The Big Book of Classic Fantasy

by The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  EPILOGUE

  “That’s a very queer story,” said Cotgrave, handing back the green book to the recluse, Ambrose. “I see the drift of a good deal, but there are many things that I do not grasp at all. On the last page, for example, what does she mean by ‘nymphs’?”

  “Well, I think there are references throughout the manuscript to certain ‘processes’ which have been handed down by tradition from age to age. Some of these processes are just beginning to come within the purview of science, which has arrived at them—or rather at the steps which lead to them—by quite different paths. I have interpreted the reference to ‘nymphs’ as a reference to one of these processes.”

  “And you believe that there are such things?”

  “Oh, I think so. Yes, I believe I could give you convincing evidence on that point. I am afraid you have neglected the study of alchemy? It is a pity, for the symbolism, at all events, is very beautiful, and moreover if you were acquainted with certain books on the subject, I could recall to your mind phrases which might explain a good deal in the manuscript that you have been reading.”

  “Yes; but I want to know whether you seriously think that there is any foundation of fact beneath these fancies. Is it not all a department of poetry; a curious dream with which man has indulged himself?”

  “I can only say that it is no doubt better for the great mass of people to dismiss it all as a dream. But if you ask my veritable belief—that goes quite the other way. No; I should not say belief, but rather knowledge. I may tell you that I have known cases in which men have stumbled quite by accident on certain of these ‘processes,’ and have been astonished by wholly unexpected results. In the cases I am thinking of there could have been no possibility of ‘suggestion’ or sub-conscious action of any kind. One might as well suppose a schoolboy ‘suggesting’ the existence of Æschylus to himself, while he plods mechanically through the declensions.

  “But you have noticed the obscurity,” Ambrose went on, “and in this particular case it must have been dictated by instinct, since the writer never thought that her manuscripts would fall into other hands. But the practice is universal, and for most excellent reasons. Powerful and sovereign medicines, which are, of necessity, virulent poisons also, are kept in a locked cabinet. The child may find the key by chance, and drink herself dead; but in most cases the search is educational, and the phials contain precious elixirs for him who has patiently fashioned the key for himself.”

  “You do not care to go into details?”

  “No, frankly, I do not. No, you must remain unconvinced. But you saw how the manuscript illustrates the talk we had last week?”

  “Is this girl still alive?”

  “No. I was one of those who found her. I knew the father well; he was a lawyer, and had always left her very much to herself. He thought of nothing but deeds and leases, and the news came to him as an awful surprise. She was missing one morning; I suppose it was about a year after she had written what you have read. The servants were called, and they told things, and put the only natural interpretation on them—a perfectly erroneous one.

  “They discovered that green book somewhere in her room, and I found her in the place that she described with so much dread, lying on the ground before the image.”

  “It was an image?”

  “Yes, it was hidden by the thorns and the thick undergrowth that had surrounded it. It was a wild, lonely country; but you know what it was like by her description, though of course you will understand that the colours have been heightened. A child’s imagination always makes the heights higher and the depths deeper than they really are; and she had, unfortunately for herself, something more than imagination. One might say, perhaps, that the picture in her mind which she succeeded in a measure in putting into words, was the scene as it would have appeared to an imaginative artist. But it is a strange, desolate land.”

  “And she was dead?”

  “Yes. She had poisoned herself—in time. No; there was not a word to be said against her in the ordinary sense. You may recollect a story I told you the other night about a lady who saw her child’s fingers crushed by a window?”

  “And what was this statue?”

  “Well, it was of Roman workmanship, of a stone that with the centuries had not blackened, but had become white and luminous. The thicket had grown up about it and concealed it, and in the Middle Ages the followers of a very old tradition had known how to use it for their own purposes. In fact it had been incorporated into the monstrous mythology of the Sabbath. You will have noted that those to whom a sight of that shining whiteness had been vouchsafed by chance, or rather, perhaps, by apparent chance, were required to blindfold themselves on their second approach. That is very significant.”

  “And is it there still?”

  “I sent for tools, and we hammered it into dust and fragments.”

  “The persistence of tradition never surprises me,” Ambrose went on after a pause. “I could name many an English parish where such traditions as that girl had listened to in her childhood are still existent in occult but unabated vigour. No, for me, it is the ‘story’ not the ‘sequel,’ which is strange and awful, for I have always believed that wonder is of the soul.”

