One step at a time they came, disciples feeling their way up the circular stair.
Inside the Observatory the darkness came billowing up into the round space, while from above starlight trickled down along the polished brass tubes of the telescope in thin cold streaks. If you turned your head slowly, allowing your gaze to traverse the darkness, you could see it flying off in showers of sparks from the metal pendulums suspended from the roof.
The blackness of the floor swallowed up the glittering drops as they slid off the smooth surface of the shining instruments.
‘The Master’s concentrating on Saturn today,’ said Wijkander after a while, pointing to the great telescope that thrust through the open roof panel like the stiff, damp feeler of a vast golden snail from out of the night sky.
None of the disciples contradicted him: they weren’t even surprised when they looked into the eyepiece and found his assertion confirmed.
‘It’s a complete mystery to me. How can anyone in this near-darkness possibly know what the instrument is pointed at, merely by looking at its position?’ said one, bemused.
‘How can you be so sure, Axel?’
‘I can just sense that the room is filled with the suffocating influence of Saturn, Dr Mohini. Believe me, telescopes really do suck at the stars like leeches, funnelling their rays, visible and invisible, down into the whirling focus of their lenses.
‘Whoever is prepared, as I have been for a long time now, to stay awake through the night, can learn to detect and to distinguish the fine and imperceptible breath of each star, to note its ebb and flow, and how it can silently insinuate itself into our brains, filling them with changeling intentions; will feel these treacherous forces wrestling in enmity with one another as they seek to command our ship of fortune … He will learn, too, to dream while awake, and to observe how at certain times of the night the soulless shades of dead planets come sliding into the realm of visibility, eager for life, exchanging mysterious confidences among themselves by means of strangely tentative gestures, instilling an uncertain and indefinable horror into our souls…
But do turn the lights on — we may easily upset the instruments on the tables in the dark like this, and the Master has never allowed things to get out of place.’
One of the companions found his way to the wall and felt for the switch, his fingertips brushing gently but audibly against the sides of the recess. Then suddenly it was light and the brassy yellow lustre of the telescopes and pendant metal shouted aloud across the emptiness.
The night sky, which until that moment had lain in yielding satin embrace with the window-panes, suddenly leaped away and hid its face far, far above in the icy wastes behind the stars.
‘There is the big, round flask, Doctor,’ said Wijkander, ‘which I spoke to you about yesterday, and which the Master has been using for his latest experiment. And these two metal terminals you see here on the wall supply the alternating current, or Hertz Waves, to envelop the flask in an electric field.
‘You promised us, Doctor, to maintain an absolute discretion about anything you might witness, and to give us the benefit of your wisdom and experience as a doctor in the mad-house, as far as you can.
‘Now, when the Master comes up he will suppose himself to be unobserved, and will begin those procedures which I hinted at but cannot explain in more detail. Do you really think that you will be able to remain unaffected by his actions and simply by means of silent observation of his overall behaviour be able to tell us whether madness is altogether out of the question?
‘On the other hand will you be able to suppress your scientific prejudices so far as to concede, if necessary, that here is a state of mind unknown to you, the condition of high intoxication known as a Turya Trance — something indeed that science has never seen, but which is certainly not madness?
‘Will you have the courage openly to admit that, Doctor? You see, it is only our love for the Master and our desire to protect him from harm that has persuaded us to take the grave step of bringing you here and obliging you to witness events that perhaps have never been seen by the eye of an uninitiate.’
Doctor Mohini considered. ‘I shall in all honesty do what I can, and be mindful of everything you told me and required of me yesterday, but when I think carefully about it all it puts my head in a spin — can there really be a whole branch of knowledge, a truly secret wisdom, which purports to have explored and conquered such an immeasurably vast field, yet of whose very existence we haven’t even heard?
‘You’re speaking there not just about magic, black and white, but making mention also of the secrets of a hidden green realm, and of the invisible inhabitants of a violet world!
