The World Above The World

by Brian Stableford

  If Franz had not known for a long time that Master Wolfram only devoted a few hours of the night to sleep, the flickering light that escaped through the two casements on the first floor of the house, and which designed peculiar shadows on the black façade opposite, would have told him that the old man was not yet asleep.

  Baron von Heberghem lifted the iron door-knocker, whose sound reverberated in the silence of the night.

  Slow and heavy footsteps son became audible on the steps of the stone staircase in the scientist’s house, and the door opened.

  “Why, it’s you, dear child!” said the old man, utterly astonished, lifting up the lantern he held in his hand to the height of his nocturnal visitor’s face.

  “Myself, Master,” Franz replied. “I have need of all your science.”

  “Come upstairs, then; all my science, as you are pleased to call it, is always at the service of my old friend’s son.”

  “I feared that I might find you asleep.”

  “Oh, I sleep very little, my dear Franz; I count the hours, and I no longer have the time to waste a single one. Octavius was two years younger than me; his death reminded me that I need to make haste if I want to finish the work I’ve undertaken.”

  Master Wolfram was an old man of about 80, still robust although somewhat bowed down, whose profound wrinkles testified to an entire life of hard work. His little eyes, dark grey in color, shone in the midst of the numerous creases that surrounded them. Their gaze was direct, as penetrating as that of just men used to reading through the mask of the face to the depths of consciousness. His nose, severe in shape, had not been deformed by age and added, by virtue of its stark line, to the austerity of his expressive physiognomy—an austerity softened by a slightly large mouth, whose strong, smiling lips, often slightly parted, indicated the old man’s generosity. Master Wolfram had devoted himself to study with love, but, as an honest man and a good citizen, without forsaking all his social duties on that account, without forgetting what he owed to himself and to others. The ambition to be useful, and not pride, had directed all his research. He was clad in a long brown robe that marked, along with his white hair, all the concern that the old man had for himself. He was, in a word, the personification of that travail in which there is a most admirable and most holy love of humankind.

  Franz closed the door to the street and followed the scientist up to the first floor and into his study, a vast room cluttered with books, through which, not without difficulty, one picked a path in order to draw near the table on which he was writing.

  A good fire was blazing in the hearth, but, in spite of its benevolent warmth, a cold and heavy atmosphere reigned in the room, vitiated by the miasmas escaping from all those old books, consulted every day. Only a scientist, by courtesy of his estate, could spend long hours there without danger.

  But Franz had better things to do than wonder whether one respired an air exclusively composed of oxygen and nitrogen in Master Wolfram’s home. As soon as he had entered, he had thrown off his coat and some to lean on the table, beside which his grandfather’s old friend had reinstalled himself in his large leather armchair.

  “Well, what is it, my son?” the old man asked, fixing is intelligent and benevolent gaze on Franz. “How do you come to be running through the streets in weather like this instead of being wrapped up warmly in your bed? How can I be of use to you?”

  “Well, Master,” the young man hastened to reply, handing his book to Wolfram, “by telling me what this is.”

  “Eh? My dear child, have you forgotten your time at university to the extent of no longer being able to read Erasmus?” The scientist had taken and opened the Colloquia. “An admirable edition,” he added. “Very rare. Did you buy it at the sale of my learned friend Octavius’ effects?”

  “I didn’t buy it,” Franz replied. And he told the story of how the Erasmus had come into his hands, and the strange sensations he had experienced since it had been in his possession. Then, without paying any heed to his old friend’s incredulous smile, he took the book from his hands, closed it, placed the cover before his eyes and showed him the mysterious characters.

  “It’s not Erasmus that interests me,” he said, “it’s this. On presenting this book, not by chance—for nothing happens by chance, in my opinion—to a flame, these characters you see appeared there. What do they mean? To what language do they belong?”

