The Green Face by Gustav Meyrink Page B

and unlocked the
heavy oak door. So vivid was the feeling that there had been
someone walking beside him that he instinctively looked round
before he entered. He climbed the stairs, which were scarcely
wider than his own chest and which, as in almost all Dutch houses, ran straight up, uninterrupted and as steep as a fireescape, from the ground floor to the attic, and went into his
bedroom. It was along, narrow room with apanelled ceiling; the
only furniture, a table and four chairs, stood in the middle; all
the rest-cupboards, washstand, chests of drawers, even the bed
- had been built into the walls which were covered in yellow
silk.

    He had a bath and went to bed.
    As he switched off the light his eye was caught by a green,
cube-shaped cardboard box on the table.
    ‘Aha, the Oracle of Delphi in papier-mache, they’ve sent it
from the Hall of Riddles’, was his thought as he subsided into
sleep.
    A while later he started out of his sleep; he thought he had
heard a strange noise, a tapping on the floor, like little sticks.
    There must be someone in the room!
    But the front door was shut, he could clearly remember
locking it.
    Cautiously he was feeling along the wall for the light switch
when something struck him a swift but gentle blow on the ann;
it felt like a small, flat length of wood. At the same time there
came a thud from the wall and a soft object rolled down over his
face.
    The next moment he was blinded by the glare of the lightbulb.
    Again he heard the tapping noise; it came from inside the
green box on the table.
    “There must be some mechanism inside that stupid cardboard
skull that has managed to set itself off, that’ll be it”, he muttered
to himself in irritation. Then he felt for the object that had rolled
over his face and had come to rest on his chest.
    It was some sheets of paper tied up in a roll. As far as he could
see with his bleary eyes it was covered with cramped and faded
writing. He threw it to the ground, turned out the light and went
back to sleep.
    ‘It must have fallen down from somewhere, or I accidentally
opened some kind of little trapdoor in the wall when I was
feeling for the switch’, were his last clear thoughts before they drifted off into a labyrinth of images at the centre of which stood
a fantastic figure, an amalgam of all that he had experienced that
day: a Zulu with a red woollen bobble-hat on his head and green
frog’s feet was holding out Count Ciechonski’s visiting card,
whilst next to him stood the skull-house from the Jodenbreetstraat, grinning all over its bony face and winking now with one
eye, now with the other.

    The last manifestation of the outside world that accompanied
Hauberrisser’s slide into the abyss of sleep was the distant wail
of a ship’s siren.

     

Baron Pfeill had intended to catch the late afternoon train for
Hilversum, where his villa, `Sans Souci’, was, and had set off
in the direction of Central Station. He had managed to fight his
way through a maze of stalls and booths, already thronged with
workers on their way home, and had almost reached the harbour
bridge when, as if at a sign from some invisible conductor, all
the bells of the hundred church towers broke out together into
an earsplitting din, telling him that it was six o’clock and he had
missed his train.
    On an impulse, he turned and went back to the old part of the
town.
    He almost felt relieved that he had missed his train because
that gave him a few hours to settle a matter that had been on his
mind ever since Hauberrisser had left him.
    He stopped outside a marvellous old baroque building of red
brick with a pattern of white shaded by the gloomy avenue of
elms in the Herengracht, looked up for a moment at the huge
sash window that took in almost the whole length and breadth
of the first floor and then tugged at the heavy bronze knob in the
middle of the door that also operated the bell.
    It was an eternity before an old