Doctor Sax

by Jack Kerouac

  The ground shuddered.

  “There’s your heaving Satan now!” he cried, raspy and whirling. “A procession of mourners in black, son, move aside—” And he pointed far off down a dim shaft alley where it seemed I saw a parade of black shrouds with candles but couldn’t see because of the unnatural red glow of the night. Through another cellar window I caught a glimpse of Redblood Merrimac flowing around in brown-red bed-shores. But even as I looked everything trembled to turn white. The milky moon was first to send the radiant message–then the river looked like a bed of milk and lilies, the rain beads like drops of honey. Darkness shivered white. Ahead of me in snow white raiment Doctor Sax suddenly looked like an angel saint. Then suddenly he was a hooded angel in a white tree, and looked at me. I saw waterfalls of milk and honey, I saw gold. I heard Them singing. I trembled to see the halo pure. A giant door opened and a group of men were standing at a rail in front of us in a gigantic hall with cave like walls and impossible-to-see ceihng.

  “Welcome!” was the cry, and an old man with a beak-nose and long white hair lounged effeminately against the rail as the others parted to reveal him.

  “The Wizard!” I heard these words sibilantly cracking from the empurpled lips of Doctor Sax, who was otherwise all white. In the whiteness the Wizard shone all over like an evil glowworm out of the dark. His white eyes now shone like mad dots of fury … they were blank and had snowstorms in them. His neck was twisted and strung and streaked with horror, black, brown, stains, pieces of tortured dead flesh, ropy, awful–

  ‘Those marks on his neck, boy, are when Satan tried to expose him first–a wretched ningling underling from nittlinging.”

  “Flaxy Sax with his Big Nax—” said the Wizard in a strangely quiet voice from the parapet rail. “So they finally are going to dispose of your old carcass anyway? Got you trapped this time?”

  “There are more ways out of this maze than you realize,” spat back Sax, his jaws pulling down his mawkish old face. I saw the bulbous pop of dumb doubt in his eyes for the first time; he seemed to swallow. He was facing his Arch Enemy.

  “Everything’s milk under the bridge this night,” said the Wizard, “—bring your boy to see the Plaything.”

  A kind of truce had been made between them–because it was “the last night,” I heard it whispered. I turned and found handsome courtiers of all kinds standing around in lounging attitudes but deeply, wryly attentive– Among them stood Amadeus Baroque, the mystery boy of the Castle; and young Boaz with a group of others. Opposite the parapet rails, in another part of the Castle I saw with amazement Old Boaz the castle caretaker sitting at an old stove with an old bum’s overcoat, heating his hands over the coals, impassive-faced, snowy– Not long after, he disappeared and came back in a minute peering up at us unpleasantly with old red eyes from a cellar grate or gutter-bar-window in the hall– Ripples of comment rose from the spectators; some were frightening black-garbed Cardinals almost seven feet tall and completely imperturbable and long faced. Sax stood proudly, whitely, before all of them; his grandeur was in the weariness and immovability of his position, coupled with the wracked fires that emanated from his plunging frame and he stalked up and down for a moment in temporary deep thought.

  “Well?” said the Wizard. “Why do you withhold from your self the great joy of finally seeing the Snake of the World your lifelong enemy.”

  “The thing’s … just struck me … silly—” said Sax, emphatically pronouncing every syllable, through thin unmoving lips, the words just expressing out through a grimace and a curse-curled tense tongue–

  “The Thing’s bigger than you loom, Orabus Flabus. Come & look.”

  Doctor Sax took me by the hand and led me to the Parapet of the Pit.

  I looked down.

  “Do ye see those two lakes?” cried Doctor Sax in a loud madvoice that made me wish there weren’t so many people to hear him.

  “Yes sir.” I could see two distant sort of lakes or ponds sitting way below in the dark of the pit as if we were looking down through a telescope at a planet with lakes —and I saw a thin river below the lakes, flicking softly, in a far glow–the whole thing mounted on a land hump like a rock mountain, strangely, familiarly shaped,—

  “And do ye see the river below?” cried Doctor Sax even louder but his voice cracking with emotion and everybody even the Wizard listening.

  “Yes sir.”

