Eventually someone did inquire about the contemplative powers and meditations of the recluse, and toward what end they might have been directed. ‘What Ascrobius sought,’ the doctor explained, ‘was not a remedy for his physical disease, not a cure in any usual sense of the word. What he sought was an absolute annulment, not only of his disease but of his entire existence. On rare occasions he even spoke to me,’ the doctor said, ‘about the uncreation of his whole life.’ After Dr Klatt had spoken these words there seemed to occur a moment of the most profound stillness in the ruined factory where we were gathered. No doubt everyone had suddenly become possessed, as was I, by a single object of contemplation – the absent grave, which Dr Klatt described as an uncreated grave, within the hilltop graveyard outside of town. ‘You see what has happened,’ Dr Klatt said to us. ‘He has annulled his diseased and nightmarish existence, leaving us with an uncreated grave on our hands.’ Nobody who was at the ruined factory that night, nor anyone else in the northern border town, believed there would not be a price to pay for what had been revealed to us by Dr Klatt. Now all of us had become meddling accomplices in those events which came to be euphemistically described as the ‘Ascrobius escapade.’
Admittedly the town had always been populated by hysterics of one sort or another. Following the Ascrobius escapade, however, there was a remarkable plague of twilight talk about ‘unnatural repercussions’ that were either in the making or were already taking place throughout the town. Someone would have to atone for that uncreated existence, or such was the general feeling as it was expressed in various obscure settings and situations. In the dead of night one could hear the most reverberant screams arising at frequent intervals from every section of town, particularly the backstreet areas, far more than the usual nocturnal outbursts. And upon subsequent overcast days the streets were all but deserted. Any talk confronting the specifics of the town’s night terrors was either precious or entirely absent: perhaps, I might even say, it was as uncreated as Ascrobius himself, at least for a time.
It was inevitably the figure of Dr Klatt who, late one afternoon, stepped forward from the shadows of an old warehouse to address a small group of persons assembled there. His shape barely visible in the gauzy light that pushed its way through dusty windowpanes, Klatt announced that he might possess the formula for solving the new-found troubles of the northern border town. While the warehouse gathering was as wary as the rest of us of any further meddling in the matter of Ascrobius, they gave Klatt a hearing in spite of their reservations. Included among this group was a woman known as Mrs Glimm, who operated a lodging house – actually a kind of brothel – that was patronized for the most part by out-of-towners, especially business travelers stopping on their way to some destination across the border. Even though Klatt did not directly address Mrs Glimm, he made it quite clear that he would require an assistant of a very particular type in order to carry out the measures he had in mind for delivering us all from those intangible traumas that had lately afflicted everyone in some manner. ‘Such an assistant,’ the doctor emphasized, ‘should not be anyone who is exceptionally sensitive or intelligent.
‘At the same time,’ he continued, ‘this person must have adefinite handsomeness of appearance, even a fragile beauty.’ Further instructions from Dr Klatt indicated that the requisite assistant should be sent up to the hilltop graveyard that same night, for the doctor fully expected that the clouds which had choked the sky throughout the day would linger long into the evening, thus cutting off the moonlight that often shone so harshly on the closely huddled graves. This desire for optimum darkness seemed to be a conspicuous giveaway on the doctor’s part. Everyone present at the old warehouse was of course aware that such ‘measures’ as Klatt proposed were only another instance of meddling by someone who was almost certainly an impostor of the worst sort. But we were already so deeply implicated in the Ascrobius escapade, and so lacking in any solutions of our own, that no one attempted to discourage Mrs Glimm from doing what she could to assist the doctor with his proposed scheme.
So the moonless night came and went, and the assistant sent by Mrs Glimm never returned from the hilltop graveyard. Yet nothing in the northern border town seemed to have changed. The chorus of midnight outcries continued and the twilight talk now began to focus on both the ‘terrors of Ascrobius’ and the ‘charlatan Dr Klatt,’ who was nowhere to be found when a search was conducted throughout every street and structure of the town, excepting of course the high backstreet house of the dreadful recluse. Finally a small party of the town’s least hysterical persons made its way up the hill which led to the graveyard. When they approached the area of the absent grave, it was immediately apparent what ‘measures’ Klatt had employed and the fashion in which the assistant sent by Mrs Glimm had been used in order to bring an end to the Ascrobius escapade.
