The Nightmare Factory

  To all appearances it was an ordinary storeroom cluttered with a variety of objects. “Make yourself comfortable,” the man said as he indicated to Dregler the way into the room. “Leave whenever you like, just close the door behind you.”

  Dregler gave a quick look around the room. “Isn’t there anything else?” he asked meekly, as if he were the stupidest student of the class. “This is it, then?” he persisted in a quieter, more dignified voice.

  “This is it,” the man echoed softly. Then he slowly closed the door, and from inside Dregler could hear footsteps walking back down the hallway.

  The room was an average understairs niche, and its ceiling tapered downward into a smooth slant where angular steps ascended upward on the other side. Elsewhere its outline was obscure, confused by bedsheets shaped like lamps or tables or small horses; heaps of rocking chairs and baby-chairs and other items of disused furniture; bandaged hoses that drooped like dead pythons from hooks on the walls; animal cages whose doors hung open on a single hinge; old paint cans and pale tarps speckled like an egg; and a dusty light fixture that cast a gray haze over everything.

  Somehow there was not a variety of odors in the room, each telling the tale of its origin, but only a single smell pieced like a puzzle out of many: its complete image was dark as the shadows in a cave and writhing in a dozen directions over curving walls. Dregler gazed around the room, picked up some small object and immediately set it down again because his hands were trembling. He found himself an old crate to sit on, kept his eyes open, and waited.

  Afterward he could not remember how long he had stayed in the room, though he did manage to store up every nuance of the eventless vigil for later use in his voluntary and involuntary dreams. (They were compiled into that increasingly useful section marked “Personal Confrontations with the Medusa,” a section that was fleshing itself out as a zone swirling with red shapes and a hundred hissing voices.) Dregler recalled vividly, however, that he left the room in a state of panic after catching a glimpse of himself in an old mirror that had a hair-line fracture slithering up its center. And on his way out he lost his breath when he felt himself being pulled back into the room. But it was only a loose thread from his overcoat that had gotten caught in the door. It finally snapped cleanly off and he was free to go, his heart livened with dread.

  Dregler never let on to his friends what a success that afternoon had been for him, not that he could have explained it to them in any practical way even if he desired to. As promised, they did make up for any inconvenience or embarrassment Dregler might have suffered as a result of, in Gleer’s words, the “bookstore incident.” The three of them held a party in Dregler’s honor, and he finally met Gleer’s new wife and her accomplice in the “hoax.” (It became apparent to Dregler that no one, least of all himself, would admit it had gone further than that.) Dregler was left alone with this woman only briefly, and in the corner of a crowded room. While each of them knew of the other’s work, this seemed to be the first time they had personally met. Nonetheless, they both confessed to a feeling of their prior acquaintance without being able, or willing, to substantiate its origins. And although plenty of mutually known parties were established, they failed to find any direct link between the two of them.

  “Maybe you were a student of mine,” Dregler suggested.

  She smiled and said: “Thank you, Lucian, but I’m not as young as you seem to think.”

  Then she was jostled from behind (“Whoops,” said a tipsy academic), and something she had been fiddling with in her hand ended up in Dregler’s drink. It turned the clear bubbling beverage into a glassful of liquid rose-light.

  “I’m so sorry. Let me get you another,” she said, and then disappeared into the crowd.

  Dregler fished the earring out of the glass and stole away with it before she had a chance to return with a fresh drink. Later in his room he placed it in a small box, which he labelled: “Treasures of the Medusa.”

  But there was nothing he could prove, and he knew it.

  IV

  It was not many years later that Dregler was out on one of his now famous walks around the city. Since the bookstore incident, he had added several new titles to his works, and these had somehow gained him the faithful and fascinated audience of readers that had previously eluded him. Prior to his “discovery” he had been accorded only a distant interest in scholarly and popular circles alike, but now every little habit of his, not least of all his daily meanderings, had been turned by commentators into “typifying traits” and “defining quirks.” “Dregler’s walks,” stated one article, “are a constitutional of the modern mind, urban journeys by a tortured Ulysses sans Ithaca.” Another article offered this back-cover superlative: “the most baroque inheritor of Existentialism’s obsessions.”