  “The lakes, the lakes!” screamed Sax leaping to the parapet and pointing down and cruelly grabbing me by the neck and shoving my head down to see and all the spectators primming their lips in approval– ”those be his eyesl”“

  Hah?”

  “The river, the river!”—pushing me further till my feet began to leave the ground—”that be his mouthl”

  “Howk?”

  “The face of Satan stares you back, a huge and mookish thing, fool!—”

  “The mountain! The mountain!” I began to cry.

  “That—his head.”

  “It’s the Great World Snake,” said the lizard Wizard, turning a wry face to us with its impossible snowy brilliance and eye shroud–a waxy faced dead man turned flower in his moment of Power.

  “Oh sir, Oh sir, no!” I heard myself crying in a loud littleboy voice above the rippling amused laughter of all the courtiers and visiting princes and kings of World Evil from every corner of the crawling globe–some of them heaving thin handkerchiefs to their mouths, politely–I looked up and saw that thousands of Gnomes were ranged in the galleries above in the stone hollow of the Cave– The mining snake beneath was coming up, inch an hour. “In another few minutes,” said the Wizard, “possibly thirty, possibly one, the Snake will reach the redoubt our miners have built for it in their now-ended labors in my service —well done, well cherished!” he cried in a hollow voice that cracked like a public address system with its own echoes— “Hail to the Gnomes, Singers of the Devil Spade!”

  There was a great clatter of spades above–some wood, some iron. I could only see vague masses beyond the crowded antennaed gnomes. Among them wildly flew the Gray Gnome Moths that made the air multiform and crazy as their pinched tragic visages looked out from their night up on the flowing fretworks of the fire, in all heaven’s dark cave soundless, wild, and listening. The Angels of the Judgment Day were making great tremendous clang across the way. I could hear some of the rattling birds that we’d seen at Dracut Tigers. Hubbubs were rising by the minute outside the Castle. The ground again shuddered, this time shook the leaning Wizard off a foot.

  “Old Nakebus wants to maw up his earth too fast.”

  “And you’ll ride his back?” grinned Doctor Sax with one hand elongated dramatically on the faded wood edge of the rail–

  “I’ll lead him through all the land, a hundred feet ahead, bearing my burden torch, till we reach the alkalis of Hebron and you’ll never make a move to stitch my path. It was a fore-ordained path, and one, that you, particularly among the unselected unchosen kind, but willing to put on the wrong regalia and think you are, don’t know your own madness– why you breathe when the sun comes up–Why oo breathe in the morning Ootsypoo.J—I’d rather lead my candle Satan soul with my Promised Snake dragon-ing the earth in a path of slime fires and destruction behind me-meek, small, white, old, the image of a soul, leading my candlelight brigades, my wild and massive Cardinals that you see here ravened like hawks along a line-wall hungry to eat the stones of Victory–with bare sand to wedge and wash it down– Pilgrimages of the Snake– We will darken the very sun in our march. Hamlets will be gobbled up entire, my boy. Cities of skyscrapers will feel the weight of this scale–won’t sit to weigh, or not for long,—and scales and Justice have nothing to do with a dragon’s sides– whether she holds alms, or balms, in her milky embowered palm– Or your Seminal Dovists, half of whom arrested now rot below–I see them floating in the lake of milky slime– Fires shall eat your Lowells–the Snake’ll make the subways his feeding-place–with one coy flick he’ll snop up whole Directories and hsts
of the census, liberals and reactionaries will be washed down by the rivers of his drink, the Left and the Right will form a single silent tapeworm in his indestructible tube– No avail your ordinary fire departments and dull departments–the earth’s returned to fire, the western wrath is done.”

  And Doctor Sax, weakly smiling, held a long pale hand over his heart, where the vacuum ball was pocketed–and waited.

  Now a mighty sigh rose from the Pit, it grew in size, rumbled, shook the earth–a great stench rose, all the noblemen covered their noses and some turned away and some ran out the door. The horrid stench of the ancient Snake that has been growing in the world-ball like a worm in the apple since Adam and Eve broke down and cried.