‘You yourself, you say, are engaged in violet magic, — you say that you belong to an ancient fraternity that has preserved its secrets and arcana since the dawn of prehistory.
‘And you speak of the “soul” as of something proven! As if it is supposed to be some kind of fine substantive vortex, possessing a precise consciousness!
‘And not only that — your Master is supposed to have trapped such a soul in that glass jar there, by wrapping it round with your Hertzian oscillation?!
‘I can’t help it, but I find the whole thing, God knows, pure …’
Axel Wijkander pushed his chair impatiently aside and strode across to the great telescope, where he applied his eye peevishly to the lens.
‘But what more can we say, Dr Mohini?’ responded one of the friends at last, with some hesitation. ‘It is like that: the Master did keep a human soul isolated in the flask for a long time; he managed to strip off its constricting layers one at a time, like peeling the skins off an onion, so as to refine its powers, until one day it managed to seep through the glass past the electric field, and escaped!’
At that moment the speaker was interrupted by a loud exclamation, and they all looked up in surprise.
Wijkander gasped for breath: ‘A ring — a jagged ring, whitish, with holes in it — it’s unbelievable, unheard of!’ he cried, ‘A new ring of Saturn has appeared!’
One after another they looked in the glass with amazement.
Dr Mohini was not an astronomer, and knew neither how to interpret nor to assess the immense significance of such a phenomenon: the formation of a new ring around Saturn. He had scarcely begun to ask his questions when a heavy tread made itself heard ascending the spiral stair. ‘For Heaven’s sake, get to your places, — turn the light out, the Master’s coming!’ ordered Wijkander urgently. ‘And you, doctor, stay in that alcove, whatever happens, do you hear? If the Master sees you, it’s all up!’
A moment later the Observatory was once more dark and silent.
The steps came nearer and nearer, and a figure dressed in a white silk robe appeared and lit a tiny lamp. A bright little circle of light illuminated the table.
‘It breaks my heart,’ whispered Wijkander to his neighbour. ‘Poor, poor Master. See how his face is twisted with sorrow!’
The old man made his way to the telescope where, having applied his eye to the glass, he stood, gazing intently. After a long interval he withdrew and shuffled unsteadily back to the table like a broken man.
‘It’s getting bigger by the hour!’ he groaned, burying his face in his hands in his anguish. ‘And now it’s growing points: this is frightful!’
Thus he sat for what seemed an age, whilst his followers wept silently in their hiding-places.
Finally he roused himself, and with a movement of sudden decision got up and rolled the flask closer to the telescope. Beside it he placed three objects, whose precise nature it was impossible to define.
Then he kneeled stiffly in the middle of the room, and started to twist and turn, using his arms and torso, into all sorts of odd contorted shapes resembling geometrical figures and angles, while at the same time he started mumbling in a monotone, the most distinguishing feature of which was an occasional long-drawn-out wailing sound.
‘Almighty God, have pity on his soul — it’s the conjuration of Typhon,’ gasped Wijkander in a horrified whisper. ‘He’s trying to force the escaped soul back from outer space. If he fails, it’s suicide; come brothers, when I give the sign it’s time to act. And hold on tight to your hearts — even the proximity of Typhon will burst your heart-ventricles!’
The adept was still on his knees, immobile, while the sounds grew ever louder and more plaintive.
The little flame on the table grew dull and began to smoke, glimmering through the room like a burning eye, and it seemed as if its light as it flickered almost imperceptibly was taking on a greenish-violet hue.
The magician ceased his muttering; only the long wails continued at regular intervals, enough to freeze the very marrow of one’s bones. There was no other sound. Silence, fearful and portentous, like the gnawing anguish of death.
A change in the atmosphere became apparent, as if everything all round had collapsed into ashes, as if the whole room were hurtling downwards, but in an indefinable direction, ever deeper, down into the suffocating realm of the past.
