The Madman's Errand Boy

The madman, Dr. Earl Louisa, smoked a vile, tar-black concoction that stunk like a rotten swamp in the summertime from a long-stemmed wooden pipe with a small bowl the size of a thimble. I could smell it coming through the floorboards from his laboratory below the dilapidated Victorian ruin he lived in and in which I had come to work for him.

The stem of his pipe and his fingers were permanently stained black from pinching small amounts into the bowl for his sessions that were becoming more and more frequent since I began working for him in June of last year. He mixed his concoctions at dawn on a Blood Moon, and it made him go into a kind of scientifically ambitious psychosis, keeping him trapped within the rabbit warrens of his own crazed mind.

When he imbibed his medicine, as he called it, he would shut himself away in the south wing or the basement laboratory, and I would hear him howling all through the night. He wailed, laughed maniacally, and sung crude, grim marches and dirges at all hours, sometimes for days on end. He would scream at himself and respond in other voices. Some mean, some clever, and some downright cruel. By the time the bumps, and rumbles, and the voices of chaos died down, it was sometimes days later, and I would go into his rooms or laboratory, check his pulse, and clean up whatever mess he had made. He was a changed man by the time he awoke, usually ten to twenty hours later, and ate the ritual breakfast I would prepare for him with great vigor and relish.

The importance of this breakfast he had impressed on me in the early days of my service to him. It must always be the same; composed of eggs in a cup, cooked gently, so the yolks still ran, two pieces of rustic sourdough bread, ten strips of bacon, and a large Florida orange. All of this he washed down with a double Bloody Mary and a quart of cool water. He swore this was the secret of regaining his full faculties following one of his spells, as he sometimes referred to his violent, mystery drug-fueled benders of insanity. At first, I flippantly referred to these benders in conversation with my friends as expressions of his "scientific lunacy."

One day, I went in to check on him after a particularly long and weary four days of his maddening chatter and loud bangs in the basement. I had been briefly elated when his heretical musings had abruptly stopped on the morning of the fourth day near dawn for a couple of hours before resuming. The rumble of madness finally wound down from a cacophony of furious expletives around six in the evening, and I descended to the basement laboratory to clean up his mess and see if he still breathed. There was something quite unusual sitting on the edge of his workbench—three unusual somethings.

The first, a thick leather-bound book with slips of aged and stained paper and clashing, brightly colored post-it notes sticking out to mark the passages within its decrepit, waterlogged leather cover, rippled and worn with age and abuse. The second, a small vial of bright violet liquid with a rubber stopper. The third unusual something was an owl the size of a crow trapped under a glass dome on the workbench. The owl had a pale white heart-shaped face, intelligent black eyes, and tawny wings that it ruffled as much as the clear dome it was trapped under allowed, which was a pitiful amount. The owl beat its wings furiously against the glass anyhow, the short distance it could, and scratched against the glass with its talons, lifting each leg to fruitlessly kick its shining, flesh-rending talons against the confines of its glass prison.

I was appalled that my employer would keep such a majestic wild bird in such a confining, airtight space and rushed over, dropping the heavy canvas bag I had partially filled with broken beakers, vials, mirrors, and charred bits of furniture. It fell with a crash that echoed in the vaulted brick room, each piece breaking against the others until the jarring crescendo built to a peak and stopped, the refuse in the bag finally at rest.

I tried in vain to pull the glass dome trapping the wild bird from the surface of the workbench. I was worried the owl would run out of air soon. It hadn't been that long since my employer fell into his stupor. He was probably lying in a corner somewhere around here, covered in vomit, but I didn't know how much oxygen was inside the dome. It seemed stuck to the table as if suctioned with a vacuum.

"Blrgh…what are you doing?" my employer demanded in a slurred voice that grated my eardrums as much as the breaking glass. I looked up. He was tottering around the edge of a tall bookcase against the wall behind me that hid his usual sleeping space in a narrow alcove he had chiseled into the wall and then stuffed with mismatched pillows and cushions.

"Earl, what the hell? Where did this bird come from? It's going to suffocate in there, you lunatic," I said.

"Relax, kid. Relax." He had made his way to the edge of the workbench, which he held on to for support, his eyes desperately trying to focus, like when you wake from the debauchery of the night before too early, still drunk and disoriented. "There's oxygen coming up through –"BURP "–that little tube right there." He thrust one black-tarred fingertip against the base of the glass dome, tink, pointing to a small blue hose in the surface of the workbench beneath the bird's feet.

