The Opal, and Other Stories Read online

  ‘Emelen – Emmel-len’ he roared until the cliffs echoed again.

  A kind of dizziness overtook him, he saw everything as if through a pair of pebble-spectacles, and the ground turned beneath him. It lasted only a moment and then his vision cleared again.

  The Tibetans had vanished, as his master had before them, and he was faced instead by an army of violet sugar loaves.

  The chief was still alive. His legs had already sunk into a bluish porridge and his body was beginning to subside, as if the whole man was being digested by some completely transparent entity. He was wearing, not a red cap, but a structure resembling a Mithraic building, in which living yellow eyes could be seen moving about.

  Jaburek brought the butt of his gun down on his skull, but couldn’t avoid the sickle-shaped knife the dying man flung at him as he fell, which struck his foot.

  He looked all round. There was not a living thing in sight. The scent of the Amberia had increased and become almost pungently suffocating. It seemed to emanate from the violet cones that Pompeius was now examining. They were all identical, consisting of the same gelatinous and slimy material. It was quite impossible to sort out the remains of Sir Roger Thornton from amongst all these coloured pyramids.

  With a gnashing of teeth Pompeius kicked aside the Tibetan’s face and hurried back the way he had come. In the distance he could see the copper helmets glinting in the grass. He pumped up his diving gear and stepped into the gas belt. The crossing felt as if it would go on for ever, and the tears rolled down the poor fellow’s face. Oh Cod, oh God, his employer was dead; dead, here in the depths of India! The ice-giants of the Himalayas yawned at the sky – what did they care for the sorrows of one puny human heart?

  Pompeius Jaburek faithfully wrote down everything that had happened, word for word, just as he had experienced and seen it, though he still could not understand, and sent it to his master’s secretary in Bombay, 17 Adheri-tollah Street. The Afghan undertook delivery. And then Pompeius died, for the Tibetan’s sickle had been poisoned.

  There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet,’ intoned the Afghan, bowing his forehead to the ground. The Hindu hunters had strewn the corpse with flowers, and burned it on a pyre, chanting their own songs of piety.

  Ali Murrad Bey, the secretary, turned pale at the frightful news, and passed the letter on to the editors of the Indian Gazette.

  And the modern Deluge began.

  The Indian Gazette, containing The Case of Sir Roger Thornton came out a good three hours later than usual next day. A strange and horrifying incident was the cause of the delay:

  Mr. Birendranath Naorojee, managing editor, and two assistants, who were in the habit of checking through the paper every day at midnight before publication, had vanished from the locked office without trace. In their place three bluish-coloured jellylike piles were found on the floor, with the newspaper proofs lying between them. The police, with their usual stolid pomposity had scarcely put the finishing touches to their first reports before countless similar cases started to be notified. Gesticulating newspaper readers vanished by the dozen under the gaze of crowds surging in panic through the streets. Innumerable small violet pyramids materialised on steps, in market places and in narrow lanes, wherever you cared to look.

  Before dusk fell half the population of Bombay had disappeared. An official health decree ordered the immediate closing of the port and interdiction of all commerce with the outside world, as a means of restricting the spread of this novel epidemic (for such it must be) to the greatest extent possible. Telegraph and cable lines hummed day and night, transmitting the frightful news and the account of the case of Sir Roger verbatim across the ocean to the world beyond.

  The following day, the quarantine was lifted, as it was already recognised as being too late.

  From across the globe came horrific reports that the ‘violet death’ had broken out everywhere almost simultaneously, and was threatening literally to depopulate the world. Everywhere reason was sacrificed, and the civilised world resembled nothing so much as a vast anthill, stirred up by the smoke of a peasant boy’s pipe.

  In Germany the plague first appeared in Hamburg. Austria remained inviolate for some weeks, since they only read local newspapers.

