"If I cannot bend the powers of heaven, I will raise the powers of hell."

Vienna, to me, was once the lightest and most immutable of cities.

Sophisticated and yet earthy, she lacked the stifling Gallic pretensions of Paris, as well as the gray Prussian militarism of Berlin. Moscow, I am told, is rough and unpolished, a city hacked out of the wilderness. London, meanwhile, is given over entirely to Industrialism, the Moloch of this age.

But Vienna was none of these things. To walk her streets, to walk among her colonnades and opera houses, to behold her eclectic, voluptuous, profoundly Romantic skyline beneath Wagnerian sunrise and sunset was to love this absurd, fairy-tale city.

What will become of you, mother of Beethoven and Straus, seat to the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary? What will become of this unhurried, unchanging and unlikely place, where the Emperor still rides in a gilded carriage and the lowliest civil official carries himself like a Hapsburg monarch?

A great night is coming and I fear a final day will come when the lights of Vienna will go out, one by one, never to be lit again, and then only the stars above will remain.

My roommate Oscar sleeps, but I cannot. I envy him. Oscar Bronkowski: a Pole from Krakow; slow, studious, and serious. A fellow student, newly arrived, inclined to regard me with caution, considering what I have been through recently. These days, everyone treats me like rare china.

We hardly know each other, but Oscar is civil enough toward me.

Still, there is no one with whom to speak of this terrible thing, and I am afraid.

Thomas would have understood. Poor Thomas...

I am awake in our flat with little more to do than write and listen. He is out there, awake as well. He, the dreamer, the failed artist, the butt of pranks and mischief, and his companions, mentor and guardian, of whom I cannot write at this -

There. Again. Scratching at the window. Slight as the tapping of an insect. Or did I imagine it?

We are two floors up, so it cannot possibly be any living thing.

Perhaps it is the great ash that grows in the courtyard outside, but I know that its branches are too far away to touch the glass. Still, it is a windy autumn night...

I push myself away from my tiny desk, lit by its single guttering candle. I will awaken Oscar, and tell him everything. He is not one given to imagination or flights of nightmare, but perhaps he will believe me.

I hesitate. Instead, I let him sleep, like Vienna. I let them both sleep, like the dead.

I came to the Imperial City as an artist, a painter of landscapes. My instructors at the secondary school in Linz had praised my talent, and urged that I go on to Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts, which I attended in the fall of 1907.

For a time, all was well and went well. My sample work was accepted by the academy. I passed the entrance examination with ease, two days worth of fairly tedious drawing exercises involving the human figure: "Episode from the Deluge," "Expulsion from Paradise", "Return of The Prodigal Son" and so forth. Each time, I finished ahead of the other students, who each labored like Sisyphus in Hell beneath his boulder. Scratch and erase, scratch and erase...

"Time," the stuffy, mustachioed instructor would eventually call.

(It is odd, but looking back, I find the choice of subject matter for the examination at once appropriate and bitterly ironic; the dress rehearsal of a doomed city.)

And so I sat, quietly luxuriating in my triumph over yet another test as the dusty minutes filed slowly past in that ancient room. I even went so far as to add backgrounds to my compositions, fantastic Biblical scenes full of exotica, of mountains and waterfalls. Some students did not fare so well. I remember one in particular, a roundish homely fellow named Werner, who crumpled sheet after sheet of paper. He wore his eraser to a nub. Each "time" drove him to greater desperation. Finally, he broke down in snuffling tears. The other students stared, either amused or embarrassed.

"Excuse me," the instructor said, without a trace of sympathy. "You. The heavy-set fellow. Take that outside, please. You're disturbing the others."

Werner - so red-faced that his cropped blond hair seemed white against his skin - gathered his belongings and made the pilgrimage to the door. There was stifled, whispering hilarity at his shameful departure, another washout, another hopeful crushed by his boulder. So long, Fatty! Aufweidershen! Stealthy slings and arrows from all sides.

Eventually the instructor cleared his throat and said in his bored, imperial voice, "Gentlemen, might I remind you, you are in the midst of a very important examination?"

The others returned to their work. Scratch and erase, scratch and erase. I, however, did not immediately resume my labors. It is true that I was well ahead, merely dilly-dallying until the next task. Werner's disgrace had been more diverting than disturbing for me, I admit, but something else - actually someone - had caught my eye.

Like me, he was finished with the current exercise, and sat back in his chair, arms folded, regarding the efforts of the other students with an irritating air of calm contempt and dreamy-eyed superiority - a cat with its paws tucked beneath it, assured in its eminence.

He was a little older now, but as pale and phantasmal as ever, the flour dusting of mustache still upon his upper lip. That much hadn't changed. But the little dandy had apparently dispensed with the black kid gloves and ivory-headed cane of his Linz days, so perhaps he was finally becoming less strangeŠ

One look into those strangely unfocused, blue-gray eyes of his dispelled that last notion.

He was still the country bumpkin. He was still the little freak.

Electricity passed between he and I in that moment, charged with the past. I smiled, softly patted my fist into my palm. The self-satisfied feline was suddenly the still mouse, stricken with fear.

He remembered me. He remembered the Linz days. He probably thought he had finally escaped us both, as he had finally escaped his overbearing father, that blunderbuss of a village customs official.

I could hardly believe the good fortune of that day! The muttersohnchen, the mama's boy, was here!

You're dead, muttersohnchen, I said silently to him, smiling, carefully mouthing the words so he knew perfectly well what I meant. I patted my fist into my palm, again. He said not a word, moved not a muscle, but I knew he was terrified.

"You," the instructor said to me from his lofty perch, his old watery eyes beetling over their delicate pince-nez. "What is your name?"

"Kempka," I replied, the mama's boy forgotten for the moment. Stillness fell over the room. "Georg Kempka."

"Return to your work, Kempka."

