Beneath the Mountain

by Luca D'Andrea

  Evi.

  The headless body thrown amid the knotted roots of a chestnut tree. And the dark mud all around, like a demonic halo.

  “Hello, Evi,” I heard myself saying. “I’m sorry for all this,” I sighed. “I haven’t told you this before, but I’m really sorry.”

  There were two more objects in the heart-shaped box.

  The doll. It was a rag doll, stuffed with cotton. The doll Clara had told me about. The kind that are made at home using old cloths and a lot of patience. It had no face. Maybe the face had been drawn on with a felt-tip pen and time had erased it. The blonde hair was gathered in two plaits. I stroked them. It looked like my daughter.

  Then I noticed a detail. It was stained. The doll was wearing a kind of long ballerina’s dress, a white apron in the Tyrolean style. The apron was stained. Big, revolting stains. The color was dark, like tan. I knew instinctively what it was. I let it slip from my hands.

  When it fell, it produced no sound.

  I was already shuddering, but now I felt nauseous. I rubbed my fingers on my jeans, trying to rid myself of the sense that I had touched something infected. I started breathing through my mouth, panting like an animal. The other object was something I couldn’t bring myself to touch.

  An axe.

  The handle was broken into two pieces tied together with frayed string. The edge of the blade shone in the light of the naked bulb hanging over my head. I took off my shirt and used it as a glove to move the axe. I would burn that shirt, I thought. The idea of putting it on again disgusted me as much as the thought of admitting what the stains on the faceless doll were.

  At the bottom of the box, packed in under all the rest, was an envelope that must once have been yellow, but which was now the color of a fish’s belly.

  I took a deep breath and picked it up. I turned it over in my hands, unable to make even the simple gesture of opening it and looking at the contents. It was light. I took an eternity to make up my mind.

  Two photographs, a small rectangle of paper, and a sheet folded in four.

  It was then, I think, that I lost all sense of time.

  * * *

  Once—it was right at the beginning of our relationship but I was already madly in love with her—I took Annelise to see the neighborhood in which I had grown up. I did it with a certain trepidation and only because she insisted.

  It was no longer the Red Hook of the ’80s, with junkies in the doorways of the apartment blocks and dealers leaning on the lamp posts smoking, but I was still a little ashamed of those peeling walls and dirty sidewalks.

  I showed her the harbor, the warehouses dating back to the nineteenth century, what remained of the bars my mother had forbidden me from entering, and bought her a scorching hot coffee from the Mexican from whom I’d purchased at least half the snacks of my childhood and many of those in my teenage years.

  Annelise loved the neighborhood to bits. Just as she loved my Mutti when, that same evening, I took her to the old apartment for dinner.

  She had done things in style, my Mutti. When she opened the door to us I noticed she had put on her best skirt. She had even made herself up.

  My father was dead by now, killed by a heart attack as he was preparing one of his fantastic hamburgers with onions, and she’d found herself a widow, having to handle both the running of an eatery and the artistic ambitions of a reckless son.

  The day I had told her that I had a girlfriend, she’d been unable to contain her joy. Naturally, she wanted to know everything about her. Naturally, I had to bring her to dinner. To introduce her. Was she really so beautiful? Was she really so sensitive? Was she really a good girl? Naturally she would prepare that dinner weeks in advance. And so she had.

  Annelise had been more than happy to converse with her in her mother tongue, and it was nice to hear my mother laughing as she hadn’t done in a very long time.

  She submitted Annelise to a polite interrogation.

  I was fascinated by my beloved’s stories. The Krampus with their whips, the snow-capped peaks of the Dolomites. The refuge at Cles, made entirely of wood, the elementary school with the windows that looked out on vineyards as far as the eye could see, the vacations in Siebenhoch and the excursions in the mountains with Werner, the decision to move back there, to the place where her parents had grown up and where Werner was not only her father, but Werner Mair, the great man who had started Dolomite Mountain Rescue. Christmas with the snow so high as to force them to stay home all day, the friends she went shopping with in Bolzano, and the decision to leave for the United States.