  Gustav Meyer (1868–1932) was an Austrian author who published under the name Gustav Meyrink. He is among the most esteemed German-language writers of his time within the genre of supernatural fiction. He was a banker before he took to the pen. An arrest on charges of profiteering led to his bank being ruined. By the time of his release after he was found innocent, he was ostracized from the community. Meyrink then moved to Vienna, where he became an editor and began publishing satirical stories whose aim seems to have been to insult the wealthy and notable figures of the city, certainly earning him the title of gadfly. By the early twentieth century, though, he turned away from satire and began to work with more fantastical and phantasmagorical elements. The utterly unique “Blamol” (1903), reprinted here in a new translation, was one of the first stories to display his new interest. Meyrink’s novel The Golem (1914), by far his best-known fiction, has been adapted to film numerous times.

  Blamol

  Gustav Meyrink

  Translated by Gio Clairval

  True, without error, certain and most true, I shall tell you: that which is below is as that which is above.

  —Smaragdine Table

  THE OLD SQUID SAT IN FRONT of a thick blue book found in a wrecked ship and slowly imbibed himself with ink.

  Cloddwellers have no idea how busy a squid can be all day long.

  This one had devoted himself to the study of medicine and from dawn till dusk two poor little starfish had to help him turn the pages—because they owed him so much money.

  Around his midsection—where other people have a waist—he wore a golden pince-nez, part of a marine loot. The lenses—left and right—were placed far away and anyone who accidentally looked through them became disagreeably dizzy.

  ——Peace and quiet all around.

  That’s when a polyp came flying at him, bag-shaped snout stretched forward, tentacles trailing behind like a bundle of rods, and it dropped to lie near the book.—It waited until the old fellow glanced up, and then greeted him profusely, after which it unwrapped a tin box out of his body.

  “You’re the purple polyp from Turbot Alley, aren’t you?” said the squid graciously. “Right, right, I knew your mother well, she was born von Octopus.” (You, perch, bring me the Polyps’ Almanach de Gophalopoda.) Well, what can I do for you, dear polyp?”

  “The inscription,—uhm, uhm—read the inscription.” The polyp coughed sheepishly (he had such a slimy pronunciation) and pointed to the tin can. The squid stared at the can and scrutinized the inscription like a prosecutor: “So, what do we have here?—Blamol!? That’s an invaluable find. Certainly from the stranded Christm
as steamer? ‘Blamol—the new remedy—the more you take it, the healthier you become!’

  “I want to open the thing immediately. You, perch, fetch me the two lobsters, you know, Coral Bank and Branch II, the brothers Scissors, but be quick about it.”

  No sooner had the green sea anemone, which was sitting nearby, heard about the new remedy than she immediately flitted up to the polyp:—Oh, she was so eager to take the remedy;—alas, so eager!

  And with her many hundreds of prehensile tentacles, she performed a delightful bustle, so that the bystanders could not take their eyes off her.

  —Holy shark!—was she beautiful! The mouth was a bit large, but that is so piquant on a woman.

  Everybody was engrossed in her charms and overlooked the arrival of the two lobsters that diligently endeavored to slash the tin can with their claws, all the way speaking their Chechen dialect.

  A light push, and the can fell apart.

  Like a hailstorm, the white pills erupted from the tin and—lighter than cork—disappeared upward, as quick as lightning.

  Everyone scrambled in excited confusion: “Stop, stop!”

  But nobody was fast enough to grab anything. Only the sea anemone succeeded in catching a pill, quickly putting it in her mouth.

  General displeasure: one would have liked to box the brothers Scissors ’round the ears.

  “You, perch, you could have paid attention!—What are you my assistant for?”

  It was a good ranting and scolding! Only the polyp could not utter a word, instead angrily slamming his clenched tentacles on a seashell so that the mother-of-pearl was crushed.

  All of a sudden there was a deathly silence:—The sea anemone!

  A blow must have hit her: she could not move a limb. Tentacles stretched out, she whimpered quietly.

  With an air of importance, the squid swam along and commenced an unfathomable examination. With a pebble he tapped or pricked different tentacles. (Hm, hm, Babynskian Phenomenon, disruption of the pyramidal tracts.)

  Finally, with the sharpness of a fin-edge, he crisscrossed the sea anemone’s belly a few times, taking on an impenetrable gaze, then he straightened in a dignified motion and said: “Lateral sclerosis. The lady is paralyzed.”

  “Can we do something? What do you think?” cried the good seahorse. “Help her, help her. I’ll rush to the pharmacy.”

  “Help?!—Are you crazy, sir? Do you think I studied medicine in order to cure diseases?” The squid became increasingly vehement. “It seems to me you are taking me for a barber, or do you want to mock me? You, perch—hat and cane—yes!”

  One by one, they all swam away. “The things that can happen to anyone here, in this life. It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

  Soon the place was empty, only from time to time did the perch return grudgingly to look for some lost or forgotten items.

