The Royal Diadem of Maggot Hall

Rains, cold and winter. The impatient penitence of the lashing winds and the pitiless drops of rain slamming against the windows of the world. Standing in the ancient manse, this moment caught and broken apart by the self immolation in cold slashing wind fire, against the windows and the walls and the roof, none of which are capable of supporting us, not now, not ever, but especially not now that the madness has come home. If it had ever left. Unreal, even I, in my now tattered too worn waistcoat and britches and white ruffled shirt, and my straight good strong body in years of perpetuity that they said would last forever, that they said was miles and leagues away from dandyism. Nothing leaning forward but the structure of this shadowy gabled building which had stood for two hundred years, but was not destined to stand much longer.

My signet ring ablaze with amethyst. Hands soft and white as undersea vessels of fish finding the night kingdom ablaze with coral diadems and the hidden songs that have kept my family going these endless generations, these machine cocked generations, for nothing more than the accelerating of them. I a shadow in a house of shadows, standing by naked window glass, watching the night rain come down.

Nothing more than the intemperate glass that holds its breath as the nodes of rain rush to it, moths to flame, and beat out their brains of winter on it, on all the windows like eyes opened to the world, for this house has many windows. And it has many eyes, this mansion, looking back at the eyes in each reflective rain drop, as though to say we are not ashamed of what has happened here, the entire world, the vistas all over the maps, known and unknown, can look in here, can look in and not askance, but directly forward, and see what we are and what we do and what we will forever be. And the madness need not taint us by osmosis or imitation. The madness that has come here, has been here so very long, especially now, so, when the child of winter came to stay.

And oblique, and cold as cornered shadows rush into me and through me, like knives of winter snow with the cleanness of it on these heaths and those mountains and the triangles and the perpendiculars, mountains and fields, where the mad child and I used to run when we were boys, and he, still a boy, or vegetated back to such a state, now it is all ruined and misplaced. There is such a feeling of loss here. There is now such a feeling of incompleteness here, as though someone had started a sentence and had neglected or on point of death, even that, refused to finish it. What they did to him, the nightmare connections to which he is linked now, that are lodged in his broken in halves brain and his portmanteau that forever pulses him in pale bruised purple around the eyes, and the withering of his body, his body now emaciated and given up trying, like a dead flower curing into and under itself in shame. The whole point of the game, wasn't it?. As Kim had given up the secrets of seeing anymore. Even seeing nothing at all, as his doktors did. As though he was quit even of such a little thing as that.

The brown wood flooring on which I stand. The lack of curtains on the front window, large and bold as brass, which I look out of, the frailty of humanity, the frailty of even inhumanity, though it is stronger than the first, eludes me, ducks behind the facility of my thoughts, factoring in numbers and equations and situations and divisions and the school board days when you thought the world could be put on track by piecing together there what was misplaced or even uncreated and we could create it our way, which of course was the right way. That we had the jewel of red ruby eternity in our hands and we could hold it close to our faces, warm the death pall away. That we could feel forever in our palms and that would mean forever did not have to come. That death was also something within our control.

We could verbalize the word and we could connote the shadows and the graveyards with their hens teeth scrabbled gnarled witches teeth of tombstones in the wiry wet wild grass ground of bone yards would scuttle away, to be so terribly frightened of who we were are and who we were and what powers we possess. And to find it all crabbed and broken and legs pulled apart. To find it desiccated and scissors cut in two like every rain drop from the molten lava volcano of the cloud rumble and sick diseased cotton batting of the sky and air, to find ourselves dashing out our own brains like the rain, on the walls and closed forever cataracts of our blind and even blinder still eyes.

"I do not understand thee, McGraw" I told him that night when I went to see that keeper of that madhouse when I had finally had enough of what they were doing to my Kim. My brother. My love. Who was, like the other inmates there, a seemingly permanent resident of bedlam and night crawling bugs and curtains of sheen and glimmer and new tasted where there had never been tastes, where there were wire hooks on which hung sanity, and the inmates were to jump for them constantly, and jump higher and higher still, the sanity being raised always and evermore.

