The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  The apparition had opened its eyes by now, beautiful big brown eyes, not at all eerie, and was looking down with a quiet, friendly expression in the approximate direction of the minister’s struggles. As was his habit, the minister returned its look with a firm, severe gaze, in spite of his helpless position, stretched out in the chair, his upper body lying between the arms, rumpled and disjointed, as if it had been thrown out on the dung-heap. ‘You are – ?’ he repeated, his voice steadier now, and tried to regain control over his limbs by blinking vigorously. Eventually he realised the pointlessness of the exercise and lay there quite still, since he was afraid of looking silly in front of the ghost. All the time his brain had been working furiously and had come to the conclusion that he was dealing with a genuine ghost, and not just a hoax. The size of the apparition alone suggested that. It was more that twice the height of a normal human and thus much taller even than the usual giants one sees exhibited; for all that it was perfectly proportioned, thus lacking the coarse, freakish quality which makes the fairground monstrosities seem so sinister. The only sinister thing here was that this bizarre figure, as if to compensate for its size, appeared to be made of some strangely loose material, through which the windows behind it could be seen and even the dull gleam of the moonlight reflected on the distant mountain ridge. A remarkable sight which, as von Klumm observed with scientific precision, could not have been produced by any kind of trickery. However, the most inexplicable fact about it was that the figure slowly and gradually began to shrink, to condense, so that its texture became firmer and firmer, without, however, distorting its outline or features in the least. Everything about it simply became more delicate, more familiar, more human, so to speak. It was now plain to see that the phantom was not at all interested in frightening anybody. On the contrary, it gave the impression (perhaps a delusion, perhaps an accurate observation of the baron’s returning senses) that it wanted to gain the minister’s confidence; indeed, it was not long before he was confronted with the incredible sight of a ghost that was most afraid of itself, that would have preferred to have cowered timidly in a corner so as not to cause any fuss, but was unfortunately fixed to the spot, to its great embarrassment and confusion.

  The minister pulled himself together and forced himself to sit upright. The first thing he did was to remove the cold compress, which he felt somewhat spoilt the tone of a private audience. Then he said, quite coolheaded once more, ‘But you must tell me your name, your name.’

  ‘Name,’ repeated the ghost, as if it were making a great effort to work something out. ‘Name … name … what is that now: name?’ Its voice was not sleepy any more, but clear and high, only with a little too much vibrato to come from human vocal chords. It had an unmistakable note of great shyness and humility.

  The baron looked up at the figure again, scrutinising it from head to toe, or rather, to knee, since parts of its lower extremities were still below floor level. Again there was a pause, which the baron used to settle himself more comfortably in his chair, whilst the apparition seemed to realise for the first time that it had arms; at least it now looked down at them in astonishment and detached them, hesitantly, incredulously, from its sides, lifted them a little and then let them fall back down again. As it did so, the movement of its head, which was the first it had made, seemed to fill it with amazement, even terror, for the expression on its face became more anxious by the second, and after these experiments in movement the rigidity of its contours became even firmer for the next few minutes.

  When occasion demanded, the baron could be ‘quite tart’ as his close colleagues called it. An occasion for his tartness had arrived. As if to compensate himself for the fright, which he had only just managed to overcome, he barked at his visitor, ‘Damn it all, man, you must know who you are, what you’re called, why you’re here and how you managed to get in here!’

  At the sound of these harsh words the apparition summoned up all its energy. An old man knitting his white eyebrows as he desperately tries to remember something, that was more or less what the apparition looked like. But all he managed to do was to twitter, ‘I think I must have just died into here.’

  ‘“Died into here?” What on earth is that?’

  Another pause.

  ‘Come on, man, I asked you a question. What is that?’

  ‘If only I knew, sir,’ replied the old man. ‘Do have pity on me. I have only just died, a little while ago, and I committed so many sins. How should I know where I am? I’m all of a daze. It’s not easy, believe me.’ And after these few sentences, the first coherent things he had said, he closed his eyes again, as if exhausted from so much exertion.

  ‘Remarkable,’ said the baron, ‘strange. Hmmm … Never heard anything like it.’ As if seeking help, he felt around with his hand and grasped the shade of his desk-lamp. The contact seemed to give him an idea. Holding on to the lampshade for support, he twisted round in his chair until he was in the bright light of the standard lamp, thus for the first time removing the ghost from his sight. Suddenly he began to rummage desperately among the piles of papers and books. They contained his normal, everyday work, his usual thoughts and ideas. He tried to cling to the individual words and figures he read, to fasten onto them, but they went blurred before his feverish eyes, he could not decipher anything at all. However, after a while he thought he had come sufficiently back to his senses to risk a glance into the room behind him. He took it slowly as he returned to his former position. There was the room, melting into endless darkness, of which the electric lamp only illuminated his immediate surroundings, not much farther than his feet. And right in front of him was that beanpole again who – it was grotesque – had not used the interval to arrange himself in a comfortable position, but was still standing there, stiff and in deadly earnest, apparently waiting, in complete oblivion of everything else, for the minister’s reply.

