Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (37 page)

When the King Vrykolakas came back, as a reward, or more likely an enticement, he introduced the inspector to the demon Brulefer, who causes a man to be found luscious by women; Surgat, around whom no lock can remain shut; Humots, who fetches any book one wishes for; Hael, who gives us command over any and all languages, but is ruled by Nebirots, whom it is best to conjure first; Trimsael, who teaches chemistry and legerdemain, and can accordingly impart the obscure process of manufacturing the Powder of Projection, which will alter base metals into gold and silver; Bucon, who causes antipathy between men and women; Sidragosam, who forces the girl of one's choice to dance in the nude.

It was all profitable to the inspector, who had never been well educated. He learned the identities of the Whispering Knights, and which demon is most delighted by ritual cremation. He still believed that everything about being dead was the same for him. But what had really happened was that, as people generally will, he grew accustomed to his new state of being. This is not to say that he made plans of any sort, much less altered the previous ones. To tell the truth, he disdained the riotous ghouls and vampires upstairs as much as ever. The snoring solitude of the King Vrykolakas was more appropriate to his nature. The inspector was well aware that this monster was one of the most dangerous of all. Trollhand ought to destroy him immediately. Well, the inspector would take care of that in time. That old ghoul in the mold-green robe who had judged him last winter had already been dealt with, and a good thing, too. But when would the inspector receive his reward?

He had never been suggestible, but now it would have been easy to
convince himself that in spite of the medallion of Saint Polona and even the golden pentacle, he was developing an allergy to light. Not wishing to give in to such satanic deceptions—for after all he had already rejected a number of notions in order to get where he was—he continued his investigations, under the guise of being a subaltern to the King Vrykolakas, who loved to look him up and down, snorting and snoring with laughter until blood-clots wormed out of his hairy nostrils. The golden pentacle would have been his mainstay in this time of hesitation, were it not for the fact that he dared not risk carrying it on his person, so that it mostly slept in the dark dirt high over his head.

Of course while he was down here exposing the Devil's work, the King Vrykolakas was employing minions to counter-investigate
him.
First they found the medallion to Saint Polona in his coffin, together with old Jette's skeleton-hand. These did not really signify, since any number of people in H—— were buried with such trash, which availed nothing against a vampire bite. So they kept on looking, while the inspector, having received approving consent from the King Vrykolakas to conduct a census of the undead, should there ever come a need to mobilize all the undead against an invasion of Holy Knights or worse, burrowed deeper and deeper, openly mapping almost everything he saw, with a secret excitement as he imagined presenting this document to Father Hauser, and clinking glasses with Hans Trollhand—nobody had thought to offer him a drink since he died! Perhaps even Richter von Lochner would come. Turning a corner, he entered a golden-black ooze-world of jawless skulls basking like crocodiles, half overgrown with vagina-flowers. More than anything the place resembled, at least to me, one of the night-garden paintings of Leonor Fini, but since she lived after the inspector's time I cannot imagine that he drew the same comparison. But here, in a grove of nude trees whose branches terminated in smooth blue hands, he met undead women, scintillatingly nude, whom he actually supposed he could love.— Dear boy, that's a truly romantic place, the King Vrykolakas remarked, gnawing on a dead frog, just to bring on an appetite for dinner.— You see, Baal constructed it for his harem, although they've since dug down to blacker paradises. It was unoccupied for more than ten thousand years, and then some of your kind moved in.

What do you mean by my kind?

Oh, the delicate sort. They cherish all their appendages, and extrude parts of themselves into each other's orifices. Female, for the most part, as you may have noticed. I've left all that above me long ago. But you're still immature, inspector. You bear the hallmark of a living man—loneliness.

Sir, I disagree that the dead are less lonely than the living. Up there in the graveyard, all they do is play pranks together and—

Exactly. Up there. The farther down you go, the more solitary it gets.

What about Baal's harem?

Oh, he ate them all.

