THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI Read online

  “The same place, will it be?”

  “We’ll find you in there, shall we?” Fergus said.

  For a moment Ross felt too trapped to think. His own question might have been designed to establish where he should avoid. He needed to be left alone to concentrate on his work, but then he wondered if the tutor had been right—if discussing the film might help him grasp his thoughts. “Someone will find someone,” he said.

  “What are we going to call you?” Donal said. “Mr Ross, that’s all we’ve been hearing.”

  Though he surely couldn’t mean the question to sound patronising, it irritated Ross. “Rees,” he retorted.

  Both students appeared to be hiding their expressions. “Rees Ross, is that?” Fergus said.

  “Nothing wrong with it, is there? Tell me an easier name to remember,” Ross said and held up a hand as Dr Craig cleared his throat, having peered at everyone over his spectacles. “I’ll look forward to reading your first essays over the weekend,” the tutor said.

  Ross hurried to his room to work on his. His thoughts so far could be better expressed, and perhaps that might help him develop his theme, but now he couldn’t write at the desk. The window made him feel like an exhibit on display to everyone who passed by. Even if he refrained from glancing up he could hear them, and he couldn’t shut his peripheral sense of them out of his mind. The colours of their clothes seemed intrusive when the page on the screen was monochrome, and he clapped the laptop shut. Surely the library would let him work in peace.

  He hadn’t realised the main room was so open and so large. Some libraries enclosed the desks with cubicles, and he wished this one did. He did his best to keep his attention on his own screen, but whenever he raised his eyes in search of thoughts he was distracted by computers on the desks ahead of him, where some of the students must be in touch with friends. I will tell you about it… The little town where I was born… These were fragments of a message, while the author’s neighbour was applying for some permit and declaring she was twenty-three years old. Ross had no idea why he should find all this so distracting, but when he shut up his computer he hadn’t written another word.

  In the Snuggery he finished off a bowl of chili con carne and a pint of Topper’s Topnotch before any of his fellow students showed up. His essay was urging him back to the room, and he headed for the exit, only to meet Fergus and Donal and their troop of friends. “After finding us, Rees?” Donal said. “Here’s every one of us.”

  They crowded him into the largest room, which immediately grew cramped. Once everybody was seated with a drink, Ross found himself the centre of attention if not interrogation. “What brought you on our film course?” Donal wanted to hear.

  “Early retirement,” Ross felt aged for saying.

  “What was that from, now?” Fergus said.

  “I taught myself.”

  “Taught yourself what?”

  “I’m saying I taught. That was my job.” Ross wasn’t sure how much of a joke the question had been or whether his reaction was too fierce. “I needed something to occupy my mind,” he said, attempting gentleness. “I’ve always loved the cinema.”

  Apparently this satisfied his audience, because the scrutiny moved on. “Do you still say the films need a warning?” Donal said.

  As long as whoever he was asking didn’t respond, Ross felt he might as well. “I think some of us should toughen ourselves up.”

  “We aren’t as old as you,” a girl—Jane, Ross remembered—said.

  “We mean we’ve not had your experience,” Fergus told him.

  “Don’t you tell me what I mean,” Jane retorted, prompting Alan to object that her voice had been discounted because of her gender. Ross felt responsible but powerless to intervene, and bruised his fingers by gripping the edge of the table. When this didn’t calm him he shoved himself to his feet. “I’m sorry if I caused this,” he said and stumbled out of the pub.

  How much had he drunk? He was unable to keep himself straight or the buildings on the campus either. The white concrete blocks looked no more solid than their shadows, especially when they swayed towards him. Of course he was unbalanced, not the buildings, even if they appeared to be growing less angular, letting their corners droop askew. He floundered back to his room, where he wished the posters seemed more welcoming. The caricatures of the comedians looked deformed enough to advertise a freak show when exhibits like that were part of a fair.

