Helmet of Horror
Page 11
A little star framed in laurel leaves. It looked very impressive, you could even feel it with your fingers. Embossing. There was a motto under the crest: ‘per aspera ad asterisk’. And there were watermarks in the paper. And as well as all that, there was a three-figure number in the upper right corner of the page – the blank sheets were numbered. Monstradamus, I wanted to ask you, what do those words mean?
Monstradamus
There is an expression ‘per aspera ad astra’, meaning ‘through difficulties to the stars’. And so this version means …
Organizm(-:
Through xxx to the xxx.
Monstradamus
Well, that’s not exactly a poetic translation. What came next, Ariadne?
Ariadne
Next I wrote a question and he wrote an answer. Why don’t I type them all out together from the sheets of paper?
Monstradamus
What do you mean, ‘type them out’? Have you got the sheets there?
Ariadne
Yes.
Monstradamus
How did you get hold of them?
Ariadne
I don’t know. When I woke up they were lying beside the bed. Perhaps the people who tidy up the room brought them.
Monstradamus
And you didn’t notice anything?
Nutscracker
Monster, you’re like a man who’s turned into a bull and is amazed to find he has a bell on his tail.
Monstradamus
Is that bit about the bull some kind of a hint?
Ariadne
Let me answer your questions and get something to eat, okay? Then you can talk among yourselves.
Monstradamus
Of course, Ariadne.
Ariadne
I’ve already told you about the first question. Let’s move on
Question:
‘How can everything else be manufactured out of nothing?’
Answer:
‘See the answer to the next question.’
Next question:
‘How can the helmet of horror be located inside one of its own parts?’
Answer:
‘The helmet of horror fractionates the one thing that is, into the multitude of things that are not. But since the helmet of horror is in no way the one thing that is, it is also one of the multitude of things that are not. And the things that are not may enter into every possible conceivable and inconceivable kind of relationship, since these relationships do not in any case exist anywhere except in the helmet of horror, which does not actually exist itself.’
Question:
‘Does this mean that inside the helmet there is another helmet and in the other helmet there is a third one and so on to infinity in both directions?’
Answer:
‘An individual by the name of A may be a part of the helmet of horror worn by B, and an individual by the name of B may at the same time be a part of the helmet of horror worn by A. This is the final infinity in both directions, and often both of them are quite nice people.’
Question:
‘Can you please say something about the occipital braid.’
Answer:
‘Longer and thicker suits the girl better.’
Nutscracker
All very logical.
Ariadne
Question:
‘How does the separator labyrinth work?’
Just look what happened then! The dwarf had his answer scribbled out even before I had finished writing my question. He waited for me, then tossed his page on to the upper table-top and began turning it. But halfway round he suddenly stopped it and asked in a considerate voice: ‘Are you enjoying your stay as our guest? Be honest.’ I told him: ‘Not much. In fact, to be quite honest, I’m not enjoying it at all.’ Then he let the wooden disc carry on turning and I received a sheet of paper with the answer: ‘That’s the way it works’.
Organizm(-:
I get it. Good, bad and UGLI. But did you ask him why the helmet of horror is called that? I asked you to, remember?
Ariadne
I remember. It was the last question I managed to ask.
Organizm(-:
Well then?
Ariadne
The dwarf asked me to excuse him. He said he’d run out of official paper. But he promised to answer shortly.
Nutscracker
What happened then?
Ariadne
We heard some kind of horn or trumpet sounding a low, sinister note. Or it could have been some animal bellowing. The dwarf was so startled he dropped his inkwell on the floor and it broke, making a blue puddle beside the table. He said his master was summoning him to help and he ran off. And as he left he shouted it was possible that blood would soon be spilled, but it would be avenged.
Nutscracker
Blood?
Ariadne
Yes.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Are you lot finished yet? When do you think the rest of us could have a chat?
Nutscracker
Nobody’s stopping you, Romeo.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Isolde, are you there?
IsoldA
Yes. How did you get home yesterday, you beast?
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Why beast?
IsoldA
What am I supposed to call you after that?
Romeo-y-Cohiba
After what?
IsoldA
After the way you behaved.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Me? Me? And just how did I behave?
IsoldA
Don’t pretend to be stupid.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Maybe we shouldn’t carry on in front of everyone?
IsoldA
So you’re embarrassed of them, but not of me! And you have the cheek to ask me how you behaved? All right, I’ll tell you. Like a coarse brute, that’s how. Worse than that, like an absolutely shameless and depraved brute who thinks he can get away with anything.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Well, well. How do you like that! Then let me tell you something. That sickening stunt you pulled yesterday left me feeling like I’d been defiled. It’s like I’ve had some foul substance sprayed into my soul and it fogs up my mind and takes away the desire to go on living.