  The first case to appear in Hamburg was particularly tragic. Pastor Stuhlken, whose venerable age had made him somewhat deaf, was sitting early one morning at the breakfast table in the bosom of his large family. Theobald, his eldest son, puffing at his long student pipe, his dear wife Jetta, daughters Nina, Tina – in short everyone was there, the whole family. The old man had just opened the English paper that had just arrived, and was reading aloud the item reporting the case of Sir Roger Thornton. He had just read past the word ‘Emelen’, and was reaching for his coffee-cup when he realised with horror that he was surrounded by a group of mucilaginous cones. One of them still had the tobacco pipe projecting from it.

  All fourteen souls had been taken up unto the Lord. The pious old man collapsed in a dead faint.

  One week later more than half the human race was dead.

  A German scholar was entrusted with the task of casting at least some light on these events. The fact that it was the deaf, and deaf-mutes who seemed immune gave him the idea (which was quite correct) that the epidemic was due to a purely acoustic phenomenon.

  In the seclusion of his study he composed a long scientific paper, which he announced as a public lecture in a few key phrases.

  His discussion consisted more or less in drawing attention to a number of almost totally forgotten Indian religious texts concerning the creation of fluid astral vortices by means of reciting certain secret words and formulae, and in supporting these descriptions by reference to the most recent discoveries in the fields of vibration and radiation theory.

  His lecture was held in Berlin and, on account of the enormous interest it evinced, his orotund sentences had to be relayed by megaphone to the assembled public.

  This memorable address closed with the lapidary words: ‘Go to your ear-specialist, who will remove your hearing, and take care never to say aloud the word ‘Emelen’.’

  One second later, the scholar and his entire audience were nothing more than blobs of slime, but the manuscript remained, in time gained currency and credence, so that humanity was at least prevented from dying out altogether.

  A few decades later, in the 1950’s, a new deaf and dumb generation has inherited the earth.

  Habits and customs have changed, rank and material wealth displaced. An ear-surgeon rules the world, music has been consigned to the alchemical formulae of the Middle Ages. Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner are objects of derision, as were, in their time, Albertus Magnus and Bombastus Paracelsus.

  In museum torture-chambers the occasional dust-covered piano bares its old keys.

  Author’s Postscript: The reader is wholeheartedly advised not to pronounce the word ‘Emelen’ aloud.

  Terror

  There is the sound of jangling keys and a platoon of prisoners marches out into the prison yard. It is noon, and they must walk round on a circular track two by two, one behind another, to breathe the open air.

  The courtyard is paved. Only in the middle are there a few patches of dark grass, like the mark of graves. There are four spindly trees and a pathetic looking privet hedge.

  All round rises a line of old, yellow walls pierced by small, barred cell windows.

  The prisoners in their grey penitentiary clothing say little as they walk on, round and round, one behind the other. Almost all of them are sick. Scurvy, swollen limbs; faces as grey as putty, eyes blank. With cheerless hearts they plod on at the same pace.

  The warder with sword and cap stands at the door, staring in front of him.

  A strip of bare earth runs round by the walls. Nothing will grow there: misery trickles through the yellowed stones.

  ‘Lukavsky’s been to see the governor,’ a prisoner calls down in an undertone from his window to the men below. The
troop treads on. ‘What’s up with him?’ asks a new arrival of his neighbour.

  ‘Lukavsky, the murderer, he’s been condemned to hang, and today’s the day they’re deciding whether to confirm it. The governor’s been reading him the sentence in his office. Lukavsky said nothing – just staggered a bit -but outside he was gnashing his teeth and working up a rage. The screws have put a straitjacket on him and strapped him to the bench so’s he can’t move till the morning, and they’ve put a crucifix in front of him.’ Bit by bit all this is called out to the marchers as they go by, by the man inside.

  ‘He’s in No. 25, that Lukavsky,’ says one of the old lags. They all look up at the bars on the window of No. 25.

  The warder leans idly against the door and kicks away an old piece of bread lying on the path.

  In the narrow corridors of the old district courthouse the cell-doors stand together in close rows: low oaken doors set into the solid walls and armoured with iron bands and massive locks and bolts. Every door has a barred opening barely a handspan square. It is through this that the news has crept, whence it flutters along the bars from mouth to mouth: ‘He’ll hang tomorrow!’

