The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  The jaw drops. The mouth stays open.

  ‘Father!’ Leonhard cries. At last the word has come, but the man to whom it is addressed will never move again.

  Uproar on the stairs, screaming voices, running steps echoing up and down the passages; the dog starts barking, interspersed with howls. Leonhard pays no attention, all he can see and feel is the terrible calm on the rigid, lifeless face. It fills the room with a radiance which illumines, envelops him. A dizzying sense of a happiness he has never known lays its hand on his heart, an intimation of an unchanging present beyond past and future, a mute rejoicing in the discovery that all around is the pulsation of a force in which he can take refuge, as if in a cloud that makes him invisible, from the restless maelstrom of the house.

  The air is filled with brightness.

  Tears are pouring down Leonhard’s cheeks.

  He starts as the door opens with a clatter. His mother comes tearing in. ‘No time for crying now. Can’t you see we’re rushed off our feet.’ Her words cut like a whiplash. The orders come tumbling out, the one countermanded by the next, the maids sob and get thrown out, in frantic haste the servants carry the furniture out into the corridor, panes of glass rattle, medicine bottles smash. ‘Get the doctor’ – ‘No, no, the priest’ – ‘Stop, stop, not the priest, the grave-digger, tell him not to forget his spade’ – ‘and to bring a coffin too, with nails to nail it down’ – ‘and someone go and open up the chapel, prepare the family vault – ‘At once, right away!’ – ‘And where are those candles that should be burning? And why is no one laying out the corpse? Do you have to be told everything ten times over?!’

  With a shudder Leonhard sees how the frenzied witches’ sabbath of life does not even pause before the majesty of death and step by step wins a hideous victory. He feels the peace within him vanish like the morning dew.

  Slavishly obedient hands are already being laid on the wheelchair to bear the count away. Leonhard tries to intervene, to protect the dead man. He spreads his arms, but they drop back feebly to his sides. He grits his teeth and forces himself to look his mother in the eye to see if there is the slightest hint of sorrow or grief there, but not for one second can he hold her shifting, restless gaze. Like a monkey’s, her eyes are constantly on the move, flitting from corner to corner, up and down, from ceiling to wall, from window to door with the zigzag flight of a demented blowfly, revealing a creature with no soul. Pain and passion bounce off her like arrows off a whirling target, she is a giant insect in the form of a woman, a woman possessed, embodying the curse of aimless, pointless toil on earth. A spurt of dread paralyses Leonhard. He stares at her, horrified, as if she were a creature he were looking at for the first time. There is nothing human about her any longer, she appears to him as an alien being from some hell, half goblin, half vicious animal.

  The idea that this is his mother turns his own blood into a noxious substance, eating away at his body and soul. His hair stands on end in a sudden onrush of horror at himself that drives him out: anywhere as long as it is away from her! He rushes into the park with no idea where he is going, what he is doing, crashes into a tree and falls on his back, unconscious.

  Leonhard is staring at a new image crossing his inner vision like a fevered dream: the chapel suffused with candlelight, a priest muttering at the altar, a scent of withering wreaths, an open coffin, the dead count in his white cloak of office, his waxy yellow hands crossed over his chest. A glint of gold on dark pictures of saints, black-clad men standing in a semicircle, lips mumbling prayers, cold musty air coming up from the floor and an iron trapdoor with a shining cross propped open: the square, yawning hole leads down into the crypt. Muted chanting in Latin, sunlight coming in through the stained-glass windows, dappling the drifts of incense with patches of green, blue, blood-red, an insistent, silvery ringing from the ceiling, the priest’s hand in its lacy sleeve waving the aspergillum over the dead man’s face. Suddenly there is movement: twelve white-gloved hands bestir themselves, lift the bier from the catafalque and close the lid; the ropes go taut, the coffin sinks into the depths, the men descend the stone steps. Then a dull echo from the vault, the crunch of sand, solemn stillness. Grave faces emerge silently from the crypt, the trapdoor descends, the lock snaps shut, dust swirls up round the edges, the cross is now horizontal. The candles gutter, go out; once more the light comes from the pine twigs in the fireplace; altar and pictures are replaced by bare walls, the flagstones covered with soil; the wreaths crumble to dust, the figure of the priest dissolves into air. Leonhard is alone again.

