Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [77]
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.
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!