The Dedalus Meyrink Reader Read online

  ‘It is a not unimportant discovery for science,’ our botanist, Eshcuid, broke in, ‘to have sounded out the deepest point on the earth’s surface.’

  ‘Science… for science,’ Radspieller repeated absent-mindedly, looking round at each of us in turn questioningly, eventually exclaiming, ‘What do I care for science!’

  Then he hurriedly got to his feet.

  Walked up and down the room a few times.

  ‘Science is as much an irrelevance for you, Professor, as it is for me,’ he said almost brusquely, suddenly turning to Eshcuid. ‘Let us face facts: for us, science is just an excuse to do something, anything, it doesn’t matter what it is. Life, ghastly, horrible life, has withered our soul, has stolen our innermost being, and to stop ourselves crying out all the time in our misery, we devote ourselves to childish fancies just so that we can forget what we have lost. Let us not deceive ourselves.’

  We remained silent.

  ‘But they have another meaning as well,’ he said, suddenly overcome with agitation, ‘our fancies, I mean. It only dawned on me very, very gradually. Some subtle spiritual instinct tells me that every act we perform has a double, magic meaning. We cannot do anything which is not magic. I know precisely why I have spent half my life plumbing the depths. I also know what it means that I have finally — finally — finally struck bottom and joined myself, right through all the swirls and eddies, by a long, fine thread to a world where no ray of this sun can penetrate, this hateful sun, whose only pleasure is to leave its children to die of thirst. What happened today is only a trivial, external event, but anyone who can see and can interpret what he sees is able to tell from the vague shadow on the wall who has walked in front of the lamp.’ He gave me a bitter smile. ‘I will tell you in a few words what the inner meaning of this external event is for me. I have found what I was searching for, from now on I am immune to those two poisonous snakes, faith and hope, which can only live in the light. I felt it from the the way it tugged at my heart today when I imposed my will and touched the bottom of the lake with my plumbline. A trivial external event has shown its inner face.’

  ‘Have such terrible things happened to you in life? I mean when you were a priest?’ Mr Finch asked. ‘To make you so sore at heart?’ he added, in a quiet aside.

  Radspieller did not reply, he seemed to be seeing some image that must have appeared before him. Then he sat down at the table again and, staring fixedly at the moonlight outside, talked like a somnambulist, almost without drawing breath:

  ‘I was never a priest, but even when I was young some dark, powerful urge turned me away from the things of this earth. There were times when, before my very eyes, the face of nature became a grotesque, grinning gargoyle which made me see the countryside, mountains, water and sky, even my own body, as the unyielding walls of a prison. No child, I imagine, feels anything when the shadow of a cloud crossing the sun falls on a meadow, but even then I was petrified with horror and, as if an invisible hand had torn a blindfold from my eyes, I found myself looking into the depths of a secret world full of the mortal agonies of millions of tiny creatures tearing each other apart in mute hatred among the roots and stalks of the grass.

  ‘Perhaps it was hereditary — my father was suffering from religious mania when he died — but soon I could only see the world as a den of cut-throats awash with blood.

  ‘Gradually my life became one long torment as my soul languished. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think as day and night, without respite, my lips mechanically repeated the phrase from the Lord’s Prayer, “Deliver us from evil” until I was so weak I fainted.

  ‘In the valleys where I come from there is a religious sect called the Blue Brethren, whose adherents, when they feel death approaching, have themselves buried alive. Their monastery still stands with their stone coat of arms over the gateway: Aconitum Napellus, a poisonous plant with five blue petals, the top one of which looks like a monk’s hood, which gives it its name.

  ‘I was a young man when I sought refuge in the order and approaching old age when I left.

  ‘Behind the monastery walls is a garden where in the summer a bed full of these deadly plants blooms; the monks water it with the blood that runs down when they flagellate themselves. Whenever a new brother is admitted to the order, he has to plant such a flower, which is then given his Christian name, as if in baptism.

