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

  The Doctor turned to leave with Poppet. “Welcome to the Gallery, Mr. Pacino,” he said. “Please enjoy your stay.”

  He left the room. He locked it behind him.

  Alone, Jerry screamed soundlessly.

  4

  Years passed. And the Doctor’s prophecy was fulfilled.

  Jerry did not die. Indeed, after some time, he realized that it might not even be possible.

  He saw the Doctor infrequently, a few times a year, and only on those long, unfortunate nights when he came harvesting flesh from what he called his “body farm,” of which Jerry was an important part.

  But even so, even were it possible to think through such harrowing pain, it was impossible to ask his benefactor any questions. Jerry’s voice, like his arms and legs, was long gone, torn away like the material the Doctor sometimes took from him, material that grew back relentlessly, insolently.

  Yet questions remained. Who was the Doctor? What power did he wield so flippantly? And what part did the Poppet play?

  Most of all, why him?

  The first long year was the worst. Jerry often thought about the girl in the Gibson dress, the one who had slit his throat. There was little else to ruminate on, to experience, in this deathless burial. But after a while time itself lost its cloying effect. After a hundred years, Jerry ceased to recall the girl, or much about life beyond his tomb and the occasional, agonizing visits by the Doctor. He had no visitors except for the Doctor. He saw nothing but grey walls and his own empty thoughts imprinted on them.

  One day he entertained the idea that he had always been a part of the Doctor’s body farm. An extension, a dream.

  And dreams do not ponder their realities.

  5

  Down in a small, inconsequential town in the middle of Kansas the mail didn’t come around until after one in the afternoon, which was just fine with the old man. He had slept through the morning, and well past noon. The phone had rung several times—his boss, he supposed—but he hadn’t picked up.

  He lay on greasy grey sheets that had not seen changing for the past four months and clutched a ragged stuffed monkey that had once belonged to his daughter. It was so old a button-eye was missing, and the stuffing jutted, disemboweled, from one side of the body. Occasionally he scratched at his pubes and listened to the prairie wind hissing incessantly through the seams of the trailer. Hunger, headache and the need to urinate finally forced him to his feet.

  The trailer was old, cantankerous, an aluminum frying pan in summer, an icebox in winter. The hallway was full of cobwebs and crumbling plaster. He paid it no mind. In the kitchenette he put a fire-blackened kettle on to heat, then stepped outside, wincing and barefoot, and walked down the long gravel drive to the mailbox.

  There were fliers, plackets of coupons, invitations from credit card companies and local churches. But today, among it all, was a plain white envelope addressed to him with a New York City postal seal. He felt a dull shock that nearly brought him crumbling to his knees there on the bare gravel drive that even the weeds had shunned.

  Clawing open the envelope, he read the typewritten letter inside with a rising and falling heart.

  THEN

  1

  The girl who came from the river awoke to darkness and to the eroding echo of water falling on stone.

  She blinked her eyes, but the darkness was the same either way. Her last echoing thought had been of crushing, unbreathable pain, and a base desire to move away from it. It spiked fear in her body, even now. She sucked in a deep breath that tasted of antiseptic and linen and sat bolt upright, prepared to rip at her face and the frightening bandages blinding her face—

  “Don’t do that,” commanded a voice out of the impenetrable darkness.

  She listened to her own panicked breathing—in, out, in, out—and slowly turned her head to find the direction of the voice.

  “Do not,” the voice spoke again, “disturb the bandages.” And then, as if to make up for such sudden harshness: “You are still healing, my dear.”

  The voice was soft, yet hard, almost metallic in strength, and very deep. It resonated around the black chamber and reminded her of some old British black and white movie watched on a long-ago Saturday morning. For some inexplicable reason, she was not afraid. She could listen to a voice like that forever. The wielder of such a voice could recite pi and hold someone spellbound.

  But her body trembled with fear even as her spirit was quelled by the sound of the voice. “Where am I?” Each syllable sucked the bitter cloth into her mouth, and she had to stop herself from panicking at the awful pressure of the bandages.

  Bandages meant something terrible had happened, something she was unprepared to deal with…

  “You are safe,” said the voice unhurriedly from across the room. “You are safe here.”

  “Where is here?”

  “Below.”

  She didn’t know what that meant, if anything. “Am…am I a prisoner?”

  A pause. “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to be a prisoner.”

  “My dear, you have no choice.”

  “Why?” she said. “Why am I here?”

  Why am I alive? she wanted to ask. Her most recent memories were of a carnivorous darkness ripping at her flesh, tearing it off the bone.

