The Dedalus Meyrink Reader

by Gustav Meyrink

  Just then a light flickered on somewhere, and for a second the wall in front of me was lit up.

  Everything I had known of fear and horror up until then was as nothing to this moment.

  Every fibre of my being shrieked out in indescribable terror. My paralysed vocal chords gave vent to a silent scream, which struck through me like a shaft of ice.

  The entire wall, right up to the ceiling, was festooned with a network of twisted veins, from which hundreds of bulbous berry-eyes gazed out.

  The one I had just fingered was still snapping back and forth, giving me a glance full of suspicion.

  I felt faint, and staggered on for two or three more steps into the darkness. A cloud of different smells engulfed me, heavy, earthy, reeking of fungus and ailanthus.

  My knees gave way and I beat the air about me. A little glowing ring appeared in front of me — the last dying gleam of an oil-lamp which flickered fitfully for a moment.

  I leaped towards it and with trembling fingers turned the wick up, just in time to save the tiny sooty flame.

  Then I swung round, holding the lamp protectively in front of me.

  The room was empty.

  On the table, where the lamp had been, there lay a longish object, glittering in the light.

  My hand reached out to it, as for a weapon.

  But it was no more than a light, crudely-made thing that I picked up.

  Nothing moved, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Carefully, so as not to extinguish the flame, I ran the light along the wall. Everywhere the same wooden trellis-work and, as I could now clearly see, overgrown with veins, evidently all patched together, in which blood was coursing.

  In amongst them countless eyeballs glistened horribly, sprouting alternately with hideous warty nodules like blackberries, and following me slowly with their gaze as I passed. Eyes of all sizes and colours, from brightly shining irises to the light blue tone of the eye of a dead horse, fixed immovably upwards. Some, shrunken and black, looked like over-ripe nightshade berries. The main stems twisted their way out of jars filled with blood, drawing up their juice by means of some unfathomable process.

  I stumbled on shallow dishes filled with whitish fatty lumps in which toadstools were growing covered in a glossy sheen; toadstools of red flesh, that shrank away at a touch.

  And all seemed to be parts of living bodies, fitted together with indescribable art, robbed of any human soul, and reduced merely to vegetative organisms.

  I could see clearly that they were alive by the way that the pupils in the eyes narrowed when I brought the lamp closer. But who could be the devilish gardener who had planted this horrible orchard?

  I remembered the man on the cellar steps.

  I reached instinctively into my pocket for a weapon — any weapon — and felt the sharp object I had previously found. It glittered, bleak and scaly: a pine cone assembled out of a multitude of pink human fingernails.

  With a shudder I dropped it and clenched my teeth: I must get out, out — even if the thing on the stairs should wake up and set about me!

  And I was already on my way past him, ready to thrust him aside, when I realised he was dead, yellow as wax.

  From his contorted hands the nails had been wrenched, and incisions in his chest and temples indicated that he had been a subject of dissection. In pushing past him I must have brushed him with my hand — he seemed to slip down a couple of steps towards me and then stood upright, his arms bent upwards, hands touching his forehead.

  Just like the Egyptian figure: the same pose, the very same pose!

  The lamp smashed to the floor and I knew only that I had flung the door open to the street as the brazen demon of spasmodic cramp closed his fingers round my twitching heart.

  Then, half-awake, I realised that the man must have been suspended by cords attached to his elbows: only by that means could he have been brought upright by slipping down the steps; and then, then I felt someone shaking me. ‘Come on, the Inspector wants to see you.’

  I was taken to a poorly-lit room, tobacco pipes ranged along the wall, a uniform coat hanging on a stand. It was a police station.

  An officer was holding me upright.

  The Inspector at the table stared past me. ‘Have you taken his details?’ he murmured.

  ‘He had some visiting cards on him. We’ve taken those.’ I heard the policeman reply.

  ‘What were you up to in Thungasse in front of an open street door?’

  Long pause.

  ‘Hey, you!’ warned the policeman, giving me a nudge.

