Beneath the Mountain

by Luca D'Andrea

And I saw it. The Beast.

  * * *

  It was white.

  It was fierce. It was motionless. But then I realized it was only ice.

  I shifted the beam of the flashlight, drawing silvery scimitars on the surface of the water. With each wavelet, it seemed as if the underground lake was smiling. It wasn’t a friendly smile, believe me.

  I followed the waves until I located the epicenter, about ten meters from me. A kind of white iceberg in miniature was floating placidly, bobbing up and down as if nodding at me.

  Come here, it was saying, come to me.

  I tried to calm down and look for a plausible explanation. It didn’t take me long to find one.

  The layer of ice above my head gave way from time to time and marble-like blocks fell into the water. That’s all it was. Maybe the heat from my body had generated that reaction. Simple physics.

  The problem was that this made me think of the cave as a living creature.

  With me inside it.

  In the whiteness.

  I felt an acid taste in my mouth. My mind, which since a tender age I had trained to tell me stories, started doing its dirty work. Going from a and getting to . . . to Grünwald’s cries as he woke up, alone, in that darkness.

  His frustrated attempts to climb back up to the opening of the eye.

  Broken nails, blood, entreaties, and cries.

  The decision to find another way out. Going ’round in circles. Arriving here.

  What then? Had he gone forward? Had he tried to swim? I wouldn’t have, but Grünwald was a lot more expert than I was, maybe he’d taken the risk and gone into that . . .

  Niche.

  That was the word.

  Five letters.

  An ecological niche. Protected from external agents. A world in which the hands of the clock had no meaning. Just like in Grünwald’s theories.

  I took a deep breath. I relaxed my shoulders, rotating them slowly. They were as stiff as strips of steel. I opened and closed my hands to restart my circulation. I was starting to feel cold. I had to keep my muscles warm and relaxed, or I would stay here forever. Like Grünwald. Like . . . How many? How many people had ended up in here? The justice of our forefathers, Werner had called it. Lynchings, more like.

  Barbaric acts.

  Five letters: death.

  If I hadn’t lingered over these macabre thoughts but had retraced my steps, I would have avoided what happened subsequently, because it was pure chance that I saw the body huddled in a crack in the rock.

  The old-fashioned clothes hung limply on what remained of the body. The knees under the chin. The right leg broken in two places.

  The bones shining in the torchlight.

  “Hello, Oscar,” I said.

  The lake responded with a splash.

  I was face to face with the remains of Oscar Grünwald.

  The backpack clutched to the chest, the arms wrapped around the knees, the head tilted to the side, the jaw wide open. A child punished. A man defeated.

  Condemned to the eternal darkness deep inside the Bletterbach.

  I imagined how much he must have suffered down here, all alone, with his broken leg, dragging himself in search of salvation. I imagined the darkness choking him, the hallucinations, the madness. A slow, wretched agony. And at last, death.

  The empty eye sockets of the skull told of a despair that went beyond anguish. A man driven mad, imprisoned in the most terrible of cells.

  Yes, he was a murderer, but nobody deserved such a dreadful punishment. I felt sorry for him.

  And horror at what Werner and the others had done.

  I don’t know how long I stayed there beside Oscar Grünwald’s body, I only know that when an eight-inch-long centipede emerged from those same eye sockets that had hypnotized me, I leapt back in surprise and disgust and lost my balance.

  I fell in the lake and lost hold of the torch. The water closed over me with a stifling sound. I gasped for air, but only managed to swallow water. I was blind and deaf.

  Above and below became as one.

  I waved my arms and legs in senseless movements dictated by panic and sank even deeper, my lungs burning and my stomach filling with a poison that tasted of bile.

  Everything was black, everything was dark.

  I acted on instinct, and it was instinct that saved my life. I freed myself of my backpack and let the force of gravity clutch at it. I felt it go down. Then I pushed with all my might in the opposite direction. A few meters that were nearly fatal to me.

  Once on the surface, I gasped and spat for a while, but instead of continuing to struggle I let myself float.

  One thing at a time, I told myself. In the meantime, breathe. Look around you. Find the shore. And get out of here as quickly as you can.

  The lamp on my helmet was working intermittently. It must have hit something as I was falling. It sent brief flashes (light, dark, light, dark) that illumined the still, dark waters with a flicker that didn’t help my pupils get used to the gloom, quite the contrary. But during one of those precious seconds of light, I thought I saw the shore and tried swimming in that direction. Slow, methodical strokes.

  But it wasn’t the shore. It was cold and slippery. Ice, I thought. Only ice. Then the ice moved. And something under the water brushed against my knee.

  Light, dark. Light, dark.

  The object I had touched was big and white and when a sudden flash lit it up, it went back under the surface. In the darkness, I felt the lapping of the water closing over it. As if it had been some big albino fish.

  Or else . . .

