SUDDENLY I REALIZED his great black cat was there. It stood four feet tall from ground to spine, with big green eyes and vast slow swishing tail like eternity on a fly–the strangest cat. “Got him in the Andes,” was all the Sax ever told me, “got him in the Andes, on a chestnut tree.” Parakeets he also had, they said exceedingly strange things, “Zangfed, dezeede leeing, fling, flang”—and one that cried in proud Spanish learnt from old bushy brow pirate who farted in his rum, “Hoik kally-ang-goo–Quarent-ay-cinco, señor, quarent-ay-cinco, quarent-ay-cinco.” A vast perwigillar balloon exploded over my head, it was a blue balloon that had risen out of the blue powders in the Forge, and so suddenly everything was blue.
“The Blue Era!” cried Doctor Sax, dashing to his kiln– His shroud flew after him, he stood like a Goethe witch before his furn-forge, tall, emasculated, Nietzschean, gaunt—(in those days I knew Goethe and Nietzsche only from titles in faded gold paint imprinted on the backs of soft brown or soft pale green old velvety Classic books in the Lowell Library)- The Cat swished his great tail. There was no time to lose. The jig was up. I could sense flurrying excitements in the air, as though a flight of ten thousand angels in small-soul form had just flown through the room and through our heads in their heavy tearful destination ever farward round the earth in search of souls that haven’t yet arrived– Poor Doctor Sax stood drooped and sad at his forge works. The fire was blue, the blue cave roof was blue, everything, shadow was blue, my shoes were blue—”Oooh–Ah-man!” I heard a whisper from the cat. It was a Talking Cat? Doctor Sax said “Yes, it was a talking cat once I suppose. Help me with these jars”.
I uprolled me sleeves to help Doctor Sax with the jars of eternity. They were labeled one after another with bright blue and obviously other colors and had Hebraic writing on them–his secrets were Jewish, mixed with some Arabic.
“Introversions! torturous introversions of my mind!” screamed Doctor Sax jumping up and down as hard as he could and screaming at the top of his lungs, his great shroud flapping. I hid in the corner, covered my mouth and nose with fear, my hands ice cold.
“Yaaah!” screeched Doctor Sax turning and protruding his great leering green face with red eyes at me, showing blue teeth in the general blue world of his own fool powders. “Screeeech!” he hollered–he began pulling his jaw cheeks apart to make worse faces and scare me, I was scared enough–he bounced back, head down, like a hip tap dancer pulling his bops away, on swinging heels–
“Doctor Sax,” I cried, “Monsieur Sax, m’fa peur!” (You scare me!)
“Okay,” he instantly said and reared back to normal, flattening against a cellar stanchion pole in a black bereaved shadow. He stood silently for a long while, the Cat swished his mighty tail. The blue light vibrated.
“Here,” he said, “you see the chief powders of the preparation. I have been working on this amazing concoction for twenty years counting ordinary time–I’ve been all over the world son, from one part of it to the other–I sat in hot sun parks down in Peru, in the city of Lima, letting the hot sun solace me– In the nights I was every blessed time inveigled with some Indian or other type witch doctorin bastards to go into some mud alley in back of suspicious looking sewer holes dug in the ground, and come to some old Chinese wisdom usually with his arms hanging low from a big pipeful of World Hasheesh and has lazy eyes and says ‘You gen’men want some-theeng?’ ‘Tis a pimp, son, hides at the secret heart of mystery–has big thick lace curtains in his loot room–and herbs, me boy, herbs. There’s a blueish weird smoke emanates from a certain soft wood to be found far South of here, to be smoked–that when mixed with wild Germunselee witch brews from Orang-Utang Hills in crazy Galapoli–where the vine tree is a hundred foot high, and the orchid bunches knock your head off, and the Snake does slither in the Pan American slime–somewhere in South America, boy, the secret cave of Napoli.”
Whirl bones rattled from the arrangement he had with the forge pull–every time he yanked, and blew on the coals, the string-chain also pulled the tripod on the ceiling that made the rattling bones whirl. There were a thousand interesting things to notice-
Reverently Doctor Sax bent on his knees. Before him was a little glass vacuum ball. Inside of it were the powders he’d taken 20 years of alchemy and world travel to perfect, not to mention everything he had to do with round-the-world doves, the trusteeship of giant secret society black cats, certain areas of the world to patrol, North and South America, for sight of Snake’s suspicious presence–manifold duties on every side.
“When I break this bubble ball and these powders come into contact with the air at the Parapet of the Pit, all my manifold duties will have melted into one white glow.”
“Will everything stay blue till we get to that Snake White?” I asked swiftly.
“No–even from inside the vacuum glass my potent powder will change the atmosphere several times this night as we jostle to our work.”
“Is the cat coming with us sir?”
“Yes–Pondu Pokie they called him in the Chilean mines —you’d never guess what his Indian name meant– It my boy meant ‘Great Cat Full of Waiting’– A beast like that is born to be great.”
He took the glass ball with its terrible innocent looking morphine-powder-like spoonful, and thrust it in his holy heart’s pocket.
He raised his face to the dark ceiling.
“—” His mouth was wide open for a great cry and he only awped with his neck muscles upstrained to the ceiling —in blueish glows of fire.
He ducked slightly, the cat stiffened, the room shook, a great cranging noise rang across the sky towards the Castle-
“That’s the Eagle’s Lord and Master coming to the fray.”
“What? Who?”—terrified, an air raid of horror everywhere.
“They say there’s a mighty force no one of us knows about and so the eagles and birds make a great to-do and noise and especially tonight when the Invisible Power of the Universe is supposed to be nigh–we don’t know any more than the Sun what the Snake will do–and can’t know what the Golden Being of Immortality can do, or will do, or what, or where– Huge batallions of loud snake-decorated birds it was you just heard above, rattling their sabers above the Lowell night, heading for the duel with the Crooges of the Castle—”
“Crooges?”
“No time to wait son I–figs and Caesar don’t mix–run to the fore with me–come and see the moo mouth maw of death–come get your ass through the western gate of Wrath, come ride the rocky road to orgone mystery. The eyes of those who have died are watching in the night-”
We’re flying in a sad slant whirl right over Centerfield Dracut Tigers, came up-chawing from the cannon of his mad activity and balled across the air talking.
“What eyes?” I cried, leaning my head on a pillow of air; it was dew, & cool.
“The eyes of eternity, son– Look!”
I looked and suddenly in the night it was all filled with floating eyes none of them as bright as stars but like gray plicks in the texture cloak of fields and nightskies–unmistakable, they drooped and dreared to see Doctor Sax and I pass in the wake of the clanging nightbirds ahead. The eyes without seeming to move followed us like flying saucer armies as we fanned out all in great raw wild flight over the fields, sandbank and still-brown foamed river to the Castle.