  It’s all quiet in the corridors and throughout the whole building, and yet there is everywhere a faint noise. Slight, inaudible, only to be felt. It presses through the walls and dances in the air, like a cloud of midges. Life : bound, incarcerated life!

  In the middle of the main entrance, at a point where it widens out, an antique, empty chest stands in the dark.

  Slowly, silently the lid rises, and a shudder of mortal fear sweeps into every corner of the house. Words die on the prisoners’ lips as it goes by, and there is not a sound in all the corridors, only the beating of one’s own heart and a rushing in the ears.

  The trees and bushes in the yard are motionless, their autumnal branches grasping paralysed at the murky air. They seem to have grown suddenly darker.

  The group of prisoners comes to a stop as if by a command. Was there not a cry? From the old chest a hideous worm slowly begins to emerge, a gigantic leech. Dark yellow in colour, with black flecks, it sucks its way along the floor, past each cell in turn. Alternately growing fat and then elongating it gropes its way along, searching. On each side of its head a cavity encloses five close-packed lidless and immobile eyeballs. This is terror.

  It slithers along until it finds a condemned man, and then fastens on to him, below the throat, just where the great artery runs bringing life up from the heart to the head, and there it sucks the vital blood, enveloping the warm body in its slippery coils.

  And now it has reached the murderer’s cell.

  There is a long, horrible shriek, a shriek without end, a single tone that reaches into the courtyard.

  The watcher leaning on the doorpost jumps back to life and pulls open the gate. ‘Back to the cells, you men, march!’ he shouts, and the prisoners go past him and up the steps without looking at him, tramp, tramp, tramp in their clumsy hobnailed boots.

  Silence again. The wind whips down into the deserted yard, tearing off an old skylight that rattles and crashes down in splinters on to the dirty earth.

  The condemned man is able to move nothing but his head. In front of him the whitewashed wall of the dungeon. Impenetrable. Tomorrow at seven they’re coming to get him. Eighteen hours to go. And seven before it’s night. It’ll soon be Winter and then Spring will come, and hot Summer. And he’ll get up early, at dawn, and walk aong the street, looking at the old milk-cart, with the dog harnessed in front. Freedom! He can do what he wants.

  And then his throat tightens again; if only he could move – damn, damn, damn – and beat his fists on the walls. To get out! To break everything, bite through the straps. He doesn’t want to die now, no, he doesn’t! They could have hanged him then, just when he had killed him, that old man; he already had one foot in the grave. He wouldn’t have done it now though! His defence lawyer didn’t mention that. Why hadn’t he called out to his accomplices? They would have judged him differently if he’d done that. He must say so now to the governor. The warder must take him along to see him. Now. Straight away. Tomorrow morning will be too late. The governor will have his uniform on, and you can’t get so close to him then. And the governor wouldn’t listen to him. It’s too late then, you can’t send away all the policemen any more. The governor won’t do it.

  The hangman places the noose over his head. He’s got brown eyes, and keeps looking straight at the man’s mouth. They heave on the rope, everything starts to turn – stop, stop, he’s still got something to say, something important.

  Will the warder come today and untie him from the bench? He can’t lie there like this for a whole eighteen hours. Of course not – the confessor has still got to come, he’s always read that. That’s the law. He’s not a believer, but he’s going to demand a priest, that’s his right.

  And then he’ll smash that arrogant parson over the head with the stone jug there …

  His tongue’s as dry as dust. He wants a drink, he’s thirsty. Oh Lord, oh God, why don’t they give him anything to drink? He’ll make a complaint, when the inspector comes next week. He’ll drown him in it, the screw, the bloody pig. He’ll scream until they come and untie him, louder and louder, until the walls fall down. And then he’ll be out in the open air at last, high up, so they won’t find him when they come looking.

  He must have fallen somewhere, he thinks. He felt such a jerk just now.

  Has he been asleep? The light is dim.