  Since the death of the old count, the servants’ quarters are in turmoil. They refuse to obey the pointless commands, one after the other they pack their things and leave. The few that are left are insolent and insubordinate, only do the most basic tasks and do not come when called.

  Lips pinched, Leonhard’s mother still rushes from room to room, but without her train of helpers. She tugs clumsily at the heavy wardrobes, hissing with rage, but they refuse to budge, the cupboards seem to be screwed to the floor, drawers resist, won’t open, won’t close. Everything she takes in her hand, she drops and no one picks it up. There are hundreds of objects lying around, debris piles up forming insurmountable obstacles no one clears away. The bookshelves fall off the wall, engulfing the room in an avalanche of books, making it impossible to get to the window to close it. It bangs in the wind until the glass breaks and the rain pours in. Soon everything is covered in a grey blanket of mould.

  The countess is seized with fits of insane fury, hammering the walls with her fists, gasping for breath, screeching, tearing up anything she can lay her hands on. Her impotent rage at the fact that no one obeys her any longer – she cannot even use her son as a servant since he fell down and has to hobble round with a stick – finally robs her of the last shreds of reason. She spends hours muttering to herself, grinding her teeth, giving angry shouts, scurrying along the corridors like a wild animal.

  But gradually a strange transformation takes place. Her features take on a witch-like air, her eyes a greenish shimmer, she seems to see spectres, suddenly listens, open-mouthed, as if someone were whispering to her, and asks, ‘What? What? What must I do?’

  Little by little the demon inside her unmasks itself as her mindless urge to be busy is replaced by a conscious, calculating malice. Now she leaves the things around her in peace, does not touch anything. Dirt and dust gather everywhere, the mirrors are clouded, the garden choked with weeds, nothing is in its right place, even the most essential utensils are impossible to find. The servants offer to clear away the worst of the mess but she forbids it with a peremptory ‘No!’. She is quite happy that everything is in chaos, the tiles falling off the roof, the woodwork rotting, the fabrics mildewed. She gloats inwardly as she sees those around her suffering a new kind of torment, an unease mounting to desperation, in place of the old restlessness that made their lives a misery. She no longer says a word to anyone, gives no orders, but everything she does is done with malice, to spread fear and terror among the servants. She pretends to be mad, creeps into the maids’ bedrooms at night, sending jugs crashing to the floor with a shrill cackle of laughter. Locking the door is impossible, she has removed every key in the house, now there is no door she cannot fling open with one heave. She doesn’t bother to comb her hair, it hangs down in tangled knots, she eats as she walks, she doesn’t go to bed any more. Only half dressed, so the rustling of her clothes will not warn people she is coming, she steals through the castle in felt slippers, suddenly appearing like a ghost, now here, now there.

  On moonlit nights she even haunts the chapel. No one dares to go there any longer. There is a rumour that the ghost of the dead count walks.

  She will accept no help, what she needs, she takes. She knows full well that her silent, lightning appearances arouse greater fear among her superstitious servants than a show of imperiousness. They only talk in whispers, never a loud word, they all have guilty consciences even though there is not the slightest
reason.

  But the main object of her machinations is her son. With insidious cunning, she uses every occasion to exploit her natural dominance as his mother and increase his feeling of dependence. She plays on his nervous fear, his feeling he is never unobserved, whipping it up into a delusion of constantly being caught in the act until he is oppressed by a permanent sense of guilt. Whenever he tries to speak to her she just screws up her face in a mocking sneer so that the words stick in his throat and he feels like a criminal whose iniquity is branded on his forehead. His vague fear that she might be able to read his most secret thoughts, that she might know about him and Sabina, becomes an alarming certainty when her penetrating gaze rests on him. At the slightest sound he desperately tries to look innocent, and the harder he tries, the less he succeeds.

