The Monogram Monograph: Part IV

Karl C. Kessler strained against his bonds, trying not to roar like the madman he was. Dr. Dexter, the dream-hypnotist, had placed the metal helmet over his head, without explaining what it was. Karl's eyes locked on those of the doctor. “If this is meant to torture me, I can't tell you more about that Marvel guy,” he said. “I don't know who he is, or was, or if he was even real.”

“He wasn't real, Mr. Kessler, that's what makes him so dangerous,” Dr. Dexter said in his light voice. “But don't worry. The helmet isn't here to induce pain. Quite the opposite. It's going to start hitting your brain with electrical waves that—”

“What?”

“—that are meant to emulate the bioelectric signature of Cannabis indica. It will be pleasurable, albeit overwhelming at some times.”

“You're filling me with dope? Maybe that explains...”—and Kessler was finding it hard to speak now—“those reports of you turning into an ape man...you had a pipe-dream and believed you turned into a monkey!”

“You have an impudent tongue, Kessler,” Dr. Dexter said. As the weird feeling, that crackling blissful feeling, filtered into Kessler's head, he saw Dr. Dexter's head become the weird warbling balloon-visage of Oliver Dran—so similar, like his voice, to his own. This was all coming over him so quickly, but the odd feeling changed time's rhythm, and slowly the light of the comfortable room grew familiar if not friendly, and warm if not trustworthy. “Soon you will be entering a dream-state—very much like the hypnotic trances that Dr. Dran doubtlessly subjected you to.⁵ In this state, your mind's own bioelectric signature will feed back into my Gateway. Your arrival was well-timed, even if we have to employ this as an escape method.”

“What do you mean?”

Kessler grinned, remembering something lovely that happened to him once. His question was forgotten in an instant, replaced instead with the appearance of a face he remembered only in unconsciousness. Her hair was long and made of something that ordinary hair wasn't made of, a slippery and unknowable thing that was like black water. Just as he was realizing what this face represented, there was a scream that split the air, that he thought at first came from the woman he was hallucinating. Instead, a distant shout from Dexter—“The butler!”—clarified who produced it. He gestured to his driver, Albert, who had helped restrain Kessler to the psychiatric couch.

“Go and help him, Albert!”

Kessler tried to sit up. “Let me up. I need to know what's going on, damn it!”

“Albert will hold him off, for a time. In that time, we will find our way out of here. You and that helmet are going to be our escape, Mr. Kessler, so please just relax.”

“Who are you?” That was what Kessler wanted to ask, at any rate. He couldn't recall if he had or not. He was positive now that the thrum of energy he felt was not merely in his head—there was also a current of energy in the helmet, at first running parallel to the electricity in him, and then connecting with it. He was part of a vast conduit, which snaked by cable back into the laboratory. That was all he could ascertain before he plunged into unconsciousness.

However, he seemed only to sleep a minute. He'd heard a noise before he'd slipped away, but it seemed to just be another scream.

When he woke up, there was a seam in his consciousness. A creased or folded line across his brain, and it took him awhile to understand where it came from. When the brain is confronted with something horrible, it folds over itself to protect itself against damage—at least, Kessler's brain did. If he were to be confronted by something like, say, a medical professional restraining him and gibbering about conspiracies and marihuana, he would make a “jump cut,” like he'd heard about with film scripts. Not even a proper fade-to-black—just a jump. Now he'd jumped to the floor, next to the couch with the helmet. The helmet was gone, along with Dr. Dexter, to say nothing of his personal sense of security. He had virtually no memory of what seemed to be the last few moments, and that they only seemed to be such was alarming to him. He sucked air in deep, and let thirty heartbeats pass.

First question: had that happened?

Yes. He had lost sense of himself immediately before entering the room but he knew the difference between dissociation, insobriety, and clarity. He was clear-headed, not dissociating, and was only reduced to insobriety later. By that helmet.