  Above all, my Mutti was delighted to hear her talk about the landscapes. She asked her to describe them so many times, I began to feel embarrassed. Maybe she had reached the age when migrants dream of settling again in their country of origin, even though they know that what they want to go back to no longer exists.

  Annelise talked about her parents, how they had spoiled her, as the only child of a couple who, because of their age, had given up hope of having children and for that very reason had been especially protective toward her.

  She talked about the time her father quarreled with the schoolmistress about a punishment that in his opinion his daughter didn’t deserve (actually she had deserved it, Annelise said, pigeons don’t drop firecrackers on someone’s head, right?), and she went into great detail about all the recipes that her mother had tried to teach her.

  “It must have been wonderful to grow up in a place like that, Annelise.”

  “I had the most beautiful childhood in the world, Mrs. Salinger.”

  And how to contradict her?

  The snow, the meadows. The sparkling air. Two loving parents.

  Siebenhoch.

  A pity it was all lies.

  * * *

  I didn’t hear him coming. I had lost all sense of time, and maybe not only that. I didn’t hear the car parking in the drive and I didn’t hear his steps coming up the stairs. I felt only his hand grabbing me.

  I screamed.

  “You,” I said.

  I tried to articulate something sensible. Nothing came out.

  Werner waited.

  He got down on one knee with a moan of pain and grabbed the doll. He blew on it and stroked it. Finally he put it back in the heart-shaped box.

  I followed each of his gestures.

  He took the two photographs out of my hands. He did so gently, without looking me in the eyes, wiped them on the sweater he was wearing and put them back in the envelope. Then he also put back the two pieces of yellowed paper, the large one and the small one.

  He laid the envelope, the blade of the axe, and the broken handle in the heart-shaped box. Finally he closed it, took it in his hands and stood up.

  “Turn off the lamp when you come down, will you?”

  “Where . . . where are you going?” I asked, as a shudder went through my body.

  “To the kitchen. We have to talk and this isn’t the most suitable place.”

  He disappeared, leaving me alone.

  I went down the stairs, clutching the handrail. I was afraid my legs wouldn’t support me.

  I found him sitting in his usual chair. He had even lit the fire. He motioned to me to sit down. He had put the ashtray on the table, next to two small glasses and a bottle of grappa. A picture of normality. If it hadn’t been for the box in his lap, I would have thought it had all been a hallucination.

  The axe. The doll.

  The photographs . . .

  A figment of my imagination.

  “Is that all?” I asked.

  Werner seemed at least as surprised by my reaction as I was by his. “Sit down and drink.”

  I obeyed.

  “I think you have a good few questions, right?”

  Once again I was struck by his tone of voice. He didn’t seem agitated or frightened.

  It was the usual Werner telling me an old story. I don’t know what I was expecting, but certainly not all that normality: two glasses of grappa an
d the fire crackling.

  Werner looking at me, his expression unreadable.

  He held out the glass to me.

  “I need answers, Werner, or as God is my witness, the first thing I’ll do when I walk out that door is call the police.”

  He withdrew his hand. He put the glass down on the table and stroked the box. “It isn’t that simple.”

  “Talk.”

  Werner sat back in his chair. “You have to know that I loved her. We all loved her.”

  “You’re a liar. A murderer.”

  Werner worked at a hangnail on his thumb until it started to bleed. He lifted it to his lips.

  “We loved her as if she were our daughter,” he said after an eternity.

  The contents of the envelope. The photographs of Kurt and Evi embracing. Kurt and Evi waving. In both, in Evi’s arms, a baby.

  A baby girl.

  Blonde.

  The name of that baby was written on the sheet of paper folded in four. Annelise Schaltzmann, it said. Mother: Evi Tognon, unmarried, January 3, 1985. A birth certificate issued by the Austrian Republic. A birth certificate that said the unthinkable.

  “Evi and Kurt had a daughter.”

  “Yes.”

  “You kept her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Annelise?”

  “Yes.”

  I passed my hand over my face. Then, from a distance, I heard my voice formulate the most horrendous of questions.

