The Nightmare Factory (6 page)

September 21st.
Day came up to the cool, clean offices of G.R. Glacy, the advertising house of whores and horrors, to meet me for lunch. I introduced her around the department to the few people I get along with, and definitely not to those vicious copy-slingers who spread rumors about me. I also showed her my little corner of commercial artistry, including my latest project. “Oh, that’s lovely,” she said when I pointed out the drawing of a nymph with flowers in her freshly shampooed hair. “That’s really nice.” That “nice” remark almost spoiled my day. I asked her to look closely at the flowers mingling freshly in the fresh locks of this mythical being. It was barely noticeable that one of the flower stems was growing out of, or perhaps into, the creature’s head. Day didn’t seem to appreciate the craftiness of my craft very much. And I thought we were making such progress along “offbeat” paths. (Damn that Briceberg!) Perhaps I should wait until we return from our trip before showing her any of my paintings. I want her to be prepared. Everything is all prepared for our vacation, at least; Day finally found someone to take care of the cat who shares her flat.

October 10th.
Good-bye diary. See you when I get back.

November 1st.
With ecstasy and exasperation, I here record a particular episode from Day’s and my tropical sojourn. I’m not sure whether the following adventure represents an impasse or a turning point in the course of our relationship. Perhaps there is some point that I have failed to entirely get. As yet I am, not surprisingly, in the dark. Here, nevertheless, is a fragment from our escapist interlude.

An Hawaiian paradise at midnight. Actually we were just gazing upon the beachside luxuriance from our hotel veranda. Day was bemused by several exotic drinks that wore flowers on their foamy heads. I was in a condition similar to hers. A few moments of heady silence passed, punctuated by an occasional sigh from Day. We heard the flapping of invisible wings whipping the warm air in darkness. We listened closely to the sounds of black orchids growing, even if there were none. “Mmmm,” hummed Day. We were ripe for a whim. I had one, not knowing yet if I could pull it thoroughly off. “Can you smell the mysterious cereus?” I asked, placing one hand on her far shoulder and dramatically passing the other in a horizontal arc before the jungle beyond. “Can you?” I hypnotically repeated. “I can,” said a game Day. “But can we find them, Day, and watch them open in the moonlight?” “We can, we can,” she chanted giddily. We could. Suddenly the smooth-skinned leaves of the night garden were brushing against our smooth-skinned selves. Day paused to touch a flower that was orange or red but smelled of a deep violet. I encouraged us to press on across the flower-bedded earth. We plunged deeper into the dream garden. Faster, faster, faster the sounds and smells rushed by us. It was easier than I thought. At some point, with almost no effort at all, I successfully managed our full departure from known geography. “Day, Day,” I shouted in the initial confusion and excitement. “We’re here. I’ve never shown this to anyone. It’s been such a torturous secret, Day. I’ve wanted to tell you for so long, and show you. No, don’t speak. Look, look.” Oh, the thrill of seeing this dark paradise with new eyes. With doubled intensity would I now see my world. My world. She was somewhere near me in the darkness. I waited, seeing her a thousand ways in my mind before actually gazing at the real Day. I looked. “What’s wrong with the stars, the sky?” was all she said. She was trembling.

At breakfast the next morning I subtly probed her for impressions and judgments of the night before. But she was badly hung over and had only a chaotic recall of the previous night. Oh, well.

Since our return I have been working on a painting entitled “Sanctum Obscurum.” Though I have done this kind of work many times before, I am including in this one elements that I hope will stir Day’s memory and precipitate a conscious recollection of not only a certain night in the islands but of all the subtle and not so subtle messages I have tried to communicate to her. I only pray she will understand.

November 14th.
Stars of disaster! Earthly, and not unearthly asters are all that fill Day’s heart with gladness. She is too much a lover of natural flora to be anything else. I know this now. I showed her the painting, and even imagined she anticipated seeing it with some excitement. But I think she was just anxiously waiting to see what kind of fool I would make of myself. She sat on the sofa, scraping her lower lip with a nervous forefinger. Opposite her I let a little cloth drop. She looked up as if there had been a startling noise. I was not wholly satisfied with the painting myself, but this exhibition was designed to serve an extra-aesthetic purpose. I searched her eyes for a reflection of understanding, a ripple of empathetic insight. “Well?” I asked, the necessity of the word tolling doom. Her gaze told me all I needed to know, and the fatal clarity of the message was reminiscent of another girl I once knew. She gave me a second chance, looking at the picture with a theatrical scrutiny. The picture itself? An inner refuge, cozily crowding about the periphery of a central window of leaded glass. The interior beams with a honeyed haze, as of light glowing evenly through a patterned tapestry. Beyond the window, too, is a sanctuary of sorts, but not of man or terrestrial nature. Outside is an opulent kingdom of glittering colors and velvety jungle-shapes, a realm of contorted rainbows and twisted auroras. Hyperradiant hues are calmed by the glass, so that their strange intensity does not threaten the chromatic integrity of the world within. Some stars, colored from the most spectral part of the spectrum, blossom in the high darkness. The outer world glistens in stellar light and also gleams with a labyrinthine glare inside each twisted form. And upon the window’s surface is the watery reflection of a lone figure gazing out at this unearthly paradise.

“Of course, it’s very good,” she observed. “Very realistic.”

Not at all, Daisy Day. Not realistic in the least.

Some uncomfortable moments later I found out she had to be leaving. It seemed she had made girl plans with a girlfriend of hers to do some things girls do when they get together with others of their kind. I said I understood, and I did. There was no doubt in my mind of the gender of Day’s companion this evening. But it was for a different reason that I was distressed to see her go. Tonight marks the first time, and this I could read in her every move and expression, that she has truly possessed a sure knowledge of my secrets. Of course, she already knew about the meetings I attend and all such things. I’ve even paraphrased and abridged for her the discussion which goes on at these gatherings, always obscuring their real nature in progressively more transparent guises, hoping one day to show her the naked truth. And now, I think, the secret has been stripped bare. Whether she believes them or not, which doesn’t make any difference, she has as clear a notion as Clare ever did of the fabulous truth about me and the others. She has positively gotten the picture now.

