The Opal, and Other Stories Page 11

  The park was waiting for something, or someone, who was coming: and when the gravel of the path from the mansion which was itself invisible in deep shadow crunched gently under a footfall, and the air wafted the sound of a rustling dress towards me, it seemed as if the trees all stretched forward, bending down to whisper words of warning to the visitor.

  The steps were those of a young mother who had come from the house, and had now thrown herself down at the foot of the cross, embracing its wooden base in an attitude of despair.

  Someone else was standing in the shadow of the cross, though, and him she could not see, nor did she suspect his presence. He it was who in the half-light had stolen her sleeping child from its cradle, and now waited for her to come, hour by hour: her husband, driven back home from his far travels by gnawing suspicion and tortured dreams.

  He was holding his face pressed to the wood of the cross, and listening with bated breath to the whispered words of her prayer.

  He well knew his wife’s soul, and the hidden springs of her inner nature, and knew that she would come. To this cross. He had seen it all in a dream. She was bound to come, to look for her child here.

  Like iron to a magnet, as the instinct of the bitch seeks out her lost puppy, so this same enigmatic power will direct a mother’s step, even if she were asleep.

  As if to warn her the leaves and twigs rustled, and the night dew fell on her hands. But she kept her eyes lowered, her senses were blind for grief and sorrow at the fate of her vanished child.

  And so she did not feel that the crucifix was bare, and that it did not carry Him to whom she called, and who had said: go, and sin no more. But instead of the One, he who heard the words of her agony would be a confessor without mercy. And she prayed and prayed, and more and more clearly her supplication formed itself into a confession – Look not, Oh Lord, at my guilt, you forgave that sinner ... And the old branches groaned aloud in their distress and their torment, and grasped at the Listener there behind the cross, and clawed at his cloak – and a blast of wind howled through the park.

  Its roaring tore the last traitorous words away, but an ear filled with hatred is not to be deceived by the storm, and in a flash a sure certainty is born out of long-harboured suspicion.

  Once more stillness reigned round about.

  The supplicant at the cross crouched in a heap, unmoving, as if in deep sleep.

  And gently, gently the stone lid began to turn, and the hands of the man glinted pale in the darkness as they crept like monstrous spiders slowly and silently around the edge of the urn.

  There was not a sound in the whole park. Paralytic horror stalked throught the darkness.

  Line by line the stone threads sank and vanished as the lid screwed shut.

  Just then a narrow beam of moonlight struck through the thicket and fell upon the ornamental decoration of the urn, glinting from the smooth knob as a horrible glowing eye and staring straight into the man’s face with unblinking and malignant gaze.

  Feet spurred on by horror and fear fled through the wood, and the cracking of twigs roused the young woman in alarm.

  The sounds grew fainter, and died away in the distance.

  But she took no notice of them: her heart missed a beat as she heard a tiny sound that had reached her ear in the darkness: an imperceptible, almost inaudible sound, borne as it were on the air.

  Was it not a faint whimper? Quite close by?

  She stood quite still and strained her ears, biting her lip; her hearing became as acute as an animal’s: and she held her breath to suffocation point, yet still her exhalations were like the roar of the tempest. Her heart resounded, and the blood rushed through her veins like a thousand subterranean rivers.

  She could hear the scraping of caterpillars under the bark of the trees, and the imperceptible movement of the ears of grass.

  And the enigmatic voices of burgeoning internal thoughts, those unborn thoughts that determine the fate of man and bind his will in invisible fetters, but which are yet fainter, fainter by far than the breath of the growing plants, these thoughts began strangely and indefinably to assail her ear.

  And all around a cry, a cry of distress, around, above and beneath her, in the air and under the ground.

  Her child was crying – somewhere – there, or there, her fingers clenched in mortal anguish – Cod would let her find him again.

  It must be very, very close by – God is just putting her to the test, surely. And the cry sounds nearer, and louder: madness flaps its sable pinions, covering the face of heaven in darkness – her whole brain is just a single aching listening nerve.

  Just one single moment of mercy, Oh God, just one moment more, and the child will be found again. In desperation she rushes forward, but the very noise of her first step drowns the faint sound, confuses her ear, and she stops, bewitched, unable to move from her place. She is bound helplessly to the spot, immobile as a stone, for fear of losing the clue.

  Again she hears the child: he is crying for her; the moonlight breaks through, lighting up the park, flooding down from the treetops in shimmering streams; and the decoration on the urn glitters like wet mother-of-pearl.

  The shadows of the cypresses point: here, here he is, trapped. Break the stone, quick, quick, before he smothers! But the mother does not hear, does not see.

  A patch of light has deceived her, and without thinking she has rushed headlong into the bushes, tearing her flesh on the thorns, and trampling through the undergrowth like a maddened beast.

  Her shrieks echo dreadfully across the park.

  White figures come rushing from the house; sobbing, they catch her hands and in their compassion carry her away.

  But the madness has cast its cloak over her, and that same night she is dead.

  Her child has suffocated, and nobody found the tiny corpse.

  The urn watched over it, until it collapsed into dust.

  The old trees fell sick after that night, and slowly they withered, leaving only the cypresses to hold the wake until the present day.

  They never spoke a word more, but grew stiff and motionless for grief. But in silence they cursed the wooden crucifix, until the north wind came, tore it out of the ground and flung it down on its face.

  The wind would have smashed the urn too in its rage, but that God had forbidden; a stone is always just, and this one had not been any harder than a human heart.

  I feel a weight on my chest, which makes me wake up. I look about me, and the space beneath the sky is full of a broken light. The air feels hot and poisonous.

  The mountains look as if they are huddled together in alarm, and the outline of every tree stands out with fearful clarity. A few white flecks of foam scud across the water, driven by some mysterious power. The lake is black, yawning below me like the gaping jaws of a monstrous and rabid hound.

  A long purple cloud, like nothing I have ever seen before, hangs awesomely motionless above the storm, reaching a spectral arm across the sky.

  The dream of the urn still weighs on me like a nightmare, and I sense that it is the arm of the warm wind up there, whose distant hand is groping invisibly about the earth, searching for that stony heart, that was harder even than a rock.

  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 its 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 angu
ish 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.