  “Is that why you killed them?”

  The Truth about the Bletterbach Killings

  “She was so small. She didn’t even cry. We thought she was dead. She was sticky with blood. You should have seen her eyes, in the middle of all that slaughter. Those blue innocent eyes.”

  “Who else was with you?” I asked.

  “Hannes, Max, and Günther.”

  I felt the blood rush to my head. “Stop lying.”

  “You don’t understand, Jeremiah. Annelise . . . was in his arms.”

  “Whose arms?”

  “The killer’s” was Werner’s reply.

  His eyes darted from side to side. From the heart-shaped box, he took the yellow envelope.

  He unfolded the photographs. Then the birth certificate. Then the small thin rectangle of paper. It was an Austrian driving license. In the name of Oscar Grünwald.

  He showed it to me.

  “He killed them.”

  “Why?”

  “I stopped asking myself that many years ago.”

  He put the license down on the table. He was silent for a moment.

  “You’re lying,” I said.

  When Werner resumed speaking, his face was twisted into a cruel grimace.

  “It was the first thing we saw when we came out into that damned clearing. Grünwald covered in blood. With the axe in his right hand and that little creature under his arm.”

  I could imagine the scene.

  The driving rain. The mud sliding beneath everyone’s feet. Stones whistling past. The treetops bent by the fury of the elements. The dull howling of the self-regenerating storm. The shattered corpses on the ground.

  Everything.

  It took my breath away.

  “As soon as he saw us, he started screaming, ‘Monsters! Monsters!’ Max and Günther froze. Hannes saw Kurt and he also started . . . Have you ever heard a madman shriek? I have, that day in the Bletterbach. But I went crazy, too. We all did. Hannes rushed at Grünwald, and I went after him. With a terrifying scream, Grünwald ran to meet him. He was clutching the child to his chest and holding the axe above his head. This axe.”

  He indicated the blade I hadn’t dared touch.

  “I saw the trajectory, I saw it only in my mind, with extreme clarity. It was as if time had stood still. I didn’t hear anything. Someone had turned down the volume. But never in my life have I had such a distinct awareness of reality.”

  Werner’s hands waved in the air in the kitchen at Welshboden. In spite of the fire, I could feel the cold in my bones.

  The cold of the Bletterbach.

  Of the storm.

  The spartan house in Welshboden with its attic full of mysteries and the table with the grappa on it had gone. That was just a stage set, made of cardboard. Werner’s words had opened a breach in time.

  The smell of mud mingled with the odor of blood. I could feel the electricity in the air.

  The crash of thunder.

  And Hannes’s screams.

  But it wasn’t Hannes screaming, Hannes had died after blowing his wife’s brains out, driven crazy by the horror of the Bletterbach. What my senses perceived was the fossil of Hannes’s scream. Imprisoned in Werner’s mind for more than thirty years.

  “The blade was dirty with blood. Big dark clots of it. God knows how long he had been standing there like a statue, with the child clutched to his chest and the muddy axe he used to kill those three. Hours, maybe. I don’t know, I don’t want to know. All I saw at that moment was the arc of the axe swinging through the air and Hannes’s frantic run. Grünwald would have added a fourth victim to his slaughter. So I threw myself at Hannes and grabbed him by the leg. He collapsed to the ground. The axe missed him by a whisker. Grünwald’s face, Jeremiah. His expression . . .”

  Werner passed the palms of his hands over his trousers, rubbing them hard.

  Reality ripped apart a little more.

  I smelled the smell of mud, mixed with that of fear.

  “He advanced toward us. In slow motion. Grünwald was waving the axe like a war trophy, with the child still clutched to his chest. Clutched so tight, I was afraid he would suffocate her. Hannes had banged his head and had a cut on his forehead. The sight of blood made the sound come back.” Werner shook his head. “I don’t know why.”

  A drop of sweat slid down from his temple to the curve of his jaw.

  Then it disappeared.

  I thought it looked red.