  “No need to save your little flijabets–Nature’s got no time to dally-hassel with its insects—” sneers the Wizard. The stench of the Snake reminds me of certain alleys I’ve been in–mixed with a horrible hot scent that no bird has ever known, comes up from the bottom of the world, the middle of the earth’s core–a smell of pure fire and burning vegetables and coals of other Epochs and Ages–the brimstone of the actual brimstone underground shelf–burning now but in the nibble of the Great Snake of the World it has acquired a strange reptilian change–the blue worms of the underworld devoured and sending up their flaw– I didn’t blame some of the Noblemen becoming disgusted even with a spectacle for which they’d waited years. Great clouds of dusty mud fell from the invisible living ceiling of eyes and souls–in a phpping rain–when the ground shuddered again, the Snake had inched his hour. Now I knew why there had been earth tremors at Snake Hill. I wondered if this had anything to do with the crack I had seen in the park–and with the dream of the Cannibals rushing over the brow of the hill–the strange afternoon in which I saw all that, and the afternoon just passed when I lay looking at the golden clouds of yesterday-today fanning in solemn mass across the afternoon balloon-

  Suddenly there was a new commotion among the Noblemen not Sax, I or the Wizard could fail to notice– Boaz Jr. had instructed nearby guards to capture Amadeus Baroque in a sensational coup that was the climax of weeks of plotting and chawing over logistical problems of nonsensical action. I recognized Boaz Jr. from his long black shoes. One day that past summer, not long after the treeing of Gene the Moon Man, on the night I’d first seen Doctor Sax in the shroud of the sandbank, we’d made a trap, a hole in the sand, six feet deep, with twigs across, a newspaper, and sand– Doctor Sax came very close to falling in, he later confessed. But Boaz Jr. who (as I now learned) was stalking around the neighborhood looking for talent for his puppet show, fell in–half in–lost a shoe (long, long black shoe, when I saw that thing I shuddered) and ran off red with embarrassment into the night … went back to the Castle, was curt to his father and went immediately to bed with the bats in the attic. He was a young man who wanted to be a vampire, and wasn’t, but was trying to learn–he took instructions from several ineffectual Black Cardinals, the Spider Committee would have nothing to do with him, so he adjusted himself to deep mystical studies, long conversations with the brilliant Condu–and at first was a close friend of Amadeus Baroque who was the only occupant and emissary of the Castle from the city of Lowell. But Boaz Jr. who was ambitious, began to suspect Baroque of Dovist tendencies– Dovism was the idealistic left of the Satanic movement, it claimed that Satan was enamored of doves, and therefore his Snake would not destroy the world but merely be a great skin of doves on coming-out day, falling apart, millions of come-colored doves spurting from it as it shoots from the ground a hundred miles long–most Dovists in fact were impractical and somewhat effeminate people–that is, their idea was absurd, the Snake was real enough– They finally had to go underground when the Wizard issued his Black Decree the year the Gnome Miners revolted but were subdued by Blook the Monster and his trained corps of Giant Jnsect Men–trainers, with sticks and antennae, they lived in huts along the underground Jaw River, next to the insect Caves–giant Spiders, Scorpions, Centipedes and Rats too. The Black Decree forbade Dovism and poor hapless Dovists (including La Contessa it turned out) were rounded up and sent to live on rafts in the Jaw River moored to the huts and insect caves. There the helpless innocent Dovists wept in an eternal gray darkness and mist. Boaz Jr., in his disappointment at not being able to be a vampire, since he wanted none of his evil literal, turned to a black art–he kidnapped boys and paralyzed them from a freezing drug that turned them into puppet dolls–an old secret learned from one of the Egyptian Doctors in the Castle. With these puppets (he shrunk them in a shrinking furnace to proper doll size) he presented his own gala Puppet Show to anybody who wanted to watch–built his own stage, sets and drapes–but it was a horrible and obscene performance, people walked away in disgust. Never the success he wanted to be, Boaz Jr. turned to anti-Dovism and was now having Baroque arrested at the crucial moment to prove to the Wizard that he was a great Solomon statesman and should at least be made his secretary–especially now with the Snake thundering to rise. He had also a tremendous vengeance to pay Baroque–Baroque, early an idealist in his first efforts to get into the Castle among the Wizard’s Forces after that initial discovery of an innocent Doctor Sax manuscript in the winter night that led him, by speculation and investigation, to further discoveries–Baroque became disillusioned and a Dovist, when he saw how really evil some of the Evilists were– Finally when he learned how Boaz Jr. got his puppets he revolted and had the news brought to the Wizard. The Wizard wearily ordered a stop to the puppet shows —Boaz Jr. had by this time finally wormed his way into an amateur show at the Victory Theater on Middlesex Street near the depot and was being booed off the stage by the parents in the Saturday afternoon audience as he snickered in his long black shoes at the footlights, tall & strange–Dicky Hampshire was the usher– Things were thrown at him, he had to run: the little kids who’d been in other acts of the amateur show with him were now running into the audience to join their parents. And that was when the news came that the Wizard was giving orders: no more puppet shows–so Boaz Jr. plotted the end of Baroque– His next plan was to make blood illegal so the Vampires could be jailed to make it ten years’ mandatory sentence for possession. The commotion we were now witnessing was the culmination of Boaz Jr.’s first great triumph– But soon it was apparent that none of this would matter, up heaved the parapet of the pit as an earthquake seemed to strike the Castle and Snake Hill.