"Earl. What is this? Why do you have this bird under a glass dome like a- "

"Jesus. Shut the hell up, kid. My head is pounding. Science experiment. Like everything else. Since when do you ask so many– "hiccup "–questions?"

"I've never found some wild – probably endangered – species in a fuckin' glass dome on the table when cleaning up after you before, Earl."

"Shows what you know, kid. I've been committing atrocities on endangered species since you were a fetus. And quit calling me Earl. When's breakfast? Wake me again then."

With that, my employer returned to his den hidden behind the bookcase, and I was left standing helplessly in front of the owl under the glass dome. It looked at me with its deep black eyes that reflected the ceiling lights as shining specks, and I was struck by the thoughtful intelligence in the creature's eyes, watching, considering—weighing my merits and his detriments.

And my ADHD was running away with me again. It was just a bird Earl had caught while flapping his wings on the rooftops with the morning doves and shouting at the passersby. It must be. Though I had only worked for him for seven months, I didn't believe his claims of animal cruelty he had just professed. He was a bickerer, an imposing drunk, and quite often unpleasant – punctuated by irregular periods of profound kindness, tact, and humility that seemed further and further between – but he wasn't cruel. Not in more than words, anyway.

I finished cleaning the laboratory. The destruction hadn't been as bad as the last time my employer had gone on one of his sessions, though from the sounds I had heard from above the last four days, it seemed like one of his worst bouts with madness from the pipe to date. Before I went up the winding staircase to the house above to begin making breakfast, I stuck my head around the corner of the bookshelf that hid his sleeping alcove and, through the gloom, saw his chest slowly rising and falling. Sighing, I headed up the stairs, wanting every step of the way to toss my sack of broken glass back down the stairs to create another crash and break his self-indulgent reverie.

In the kitchen at the head of the basement staircase, I had found a space of my own. My employer didn't cook ever, though he had stocked his sprawling Victorian kitchen with top-of-the-line Wolf ranges, ovens, and other appliances. Each time I stepped foot into the kitchen, I was struck anew with the grandeur of the room that wouldn't have been out of place in the home of a royal family. Compared to the dilapidated condition of the rest of the estate, it was a palace. I often used it as a space for entertaining my friends from the local university, which I had left for a semester to earn money for tuition. My employer rarely ate more than frozen burritos in his subterranean laboratory or apples from the branches outside the south wing of the house, where he occasionally went to change his clothes and comb his hair.

The exception to his strict, monastic diet was the meal immediately following one of his sojourns into madness.

I pulled the bacon out of the enormous double-doored refrigerator that looked more like the grand doors of a cathedral than the home of sliced meats and fresh produce, along with a pair of speckled brown eggs, two slices of sourdough bread, and a gigantic orange. I had to hand it to him – even without being cooked yet, the smell of the smoked bacon and the pungent fragrance of the orange was a mouth-watering combination. I didn't usually need to rouse him a second time. Once the smell of freshly brewed coffee and bacon wafted through the open door to the basement and down the stairs, he would typically come slowly stomping up the stairs, his eyes closed behind a pair of dark sunglasses.

I pulled a heavy crystal pitcher from the cupboard above the sink and set it on the counter with a thunk. From a lower cabinet, I pulled a half-gallon bottle of my employer's favorite vodka, a bottle of Bloody Mary mix, and his favorite cocktail glass, a large plastic beer mug he said he'd had since college.

I filled the 32oz. alcohol barrel with ice, poured it half-full of vodka, and turned to check on breakfast. I heard his slow, plodding steps begin to stomp up the basement stairs as soon as I removed the bacon from the oven and hurried to pop a stalk of celery, a pickle spear, and a couple of olives into the cheap plastic drum of booze. I set it in front of his favorite stool at the counter just as he rounded the final curve of the stairs and looked up at me through thick black glasses. He had one hand on the wall, the other on the railing, his cheek pressed against the cool outer brick wall.

He reached the top of the stairs as I finished filling a quart jar with cold water. He dropped into his stool across from me at the kitchen island. Due to its sheer volume, it sometimes seemed larger than the apartment I had lived in before moving to the estate to take care of his feeding, watering, and general well-being.

