The Opal, and Other Stories Read online

  And as if the one word had demolished a wall, I was overcome by the flood-waves of a realisation that that alone must be the key to all the mysteries of our existence.

  An uncanny, automatic act of imitation, unconscious, perpetual, the hidden guide of every creature! An omnipotent, mysterious guide – a masked pilot, silently stepping on board the ship of life in the grey of the dawn. Rising up out of those measureless chasms into which our soul delights to descend when sleep has closed the gates of day! And perhaps down there in those abysses of disembodied existence there stands the brazen image of a demon willing us to be like him, to shape ourselves in his likeness.

  And this word: ‘imitate’, this brief call from the ether became a road for me, and I set out on it at that same moment. I took up the pose, raised both arms above my head in imitation of the statue, and lowered my fingers until the nails just brushed my scalp.

  Nothing happened.

  No change, either within me or round about me.

  So as to make no mistake in my pose I looked more closely at the figure, and saw that the eyes were closed, as if in sleep.

  I decided that I had had enough, broke off the exercise, and put further action off until nightfall. When that came I stilled the ticking of the clocks and lay down, reassuming the position of my arms and hands.

  A few minutes passed in this state, but I cannot believe that I could have fallen asleep.

  Suddenly there seemed to come echoing out from somewhere inside me a sound, as of a huge stone rumbling down into the depths.

  And as if my consciousness were tumbling after it down a monstrous staircase, bouncing two, four, then eight and ever more steps at a time, my memory leaped back through my life, and the spectre of apparent death cloaked itself about me.

  What then happened I will not say: none can say it.

  People laugh at the idea that the Egyptians and Chaldaeans are supposed to have possessed a magic secret, guarded by uraeus snakes, and never betrayed by any one of the thousands of initiates.

  There are no oaths which can possibly bind so securely, we think.

  And I, too, thought this once; but in that instant I understood.

  It is an event in no way connected with human experience, where perceptions lie as it were one behind another, and there is no oath that binds the tongue – the merest thought of a hint at these things, here on this side, and it is enough to alert the vipers of life into taking aim to strike at your very heart.

  So the great secret stays hidden, for it conceals itself and will remain a secret for as long as the world lasts.

  But all that is merely incidental to the searing blow which has struck me down for ever. Even someone’s superficial fate may be shifted on to a new track if his consciousness can break through the barriers of earthly perception for just one moment.

  A fact, of which I am a living example.

  Since that night, when I had that out-of-body experience (I can describe it in no other way), the course of my life has changed, and my existence, previously so unhurried, now reels from one inexplicable, horrific experience to another, towards some dark, unfathomable goal.

  It is as if a devil’s hand is measuring out my periods of lucidity in ever-diminishing quantities, thrusting into my path images of terror which grow in awfulness from one occasion to the next, as if slowly and stealthily to create a new and unheard-of form of madness in me, a form imperceptible to an outsider, unsuspected, known only through the nameless torment of its victim.

  In the course of the next few days after the experiment with the hieroglyph I began to experience sensations which I took at first to be hallucinations. In the midst of all the sights and sounds of everyday I would become suddenly aware of strange roaring noises or jarring undertones in my ears, or catch sight of shimmering colours which I had never seen before.

  Bizarre figures would appear, unheard and unseen by anyone else, acting out incomprehensible and unfathomable plots in shadowy gloom. They would shift their shapes, lie suddenly still as death, then slither down along the gutters in viscous elongation, or squat stupid and exhausted in dark doorways, as if drained of existence.

  This condition of hypersensitive awareness does not persist – it waxes and wanes like the moon.

  The steady decline of my interest in others, whose desires and hopes impinge on me only as if from a distance, suggests to me that my soul is engaged upon some dark journey, far far away from the rest of humanity.

  At first I allowed these whispering voices filling the edges of my consciousness to lead me along. Now, I am like a beast of burden, strapped firmly into its harness and obliged to follow exactly the path along which I am being driven.

  And so one night I was again dragged awake and forced to wander aimlessly through the silent alleyways of the Kleinseite, just for the sake of the impression that the antiquated houses make upon me.

  This part of Prague is uncanny, like nowhere else in the world.

  The bright light of day never reaches down here, nor yet is it ever quite as dark as night.

  A dim, gloomy illumination emanates from somewhere or other, seeping down from the Hradschin on to the roofs of the city below, like a phosphorescent haze. You turn into a narrow lane, and see nothing: only a deathly darkness, until suddenly a spectral ray of light stabs into your eyes from a chink in a shutter, like a long, malevolent needle.

  Then a house looms out of the fog – with decayed, drooping shoulders it stares vacantly up into the night sky out of blank lights set into the receding forehead of its sloping roof, like some animal wounded unto death.

  Next door, another building leans inquisitively forward, glimmering windows peering down, searching eagerly through the depths of the well down below for any trace of the goldsmith’s daughter who drowned there a century ago. And if you walk further on across the uneven cobbles and then suddenly turn to look back, you’ll very likely catch sight of a pale and bloated visage staring after you from the corner – not at shoulder height, no, but quite low down, at about the level where you might expect to meet the gaze of a large dog.