  A secret longing ripening into love draws Leonhard and Sabina together. They slip each other little letters with the feeling they are committing a mortal sin. But the tenderer shoots of affection are poisoned by their sense of perpetually being followed and wither, leaving them in the grip of boundless animal lust. They station themselves at the junction of corridors where they cannot see each other but where one of them will spot the countess if she comes and can warn the other. Thus they talk and, afraid of losing precious minutes, speak frankly, openly putting their feelings into plain words and fanning the flames of desire even more.

  But they find they are more and more restricted. As if the old woman suspects what is going on, she locks up the second floor, then the first. All that is left to them is the ground floor, where the servants are coming and going all the time. Leaving the castle grounds is forbidden and there are no hiding places in the park, even at night. If the moon is shining, they can be seen from the castle windows, if it is dark, they risk having the countess steal up on them.

  Their passion grows impossible to curb the more they are compelled to repress it. The idea of openly disregarding the barriers between them never enters their heads. From earliest childhood they have been too deeply imbued with the conviction that they are completely at the mercy of a demonic force with power over life and death for them even to think of looking each other in the face in his mother’s presence.

  The meadows are scorched by the torrid heat of summer, the ground is parched and cracked, the evening sky is aflame with sheet lightning. The grass is yellow, numbing the senses with the sultry smell of hay, the walls quiver in the heat haze. Leonhard and Sabina too are so hot with desire their whole being revolves around one thing alone. When they meet they can hardly stop themselves falling upon each other.

  Then comes one feverish, sleepless night with wild, lascivious waking dreams. Every time they open their eyes they see Leonhard’s mother peering in, hear her stealthy footsteps at their doors. It hardly registers with them, seems half reality, half delusion, they cannot wait for the morrow when they are finally going to meet, regardless of the consequences, in the chapel.

  They stay in their rooms the whole morning, listening at the door with bated breath and quaking knees for signs that the old woman is in some more distant part of the castle.

  Hour after hour passes in agonising torment, midday sounds. There! A noise like the clink of keys in the interior of the building gives them the illusion of safety. They dash out into the garden. The chapel door is ajar, they push it open and slam it to behind them so that the bolt snaps shut.

  They do not see that the iron trapdoor leading down into the crypt is propped open by a wooden strut, do not see the square hole yawning in the floor, do not feel the icy air coming out of the funeral vault. Like beasts of prey, they devour each other with their looks. Sabina tries to speak, but all that comes out is a frenzied babble. Leonhard rips off her clothes and throws himself on her. Panting, they seize each other in a vicelike grip.

  In their intoxication they lose all sense of their surroundings. Shuffling steps feel their way up out of the crypt; they hear them clearly but they make no more impression on their consciousness of what is happening than the rustling of leaves.

  Hands appear in the opening, take a grip on the stone flags and pull up.

  A figure slowly emerges from the floor. Sabina sees it first through her half-closed lids, as if through a red veil. Suddenly awareness of the situation strikes and she lets out a piercing cry. It is the gruesome old woman, the terrible creature who is everywhere and nowhere, rising from the ground!

  Leonhard jumps up in horror. For a moment he is paralysed as he finds himself staring into his mother’s face, twisted in a malevolent grimace, then fury breaks out in a wild, foaming torrent. He kicks away the wooden prop. The trapdoor comes down with a crash on the countess’s skull, sending her tumbling down into the crypt. They hear the dull thud as her body hits the ground.

  Rooted to the spot, they stare at each other without a word, eyes wide, knees trembling. To save herself from falling, Sabina slowly crouches down and, groaning, buries her head in her hands. Leonhard drags himself over to the prie-dieu. His teeth are chattering audibly.

  Minutes pass. Neither of them dares to move, they avoid each other’s eyes. Then, under the whiplash of the same thought, they both dash out into the open and back into the house, as if the Furies were at their heels.

