When he came back he fanned the embers of his fire again and warmed himself. And as he thus sat, his eyes would keep open no longer, and he felt a desire to sleep.
Then he looked around and saw a great bed in the corner. “That is the very thing for me,” said he, and got into it. When he was just going to shut his eyes, however, the bed began to move of its own accord, and went over the whole of the castle. “That’s right,” said he, “but go faster.”
Then the bed rolled on as if six horses were harnessed to it, up and down, over thresholds and stairs, but suddenly hop, hop, it turned over upside down, and lay on him like a mountain. But he threw quilts and pillows up in the air, got out and said, “Now anyone who likes, may drive,” and lay down by his fire, and slept till it was day.
In the morning the King came, and when he saw him lying there on the ground, he thought the evil spirits had killed him and he was dead. Then said he, “After all it is a pity, for so handsome a man.”
The youth heard it, got up, and said, “It has not come to that yet.”
Then the King was astonished, but very glad, and asked how he had fared.
“Very well indeed,” answered he. “One night is past, the two others will pass likewise.”
Then he went to the innkeeper, who opened his eyes very wide, and said, “I never expected to see you alive again. Have you learned how to shudder yet?”
“No,” said he, “it is all in vain. If someone would but tell me.”
The second night he again went up into the old castle, sat down by the fire, and once more began his old song: “If I could but shudder.”
When midnight came, an uproar and noise of tumbling about was heard. At first it was low, but it grew louder and louder. Then it was quiet for a while, and at length with a loud scream, half a man came down the chimney and fell before him.
“Hullo,” cried he. “Another half belongs to this. This is not enough.” Then the uproar began again, there was a roaring and howling, and the other half fell down likewise.
“Wait,” said he, “I will just stoke up the fire a little for you.” When he had done that and looked round again, the two pieces were joined together, and a hideous man was sitting in his place.
“That is no part of our bargain,” said the youth. “The bench is mine.”
The man wanted to push him away. The youth, however, would not allow that, but thrust him off with all his strength, and seated himself again in his own place.
Then still more men fell down. One after the other, they brought nine dead men’s legs and two skulls, and set them up and played at nine-pins with them.
The youth also wanted to play and said, “Listen you, can I join you?”
“Yes, if you have any money.”
“Money enough,” replied he, “but your balls are not quite round.” Then he took the skulls and put them in the lathe and turned them till they were round. “There, now they will roll better,” said he. “Hurrah! Now we’ll have fun.”
He played with them and lost some of his money, but when it struck twelve, everything vanished from his sight. He lay down and quietly fell asleep.
Next morning the King came to inquire after him. “How has it fared with you this time?” asked he.
“I have been playing at nine-pins,” he answered, “and have lost a couple of farthings.”
“Have you not shuddered, then?”
“What?” said he. “I have had a wonderful time. If I did but know what it was to shudder.”
The third night he sat down again on his bench and said quite sadly, “If I could but shudder.”
When it grew late, six tall men came in and brought a coffin. Then said he, “Ha-ha, that is certainly my little cousin, who died only a few days ago.” And he beckoned with his finger, and cried, “Come, little cousin, come.”
They placed the coffin on the ground, but he went to it and took the lid off, and a dead man lay therein. He felt his face, but it was cold as ice. “Wait,” said he, “I will warm you a little, and went to the fire and warmed his hand and laid it on the dead man’s face, but he remained cold.”
Then he took him out, and sat down by the fire and laid him on his breast and rubbed his arms that the blood might circulate again. As this also did no good, he thought to himself, When two people lie in bed together, they warm each other, and carried him to the bed, covered him over and lay down by him.
After a short time the dead man became warm too, and began to move. Then said the youth, “See, little cousin, have I not warmed you?”
The dead man, however, got up and cried, “Now will I strangle you!”
“What?” said he. “Is that the way you thank me? You shall at once go into your coffin again. And he took him up, threw him into it, and shut the lid. Then came the six men and carried him away again.”
