Surely this monstrous hybrid comes not from a mother’s womb but from an Ephialtes, an Incubus, or some other horrendous demon, as though spawned in a putrid and venomous fungus, son of Fauns and Nymphs, more devil than man.
—Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, Amsterdam, Jansson, 1665, II, pp. 279–280
That day, I wanted to stay home—I had a presentiment—but Lia told me to stop acting the prince consort and go to work. “There’s time, Pow; it won’t be born yet. I have to go out, too. Run along.”
I had almost reached my office when Signor Salon’s door opened. The old man appeared in his yellow apron. I couldn’t avoid greeting him, and he asked me to come inside. I had never seen his laboratory.
It must have been an apartment once, but Salon had had all the dividing walls demolished, and what I saw was a cave, vast, hazy. For some obscure architectural reason, this wing of the building had a mansard roof, and the light entered obliquely. I don’t know whether the glass panes were dirty or frosted, or if Salon had installed shades to keep out the direct sun, or if it was the heap of objects on all sides proclaiming a fear of spaces left empty, but the light in the cave was late dusk. The room was divided by old pharmacy shelves in which arches opened to passages, junctions, perspectives.
The dominant color was brown: the objects, the shelves, the tables, the diffuse blend of daylight and the patchy illumination from old lamps. My first impression was of having entered an instrument maker’s atelier, abandoned from the time of Stradivarius, with years of accumulated dust on the striated bellies of the lutes.
Then, as my eyes gradually adjusted, I saw that I was in a petrified zoo. A bear cub with glassy eyes climbed an artificial bough; a dazed and hieratic owl stood beside me; on the table in front of me was a weasel—or marten or skunk; I couldn’t tell. Behind it was a prehistoric animal, feline, its bones showing. It might have been a puma, a leopard, or a very big dog. Part of the skeleton had already been covered with straw and paste, and it was all supported by an iron armature.
“The Great Dane of a rich lady with a soft heart,” Salon said with a snicker, “who wants to remember it as it was in the days of their conjugal life. You see? You skin the animal, on the inside of the skin you smear arsenic soap, then you soak and bleach the bones…. Look at that shelf and you’ll see a great collection of spinal columns and rib cages. A lovely ossuary, don’t you think? You connect the bones with wire, reconstruct the skeleton, mount it on an armature. To stuff it, I use hay, papier-mâché, or plaster. Finally you fit the skin back on. I repair the damage done by death and corruption. This owl—doesn’t it seem alive to you?”
From then on, every live owl would seem dead to me, consigned by Salon to a sclerotic eternity. I regarded the face of that embalmer of animal pharaohs, his bushy eyebrows, his gray cheeks, and I could not decide whether he was a living being or a masterpiece of his own art.
The better to look at him, I took a step backward, and felt something graze my nape. I turned with a shudder and saw I had set a pendulum in motion.
A great disemboweled bird swayed, following the movement of the lance that pierced it. The weapon had entered the head, and through the open breast you could see it pass where the heart and gizzard had once been, then branch out to form an upside-down trident. One thicker prong went through the now-emptied belly and pointed toward the ground like a sword, while the two other prongs entered the feet and emerged symmetrically from the talons. The bird swung, and the three points cast their shadow on the floor, a mystic sign.
“A fine specimen of the golden eagle,” Salon said. “But I still have a few days’ work to do on it. I was just choosing the eyes.” He showed me a box full of glass corneas and pupils, as if the executioner of Saint Lucy had collected the trophies of his entire career. “It’s not always easy, as it is with insects, where all you need is a box and a pin. This, for example, has to be treated with formalin.”
I smelled its morgue odor. “It must be an enthralling job,” I said. And meanwhile I was thinking of the living creature that throbbed in Lia’s belly. A chilling thought seized me. If the Thing dies, I said to myself, I want to bury it. I want it to feed the worms underground and enrich the earth. That’s the only way I’ll feel it’s still alive….