  Mine was called Hieronymus and drank my blood, while I languished for years, vainly pleading for a miracle by which the “Invisible Gardener” would refresh the roots of my life with just one drop of water.

  ‘The symbolic meaning of the strange ceremony of the baptism with blood is that we should plant our soul by magic in the garden of paradise and feed its growth with the blood of our desires.

  ‘It is said that in one single night, at the full moon, a monkshood covered all over with flowers, shot up on the burial mound of the founder of the sect, the legendary Cardinal Napellus, and when the grave was opened the body had disappeared. The saint, so the story went, had changed into the plant, which was the first to appear on earth, and all the others are descended from it.

  ‘When the flowers wither in the autumn, we collect the poisonous seeds, which look like little human hearts and, according to the esoteric tradition of the Blue Brethren, represent the “grains of mustard seed” of faith, of which it is written that whoever has it may remove mountains — and we ate them.

  ‘Just as the terrible poison changes our hearts and puts us in a state between living and dying, so the essence of faith should transform our blood and become a miracle-working power in the hours we spend between mortal agony and ecstatic rapture.

  ‘But with the plumbline of my insight, I ventured even deeper into these wondrous symbols and faced up to the question: what will happen to my blood, when it is finally impregnated with the poison of the blue flower? And the things all around me came alive, even the stones by the wayside cried out to me in a thousand voices, “It will be poured out, again and again, when spring comes, so that a new poisonous plant may grow bearing your own name.”

  ‘In that moment I had torn the mask from the vampire I had been feeding and I was seized with ineradicable hatred. I went out into the garden and crushed the plant that had stolen my name Hieronymus and grown fat on my life with my foot until not a fibre was left above ground.

  ‘From then on my path through life seemed strewn with wondrous happenings. In the very same night a vision appeared to me: Cardinal Napellus, with his fingers in the position of someone carrying a lighted candle, bearing the blue aconite with the five-petalled flowers. His features were those of a corpse, only his eyes radiated life indestructible.

  ‘He so resembled me that I thought I was seeing my own face. Horrified, I automatically felt my face, just as someone whose arm has been torn off by an explosion might feel for the wound with his other hand.

  ‘Then I crept into the refectory and, burning with hate, broke open the casket that was supposed to contain the saint’s relics, intending to destroy them.

  ‘All I found was the globe you can see in that niche there.’

  Radspieller stood up, took the globe down, placed it before us on the table and continued, ‘I took it with me when I fled the monastery in order to destroy the last physical relic of the founder of the sect. Later I had the idea that I would show it more contempt by selling it and giving the money to a whore. And that is what I did at the earliest opportunity.

  ‘Many years have passed since then, but I have not let a minute pass without searching for the invisible roots of that plant, which is the source of mankind’s suffering, in order to banish them from my heart. Earlier I said that from the moment I saw the light, one “wonder” after another crossed my path, but I remained firm, no will-o-the-wisp has lured me into the mire.

  ‘When I started collecting antiquities — all the things you can see in this room come from that time — there were some objects among them that recalled the dark rites of gnostic origin and the ce
ntury of the Camisards. Even the sapphire ring here on my finger — strangely enough, its coat of arms bears a monkshood, the emblem of the blue monks — was a chance acquisition I came across rummaging through a hawker’s tray, even that has not made me waver in my determination. And when one day a friend sent me this globe here as a present — the selfsame globe I had stolen from the monastery and sold — all I did was laugh at the childish threat from some stupid fate.

  ‘No, the poison of belief and hope will not follow me up here in the thin, clear air of this world of snowy peaks; the blue monkshood cannot grow at this altitude.

  ‘In me the old adage has become a new truth: If you would seek out the depths you must climb the mountains.