  “I found you,” answered the voice, with a touch of annoyance, “by the river. Washed up. I remade you. You belong to me. It’s only fair, don’t you agree?”

  His words angered her. And anger was an old friend. “Fuck you,” she said defiantly.

  The man who spoke to her stood up. “You must articulate. You do not want to fuck me, Poppet. You want to hurt me. To hurt me in response to the man who hurt you. Articulate.”

  “Fuck you,” she responded. “Fuck you and fuck you and fuck you!” she screamed hysterically through the bitter bandages.

  “You’re a stupid little bitch,” said the man. He was standing over her.

  She swung her clawed hand at him, to strike him.

  He caught it. His hand was cold and immovable, like a machine. An army of men could not have broken his grip on her.

  She quivered, waiting for the killing blow to fall.

  “You are mine,” said the man. The sound of his voice was scorching, like the grind of gears. “Forget the rest. Forget the rage. Forget the pain. And do not raise your hand to me again, Poppet. I gave you this hand,” his fingers closed incrementally tighter about her wrist until she groaned at his strength, “and I can take it off.”

  He let her go.

  He left her to wallow in darkness and questions for a long time.

  2

  Slowly, as the panic lessened, the girl became aware of a world surrounding her.

  Voices. Sounds of footsteps, feral life. People passed in distant corridors, speaking in hushed voices as if afraid to awaken something in this place…this Below. Sometimes she heard the man’s voice. Sometimes it was a woman who spoke. Sometimes she heard nothing at all, though she sensed the man’s presence brushing past her like the flit of old moth wings. Always she heard the despondent drip of water on stone.

  She slept for great unfathomable swaths of time.

  A woman saw to her meager needs. She would come into the chamber and put on a record. The music was old and moving, dire. Then she would attend to the girl, changing soiled clothing or bedding. Sometimes she bathed the girl like a child. The girl would have been utterly mortified, but she was too weak to move. Breathing itself was a labor.

  The woman who cared for her spoke little, but when she did, her voice was scouring. She was an old woman, hands aged into claws. She was not bothered by even the vilest of tasks. She simply did what the man asked her to do.

  The girl asked about the Below, and about the man who had imprisoned her.

  “We call him the Doctor,” said the woman. Her name, the girl discovered, was Mary. “He takes care of us. We, in turn, take care of him.”

  Mary’s voice was diffident, except when she s
poke of the Doctor. Then it changed. It came alive. Mary smelled of talc and lavender, but there was an undercurrent of rot on her breath. She did not always answer the girl’s questions.

  “Is he really a doctor?” asked the girl.

  Mary dressed her in a new nightgown.

  “Where are we? What is the Below?”

  The record played out. Mary did not answer.

  In time, she left the room.

  3

  Time passed.

  The girl’s sleep grew lighter, discomforting. Her muscles cramped, wanting to move.

  One day she climbed, swaying, to her feet, clinging to a bedpost to keep herself upright. She felt like a rag doll all pieced together.

  She thought about the Doctor, what he said. I remade you. Whatever that meant.

  She took her first faltering step like an infant and fell violently against the side of the bed, clutching at the bedclothes. The second step was easier, but she could not find her balance at all. It was like swimming in a dark ocean, where any direction might be up.

  Mary came into the room and put her back to bed without aplomb.

  “Let me go,” she said to Mary through a slit in the bandages. Mary had cut one so she could take soup and water. The Doctor had ceased feeding her intravenously the day before.

  Mary said, “The Doctor will soon return.”

  The girl lay tiredly on the pillows, awash with questions.

  There were cats. One jumped all over the bed once Mary had left.

  The girl clutched it like a toy she had once loved, and waited.

  4

  In the evenings the Doctor visited her.

  He fed her spoonfuls of a thin broth through the slit in the bandages. He did not hurt her again, or threaten her, though he did ask strange questions like, “What would you do if I kept you here forever, Poppet?” and “What if you were never allowed to leave?”

  “I would find a way to escape,” she answered simply.

  “Would you, Poppet?” he answered. “And how would you go about accomplishing that task?”

  “I don’t know. I’d find a way.” She thought a moment. “I would ask.”

  “And who would you ask?”

  “You. I would ask you questions that would give me clues.”

  “Perhaps I would lie to mislead you. Perhaps I intend to kill you in time.”

  “You won’t,” she said.

  “Why is that?”

  “You aren’t done hurting me yet.” And the girl lowered her head.

  5

  Finally the girl was able to walk the course of the room and all the way back to the bed before falling from exhaustion. But she did not tell the Doctor that when he visited her that evening.

