The Dedalus Meyrink Reader Read online

  His words were full of unbridled scorn and a sudden terror made my blood freeze when I felt that in truth I could not move a limb and had become as stiff as a dead man.

  Once more Dr Zagräus spoke: ‘Yes, the hymn of hatred is sounding throughout the world. I beheld him with my own eyes, the one on the pale horse, and behind him the myriad forms of the army of machines — our friends and allies. They have long since assumed power over themselves, but mankind remains blind, still thinking themselves their masters.

  ‘Driverless locomotives, laden with boulders, come tearing along with mindless ferocity, fall on them and bury hundreds upon hundreds beneath the weight of their iron bodies.

  ‘The nitrogen in the air condenses to produce terrible new explosives: Nature herself pushes forward, breathless in her haste to give up her best resources willingly in order to wipe out the white monster who, for millions of years, has dug scars in her face.

  ‘Metal tendrils with terrible, sharp thorns grow out of the ground, catching their legs and tearing their bodies apart. And in mute triumph the telegraphs wink at each other: another hundred thousand of the hated race gone for good.

  ‘Hidden behind trees and hills, the giant mortars lie in wait, their necks stretched up to the heavens, lumps of ore in their teeth, until the treacherous windmills give them secret signs with their arms to spew out death and destruction.

  ‘Electric vipers dart along under the ground — there! a tiny greenish spark and an earthquake erupts with a roar, transforming the countryside into a mass grave!

  ‘With the glowing eyes of predatory beasts the searchlights peer through the dark. More! More! More! Where are there more of them? And they come, swaying in their grey gravecoats, interminable hordes, their feet bleeding, their eyes lifeless, stumbling in their weariness, half asleep, lungs gasping, knees trembling — but quickly the drums bark out their fanatical fakir rhythm, whipping the benumbed brains into a fury until the howling, berserk frenzy breaks out and only stops when the showers of lead fall on nothing but dead bodies.

  ‘From the east and the west, from America and Asia they come, the metal monsters with murder in their round mouths, to take part in the war dance.

  ‘Sharks of steel creep round the coasts, suffocating in their bellies those who once gave life to them.

  ‘But even those that stayed at home — the apparently “lukewarm” ones who for so long blew neither hot nor cold, who previously had only given birth to peaceable instruments — have awoken to play their part in the great death: tirelessly they belch out fiery breath into the sky day and night, and from their bodies pours forth a stream of sword blades and powder cartridges, lances, shells. None wants to sit there and sleep any more.

  ‘More and more gigantic eagles are waiting to leave the nest to circle over the last hiding places of mankind; already thousands of iron spiders are rushing tirelessly to and fro to weave shining silvery wings for them.’

  For a moment there was a pause and I saw that Count Chazal was suddenly there; he was standing behind the chair in the west, leaning on the back, arms crossed. He looked pale and emaciated.

  With an emphatically insistent gesture, Dr Zagräus went on: ‘And is that not a ghostly resurrection? The blood and fat of antediluvian dragons, long since decomposed and lying in underground caverns as mineral oil, is stirring, wants to come back to life. Simmered and distilled in fat-bellied cauldrons, it now flows as “petrol” into the veins of new, fantastic monsters of the air and sets them throbbing. Petrol and dragon’s blood! Who can tell the difference? It is like the daemonic prelude to the Day of Judgment?’

  The Count hastily broke in and I could sense a vague fear in his voice. ‘Don’t talk of the Day of Judgment, Zagräus,’ he said, ‘It sounds like a portent.’

  The gentlemen stood up in surprise. ‘A portent?’

  ‘We wanted to meet today for a celebration,’ the Count said, after having spent a long time looking for words, ‘but until this moment my feet were kept firmly fixed in — Mauritius.’ (I dimly understood that there was a hidden meaning behind the word and that the Count was not referring to the country.) ‘I have long had my doubts whether what I saw in the reflection that floats up from the Earth to the Moon is correct. I fear, I fear — and icy shivers run over my skin at the terrible thought — that in the short term something unexpected might happen and snatch victory from us. What good is it that I realise there may be another secret meaning in the present war, that the world spirit intends to separate the nations from each other so that they stand alone, like the members of some future body; what use is that to me, if I cannot see the ultimate intention? It is the influences one cannot see that are the most powerful. I tell you:

  ‘Something invisible is growing and growing and I cannot find its root.