  ‘Now, you tell me … You say you have died … And yet you’re alive … What is that supposed to mean? Can’t you express yourself a little more rationally? Have you really died or are you here?’

  ‘I died into here … because of my sins.’

  The baron shook his head. ‘Because of your sins? You’ve said that already. What kind of sins? You’re a murderer, aren’t you?’

  A violent shudder of loathing passed through the ghost’s body. It shook itself thoroughly then, still somewhat clumsily but with emphatic vigour, raised its arms and even clasped its hands above its head, as it cried out piteously, ‘A murderer!? Me, a murderer!? No, the Lord be praised, I kept well away from that all my life. However painstakingly I examine my heart, as it was and as it now is, I cannot find the slightest trace of murderous thoughts.’

  ‘So you must have been a thief, an embezzler, a black-marketeer, a swindler, or at least dishonest in some way, mustn’t you?’

  ‘Dishonest, yes, that might be it. I did not always bear the eternal truth of things in mind wherever I went and whatever I was doing, although I kept on making a firm resolution to do so.’

  ‘And that was the sum total of your dishonesty?’ The baron burst out laughing.

  ‘Oh, it was a sin, the very worst sin of all! That is why my punishment is this dreadful transfer to another world, that is why my death did not lead to promotion to a higher sphere, but to this terrible exile in a parallel, if not lower stage of development.’

  ‘Incredible. So you still insist that you are dead?’

  ‘Of course. What I am going through at this moment is the thing men should stand most in fear of, or rather, since it is a sign of divine justice, most in awe of: I am going through the first hour after my death.’

  ‘That must be terribly interesting.’ The words had passed the baron’s lips before he had time to think about them. ‘That is … I mean … Wouldn’t you like to sit down? You must tell me more about it. What is it like, this first hour after death? You must realise that I have often spent an idle moment thinking about it, or rather, trying to visualise what it must be l
ike. Unfortunately I am always very busy. But sometimes, you know, between important matters of state, such abstruse ideas do occur to one. I feel I must call them abstruse, for how can a living person know or imagine with any degree of accuracy what will happen inside him after his death. It’s a downright impossibility, an absurdity. Now, I feel I must preface my remarks by saying how close this matter has always been to my heart, I have kept it constantly under review …’ As he warmed to his subject he automatically began to use the elegant phrases with which he had been fobbing off petitioners and deputations for years, showing just how much this conversation had lost its bizarre and phantom character for him, how much he was beginning to regard it as a normal conversation and not at all eerie. ‘To put it in a nutshell, I imagine that in that first hour everything, if that is the right word, around one will be quite dark and empty and desolate. Nothingness, do you understand, nothingness in the most precise meaning of the word. That’s how I imagine it. Of course, I wouldn’t dream of putting my experience on a par with yours, or even of comparing it. You must forgive me for going on like this. I would much rather listen to what you have to say than to go blethering on myself. There, I’m all ears. But please, do sit down, over here …’

  The ghost had let its eyes wander round the room with a rather bewildered air, but now they focused on the leather armchair the minister was drawing up. It seemed to have understood the words, for it sat down obediently, and as quickly as the fact that its feet were still stuck in the floor would allow; it did, however, reveal a certain lack of familiarity in the use of seating as it flopped down across both armrests at once. But it would anyway have had difficulty in squeezing itself into the wide seat of the chair, since it was still of gigantic proportions.

  ‘Off you go then, tell me something about this paradise that the preachers claim to be so well acquainted with.’

  ‘Paradise!’ replied the ghost with a sigh. ‘How should a miserable wretch like myself be able to tell you anything about paradise. I might enter it after a billion years, perhaps never.’

  ‘Tell me about hell then, if you like,’ countered the minister with a casual wave of the hand, as if he were making conversation.

  ‘Well, unless I am very much mistaken, I do seem to have escaped hell,’ replied the apparition, with a not very confident glance round the room; but it seemed to feel that even that glance was presumptuous and immediately corrected itself with quiet modesty. ‘Anyway, you must not think it is something special. The extremes, that is complete redemption and complete damnation, are probably, at least that is my assumption, just as exceptional in eternity as in our mortal existence. The middle ground, with its thousand shades of grey, is much the commoner. Although I am not entirely sure about it, a plot of that middle ground seems to be my lot as well.’

  ‘To my mind nothingness, the absolute nothingness that follows death, would be hell enough.’

  ‘Nothingness?’

  ‘Yes, the nothingness I spoke about before, the disappearance of all sensation, of all desire and joy and sorrow.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, but I can’t have understood you properly before. You must be patient with me. I’m doing my best, but I’ve been so confused, so dazed by all the new things around me, that I find it difficult to follow you, in spite of all your kindness. Nothingness after death, you said? I should have contradicted you straight away there. It’s the precise opposite, in fact. After death one is assailed by a wealth of fresh and unsuspected impressions. It takes a great effort to fend them off …’

  ‘New impressions … at the moment of death?’

