The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  Every morning when he wakes up Leonhard resolves to break out of the torture chamber of this memory. He recalls his father’s advice to find a fixed point within himself, then his eye falls on Sabina, he sees how, desperately trying to smile, she only manages to twist her lips in a contorted grimace, and once again he sets off on a headlong dash to escape from himself.

  He decides to change his surroundings and sends all the servants away, keeping just the old gardener and his wife. The only effect is to make his solitude with its lurking menace even more profound, the ghost of the past even more alive. It is not a guilty conscience for the murder that is plaguing Leonhard. Not for one second does he feel any remorse, his hatred of his mother is as intense as the day his father died. What is driving him to the edge of madness is her invisible presence as a formless spectre he cannot exorcise standing between him and Sabina. All the time he feels her horrible eyes fixed on him, he cannot rid himself of the scene in the chapel, which is like an ulcer festering inside him.

  He does not believe the dead reappear on earth, but that they can live on in much more terrifying form, without visible shape, as a malign influence which neither lock nor key, curse nor prayer can keep out, that is something he learns from his own experience, something he can see every day in Sabina’s behaviour. Every object in the house awakens the memory of his mother, there is nothing that has not been infected by her touch, that does not hourly summon up her image in his mind. The folds in the curtains, a pile of crumpled washing, the grain in the panelling, the lines and spots on the tiles, everything he looks at resolves into her face. His similarity to her leaps out at him like a viper from the mirror, making his heartbeat run cold for fear that the impossible might happen, that his face might might suddenly turn into hers, a gruesome legacy that will remain with him to the end of his days.

  The air is filled with her stifling, ghostly presence, the creak of the floorboards sounds as if it comes from her footsteps. Neither heat nor cold drives her away; whether it is autumn, a cold, clear winter’s day or a mild, sickly spring breeze, it only touches the surface. No season, no outward change affects her, she is constantly striving to take form, to become more clearly visible, to assume permanent shape. The secret conviction that one day she will succeed, even if he cannot imagine how it can happen, is like a huge boulder pinning him down.

  Help, he realises, can only come from his own heart, for the outside world is in league with her. But the seed planted in him by his father seems to have withered and died. The brief moments of relief, of peace he felt then, refuse to return, however hard he tries to revive them. The most he can do is evoke the superficial impressions, which are like artificial flowers, lacking scent and with ugly wire stalks. He tries to breathe life into them by reading the books which form the spiritual bond between himself and his father, but they remain a labyrinth of abstractions which set off no vibrations inside him.

  Strange things turn up as he delves into the jumble of tomes with the ancient gardener. Parchments covered in symbols, pictures of a goat with a man’s face, devil’s horns at the temples and a golden beard, knights in white cloaks, their hands folded in prayer and crosses on their breast that are not formed from an upright and a horizontal bar, but from four running legs, bent at the knees, the satanic cross of the Templars, as the gardener reluctantly tells him, then a small, faded portrait, his grandmother, to go by the name embroidered underneath in coloured glass beads, with two children, a boy and a girl, sitting on her lap. Their features seem strangely familiar. For a long time he cannot tear his eyes from them and a dark suspicion surfaces in his mind: these must be his parents, even though they are clearly brother and sister. The sudden unease in the old man’s expression, the way he avoids his eye and obstinately ignores all his questions about the two children only serve to strengthen his suspicion that he is on the track of a secret that concerns him.

  A bundle of yellowing letters appears to belong with the picture since they are in the same casket. Leonhard takes them, resolved to read them that very day.

  It is the first night for a long time that he has spent without Sabina. She feels too weak to sleep with him, says she is in pain.

  He walks up and down in the room where his father died. The letters are on the table. He keeps going to read them then puts it off, as if under some kind of compulsion.

  A new, indistinct fear announces itself. It is as if someone were standing behind him with a drawn dagger, throttling him. He knows that this time it is not his mother’s ghostly presence that makes him break out in a cold sweat, it is shadows from a distant past that are bound to the letters and are waiting to drag him down into their realm.