November 16th.
Tonight we held an emergency meeting, our assembly in crisis. The others feel there’s a problem, and of course I know they’re right. Ever since I met that girl I could sense their growing uneasiness, which was their prerogative. Now, however, all has changed; my romantic misjudgment has seen to that. They expressed absolute horror that an outsider should know so much. I feel it myself. Day is a stranger now, and I wonder what her loquacious self might disclose about her former friend, not to mention his present ones. A marvelous arcana is threatened with exposure. The secretness we need for our lives could be lost, and with it would go the keys to a strange kingdom.

We’ve confronted these situations before, and I’m not the only one to have jeopardized our secrecy. We, of course, have no secrets from each other. They know everything about me, and I about them. They knew every step of the way my relationship with Daisy. Some of them even predicted the outcome. And though I thought I was right in taking the extravagant chance that they were wrong, I must now defer to their prophecy. Those lonely souls,
mes frères!
“Do you want us to see it through?” they asked in so many words. I consented, finally, in a score of ambiguous, half-hesitant ways. Then they sent me back to my unflowered sanctum. I’ll never do this again, I thought, even though I’ve made this resolution before. I stared at the razory dentes of my furry sculpture for a perilously long while. What that poor girl saw as tongue-like floral appendages were silent: the preservation of such silence, of course, is their whole purpose. I remember that Daisy once jokingly asked me on what I modeled my art…

November 17th.

I do this to pass the hours. Only to pass the hours.

November 17th.
12.00 a.m. Flowers.

ALICE’S LAST ADVENTURE

“Preston, stop laughing. They ate the whole backyard. They ate your mother’s favorite flowers! It’s not funny, Preston.”

“Aaaaa ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Aaaaa ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”

—
Preston and the Starving Shadows

^A
long time ago, Preston Penn made up his mind to ignore the passing years and join the ranks of those who remain forever in a kind of half-world between childhood and adolescence. He would not give up the bold satisfaction of eating insects (crispy flies and crunchy beetles are his favorites), nor that peculiar drunkenness of a child’s brain, induplicable once grown-up sobriety has set perniciously in. The result was that Preston successfully negotiated several decades without ever coming within hailing distance of puberty; he lived unchanged throughout many a perverse adventure in the forties and fifties and even into the sixties. He lived long after I ceased writing about him.

Did he have a prototype? I should say so. One doesn’t just
invent
a character like Preston using only the pitiful powers of imagination. He was very much a concoction of reality, later adapted for my popular series of children’s books. Preston’s status in both reality and imagination has always had a great fascination for me. In the past year, however, this issue has especially demanded my attention, not without some personal annoyance and even anxiety. Then again, perhaps I’m just getting senile.

My age is no secret, since it can be looked up in a number of literary reference sources (see
Children’s Authors of Today
) whose information is only a few years off—I won’t tell you in which direction. Over two decades ago, when the last Preston book appeared (
Preston and the Upside-Down Face
), one reviewer rather snootily referred to me as the “‘Grande Damned’ of a particular sort of children’s literature.” What
sort
you can imagine if you don’t otherwise know, if you didn’t grow up—or not grow up, as it were—reading Preston’s adventures with the Dead Mask, the Starving Shadows, or the Lonely Mirror.

Even as a little girl, I knew I wanted to be an author; and I also knew just the kinds of things I would write. Let someone else give the preadolescents their literary introductions to life and love, guiding them through those volatile years when
anything
might go wrong, and landing them safely on the shores of incipient maturity. That was never my destiny. I would write about my adventures with Preston—my real-life childhood playmate, as everybody knew. Preston would then initiate others into the mysteries of an upside-down, inside-out, sinistral, always faintly askew (if not entirely reversed) universe. A true avatar of topsy-turveydom, Preston gave himself body and soul to the search—in common places such as pools of rainwater, tarnished ornaments, November afternoons—for zones of fractured numinosity, usually with the purpose of fracturing in turn the bizarre icons of his foul and bloated twin, the adult world. He became a conjurer of stylish nightmares, and what he could do with mirrors gave the grown-ups fits and sleepless nights. No dilettante of the extraordinary, but its embodiment. Such is the spiritual biography of Preston Penn.

But I suppose it was my father, as much as Preston’s original, who inspired the stories I’ve written. To put it briefly, Father had the blood of a child coursing through his big adult body, nourishing the over-sophisticated brain of Foxborough College’s associate professor of philosophy. Typical of his character was a love for the books of Lewis Carroll, and thus the genesis of my name, if not my subsequent career. (My mother told me that while she was pregnant, Father
willed
me into a little Alice.) Father thought of Carroll not merely as a clever storyteller but more as an inhumanly jaded aesthete of the imagination, no doubt projecting some of his own private values onto poor Mr. Dodgson. To him the author of the Alice books was, I think, a personal symbol of power, the strange ideal of an unstructured mind manipulating reality to its whim and gaining a kind of objective force through the minds of others.

It was very important that I share these books, and many other things, in the same spirit. “See, honey,” he would say while rereading
Through the Looking Glass
to me, “see how smart little Alice right away notices that the room on the other side of the mirror is not as ‘tidy’ as the one she just came from. Not as
tidy
,” he repeated with professorial emphasis but chuckling like a child, a strange little laugh that I inherited from him. “Not tidy. We know what
that
means, don’t we?” I would look up at him and nod with all the solemnity that my six, seven, eight years could muster.