  Ross crawled into bed to sleep or else to think, but failed at both. His ideas were as unstable as the buildings had seemed, and receded beyond reach whenever he tried to seize them. He would have thought the alcohol might put him to sleep, but it didn’t mute the nocturnal sounds, a distant quarrel or else an enraged monologue, a microscopic yapping, stealthy footsteps in the corridor. He got up not long after he was sure that all his neighbours had gone to bed, but he hadn’t left the toilet cubicle when he heard a tap splash a sink. He shut his eyes while he waited for whoever was out there to leave, only to thump the door with his brow as unconsciousness sent him nodding forward. The tap had fallen silent, and when he found that the room was deserted he wondered if anybody had been at the sink.

  In his room he tried to watch Caligari, only to feel as if he was dreaming the film. He roused himself to hurry to the auditorium, where Donal came over to him. “Rees, we’re sorry if any of us upset you in the pub.”

  “Good heavens, it’d take more than, that’s to say I really wasn’t bothered.”

  “I’ll tell them,” Donal said, only to look more concerned. “What’s wrong with your head?”

  “Nothing whatsoever. Not a thing,” Ross declared, then touched his unexpectedly tender forehead. “Oh, this, you mean. Just me being a clumsy ass. Nobody else was involved.”

  “You want to take care of yourself, all the same.”

  “I do, thank you.” In a bid to sound less hostile Ross said “I’ll take care of all of you—next time it’s my round.”

  “I expect we’ll see you in there,” Donal said and rejoined his friends. Ross couldn’t see whether they were talking about him before Dr Craig’s arrival brought the muted conversation to an end. Yesterday’s films were the subject of discussion, but since the tutor didn’t look at him Ross kept his thoughts to himself. He struggled to cling to consciousness once the lights went down, only to keep wakening to glimpse people saying he was asleep or had been. He clenched his fingers on the dark and felt he was trying to grasp nothingness. At least this kept him awake while Orson Welles blundered through a nightmare fairground, explaining the plot of the film to the audience. Ross found this altogether too overwhelming—the gabble of narrative and the distorted funhouse—and was glad to retreat to his room. Besides restoring order to his thoughts, his essay would prove he deserved to be on the course.

  He couldn’t work at his desk. The world at the edge of his vision looked so misshapen that he had to keep glancing out of the window to dispel the impression. It must be a lingering symptom of drink, and shifting to the library didn’t help. He still couldn’t help glancing up to fend off the sense of distortion, only to be distracted by words on computers—Judge for yourselves, So help me God, Perhaps you should speak to him personally… Someone was reading if not studying After the Funeral, an old Agatha Christie novel, on the back of which the largest word was MURDER. Ross tried watching Caligari without sound, which lent the intertitles more of a presence, until he could have fancied they contained the insight that was eluding him. At last he had one: that he could work in his room after all. He only needed to shut out the world.

  As he hurried through the distractingly colourful crowd he caught sight of the newspaper placard at the end of the side road. Once again the solitary identifiable word was MURDER. Hadn’t the shop changed the placard, or was this a different crime? Ross didn’t need to know. In his room he turned his back on the crazed spiky caricatures on the walls and cl
osed the blinds, turning the place whiter.

  He didn’t need sound while he watched the film, but the silence seemed to bring the intertitles closer still, one word in particular: Murder!... MURDER... murdered... murder... murder!... MURDERER... murders... murders... murder... Ross felt as if he couldn’t look away until he interpreted the repetition, and all at once he found he had. Whoever was suffering the hallucination that made up the film, his mind had to be so convoluted that he let words become his personality—the words that escaped from the pages about Caligari to appear everywhere around their victim. He added the conclusion to his essay and shut down the computer before settling back on the chair.

  A sound hardly large enough to be called one wakened him. It was behind him—a papery whisper that put him in mind of a word groping to take shape. He swung around to see a page slipping under the door. The single word that had entered the room so far was inverted, which didn’t prevent him from reading CESARE. Of course it was the other name, the pizza firm’s, but he didn’t welcome that either. “Not here,” he shouted, “not wanted here,” and dashed to fling the door open. As the flyer reared up at him he saw the corridor was deserted.

