The bear was in the room again, its maw covered in blood. How had it killed her father? It was a ghost. How had it touched him? Would it touch her too? She watched its darkness swell and shrink, and inside it curled the ghosts of thousands of dead.
“Safe in Frankfurt,” said the doctor, stroking her hair. She felt like a pet, orphaned and taken from its home.
The bear was as large as the whole house one moment, and small as a dog the next. It clawed the furniture. It tore at the grass, at the bedclothes, at the boundary of the property.
“All is well,” said the doctor.
Beate knew he was lying. Nightly, she saw the bear running from the house, gaining speed as it went, and the ghost of her father tumbling over in the grass. The surgery, she soon learned, was full of dead rabbits, all of them neck-wrung. The kitchen was full of skinned rabbits. Now that her eye was healed, she knew the whole place swarmed with the dead, and all the dead could do was try to hide from the monster that lived here, the great bear, gorging and expanding.
The ghost of her father looked up at the windows of her bedroom.
“Can you help me?” he asked. She could not.
She had not liked her father, and her father had not liked her, but he had not deserved to be eaten by something that didn't exist. What was this land that it called for sight?
8.
The rabbit cornea healed into increasing clarity over the next months, the flap of skin transparent, the vision improving, but the girl herself was not right. Von Hippel had planned to announce his victory at the Ophthalmological Society Meeting of 1886, a surprise to every surgeon there. His success would birth a new method, the clockwork trephine combined with cocaine anesthetic. He was nervous that this would be impossible, though he'd given himself a year to prepare.
At first, Beate jumped at every sound, and then spent hours at the windows, tears running down her cheeks. She patrolled the rabbit pens, and gazed into the woods. At night, she often screamed, but refused sedation. She left her lights burning.
Von Hippel worried. There was still no explanation for what her father had done, his midnight disappearance. The mother, he understood. The loss of her husband had placed the woman in a bleakness it'd been impossible to recover from.
He looked at Beate's beautiful face, listened to her sweet voice. Surely she would recover completely. It simply needed time. Von Hippel made certain to dress her in the clothing of a respectable young woman, though she cared nothing for fashion. She didn't know how to lace her corset, nor did she know how to bathe herself. She didn't know how to read. She didn't know how to write.
She only knew, it seemed, how to sit in the grass, surrounded by rabbits. Sometimes the doctor would look out the windows of his office, and see her sitting there, her skirts spread around her, even as fall came down and the cold began.
“The thing I saw is gone,” she informed him one evening. “It's gone into the wood, or into a cave.”
“It is light,” he told her, impatient with her visions. “The thing you saw is light. If it is gone, Beate, it is a good sign. You're healing well, and your mind is beginning to forget its old notions.”
“Hibernating, perhaps,” she said.
But after that, for a time, she was better, calmer, though it was clear she still saw things. Her eyes, both the sighted and the not, darted around when he spoke to her. Carefully, he ignored it, not asking what she thought she saw. It would only encourage her mind to invent more ferociously. He had the cook and a maidservant watching Beate, and he did too, when he could. Her mind had been trained by years of darkness, he concluded, and she saw spots of light and made them into spirits. That, or he'd left a speck of dust in her eye. He examined her frequently, fearful the graft would fail, but it did not. There were no signs of infection, of cloudiness.
She seemed well enough but for her visions, and so the doctor focused on teaching her how to behave as a woman should. She learned to use her knife and fork at table, and then how to dress herself prettily enough. Mostly she learned to discern which clothing was flattering, but one day he found Beate standing in the garden, in the center of heap of dead leaves. She was wearing her winter cloak, her hair loose and golden. On her head, there was a crown. He first thought it was only feathers, but then he saw that it was made of dead birds, their bodies stiff in the icy air. Von Hippel stood watching her for a time, and finally approached her, quietly. She turned to look at him, and smiled with a kind of triumph.
“They like it,” she said. “Their bodies used for something other than death.”
