Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [82]
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.
Doctor Sax was bellowing in the fury “And now you will know that the Great Snake of the World lies coiled beneath this Castle and beneath Snake Hill, site of my birth, a hundred miles long in enormous convolution reaching down into the very bowels and grave of the earth, and for all the ages of man has been inching, inching, inch an hour, up, up, to the sun, from the unspeakable central dark depths to which originally he had been hurled–now returning and now only five or four minutes from breaking the crust of earth once more and emerging in the breaking boil of evil, full flaming fury of the dragon into the golden sunshines of Sunday morn as bells of men ring around the countryside, to crawl across the land in a path of fire, destruction and slime, to make horizons blacken with his huge and horizontal crawl. Yah, mad shriveled wizard that falmigates around the Cee–famous fuckface of history-come back from detestable grave to gather vampires, gnomes and spiders and committees of the black mass ecclesiasts and werewolves of the soul aspiring to destroy mankind again with evil, final evil,— Yaah fiend of dirty fires—”
The gnomes below began to crawl out of the Pit in groups like cockroaches running out of a hot stove–years of labor, awful drudgery in secret barges and tiny dirt-carts in the undergrounds of Old Swift Waters Merrimac —the whole thing exploding now in their faces.
Now more than ever I saw there were an infinite number of levels in the Castle, millions of candles which I now saw were held individually each one by gnomes, no end to those, and various levels above the parapet that had rows of black-garbed figures of the Wizard’s mad and evil church, heretics in black smoke, on other levels there were women with wild scraggly hair, on other levels spiders with funny eyes looking down almost human–the whole mad gallery swaying in the demented gloom. There were things going on I couldn’t fathom, a big slide of some sort, a rack of neckties hanging–the enormous complexity. Just one level above the parapet where we were I saw a boat floating by, and people on it sitting in easy chairs under reading lamps talking. And they had no idea what was below. It was like old women rocking on the porch in New England, who don’t realize that the goddam thing is underneath the earth, placidly reading the New England News. And I saw everything, I saw a colored porter cleaning out ashtrays, cutting along and taking a nip out of a bottlè in his backpocket and disappearing thru the swinging doors. He didn’t know where he was. Farther up I saw distant parapets that were so far away and so far up I doubt that the people up there could see as far down as to see the Snake, or see anything but a blur or maybe they were able from that great height to see that it was a Snake’s head better than I could– I wondered that the people of Lowell had thought this an abandoned Castle–I looked far down the hall, and couldn’t see across, except for vague movements like parades in India bringing up the incense for the Wizard– I called to Doctor Sax “Is this the Castle of the World?”
“It is fitting for the snake of the world, yes,” he said, —”My son, this is judgment day.”
“But I only started to stand on the sandbank–I didn’t want no JUDGMENT DAY!” Everything else was vibrating as I said these words–I wanted