The Architecture of Fear (13 page)

The stairway is of endless black marble, polished to a mirror-sheen, giving back no reflection. The SS officers, alike as a thousand black-uniformed puppets, are goose-stepping in orderly, powerful ranks down the polished stairway. Toward them, up the stairway, a thousand blonde and blue-eyed Valkyries, sequin-painted and brass-brassiered, flaxen locks bleached and bobbed and marcelled, are marching in rhythm—a Rockette chorus line of Lorelei.

Wir werden weiter marschieren,

wenn alles in Sherben fallt,

denn heute gehort uns Deutchland

und morgen die ganze Welt!

Needles plunge downward.

Inward.

Distancing.

Der Fuhrer
leans and peers inward. He wipes the needles with his tongue and snorts piggishly.
Our final revenge,
Hitler promises, in a language he seems to understand. The dancers merge upon the stairway, form a thousand black-and-white swastikas as they twist their flesh together into DNA coils.

Sieg Heil!

Someday.

A thousand bombs burn a thousand coupled moths into a thousand flames.

A thousand, less one.

Distance.

***

While he hated and feared all of his fantasies, he usually hated and feared this one most of all. When he peered through the windows of the building, he saw rows of smokestacks belching uncounted souls into the recoiling sky.

But often there was no fence. Only a main entrance.

A Grand Entrance. Glass and aluminum and tile. Uncorroded, but obscured by thin dust. A receptionist's desk. A lobby of precisely arranged furniture: art moderne or coldly functional—nonetheless serving no function in the sterile emptiness.

No one to greet him, to verify an appointment, to ask for plastic cards and indecipherable streams of numbers. He always thought of this as some sort of hospital, possibly abandoned in the panic of some unleashed plague virus.

He always avoided the lifts. (Shouldn't he think of them as elevators?) Instead he followed her through the deserted (were they ever occupied?) hallways and up the hollow stairwell that gave back no echo to their steps.

***

There is another fantasy that he cannot will away.

He is conscious of his body in this fantasy, but no more able to control his body than to control his fantasy.

He is small—a child, he believes, looking at the boyish arms and legs that are restrained to the rails of the hospital bed, and examining the muted tenderness in the faces of the white-clad supplicants who insert the needles and apply the electrodes to his flesh.

Electric current makes a nova of his brain. Thoughts and memories scatter like a deck of cards thrown against the sudden wind. Drugs hold his raped flesh half-alert against the torture. Smoke-stacks spew forth a thousand dreams. All must be arranged in a New Order.

A thousand cards dance in changing patterns across his vision. Each card has a face, false as a waxen mask. His body strains against the leather cuffs; his scream is taken by a soggy wad of tape on a wooden paddle.

The cards are telling him something, something very essential. He does not have time to read their message.

I'm not a fortune teller!
he screams at the shifting patterns of cards. The wadded tape steals his protests.

The rape is over. They are wheeling him away.

The cards filter down from their enhanced freedom, falling like snowflakes in a dying dream.

And then he counts them all.

All are there. And in their former order.

Order must be maintained.

The Old Order is stronger.

But he knows—almost for certain—that he has never been a patient in any hospital. Ever.

His health is perfect. All too perfect.

***

She always led him through the maze within—upward, onward, forward. The Eternal Female/Feminine Spirit-Force. Goethe's personal expression of the ultimate truth of human existence—describing a power that transcended and revoked an informed commitment to damnation—translated awkwardly into pretentious nonsense in English. He remembered that he had never read Goethe, could not understand a word of German.

His therapists said it was a reaction to his adoption in infancy as a German war orphan by an American family. The assertive and anonymous woman represented his natural mother, whom he had never known. But his birth certificate proved that he had been born to unexceptional middle-class American parents in Cleveland, Ohio.

And his memories of them were as faded and unreal as time-leached color slides. Memories fade before light, and into night.

False memories. Reality a sudden celluloid illusion.

Lightning rips the night.

Doctor! It's alive!

***

Another fantasy evokes (or is invoked by, say his therapists) visions of
Macbeth,
of scary campfire stories, of old films scratched and eroded from too many showings. His (disremembered) parents (probably) only allowed him to partake of the first, but Shakespeare knew well the dark side of dreams.

Sometimes he is on a desolate stretch of moor, damp and furred with tangles of heather. (He supposes it is heather, remembering
Macbeth.)
Or perhaps he is on a high mountain, with barren rocks thrusting above dark forest. (He insists that he has never read
Faust,
but admits to having seen
Fantasia.)
Occasionally he stands naked within a circle of standing stone, huge beneath the empty sky. (He confesses to having read an article about Stonehenge.) And in this same Gothic context, he has another such fantasy, and he never speaks of its imperfectly remembered fragments to anyone—not to lovers, therapists, priests, or his other futile confidants.

It is, again (to generalize), a fantasy in which he is again the observer. Passive, certainly. Helpless, to be sure. But the restraints hold a promise of power to be feared, of potential to be unleashed.

Hooded figures surround him, center upon his awareness. Their cloaks are sometimes dark and featureless, sometimes fantastically embroidered and colored. He never sees their faces.

He never sees himself, although he senses he stands naked and vulnerable before them.

He
is there. In their midst.
They
see him.

It is all that matters.

They reach/search/take/give/violate/empower.

There is no word in English.

His therapists tell him this is a homosexual rape fantasy.

There is no word in any language.

There is only the power.

***

The stairway climbed inexorably as she led him upward into the building. Returning—and they always returned, he knew now—the descent would be far more intolerable, for he would have his thoughts to carry with him.

A stairwell door: very commonplace usually (a Hilton or a Hyatt?), but sometimes of iron-bound oak, or maybe no more than a curtain. No admonition. No advice. On your own. He would have welcomed
Fire Exit Only
or
Please Knock.

