Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [80]
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