by Mike Carey
Secretary Tuss found my body the next morning. He contacted the governors of the region and told them I was dead. It was a nine days’ wonder. Every man and woman at the glassworks was questioned at length. Simona kept her nerve admirably, and said like everyone else that the last she’d seen of me was at eight o’clock when the shift ended.
Nobody was ever charged, and nothing came of it. There were far greater tragedies at that time, and far greater scandals. The death of one minor official wasn’t going to make the world stop spinning.
There was, though, plenty of gossip about it on the shop floor. One woman said she thought I’d been murdered by enemies of the regime. Another was of the opinion that the regime itself had done away with me in one of its internal purges.
‘What do you think happened to the manager, Simona?’ the next woman along the bench asked her.
Simona chewed the question over for a little while.
‘I think he wandered into the woods and lost his way,’ she said at last. ‘That can happen to anyone.’
There was a thoughtful silence after Zelzer had finished his tale, but there was no applause. The story had been told to illustrate a point, Drozde realised (though she was far from clear what the point was), and that changed the occasion and the required etiquette.
‘It was the torc,’ the woman Petra said. ‘It was cursed, as I said.’
‘It was not the torc,’ Zelzer replied. He sighed deeply. ‘I had shown Simona that I was a man, and she was prepared – for a moment, at least – to see me in that light. But then I showed her that I was a greedy hypocrite, prepared to give up all that I believed for a life of ease.’
‘It was cruel,’ said a little bearded man who might have been one of the monks from the old abbey.
‘No.’ Zelzer shook his head firmly. ‘It was not cruel at all, but kind and compassionate. She killed me to save me from my own weakness. I have taken it as a sign that she did have some feelings for me after all.’ His gaze had been downcast, but now he raised his head and looked around him defiantly. ‘I think my story has a happy ending.’
Magda tugged at Drozde’s sleeve, and Drozde felt the movement. Startled, she looked down.
‘Now I have to show you something,’ the little girl said. ‘Come on.’
They went back along the dark corridors and left the house again by the back door. There was an iron shoe-scraper on the top step that Drozde hadn’t noticed before. She wouldn’t have noticed it now except that Magda pointed to it and told her to bring it. Unwilling to argue (her voice might be heard where Magda’s would not), she did as she was bidden.
The moon was down now and the night was dark, but Magda was if anything more clearly visible than before and it was easy for Drozde to follow her.
In the ruins of the abbey Magda walked back and forth for a little while until she found a spot next to a mossy stone whose sharply angled sides made it clear that it had once been part of a wall.
‘Here,’ she said at last. ‘Dig. The shoe-scraper is like a little spade, only it’s wider and blunter and hasn’t got a proper handle.’
Drozde was far from keen. ‘What if someone sees? They’ll think I’ve lost my senses!’ she protested.
The dead girl scowled at her, hands on hips. ‘You asked the question!’ she said. ‘And then you said, “If you don’t tell me I’ll go away, ner, ner, ner.” Well, we’re trying to tell you, Drozde. But you’ve got to help!’ She held up her phantom hands and waved them, head cocked sarcastically. ‘Or do you expect me to do it?’
Drozde dug.
It took half an hour, and the narrow hole she made was excavated to a depth of two feet before she found what was buried there. With a trembling hand she drew it out.
It was too dark to see clearly, but she traced its outline with her fingers. A curve of hard, cold metal, as thick as her thumb, which did not quite close into a loop but terminated in two irregular bosses that were twice the thickness of the rest.
‘My God!’ she whispered. The words seemed forced out of her, and after them nothing else would come.
‘Simona Kaiser puts it back where Mr Zelzer found it,’ Magda said. ‘Then a builder digs it up again when they start to turn the old abandoned factory into a hotel. But that’s not until my time. Well, almost. Almost my time. In my time it’s sitting in a glass case in the little museum we’ve got, with some of the pictures from the gallery upstairs and some relics from the abbey. And there’s a card that tells how it was found and that it’s probably a thousand years old but nobody knows who made it or what it was doing there.