  He goes over to the window, looks out: all around a breathless, deathly hush. There are two bright stars close together in the southern sky. They seem strangely alien, the sight troubles him, though he cannot quite say why, arousing a foreboding of some cataclysmic event. They are like shining fingertips pointing at him.

  He turns back to the room. The flames of the two candles on the table are waiting for him, motionless, like two ominous messengers from the world beyond. It is as if their light comes from a long way away, from a place where no mortal hand can have placed them. Imperceptibly the hour draws nigh. Softly, like ash falling, the hands move round the clock.

  Was that a cry downstairs in the castle? Leonhard listens. Everything is quiet.

  He reads the letters. His father’s life unrolls before him, the struggle of a free spirit who rebels against everything that goes by the name of law. He sees a towering Titan bearing no resemblance at all to the dotard he knew as his father, a man who will stick at nothing, a man who openly proclaims that, like his ancestors, he is a knight of the true Order of Templars, who glorify Satan as the creator of the world and for whom the very word ‘grace’ is an indelible stain on their honour. Intermingled with the letters are pages from his diary describing the torment of a parched soul, the impotence of a spirit with wings worn ragged by the cares of the everyday world: he is on a road that leads down, from abyss to abyss, into darkness and madness, a road on which there is no turning back.

  A thread running through everything is the repeated indication that the whole family has been driven for centuries from one crime to the next. It is a grim legacy, passed on from father to son, that a woman, be it wife, mother or daughter, will always appear, as victim or perpetrator of bloody murder, to frustrate their search for spiritual peace. And yet even in the deepest despair hope ever shines anew, like an inextinguishable star, that one day a scion of their line will come who will not bow before the curse, but will end it and win the crown of ‘Master’.

  Pulse racing, Leonhard devours episodes blazing with his father’s passion for his own sister, episodes which reveal that he is the fruit of this union, and not only he, but Sabina as well. Now it is clear why Sabina does not know who her parents are, why there is nothing to reveal her origin. The past comes alive, and he sees his father trying to protect him by having Sabina brought up as a peasant girl, a serf of the lowest rank, so that both of them, son and daughter, will remain unaware of the stigma of incest, even if the curse on their parents should return and bring them together as man and wife.

  This desire informs every terror-haunted word in one letter from his father, ill in a foreign city, to their mother. He implores her to do everything possible to prevent the children discovering the dark secret, including burning his letter immediately.

  Leonhard is devastated. He tears his eyes away from the letters, but they are like a magnet, drawing him back to read on. He knows they will contain things that are exact parallels to what happened in the chapel, things that will drive him to the outer edge of horror if he reads them. With sudden insight, like lightning rending the darkness, he sees the cunning strategy of a gigantic demonic power which, concealed behind the mask of blind, impassive fate, is systematically trying to crush the life out of him. One poisoned arrow after another is being aimed at his soul so that he will wa
ste away until the last threads of confidence wither and he falls prey to the same destiny as his forefathers in a helpless, impotent collapse.

  Suddenly, like a tiger, resistance asserts itself and he holds the letter in the flame of the candle until the last glowing fragments scorch his fingers. A wild, implacable fury at the satanic monster that has the weal and woe of mankind in its grasp burns him to the very marrow. His ears ring with the cry for vengeance from a thousand throats, from all the past generations that fell into the clutches of fate and came to a wretched end. His every nerve is a clenched fist, his soul a bristling arsenal of weapons.

  He feels he must perform some unheard-of deed, something to shake heaven and earth to their foundations. Behind him is the numberless army of the dead, their myriad eyes fixed on him, just waiting for a sign to follow him, the living man, the only one who can lead them into battle and fall upon their common enemy.

  Staggering under the impact of a wave of power that pours over him, he looks round. What should he do first? Set the house on fire, tear himself limb from limb, or charge down, knife in hand, and slay everyone he comes across?