My employer looked at me blankly from behind his impermeable black frames, and I pushed the large jar of water and cry-for-help-in-a-cup across the counter towards him, followed by the tray holding his breakfast.

I poured myself a cup of coffee, grabbed the plate I had fixed for myself – just bacon and eggs – and sat down across the wide granite countertop from him. He said nothing, holding the water jar in his hand and tipping it up and down until it was drained, then pulled the vat of vodka and tomato juice towards him, drinking deeply before sighing, pulling off his sunglasses, and meeting my gaze across the countertop.

"So, I suppose that was a rather odd find for you to stumble across this morning."

"It's six in the evening."

"…An odd find this evening." He took a bite of bacon and dipped a toast point into the eggs. "Usually, I don't let you find any of the live ones."

I wasn't amused and remained expressionless. After a long moment, he cracked a grin. It faded quickly, replaced by a look of weariness and anxiety I had rarely seen him allow to show on his face.

"Thing is, errand boy – what's your name again?"

"It's – "

He continued without pausing or seeming to hear me, "I'm rather more in need of an assistant now than an errand boy that's also, I must say, quite a tremendous cook." He dipped a crust into the remaining egg on his plate to punctuate his point. "I've come upon a discovery recently that I believe I cannot hope to safely navigate without the direct assistance of someone mildly capable and astute with their critical thinking skills." He stared at me over the chewed-up plastic rim of his Bloody Mary cup. "Think that's you, kid?"

"What would it entail…?" I began hesitantly.

He let out a harsh croak of a laugh and had to cough to keep from choking on his mouthful of orange.

"Oh, you know. A bit of the same, but with a more hands-on approach."

"And how does this relate to the bird in the basement?" I asked.

"Someone never studied Tytonidae or Strigidae."

"Studied what…?"

"Owls, boy. Owls," he grumbled. He was nearing the bottom of his two-story Bloody Mary. "It's a barn owl, likely from the United States judging by its build. Michigan, I think, though I could be wrong. One of those Midwest states. You can tell by its coloring. Well, you can make an approximation anyway."

"Barn owl? The owl in the basement? That's why you want to –to promote me?" I asked with mild disdain. "To help you torture and maim fucking owls in the basement?"

"Jesus, kid! No. Nothing of the sort. At least, I hope not. See, I've discovered something. Something I can't share with anyone but desperately need help with. You don't typically ask many questions." Here he raised his eyebrows meaningfully at me. "Except for today."

I didn't respond and instead waited silently for him to continue, sipping my coffee.

He sighed. "So, you know why I initially hired you. You know I'm something of a," he paused thoughtfully. “A psychotropic explorer. That's what you probably think. Am I right?"

"Well, I mean, I know you smoke some weird shit in a weird pipe that stains your fingertips black and makes you act like a complete lunatic a few times a week. I also know you're a well-respected biologist in the scientific community. Or at least you used to be."

"Right. That stuff is a concoction of my own devising based on some tips from various indigenous medicine men and women around the world. It's a special blend. Not for the faint of heart, to be sure. Well, smoking that stuff gives me insight into a new world, errand boy."

"My name is – "

"And I've come across something I don't think I can ignore, which will require your assistance to ensure the validity of my scientific method. You see, this plane, this –"Here he gestured in the air around him. "– reality is the control. And you, you'll be the experimenter. I'll be the subject."

"All right, well, it's been nice having breakfast for dinner with you, Earl, but I'm going to get started on the dishes." I stood from my place across from him at the vast kitchen island and began gathering our plates.

His palm smacked the countertop, startling me.

"For fuck's sake, Earl, get a grip," I shouted, losing my hold on the temper I normally kept tightly in check.

"Sit down, kid. Sit down. Please." He rose and walked around the island to the kitchen sink, where he dumped the dregs from the crystal pitcher before rinsing it and filling it with fresh ice, then added vodka and Bloody Mary mix. He poured me a glass, gently pushed it in front of my plate while looking gingerly at the annoyed look on my face and returned to his seat across from me. "I need you to listen to me. This is serious business."

"Fine. Okay. You pay me enough. I guess I can entertain this as well." I crossed my arms, not touching the glass filled to the brim in front of me.

"Okay…well. This is how it started," he began.

