The Dreadful Doctor Faust by K. H. Koehler Read online

  THE DREADUL DOCTOR FAUST

  by

  K. H. Koehler

  Published by K. H. Koehler Books

  http://www.khkoehler.com

  ***

  SMASHWORDS EDITION

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, save those clearly in the public domain, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 K. H. Koehler. All rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the Publisher, except for short quotes used for review or promotion. For information address the Publisher.

  Cover design by K. H. Koehler

  * * *

  THEN

  1

  The Church of Saint Bridget sat disemboweled.

  Built in 1873 on the East River waterfront by the well-meaning Irish immigrants of Vinegar Hill, it failed to thrive despite their nurturing. Some said it was the dead brown fish smell of the river that wafted through the open clerestory windows in the summer, or the cobblestoned roads that never saw repair, or the careless rambling look of the cathedral, so at odds with the shapely modern white chapels that had come to dot Brooklyn. There may have been a history of violence, or some mischief, but if so, the story had never come to light.

  In only a hundred years the church had become a shell. By the late 1970’s, the last bits of statuary had been scraped from the structure in a thorough religious abortion, and the grounds de-sanctified. Time and blistering industrial wind did their work. The cathedral leaned, the unwelcomed light of day spiking through massive nesting holes in the ceiling. Mosaic windows, once full of leering Ecclesiastical images, were kicked out by kids so that jagged glass glinted like alien orifices all over the surface of the building. Inside, the crumbling plaster, studs and buckled floor made a deathtrap for the children who dared each other to venture into the structure. There were tarry patches of oil upon which floated crushed beer cans, used condoms, syringes. The floor simmered with dust and rats.

  Urban renewal was discussed, the church boarded over and yellow-taped for demolition, then abandoned when the investor lost his capital, his life savings, and swallowed a bullet from his gun. Slopes of debris from demolished buildings to either side embraced the church. It was soon forgotten again, protected by an urban wasteland of darkness, time, pollution.

  Sometimes garbage floated down from the Long Island Sound and found itself here, tongued to shore by the East River running brown and relentless past the church. And sometimes a few mottled blue-black bodies turned up as well, thrown off the Brooklyn Bridge like unwanted pets, eyes blind eggs in waxen faces so like mannequins. But the corpses didn’t linger long among the debris; they were efficiently dragged off by the clans of scavenging dogs that lived around the church.

  When the body of the girl drifted to shore among the other refuse, there was no one to see, and no dogs. It lay green and heavy, like a marble statue left out in the rain. It did not move, except for the occasional shudder like a little orgasm of pain rippling through the fish-white flesh.

  The man in black found the girl in the moments before daybreak. She was tall, insect-thin, with small, young applelike breasts and long dancer’s legs. Her hair was very long, and full of mildewing leaves like some siren coughed up out of the water in an old myth. She had been chewed, swallowed and digested by the city. Now she was excrement. Like the church, expelled. She might have been pretty, once; he didn’t know. The girl had no face, just a red gaping wound where a pretty face might once have been.

  He lifted her quivering weight into his arms and carried her into the ruined corpse of the church, into that place of the dead.

  NOW

  1

  The girl with the long hair and mismatched eyes stepped through the doors of the academy just as the final class of the day was letting out. Girls flew past her, a blur of checked skirts and maroon vests over sweaty white button-down blouses. They were burning off the last energy of the day, rushing to practice, rehearsals or club. They noticed the new girl for perhaps half a second, but so preoccupied were they, that few of them remembered her, even after all had come to pass.

  The girls hated the uniforms, of course, trashing them in subtle ways. Fencenet stockings under knee-high socks, black lace bras peeking through skin-thin shirts. But the new girl’s uniform was virgin, starched razor straight. She was tall and bony, like a young filly that still needed to grow into her skin. Her hair was long and jet-black and framed a sunless white face made all of dire planes, the homely beauty of a young British actress. Her eyes were hard, like crystal, and of two different colors. Sometimes they sent the problem girls from the Bronx down here on scholarships. Good Works, they called it.

  It wasn’t unusual for new faces to crop up unexpectedly.

  And so, as the students fled en masse toward their destinations, no one felt concerned.

  By the following day, the girl had disappeared. And in many ways, she had never been there at all.

  2

  Jerry Pacino was dying for a smoke.

  He guided the heavy, chalk-dusted broom down the central hallway of the academy. Twenty-two years of picking up after the brats and he had cleaned up every imaginable substance, and a few he’d rather not think about. He let it clack to the floor and lit up, gravitating toward one of the closed classrooms.

  The lights were off and the room was dim, but not dark. He went to the bank of windows and cranked a pane out to air the room as he smoked. Over twenty years, and what had he to show for it but calluses, a nagging cough, and this bank of windows that showed whiteness in winter, green in spring, and the crisp red and fawn colors of autumn.