IsoldA
On the subject of sprays of filth that take away the desire to go on living, you’ve hit the nail on the head there. My fingers would have refused to type that. Even though it’s exactly what I feel. I never even suspected that such a small opening …
Romeo-y-Cohiba
That’s enough. I don’t want the last thing you hear – that is see – from me to be this mean abuse. So stop right there. Did you notice how long it took me to get there yesterday? Do you know why? I couldn’t find the way at first, someone had changed all the marks I left at the turns. I got lost and wandered into a place I’d never been before. The path ran into a dead-end with an old-fashioned red phone box with the British royal coat of arms. The kind they used to have in London. I went in. There was a plaque with the words: ‘Hampton Court Maze, Blind Alley #4, East’. And written in pencil under that was a telephone number and the name Isolde. I tried calling for ages. The line was engaged all the time, and finally I realised it would never be free. But, every time I dialled the number, for a few seconds I believed the next moment I would hear your voice. My Losolde. My Legalita. And that hope, that mute tremor in my soul, like when you pick up speed hurtling down the ski-jump before you launch out into the mist, all the feelings I had time to feel while the dial was turning back to its starting point, gently clicking out the final digit of your false number, that inverted infinity of the figure eight – it was happiness. The figure eight, like two tender sets of lips one above the other, and a blurred row of bushes through the window …
IsoldA
How very touching, I think I’ll burst into tears. Only I don’t understand how after such exalted emotions you could do … that … I don’t eve
n know what to call it. It was enough to make even a paedophile puke.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
But what did I do? You did absolutely everything yourself. The only thing I have to reproach myself with is not offering any resistance. Though that was what I really wanted to do, even before it really began to hurt.
IsoldA
How can you lie so brazenly? But then, what else can I expect from you?
Monstradamus
Pardon me for butting in, I know you can’t stand it. But perhaps I could set you thinking in a new direction. On the map that Isolde saw in the park it said ‘Plan of the labyrinth at Versailles’. But the telephone booth that Romeo was calling her from is located, if we can believe the plaque, in a suburb of London. Do you see what I’m driving at?
Nutscracker
I wouldn’t take those signs seriously. The Versailles outside Isolde’s door is about as real as Romeo’s London. Ugly would say the devil has us all exactly where he wants us. And she’d be absolutely right.
Monstradamus
I wouldn’t argue with that. But every dimension has its own intrinsic laws. And even if we are somewhere in the suburbs of Hell, when one person sees ‘Versailles’ and another sees ‘London’, there’s good reason to assume the devil’s holding them in different places.
IsoldA
What gibberish.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
That’s way over the top.
Monstradamus
But really, Romeo and Isolde, what made you think you were close to each other?
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Everything around us is the same.
Nutscracker
What exactly? Bushes? Bushes are the same everywhere.
Monstradamus
Especially the word ‘bushes’ on two different screens.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Even the soil under our feet is the same colour. Beige.
Monstradamus
Beige – what colour is that?
Romeo-y-Cohiba
How do you mean, what colour?
Monstradamus
Can you describe it some other way?
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Dark-brown.
IsoldA
What’s that – dark-brown? Beige is light yellow-grey!
Nutscracker
Right. So now we know. Romeo set off to meet Isolde and bumped into Juliet. Isolde set out to meet Romeo and ended up in Tristan’s clutches. If we imagine that Juliet and Tristan are the same person … Although in this case we can hardly call it a real ‘person’. More like an empty mask. Or maybe a ‘helmet’?
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Listen, you xxx linguist, shut your mouth!
Nutscracker
It’s certainly a frightening metaphor. There’s nothing new about succubuses and incubuses, of course, but in this appalling dimension we have the spectral manifestation of a certain Julietristan who manages to take the place of not just one partner, but both at once.
UGLI 666
And not only in this dimension. Why is fornication such a detestable sin? The Church teaches us it’s because the fornicator blinded by lust is really copulating with the laughing devil.
Organizm(-:
Romeo, did you hear any laughter from behind the wall?
Nutscracker
How very instructive. The Helmholtz doesn’t even know who he’s xxx. Or who’s xxx him. A drawing on the wall, a few flickers in the eyepieces of the helmet, but the true recipient of his passion remains profoundly anonymous.
Organizm(-:
I don’t quite get it. How does the Minotaur manage to take the place of both partners at once? Are you saying he xxx himself?
Nutscracker
No. With Romeo he’s Isolde, and with Isolde he’s Romeo. But what you said is an even more interesting idea. Well worth thinking about. Well, lady and gent, pardon my lack of modesty, but what exactly did happen in the pavilion? My imagination blushes and fails me. Nothing that comes to mind is worthy of the emotions that we have observed. ‘Oh, it’s very hard to come with your finger up your bum’ or the last tango in Paris. I’m thinking in banal terms, of course. Romeo, can you elaborate?