  ‘That is why I will never go back down to the lowlands. I am healed. Even if the wonders of all the worlds of angels should fall into my lap, I would cast them away as so much dross. Let the aconite remain as a poisonous medicine for the weak and the sick at heart in the valleys, I intend to live and die up here in the face of the fixed, adamantine law of the unchanging exigences of nature which no daemonic spectres can break through. I will continue to plumb the depths, not aiming, not hoping for anything, happy as a child for whom the game is enough and who has not yet been polluted by the lie that life has a deeper purpose; I will continue to plumb the depths, but whenever I touch bottom I will cry out, as if in triumph, “It is only the earth I am touching, once again the earth and nothing but the earth, the same proud earth that coldly throws the hypocritical light of the sun back into space, the earth that remains true to itself, outside and in, just as this globe, the last miserable legacy of the great Cardinal Napellus, is and will ever be a piece of dead wood, outside and in.

  ‘And each time the lake will tell me again: it is true that, generated by the sun, terrible poisons grow on the earth’s crust, but inside, in its chasms and abysses, it is free of them and the depths are pure.’ The intensity brought red blotches to Radspieller’s face and his voice cracked with the emphasis he put on each word: ‘If I could have just one wish’ — he clenched his fists — ‘it would be to let down my plumbline to the centre of the earth, so that I could shout out to the world, ‘See: here, there, see: earth, nothing but earth!’

  We looked up, taken by surprise when he suddenly fell silent.

  He had gone over to the window.

  Eshcuid, the botanist, took out his magnifying glass, bent over the globe and said out loud, in an attempt to cover the embarrassment caused by Radspieller’s last words, ‘This relic must be a fake. It must be from this century, the five continents’ — he pointed to America — ‘are all on the globe.’ Matter-of-fact and normal though his observation was, it could not relieve the strained atmosphere which, for no obvious reason, began to take hold of us and gradually intensified until it was threatening to turn into fear.

  Suddenly a sweet, overpowering smell, as of alder buckthorn or spurge laurel, seemed to fill the room.

  I was trying to say, ‘It’s coming in from the park,’ but Eshcuid forestalled my stuttering attempt to shake off the oppression that had taken hold of us. He stuck a needle in the globe and was muttering something about it being strange that even our lake, such a tiny point, was on the map, when Radspieller’s voice started up again from beside the window and interrupted him in shrilly scornful tones:

  ‘Why has the image of his Eminence, the great Lord Cardinal Napellus, stopped pursuing me, as it used to waking and sleeping? Is there not a prophecy concerning the neophyte in the Codex Nazareus, the book of the gnostic blue monks, written around 200 BC: “Whoever feeds the mystical plant to the very end with his blood will be faithfully guided by it to the gate of eternal life; the sinner who pulls it up, however, will see it face to face as death and his spirit will go out into the darkness until the new spring comes.” Where are they, these words? Have they died? A two-thousand-year-old promise has been dashed to pieces on the rock that is me! Why does he not come, so that I may spit in his face, this Cardinal Nap—’ Radspieller broke off with a gasp. I saw that he had noticed the blue plant that Eshcuid had placed on the windowledge when he came in and was staring at it.

  I was about to jump up and hurry over to him when an exclamation from Giovanni Braccesco stopped me.

  Eshcuid’s needle had caused the yellowed parchment skin over the globe to split and come away, like the peel coming off an overripe fruit, leaving before us a large, shining glass ball.

  Inside it was a wondrous work of art, enclosed in the ball in some way that was beyond our understanding: the figure of a cardinal in cloak and hat, standing and in his hand, his fingers in the position of someone carrying a lighted candle, a plant with steel-blue, five-petalled flowers.

  Petrified with horror, I could hardly turn my head to look at Radspieller. Lips pale, his features those of a corpse, he was standing against the wall, upright and unmoving, like the statuette in the glass ball, and like it with the poisonous blue flower in his hand, staring across the table at the face of the Cardinal.

  Only the light in his eyes told us he was still alive, but we knew that his spirit had disappeared for good in the black night of madness.

  Eshcuid, Mr Finch, Giovanni Braccesco and I parted the next morning, almost without farewell. The horror of the last few hours of that night still held our tongues in thrall.

