“In return you will let my daughter, my grandson Sebastian, and my assistant Karl Wagner walk free and live in peace forevermore. Promise!”
“I promise.”
Johann smiled. He really was Tonio’s son, a true magician. The greatest magician in the world.
And his final trick would be his best one yet.
With a sudden movement, Johann yanked the chain from his neck and handed the globe to the devil. The silver ball looked like a tiny pearl in the palm of the huge paw. Still, the beast managed to undo the two halves of the globe and take a look inside.
The halves were empty.
And realization dawned in the eyes of the beast.
“This world shall be yours,” repeated Johann. “And I shall be yours until the end of this world.”
Then he spun around and leaped into the flames.
“Nooooo!” roared the beast. “Stay with me! The two of us will be the rulers of the world! What have you done?”
Seething with rage, hatred, and disappointment, the devil clenched his talon around the small globe, the tiny silver world Johann had just handed him, then hurled the squashed lump against the wall.
You shall be mine until the end of this world.
And the devil roared as he realized that Faust had deceived him once more.
A loud, angry voice penetrated Karl’s innermost consciousness.
It drilled its way through his ear canals and screamed through his head, causing him to wake up. Or was he only dreaming? The sulfurous fumes had made him lose his senses, just like they had with Greta and little Sebastian, who were lying next to him on the cave’s floor, unconscious or perhaps dead. So who was screaming? It must have been a dream, a nightmare. Karl lifted his head. At the other end of the cave he saw the doctor disappearing into the glowing earth. For an instant Karl thought Faust was waving in farewell.
Karl squinted. Flames were lapping up from cracks, painting the cave in an otherworldly light. An enormous, hairy monster with horns was standing in front of the flaming hole into which the doctor had vanished. The beast roared, screeched, ranted, raved, and snorted. A hellstorm swirled through the cave, so hot that Karl thought his hair would catch on fire.
Hell! he thought. This is hell. The pact is coming to an end.
In that moment Karl knew that this was no dream. He knew the doctor had just left him forever. But it was strange: even though Faust was no longer there, the love for him remained, and Karl was no longer afraid. He felt the love like a warm, glowing gem in his heart. A smile spread on his face.
This is the true philosopher’s stone.
The love filled him completely, and Karl knew: no matter how much the beast ranted and raved in this cave, against this force, against the power of love, even the devil was powerless.
Johann was no more—he had gone to hell right before Karl’s eyes—and yet he would always be with Karl.
This thought helped Karl to stay sane.
What also helped was that he lost consciousness again.
Johann was falling.
He knew that his fall was already taking much longer than the laws of nature permitted. But he also knew that the laws of nature didn’t apply to this world. He was surrounded by blazing flames licking at his clothes. Strangely, they were not hot but cold, as if he was tumbling through space. Johann fell, and yet he was weightless, a down feather drifting in the wind, and for the first time in his life he felt something that had been entirely foreign to him until then.
Peace.
No restless pondering and searching, no urge, no thunderstorm of thoughts.
He simply was.
Until just a few moments ago, his thoughts had been spinning. Johann knew the devil couldn’t be vanquished. But he could be cheated. Greed blinded the devil, and Leonardo had known it, too. Back in the underground passages below Nuremberg, Johann had also managed to trick the devil, and now he’d done it again.
For the last time.
With a simple sleight of hand—a trick Tonio himself had taught Johann.
With words and gestures Johann had managed to distract the beast for one fleeting moment. Instead of placing the formula on the tissue paper back inside the globe, he had slipped it into the pocket of his trousers. Now, as he fell, he pulled out the paper and let it go. It flared up, turned to ashes, disintegrated, and was gone.
My final magic trick, thought Johann.
The secret of the igró pir would remain secret—at least until someone else set about the task of creating a deadly weapon for mankind. Johann knew the day would come. He himself had chosen a different weapon in his battle against the devil, a weapon that was just as deadly as fire.
Words.
This world shall be mine, and you shall be mine until the end of this world.
Tonio had uttered those words as Johann handed him the globe. And in the moment that the devil destroyed the globe in anger, Johann had been free.
The end of this world.
The devil was bound by his promise, decreed by a law as old as the world itself. Johann laughed, though no sound came out of his mouth. Greta, Karl, and little Sebastian—his grandson—they would live! Perfect happiness flooded through him.
He remembered playing in the hay with Greta’s mother as a child, how he performed his first magic tricks for Margarethe, the prefect’s daughter; he thought of their first kiss and their secret hours together as they had explored and tasted each other’s bodies for the first time. His love for Margarethe, the passion he had felt for exotic performer Salome as a young man, and most of all his love for Greta had carried Johann through life in spite of the unhappy pact with Tonio.
He had laden guilt upon himself and created something good; he had loved and he had sinned, made mistakes and regretted them—in short, he had been human.
Man
