Lotte abruptly pulled back the heavy curtain. Herr Huhnebein was there, leaning out the open window, motionless.
Lotte went over to him, then leapt back with a cry of horror.
"Don"t look! For the love of heaven, don"t look! He...he...his head is gone!"
I saw Frida stagger, ready to faint. Meta"s voice called us back to reason: "Be careful! There"s danger here!"
We pressed up close to her, feeling protected by her presence of mind. Suddenly something blinked on the ceiling, and we saw with alarm that darkness had invaded two opposite corners of the room, where the lights had just been extinguished.
"Hurry, protect the lights!" panted Meta. "Oh!...There!...There he is!"
At that moment the white moons on the mantelpiece burst, spat out streaks of smoky flame, and vanished.
Meta stood motionless, but she looked all around the room with a cold rage that I had never seen in her before.
The candles on the table were blown out. Only the little chandelier continued to shed its calm light. I saw that Meta was keeping her eyes on it. Suddenly her rapier flashed and she lunged forward into empty s.p.a.ce.
"Protect the light!" she cried. "I see him! I"ve got him!...Ah!..."
We saw the rapier make strange, violent movements in her hand, as though an invisible force were trying to take it away from her.
It was Frida who had the odd but fortunate inspiration that saved us that evening. She uttered a fierce cry, picked up one of the heavy copper candlesticks, leapt to Meta"s side, and began striking the air with her gleaming club. The rapier stopped moving; something very light seemed to brush against the floor, then the door opened by itself, and a heartrending clamor arose.
"That takes care of one of them," said Meta.
One might wonder why we stubbornly went on living in that murderously haunted house.
At least a hundred other houses were in the same situation. People had stopped counting the murders and disappearances, and had become almost indifferent to them. The town was gloomy. There were dozens of suicides, for some people preferred to die by their own hands rather than be killed by the phantom executioners. And then, too, Meta wanted to take vengeance. She was now waiting for the invisible beings to return.
She had relapsed into her grim silence; she spoke to us only to order us to lock the doors and shutters at nightfall. As soon as darkness fell, the four of us went into the living room, which was now a dormitory and dining room as well. We did not leave it until morning.
I questioned Frida about her strange armed intervention. She was able to give me only a confused answer.
"I don"t know," she said. "It seemed to me I saw something....A face....I don"t know how to say what it was....Yes, it was the great fear that was in my room the first night."
That was all I could get out of her.
One evening toward the middle of April, Lotte and Frida were lingering in the kitchen. Meta opened the living-room door and told them to hurry. I saw that the shadows of night had already invaded the landings and the hall. "We"re coming," they replied in unison.
Meta came back into the living room and closed the door. She was horribly pale. No sound came from downstairs. I waited vainly to hear the footsteps of the two women. The silence was like a threatening flood rising on the other side of the wall.
Meta locked the door.
"What are you doing?" I asked. "What about Lotte and Frida?"
"It"s no use," she said dully.
Her eyes, motionless and terrible, stared at the rapier. The sinister darkness arrived.
It was thus that Lotte and Frida vanished into mystery.
Dear G.o.d, what was it? There was a presence in the house, a suffering, wounded presence that was seeking help. I did not know whether Meta was aware of it or not. She was more taciturn than ever, but she barricaded the doors and windows in a way that seemed designed more to prevent an escape than an intrusion. My life had become a fearful solitude. Meta herself was like a sneering specter.
During the day, I sometimes came upon her unexpectedly in one of the halls; in one hand she held the rapier, and in the other she held a powerful lantern with a reflector and a lens that she shone into all the dark corners.
During one of these encounters, she told me rather impolitely that I had better go back to the living room, and when I obeyed her too slowly she shouted furiously at me that I must never interfere with her plans.
Her face no longer had the placid look it had worn as she leaned over her embroidery only a few days before. It was now a savage face, and she sometimes glared at me with a flame of hatred in her eyes. For I had a secret....
Was it curiosity, perversity, or pity that made me act as I did? I pray to G.o.d that I was moved by nothing more than pity and kindness.
I had just drawn some fresh water from the fountain in the wash-house when I heard a m.u.f.fled moan: "Moh....Moh...."
I thought of our vanished friends and looked around me. I saw a well-concealed door that led into a storeroom in which poor Huhnebein had kept stacks of books and paintings, amid dust and cobwebs.
"Moh....Moh...."