‘Do you understand, Drozde? This is your lifetime we’re in right now, because you’re still alive. And you lived a long time after Petra buried the torc – so long that the church they built on top of it has all fallen down again – but a long time before Mr Zelzer finds it under the floor of the factory. Before Simona Kaiser kills him and then puts it back where he found it because she doesn’t want to be rich but only to keep her job and do the work she’s happy doing.’
‘I …’ Drozde tried to speak. She felt as though the world was spinning under her feet and she might fall headlong. But the sickening spin she felt, the sense of movement, was not fast at all; it was something that played out over centuries, and if she once lost her footing she was afraid she might never stop falling. ‘Magda! Tell me, when were you born?’
‘Two days after the millennium. January the second, 2001.’
‘No! Tell me the truth!’
‘That is the truth, Drozde.’ The little girl’s tone was reproachful. ‘I wouldn’t tell a lie to you, because I love you.’
‘Dying is not so very different from being born,’ said another voice. It was Gelbfisc. He stepped into view, walking unhurriedly through the remaining wall of the ruin to stand at Drozde’s side. He looked at her with something of concern in his face. Unless it was pity. ‘Do you believe, madam, that the soul is eternal?’
‘I … I hadn’t thought about it very much,’ Drozde said.
The Jew shrugged. ‘Not many of us ever do,’ he said. ‘And when we do, we mostly miss the point. If the soul is eternal, where does it live before it enters into us?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Why, in eternity, of course. And when we die, where does it go back to? Eternity again. That’s still where it belongs. But before birth the soul had no name, no memories, no sense of itself. All things were as one to it. After death …’ Gelbfisc spread his arms. ‘Why, after death, the soul is the man, the woman, the child it was when it lived. All that’s left of us. Like the lizard of Afric in the story, it has taken the colour of its surroundings.
‘That’s what we are, madam. Poor, unhoused creatures, delivered out of time in a second birth that was more painful than the first. Lost in a maze, although the maze has no walls. And though we seem to be tethered to the place of our death, we are free to roam when it comes to the time before and the time after. Only imagine! There is no before and after for us. In eternity nothing comes first and nothing comes later. It all happens at once. And so the time when we walked the world alive, in our flesh, is like a single room in a house that has a thousand million rooms. When we find it we are happy to see it again, or else appalled. Were the walls really that colour? The space so narrow? But most of our time we spend elsewhere.’
Drozde shuddered and hugged herself, overwhelmed. Magda stroked her hair and whispered reassurances she didn’t even hear. ‘Horrible!’ she whispered. ‘Horrible!’
‘Yes, horrible. That’s the word. And the horror enters into us, and breaks us, like a robber’s crowbar wedged into the jamb of a door. We lose ourselves slowly, become grey shadows and fading echoes. You’ve seen ghosts that are like that, I think? Ghosts who have lost what I can only call the self of themselves. The haecceitas, the thisness. Ghosts that become only words or gestures, or less than that, a slight prickling of the skin as you walk into a room.’
Drozde nodded without speaking. All the ghosts she’d me
t before Pokoj had been of that kind.
‘But then someone came,’ Gelbfisc said, ‘and taught us a new trick.’
‘Stories!’ Magda spoke the word as though it were the answer to a riddle. As though she was saying, It’s so simple. Don’t you feel like a goose that you didn’t guess it?
‘When we tell ourselves, we become stronger and more certain in ourselves,’ Gelbfisc said. ‘It is, almost, a kind of magic. But where magicians are supposed to charm spirits into a circle, we charm our own spirits back into ourselves. We keep ourselves close. We do not fade. The one who came – it was as though she lit a fire for every one of us, and so long as we keep the fire tended we can be warm and safe there for as long as we want to. And because that is such a very great gift, because it saved us from the cold and the dark, we honour the one who gave it.’
