by Jack Kerouac
“Well,” says G.J. turning to Scotty, as Lousy ghostly comes up-flailing in the leafwild shade of Riverside with his funny sounds and little pebbles he is throwing, approaching us out of eternity, a riddlic being, headed the other side–elf—G.J. is saying “I wonder where Jacky is tonight.”
SCOTTY: Dunno, Gus. He may be over to Dicky Hampshire’s. Or down in the alley spottin.
GUS: Here comes Old Lousy–whenever I see old Lousy coming, I know I’ll go to heaven, he’s an angel Goddam Lousy-
Doctor Sax and I suddenly fly into the upper air like we were dodging some tremendous black force that would have knocked us far–instead we veer up, and over a great deal, so I don’t know where we are, and can’t see how far down, or up, or over, and what precipice and shelf it is. But it’s familiar: it’s not a baptismal font, but it’s in the shrouds and holy hands V-clasped,— Doctor Sax, elongated like a long scorpion, is flying across the moon like a demented cloud. Fiendish, teeth shining, I fly after him in a minor flare of ink– We come to the red-works of his shack, we’re standing in the middle of his house looking down at an open trap door.
“Into that innocent land go as you are now, naked, when you go into the destruction of world snakes. Leery-head may moan, go ahead and do your groan, Leda and the Swan may moan, go a lone groan, listen to your own self–it ain’t got nothin to do with what’s around you, it’s what you do inside at the controls of that locomotive crashing through life—”
“Doctor Sax!” I cried “I don’t understand what you’re saying! You’re mad! You’re mad and I’m mad!”
“Hee hee hee ha ya,” he gaggled gispled, “this is the Moan victory.”
“How mad can you get?” I thought. “This old hero of the shroud is a crazy old fool. What’d I let myself in for?”
We’re standing there staring at the red glow in the trap door; there’s a wooden ladder.
“Go down!” he says impatiently. I jump down that ladder fast, the rungs are hot; I land on a hard dirt floor like clay upon which there are several great straw rugs and scrapes all stretched and torn but keeping your feet from the cold clay–all bright with designs skimmed in and wove, but dancing in the red fire light. Doctor Sax had a forge, it was well nigh impossible to hear the clang of your own heart for the hearty meaty clang of that harp-fire, it was a sodden bum-down red bed of coals, and a blower, a batwing blower, fue, powders were made to undergo hardening and boiling down tests in these works. Doctor Sax was making the herb powder that was going to destroy the Snake.
“Anoint thee, son—” he hallooed in the mud cellar— “we’re going into Homeric battles of the morn–over the dew tops of every one of your favorite pines of Dracut Tigers slants the far red sun that’s just now rising from a bed of night-blue to a day of bluebells in the crime–and the shores of oceans will crash, in Southern Latitude climes, and the bark will plow thou hoary antique sea with a vast funebreal consonant splowsh of bow-foams —you’re in on no mean squabble the butcher’s devil.”
8
SUDDENLY I REALIZED his great black cat was there. It stood four feet tall from ground to spine, with big green eyes and vast slow swishing tail like eternity on a fly–the strangest cat. “Got him in the Andes,” was all the Sax ever told me, “got him in the Andes, on a chestnut tree.” Parakeets he also had, they said exceedingly strange things, “Zangfed, dezeede leeing, fling, flang”—and one that cried in proud Spanish learnt from old bushy brow pirate who farted in his rum, “Hoik kally-ang-goo–Quarent-ay-cinco, señor, quarent-ay-cinco, quarent-ay-cinco.” A vast perwigillar balloon exploded over my head, it was a blue balloon that had risen out of the blue powders in the Forge, and so suddenly everything was blue.
“The Blue Era!” cried Doctor Sax, dashing to his kiln– His shroud flew after him, he stood like a Goethe witch before his furn-forge, tall, emasculated, Nietzschean, gaunt—(in those days I knew Goethe and Nietzsche only from titles in faded gold paint imprinted on the backs of soft brown or soft pale green old velvety Classic books in the Lowell Library)- The Cat swished his great tail. There was no time to lose. The jig was up. I could sense flurrying excitements in the air, as though a flight of ten thousand angels in small-soul form had just flown through the room and through our heads in their heavy tearful destination ever farward round the earth in search of souls that haven’t yet arrived– Poor Doctor Sax stood drooped and sad at his forge works. The fire was blue, the blue cave roof was blue, everything, shadow was blue, my shoes were blue—”Oooh–Ah-man!” I heard a whisper from the cat. It was a Talking Cat? Doctor Sax said “Yes, it was a talking cat once I suppose. Help me with these jars”.
I uprolled me sleeves to help Doctor Sax with the jars of eternity. They were labeled one after another with bright blue and obviously other colors and had Hebraic writing on them–his secrets were Jewish, mixed with some Arabic.
“Introversions! torturous introversions of my mind!” screamed Doctor Sax jumping up and down as hard as he could and screaming at the top of his lungs, his great shroud flapping. I hid in the corner, covered my mouth and nose with fear, my hands ice cold.
“Yaaah!” screeched Doctor Sax turning and protruding his great leering green face with red eyes at me, showing blue teeth in the general blue world of his own fool powders. “Screeeech!” he hollered–he began pulling his jaw cheeks apart to make worse faces and scare me, I was scared enough–he bounced back, head down, like a hip tap dancer pulling his bops away, on swinging heels–
“Doctor Sax,” I cried, “Monsieur Sax, m’fa peur!” (You scare me!)