If the helmet did somehow emulate the feeling of the plant Cannabis indica, it wouldn't work over a distance. It was a helmet, it needed to encircle his head. So the helmet had to be real. The drugged feeling hadn't altered his memories, as far as he knew. He was sure the vision of Virginia had actually appeared in the moment at the very least. As he realized that, a whisper in his ear told him that he would soon feel the crackle in his hands, and he would begin craving a throat to wrap those hands around. But the remarkable circumstances seemed to quiet the voice for a moment, and he was infinitely grateful for that. (He was already glad for the marked casualness he had towards his pain at this point; it was an unhealthy and small mercy but a mercy all the same.)

The screams and other noises he'd heard he could rule out as hallucinations, but Dexter and Albert were nowhere to be seen. They had presumably left in response to what they had heard. That something, it seemed, was some sort of intruder. One who had provoked a shriek from the butler.

Karl was proud of his ability to deduce the truth. That it only increased his anxiety wasn't inspiring.

He had to get out of here. When he stood up, he saw that the helmet was missing, and that the door was still closed. It was dark and completely silent. As he wandered to the door and tried the knob he found that it was locked.

There was a note taped to the door. It was brief: “Kessler – You're locked in for your own good. I'll be back. If not back soon...get out and/or call police.”

When he sighed, it was so loud that he nearly jumped. Paranoia or not, there was a chance of someone or something hearing him. He'd lost none of his determination to escape, though, and so when his eyes locked onto the air vent high on the wall opposite the door, he knew he would have to make a gamble.

Ordinarily, he hated gambling—in the more metaphorical sense, rather than the gaming sense, though he hated that too. But that was usually because people were there to watch him if he screwed up. He wouldn't screw now that no one was expecting him to. He would merely die if he screwed up, at the hands of the murderer who had killed Dr. Dexter and his chauffeur.

Now there was deducing, he reasoned, and there was wild leaps. Wild leaps were also akin to gambles, but they weren't good counterparts to either taking chances or deductions. Dr. Dexter had evidently found time to take his weird marihuana-energy helmet with him before investigating the disturbance. There was probably nothing to worry about in the vent save for tightness—and even then, he was not claustrophobic (at least at this moment he wasn't), and it was an unnaturally large vent anyway.

“For your own good,” Dexter had written. Another crease was keeping that thought from catching up with him too. (Why couldn't the human consciousness process everything at once? Why did it have biological limits?) There were two meanings to that: the first was the one he was already considering, that someone had broken in. The second was that he could've been locked up to keep others safe. This wasn't an idle thing. His dreams involved him killing people, after all. Maybe this had all been a trap, a collaboration between Dran and Dexter to finally contain him. But then why should he urge him to call the police?

Couldn't be an armchair detective forever. Those guys were stupid, because they didn't understand that real-life experience is needed to be brilliant. Kessler knew he wasn't brilliant. He could hardly write correctly, in all fairness. But he knew the value of real-life experience. Best to know the world than to be trapped in it.

There was an incline to the vent, which he followed for some distance. Eventually, he saw an orange candle-light below a slatted opening. Looking down, he saw that it was indeed from a candle; a brazier on the wall, next to a Dexter family portrait. A firm kick downward, and he was out of the vent, into a hallway on the upper floor of the Dexter house. Straight ahead of him was a staircase that he felt led back down to the entrance hall of the house. There was only one issue—there was a door between he and this staircase, and it was partially open.

His heart began to accelerate. He was tempted to look inside the crack of the door, and he was unable to resist that temptation. But he didn't want to make any sort of disturbance—he couldn't open the door, nor could he look for lights. He wasn't even letting himself breathe.

There was something sitting in the darkness. He wondered if it could be a man. It rather looked to be one, slumped against a wall but slightly obscured from Kessler's perspective by a dresser. He wondered about the pants on the could-be person, if those were legs he saw, and he wondered if they were (as they seemed to be) the same worn by Albert the driver. He wanted to get closer, to tell if it was a man or a doll or a loose pair of pants or none of those things. But he decided it would be better to go downstairs instead.

