The Opal, and Other Stories Read online

  Melchior fell silent for a moment, lost in his own thoughts.

  ‘And when I think of what horrific properties that dwarf Dhananjaya possessed, which kept his life perpetually renewed, I can only see the awful confirmation of that theory.’

  ‘You speak as if the twins were dead. Have they died?’ asked Sinclair with surprise.

  ‘A few days ago. And it is as well that they did. The fluid that one of them spent most of his day in dried out, and nobody knew its composition.’

  Melchior fell silent for a moment, lost in his own thoughts.

  ‘And when I think of what horrific properties that dwarf Dhananjaya possessed, which kept his life perpetually renewed, I can only see the awful confirmation of that theory.’

  ‘You speak as if the twins were dead. Have they died?’ asked Sinclair with surprise.

  ‘A few days ago. And it is as well that they did. The fluid that one of them spent most of his day in dried out, and nobody knew its composition.’

  Melchior Kreuzer stared into space and shuddered. ‘There were things so awful-so indescribably horrible—it’s a blessing Lucretia never found out; that at least was spared her! Just to see that frightful double creature was enough to unhinge her! It was just as if her maternal feelings had been torn in half.

  Just let me forget all that for today. The thought of Vayu and Dhananjaya – it still makes my head reel.’ He sat a while in contemplation, then jumped up suddenly, exclaiming ‘Pour me some wine – I don’t want to think about it any more. Let’s change the subject – Music, anything, just to dream up some different thoughts! Music!

  And he stumbled across to a gleaming juke-box standing against the wall, and tossed a coin into the slot.

  Clink. The money fell audibly inside and the machine ground into motion.

  Three odd notes sounded, then a moment later the tune blared across the room: ‘Oh, once I had a comrade true You’ll never find a better’.

  Fever

  Alchemist: who art thou, dim shade in the glass here? I bid thee speak.

  The Matter in the Retort: Ater corvus sum.

  Once upon a time there was a man who was so tired of the world that he decided to stay in bed. Every time he woke up he turned over on to the other side, so that he always managed to sleep on a little longer.

  But one day this plan wouldn’t work any more: it just would not, he could not go on. And he lay there in bed, quite still, for fear that if he changed his position he would shiver.

  He had to look out through the window from his pillow, and just at the moment when his sleep was quite at an end, the sun was setting.

  A broad, golden-yellow wound gaped across the sky beneath a dark, heady mass of cloud.

  ‘It certainly won’t do to get up, just at such a fateful moment,’ said the man, his teeth chattering – and he was even more afraid than before that he might shiver - ‘even for someone who is not so tired of the world as I am.’ And he stared with melancholy gaze into the yellow evening, its glowing rim huddled beneath the skirt of fog. One black cloud had drifted away from the rest, shaped like a curving wing, feathers visible at the edge.

  And from out of her burrow there crept into the man’s head, with the fluffy outlines of a fur muff, the recollection of a dream. A dream of a raven, brooding upon a heart.

  And all through his long sleep he had been wrestling with this dream – of that the man was now quite certain.

  ‘I must discover whose this wing is,’ he said, and climbed out of bed in his nightshirt, down the stairs, and out into the street; and he went, on and on, always in the direction of the sunset.

  But the people he met whispered: ‘pst, pst, pst, hush, hush, he’s dreaming it all.’ Only Vrieslander, baker of consecrated wafers by formal appointment, thought himself to be in a position to make a joke. He stood in the man’s path, pursed his lips and made round eyes like a fish. His wispy tailor’s beard seemed even more phantasmal than usual, and with his bony arms and fingers he cut a splayed, and madly twisted pose, and crooked his legs most strangely. ‘Psst psst, gently, do you hear?’ he whispered venomously; ‘my name is Giggle, you know, Gig ...’ and he suddenly jerked his sharp knee up into his chest, and pulled his mouth wide open, while his cheeks drained to a leaden pallor, as if he had been overtaken in the midst of his pirouette by Death.

  The man in his nightshirt felt the hair on his head stand on end for horror, and he ran on, out of the town, across meadows and stubble fields, always towards the sunset, always with his feet bare.

  From time to time his foot slipped on a frog.

  Only when it was night, long after the burning slit in the sky had closed again, did he reach the long white wall, behind which the cloudy wing had vanished.

  He sat down on a little hill. ‘Here I am then, in the burial ground,’ he said to himself, and looked about him. ‘Well, now, this may turn out to be awful nonsense. But I must find out who the wing belongs to!’

  As the night wore on it grew gradually lighter, and the moon crept slowly above the wall. A kind of dawning astonishment spread across the sky.

  As the moonlight’s harsh illumination swept across the ground flocks of blue-black birds flew up out of the ground behind the gravestones, slipping up behind, from the side turned away from the light, to rest silently on the whitewashed wall.

  Then for a space a corpse-like immobility was cast over all.

  ‘That is the dark wood in the distance of course, rising out of the mists, and the round head in the middle is the hill with its crown of trees,’ dreamed the man in the nightshirt. But when he looked more closely it was a monstrous raven, perched with pinions outstretched on the wall over there.

