The Angel of the West Window

by Gustav Meyrink

  Good that a doctor, Talbot Price, is here. He bends down over me and whispers:

  “Courage, John old boy, it’ll soon be over. Human frailty, old boy, natural human frailty. It’s the gall-bladder, it’s the kidneys. That damned stone’s the trouble, the stone, old friend. It’s the stone that is causing you such pain.”

  “The Stone!?” I gasp, collapsing back onto the straw.

  “Yes, John, the stone. Lots of people suffer from the stone and we doctors can do nothing to relieve it as long as we are not allowed to cut into the flesh.”

  The excruciating pain sets piercing rays of light flashing before my inner eye:

  “O wise Jew of Prague, o Rabbi Low!” the cry seems to be squeezed out of me like the cold sweat from my chest. So that is the “Stone”?! A cheap trick. I feel all hell is mocking me: “The Angel brought you the stone of death and not the Stone of Life. Long ago. Did you not know?”

  I seem to hear the Rabbi calling to me from a long way away in time:

  “Beware when you pray for the Stone. Beware that your prayer-arrow is not caught by the Other One!”

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?” I hear Price ask me.

  Alone, wrapped up in rags and mangy furs, I am sitting in my old armchair. At the fireside. Now I remember: I asked Price to set my chair so that I face East – so that I can receive my next visitor, whoever that shall be, looking in the opposite direction from the one I spent my whole life facing: with my back to the green West.

  The visitor I am waiting for is death ...

  Price has promised to come in the evening to see how I am; he will make death easier.

  I am waiting. Price has not come.

  I have been waiting like this for hours, impotent against the tormenting pain and hoping Price will appear to release me. The night passes; Price, my last friend, has failed me.

  All promises, whether from mortal men or immortal beings, have left me stranded, alone.

  Nowhere is there help. That I have learnt. Nowhere is there pity. God is in His heaven and sound asleep in a soft bed, like my doctor. None of them suffers the torment of the stone cut with seven times seventy razor-sharp edges in his side. Why is not Hell here to savour my suffering? Lost! Betrayed! Abandoned!

  My mind is benumbed by pain; my hand gropes over the surface of the hearthstone; it stumbles on something cold: a scalpel. Price left it here so that he could bleed me. Blessed chance! May you be rewarded for it, Talbot Price! This little blade is worth more to me at this moment than the blunt Spearhead of Hywel Dda. It will make me free ... free at last!

  I lean my head back, making the skin on my neck taut, raise the knife to my throat ... the first rays of the morning sun strike the blade red, as if it were already dripping with my sluggish life-blood. At that moment, above the scalpel, I see a broad face grinning at me from the empty air of the half-lit room: the wall-eyed face of Bartlett Greene. He nods expectantly: “Cut! Cut! Cut your throat open. That will help. That will unite you with Jane, your wife, that other suicide. That will bring you down to us. That is as it should be.”

  Greene is right; I want to join Jane. –

  How friendly the blade looks, twinkling in the sunshine!

  What!? Pressure on my shoulder from behind! – NO! I will not turn round; I will not look to the west. There is heat in the pressure, as if from a human hand, it fills me with a warm glow.

  I do not need to turn round: before me stands Gardner, my old, long forgotten assistant, Gardner, who left me after a quarrel. Why should he suddenly appear here in the castle ... and at the very moment when I am about to turn my back on Mortlake and the whole deceiving – and deceived – world?

  He is strangely apparelled, my worthy assistant. He wears a white linen gown with a gold rose embroidered over the left breast. It twinkles in the morning sun. And his face has stayed young, so young! Not at all as if twenty-five years had passed since we last saw each other.

  With a friendly smile, the eternally young Gardner comes up to me:

  “You are alone, John Dee? Where are your friends?”

  All my woe melts into a stream of tears. I can only manage a dry croak, faint with pain and weariness:

  “They have abandoned me.”

  “You are right, John Dee, not to put your trust in mortal men. Everything mortal is double-tongued; it brings the doubter to despair.”

  “But the immortal powers have also betrayed me!”

