The Dedalus Meyrink Reader

by Gustav Meyrink

  There were all sorts of odd rumours about him going round the village: he didn’t get wet when it rained, things like that; and: if he went past the houses at night, when people were in their beds, the clocks all stopped.

  I ignored this idle gossip. The fact that from time to time the metal objects in the castle such as knives, scissors and rakes became magnetic, so that steel nibs, nails and other things stuck to them, is presumably a perfectly normal natural phenomenon; at least the Count explained it when I asked him. The castle stood on volcanic ground, he said; also such occurrences were connected with the full moon.

  In fact the Count had an unusually high opinion of the moon, as I deduced from the incidents that follow.

  I must first mention that every summer, on 21 July, an exceptionally bizarre guest came and always stayed for just twenty-four hours: the aforementioned Dr Haselmayer.

  The Count always called him the ‘Red Tanjur’, why, I do not know, for Dr Haselmayer did not have red hair, in fact he did not have a hair on his head, not even eyebrows or lashes. Even in those days he gave me the impression of being an old man; maybe it was caused by the extremely old-fashioned clothes which he wore year in, year out: a dull, moss-green moleskin top hat, quite narrow, almost pointed at the top, a velvet doublet, buckled shoes and black silk knee-breeches on his alarmingly short, thin little legs. As I said, maybe it was only because of his dress that he looked so … so ‘deceased’, for his high, pleasant child’s voice and his delicately curved girl’s lips spoke against him being old.

  On the other hand, I’m sure there were no eyes anywhere in the whole wide world that were as lifeless as his.

  With all due respect, I have to add that he had a huge round head, which also seemed to be frighteningly soft, as soft as a boiled egg that’s been shelled, and not just his pale, spherical face, but also the skull itself. At least, whenever he put his hat on, a kind of bloodless tube immediately swelled up all round under the brim, and when he took it off again, it was always a considerable time before his head returned to its original shape.

  From the minute Dr Haselmayer arrived until the time he left, he and the Count used to talk — without a break, without a bite to eat, without sleeping or drinking — about the moon, and they did so with a puzzling ardour which I could not understand.

  And they even, when the full moon fell on 21 July, went out during the night to the marshy little castle pond and spent hours staring at the silvery reflection of the moon in the water.

  Once, as I happened to go past, I even saw the two gentlemen throwing lumps of some whitish substance — it will have been pieces of bread roll — into the pond, and when Dr Haselmayer realised I had seen them, he quickly said, ‘We’re feeding the moon … er, sorry, I mean the …er … swan.’ But there was no swan far and wide. Nor any fish, either.

  The things I could not help overhearing later that night seemed to have some mysterious connection with that, which is why I memorised them, word for word, and immediately put them down on paper.

  I was in my bedroom, still awake, when, in the library that was next door and never used, I suddenly heard the Count say, ‘After what we have just seen in the water, my dear Dr Haselmayer, unless I am very much mistaken our cause is nearing fruition and the old Rosicrucian prophecy: post centum viginti annos patebo — after a hundred and twenty years I will be revealed — is turning out exactly as we would have wished. Truly, a most satisfactory centenary midsummer celebration! What we can say for certain is that in the last quarter of the previous century the machine was already rapidly taking over, and if things continue in the way we hope, in the twentieth mankind will hardly have time to see the light of day for all the work they will have cleaning, polishing, maintaining and repairing the ever more numerous machines.

  ‘Today we can justifiably say that the machine has become a worthy twin of the Golden Calf of yore, for anyone who torments their child so badly that it dies will get at most fourteen days in prison, while anyone who damages a steam roller will get three years hard labour.

  ‘But the production costs for such a piece of machinery are considerably higher,’ Dr Haselmayer objected.

  ‘That is in general true,’ Count Chazal replied politely. ‘But it is certainly not the only reason. I feel the essential fact is that, strictly speaking, man is merely a half-finished thing which is destined to become a mechanism at some point in the future. This view is clearly supported by the way certain instincts have already become automated — for example choosing the right spouse in order to improve the race. It is hardly surprising, then, that he sees the machine as his true offspring and his natural child as a changeling.

