by John Langan
Then Lottie’s flying through the air. One instant, she’s hanging suspended in space. The next, she’s colliding with the closet door. She falls to the floor, and the door springs open, spilling the crowd outside it in. Lottie’s co-workers pour into the closet so fast they don’t notice her lying in front of them, and they trip and fall over her. All at once, she’s at the bottom of a pile of men and women swearing furiously at one another as they try to regain their footing. Lottie’s voice, knocked out of her by the crash into the door, returns, and she screams for help, screams for her mother to help her. Clara hears her above the din and starts hauling bodies off her, yelling at them to get up, that’s her daughter they’re crushing under their fat asses. A pair of hands catches Lottie beneath the arms, and she scrambles to her feet and into Clara’s embrace. Lottie wraps herself around her mother, hugs her in that self-abandoned way she had as a child. “What?” Clara says, “All this over a bag of almonds?”
That’s it. At her mother’s joke, Lottie bursts into tears, sobbing as if her heart had broken. She continues to cry as Clara leads her out of the closet and out of the bakery. She cries all the way home, and after Clara has undressed her and put her to bed. She cries herself to uneasy sleep, and later, Clara will tell her that, even then, she continued crying.
As for Helen, she’s gone, disappeared from the closet as if she opened a door in the darkness and stepped through it. Traces of her remain. Her smell, which sickens half a dozen people to the point of vomiting, lingers in the air, while her muddy trail dirties its floor. Seeing the dirty footprints, Clara knew what had happened, which is why she removes Lottie to the safety of their home. Why Helen threatened her daughter Clara isn’t sure, but she guesses it’s connected to whatever it is that kept Rainer at his books for most of last night.
XII
Rainer runs in the door. As he’s drawn closer to home, the conviction has been growing in him that whatever has happened to Lottie is the direct result of his experiments the previous night, what he had hinted at to Italo. The look on Clara’s face as he stops, panting, in the kitchen, is confirmation that his recent activity has not gone unnoticed. On hearing that Helen has visited his daughter, Rainer is distraught. Despite Clara’s assertion that the girl has been through enough excitement for one day, and she needs her rest, Rainer insists on seeing her. He swears he’ll be quiet, but when he sees her lying in her bed, still faintly sobbing, a kind of strangled noise forces its way out of his mouth. Clara whispering, “Come back!” he crosses to the bed Lottie usually shares with her sisters and sits down on the edge of it. His daughter does not waken. Rainer places his hand on Lottie’s forehead, and snatches it back, as if he’s been burned. He looks down at the floor, his shoulders sagging, and mutters something Clara can’t hear from her position at the door. Lottie inhales sharply, sniffles, sobs once, twice, and falls quiet. Rainer stands and walks quickly out of the room.
“What is it?” Clara asks when they’ve closed the door. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s sick,” Rainer answers. “That woman—that thing has done something to her.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Rainer says, “but she has been poisoned.”
“Poisoned?” Clara says.
“Yes,” Rainer says. “Her soul is sick, very sick.”
Clara glares at him, trying to control her frustration. “Her soul,” she says. “So has she really been poisoned, or are you speaking in metaphors?”
“Both,” Rainer says. “That woman has done violence to a part of Lottie we cannot see or touch. But it is a crucial part of her all the same, and the wound to it has sickened the Lottie we can see and touch.”
“Can she be cured?” Clara asks.
“I have given her a blessing,” Rainer says, “which will help a little.”
“Should we send for Reverend Gross?”
“The minister?” Rainer snorts the word. “What does a minister know about any of this? They spend all their days worrying about who might be thinking impure thoughts—who might be thinking at all. You might as well ask Gretchen or Christina for help.”
“Who, then?” Clara asks, “Who is going to help our daughter?” Before Rainer can answer, she adds, “Surely the books say something about this kind of thing? It’s all connected, isn’t it? This maybe-Schwarzkunstler, the dead woman, Lottie’s sickness, they’re like links in the same chain. Understand the one and you will understand the others.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?” Clara says.