We continued speaking long into the night, during which I barely moved or spoke, except to nod when he offered me another glass to wash his story down.

He began when he first discovered the volatile combination of poisonous minerals and hallucinogenic plants that sent him into his wild tangents of lunacy. Apparently, his current recipe was 'much safer' than what he used to smoke, but it still left him feeling like he was on Death's doorstep. He told me the lasting effects that my wonderful breakfasts cured him of, for the most part, were comparable to the worst hungover comedown anyone experienced without requiring immediate medical attention. He likened the aftereffects to how one might feel on day five following a steady four-day diet of whiskey, cheap bagged wine, one slice of pizza a day, and copious plethoric drug consumption at a music festival.

He claimed this maniacal combination gave him insight into another world, across what he referred to as 'the Gap.' This other world, the Otherside, as he called it, was a parallel reality he had found a way to break into by smoking his tar-like substance. He explained that when I heard him raving like a madman all through the night and for days on end, it resulted from his being unable to enter this new world's reality that he had become obsessed with studying. When the drugs didn't work, he simply went mad and couldn't control it. However, when the drugs did work, he was thrust through the Gap into the Otherside.

On the Otherside, he told me, the world was like ours in many ways, like Earth, but profoundly different in others. Everything that occurred in this world was to an extreme degree. He had witnessed sunrises and sunsets of the Otherside's two polar suns that made him run for cover from their burning gaze. He befriended kind, gentle beasts the size of houses. He couldn't begin to guess their evolutionary heritage but described these creatures as a cross between a rhinoceros and a childishly animated idea of a dinosaur. He had also witnessed a battle between warring factions of the same creatures that ended with the rolling meadows filled with nothing but corpses. All attackers and defenders slain. He had never learned what they had fought over before so violently destroying one another, and hadn't seen any since the battle.

He told me, in essence, this other world, the 'Otherside' of the 'Gap,' was a world of extremes. Extreme, shocking beauty and majesty, and extreme brutality and heinous cruelty, sometimes in the span of a breath. A dominant sentient species he had not yet come across.

Studying this other world, the Otherside, had quickly become his passion. His passionate scientific curiosity had come to be replaced by fervent obsession, he admitted, which became more pronounced each time he traversed the Gap, and which left him a spitting, raving madman when he wasn't able to make the crossing. The unknown reasons he sometimes made the crossing in a heartbeat and other times didn't reach it in days of seemingly identical attempts was a particular point of contention for his once wholly-scientific mind. He mentioned to me in the painfully-smiling jest of a man speaking the truth that he had once been ruled by logic and critical thinking rather than the madness and obsessive ambition that seemed to dictate his life choices now. He also knew he could not return to the life he had led before learning of the Otherside across the Gap.

Each time he journeyed to the Otherside, where he studied its world of extremes, he did so under the influence of his mysterious smokeable concoction, which was heavily hallucinogenic and more than slightly poisonous. His descriptions of this world's extreme beauty, joy, malicious destruction, and brutality made me nauseous to even think about and sparked some primal fear response deep in my psyche that told me to run far and fast.

I didn't. I became his assistant, though I still held the responsibilities of an errand boy. In actuality, this meant that I now held a more significant position of importance in his life than just his cook, cleaner, and uncertified EMT. He trusted me now and needed my help. Each time I judged his mental acuity as possibly capable of handling the idea without blowing into a rage, I implored him to release the barn owl he kept now in a large cage along one wall of the laboratory. The owl sat its perch silently, watching our experiments and only screeching when he came near the cage, for it only tolerated me to feed it and give it fresh water or talk kindly to it in a low voice. Despite my entreating arguments that he return this mysterious barn owl to wherever it had come from, he staunchly refused. Though, after the first few days of its captivity under the glass dome, I had convinced him to move the bird to a larger cage. This was followed by a larger cage still several weeks later that I had gotten off of a retired lion tamer in a trailer park in Reno. However, he would not explain to me what significance the owl held, only that we must not let it go.