The message which those who had gone up to the graveyard carried back to town was that Klatt was nothing but a common butcher. ‘Well, perhaps not a common butcher,’ said Mrs Glimm, who was among the small graveyard party. Then she explained in detail how the body of the doctor’s assistant, its skin finely shredded by countless incisions and its parts numerously dismembered, had been arranged with some calculation on the spot of the absent grave: the raw head and torso were propped up in the ground as if to serve as the headstone for a grave, while the arms and legs were disposed in a way that might be seen to demarcate the rectangular space of a graveyard plot. Someone suggested giving the violated body a proper burial in its own gravesite, but Mrs Glimm, for some reason unknown even to herself, or so she said, persuaded the others that things should be left as they were. And perhaps her intuition in this matter was felicitous, for not many days later there was a complete cessation of all terrors associated with the Ascrobius escapade, however indefinite or possibly nonexistent such occurrences might have been from the start. Only later, by means of the endless murmurs of twilight talk, did it become apparent why Dr Klatt might have abandoned the town, even though his severe measures seemed to have worked the exact cure which he had promised.
Although I cannot say that I witnessed anything myself, others reported signs of a ‘new occupation,’ not at the site of the grave of Ascrobius, but at the high backstreet house where the recluse once spent his intensely contemplative days and nights. There were sometimes lights behind the curtained windows, these observers said, and the passing figure outlined upon those curtains was more outlandishly grotesque than anything they had ever seen while the resident of that house had lived. But no one ever approached the house. Afterward all speculation about what had come to be known as the ‘resurrection of the uncreated’ remained in the realm of twilight talk. Yet as I now lie in my bed, listening to the wind and the scraping of bare branches on the roof just above me, I cannot help remaining wide awake with visions of that deformed specter of Ascrobius and pondering upon what unimaginable planes of contemplation it dreams of another act of uncreation, a new and far-reaching effort of great power and more certain permanence. Nor do I welcome the thought that one day someone may notice that a particular house appears to be missing, or absent, from the place it once occupied along the backstreet of a town near the northern border.
THE BELLS WILL SOUND FOREVER
I was sitting in a small park on a drab morning in early spring when a gentleman who looked as if he should be in a hospital sat down on the bench beside me. For a time we both silently stared out at the colorless and soggy grounds of the park, where things were still thawing out and signs of a revived natural life remained only tentative, the bare branches of trees finely outlined against a gray sky. I had seen the other man on previous visits to the park and, when he introduced himself to me by name, I seemed to remember him as a businessman of some sort. The words ‘commercial agent’ came to my mind as I sat gazing up at the thin dark branches and, beyond them, the gray sky. Somehow our quiet and somewhat halting conversation touched upon the subject of a particular town near the northern border, a place where
I once lived. ‘It’s been many years,’ the other man said, ‘since I was last in that town.’ Then he proceeded to tell me about an experience he had had there in the days when he often traveled to remote locales for the business firm he represented and which, until that time, he had served as a longterm and highly dedicated employee.
It was late at night, he told me, and he needed a place to stay before moving on to his ultimate destination across the northern border. I knew, as a one-time resident of the town, that there were two principal venues where he might have spent the night. One of them was a lodging house on the west side of town that, in actuality, functioned primarily as a brothel patronized by travelling commercial agents. The other was located somewhere on the east side of town in a district of once-opulent, but now for the most part unoccupied houses, one of which, according to rumor, had been converted into a hostel of some kind by an old woman named Mrs Pyk, who was reputed to have worked in various carnival sideshows – first as an exotic dancer, and then later as a fortune-teller – before settling in the northern border town. The commercial agent told me that he could not be sure if it was misdirection or deliberate mischief that sent him to the east side of town, where there were only a few lighted windows here and there. Thus he easily spotted the vacancy sign that stood beside the steps leading up to an enormous house which had a number of small turrets that seemed to sprout like so many warts across its façade and even emerged from the high peaked roof that crowned the structure. Despite the grim appearance of the house (a ‘miniature ruined castle,’ as my companion in the park expressed it), not to mention the generally desolate character of the surrounding neighborhood, the commercial agent said that he was not for a moment deterred from ascending the porch steps. He pressed the doorbell, which he said was a ‘buzzer-type bell,’ as opposed to the type that chimed or tolled its signal. However, in addition to the buzzing noise that was made when he pressed the button for the doorbell, he claimed that there was also a ‘jingle-jangle sound’ similar to that of sleigh bells. When the door finally opened, and the commercial agent confronted the heavily made-up face of Mrs Pyk, he simply asked, ‘Do you have a room?’