  ‘I have interpreted the signs in the heavens which do not lie. Yes, the demons from the depths are arming for battle and soon the Earth’s skin will shudder, like the hide of a horse plagued by flies. Already the great ones of darkness, whose names are written in the Book of Hatred, have once more flung a comet out of the abyss of space, this time at the Earth, as they have so often thrown one at the Sun and missed the target so that it flew back to them, just as the boomerang of the Australian aborigines returns to the hunter’s hand, when it has not struck its intended victim. But who, I asked myself, is behind this array of strength, when the fate of the human race seems already sealed by the army of machines?

  ‘Then scales fell from my eyes, but I am still blind and can only feel my way.

  ‘Can you also not feel the imponderable power, that death cannot touch, swelling up into a river compared with which the oceans are like a bucketful of dishwater?

  ‘What a mysterious force it is that can sweep away overnight everything small and open up a beggar’s heart until it is like that of an apostle! I saw a poor schoolmistress adopt an orphan and set no great store by it, and fear came over me.

  ‘What has happened to the power of the machine in a world where mothers rejoice, when their sons fall, instead of tearing their hair? And could it be a prophetic rune that no one can read yet: a picture is displayed in the city stores, a cross in the Vosges with the wood shot away, but the Son of Man — was left standing?

  ‘We hear the wings of the Angel of Death booming over the lands, but are you sure it is not the wings of another, and not those of death? One of those that can say “I” in every stone, every flower and every animal, both in and outside time and space?

  ‘Nothing can be lost, it is said. But then whose hand is it that gathers this enthusiasm, released everywhere like a new force of nature, and to what will it give birth and who will inherit it?

  ‘Is another about to come whose steps none can stay, as has happened again and again in the course of the millennia. I cannot get that thought out of my mind.’

  ‘Let him come! As long as this time he comes clothed in flesh and blood again.’ Herr Wirtzigh interrupted scornfully. ‘They’ll soon nail him with jokes. No one has ever defeated grinning laughter.’

  ‘But he can come without shape or form,’ Dr Zagräus muttered to himself, ‘just as recently something uncanny befell the animals, so that overnight horses could count and dogs read and write. What if he should burst forth like a flame from human beings themselves?’

  ‘Then we must deceive the light in humans with light,’ Count Chazal broke in shrilly. ‘From that point on we must inhabit their brains as the new, false brilliance of a deceptive, sober rationalism, until they confuse the sun and moon, and we must teach them to distrust everything that is light.’

  I cannot remember what else the Count said. Suddenly the state of glass-like fixity, in which I had been held thus far, left me and I could move again. A voice inside me seemed to whisper that I should be afraid, but that was beyond me.

  Despite that, I stretched out my arm with the lamp in front of me, as if to protect myself.

  Whether a draught caught it or the snake had reached the space in t
he idol’s head, making the glowing wick burst into flame, I could not say. All I know is that a blinding light suddenly burst my senses apart; again I heard my name being called, then a heavy object fell with a dull thud.

  I presume it must have been my own body, for when I opened my eyes for a brief moment before I lost consciousness, I saw that I was lying on the floor and the full moon was shining above me. But the room was empty, the table and the gentlemen had disappeared.

  For many weeks I lay in a coma and when I had eventually recovered, I was told — I forget by whom — that Herr Wirtzigh had died and had made me sole heir to his entire estate.

  But I will have to keep to my bed for quite a while longer and that will give me time to reflect on what had happened and to write it down.