  ‘Ah, the wing thought the man, pleased with himself, ‘the wing ...’ And the bird, inflated with pride, boasted: ‘I am the raven who broods on hearts. When someone breaks a heart it is brought straight away to me.’ And it flapped down from the wall and came to rest perched on a stone of marble, and the wind of the beat of its wings had the odour of withered flowers.

  But under the marble stone lay one who had but today come to join his family.

  The man in his nightshirt spelled out a name, and was curious to know what kind of a bird would hatch from this shattered heart; for the newly deceased had been a well-known philanthropist, had devoted his whole life to enlightenment, had done and said nothing but good, had cleansed the Bible and had been the author of elevating tracts. His eyes, simple and without guile, like saucer-mirrors, had radiated goodwill in life, and now too, in golden letters upon his grave was written:

  Loyalty and Honesty be ever thine Unto your cool grave, And step not aside one whit From the path of righteousness.

  The man in the nightshirt watched with rapt attention. A gentle crackling rose up out of the grave, as the young chick eased itself from its heart’s shell – and then it fluttered off with a croak, a pitch-black shadow flitting up to join the others along the wall.

  ‘But that was really to be expected, was it not? Or were you in your innocence perhaps expecting a partridge?’ mocked the raven.

  ‘There is something white about it, even so,’ said the man doggedly, by which he meant one light, bright feather, which clearly stood out. The raven laughed. That goose-down? That’s just stuck on. It’s come out of the feather pillow the man always slept on!’ And it flew on from grave to grave, settling for a while here and there, and everywhere the fledglings came fluttering, sable-black from the earth.

  ‘Black? Are they all, all black?’ asked the man after a while, sick at heart.

  ‘Black. All, all black!’ snarled the raven in reply.

  And the man in his nightshirt was sorry that he had not stayed in his bed.

  And as he looked up at the sky, the stars were full of tears, blinking.

  Only the moon stared wide-eyed, uncomprehending.

  But suddenly there sat, quite still on a cross, another raven, and it was shining snowy white. And it seemed as if all the glimmer of the light cam
e from it. The man only saw it because he happened to turn his head that way. And on the cross the inscription named one who had been an idler his whole life long.

  The man in the nightshirt had known him well. And he pondered long.

  ‘What deed was it that made his heart so white, then?’ he asked at last.

  But the black raven had grown ill-tempered, and was repeatedly trying to jump over its own shadow.

  ‘What deed, what deed, what deed?’ The man went on, importunate.

  Then the raven burst out in anger: ‘Do you think it is deeds that can make it white? You ... you ... cannot even do a deed! I should as easily jump over my own shadow. That jumping jack there, rotting to pieces on the tiny grave – do you see it? - Once it belonged to the child buried beneath. And for a long time that decaying toy too thought he was a great fellow in the world. Because he couldn’t see the strings he was hanging by, and would not believe it was a child who played with him. And you – you? What do you think will happen to you when the -‘Child’ abandons you for another toy? You’ll be laid out and you’ll cr...’

  The raven glanced slyly across at the wall - ‘and you’ll cr...’

  ‘Croak!’ went the raven-flock, overjoyed at the chance to join it.

  And the man in the nightshirt was afraid, quite inordinately so.

  ‘So what else made his heart so white? Listen to me, what else made his heart so white?’ he asked.

  The raven shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. ‘It must have been the yearning. Yearning for something hidden, that I do not know and have never found on earth. We all saw his yearning grow like fire, and understood it not. It burned up his blood, and eventually it burned up his brain: we understood it not.’

  The man in the nightshirt grasped the idea ice-cold: The Light Shineth In Darkness, And The Darkness Comprehended It Not.

  ‘Yes, we did not comprehend,’ continued the raven, ‘but one of the gigantic, gleaming birds, that have hovered eternally unmoving in space since the beginning of time, spied the glowing spark and stooped down. Like white-hot fire. And He has brooded on that man’s heart, night after night.

  And vivid images now began to crowd in on the vision of the man in his nightshirt. Images which had never quite been able to die away from his memory – events in the fortune of the idler, that were passed among the people from mouth to mouth: he saw that man standing under the gallows – the hangman drawing the linen mask down over his face – the spring that was supposed to tilt the board under the feet of the poor sinner failing to operate; - they took him away and put the board straight. And once more the hangman reached for the linen mask; once more the spring would not work. And after a month, when the man again stood there, the linen mask across his eyes, once more – the spring broke in two.

  But the judges – the judges in exasperation ground their teeth and cursed – cursed the carpenter, who had made the scaffold so badly.

  Then the vision faded.

  ‘And what became of him?’ asked the man in the nightshirt, full of horror.

  ‘I consumed his flesh, and his bones; and the earth has been diminished by the measure of his corpse,’ said the white raven.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ whispered the black. ‘His coffin is empty, he cheated the grave.’ All this the man heard, and his hair stood on end; he tore at the shirt on his breast and ran to the white bird perched on the cross, crying: ‘Hatch out my heart, hatch out my heart! My heart too is full of longing!’ But it was the black raven that threw him to the ground with its pinions and settled heavily upon him. The air was filled with the odour of decaying flowers.

