The entablature above the doorway proclaimed:
THE MIDNIGHT MUSEUM
Afternoon Tours Available
“Funny,” he said, then—smacking the crowbar against his hand to assure himself of its weight and power—stepped through.
The floor was a highly-polished chessboard of alternating black-and-white marble tiles whose configuration, coupled with the incredible height of the ceiling, gave the interior an almost-dizzying forced perspective, but despite the bright tract lighting, the large wall-mounted video monitors (all of which were currently displaying electronic snow), and the enormous oval skylight set into the center of the cavernous ceiling, it was a dim-spirited place, a terrible place, a place where gigantic tumors squatted in fossilized silence, where syphilitic skulls stared out from glass cases, and where a pair of tubercular torsos encases in bulky Lucite squares sat atop short ersatz-Roman columns, one on each side of the entrance to the innumerable displays—among which a quick glance would find: infected eyes; rows of malformed infants in chemical-filled Plexiglas coffins; sliced cross-sections of human faces; a baby without sexual organs; a colon grown to seven times normal size; a plaster cast of Siamese twins, made after death, with armpit hairs in the casting; a special display centering around a nameless man who died in 1897 when the tissue connecting his muscles mutated torturously into bone; something called “The Soap Lady”—a body buried in soil possessing rare properties that turned her corpse into adipocere, her mouth open as if she’d died calling out the name of some long-forgotten love; the skeletons of an eight-foot giant and a three-foot dwarf (The remains of an old magic man and his ungrateful apprentice? Martin wondered); and the obscene death-mask of a little boy whose grotesque facial cleft had turned him into a human gargoyle. No sound. No movement. Death inviting the viewer to pause, so as to better esteem the agonizing poetry of its more creative handiwork.
Unable to absorb all of it at once, Martin focused his eyes straight ahead, on the sign reading Rights of Memory.
He swallowed, took a deep breath, and moved toward it.
Upon entering, the first thing he saw were rows upon rows of bookshelves crammed to overflowing with ancient volumes that reached from the floor to the ceiling.
The books were all three times the size of any encyclopedia he’d ever seen; stamped in gold on their spines were words and sigils he didn’t understand. The smell of mildew wafting down from their pages filled the air, even though only a few of them lay open, face-down, on nearby reading tables.
So Gash has been passing the time with a little light reading.
The video monitors came on, and Martin immediately jumped behind one of the reading tables.
Oh, some hero-to-the-rescue you are, jackass! First little sound and you’re scrambling for cover.
After the better part of a minute with Gash still a no-show, Martin realized that the monitors must be on some kind of automatic timer—or what passed for such a thing in this place.
He moved from behind the table in slow increments, not fully rising to his feet until he was certain company wasn’t coming.
Each screen was displaying a different image: Spring-greened fields; animals giving birth; scenes of war that shook and jerked from side to side because whoever was holding the camera couldn’t keep it still; an empty playground; a pair of gloves lying on a sand dune in the moonlight; silently screaming faces; children playing; old folks
(Bob, lying in that room in the Taft . . . no, he wasn’t among them)
dying; homeless ones begging for money from passing strangers; couples making love; people in uniforms torturing prisoners; babies being murdered by their parents; priests celebrating Mass; bright fireworks over rivers; assassinations; roses in bloom; wedding photographs; mangled bodies in bomb-blasted streets—
—Martin had to look away, shaking his head to clear it of the images.
Gripping the crowbar with both hands, he moved toward the center of the room, turning in slow circles as he did, not giving anything a chance to sneak up from behind.
The video monitors blinked, then returned to their previous state of silent electronic snow.
Overhead, something moved.
Martin looked up and saw what appeared to be a large, pulsating, organic black sac hanging from between two of the monitors. A thin red tube ran down from its center, dividing into several more that branched out in all directions like veins or exposed nerves.
He held his breath, then looked down at his feet.
The floor itself—already dizzying when stilled—was pulsing in rhythm with the sac overhead, as if the entire structure was a living thing, a single entity composed of several disparate parts, each one somehow alive—but not in the same way Martin himself was alive; this level of existence (if it could be called that) more resembled that of someone in REM sleep, or a hospital patient deep in a coma.
It took a moment for the impact of this to register, and when it did, Martin smiled.
Gash was sleeping again; maybe just a quick little nap, forty winks before finishing the job, but . . . yeah; asleep once more.
Stepping past a glass case containing something that looked like a giant insect carapace with angel’s wings, Martin moved toward a pile of bodies (Christ, how he hoped they were just life-sized and –like statues), all of which had been set aflame at some point in the past: they had melted in places, fusing together into a grotesque mass of entwined limbs and bloated flesh that encircled a glass case in the middle. At various points, a few of the red “veins” from the ceiling sac entered the mass through moist, puckered knots.
But this still wasn’t the worst of it.
Behind the mass and the glass case they encircled, the first in a series of naked human figures hung upside-down by its shackled ankles, swinging back and forth at the end of a rusted chain.
It wore Bob’s face, broken with grief, darkened by terror.
In the center of its chest was a moist, round, bloody hole.
It’s not him; remember that.
Easier said than done, because each succeeding figure not only shared Bob’s face and the gaping bloody chasm in the center of his chest, but built upon his original expression of grief and terror, his horror more defined, enabling Martin to witness the perverted evolution of his anguish: rage, euphoria, self-loathing, ecstasy, confusion, pride, and—on the final, hideously-realized figure—helpless resignation. This last image of Bob was looking directly at something massive that lay
(slept?)
under a gigantic tarpaulin at the farthest side of the room.
Martin thought: Oh, fuck me . . .
Because he knew what was under there.