  “Strange, in truth!” Master Wolfram replied, after a moment’s silence. With a magnifying glass in his hand, he was examining, not the letters, to which he had devoted no more than a glance, but the parchment itself, in the places where it was not covered in writing. “Strange! I don’t recognize the material of which this cover is made. It’s neither goatskin nor sheepskin, of which the Geeks made use; nor is it pigskin, with the aid of which the Middle Ages have transmitted their marvelous church books to us. Ah! I think I have it. Look, these thin strips confused with one another, these little asperities that erasure hasn’t completely removed, the multiform papillae, some rounded, others conical, have put me on the track. Moreover, I don’t perceive on the inverse of the skin, any trace of the passage of hairs, which, in the animals I’ve just named, continue through the dermis as far as the follicles that nourish them and protect their roots. Light a lamp, if you please.”

  Never taking his eyes of the old man, Franz made haste to obey. He took a bronze lamp from the mantelpiece, lit it, and brought it to Master Wolfram, who had just delicately detached a fragment of the curious cover of the Colloquia with a penknife. Having steeped it momentarily in a chemical solution, he presented it to the flame.

  The parchment, brightening close to the flame, twisted as if it were trying to get away. After a brief interval, it caught fire—or, rather, shriveled up, crackling.

  “No more doubt,” said the scientist. “In consideration of the manner in which that little piece of skin burned, and the particular odor it gave off, there’s no more doubt. It’s bizarre! What’s inscribed there must be very precious, or it was written by a singular eccentric.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s written on human skin.”

  “On human skin?”

  “Exactly. If the physiognomy of the parchment, the marks and asperities that I’ve just pointed out to you, had not been sufficient for me to recognize it, the color of the flame and the intolerable odor would have convinced me.”

  “Human skin!” Franz repeated, in amazement. “Is there any example of human skin being employed for such a purpose?”

  “Askew,”25 Wolfram replied, “the bibliomaniac English physician who succeeded in bringing together all the editions of various Greek writers, had one of his favorite authors rebound in that way, in order to possess a unique binding—but apart from the title of the book and the name of its author, nothing was written on the cover. It might well be that the membrane on which Joseph made sure that copies were made of the holy books that the high priest Eleazer sent to Ptolemy Philadelphius was made of human skin—but outside of those two cases, my dear Franz, our poor envelope seems to me to have been most frequently respected.”

  “And the characters?”

  “Ah, the characters! Let’s examine them together.”

  Bent over the cover of the Erasmus, like the old man, Franz began to study the letters on the fantastic parchment again. With each passing moment they were taking on a greater importance in his eyes. It was with a feverish anxiety that he waited for Master Wolfram’s verdict. It seemed that his life—or, even more, his happiness—depended on what was written on that fragment of human skin.

  “Of course!” the scientist said, after a few minutes. “My dear child, I have no need to search any longer; these letters are runic characters. If I hesitated momentarily in recognizing them, it’s because they belong to the Scandinavian or Marcomanni26 variety. As for explaining to you immediately what they mean, however, that’s more difficult. I can see that these three letters”—he showed Franz three symbols placed separ
ately at the head of the 12 or 15 lines traced on the parchment—“are the three first letters of the runic alphabet; they bear the names of three great Scandinavian deities: Freyr, Thor and Odin. Do they form here, by virtue of their combination, a word whose meaning escapes me, or are they there as an invocation of the three redoubtable gods? I can’t be sure. For that which follows, familiar as I am with the interpretation of runes, the letters don’t seem to me to be placed in a fashion to form any words—not ones known to me, at least. Perhaps the author of these singular lines did not think his secret sufficiently well-defended by sympathetic ink and, better to protect it from the uninitiated, he has written it down by giving to the letters of the alphabet of which he has made use a conventional value of his choice. The more I examine these different groups, the more I think that that’s the case. Look, these two symbols”—he showed the young man two letters similar to the French B, only differing from one another by virtue of a dot placed in the inferior circle of one of them—“are, in runic words, two infrequently-employed consonants, the first corresponding to our B, the second to our P, but here I see them repeated continually. It’s the same with this other letter, which is the same as the djh of the Indian Pali idiom, in the Magadha alphabet, and which corresponds to our K, from which it only differs in form, as you can see, by the suppression of the lower oblique branch. One encounters it quite rarely in the funeral and votive inscriptions that exist in great quantity in the Swedish province of Uppsala, but in these 15 lines it occurs more than 50 times. It’s evident to me that it does not have its usual value-but what other letter is it replacing? I can’t tell yet. It’s only by feeling our way and calling hypotheses and probabilities to our aid that we’ll arrive at a literal translation of this singular manuscript.”