  ‘Make no mistake, Cousin, it is greed, not longing, that slumbers in your heart! Yes, many would gladly try it before they cr ...’ and he glanced slyly across at the wall: ‘before they cr...!’

  ‘Croak!’ went the raven assembly along the wall, delighted to be given their turn again.

  The heat of his body was strange and agitating, like fever, he felt; and then his consciousness fluttered away in dissolution.

  When he awoke from a long sleep the moon stood high in the sky, and was staring him in the face. Its brilliance had drunk up the shadows, and struck down on the stones from all sides.

  The black ravens had gone.

  But the man could still hear their spiteful croak in his ears, and with an unquiet mind he clambered over the wall and into his bed.

  The doctor was there already in his black coat. He took the man’s pulse, closed his eyes behind his gold-rimmed spectacles and babbled to himself long and inaudibly with a tremor of his lower lip. Then with a flourish he fetched out his notebook and wrote out a prescription:

  Rp:

  Cort. Chin. Reg. Rud.tus .. .. 3P

  coque c. suff. Quant, vini rubri, per horam . j

  ad colat.......3viij

  cum hac inf. Herb, abs . . .. 3j postea solve

  acet. Lix......3j

  tunc adde

  syr. Cort. Aur.....3P

  M. d. ad

  One tablespoon 3 times daily

  And when he had finished he stepped with a consecratory gesture to the door, turned back once again and said mysteriously, one finger raised with a dignified air:

  ‘Contra the fever, contra the fever’.

  What’s the use of white dog shit?

  ‘Stand up, for King and Country’

  Not many people know that it’s good for anything.

  But there’s no doubt at all that it serves some special purpose.

  When I leave the house first thing in the morning, just before the postman arrives and shoves a whole load of paper through the letterbox (I’ve rigged it up with a proper flushing system, by the way), I always stop in the garden for a moment and say out loud:

  ‘Ksss, Ksss'.

  And at once a most peculiar phenomenon takes place. A kind of wheezing cough can be heard from the dry leaves; a croaking and rustling, spitting sound. Two fiery eyes light up about a foot from the ground and then something black with a bald swelling on its neck comes hurtling out of the bushes at me, snapping madly at my trouser-creases.

  What species of animal it belongs to I haven’t yet succeeded in finding out.

  It spends the morning crouching curled up under an elder bush: that at least I have managed to establish.

  The maid swears the thing can sometimes be seen wearing a blue blanket lined with red and ornamented in the far corner with a crown. In spite of the closest observation I haven’t been able to confirm this: it almost seems as if each person’s retina responds to it in a different way.

  Now, what this thing with the bald excrescence may be: whether, if we are to judge by the crown, it is the restless shade of the last degenerate scion of an extinct dynasty, taking on form under the influence of certain astrological constellations, or whether it is instead a single citizen of the animal kingdom - whatever it is, it does partake of a spectral quality, which continually causes me to doubt its corporeality.

  I feel clearly it’s as old as the hills, and I don’t doubt it finds it easy enough to remember the battle of Cannae. There’s a haze of history wafting about it.

  But in spite of its antiquity there is no purity in it; the hatred of an entire world is able to find room in its heart.

  It has never yet managed to get a good hold on my trouser-creases. This too would be evidence that it is no more than a reflection from another sphere. Something imponderable, invisible, seems to force it to turn away at the very last fraction of a moment, although it never tires of making the attempt, and is continually prepared to try again.

  As suddenly as the phenomenon appears, so it vanishes. Then all at once, without any warning, a shrill voice in the sky shrieks: ‘Ah-meee! Ah - meee!’

  Quite clearly: ‘Ah - meee!’

  Now there’s nothing particularly marvellous about that. The old Jews heard a voice from Heaven like that often enough; why shouldn’t it happen to me in Columbus Lane?

  On this thing with the blister however it
has a quite devastating effect.

  With a jerk the phantom tears itself away from me, scrabbles its way through the garden gate and around the corner where it instantly de-materialises!

  On reflection, this word Ah-meee’ seems to me to be one of those accursedly sonorous formulae such as you find referred to in the Lam-rim of Tson-ka-pa, those terrible Tibetan books of magic, and which, when properly pronounced, are capable of raising in the causal realm astral whirlwinds of such power that even inside our protective material bodies we can become fearfully aware of the last eddies of these catastrophes as they become manifested in the form of mysteriously inexplicable happenings.

  I have often chanted these strange syllables to myself: ‘Ah-meee!’ Hesitantly at first, but then more boldly, but there has never been any change visible in my material surroundings. I have obviously put the wrong stress on them. Or is their effectiveness dependent on a presumption of strict asceticism in the chanter?

  The dematerialisation of this thing, which I witness every morning, is by no means the end of the sequence of events.

  No sooner has the voice from above died away than a disabled soldier comes into my garden, and makes straight for the elder bush.