  ‘Not precisely at the moment of death. That is accompanied by a brief instant of diminished consciousness, during which you feel nothing apart from a violent tearing, the previously unknown, quite strong but brief sensation of the soul detaching itself from the body, a tug, of which it is impossible for me to say whether it is closer to pain or pleasure. However, as I said, it only lasts for a fraction of a second, then the soul is free of physical matter, completely pure and unhampered. But that is just what is the most strenuous thing about it. How can I describe it? We spend all our days trying to saturate our physical being – which, let’s be honest about it, is the main focus of our existence – with mental, emotional and spiritual life, which we extract for our own use from the streams of life flowing all around us. Suddenly our soul is free, is what you might call a non-material cavity, a vacuum, a bubble surrounded by matter. But matter, which is accustomed to feeding on spiritual life, to drinking its fill, so to speak, naturally falls on the cavity from all sides, wild with desire, and tries to penetrate it. All types of substantiality, even those of the lowest forms of life, would like to take possession of the liberated soul, to feed on it and fatten themselves up. Those first minutes are terrible. I must say that I came through it quite well, I kept a tight hold on my tiny bundle of soul. But there are many souls that are ripped apart in those first moments of their new life, simply torn to shreds. It gives me the shivers to imagine the suffering a soul that has been reduced to atoms like that must go through. In spite of everything, they retain their awareness of the self as a unity, whilst at the same time having to continue a physical existence as an earthworm, a leaf, and perhaps a few bacteria on it that are devouring each other. I assume it is this condition which people call hell.’

  ‘Could be, could well be,’ interrupted the baron with the smile he reserved for opponents he had caught out. ‘The only thing that puzzles me, however, is where you get all this precise information not only about your own destiny but about that of other souls into the bargain? Without wanting to offend you, you are aware, aren’t you, that with all this you are treading on ground which is wide open to all kinds of fantasies and delusions, especially self-delusions? Have you searched your heart enough in this regard? Are you completely sure that a little .. I won’t say lie … that a little exaggeration or distortion of the truth is quite out of the question?’

  The old man was not offended. On the contrary, he seemed grateful for any admonition and, after having achieved a relatively calm tone in his last speech, now reverted to his initial abject contrition. ‘Oh, you are right, you are so right. Obviously you are ordained to be the judge before whom I have to justify myself, no, not justify, before whom I am to confess my sins. Yes, it is true, I certainly have not truly searched my soul, nor have I guarded against vain self-delusion sufficiently, although that was my firm intention. My insight, if I might be allowed to use that word for the wretched sum of my life, was just sufficient for me to survive the first test after my death, the attack of physical matter. At that moment I was endowed with a truly remarkable clarity of vision which allowed me to see not only what was happening to me, but to all the other newly dead around me. I saw terrible things in only a few minutes and had a clear premonition of some even more terrible. Moreover, in spite of my desperate defence, I did not succeed in remaining completely pure myself. I see I have all kinds of alien matter stuck to me that should have nothing in common with immortal substances.’ As he spoke these words, he fingered his coat buttons sadly and pulled the jacket he was wearing tight across his stomach with a gesture that showed that he found the article of clothing incomprehensible, that he thought it was perhaps a part of the body.

  ‘Don’t worry, there’s something grotesque about all clothing,’ the minister graciously comforted him.

  ‘Clothing you call it … Ah, now I understand. Though our clothing was quite different. In the Sylphian sphere, where I come from, clothing consists of a certain very high velocity at which individuals spin round their own axes like tops.’

  ‘So you are a Sylph, a Sylphide.’ A vague memory of the fair Gabrielle and her Dance of the Sylphides in the last ballet floated through the baron’s mind. ‘Though our image of Syplhs does not quite correspond to your figure, I’m afraid.’

  ‘They are quite different, that is true, and their mode of life is quite different from mine at this moment. At the moment I am in
the middle of a transfer to your world; I’m in a halfway house, so to speak, and doing my best to behave as a human being. That is the second trial I have to go through. You suddenly find yourself in a completely different world with completely new standards. You shed all your habits, all the things you did as a matter of routine, and that is the acid test which shows how much real reality, reality that is valid for any possible world, you have managed to acquire in the course of your life …’

  ‘So you’re not a dead human being at all, but from another world?’ asked the baron, leaning back in his chair, somewhat bewildered again.

  ‘I have died into this world from another one,’ repeated the ghost patiently.

  ‘From the moon, maybe, or from Sirius?’

  ‘No. As I said before, I come from a completely different world system.’

  ‘From the Milky Way or the Orion Nebula?’

  ‘However far you go in your physical world, you will not find my home. My home is a realm of different senses, or rather, it was so until today, and I still belong there a little. We Sylphs do not see, we do not hear or smell, nor are we heard or seen. We have different organs, are subject to a different gravity and different natural laws. As far as space is concerned, we live amongst you humans. There just happens to be an infinite number of worlds, but they are interlocking rather than running parallel, and despite their contiguity they know nothing of each other. Until this moment your world, with its starry sky and Milky Way and everything your senses perceive, was completely hidden from me as well. I am absolutely amazed to find myself in such an unsuspected, novel environment without moving from the spot, merely by means of an inner conversion of my organs.’