The Ballet of Dr Caligari Read online

  title page

  The Ballet of Dr Caligari

  and Madder Mysteries

  Reggie Oliver

  Tartarus Press

  Copyright Information

  The Ballet of Dr Caligari and Madder Mysteries

  by Reggie Oliver

  First published 2018 by Tartarus Press at

  Coverley House, Carlton-in-Coverdale, Leyburn,

  North Yorkshire, DL8 4AY, UK

  All stories © Reggie Oliver, 2018

  All illustrations © Reggie Oliver, 2018

  The publishers would like to thank Jim Rockhill

  for his help in the preparation of this book.

  ‘We differ not because we select different objects out of the same world but because we see different worlds.’

  Iris Murdoch

  CONTENTS

  from

  Madder Mysteries

  A Donkey at the Mysteries

  The Head

  Tawny

  The Devil’s Funeral

  Baskerville’s Midgets

  The Game of Bear (with M.R. James)

  And more

  The Final Stage

  The Endless Corridor

  The Vampyre Trap

  The Ballet of Dr Caligari

  Love and Death

  Porson’s Piece

  Lady with a Rose

  Author Note

  A DONKEY AT THE MYSTERIES

  Dolphins had followed the little ferry boat that afternoon all the way from Alexandroupolis to Thrakonisos, their polished pewter backs arcing in and out of the sapphire and diamond waves. They seemed to me like an escort, a guard of honour, seeing me safe to the little island, celebrating my voyage. I was eighteen at the time, an age when, if you are reasonably lucky, the whole world can seem to be in your favour.

  At first Thrakonisos was no more than an indigo smudge on a stretch of brighter blue. Then the golden rocks that crowned its heights, intersected by deep green gorges, began to define themselves; and finally the white lines of houses that composed the island’s principal town and harbour of Chora, glittering in the unclouded sunlight. I knew little about the island except that there were some archaeological remains there connected with an ancient mystery cult. This was the reason for my visit.

  As I stepped off the ferry onto the jetty at Chora I was surrounded by schoolchildren who had come with me from the mainland in their bright sky-blue uniforms. The teacher in charge was talking to the captain of the boat, and the children, taking advantage of their release from control, surrounded me, chattering and asking me questions.

  My Greek was only sufficient to understand simple, slow interrogations and to give equivalent replies, so I smiled and waded through them towards an inviting looking bar on the sea front. One of the children pointed to the paperback I was carrying and which I had occasionally tried to read on the choppy voyage out to the island. He was indicating the strangely distorted human figures outlined in turquoise green on its cover, and seemed to be asking me what the book was. It would have been impossible for me to explain that it was a copy of E.R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational, a book my future tutor in Greek Literature had recommended I read before coming up to Oxford. Up till now the book had interested without engrossing me.

  I sat down at one of the tables on the pavement outside the bar and ordered a beer. In those days I travelled hopefully. I knew I wanted to visit the site of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, and that near it was a Xenia Guest House, but I had no idea how to reach it or whether there would be accommodation for me.

  When the barman came out with an icy, perspiring bottle of FIX beer I asked if there was a bus going to the Sanctuary. He shook his head several times. What about a taxi? He looked doubtful and gave an ambiguous reply. He suggested I do the six kilometres to the Xenia Guest House meta podia, on foot. It was a razor-bright, cloudless Greek afternoon, and the prospect of doing six kilometres with a heavy rucksack was not inviting. I would decide what to do when I had finished my drink.

  The local habitués of the bar sat inside playing draughts or clacking their worry beads. The tables on the pavement were occupied only by myself and a man and a woman drinking ouzo.

  They seemed an odd couple. The man, balding, fiftyish, sandy haired, wore a shapeless linen jacket and baggy trousers. He looked like an English schoolmaster on holiday. The woman, slender and in her thirties, wore an immaculate black trouser suit which could have come straight from a Paris couturier. A little diamond broach glittered on her lapel. Her hair was covered in a vivid scarlet and black silk headscarf and she wore dark glasses. From what little I could see of her face she must have been something of a beauty with high cheek bones and a perfectly formed mouth. Her skin was a smooth creamy white. She might have been taken for a film star trying to travel incognito.

  I thought of approaching them, but in those days I was very shy. It was one of the reasons I had decided to spend some of the eight months or so between school and Oxford travelling around Greece and Italy on my own. Though I missed the pleasure of companionship, I was entirely free. I could stay or go where I liked. If I missed a bus, or failed to book ahead and had to sleep on a beach, I needn’t feel guilty about having inconvenienced anyone but myself. I took a sip of beer and read from Chapter Five of the book I had been carrying:

  There is no domain where clear thinking encounters stronger unconscious resistance than when we try to think about death . . .

  A shadow fell across my page. It was the barman and beside him was a nut brown, wizened man with teeth the colour of his amber worry beads. The barman explained that this was Stavros who would drive me the six kilometres to the Xenia Guest House. He named a price that was high even by London cab standards. I wondered if I was meant to haggle but I was too tired and full of beer to bother. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the sandy haired man rise, as if he were about to come over to me; but the lady gripped his arm and he subsided into his seat. I noticed her fingernails for the first time: painted scarlet and honed to a point, like little bloodstained arrowheads.