And the mad eyes and the scalded laughter like hurtful hard and brittle and angry painfully hot soup flung on my soul in vats of huge number and size every time I went to that place of lightning captured in a bottle. This place that was made up off nights picked up piecemeal, in swaths all over the night world, and laid at the door step of the madhouse. Of what it was and how it was meant to be with its locks and bars and twisting lost corridors and steps to nowhere and ladders down to something even more grotesque in the basement of the place, I imagined, not too difficult what I did not personally see and hear, I read about, and most especially, the keys out of this kingdom, clever and much vaunted, and their mysterious places like the secret pulsating heart of the living Christ that was put up from prying fingers, such as those the inmates herein had.

"I do not understand thee, either, why you would want such a thing?" Doktor McGraw said, turning from the mantle over the banked fireplace in this cold office of his, austere, and black hearted as feldspar and cold with the winter wind gauging all the north passages to this door step, to this mausoleum of insanity of more than the patients here in the wintry clime, here in the middle of the nowhere Chesterton Abbey district, here where the night howls were luminous coal dark effigies that were released as balloons out of barred windows out of places where the light was a foreigner, which, had it for a moment been let in, it would receive the immolation of fire brands as the mocking evil cur that it was off in the distance. No, it did not dare to touch this shadow place at all, so much attention to keeping the madness in.

So much attention in keeping the madness contained and not letting it escape, as though it were a dear process, as though it were valuable and would be the fulcrum which would move the world. Something here of great power and prowess that would fuel Verne's ship to the moon one day soon, surely.

But madness from turned under eyelids and fragile bones and eyes that plague a person even if seen only one time, the terrible close vaulted eyes, the terrible instructions of them in the little wizened child like withered bodies, the mammary glands of madness that reach and stray and push as though they are things from out of the world, things from another planet or a horror nightmare coming so terribly true, monsters with huge pendulous teats to be sucked on by the mad people, indeed, like Kim, like Kim, my brother.

Brought into insanity by this place and brought deeper and colder into the reaches of the mad Doktors who run such a nightmare factory, who dispense with nothing but cold hearts and colder fingers scribbling in their journals and their patient reports night and day, always the cruel authority lips with the arrogant smiles and the voices that are so vaingloriously patient and calm that they irritate and make half man one's self with their petty words and their puerile facitiousness. Madness from dolls with broken heads.

Cruel ministerings from dolls that have lost their stuffing. That have had their button eyes pulled out and their stitching unstitched. Dolls that are small and hopeless and lifeless, but dolls that are always to be unsure of, to back off from, to run from in terror, if your fellows are not there to see you in your swaggering manhood turn coward and flee. Madness, as religion. And Doktor God.

Madness as copulation with things of deep under the sea or far out in the crystal star broken and impacted universes. Things they see and the so alleged sane do not. Things they see that are tacitly wondered about in unconscious dicing and dissections by the like of McGraw with, hale and mutton chopped and ample bellied and soft spoken and balding crested, the only holder of the whole place himself, this whole asylum, the great and benevolent, as long as the mad here have relatives who will pay the stiff fees for their being locked behind bars, the great and benevolent, Dr. McGraw. Come, let us give thanks to alienists everywhere.

Who like the rest of them throw their monstrous pettiness and lackluster building blocks of their reality out on the undefended and plead total smirking ingeniousness at doing so. The monsters were there when they came here, the doktors say. Yes, they were. Many of them. And that's the whole point. We must fix them, the doktors say. To which I reply, fix your own goddam selves first.

Dr. McGraw with his tiresome didactic voice and his long stemmed clay pipe which he smokes incessantly. Dr. McGraw with his "reasonableness," his marks against sadness with impunity, his white horsed mealy mouthed, incidental chatter, which he sees as the utmost of normalcy, from who others must copy, savior his approach, his rucking eyes that hide behind glasses of square non-entity blandness. Almost a ghost, he. His little molten temper that he always shies down even though it is more like dyspepsia than temper.