  But whatever fatuities they may have inspired, his recent books—A Bouquet of Worms, Banquet for Spiders, and New Meditations on the Medusa—had enabled him to “grip the minds of a dying generation and pass on to them his pain.” These words were written, rather uncharacteristically, by Joseph Gleer in a highly favorable review of New Meditations for a philosophical quarterly. He probably thought that this notice would revive his friendship with his old colleague, but Dregler never acknowledged Gleer’s effort, nor the repeated invitations to join his wife and him for some get-together or other. What else could Dregler do? Whether Gleer knew it or not, he was now one of them. And so was Dregler, though his saving virtue was an awareness of this disturbing fact. And this was part of his pain.

  “We can only live by leaving our ‘soul’ in the hands of the Medusa,” Dregler wrote in New Meditations. “Whether she is an angel or a gargoyle is not the point. Each merely allows us a gruesome diversion from some ultimate catastrophe which would turn us to stone; each is a mask hiding the worst visage, a medicine that numbs the mind. And the Medusa will see to it that we are protected, sealing our eyelids closed with the gluey spittle of her snakes, while their bodies elongate and slither past our lips to devour us from the inside. This is what we must never witness, except in the imagination, where it is a charming sight. And in the word, no less than in the mind, the Medusa fascinates much more than she appalls, and haunts us just this side of petrification. On the other side is the unthinkable, the unheard-of, that-which-should-not-be: hence, the Real. This is what throttles our souls with a hundred fingers—somewhere, perhaps in that dim room which caused us to forget ourselves, that place where we left ourselves behind amid shadows and strange sounds—while our minds and words toy, like playful, stupid pets, with diversions of an immeasurable disaster. The tragedy is that we must steer so close in order to avoid this hazard. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror.”

  Now Dregler had reached the outermost point of his daily walk, the point at which he usually turned and made his way back to his apartment, that other room. He gazed at the black door with the brass knob and knocker, then glanced down the street at the row of porchlights and bay windows, which were glowing madly in the late dusk. Looking skyward, he saw the bluish domes of streetlamps: inverted halos or open eyes. A light rain began to sprinkle down, nothing very troublesome. But in the next moment Dregler had already sought shelter in the welcoming brownstone.

  He soon came to stand before the door of the room, keeping his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat and away from temptation. Nothing had changed, he noticed, nothing at all. The door had not been opened by anyone since he had last closed it behind him on that hectic day years ago. And there was the proof, as he knew, somehow, it would be: that long thread from his coat still dangled from where it had been caught between door and frame. Now there was no question about what he would do.

  It was to be a quick peek through a hand-wide crack, but enough to risk disillusionment and the dispersal of all the charming traumas he had articulated in his brain and books, scattering them like those peculiar shadows he supposed lingered in that room. And the voices—would he hear that hissing which heralded her presence
as much as the flitting red shapes? He kept his eyes fixed upon his hand on the doorknob, turning it gently to nudge open the door. So the first thing he saw was the way it, his hand, took on a rosy dawn-like glow, then a deeper twilight crimson as it was bathed more directly by the odd illumination within the room.

  There was no need to reach in and flick the lightswitch just inside. He could see quite enough as his vision, still exceptional, was further aided by the way a certain cracked mirror was positioned, giving his eyes a reflected entrance into the dim depths of the room. And in the depths of the mirror? A split-image, something fractured by a thread-like chasm that oozed up a viscous red glow. There was a man in the mirror; no, not a man but a manikin, or a frozen figure of some kind. It was naked and rigid, leaning against a wall of clutter, its arms outstretching and reaching behind, as if trying to break a backwards fall. Its head was also thrown back, almost broken-necked; its eyes were pressed shut into a pair of well-sealed creases, two ocular wrinkles which had taken the place of the sockets themselves. And its mouth gaped so widely with a soundless scream that all wrinkles had been smoothed away from that part of the old face.