  “You’re the swift one, aren’t you?” he cried. “Swift and silent too.” He was suddenly afraid that a door might open—that one of his neighbours might look out in search of an explanation. Ross was too exhausted to articulate one, and withdrew into his room. He’d accomplished his task and earned a rest now that he could empty his mind. He tore the flyer into the tiniest pieces he could produce, and found himself wishing they were more symmetrical. He hadn’t the energy even to undress before collapsing on the bed.

  A thought wakened him, or at least a sense of having had one. Whatever task he’d left undone or uncompleted, he sneaked along the corridor in the hope that behaving as if it were daytime might enliven his mind. The shower stall was even more confined than the toilet cubicle; it felt as shrunken as his consciousness. Shouldn’t finishing his essay have rid him of the film? He didn’t know how long he sat on the bed, digging his fingers deep into the edge of the mattress, before he realised why he wasn’t done with the essay. He still had to print it out for the tutor.

  A cleaner mouthed at him beyond the glass doors of the students’ union, but Ross couldn’t distinguish a word. He brandished his laptop and knocked on the glass with it until she let him in, by which time he’d had to shut his eyes to fend off the impression that the concrete block had begun to nod towards him. As the printer in the wide bare lobby disgorged his work he was beset by phrases in advertisements pinned on the extensive notice-board. ENTERTAINMENTS OF EVERY VARIETY… WAIT!!! WAIT!!!... HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME… RIGHT BEFORE YOUR EYES… UNMASK YOURSELF… He needn’t let them into his head, and he grabbed the hot pages the instant the last one emerged. “Thanks for the door,” he told the cleaner, “that’s thanks for opening,” and felt as if he was translating his not entirely wakeful thoughts.

  He was the first to arrive at the auditorium, and left his essay on the tutor’s desk beside the screen. Perhaps he was nervous about how his work would impress Craig, because the room felt disconcertingly cavernous, even once more students came in. They buried his essay under theirs, and Ross had to resist an impulse to ensure his was the first the tutor saw, to demonstrate he’d done the work. He stayed out of the discussion of the Welles film, and eventually the voices gave way to silence and darkness, though neither lasted long. Today’s film was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, and Ross clenched his fingers on his thighs to help him grasp its grey minimal world—a diner, a car, a motel, none of which seemed more solid than the dark. Nobody could say he was asleep, at any rate. He dug his fingers deeper as an accident or fate made the man on the screen throttle a woman with a telephone cord without realising he had. Did this mean that failures of communication—silences bereft of words—led to killing? Ross had no means of writing this down, and managed to relax his fingers as the lights blanched the final credits of the film.

  Craig leafed through the essays while students drifted out of the auditorium. Ross was heading for the exit rather than appear impatient for a verdict on his work when the tutor called “Mr Ross, can you spare me a few minutes?”

  Ross felt proud to be singled out. “As many as you need,” he said.

  The tutor watched the last students leave the auditorium. “How are you finding the course?”

  “I hadn’t realised you could see so much in these films.”

  “It’s opened your eyes, you’d say.”

  “Not just mine, I expect.” With a sympathetic laugh Ross said “Our friend who thought there should have been a trigger warning.”

  Craig frowned at the stack of essays, and Ross saw his own had ended up on top. “I hope you’ll think I’ve done it justice,” he said.

  “I don’t think justice is the issue at the present, Mr Ross,” the tutor said, though he’d laid a hand on the essay like a judge identifying a piece of evidence. “I’m afraid your studies haven’t worked as we hoped they would,” he said. “May I ask you to consider rewriting your essay? Alternatively under the circumstances I’m prepared to accept an overview of several of the films.”

  “That’s kind of you,” Ross said without knowing if it was. “Only can I ask where I’ve gone wrong?”

  Craig spread the essay across the desk. “I trust you may see for yourself.”