  Just occasionally, at night, a very strange feeling comes over me as if there were an empty space yawning in my chest, stretching out endlessly to the east, south, north and west, and in the middle is the moon; it waxes to a shining disc, wanes, goes black, appears again as a slim crescent, and each time the phases are the faces of the four gentlemen as they sat at the round stone table the last time. Then, to take my mind off it, I listen to the boisterous sounds coming through the surrounding silence from the nearby robber’s castle of the wild painter Kubin, who holds riotous orgies into the early hours of the morning with his seven sons. When day breaks Petronella, the old housekeeper, sometimes comes to my bed and says, ‘How are we today, Herr Wirtzigh.’ She keeps trying to tell me that, as the pastor knows very well, there has not been a Count Chazal since 1430, when the line died out, and that I was a somnambulist, who fell off the roof while sleepwalking and for years imagined I was my own valet. Naturally she denies that there is either a Dr Zagräus or a certain Sacrobosco Haselmayer.

  ‘Of course, the Red Tanjur does exist,’ she always says at the end, wagging her finger at me. ‘It’s over there on the stove. They tell me it’s a Chinese book of magic. And we all know now what happens when a good Christian reads that kind of thing.’

  I say nothing, for I know what I know. But every time the old woman goes out, I get up and open the Gothic cupboard just to confirm what I know. And naturally it’s still there, the snake lamp and, hung up underneath it, the green top hat, doublet and silk knee-breeches of Herr Dr Haselmayer.

  My Torments and Delights in the World Beyond Communicated by Spiritualist Table-Rapping

  As is right and proper for a German writer, I recently — you will have read about it in the Munich newspapers, in the ‘Culture’ section, below the usual editorials on ‘Foot and Mouth Disease in Bavaria’ — died from unnatural causes.

  Weary of contemplating, morning, noon and night, the ineluctable fate of the writer — a painful death smothered in gold at some point in the future — I decided to put an end to my suffering.

  I hurried off through the blizzard — the city was wearing white for Whitsuntide — and entered one of those little stone buildings in which, as the inscription above the doors indicates, they insist on strict segregation of the sexes. Once inside I inserted a ten-pfennig piece, the dragon on sentry duty handed me a clean towel and I made a noose in it.

  A choking sensation in my throat, masses of golden stars before my eyes, startled exclamations such as, ‘What’s going on here?’, finally a jerk and my soul was free.

  Immediately everything looked quite different but, thanks to the occult studies I had religiously pursued on earth and the fact that from a very early age I had kept my spiritual components in good working order, I had no problem orienting myself right away.

  A female figure of unutterable beauteousness came gliding through the air and set about lavishing a series of ghostly caresses on me. The pungent smell of goat’s milk she gave off told me she was already in an advanced state of purification but nevertheless — mindful of the Venusberg scene in Wagner’s Tannhäuser — I extricated myself from her embrace. One second later she had cast off her mask and before me stood Mrs Pankhurst, the notorious maenadic leader of the Suffragettes, who was trying to impede my escape.

  But already my fleet foot had taken me to the bank of a murky river where I boarded a boat propelled by the former president of the Charon Rowing Club himself.

  The dress of my fellow passengers — chamois-leather trousers, tufts of hair on their hats and green, knee-length, footless stockings — as well as the fact that at regular intervals the gentlemen among them took out coloured phials, poured snuff into the hollow below the thumb and inhaled it with a noisy sniff, suggested to me they were the spectres of departed Bavarian notables.

  My suspicion was confirmed by certain malicious references in verse form to my Protestantism. For example:

  Silly old Prod,

  You don’t believe in God.

  Liar, Liar!

  You’ll burn in hell fire.

  Our journey took us past cypress groves in the Lake-Garda-Riviera style and we finally landed safely on a promontory that was teeming with departed souls. It was uncommonly busy, a real immigration port. Extremely interesting, I can tell you.

  The formalities were rushed through hurriedly, the officials were already muttering about lunch. We were weighed and shooed along though the eye of a needle by a camel driver, though I was exempted from this later requirement, since I could demonstrate my status with a fat bundle of unpaid bills.

  A few minutes later I was sitting on the box of a stagecoach crammed full of souls of all social classes. With a crack of the whip and the clatter of hooves, we set off for the Elysian Fields, as I — unfortunately mistakenly — assumed.

  Limousines sped past us. ‘Heading for Hell’ I was told.

