There is argument as to how far Meyrink is the author of the whole of The Angel of the West Window, first published in 1927, and how much was written by his friend, F. A. Schmid Noerr, but it is generally dealt with as part of Meyrink’s oeuvre. The novel is based on the life of the Elizabethan mathematician and astrologer, John Dee, and his skryer, Edward Kelley. At times it uses John Dee’s ‘diary’ (Dee did actually leave an account of his dealings with ‘some spirits’), at times a modern descendant, who has received his papers, becomes John Dee. The book is set partly in England and partly in Prague, where Dee went hoping for patronage from the Emperor Rudolf II.
Extract from The Angel of the West Window: The Conjuration of the Angel of the West Window
O the night of the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin! How deeply it is engraved on the memorial of my soul! Now all those hours of waiting, of feverish expectation are behind me, past and forgotten. A miracle, an unbelieveable miracle has been vouchsafed me from the world beyond. I am dumbfounded with wonder and amazement at the might and power of the glorious, thrice blessed Angel. Deep within my heart I have made apology to Kelley that I ever thought ill of him and that I saw the mote in my brother’s eye and not the beam in mine own. He is an instrument of providence, that I now know and I shudder at the thought of it.
The days that preceded the night were a torment to me. Every day, I sent servants to London to enquire of the craftsmen that had contracted to make, according to Kelley’s precise instructions, the table around which the five of us — Jane, Talbot, Price, myself and Kelley — were to sit when we conjured the Angel. It had to be made of pieces of costly sandalwood and laurel and greenheart and in the form of a five-pointed star. In the middle there was to be a large hole in the shape of a regular pentagon. Set in the edges were cabbalistic signs, seals and names in polished malachite and brown cairngorm. Now I am ashamed to the depths of my soul when I think of my miserable, mean-minded concern at the thought of the enormous sum of money this table would consume. Today I would tear out my eyes and use them as jewels to decorate the table if it were necessary.
And always the servants would return from London saying, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. The table was never ready, there seemed to be a spell on it; for no reason this or that journeyman would suddenly fall ill and whilst working on it three had already died a sudden, inexplicable death, as if seized by the ghost of the plague.
I strode restlessly round the rooms of the castle, counting the minutes until the morning of the 21 November broke, dull and grey.
Price and Talbot were sleeping like winter marmots, a strange, heavy, dreamless slumber, as they later told me. Jane, too, had been nigh impossible to wake and she shivered with inner cold, as if taken by a fever in her sleep. My eyes alone were unresting; heat, unbearable heat coursed through my veins.
Days before, Kelley too had been seized with a mysterious unease; like some shy animal he avoided the sight of men; I saw him wander round the park in the twilight and start like a guilty thing surprised when steps approached. During the day he sat brooding on the stone benches, now here, now there, murmuring absent-mindedly to himself or shouting in an unknown language at the empty air, as if someone were standing there. When he awoke from this state it was but for minutes, and then he would ask breathlessly if all were prepared at last; and when I told him, despairing, that it was not, then he began to berate me with curses, which he would suddenly interrupt to return to his soliloquy …
Finally, shortly after midday — I had not been able to force even one mouthful down, so wrought was I with the impatience and unrest of the long wait — I saw, on the brow of a distant hill, the carts and waggons of the London craftsmen approaching. In a few hours the parts — for it would have been impossible to bring it through the doors in one piece — had been assembled in the room prepared for it in the castle tower. As Kelley had ordered, three of the windows — to the north south and east — had already been bricked up and only the high, arched west window, a good sixty feet above the ground, remained open. On my orders the walls of the circular chamber had been hung with the pictures of my ancestors, dark with age; chief among them was to have been a portrait of the legendary Hywel Dda, from the brush — and the imagination — of an unknown master, but we had had to remove it, as Kelley flew into a wild rage the moment he saw it.
In the niches of the walls stood my tall silver candelabra with sturdy wax candles in them in preparation for the solemn conjuration. Like an actor memorising his part, I had spent much time walking up and down in the park to commit to memory the enigmatic, incomprehensible formulae that were needed to call up the Angel. Kelley had given them to me one morning and told me they had been handed to him, scratched on a strip of parchment, by a disembodied hand lacking a thumb. My mind immediately saw the terrible Bartlett Greene as he bit off his thumb and spat it into Bishop Bonner’s face in the Tower. The memory sent a cold shiver down my spine, but I shook it off: had I not burnt the outlaw’s present, the polished coal skrying-glass, and thus broken all bonds between us …?
After much toil, the words had finally seeped into my blood so that they would come automatically to my lips when I opened them to pronounce the conjuration.
