Crackpot Palace

by Jeffrey Ford

  The experiment was begun. In a small room just off the observatory, Enche lay on her stomach, on a tall flat bed, her neck tilted so that her chin rested on the surface of the platform. She directly faced the end of a short, clear tube, its opening positioned directly at her left eye. Circling her head was a strap that held a device whose two thin claw ends were inserted beneath her eyelid. This “eye stay,” as it was called, once a tool of the torturer who wanted to deny a victim’s need for sleep, disabled the blinking response of the eye. Arbiton stood on one side of Enche and Perul on the other. “Good luck, sir,” said the servant, and his employer answered, “If we’re lucky, luck will have nothing to do with it.” Checking his pocket watch again and noting that the moment had come when the star had risen to its calculated position, he pulled a cord that was attached through a hole in the wall to the shutter on the eyepiece of the great telescope.

  Arbiton put the intervening time between the pull of the cord and the appearance of the ray of light at five minutes. Perul stated four and three-quarters minutes, precisely as he’d predicted. It came, like a bright thread, slowly inching its way through the center of the clear tube aimed at Enche’s eye. It literally punctured the lens, like a needle going through flesh—a pliant shudder at the iris and then a hair-thin trickle of blood. The instant it entered, the girl screamed as if she were on fire. Her body quickly began shuddering and Arbiton reached for her. Perul interceded, saying, “Two more seconds,” and Arbiton later attested they were the longest two seconds of his life. Finally, when the necessary time had passed, Perul himself swept her off the table and carried her to her room. She was unconscious and already burning with a fever. All the rest of that night the luminist and his servant sat by her bedside, brought cool compresses for her head, and forced sips of water into her. Arbiton states that at one point he’d thought she was going to die and was severely shaken, and it was precisely at that point that Perul said to him, “There is starlight in her head.”

  Enche awoke before dawn and complained of sparks behind her eyes and a terrible headache, and then fell back into a fitful sleep. When she awoke again the following afternoon, she didn’t exhibit any signs of pain, but she wore an odd, dull affect. “Circles,” Perul repeated to her for an hour, but Arbiton, having seen enough, overstepped his bounds and demanded that his employer leave her alone. And this is precisely where Arbiton left the history of the experiment. Perul fired him on the spot. With no emotion and few words: “You are dismissed.” Arbiton states that he “stood stunned for a moment,” but when Perul again started intoning the word “circle,” he knew his time at Dark See was over. He left the room, packed his things, and at twilight descended the hill carrying his bag.

  From this point forward, we must rely on Perul’s notes for what is known to be true. He records that Enche never achieved a consciousness more than a general stupor. She could be led around, and fed, and would speak occasionally, but it was never as if she had fully wakened from sleep. “I’m racing,” she’d suddenly yell. “My soul is dizzy,” she’d whimper. When he’d put his hands to her head, he stated that he could feel it hum with the energy of the stars. On the second night after the experiment, when Enche had been put to bed, he wrote, “Her condition could continue in this manner for a lifetime, and one thing I foolishly overlooked is how much younger she is than myself. I could very well pass on before seeing the results of this experiment. Steps must be taken, and I see a way to gain fast results and perhaps help the poor girl’s condition in the process.” Following these words was a detailed plan for a person-size canister in which Enche could fit, submerged in Lud Fog.

  At this point all manner of speculation might enter the story of the Dream of Reason, but there is little reliable information. After the plans for the larger Lud Fog chamber, there comes only one more word from Perul—“Monstrous”—scrawled across an otherwise blank page of his journal. The next authenticated piece of evidence of what transpired comes from Issac Hadista, a hunter, who, when interviewed years after the experiment had become famous, told that he’d been hired by Perul to hunt a strange and dangerous figure that haunted the woods behind the observatory. “The man’s hair had fallen,” said Hadista, “like a ship going under. And he told me the thing I hunted looked like a young woman but was really a demon loosed on the world because of a failed experiment he’d conducted. He begged me not to shoot her in the head, saying it would release her ancient spirit into the atmosphere and would infect me and overtake my soul. ‘Through the heart,’ he told me. ‘It’s the only way.’ ”

