“But it could have been a kind of collective hysteria.”
“Indeed, it could. But what started the hysteria?” The arrival of the main course interrupted the conversation. There were small circular steaks of elk and reindeer, with fennel sauce and sour cream. They drank a heavy red Bulgarian wine, served cold. For the remainder of the meal, the conversation remained general. The girls were evidently bored with the talk of vampires; they wanted Carlsen to describe the finding of the derelict.
Geijerstam interrupted only once; it was when Carlsen was speaking of the glass column, with its squidlike creatures.
“Do you have any theory about what they were?”
“None. Unless they were some kind of food.”
Miss Freytag said: “I hate octopuses.” She said it with such intensity that they all looked at her.
Fallada said: “Have you ever encountered one?”
Her face coloured. “No.” Carlsen wondered why Geijerstam was smiling.
They drank coffee in the library. The heat of the fire made Carlsen yawn. The Count said: “Would you like to go to your room now?”
Carlsen shook his head, smiling with embarrassment. “No. Your excellent food has made me sleepy. But I want to hear more about Count Magnus.”
“Would you care to see his laboratory?”
Selma Bengtsson said: “At this time of night?”
Geijerstam said mildly: “My dear, this is the time when the alchemists did most of their work.”
Carlsen said: “Yes, I’d like to see it.”
“In that case, you will need your overcoat. It is cold up there.” He turned to the girls. “Would anyone else care to come?”
All three shook their heads. Selma Bengtsson said: “I can’t even stand the place by daylight.”
Fallada said: “Do you think the Count’s activities might interest me?”
“I am sure of it.”
Geijerstam opened a drawer and took out a large key. “We have to go outside the house. There used to be an entrance on the other side of the hall, but the previous owner had it bricked up.”
He led them out of the front door. It was a clear moonlit night; the moon made a silver path along the water. Carlsen felt revived by the cold air. Geijerstam led them along the gravel path, towards the northern wing.
Fallada asked: “Why did he brick it up? Was he afraid of ghosts?”
“Not of ghosts, I think — although I never knew him. The house had been empty for fifty years before I moved in.” He inserted the key in the lock of the massive door, then turned the handle. Carlsen expected a creak of rusty hinges, but it opened silently. The air inside smelt musty and was unexpectedly cold. Carlsen knotted his scarf around his throat and turned up the overcoat collar. On their left, the door that should have led into the house had been bolted to its frame with angle irons.
Fallada said: “Was this built at the same time as the rest of the house?”
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
“I notice that the stairs are unworn.”
“I have often wondered about that. I think that perhaps no one uses them.”
As in the main part of the house, the walls were panelled with pinewood. Geijerstam led the way up three flights of stairs, halting on each landing to point out the pictures. “These are by Gonzales Coques, the Spanish painter. As a young man, Count Magnus was a diplomatic envoy in Antwerp, where Coques worked for the Governor of the Netherlands. He commissioned these portraits of great alchemists. This is Albertus Magnus. This is Cornelius Agrippa. And this is Basil Valentinus, who was a Benedictine monk as well as an alchemist. Do you notice anything about these portraits?”
Carlsen stared hard but finally shook his head. “The painter has given each of them a noble bearing.”
Fallada nodded. “They look like saints.”
“Magnus was in his twenties when these were painted. I think they reveal that he possessed high ideals. And yet a mere ten years later, he was slaughtering the peasants of Västergötland and preparing to sell his soul to the devil.”
“Why?”
The Count shrugged. “I think I know why, but it would take a long time to explain.” He led the way up the final flight. From the stained-glass window in the alcove, they could see the expanse of moonlit water.
The door that faced them on the top landing was covered with heavy iron bands and metal studs. Its right edge showed signs of having been forced; the wood was splintered, and there were the marks of hatchets.
Geijerstam said: “I imagine this room was sealed after Magnus’s death, and the key was probably thrown away. Someone of a later generation broke it open.” He pushed the door, and it swung open.
The room inside was bigger than they had expected. It had a strange and disagreeable odour, in which Carlsen seemed to be able to detect incense. There was another element that he found harder to place: a sickly smell. Suddenly, it came to him: the smell of a mortuary when a corpse is being dissected.
Geijerstam pressed the light switch, but nothing happened.
“It’s strange. Electric light bulbs never last very long in this room.”
Carlsen said: “You think the Count dislikes them?”
“Or there is something wrong with the wiring.” Geijerstam struck a match and lit two oil lamps on the bench. They could now see that the main furniture of the room was a furnace of brick, and a tentlike erection. When Carlsen touched this he found it to be made of black silk, the heaviest he had ever seen.
Geijerstam said: “That is a kind of darkroom. Certain alchemical operations have to be performed in total darkness.”
On the shelves there were heavy glass bottles and containers of various shapes and sizes. There was a small stuffed alligator and a creature with a bird’s head, a cat’s body and the tail of a lizard. Carlsen peered at this closely, but was unable to see the joins. In the corner stood a tall, clumsy metal apparatus with many pipes leading away from it, and a heavy clay lid.
Geijerstam took down a leather-bound volume whose hinges were worn through, and opened it on the bench. “This is the Count’s alchemical diary. He seems to have had the makings of a true scientist. All these early experiments are attempts to make a liquid called Alkahest, which is supposed to reduce all matter to its primitive state. That was the first step in alchemy. When he’d obtained his primitive matter, his next task was to seal it in a vessel and put it in the athanor — that is, the furnace in the corner there. Magnus spent almost a year trying to make Alkahest from human blood and urine.” He turned over the pages. The handwriting was angular, spiky and untidy, but the drawings in the text — of chemical apparatus and various plants — showed enormous care and precision.
Geijerstam closed the book. “On January 10, 1683, he became convinced that he had finally made Alkahest from baby’s urine and cream of tartar. This next volume begins two months later, because he needed spring dew for his primal matter. He also spent two hundred gold florins on cobra’s venom from Egypt.”
Fallada said with disgust: “No wonder he went crazy.”
“Oh, no. He has never sounded more sane. He claims that he had saved the life of his bailiff’s wife in childbirth, and cured his shepherd of gout, with a mixture of Alkahest and oil of sulphur. He says: ‘My shepherd climbed to the top of the tree beyond the fish pond.’ But now, look at this” — he turned to the end of the second folio — “what do you notice?”
Carlsen shook his head. “Nothing — except that the writing gets worse.”
“Precisely. He is in despair. A handwriting expert once told me that it is the writing of a man on the point of suicide. Look: ‘Or n’est il fleur, homme, femme, beauté, que la mort à sa fin ne le chace.’ There is no flower, man, woman, beauty, that death does not chase to his end. He is obsessed by death.”
Fallada asked: “Why does he write in French?”
“He was French. The Swedish court was full of Frenchmen in the seventeenth century. But now look” — he took down another folio, this one bound in black leather — “he writes the date in code, but I have worked out the code: May 1691, the month after his expulsion from the court. “He who wishes to drink the blood of his enemies and obtain faithful servants should voyage to the town of Chorazin and there do homage to the Prince of the Air.” And then the next entry is in November of 1691 — six months later. And look at the handwriting.”
Carlsen said: “Surely it isn’t the same person?” The writing had taken on an altogether different character: neater, smaller, yet more purposeful.