  I stammered something about a murder in the cellar of the house in Thungasse.

  The policeman left the room.

  The Inspector, still not bothering to give me a glance, embarked on a long speech, of which I heard very little.

  ‘What are you talking about? Dr. Cinderella is a great scientist — Egyptologist — he is cultivating all sorts of new carnivorous plants — Nepenthes, Droseras and suchlike, I think, I don’t know. — You should stay indoors at night.’

  A door opened behind me; I turned to face a tall figure with a long heron’s bill — an Egyptian Anubis.

  The world went black in front of me as Anubis bowed to the Inspector and went up to him, whispering to me as he passed: ‘Dr. Cinderella.’

  Doctor Cinderella!

  At that moment something important from the past came back into my mind and then immediately vanished again.

  When I looked at Anubis once again he had become nothing more than an ordinary clerk with something birdlike about his features. He gave me my own visiting cards back. On them was printed:

  Dr. Cinderella.

  The Inspector suddenly looked straight at me, and I could hear him saying: ‘You’re the Doctor himself. You should stay at home at night.’

  And the clerk led me out. As I went I brushed against the coat hanging on the stand.

  It subsided to the floor, leaving the arms hanging.

  On the whitewashed wall behind, its shadow raised its arms aloft, as it attempted awkwardly to take up the pose of the Egyptian statuette.

  You know, that was my last experience, three weeks ago. I’ve had a stroke since then: I have two separate sides to my face, and I have to drag my left leg along.

  I have looked in vain for that narrow, fevered little house, and down at the station nobody admits to knowing anything about that night.

  The Ring of Saturn

  One step at a time they came, disciples feeling their way up the circular stair.

  Inside the Observatory the darkness came billowing up into the round space, while from above starlight trickled down along the polished brass tubes of the telescope in thin cold streaks. If you turned your head slowly, allowing your gaze to traverse the darkness, you could see it flying off in showers of sparks from the metal pendulums suspended from the roof.

  The blackness of the floor swallowed up the glittering drops as they slid off the smooth surface of the shining instruments.

  ‘The Master’s concentrating on Saturn today,’ said Wijkander after a while, pointing to the great telescope that thrust through the open roof panel like the stiff, damp feeler of a vast golden snail from out of the night sky.

  None of the disciples contradicted him: they weren’t even surprised when they looked into the eyepiece and found his assertion confirmed.

  ‘It’s a complete mystery to me. How can anyone in this near-darkness possibly know what the instrument is pointed at, merely by looking at its position?’ said one, bemused.

  ‘How can you be so sure, Axel?’

  ‘I can just sense that the room is filled with the suffocating influence of Saturn, Dr Mohini. Believe me, telescopes really do suck at the stars like leeches, funnelling their rays, visible and invisible, down into the whirling focus of their lenses.

  ‘Whoever is prepared, as I have been for a long time now, to stay awake through the night, can learn to detect and to distinguish the fine and imperceptible breath of each star, to note i
ts ebb and flow, and how it can silently insinuate itself into our brains, filling them with changeling intentions; will feel these treacherous forces wrestling in enmity with one another as they seek to command our ship of fortune … He will learn, too, to dream while awake, and to observe how at certain times of the night the soulless shades of dead planets come sliding into the realm of visibility, eager for life, exchanging mysterious confidences among themselves by means of strangely tentative gestures, instilling an uncertain and indefinable horror into our souls…

  But do turn the lights on — we may easily upset the instruments on the tables in the dark like this, and the Master has never allowed things to get out of place.’

  One of the companions found his way to the wall and felt for the switch, his fingertips brushing gently but audibly against the sides of the recess. Then suddenly it was light and the brassy yellow lustre of the telescopes and pendant metal shouted aloud across the emptiness.

  The night sky, which until that moment had lain in yielding satin embrace with the window-panes, suddenly leaped away and hid its face far, far above in the icy wastes behind the stars.

