I said: ‘I thought you saved the situation rather brilliantly.’ She waved aside the compliment.
‘One does one’s best to forestall complete tedium. I used to think M.R. James was exaggerating when he had all the dons in his stories talking about nothing but golf, but he was right. If it’s not golf, it’s the price of property in North Oxford, or their ghastly brats’ education. At least now we can discuss something interesting. I gather you’ve been seeing quite a bit of our mutual friend Enoch Stapleton.’
Why did I have the strong impression that this was the subject she had been waiting to broach all evening? I gave a vague reply and, as I did so, I noticed that her left hand was gripping her coffee cup so tightly that it trembled a little.
‘What have you two been discussing?’ she asked.
‘Oh, mainly things about my book on Tremayne.’
She said: ‘Ah yes. The Cabbalist.’ It seemed to me rather an odd way of talking about a renowned metaphysical poet; like referring to Albert Camus as ‘the footballer’.
‘You know about that.’
‘Of course, I do. By the way, is Enoch still on the trail of that . . . er . . . Mortlake Manuscript?’ She asked the question with deliberate casualness which did not deceive me. Even in the twilight under the lime, I could see that her whole body was taut with expectation. I paused, rather relishing the fact that for once I had a hold over her. At the same time I felt uneasy.
‘I didn’t know that he was really,’ I said.
‘Oh, come on! He’s been after it for years.’
‘You seem to know a great deal more about it than I do.’
‘The Manuscript would be a very important thing to find. For both of us.’
‘Why?’
By this time Francine was making no secret of her irritation with me. She put down her coffee cup on the bench between us to stop it from rattling. She breathed deeply, then, picking her words carefully, she said: ‘If you do get to hear that Enoch’s found it I’d like to know, that’s all . . . and of course, if I hear anything, I’d tell you,’ she added as an afterthought.
‘Why don’t you ask Enoch yourself?’
Francine looked away and said: ‘Oh, you know how tricky Mr Enoch Stapleton can be. I don’t seem able to get a straight answer from him these days.’
I said: ‘Francine, I don’t understand why this matters to you so much.’ She turned back to me and her eyes looked straight into mine. She stretched out her hand towards me, but not far enough to touch.
‘Please, Rupert,’ she said. As I put out my hand to take hers she withdrew it. It was at this moment that I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Against the high flint wall of the Fellow’s Garden was a group of elms, between which there appeared the shadow of a tall man in a gown or cloak. I had the feeling he was looking at me, but I saw no features, only the dark outline. Then from beyond the garden wall I heard the high-pitched laughter of some undergraduates walking in Latimer Lane. It was a momentary distraction, but when I looked again there were no strange shadows among the elms. I said something noncommittal to Francine and we went back into the Senior Common Room to replenish our coffee cups. By some unspoken mutual consent we did not mention the Mortlake Manuscript again that evening.
III
A few weeks later, and towards the end of that Trinity Term, I had an e-mail from Enoch Stapleton. That was unusual, but his offhand perfunctory tone was not. It merely said that he would like me to get down to Cricklewood to see him as soon as possible. I knew it would be useless to interrogate him further so I simply replied that I would be with him early the following day. I set off the next morning before five, the only time when driving to London from Oxford can be almost pleasurable. I was in Cricklewood shortly after seven.
Enoch came to the door of his flat, as usual in pyjamas, with a bowl of soggy cornflakes in his hand from which he ate greedily as he led me into the main room. There on the table was an ancient oblong cardboard box. In spite of myself my heart began to beat violently.
‘Is the Manuscript in there?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Where did you find it?’
‘Hastings. When Crowley died there in 1947, at a guest house called Netherwood, he owed his landlady a considerable sum of money. She retained some of his papers in lieu, as it were, hoping to sell them at a later stage: and many of them she did. All except this one box. I have been in touch with the landlady’s son for some years now and eventually I got him to turn out his attics in case there was more Crowleyana. He found this. Why it had not been disposed of before is a mystery. If I were fanciful, which I am not, I would say that it hid itself until it wanted to be found.’
