The Nightmare Factory (15 page)

A fair-haired girl in denim slacks and leather jacket stood up and approached me. In the present light her blandness was actually more a murky tomato soup or greasy ketchup than fresh strawberry. She delivered a mechanical statement that began “Welcome to the House of Chains,” and went on and on, spelling out various services and specific terms and finally concluding with a legal disclaimer of some carefully phrased sort. “Yes, yes,” I said. “I’ve read the ads, the ones set in that spikey Gothic type, the ones that look like a page out of an old German bible. I’ve come to the right place, haven’t I?”

“Sure you have,” I thought to myself. “Sure you have,” echoed the blonde with blood-dyed hair. “What will it be tonight?” I inwardly asked me. “What will it be tonight?” she asked aloud. “Do you see anything you like?” we both asked me at the same time. From my expression and casual glances somewhere beyond the claustrophobic space of that tiny foyer, she could see right away that I didn’t see anything, or at least that I wanted her to think I didn’t. We were on the same infra-red wavelength.

We stood there for a moment while she took a long delicious sip from a can of iced tea, pretending with half-closed eyes that it was the best thing she’d ever washed her insides with. Then she pushed a button next to an intercom on the wall behind her and turned her head to whisper some words, though still keeping those violent eyes hooked on mine.

And what did those eyes tell me? They told me of her life as she lived it in fantasy: a Gothic tale of a baroness deprived of her title and inheritance by a big man with bushy eyebrows, which he sometimes sprinkles with glitter. (She once dreamed that he did.) And now this high-born lady spends much of her time haunting second-hand shops, trying to reclaim her aristocratic accoutrements and various articles of her wardrobe which were dispersed at auction by the glitter-browed man who came out of the forest one spring when she was away visiting a Carmelite nunnery. So far she’s done pretty well for herself, managing to assemble many items that for her are charged with sentiment. Her collection includes several dresses in her favorite shade of monastic black. Each of them tapers in severely under the bustline, while belling-out below the waist. A bib-like bodice buttons in her ribs, ascending to her neck where a strip of dark velvet is seized by a pearl brooch. At her wrist: a frail chain from which dangles a heart-shaped locket, a whirlpooling lock of golden hair inside. She wears gloves, of course, long and powdery pale. And tortuous hats from a mad milliner, with dependent veils like the fine cloth screen in a confessional, delicate flags of mourning repentance. But she prefers her enveloping hoods, the ones that gather with innumerable folds at the shoulders of heavy capes lined in satin that shines like a black sun. Capes with deep pockets and generous inner pouches for secreting precious souvenirs, capes with silk strings that tie about her neck, capes with weighted hems which nonetheless flutter weightlessly in midnight gusts. She loves them dearly.

Just so is she attired when the glitter-browed villain peers in her apartment window, accursing the casement and her dreams. What can she do but shrink with terror? Soon she is only doll-size in dark doll’s costume. Nevertheless, quivering bones and feverish blood are the stuffings of this doll, its entrails tickled by fear’s funereal plume. It flies to a corner of the room and cringes within enormous shadows, sometimes dreaming there throughout the night—of carriage wheels rioting in a lavender mist or a pearly fog, of nacreous fires twitching beyond the margins of country roads, of cliffs and stars. Then she awakes and pops a mint into her mouth from an unraveled roll on the nightstand, afterwards smoking half a cigarette before crawling out of bed and grimacing in the light of late afternoon.

“C’mon,” she said after releasing the button of the intercom. “I think I can help you.”

“But I thought you couldn’t leave the reception area,” I explained, almost apologetically. “Of course, if I’d known…”

“C’mon,” she repeated with both hands in her jacket pockets. And her loud heels led me out of that room where every face wore a fake blush.

We walked through a pair of swinging doors which met in the middle and were bound like books, imitation leather tightly stretched across their broad boards and thick spines. Title page:

House of Chains: A Romance in Red Decorated with Diverse Woodcuts

Page one: Deep into December, as the winds of winter howled beyond the walls, two children, one blond and the other dark, found themselves in the heart of a great castle in the heart of a gloomy forest. The central chamber of the castle, as is a heart’s wont, glowed with a warm red light, though the surrounding masonry was of damp gray stone. A great many people of the court capered about, traveling aloft or below by means of sundry stairways, ingressing and egressing through the queerly shaped portals of shadowed corridors (which seemed everywhere), and thronging here and there as in the curious bazaars of oriental scenes. Uncouth voices and harsh music fell upon the children’s ears.