  He tries to put a hand up to his head: his hands are tied fast. From the old tower the time drones out, one, two -how late is it then? - six o’clock. Oh God in Heaven, only thirteen more hours and they’ll wrench the breath from his body. He’s going to be executed, hanged, with no mercy. His teeth start chattering with the cold. Something is sucking right at his heart, he can’t see. Then everything goes black. He screams, but he can hear no scream; everything about him screams, his arms, his chest, his legs, his whole body, all the time without ceasing, without pausing for breath.

  An old man with a white beard and a hard, forbidding face steps towards the open window of the office, the only

  one without bars, and looks down into the yard. The screaming irritates him, he frowns, murmurs something to

  himself, and slams the window shut. The clouds scud across the sky in long, curling lines. Tattered hieroglyphs, like old, half erased writing: Judge ^ yg bg no% judged,t

  Petroleum, Petroleum

  In order to secure to myself the priority of prophecy, I must point out that this story was written in 1903.

  Gustav Meyrink

  On Friday, at midday, Dr. Kunibald Jessegrim poured the strychnine solution gently into the stream.

  A fish rose to the surface, dead, floating belly upwards.

  You’d be as dead as that, by now, said Jessegrim to himself, and stretched, glad that he had emptied away his suicidal thoughts along with the poison.

  Three times in his life he had looked Death in the eye in this way, and each time he had been locked back into life by a vague premonition that there was still some great deed, one wild, grand act of revenge waiting for him.

  The first time he had wanted to put an end to it all was when his invention had been stolen, and then again ten years later, when he had been hounded out of his job because he had never given up pursuing the thief in order to expose him, and now, because – because – Kunibald Jessegrim groaned aloud as thoughts of his overwhelming misery welled up once more.

  Everything had gone, everything he had depended on, everything that had once been dear to him.

  And it was that blind, narrow-minded, baseless hatred of the crowd, driven by slogans to oppose everything that did not conform to dull mediocrity, that had done this to him.

  To think of all the things he had undertaken, had thought of and suggested! He had scarcely got going before he had to stop in the face of a ‘Chinese wall’ - the generality of obstinate humanity, and the cry of‘but...’ ‘The
Scourge of God’ - yes, that’s the solution, Dear God Almighty make me a destroyer, an Attila! And the fury blazed up in Jessegrim’s heart.

  Tamburlaine, Genghis-Khan limping across Asia, and devastating the fields of Europe with his Golden Mongol Horde, the Vandal Kings, who found peace only on the ruins of Roman art – all these were of his kind, powerful brothers in barbarism, born in the same eagle’s nest.

  A monstrous, limitless affection for these creatures of Shiva grew in him. He felt that their dead spirits would stand by him, and another type of existence flashed into his body.

  If he had been able to look into a mirror at that moment these miracles of transfiguration would no longer have presented a mystery.

  Thus it is that the dark powers of nature surge into our blood, profoundly, and of a sudden.

  Dr. Jessegrim was possessed of extensive knowledge. He was a chemist, and he found it easy enough to succeed.

  In America such people get on well. It is no surprise that he was soon making money – a lot of money.

  He had established himself in Tampico in Mexico, and made millions out of a lively trade in mescal, a new anaesthetic and social drug, whose preparation he had developed.

  He owned four square miles of estates around Tampico, and the huge reserves of oil beneath them promised to multiply his wealth beyond measure.

  But that was not the object for which his heart yearned.

  The new year was approaching.

  Tomorrow is January ist 1951, and those lazy creoles will have yet another reason for spending three days on the binge and dancing their fandangos,’ thought Dr. Jessegrim, looking down from his balcony at the tranquil ocean below.

  ‘And it’ll be hardly any better in Europe. The papers will be coming out in Austria about now – twice as fat as usual, and four times as stupid. A picture of the new year as a naked boy; a new calendar full of women in diaphanous clothes and holding cornucopias; notable statistics: on Tuesday at 35 minutes and 16 seconds past n it will be exactly 9 thousand million seconds since the inventor of double entry bookkeeping went to his eternal (and well-deserved) rest – and so on.’