‘I didn’t!’ Drozde shook her head violently. ‘I would know if I’d …’
‘You would, yes. But for us, no before and after. She always comes. We always honour her. We like to be close to her, because of the strength she gives us. And if in our thoughtless chattering we’ve brought her any pain or unhappiness, we beg her pardon. Truly we do.’
‘Yes,’ Magda said contritely. ‘We’re sorry, Drozde. But you said you had to know, so we told you. Please don’t be sad. None of it is as sad as you think it’s going to be, even when the horrible old colonel—’
‘Enough,’ Gelbfisc said, but he said it very gently. ‘No more for now, child. Give her some peace.’
‘When the colonel does what?’ Drozde demanded. But the ghosts were already fading, Magda with a smile and a wave as though – underneath the terrible weight of these revelations – everything that had happened was still part of a game, and the only thing they’d forgotten was to tell their new friend the rules.
26
Considering his earlier errors, and determined not to repeat them, Klaes went back to first principles.
The only substantial pointer to what it was the villagers were trying to conceal – and it was clear now, if it hadn’t been before, that they were trying to conceal something – was the words spoken by the yokel Kopesz when Klaes was lying on the ground and presumed to be stunned.
About Petos. About the cellar, and all that stuff.
That had given him two directions to investigate, and he had been remiss in both. First of all, he had taken Bosilka’s threat to tell Meister Weichorek to mean that it was to the burgomaster that this secret belonged. And he had taken his lack of knowledge to the mayor and tried to bluff the secret out of him, with predictable results. He had no desire to repeat that experiment any time soon, although he promised himself that when he got to the bottom of this he would pull Weichorek’s beard hard enough to hurt.
But he had also assumed that the tiny room behind the kitchen where the gypsy had made her nest was the only cellar that the mansion boasted. He knew now that this could not be the case. Weichorek had described much more extensive cellars, complete with wine racks and broken furniture. Perhaps if he were to seek them out, he would find something in them that would either answer his questions or point him in a new direction.
So he descended the main staircase to the mansion’s wide entrance hall and began to search the rooms on the ground floor. Most of these were still empty, apart from Molebacher’s kitchen and the adjacent apartments that he was using as storage space.
Klaes began there, at the rear of the house, and made a slow, methodical clockwise circuit, through the sodden, mildewed wilderness of the east and north extensions, then back into the habitable part of the house via a vast echoing ballroom. His skin prickled unpleasantly here, but most likely it was only the chill.
Nowhere did he find what he was looking for: a door or trap with a staircase behind it, leading down into the mansion’s underground levels. Was this another lie of Weichorek’s? Was Drozde’s rancid hideaway, after all, the only cellar Pokoj possessed? It seemed highly unlikely now that he thought about it. A house whose living space was this large would surely have needed storage on a similar scale. And yet it seemed there was nothing.
Klaes completed his circuit at Molebacher’s kitchen again. This was the most likely place for a cellar door. The mansion would have needed a spring house or icehouse, or something of that kind, and such accommodations were typically below ground. He walked round all the walls of the kitchen itself – the quartermaster sergeant was evidently still closeted with Colonel August – but nothing presented itself to his eye. The only stairs were those that led down to the room the gypsy had claimed.
He turned his attention to the floor. No trapdoors could be seen, and there were no coverings beneath which one might have lain hidden.
He was about to begin a second circuit of the walls when it occurred to him that there was another telling mystery in all of this. When they had first come here, a few short weeks before, they had found a house open to the elements and obviously deserted. If there had been a militia detachment here, what rooms had they occupied? Why had they left nothing behind of themselves, not even the rubbish from their meals or the shit from their latrines?
Perhaps the colonel was right, Klaes thought, and Petos had deserted. But then, what had happened to the rest of his detachment? Surely they had not gone with him: a dozen militiamen to turn into ghosts, all at once, and leave no shadow or footprint? It was hard to credit.