He would not have such a thing, this late middle aged man who was a transport unto himself, who diddled his own sexuality into a late night division that was himself against the handiwork, broken of course to be sure, of the human endeavor, the human mind basing itself on reality and nature and flux and pushing away and turning forward, to not see into itself, to not see its own soul come unraveling like a string of cloth that someone some day would get hold of, and hank forever from him.

McGraw tells the story now. Of what I told him Kim did, damn me. The same story. Like a monk's chant. Look what you brought to us, sir! Evil in his mouth, ugly. Kim on the heath, Kim in madness, Kim in the summer lightning storm, Kim naked, willowy and laughing with the water blessing him from the skies, his member proud and hard, his balls nut small and sweet, pale in pale night, his buttocks glistening half moons in the rain. And he screaming and coming apart and rushing through the cold muck of ponds and grass and mud.

Then to take him from there to this asylum--and here to take him to an entrance underground where the pain would stop, here to entrance him into something tunneled and broken like he, like a gourd had been smashed on the hard cold and intemperate ground, like aces of playing cards were coming out his head, broken and bleeding and broken again as his hands hit on the top of his skull, cracked wide the night as though he thought he was the night, thought he was the unliving on whom was played the most terrible, most intrinsic joke of all time, that need of the dead, the husk, the given up and given overs, to have the heart stop beating.

Because to him, the beating heart was the cruelest joke of all. It was not, and it was not because it was so, and like the spider strand which held him unwillingly and he held unwillingly to it, that senselessly kept him tied to the world, to keep him unsafe in this web that he had gotten into. And then the Doktor. And then the asylum.

And then the tears he had bled red ruby from his eyes as he begged me in the horse drawn carriage in front of the tightly clipped barred huge wood doors of this mad place, "take me home," he pleaded to my cruel kindness, as I brought him to this cruelest place known to man, this chipped and brandished and evil smelling urine and bowel movement smelling place, where the unwanted are flung, though at the time I had not known, in my self righteousness, my arrogance that I knew, like they, what was best, and was in no mood to be questioned, my belief then though never ever again in doctors and beneficence.

And I had had nothing else I thought I could do, for he was interfering in my social life, he was the talk of people all round the manor and beyond. He was--god help me-- embarrassing me in so many different ways, soiling himself in public, and he starting to gibber when I took him into the village, and in the face of a rain of laughter from those around us, I had to whip the horse and rush away from it again, rush from all those piercing judging stupid moon stone braying gesturing eyes, and back and back to home and again.

And he holding to me, so very tightly, as I tried to say, as gently as my cocksure character would allow, my knowing what was best, his heaped and crushed and blown apart flowers of a body, and he weeping at the side of my neck, begging me not to do this thing, begging me not to put him in there with the monsters, for there were monsters everywhere, he said, it was just he couldn't go in there, where he knew even more hideous monsters lived and fed on such as him, and I disquieted and he, stricken down, oh god the things the terrible things I said to him at that moment.

I forced him off the cart, and carried him almost bodily to the doors where I rang the bell and waited, and he like a cast off cat in my arms, screaming for me not to drown him in the offal waters the swamp infested waters of what lay beyond those huge and imponderable doors.

And when I visited him every month. When I saw his cell, like a prison cell, and the other cells I had to pass to get to his, when I saw the urine and shit not cleaned up for who knows how long, when I saw and heard the screaming tears that were like sea anemones writ huge and placing themselves in my dreams, and scoring me and scourging me, and the doktors and attendants, I knew it for what it was. I knew it far too late. I found out the great and magnificent Doktor McGraw was too sagacious, too busy and too important to ever have anything to do with the lowly misbegotten patients himself, he scrawling in his book lined study in his comfortable easy chair and his fire banked or blazing and his comforting pipe in his over red lipped mouth.