Decoration opposite opening page: Two children, one blond and the other not; passing through a tunnel of tangled forest which looks as if it’s about to descend and devour them both. The girl, open mouthed, is pointing with her left hand while holding onto her brother with the right; the boy, all eyes, seems to be gazing in every direction at once, amazed at the pair’s wondrous incarceration.

“Can I get the ninety-eight cent tour,” I asked my hostess. “I’m from out of town. We don’t have anything like this where I come from. I’m paying for this, right?”

Half of her mouth found it possible to smirk. “Sure,” she said, drawing out the word well past its normal duration. She moved in a couple of false directions before guiding me toward some metal steps which clanged as we descended into a blur of crimson shadows. The vicious vapor followed us downstairs, of course, tagging along like an insanely devoted familiar.

Surprisingly enough, there was a window in the vaguely institutional basement of the House of Chains (I was beginning to enjoy that name), but it was composed of empty panes looking out upon a phony landscape. Pictured were vast regions of volcanic desolation towered over by prehistoric mountains which poked into a dead-end darkness. The scene was illuminated by a low-watt bulb. I felt a bit like a child peeking into a department store model of Santa’s workshop, but I can’t say it didn’t create a mood.

“Nice painting,” I said to my companion. “Kind of spooky, don’t you think?” I looked at her for a reply to my patter, but no counter-patter was forthcoming. She simply stared at me as if I’d just told a joke she didn’t get.

“There’s not much down here,” she finally said. “Just a couple of hallways that don’t go anywhere and a bunch of rooms, most of them locked. If you want to see something spooky, go to the end of that hall and open the door on the right.”

I faithfully followed her instructions. On the door handle hung a rather large animal collar at the end of a chain leash. The chain jingled a little when I pushed open the door. The red light in the hallway barely allowed me to see inside, but there was little to see anyway except a small, empty room. Its floor was bare cement and there was straw laid down upon it. The smell was terrific.

“Well?” she asked when I returned down the hallway.

“It’s a start,” I answered, winking the subtlest possible wink. We just stood for a moment gazing at each other in a light the color of fresh meat. Then she led me back upstairs.

“Where did you say you’re from?” she asked as that noisy stairway amplified our footsteps into reverberant dungeonlike echoes.

“It’s a real small place,” I replied. “About a hundred miles outstate. It’s not even on the maps.”

“And you’ve never been to a place like this before?”

“Uh-uh, never.”

She stopped at the top of the stairs. “Then before we go any further,” she said, “I want to give you some advice and tell you to go back where you came from.”

I just looked at her, shaking my head slowly and insolently.

“Okay, then. Let’s go.”

We went.

And there was much to see on the way—a Punch and Judy panorama which was staged between the chasmical folds of a playhouse curtain of rich inky red, and getting redder every passing second. Each scene flipped by like a page in a storybook: that frozen stage where the players are stiffened with immortality and around which the only thing that stirs is the reader’s roving eye.

Locked doors were no obstacle.

Behind one, where every wall of the room was painted with heavy black bars from floor to ceiling, the Queen of the Singing Kingdom—riding crop raised high—sat atop her magic flying leopard, which unfortunately had been recently transformed into a human. And, sadly, the animal had lost one of its paws. What good fortune that it could still fly! But did it want to? Or did it prefer to lumber lamely around its cage, with the Queen herself growing out of its back like a Siamese twin, her royal blood and his beast’s now flowing together, tributaries from distant worlds mingling in a hybrid harmony. The animal was so pleased that it yowled a tune as the Queen beat time upon its flanks with her stinging crop. Sing, leopard, sing!

