Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [78]
‘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