She always opened the door—some atavistic urge of masculine courtesy always surfaced, but he was never fast enough or certain enough—and she held it for him, waiting and demanding.

Beyond, there was always the same corridor, circling and enclosing the building. If there were any significance to the level upon which they emerged, it was unknown to him. She might know, but he never asked her. It terrified him that she might know.

There is innocence, if not guiltlessness, in randomness.

He decided to look upon the new reality beyond the darkened windows of the corridor. She was impatient, but she could not deny him this delay, this respite.

Outside the building he saw stretches of untilled farmland, curiously demarcated by wild hedgerows and stuttering walls of toppled stone. He moved to the next window and saw only a green expanse of pasture, its grassy limitlessness ridged by memories of ancient fields and villages.

He paused here, until she caught at his arm, pulled him away. The next window—only a glimpse—overlooked a city that he was given no time to recognize, had he been able to do so through knowledge of the fire that consumed it.

There were doors along the other side of the corridor. He pretended that some might open upon empty apartments, that others led to vacant offices. Sometimes there were curtained recesses that suggested confessionals, perhaps secluding some agent of a higher power—although he had certainly never been a Catholic, and such religion that he recalled only underscored the futility of redemption.

She drew aside a curtain, beckoned him to enter.

He moved past her, took his seat.

Not a confessional. He had known that. He always knew where she would lead him.

The building was only a facade, changing as his memory decayed and fragmented, recognizing only one reality in a dream-state that had consumed its dreamer.

A stadium. A coliseum. An arena.

Whatever its external form, it inescapably remained unchanged in its function.

This time the building's interior was a circular arena, dirt-floored and ringed by many tiers of wooden bleachers. The wooden benches were warped and weathered silver-gray. Any paint had long since peeled away, leaving splinters and rot. The building was only a shell, hollow as a whitened skull, encircled by derelict rows of twisted benches and sagging wooden scaffolding.

The seats were all empty. The seats had been empty, surely, for many years.

He sensed a lingering echo of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" played on a steam calliope. Before his time. Casey at the bat. This was Muddville. Years after. Still no joy.

He desperately wished another reality, but he knew it would always end the same. The presentation might be random, might have some unknowable significance. What mattered was that he knew where he really was and why he was here.

Whether he wanted to be here was of no consequence.

She suggested, as always.
The woman at the bank who wouldn't approve the car loan. Send for her.

She was only doing her job.

But you hated her in that moment. And you remember that hatred.

Involuntarily, he thought of her.

The numberless windows of the building's exterior pulsed with light.

A window opened.

Power, not light, sent through. And returned.

And the woman was in the arena. Huddled in the dirt, too confused to sense fear.

The unseen crowd murmured in anticipation.

He stared down at the woman, concentrating, channeling the power within his brain.

She screamed, as invisible flames consumed her being. Her scream was still an echo when her ashes drifted to the ground.

He looked for movement among the bleachers. Whatever watched from there remained hidden.

Another,
she urged him.

He tried to think of those who had created him, this time to send for them. But the arena remained empty. Those he hated above all others were long beyond the vengeance of even his power.

Forget them. There are others.

But I don't hate them.

If not now, then soon you will. There is an entire world to hate.

And, he understood, too many nights to come.

Some are Born to sweet delight,

Some are Born to Endless Night.

—William Blake,

Auguries of Innocence

Joseph Lyons is a new writer and a student of Marta Randall. His first published story, "Trust Me" erodes our comfortable notions of the nature of horror and of reality. Because Lyons tells his tale with fablelike economy, of all stories in this volume his is the shortest.

At the first cry he looked up at the clock on the mantel and nodded. Almost four minutes late tonight.

At the second cry, the one that usually faded into a stifled moan, he rustled his newspaper and brought it closer to his face.

Thirty seconds later, with the first clear scream, he tightened all over, holding his breath, and slowly lowered his newspaper. Across the room his wife raised her head from her book.

"That child," she said, speaking into the air. When he said nothing: "The least a person might do is recognize when it's their turn."

He shook his newspaper. "She's old enough, goddammit, not to do this every night."

The next scream was louder. It rose and trailed off, erupting in muffled words.

He swore to himself and pushed himself heavily to his feet. The overstuffed chair sighed as he rose. "Next time...," he said. "Just remember, it's your turn next time."

She waited until he had left the room and then dropped her eyes to her book.

The hallway was dark, because he insisted that no child nine years old still needed a night light. In the small bedroom the girl was already sitting up in bed, her fingers wound skin tight around the edges of the blanket clutched at her throat. He sat down on the bed and turned on her table lamp, and her eyes winced at the sudden spill of light between them. Deep shadows darkened the rest of the room.

"Don't tell me," he said, "let me guess. They came in that window, right?"

She nodded and swallowed, her eyes fixed on his.

"And then they saw you, and they came after you. They were all dark and crawly, slimy things—"

A soundless plea formed on her lips.

"—with long green fingers reaching for you. And they came up on the bed and slid along there, right toward you, little by little... right... toward... you..."

She choked back a scream and whispered faintly, "Don't. Stop."

He waited, watching her. "I don't know," he said. "Just what do you want? Damn it, what do you want me to do?" And when she only stared at him in silence, her face trembling, he said, "Okay, then, tell me: Where are they now?"

"They were so real, so real." She shook her head helplessly. "You don't believe me."

"That's right. I don't believe you." He glared at her until she looked down. "And I don't think you were asleep, either."

"But I was asleep. I had a dream. It was a nightmare."

He said, leaning slowly toward her, "No it wasn't." The bed creaked beneath him. "You didn't dream them at all. And you know why? Because they're real."