The five of us sat in silence in the great hall as the bell in the spire of the parish church tolled the third quarter before two — excitement had so sharpened my ear that the noise was almost painful to it. Then we climbed up the tower. The five-pointed table that almost filled the chamber shone bright in the light of the candles as Kelley, tottering as if he were drunk, lit them one after the other. Then we sat in order in the high-backed chairs. Two of the points of the pentagram were directed towards the west, where the clear moonlight and the ice-cold night air poured in through the open window. Jane and Kelley sat at these two points; I myself was sitting with my back to the east and my eye was drawn out into the wooded landscape, deep in shadow, through which the frosty paths and roads flowed like rivulets of spilt milk. On either side of me sat Price and Talbot in mute expectation. The candle flames flickered in the air, as if they too were restless. The moon, high in the sky, was hidden from view, but its bright light fell in dazzling cataracts on the white stones of the window-sill. The five-sided hole in the table gaped before me like a dark well-shaft.
We sat as still as the dead, though each one could surely hear his own heart thumping in his breast.
All at once Kelley seemed to fall into a deep sleep, for suddenly we could hear a snoring sound as he breathed. His face began to twitch, but that may only have been the light of the candles flickering over his features. I did not know whether to begin the conjuration or not, for I had expected to hear an order from Kelley. I tried to pronounce the formulae, but each time it was as if an invisible fmger were laid upon my lips … Is it all Kelley’s imagination? I asked myself and was beginning to fall prey to doubt once more, when my mouth began to speak as if of its own accord and in a voice so deep and resonant that it seemed foreign to me, uttered the words of the evocation.
An icy numbness filled the room. The candles were suddenly as still as death, their flames rigid and giving off no light: you could break them off from the candles, I thought, break them off like withered ears of corn … The pictures of my ancestors on the walls had become black chasms, like the openings into dark dungeons, and the disappearance of the portraits made me feel as if I was cut off from those who were there to protect me.
In the deathly silence a child’s voice rang out:
‘My name is Madini; I am a little girl from a poor family. I am the second youngest of the children; at home my mother has a babe at her breast.’
At the same time I saw hovering in the open air outside the window the figure of a pretty little girl of seven to nine years old; her long hair hung in ringlets over her forehead; her dress shimmered red and green and looked as if it were made from flakes of the jewel alexandrite, which appears green by day and at night blood red. Charming as the child looked at first sight, its appearance made a terrifying impression: it hovered outside the window, fluttering like taut, smooth silk, a shape without any physical depth, its features as if painted — a phantom in two dimensions. Is that the promised angel? I wondered, and a bitter disappointment fell upon me which the miracle of this inexplicable apparition could do nothing to lessen. Then Talbot leant over to me and whispered in a choking voice:
‘It is my child; I am sure I recognise it. She died not long after birth. Do the dead continue to grow?’
There was so little pain and sorrow in my friend’s voice that I felt sure he was as terrified as I was. Could it be an image, deep within him, that had been projected out into the air, that has somehow been released from his soul and taken visible form? But I immediately abandoned the thought as the phantom was obscured by a pale green pillar of light which suddenly shot up like a geyser through the hole in the table and then moulded itself into a human shape which yet had nothing human about it. It congealed into an emerald form, as translucent as beryl, and as hard — a hardness which seemed to gather and concentrate at its centre more perceptibly than in any earthly material. Arms detached themselves from the stone, a head, a neck. — And hands! Those hands! There was something about them that I could not quite pin down. For a long time I could not take my eyes off them until I saw it: the thumb on the right hand pointed outwards, it was the left-hand thumb. I will not say that this terrified me — why should it? But this apparently trivial detail emphasised the otherness, the ahuman nature of the gigantic being rising up before me even more than its miraculous, inexplicably tangible emergence from the green pillar of light.
The face, its eyes without lashes and set wide apart, was fixed beyond description. There was something fearful, paralysing, deadening and yet shatteringly sublime in its gaze which froze me to the bone. I could not see Jane, she was blocked by the figure of the Angel, but Talbot and Price seemed corpses, so deathly white were their faces.
The lips of the Angel were red as rubies and formed into a strange smile, turned up at the corners, where they tapered to a delicate point. The child before had seemed unnatural in its flatness, this gigantic creature was stupefying in its corporeal presence, which surpassed all earthly measure: there was not the slightest shadow cast by its garments to give it emphasis or perspective. Yet in spite of — or perhaps because of — that, it made me feel that until that point I had in my whole life on earth seen nothing but flat surfaces, when compared with the sight of this being from another world.
Was I the one who asked, ‘Who are you?’ Or was it Price? I cannot say. Without opening its lips, the Angel said, in a cold, piercing voice that sounded as if it were an echo from deep within my own breast:
‘I am Il, the messenger of the West Gate.’
Talbot wanted to ask a question, but all he could bring out was incoherent babbling. Price pulled himself up straight; he wanted to ask a question but all he could do was babble too! I gathered all my strength to raise my eyes to the Angel’s countenance, but I had to let them drop; I sensed I would die if I insisted. My head bowed, I asked in a stuttering voice:
‘Il, All-powerful Being, you know that which my soul longs for. Grant me the secret of the stone! I would give my heart, I would give my blood — so fervently do I desire the metamorphosis from a human animal into a King, into one that has risen from the dead both here and beyond. I would understand St. Dunstan’s book and its secrets! Make me into the one that I … was destined to be!’
