Assja visits me daily. Now that memory has returned I have to acknowledge that fact. She no longer comes through the door; she simply appears.
Usually she sits on the chair at my desk and – my God, how pointless it is to try to conceal the truth from myself – she always comes in the same dress of black and silver; it has a flowing, wavy design – the Chinese symbol of eternity – which is the same as the decoration on the Russian Tula-ware box.
My eyes are attracted towards the dress of the dead Princess, all the time, and my lustful gaze seems to wear it away so that it has gradually become older and more and more transparent. It sits more and more loosely on her body, the weave becoming sketchier, gradually falling to pieces, until now the Princess – or rather the Thracian Goddess Isaïs – is gleaming in all her naked beauty on the chair before me.
All the time I have concentrated my gaze on the decay of her dress. At least that is what I tell myself. Perhaps I wished it away! Or am I not deceiving myself after all? It could be so, for I know that not a word of passion has been spoken.
Have we talked to each other at all? No! What could I have said in the face of this slow uncovering of the Princess?!
And I call on thee, thou awful, double-faced guardian of my dreams, Baphomet, be thou my witness before God: did impure desire fill my thoughts or was it not rather a time of amazement, of hate-filled curiosity, and of the will to do battle? Have I ceased to call upon Jane, my saint, for aid against the emissary of Black Isaïs, the companion of Bartlett Greene, the destroyer of John Roger and of my own blood-line?
But the more fervently I called upon Jane, the more swiftly, the more surely did Assja come, triumphant, glowing in the beauty of her golden-brown flesh. She came – – she still comes ...
Did Lipotin not prophesy this? Prophesy that the struggle was only just beginning?
I am prepared; I am armed. But I do not know when the battle began. It began imperceptibly at a time that I have now forgotten. I do not know the manner of the struggle nor how it is to be won. The first attack that I must make fills me with apprehension, for I am afraid of stabbing the empty air and losing my balance. I am filled with dread at the thought of the days spent sitting opposite each other in silence, locked in a psychokinetic struggle. .
I am filled with dread. I sense that at any moment the Princess can materialise again.
Again the jangle of a bell. I listen; no, it is not a ringing in my ear as I imagined. It is the front door bell, an ordinary front door bell – and yet I still feel dread seeping through my veins. But the ringing drags me from my chair; I press the buzzer to let the door open, hurry to the window and look down: in the street two silly boys dash away when they realise they have been seen.
Nothing – and yet the dread does not loosen its grip on me.
The front door is open, I remind myself and feel uneasy at the thought that I am open to the world, that any foolish, prying busybody can walk straight into my carefully guarded life and secrets. I am about to go down and shut the door for good when I hear footsteps on the stairs, familiar footsteps, swift, smooth and elastic.
Lipotin appears!
He greets me with an ironic twinkle beneath the heavy drooping eyelids.
We exchange a casual greeting, as if we had last seen each other the previous day. He stands on the threshold of my study, sniffing at the air like a fox who finds strange tracks outside the entrance to his den.
I say nothing; I for my part am examining him.
He seems changed, though it is difficult to say exactly in what way. It is almost as if he were not himself, but his own double: there is something insubstantial, shadowy and strangely monotonous about all his utterances. Are we perhaps both dead? is the odd thought that comes to me. Who knows exactly what the social conventions amongst the dead are!? Round his neck is a red scarf that I have never seen him wearing before.
He turns his head towards me and whispers in a hoarse voice:
“It is approaching. This is almost like John Dee’s kitchen.”
My blood runs cold at this unearthly voice; it has the discordant whistling of someone with cancer articulating laboriously through a tube in his throat. Lipotin repeats with mocking self-satisfaction:
“It is approaching.”
I ignore it. Don’t understand it. I am spellbound by horror and without thinking, without realising what I am saying before I hear my own words outside me, I gasp:
“Lipotin, you are a ghost.”
He looks up sharply; his eyes glitter with a greenish light. He wheezes:
“My dear Sir, as far as I can see, you are the ghost. I still belong to the same level of reality that pertains to my being. What is understood by “ghost” is usually some person – or part of a person! – returning from the dead. Every living person is a being who by the act of birth has returned to the earth, ergo every living person is a ghost. Is that not so? Nothing