  ‘If women were to start giving birth to bicycles, or revolvers you should see how people would start marrying for all they were worth. In the Golden Age, when mankind was less developed, they only believed what they could “think”, but then the age gradually came when they only believed what they could eat; now, however, they have ascended the summit of perfection, that is, they only consider as real what they can sell.

  ‘Because the Fifth Commandment says, “Honour thy father and thy mother etc.”, they take it as a matter of course that the machines which they bring into the world and lubricate with the finest spindle-oil — while they themselves make do with margarine — will repay all the effort that went into nurturing them a thousand times over and bring them all kinds of happiness. What they completely forget is that machines can also be ungrateful children.

  ‘They are so drunk on credulousness they are happy to accept the idea that machines are just lifeless things which have no effect on them and which they can throw away at will. Or so they think.

  ‘Have you ever had a good look at a cannon, my friend? Is that a “lifeless” thing? I tell you, not even a general is given such loving care. A general can get a cold and no one would give a damn, but the cannons have aprons wrapped round them, so they don’t get cold, and hats on to keep off the rain.

  ‘All right, I agree that you could object that a cannon only roars when it’s been primed with powder and the order to fire has been given. But doesn’t a tenor only roar when the signal has been given and then only when he has been sufficiently filled with musical notes? I tell you, in the whole universe there is not a single thing that is truly lifeless.’

  ‘But is not our home, the moon,’ Dr Haselmayer objected shyly in dulcet tones, ‘a dead planet, lifeless?’

  ‘It is not dead,’ the Count told him, ‘it is just the face of death. It is — how shall I put it? — it is just the focusing lens which, like a magic lantern, reverses the effect of the life-giving rays of the accursed, show-off sun, draws all sorts of pictures out of the brains of the living, conjuring them up in what they call reality, and makes the poisonous force of death and decay germinate and breathe in the most diverse forms and expressions. It is exceedingly odd — do you not agree? — that, despite all this, humans love the moon above all heavenly bodies, that even their poets, who are looked upon as visionaries, sing its praises with sighs of rapture and ecstatic looks, and none of them pale with horror at the thought that, month after month, for millions of years, the earth has been orbited by a bloodless cosmic corpse. Truly, dogs are more sensible, especially black ones. They put their tails between their legs and howl at the moon.’

  ‘Did you not write to me recently, my dear Count, that machines were directly created by the moon? How am I to understand that?’ Dr Haselmayer asked.

  ‘You have misunderstood me,’ the Count replied. ‘The moon merely impregnated men’s brains with ideas through its poisonous breath and machines are the visible offspring.

  ‘The sun has planted in the souls of mortals the desire for an abundance of joy, but also the curse of creating transitory works by the sweat of their brow and breaking them; but the moon, the secret source of earthly forms, confused them by giving this a deceptive lustre so that they were led astray into a false vision and transferred things they were meant to contemplate inwardly to
the external, tangible world.

  ‘The result is that machines have become the visible bodies of Titans, born of the brains of degenerate heroes.

  ‘And just as to “comprehend” and to “create” something means nothing other than to allow the soul to take on the form of what one “sees” or “creates” and to become one with it, so men are now well on the way to turning themselves, as if by magic, into machines. They are helpless to do anything about it and will eventually end up as naked, never-resting, groaning, pounding mechanisms — as what they have always being trying to invent: a joyless perpetuum mobile.

  ‘But then we, the Moon Brethren, will inherit the “eternal being”, the sole, immutable consciousness that does not say, “I live” but “I am” and that knows: “even if the universe should collapse, I will remain.”