  Until he looked Ross was afraid to try. While the font was large enough for posters—the printer must have played that trick—he could see nothing else amiss. “The words are too big, you mean.”

  “Not only that. Please take your time. I believe it’s important that you see.”

  Ross stared at the pages until the words appeared to lurch off the paper towards him. “You’ll have to tell me,” he pleaded, only to feel provoked into defending himself. “I wonder whether Alan’s work is any better.”

  “Who are you speaking of, Mr Ross?”

  “Alan. Jane’s boyfriend. I said before, the young chap who wanted you to give the trigger warning.”

  “Mr Ross.” Craig took a prolonged breath. “We have nobody of those names on the course,” he said. “They’re characters in Caligari. Nobody mentioned triggering but you, and please forgive me, but you ought to know the reason.”

  Ross felt as if reason had fled the world. “They can’t only be in the film.”

  “I assure you that’s the case.” With another despairing breath Craig said “And so are all your words.”

  “Which are?” More wildly still Ross demanded “Did you even hear half I said?”

  “Look here.” As Craig began to read the first page aloud, Ross heard the last of his patience desert him. “Cesare… The annual fair… Murder… Till the break of dawn… We’ll leave the choice up to her… We shall remain friends… He’s asleep… He was asleep… Wake him up… Really, Mr Ross, need I continue? You must be able to hear it makes no sense.”

  “Yes, you go on,” Ross said, feeling his nails scrape his palms. “Make yourself clearer.”

  The tutor emitted a tut of frustration. “How can this help? I’m no doctor,” he protested, but when Ross gazed at him he reverted to reading aloud. “I will tell you about it… the little town where I was born…I wish to apply for a permit… twenty-three years old… That’s Cesare’s age in the film, Mr Ross.”

  “Don’t interrupt yourself,” Ross said and succeeded in flexing his fingers. “You’re helping, I give you my word.”

  “Judge for yourselves… So help me God… Perhaps you should speak to him personally… After the funeral…”

  He sounded close to possessed by the words, but Ross had had enough. “Unmask yourself.”

  Craig peered at the pages. “That’s your last line here, yes. So I trust you see—

  “I hear as well. Not a doctor, aren’t you? I think you think you’re his kind.”

  “Mr Ross, I
can assure you—”

  “No you can’t. You think I’ve got an obsession you can cure me of, do you? What’s the rest of your name, I wonder? Craig Ali, would it be? Ali Craig?”

  “So help me God—”

  Ross had to laugh at the idea that the tutor meant to babble every intertitle from the film, but it was only worth one laugh. “The end,” he said and set about silencing him. At last his fingers had something to do. Craig’s face drained of colour when Ross seized him by his unappealingly infirm throat, but as his eyes grew to fill his round spectacles they became as tinted as the rest of his face. The last sound he managed to produce reminded Ross of a strip of film losing its hold on a spool.

  He left the tutor lolling on his back beneath the screen with his mouth plugged by his bulging tongue. Now that Ross was aware of the auditorium once more, it felt not much less dauntingly enormous than the world. Outside would be even worse, and in any case he ought to hide. A doorway beyond the desk strewn with redundant paper led to a service corridor, and Ross was silently grateful to the cleaner he’d encountered for putting the idea in his head. When he found a cupboard halfway down the corridor he transferred the mops and buckets into a neighbouring storeroom, and then he shut the cupboard door in front of him, sealing the darkness around him. He closed his eyes and crossed his hands on his chest, and wished Craig could hear his solitary line, because it wasn’t from the film. Anyone who opened the door would hear it. “Don’t waken me,” he said, not yet aloud.

  He is a good man. Remember that. He is a good man.

  ***

  There’s something in the bed, something that scratches your skin when you move your legs, and you whip the sheets aside, fearing an insect, or worse—a spider. Dirt, coarse and abrasive, clings to your feet and ankles, between your toes. You hiss in a breath, shake your husband’s pajama-clad arm.

  Half-asleep, he mumbles, “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s dirt in the bed.” Your voice is little more than a whisper.