  Hadista set off through falling snow, in amidst the barren white trees of the wood. With the snow on the ground it was easy to track her. She lurched out of the shadows at twilight, bouncing from tree trunk to tree trunk, moaning loudly. According to Hadista, her flesh was a pale green (some attribute this to her having spent considerable time in the Lud Fog). She sensed the hunter’s presence and came down a snow-covered trail toward him, one hand out in front, calling, “Help me.” “I was not fooled by the demon’s scheming,” Hadista stated. “I lifted my rifle and shot her through the heart, and then a second time before she fell dead.” On his way back to the observatory, carrying her body as he’d been instructed, he recounted, “It was pitch black, and all I had to light my way were the stars.”

  When Perul performed the autopsy upon the brain of Enche Jenawa, what he found astounded him. The diamond dust he’d expected was absent, but what was there changed, in a moment, his entire conception of the nature of stars and the formation of the universe. What he found there, at the core of the young girl’s gray matter, was, instead, nothing. “Nothing,” Perul wrote in his results. “I should have known, but there it is.” And from the experiment later named the Dream of Reason, humanity came to learn that the stars were made of nothing—hard, shiny, chips of nothing. Cosmologists understood now that at the dawn of everything there was nothing, and when the universe burst to life, the nothing was shattered and thrown out into the darkness of space to make way for the sun and the Earth. Science had prevailed, and Perul was lauded with honorariums and testimonials at the University of Veldanch.

  After this experiment to end all experiments, Perul retired from research and returned to the town of Libledoth where every night he frequented the café and drank to excess bottles of Rose Ear Sweet. His use of the winterspice increased as well, and in only a few years his appearance grew haggard, his hair now a frizzled storm cloud over his shoulders. He turned to mysticism in his later years and claimed that he could contact the spirit world. In messages from the other side that he would record during long bouts of automatic writing, the spirits told him that the stars were giant balls of flaming gas, like the sun. These and other delusions began to crowd out his reason. He ended his days in Debtor’s Prison, completely insane, mumbling to himself and endlessly turning tight pirouettes.

  A Note About “The Dream of Reason”

  I remember when my novel The Physiognomy came out, a number of reviewers said that it had an anti-science message. What foolishness. I’m most definitely pro-science, but I am also most definitely anti bad science or quackery. I’m afraid there’s a difference. Would it have been better if I’d written admiringly about the crackpot philosophy and practices of physiognomy? This story, “The Dream of Reason,” is also a look at the scientific method gone awry with the exception of perhaps one aspect, which I wasn’t even aware of when writing it. In the story, Perul believes that stars are made of diamond and their twinkling is merely caused by the reflection of the sun. As it turns out, this bit of fictional whim-wham has a sort of truth to it. The story was written in 2008. In 2011, astronomers discovered a heavenly body about four thousand light years from Earth, an eighth of the way to the center of the Milky Way, most likely the remnant of a once massive star. It has lost its outer layers to the effects of the pulsar it circles and is now a planet made almost entirely of diamond. Who knows what other future half-truths lie dormant within the pages of this story?
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  The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper

  Just before I dozed off to sleep last night, I had a vision. I saw, with my eyes closed, a room that was wallpapered with the most amazing scenery of a battle between angels and demons. It was brilliantly colorful and so amazingly detailed. I can still see the deep red of the evil horde, their barbed tails and bat wings—classic Madison Avenue horned demons, but playing for keeps, slaying angels with their tridents. The angels wore billowing white robes and, of course, had feathered wings in contrast to the slick bat-like ones of the enemy. Halos, gleaming swords, harps to call the troops to charge, they poured out of the clouds, riding beams of light toward Earth, where the demons crawled out of cracks in the ground, smoking volcano craters, and holes in giant trees. The middle part of the wall, from just above knee height to the top of the rib cage, was taken up by the actual battle. The upper part held scenes in Heaven as the troops made ready to descend and the dead and wounded were brought in. The lower part of the wall was the stalactite-riddled caverns of burning Hell, showing the incredible numbers of Satan’s minions. If you’ve ever seen the Where’s Waldo? books—it looked like one of those, or at least every inch was as crowded with as many characters, painted in the style and color of Matthias Grünewald. One thing to keep in mind—I knew this was a war between Heaven and Hell, not the war in Heaven in which Lucifer and his posse were evicted.