  “You are right, John Dee; men should not trust the immortal powers, either; they feed on the prayers and sacrifices of mankind and hunger after them like ravenous wolves.”

  “But I no longer know where God is.”

  “That comes to all who seek Him.”

  “And who have lost their way?”

  “It is not you who will find the way; the way will find you. We have all lost the way at one time or another; for our task is not to make our way, but to find the jewel.”

  “You find me here, lost and alone; how should I not faint with thirst, astray in the wilderness?”

  “Are you alone?”

  “No, you are with me!”

  “I am ...” – Gardner’s figure becomes shadowy, disappears.

  “So you, too, are nothing but deceit?!” – the words rattle in my throat.

  From a great distance the cry is hardly audible to my ear:

  “Who is it that calls me a deceiver?”

  “I do!”

  “Who is this I?”

  “I am.”

  “Who is it that would compel me to return?”

  “I do.”

  Once more Gardner is visible before me. He smiles at me:

  “Now you have called on the One who never abandons you when you have gone astray: the Unfathomable Self. Ponder the formless being you see with your physical eye; ponder the being of primal form you see with the eye of conscience.”

  “Who am I?” something groans inside me.

  “Your name is recorded, though you be nameless. You have lost your sign, son of Rhodri. That is why you are alone!”

  “My sign?”

  “This!” – from his cloak Gardner takes the paper-knife, the lost dagger, the jewel of the Dees, Hywel Dda’s spear.

  “There it is.” My assistant is mocking me, his cold smile cuts me to the heart.

  “There it is, John Dee: once the most noble weapon of your ancestors, then the jealously guarded fetish of your line, then a common paper-knife for the degenerate heir, and finally a tool for black magic, frivolously employed, frivolously lost. – Idolatry! Do you understand me? A noble talisman from ancient times has sunk to an ignoble use through you, John Dee!”

  Hatred, hatred glowing as hot as a lava flow erupts from me: “Give me the dagger, deceiver!”

  My former assistant does not move an inch as my hand grasps at the dagger.

  “Out with the dagger, thief! Thief! The last deceiver, my last enemy on earth, my ... mortal enemy.”

  The words stick in my throat; I gasp for breath. I can feel my nerves tear like frayed strings. Yet my mind is clear: this is the end.

  My trembling body collapses.

  A gentle laugh wakes me from my faint:

  “Thank God, John Dee, that now you distrust all your friends – even me. At last you have found yourself. At last I can see that you put your trust in yourself alone, that you have the strength to follow your own course.”

  I sink back. I feel myself defeated in some strange way. My breathing is shallow; I murmur:

  “Give me back what once was ours, my friend.”

  “Take it!” says Gardner and holds the dagger out to me. Hastily I grasp at it like – like a dying man the sacrament. My hand closes on empty air. Gardner is still before me. The dagger in his hand shines in the morning light with a glow as real as the dull gleam of my own bloodless hand trembling before me in a ray of sun ... but I cannot grasp the dagger. Softly Gardner says:

  “You see: your dagger is not of this world!”


  “When ... where ... can I take hold of it?”

  “On the other side, if you seek it there. On the other side, if you do not forget it there.”

  “Help me, my friend, not ... to ... for ... get.”

  Something within me screams: I do not want to die with my ancestor, John Dee! With a violent jerk I pull myself back and the next moment my study appears around me; I am once more the one I was when I looked into the coal scrying glass. But I will not put it away yet. I want to learn what happened to John Dee afterwards.

  And straightaway I am back in the ruinous chamber in Mortlake Castle. But this time I am only an invisible witness to the events there, not John Dee himself any more.

  And I see my ancestor, or the larva that for eighty-four years bore his name: Doctor John Dee, Lord of the Manor of Gladhill, upright in his armchair at the brick hearth, his blank gaze turned to the East, as one who has centuries of time for waiting. I see the dawn break once more over the rotten planks of the makeshift roof of this once noble seat. I see the first rays of the morning sun flit over the face which does not really look dead, but seems to be listening for something, leant back in the chair with the breeze playing in his silver locks. It seems to me that I can sense an alertness, that I can see hope, can see life in the blank gaze of the old man; and I am sure I hear a sigh of release from the sunken breast. – Who could say I was deceiving myself?

