August puffed on his cigar as he watched the scenery pass by the cabin window. The weather was sunny, but a strange mist made the sky painfully whitish. He adjusted the flow in his kirlian-monocle, but saw no sign that the ether was hiding anything unhealthy. After his severe illness two years ago, he felt constantly watched – it was as if Death felt cheated and just waited in the wings. He snorted and thought, “And it is entirely the fault of the cow Harriet… who blabbed to the theater people, and, what do you know, the information had immediately been passed on to the witch Mathers in Paris.”
To impress Miss Bosse, he had bragged about how he, during the inferno years, had found ancient documents that had turned out to be of great interest to people in both the Royal Academy of Sciences and a couple of Free Masons of his acquaintance. Just imagine that he, as any besotted fool, had revealed to her that the documents were actually stolen from Mathers’ Ahathoortempel in Paris. This was an almost catastrophic blunder. He shivered. Golden Dawn and their ideas about freemasonr, ancient Egypt and Atlantis. Or R’lyeh or whatever they were calling it … Surely, he had good reason to feel persecuted, now that Mathers was on his trail.
But soon there would be other things to think of! His poetry and prose harvested the triumphs he was worth and his contribution to Sweden’s greatness – the construction plans for the revolutionary new ether radium boiler which, admittedly, was copied from the documents he had stolen – had not passed by without justified attention. As long as the rumor of the unveiling of the invention did not reach the Golden Dawn, then he should be able to feel safe. By the way, who knows where Mathers in turn had received the papers from?
Now he – visionary and poet fighting the world – was sitting in a train to Gävle to participate in the unveiling of the prototype. To be inaugurated by Prince Wilhelm, the inflated idiot. What could possibly go wrong?
