Just how very much he himself wished that I would enter upon his ghastly inheritance and write his unfinished book to the end became clearer to me as 1 was hurrying along the zigzag routes of the garden walls to his home in the roaring snowstorm. I had to exert myself not to be stopped by the snow. Yet I experienced the inclemency and my exertions as if I were in a bell jar, for I had only one thought: getting access to the central control station of evil and confronting the master of manipulation.
When I finally arrived at his house, my coat had donned a massive armor of ice, and I resembled a hedgehog that had just stepped out of a deep freeze. Instead of hair, razor-sharp spines of ice grew from my skin, and even my whiskers were frozen stiff, making me afraid that they would shatter at the slightest vibration. If I had been out there any longer you could hardly have told me apart from Joker. And yet, despite everything, the outer cold could not compete with the inner cold.
I circled the house once and noticed there were no lights on anywhere. It was highly unlikely that the master of the house had gone to bed so early on Christmas Eve. Either he had left town or he was frolicking right now at some wild Christmas party. The Emperor of the Dead, however, was in there: that was as certain as the fact that Claudandus was controlling our destinies. Indeed, perhaps he was even waiting for me, just as people would be waiting all night long for a visit from Santa Claus.
Oddly enough, I wasn't at all afraid, because I knew wiseass Francis was the only chance he had to see that his life's work would be completed one distant day. Whatever the reason might be, he thought his baby was in good hands with me. But could I really allow myself to be so confident?
I paused to think in front of that ultra-stylish pet passageway. Yes, I had added one and one, and I had come up, satisfactorily enough, with two. This fellow, however, was nuttier than a squirrel's breakfast, and I didn't doubt that his arithmetic would probably follow entirely different laws. In fact, it was probable that he wasn't even able to do math anymore. This thought made me shake my head, and I smiled bitterly to myself. No, the Prophet wasn't insane at all, and I had to admit that his great dream was not without a certain logic. Logic! Once again, that hateful word. The word that from time immemorial had accompanied me and shaped my life like a fetish, had, from the way things looked, shaped his life as well. The Prophet had had an insane but logical reason for all his murdering—to the extent that a murderer would have a reason to kill at all. But anyway, no matter what the reasons, after this night, one way or another, the murders would end.
I slipped through the passageway and entered the dark house. It was unlikely that he was lying in wait for me somewhere and at the right opportunity would pounce on me. As mentioned, he was in the habit of speaking in words laden with significance before taking neck measurements. He was probably asleep right now and would only gradually notice my presence. Nevertheless, I was gripped with a fearful excitement, and my heart began to pound wildly, like a jackhammer.
Softly, I padded through the hallway and entered the study through the half-opened door. Gregor Johann Mendel looked down on me grimly from a thicket of his pea plants. He seemed peeved because I had gotten to the bottom of his mystery. Through the glass wall I saw that the snowstorm had now come to acquire all the elements necessary for it to become immortalized in a kitschy winter landscape painting, just right for Gustav's taste. A gale raged like an unleashed demon over the gardens with an incessant, eerie whistling, swept away gigantic snowdrifts in seconds only to erect them anew a moment later elsewhere, and swirled snowflakes around so that their flickering apparition resembled a distorted television image.
I sprang up on the desk and with both paws pressed the operating switch of the computer to "on." The processing unit began its familiar quiet drone. Then, like will-o'-the-wisps over a bewitched cemetery, brightly glowing status information on the system and the drives appeared against the impenetrable black backdrop of the monitor. After the processing unit had booted itself up with its electronic memory, the cursor blinked impatiently as if it wanted to know what the next step was. I wanted to know that myself, and posed the crucial question. What code name would 1 give a file that contained the best-kept secrets in the district and was to be accessible only to myself? Perhaps a name that would sum up the diabolical reason for the file itself, that would remind me every time I typed it of the reason for my revenge, and that nobody in my surroundings would associate with me.
My first try