I nodded, and resumed drawing. As said, I passed the examination with ease, though one anonymous instructor noted in his chicken-scratch scrawl that I was to have rendered the human form only, and not other sundries such as mountains and bushes, et al. Follow instructions closely and to the letter. Remember, G. Kempka: Authority and subject. Obedience. Order. No signature.

I celebrated my triumph with my friend Thomas Grossmann, some other fellows and a succession of good bottles of wine. Sharp sunlight and a shattering headache were my companions come the following morning.

There was sly talk of midnight roguishness afterward and of a secret visit to a woman, an Italian or Polish prostitute. Horror of horrors! What would my German parents think? Thomas said I behaved like quite the animal that night. But more than likely it was merely talk. And if I had been Dionysius, all I had to show for the debauch was a hangover pulsing within my wine-sodden skull. But who cared? I had been accepted into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Great things lay ahead.

The muttersohnchen, meanwhile, had fared far worse than I had. He failed the entrance examination. Twice.

That must have been a bitter pill for the little wretch to swallow. At our school in Linz, he had always fancied himself the best artist in our class.

I lived at No.33 Stumper Allee, near the West Railway Station, in a small rented room on the second floor.

Thomas was my roommate.

He had come with me from Linz, but was bound for the School of Architecture. He was a good-looking fellow with a decent, honest, open face. Straight teeth. Blond. The Hohenzollern ideal of a young man. He was a year younger than I, but in the same grade because of his abilities, moral character and discipline. I don't ever recall Thomas receiving less than 'Highly Satisfactory' in any of his studies, though an instructor took note of and cautioned against the boy's occasional hot temper - as well as his proclivity for teasing the little muttersohnchen.

No.33 was large, old and dank, a brown brick-and-mortar blunder from the later years of the last century, with paint-peeling windows and steep stairwells and wooden floors that squealed underfoot.

The rooms, by contrast, I believe had formerly served as broom closets or kennels. In fact, it seemed I could reach out with both hands and nearly touch the two opposing walls.

The best thing one could say of No.33 was that it was fairly close to the Academy and that the neighborhood was not entirely decayed. It was a disappointing introduction to Vienna - I was not prepared for this, the clammy white underside of the Imperial City

Nor was I prepared for the thronging masses of people I saw, or for the bustling streets where I often heard hardly a word of German, but instead the curious dialects of eastern peoples. Poles and Hungarians. Italians and Slovaks. Croats and Slovenes. Eastern Orthodox Jews driven out of Russia by the pogroms. Dusky skin, dark hair, brown eyes, descendants of Middle-Age invaders content now to haunt coffeehouses, rabbis engrossed in endless games of chess. All that was strange and exotic, all that was passionate and alive, was here, in Vienna - Linz, by comparison, seemed sterile and dead. I fell in love, again and again. My heart was broken, over and over, with the crossing of every street.

Thomas and I ranged far and wide over that giant, improbable city in those first fall days, from the Ringstrasse to green and gold shaded vistas of Schonbrunn Park. We beheld the dizzying spire of St. Stefan's Cathedral. We walked within the stolid, imposing, sky-lit Greek temple of the Parliament House, whose walls were faced in autumnal shades with marble from Pavanazzo, whose entrance was flanked to either side by effigies of the Gods. Among them were wise Athena; Lord Zeus; Hephaestus the Smith; Poseidon of the seas; Artemis the huntress; and last of all, terrible, pitiless Ares the destroyer.

(How appropriate, that I should have found the God of War here in this great but dying city where storm-clouds gather and mount on the horizon. How appropriate - how Classical - in the midst of impending tragedy.)

It was at once highly amusing and yet somewhat appalling, however, to behold the contrast to this grandeur, which was provided by the comic-opera of the General Assembly.

What a circus! What a bazaar! God knows how many statesmen and burghers, officials and representatives there were, fighting to make themselves heard over the general din! There were shouts, proclamations, furious denunciations, calls to order, the sharp pounding of the gavel.

Now and then order resumed and issues were discussed. The "Pig War" with troublesome little Serbia - that absurd barnyard embargo - was not going well. Serbia was making the Dual Monarchy look the fool.

The empire's Slavs, meanwhile, were growing increasingly irritated with Austrian Pan-Germanism - I myself admit to preferring Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles to the doddering, creaky Hapsburg anthem, but I understood their sentiments. One stuffed shirt replied, in so many words, that Slavs and "Jew-shopkeepers" have no business dictating national policy to the Emperor. There was an argument and he nearly came to blows with an official from the province of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Shouts and an undignified scuffle on the floor. Pandemonium. Thomas and I clapped, cheered and whistled. All that was needed now was a lion-tamer with whip and chair. Rise, you diplomats, on your hind legs! Jump! Jump through this flaming ring!

The big, dignified gentleman and his companion, next to me, were not so amused, however.

"Democracy," the gentleman said, with a knowing sigh. "What fools. What oafs."

His companion nodded sagely.

"But it's good fun, all the same," Thomas said, offering the elderly pontificator his most winning smile. The old Austrian was a bit too melancholic and reserved for that, however, one might as well joke with a block of granite, which he somewhat resembled: gray, coarse-skinned and impenetrable. But what an Austrian! Cropped white flattop of hedgehog bristles. Hapsburg jawline. Beetling monocle. Every last square inch starched and buttoned.

His companion was a smaller man of perhaps forty, a nasty piece of work. Slicked back hair, arrogant little waxed mustache, contemptuous little mouth, stern black suspicious eyes - there was an air of slight superiority about him, and I wondered if he were a glorified minor official of some sort. A master post-clerk? A junior military officer?

The gentleman tugged absently his full mustache, leaned slightly toward us. His companion looked on with mild interest.

"And just what do you mean by that, young fellow?" he asked. It was then that I noticed the deep, curious resonance of his voice, rather like a species of woodwind instrument. It commanded attention, silenced frivolity. "You mean to say you find this travesty amusing?"