“I cannot manage to shudder,” said he. “I shall never learn it here as long as I live.”
Then a man entered who was taller than all others, and looked terrible. He was old, however, and had a long white beard. “You wretch!” cried he, “you shall soon learn what it is to shudder, for you shall die!”
“Not so fast,” replied the youth. “If I am to die, I shall have to have a say in it.”
“I will soon seize you,” said the fiend.
“Softly, softly, do not talk so big. I am as strong as you are, and perhaps even stronger.”
“We shall see,” said the old man. “If you are stronger, I will let you go—come, we will try.”
Then he led him by dark passages to a smith’s forge, took an ax, and with one blow struck an anvil into the ground.
“I can do better than that,” said the youth, and went to the other anvil. The old man placed himself near and wanted to look on, and his white beard hung down. Then the youth seized the ax, split the anvil with one blow, and in it caught the old man’s beard. “Now I have you,” said the youth. “Now it is your turn to die.” Then he seized an iron bar and beat the old man till he moaned and entreated him to stop, when he would give him great riches.
The youth drew out the ax and let him go.
The old man led him back into the castle, and in a cellar showed him three chests full of gold. “Of these,” said he, “one part is for the poor, the other for the King, the third yours.”
In the meantime it struck twelve, and the spirit disappeared, so that the youth stood in darkness. “I shall still be able to find my way out,” said he and felt about, found the way into the room, and slept there by his fire.
Next morning the King came and said, “Now you must have learned what shuddering is?”
“No,” he answered. “What can it be? My dead cousin was here, and a bearded man came and showed me a great deal of money down below, but no one told me what it was to shudder.”
“Then,” said the King, “you have saved the castle, and shall marry my daughter.”
“That is all very well,” said he, “but still I do not know what it is to shudder.”
Then the gold was brought up and the wedding celebrated, but howsoever much the young King loved his wife, and however happy he was, he still said always, “If I could but shudder, if I could but shudder.” And this at last angered her.
Her waiting-maid said, “I will find a cure for him, he shall soon learn what it is to shudder.” She went out to the stream which flowed through the garden, and had a whole bucketful of gudgeons brought to her.
At night when the young King was sleeping, his wife was to draw the clothes off him and empty the bucketful of cold water with the gudgeons in it over him, so that the little fishes would sprawl about him.
Then he woke up and cried, “Oh, what makes me shudder so? What makes me shudder so, dear wife? Ah, now I know what it is to shudder!”
Fräulein Fearnot
MARKUS HEITZ
Translated by Sheelagh Alabaster
Homburg, Saarland, Germany
And so it was that Asa came upon the beast up on its hind legs, a foot and a
half taller than she was herself. Its sharp fangs were each as long as her little finger and the eyes glowed red and evil. From the depths of its throat the werewolf growled as it stared hungrily down at the brown-haired girl, pointed claws opening and closing in greedy anticipation, saliva dripping from its jaws.
Asa had quite different problems to cope with, werewolf or no werewolf.
She glanced up at the roof of the sandstone cave where she and the werewolf stood. It looked as if the stonework just above Tinkerbell—Tinkerbell the Lycanthrope, her favorite—was going to crash down any moment now. Tinkerbell had four processors to control movement, brilliant red eyes, real fur and a shockingly convincing snout. On the press of a button, gobs of slobber and stage blood came shooting out.
Asa picked up her radio. “Martin, we’ve got a problem on Level Eight in the Throne Room,” she reported. “The rock face has got to be glued back pronto or the whole lot’s going to come down on top of Tinkerbell.”
“How bad is it?”
“I really think it should be dealt with tonight.” She turned back to the werewolf, burying her fingers in its fur to find the switch at the side of its neck. She pressed it, and the creature’s growling ceased and the red eyes stopped flashing. “Good werewolf,” she grinned, patting it.
“Okay. I’ll let the boss know. Are you coming out now?”
