tandem.
Your laughter equals the explosion of thunder. Oh, how the dark rage buries the blinding sunlight! Berserker paces, races back and forth in his prison, excited, eager for freedom. His wild eyes are alive, brilliant with awareness of your authority. The earth trembles as if in awe, sensing he will do your bidding.
In the century in which you were born, the French deemed what lay above as the macrocosm, the greater world or universe, reflected here on this tiny earth as the microcosm. You are in touch with this reality that equates the inner with the outer, the small and insignificant with the grand and incomprehensible. It is the source of your strength and to draw from it is your right.
You contemplate the earth itself, so abundant with the flicker of warm-blooded creatures. Their metallic scent seeps through their wet pores, wafting along humid air in a tantalizing manner— the scent of steaming blood! In the blackness that has descended, you see them here and there, glittering stars with the added dimension of being aromatic.
You have always acknowledged nature. Respected her. You know you are her equal. Nature is, perhaps, all you respect, for you believe only in the natural order. You are the culmination of Darwin’s evolution. The one who has evolved over time to become the most advanced life-form on the planet. You are master of this terran universe. The English naturalist would have been thrilled to meet you.
These mortals would declare that such notions disease the mind, although you do not permit dis-ease to infiltrate your crystal awareness. Berserker is a worthy assistant because beyond all else, he is like you: adaptable and cunning, dominant traits imbedded in your genes as Herr Mendel discovered when he played with peas. Dominant traits which are the foundation of potency and preeminence!
The storm crashes around you, drawn to you, for you are the source of division. Berserker leaps at the bars that confine him, as if crying “Death or Freedom!”
Over 400 years of existence have developed your organic talents. You will adapt to England. But England will never adapt to you. You will infect these bleeders as the Frenchman Pasteur predicted. You will spread through the population like a germ, a plague darker than black, leaving them helpless, unable to resist. Imprisoning them in their own weakness.
Your laughter expands, drowning out the thunder, and Berserker begins to howl in earnest, bashing his body against the bars, drawing blood. The smell of it intoxicates you. The mortals for miles around tremble at the unfamiliar sound and scent of wildness that strikes a primal cord.
The wolfs victory cry delights your ears, riding sharp and crisp through the wind. You are a pair, in unison, like lovers, or father and son, master and slave. Two warriors, unstoppable.
You raise a hand to the sky and lightning follows where you point, splitting a birch down the middle. You are a warlord now, as you were
Ottomans buck from your boundaries, back over the Carpathian Mountains, back to the land where they belonged. They respected and feared you for preserving the law, for enforcing Christian values. Did you not punish the dishonest, those who would steal and lie and cheat for personal gain? And even as much as those you ruled respected and feared you, they loved you. Then, and now. Your reputation survived, even as has your body in this supple, corporeal form you continue. You are a hero to your countrymen. The British who have colonized so much of the world are simply modern Ottomans. You defeated the turbaned ones, you will erode from within this society that wears the high hat symbolizing the pinnacle of civilization.
You are Ruler of Transylvania, King of Terrors, Lord of the Undead. You are invincible. That truth causes your lips to split apart and a long hiss to escape your throat, swirling through the air like a current that will crush everything in its wake, mingling with Berserker’s mad howls. The wind whips the soul of every soon-to-be corpse in this park. It slices through to the subconscious Freud postulates. But humanity’s creative inventors and astute thinkers cannot save them!
You have read that Kierkegaard preached an acceptance of fate, which includes suffering. That philosophy is repugnant to you. It is Nietzsche who speaks your creed. You and you alone are of paramount importance. The prattle of Marx and Engels will dissolve in the vapors of time—there is little strength in a collective without a strong leader. Machiavelli, your contemporary, knew this. He spoke from your era, where politics sired all.
Berserker’s instincts are aligned with your own. He understands all too well the rules of power and control as crucial for survival. He cannot cower at your just fury because he shares this reaction. You cannot bear to see him entrapped this way. It is not sentiment which inspires you but a sense of reestablishing order. These mortals will pay for their insolence! Let them gloat for now. Their telegraphs and telephones and phonographs. Their printing presses and cameras. Their refinement of pistols and rifles and gunpowder. None of it will help them! All will incinerate in the blaze of a power greater than their own. All of their knowledge will crumble to dust.
Your knowledge has been gleaned over many lifetimes, knowledge that covers the spectrum of life, that totals the grains of sand on all of the beaches of the world! Mortal philosophy is correct in one thing—they will taste divine suffering through their servitude to you, their master. Your violent kiss will bequeath this destiny to them. They will languish in the knowledge that they will be like you but never be your equal.
With the strength of ten men, you direct the forces of nature. Your hand sprouts talons that claw the lock on the cage. Instantly, sparks shoot through you. In the deluge, the metal sizzles and melts. You grasp it in your hand, snap the lock, and pull open the door of the prison.
Berserker does not hesitate. In one leap, he is on the ground, before his master. “Go!” you tell him, mentally directing his instincts toward Whitby and Hillingham. Toward the glass that separates you from Lucy, as if such tangible reality can stand in your way!
Berserker swivels his head to stare in the direction of the keeper. “When you have served me and my work is done,” you remind him, “then and only then will you will reap your reward!”
He hesitates but a moment. Then, swiftly, he sprints over the drowning grass and into the trees. Free. Alive. As lucid as can be.
Curtain Call
Gary A. Braunbeck
I have been, for most of my life, a collector of notes on subjects of great diversity—such as deviations from concentricity in the lunar crater Copernicus, to the great creature Melanicus and the super-bat upon whose wings it broods over the affairs of Man, as well as stationary meteor-radiants, the reported growth of hair on the bald head of a mummy, the appearance of purple Englishmen, instances of amphibians and blood raining down from the heavens, apparitions, phantoms, the damned, the excluded, wild talents, new lands, and “Did the girl swallow the octopus?”
But my liveliest interest is not so much in things as in the relations of things. I find now, in the twilight of my life, as I pour over the endless data that I have assembled throughout my days, that I think more and more about the alleged pseudo-relations we call “coincidences.” What if these events, rather than being happenstance, are the final result of great, secret, dark machinations of the Universe interacting with the subconscious to produce an event or events which guide humanity down certain roads its members were destined to take?
I am writing now of a brief period I spent in London when I was thirty-six, in the early months of 1912 (nearly ten years before I decided to move there), and of a most singularly peculiar bookshop, its even more peculiar proprietor, and a bit of London Theatre history which none before me has ever recorded.
I was staying at a very comfortable rooming house in Bedford Place, just around the corner from the British
