There, in the gloom of another alley—and the ears I no longer have, at this memory, quiver under my worn cap—a giant loomed up before us, a horrible gray creature with a dull expression, his body sheathed in bronze verdigris, leaning on a gnarled and knobby stick of white wood. The apparition gave off an intense odor of sandalwood. Mortal horror magically coalesced in that being that confronted me, yet I could not take my eyes off the nebulous globe that sat atop his shoulders, and in it discerned, barely, the rapacious face of an Egyptian ibis, and behind that face, more faces, incubi of my imagination and my memory. The outlines of the ghost, in the darkness of that alley, dilated, contracted, as in a slow, nonliving respiration … And—oh, horror!—instead of feet, I saw, as I stared at him, on the snow two shapeless stumps whose flesh, gray and bloodless, was rolled up, as if in concentric swellings.
My voracious memories…
“The golem!” Dee cried, raising both arms to heaven. His black coat with broad sleeves fell to the ground, as if to create a cingulum, an umbilical cord between the aerial position of the hands and the surface, or the depths, of the earth. “Jezebel, Malkuth, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes!” he said. And suddenly the golem dissolved like a sand castle struck by a gust of wind. We were blinded by the particles of its clay body, which tore through the air like atoms, until finally at our feet was a little pile of ashes. Dee bent down, searched in the ashes with his bony fingers, and drew out a scroll, which he hid in his bosom.
From the shadows then rose an old rabbi, with a greasy hat that greatly resembled my cap. “Dr. Dee, I presume,” he said.
“Here Comes Everybody,” Dee replied humbly. “Rabbi Allevi, what a pleasant surprise…”
The man said, “Did you happen to see a creature roaming these parts?”
“A creature?” Dee said, feigning amazement. “What sort of creature?”
“Come off it, Dee,” Rabbi Allevi said. “It was my golem.”
“Your golem? I know nothing about a golem.”
“Take care, Dr. Dee!” Rabbi Allevi said, livid. “You’re playing a dangerous game, you’re out of your league.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Rabbi Allevi,” said Dee. “We’re here to make a few ounces of gold for the emperor. We’re not a couple of cheap necromancers.”
“Give me back the scroll, at least,” Rabbi Allevi begged.
“What scroll?” Dee asked, with diabolical ingenuousness.
“Curse you, Dr. Dee,” said the rabbi. “And verily I say unto thee, thou shalt not see the dawn of the new century.” And he went off into the night, murmuring strange words without consonants. Oh, Language Diabolical and Holy.
Dee was huddled against the damp wall of the alley, his face ashen, his hair bristling on his head. “I know Rabbi Allevi,” he said. “I will die on August 5, 1608, of the Gregorian calendar. So now, Kelley, you must help me to carry out my plan. You are the one who will have to bring it to fulfillment. Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy. Remember,” he said. But I would remember in any case, and William with me. And against me.
He said no more. The pale fog that rubs its back against the panes, the yellow smoke that rubs its back against the panes, licked with its tongue the street corners. We were now in another alley; whitish vapors came from the grilles at ground level, and through them you could glimpse squalid dens with tilting walls, defined by gradations of misty gray. I saw, as he came groping down a stairway (the steps oddly orthogonal), the figure of an old man in a worn frock coat and a top hat. And Dee saw him. “Caligari!” he exclaimed. “He’s here, too, in the house of Madame Sosostris, the famous clairvoyante! We have to get moving.”
Quickening our steps, we arrived at the door of a hovel in a poorly lit alley, sinister and Semitic.
We knocked, and the door opened as if by magic. We entered a spacious room: there were seven-branched candelabra, tetragrams in relief, Stars of David like monstrances. Old violins, the color of the veneer on certain old paintings, were piled in the entrance on a refectory table of anamorphic irregularity. A great crocodile hung, mummified, from the ceiling, swaying slightly in the dim glow of a single torch, or of many, or of none. In the rear, before a kind of curtain or canopy under which stood a tabernacle, kneeling in prayer, ceaselessly and blasphemously murmuring the seventy-two names of God, was an old man. I knew, by a sudden stroke of nous, that this was Heinrich Khunrath.