  Each ‘deed’ seems more petty than the other. His sense of his own puniness threatens to crush him, he fights against it in an upsurge of youthful defiance and feels a mocking grin suffuse the space around which only serves to goad him to further action.

  He tries a calm approach, forcing himself into the attitude of a general weighing every factor. He goes to the chest outside his bedroom, fills his pockets with gold and jewels, takes his coat and hat and strides out proudly, without any farewells, into the misty night, his mind awash with confused, childish plans of wandering aimlessly round the world and confronting the lord of destiny.

  The castle disappears behind him in the milky haze. He would like to avoid the chapel, but has to go past it. He can feel the generations of the bloodline trying to stop him escaping their influence and forces himself to walk straight ahead, hour after hour. But the spectres of memory keep step with him. There! And there! Dark thickets yawn like the murderous trapdoor.

  He is tormented by concern for Sabina. He knows this is the earthward pull of his mother’s curse-laden blood in his veins trying to curb his soaring flight, trying to smother the youthful fire of his enthusiasm with the grey ashes of mundane reality. He resists with all his might, feeling his way forward from tree to tree until he sees a light in the distance, hovering above the ground at head-height. He hurries towards it, loses sight of it, sees it flashing in the mist, nearer and nearer, flitting to and fro, now here, now there. A path guides his feet, twisting and turning.

  Soft, mysterious cries, barely audible, quiver in the darkness. Then the massive bulk of high, black walls with an open door rise up. Leonhard recognises his own home.

  He has walked through the night in a circle.

  Defeated and resigned to his fate, he goes in. As his hand touches the latch of the door to Sabina’s room he feels an icy shock, an inexplicable, deadly certainty that his mother, flesh and bone, a corpse come back to life, is in there waiting for him.

  He tries to turn away and flee back into the darkness. He cannot. An irresistible force is compelling him to open the door.

  Sabina is lying on the bed, eyes closed, white as the sheets, a bloodless corpse. Beside her, naked, lies a newborn child, a girl with a crumpled face, a vacant, restless stare and a red mark on her forehead: in every feature the grisly image of the murdered countess in the chapel.

  Leonhard sees a figure rushing across the face of the earth, its clothes ripped to shreds by thorns. It is himself, driven from house and home by a horror past bearing, the mailed fist of fate, no longer deluding himself with the vision of great deeds.

  The hand of time builds up city after city in his mind – bright, gloomy, large, small, brazen, timid cities at random – only to crush them; it paints rivers like shining, silvery snakes, grey wastes, a merry patchwork of fields and pasture in brown, purple and green, dusty country roads, sharp-pointed poplars, hazy meadows, cattle grazing, dogs wagging their tails, roadside crucifixes, people young and old, showers of rain, the glitter of drops, the gold gleam of frog’s eyes in ditches, horseshoes with rusty nails, storks on one leg, fence posts with splintering bark, yellow flowers, graveyards and cotton-wool clouds, misty peaks and blazing smithies. They come and go like night and day, sink into oblivion then reappear like children playing hide and seek when a scent, a sound, a quiet word calls them back.

  A procession of countries, castles and mansions passes Leonhard and takes him in. His name is known, he meets with friendship and with hostility. He talks to the people in the villages, to tramps, scholars, shopkeepers, soldiers, priests, and inside him the blood of his mother is in constant struggle with the blood of his father. What one day fills him with awestruck musings, gleaming in vivid colour, like a peacock’s tail made of a thousand shards of glass, the next seems dull and grey. It all depends whether his mother or father is dominant.

  Then come the dreaded long hours when the two streams mingle and he is back in his old self, giving birth to remembered horrors, and he plods on blindly, step by step, in mute silence, the space between eye and lid filled with images: the baby with an old woman’s face, the ominous, lifeless candle flames, the two stars close together in the sky, the letter, the sullen castle and its life-sapping torments, Sabina’s corpse with its snow-white hands. In his ear he hears the babble of his dying father, the rustle of the silk dress, the crack of a skull bursting open.