Then suddenly there is an interruption: a sequence of slithery slapping sounds, as some invisible thing, dripping wet, patters muddily with short, quick steps across the room. Flat shapes of hands, shimmering with a violet glow, materialise on the floor, slipping uncertainly to and fro, searching for something, attempting to raise themselves out of their two-dimensional existence, to embody themselves, before flopping back, exhausted. Pale, shadowy beings, dreadful decerebrated remnants of the dead have detached themselves from the walls and slide about, mindless, purposeless, half conscious and with the stumbling, halting gait of idiotic cripples. They puff their cheeks out with manic, vacant grins — slowly, very slowly and furtively, as if trying to conceal some inexplicable but deadly purpose, or else they stare craftily into space before lunging forwards in a sudden movement, like snakes.
Bloated bodies come floating silently down from the ceiling and then uncoil and crawl away — these are the horrible white spider-forms that inhabit the spheres of suicides and which with mutilated cross-shapes spin the web of the past which grows unceasingly from hour to each succeeding hour.
An icy fear sweeps across the room — the intangible that lies beyond all thought and comprehension, the choking fear of death that has lost its root and origin and no longer rests on any cause, the formless mother of horror.
A dull thud echoes across the floor as Dr Mohini falls dead.
His face has been twisted round back to front; his mouth gapes wide open. Wijkander yells again: ‘Keep a tight hold on your hearts, Typhon is …’ as all at once a cacophony of events erupts.
The great flask shatters into a thousand misshapen shards, and the walls begin to glow with an eerie phosphorescent light. Around the edges of the skylights and in the window-niches an odd form of decomposition has set in, converting the hard stone into a bloated, spongy mass, like the flesh of bloodless, decayed and toothless gums, and licking across the walls and ceilings with the rapidity of a spreading flame.
The adept staggers to his feet, and in his confusion has seized a sacrificial knife, plunging it into his chest. His acolytes manage to stay his hand, but the damage is done: the deep wound gapes open and life trickles away — they cannot close it up again.
The brilliance of the electric lights has once again taken possession of the circular compass of the Observatory: the spiders, the shadows and the corruption have vanished.
But the flask remains in shattered pieces, there are obvious scorch marks on the floor, and the Master still lies bleeding to death on a mat. They have sought in vain for the knife. Beneath the telescope, limbs contorted, lies the body of Mohini, chest down. His face, twisted upwards, grins grotesquely at the roof reflecting all the horror of death.
The disciples gather round the spot where the Master rests. He gently brushes aside their pleas to stay quiet: ‘Let me speak, and do not grieve. No one can save me now, and my soul longs to complete that which was impossible while it was trapped in my corporeal state.
‘Did you not see how the breath of corruption has touched this building? Another instant, and it would have become substance, as a fog solidifies into hoar-frost, and the whole Observatory and everything in it would have turned to mould and dust.
‘Those burns there on the floor were caused by the denizens of the abyss, swollen with hate, desperately trying to reach my soul. And just as these marks you can see are burned into the wood and stone, their other actions would have become visible and permanent if you had not intervened so bravely.
‘For everything on earth that is, as the fools would have it, “permanent”, was once no more than mere shadow — a ghost, visible or invisible, and is now still nothing more than a solidified ghost.
‘For that reason, everything, be it beautiful or ugly, sublime, good or evil, serene though with death in its heart or alternatively, sad though harbouring secret happiness — all these things have something spectral about them.
‘It may be only a few who have the gift of detecting the ghostly quality of the world: it is there nevertheless, eternal and unchanging.
‘Now, it is a basic doctrine of our brotherhood that we should try to scale the precipitous cliffs of life in order to reach that pinnacle where the Great Magician stands with all his mirrors, conjuring up the whole world below out of deceptive reflections.
‘See, I have wrestled to achieve ultimate wisdom; I have sought out some human existence or other, to kill it in order to examine its soul. I wished to sacrifice some truly useless individual, so I went about among the people, men and women, thinking that such a one would be simple to find.