"Well, no, sir. It's just-"

The Austrian gentleman settled back in his seat. "If these little dancing dogs knew better, they'd be betting on the horse we're betting on, I assure you."

"And whom might that be?" I asked.

This time the gentleman's companion spoke. His voice and tone were clipped, abrupt and correct. He addressed me as if I was an army conscript.

"My master and I are not at liberty to say, at this time. In fact, we are sure that if you were to see him now, you would wonder at our judgement. He isn't much to look at these days. But I assure youŠhe's worth any ten of these pikers. And he has no use for 'democratic institutions' such as this, either."

"Is he German?" Thomas asked.

The gentleman replied: "Technically, no. He is as Austrian as you or I. But! In his heart he is more German than most Germans, I should sayŠas am I."

The gentleman permitted himself a small clever smile and showed us the cornflower he wore, a symbol of loyalty to the Prussian Hohenzollerns rather than the Hapsburgs.

We smiled in return. I was intrigued. Did I detect some mischief beneath that gruff, stolid exterior? I placed his age at fifty at least, perhaps sixty and yet his eyes betrayed neither the weariness nor sadness that come to all with time. Rather, they were bright and youthful, full of song and bonhomie, the irises hazel and the sclera as white and flawless as Dresden china. He was an old tree, yes, yet tough and green at the roots.

"But forgive my ignorance in introducing ourselves," the gentleman said, "I am Hans Muller-Hillebrand, munitions manufacturer, and this here is my manservant Rau."

We introduced ourselves, in return.

"From Linz, then?" the gentleman asked. "Now there is a fine city, ah, Rau?"

"One of the finest, Herr Muller-Hillebrand."

"Our man hails from there, as a matter of fact. He has great plans for Linz, someday...someday, when this entire rotting contraption finally comes crashing down. GodŠto be a German in such a ridiculous patchwork country...it's a wonder I don't take my cane to those asses down there. Forment open revolt. Assassinate the Emperor."

Muller-Hillebrand and Rau chuckled. I was rather shocked by their cavalier humor. Thomas, I knew, was growing angry.

"Herr Muller-Hillebrand," I said, "I realize you are making jokes, but what you say borders on treason."

He sniffed disdainfully. "For the time being, yes. But not for long, my young fellows. The winds are shifting. Our man already knows this; he has sniffed the air and knows what is coming. He knows it is only a matter of time before this tatty scarecrow of a so-called empire is blown down and a new order rises, springing forth from the decay of the old."

Thomas became indignant. "The Emperor would never permit such things!"

The gentleman leaned close, now. His bass voice was low, a dull horizon rumble of thunder. "Forgive me, dear boy, but your mutton-chopped Emperor is a senile old fool whose ideas are as bald as the top of his head. These days, he can't remember with which hand he should greet foreign dignitaries and with which he should wipe his arse."

We were thunderstruck! I did not know whether to laugh in astonishment at this crowning obscenity, or strike the man responsible. To speak of the beloved Emperor Franz Josef in such gutter terms! Even the lowliest Slav knew better!

Thomas was almost beside himself with anger. Forgetting his elder's station, he leaned across me and thrust a finger at the gentleman's complacent, ruddy face.

"So help me God, sir," Thomas said, "if you continue to say such things of the Emperor, I - I will be forced to challenge you to a duel!"

"A duel? Gott in Himmel, Rau. A duel. This boy looks barely old enough to be away from his mother's breast."

"He does have a callow look about him," Rau said coldly. "Are you feverish, boy?"

"I'm not afraid to die," Thomas said. "Are you?"

It was time to intervene. I gently pushed Thomas back. "Please, sir, Herr Muller-Hillebrand - please forgive my friend. His temper carries him away sometimes. But, you should really not speak such ill of our Emperor. It -"

They had risen, and were hardly listening to me. Rau helped Muller-Hillebrand into his coat.

"I merely speak my mind, dear boy," Muller-Hillebrand said, "and not my heart, as does your friend. And I do not fear his challenge. I do not fear death in the slightest.

"You boys, on the other hand, should."

Donning his hat, he rose. I was taken aback by his height - clearly over six feet. He dwarfed his manservant, who appeared nearly a full foot shorter.

"NowŠwe must be going. This has been amusing, but we tire of playing at parliament and loyalties. We have pressing business elsewhere.

"And if you should finally learn how this little fools' parade turns out, please let me know. Rau and I would be most interested. As would our man. Good day."

Rau lingered a moment longer, drawing on his gloves with tight, perfect motions. He tipped his hat.

"Be good, boys," he said.

He then marched after his lumbering master out of the chamber, like a clockwork martinet.

"The nerve!" Thomas said, when they were gone. "The utter nerve! So help me, if I come across them again..."

I hardly heard him. The blunt words of Muller-Hillebrand - who had never once offered the name of his mysterious charge - had filled me with a certain momentary disquiet. Everything seemed suddenly hollow, transparent, hauntingly remote and fleeting, given over to dust and dreams. Were we as ghosts, astray in realm of the living, within a circus of the imagination?

The feeling passed, however, and I was myself again, enthralled with the theatrics of my elders.

Below us, the diplomats rose on their hind legs and leaped through flaming rings.

There were signs of rot elsewhere in the city, as well.

It is difficult to describe, because it was not always evident. Sometimes, it was too plainly obvious, as in the case of such shabby, soot-soiled slums as Brigittenau and the Gumpendorf Strasse, or our own hardscrabble abode near the train station. In the flophouses, soup kitchens, saloons, and alleys empty of light and hope it reared its stinking, reptilian head and said, "Here I am!"

Yet, it was all deception. Nacht und Nebel. It was the music of night-creatures masking the movement of a deeper, deadlier thing or things as yet unseen.

We were meant to be taken in by these dry surface performances, these petty little morality plays and penny-dreadfuls so beloved of philosophers and thinkers. There was no evil here, they thought, that advances in science, or medicine, or social justice could not remedy. There was nothing here that did not heed the rule of order, be it student and teacher, subject and Emperor.

Comfort, common sense and continuity - all as unchanging as Vienna itself.

So the charade - this great masked ball - continued, and we danced as we had always danced and never once did we note the subtle poisonous shift in the music we heard. Never once did we think to peer beneath the masks we wore.

(Perhaps we fear to see the yellow-eyed primordial serpent staring back. Or will we welcome Him?)

Those of a sensitive nature, I think, must have sensed something beneath the surface of things, pulsing and black. I know I did, as autumn drew on and the days grew ever more absent of light and color.

I heard in the fiery speeches of Vienna's mayor, Karl Leuger - "Handsome Karl", warning us against the political machinations of the Semites, these Wandering Jews so many lately come from the East. When, he asked admiring crowds of fearful bourgeoisie, has anything ever good come from there? Scattered shouts of Never! and Send them back! from the proper, powdered, dewy women in taffeta and lace, the stiff, upright men with their canes and watch-fobs. An amazing spectacle.

When I later disparaged Leuger's ideas before Thomas and a girl he had recently met, the pretty thing very patiently (and rather boringly, I might add) explained the ultimate "world goals of Zionism" to me. And besides, did I not know that during Easter, Jews kidnapped Christian infants for sacrifice to their Jehovah? She had heard it was a quite common occurrence in Eastern Europe.

I fear I irritated her greatly when I laughed at such absurdities.

Rather more difficult to laugh at were the innumerable, irregularly printed racist pamphlets one found at seemingly every café, tobacco-shop and beer-garden, like sickly leaves fallen from some tree of madness. Deutsches Volksblat. Der Tiroler. Der Scherer. Linzer Fliegender Blatter.

The worst, most preposterous and insane among them could be bought for only thirty-five pfennig. That was Ostara - trumpeting certain doom for the Aryan superman if he did not AWAKEN AND HEED THE SUBHUMAN THREAT! DEFENDER OF THE WEST, DO YOU SLEEP STILL?

Within, more filth. Talk of race-war and race-murder. Talk of Free Mason plotting and the conspiracies of the Catholic Church, of helpless blonde maidens submitting to the crude advances of "lesser breeds". Cruel caricatures of Jews. Talk of mass deportations. Castration. Extermination.

Strange that such a vile pamphlet should be of a pink innocent as a rose petal.

Stranger still that it should be the favored reading material of the muttersohnchen, as I later learned.

Autumn. Time of descent, time of wind, of change. Dawn is still a few hours off, the steeple-bells silent. All belongs for now to the outer spaces, this void broken only by a single candle and the scratching of my pen.

Everything is as it was before, nothing is the same.

I rise, and pace a few steps. Such a small space, such a small room, like a tomb, I should think.

Someday, perhaps soon, Thomas and I will be beside each other, for all eternity.

Oscar sleeps like doomed Palinurus, trusting to becalmed sea and sky. So you will lie, a shroudless form, on an unknown strand.

There, again. That slight, maddening sound at the window.

I go to it, my heart gripped in a vise, and slowly draw the curtains aside.

Outside is naught but dark windows, dark doorways, the great ash tree, the empty street, all touched and made phantasmal by moonlight.

I wait, expecting to see something, for something to happen. But it will not reveal itself, not now.

I close the curtains and return to my task.

They are out there, waiting. This much I know. He is, as well, though I no longer know where.

Perhaps he is at the cemetery. It would be appropriate, at least. In Linz, it was said that as a younger boy he would sit at night for hours upon the wall of the village graveyard at Braunau-am-Inn, where his little brother was buried, and stare - whether at his lost sibling's headstone or the stars above, none could decide.

Does he play at war-games still, I wonder? We had pretended to be the English, then, and he and his companions, the Boers. We outgrew such foolishness, eventually. I don't think he ever did. I don't think he ever will.

Perhaps he sits alone in the Schonnbrun, patient and waiting, like a spider in its web. That is where Thomas and I found him one day last spring before he disappeared that winter.

That he had remained in Vienna was of some astonishment to us, but there he was sitting upon a stone bench, a satchel beside him, scribbling into a large pad of paper - the muttersohnchen.

We could hardly believe it. He had not noticed us, yet. He was busy, drawing. The park was largely empty at that afternoon hour, a chance for some real mischief, to really get his goat.

Thomas plopped himself down on the bench beside him, grinning like a fool.

I stood at the other end, leaning rakishly. His scratching came to a sudden stop. He wouldn't look at us, but he knew who we were.

"Heil, muttersohnchen," I said, cheerfully enough. "Fancy finding you here. I thought you'd flunked out of the Academy."

The gaunt, peach-fuzz face was whiter than usual with fear. I noticed he was trying to shield his work from us.

"What's he got there, Thomas?"

Thomas grasped at the big, clumsy drawing pattern. With a rattle of paper, the muttersohnchen jerked it back. Thomas tore it away from him. He stood, scrutinizing the sketch with comic intensity. The mama's boy jumped to his feet, but dared not challenge Thomas. Instead, he looked on, in silent anguish.

"Just the usual," Thomas said. "Buildings, buildings, and more buildings."

"Anything else?" I asked, in high good humor.

"Let me look," Thomas said. He ripped the sketch out and threw it aside. A spring breeze carried it away. "No, just more of the same."

"Hand it here," I said.

The mama's boy made a half-hearted attempt to retrieve his work. I nudged him away. "Now, just wait," I said, admonishing him with a raised finger.

I flipped through the pad, making small, thoughtful noises. Just as Thomas had said, buildings, buildings, and more buildings, most of them competently rendered and almost entirely, unnaturally devoid of people.

That, I didn't like, this absence of humanity. The muttersohnchen's lack of skill in depicting the human form was partly the reason for it, but something else was at work. There was, shall I say, an eerie deadness to the scenes he had rendered, a grand indifference untouched by either nuance or subtlety. Think of the masters, of the light and life that grace their work! It was not to be had here. The beauty of Vienna was lost upon him: everything he made a cyclopean monolith, everything a titan mausoleum, and all empty, as if the whole of Man had been spirited far away by some thing or things in the night. It was the Garden after the Expulsion. It was the dead drowned remains of the world, revealed at the receding of the Flood.

"Kempka...get a look at this," Thomas said. He had taken advantage of our victim's distraction to rifle through his satchel bag. Thomas helped himself to one of the muttersohnchen's sandwiches, but he had also found something much more interesting. A pinkish pamphlet: Ostara. Now our prey was doubly worried.

"'Aryan man,'" Thomas read, "'if you do not stand against the lowly Tschandale, who will?'

"Or wait, listen to this: 'Blond god, heed the call to war! Be firm, Culture-Bearer! With shield raised and lance leveled, none shall get the better of you! None shall pass!'"

I rolled my eyes at the shabby grandeur of this nonsense.

"To think people buy this," Thomas said.

"To think," I replied.

"Do you believe in this, muttersohnchen?" Thomas asked our victim, who did not reply. I found his stubborn, frightened silence puzzling. In younger days, he had been something of a school terror, giving contradictory answers to the headmaster's questions, or no answer at all, even once releasing cockroaches into the classroom.

"Do you?" Thomas asked again.

Silence.

"He's pulling that old grade-school nonsense again, not answering," Thomas said. He stood and spoke almost directly into the little freak's ear, "I asked, mutter-

The next moment caught both Thomas and I off our guard. Swift as a serpent, the muttersohnchen grasped at the drawing pad I held, and used it as a battering ram against me. The pad struck me full in the face, and I was sent sprawling. Before Thomas could do anything, the mama's boy had hit him in the ear with the hard edge of the pad.

Then he was off and running, satchel bounding madly upon his back, his work abandoned.

"Come on!" I said, pulling Thomas with me. The little freak wasn't going to get away that easily, but Christ, could he run.

Thomas, infuriated, soon pulled ahead of me. Pell-mell we rushed through the streets of the Imperial City, past the somber figures gathered at the cafes, the stern statuary of ages past. So intent were we on capturing our victim that we bowled over a street-side vegetable vendor, ruining an armful of his wares as they tumbled to the ground. He shouted curses after us. Bastards! Not that we cared. We were full of excitement, eager to mete out punishment.

Even a mounted gendarme - a latter-day landsknecht in his plumed helm - could not stop us.

"Halt!" he said, trying to maneuver his horse between our victim and us. It was to no avail. Thomas and I went around him. "Halt, I say!" he cried.

The muttersohnchen tried every trick to elude us. If he had kept his nerve, and had had the sense to remain hidden when we came bounding along, we would have lost him. Yet always, at the last moment, he would panic and bolt from cover, be it alley, doorway, newspaper stand, or monument, and the chase would resume.

Try as we might though, we could not catch him, though there were moments that he was within grasp. Then he would veer madly in another direction, like a rabbit, and put distance between himself and us again. Still, his flight was not completely haphazard or chaotic. He seemed to have a final destination, and it grew clearer and clearer.

It was the Stumper Allee.

Up the street he pummeled, past the decrepit brown buildings with their narrow gray windows. Suddenly, he veered up a short flight of stone steps of one such structure to a door, and darted within.

"There! Number 29!" Thomas exclaimed.

Gruss Gott! He lived on the same street as we did!

We pounded up the steps of No.29, nearly out of breath, and went inside. We were in a dim, grimy foyer of some sort. There were hurried footsteps, from above. The stairs! He was as good as trapped!

But we did not have him, for - deus ex machina - the landlady, armed with a broom, stepped out from a side room. She had seen the whole chase from her window. She was highly irritated. "Out! Out! Out!" she shouted, prodding us out the door with the broom's stiff bristles.

There, glowering in the street, was the mounted gendarme.

So the muttersohnchen had been in our midst, in Vienna, all along. He had not left. So what was he doing here?

Almost as amazing was the fact that he had escaped our notice for so long. We were students, though, usually busy with classes and away from our flat, preoccupied with our studies. It was probably easy for him to note our routines and then take steps to avoid us. The incident in the Schonnbrun had been mere bad luck on his part - I doubt he would repeat such a mistake.

There was no chance of taking No.29 by storm again. The landlady was watchful as Cerberus and the gendarme had warned us hooligans not to go there, or he would arrest us both. Surely, we didn't want that mark on our records, did we?

We had both nodded humbly and said "No, Herr gendarme."

Thomas and I would not be so easily foiled, however. We were intrigued as well as incensed: what was he still doing here?

Thomas suggested that we wait for him, in ambush. I argued that we knew neither his schedule nor his habits. Casual inquiries about the neighborhood revealed that no one else knew much of the strange tenant of No.29, either.

A cold fish, one fellow said of him.

Never says a word. Never buys anything when he comes in, except those pamphlets, said a shopkeeper.

We found the canteen that served the kind of sandwich we had found in his satchel. The owner had seen him in there before. Bit of an oddball, if you ask me. I've never seen him with a girl, or any friends. He's always alone. Why do you ask? Do you know him?

I told the man that we were former associates of his from earlier days and merely wished to know the state of his well being. Yes, he was a bit eccentric, wasn't he? Yes, he could use some looking after. No, there was no need to contact him on the matter; we would find him in due time.

He was not attending classes. He did not appear to be employed anywhere. No one had a good word for him. His was a sort of non-existence; he did not so much live in Vienna, as he seemed to haunt it, appearing at random and in unexpected places.

Stranger still were the other rumors, which cast a shadow about the muttersohnchen that had not existed before.

It was said that while he kept no company by day, night was another matter. Voices had sometimes been heard in his third-floor room at No.29, usually well after midnight, in some sort of ongoing, hushed discussion or debate. One was noted for its peculiarly resonant tone and note of languid command. No details of these nocturnal rendezvous were ever learned, though the landlady ventured to knock once and ask who was in there.

Just as puzzling were the occasional sounds of footsteps on the stairs, long after the main entrance had been locked for the night. Investigation here had proved nothing, either, but by dawn the entire third floor of No.29 was said to smell vaguely of smoke and ozone.

The stories grew even more fantastic, taking on the trappings and nature of a ghost story. A resident of our building reported to have seen strange guttering lights in one of the third-floor windows of No.29, and inexplicable brief soundless flashes as if of thunder.

The landlady was said to have asked after these incidents, but the muttersohnchen would not discuss them.

Most improbable of all - at least then, it seemed - was the recollection of a sometime-laborer and vagabond who called himself Frick, a haunter of flophouses and mercy convents. Given to late-night wanderings, he said he had once heard an unearthly disturbance from within No.29 that had shaken him to the core.

It had begun innocuously enough with the echo a slammed door, not a noteworthy event in poorer neighborhoods by any means. He had heard slow footsteps from high above, but something else too, a gibbering, tittering, half-suppressed lunatic laughter, soft and yet as frantic as a moth beating at a flame. Louder and louder it grew in time with the footsteps, which paced back and forth. Surely someone else had heard it, especially when the laughter became glassy, gobbling shrieks that spiraled ever outward, and the ever-swifter footsteps louder than guns, louder than thunder.

Then, a deadly pause, followed by a terrific concussion. Mad chattering rose and was borne away like dead leaves, like ash upon a cold wind.

The terror came some weeks later, upon the edge of winter.

It was late at night. I had spent the greater part of the day in my studies. Both Thomas and I were looking forward to the Christmas break, the return to Linz and our families. I was in bed, but sleep had been elusive and fitful.

Thomas was away, visiting his girlfriend - I was frankly surprised that he hadn't come back yet. We had classes in the morning. But, then, he had always been the more devil-may-care of us and rather dismissive of my Prussian sense of punctuality.

I lay staring at the sickle of moon above in the windowpane, thinking of what Frick had told us. Thomas had dismissed the man: he'd told us what we wanted to hear. I wasn't been so sure myself, and I am not given to the fantastic.

At least I wasn't then...

Sleep finally came, or some semblance thereof. It did little to make itself welcome. There were dreams, half-formed, struggling things that pulled restlessly at the edges of consciousness, and I think I whispered or spoke aloud more than once - to myself, or them, I am not certain. I recall now only mere fragments: scratching at the window. A skeletal three-legged thing. The floor of the Parliament House a thousand years hence, the skeletal diplomats clad in rotting finery, their uproar forever stilled. An empty city street, beaded with a row of iron street lamps receding into an immense darkness, beneath them an older, well-dressed man walking, whose face seemed ever more changed, ever more corrupted as he passed again and again between light and darkness.

I was finally awakened by the most ordinary of things: human voices, talking, outside in the courtyard. I greeted such company with relief, at first.

There were two or three voices. There was nothing implicitly sinister in the exchange. Students occasionally loitered out in front of No.33, before going home to bed. In fact, I thought I recognized Thomas' voice. Was he with his girlfriend? Perhaps they would steal one last kiss before turning in. The thought made me smile.

Gradually, my smile faded. There was an uncharacteristic tension in my friend's tone. Nor did I like the other voices, especially the clipped authority of one...

What I heard next, froze my blood. Thomas said, "What are you doing?" and there came a sound, a heavy, muffled thump like that of a rug being beaten, followed by a cry, and then another thump, and another.

I sprang to the window. Outside, in the blue, luminous courtyard, were two men in heavy coats, and third on the ground, shielding himself from the blows of the cane and feet of the other two. And there was a fourth, who stood a slight distance away. He struck a match to light his pipe, and revealed briefly an orange sliver of jowly, heavy-set face. A mustache. A monocle.

Herr Muller-Hillebrand.

"STOP!" I yelled, beating on the glass with my fists.

The three men looked up. Yes, it was Muller-Hillebrand and his detestable manservant. But the sickly pale watchful face of the third, turned upward like some form of night-loving fungus that pierced me through with rage and horror.

It was him, the muttersohnchen.

I burst out of our flat, clad only in my sleeping gown. I took the stairs two at a time, veered crazily down the risers. Black murder pulsed in my veins. Vengeance shrieked in my ears. Over and over I cried Thomas! Thomas!

The courtyard, however, proved empty. There was no sign of my friend's assailants - only Thomas, a dark, still and crumpled form. Blood dribbled from his nose and ears to puddle beneath his ruined face. A terrible gash parted his scalp. I could not tell if he was alive or dead.

My vision blurring with tears, I went to him.

That was when I heard it, a small stealthy sound, from some distance away.

It was him, the muttersohnchen, across the street, watching me.

A strange expression came over him, some terrible rubbery facsimile of a grin, as if an inexpert puppeteer manipulated his face.

With renewed fury, I launched myself at him. He turned and ran.

Under different circumstances, I am sure he would have escaped. He was as fast and nimble as ever. But as he rounded a corner into a trash-littered alley, he slipped in mud, and stumbled. I was so close behind him, he never had a chance to regain his footing. I grasped a handful of his jacket and we both went sprawling in the ice-cold muck.