“Not yet. I’ve got some stuff to do on Goldilocks. See you in the morning.”
“Don’t know the meaning of sleep, do you?”
“Nope.”
“And you don’t know the meaning of fear, either,” he retorted. “What’s a nice young girl like you doing here with all these—”
She laughed. “Piss off, Martin.” She switched the radio off and left the cave they called the Throne Room. The soft sand under her feet silenced her steps.
Altogether there were twelve levels in the Schlossberg, Europe’s largest sandstone cave system. A wealthy investor had turned it into a massive horror attraction. Hundreds of years ago the quartz sand here had been dug out for the manufacture of glass, and now people came here in droves to get scared out of their wits. Each level had its own theme: from werewolves to vampires, ghosts, demons, serial killers, execution scenes and torture chambers. There were actors to boost the effects of the motorized figures, ensuring terrified screams from the punters.
But the whole place reeked of history, and some said the mountain itself was properly haunted. Visitors had reported seeing strange things on parts of the tour where there were no show installations at all. And Martin, one of the staff, claimed to have experienced it himself.
Asa wasn’t just a splendid technician; she would dress up in costume like the actors and steal round corners, creeping up on the paying public to terrify the life out of them.
She’d give anything to catch sight of one of the real ghosts herself.
She thought of herself as being a kind of phantom. Her boss hadn’t ever put her on the books—he paid her in cash—and she didn’t have a fixed address.
What did she need an address for? She could live wherever she wanted to.
Her breath was like white fog in the air. The temperature in these caves was a steady 10°C, which wasn’t necessarily very good for the valuable figures, so it was vital to carry out regular maintenance.
Asa reached her workshop at the back of Level Ten and surveyed Goldilocks: a seven-foot-tall zombie, its body in an advanced state of decay, but very muscular and cleverly airbrush-finished in an aggressive pose—enough to make weak hearts falter any time it came whizzing out from a side corridor, groaning horribly.
The girl fastened back her longish brown hair with a quick movement and started up the gas turbine heating. She took off her coat, displaying the neat body that she mostly kept concealed under a black roll-neck sweater and dark cargo pants. On her feet she wore Doc Martens, which helped insulate her feet from the cold.
Asa began the intricate repair work on the zombie, resoldering a few points on the motherboard before checking the programming.
In general people called her a geek, and thought her reserved and difficult to get on with. Others assumed that she was highly gifted. Now thirty, she’d never completed any apprenticeship or course of study, but she was good at anything she cared to turn her hand to. If you didn’t know her and had never seen her work you might think she was a bit dim—but in fact she had an inquiring mind and wasn’t afraid of anything—all good qualities for a research scientist, really.
Asa didn’t give a damn what other people thought of her. She had her little sweeties, her own created monsters—and nothing shocked or disgusted her. Why would it?
A faint sound issued from the corridor.
Asa put down the soldering iron and cocked her head to listen.
Another rustle—something was being dragged along on the sand.
She glanced at the time. Could it be the technicians, off to the Throne Room to mend that precarious roof?
Then there was a clink, followed by a noise she couldn’t identify, but it sounded a little like sobbing. A high voice started begging desperately, “Don’t! Please don’t—please don’t—”
That was definitely not the tech-crew. Asa picked the hammer up from the bench and started toward the noise. She was thrilled to think it might be real ghosts.
Stepping out into the long corridor, she saw a dark figure swish past. A ghoulish laugh reverberated off the walls. “This is our mountain,” a voice breathed in her ear. “Get out of here, human, or we will kill you!”
“Hey—stop!” She raced off, hammer in hand, toward Tinkerbell’s cave.
The emergency lighting gave the sandstone a fascinating, magical appearance. The werewolf looked like a living creature frozen by a sorcerer’s spell. But where was the fog coming from? Asa had no idea. She’d never noticed that phenomenon here before.
Her heart was thumping in anticipation. “Who are you?”
