, son, move aside—” And he pointed far off down a dim shaft alley where it seemed I saw a parade of black shrouds with candles but couldn’t see because of the unnatural red glow of the night. Through another cellar window I caught a glimpse of Redblood Merrimac flowing around in brown-red bed-shores. But even as I looked everything trembled to turn white. The milky moon was first to send the radiant message–then the river looked like a bed of milk and lilies, the rain beads like drops of honey. Darkness shivered white. Ahead of me in snow white raiment Doctor Sax suddenly looked like an angel saint. Then suddenly he was a hooded angel in a white tree, and looked at me. I saw waterfalls of milk and honey, I saw gold. I heard Them singing. I trembled to see the halo pure. A giant door opened and a group of men were standing at a rail in front of us in a gigantic hall with cave like walls and impossible-to-see ceihng.

“Welcome!” was the cry, and an old man with a beak-nose and long white hair lounged effeminately against the rail as the others parted to reveal him.

“The Wizard!” I heard these words sibilantly cracking from the empurpled lips of Doctor Sax, who was otherwise all white. In the whiteness the Wizard shone all over like an evil glowworm out of the dark. His white eyes now shone like mad dots of fury … they were blank and had snowstorms in them. His neck was twisted and strung and streaked with horror, black, brown, stains, pieces of tortured dead flesh, ropy, awful–

‘Those marks on his neck, boy, are when Satan tried to expose him first–a wretched ningling underling from nittlinging.”

“Flaxy Sax with his Big Nax—” said the Wizard in a strangely quiet voice from the parapet rail. “So they finally are going to dispose of your old carcass anyway? Got you trapped this time?”

“There are more ways out of this maze than you realize,” spat back Sax, his jaws pulling down his mawkish old face. I saw the bulbous pop of dumb doubt in his eyes for the first time; he seemed to swallow. He was facing his Arch Enemy.

“Everything’s milk under the bridge
this
night,” said the Wizard, “—bring your boy to see the Plaything.”

A kind of truce had been made between them–because it was “the last night,” I heard it whispered. I turned and found handsome courtiers of all kinds standing around in lounging attitudes but deeply, wryly attentive– Among them stood Amadeus Baroque, the mystery boy of the Castle; and young Boaz with a group of others. Opposite the parapet rails, in another part of the Castle I saw with amazement
Old Boaz
the castle caretaker sitting at an old stove with an old bum’s overcoat, heating his hands over the coals, impassive-faced, snowy– Not long after, he disappeared and came back in a minute peering up at us unpleasantly with old red eyes from a cellar grate or gutter-bar-window in the hall– Ripples of comment rose from the spectators; some were frightening black-garbed Cardinals almost seven feet tall and completely imperturbable and long faced. Sax stood proudly, whitely, before all of them;
his grandeur was in the weariness and immovability of his position, coupled with the wracked fires that emanated from his plunging frame and he stalked up and down for a moment in temporary deep thought.

“Well?” said the Wizard. “Why do you withhold from your self the great joy of finally seeing the Snake of the World your lifelong enemy.”

“The thing’s … just struck me …
silly—”
said Sax, emphatically pronouncing every syllable, through thin unmoving lips, the words just expressing out through a grimace and a curse-curled tense tongue–

“The Thing’s bigger than you loom, Orabus Flabus. Come & look.”

Doctor Sax took me by the hand and led me to the Parapet of the Pit.

I looked down.

“Do ye see those two lakes?” cried Doctor Sax in a loud madvoice that made me wish there weren’t so many people to hear him.

“Yes sir.” I could see two distant sort of lakes or ponds sitting way below in the dark of the pit as if we were looking down through a telescope at a planet with lakes —and I saw a thin river below the lakes, flicking softly, in a far glow–the whole thing mounted on a land hump like a rock mountain, strangely, familiarly shaped,—

“And do ye see the river below?” cried Doctor Sax even louder but his voice cracking with emotion and everybody even the Wizard listening.

“Yes sir.”

“The lakes, the lakes!” screamed Sax leaping to the parapet
and pointing down and cruelly grabbing me by the neck and shoving my head down to see and all the spectators primming their lips in approval–
”those be his eyesl”
“

Hah?”

“The river, the river!”—pushing me further till my feet began to leave the ground—
”that be his mouthl”

“
Howk?”

“The face of Satan stares you back, a huge and mookish thing, fool!—”

“The mountain! The mountain!” I began to cry.

“That—
his head.”

“It’s the Great World Snake,” said the lizard Wizard, turning a wry face to us with its impossible snowy brilliance and eye shroud–a waxy faced dead man turned flower in his moment of Power.

“Oh sir, Oh sir, no!” I heard myself crying in a loud littleboy voice above the rippling amused laughter of all the courtiers and visiting princes and kings of World Evil from every corner of the crawling globe–some of them heaving thin handkerchiefs to their mouths, politely–I looked up and saw that thousands of Gnomes were ranged in the galleries above in the stone hollow of the Cave– The mining snake beneath was coming up, inch an hour. “In another few minutes,” said the Wizard, “possibly thirty, possibly one, the Snake will reach the redoubt our miners have built for it in their now-ended labors in my service —well done, well cherished!” he cried in a hollow voice that cracked like a public address system with its own echoes— “Hail to the Gnomes, Singers of the Devil Spade!”

There was a great clatter of spades above–some wood,
some iron. I could only see vague masses beyond the crowded antennaed gnomes. Among them wildly flew the Gray Gnome Moths that made the air multiform and crazy as their pinched tragic visages looked out from their night up on the flowing fretworks of the fire, in all heaven’s dark cave soundless, wild, and listening. The Angels of the Judgment Day were making great tremendous clang across the way. I could hear some of the rattling birds that we’d seen at Dracut Tigers. Hubbubs were rising by the minute outside the Castle. The ground again shuddered, this time shook the leaning Wizard off a foot.

“Old Nakebus wants to maw up his earth too fast.”

“And you’ll ride his back?” grinned Doctor Sax with one hand elongated dramatically on the faded wood edge of the rail–

“I’ll lead him through all the land, a hundred feet ahead, bearing my burden torch, till we reach the alkalis of Hebron and you’ll never make a move to stitch my path. It was a fore-ordained path, and one, that you, particularly among the unselected unchosen kind, but willing to put on the wrong regalia and think you are, don’t know your own madness–
why you breathe when the sun comes up–Why
oo breathe in the morning Ootsypoo.
^J
—I’d rather lead my candle Satan soul with my Promised Snake dragon-ing the earth in a path of slime fires and destruction behind me-meek, small, white, old, the image of a soul, leading my candlelight brigades, my wild and massive Cardinals that you see here ravened like hawks along a line-wall hungry to eat the stones of Victory–with bare sand to wedge and wash it down– Pilgrimages of the Snake– We will darken
the very sun in our march. Hamlets will be gobbled up entire, my boy. Cities of skyscrapers will feel the weight of
this
scale–won’t sit to weigh, or not for long,—and scales and Justice have nothing to do with a dragon’s sides– whether she holds alms, or balms, in her milky embowered palm– Or your Seminal Dovists, half of whom arrested now rot below–I see them floating in the lake of milky slime– Fires shall eat your Lowells–the Snake’ll make the subways his feeding-place–with one coy flick he’ll snop up whole Directories and hsts of the census, liberals and reactionaries will be washed down by the rivers of his drink, the Left and the Right will form a single silent tapeworm in his indestructible tube– No avail your ordinary fire departments and dull departments–the earth’s returned to fire, the western wrath is done.”