  All at once there are four figures standing in the wretched hovel. I sensed rather than saw them emerge through the walls, each from a different point of the compass. They are tall, almost too tall for human beings, there is something unearthly about them. It may be that it is their garments that give them a ghostly look: they are dressed in long, blue-black habits with broad cowls across neck and shoulders. Their faces are hooded. They resemble medieval gravediggers, masked, hidden from view, just as the first stages of bodily corruption are.

  They carry a strangely shaped coffin in the form of a cross. It is made of some matt, polished metal; lead or zinc it seems to me.

  They lift the dead man out of the chair and lay the corpse out on the ground. They stretch out his arms to make a cross.

  Gardner is standing at the dead man’s head.

  He is wearing his white linen gown. The golden rose on his breast shines. In his outstretched hand he holds the dagger of the Dees with the spearhead of Hywel Dda, gleaming in the sunlight. Slowly Gardner bends down over the dead man and lays it in John Dee’s open hand. For a moment I seem to see the yellowed fingers tremble and curl around the haft.

  Then, all of a sudden, the gigantic figure of Bartlett Greene shoots out of the ground, broad teeth grinning out of a flaming beard.

  With a grunt of satisfaction the ghostly captain of the Ravenheads contemplates the corpse of his former cell-mate.

  An appraising look, a butcher assessing the value of a carcase.

  Every time Greene’s milky-white wall-eye passes over the dead man’s head, he blinks as if dazzled by an irritating light. He ignores the white-gowned adept. Soundlessly – like the speech in dreams – he talks to the dead John Dee – and I feel I am being addressed as well.

  “All the waiting over at last, is it, old soldier? You must have waited and hoped the soul out of your body, old fool. Are you all set for your journey to Greenland? Come on, then.”

  The dead man does not move. Bartlett Greene kicks roughly with his silver shoe – the flaky crust seems to have become thicker – at the corpse’s legs, which are stretched out straight along the ground. A puzzled look comes over his face.

  “No cause to crawl away and hide in the decrepit hovel of this pile of flesh, my dear Sir. Come on, speak up! Where are you?”

  “Here I am!” answers Gardner’s voice.

  Bartlett Greene gives a start. He pulls himself up sharply to his full, massive height. He is like a watchful bulldog who hears a suspicious noise and looks up, growling:

  “Who speaks?”

  “I do!” comes the answer from the other side of the body.

  “That is not my brother Dee,” snarls Greene. “You did not ask for this doorman to guard your threshold, brother Dee, not you, I know; send him away.”

  “What do you want of one you cannot see?”

  “I want nothing to do with invisible folk! Go thy way and let us go ours.”

  “Very well. Go then!”

  “Up you get!” roars Bartlett Greene, shaking the corpse, “up you get in the name of the Lady, to whom we are bound, comrade. Get up, accursed coward! It is no use pretending to be dead when you really are dead, my lovely. The night is over. The dream is ended. It is time for your journey; quick march!” With long, gorilla’s arms the giant bends over the body and tries to lift it from the floor. It does not move. Panting, he bellows at the empty air:

  “Leave go, hobgoblin! That is cheating.”

  Gardner does not move a muscle, motionless by the corpse’s head:

  “Take him. I will not stop you.”

  Like one of the beasts of the Apocalypse Greene falls upon the dead man; he cannot lift him.

  “The devil take you, man, why are you so heavy? Heavier than damned lead. You must have managed to pile up a greater weight of sin than I would have expected of you! – Right then, up we come!”

  But the corpse seems to be rooted in the ground.

  “Weighted down with sin, you are, John Dee!” groans the redbeard.

  “Weighted down with the rewards of suffering!” comes an echo from the other side of the dead man.

  Greene’s face is a greenish hue and distorted with rage:

  “Invisible deceiver! Nightmare! Goblin! Get off and I will pick him up with one hand.”