‘I am so glad you are not fanciful,’ I said, looking away from him and out of the window to hide my smile. I could see my car parked across the street, and that a man was standing beside it. It worried me. He seemed to be a black man in a black hooded track suit. One should not give in to prejudice. I turned back and looked at Enoch who was staring at me with his pale eyes. At one corner of his grey, shapeless lips was a drop of milk and a soggy shred of cornflake.
‘Are you going to let me take a look at it?’ I asked.
‘No. I am going to let you take it back to Oxford and examine it at your leisure.’
For some moments I could say nothing I was so astonished. I began falteringly to explain that I had no money with which to pay for it, nor even adequately insure it, if indeed it was in the hand of Dr Dee himself.
‘Oh, yes. It’s Dee all right. And I can confirm that there is a postscript of sorts written by your friend Elias Tremayne. These documents require no payment. They are quite literally priceless. The previous owner asked no money for them either. He seemed glad to be rid of them.’
I picked up the box. The contents seemed unusually heavy for papers. Enoch was watching me intently and I thought I detected dismay in his eyes when I put the box down again. I felt I owed him something, so I told him of my conversation with Francine Stalker in the Fellow’s Garden at Latimer.
Enoch nodded several times and then said: ‘You won’t tell her about our discovery. She is not to be trusted.’ He brushed aside all my requests for an explanation. ‘If you want to get back to Oxford, you’d better be going now,’ he said. I made no further demur and picked up the box. Enoch in his pyjamas followed me downstairs and across the street to the car. The black man was gone and my car had been, as far as I could tell, unmolested.
Once Enoch had seen me place the box reverently on the back seat he gave me a perfunctory wave and jogged back over the road to his flat. I was alone at last with the Mortlake Manuscript.
I can be a patient man when I choose to be. When I got back to my rooms at University College I put the box in the bottom drawer of my desk. I then listened to two undergraduates read me their amazingly foolish opinions on Spenser’s Faerie Queene in a tutorial. After this I went for a long walk on Port Meadow with only the swans and horses for company to wash away the effects of lazy and ill-informed thinking. I dined in Hall and it was only after I had returned from this that I took the box out. I had ‘sported my oak’, that is bolted the outer door of my rooms, and so made myself free from interruption.
The box itself was well over fifty years old and on the lid, scrawled in black ink were the numbers 666 in a triangle and the words Noli Me Tangere (do not touch me), obviously in the hand of the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley. Inside were about seventy five sheets of very old paper interleaved, by some careful later owner, with tissue paper.
The manuscript was in two sections. The second was some sort of magical text or grimoire with the usual jumble of sigils, diagrams and nonsense; the first seemed to be a continuous narrative in Latin. Fortunately I am a fairly proficient classicist and could translate. The very first sheet in the box was a kind of title page. At the top in bold capitals was written:
RELATIO DIVINA DE SECRETA SECRETORUM
‘Sacred Narration concerning the
Secret of Secrets.’ Below this was the scrawled signature ‘Johannes Dee’ and a date, ‘Praga, Martio Mense, Anno MDLXXXVI’, ‘At Prague in the month of March 1586.’ At the very bottom of the sheet, as an afterthought Dee had added: ‘scriptio pro omnibus et nemine,’ ‘a writing for all and no-one.’
I think I had better simply put my rough translation before the reader and leave whatever comments I have to the end, as I will Tremayne’s contribution to this extraordinary document.
IV
In other places and at other times I have told and will tell of the many wonderful things I saw and did in Bohemia; and also of the many conversations with spirits and angels which I had, together with my companion Edward Kelley. But this narration, for many significant reasons, I must put down separately and guard from intruding eyes, not least that man in whom, to my shame, I laid my greatest trust. [He means, I believe, his medium, the aforementioned Kelley.]
