‘I am sorry you were forced to witness that, Dr Sinclair. If I had had any other choice, of course I would not have done what I had to do. But Klosterheim was the force behind Hitler and his men. He has lived for a very long time. Some will tell you he counselled Martin Luther. Others say he was the angel who stood with Duke Arioch at Lucifer’s right hand during the great war in Heaven. He had no soul. That is what gave him such confidence. Having no soul, he was almost impossible to destroy. By conferring a soul upon him, I could kill him. Or, at least, I hope I killed him…’
‘But I think what is concerning my old friend Sinclair,’ interrupted Bardot, ‘is a very important question.’
‘Which is?’ Zenith seemed genuinely puzzled.
‘Taffy and I have both wondered about it,’ put in Begg, leaning forward to address his cousin. ‘Our question would be – where did that soul come from? Whose did you use? You can surely see why we would be wondering…’
‘Aha!’ Monsieur Zenith turned, laughing, to Mrs Persson. She clearly knew the answer. She leaned down and petted her two Orientals, who lay, perfectly behaved, at her feet. ‘I think I will leave that to you, Mrs Persson.’
The exquisitely beautiful adventuress straightened up and reached for her glass of absinthe. ‘It was the last soul the sword drank. It has been many years, if I am not mistaken, since you have unsheathed that particular weapon, Monsieur Zenith?’
‘Oh, many. I suppose, my friends, I will have to let you into a secret I have kept for rather a long time. While I have in the course of the past two thousand years sired children and indeed founded a dynasty which is familiar to anyone who knows the history of the province of Waldenstein and her capital Mirenburg, I am not truly of this world or indeed this universe. It is fair to say that I have, in the way some of you will know to be possible, been dreaming, as it were, myself. I have another body, as solid as this one, which as I speak lies on a ‘dream couch’ in a city more ancient than the world itself.’ He paused almost in sympathy as he observed their expressions.
‘The civilisation to which I belong is neither truly human nor truly of this universe. Its rulers are men and women who are capable of manipulating the forces of nature and, if you like, super-nature to serve their own ends. They are sometimes, in this world, called sorcerers. How they learn their sorcery is by making use of their dream couches, sleeping sometimes for thousands of years while they live other lives. In those other lives they learn all kinds of arcane wisdom. Upon waking, they forget most of the lives they have ‘dreamed’ save for the skills of sorcery, which they employ to rule the world of which their land is the imperial centre. I am one of those aristocrats. The island where I dwell is known, as far as I can pronounce it in your language, as Melnibone. We are not natives of that world, either, but were driven to inhabit it during a terrible upheaval in our history which ultimately turned us from peaceful beings into the cruel rulers of a planet.
’The demonic archangel upon whom of Klosterheim called to aid him is our own patron Lord of Chaos. His name is Arioch. Both your Bible and the poet Milton mention him. On occasions, he inhabits that black blade you saw me use. On other occasions, the sword contains the souls of those its wielder has killed. Some part of those souls are transferred to whoever uses the blade. Other parts go to placate Arioch. When Satan attempted, hundreds of years ago, on this plane – or one very much like it – to be reconciled with God, neither Klosterheim nor Arioch accepted this and have, across many planes of the multiverse, sought not only the destruction of God himself, but also of Satan – or whatever manifestations of those forces exist here.’
’You have still not explained whose soul Klosterheim’s body drank,’ pointed out Sinclair.
‘Why, the last soul it took,’ said Monsieur Zenith in some surprise. ‘I thought that is what you understood.’
‘And whose was that-?’
Monsieur Zenith had risen swiftly and elegantly and was kissing Mrs Persson’s hand, moving towards the shelf where he had placed his silk hat and gloves. ‘You must forgive me. I have some unfinished business at a nearby art gallery.’
Almost instinctively, Commissaire Lapointe rose as if to apprehend him but then sat down again suddenly.
Sir Seaton Begg, with dawning comprehension, laid his hand on his old friend’s arm, but Taffy Sinclair was insistent. ‘Whose, Monsieur Zenith? Whose?’
Monsieur Zenith slipped gracefully from the table and seemed to disappear, merging with the sunlit spray of the fountain.
‘Whose?’ Sinclair turned baffled to look at Mrs Persson, who had taken her two cats into her lap and was stroking them gently. ‘Do you know?’
She inclined her head and looked questioningly, intimately at Sir Seaton Begg, whose nod was scarcely perceptible.
‘It was his own, of course,’ she said.
NEW MYSTERIES OF PARIS by BARRY GIFFORD
I was recently told a story that was so stupid, se so melancholy, and so moving: a man comes in into a hotel one day and asks to rent a room. He is shown up to number 35. As he comes down a few minutes later and leaves the key at the desk, he says: ‘Excuse me, I have no memory at all. If you please, each time I come in, I’ll tell you my name: Monsieur Delouit. And each time you’ll tell me the number of my room.’ ‘Very well, Monsieur.’ Soon afterwards, he returns, and as he passes the desk says: ‘Monsieur Delouit.’ ‘Number 35 Monsieur.’ ‘Thank you.’ A minute later, a man extra ordinarily upset, his clothes covered with mud, bleeding, his face almost not a face at all, appears at the desk. ‘Monsieur Delouit.’ ‘What do you mean, Monsieur Delouit? Don’t try to put one over on us! Monsieur Delouit has just gone upstairs!’ ‘I’m sorry, it’s me… I’ve just fallen out of the window. What’s the number of my room please?’
André Breton, Nadja
Nadja was taken to a madhouse in 1928. Some place in the French countryside where ordinary people, those fortunate enough to have escaped scrutiny, who have avoided so far in their lives being similarly judged and sentenced and dismissed from the greater society, will not be reminded of their own failings by the screams of the outcast.
It is reasonable to suppose that by that time there could not be much difference for Nadja between the inside of a sanatorium and the outside – but Nadja was here, she left something of herself. Certainly she’s dead by now, buried in a field behind an insane asylum, cats screwing on her grave.
The day she threatened to jump from the window of her room in the Hotel Sphinx on the boulevard Magenta I should have known she was not a fake. Who can tell the genuine mad from the fake? Nadja could. She was always pointing them out to me. In a café she’d whisper, ‘Look at her. Biting her nails. Pretending to be waiting for someone. She’s a fake. Her lovers disappear.’ ‘But how can you tell,’ I’d ask. ‘Look at my eyes,’ Nadja would say. ‘Can you see the way they are lit from behind? I’m dangerous. To be avoided.’
Who was Nadja? What was the significance of Nadja in my life? Why does she return, a constant, though I’ve neither seen nor heard of or from her in fifty years?
I saw a woman in a marketplace in a Mexican city, Merida, perhaps, in the Yucatan, twenty years ago or so. She resembled Nadja, or what she might have looked like, according to my idea of Nadja had she still been alive, let alone an inhabitant of a jungle town in Mexico. I followed her as she moved from stand to stand, inspecting the fruits, dresses, beads, kitchen knives, crucifixes. Was this a woman or a phantom? Her grey hair was worn long and thick and fell across her face so that her features were indistinct, shadowed. Nadja had been blonde, with the short, curled haircut of the day, a brief nose, sharp black hawk’s eyes, a long mouth with slender lips, purple, that grinned in one corner only. This hag in the marketplace was fat, toothless, I would say, judging by the line of her jaw, dark-skinned. Nadja had been white as the full moon of February over Venice, almost emaciated, seldom are, with a full mouth of teeth, crooked but strong. She was capable of cracking open with ease in one swift bite a stalk of Haitian sugarcane.