It was coming from inside the storeroom. I opened the door and looked into the gray semidarkness. Everything seemed normal. The lamentation had stopped. I stepped inside. Suddenly I felt something seize my dress. I cried out. I immediately heard the moaning very close to me, plaintive, supplicating, and something tapped on my pitcher.
I put it down. There was a slight splashing sound, like that of a dog lapping, and the level of the water in my pitcher began to sink. The thing, the being, was drinking!
"Moh!...Moh!..."
Something caressed my hair more softly than a breath.
"Moh....Moh...."
Then the moaning changed to a sound of human weeping, almost like the sobbing of a child, and I felt pity for the suffering invisible monster. But there were footsteps in the hall; I put my hands over my lips and the being fell silent.
Without a sound, I closed the door of the secret storeroom. Meta was coming toward me in the hall.
"Did I hear your voice just now?" she asked.
"Yes. My foot slipped and I was startled...."
I was an accomplice of the phantoms.
I brought milk, wine, and apples. Nothing manifested itself. When I returned, the milk had been drunk to the last drop, but the wine and the apples were intact. Then a kind of breeze surrounded me and pa.s.sed over my hair for a long time....
I went back, bringing more fresh milk. The soft voice was no longer weeping, but the caress of the breeze was longer and seemed to be more ardent.
Meta began looking at me suspiciously and prowling around the storeroom.
I found a safer refuge for my mysterious protege. I explained it to him by signs. How strange it was to make gestures to empty s.p.a.ce! But he understood me. He was following me along the hall like a breath of air when I suddenly had to hide in a corner.
A pale light slid across the floor. I saw Meta coming down the spiral staircase at the end of the hall. She was walking quietly, partially hiding the glow of her lantern. The rapier glittered. I sensed that the being beside me was afraid. The breeze stirred around me, feverishly, abruptly, and I heard that plaintive "Moh!...Moh!..."
Meta"s footsteps faded away in the distance. I made a rea.s.suring gesture and went to the new refuge: a large closet that was never opened.
The breeze touched my lips and remained there a moment. I felt a strange shame.
May came.
The twenty square feet of the miniature garden, which poor, dear Huhnebein had spattered with his blood, were dotted with little white flowers.
Under a magnificent blue sky, the town was almost silent. The cries of the swallows were answered only by the peevish sounds of closing doors, sliding bolts, and turning keys.
The being had become imprudent. He sought me out. All at once I would feel him around me. I cannot describe the feeling; it was like a great tenderness surrounding me. I would make him understand that I was afraid of Meta, and then I would feel him vanish like a dying wind.
I could not bear the look in Meta"s fiery eyes.
On May 4, the end came abruptly.
We were in the living room, with all the lamps lighted. I was closing the shutters. Suddenly I sensed his presence. I made a desperate gesture, turned around, and met Meta"s terrible gaze in a mirror.
"Traitress!" she cried.
She quickly closed the door. He was imprisoned with us.
"I knew it!" she said vehemently. "I"ve seen you carrying pitchers of milk, daughter of the devil! You gave him strength when he was dying from the wound I gave him on the night of Huhnebein"s death. Yes, your phantom is vulnerable! He"s going to die now, and I think that dying is much more horrible for him than it is for us. Then your turn will come, you wretch! Do you hear me?"
She had shrieked this in short phrases. She uncovered her lantern. A beam of white light shot across the room, and I saw it strike something like thin, gray smoke. She plunged her rapier into it.
"Moh!...Moh!..." cried the heartrending voice, and then suddenly, awkwardly, but in a loving tone, my name was spoken. I leapt forward and knocked over the lantern with my fist. It went out.
"Meta, listen to me," I begged, "have pity...."
Her face was contorted into a mask of demoniac fury.
"Traitress!" she screamed.
The rapier flashed before my eyes. It struck me below the left breast and I fell to my knees.
Someone was weeping violently beside me, strangely beseeching Meta. She raised her rapier again. I tried to find the words of supreme contrition that reconcile us with G.o.d forever, but then I saw Meta"s face freeze and the sword fell from her hand.
Something murmured near us. I saw a thin flame stretch out like a ribbon and greedily attack the curtains.
"We"re burning!" cried Meta. "All of us together!"
At that moment, when everything was about to sink into death, the door opened. An immensely tall old woman came in. I saw only her terrible green eyes glowing in her unimaginable face.
A flame licked my left hand. I stepped back as much as my strength allowed. I saw Meta still standing motionless with a strange grimace on her face, and I realized that her soul, too, had flown away. Then the monstrous old woman"s eyes, without pupils, slowly looked around the flame-filled room and came to rest on me.