  “I thought Hannes’s blood would mix with his son’s. I found that horrible. Then Grünwald was on me. He seemed ten meters tall. A giant, a creature of the woods straight out of a legend. His eyes were popping out of their sockets, he had blood on his face, blood on his clothes.”

  Werner grabbed the bottle of grappa and took a long swig. Then another. “I’ve seen wounded people, dead people, in my life. I’ve seen broken limbs. I’ve seen a father bring his son’s leg down the mountain, I’ve seen children beg me on their knees to save fathers who’d had their skulls opened by a rock. I’ve seen what the force of gravity does to a body after a fall of 400 meters. I myself have risked death many times. I’ve felt it coming. Like a fast-moving wind that sweeps you away. But that day in the Bletterbach, death was a giant with an axe in his hand looking at me with wild eyes.”

  Werner stared at me.

  “It was the Krampus. No whips or horns, but it was the Krampus. It was the devil. And . . . I heard him speaking.”

  “What was he saying?”

  “It sounded like a magic spell. Or a curse. I don’t know. I didn’t understand, lightning had just brought down a tree less than ten meters away. My ears were whistling, my eardrums were destroyed. But it was a meaningless sentence, maybe just the cry of a madman. I’ve thought about it for years.”

  Werner passed his hand through his snow-white hair. I felt an emptiness in my stomach. I knew what it was. It wasn’t a meaningless sentence. It was a name in Latin.

  My hands made stiff by that cold from another place and another time, I searched in my pocket and took out my phone. I looked in the memory for the image that Mike had sent me, and at last showed the screen to Werner.

  “What’s that?”

  “Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae. Were those the words Grünwald was saying?”

  Werner repeated them to himself, several times, like a mantra, like a prayer. His eyes were light-years away from Welshboden.

  “Yes!” he exclaimed all at once. “That’s it. Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae. How did you know?”

  “Grünwald was conv
inced they still existed in the Bletterbach. The Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae was an ancestor of the scorpion that became extinct in the Permian, the very era that the deepest strata of the gorge go back to. That’s the monster he was talking about. The monster . . .” I shook my head, incredulous. “Evi had destroyed his career with a paper that demolished his theories. Grünwald had become the laughing stock of the academic world. A pariah.”

  I remembered Max’s words.

  “He was a loner. He had nobody. Only . . .”—I pointed to the creature on the phone’s display—“. . . his obsessions. He went in search of monsters, and when Evi stood between him and them he became a monster himself.”

  I examined Grünwald’s face on the license. The high forehead, the incipient baldness. The short hair, the dark, narrow eyes, as if he was short-sighted but too vain to wear glasses.

  I picked up the photographs of the killings. I put them down on the table one next to the other, pieces in a mosaic of horror.

  I passed my finger over them. My fingertip burned.

  “The severed legs. The arms. The decapitation. That was how the Jaekelopterus hunted. Forty-six-centimeter claws as sharp as blades.” I sat down. “He was mad. Mad.”

  I didn’t want to believe it. It struck me as absurd, but at the same time it all hung together.

  Suddenly, the story of Grünwald became a perfect sequence of points united by a single line that went from a, past b, until it became red with blood, in the Bletterbach. The evidence was all there, in front of me.

  And even if the evidence wasn’t enough, part of me was in the Bletterbach, in April 1985. My back was numb with cold.

  I could see him.

  I could hear him mutter that curse from millions of years ago.

  Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae.

  “What happened then?”

  “Grünwald let out a terrible cry. But Günther was quicker than him. The lightning had roused him from the shock. He threw himself at Grünwald like a fury. He grabbed him by the waist and flung him to the ground. The baby fell in the mud and if it hadn’t been for Max’s reflexes she would have rolled over the precipice. She started to cry. It was the cry of a kitten, not a child. Günther in the meantime was wrestling with Grünwald. I stood up and went to help him. He was hitting out blindly. I was the one who tore the axe from his hands. I lifted it up and screamed so loudly I almost destroyed my vocal cords. It was a reaction that didn’t belong to me, it was something animalistic. Then I realized that the handle was sticky with blood. I screamed again, but this time in horror.”