“Because it isn’t like links on a chain,” Rainer says. “The relations among these things are more subtle, more complex. It’s like the relations of the sun and the planets, the planets and their moons—it’s like the relations of those moons to the sun.”
“You’re saying it’s beyond you,” Clara says.
Rainer stiffens. “I didn’t say that. I’m among the few men alive who understands even a fraction of it.”
“But not enough,” Clara snaps. “Not enough to put that woman back where she belongs, and not enough to help your daughter.”
“It’s complex,” Rainer says. “Half of what the books tell makes no sense, and the other half is close to madness.”
“Mad as a woman who should be dead poisoning your child?”
“Worse,” Rainer says, “far worse.”
“I don’t care,” Clara says. “If the books can help Lottie, you will find out how and do what has to be done. No excuses. I don’t want you wasting time worrying if this word means ‘a’ or ‘one.’ You should have done this by now, and then none of this would have happened. No more waiting. You act now.”
Although ten years will elapse before Clara relates this conversation to Lottie, she’ll still remember the fury she sees raging in her husband’s eyes. There isn’t much Rainer is proud about any more. In coming to America, he’s had to eat a tableful of humble pie, and he’s learned it goes down best with a smile. He’s accepted his sister-in-law’s snide reproofs in her bakery. He’s accepted his co-workers criticisms of his masonry. He’s even accepted his children’s corrections of his English. Throughout it all, he’s treasured his scholarship as the one place no one dares intrude, the kingdom in which he still reigns. Prior to the start of this mad affair, he managed to steal a few minutes every night with one book or another. Clara pretended not to see his lips moving soundlessly, his finger leaping from word to word, as he delivered an imaginary lecture. Though he’s never voiced any such hope to her, Clara knows that he secretly dreams of finding a position at an American university, re-establishing the career he was forced to abandon. For her to attack him here, the last bastion of his pride and self-respect, is the kind of betrayal of which only someone you love is capable. It’s thin ice to be skating onto, and Clara is aware of her danger. As Rainer struggles to find a reply, she says, “I have sent Gretchen and Christina to stay with the Oliveris. I’m going over to help them. That poor woman already has all she can do with her own children and those others. Help your daughter,” she says, and leaves.
XIII
Since Clara isn’t there to see what Rainer does, and since Lottie is unconscious, I can only speculate as to what happens next. No doubt Rainer thought of the perfect reply to Clara’s accusations the second the door closed behind her. You know how that is. Maybe he walked around the kitchen, trying to bring his anger under control. Eventually, though, he fetched his books from wherever he concealed them and spread them out onto the kitchen table. Years ago, when they were in Germany, just before the storm broke over Rainer, Lottie saw one of the books. At the time, she didn’t know what she was looking at. It was only in talking to Reverend Mapple that she stumbled across the memory and finally understood its significance. She was spying on her father, peering through the keyhole in his study door for no other reason than that he’d strictly forbidden her and her sisters to disturb him while he was in it with the door shut. Lottie observed him unlock one of his glass-
doored bookcases with a key strung on his watch chain. From the bookcase’s highest shelf, he reached down a tall, narrow volume. Bound between plain gray covers, it was secured with a lock, which Rainer opened with a second key on his watch chain. He sat down at his desk, turning back the book’s cover. Lottie swore the room darkened, as if the air in her father’s study had filled with particles of minute blackness, making it difficult for her to distinguish Rainer. Because of this, she couldn’t say for sure if what she saw next was accurate, but the pages of the book appeared to be giving off a black light, dimming her father’s face. Lottie bolted, ran from what she seemed to be seeing, heedless of Rainer hearing her. For the better part of the week that followed, she kept as much distance between herself and Rainer as reasonably possible. When there was no escape, when she had to embrace him, she had all she could do keeping herself from shuddering at the tiny flakes of blackness she could see clinging to his cheek, like the flecks of shaving foam he missed. For years after, she woke gasping from nightmares in which her father looked up from his desk to show her no face, only a black emptiness.
