I lean my head back, making the skin on my neck taut, raise the knife to my throat ... the first rays of the morning sun strike the blade red, as if it were already dripping with my sluggish life-blood. At that moment, above the scalpel, I see a broad face grinning at me from the empty air of the half-lit room: the wall-eyed face of Bartlett Greene. He nods expectantly: “Cut! Cut! Cut your throat open. That will help. That will unite you with Jane, your wife, that other suicide. That will bring you down to us. That is as it should be.”
Greene is right; I want to join Jane. –
How friendly the blade looks, twinkling in the sunshine!
What!? Pressure on my shoulder from behind! – NO! I will not turn round; I will not look to the west. There is heat in the pressure, as if from a human hand, it fills me with a warm glow.
I do not need to turn round: before me stands Gardner, my old, long forgotten assistant, Gardner, who left me after a quarrel. Why should he suddenly appear here in the castle ... and at the very moment when I am about to turn my back on Mortlake and the whole deceiving – and deceived – world?
He is strangely apparelled, my worthy assistant. He wears a white linen gown with a gold rose embroidered over the left breast. It twinkles in the morning sun. And his face has stayed young, so young! Not at all as if twenty-five years had passed since we last saw each other.
With a friendly smile, the eternally young Gardner comes up to me:
“You are alone, John Dee? Where are your friends?”
All my woe melts into a stream of tears. I can only manage a dry croak, faint with pain and weariness:
“They have abandoned me.”
“You are right, John Dee, not to put your trust in mortal men. Everything mortal is double-tongued; it brings the doubter to despair.”
“But the immortal powers have also betrayed me!”
“You are right, John Dee; men should not trust the immortal powers, either; they feed on the prayers and sacrifices of mankind and hunger after them like ravenous wolves.”
“But I no longer know where God is.”
“That comes to all who seek Him.”
“And who have lost their way?”
“It is not you who will find the way; the way will find you. We have all lost the way at one time or another; for our task is not to make our way, but to find the jewel.”
“You find me here, lost and alone; how should I not faint with thirst, astray in the wilderness?”
“Are you alone?”
“No, you are with me!”
“I am ...” – Gardner’s figure becomes shadowy, disappears.
“So you, too, are nothing but deceit?!” – the words rattle in my throat.
From a great distance the cry is hardly audible to my ear:
“Who is it that calls me a deceiver?”
“I do!”
“Who is this I?”
“I am.”
“Who is it that would compel me to return?”
“I do.”
Once more Gardner is visible before me. He smiles at me:
“Now you have called on the One who never abandons you when you have gone astray: the Unfathomable Self. Ponder the formless being you see with your physical eye; ponder the being of primal form you see with the eye of conscience.”
“Who am I?” something groans inside me.
“Your name is recorded, though you be nameless. You have lost your sign, son of Rhodri. That is why you are alone!”
“My sign?”
“This!” – from his cloak Gardner takes the paper-knife, the lost dagger, the jewel of the Dees, Hywel Dda’s spear.
“There it is.” My assistant is mocking me, his cold smile cuts me to the heart.
“There it is, John Dee: once the most noble weapon of your ancestors, then the jealously guarded fetish of your line, then a common paper-knife for the degenerate heir, and finally a tool for black magic, frivolously employed, frivolously lost. – Idolatry! Do you understand me? A noble talisman from ancient times has sunk to an ignoble use through you, John Dee!”
Hatred, hatred glowing as hot as a lava flow erupts from me: “Give me the dagger, deceiver!”
My former assistant does not move an inch as my hand grasps at the dagger.
“Out with the dagger, thief! Thief! The last deceiver, my last enemy on earth, my ... mortal enemy.”
The words stick in my throat; I gasp for breath. I can feel my nerves tear like frayed strings. Yet my mind is clear: this is the end.
My trembling body collapses.
A gentle laugh wakes me from my faint:
“Thank God, John Dee, that now you distrust all your friends – even me. At last you have found yourself. At last I can see that you put your trust in yourself alone, that you have the strength to follow your own course.”
I sink back. I feel myself defeated in some strange way. My breathing is shallow; I murmur:
“Give me back what once was ours, my friend.”
“Take it!” says Gardner and holds the dagger out to me. Hastily I grasp at it like – like a dying man the sacrament. My hand closes on empty air. Gardner is still before me. The dagger in his hand shines in the morning light with a glow as real as the dull gleam of my own bloodless hand trembling before me in a ray of sun ... but I cannot grasp the dagger. Softly Gardner says:
“You see: your dagger is not of this world!”
“When ... where ... can I take hold of it?”
“On the other side, if you seek it there. On the other side, if you do not forget it there.”
“Help me, my friend, not ... to ... for ... get.”
Something within me screams: I do not want to die with my ancestor, John Dee! With a violent jerk I pull myself back and the next moment my study appears around me; I am once more the one I was when I looked into the coal scrying