  ‘There is the big, round flask, Doctor,’ said Wijkander, ‘which I spoke to you about yesterday, and which the Master has been using for his latest experiment. And these two metal terminals you see here on the wall supply the alternating current, or Hertz Waves, to envelop the flask in an electric field.

  ‘You promised us, Doctor, to maintain an absolute discretion about anything you might witness, and to give us the benefit of your wisdom and experience as a doctor in the mad-house, as far as you can.

  ‘Now, when the Master comes up he will suppose himself to be unobserved, and will begin those procedures which I hinted at but cannot explain in more detail. Do you really think that you will be able to remain unaffected by his actions and simply by means of silent observation of his overall behaviour be able to tell us whether madness is altogether out of the question?

  ‘On the other hand will you be able to suppress your scientific prejudices so far as to concede, if necessary, that here is a state of mind unknown to you, the condition of high intoxication known as a Turya Trance — something indeed that science has never seen, but which is certainly not madness?

  ‘Will you have the courage openly to admit that, Doctor? You see, it is only our love for the Master and our desire to protect him from harm that has persuaded us to take the grave step of bringing you here and obliging you to witness events that perhaps have never been seen by the eye of an uninitiate.’

  Doctor Mohini considered. ‘I shall in all honesty do what I can, and be mindful of everything you told me and required of me yesterday, but when I think carefully about it all it puts my head in a spin — can there really be a whole branch of knowledge, a truly secret wisdom, which purports to have explored and conquered such an immeasurably vast field, yet of whose very existence we haven’t even heard?

  ‘You’re speaking there not just about magic, black and white, but making mention also of the secrets of a hidden green realm, and of the invisible inhabitants of a violet world!

  ‘You yourself, you say, are engaged in violet magic, — you say that you belong to an ancient fraternity that has preserved its secrets and arcana since the dawn of prehistory.

  ‘And you speak of the “soul” as of something proven! As if it is supposed to be some kind of fine substantive vortex, possessing a precise consciousness!

  ‘And not only that — your Master is supposed to have trapped such a soul in that glass jar there, by wrapping it round with your Hertzian oscillation?!

  ‘I can’t help it, but I find the whole thing, God knows, pure …’

  Axel Wijkander pushed his chair impatiently aside and strode across to the great telescope, where he applied his eye peevishly to the lens.

  ‘But what more can we say, Dr Mohini?’ responded one of the friends at last, with some hesitation. ‘It is like that: the Master did keep a human soul isolated in the flask for a long time; he managed to strip off its constricting layers one at a time, like peeling the skins off an onion, so as to refine its powers, until one day it managed to seep through the glass past the electric field, and escaped!’

  At that moment the speaker was interrupted by a loud exclamation, and they all looked up in surprise.

  Wijkander gasped for breath: ‘A ring — a jagged ring, whitish, with holes in it — it’s unbelievable, unheard of!’ he cried, ‘A new ring of Saturn has appeared!’

  One after another they looked in the glass with amazement.

  Dr Mohini was not an astronomer, and knew neither how to interpret nor to assess the immense significance of such a phenomenon: the formation of a new ring around Saturn. He had scarcely begun to ask his questions when a heavy tread made itself heard ascending the spiral stair. ‘For Heaven’s sake, get to your places, — turn the light out, the Master’s coming!’ ordered Wijkander urgently. ‘And you, doctor, stay in that alcove, whatever happens, do you hear? If the Master sees you, it’s all up!’

  A moment later the Observatory was once more dark and silent.

  The steps came nearer and nearer, and a figure dressed in a white silk robe appeared and lit a tiny lamp. A bright little circle of light illuminated the table.

  ‘It breaks my heart,’ whispered Wijkander to his neighbour. ‘Poor, poor Master. See how his face is twisted with sorrow!’

  The old man made his way to the telescope where, having applied his eye to the glass, he stood, gazing intently. After a long interval he withdrew and shuffled unsteadily back to the table like a broken man.

  ‘It’s getting bigger by the hour!’ he groaned, burying his face in his hands in his anguish. ‘And now it’s growing points: this is frightful!’

