The flame soon died down. There was a tiny glowing ember amongst the ashes. A thin column of smoke rose up.
Quickly I leant over the bowl and breathed deeply. The smoke tasted even more acrid than before as I felt it spread down to my chest. Disgusting! Unbearable! Will it be possible for me on my own, without outside help, to cross the threshold of suffocation and reach the other side? Should I call Jane? Ask her to hold my head fast over the bowl, unwavering as I suffocate? The red-capped “Lipotin” did it with a grip of iron, but Jane?! Calling on all my reserves of strength and determination, I clenched my teeth against the upsurge of nausea ... “Do or Die!” – the watchword of my ancestors suddenly came back to me, the motto of the Dees!
Then the terrible shudders of the death throes. Scraps of thought course through my veins: it is like drowning in shallow water. – Do or die! – Suicide in a wash-basin ... only hysterical women can manage that, I once heard it said. Well done, hysterical women, then! I am only a man and it seemed damned difficult to me. Damned difficult ... aah! Help! Save me! ... There he is ... a long way off ... the red-capped monk, gigantic ... the Master of Initiation ... he doesn’t look at all like Lipotin ... he is raising his hand, his left hand ... he is going behind me ... all at once I plunge down into the realm of the dead.
When I staggered to my feet, the back of my head ringing with pain, the poison seeming to penetrate every fibre of my body, all that was left in the stinking bowl was ashes. I had to collect my scattered wits before I remembered what the purpose of it all was: I grabbed the coal scrying glass and stared at its polished surface. A feeling of calm came over me: for the second time, and all on my own, I had passed through the portals of death.
Then I saw myself sitting in a car going backwards, the boot first then the bonnet and the radiator, racing in ghostly silence along the river. On either side of me sat Jane and Assja Shotokalungin. Both were looking straight ahead; not an eyelid, not a muscle in their faces moved.
The ruins of Elsbethstein flew by. “The fountain of life,” I said to myself. Clouds of fine white steam rose from the courtyard. On top of the high tower stood the mad old gardener, waving at us. He waved his arm violently in a north-westerly direction and then pointed at himself, as if to say: First of all over there and then ... back to me.
“Damn,” whispered a voice inside me, “the old man doesn’t know I have returned to my true self, Doctor John Dee.” But if that’s the case, it occurred to me, how is it that Princess Assja Shotokalungin is sitting here beside me? I glanced at her. Next to me was – the dark bronze idol of the Thracian cult of Isaïs, holding the mirror and the spear and bending towards me, naked – naked and in an attitude that set all my senses on fire. My reason desperately tried to reassert its control: once more the Cat Goddess is trying to ensnare me in the tentacles of lust. Must I succumb, whether I want to or not? Am I no longer master of my own body? What is it that compels my mind’s eye to keep on seeing the Princess as she never appeared to me in the flesh. I refuse! I refuse! I refuse to share the fate of my cousin, John Roger.
The youthful goddess with the firm, glistening skin threw me an indescribable glance. It combined the unapproachable majesty of a goddess with the seductive accessibility of a woman: a slight, sensual tautening of the breasts, a voluptuous stretching of the limbs, profound contempt in her enigmatic expression, ruin glinting from the slits of her eyes, the stench of panther ...
The limousine has long since acquired a sharp-edged keel and dived down through a froth of green waves. We speed along through the green water, impossible to say how deep below us, how high above us it stretches, impossible to tell which way is up, which down.
Now there is nothing left of the green waters except a small circular lake which I am looking back at with great concentration. Like a tunnel entrance it gradually reduces in size amidst the deepest darkness.
Then I have the feeling of rising to the surface; of rising to the surface of a deep well-shaft surrounded by a parapet of white stone with immeasurable depths yawning below me. Above the edge of the well-shaft drifts the nebulous form of the bronze Thracian Isaïs. With a malevolent smile she points downwards with the broken-off spearhead. She holds the mirror aloft as she appears to sink. It is as if the tiny, circular green lake is gleaming at the bottom of the well.
Is it the Goddess herself who drew me here? Here? Where am I?
I have not fully formulated the question when a shock cuts through me. There, right in front of me in the semi-darkness – – Jane, my wife! I can see her troubled gaze. She is wearing a dress from the time of Queen Elizabeth and I know that she is the wife of John Dee – the John Dee who I am myself. It is the awesome well in the cellar of my host, Doctor Hajek, in Prague and she is about to throw herself into it. It is the night following the command of the Green Angel and I, with breaking heart but obedient to my oath, have had to hand over my wife Jane, my only love, to Edward Kelley, my blood brother, that he should enjoy – o what torment! – the same conjugal rights. It has