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Yes, I can. If you stick your nose into our lives once more, I’ll find you and xxx you so hard your brains will be thinking their filthy thoughts across the wall, understand?
Nutscracker
I wonder exactly how you plan to find me? I’m not Isolde – there’s no trapdoor between us. There wasn’t even one between you two, as it happened …
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Just remember that if I look hard enough I might just find one.
Nutscracker
I don’t understand what you’re getting so het up about. Did the knife slip when they were circumcising your cochiba ? It wasn’t me, you half-wit, it was your Julistan.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
That’s it. Nutcracker, I’m on my way to kill you.
Nutscracker
I couldn’t give a xxx. I’m wearing a helmet of horror.
Ariadne
There’s no need to be like that.
Organizm(-:
Julistan – it sounds like the name of some small but highly malevolent state located at the very centre of the axis of evil.
Ariadne
By the way, I’ve seen that word – Julistan.
Monstradamus
Where?
Ariadne
In that place where I was asking the dwarf questions. The archive.
Monstradamus
You didn’t say anything about that.
Ariadne
When the dwarf ran off, I was left in the archive alone. At first I went on sitting at the table, waiting for him to come back. But he was gone for ages and ages. Then I got up and went over to look at the shelves of files along the walls. There were all sorts of different things on them. Depositions from the Minotaur’s defeated enemies. Interrogations of Minotaurs by other Minotaurs. An entire shelf full of records of cross-examinations of Minotaurs by themselves – they were called ‘Alone Together’. They must have been thinking of the horns, right? But the biggest number of files was filled with answers to the so-called eternal questions like the ones you and I were asking. They were all old and yellow with age and covered in dust. Do you know what paper covered with writing smells like when the people who wrote on it are already dead?
Monstradamus
Do you remember anything?
Ariadne
I have a whole pile of pages here from various files. When I woke up they were lying beside the dwarf ’s answers. There’s not much new in them. The eternal questions haven’t got any cleverer – that’s why they’re eternal.
Monstradamus
Read us something.
Ariadne
Question:
‘Why does the existent exist?’
Answer:
‘To pass the time more pleasantly.’
Question:
‘Why heap up so many events and beings to pass the time if in any case nowhere exists except in the helmet of horror?’
Answer:
‘Events and beings also cannot be accumulated anywhere except in the helmet of horror, so Mesdames et Messieurs are requested not to be concerned.’ What’s next … About the separator labyrinth … ‘But who …’ Right, that’s it: ‘Who else is produced there?’ A couple of pages from some review of historical chronicles. An analysis of contradictions. One text says the Minotaur himself is the builder of the labyrinth. Another claims the labyrinth was built by eighteen thousand Minotaurs divided into two columns. A third claims these columns should be understood metaphorically and the labyrinth is created by the two mental nodules or hemispheres, which are symbolised by the two horns. And so on. And here at the end there are a few pages about this Julistan. They look quite different, really ancient and faded. Many of them are so old I can hardly make anything out. Covered with strange, beautiful handwriting. They’re tra
nslations of inscriptions from the Julistan caves. The actual inscriptions were destroyed long ago, together with the caves themselves, and all that’s left are copies of copies. Fragmentary translations. Some are short and incoherent, some are a bit longer. Shall I read some?
Monstradamus
Certainly.
Ariadne
‘One may begin with whatever one likes, without worrying about it at all …’
Monstradamus
Begin what?
Ariadne
You seem to be worrying about it already. Wait, that’s not the right page. Here’s the beginning: ‘Asterius is everything that is before us and within us, especially “before” and “within”. Irrupting into the mind he simulates this world and our own reason with all its voices, which dispute so convincingly with each other. To understand this means to see Asterius. One may begin with whatever one likes, without worrying about it at all …’
UGLI 666
Instead of listening to this drivel, shouldn’t we perhaps be thinking about what to do in real reality? I didn’t like the sound of those words about blood that is about be spilled.
Ariadne
‘The true hidden name of Asterius, which gives power over him, is Asterius, which is We. For many years the magicians of ancient times cut away the final letters of all the inscriptions so that no one would understand …’
UGLI 666
We’re wasting precious time.
Ariadne
The next sheet: ‘Man is like unto a tree. The thoughts in his head are like the songs of birds in the crown of the tree. How many birds must sing in unison for that which we consider ourselves to appear? And does the tree truly possess a song of its own? Asterius is also created after this fashion …’
UGLI 666
Someone shut that crazy woman up.