  The road out to the Xenia ran along the coast. It was little better than a dirt track and Stavros drove fast. Whenever we bumped particularly violently over a stone or into a pothole he would turn to me and grin. It was not reassuring: I would rather he had kept his eyes on the road, especially as his breath smelled strongly of garlic. Several times he asked me questions which I could not hear above the racket of the car, so I simply nodded and smiled.

  We roared up the drive of a long low modern building, which was the Xenia Hotel. I paid Stavros the sum we had agreed upon, at which he seemed slightly embarrassed. He asked me a question which this time I understood. Was I here to see ‘ta archeea’, the ancient things? I nodded and said I was. Stavros took something out of his pocket and pressed it into my hands. It was a small set of yellow plastic worry beads with a little metal cross attached to them by a chain. I protested only slightly as I could see he would be offended if I refused the gift.

  Something about Stavros’s suddenly earnest manner brought to mind a snippet about Thrakonisos that I had picked up from one of Montague Summers’s books, The Vampire in Europe:

  Greece too has its Vampire tradition. Commonly known as katakhanadhes or vrykolakes they inhabit mostly the mountain villages and the islands. One island in particular, Thrakonisos, is famous for its vampires, so much so that ‘vrykolakes to Thrakonisos’ is their colloquial equivalent of our ‘coals to Newcastle’.

  It was 1971 when all this happened, a time when the Colonels were ruling Greece. In those days the state-owned Xenia Hotels were clean, cheap places, often run with an almost military efficiency. The staff at this particular establishment was exclusively f
emale: pasty faced, unattractive middle-aged creatures, all dressed in identical blue overalls. The woman on the reception desk told me that I could only stay one night. This surprised me as the place seemed deserted, but I was offered no explanation. I was shown to a room of simple comfort that faced onto the sea.

  I did not spend much time in my room as I was determined to get out and explore the place before supper. The Xenia was perched on a small hill facing the sea. To one side of it there was a broad, shallow valley where lay the remains of the Ancient Greek sanctuary. The sun was getting low in the horizon, and making the crystalline marble slabs and columns that lay about shine like gold. Further up the valley the authorities had reconstructed four Ionic columns of an ancient temple, thus providing the focus for a scene that otherwise would have looked entirely chaotic and desolate. Across the valley on another bluff overlooking the sea was a little white chapel. Apart from this, the hotel, and a distant farmhouse on the hillside beyond the Sanctuary no other habitable buildings could be seen. I decided to save my exploration of the Sanctuary for the following morning and walk to the chapel instead.

  I wandered along the steeply-raked shingle beach. There was not a boat, let alone a bather, in sight. I could see far into the sea’s clear blue depths. Then I climbed a sheep track that snaked around the bluff and up to the chapel.

  Like many Greek Island chapels this one seemed improbably small, incapable of holding any sort of congregation. It was entirely white on the outside, but within it was painted an intense cobalt blue. Western light shone in through tiny deep-set lancet windows. Apart from a brass sanctuary lamp suspended from the ceiling and two blackened icons, there was no decoration. There was a plain stone altar, and on it was a coffin.

  I was so shocked by this unexpected encounter with death, that it was some time before I noticed that there was something odd about the coffin itself. No flowers rested on it. Instead it seemed to have some thing or things wound around it, rather like the straps round an old-fashioned trunk. I approached the altar just near enough to determine what they were. They were long strands of brambles or thorns, tightly plaited together. It looked as if someone had taken a great deal of trouble to bind the lid to the box, as if to prevent anyone or anything from getting into it, or out.

  I can’t say that I was deeply affected by the sight. I simply made a note of it, as a picturesque local detail that I must remember to put into the travel journal I was keeping.

  By the time I had got back to the hotel it was supper time, and before going into the dining room I loitered for a while in the entrance hall, curious to see if there were any other guests. There were not. I studied the rack of picture postcards at the reception desk, most of them dull, deckled-edged black and white images of the excavations. There was also a slim paper-backed book on sale in two piles, one labelled ‘German’, the other ‘English’. The cover was grey with the image of an ancient Thakonisian coin printed on it in black, but there was no writing on it to tell me what the book was about. I took one from the ‘English’ pile and opened it at the title page.

  A Guide to the Excavations of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, Thrakonisos by Dietrich Leichenfeld, Honorary Doctor of Ancient Languages at the University of Tübingen. It was not perhaps the most thrilling of titles, but I bought a copy because I would feel safer with it when I entered the dining room. I had found on my solitary voyage round Greece that reading at meals in restaurants not only protected one from unwanted attention, but was a pleasure in itself.

  The dining room contained some twenty tables gleaming with stainless steel, glass and pristine white napery. I was firmly directed by one of the blue-overalled women to a particular table in a far corner, in spite of the fact that all but one of the other tables were unoccupied. In the opposite corner of the room to mine sat the man and woman whom I had seen outside the bar in Chora. They were looking at me intently. I smiled and nodded at them; I may even have waved. They immediately pretended not to have noticed me, suddenly taking a great interest in each other’s conversation, pouring out orange-coloured retsina into glasses, crumbling bread rolls. I felt no inclination to challenge their unsociability, so ordered my food and a carafe of the orange-coloured wine (surprisingly drinkable) and settled down to the book I had bought.