  Now and then he feels a sudden spasm of fear that he is going round in a circle again. Every wood appearing in the distance threatens to turn into the familiar park, every wall into the castle, the faces of people coming towards him look more and more like the maids and servants of his youth. He takes refuge in churches, sleeps out in the open, joins wailing processions, gets drunk in taverns with rogues and whores in order to hide from the sharp eye of fate, lest it to catch him again. He decides to become a monk. The abbot of the monastery is horrified when he hears his confession and learns he bears the name of a family still under the anathema pronounced on the old Knights Templar. He plunges into the maelstrom of life; it spews him back out. He goes in search of the devil. Evil is everywhere, yet its author nowhere to be found. He looks for him within his own self, and that self has disappeared. He knows it must be there, he can feel it with every second, and yet the moment he looks for it, it is gone, every day it is different, a rainbow that touches the earth but constantly recedes, dissolves, when you try to grasp it.

  Wherever he looks, he sees the Cross of Satan formed from four running legs hidden behind everything, everywhere the same pointless procreation, the same pointless growing and dying, a wheel, eternally spinning in the wind, which he equates with the womb from which suffering springs, only the axis on which it turns remains, as intangible as a mathematical point.

  He meets a monk from a mendicant order, travels with him, prays, fasts, castigates himself as he does. The years slip by like the beads of a rosary, nothing changes, not inwardly, not outwardly, only the sun grows dimmer. As always, every last thing is taken from the poor while the rich are rewarded twice over. The more fervently he begs for ‘bread’, the harder the stones the world gives him. The heavens remain as hard as steel. His old boundless hatred of the secret enemy of mankind that decrees our destinies breaks out again.

  He listens to the monk preaching about justice and the torments of the damned in hell. To Leonhard it sounds like the crowing of the devil. He hears him rail against the wickedness of the Order of Templars which, though burnt at the stake a thousand times, keeps on raising its head, refuses to die, and lives on, ineradicable, secretly spread over the whole world. It is the first time he has learnt anything precise about the beliefs of the Templars: that they have two gods, one up above, far from mankind, and one down below, Satan, who hourly creates the world anew and fills it with abominations that grow more loathsome every day until it suffocates in its own blood; and th
at there is a third god above these two, the Baphomet, an idol with a golden head and three faces.

  The words burn into his soul, as if they had been spoken by tongues of fire. He cannot penetrate the depths they cover like a quivering carpet of swamp-moss, but there is not the slightest doubt in his mind that this is the only path by which he can escape from himself. The Order of Knights Templar is reaching out for him, the legacy of his forefathers which no man can deny.

  He leaves the monk.

  Once more the dead are thronging round, calling out a name until his lips repeat it and he, gradually, syllable by syllable, as if it were a tree growing, branch by branch, up from his heart, comes to understand it as his mouth speaks it, a name, completely unknown to him and yet inextricably bound up with his whole existence, a name bearing the purple and a crown, a name he feels compelled to whisper to himself and cannot clear from his mind as it is beaten out by the rhythm of his feet hitting the ground: Ja-cob-de-Vi-tri-a-co.

  Little by little the name becomes a spectral guide leading him onward, now as a legendary Grand Master of the Knights of the Temple, now as a disembodied inner voice.

  Just as a stone thrown into the air changes its trajectory and plummets to the earth with increasing speed, so the name is associated for Leonhard with a change in the direction of his desires as his whole being is gradually consumed with an inexplicable, overpowering urge to find the man who bears it.

  Sometimes he could swear the name was new to him, at others he has a clear memory of having seen it mentioned on a specific page of one of his father’s books as the head of an order of knighthood. He tries to tell himself there is no point in looking for this Grand Master Jacob de Vitriaco, that he lived in another century, that his bones have long since turned to dust, but in vain. Reason no longer has the power to control his thirst for the search, the cross with the four running legs is rolling in front of him, invisible, pulling him along behind.