“Okay,” he instantly said and reared back to normal, flattening against a cellar stanchion pole in a black bereaved shadow. He stood silently for a long while, the Cat swished his mighty tail. The blue light vibrated.
“Here,” he said, “you see the chief powders of the preparation. I have been working on this amazing concoction for twenty years counting ordinary time–I’ve been all over the world son, from one part of it to the other–I sat in hot sun parks down in Peru, in the city of Lima, letting the hot sun solace me– In the nights I was every blessed time inveigled with some Indian or other type witch doctorin bastards to go into some mud alley in back of suspicious looking sewer holes dug in the ground, and come to some old Chinese wisdom usually with his arms hanging low from a big pipeful of World Hasheesh and has lazy eyes and says ‘You gen’men want some-theeng?’ ‘Tis a pimp, son, hides at the secret heart of mystery–has big thick lace curtains in his loot room–and herbs, me boy, herbs. There’s a blueish weird smoke emanates from a certain soft wood to be found far South of here, to be smoked–that when mixed with wild Germunselee witch brews from Orang-Utang Hills in crazy Galapoli–where the vine tree is a hundred foot high, and the orchid bunches knock your head off, and the Snake does slither in the Pan American slime–somewhere in South America, boy, the secret cave of Napoli.”
Whirl bones rattled from the arrangement he had with the forge pull–every time he yanked, and blew on the coals, the string-chain also pulled the tripod on the ceiling that made the rattling bones whirl. There were a thousand interesting things to notice-
Reverently Doctor Sax bent on his knees. Before him was a little glass vacuum ball. Inside of it were the powders he’d taken 20 years of alchemy and world travel to perfect, not to mention everything he had to do with round-the-world doves, the trusteeship of giant secret society black cats, certain areas of the world to patrol, North and South America, for sight of Snake’s suspicious presence–manifold duties on every side.
“When I break this bubble ball and these powders come into contact with the air at the Parapet of the Pit, all my manifold duties will have melted into one white glow.”
“Will everything stay blue till we get to that Snake White?” I asked swiftly.
“No–even from inside the vacuum glass my potent powder will change the atmosphere several times this night as we jostle to our work.”
“Is the cat coming with us sir?”
&nbs
p; “Yes–Pondu Pokie they called him in the Chilean mines —you’d never guess what his Indian name meant– It my boy meant ‘Great Cat Full of Waiting’– A beast like that is born to be great.”
He took the glass ball with its terrible innocent looking morphine-powder-like spoonful, and thrust it in his holy heart’s pocket.
He raised his face to the dark ceiling.
“—” His mouth was wide open for a great cry and he only awped with his neck muscles upstrained to the ceiling —in blueish glows of fire.
He ducked slightly, the cat stiffened, the room shook, a great cranging noise rang across the sky towards the Castle-
“That’s the Eagle’s Lord and Master coming to the fray.”
“What? Who?”—terrified, an air raid of horror everywhere.
“They say there’s a mighty force no one of us knows about and so the eagles and birds make a great to-do and noise and especially tonight when the Invisible Power of the Universe is supposed to be nigh–we don’t know any more than the Sun what the Snake will do–and can’t know what the Golden Being of Immortality can do, or will do, or what, or where– Huge batallions of loud snake-decorated birds it was you just heard above, rattling their sabers above the Lowell night, heading for the duel with the Crooges of the Castle—”
“Crooges?”
“No time to wait son I–figs and Caesar don’t mix–run to the fore with me–come and see the moo mouth maw of death–come get your ass through the western gate of Wrath, come ride the rocky road to orgone mystery. The eyes of those who have died are watching in the night-”
We’re flying in a sad slant whirl right over Centerfield Dracut Tigers, came up-chawing from the cannon of his mad activity and balled across the air talking.
“What eyes?” I cried, leaning my head on a pillow of air; it was dew, & cool.
“The eyes of eternity, son– Look!”
I looked and suddenly in the night it was all filled with floating eyes none of them as bright as stars but like gray plicks in the texture cloak of fields and nightskies–unmistakable, they drooped and dreared to see Doctor Sax and I pass in the wake of the clanging nightbirds ahead. The eyes without seeming to move followed us like flying saucer armies as we fanned out all in great raw wild flight over the fields, sandbank and still-brown foamed river to the Castle.
9
AND THEN IT BEGAN TO RAIN, Doctor Sax deposited himself sadly on a rock right down by the river at the part where Snake Hill lawns stretched down bushy and wild to the Rocky eternal Merrimac shore. “No, son,” said Sax, as the first drops pittered and I look all around at the suddenly dark night with its rainshrouds and listen for spooks from the Castle, “no, me boy, the rain comes to peter me out. Years of my life have piled a great woe-weariness in a one-time worry-house soul that stood on vibrating but solid pillars; no, now it’s doubt returns to flagle me in my old age, where once I’d conquered in youth–sun-lizard days– No this woe and rain makes me want to sit down on a rock and cry. O waves of the river, cry.” He sits down, be-shrouded– I see a little corner of his rubberboat sticking out of his cardinal black hat above its frightening cargo blackbody in drape. The river laps and ululates on rocks. Night creeps across its misty surface to a meet with dumpshores and factory pipes. All Lowell is bathed in blue light.
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.”
10
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.