  He barely recognized this face, this naked and paralyzed form which he had all but forgotten, except as a lurid figure of speech he once used to describe the uncanny condition of his soul. But it was no longer a charming image of the imagination. Reflection had given it charm, made it acceptable to sanity, just as reflection had made those snakes, and the one who wore them, picturesque and not petrifying. But no amount of reflection could have conceived seeing the thing itself, nor the state of being stone.

  The serpents were moving now, coiling themselves about the ankles and wrists, the neck; stealthily entering the screaming man’s mouth and prying at his eyes. Deep in the mirror opened another pair of eyes the color of wine-mixed water, and through a dark tangled mass they glared. The eyes met his, but not in a mirror. And the mouth was screaming, but made no sound. Finally, he was reunited, in the worst possible way, with the thing within the room.

  Stiff inside of stone now, he heard himself think. Where is the world, my words? No longer any world, any words, there would only be that narrow room and its two inseparable occupants. Nothing other than that would exist for him, could exist, nor, in fact, had ever existed. In its own rose-tinted heart, his horror had at last found him.

  CONVERSATIONS IN A DEAD LANGUAGE

  Conveniens vitae mors fuit ista suae.

  Ovid

  I

  After changing out of his uniform, he went downstairs to search the kitchen drawers, rattling his way through cutlery and cooking utensils. Finally he found what he wanted. A carving knife, a holiday knife, the traditional blade he’d used over the years. Knifey-wifey.

  First he carved out an eye, spearing the triangle with the point of his knife and neatly drawing the pulpy thing from its socket. Pinching the blade, he slid his two fingers along the blunt edge, pushing the eye onto the newspaper he’d carefully placed next to the sink. Another eye, a nose, a howling oval mouth. Done. Except for manually scooping out the seedy and stringy entrails and supplanting them with a squat little candle of the vigil type. Guide them, holy lantern, through darkness and disaster. To me. To meezy-weezy.

  He dumped several bags of candy into a large potato chip bowl, fingering pieces here and there: the plump caramels, the tarty sour balls, the chocolate kisses for the kids. A few were test-chewed for taste and texture. A few more. Not too many, for some of his co-workers already called him Fatass, almost behind his back. And he would spoil the holiday dinner he had struggled to prepare in the little time left before dark. Tomorrow he’d start his diet and begin making more austere meals for himself.

  At dark he brought the pumpkin out to the porch, placing it on a small but lofty table over which he’d draped a bedsheet no longer in normal use. He scanned the old neighborhood. Beyond the railings of other porches and in picture windows up and down the street glowed a race of new faces in the suburb. Holiday visitors come to stay the night, without a hope of surviving till the next day. All Souls Day. Father Mickiewicz was saying an early morning mass, which there would be just enough time to attend before going to work.

  No kids yet. Wait. There we go, bobbing down the street: a scarecrow, a robot, and—what is it?—oh, a white-faced clown. Not the skull-faced thing he’d at first thought it was, pale and hollow-eyed as the moon shining frostily on one of the clearest nights he’d ever seen. The stars were a frozen effervescence.

  Better get inside. They’ll be coming soon. Waiting behind the glass of the front door with the bowl of candy under his arm, he nervously grabbed up palmsful of the sweets and let them fall piece by piece back into the bowl, a buccaneer reveling in his loot…a grizzled-faced pirate, eye-patch over an empty socket, a jolly roger on his cap with “x” marking the spot in bones, running up the front walk, charging up the wooden stairs of the porch, rubber cutlass stuffed in his pants.

  “Trick or treat.”

  “Well, well, well,” he said, his voice rising in pitch with each successive “well.” “If it isn’t Blackbeard. Or is it Bluebeard, I always forget. But you don’t have a beard at all, do you?” The pirate shook his head shyly to say no. “Maybe we should call you Nobeard, then, at least until you start shaving.”

  “I have a moustache. Trick or treat, mister,” the boy said, impatiently holding up an empty pillow case.

