A Dream-Story from long ago (maybe 1973)

In my dual character of Virgo Security Guard and Mercury Guide of Souls (Psychopompous), I was aboard the Orient Express, escorting the embalmed, coffined body of a murdered Archduke back to pre-World War I Vienna. For all the power of the huge pre-war locomotive and the funereal splendor of  his Highness's entourage, his final entombment--when at last, under cover of night, the train pulled to a stop, in just one  (seemingly the first at hand) among many obscure, empty, vaulted niches of the vast, gloomy cellar-prison such as might have been depicted by Piranesi, and which seemed to serve both as train station and mausoleum--was disconcertingly perfunctory, without any kind of ceremony. As the train rolled away behind us into the night, we former pall-bearers walked back along the tracks, shivering in the cold wind that seemed to blow from everywhere, shuffling in the  peculiar grainy grey-white dust that lay in sparse drifts on the stony ground, finding oddly placed little doors in the sides of the cavernous underground space that opened onto the  prosaïc, gemütlich corridors of luxurious pre-war Vienna hotels.

So I was at breakfast with my Girl Friday--the coffee was excellent, and the Kaiserschmarrn mit Kirschen exquisite--and reading (well, glancing through) the Wiener Zeitung:  Several stories about the disappearances lately, here in Old Vienna, of Famous Beauties.  Suddenly I had an idea--and I said to my lovely and vivacious young companion, "I think you need to visit the Beauty Salon of our grand hotel,  Get your nails, maybe your hair, done. Perhaps we shall buy you some feminine Beauty Products." And after breakfast I dropped her off at Chez Proserpine, and came back a couple of hours later to pick her up.  As we left the Salon, we stopped at the front counter where I gallantly paid for the beauty treatments that had been given her, and, just at the last, bought her a big oval-shaped cannister of the house-specialty face powder, called in fancy flowing script on the sides "Jeunesse Éternelle." And, right there at the counter, I pried the lid up and took a curious pinch of it between my thumb and forefinger--and I could not help exclaiming aloud, "Aha!  It is just as I thought!" For it was the same peculiar grey-white dust--bone dust!--that blew and drifted in the desolate emptiness of the archduke's tomb.

That evening my young companion and I hovered in the shadows across the street from Chez Proserpine while a magnificent Daimler came to a stop before the entrance, and an extraordinarily beautiful, fashionably (in the mode of 1913) dressed woman with hauntingly sad eyes descended from the motorcar and hurried inside, for her personal special beauty treatment:  An upper colonic irrigation with Aqua Regia.  We watched as the short-haired female attendant (no doubt Lady Proserpina herself), dressed more like a nurse than a beautician, locked the glass-panelled front door from the inside and pulled down the sign which said Closed.

And then we went away.  Once the mystery was solved, it had no further interest for me.  The sad fate of the Famous Beauties is, after all, just one among countless stories of ironic destiny that are told, and concluded,  in the Afterworld.