The Golem by Gustav Meyrink Read Free Book Online

the day came when the long arm of the law was reaching out for Dr. Wassory.
    That was when the fiend committed suicide, the Lord be praised! It was as if my double had been beside him, guiding his hand! He took his life with the very phial of amyl nitrate that I had deliberately left in his surgery when I went there myself to trick him into falsely diagnosing glaucoma in me as well. When I left it I breathed a fervent prayer that it would be this phial of amyl nitrate that would deliver the coup de grâce .
    Word went round the city that he had died from a stroke – the effect of amyl nitrate when it is inhaled resembles a stroke. It was not long, however, before the truth was known.”
    Charousek stared into space, lost in thought, as if immersed in some deep problem; then he shrugged a shoulder in the direction of Aaron Wassertrum’s junk shop. “Now he’s alone”, he muttered, “all alone with his greed and – and – and with his wax doll.”
    My heart began to thump. I stared at Charousek in horror. Was the man mad? It must be the wanderings of a fevered mind. Of course! Of course! He must have invented it all, dreamt it up. That tale about the eye-specialist can’t be true. He’s consumptive, it’s the fever of death spinning round and round in his brain. I decided to make some jocular remark to calm him down, to set his thoughts moving in a more cheerful direction, but before anything suitable occurred to me, a memory struck me like a bolt of lightning: the door to my room being torn open and the face of Aaron Wassertrum with its hare-lip and round, fish’s eyes staring in.
    Savioli? Dr. Savioli?! Now wasn’t that the name that Zwakh, the old puppeteer, had whispered to me as the name of the young gentleman who had rented his studio? Dr. Savioli! It was as if someone were screaming the name inside my head. A stream of twitching, nebulous figures danced through my mind, jostling with sudden inklings that were racing towards me.
    Filled with fear, I was about to question Charousek, to tell him everything I had seen and heard from the room next to mine, when he was suddenly racked with a violent fit of coughing that almost sent him tumbling to the ground. He nodded a brief farewell, and I saw him grope his way along the wall and out into the rain. His story, I now felt, was not the figment of a fevered imagination. He was right; crime did stalk these streets, day and night, like a disembodied spirit in search of a physical form through which to manifest itself. It is in the air, but we do not see it. Suddenly, it precipitates in a human soul, but we are not aware of it and by the time we sense it, it has long since dissolved back into thin air. All that we hear are dark rumours of some hideous deed.
    All at once I understood the innermost nature of the mysterious creatures that live around me: they drift through life with no will of their own, animated by an invisible, magnetic current, just like the bridal bouquet floating past in the filthy water of the gutter. I felt as if the houses were staring down at me with malicious expressions full of nameless spite: the doors were black, gaping mouths in which the tongues had rotted away, throats which might at any moment give out a piercing cry, so piercing and full of hate that it would strike fear to the very roots of our soul.
    What was the last thing the medical student had said about Wassertrum? I whispered his words to myself, “Aaron Wassertrum is alone now with his greed and – his wax doll.”
    What in heaven’s name can he have meant by the wax doll?
    I told myself to calm down, he must have meant it metaphorically. It must have been one of those deranged metaphors he uses to take you by surprise; you don’t understand them at first, only later they unexpectedly take shape and give you a profound shock, like a harsh light suddenly striking some unusual object.
    I gave the people who were sheltering in the archway with me a closer scrutiny. Now the fat