“Come to the point, Dee,” he said, turning and breaking off his prayer. “What do you want?” He resembled a stuffed armadillo, an ageless iguana.
“Khunrath,” Dee said, “the third encounter did not take place.”
Khunrath exploded in a horrible curse: “Lapis exillis! Now what?”
“Khunrath,” Dee said, “you could throw out some bait; you could put me in touch with the German line.”
“Let me see,” Khunrath said. “I could ask Maier, who is in touch with many people at the court. But you will tell me the secret of Virgin’s Milk, the Most Secret Oven of the Philosophers.”
Dee smiled. Oh the divine smile of that Sophos! He concentrated then as if in prayer, and said in a low voice: “When you wish to translate into water or Virgin’s Milk a sublimate of Mercury, place the Thing duly pulverized over the lamina between the little weights and the goblet.
Do not cover it but see that the hot air strikes the naked matter, administer it to the fire of three coals, and keep it alive for eight solar days, then remove it and pound it well on marble until it is a fine paste. This done, put it inside a glass alembic and distill it in a Balneum Mariae over a cauldron of water set in such a way that it does not touch the water below by the space of two fingers but remains suspended in air, and at the same time light the fire beneath the Balneum. Then, and only then, though the Silver does not touch the water, finding itself in this warm and moist womb, will it change to liquid.”
“Master,” said Khunrath, sinking to his knees and kissing the bony, diaphanous hand of Dr. Dee. “Master, so I will do. And you will have what you wish. Remember these words: the Rose and the Cross. You will hear talk of them.”
Dee wrapped himself in his cloaklike coat, and only his eyes, glistening and malign, could be seen. “Come, Kelley,” he said. “This man is now ours. And you, Khunrath, keep the golem well away from us until our return to London. And then, let all Prague burn as a sole pyre.”
He started to go off. Crawling, Khunrath seized him by the hem of his coat. “One day, perhaps, a man will come to you. He will want to write about you. Be his friend.”
“Give me the Power,” Dee said with an unspeakable expression on his fleshless face, “and his fortune is assured.”
We went out. Over the Atlantic a low-pressure air mass was advancing in an easterly direction toward Russia.
“Let’s go to Moscow,” I said to him.
“No,” he said. “We’re returning to London.”
“To Moscow, to Moscow,” I murmured crazily. You knew very well, Kelley, that you would never go there. The Tower awaited you.
Back in London, Dee said: “They’re trying to reach the solution before we do. Kelley, you must write something for William … something diabolically insinuating about them.”
Belly of the demon, I did it, but William ruined the text, shifting everything from Prague to Venice. Dee flew into a rage. But the pale, shifty William felt protected by his royal concubine. And still he wasn’t satisfied. As I handed over to him, one by one, his finest sonnets, he asked me, with shameless eyes, about Her, about You, my Dark Lady. How horrible to hear your name on that mummer’s lips! (I didn’t know that he, his soul damned to duplicity and to the vicarious, was seeking her for Bacon.) “Enough,” I said to him. “I’m tired of building your glory in the shadows. Write for yourself.”
“I can’t,” he answered with the gaze of one who has seen a lemure. “He won’t let me.”
“Who? Dee?”
“No, Verulam. Don’t you know he’s now the one in charge? He’s forcing me to write works that later he’ll claim as his own. You understand, Kelley? I’m the true Bacon, and posterity will never know. Oh, parasite! How I hate that firebrand of hell!”
“Bacon’s a pig, but he has talent,” I said. “Why doesn’t he write his own stuff?”
He didn’t have the time. We realized this only years later, when Germany was invaded by the Rosy Cross madness. Then, from scattered references, certain phrases, putting two and two together, I saw that the author of the Rosicrucian manifestoes was really he. He wrote under the pseudonym of Johann Valentin Andreae!
Now, in the darkness of this cell where I languish, more clearheaded than Don Isidro Parodi, I know for whom Andreae was writing. I was told by Soapes, my companion in imprisonment, a former Portuguese Templar. Andreae