‘With the joyous expectation of certainty I visited lawyers, doctors, soldiers — I nearly found one in the ranks of schoolteachers — so very nearly!
‘But it was always only nearly — there was always some little mark, some tiny secret sign on them, which forced me to loosen my grip.
‘Then came a moment when at last I found what I was looking for. But it was not an individual: it was a whole group.
‘It was like uncovering an army of woodlice, sheltering underneath an old pot in the cellar.
‘Clergywives!
‘The very thing!
‘I spied on a whole gaggle of clergywives, watching them as they busied themselves at their “good works”, holding meetings in support of “education for the benighted classes” or knitting horrible warm stockings and protestant cotton gloves to aid the modesty of poor little piccaninnies, who might otherwise enjoy their God-given nakedness. And then just think how they pester us with their exhortations to save bottle-tops, old corks, paper, bent nails and that sort of rubbish — waste not, want not!
‘And then when I saw that they were about to hatch out new schemes for yet more missionary societies, and to water down the mysteries of the scriptures with the scourings of their “moral” sewage, the cup of my fury ran over at last.
‘One of them, a real flax-blonde “German” thing — in fact a genuine outgrowth of the rural Slavonic underbrush — was all ready for the chop when I realised that she was — “great with child” — and Moses’ old law obliged me to desist.
‘I caught another one — ten more — a hundred — and every one of them was in the same interesting condition!
‘So then I put myself on the alert day and night, always ready to pounce, and at last I managed to lay my hands on one just at the right moment as she was coming out of the maternity ward.
‘A real silky Saxon pussy that was, with great big blue goose-eyes.
‘I kept her locked up for another nine months, to be on the safe side, just in case there was anything more to come in the way of parthenogenesis or perhaps budding, such as you get with deep-sea molluscs for instance.
‘In those moments of her captivity when I was not directly watching her she wrote a great thick book: Fond Thoughts for our German Daughters on the Occasion of their Reception into Adulthood. But I managed to intercept it in time and incinerate it in the oxy-hydrogen compressor.
‘I had at last succeeded in separating soul from body, and secured it in the flask, but my suspicions were aroused one day when I noticed an odd smell of goat’s milk, and before I was able to readjust the Hertz Oscillator which had obviously stopped working for a few moments, the catastrophe had occurred and my anima pastoris had irrevocably escaped.
‘I had immediate resort to the most powerful means of luring it back: I hung a pair of pink flannel knickers (Llama Brand) out on the window-sill, alongside an ivory backscratcher and a volume of poetry bound in cyanide-blue and embellished on the cover with golden knobs, but it was all in vain!
‘I had recourse to the laws of occult telenergy — again it was to no avail!
‘A distilled soul is hardly likely to allow itself to get caught! And now it’s floating freely about in space, teaching the innocent souls of other planets the infernal secrets of female handicrafts: I found today that it had even managed to crochet a new ring round Saturn.
‘That really was the last straw. I thought things through, and cudgelled my brain for a solution until I came up with two possibilities: either to use deliberate provocation, as in the case of Scylla, or to act in an opposite sense, like Charybdis.
‘You are familiar with that brilliant statement by the great Johannes Müller: “When the retina of the eye is stimulated by light, pressure, heat, electricity or any other irritation, the corresponding sensations are not specifically those of light, pressure, heat, electricity etc., but merely sensations of sight; and when the skin is illuminated, pressed, bombarded with sound or electrified, only feeling and its concomitants are generated.” This irrefutable law holds here too — for if you apply a stimulus to the clergywife’s essential nucleus, no matter by what means, it will start crocheting; if however it is left undisturbed’ — and here the Master’s tones grew faint and hollow — ‘it merely reproduces.’
And with these words he sank back, lifeless.
Axel Wijkander clasped his hands together, deeply moved. ‘Let us pray, brothers. He has passed on, on to the tranquil realm. May his soul rest in peace and joy for ever!’