Salon was still talking. He took a strange specimen from one of the shelves. It was about thirty centimeters long. A dragon, a reptile with black membranous wings, a cock’s crest, and gaping jaws that bristled with tiny sawlike teeth. “Handsome, isn’t he? My own composition. I used a salamander, a bat, snake’s scales…. A subterranean dragon. I was inspired by this….”
He showed me, on another table, a great folio volume, bound in ancient parchment, with leather ties. “It cost me a fortune. I’m not a bibliophile, but this was something I had to have. It’s the Mundus Subterraneus of Athanasius Kircher, first edition, 1665. Here’s the dragon. Identical, don’t you think? It lives in the caves of volcanoes, that good Jesuit said, and he knew everything about the known, the unknown, and the nonexistent….”
“You think always of the underground world,” I said, recalling our conversation in Munich and the words I had overheard through the Ear of Dionysius.
He opened the volume to another page, to an image of the globe, which looked like an anatomical organ, swollen and black, covered by a spider web of luminescent, serpentine veins. “If Kircher was right, there are more paths in the heart of the earth than there are on the surface. Whatever takes place in nature derives from the heat and steam below…”
I thought of the Black Work, of Lia’s belly, of the Thing that was struggling to break out of its sweet volcano.
“… and whatever takes place in the world of men is planned below.”
“Does Padre Kircher say that, too?”
“No. He concerns himself only with nature…. But it is odd that the second part of this book is on alchemy and the alchemists, and that precisely here, you see, there is an attack on the Rosicrucians. Why attack the Rosicrucians in a book on the underground world? Our Jesuit knew a thing or two; he knew that the last Templars had taken refuge in the underground kingdom of Agarttha….”
“And they’re still there, it seems,” I ventured.
“They’re still there,” Salon said. “Not in Agarttha, but in tunnels. Perhaps beneath us, right here. Milan, too, has a metro. Who decided on it? Who directed the excavations?”
“Expert engineers, I’d say.”
“Yes, cover your eyes with your hands. And meanwhile, in that firm of yours, you publish such books … How many Jews are there among your authors?”
“We don’t ask our authors to fill out racial forms,” I replied stiffly. “You mustn’t think me an anti-Semite. No, some of my best friends … I have in mind a certain kind of Jew….”
“What kind?”
“I know what kind….”
He opened his coffer. In indescribable disorder it contained collars, rubber bands, kitchen utensils, badges of different technical schools, even the monogram of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the Cross of the Legion of Honor. On everything, in his madness, he saw the seal of the Antichrist, in the form of two linked triangles.
—Alexandre Chayla, “Serge A. Nilus et les Protocoles,” La Tribune Juive, May 14, 1921, p. 3
“You see,” Salon went on, “I was born in Moscow. And it was in Russia, when I was a youth, that people discovered the secret Jewish documents that said, in so many words, that to control governments it was necessary to work underground. Listen.” He picked up a little notebook, in which he had copied out some quotations. ‘“Today’s cities have metropolitan railroads and underground passages: from these we will blow up all the capitals of the world.’ Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Document Number Nine!”
It occurred to me that the collection of spinal columns, the box with the eyes, the skins stretched over armatures came from some extermination camp. But no, I was dealing with an elderly man nostalgic about the old days of Russian anti-Semitism. “If I follow you, then, there’s a conventicle of Jews—some Jews, not all—who are plotting something. But why underground?”
“That’s obvious! Any plotter must plot underground, not in the light of day. This has been known from the beginning of time. Dominion over the world means dominion over what lies beneath it. The subterranean currents.”
I remembered a question of Agliè’s in his study, and then the Druidesses in Piedmont, who called on telluric currents.
“Why did the Celts dig sanctuaries in the heart of the earth, making tunnels that communicated with a sacred well?” Salon continued. “The well goes down into radioactive strata, as everyone knows. How was Glastonbury built? And isn’t the island of Avalon where the myth of the Grail originated? And who invented the Grail if not a Jew?”
The Grail again, my God. But what grail? There was only one grail: my Thing, in contact with the radioactive strata of