  The sight of this wallpaper jazzed me back to consciousness, and I said to Lynn, who was dozing off herself, “I just saw War Between Heaven and Hell wallpaper.” She was silent for a while, but I knew from her breathing she wasn’t asleep. “What do you think of that?” I said. She laughed. “I have to get up early tomorrow,” she said. A few moments later I was describing it to her. When I was done, I said to her, “What do you think that means?” “You’ve got a screw loose,” she said. “It was so colorful and intricate,” I told her. “Great,” she said, and a few seconds later, she was lightly snoring.

  I lay awake for a while and contemplated the War Between Heaven and Hell wallpaper. In my imagination a woman got this wallpaper installed in a room in her house. Eventually she noticed that the scenes changed each day while she was at work. On the days when she had a bad day at the office, Satan’s troops had gained the advantage, and the days when things went well for her, Heaven took the lead. Months went by and Heaven really started to kick ass, pushing the demons back into Hell and then invading the smoky underworld in order to finish them off. The last battalion of winged demons had pulled back into the frozen parts at the center of Hell where they’d amassed their infernal artillery and battle beasts, falling into a siege amid the ice mountains. The angels surrounded the last bole of Hell and used longbows and spears.

  For the woman to take all of this in each night, she had to get down on the floor and move a desk out of the way to see the spot where the final battle was taking place. Just as it looked like the demons were going to be obliterated, she started to feel bad for them. She felt an uneasiness with the lack of balance represented by the wallpaper’s scenario. Since the wallpaper scenes had something to do with what happened to her through the day, she decided to try to turn the tide of the battle by performing acts of evil, things that would reflect badly upon her and ensure she would have a bad day. She put her plan into practice, and the demons began to rally. A call came through on her cell phone, and Satan engaged her as an agent in the War Between Heaven and Hell. That’s when I fell asleep.

  I woke up this morning from a dream of a kind of monastery in a snowy wood. I think a monastery is a place where monks live, but this place had Catholic priests living in it. Lynn and I came to it after slogging through swamps and through a snow-covered forest. We were totally lost. The place was built from the most marvelous-smelling rosewood, and it seemed to have been carved from enormous blocks of it rather than put together with nails and screws. The trees came right up to the sides of the walls, as if the monastery had been there for a very long time and they had grown up next to where it was built. There were a number of larger buildings linked to each other by screened hallways. Some of these buildings were more than one story and were decorated with gargoyles of demons and angels.

  We were met by a priest out in the yard behind the open gates at sundown. We were weary and hungry. He told us to hurry if we wanted to eat. We followed him through the winding, dark hallways of the place. The shadows were kept at bay only by lit candles. We were led to a small kitchen and given a piece of stale bread and a bowl of onion soup. The priest introduced himself as Father Heems. He was a very downtrodden-looking fellow, his face filled with worry lines, and his hands shaking slightly. He told us the place was haunted by the Holy Ghost, and that the spirit was angry. Just the night before we arrived it had strangled the caretaker, whose body he pointed out to us lying next to the stove wrapped in black plastic and tied at the feet and head. “You’ve got to keep moving. You can’t sleep till dawn. If you doze off, the ghost will strangle you through your dreams. A breeze will pass over you and you will feel it tightening its fingers around your throat.”