“The souls of dead mine workers,” came the whispers from all sides, out of the drifting mist.
She took another step and grinned with delight. “Then show yourselves—I want to see you!”
“Go away, get out of our mines,” came the hissed warning, “or you will forfeit your life.”
“Let me get a look at you.” She forced her way through the damp mist. “This is so much better than my mechanical creations—”
“We warned you, woman,” came the thundering, angry voice behind her. “Now you shall die!”
Asa spun round and saw a sketchy figure with long, skeleton-like fingers reaching for her—and she lashed out with the hammer.
The tip of the weapon hit home, demolishing the face. The ghost spun back, screaming.
“Not so fast,” Asa shouted as she followed through and swung the iron hammer at the phantom again, forcing it to flee, stumbling, back into the protection of the mist.
Then something grabbed Asa’s shoulder.
“I’ll show you, you stupid ghost,” she cried as she twisted herself skillfully out of the phantom’s grasp and slammed the hammer into the lost soul’s skull. “I’m not going to let you kill me—”
The blunt end of the hammer burst through the cranium and the metal was now stuck fast, deep inside the skull. The figure collapsed with a gurgling sound and lay convulsing at Asa’s feet, blood gushing out over the tips of her shoes and sinking into the sand.
Asa realized something wasn’t quite right. “What the hell—?” She bent down to examine the ghost.
The fog lifted slowly and it became clear that the figure collapsed at her feet was no ghost, but a human in disguise. The man had transformed himself into a ghoul by means of an elaborate costume.
She pulled the fabric away and saw the shattered bone where the hammer was lodged. It was Martin, her coworker; the microphone he’d used to activate the loudspeaker at his waist had distorted his voice. Now it hung, broken, on his jaw. There was little point in checking for a pulse.
Asa began to realize that the ot
her figure hadn’t been a ghost, either. It, too, was human, and decidedly mortal.
Dismayed, she rushed back to the spot where she had beaten off her first attacker. She did not have to search for long. The girl could see from the scuffs and blood splatters that the other victim must have dragged himself a few yards further on. He lay in the sand, smashed face upward, with splinters of bone piercing the skin. The battered features looked grotesque, inhuman. There was blood streaming from the ears and the nose, and one eye had burst open. The man’s headset mouthpiece had been slammed right into his teeth, and there were broken stumps showing.
It could be Bernard, one of Martin’s buddies, the sound techie for the Ghost Ride, but there was so much blood that Asa couldn’t be sure. She remembered he’d once threatened to play a trick on her—he’d said he wanted to make her so afraid she’d crap herself.
Looked like it had all gone disastrously wrong, for him and for Martin.
“Hell.” She glanced at her filthy sweater, her bloodied hands and the glistening hammer with strands of hair still sticking to it—Martin’s hair.
Nobody was ever going to believe her.
At the very least she’d be banged up for ages in custody while they tried to fathom exactly what had happened. And her boss would be in trouble, too, for employing her illegally. Perhaps he’d be so scared that he’d just deny he’d ever met her …
Asa decided to take the simple way out. It was the easiest thing in the world for someone who didn’t officially exist and who had no fixed address to just disappear.
She sent her boss a quick text, explaining and apologizing for everything, expressing her distress at the two deaths, then she collected her things and set off.
She’d been working on the Ghost Ride for such a long time, and now, thanks to her and to a misunderstanding, the show sported a couple of genuine lost souls.
Ten kilometers south of Hannover, Germany
“So, do you do this a lot, bombing up the autobahn in the dead of night?” Asa was hitchhiking again, as she’d so often done in the past. She was enjoying the luxury of stretching her legs out in the roomy limo. Her kit was stowed in the trunk of the car, and Angelika, a blond in a bright red business suit, turned out to be a film director, and really easy to talk to. She’d picked Asa up at the last motorway service station, offering to take her to Hannover. It wouldn’t be far to Hamburg from there.
Fearie Tales Page 14