One night in February of the year of Our Lord 1586, as I was sitting with Master Kelley at our lodgings in Prague, there came a messenger who wished to take me to meet someone for a private conversation. At this Kelley became very angry and haughty, as he is wont to do, and threatened to throw the man out.
‘If you come from the Emperor Rudolph, he had best talk with me. It is to me that the Spirits speak. The Doctor merely writes down these communications. My knowledge of the alchemical arts is greater even than his.’
The man, who was very small, and dressed in the long gabardine robe of a Jew, shook his head. ‘I do not come from the Emperor Rudolph,’ he said. ‘It is my master the Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel who wishes to converse with your master, Dr John Dee.’
When Kelley heard the man refer to me as his ‘master’, he picked up a bottle to hurl at the little man, and would have done so if I had not stepped between them. Then Kelley, as he usually does, subsided as suddenly as he was aroused, and lapsed into a sulk.
‘Very well then! Go and see your Jew, and much good may it do you. See if I care!’
‘Must it be tonight?’ I asked the man.
‘It must. The Rabbi is spending only a few days in Prague.’
As we made our way through the dark streets of Prague my companion explained to me that the Rabbi Loew (as I shall call him) was here on a brief visit from Moravia to which he had fled to escape the Emperor’s persecutions. I myself already knew that the Rabbi was a very great leader of the Jews and wise in all aspects of the Torah and the Cabbala. It flattered me, I confess, to think that he had heard of me.
By a long and winding route, through dark passages and courtyards lit only by a glimmer of starlight from above, the little man brought me to a tall and ancient house in the Jewish Quarter. There he knocked three times in quick succession on the front door. This presently was answered in turn by three rapid knocks from within. I heard a sliding of bolts and a turning of keys and at last the door was opened. Once we had entered the house I was conducted in silence by the light of a single candle up a series of wooden steps. The entire building was made of wood and seemed to creak and groan like a living thing. Once a draught of air whistling through a crack threatened to extinguish the candle and plunge us into darkness.
Finally I was ushered into a tall room at the top of the building under the roof gables. It was furnished entirely in dark wood and around the walls were many shelves and cabinets containing innumerable scrolls, some plain, some elaborately encased in silver after the Jewish fashion. The room was well lit by several menorahs, the seven branched candelabrum of the Jews, which were ranged down the length of a great oak table in the centre of the room. At one end of the table in a carved wooden armchair like a throne sat a giant of a man with a long beard streaked with grey. He rose to greet me and introduced himself as the Rabbi Loew.
It is not my business to record the long and interesting discussion we had on many points of philosophy and the Cabbala. The Rabbi had heard of my intercourse with angelic beings and was anxious to hear of my researches. I told him things that I have told few others: namely, how I had been granted by the spirits the forty eight Angelic Keys, written in the original Adamic (or Enochian) language. These I knew to be instruments of great power and wisdom, but they were useless to me as I did not know the meanings of the language used and the Spirits would not vouchsafe them.
The Rabbi considered what I had told him for some moments in silence, as if he were making up his mind. Then he rose from his chair.
‘My knowledge of the language of Adam is still very imperfect. But I know a man who is well versed in it. Come, let me show you something.’ He took up one of the menorahs and led the way to one of the shelves. He turned a small wooden lever in the shelf and a part of it swung back, revealing another large room, this time almost totally shrouded in darkness. Then he said: ‘But first I must swear you to secrecy. You may record what you hear and see, but it must be for your eyes alone.’
I laid my hand on a copy of the Torah bound in silver and swore a solemn oath.
The room into which the Rabbi led me was, like the other, all of wood with a high pitched roof. It was quite bare of furniture but in the middle of the room stood something the like of which I had never seen before or since.
