I switched on the bedside lamp and sat up to face the well-known intruder.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as if in protest.
“My apologies,” he said in a polite yet unapologetic tone. “There is someone I want you to meet. I think it might be beneficial for you.”
“If that’s what you say. But can’t it wait? I haven’t been sleeping well as it is. Better than anyone you should know that.”
“Of course I know. I also know other things,” he asserted, betraying his annoyance. “The gentleman I want to introduce to you will be leaving the country very soon, so there is a question of timing.”
“All the same …”
“Yes, I know—your nervous condition. Here, take these.” Dr. Dublanc placed two egg-shaped pills in the palm of my hand. I put them to my lips and then swallowed a half-glass of water that was on the nightstand. I set down the empty glass next to my alarm clock, which emitted a soft grinding noise due to some unknown mutations of its internal mechanism. My eyes became fixed by the slow even movement of the second hand, but Dr. Dublanc, in a quietly urgent voice, brought me out of my trance.
“We should really be going. I have a taxi waiting outside.”
So I hurried, thinking that I would end up being charged for this excursion, cab fare and all.
Dr. Dublanc had left the taxi standing in the alley behind my apartment building. Its headlights beamed rather weakly in the blackness, scarcely guiding us as we approached the vehicle. Side by side, the doctor and I proceeded over uneven pavement and through blotched vapors emerging from the fumaroles of several sewer covers. But I could see the moon shining between the close rooftops, and I thought that it subtly shifted phases before my eyes, bloating a bit into fullness. The doctor caught me staring.
“It’s not going haywire up there, if that’s what is bothering you.”
“But it seemed to be changing.”
With a growl of exasperation, the doctor pulled me after him into the cab.
The driver appeared to have been stilled into a state of dormancy. Yet Dr. Dublanc was able to evoke a response when he called out an address to the hack, who turned his thin rodent face toward the back seat and glared briefly. For a time we sat in silence as the taxi proceeded through a monotonous passage of unpeopled avenues. At that hour the world on the other side of my window seemed to be no more than a mass of shadows wavering at a great distance. The doctor touched my arm and said, “Don’t worry if the pills I gave you seem to have no immediate effect.”
“I trust your judgement,” I said, only to receive a doubtful glance from the doctor. In order to revive my credibility, I told him what was actually on my mind: the matter of who I would be meeting, and why.
“A former patient of mine,” he answered bluntly, for it was apparent that at this point he was prepared to assume an open manner with me. “Not to say that some unfortunate aspects do not still exist in his case. For certain reasons I will be introducing him to you as ‘Mr. Catch’, though he’s also a doctor of sorts—a brilliant scientist, in fact. But what I want you to see are just some films he has made in the course of his work. They are quite remarkable. Not to deny those unfortunate aspects I mentioned… yet very intriguing. And possibly beneficial—to you, I mean. Possibly most beneficial. And that’s all I can say at the moment.”
I nodded as if in comprehension of this disclosure. Then I noticed how far we had gone, almost to the opposite end of the city, if that was possible in what seemed a relatively short period of time. (I had forgotten to wear my watch, and this negligence somewhat aggravated my lack of orientation.) The district in which we were now travelling was of the lowest order, a landscape without pattern or substance, especially as I viewed it by moonlight.
There might be an open field heaped with debris, a devastated plain where bits of glass and scraps of metal glittered, though perhaps a solitary house remained in this wasteland, an empty skeletal structure scraped of its flesh. And then, turning a corner, one left behind this lunar spaciousness and entered a densely tangled nest of houses, the dwarfish and the great all tightly nestled together and all eaten away, disfigured. Even as I watched them through the taxi’s windows they appeared to be carrying on their corruption, mutating in the dull light of the moon. Roofs and chimneys elongated toward the stars, dark bricks multiplied and bulged like tumors upon the facades of houses, entire streets twisted themselves along some unearthly design. Although a few windows were filled with light, however sickly, the only human being I saw was a derelict crumpled at the base of a traffic sign.
“Sorry, doctor, but this may be too much.”
“Just hold on to yourself,” he said, “we’re almost there. Driver, pull into that alley behind those houses.”
The taxi joggled as we made our way through the narrow passage. On either side of us were high wooden fences beyond which rose so many houses of such impressive height and bulk, though of course they were still monuments to decay.
The cab’s headlights were barely up to the task of illuminating the cramped little alley, which seemed to become ever narrower the further we proceeded.
Suddenly the driver jerked us to a stop to avoid running over an old man slouched against the fence, an empty bottle lying at his side.
“This is where we get out,” said Dr. Dublanc. “Wait here for us, driver.”
As we emerged from the taxi I pulled at the doctor’s sleeve, whispering about the expense of the fare. He replied in a loud voice, “You should worry more about getting a taxi to take us back home. They keep their distance from this neighborhood and rarely answer the calls they receive to come in here. Isn’t that true, driver?” But the man had returned to that dormant state in which I first saw him. “Come on,” said the doctor. “He’ll wait for us. This way.”
Dr. Dublanc pushed back a section of the fence that formed a kind of loosely hinged gate, closing it carefully behind us after we passed through the opening. On the other side was a small backyard, actually a miniature dumping ground where shadows bulged with refuse. And before us, I assumed, stood the house of Mr. Catch. It seemed very large, with an incredible number of bony peaks and dormers outlined against the sky, and even a weathervane in some vague animal-shape that stood atop a ruined turret grazed by moonlight. But although the moon was as bright as before, it appeared to be considerably thinner, as if it had been worn down just like everything else in that neighborhood.
“It hasn’t altered in the least,” the doctor assured me. He was holding open the back door of the house and gesturing for me to approach.
“Perhaps no one’s home,” I suggested.
“Not at all—the door’s unlocked. You see how he’s expecting us?”
“There don’t appear to be any lights in use.”
“Mr. Catch likes to conserve on certain expenses. A minor mania of his. But in other ways he’s quite extravagant. And by no means is he a poor man. Watch yourself on the porch—some of these boards are not what they once were.”
As soon as I was standing by the doctor’s side he removed a flashlight from the pocket of his overcoat, shining a path into the dark interior of the house. Once inside, that yellowish swatch of illumination began flitting around in the blackness. It settled briefly in a cobwebbed corner of the ceiling, then ran down a blank battered wall and jittered along warped floor moldings. For a moment it revealed two suitcases, quite well used, at the bottom of a stairway.