cross-examined later: Did you knock before you went in? Yes, Your Honor, I even announced my presence. I glanced behind me once more, then reached inside to the lefthand wall. I found a light switch, flicked it on. Directly in front of me, the Black Well.
“Shit!” I said aloud.
It was only a painting, but it still took me a moment to calm down. I stepped inside the room, put a hand against the wall. I was in some kind of cathedral-ceilinged library. The walls cut in and out, creating dozens of nooks and multiplying the wall space. Towering bookshelves alternated with narrow, green-draped windows, and the remaining spaces were filled by paintings and tapestries and glass frames of every size. In the center of the room were several fat leather chairs surrounded by long tables that held stacks of books, small glass cases, Tiffany-style desk lamps. The centerpiece seemed to be a podium holding an open book the size of my mom’s family Bible. The Black Well painting hung on the wall opposite the door, in a dark frame maybe three feet wide and four feet tall. I walked around the crenellated edge of the room, distracted by all the exotics hanging on the walls: African masks; pen-and-ink drawings of mythological animals and armored knights; tapestries of unicorns and demons and lines of pilgrims; plaques and awards in German and French and English; black-and-white photographs of bespectacled men with pipes and dark-eyed women in large hats; honorary degrees; framed prints from old books, some illustrated with arcane symbols. Most striking were the dozens of paintings, many of them multicolored mandalas but others art-nouveau-style renderings of fantastic characters: a winged man with a devil-horned forehead; a bearded man in robes; a long-haired woman naked except for a black snake draped over her shoulders.
But my attention kept returning to the Black Well painting. I approached it obliquely like a swimmer fighting the current, and stopped a few feet away.
The well wasn’t rendered exactly as it had appeared to me under the lake, but the painting caught the essence. Bands of black and red and purple spiraled and twisted away from the eye, promising an infinite regress. I put a hand out, hovering above the canvas. I pictured my hand plunging into it, the well sucking in my arm, my body. I stepped back, feeling nauseous.
Behind me, the chirp of rusty hinges. I whipped my head toward the door.
An old man pushed an antique wooden wheelchair into the room.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”
He held up a hand—to silence or reassure me, I wasn’t sure which—and rolled the chair toward me. It was an ungainly, slatbacked thing like a steamship deck chair mounted on rusting bicycle wheels. The man pushing looked as old as the chair. He was thin, all forehead and white hair, dressed in a loose white shirt and blue pants that could have been pajamas or hospital scrubs. His hair started at ear level and dropped to his shoulders, clouding into a white beard that fanned his chest.
“December of 1912,” he said. His voice was quiet but penetrating.
“Dr. Jung experienced what some people call a breakdown, and what others call a breakthrough.”
He pushed the empty wheelchair to a spot between a chair and couch. “The doctor referred to it as his Nekyia, his Ulysses-like descent into the underworld.”
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 seance 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
days building miniature villages of stone and sand, peopling them with tiny figures, token humans to attract the spirits. And then he destroyed the figures in a symbolic sacrifice.”
I looked up from the book. “And did it work?”
He shrugged. “Evidently.”
“So what do you want me to do? Buy some Legos?”
He laughed. “It might not hurt. But we’ve found that it usually helps just to talk.”
“Talk,” I said skeptically.