  Thus he sat for what seemed an age, whilst his followers wept silently in their hiding-places.

  Finally he roused himself, and with a movement of sudden decision got up and rolled the flask closer to the telescope. Beside it he placed three objects, whose precise nature it was impossible to define.

  Then he kneeled stiffly in the middle of the room, and started to twist and turn, using his arms and torso, into all sorts of odd contorted shapes resembling geometrical figures and angles, while at the same time he started mumbling in a monotone, the most distinguishing feature of which was an occasional long-drawn-out wailing sound.

  ‘Almighty God, have pity on his soul — it’s the conjuration of Typhon,’ gasped Wijkander in a horrified whisper. ‘He’s trying to force the escaped soul back from outer space. If he fails, it’s suicide; come brothers, when I give the sign it’s time to act. And hold on tight to your hearts — even the proximity of Typhon will burst your heart-ventricles!’

  The adept was still on his knees, immobile, while the sounds grew ever louder and more plaintive.

  The little flame on the table grew dull and began to smoke, glimmering through the room like a burning eye, and it seemed as if its light as it flickered almost imperceptibly was taking on a greenish-violet hue.

  The magician ceased his muttering; only the long wails continued at regular intervals, enough to freeze the very marrow of one’s bones. There was no other sound. Silence, fearful and portentous, like the gnawing anguish of death.

  A change in the atmosphere became apparent, as if everything all round had collapsed into ashes, as if the whole room were hurtling downwards, but in an indefinable direction, ever deeper, down into the suffocating realm of the past.

  Then suddenly there is an interruption: a sequence of slithery slapping sounds, as some invisible thing, dripping wet, patters muddily with short, quick steps across the room. Flat shapes of hands, shimmering with a violet glow, materialise on the floor, slipping uncertainly to and fro, searching for something, attempting to raise themselves out of their two-dimensional existence, to embody themselves, before flopping back, exhausted. Pale, shadowy beings, dreadful decerebrated remnants of the dead have detached themselves from the walls and slide about, mindless,
purposeless, half conscious and with the stumbling, halting gait of idiotic cripples. They puff their cheeks out with manic, vacant grins — slowly, very slowly and furtively, as if trying to conceal some inexplicable but deadly purpose, or else they stare craftily into space before lunging forwards in a sudden movement, like snakes.

  Bloated bodies come floating silently down from the ceiling and then uncoil and crawl away — these are the horrible white spider-forms that inhabit the spheres of suicides and which with mutilated cross-shapes spin the web of the past which grows unceasingly from hour to each succeeding hour.

  An icy fear sweeps across the room — the intangible that lies beyond all thought and comprehension, the choking fear of death that has lost its root and origin and no longer rests on any cause, the formless mother of horror.

  A dull thud echoes across the floor as Dr Mohini falls dead.

  His face has been twisted round back to front; his mouth gapes wide open. Wijkander yells again: ‘Keep a tight hold on your hearts, Typhon is …’ as all at once a cacophony of events erupts.

  The great flask shatters into a thousand misshapen shards, and the walls begin to glow with an eerie phosphorescent light. Around the edges of the skylights and in the window-niches an odd form of decomposition has set in, converting the hard stone into a bloated, spongy mass, like the flesh of bloodless, decayed and toothless gums, and licking across the walls and ceilings with the rapidity of a spreading flame.

  The adept staggers to his feet, and in his confusion has seized a sacrificial knife, plunging it into his chest. His acolytes manage to stay his hand, but the damage is done: the deep wound gapes open and life trickles away — they cannot close it up again.

  The brilliance of the electric lights has once again taken possession of the circular compass of the Observatory: the spiders, the shadows and the corruption have vanished.

  But the flask remains in shattered pieces, there are obvious scorch marks on the floor, and the Master still lies bleeding to death on a mat. They have sought in vain for the knife. Beneath the telescope, limbs contorted, lies the body of Mohini, chest down. His face, twisted upwards, grins grotesquely at the roof reflecting all the horror of death.