  Howling roars from the snake pipes rose.

  11

  GREAT MOLE CAME FARTING FROM THE GROUND. Everybody ran. Milky white horror flowed in the air. Only Sax wasn’t afraid. He ran back to the parapet, which was now uptilted, and stood gripping one crazy rail and reached for his magic herb powders. All the whiteness vanished when Sax jolted that vacuum ball–normal gray of the world returned. It was like walking out of a technicolor movie and suddenly on the gray suit grit of the sidewalk you see small shining bits of glass in the neon lights of disappointed Saturday night. Screech went a wild honk, it rose like a siren from the hot pit, there was an answering deeper rumbling subterranean honk, more like a burp of heavy sounding hell in his Huge Goop– Some courtiers flung anguished hands across their eyes to hear the Snake make voice. It was a tremendous experience full of shuddering and general horror in my bones and in the stones of the Castle. The earth swayed. I wondered what all Lowell was doing–I saw that it was daylight. Sunday morning, the bells of Ste. Jeanne d’Arc calling Gene Plouffe, Joe Plouffe and all the others-There were no explosions in Pawtucketville Peaceful Sunday Morning–impossibility in the choked out grass outside the church where the men stand and smoke after Mass–Leo Martin comes up to St. Louis the Shadow who’s been saying his Rosary with his hawk lips, says “A tu un cigarette?”(Got a cigarette?)

  But Doctor Sax stood at the Parapet, leering down with an insane laugh–his cloaks were black again, his figure was half hidden in the gloom. “Ah priests of the hidden Gethsemane” he was shouting. “Oh molten world of jaw-fires drooling lead–Pittsburgh Steelworks of Paradise–heaven
on earth, earth till you die– Law’s amighty as they said in Montana–but these old Doctor Sax eyes do see a horrid mess of snapdragon shit and pistolwagon blood floating in that wild element where the Snake’s made his being and drink for all nigh on ta– Saviour in the Heaven! Come and lift me up—”

  He sounded delirious and incoherent even to me.

  All the guards and Noblemen who a moment before had been wrangling around the arrest of Amadeus Baroque were now lost in swirls of crowds of them, it amazed me to see the extent and numbers of the Wizard’s Evilist Colony.

  Then I heard the screams of thousands of gnomes in the unbelievably immense cellar beneath the Castle, a cellar so enormous, so full of coffins, and levels, and shaftways that you try to crawl out of and they get increasingly narrower —there were gnomes dying down there.

  The Parapet heaved up farther, it was about to gulp itself up, rocks and dust and sand flew, Doctor Sax took his suction cups and climbed the sheer wall of the Parapet and came to the edge howling.

  I saw the mad frustrated puppeteer with the long black feet running under falling boulders. “There must have been a lot to what Doctor Sax said if he used to stand in the door of the Castle bowing from the waist,” I said to myself in a daze. Boaz Jr. went up, climbed several balconies: he was safe, sitting on another parapet with old shriveled Wizard with his white hair. An updraft from the Pit made all their hair stand wild and flamelike.