Behind another door, one with a swastika splashed negligently on its front in such a way that the paint had dripped from every appendage of the spidery symbol, was a scene similar to the previous. Inside, some colored lights were angled down upon the floor, where a very small man, his hunchback possibly artificial, knelt with head bowed low. His hands were lost in a pair of enormous gloves with shapeless fingers which lolled around like ten drunken jacks-in-the-box. One of the numb fingers was trapped beneath the pointy toe at the base of a lofty boot. See the funny clown! Or rather
jester
in a jingly cap. His ringed eyes patiently gazed upwards into the darkness, attentive to the hollow voice hurling anger from on high. The voice was playing up the moral disparity between its proudly booted self and that humiliated freak upon the floor, contrasting its warrior’s leaping delights with the fool’s dragging sack of amusements.
But couldn’t the stooping hunchback’s fun be beautiful too?
his eyes whispered with their elliptical mouths.
But couldn’t
—Silence! Now the little monkey was going to get it.

Behind still another door, which had no distinguishing marks, a single candle glowed through red glass, just barely keeping the room out of total blackness. It was hard to tell how many were in there, more than a couple, less than a horde. They were all wearing the same gear, little zippers and big zippers like silver stitches scarring their outfits. One very little one had an eyelash caught in it, I could tell that much. For the rest of it, they might as well have been human shadows that merged softly with one another, proclaiming threats of ultimate mayhem and wielding oversized straight razors. But although these gleaming blades were always potently poised, they never came down. It was only make-believe, just like everything else I had seen.

The next door, and for me the last, was at the end of an exhausting climb in what must have been a tower.

“Here’s where you get your money’s worth, mister,” said my date, blind to the signs of apprehension—clutching my coat, lightly pawing my cheek—I was beginning to exhibit like an insecure artist about to reveal his unseen canvasses.

“Show me the worst,” I said, eyeing the undersized door before us.

The situation here was as transparent as the others. Only this time it wasn’t pet leopards, pathetic clowns, or paranoid shadows. It was, in fact, two new characters: a wicked witch and her assistant in the form of an enchanted puppet. The clumsy little creature, due to an incorrigibly mischievous temperament, had behaved badly. Now the witch was in the process, which she had down to perfection, of putting him back in line. She swept across the room, her dark dress swirling like a maelstrom, her hideous face sunken into an abundant hood. Behind her a stained-glass window shone with all the excommunicated tints of corruption. By the light of this infernal rainbow of wrinkled cellophane, she collared her naughty assistant and chained him hands and feet to a formidable-looking stone wall, which buckled aluminum-like when he collapsed against it. She angled down her hooded face and whispered into his wooden ear.

“Do you know what I do with little puppets who’ve been bad?” she inquired. “Do you?”

The puppet trembled a bit and would have beamed bright with perspiration had he been made of flesh and not wood.

“I’ll tell you what I do,” the witch continued half-sweetly. “I make them touch the fire. I burn them from the legs up.”

Then, surprisingly, the puppet smiled.

“And what will you do,” the puppet asked, “with all those old dresses, gloves, veils, and capes when I’m gone? What will you do in your low-rent castle with no one to stare, his brow of glittering silver, into the windows of your dreams?”

Perhaps the puppet was perspiring after all, for his brow was now glistening with tiny flecks of starlight.

The witch stepped back and whipped off her black hood, exposing blond hair beneath it. She wanted to know how I knew about all that stuff, which she had never revealed to anyone. She accused me of peeping-tomism, of breaking and entering, and of illicit curiosity in general.

“Let me out of these chains and I’ll tell you all about myself,” I shouted.

“Forget it,” she answered. “I’m going to get someone to throw you out of here.”

“Then I’ll just have to release myself,” I said more calmly.

The manacles opened around my ankles, my wrists, and the chains fell away.

“You can’t pretend,” I continued as I approached her, “that there isn’t something familiar about me. After all we’ve meant to each other, after all we’ve done together, over and over and over. You’re not bored, are you? I hate to think what that would mean…for both of us. You’ve been cooped up here in this silly place too long. For someone like you, that can be deadly. You’ve always known you were special, haven’t you? That someday—and it was always just around the corner, wasn’t it?—great things were going to happen, great things that didn’t quite have a name yet. But they were there, as real as the velvet embrace of your favorite cape, the one with the silver chain that draws its curtainy wings together at your bosom. As real as the tall candles you love to light during storms, and which you drunkenly knocked over once, burning your right hand. No, don’t cover up the scar, I’m sure no one’s noticed it before now. You love those storms, don’t you, with their chains of raindrops whipping against your windows. All that craving for noise and persecution. All that beautiful craziness! The storms: your eyes stared into their eyes, and into mine.