  He peered out at the dark shadows amassing on the soccer field—girls kicking a ball through the wheat-colored grass, screaming, the setting sun making them featureless black ghosts. There was a chill under his limp blue uniform, a kind of unfathomable fatigue that was too much like despair. He coughed it up to the insomnia; he hadn’t slept right in months, not since that crazy bitch came slamming against his door in the middle of the night, waking him and Nora from a sound sleep.

  But this was New York. The city was full of crackheads. The couple downstairs had wild rows every night that rattled the eighty-year-old plumbing. And, once, upstairs, some kid had passed out over his pipe and left his faucet on all night. The water managed to cave in part of the ceiling over the kitchen. It was months before the landlord repaired it, and there were still dings in Nora’s kettle from the accident.

  Then there was that time—ten years ago, if he remembered right—when Nora took in a runaway who stole five hundred dollars from her. Never again. Jerry told her. And Jerry had stayed true to his promise, even that night when Nora climbed out of bed in her hairnet and diabetic socks and said the girl at their door sounded like she was in trouble.

  “Remember what happened with that bitch?” Jerry roared softly into the pillow under his chin.

  “I know, Jer, but…”

  “Forgetaboutit. Call the police.”

  Nora did. But by the time the uniforms arrived, the frenetic pounding had subsided. Jerry told them some wild party was going on next door, kids out of control, some girl high as a kite on smack, from the sound of her—or whatever they were smoking these days.

  But the investigating cops found no girl. No party. It was surreal, an annoyance.

  Nora wo
uldn’t let it go. She nagged him until it was all he could do to get out in the morning.

  A few days later, Jerry stepped out into the hall, picked up his neighbor’s mail and knocked on his door. When the young man answered—Tim, his name was, if Jerry wasn’t mistaken—Jerry handed over a cable bill, telling him it had gotten mixed in with Jerry’s own mail.

  Tim wasn’t at all like the brats he cleaned up after. Groomed, shy, with amazing black philosopher’s eyes. His apartment was spotless and landscaped with old Chippendale furniture and throw afghans. Dusty light slivered through the chintzy curtains and spotlighted old family pictures, frayed leather-bound books, benign knickknacks. Jerry commented on how similar their apartments were, even down to the “bric-a-brac” (Nora’s word for stuff). The boy smiled and said it was his mother’s.

  Nora had wanted Jerry to ask about the girl, but wild girls like that weren’t the kind of dates that young men like Tim brought home to meet their mothers. Jerry went back inside and forgot about the incident, except at night, when he dreamed.

  Jerry tossed the cigarette out the open window. He had just one room left to do.

  Generally speaking, he disliked the school auditorium. After hours it was tragically unlit, the flags on the walls amorphous squares of darkness, the arched windows—for the room doubled as a chapel—bleeding in watery colored light that never quite reached the aisles between chairs. Tonight there was only one dim light burning high above the stage, shining down on the background scenery of an Austrian mountainside, painted by the art class in long slopes of green and brown for the school production of The Sound of Music.

  The pneumatic door slowly hissed closed behind him as he pushed his bulk through. Otherwise, the place was as soundless as a tomb.

  He started down the aisle, his janitor’s bucket thrust out before him like a lance. He was alone and the place was deathly quiet, yet a part of him quivered within.

  He thought the place was empty until he noticed the body of the girl lying prone on the stage. “Hey,” said Jerry. His unkempt smoker’s voice cut into the deafening silence like an unwelcomed knife. He was irritated. But he wasn’t afraid, not then, and not until the very end.

  If this was the brats’ idea of a joke…

  In twelve strides he was down the aisle. In six he was at the top of the stage. That was when he felt the first twinge of real concern.

  The girl was lying in a dramatic posture on the stage, arms outflung, legs bent at the knees, as if she had been crucified. Her face was turned on a sea of hair like frayed black silk.

  “Hey,” Jerry said again, hovering uselessly. “Hey, are you all right?”

  The girl opened her eyes. Her face was milk-white, her eyes queer, one a pale watery blue, the other a deep Asian black. Instead of answering him, the girl with the eyes slowly pulled herself upright with the paralyzing grace of a pole dancer.

  She stood there as if listening for a cue. Then, like something carefully choreographed, she extended her arms longingly to the darkness beyond the stage curtain. Moment’s later she was joined by a man, tall and slim, and outfitted entirely in black. Jerry felt his reality shift half a foot to the left. The man was dressed in a dark stiff suit, standing collar and a solitaire, like something from an old British cozy. A wide-brimmed black felt hat slanted across the face, hiding much of it from view, but from what Jerry could tell, the man was ghastly white beneath.

  With a flourish he reached for the girl, pantomiming concern, his shining, black-gloved hands closing about her delicate wrists. With exaggerated care, he waltzed her across the stage like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers high-stepping past a muzzy late-night TV screen. Jerry watched him slant her slight figure into the circle of his arms. The girl lolled back in her partner’s embrace in a kind of slow-motion ballet d’action. Exquisite, dreamlike. Part of the play?