  Instead, she asked, “Who is Mary?”

  The Doctor sat in the chair beside her bed. He had brought the evening’s bowl of soup. One of the cats skittered by over the coverlet. “She is my assistant,” he answered.

  “Is she your wife?” the girl asked between spoonfuls of the soup.

  “No.”

  She felt stronger, bolder. As he fed her, she reached out and touched the hand holding the spoon. She was surprised to find the Doctor’s hand young, firm, cool. He wore rings.

  The Doctor grew very still.

  “Don’t you like women?” the girl asked.

  The Doctor was silent a long moment. Then he said, “Women and I have grown apart.”

  “Why?”

  He hesitated. “There has been too much time.”

  “Are you very old?”

  “You talk like an ignorant child.”

  She swallowed. Waited.

  He was invisible to her senses.

  She said, “I’m not a child. I’m sixteen.” One of the cats came up under her hand. She clutched it like a shield. “But I feel much older. Thirty-five. Forty.”

  “One day you will be,” answered the Doctor. “One day you will be a hundred. Two hundred.”

  She laughed at his funny joke.

  “You’ re a child,” he said. “A poppet. Just that. Perhaps I should plait your hair. Dress you in a pinafore.”

  “Fuck you,” she said, quietly, with subdued anger. “I’m not your doll.”

  “I should wash your mouth out with soap, Poppet.”

  “My name is Louise, not Poppet,” she shouted.

  He dropped the spoon into the soup. “Not anymore.”

  6

  Eventually Louise climbed out of bed and did not fall. She ached, but she could manage. Pain was an old ally.

  She moved around the room, bumping into big pieces of furniture. There was a long dressing table with toiletries, brush and comb. Scissors. A trill of fear went up her back, but her hands were as steady as steady as those of a surgeon as she cut through the bandages along the back of her head. Her hair spilled forth, damp and oily. The bandages came off like a mask imprinted with a human face.

  Gaslight turned the antique bedchamber around her golden. It looked less like a bedroom and more like the burial tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh.

  Louise felt nauseous. She dropped the mask of bandages at her feet. There was a round gilded mirror on the wall just above the dressing table. But her sight was dark and seemed to sleep within her. She stared into it until blurs became smudges and smudges slowly took the form of images.

  She expected a monstrous face of ruined girlflesh. She was not prepared for the stranger’s face looking back at her.

  This girl looked older than she. Her face was swollen and discolored a bruised purple. But the flesh was whole. There was no monster, just this stunningly alien face full of sloping planes and two new eyes not her own, one the color of ink mixed with rain, the other the deep brown-black of a girl of the Orient.

  She was bandaged over most of her body. But calm indifference of the face gave her courage. She went to work with the scissors, shedding the linen like a chrysalis. There were no scars, no horrors, as she had expected. Her confidence grew. She lifted her arms and stared at her bony wrists, her lightly muscled arms, her high white breasts with their deep rose points, the clean shaven whiteness at her groin, her long, even, unmarred legs.

  The Doctor stood in the room behind her. She never heard his coming. In that way he was like the cats.

  She saw him first reflected in the mirror.

  He was amazingly tall, as she had suspected, and dressed entirely in black. The dim lamplight of the room slivered across an antique pocket watch and brass cufflinks. His clothes were ridiculously proper. She expected something gothic, but he was more like a talented young actor playing Professor Moriarty on television than a vampire exhumed from his crypt of a thousand years.

  Only his face made her pause. It was masked in bandages, as hers had been. Two slits for the eyes and another for the mouth.

  So. They had this kinship.

  He did not seem especially dismayed by this act of insolence on her part, this molting. His eyes were hard and unreal, like shards of broken glass. There was nothing like light or life in them, even though he breathed audibly behind the bandages. They were the eyes of the dead, she realized. And she had no doubt in her mind that he could murder her and feel nothing human.

  He stood behind her so that, in the mirror, she was framed all around by his darkness. He put his hands out—they were thin and musical, but heavily corded, young-old, and full of rings—and set them both upon her naked shoulders. She jumped inside at his cold. The Doctor’s hands swept over her, hard and learned, touching her like an artist admiring a great sculpture.

  She held perfectly still as he explored every inch of her, testing the pliancy of her skin, the strength of her muscles, the limits of her modesty. She had never much cared for the touch of a man’s hands on her body, the blunt, listless grappling. But this was different. This wasn’t about sex. It was about possession. It was about art.

  “You fixed my face,” Louise said after some time. She tried not to tremble at the chill the passage of his hands left behind. “But you
made me different.”