Upon entering the vestibule to the house, he was made to pause by Mrs Pyk, who gestured with a thin and palsied hand toward a registration ledger which was spread open on a lectern in the corner. There were no other visitors listed on the pages before him, yet the commercial agent unhesitatingly picked up the fountain pen that lay in the crux of the ledger book and signed his name: Q. H. Crumm. Having done this, he turned back toward Mrs Pyk and stooped down to retrieve the small suitcase he had brought in with him. At that moment he first saw Mrs Pyk’s left hand, the non-palsied hand, which was just as thin as the other but which appeared to be a prosthetic device resembling the pale hand of an old mannikin, its enameled epidermis having flaked away in several places. It was then that Mr Crumm fully realized, in his own words, the ‘deliriously preposterous’ position in which he had placed himself. Yet he said that he also felt a great sense of excitation relating to things which he could not precisely name, things which he had never imagined before and which it seemed were not even possible for him to imagine with any clarity at the time.
The old woman was aware that Crumm had taken note of her artificial hand. ‘As you can see,’ she said in a slow and raspy voice, ‘I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself, no matter what some fool tries to pull on me. But I don’t receive as many gentleman travelers as I once did. I’m sure I wouldn’t have any at all, if it were up to certain people,’ she finished. Deliriously preposterous, Mr Crumm thought to himself. Nevertheless, he followed Mrs Pyk like a little dog when she guided him into her house, which was so poorly lighted that one was at a loss to distinguish any features of the décor, leaving Crumm with the heady sensation of being enveloped by the most sumptuous surroundings of shadows. This feeling was only intensified when the old woman reached out for a small lamp that was barely glowing in the darkness and, with a finger of her real hand, turned up its wick, the light pushing back some of the shadows while grotesquely enlarging many others. She then began escorting Crumm up the stairs to his room, holding the lamp in her real hand while simply allowing her artificial hand to hang at her side. And with each step that Mrs Pyk ascended, the commercial agent seemed to detect the same jingle-jangle of bells that he had first heard when he was standing outside the house, waiting for someone to answer his ring. But the sound was so faint, as if heavily muffled, that Mr Crumm willingly believed it to be only the echo of a memory or his wandering imagination.
The room in which Mrs Pyk finally deposited her guest was on the highest floor of the house, just down a short, narrow hallway from the door leading to the attic. ‘By that time there seemed nothing at all preposterous in this arrangement,’ Mr Crumm told me as we sat together on the park bench looking out at that drab morning in early spring. I replied that such lapses in judgment were not uncommon where Mrs Pyk’s lodging house was concerned; at least such were the rumors I had heard during the period when I was living in the town near the northern border.
When they had reached the hallway of the highest floor of the house, Crumm informed me, Mrs Pyk set aside the lamp she was carrying on a table positioned near the top of the last flight of stairs. She then extended her hand and pushed a small button that protruded from one of the walls, thereby activating some lighting fixtures along either wall. The illumination remained dismal – actively dismal, as Crumm described it – but served to reveal the densely patterned wallpaper and the even more densely patterned carpeting of the hallway which led, in one direction, to the opening onto the attic and, in the other direction, to the room in which the commercial agent was supposed to sleep that night. After Mrs Pyk unlocked the door to this room and pushed another small button upon the wall inside, Crumm observed how cramped and austere was the chamber in which he was being placed, unnecessarily so, he thought, considering the apparent spaciousness, or ‘dark sumptuousness,’ as he called it, of the rest of the house. Yet Crumm made no objection (nor felt any, he insisted), and with mute obedience set down his suitcase beside a tiny bed which was not even equipped with a headboard. ‘There’sa bathroom just a little way down the hall,’ Mrs Pyk said before she left the room, closing the door behind her. And in the silence of that little room, Crumm thought that once again he could hear the jingle-jangle sound of bells fading into the distance and the darkness of that great house.