  Then Jerry saw again the backdrop of green and golden Salzburg mountains. There was no scene like this in the play, he knew that. The Sound of Music was a favorite of Nora’s.

  Jerry tried to laugh off the absurdity of the performance, but the man in the antique clothes turned his partner in a pirouette and the girl jumped like a stringless marionette. There was a flash like light through the colored windows.

  Jerry felt no pain, but a gush of flowering red hit the white face of the man in black. It gusted over the girl, over her horsey, pale, unpretty face. Beads of blood clung to her long, curling lashes and were blinked away like red tears.

  Jerry slid, soundless, to the floor of the stage, in his mind protecting his throat even as his conscious thought began ebbing away with his blood. The girl who had cut his throat was frozen in place, like a sculpture. He looked and he saw the exquisite glint of the surgeon’s scalpel in her upraised hand, a blade dipped in bright red paint. He saw the depthless shine of her unblinking eyes. She looked as pleased with herself as Sweeney Todd about to break out in song.

  These brats, he thought.

  Darkness swallowed him up for some time.

  3

  Jerry opened his eyes to a pale, smeary darkness.

  It was dim, but he picked out little details. Distant tiled walls, a numbing silence, the disconcerting shine of stainless steel so suggestive of hospitals and morgues.

  For many hours he had been floating inside a warm sea of drug-induced half-dreams. Many times he had tried to call out, but all he could manage was a pained moan. He slept and woke and slept again on the undulating waves of glistening unconsciousness.

  But this time he didn’t sleep. This time he was aware.

  Something important must have occurred. A fall. Or his heart. He hoped it wasn’t his heart. He glanced around, searching for Nora, expecting to find her seated beside his bed in a deathwatch, but he found he was alone.

  He was so dry, his tongue moving like a fat worm in his mouth. He wanted to summon a nurse, but his body felt like lead. He could not even lift his arms.

  Somewhere in the swimmy darkness a door opened, and bright artificial lights flicked on. Now he saw the room in clear detail, the painful white sterility of a vast operation theatre. It felt as cold as an alien ship.

  A man and a woman stood over him.

  Jerry had to shuffle the images in his brain before he placed them. The man wore black and had no face…no, his face wasn’t absent, only masked in frightening bandages, with small slits for the eyes and mouth, with tiny shards of mirror-like eyes glinting out. The woman, though, worried him more. She was beautiful and ugly all at once, and awash in great reams of black satin hair. He knew them both…but from where?

  “Welcome back, Mr. Pacino,” said the man in black. His voice was a brimming dark baritone with a vibrating British inflection, muffled but not softened by the bandages. “I trust you are comfortable? That you slept well?”

  The sight of the pair of them made a trill of danger sound down Jerry’s back. He tried to speak, but he had no voice, just a beelike burr of noise in his throat.

  “Please do not strain yourself,” said the man in black thoughtfully. “You are still healing.” He inclined his head in greeting. “I am the Doctor.” Then he glanced aside at the woman. “And this is my assistant, Poppet.”

  The Doctor cut such a powerfully strange figure, Jerry didn’t notice until that moment that the woman he called Poppet was dressed like a Gibson girl in a long dress of shining jet black moiré with puffed sleeves and a bustled waist. What a strange girl, he thought.

  Then he recognized the mismatched eyes. He remembered. Instinct made him want to shift away from the girl, to protect his throat from her knife, but his arms refused to work.

  “I believe Mr. Pacino is prepared to join the others in the Gallery now,” said the Doctor to his assistant. “Bring him, Poppet, won’t you?”

  Wordlessly, she wheeled him from the operation theatre and down a long corridor that stretched into darkness and dripping cold. The walls were not white tile, as Jerry had expected, but of some porous concrete that the chill and moisture clun
g to like sweat. There were old iron-banded doors on both sides, like something from a medieval dungeon. Pipes ran down the length of the corridor, dripping down noxious wetness onto Jerry’s face. And from all around came distant murmuring high notes that might have been human voices crying out from some undiscovered hell.

  What is this place? he wondered. Long before they reached his cell, the terror solidified into something hard and bitter and spoiled within him.

  The Doctor held a door open. He seemed to sense his patient’s distress. “I have given you a great gift, Mr. Pacino,” he said as they maneuvered Jerry’s gurney into the room. “Life everlasting—more than any god has ever granted mortal human flesh. Like Hercules, you have labored and will now exist immemorial.”

  The words made no sense to Jerry.

  The cell was small and windowless, and of that curious dripping grey concrete, a desolate hole in the ground. Jerry breathed in the dirty air and began to struggle in earnest, finally dislodging the sheet covering him. He wanted to grab and tear at the two of them, kick at them, these pious evil performers in their fancy dress and stage eyes, but he found himself quite unable to. He had no arms, no legs, though streaks of phantom pain radiated from the centermost part of his body outward.