  The setting sun transforms the well into a pool of blood, the castle windows are ablaze with fire, the shadows of the trees turn into long, thin arms with fingers inching their way across the lawn to stifle the last chirping of the crickets. The breath of twilight dulls the radiance. Night falls, blue-black.

  With much shaking of heads the servants speculate as to where the countess might be. They ask the young master; he just shrugs his shoulders and looks away so they won’t see how deathly pale his face is.

  Lantern lights bob to and fro in the park. The servants scour the banks of the pond and shine their lanterns over the water; black as asphalt, it throws back the light. A sickle moon is floating on the surface. Startled marsh-birds fly up from the reeds.

  The old gardener unleashes his dog and combs the woods round the castle. Now and then the sound of his voice calling can be heard in the distance. Each time Leonhard starts, his hair stands on end, his heart misses a beat. Is that his mother crying out under the ground?

  Midnight. The gardener still has not returned. The servants are oppressed by a vague sense of impending disaster and crowd together in the kitchen, telling each other spine-chilling stories of people who mysteriously vanished to reappear as werewolves, digging up graves and feeding off the bodies of the dead.

  Days, weeks pass. No sign of the countess. It is suggested Leonhard should have a mass said for her soul. His response is violent. He refuses. The chapel is emptied of its furnishings, only a gilded, carved prie-dieu is left in which he sits for hours, brooding. No one else is allowed to enter the building. Some say that if you look through the keyhole you can often see him lying with his ear to the floor, as if he were listening for sounds from the crypt.

  At night Sabina shares his bed. They make no attempt to conceal the fact that they are living together as man and wife.

  The rumour of a mysterious murder reaches the village, will not die, eats its way instead farther and farther out into the country. One day a spindly, bewigged official drives up in a yellow carriage. Leonhard remains closeted with him for a long time, then the man leaves. The months pass and no more is heard of him, yet the malevolent whispers in the castle continue. No one doubts that the countess is dead, but she lives on as an invisible ghost, everyone can sense her malign presence.

  The servants give Sabina black looks, think she is somehow to blame for whatever has happened; conversations abruptly break off when the young count appears.

  Leonhard sees what is happening, but behaves as if he hadn’t noticed, puts on a frosty, peremptory manner.

  In the house nothing has changed. Creepers climb up the walls, mice, rats, owls nest in the rooms, tiles are missing from the roof, exposed beams rot and crumble. Only in the library is there some semblance of o
rder, but the books have gone mouldy with the damp and are scarcely legible any longer. Leonhard spends whole days hunched over the old volumes, laboriously trying to decipher the smudged pages covered in his father’s jerky scrawl. Sabina must be at his side all the time.

  Whenever she is not there he falls prey to an agitation almost beyond control; he doesn’t even go to the chapel without her any more. But they don’t talk to each other. Only at night, when they are in bed together, he is seized with a kind of delirium and, in an endless tangle of gabbled sentences, he spews out everything he can remember from the books he has devoured during the day. He knows the reason for this compulsion. It is his mind desperately struggling to stop the terrible image of his murdered mother taking shape in the darkness, to drown out with words the hideous, resounding crash of the trapdoor which keeps on echoing in his ear. Sabina lies there motionless, rigid, not interrupting, not even with a single word, but he can feel she is not taking in anything of what he is saying. He can tell from the empty look in her eyes, permanently fixed on one distant spot, what thought she cannot get out of her mind.

  He squeezes her hand; it is minutes before he feels her fingers return the pressure, and it does not come from the heart. He tries to plunge them back into the riptide of passion, to return to the days before the happening and make them the starting point for a new life. Sabina responds to his embrace as if in a deep sleep and he feels a horror of her pregnant womb, heavy with the fruit of murder.

  His sleep is leaden and dreamless, but it does not bring oblivion. He sinks into a boundless solitude in which even the dread images are lost to view, leaving only an agony of suffocation, a sudden blackout of the senses such as someone might feel who, eyes closed, is expecting the executioner’s axe to fall with the next heartbeat.