So I imagine Rainer bathing his eyes in the black light that spills off the pages of those books and clots the very air. A few streets over, Clara makes small talk with Italo and Regina, the three of them doing their combined best to talk around the strangeness squatting in their midst like an enormous toad. Lottie tries to escape from the black ocean, where her dreams have returned her. There’s no giant mouth rising to devour her. There’s only the face of her other-self and that unceasing monologue. Sometimes the speech returns to familiar ground—fantasies of her father’s friend, loathing of her sisters—other times, it ranges over new territory—fantasies of her father himself, loathing of her mother. Lottie has never heard anything like this, but it isn’t the shock of the language her other-self spits out that’s so disturbing. It isn’t even the sheer strangeness of confronting another her. What is truly bad, in a way that pumps fresh meaning into that deflated word, returning to it all the force it possessed when her parents used it on her when she was a child—what is bad is that each vile chapter in the other-Lottie’s fantasy of degradation evokes a response in her beyond simple revulsion. Every ugly assertion makes a part of Lottie jump with recognition. She’s no liar, this blank face. She’s telling the truth, giving voice to impulses Lottie hasn’t wanted to be aware she has. She’s tried to make of her soul a garden, so to speak, but the other-her’s words dig into the soil and overturn it, exposing what is wet and wriggling there to the light of day.
Maybe all this sounds kind of naïve to us, kind of dated. We’re much more used to the idea that we’re full of all manner of unpleasant impulses, aren’t we? What Lottie is experiencing, however, is more than just a pious, sheltered girl realizing her own impure thoughts. She’s undergoing a recognition—a recognition of intent so intense it’s for all practical purposes equivalent to having committed the acts themselves. The ground has fallen out from underneath her. She realizes that the words her other-self is saying are coming from her mouth, too. Her mind is becoming brittle, freezing over the way a pond does, her thoughts becoming sluggish, struggling through an increasingly icy medium. Only the horror gripping her seems capable of surviving the cold, moving freely within her. It trundles along like some kind of small, polar beast, tireless, persistent, heedless of the plummeting temperature. Once the process is complete and her mind has frozen, only that small beast will be left, only the horror.
Clara stays away from the house the entire night, refusing Italo and Regina’s offer of their bed in favor of sitting up at their kitchen table when everyone else has turned in for the night, smoking away the hours. From what little I’ve heard of her, she strikes me as a woman prone neither to regret nor worry, but on this night I suspect she must taste a little of both. She must think about the house she was mistress of in the old country, in the days before everything went wrong for her husband. She must think about that old life, and the distance between it and this new one. Does she remember the first time Lottie was sick, truly sick, and she sat up with her? How could she not?
XIV
Returning home with Gretchen and Christina the next morning, Clara is met at the door by Rainer. His face is drawn with exhaustion, but his eyes are alive with a light his wife has not seen in them previously. This light doesn’t seem to radiate from within his eyes so much as to be reflected upon them, as if Rainer is gazing at a source of illumination invisible to everyone else. Clara doesn’t like the look of this light. It isn’t the warm glow of the sun; it’s the cold glare of lightning. Over the course of their marriage, Clara has been afraid of Rainer on one or two occasions, instances when his temper flared so bright she was sure it would push him to violence. In all that time, she’s never been afraid for him, not once, not when he told about his secret studies and the terrible cost they took, not when he walked out the door to begin the work as a stonemason he had absolutely no training or, so far as she could see, no real inclination for. She has faith in her husband, in his fundamental ability, despite a persistent absent-mindedness, to take care of himself. It’s one of Rainer’s qualities she likes the best, the way he encourages confidence in himself. Now, seeing that dead light playing on his eyes, she pictures Rainer as a man promenading in the middle of a thunderstorm, carrying a long metal pole high in his hands as lightning shatters trees around him. The hairs on the back of her neck stand up as Clara trembles at what she may have pushed him to. She might lose not only her daughter, she realizes, she might lose her husband as well. But what else is there to be done? Putting on a brave face, she hustles the girls into the house past their father, telling them to hurry, they’re almost late for school. When they’re inside, she looks into Rainer’s strange eyes and says, “Well? You’ve succeeded?”
