Макс Фрай - The Stranger

In any case, I received an exhaustive answer to my question, and a half hour later I was home. In Cell No. 5-Ow-Nox, that is. I sat sprawled out in a soft arrestee’s chair. I was trying to digest the information I had received. Naturally, you couldn’t get around the requisite crazy Magician—that was as clear as day. Maxlilgl Annox, Grand Magician of the Order of the Sepulchral Dog, and one of the fiercest opponents of the reform, served a prison term in Xolomi during the height of the Troubled Times. According to Juffin, the combined efforts of a dozen of the best practitioners of the Order of the Seven-Leaf Clover were needed to imprison his person, remarkable in all respects. At the same time, even the Grand Magicians of other Orders, who had long ago lost any capacity for fear, trembled before him.

He wasn’t such a madman, though, this head of the Order of the Sepulchral Dog. Of course, he had traveled a strange and winding road. But if you believed the historical chronicles, which I devoured by the dozens in my spare time, you’d discover that few of the Grand Magicians were guilty of banality and lack of imagination in their chosen paths.

And so, Mister Annox was deeply preoccupied with the problem of life after death. Not only there, where I was born, but here in the World, as well, no one really knows the answer to the question of what awaits us after death. There are myriad hypotheses—murky, frightening, and seductive—but not a single one of them has much value for someone who isn’t inclined to take a stranger’s word on faith alone.

Of course, the interest in immortality wasn’t solely theoretical for the prisoner of Cell No. 5-Ow-Nox. Those Magicians of yore, one must realize, were serious fellows and didn’t waste their precious time.

As far as I could understand, Sir Annox expended unimaginable effort trying to continue ordinary earthly existence, even after death, in the human body so dear to his heart. In simple terms, he wanted to be resurrected. I didn’t doubt that this old geezer had discovered a sneaky way of returning to the land of the living. But then he died. In this very Cell No. 5-Ow-Nox.

The victors never meant to kill him. It seems they very reluctantly killed their enemies, supposing that every death was an irreversible event. And the Order of the Seven-Leaf Clover maintains the belief that an irreversible event should occur as seldom as possible. This so that the World can become stronger—or something like that . . . I hadn’t yet had time to figure out all the fine points of the local eschatology.

Nevertheless, the Grand Magician Maxlilgl Annox had died. It wasn’t a suicide in the ordinary sense of the word; I think this death was some sort of “laboratory experiment” essential to his research.

The fact that the walls of Xolomi were the most impenetrable barrier for magic of any degree did not infuse me with optimism. On the contrary, it forced me to think that the posthumous existence of Sir Annox was limited to the walls of his cell. It was evident that proximity to the dead Magician didn’t have a beneficial effect on his latter-day cellmates. Being condemned to life in this cell was a kind of death sentence. That was no good, I decided. Unjust. In this sense, prisoners are far more vulnerable than ordinary citizens. They can’t change their place of domicile, even when they feel it is urgent to do so. I wouldn’t want to be in their place . . . but, in fact, I already was.

I whiled away the night reading the next volume of Manga Melifaro’s Encyclopedia, which I was able to find, to my delight, in the prison library. Nothing supernatural happened, except that I again felt someone’s attentive eyes prickling me. They were even more ticklish this night than they had been the night before. Several times I heard a quiet, dry coughing, which seemed more like an auditory hallucination than the real thing.

Toward morning I got another strange sensation—I felt as if my body hardened like the shell of a nut. So much so that the tickling, to which I was already accustomed, felt not like something touching my skin, but like a slight trembling of the air around me. This wasn’t very pleasant, but I felt that the invisible being who monitored my every move all night long was even less pleased. His displeasure translated itself in part to me. Soon I would start berating myself for not letting the possessor of the powerful gaze tickle me to his heart’s content. What spiritual callousness and disrespect for a stranger’s desires, I would say to myself in reproach!

I couldn’t explain these events with any originality. Maybe I’m just imagining it? Or maybe Juffin put a protective spell on me, without my knowing it? He very well could have. And what if the true explanation was that I was a creature from another World—almost like a space alien?

I was so tired from all these conjectures that I went to sleep before dawn. I wonder how poor Lonli-Lokli is spending his time, I thought when I was dozing off. He’s probably bored. And hungry. What a jam he’s in!

But I had no opportunity to be bored. I had no opportunity to sleep, either. I woke up at noon from the familiar tickling sensation. I was amazed. Was this creature, whoever he might be, really able to operate during the day? On the other hand, why not? All of the most terrible things I had witnessed during my sojourn in Echo had happened in broad daylight. It’s possible that assuming nightmares lie in wait for us only at night is the most foolish of superstitions, born in that long-distant past when our forebears finally lost the ability to see in the dark.

I washed myself, drank a mug of kamra, and began to go over things in my mind. My predecessors in the cell had died only at night. A coincidence? Or was the reason much simpler—they died at night because they slept at night, like all normal people? And because of me the local ghouls had had to change their schedule? Questions, questions, and no answers.

But what unnerved me most of all was my own equanimity. For some reason, I was still not afraid of anything. Not of what had already happened, not of what, theoretically, could happen still. Somehow I had become certain that nothing bad would ever happen to me. Not here, nor in any other place. Never. Bravery verging on lunacy. Until recently I had never suffered from such a syndrome. Maybe the secret of my courage was the trick up my sleeve—or at the end of my fingertips: the well-concealed Sir Lonli-Lokli. But maybe the person whose identity I was interested in discovering derived some advantage from dealing with a myopic daredevil? And he was boosting my mood, unbeknown to me?

For whatever reason, I didn’t fall asleep again that day. Until twilight, I kept pouring myself mugs of kamra, and I read my beloved Encyclopedia , which made me smarter with every line.

Then I came to understand that events were unfolding precisely in the tradition of fairy tales. The first and second nights I was just teased mildly. Predictably, the real horror was postponed until the “fateful” third night.

When dusk set in, I was overcome by a heavy somnolence. This was more than strange, since I usually experience an excess of liveliness and energy at that time, regardless of how I spent the day.

Now, though, I had to stave off sleep, and I didn’t manage very well. I tried to spook myself by summoning up the lurid horrors that lay in wait for me on the far side of my closed eyelids. No use. Even thinking about the unprecedented shame that would cover me if I failed didn’t work. Melifaro’s stinging remarks, Juffin’s consoling gestures, and (the apotheosis) Lady Melamori’s contemptuously pursed lips. Even that didn’t help. A blissful drowsiness enveloped me like a downy pillow, the weapon of choice of a gentle strangler. I was just one wink away from the land of nod.