I am writing this in a strange little house. Where am I? Alone. And yet all this is full of tumult, an invisible but unrestrained presence is everywhere. He has come back. I have again heard my name spoken in that awkward, gentle way....
Here ends the German ma.n.u.script, as though cut off with a knife.
The French Ma.n.u.script The town"s oldest coachman was pointed out to me in the smoky inn where he was drinking heady, fragrant October beer.
I bought him a drink and gave him some tobacco. He swore I was a prince. I pointed to his droshky outside the inn and said, "And now, take me to Saint Beregonne"s Lane."
He gave me a bewildered look, then laughed.
"Ah, you"re very clever!"
"Why?"
"You"re testing me. I know every street in this town I can almost say I know every paving-stone! There"s no Saint Bere....What did you say?"
"Beregonne. Are you sure? Isn"t it near the Mohlenstra.s.se?"
"No," he said decisively. "There"s no such street here, no more than Mount Vesuvius is in Saint Petersburg."
No one knew the town, in all its twisting byways, better than that splendid beer-drinker.
A student sitting at a nearby table looked up from the love letter he had been writing and said to me, "There"s no saint by that name, either."
And the innkeeper"s wife added, with a touch of anger, "You can"t manufacture saints like sausages!"
I calmed everyone with wine and beer. There was great joy in my heart.
The policeman who paced up and down the Mohlenstra.s.se from dawn till dark had a face like a bulldog, but he was obviously a man who knew his job.
"No," he said slowly, coming back from a long journey among his thoughts and memories, "there"s no such street here or anywhere else in town."
Over his shoulder I saw the beginning of Saint Beregonne"s Lane, between the Klingbom distillery and the shop of an anonymous seed merchant.
I had to turn away with impolite abruptness in order not to show my elation. Saint Beregonne"s Lane did not exist for the coachman, the student, the policeman, or anyone else: it existed only for me!
How did I make that amazing discovery? By an almost scientific observation, as some of my pompous fellow-teachers would have said. My colleague Seifert, who taught natural science by bursting balloons filled with strange gases in his pupils" faces, would not have been able to find any fault with my procedure.
When I walked along the Mohlenstra.s.se, it took me two or three seconds to cover the distance between the distillery and the seed merchant"s shop. I noticed, however, that when other people pa.s.sed by the same place they went immediately from the distillery to the shop, without visibly crossing the entrance of Saint Beregonne"s Lane.
By adroitly questioning various people, and by consulting the town"s cadastral map, I learned that only a wall separated the distillery from the shop.
I concluded that, for everyone in the world except myself, that street existed outside of time and s.p.a.ce.
I knew that mysterious street for several years without ever venturing into it, and I think that even a more courageous man would have hesitated. What laws governed that unknown s.p.a.ce? Once it had drawn me into its mystery, would it ever return me to my own world?
I finally invented various reasons to convince myself that that world was inhospitable to human beings, and my curiosity surrendered to my fear. And yet what I could see of that opening into the incomprehensible was so ordinary, so commonplace! I must admit, however, that the view was cut off after ten paces by a sharp bend in the street. All I could see was two high, badly whitewashed walls with the name of the street painted on one of them in black letters, and a stretch of worn, greenish pavement with a gap in which a viburnum bush was growing. That sickly bush seemed to live in accordance with our seasons, for I sometimes saw a little tender green and a few lumps of snow among its twigs.
I might have made some curious observations concerning the insertion of that slice of an alien cosmos into ours, but to do so I would have had to spend a considerable amount of time standing on the Mohlenstra.s.se; and Klingbom, who often saw me staring at some of his windows, became suspicious of his wife and gave me hostile looks.
I wondered why, of all the people in the world, I was the only one to whom that strange privilege had been given. This led me to think of my maternal grandmother. She was a tall, somber woman, and her big green eyes seemed to be following the happenings of another life on the wall in front of her.
Her background was obscure. My grandfather, a sailor, was supposed to have rescued her from some Algerian pirates. She sometimes stroked my hair with her long, white hands and murmured, "Maybe he...Why not? After all..." She repeated it on the night of her death, and while the pale fire of her gaze wandered among the shadows she added, "Maybe he"ll go where I wasn"t able to return...."
A black storm was blowing that night. Just after my grandmother died, while the candles were being lit, a big stormy petrel shattered the window and lay dying, b.l.o.o.d.y and threatening, on her bed.