Later in the winter he found her stitching a cape of rabbit pelts. He allowed it. She could have her birds and her pelts, if he had her good behavior at dinner, and soon, in Heidelberg. She seemed quite sane now.
She wore her rabbit fur muffler, and her rabbit fur hat, and at dinner, she was lovely. At night, she wandered, mapping the dark, he imagined, though she knew the house now. He was interested in her research into her surroundings, and added it to his own, the way she gained confidence, the way she ran her fingers over the walls, kneeling to look at the baseboards, testing the strength of doors. She explored the rabbit pen, touched the wallpaper with her fingertips and asked the names of colors, nodding seriously, sometimes gay, sometimes melancholy, but steadily improving. She wandered the kitchen, asking questions of the cooks, and learning the history of the place, the land, the house itself.
Von Hippel walked into the room one afternoon to find Beate seated at the bench, all the kitchen girls around her. They were of an age.
“It stalks,” Beate was saying. “It's lonesome.”
“Yes, and so it would be,” said one of the girls, the redhead. “My grandmother says that the last one was shot here, in these same woods, when she was a girl. She remembers seeing it carried off, tied to a log, five men to carry it. Back then, there was no house like there is now. There was only the wood, and little cabins. Killed three hunters, and they thought it was a monster, but then they hunted it down. My grandmother said it was tall as four men, with great red eyes and huge teeth-”
“What are you doing, Beate?” Arthur asked, his tone causing the kitchen girls to scatter.
“Learning about this house,” Beate informed him calmly. “Do you not wish me to study?”
He let the redheaded kitchen girl go. In the early spring, Beate informed him that the thing she'd been watching had returned, but that it was quiet. She said it only once, and he forgot it soon enough.
There was only one truly troubling moment for von Hippel, a day when Arthur and Beate took a walk out in the sun, passing one of the taller trees. She took a few steps away from him, running gaily, and Arthur reached out his hands to put them around her waist.
She turned, startled, when the doctor cried out, his hand to his face. Something had stung him. He brought his hand away and found blood on his fingers.
A jagged cut an inch long. It would have to be sutured. He had no notion of where it had come from. Beate looked at him darkly and shook her head.
Von Hippel felt a chill, and then realized, to his relief, that it could only have been a thorn from one of the branches. He had the trees trimmed the next morning, and then all was well again.
Beate stopped sleeping at night. She spent hours outside. The bear was shifting, and more dangerous. She'd begun to try to find another human ghost for it, something to quiet it. She was hunting a hunter to kill the bear, or another ghost bear to please it, but she found none. She walked into the woods, slowly, feeling the trees heavy all around her, and behind her the bear, shambled, dark and loud. There were still no human ghosts here, though, not that she could see. If there were any, the bear's presence would force them out. Perhaps this ground was salted by the blood of those the bear had killed. Maybe ghosts knew to stay away.
The bear was hungry. It huffed beneath branches and fallen logs, unearthing ghosts of fox cubs frozen in a long ago winter.
Beate looked furiously into t
he dark, her human eye showing her nothing of use.
This bear was full of murders, an absorber of things that had been done badly in the wood and on the grounds. This ghost had been hunted.
She stumbled upon the bear one night under a full moon, a valley, a rill, and the bear shook and moaned, sounds she'd never heard it make before. The first shot hit it, and then she watched the bear stabbed. There were human ghosts here, suddenly. Three ghost hunters swarmed from the trees.
The bear had been killed by a pack of hunters. The bear killed them again with a swipe of a paw, even as the bear itself fell. She watched its fur stripped from its body. The ghost bear watched mournfully as it was skinned.
The death was like deaths she'd seen before, the deaths of human ghosts, and she realized that she was seeing its original death. It had died with no other bears around.