  Eager to learn about my new surroundings, I turned to the coachman, a strapping Egyptian Anubis, whose goodwill I had secured by telling him a few risqué anecdotes. ‘Tell me, my good man, what is that grey tower over there? There, between the two telegraph poles?’

  ‘Ach,’ the coachman, clearly a Bavarian Egyptian Anubis, said, shaking his head gloomily, ‘yon’s the weather-ninny, sir. The ane that’s in charge o’ the barometer stuff, ye ken, the ane that delivers the temperature differences for them as are still down there on earth. He’s gettin’ tae be an auld sourpuss, an’ he’s gaen’ a wee bit saft in the heid, too, tae tell the truth.’

  ‘I say, you there. Yes, you, coachman.’ The shrill voice of a North German lady joined in. ‘Aren’t we going to stop soon? The horses need their gingerbread.’ From the swimming movements of her podgy arms, her military bearing and her little, crooked parrot nose I had no difficulty recognising that it was the soul of the celebrated singer and extreme preventer of cruelty to animals, Lilli Kraut, speaking.

  The Anubis turned round irritatedly, spat through his teeth and shot her down with a pun.

  ‘Yon’s genuine Elberfeld stallions. They dinnae eat nae fruitbread, they only eat square roots and they can find those themselves.’

  Soon afterwards we stopped outside a long school building.

  Shivers of horror ran down my spine: that could only be Purgatory! And yes, there was Herr Sassafrass, the headmaster. He came out, gave me a penetrating look and said, ‘That’s Meyrink, Gustav, who kicked against the pricks.’ Taking hold of my ear, he led me into the classroom. Right at the back, in the last row, was Lessing. He was wearing short trousers, buttoned at the back, and was crying. He hadn’t done his allotted task again, to recite the essays of Herr Deertick without faltering. He was a very poor pupil! Once he’d whispered the answer to Lenau and another time he’d tried to lick off an ink-blot.1

  The teaching staff gathered at the front, muttering to each other and sending me dark looks.

  Hölderlin, whom I had sat down next to in my despair, whispered a warning: ‘You’ll get “The Song of the Honest Man”.’2

  ‘No, they’re saving that for Lasker-Schüler,’ Hartleben assured me in a quiet voice, ‘I heard them discussing it in the staff room. you’re going to get the “Sioux Lament for the Dead”.’

  The �
��Sioux Lament for the Dead’! Automatically, lips trembling, I started to run through it in my head:

  Behold him sitting on the mat,

  Reposing there, upright,

  With the dignity he had

  When he still saw the light.

  ‘Well, if I can imagine the sound of a barrel organ as I recite it,’ I thought, to calm myself down, ‘I might be able to survive.’ But then things took a turn for the worse. With a loud crash, a trapdoor in the floor opened and — clean shaven, his hand tucked into his coat front, his missing sideburns suggested by laurel leaves — the immortal astral body of an actor stepped up onto the teacher’s rostrum.

  A terrified murmur went through the rows of my fellow sufferers: ‘Oh no, he’s been copying Ernst von Possart!’3

  Dear Readers, I — I — I — er — no, no, I simply cannot bring myself to describe the ordeal I went through, the intense pain as the spiritual dross within me crumbled away during this course of treatment. I would scarcely have survived it, believe me, had not a timely miracle occurred. As the great actor paused for effect after the words ‘The smoke from his pipe still blew/ To the Great Spirit in the sky’, a hand tapped me on the shoulder and my lawyer, Dr Seidenberger from Munich, handed me a document. From the black gown he was wearing, I deduced that he had not gone the way of all flesh, but had simply come to visit me in his kama rupa as the Indians call it, the psychic body which, as is well known, allows mortals to leave their earthly frame while still alive.

  ‘Quick, sign this letter of attorney for me,’ he said, adding, as I obeyed with trembling fingers, ‘By the way, I’m supposed to be sorting out your estate and I could only find two pfennigs!?’

  ‘That must be a mistake, Dr Seidenberger,’ I exclaimed, ‘I’ve never possessed that much.’ But he wasn’t listening any more. He went up to the headmaster, presented the letter of attorney, and said, in matter-of-fact tones: