MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

We did not hear from Rasputin until a few years later, when we learned that some Russian nobles had conspired against him, and although they finally managed to kill him, they had to employ the whole repertoire of murder methods, all of them in a single night. And even so, it seems that when they threw him into the cold waters of the Neva River, he was still alive and his death was caused by freezing. Of the "book fallen from the sky", we never knew anything else. Probably it has gone back to where it came from. Anyway, when I am under the open sky, I'm always looking up just in case. My physical constitution is not as robust as that of Papus, and I doubt that I survived the impact of such a voluminous book. And as for the rest of things, M. de Charlus has proposed himself to separate me from the tutelage of my Rosicrucian friends and to instruct me in his own wisdom, much more mundane and whose motto could be summarized in the word “Yippee!”. Although one day I trampled h...

The duel was scheduled for dawn. The field of honor would be a clearing in the forest that surrounded the castle. I could have closed my eyes and returned home immediately, but to appear as a coward before the most select of high society did not seem to me the best way to enter it. So I accepted the challenge. Papus and Marquis de Guaita himself offered to be my seconds. Since I was the challenged, I had the right to choose weapons. I knew that Baron de Charlus mastered all kinds of weapons, while the only weapon that I had used in my life was, when I was a child, the slingshot. So I didn’t hesitate a moment: “The sling”, I announced leaving everybody perplexed. We had to borrow the weapons from the Marquis’ children. Both kids refused at first to lend their slings and barricaded themselves in the attic from where they bombarded us with large stones like chicken eggs. In a burst of heroism, one of the Baron's seconds rushed up the stairs and received a stone right in the middle of ...

In the castle of the Marquis de Guaita, everyone wore ceremoniously except for a guy named Jean Paul Pattin who, for some mysterious reason, said he was not there. That stunned me at first, but then I realized that, technically speaking, I was not there either. So I tried to worm his secret out of him. After more than two hours wasted, I discovered that his secret was that he was crazy and that he had escaped from a nearby asylum. Eager to make up for lost time, I burst as a cyclone in the ballroom at the precise moment when, by a move of the dance, a lady had just momentarily separated from her dance partner. Literally, she bumped into me. She was so self-absorbed that she did not notice the change and grabbed me as if I were her partner. “What an embarrassing situation”, I thought, “Maybe I’d better close my eyes and go back home to meet my body”. (I had left him something to eat and drink because at that time I was not sure how your body behaves when you leave it. That is also the r...

Today, while walking through the gardens of Luxembourg, two misfortunes have occurred simultaneously: a sudden storm has broken out and I came across Monsieur de Charlus. I thought he would not remember me, but he immediately pointed to me with his outstretched arm and exclaimed: "You!" I became  paralyzed. I didn’t know whether to run or to pretend I was a statue. I chose this last. But, still, he came towards me with great strides swinging his cane and roaring with laughter at my pretence. Such undisguised disbelief made me angry and decided me to persist in my pretense. Furthermore, so there could be no doubt that I was a statue, I internalized my status as a statue. I no longer pretended: I was one of the many statues that dot the Luxembourg Gardens, and nothing and no one could persuade me otherwise. How do you persuade a block of stone? I was not aware of anything! I neither reasoned nor heard or saw or felt anything anymore. I have no idea what that damn Charlus told m...