The nightmares assumed an undertone of cruelty.
In a catatonic emotional state, absolutely numb to external stimuli and filled with indescribable grief, I made my way home like a sleepwalker. The fury that had flared up briefly in my heart was now changing into resignation and depression. A peculiar weariness seized me, and I thought it best to rest for a few hours.
With Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs on the stereo, as soon as I entered the bedroom and located a cozy place to sleep on a cushion I slipped into a sinister dream. The place where I suddenly found myself looked like the stage setting for a doomsday film: it was obvious that the world had been wiped out by a nuclear holocaust or bacteriological war—but who knew why? Only the wretched vestiges of civilization, if a civilization it had ever been, were visible. It took a while before I realized that this expanse of ruins had once been our district. Of the charmingly renovated houses only hollow shells remained. They had been demolished, gutted, and bombed. Huge holes gaped in the facades, behind which terrible secrets seemed to dwell. Strangest of all, however, were the plants. A stubborn green growth had overgrown the entire district like an inexorably moving carpet of slime, smothering everything, forcing itself into the smallest cracks the way a creeping plant does in real life. When I looked around more carefully, I discovered that the vegetation consisted of pea plants of gigantic dimensions. It was crazy, but then dreams are not exactly rational. Evidently humanity was no longer making a guest appearance in the great, evolutionary drama, and had yielded the stage to pea plants. The scene reminded me somehow of Sleeping Beauty, the only difference being that there weren't any more human beings to fall under the sleep spell.
After having seen my fill of this unreal scene, I trotted aimlessly along the garden walls, which in this doomed world seemed like the remnants of a Buddhist temple. I stopped again and again, looking around attentively in the hope of finding a clue that would explain the destruction. It was in vain. Aside from the fact that the pea plants had even eaten their way into the apartments, I discovered nothing.
The green nightmare became thicker and thicker, more and more tangled. I was just starting to get desperate when I saw a tiny opening in a thicket through which a blinding light shone. I ran up to it quickly, poked my head in, and then squeezed my entire body through it. What I saw filled me with unspeakable horror.
Before me was a wide clearing bathed in brilliant light, strewn with corpses of my kind. Obviously, not only the human race had met with doom in this apocalypse. Mountains of corpses were piled up on top of one another every which way, like refuse at a garbage dump on which a shower of blood had fallen. Millions of wide-open eyes stared pensively at the red fluid running down from millions of lacerated necks. Some of the corpses were already putrified; their coats had holes in them large enough for their insides to be seen. And yet they continued to bleed as if supplied by a mysterious underground pump.
Although this sight made my eyes well up with tears, through a veil of sadness I recognized old and trusty friends lying dead on the nearest heap of corpses. Not only Felicity, Sascha, and Deep Purple, but also Bluebeard, Kong, Herrman and Herrmann, Pascal, and friends from my former neighborhood were guests at this mute party; their dead eyes stared as expectantly as if they were listening to the toast of their host. Even Atlas, Tomtom, and the unknown brother, whom I thought I recognized although I had never seen him before, were here at this gruesome cemetery. Human beings had remained faithful to their old and venerable customs, and had brought disaster not only on themselves but on everyone else as well.
Yet the silence did not last long. Suddenly, the earth vibrated as if a subway train were rushing along a few inches under my paws. A distorted, roaring sound could be heard, as if the hydrogen bomb that destroyed this world was about to rise again out of the earth and mushroom skyward in reverse motion. The corpses began wriggling wildly as if reacting to a magnet hidden in the earth that was shifting back and forth rapidly. The roaring reached the pain threshold, the dead jumped like newly caught fish being landed, the sky turned a dark crimson, and a powerful wind blew.
Suddenly, with an ear-splitting boom, he shot up out of the middle of the lifeless bodies: nearly ninety feet high, titanic, with ominously glinting eyes behind eyeglasses reflecting the reddening sky. His black frock flapped indolently in the wind; his hair stood straight up, swirling like blazing flames. He laughed, but his laugh was more of a scream, the caricature of a laugh. It was Gregor Johann Mendel, the man in the portrait, who had now become a colossus.
"The solution to the mystery is really very simple, because it's just a matter of logic, Francis," he barked down at me scornfully. "And I can tell just by looking at you that you're a born logician."
Grinning hideously, he looked around at the corpses below him.
"Panthera, Acinonyx, Neofelis, Lynx, Leopardus: Felidae! More than a million kinds of animals live on the earth today, but none of them compel as much respect and admiration as good old Felidae! It may sound like a cliché, but they are indeed a miracle of nature! But be careful, Francis! Don't underestimate Homo sapiens!"
Only now did I notice that he had concealed his right hand behind his back. Still grinning repulsively, he now brought forward this hand, which held an oversized cross, the kind that are used to control puppets. But unlike a normal cross, there were no strings attached to the many pieces of wood out of which it