  * * *

  —

  At the bottom of the sea, the night stirred. Rays of light, of which nobody knows where they come from and where they disappear, floated like veils in the green water, shimmering so wearily as if they were never again to return.

  The poor sea anemone lay immobile and watched them in bitter pain as they rose slowly, slowly upward.

  Yesterday, by this time, she had been fast asleep in a safe hiding place.—And now?—To die outside, like an—animal!—Beads of air pearled on her forehead.

  And tomorrow it is Christmas!!

  She thought of her distant husband, who was wandering about, God knows where—Three months and already a seagrass widow! Truly, it would not have been a wonder if she had cheated on him.

  Oh, if only the seahorse had stayed with her!

  She was so afraid!

  It was getting so dark it was almost impossible to make out one’s own tentacles.

  Broad-shouldered darkness crept out from behind rocks and algae, devouring the blurred shadows of coral reefs.

  Ghostly black bodies glided past—with glowing eyes and violet-lit fins—Night fish!—Evil rays and monkfish that stalk in the dark. Murderously lurking behind shipwrecks—

  Coy and quiet as thieves, clams open up their shells and lure the late wanderer onto soft cushions for gruesome debauchment.

  Far away, a dogfish barks.

  -—- A bright gleam flickers through the green algae: a luminous medusa guides drunken boozers home—Eeldandies and slovenly Moraystrumpets swimming fin-in-fin. Two silver-decked young salmon have stopped to look contemptuously at the exciting crowd. Rakish singing resounded:

  “Among the green seagrass

  I asked her

  If she craved me.——

  —Yes, she said.

  Then down she bent—

  and I pinched her.

  Oh, among the green seagrass…”

  “No, no, out of the way, Shoo—naughty salmon—Shoo!” an eel roared suddenly.

  The silvery one continues: “Be quiet! You need to speak Viennish. That’s because you’re the only creature that does not live in the Danubian region, I suppose—”

  “Pst, pst,” soothed the medusa, “shame on you, look who comes!”

  All of them fell silent and gazed timidly at a few slender, colorless figures that demurely moved in their direction.

  “Lancet fish,” someone whispered.

  ? ? ? ? ?

  -—- “Oh, these are high lords,—councilors, diplomats and such.—Yes, they are from birth destined to natural wonders: they have neither brain nor backbone.”

  Minutes of silent admiration, and then everyone swims peacefully off.

  The noises die away.—The deathly hush deepens.

  Time passes.—Midnight, the hour of terror.

  Weren’t those voices?—They cannot be shrimps,—so late now?—

  The Night Watch makes the rounds: Policecrabs!—

  How they are pawing with armored legs, crunching the sand, dragging their prisoners to secure places.

  Woe to him who falls into their hands;—they do not shy away from any crime,—and their lies stand in court like oaths. Even the electric ray tingles when they approach.

  The sea anemone’s heartbeat halts in horror, she, a lady, lies there helpless, out in the open! What will happen if they see her? They will drag her to the judge, that perjurious crab,—the biggest crook in the whole deep sea—and then—and then—

  They approach—now—one more step, and shame and ruin will sink their fangs in her belly.

  The dark water quivers, the coral trees groan and tremble like seagrass, a pale light shining far away.

  Crabs, rays, monkfish duck low and dart in wild flight across the sand as rocks break and whirl upward.

  A bluish, glistening wall––as tall as the world—comes flying through the sea.

  Nearer and nearer the phosphorescence hunts: the glowing giant fin of Tintorera, the demon of annihilation, sweeps along and rips abyssal glowing funnels into the foaming water.

  Everything twists into crazed swirls. The sea anemone flies across bubbling expanses, up and down—over lands of emerald froth. Where are the crabs, where are shame and fear! Roaring destruction storms throughout the world. A bacchanal of death, a jubilant dance for the soul.

  Her senses blink out, like dull light.

  A terrible jolt. Whirling, and faster, faster, faster and faster, everything twirls backward and crashes to the bottom, all that the spinning funnels had wrested from the ground. A few armors break.

  When the sea anemone finally emerged from unconsciousness after the fall, she found herself lying on a bed on soft algae.

  The good seahorse—who had not gone to work for the day—leaned over her.

  Cool morning water fanned her face, and she looked around. The chattering of barnacles and the cheerful bleating of a lamprey reached her.

  “You’re
in my country cottage,” the seahorse answered her questioning look, looking deep into her eyes. “Wouldn’t you want to go back to sleep, my gracious lady? It would do you good!”

  The sea anemone couldn’t sleep for all she tried. An indescribable feeling of disgust pulled down the corners of her mouth.

  “What a storm, last night! Everything is still spinning before my eyes,” the seahorse continued. “By the way, can I tempt you with a bit of smoked ham, a piece of Sailor’s speck?”