The inspector said nothing. In resentment and despair he soon set out to expand his map, not that he would ever record the existence of the “romantic place,” which was too interesting to be destroyed. By now he had explored all the way to the horned long barrows of Bryn Celli Ddu. But often he returned to that black garden where the skulls basked like crocodiles, and the lovely blue undead women loitered in the grove of hand-trees, and there he tried calling on the demon Brulefer, who granted his prayer, so that all those women loved him happily. The deeper down he went, the more he began to believe, if only to console himself, that he must be digging for something, perhaps the water of life or death, although the glowing, coagulating atmosphere he swam into down there addled him so much that he sometimes hardly gathered what he was about; nonetheless, you will be relieved to know that he remained capable of mapping and memorizing everything. Just as Bohemia's crown jewels lie hidden underground near Saint Wenceslas's tomb, so the precious matter of the vampires and their kin entombed themselves right beneath the cemetery of H——, which after all is the center of the world. And now the inspector began to uncover more such secrets, each of them more charming than the last, and the deeper he went, the more bewildered he became, while by now the King Vrykolakas's minions had discovered the golden pentacle, which once again (although the king himself was certain) they could not prove to be the inspector's, but it was certainly a dangerous item; it would have burned them had they touched it; to pick it up they had to pass a stick through its necklace-chain. Depositing it in the ribcage of old Jette, whom none of the undead had ever found a prior use for, they rendered that poisonous thing halfway safe,
even though the more sensitive ones among them could see its baleful golden glow right through Jette's coffin.

They were fairly sure but not positive.— You deserve a rest, said the King Vrykolakas to the inspector. Why don't you go up to your coffin for a year or two, while I take my nap?

Chuckling, he watched the inspector's glance flick toward the map, then away. What did he care? Even Trollhand was in no position to threaten the cemetery frontier. And the inspector watched him watch. Since the King Vrykolakas knew his secret, what was supposed to happen? The inspector did not dare to take it with him, but he felt confident that he had most of it memorized. Of course he had better visit Father Hauser sooner rather than later; in case he too became stupider.

He clambered back up through the ooze. In the chamber he had left, his host was already snoring like a goodwife's iron pot bubbling day and night on the stove.

It happened during the twentieth Mansion of the Moon:
Abnahaya,
which strengthens prisons. By now the inspector wore the generic fangs of a dead Bohemian. When he blasphemed, it no longer brought him any pleasure. His position felt as cynical as the policy of the angels. Sometimes he dreamed that he had forgotten the way to his tomb, but found himself twitching strangely and counting pebbles whenever he entered a graveyard. He yearned to give himself to the green darkness of oak leaves, which unlike the living or the undead would accept him without conditions.

His pentangle was gone. This alarmed him, but not so much as he might have expected. Just before dawn he set out with his Saint Polona medallion, but it had lost much virtue, and he was in agony by the time he reached the sexton's toolshed. A witch was hurrying away from the daylight, clutching something wrapped up in a dirty cloth. He knew her; she must have just dug up a dead man's head, and today would be planting black beans in his eyes, mouth and ears, to make herself invisible. Well, Trollhand could burn her. The inspector drew on his mendicant's cloak, which used to stick to his oozing flesh but which now hung quite
loosely, and when he regarded his hands he saw why; they were semiskeletonized.

Creeping into the church, he found it disagreeably warm, for he had grown accustomed to the delightful coolness of muck and clay. Naturally, he did not permit this discomfort to distort his projects in any way.

Father Hauser was in bed at home. But his good friend Trollhand was there, dozing in the rearmost pew, wrapped in his black-and-red cloak, with a heap of sharpened stakes at his feet. Since his salary was low except when there were dogs and rats to catch, he often preferred to sleep in the church, in order to avoid his hungry wife and children. The inspector stood over him, longing to eavesdrop on his thoughts, for suddenly it came to him that the only key to understanding himself he now possessed was this Hans Trollhand. Perhaps he felt this because they had been friends together, or it might simply have been that Trollhand was the first living person he had seen in a long time, and the inspector still thought of himself as in a way living. Or it might have been that his assignment, which nowadays we would call espionage, had rubbed off on him, although in fact everybody in H—— does much the same; practically every night Doroteja caught somebody listening at her keyhole to the sounds she made when she was combing her hair.

Trollhand uttered a cry when the inspector touched his shoulder. After all, it had been awhile since they had met. The inspector began to tell him his great news, only to discover that he seemed to have lost his tongue.