Time passed — it seemed an eternity. Deep sleep threatened to overcome me but I fought it with all the strength of my longing. The room resounded with words, as if the floor and walls were joining in:
‘It is good that thou hast sought in the West, in the Green Realm. I am well pleased. It is in my mind that I shall grant thee the Stone.’
‘When?’ I screamed, almost consumed in wild, nameless joy.
‘The day after tomorrow!’ came the answer, syllable by syllable.
‘The day after tomorrow!’ My heart leapt up. ‘The day after tomorrow!’
‘Dost thou know who thou art?’ asked the Angel.
‘I? — I … am John Dee.’
‘You are? You are … John Dee?!’ the apparition repeated. The Angel said it in a piercing voice, even more piercing than before. I felt … I dare not even think it: … as if. .. no, I will not let it pass my lips as long as I have power over them, nor will I let my quill write it down whilst I have the strength to control it.
‘John Dee thou art, Lord of the Manor of Gladhill and Master of the Spear of Hywel Dda, oh, I know thee well!!’ came a shrill, mocking voice from the window. I sensed it was the spectral child outside speaking.
‘He who has the Spear is the Victor!’ — the words echoed from the mouth of the Green Angel. ‘He who has the spear is called and chosen. The Watchers at the four Gates are all subject to him. But thou, follow ever thy brother Kelley. He is my instrument here on earth, he is appointed to lead thee over the abyss of pride. Him thou shouldst obey, whatever he demands. Inasmuch as the least of these my brethren demand it, grant it him, for I am he and thou grantest it unto me. Then I can be with thee, in thee and around thee until the end of time.’
‘That I solemnly swear to you, Blessed Angel!’ I replied, struck to the very marrow and trembling in every limb. ‘I raise my hand and swear to you, even should I thereby perish!’
‘Should … perish!’ came the echo from the walls.
There was a deathly hush in the chamber. I felt as if my oath were resounding through the depths of the cosmos. The candles flared up; the flames were horizontal as if in a blast of wind.
An icy cold that froze my fingers came from the Angel. With numbed lips I asked:
‘Il, hallowed spirit, when shall I see you again? How can I see you when you are far from me?’
‘Thou canst always see me in the coal-glass, but I cannot speak through it.’
‘I have burned the coal,’ I stammered, and I regretted that I had destroyed the skrying crystal in the presence of Gardner, my cursed assistant, for craven fear of Bartlett Greene.
‘Shall I return it to you? John Dee … heir to … Hywel Dda?’
‘Give it to me, mighty Il!’ I beseeched him.
‘Put thy hands together in prayer. To pray is to receive if … a man … has learnt to pray!’
‘That I have,’ I rejoiced. I placed my hands together — an object swelled up between my palms, pushing them apart. When I opened them, there was the coal skrying-glass!
‘Thou hast burnt it. Through that it lost its old life; now it has thy life in it, John Dee. It is reborn and risen from the dead. Just like men, things live on too.’
I stared at the thing, full of astonishment. How marvellous are the ways of the invisible world. Not even the devouring fire of earth can bring destruction!
‘I … thank you … Il … I thank you!’ I was about to stammer, but I was so moved that I could not speak. My voice was choked with tears. Then it burst out of me like a spring tide:
‘And the stone? That too … ?!’
‘The … day … after … tomorrow,’ the whisper came as if from a great distance. The Angel had become a faint wisp and the child at the window seemed to my eye translucent, like milky glass. It hung in the air, lifeless as a scrap of silk. Then it sank back into the landscape, floated as greenish, shimmering mist to the ground and became a patch of meadow.
That was my first meeting with the Angel of the West Window.
After such favour, can fate hold any torment in store for me? Blest be the night of the feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary.
We sat together for a long time and talked ecstatically of the wondrous occurrence. As if it were the greatest treasure in the world, I clutched Bartlett Greene’s — no, no: the Angel’s coal crystal as a constant reminder that I had been found worthy of a miracle. My heart was full to bursting when I remembered the Angel’s promise: The day after tomorrow!
Kelley lay in a deep sleep until the dawn appeared in a sky flushed red, as if smeared with blood from wounded clouds. In silence, shuffling like a weary old man, he went down the stairs without one glance at the rest of us.
How wrong is the common cry: Beware of him who bears the brand! I felt this as I watched the man with the ears cut off disappear down the stairs. ‘He is an instrument of providence and … I took him, my brother, for … a criminal — — — I will practise humility,’ I resolved. Practise humility … and be worthy of the stone! —
One strange fact I learnt from Jane: I had assumed the Angel had stood with its back to her. To my surprise she told me that the face had been turned towards her the whole time, just as it had been turned towards me. She had heard what it had said, just as I had. Price spent his time trying to fathom how the miracle of the return of the coal had happened and what were the hidden laws behind it. He thought things were probably different than we, with our dull senses, supposed; perhaps they were not physical objects but visible manifestations of some unknown force. I did not listen to him! My heart was too full.
Talbot was silent. Perhaps he was thinking of his dead child.