The next few awful moments became a blur of spattering mud, his distorted, frightened face, the fever-beat in my ears, the murderous thickness in my throat. He threw something at me, a brickbat, and missed. I hit him hard in his scrawny chest and he staggered. Another blow drove him to the ground, into a puddle rimed with delicate autumn frost. I sprang on him, on his back. I pushed his face down into the filthy water, held it under. He fought, trying to throw me off. He snorted and struggled, gasped and coughed, and finally, a sound from him, a strangled, half-choked cry of pure terror, and I grinned in animal delight. I forced his face into the freezing water again -

And was struck a blow full in the back.

My body arched in a rictus of agony. I rose and staggered away from my victim in pain and utter confusion. Then, a sudden venomous sound, that of air being cut by something swift and deadly, and my right side erupted in hot agony. I fell to my knees, sprawled against the cold brick wall. I could not breathe. I gaped like a fish.

"That's quite enough, Rau," a sonorous voice said. "See if it's him."

"Yes, Herr Muller-Hillebrand."

Something cold and hard was placed gently under my chin - the sculpted knob of a cane - and my face was tilted inexorably upward.

"It's him, all right, sir."

"I suspected as much," Muller-Hillebrand said. "Though, I'm a bit surprised. He didn't seem to have quite the fire the other one did. Go see if our man's all right."

"Yes, Herr Muller-Hillebrand."

The Austrian squatted before me, elbows on his knees.

"Are you able to stand, boy?" he asked me.

I shook my head. I could barely breathe.

"You're quite lucky, actually. Rau is able to crack skulls with my cane, if I so desire. You've gotten off rather lightly. You should be all right in a few days or so."

I shuddered with the cold and horror. "Thomas..."

"Indisposed, at the moment." There was the scrape of a match, and I smelled the faint sweetness of tobacco. "It seems he wasn't as fortunate as you."

My teeth began to chatter with the cold and fear. Waves of near-epileptic trembling passed through my body. If Muller-Hillebrand noticed, he made on sign. Instead, he asked, "Rau? How is our man doing?"

"Wet and bit shaken, sir, but otherwise sound."

Muller-Hillebrand rose. Footsteps, two shapes that momentarily blotted the moon from view. Rau and the muttersohnchen. The latter muttered something, and spit at me.

"No need for crudity, young man" Muller-Hillebrand said. "As a matter of fact, you should be getting along now. It's late."

The muttersohnchen lingered for a moment, and then half-walked, half-trotted out of the alley, looking this way and that, like a rat in his movements, like a ghost in his soundlessness. I realized, then, that he was in his spiritual element here, this dismal blind maze of brick and mud, stinking of rot. Then he was gone, returned to darkness. Rau and Muller-Hillebrand watched him go.

"I have great hopes for him, someday," he said, his avuncular tone jarring, in light of what had just happened. "As I told you and your friend before, he has sensed the coming of great and terrible things. All poets and prophets do, in time."

"He'd kill himself crossing the street," I said. I surreptitiously searched the ground for a bottle, a brickbat, something to hit this madman withŠ

Muller-Hillebrand's quiet chuckle surprised me. "You underestimate him, my good man. Everyone does. You and your friend. His own father. The instructors at the academy. Vienna. The world. Everyone.

"And it will be that way for quite some time. Years, in fact. But he will persist, like these walls. Like the seasons. Like the rats the crawl through the sewers of your beloved city. He will walk unscathed through hell itself while you fools are cut down left and right and yet you will continue to dismiss him.

"It will be your greatest mistake, in the end."

He was distracted now, as was his manservant. I rose, slowly, brickbat in hand, leaning against the wall. "No," I said, "he will not. He dreams. Nothing more."

"And it is his dreams that will one day become your holocaust, dear boy. I am willing to stake my reputation upon it. And the reputation of my master, as well."

"I'm sure you are, Herr Muller-Hillebrand," I replied, and smashed the back of his head with the brickbat.

It is here that reality ends, and the descent into madness begins.

Oddly, however, I have come to accept it. A year has passed since the terrible events I have recorded above and nothing implicitly sinister has happened since then. The sun rises and sets, as always, and Vienna is as lovely and unchanging as ever. Thomas is dead and buried, but that changes nothing. The Imperial City will go forward without him, as it will one day without me, until he makes it his own, as he will make many other cities and Europe as well.

I have contemplated a hundred different ends for myself, I should say, measuring them against one another as to the relative dignity I might be afforded by each. I have contemplated poison, but that seems weak and womanly. Hanging, clumsy. I could throw myself from a bridge into the Danube but the well-meaning Viennese, who dislike any civil disruption, would likely rescue me. The bullet and razor blade are perhaps more certain, but frankly, both terrify me.

No one knows of my thoughts, of course. The Pole Bronkowksi merely believes me slightly touched in the head. We never talk much.

The police questioned me, and even suspected me, but they could prove nothing. I told them what happened...though I left out significant details, which, I am sure, would have placed me in a sanitarium.

Upon reflection, perhaps this would not have been a bad thing.

Of Muller-Hillebrand and Rau there is no sign. It is as if they never existed. Nor have I seen him since that awful night.

For this, I am grateful.

The world...the world shall one day be naught but barbed wire and the smoke of burning. Of this I am certain.

And I am certain that I killed Muller-Hillebrand, as well. He simply chose not to die, is all.

He seemed dead, at the time. He collapsed heavily, like a great tree. I fled. From behind me came a savage snarl, a liquid animal sound from deep in the throat - it was Rau, in an inhuman rage. His eyes seemed to all but glow in the eerie half-light.

I ran faster up the street, through a graveyard of dark buildings and twisting alleys. Rau followed, snarling and gibbering.

Once or twice I turned to gauge his progress, and this is where it becomes difficult to write.

A bestial, shocking, frightful change had come over Rau's appearance as well as his behavior. He seemed, though I couldn't quite tell, to be scrabbling, almost hopping along on all fours. Or was it three limbs? I could not quite place the presence of his other arm. And had he closed with me, or did he seem larger now, distorted, like a dark shape seen through thick glass?