And I saw Kim the first time in that place where they throw the unwanted, the misbegotten, two years and seven months ago/ I saw his hands and bloodied fingernails, naked, abused, eaten into, bite marks all over him, human and otherwise, and I saw his heart in his strangling chest and his eyes that had the passion of already dullard impassion at my betrayal of him, my lingering chicken boned neck that he wished to crush and would have crushed save for the shackles that held him to the wall and would allow him freedom of movement only to lie and turn on his cot.

And outraged I was, and the attendants said not to worry, said this is best for them, it is best they have order in their lives, for "it may seem cruel, but if it saves them from slashing their throats one fine day, sir?, that they learn the straight and narrow, that they have some dignity and pride in themselves, and that encompassed the things, bring them to even more of the bottom of the pit than they have gone before."

And then gradually bring them upward, to real life again, that's the ticket, and the characteristics they said they wanted to impart were those I had always thought I had in myself, things that I thought proper and that made me a gentleman during the day and a dandy, yes, but one with a conscience, (such a laugh to me now, I cared for no one, not even Kim, I cared only and always--then--for myself) at night, as though I could hold those two things sacrosanct, and it was in truth in this smelly place in this rigorous place with cries for help in the night that I saw myself in the keepers. In the night, for there was always night there and in my heart too. The doktors heard nothing, the doktors did nothing but turn away and close doors thick and hard, thicker and harder even than their very own marblewood heads, so they would not have to hear the din, the craziness from the broken dolls of which even they were sorely afraid.

But for so long I believed them, and every time I steeled myself for the noise and the horror and the pathetic used up remnants of minds turned inside out parboiled, and then I left him and them, almost gibbering to myself in my getting away to safety, to cool window seats of dignity and daintiness and hopes that all of what I thought of it was wrong--that there was true compassion from these doktors. I think I met all these wise, noble gentlemen, when they could spare a moment or two, when there was the need of spirit of charitable money from the coffers of those who care, even though the relatives of the patients were paying a king's ransom for the never to be returned objects of that ransom, the word turned on its head then, but never enough money for these zoo tenders, always more to be contributed to help our lesser brethren in such distress. In that, they were quite good at their trade. The trade in human beings no lesser than they. Far more than they.

And people gave and they gave some more at the behest of this new religion, to these new gods in these godforsaken places out in the moors where there are rest cures and teas in the afternoon, and where there are skeleton break your heart fantasmagoric "parties" for patients and what few relatives and friends came to see them--shadow show and the most cruel of all perhaps. In the doktors' offices, surely there were long conversations concerning the philosophies of Spinoza versus, say, Defoe. Oh yes, to show how humane the makers of this Byzantine hell were, there were piano recitals and doktors who exhibited their most dead spine and dead head failures, who they called their successes, like an auction of hubris with those zombie pieces of meat with the scars on their heads where the knives had bit deeply. We tend the broken and the wishes of family and friends that these people be put back in society, so the success stories are always used as broken stringed marionettes--look how clean he is, ladies and gentlemen?, look how bathed he is?, and see how nicely cut is his hair?, now he will drink a bowl of soup without spilling most of it on himself?, magnificent success, is it not, and soon that cloth monster we have made of this man will be seeing only what everyone else sees, saying only what everyone else wishes them to say, being only what everyone else wishes them to be. The doktors on their little stage. The patient in question standing beside them. The guards ready at the first wrong move. The man or woman or boy exhibit, head bowed, body made a sickness, mind made a field of glass shards thrown in revenge against a hard rock that shatters it.

And my Kim here, who gave me--deservedly so--my sleepless and lonely and despondent nights, my equally lonely and despondently restless days. I believed, so stupidly and for so long, denying the fatuousness of Dr. McGraw when he deigned a moment or two, especially when I said "contributions" were involved in my visit. Otherwise he was too busy, doing what, then, dammit?, scraping his quill feathered pen in meaningless scrawls on paper?, what did that accomplish?, which meant that he was me, that he exhibited my fatuousness I had had for most of my life. But this ordeal, the crawling pain of thunder that revelation wrapped about my bones I cannot describe, opened my eyes, and how wonderful and crystal clear that it only took my Kim to this true devil hell place of bones of long centuries dead bones for me to understand it.