  ‘How could it be, if forms were not simply dreams, that we are able to exchange our body for another at will, to appear among men in human form, among phantoms as shades and among thoughts as ideas, and this by virtue of the secret of being able to divest ourselves of our forms as if they were mere toys chosen in a dream? In the same way as someone who is half asleep can suddenly become aware of their dream, shift that delusion, time, into a new present and set their dream moving in another, more desirable direction, jumping straight into a new body, so to speak, especially since the body is basically nothing more than a spasm, suffering from the delusion of denseness, of the all-pervading ether.’

  ‘Excellently put,’ Dr Haselmayer exulted in his sweet, girlish voice. ‘But why do we not want to allow these earthlings to enjoy the blessing of transfiguration? Would that be such a bad thing?’

  ‘Bad? It would be terrible! Incalculable!’ the Count broke in shrilly. ‘Just imagine: mankind with the power to spread their “culture” throughout the cosmos!

  ‘What do you think the moon would look like after a fortnight of that? Velodromes in every crater and sewage farms all around. That is assuming they hadn’t previously introduced the dramatic “art” and thus made the soil too acid for any kind of vegetation.

  ‘Or do you want to see the planets linked by telephone during the hours of dealing on the stock exchange? And the double stars in the Milky Way compelled to produce official marriage certificates?

  ‘No, no, my friend, the universe can manage with the old, easy-going routine for a while longer.

  ‘But to come to a more rewarding topic, my dear Dr Haselmayer — by the way, it’s high time you started to wane, I mean, depart; we’ll meet again at Wirtzigh’s, the apothecary’s, in August 1914. That is the beginning of the end, the great end, and we want to celebrate that catastrophe for humanity in worthy fashion, don’t we?’

  Even before the Count had finished, I had slipped into my valet’s livery to assist Dr Haselmayer in packing and accompany him to the carriage.

  The next moment I was out in the corridor.

  But what did I see? The Count came out of the library alone, carrying Dr Haselmayer’s velvet doublet, silk knee-breeches and buckled shoes, as well a his green top hat, while Dr Haselmayer himself had disappeared. Without a glance in my direction, the Count returned to his bedroom and closed the door behind him.

  As a well-trained servant, I considered it my duty not to be surprised at anything my master saw fit to do but I couldn’t help shaking my head and it was a long time before I managed to get to sleep.

  Now I must pass over many years.

  They went by monotonously. In my memory they are like fragments of some old book that recorded confused events in elaborate script on yellowing, dusty paper, a book one had read and hardly understood at some time when one’s mind was dulled by fever.

  There is just one thing I am clear about. In the spring of 1914 the Count suddenly said to me, ‘I shall soon be going away. To — Mauritius’ (he gave me a quick glance) ‘and I would like you to go to work for my friend Peter Wirtzigh, apothecary, in Wernstein am Inn. Is that clear, Gustav? I won’t take no for an answer.’

  I made a silent bow.

  One fine morning the Count had left the castle without making any preparations. I deduced this from the fact that I did not see him again and a stranger was sleeping in the four-poster bed the Count had been in the habit of using when he slept.

  It was, as I was later told in Wernstein, the apothecary, Herr Peter Wirtzigh.

  Once I had arrived at Herr Wirtzigh’s property, from which one could look down on the foaming River Inn, I immediately set about unpacking the suitcases and boxes I had brought with me to stow the contents away in the cupboards and chests.

  I took out a highly unusual old lamp shaped like a transparent Japanese idol, sitting cross-legged (its head was a sphere of frosted glass); inside was a moving snake, operated by a clockwork mechanism, holding up the wick in its jaws. I was going to put it in a tall, Gothic cupboard, but when I opened it I saw, to my horror, the corpse of Herr Dr Haselmayer dangling there.

  The shock almost made me drop the lamp, but fortunately I realised in time that it was only Dr Haselmayer’s clothes and top hat, which had deluded me into thinking it was his body hanging in the cupboard.

  Despite that, the experience made a profound impression, leaving me with a sense of premonition, of something menacing, ominous, which I could not shake off even though nothing particularly exciting happened during the months that followed.