Somehow, I lost Rau, threw off his pursuit. Or should I say the thing that was Rau? For when I chanced to peer from my hiding place within a deeply shadowed alley, I saw a shape - an immense lunatic shadow, seemingly tall as the spire of St. Stephan, creeping over the street like black blood. The dim glow of the streetlights made it diffuse, indistinct, but did nothing to diminish the horror of its outline, which was that of a shape wrought in Hell - hard as winter and lean as famine, and headless but for some lashing tapered appendage where a face should be.

There was a smell, a disgusting mustiness as if of a forgotten vegetable cellar or decaying fish. The shadow-shape lingered, as if searching. I shrank in horror from it. Some hidden, vestigial instinct told me that I must not make a sound, that it was listening for me.

Slowly, I began to back away, further down the alley, searching desperately for a doorway, a window, somewhere to hide. It knew I was here. Then I found a shallow recess, a bricked-over alcove.

A thin crackle of ice from behind me and a soft splash - something was stealthily making its way down the alley. Terrified, I pressed myself against the cold brick of the alcove, among the rotting boxes and barrels. I could not stop shivering. My feet were numb, my breath plumed in the frigid air. I was vaguely aware that I might be freezing to death.

Such thoughts ended when I saw the thing making its way, with almost grotesque delicacy, down the alley where I hid. Every fiber of my being strove to scream when I saw it - I was convinced, at first, that it was a misshapen spider the size of a man, blackish-green, its long legs tipped with steel spines.

My horror redoubled when I realized that it was a titanic hand, tipped with claws like daggers, making its blind way toward me.

I cried out and burst forth from hiding place. Boxes and barrels fell with a clatter. The hand grasped at me, but missed.

It was another hand, instead, that seized me by the neck as I plunged around a corner, frantic with terror.

I would have screamed, if a palm hard as iron had not clamped over my mouth.

It was Muller-Hillebrand.

Unlike his manservant - if that thing could be called that - no change had come over him. Only his monocle was missing. Nothing less, nothing more. He shoved me into the wall.

He should have been dead.

"Well," he said, "it appears I was wrong. You do have some fire in you, don't you?"

I tried to pull away from him but he held me in his bear-trap grip, which tightened about my throat. "I wouldn't do that anymore, if I were you. The thing out there? It knows you're here. And it's here, as well."

A strange smile creased Muller-Hillebrand's fleshy face. "It was quite clever of you to try and knock my brains out, yes. Pointless, but quite clever. Had I not been who I am, I am sure you would have killed me. But it is as I said to you in the Parliament House: I do not fear death, because I cannot die. I came before, and I will follow after."

Without explanation, he released his grip upon me, and I slid to my knees in the mud - weary, filthy, frightened, dreadfully close to unconsciousness and yet taut with dread, my head swimming as if in delirium.

"What is that thing out there?" I croaked.

"That," Muller-Hillebrand replied, "is the messenger of the Outer Gods. That - is Chaos - the Crawling Chaos, if you're a stickler for such things, as I am, myself.

"You may know us both as Nyarlathotep, however, if you prefer."

"My God, you're mad."

"Not mad...merely amoral, if you understand me. There is a distinct difference."

He crouched near me, the oddly avuncular air about him again. "Cold, isn't it?" he asked.

I nodded, shuddering.

"Then I'll keep what I have to say brief.

"From here on, you leave little Adolf alone. You leave the muttersohnchen alone. No more threats. No more harassment. Great and terrible things lie ahead for him and I will not tolerate anymore interference. Is that understood?"

I nodded. Dear God, the cold. The stars seemed to wheel dizzyingly high above. Muller-Hillebrand leaned close. He spoke quietly.

"As far as you are concerned, he was never in Vienna. This never happened. I am not talking to you at this very moment.

"Do we have an agreement?"

I nodded, and then broke into weak, helpless tears.

Muller-Hillebrand rose and, an Austrian gentleman to the end, stiffly offered me his hand. His eyes were yellow and luminous, like those of a night-animal.

And God help me, I clasped his hand in my own.

I am still an artist, of course.

Sometimes, I am inclined to wonder if he is, as well.

The events I have related here should have destroyed me, perhaps, and for a time they did. In Linz, I remained locked in my room for most of a year. The ministrations of doctors and priests were in vain. I dreaded the coming of night.

But gradually, slowly, painfully, I returned to painting. Scenes from mythology. Nothing of any particular import.

The instructors at the academy pleaded for me to return, and I did. My parents felt it would be good for me, and I obeyed their wishes. Of course, I never returned to my room at No.33. I never returned to the Stumper Allee.

For a time, things went well. But lately, my work has taken a turn for the worse. Even if I must keep hidden what has happened to me, I fear it will make itself known in my work, as bones in shallow graves will work their way toward the surface after a hard rain.

Fitting, that I should write of graves, of bones...the medium in which he will one day work, the world as his canvas.

In the galleries they whisper of me, and fall silent should I draw near. I am the supreme affront to their sensibilities. I am the puzzle of my instructors and the shame of my family.

There hangs now in the Academy a final work by me. It will not be there for long. It is the talk of Vienna. They say it is proof of my madness and that it should be burned, that it will be burned. I say that even as ashes it will remain, long after I am dead and Vienna rubble.

It is an oil painting, after the manner of the masters. It is a scene from antiquity, a warning, a question and a moral: the Expulsion from Paradise.

There is nothing outwardly shocking about it, but for this single small detail: the naked, anguished figures of Adam and Eve have had their eyes torn out by what I hope is a merciful God.

Upon seeing it, a prominent and appalled patron of the arts demanded to know why I had perpetrated such a monstrosity.

I coolly replied that if God will no longer allow us to dwell within Paradise, I should hope that he would blind us to the terrors without.