The Mephistophelean House (13 page)

“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.”

“The illusion?”

“The illusion of free will. Life, as we know it, necessitates the absorption of other lives. By isolating the human soul I can sever the bonds of contrition.”

“Would you experiment on yourself like you do on your victims?”

“Funny you should bring that up.”

The balustrade was bowdlerized in mist, concealing all but the parapet, the Weeping Tree, and the red box.

The Doctor was exacerbating.

“But in order to begin the experiment, I’ll need your help.”

“Me?”

“Go ahead. Take a look.”

Cloud droplets formed on my clothes.

The red box sat on the plinth.

It was irresistible.

“Open it.”

I opened the red box.

I was blinded by something brilliant.

“Now do you see?”

A faded sun burned meekly.

“It’s just a mirror.”

“Look again.”

The Doctor was right.

It wasn’t a mirror.

Desire, drives, the mind, the soul, discordant facets of a whole began take a heavy toll upon a self I once extolled.

“Now do you see what you were all along?”

I could see the parts.

Mouth. Eyes. Ear. Hair.