She watched a procession, the bear strapped to a log, carried by invisible bodies. The men who'd carried it were long dead, but not dead of the bear, so they were not here. Instead, there was just a log, moving through the forest without visible means of support, the skinned bear hanging from it. The next day, as though none of this had happened, the bear reappeared, its fur intact, beside her.
The hunters the bear had killed, she could not find again, though she searched, hoping those ghosts could help her make the bear rest. They did not appear, and the bear followed behind her, tremendous, hunting rabbits and birds, a hive of long dead bees surrounding the echo of honey.
She went back to the house, and to her bedchamber, the bear with her. On the lawn, her father died again.
9.
September, and the Ophthalmological Society meeting was looming, every eye doctor in Germany traveling to Heidelberg. Beate would be exhibited. She'd known for months. This was the culmination of all their efforts. But she did not wish to leave the premises.
“What if,” she said to von Hippel, sounding hunted, “what if I see too much? I don't know what I might see when we leave these grounds.”
“You'll see what there is to see, of course,” the doctor said. “Your visions are much improved, are they not? Now you have control over them. You know the difference between a vision and a city. Heidelberg is a lovely place. There will be people to meet, and gardens to stroll in. There will be concerts.”
She looked frantically at him. For the first time in months, von Hippel dreaded what she might say at the convention. A little sedation, then, an injection of the morphia. In the carriage to the train station, Beate was limp on the seat across from him, her lips open slightly, the ruff around her throat loosened.
She screamed as they crossed the boundary of the property onto the road. She gestured out into the land, the trees and grasses on either side of the carriage.
“There,” she said. “Look at the forest. Look at how the rabbits all come out to see me go. And there! If you could see what I do, you would be frightened too. Someone was hanged for being a witch, just there.”
She turned her head to him again, and gasped, staring at the space just beside him.
“Oh,” Beate said, her voice miserable. “Oh, I thought it might stay here. But it travels with us.”
Her expression was weary, and frightened. It occurred to Arthur that she'd been so since the day in the trees, though he was now fully healed.
“Will you take the train with us, then?” she asked the space beside Arthur, her voice pinched. “I should not have thought you would. Or will you run alongside?”
She sighed, and looked at the doctor. “It can touch the living, as you know, if it tries. It hungers. It's been on the land a long time, and there isn't much there for it now.”
Von Hippel had brought tea to lift her spirits, and a cake as well. He poured out the tea and swiftly mixed honey and valerian into it. She didn't notice. She was too occupied with staring at the space beside him, and then out the window again, narrating.
“Someone there was run through by a boar, a long, long time ago. But no one knows what we travel with, Arthur. We have the last, lost bear in Germany.”
It was the first time she'd identified the thing she thought she saw. The doctor felt his skin clench, all over, every inch of flesh turned into something frozen and rolled in snow. He could not say whether it was that he didn't believe her, or that he did.
“We do not have a bear in this carriage, Fraulein Abendroth,” he said. She startled, hearing her formal name. “It's the drug that makes you see it.”
“It's beside you,” she protested. “It's all around you. It's not exactly a bear, but what would you be if you'd never seen another like you? You'd forget what you were, would you not? It didn't belong here. It must have come over the mountains.”
Von Hippel thought unhappily back to the conversation he'd overheard. Kitchen gossip. He wanted to argue with Beate. He wanted to slap her face and make her return to her senses. It would be his reputation on the line in Heidelberg, not hers.
“If I'd never seen another von Hippel, I'd still be myself, just as I am now,” he said, as calmly as he could, for what would it be if she did this at the meeting? The rest of the surgeons would blame his procedure, damaging her eyes so that she could not help but see things. The vision of the bear would be, to them, some misunderstood light, a flaw in the surgery. “I'd be Arthur von Hippel, just as you are Beate Abendroth.”
“Oh, but I'm not the same as I was,” she said. “I've seen too much to be Beate. I see everything now.”
The doctor looked at her eyes, one clear and gentian blue, only the faintest line of scar where the cornea had joined her own flesh, the other eye silvery and nearly blind. He should have performed both at once.