Are you the inspector? Trollhand demanded. Why don't you say something? For all I know, you're some ghoul who's gotten hold of that cloak. Speak to me, damn you!

This insulting treatment enraged the inspector, who, after all, had given up quite a lot for his fellow men. But he bit what remained of his lip, and gestured that he wished for something to write with. Narrowly observing him, Trollhand said: I don't have much truck with reading and writing. Now, are you the inspector or aren't you? Nod your head yes or no.

The inspector nodded once. The man's ignorance revolted him, not that the King Vrykolakas had been any better. Was there nothing but one
kind of self-satisfied cunning stupidity or another? Neither one of them even cared about the demon Brulefer, much less Trimsael or Humots.

Trollhand then insolently said: And have you ever met the Angel of Death, old boy?

Suddenly the inspector was overcome with indifference. Not only are the lusts of the living never satisfied, he said to himself, but they grow and grow, just like the death within them. How many of us has he staked and burned, thanks to my efforts? And now he wants to mock me.— Turning away, he shambled back to the cemetery. So many birds, so many insects! Blackbirds were nesting where the archers used to shoot. A pigeon trilled within a dead knight's blind arch. But it all hurt him. He longed to be as supple as a lizard in a shady crevice, the way he used to be when he was alive. As he drew near he began to perceive the shining of the golden pentacle coming up through the earth of Jette's grave. Since none of the undead could possibly be on watch, he dove down to retrieve it, and at once he felt more together, so to speak. The sun scarcely annoyed him, and vapors no longer rose from his cloak. He could have returned straight to Trollhand, in order to express himself to him with greater success, but instead he decided to visit Doroteja, who was always kind to everyone.

Of course the sun was higher now, and people saw him. The kerchiefed women, already kneeling down in the fields while two matrons approached with baskets, rose up to scream; men threw stones, and someone ran off to fetch the priest. Not wishing for Doroteja to get burned for a witch, the inspector gave it up, wondering: Am I the only one who is not incapable of love or of facing truth? He spat, determined not be reconciled with any of them. Having inhaled all those secrets issuing out from between the King Vrykolakas's teeth, having betrayed many a fetching vampiress, even the innocent ones who still wore their white shrouds, he must have done enough. So he returned to the cemetery, returned the pentangle into Jette's eternally unconscious keeping, and descended into his own grave. By now he felt too weak to return the black cloak, so there it lay in full daylight on top of his tombstone.

When he had rested for a night or two, he called upon Humots, who stood ready to bring him any book of his desire. So he asked for the Secret Book of Angels, which contained rules for every situation, especially
the postmortem ones. He said: I hope to learn what belongs to me.— Humots twinkled his red eyes at the inspector, then flew up toward heaven with a great buzz of blackish-green insect wings. And the inspector waited.

The Romanians say that a vampire can go up into the sky by the thread that a woman weaves at night without a candle, and thus he eats the moon. Perhaps Humots ascended in some such fashion, and then some malicious angel snipped the thread, for he never came back. The inspector lay at rest, and sometimes he dreamed of Doroteja trying to stab him through the heart with a silver hairpin while sometimes he dreamed of Doroteja smiling at him with nearly closed eyes. And so his mission became to him like a vampire's tomb so overgrown with underbrush that not even Trollhand could find the way.

Richter von Lochner had once succeeded in forcing a witch to confess (a triumph of his jurisprudence) that she had flown her broomstick to Prague, and there been conveyed by certain sinful creatures into that secret tunnel about which Father Hauser had so often preached; it runs from the Jewish Ghetto all the way to Jerusalem—and, as anyone might expect, makes a special detour to the churchyard here in H——, where the greatest battle ever between good and evil is eternally taking place. Thanks to the inspector's efforts, the fact of this battle was now proved, as a result of which the priest and the judge both expected to melt down many more scrap-hearts in the furnace of piety. But then the inspector stopped coming. He never drew out for them his subterranean map, or informed them of the whereabouts of the King Vrykolakas, whose staking would have been a grievous loss to hell, or even gave them more names of pranksters from the cemetery. Even on Saint John's Day, when our vilest witches creep out naked to gather certain herbs whose magic will steal the milk from their neighbors' cows, the inspector never appeared to finger them.