Pandemonium

Oh, Nekyia, I thought. Right. Of course.

“He said it was as if the floor literally gave way beneath him, and he chose to fall,” the old man said. As he talked he carefully adjusted the chair’s angle, backing and filling until it was aimed directly at me.

“Into the depths. Into the womb of primordial life.”

He straightened, then nodded at the Black Well painting. “Can you imagine, choosing to fall into that?”

There was a wink in his voice. I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at me or trying to convince me he was in on the joke.

“You must be Dr. Waldheim,” I said. O’Connell had told me they were a married couple.

He shook his head. “No, no, I’m the other Dr. Waldheim. Call me Fred.” He walked toward one of the protrusions of wall I’d passed. He moved slowly, but he didn’t seem to be in any need of a walker. “After the doctor fell, he was introduced to several independent personalities who became his guides through the underworld.” He indicated the picture of the old man beside the naked girl and her black snake.

“First were Elijah and Salome. They were the first to anoint him as the Christ—the Christ within each of us.” He smiled. “Well, maybe not all of us.”

He moved on to the winged old man with the horns. “This is Philemon, the doctor’s most important advisor. You notice the four keys he holds, representing the quaternity: the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost—and the Devil. Dr. Jung came to realize that the separation between God and Satan was an artificial construction of later Christians. The Gnostics understood that there was one God—some call him Abraxas, but he has many names—and that truth and falsehood were aspects of the same universal nature.”

I stood there, trying to figure out how I could get out of the room. The Black Well hovered just behind me, a dizzying void like the edge of a roof under my heels. “Yeah, well . . .”

“However . . . ,” the old man said, drawing out the word. “The doctor could have just been, what’s the word, whacked.” He rolled his eyes toward the wheelchair and then laughed, a long, dry chuckle. I forced a thin smile. “I really should get back to bed.”

“Wait, you’re missing the best piece.” He gestured toward the podium and the huge book on it.

The pages were old and thick, and looked like they’d been handbound to the leather cover. The leather was a dark, burnished red.

“Oh,” I said. “This must be that Red Book I’ve heard so much about.”

The old man laughed, delighted. “This is just a copy, but we’ve tried to make it as accurate as possible.”

One page was a large illustration, the other handwritten text. I moved around to the other side. The picture was of an angelic creature with a crown of stars and great wings behind it—like the Philemon character, but more refined. Someone had written in the margin: Ka. What kind of word was that—more Greek? The dense scrawl on the opposite page was harder to decipher, but at least it was in English. Someone had underlined this:

The archetype is a figure—a demon, a human being, or a process—that recurs constantly throughout history. It appears whenever creative fantasy is expressed freely.

“After the Nekyia he recorded his innermost findings about his experiences here,” Fred said. “The book’s never been shared with biographers—it could too easily be misunderstood by the masses. Gnostic texts such as these are like mandalas, wheels within wheels. But I have a feeling you would find it enlightening.” He made a flipping gesture—go on, go on—and I started turning over pages, just humoring him.

“The problem of possession concerned him from the beginning,”

Fred said. “In 1895 he attended a séance in which his thirteen-yearold cousin Helly was controlled by the spirit of their mutual grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk—the first of many possessions. Later the doctor learned to call down personalities himself, exercising what he called the ‘transcendent function.’ However, soon after he began to fear that these archetypes, these ‘invisible persons,’ would overwhelm him, and he engaged in elaborate rituals to ward them off. He spent