  Without saying a word, Franz listened to the old man, who also seemed to be gripped by an ardent desire to know what they had before their eyes.

  Master Wolfram returned to the examination of the manuscript for several minutes, and then raised his head again.

  “I think I’m definitely on the right path,” he said. “I’d wager now that these three letters placed at the head of the page are an invocation of Freyr, Thor and Odin. If I’m not mistaken, that’s a reference-point of extreme importance for our research. What comes next is perhaps only a prayer, or one of the supposedly magic formulae of which the priests made use, in the earliest historical epochs of Scandinavia, to interrogate destiny. We shall see—but tomorrow. To complete this translation I need more lucidity than one has at my age after a long day’s work. I need a more considerable tension of the brain than I would be able to support at present. Come back tomorrow evening. I’ll tell you then, my child, what is written here, or admit my ignorance.”

  In spite of his desires and his impatience, Franz dared not insist. After having thanked Wolfram and having promised to return at dusk the following evening, he left and went back to his house.

  We have said that Schmidt had gone to sleep while waiting for his master. The impact of the knocker on the massive door to the street woke him up abruptly. When he opened it to the snow-covered young man it was with a maternal solicitude that he questioned him—but Franz, absorbed in his dreams, made no reply, and the fearful old servant followed his master to the threshold of his bedroom, whose door the latter closed behind him.

  Schmidt heard him walking back and forth for half the night. The young Baron von Heberghem’s imagination was struck by the sequence of strange incidents that had been logically strung together around him since the morning, and that idea drew him into the milieu of worlds of fantasy.

  He remembered everything that had happened to him in a matter of hours: the purchase of a book that had had the effect of taking him out of the city, in the exact direction of the schloss of the relative that he avoided in order not to allow himself to be seduced by Marguerite’s love; the intolerable weight of the little volume and the efforts he thought he had made to get rid of it; the bizarre coincidence that had sat him down next to a mystic philosopher who had taken him far from reality, and opposite the beautiful young woman who had offered him, on the contrary, all that the real world contains of joy and happiness; then the discovery of those mysterious characters on the parchment made of such a strange material; and finally, the visit he had just made to Master Wolfram, who had left him in confrontation with the unknown. He would have given ten years of his life to be 24 hours older.

  Toward morning, Franz succumbed to fatigue, threw himself on to his bed and fell asleep.

  His servant woke him up only a few moments before lunch-time. In his hand, he held a letter, and the Colloquia of Erasmus, which he had a strong desire to throw in the fire rather than taking it to his master.

  “Give it to me, quickly,” said the Baron to the old servant, snatching the book and the letter from his hands. He had guessed that the letter could not be anything other than Master Wolfram’s reply. With a feverish hand he broke the seal and began to read avidly.

  Dear child, the old man wrote, I’ve been able to translate the runes on the cover of your Erasmus more rapidly than I expected. As I observed your impatience, I’m sending you the book and the translation without waiting for your visit this evening. As I had supposed after a brief examination, the runes are only a species of evocation and a magic formula. I hope that this only has the attraction of curiosity, for I firmly suppose that your brain is not in a poor enough state to believe in such follies.

  This is what the 15 lines so mysteriously traced signify, word for word:

  Freyr, Thor, Odin!