His assertion was correct, and he was once more at the front of the house, standing over a now further-disturbed collection of smashed junk. The front door was as junked as everything else; it was broken from the inside out, oddly enough, but it could have been torn out, he figured. A cool evening wind blew through the door, and he considered taking himself out into that wind. For a moment the night was suddenly more imposing than anything that could be in this house. Even the prospect of “the Gateway”; even the prospect of monsters.

But love destroys apprehension, and for a brief moment, something caught Kessler's eye. It would always catch his eye, and she was not something but someone. Her eyes were staring at him, and it was a flicker through his spirit—he remembered her sitting on the front steps of the apartment building, reading a book, in that green dress they could barely afford. She wasn't wearing that now, she had on something white; he kept the green dress, though he didn't know where it was. He remembered cool summer nights where they left the window open listening to the radio, when it worked. He'd lost that radio, too...

The night melted away, or at least the fear of it did. She'd never looked so real before, and now that he was seeing her awake—for now he knew he was awake—he had to try something he hadn't tried in a long time. He tried to reach her.

As he stepped towards her, though, she grinned and turned. He began to run, and so did she—she kept his pace perfectly. Anytime he sped up, she sped up, and when he lost wind, she did the same. He could only think of how before they'd been perfected synchronized, too, finishing each other's thoughts or sentences, and ordering the same things at restaurants. He just wished that for once they would lose that connection, so that she would slow down. He hardly noticed as the city came up around him, the titanic spires blurring as they had in the limousine into a watery tapestry that he took for granted. He hardly noticed when he was following a familiar path, through streets entirely absent of people, past neon lights for shops staffed by no one and alleys devoid even of cats. She rounded a corner that he knew well, and when he did, she was gone.

He couldn't give up—not now. Another crease: it had seemed to take only minutes, but he had traveled several miles. At least, he should've had to in order to get to where he was now. He blinked as his eyes regarded the door of the apartment complex. All the same, he felt he saw the door vibrate somewhat, as if it had just been closed. Maybe she had gone in there—she was quick, after all, much more in shape than he.

He followed, and when the staircase met his eyes, barely lit (the bulbs were almost burnt out), he saw a split-second trace of her clothes trailing upstairs behind her. Knowing that there was no one there to sign him in, he went up the stairs, until he came to the sixth floor. He was wheezing even as he finally assembled all of it again in his mind—undoing another crease.

Not far ahead of him was the door to Dr. Dran's office, or where it was supposed to be—it was open, a figure was emerging. Two figures, one led by the other: one short, the height of a child, the other tall and bony. Kessler was back down the stairs even as the shorter man, the dwarf, turned to look at him. This dwarf's name was Luigi, and his taller companion, floating with a bulging Halloween pumpkin face, was the magician and murderer Emil Nardo.

This time there was no crease. No neat jump cut. Now it was just a fade to black.

<< Part III                                                                                                                              Part V >>

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5. I have been scant with providing details on Dr. Oliver Dran. Dran was indeed a dream-hypnotist, a practitioner of the method perfected by Dr. Gavin Otis, Sr. It was through the writings of Dran that the dream-hypnotism school of psychiatric practice became so widespread throughout the United States in the last few decades. It is, of course, a branch of Freudian thinking, but given a pseudo-mystical air abetted by the fact that both Drs. Dran and Otis were also attendees of the Suki Institute. Dran's experience in Imaginal Manipulations led to the aforementioned incident wherein he summoned an ectoplasmic Gorgosaurus (see the “reptilian creature” above). He was spared from humiliation and expulsion over this incident by several other students and from there on out was more conservative in his aspirations. For a time he was more interested in investigating interuniversal interactions, even discovering a hitherto undiscovered universe in the form of Earth-3133.