  “It is not I that you must blame,” comes the reply, “not I; you have made him so heavy and now you are surprised?”

  In Greene’s pale wall-eye there appears a venomous gleam of triumph:

  “Then stay where you are till you rot, craven scum! – You’ll come for your cheese soon enough, my little mouse; we have your cheese safe and sound, as you know. Come and get the spear of Hywel Dda, come for your dagger, your paper-knife, your little toy, John Dee!”

  “He has the spear!”

  “Where?” – – Only now does the butcher seem to see the dagger in the dead man’s right hand. He swoops on it like a hawk.

  The dead man’s fingers move perceptibly. They curl round the handle and grip it tight.

  The furious snarls of a bulldog with its teeth in its victim come from Greene’s throat. The adept in white turns his upper body towards the sun; a ray is refracted in the golden threads of the rose; radiance spreads over the ghostly figure of Bartlett Greene. Waves of light wash him away.

  The hooded men return. They lift up the body and lay it gently in the cross-shaped coffin. Gardner signals to them with his hand and leads them out to the glory of the warm sun. His figure dissolves into crystalline light, the pallbearers follow him and the silent procession floats out through the East wall of the hovel.

  A garden. Masonry gleaming between high cypresses and shady oak trees. Is it the park of Mortlake Castle? It could be, for there are mournful burnt-out ruins amongst the glowing beds planted with all kinds of flowering shrubs and luminous sunflowers; but Mortlake never had such forbidding towers and ramparts as can be seen everywhere here through the foliage; and beyond the crumbling fortifications a vista opens out onto a deep blue valley with the line of a winding river etched into its floor. One flowerbed is a jumble of plants and soil where a grave has been dug; the cross-shaped coffin is being lowered into it.

  Whilst the dark pallbearers fill the grave with earth the adept in the white gown moves from place to place, bending down at some mysterious task. He seems to be tending plants and shrubs like a gardener; he prunes, he ties, weeds and waters, steadily, calmly, as if he has long since forgotten the burial.

  A mound rises over the grave. The blue-black pallbearers have gone. Gardner, the strange alchymist’s assistant, has tied a strong, young rose
stock to a newly cut, slender stake. The roses glow blood red amongst the wealth of leaves.

  I am tormented by a question which is forcing its way to my lips. But before they can form the words, the adept looks over his shoulder at me: it is Theodor Gärtner, my friend who drowned in the Pacific.

  The coal dropped from my hand; my head throbbed. I felt convinced that I would never again see anything in the black glass. I had been through some kind of metamorphosis, of that I had no doubt, although I could not say precisely what it was. “I have become heir to John Dee in all that he was or did” might be the best way of putting it. We have become fused; he is no more and I am here in his stead. He is I and I am he for ever.

  I threw open a window; the stale reek from the onyx bowl was unbearable. It stank of decay.

  Hardly had I filled my lungs with fresh air and removed the bowl and its disgusting smell than Lipotin arrived.

  As he entered he sniffed the air as unobtrusively as possible but said nothing. He greeted me rather loudly and effusively; his normal calm and languid air became nervous, fidgety. He kept laughing without reason and said “Yes, yes” and made a whole ceremony of sitting down. He crossed his legs in a rather exaggerated fashion, hurriedly lit a cigarette and started abruptly:

  “I represent a client, of course.”

  “The client being ...?” I asked with excessive politeness.

  He bowed: “The Princess, of course.”

  Without doing so deliberately, I stuck to the tone of exaggerated dignity in which our conversation had begun and which made it sound like the negotiations of two stage diplomats.

  “Yes, my benefactress, Princess Shotokalungin.”

  “And?”

  “I have been commissioned to purchase from you – if possible – this ... this ... poignard, shall we call it. May I?” His long, slender fingers took up the dagger which lay on the table and he pretended to examine it thoroughly, screwing up his eye like a caricature connoisseur:

  “Actually it’s not difficult to run this piece down. Look at the crude workmanship. A mish-mash!”