Munich. Also there were all the brothers from Breslau. After prayers to Natura Magna Mater we commenced the initiation rites. The hymn to Cybele followed by the ancient Indian mantras in honour of Gauri sent our medium into a trance. After a while, the deity spoke in the medium’s high-pitched voice. Brother Johann of Munich translated, while brother Hermann of Marburg noted down the deity’s message. Our medium has great power. The daughter has all her father’s strength, certainly. This power has only to be freed. The medium was able to free all the beings circulating around her. Was able to pick up mighty clusters of spiritual energy from supersensory reality. We heard whispers and voices all around and within the house, and … [the rest is illegible zigzags].
BRESLAU, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28TH, 1919
A QUARTER PAST MIDNIGHT
Mock stood in the doorway of a vast room and studied the people assembled there. He could do so quite openly and without inhibition, because everybody was completely and utterly focussed on a woman in a wheelchair; all eyes were glued to her lips. The woman was shouting something in a shrill voice, and as she did so her veil billowed about her large head. It looked as though her hair had either been shaved or plastered down. Mock’s brain, geared towards philology as always, registered the hissing sibilants in the invalid’s cries, which constructed entire sentences fused by a clearly stressed rhythm.
In this enormous room with panelled walls blackened with age, empty but for seven leather armchairs and piles of ancient publications on a three-metre-long desk, sat seven men. All were in evening attire, with snow-white shirt-fronts shining from the lapels of their tailcoats. The eldest of those assembled was translating the invalid’s ecstatic groans and a fifty-year-old bearded man who looked like an office worker was noting down the translation, while the rest fixed their anxious eyes on the crippled prophetess.
It sounded to Mock as if the woman was reciting some poem in a language unknown to him. He felt genuine admiration for the elderly man who was interpreting these utterances
Mock stepped into the room and clapped loudly.
“Take a break, good gentlemen,” he shouted.
Nobody took anything. The invalid continued to spit out dark tautologies, the veil sticking to the saliva on her lips. The assembly did not take their eyes off her. The man leading the meeting made a mistake in his interpretation, and the bearded secretary crossed out something in his notes. Nobody so much as glanced at Mock.
“Which of you gentlemen is Doctor Rossdeutscher?” asked Mock.
He was answered by the cries of the lame Sybil. She choked and spluttered over the agglomerations of consonants which no vowel severed, no anaptyxis disjoined. Mock walked around those gathered there and approached the secretary. He reached for the pile of papers, unfastened the clip and pulled out a few sheets from the very middle. He began to read.
“It is he,” the leader translated, and his secretary noted everything in cursive script. “He is here. Our greatest enemy. He is here!”
“I have conducted an experiment; time will verify its results. How did I do it? I isolated the man and forced him to confess to his adultery in writing. It was a terrible confession for him to have to make since he was permeated to the bone with middle-class morality. I brought this man to a certain place late at night. He was bound and gagged. I freed his right hand, tied him to a chair and then asked him once again to deny what he had written previously, promising him that if he obeyed I would give this second letter to his wife. Feverishly he scribbled something down. I took the second letter, the denial, and slipped it down the drain. I witnessed his fury and his pain. ‘I’m going to come back here,’ his eyes told me. Then I took the man out to the carriage and drove away. Later I killed him, leaving him where he was sure to be found. His ghost will return and draw the attention of the inhabitants of that place to the drain,” Mock read.
The medium began to wail. She rubbed her twisted knees, dribbled saliva and thrashed her head about. The veil slid slowly down her smooth skull. A gloved hand slipped through the folds of her dress. Her screams, which sounded like the howling of an enraged bitch, infected the translator.
“It’s him! It’s him!” translated the man. “Kill him! Kill!”
“I ate my supper and approached the tenements into which the prostitute I was tailing the day before yesterday had disappeared. I waited. She emerged at about midnight and winked meaningfully at me. A moment later we were in a droschka, and a quarter of an hour after that at the place where we bring offerings to the souls of our ancestors. She undressed, and for a generous sum allowed me to tie her up. She did not protest even when I gagged her. She had terrible eczema on her neck. This constituted the fulfilment of anticipation. After all, yesterday I offered up to science Director W., aged sixty, who had identical eczema. And his was on the neck, too!’” Mock read.
He put down the pile of papers and looked at the bearded secretary. Police cars could be heard entering Korsoallee. Mock was assailed by piercing sounds from all sides: the wailing of sirens, the high-pitched yowls of the bitch, the howling of the sea wind. He grabbed the scribe by the throat and forced him to the back of the armchair, so that his balding head thudded dully against the wood at the top of the backrest.
“Did you write this, you son of a whore?” Mock’s lower jaw jutted out as he covered the secretary’s beard with thick gobbets of saliva. All of a sudden he felt a blow on his thigh. He spun around and turned to stone. The creature in the wheelchair had wispy, plastered-down hair. Through it he could see white patches of skin with dark blotches here and there; sparse clumps grew over the horny edges. The tip of her tongue vibrated in her open, gabbling mouth. Her egg-shaped head thrashed from side to side, with first one temple then the other thumping against the back of the wheelchair.
“Slaughter him! Slaughter him! Tear him apart!”
Mock drew back his arm as if to take a swing.
“Don’t hit her!” he heard the secretary shout. “She’ll tell you everything! You’ll realize your mistake, Mock! You were wrong that time in Konigsberg! Admit your mistake!”
Mock’s head found itself momentarily in the harbour of his elbow and arm. He struck. He felt pain in his wrist. The cripple opened her eyes wide and, falling backwards with the wheelchair, spat out the tongue she had just bitten off. She was no longer choking on the indigestible groups of consonants, she was choking on her own blood.
The secretary ran to her, kneeled down and turned her on her side. The invalid kicked out her twisted legs in agony. The secretary tore his bloodied cheek away from her head and stared at Mock. A swollen weal cut across his face; one eye glistened, circumscribed by a band of gore.
“My name is Doctor Horst Rossdeutscher,” he said, wiping the blood from his face. He pointed to the prostrate being. “And that’s my daughter, Louise Rossdeutscher. You’ve killed her, Mock. The strongest medium that ever lived. I satisfied all her whims, fulfilled all her needs, and you, a shoemaker’s son, killed her with one blow of your hoof.”
The sound of metal-capped shoes resounded on the stairs. Doctor Pyttlik and Commissioner Muhlhaus were on their way up to the first floor.
“But vengeance will come, Mock,” yelled Rossdeutscher as he slipped his hand into the inside pocket of his tailcoat. “The Erinyes born of the corpses of those closest to you will find you.” Rossdeutscher pulled out a gun and put it in his mouth. “Those whom you love, Mock …” — the barrel of the gun made him lisp — “tell us, where are they now? …” He pulled the trigger. The sirens were silenced.
BRESLAU, THAT SAME SEPTEMBER 28TH, 1919
HALF PAST ONE IN THE MORNING
Mock ran up to the fourth floor of the tenement on Gartenstrasse, taking three stairs at a time. The loud pounding of his brogues on the wooden steps woke the residents and their dogs. He conquered floor after floor chased by barking, swearing and the stench that erupted from dirty kitchens and draughty toilets.
At last he found himself outside the door to number 20. He rapped out the rhythm of “Schlesierlied”: slow-