  We got up from the table and started walking. “That’s it,” cried Heems, “keep moving.” Three other priests, two very old ones and a slow heavy one, and Lynn and I, along with Heems, moved through the corridors of the place—up stairs, down stairs, through catacombs, along balconies. When we passed through the dungeon, there was a cell with straw on the floor and about a dozen young children milling around behind the bars. The heavy priest told us that the children were safe from the ghost at night behind the bars. I asked, “Why don’t we go in there too?” And Heems yelled, “Pipe down and keep moving.” Every time I’d begin to feel tired and slow down I’d hear the wind blow outside and feel a breeze creeping down the hallway.

  Somewhere in the middle of the night, Father Heems called out to one of the other old priests as we made our way along, “Where is Father Shaw?” This almost made me stop in my tracks, because Father Shaw was the head priest at the church I went to as a kid. He was stern to the verge of cruelty and looked like an emaciated Samuel Beckett. We all hated him. Even the parents hated him. When we kids went to the church for any kind of instruction, like before First Communion or for Confirmation training, he’d appear and spew rants about how we were a bunch of little sinners and he wished we could feel Christ’s pain from the crucifixion. Anytime I ever went to Confession and that little door in the dark confessional would slam back and I’d see his profile through the grating, I’d nearly crap my pants. The prayers he’d give you to say for even some minor infraction of disobedience would be an onerous weight.

  Soon after the mention of Father Shaw, daylight came and we could finally stop walking. In some kind of weird chain of events and reasoning, Heems made me the new caretaker for the time Lynn and I would stay there, which if I had my preference was not going to be very long. First, though, we had to figure out where we were. Once the other priests left us alone for a few minutes, Lynn asked me, “What’s with the kids in the dungeon?” “That’s not cool,” I said. But then Heems was back with a canvas bag for me with a shoulder strap on it and a long stick with a nail poking out the end. I got the idea that I was meant to police the grounds. So I started around the outside of the building, poking candy wrappers (there were a lot of candy wrappers for some reason). When I made my way around half the building, I came to a little alcove, and lying in the middle of it on the snow was Father Shaw—dead. He was leaking from somewhere onto the snow, and the snow had turned the color of Mountain Dew. His flesh was rotted and yellow. The second I saw him I started breathing through my mouth to avoid smelling him. I thought, “Do I have to clean this shit up all by myself?” Time skipped here, and I was tying a string around the plastic that covered his legs. I woke up.

  While eating breakfast, I realized why Father Shaw had appeared in this dream. I’d mentioned him to Lynn not two days earlier. We were at a wedding in South Jersey, staying in a place called the Seaview in Absecon. It’s a re
ally old hotel and golf resort. That’s where the wedding reception was being held. Lynn had stayed there once for a conference she was participating in, and she told me that the hallways of the place reminded her of the hotel in The Shining.

  After the reception was over, we went and got our room, hung out for a while, and then headed downstairs to the bar to have a drink. On the way, we passed a room, like a study, with wooden paneling and stuffed chairs and glassed bookcases and with a plaque over the door on the outside that read SHAW. I immediately thought of Father Shaw and told Lynn about him. The memory of his face prompted me to recall that my father was in the hospital to have a cyst removed once when we were kids, and when he returned from his stay, I’d overheard him say to my mother that Shaw had been in there at the same time, dying of cancer. “All of his great solace in God went right out the window,” my father said. “Shaw wailed just as loud as the rest of the sinners.” At the moment he said this, he was eating a cracker with a sardine on it. He gulped down the cracker in one bite, licked his forefinger, his thumb, and then smiled, giving the advantage to either Heaven or Hell. I’m still not sure which.

  A Note About “The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper”

  Everything that happens in this story, the dreams, the thoughts, the dialogue, the places and people, is all true. The series of events, because they happened so closely together and seemed centered around the theme of religion, made them cohere for me as a story, albeit one with a kind of strange structure. That odd structure, though, and the real-life events that read like fiction, were perfect for a new anthology I’d heard of, Interfictions 2, to be published by Small Beer Press. The editors were Delia Sherman and Chris Barzak. As a little something unusual, I thought that for the after note for this story, I’d attach another little story, also influenced by my experience with religion.