Although he had put in quite a long day, the commercial agent did not feel in the least bit tired, or possibly he had entered into a mental state beyond the boundaries of absolute fatigue, as he himself speculated when we were sitting on that bench in the park. For some time he lay on the undersized bed, still fully clothed, and stared at a ceiling that had several large stains spread across it. After all, he thought, he had been placed in a room that was directly below the roof of the house, and apparently this roof was damaged in some way which allowed the rain to enter freely through the attic on stormy days and nights. Suddenly his mind became fixed in the strangest way upon the attic, the door to which was just down the hall from his own room. The mystery of an old attic, Crumm whispered to himself as he lay on that miniature bed in a room at the top of an enormous house of enveloping shadows. Feelings and impulses that he had never experienced before arose in him as he became more and more excited about the attic and its mysteries. He was a traveling commercial agent who needed his rest to prepare himself for the next day, and yet all he could think about was getting up from his bed and walking down the dimly lighted hallway toward the door leading to the attic of Mrs Pyk’s shadowy house. He could tell anyone who cared to know that he was only going down the hall to use the bathroom, he told himself. But Crumm proceeded past the door to the bathroom and soon found himself helplessly creeping into the attic, the door to which had been left unlocked.
The air inside smelled sweet and stale. Moonlight entered by way of a small octagonal window and guided the commercial agent among t
he black clutter toward a light-bulb that hung down from a thick black cord. He reached up and turned a little dial that protruded from the side of the lightbulb fixture. Now he could see the treasures surrounding him, and he was shaking with the excitation of his discovery. Crumm told me that Mrs Pyk’s old attic was like a costume shop or the dressing room of a theater. All around him was a world of strange outfits spilling forth from the depths of large open trunks or dangling in the shadows of tall open wardrobes. Later he became aware that these curious clothes were, for the most part, remnants from Mrs Pyk’s days as an exotic dancer, and subsequently a fortune-teller, for various carnival sideshows. Crumm himself remembered observing that mounted along the walls of the attic were several faded posters advertising the two distinct phases of the old woman’s former life. One of these posters portrayed a dancing girl posed in mid-turn amidst a whirl of silks, her face averted from the silhouetted heads representing the audience at the bottom of the picture, a mob of bald pates and bowler hats huddled together. Another poster displayed a pair of dark staring eyes with long spidery lashes. Above the eyes, printed in a serpentine style of lettering, were the words: Mistress of Fortune. Below the eyes, spelled in the same type of letters, was a simple question: WHAT IS YOUR WILL?
Aside from the leftover garments of an exotic dancer or a mysterious fortune teller, there were also other clothes, other costumes. They were scattered all over the attic – that ‘paradise of the past,’ as Crumm began to refer to it. His hands trembled as he found all sorts of odd disguises lying about the floor or draped across a wardrobe mirror, elaborate and clownish outfits in rich velvets and shiny, colorful satins. Rummaging among this delirious attic-world, Crumm finally found what he barely knew he was seeking. There it was, buried at the bottom of one of the largest trunks – a fool’s motley complete with soft slippers turned up at the toes and a two-pronged cap that jangled its bells as he pulled it over his head. The entire suit was a mad patchwork of colored fabrics and fitted him perfectly, once he had removed all of the clothing he wore as a commercial agent. The double peaks of the fool’s cap resembled the twin horns of a snail, Crumm noticed when he looked at his image in the mirror, except that they drooped this way and that whenever he shook his head to make the bells jangle. There were also bells sewn into the turned-up tips of the slippers and hanging here and there upon the body of the jester’s suit. Crumm made them all go jingle-jangle, he explained to me, as he pranced before the wardrobe mirror gazing upon the figure that he could not recognize as himself, so lost was he in a world of feelings and impulses he had never before imagined. He no longer retained the slightest sense, he said, of his existence as a travelling commercial agent. For him, there was now only the jester’s suit hugging his body, the jingle-jangle of the bells, and the slack face of a fool in the mirror.