  There was nobody out in the streets.

  Deathly still.

  The ancient entries held their lips firmly clamped shut. I turned into Thungasse, where Countess Morzin has her great house.

  There in the mist crouched a narrow building, no more than two windows broad, a disagreeable wall with a hectic pallor; and here I was gripped spellbound as I felt my mood of hypersensitivity rising within me.

  Under such conditions I act spontaneously, as if driven by another will, and I scarcely know what the next moment will make me do.

  So, in this state, I pushed open the door which had been merely standing ajar, and, passing down a passage, descended the stairs to the cellar, all as if I really belonged in this house.

  At the bottom, the invisible rein holding me in check was relaxed and I was left standing in the darkness, painfully aware that I had done something entirely without purpose.

  Why had I gone down there? Why hadn’t I even thought of putting a stop to such a pointless idea? I was ill, patently ill, and I took comfort in the fact that it could be nothing else: the mysterious, uncanny force had nothing to do with it.

  But in the next moment I realised that I had opened the door, entered the house and gone down the stairs without once bumping into anything, like someone who knew every step of the way: my hope evaporated on the instant.

  My eyes slowly became accustomed to the darkness, and I looked about me.

  There on one of the steps of the cellar stairs someone was sitting. How could I have got past without touching him?

  I could only see the crouched figure rather indistinctly in the darkness.

  A black beard covered a bare chest; the arms were bare too.

  Only the legs seemed to be encased in trousers or perhaps a loincloth. There was something fearful about the position of his hands – they were so extraordinarily bent back, almost at right angles to the joint.
/>   I stared at the man for a long time.

  He sat there with such corpse-like rigidity that I had the sense that his outline had somehow become etched into the dark background, and that this image would remain until the house itself fell into ruin.

  A cold shiver overcame me, and I went on down the twisting passage.

  At one point I reached out to touch the wall. My fingers closed upon a splintered wooden trellis, such as creepers are trained on. They seemed indeed to be growing there in great profusion, for I almost got caught up in a maze of stalky tendrils.

  The odd thing was that these plants (or whatever they were) felt warm to the touch and full of life – altogether they seemed to have a certain animal quality.

  I put my hand out once more, but immediately snatched it back again: this time I had touched a round ball about the size of a walnut, which felt cold and which shrank away on the instant. Was it a beetle?

  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 black-berries, 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.

  Saint Gingolph’s Urn

  Half-an-hour’s walk from St. Gingolph, behind the hills, there is an ancient park, wild and deserted. It’s not marked on any map.

  The mansion that once stood at its heart must have fallen down centuries ago. The white remains of its foundation walls – they reach scarcely to your knees – project at intervals out of the tall, rampant grass, like the gigantic bleached tooth-stumps of some prehistoric monster.

  The earth has unceremoniously buried everything, and the wind has blown it all away: the name of the owners and their coat of arms, the gates and gateways, everything, lock, stock and barrel.

  And the sun has glared down on turret and tower, on and on, until everything has slowly fallen into dust, and
been wafted away with the vapours of the valley.

  So is it that the all-consuming sun treats the things of this earth.

  One mouldering stone urn, standing deep in cypress shade, has survived in the park, the last remains of a forgotten era. The dark boughs have sheltered it from the storms.

  I once sat down in the grass beside this urn, and was listening to the idle chatter of the crows in the treetops when some clouds suddenly laid a hand across the sun and the light of heaven went out, as if a thousand sad eyes had suddenly closed around me.

  I lay still for a long time, hardly moving.

  The lowering cypresses stood guard darkly over the urn, which gazed down at me with its weathered stone face, a being without breath or heart, grey and insensible.

  And my thoughts slipped down into a sunken realm, full of the sounds of fairy tales and the mysterious timbre of metallic harp-strings; I imagined beribboned children coming with dried twigs and pebbles in their little hands, and standing on tiptoe to throw them into the urn.

  And then I pondered long on the reason why this urn had such a heavy lid, like a defiant stone shell, and I felt a strange sensation come over me at the thought of the air inside, and the few poor mouldered objects that it perhaps contained, and how they lay so secretly and without purpose, cut off perhaps for ever from the throbbing life outside.

  I tried to move, and felt as if my limbs were locked in sleep while the multicoloured images of the world grew pale around me.

  And I dreamed that the cypresses had grown young again, and were swaying imperceptibly in the gentle breeze.

  Starlight shimmered on the urn, and the shadow of a huge bare crucifix that towered, dumb and spectral over it, fell like the entry to a dark tunnel across the white nocturnal gleam of the meadow.

  The hours ticked by, and here and there bright circles flitted for a few moments across the grass and over the glittering heads of wild fennel, which glowed magically in the light, like coloured metal; sparks struck by the moonlight through the trees as it rose above the brow of the hill.