  Herr Wirtzigh treated me in a consistently kind and friendly fashion, but in many respects he was far too similar to Herr Dr Haselmayer, so that the incident with the cupboard kept coming back to mind whenever I looked at him. His face was perfectly round, like Dr Haselmayer’s, only very dark, like that of a Moor — for years he had been suffering from the incurable effects of a complaint of the gall bladder, from melanosis. If you were only a few steps away from him and it wasn’t very light in the room, you could often hardly distinguish his features and his narrow, silvery beard which, scarcely the width of a finger, went from underneath his chin up to his ears and stood out from his face like an eerie, dull radiance.

  The oppressive strain kept me in its grip until August, when the news of the outbreak of a terrible world war hit everyone like a thunderbolt. I immediately recalled what I had heard Count Chazal say all those years ago about a catastrophe threatening mankind and so perhaps that was why I could not wholeheartedly join in the curses the villagers hurled at the enemy states; it seemed to me that the cause behind it was the dark influence of certain natural forces filled with hatred which use human beings like puppets.

  Herr Wirtzigh was completely unmoved, as if he had long since foreseen it.

  It was only on 4 September that he showed some slight agitation. He opened a door, which until then I had always found closed, and took me into a blue, vaulted chamber with a single, round window in the ceiling. Immediately below, so that the light fell directly on it, was a circular table of black quartz with a depression like a trough in the middle. Around it were golden, carved chairs.

  ‘This trough,’ Herr Wirtzigh said, ‘is to be filled this evening, before the moon rises, with cold, clear water from the well. I’m expecting a visitor from Mauritius and when I call, you’re to get the Japanese snake-lamp, light it — I hope the wick will only glow,’ he added, half to himself — ‘and stand, holding it like a torch, there, in that niche.’

  Night had long since fallen, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock struck and I was still waiting.

  No one could have come in, I am sure of that. I would have noticed, because the door was closed and always creaked loudly when it was opened and I had heard no sound so far. There was a deathly silence all round and the pounding of the blood in my ears was gradually becoming a thunderous roar.

  At last I heard Herr Wirtzigh calling me — as if from a great distance. As if it came to me from my own heart.

  With the glowing lamp in my hand, almost dazed from an inexplicable drowsiness, such as I had never felt before, I felt my way through the dark rooms to the vaulted chamber and took up my
position in the niche.

  The mechanism hummed softly in the lamp and through the reddish stomach of the idol I could see the glowing wick glittering in the mouth of the snake as it slowly revolved, appearing to be creeping almost imperceptibly upwards in spirals.

  The full moon must have been directly above the hole in the ceiling, for its reflection was like a motionless disc of silver with a pale green glow in the trough of water in the stone table.

  For a long time I thought the golden chairs were empty, but eventually I could see that three were occupied. As they moved cautiously I recognised the men: in the north the apothecary, Herr Wirtzigh; in the east a stranger (Dr Chrysophron Zagräus, as I learnt from their later conversation); in the south, a wreath of poppies on his bald head, Dr Sacrobosco Haselmayer.

  Only the chair in the west was empty.

  My hearing must have gradually woken, for words were drifting over to me, some Latin, which I could not understand, and some German. I saw the stranger lean forward, kiss Dr Haselmayer on the forehead and say, ‘beloved bride’. There followed a long sentence, but it was too softly spoken for me to be aware of it.

  Then, suddenly, Herr Wirtzigh was in the middle of an apocalyptic speech:

  ‘And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne and round about the throne were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And I looked, and behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto him to take away peace from the earth, that the inhabitants thereof should slaughter one another; and to him was given a great sword.’

  ‘A great sword,’ came the echo from Dr Zagräus. Then he caught sight of me, paused and asked the others in a whisper if I could be trusted.

  Herr Wirtzigh reassured him. ‘He has long since become a lifeless mechanism in my hands. Our ritual demands that one who is dead for the world must hold the torch when we are gathered together. He is like a corpse. In his hand he carries his soul, in the belief that it is a smouldering lamp.’