  My screams became a chorus of sounds, a thousand superimposed voices that seemed to mock my fear. The screams of the women condemned by Siebenhoch. The laughter of the witches buried down here. That’s what Günther said he had heard. What Oscar Grünwald must have heard before he died, huddled in that crack in the rock as if . . . As if he had seen something terrible moving in the water. Something big and cold. And for the second time, I felt something touch my foot. With greater insistence. I jerked my leg up and ended up with my head under the surface of the water. At that moment, the torch came on.

  Light.

  It was white. It was huge.

  Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae.

  I kicked.

  I found the surface, oxygen. I took wheezing breaths. I swam. Away from there. Without thinking about the white, slippery thing with the Latin name that had grabbed my boot. About its 46-centimeter claws. About its unnatural size. Two and a half meters of marine scorpion. About its perfectly ’round, black eyes, eyes so inhuman they verged on the unthinkable.

  A predator millions of years old.

  Don’t think, I ordered myself.

  How did Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae hunt? Were its attacks quick and lethal, like those of sharks, or else were they more like those of crocodiles? Would it grab my leg? Would I feel its claw breaking my bones and cartilage, or would it drag me down, drowning me?

  Worse still: where had it gone?

  Why hadn’t it attacked me yet?

  “Don’t think, dammit!”

  There was no monster down there. It was impossible. I wasn’t really sure I had seen it. The white monster in the ink-black lake. I thought I had glimpsed it. The key to not going mad was in those seven simple letters: thought.

  The taste of bile in the water was making me nauseous. And I was cold. I swam, trying to keep to the same direction. It was an underground lake, not an ocean. Sooner or later, I would find something to cling onto. I swam until my fingers hit solid rock. Wearily, I hoisted myself onto dry ground.

  I had no idea where I was, but I knew I had to move. I was so wet, there was a risk I might die from exposure. So I had to move, but in what direction?

  One was as good as the other.

  I walked.

  The darkness entered into my skin, swallowed me up.

  The sound of my breathing became the breath of the Bletterbach.

  Time frayed until it disappeared c
ompletely.

  At last, exhausted, I collapsed to the ground. Maybe I was just a few steps from an exit, but without light I would never know. It was pointless. I was in a labyrinth.

  I raised my hands to my face.

  I thought about Clara. About Annelise.

  “Forgive me,” I said.

  The witches sneered. At my stupidity.

  Maybe I slept, I don’t remember.

  I was woken by a terrifying sound. A roar that made me leap to my feet, shaking.

  It wasn’t a hallucination. It was the sound of something moving implacably on the surface of the water, beating what could only be a tail.

  A long tail covered with a shell. Eyes like black wells. Claws like blades.

  It was coming.

  Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae.

  This is how the pathetic story of Jeremiah Salinger ends, I told myself.

  Devoured by a monster as old as the world.

  I started laughing and couldn’t stop.

  It was the most ridiculous death I’d ever heard of.

  “Come on, you scumbag!” I cried.

  The noise was rapidly coming closer.

  It had followed me. It had spied silently on my every move. It had waited for me to lose energy. For me to despair. Patiently, inexorably. And now it was attacking.

  It was clever, the bastard.

  “Come on, you son of a bitch!”

  I leaned against the wall, looking for some stone or other to pull out and use as a weapon of defense. I wouldn’t go down without a fight. When the Jaekelopterus charged, I would let it know that now was no longer its time. It was extinct. It was dead. Gone.

  My fingers found something much more precious than a stone. They found an inscription.

  A few straight lines, carved into the bare rock. Three triangles with the points turned upward. Human, without a shadow of a doubt. Geometrical. Nothing in nature could have cut into the stone so precisely. Destiny wasn’t providing me with a weapon, it was offering me something better.

  Hope.

  Frantically, I touched it.

  The roar of the Jaekelopterus seemed closer now. Twenty feet. Maybe less. A few centimeters from the inscription, my fingers grasped a metal hook.

  The noise became thunder.

  One meter.

  Drops of fetid water on my face.

  I screamed and darted to one side, clutching the protruding metal with all my might. I must have pulled a muscle in my back. The pain shot up to my neck. I stumbled, bounced back, lost my balance, held on even more grimly. I knocked my helmet against the rock and the flashlight started working again.

  Wonderful, blinding light.

  What did I see?

  A huge block of ice, floating on the water. Nothing else.

  * * *

  It must have been the miners who had planted the hook and carved the three triangles. The ones who worked in the copper mines that had collapsed in the 1920s. It was their method for indicating exits or bends, so that they wouldn’t lose their way in the chasms they themselves were creating. Usually, they were little crosses. At other times, initials or symbols that in some way referred to the identity of those who made them, or the villages from which they came. It didn’t matter. Those marks in the rock were hope.

  I continued to feel my way until I found the entrance to a tunnel, over which the same symbol was carved. I couldn’t restrain my joy. I went in without hesitation.

  I had to proceed on all fours, my helmet touching the rock, the lamp continuing to blink on and off. I didn’t care. Hope gave me new energy. Besides, I could sense that at last I was moving upward.