  The frontispiece was a photograph of its author, Dr Dietrich Leichenfeld. This assertion by the writer of his own personality in an archaeological monograph impressed me. Leichenfeld was shown standing in the ruins of the Sanctuary, one foot on the earth, the other on a slab of masonry, as if it were the neck of a lion and he an Edwardian game hunter. He had one of those big, squat Germanic heads with small regular features, glittering currant eyes, and a long thin mouth turned down at the corners, of the kind frequently called ‘cruel’ by lovers of the cliché. His toad-like face reminded me a little of photographs I had seen of Goering at the zenith of his grotesque power; but Leichenfeld’s look was more intellectual, more formidable even.

  Most of the book was taken up with a rather dry description of the various structures found on the site and the artefacts discovered in them. It was illustrated with foggy black and white photographs, one or two plans and several speculative elevations of the buildings. I skipped through much of this, but there was a short final section which looked more promising. It was headed:

  THE MYSTERIES OF THE GREAT GODS

  The word mystery derives from the Greek word μυειν, to be silent or blind. If it was true of the Mysteries of Eleusis that this silence was preserved by its devotees, it was even more closely guarded by the Initiates of Thrakonisos. The penalties in both this life and the next for divulging the mysteries were said by Diogenes Laertius to have been of the utmost savagery, though he did not specify what they were. For this, and no doubt for other reasons, the secrets of the Great Gods were faithfully maintained throughout antiquity.

  What little is known of the cult can be summarised as follows:

  Traces of a religious site have been found dating from as far back as the middle of the Bronze Age, around 1500 BC.

  It was a chthonic cult, probably of Phrygian, certainly of Middle Eastern origin. The earliest cult objects found are small votive images of the god who appears to be hermaphrodite. By the end of the Bronze and beginning of the Iron Age (around 950 BC) the deity (or deities) has become a strange creature with a somewhat amorphous but bestial body and two heads, one bearded and masculine, the other female. Until well into the fifth century this image remained on Thrakonisian coinage.

  We know for certain that from around 600 BC these deities became associated with the Hellenic Gods of the underworld, Hades (or Pluto) and his consort Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, goddess of fertility and the seasons. A recently discovered papyrus fragment from Oxyrinchus associates these deities directly with Thrakonisos. The fragment, written in hexameters, appears to be part of an Orphic hymn. Language and style dates it to the late epic period of literature, around the time of the composition of the earliest Homeric Hymns. Some have even boldly ascribed these lines to Hesiod:

  . . . the trim-ankled daughter

  of yellow haired Demeter

  Gathering flowers in a soft meadow

  of sea-girt Thrakonisos.

  With her, her companions, the lovely

  white-skinned daughters of Okeanos

  Picked violets and roses,

  and the sweet-scented hyacinth, Beautiful to behold . . .

  There the Son of Kronos,

  he who has many names, saw her,

  And longed to embrace the white-armed

  daughter of Demeter.

  He caught her up, reluctant,

  into his dark-hued chariot.

  Bitter pain and fear seized her heart

  as she cried out

  To her lady mother who was distant

  and did not hear,

  But the dusky horses

  of the dread son of Kronos

  Bore her down

  into the empty halls beneath the
earth,

  And he seized her with violence,

  and held her down on the black earth

  With his death-dealing arms.

  Three times her terrible cries

  Echoed across the wide plains

  of sea-girt Thrakonisos,

  And the pale-skinned daughters of Okeanos

  heard the pitiful lament,

  As they gathered flowers,

  but heeded it not . . .’

  Neither Pluto nor Persephone are mentioned by name in these fragmentary verses in accordance with the ancient superstitious dread of naming the deities of the underworld. From these verses we may assume that the tradition, mentioned in Pausanias, that one of the entrances to the Underworld was in Thrakonisos had become well-established by the sixth century BC. The rest of the poem appears to follow the well-known version of the legend. Demeter complains to Pluto’s brother Zeus and obtains a reprieve for Persephone whereby she can spend four months of the year above ground with her mother. The only departure from the common version is that the Daughters of Okeanos in the Oxyrinchus fragment are punished for their failure to heed Persephone’s cries by being made to become her perpetual handmaidens both below and upon the earth.

  The priesthood at the Shrine of the Great Gods in Thrakonisos was all female. Like the legendary Daughters of Okeanos, these priestesses were known as the λευκοπαρθενοι or ‘white maidens’ because of the exceptional whiteness of their skin. This pallor, says Herodotus, may be attributed to the fact that ‘in ecstatic states the Priestesses frequently cut themselves with knives and bleed upon the altars of the Great Gods’.

  ***

  At breakfast in the dining room the next morning the only other person present was the woman with the headscarf, Chanel suit, and dark glasses. She ate nothing but drank large quantities of black coffee.