  “You do have a nice moustache at that. Here you go, then,” he said, tossing a handful of candy into the sack. “And cut a few throats for me,” he shouted as the boy turned and ran off.

  He didn’t have to say those last words so loudly. Neighbors. No, no one heard. The streets are filled with shouters; tonight, one the same as another. Listen to the voices all over the neighborhood, music against the sounding board of silence and the chill infinity of autumn.

  Here come some more. Goody.

  Trick or treat: an obese skeleton, meat bulging under its painted-costume bones. How unfortunate, especially at his age. Fatass of the boneyard and the schoolyard. Give him an extra handful of candy. “Thanks a lot, mister.” “Here, have more.” Then the skeleton waddled down the porch steps, its image thinning out into the nullity of the darkness, candy-filled paper bag rattling away to a whisper.

  Trick or treat: an overgrown baby, bibbed and bootied, with a complexion problem erupting on its pre-adolescent face. “Well, cootchie coo,” he said to the infant as he showered its open bunting with candy. Baby sneered as it toddled off, pouchy diapers slipping down its backside, disappearing once again into the black from which it had momentarily emerged.

  Trick or treat: midget vampire, couldn’t be more than six years old. Wave to Mom waiting on the sidewalk. “Very scary. Your parents must be proud. Did you do all that make-up work yourself,” he whispered. The little thing mutely gazed up, its eyes underlidded with kohl-dark smudges. It then used a tiny finger, pointy nail painted black, to indicate the guardian figure near the street. “Mom, huh? Does she like sourballs? Sure she does. Here’s some for Mom and some more for yourself, nice red ones to suck on. That’s what you scary vampires like, eh?” he finished, winking. Cautiously descending the stairs, the child of the night returned to its parent, and both proceeded to the next house, joining the anonymous ranks of their predecessors.

  Others came and went. An extraterrestrial with a runny nose, a smelly pair of ghosts, an asthmatic tube of toothpaste. The parade thickened as the night wore on. The wind picked up and a torn kite struggled to free itself from the clutches of an elm across the street. Above the trees the October sky remained lucid, as if a glossy veneer had been applied across the night. The moon brightened to a teary gleam, while voices below waned. Fewer and fewer disguises perpetrated deception in the neighborhood. These’ll probably be the last ones coming up the porch. Almost out of candy anyway.

  Trick or treat. Trick or treat.

  Remarkable, these two. Obviously brother and sister, maybe twins. No, the girl looks older.
A winning couple, especially the bride. “Well, congratulations to the gride and broom. I know I said it backwards. That’s because you’re backwards, aren’t you? Whose idea was that?” he asked, tossing candy like rice into the bag of the tuxedoed groom. What faces, so clear. Shining stars.

  “Hey, you’re the mailman,” said the boy.

  “Very observant. You’re marrying a smart one here,” he said to the groom.

  “I saw you were, too,” she replied.

  “Course you did. You’re sharp kids, both of you. Hey, you guys must be tired, walking around all night.” The kids shrugged, unaware of the meaning of fatigue. “I know I am after delivering the mail up and down these streets. And I do that every day, except Sunday of course. Then I go to church. You kids go to church?” It seemed they did; wrong one, though. “You know, at our church we have outings and stuff like that for kids. Hey, I got an idea—”

  A car slowed down on the street, its constabulary spotlight scanning between houses on the opposite side. Some missing Halloweeners maybe. “Never mind my idea, kids. Trick or treat,” he said abruptly, lavishing candy on the groom, who immediately strode off. Then he turned to the bride, on whom he bestowed the entire remaining contents of the large bowl, conveying a scrupulously neutral expression as he did so. Was the child blushing, or was it just the light from the jack-o-lantern?

  “C’mon, Charlie,” his sister called from the sidewalk.

  “Happy Halloween, Charlie. See you next year.” Maybe around the neighborhood.

  His thoughts drifted off for a moment. When he regained control the kids were gone, all of them. Except for imaginary ones, ideals of their type. Like that boy and his sister.