But what if one were to start from the opposing premise? If they had been here, then the signs of their presence would be here still. It was just that he hadn’t seen them.
He walked the rooms again, looking this time not for doors but for evidence of human habitation – by a large group of men, and in the recent past. He found none.
He went back up onto the upper floor and did the same. He could not, of course, go into the other officers’ quarters, but then he had been largely responsible for supervising their installation and so he felt reasonably sure that memory would suffice here.
Nowhere in the house could he find any relicts of Petos or his militiamen. No lost items of clothing, no personal belongings forgotten in the haste of a sudden departure. No apple cores, nutshells or cheese rinds from hasty barracks meals. No scuffs or scrapes left by pallet beds pushed up against walls or boots dragged across floors. Above all, no indication that anyone had ever tried to make this bleak and decaying place more homely or comfortable to the tiniest degree, except in the rooms that August’s officers had taken over. If they had ever been here, the militia had taken away with them every last atomy of their goods and of their detritus.
Klaes leaned against the window frame in one of the rooms that overlooked the ruined abbey, gazing out through the shattered window. It was here, in the extensive grounds to the front and the southern flank of the house, that the enlisted men had set up their tents. And the camp followers, of course, had gone where the enlisted men had gone, just as surely as water runs downhill. There were a great many tents, but they were most thickly clustered close to the mansion, like children clinging to their mother’s skirts. Behind them and to the west was where the carpenters from the village were building the whipping frames for the next day’s flogging. The sound of their hammers came to Klaes on the crisp, cold air.
On the east side Pokoj directly adjoined the road.
What of the rear of the house, though? The stable yard was all he had seen, because the back door opened straight off it. He went there now and found a gate that took him past the well into a narrow kitchen garden bordered on all sides by walls of moss-covered stone. Another gate on the further side, closed with a bolt, led to an orchard with about a dozen trees. Some were obviously dead, bracket fungus spilling like intestines from their split, dried-out bark. A wicker basket lay under one, as though someone picking fruit had been called away or distracted in some long-ago summer, and had never returned to finish the task. Couch grass grew up through the basket’s broken weave.
Klaes walked on through the orchard, keeping the rear wall of the house on
his left until he came to the corner. All was ruin and neglect here. The coulter of a plough, half-buried in the ground, almost tripped him. It was as though unimproved nature was triumphing over the men and women of the house, now dead, who had tried to tame and teach her.
He went back to the garden. This must once have been a well ordered kingdom of herbs and vegetables. Stone flags marked it out into three separate beds of roughly equal size, except that a heap of dry straw at the bottom of the middle bed left a smaller cultivable area. Nothing was being cultivated here now in any case: left to themselves for many years, all the beds were dense tangles of weeds. Some of the brambles had stems almost as thick as Klaes’s wrist.
He was still looking for discarded waste from the meals Petos and his men might have eaten here. That was why his gaze was on the ground, and why he saw what he would otherwise have missed. The grass and weeds had been cut away around the mound of straw. It hadn’t been dumped on top of the weeds: it had been set down in a cleared space between them.
Where had the straw come from in the first place, in a kitchen garden? It had most likely been brought in from the stable yard, but why would anyone do that? To start a compost heap? But the work had been done recently – too recently for the days when this garden was still fruitful and might have derived some benefit from composting.
Gingerly, because it was a little damp and musty, Klaes cleared away the straw. Underneath it was bare soil raised into a low, untidy mound. Someone had dug here and then heaped up the straw to hide the fact.
Klaes went to find a spade. There were no sappers with the detachment, but Sergeant Strumpfel kept six shovels for the digging of latrines. He found them leaning in a row against the walls of the stables and took the nearest.
There had been no serious frost yet, so the earth was soft enough. Klaes took off his coat, folded it carefully and set it on the ledge of a ground floor window. Then he rolled back his sleeves and set to work.
