Antal Szerb: The Pendragon Legend

“Please continue. Tell me what happened to the Earl,” I repeated, in my monomaniac refrain.

“Yes, yes, the Earl. I thought, this is no good; he can see Morvin’s here, he’ll start to get suspicious. He was sitting in a chair, with his head in his hands, like this … I took out my revolver, the tiny one I bought in Paris … it’s so pretty, with white enamel … I thought I’d stand behind him and shoot him in the head, at the nape of the neck, where the skull is soft … Do you know, I once saw a man whose head had been shattered into pieces by a bullet. It was in Morocco … how warm it was there … and those women with their veils … We’ll go to Morocco, won’t we? But how can we ever get away from here?”

Oh, the contradictions of feeling! To hold in your arms someone you yearn to embrace, whose body draws you like a magnet, and yet your trembling consciousness utterly abhors …

“What happened to the Earl?” I shouted at her.

“Don’t shout, please; please, don’t shout. I don’t know what happened to him … That man was standing there. He took my revolver away. I couldn’t move. He picked me up like a sack and threw me in a room … oh, such a room … I had no idea there were so many rooms in this little house, and so cold … Are you quite sure that man isn’t the Earl of Gwynedd?”

“I’m not sure of it. How can we be sure of anything anymore? He may well be the Earl of Gwynedd. There have been so many of them. Eighteen. It could be any one of them. But you … Why do you think it was him?”

“His face. It was the same face. And yet different. As if it had been turned inside out.”

She was seized by a renewed fit of ever more violent shivering and outbursts of sobbing. She was in a very bad way. To bring her round I had to rub her vigorously, as one does with people rescued from drowning. After that she fell asleep.

The bustle beyond the walls started up again, even noisier than before, and the smell of incense from the burner filled the room, covering everything like a fog. Outside the door, the door I couldn’t see, the one Eileen had come through … was someone standing there, watching us? My terror mounted. I was feverish again. She whimpered and snuggled closer to me. We were like two animals in mortal danger, cowering together. Rather this guilty, wicked woman, who was at least human, than that presence beyond the wall …

Again I fell asleep.

When I woke, she was awake too. Her cloak had fallen open. On the black bedcover her white body lay in all its surreal and terrible beauty.

“Eileen … ”

Her beauty enveloped me, like a cloud. The little seaport, at the end of the world …

She put her arms around my neck and kissed me.

I find the next bit difficult to relate. She was lying there in front of me. I threw myself on top of her and began to kiss her body, all over, with growing ecstasy and a passion I had never known in all my coldly conventional life.

“Oh, how wonderfully warm, how wonderfully warm your mouth is,” she murmured. In the closeness of our embrace she was purring contentedly, like a kitten.

Had I nothing else to be thinking of? Was my ardour not chilled by my terror, the horrors I had lived through, or the danger hovering at the door? No. Nothing occupied me beyond the moment. I was at the end of the world, beyond my own life, just thirty seconds before everything imploded, light years away from all that was rational. Nothing remained but the desire of one body for another. In such a spiritual earthquake as this the deepest and most real layers of one’s being are hurled to the surface. Perhaps I was trying to make up for every second I had failed to devote to my body? As a lover I had always been as silent as a butterfly, but now I was shouting out and gasping for breath. In fact it was no longer ‘I’, but a stream of pure life, utterly impersonal, cut off from its source and racing into extinction.

Suddenly, as if in response to some command, we broke apart. We quickly wiped our hands over our necks and faces, and got up.

The unseen door opened and we proceeded out, with slow, ritual steps.

Everything I did subsequently was done as if under orders. I never hesitated for a moment. I understood everything, how everything was connected; it was as if someone had revealed everything to me by some unknown, purely internal process.

I knew that she would be the sacrifice, on the sacred site I had prepared myself.

I knew too that she had to die in this particular way, her body soiled by lustful kisses, in mortal sin, for the sacrifice to be pleasing to Satan.

The strange thing is that I was not in the least afraid. I stood above and beyond everything human. My feelings were numb: they no longer existed. I simply went about my business. Later, I was glad it had happened this way. Who knows what trauma, what terrible damage to the nervous system, the stress of such moments might otherwise have caused?

We made our way through several empty rooms, all humming with some indefinable energy and life, as though a large furnace blazed nearby. And yet the rooms were empty, and nothing moved in them. There was dense smoke, and we went through a fog, as if over a nocturnal lake.

Then I stumbled on something, and glanced down. A man lay at my feet. He was dead, and his head was facing backwards. I knew it was James Morvin. I stepped over him and went on.

We arrived in the pentagonal room. Everything was just as I had arranged it, or appeared to have arranged it, in my dream: the concentric circles, the triangle containing the three smaller circles, the incense burner, the candlesticks, and the four symbolic objects — the bat, the cat, the goat’s head and the skull.

We stopped.

The wall opposite us opened and the apparition stepped through. He wore a black robe and a black fur hat, and carried a curiously-shaped sword in his hand. His face was as devoid of expression as a man’s could be.

Eileen continued towards him, her head bowed and her arms hanging by her sides. I leant against a column, incapable of further movement.

The gnome was once again leaping, flickering and sizzling before my eyes. At times his head was as high as the ceiling; at times he took the form of a dog. More and more his face came to resemble my own.

Someone had halted between the two black candelabra and spread her arms out wide: Eileen. Her hands touched the flames on either side, but she did not flinch. Could she not feel them?

The magus raised his curious-looking sword in the air. The gnome was trying, grotesquely and painfully, to balance himself over the incense-burner. Without a sound, the woman went down. The gnome scooped up the flowing blood in his hands and poured it, again and again, onto the marble slab.

The phantom stood above the slab … his arms wide, the sword in one hand …

The words of Satanic invocation … barbaric, incomprehensible words, as the sword drew figures in the air …

The smoke became ever more dense. I could barely make out what was happening on the other side of the room. The words of conjuration reverberated in my ears, like the howling of wolves at prey.

Then a terrible scream, and the cry of a wounded animal beneath the pitiless stars.

The phantom flung the sword away and dashed out through the opening in the wall.

In that instant my nightmare, or vision — I have no idea what to call it — ended. I was suddenly as sober and sane as a person is often said to be when his life is on the brink.

It came to me in a flash that the Devil-conjuror must have seen some terrible sight that drained his courage, and made him throw down his sword and fly. He was fleeing from the horror he had called up within himself.

Now it was my turn to flee.

I darted out through the gap the apparition had used. In a trice I was in the open air, with the building behind me.