  You who have the intelligence and the courage, and who seek wisdom, go very far into the North, between the rivers Driva and Logen in Scandinavia. On the night of the summer solstice, when Hodur and Nott are the masters of the sky at the same time as Vali, climb the Nunsfjeld, and do not stop until you reach the summit. With a runic staff inscribed with the sacred formula in hand, you will stand it up, inclining it toward the pale star as it rises, in the lowest of the mysterious signs engraved in the granite, and, following its shadow to the place where it stops, you will lift up the rock, while invoking Vidar. Do not let yourself be seduced by the silver harps of Hogspolar, brave the Niks and the Valkyries; the spirit of the sage Mimer is there, confided to the Earth, under the guard of Moralfer, who will retreat before you.

  Franz reread this strange invocation several times, striving to understand it; then, having got up, dressed rapidly and went out, without giving any more thought to the lunch that awaited him than to the supplicant expressions of Schmidt, who watched him in amazement.

  “No more doubt about it—my poor young master is mad,” said the old servant, taking his head in his hands, when he could no longer hear the young man’s footfalls in the stairwell. “What are we going to do now?”

  Twenty minutes later, Franz knocked at Master Wolfram’s door.

  “Ah! I was expecting you, my son,” the old man said to Baron von Heberghem, while the latter took his place in the large armchair next to the fire. “Well, are you content with my translation? If, like your dear grandfather, you love the fantastic and the extraordinary, you must be satisfied—that’s exactly what you’ve got.”

  “Listen, Master,” said Franz, interrupting Wolfram. “You only remember me when I was very young; you don’t know what has happened to my mind since I entered the phase that follows the 20th year. The indifference I had for everything toward the end of my adolescence—a sentiment that was perhaps not happiness but was at least calm—had soon been replaced, even before I left university, by a curiosity, a passionate desire for knowledge. When I returned to my father’s house, especially, the quietude of my early youth gave way to fever and insomnia. This mysterious parchment has redoubled my thirst for the unknown. No, your translation doesn’t satisfy me. However correct it is, it’s obscure to me. I’ve come to ask you for a more complete explanation of these runes.”

  “Oh, my dear child,” said Master Wolfram, drawing nearer to Franz,
whom he examined for a few moments with his limpid and searching gaze, and taking him by the hand, “you really do have a fever—your skin is dry and hot. Take my advice and go home, without asking anything more. Have a horse saddled, gallop flat out along the bank of the Main until the evening, in company with joyful friends, or think about your beautiful cousin Marguerite Heven, whom, if what they say is true, you are killing with your indifference. You are certainly the grandson of my old friend the philosopher, the dreamer, your grandfather. For a head like yours, the tree of science only bears dangerous fruit. Avoid it; don’t try to gather them; remember the parable of Scripture. Most of the time, we only harvest doubt in the arid fields of science, over whose soil we remain bent all our lives. You spoke of happiness, my son; ignorance, that’s happiness! Do you think that a man who has tried to penetrate all the mysteries of nature can have a single day, a single hour or a single second of calm, unless his faith is strong, unbreakable and all-powerful?”

  “But knowledge!”

  “Knowledge! Doesn’t every new step that he makes in knowledge show him his weakness, his ignorance, and prove the domination over him of everything that surround him? If a man interrogates his body, he fears death at every instant; if he raises his eyes to the Heavens, he sees how far away he is from God; if he lowers them to the Earth, he perceives his tomb at his feet. In the domain of science, he only overcomes one obstacle to find himself facing an unsurpassable one. If you only knew, Franz, the disappointments and frustrations that we laborers owe to that bitter fruit; if you only knew the despair into which those superb individuals have been dragged who have tried to cross the barriers that the Creator has imposed on our judgment; if you only knew the slow tortures in the midst of which those indefatigable seekers the world admires have succumbed—those insensate dreamers who are not content to interrogate the earth, that dust from which we emerged and to which we must return, but who also want to sound the incommensurable depths of infinite space with their human gaze! The love of science is the most frequent form of pride. Those whom you call great men know full well that they are only considered so by virtue of an inversion of the ordinary laws of physics. The further away they are viewed from, the larger they appear!”