It stood some twenty feet high and its head nearly touched the roof. The colour of it was grey and the surface of it was rough and mottled, but not like stone. It seemed to be made of some kind of mud, or possibly clay, and its shape was human, I suppose, though more like some inhuman beast that stood on two legs than a man. The head was squat with a heavy brow below which what looked like two black spheres of obsidian had been stuck where the eyes should be. The mouth was no more than a shapeless hole in which lolled a great grey tongue, and there was no nose to speak of. The right arm possessed a hand with four crude fingers on it, but the right was still only a lump of grey matter. I guessed it to be a half-made sculpture, but why should anyone want to carve such a hideous thing, unless he wanted to represent a demon?
‘That is to be the saviour of my race,’ said the Rabbi.
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘An idol?’ Rabbi Loew laughed.
‘Do you think so little of my people that you imagine we worship a thing like that? No, it will be our servant and protector. Some call it the Golem.’
‘How can you use such a monstrous thing?’
‘To fight a monstrous thing. The persecution of our race.’
I could no longer bear to look at the object which filled the room and, despite being only half formed, seemed on the point of breaking into life. It was then that I noticed a shadowy figure of a man crouching in the far corner of the room. The Rabbi gestured to him and he came forward, his eyes fixed on me the whole time. He wore the simple robes of his race rather like the rabbi and he made no sound as he walked towards me over the wooden boards.
Though he was of middle height, there was something shrunken about him. His cheeks were hollow, his pale grey eyes very deep set. His long hair and beard were black and he did not show any signs of infirmity, but I felt somehow that he must be very old. When he spoke it was in perfect English, if not quite perhaps in the modern style.
‘Dr Dee,’ he said, ‘I am honoured to make the acquaintance of one of the most learned and ingenious men of your generation.’
I bowed low, not knowing what to say in reply, because I had not been introduced. Then the man said to me:
‘Can the wings of the wind understand my voices of wonder which the burning flames have framed in the depth of my jaws?’
At these words I was greatly astonished because they were the very words that the angelic spirit Madimi had spoken to me through my assistant Edward Kelley only a few nights before. I turned to my friend Rabbi Loew who was smiling:
‘This is Issachar,’ he said. ‘He is helping me with my work on the Golem. You must know that his presence here, like this room, is a deadly secret, because he is an outcast among us Jews. An outcast of outcasts, you might say. But I know of no outcasts. It is he whom I told you of.
He alone of all men can safely interpret the Adamic language.’
I bowed low, and a thought occurred to me. Just then there was a small noise from outside. Rabbi Loew reacted instantly. ‘You must go at once,’ he said. The next moment he had hurried me out of the room and shut the concealed door on Issachar and the grey monster. Then I was being led down flights of stairs to the front door. Before he pushed me out into the street, the Rabbi said to me: ‘If you wish to talk further with Issachar, then send a message addressed to Isaac de Laquedem at the Sign of the Golden Plover in the Street of the Alchemists. It will reach him there.’
The next moment I was blinking under the stars in the black street. I had barely recovered my sense of direction when I heard the tramp of feet on cobbles. Then round the corner came a small posse of the Imperial guard carrying torches, the firelight gleaming on their breastplates and halberds. At the head was Rabenthal, a captain of the guard whom I had met during a visit to the Emperor.
‘Master Dee, you are late abroad tonight.’
I explained that I had been visiting a sick friend, and pointing vaguely off into the distance, I said that I appeared to be lost.
‘This is not the place to be on a dark night,’ said Rabenthal and detached two of his men to escort me home.
It was some days before I could see Issachar again, as I very much wanted to, because I wished to converse with him without fear of interruption from Master Kelley. But by good fortune Master Kelley was beginning to acquire a reputation as a transmuter of metals by virtue of his famous ‘transforming powder’. When Count Rosemberg, a renowned enthusiast for the alchemical arts, invited Kelley to his castle, I urged him to go. Perhaps I urged him too hard because he looked at me with suspicion, but still he went. On the morning that he left I despatched my message to the Golden Plover, and that night, under cover of darkness, Issachar came to my door. He refused all refreshment. When we were sat down in my inner room, he said:
Mrs Midnight and Other Stories Page 23