  For years I have wandered the earth, alone and aimless, but I have never met any of them again. Just once, after many years, my path took me to that region. Of the castle only the walls were left, but as far as the eye could see there grew from among the fallen masonry, in serried ranks the height of a man in the scorching sun, a steel-blue bed of flowers: aconitum napellus.

  The Four Moon Brethren A Document

  Who I am is quickly told. From the age of 25 to 60 I was valet to Count Chazal. Before that I had been a gardener’s assistant in charge of the flowers in the monastery of Apuana, where I had also spent the dreary, monotonous days of my youth and had been taught to read and write thanks to the kindness of the abbot.

  As I was a foundling, my godfather adopted me on the day of my confirmation and since then I have the legitimate name of Meyrink.

  As far back as I can remember, I have always felt as if there were a band of iron round my head, constricting my brain and preventing the development of what is generally known as imagination. I could almost say I lack an inner sense, but to make up for it, my eyes and ears are as sharp as a savage’s. When I close my eyes I still see with oppressive clarity the stiff black outlines of the cypresses that stood out against the crumbling monastery walls, still see the worn bricks on the floor of the cloisters, so distinct and clear I could count them — but all that is cold and mute, it doesn’t speak to me, even though I have often read that things should speak to us.

  I am being open, saying frankly the way things are with me, because I want to be believed. I take up my pen in the hope that what I write here will be seen by people who know more than I do and can, if they want and are allowed, shed light for me on what has been like a chain of insoluble mysteries accompanying me on my way through life.

  If, contrary to all reasonable expectation, this pamphlet should fall into the hands of Dr Chrysophron Zagräus and Dr Sacrobosco Haselmayer, known as ‘the Red Tanjur’, the two friends of my late second master, the apothecary Peter Wirtzigh (who died and was buried at Wernstein am Inn in the year of the Great War, 1914), I trust they will bear in mind that it is not love of idle gossip, nor of poking my nose into other people’s business, that has persuaded me to reveal something they have kept secret for perhaps thirty years. As an old man of seventy I have long since outgrown such childish nonsense; it is, rather, reasons of a spiritual nature that have compelled me to write this of which not the least is my heartfelt fear that after the death of my body I will become a — machine (the two gentlemen will understand what I mean).

  But to return to my story. The first words Count Chazal spoke to me, when he took me into his service, were, ‘Has a woman ever pl
ayed a significant role in your life?’

  When, with a clear conscience, I replied, ‘No,’ he seemed visibly content. Even today, the words burn me like fire, I cannot say why. Thirty-five years later my second employer, Herr Peter Wirtzigh, asked me the same question, down to the very last syllable, when I started work as his servant: ‘Has a woman ever played a significant role in your life?’

  Then, too, I had no hesitation in replying ‘No’, but for one terrifying moment I felt I was a lifeless machine when I said it, not a human being.

  Whenever I ponder over it today, an awful suspicion creeps into my mind; I can’t put it into words but — are there not plants which can never develop properly, which are always as yellow as wax, as if the sun never shone on them, and wither away because a poison sumach grows nearby and secretly feeds on their roots?

  During the first months I felt very uncomfortable in the isolated castle that was inhabited solely by Count Chazal, his old housekeeper, Petronella and me, and was literally filled to bursting with strange, old-fashioned instruments, mechanisms and telescopes, especially as the Count had all kinds of odd habits. For example, although I could help him get dressed, he never allowed me to help him undress, and when I offered, he always used the excuse that he was going to read for a bit longer. In reality, I assume he must have been out in the dark, for in the morning his boots were often thickly coated with mud and marshy soil, even though he had not set foot outside the house during the previous day. And his appearance made me feel uneasy too. Small and slight, his body was out of proportion with his head; although well-formed, for a long time the Count gave me the impression he was a hunchback, though I could not say exactly why.

  He had a sharp profile and his narrow, prominent chin with the pointed, grey beard jutting out in front gave him an oddly sickle-like appearance. He must have possessed a powerful vital force, for he hardly appeared to age at all during all the years I served him; at most the curious crescent-moon shape of his face seemed to grow sharper and slimmer.