The next several weeks passed. I was still responsible for my regular duties and some new duties, such as helping in the lab in preparation for attempts to cross the Gap to the Otherside. He wouldn't let me remain in the laboratory with him when he imbibed the substance from his pipe for fear he might become violent if he couldn't make the crossing and became unable to control himself and his rage while under its influences. Each time he was gone – blinked out of our world like a blown circuit breaker – began to grow longer, though he claimed his real-time of twelve hours remained unchanged on his wristwatch, which I verified each time he returned. We couldn't account for this discrepancy and renewed our efforts with greater intensity, sending him across the Gap each night. At the start of our collaboration, a journey of a single hour as measured on Earth amounted to twelve hours of real-time on the Otherside. After several weeks of these trials, his time away grew significantly longer.

After several months of our trials, each twelve-hour session of real-time as measured by his wristwatch had become exponentially expanded on Earth. He would cross the Gap, and I would go upstairs and attempt to live a regular life while all the time knowing he was in some parallel world doing God knows what, never knowing how long it would be before he returned once again, wearily stomping up the basement stairs. I began to long for the sound and kept the fridge and liquor cabinet stocked, spending most of my time sitting on a kitchen stool waiting.

Our most recent trial, which had begun with his departure to the Otherside in June of 2021, at the midnight mark of the summer solstice, returned him only one week past now, in mid-January of 2022. He came running up the basement stairs, breathless, disheveled, and covered head to toe with oozing cuts that looked like he had tumbled into a thorn bush full of knitting needles. He proceeded to regale me with the story of his past twelve hours, which to me had been seven months of bad sleep and existential dread.

My employer told me that he had kept his true theories and postulations from me throughout the course of our trials, not wanting to worry me for his well-being and mental capacity to handle the logically paradoxical nature of his dual existence between Earth and the Otherside.

He told me that when he left the laboratory in June and was wrenched across the Gap, he immediately found himself standing on a mountain top, looking across a low, fertile valley crossed with sparkling blue rivers and thick green forests. He heard the shrieking and call-and-answers of creatures on the forest floor, along with the harsh snarls of some beast that must have been enormous, for it shook the rock beneath his feet and echoed across the valley. Above him, he spotted a bird from the corner of his eye circling high above, a blur in the glare of the dual suns.

He craned his neck to see better, squinting his eyes against the harsh double sunlight, and the bird swooped lower. Still, the glare of the sun off of the waterfalls ringing the valley was like spotlights on his vision, and he lost sight of it. Then he heard a piercing, ear-splitting screech and flung his head back to see the great bird plummeting towards him; its talons outstretched like tawny golden scimitars. He dropped to the ground, knowing any moment those spikes would pierce his flesh – chest, and legs punctured like a needle in a grape – and he would be carried away to be this enormous bird's lunch. But it never came. He raised his head, still shaking. The uncomfortable "breathing" hallucinations leftover from the medicine he smoked to get to the Otherside made him want to puke, exacerbated by his fear.

The giant bird flew back and forth in tight ellipses over the valley, not fifty yards in front of him. Its wingspan must have been eighteen feet or more. He could feel its yellow eyes burning into him with a predator's ferocity. An unyielding, unmerciful stare. It was a barn owl; a gigantic specimen built like a pterodactyl. Its colors were the exact inverse of his laboratory's captive in the cage. He felt the blood drain from his face, fingertips, and toes, and his stomach dropped into his belly. The giant owl screeched again, making his eardrums feel as if they would burst, and suddenly it was flying towards him, shooting across the distance of the chasm between them like a feathered torpedo.

He could do nothing but stare, paralyzed in place. Not that he could have run or hidden if he had wanted. The flat area where he stood on the mountain top was only about twenty feet across, surrounded on three sides by impenetrable jungle foliage. Knotting vines as thick as his wrist blocked all but creatures the size of a soccer ball or smaller from passing through the living net they spread around the mountain top clearing. The side of the clearing facing the valley was a sheer cliff that fell hundreds of feet before reaching another ledge. But he saw none of this. His eyes were focused on the barn owl. Its broad golden chest, the inverse of its mate's white feathered body, rippled with the speed of its flight in the glaring sunlight like the belly of a golden kamikaze airplane hurtling towards him.

Shortly after telling me of his encounter with the giant barn owl, he seemed to lose his grip on himself and his mind and devolved into a steady stream of "I was right, I was right, I was right, I was right, I was right, errand boy. There is a way. There is a way. The way. The way. The way. We have to know and go the way." Then he lifted one black-stained finger and pointed weakly at the captive owl that stood on the edge of its perch, looking down at us intently, and fell into unconsciousness.