The doctor was unnerved enough by her steady gaze to glance at the empty seat beside him. She looked at him as he carried her onto the train. The drugs had taken effect now entirely.
“At least we shall not be plagued by the rabbits on this journey,” she said sleepily. “The bear frightens them all away. It should be frightening all the other ghosts away too, but it only looks at me.”
Not an hour later, though, she was speaking angrily to a vision of her mother.
“He told me you were in Frankfurt, mother, but I knew you weren't. No, you are still here, I see. I see you. Hush. I see you.”
Beate looked at her mother, there, in her bloodied dress, on the train where she didn't belong, part of the train now.
Go, go, go, whispered Johanna, but she looked at the end of the carriage, where the bear was curled, waiting, a darkness filled with ghosts, and she made a sound of horror. She hadn't died of this bear. She didn't stay long with her daughter, but returned to the nose of the train. She had nothing to give.
Beate sat, pressed against the seat, panting, wondering at her own emotions and looking at the doctor, who said nothing, though he'd lied to her over and over. Her mother was not in Frankfurt.
Her mother, she discovered, was dead. She felt more sorrow for her father, the way he fled the bear nightly.
The bear filled half the traincar with its invisible bulk. She could smell berries and rotting meat. There were blackflies coming in the window. The doctor was reading a paper and surreptitiously watching her. He saw nothing of what was really around him. No one did.
The bear stretched itself until it was nearly as large as the train, and then shrunk again, into a cub, or what passed for a cub. She couldn't tell what it wanted, if it wanted. She only knew that it was hers now, that it followed her from room to room. And now into the train. Now it wanted to be seen, like all of them, having been seen by Beate, and it was hungry, like all of them, but this ghost was worse than any other.
She would give anything to quiet the bear. To end it.
The ghosts of everything and everyone surrounded her, a train full of forgotten things looking to be remembered. Out of the windows she saw ghost armies marching, and ghost rabbits springing alongside the tracks. The bear stood to look out, intrigued. Sometimes it exited the
cars and rambled along the top of the train, hunting human ghosts. Some it caught and ate, and she watched that too, the bear consuming the already dead, its belly full of ghost light.
She could not spend the rest of her life followed by a creature only she could see. She looked at the bear. The bear looked back, glittering eyes, an ancient thing made of teeth. It hunkered down, folding its claws beneath it, and stared at her, anticipating the ghosts of Heidelberg. She feared it did not just anticipate ghosts.
10.
In Heidelberg, Beate stood calmly on the stage beside von Hippel, and he spoke of her surgery, of the ways in which the cocaine anesthetic had impacted the treatment, of the way the clockwork trephine had ensured perfection, and she smiled pleasantly, nodding even as he opened her eye and demonstrated the proper placement of the trephine.
When other doctors questioned her, she said “I can see everything now. I thank the good doctor for restoring my sight.”
They held up pictures for her to describe, numbers for her to call out, and she did so, without hesitation, elegantly: he'd spent the last months teaching her to recognize them. Her parents had never thought it necessary that she read. She was a credit to the procedure.
Her rabbit eye was examined by a line of doctors, each one awed at the precision, the perfection of the healing. There had been centuries of failure before this, lenses made of glass rimmed with gold, lenses brought from all manner of creatures and mangled in their transit. She was a miracle, the first of her kind, a girl seeing through the eye of a rabbit.
Only once did she whisper to von Hippel that the room was full of ghosts, and then, looking around a few moments later, she told him that it wasn't any longer. The bear had frightened them away.
He took her to the Philosopher's Walk as a reward for her good behavior, and to see the Neckar River, and the old Roman building they called The Witch's Tower.
“Too many dead,” she said. “The bear doesn't like it.”
The bear was inside the tower. The Romans had kept bears. It snuffled around, growling and roaring, but there were no other bear ghosts in Heidelberg.
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 22
