The giant Mendel swayed the thing in his hand self-importantly, as if he were performing a marvelous magic trick.
"Don't despair, my friend. Only at first glance is death a matter of finality. Bear in mind how HE called Lazarus to come forth. You should include the Claudandus case in your reflections. I shall live again and again, although I have long been dead. Watch!"
He whipped the control downward. Suddenly, thousands upon thousands of black strings grew from the wooden guides and fanned out. Their ends caught the limbs of the dead bodies like fishing hooks.
Mendel jerked the control upwards, shouting happily: "And up, up, up, up! …"
The mouths of the reanimated dead emitted a gruesome, bloodcurdling howl that sounded like a burial march played backwards and became a whirlpool of sound. The hairs on my back stood on end like wire bristles. I was afraid I would lose my mind if I had to witness this insane performance any longer, but there was no escape.
The dead rose from the sleep of death, rising to their feet with jerky movements, and then lined up in rank and file. The puppeteer twirled the control like a virtuoso, skillfully pulling its strings. Accompanied by a howling singsong, legions of zombies began stomping in a robotlike dance during which they were thrown back and forth by the strings or forced to make jolting leaps and pirouettes. I saw Felicity twitch her head up and down mechanically to the rhythm of the music, and Bluebeard attempt to imitate ballet poses, despite his various disfigurements, with grotesque effect. Despite their swinging, dancing movements and the furious tempo, their faces revealed their repugnance at and protest of their forced resurrection.
But Mendel had worked himself into an unrestrained frenzy, pulling at the control like a madman, back and forth, up and down, and he himself began to dance a wild jig. The army of dead Felidae obeyed his cruel commands, exceeding themselves in their daring contortions and ecstatic stomping.
"And up, up, up, up!" the colossus sang like a lunatic. "Plant hybrid experiments! Plant hybrid experiments! More hybrid experiments! The essence of the matter is hidden in the pea! Plant hybrid experiments! Plant hybrid experiments! …"
While he repeated and repeated this like a crazy parrot and continued his perverse dance, he grew larger and larger until he was the size of an apartment building. The undead, however, could no longer endure the strain of the wild dance and gradually fell apart into pieces. Detached limbs, decomposing heads, indefinable organs flew around in an endless explosion that slowly thickened into a stinking black cloud, from the middle of which Gregor Johann Mendel, a crazy grin on his face, rose like a hurricane …
When I opened my eyes, Mendel stood in front of me with an odd smile. I was about to scream when I recognized the man before me. It was not the dancing colossus, but Gustav. He kneeled down beside me on the floor and caressed me softly. My whole body was shaking as badly as if I had spent all that time in a freezer.
Darkness had fallen. Galelike winds whistled around the house. The window shutters, whose latches had all fallen off, slammed uncontrollably against the outside walls making a frightening racket. Gustav had lit four candles, and their flickering light added to the spooky atmosphere. He briefly vanished from the room and returned a few minutes later with a portable television in one hand, a cot in the other. That was when I knew what day it was. It was time for that sacred event of the week, Gustav's Saturday late-night movie. All the horrible events of the past few days, and particularly of the present day, had robbed me of my sense of time.
Gustav came and went again and again, lugging blankets, diverse cushions, and his Saturday evening ice cream sundae, the last quarter of which I was allowed to lick up all in keeping with time-honored tradition. Before departing for dreamland in the middle of the film he wanted me to take part with him in what had become a cherished, if not compulsive, ritual over the years. Since I, however, had just come from dreamland, I didn't feel much like spending the evening in the time-honored way. Nevertheless, I obliged him until he conked out in the middle of Rebecca, which I had already seen more times than I cared to count. Then I turned my back on that flickering blue screen and snuck quietly out of the room to do what I always do when I want to clear my head and urgently need diversion from stress: rat hunting!10
And now a few words of enlightenment for animal rights advocates: for many, the sight of my kind with one of these plague bags, excuse me, with one of these rodents between our teeth is a heartrending sight. They pity these plague sacks, excuse me, rodents, lamenting the cruel creed of kill or be killed. As if that weren't enough, some even keep these plague bags, excuse me, rodents as house pets. You can't reproach these people, for how are they supposed to know what megalomaniacs their "house companions" really are? But once you know the facts, it's obvious that rats are out for world supremacy! And there are more and more signs that suggest they will reach this goal in the near future. Bias? Grotesque exaggeration? Paranoid fantasies that are to be expected of my kind? Well, here are some sober statistics: it takes only a hundred rats to devour one and a half tons of grain annually. Damages caused by rats worldwide are estimated at over fifty billion dollars annually. Some more figures? At present, about one hundred and twenty million rats make their home in West Germany. There are ten rats for every inhabitant of New York City; that means there are ninety million rats for the nine million inhabitants of that city alone. I would like to spare myself a lecture