“We’ll see,” is his answer. He walks past her, towards George and Helen’s house. In his right hand, he’s carrying one of the good dinner knives, the silver ones, that Clara packed away in the trunk at the foot of their bed. The girls, who have reappeared with their school things, stare at her. Usually their father is full of hugs and kisses for them. Who, their faces ask, is this? Clara shoos them on their way. She sees them glance back as they go, watching her watching Rainer.
He strides up to the front door of the house next door. He raises his right hand, and begins to score the door with the good dinner knife, his arm moving in long arcs and slashes. Clara can hear the metal tearing wood, but because the houses are positioned the same way, can’t see the marks he’s making. After watching him for a moment, she guesses that he’s writing something. His arm drops to his side. He says something Clara can’t hear. Then he moves to his left, around to the side of the house hidden from Clara’s view. She notices that he carries the knife in close to his chest, point-down. Wishing she hadn’t smoked her last cigarette at Italo and Regina’s, she watches the back of the neighboring house, where she assumes Rainer will appear once he’s completed whatever he has to do on the far wall. Sure enough, a minute or two later, here is Rainer, the knife held to his chest point-up. He marks the house’s rear wall, says something else that Clara can’t hear but that, from the way his lips move, she thinks is different from what he said at the front door, and proceeds to the last remaining wall. His back to his wife, Rainer sweeps the knife over the wall in the overblown gestures of a circus ringmaster. Clara’s assumption is correct. He’s writing, letters or maybe words in an alphabet she doesn’t recognize, swirling arabesques that spin and loop and fall back on themselves, so that she can’t tell where they begin or end. She stares at them, and they move, writhing on the wood in a movement she feels on her eyes. Crying out, Clara jerks her head back, rubbing furiously at her eyes, where she can still fell those shapes squirming under her lids. All at once, the sensation stops, and when she removes her hands from her face Rainer is back in front of their neighbor’s house, the knife held high overhead. The picture Clara had of him holding a metal pole up into a thunderstorm flickers acro
ss her mind’s eye. Rainer snaps his arm down, hurling the knife into the ground at his feet, where it sticks vibrating, the light racing up and down its sides.
That is that. Leaving the good dinner knife stuck in the dirt, Rainer walks back to Clara standing in the doorway. For all that he’s just performed what looks to his wife very much like sorcery, there’s a spring in his step she hasn’t seen there for a length of years, and not ever in this country. He used to walk this way coming home from the University, sometimes. Clara would catch sight of him from the parlor windows and know he’d accomplished something significant that day, solved a particularly difficult problem, won an especially challenging argument. There’s a kind of bounce to that step that’s equal parts joy and confidence, with a sprinkle of arrogance. Witnessing it here and now fills Clara with sudden nostalgia, nostalgia tinged with unease. As Rainer draws closer, so Clara’s nervousness grows. The unearthly light has spread, widening its glow to encompass his cheeks and forehead. The more she sees of it, the less she likes it.
When Rainer has walked past her into the house, Clara asks him, “What did you do?”
“I made a box,” Rainer says, almost grinning as he does.
“Don’t speak in riddles,” Clara snaps. “What did you do?”
That half-grin refuses to leave his mouth. “I trapped her,” he says.
“The woman? Helen?”
Rainer nods. “She’s not a woman, anymore.”
“I know that,” Clara says. “I don’t care what she is, as long as this helps Lottie. Will it?”