  Nothing could stop me now. And nothing did.

  All at once, I felt fresh air.

  When I saw the light, a little hole high up above, I started crying. I clambered up, slipped and fell, hurting my hands. I tried again and again. I broke my nails, cursed and spat. At last, gripping the knotted roots of a chestnut tree, I hoisted myself toward the source of light.

  When I emerged onto the surface, I did so with a scream that echoed throughout the gorge.

  I rolled in the snow, sinking into the ice, which seemed so pure it went to my head. The air I was breathing was as sweet as honey. The sun was blinding. It was pale and crepuscular and I was surprised to see it. When I checked the time, I realized that my wandering in the bowels of the mountain had lasted hardly any time at all. And I started to feel the bite of the cold.

  I came back to earth.

  I was without my equipment, soaking wet, and my body was starting to fall apart. I had to move. I hoisted myself with difficulty onto the chestnut tree whose roots had saved me. I reached a sturdy fork and sat down astride it. I scrutinized the horizon and it didn’t take me long to see the tourist trail through the Bletterbach, with its fine white and red signposts, its warnings of danger. Common objects, made by some local carpenter.

  They struck me as masterpieces worthy of a museum.

  * * *

  I turned onto the drive, surprised by how prodigious that banal act seemed. From the windows came a soft warm light. I switched off the engine.

  Tears rose to my eyes, and at that moment Clara drew back the curtains and waved at me. I returned her wave. Behind my daughter, I could see Annelise.

  She was very beautiful.

  I got out of the car.

  It was Werner who opened the door. He looked at my scratched and bruised face. Then my swollen, ruined hands. He opened his eyes wide. He tried to say something. I gestured to him to be quiet.

  I reached out my hand and he responded to the gesture.

  No words were needed.

  I passed him and walked toward Annelise. She was as frozen as stone. She looked like a corpse.

  “I love you,” I said.

  * * *

  That night, I waited for Annelise to go to sleep, then slipped out of bed, went to my study and closed the door. I switched on the computer and updated the file.

  Then I dragged it across to the recycle bin.

  It was over.

  Parents

  I spent the last days of March in bed, brought low by a fever that reduced me to a shadow of my former self. The pills I took were no use: my condition was only partly physical. My descent into the bowels of the Bletterbach had wiped me out, and I needed time to recharge my batteries and start over again.

  I didn’t sleep much, and then only fitfully. In those brief periods of sleep, I would return to those caves. I would see again the dark eye, Grünwald’s body, and the monster that emerged from the water wasn’t a block of ice: it had a mouth, claws, and a Latin name. I would wake up disorientated and scared, but safe.

  At home.

  Home was Clara who would put her worried little face ’round the bedroom door, bringing me a fruit juice that tasted disgusting in my sick state, but which I drank to the last drop to make her happy.

  “Is it good, Papà?”

  “It’s wonderful, sweetheart,” I said, struggling not to throw up.

  “Would you like me to take your temperature?”

  “I’d like a kiss, honeybun.”

  I always got plenty of those.

  Every now and again, when Annelise went shopping, Clara would tiptoe in and sit down on the edge of the bed. She would tell me fairy stories and stroke my hair, almost as if she was the grown-up now and I was the child to be looked after. Lots of times, she’d just sit there and look at me.

  Can you imagine a nicer picture of love?

  Annelise never asked me anything. She was caring, attentive, and anxious. I knew the questions were only being postponed, I could see it in her eyes, but first I had to get better.

  And that’s what I did.

  * * *

  The fever passed. I still had dizzy spells, still felt as I’d been driven over by a steamroller. But my eyes no longer filled with tears whenever I tried to read a newspaper, and the headache wasn’t much more than a dull ache at the back of my neck. I began to get my appetite ba
ck. Annelise would provoke me with incredible quantities of food I simply couldn’t refuse. It was so good to feel something that wasn’t pain.

  After a couple of days spent wandering around the house in my pajamas, I decided to venture into the outside world. I needed fresh air. And don’t be angry with me, I also needed a Marlboro.

  I put on thick jeans, a sweater, a scarf, and my padded winter jacket and walked out, as determined as Harrison Ford in pursuit of the Holy Grail.

  With unsteady steps, I reached the garden gate. I touched it with my fingertips. Satisfied with my achievement, I turned back, sat down on the front steps, and granted myself a cigarette.

  The sun was high, brighter than I had seen it in months, and I let the wind waft the smell of the woods to my nostrils. Spring was finally coming. There were still patches of snow on the ground, above all at the sides of the roads, where the snowploughs had heaped it in dark dirty piles, but nature was waking up again.

  And so was I.

  Suddenly I became aware of Annelise standing behind me.

  “I think I owe you an explanation,” I said.

  She gracefully slid her skirt under her legs, sat down next to me, and leaned her head on my shoulder.

  The off-key call of a blackbird could be heard, then a rustling of wings. A bird of prey was flying high in a sky dotted with slow-moving snow-white clouds.

  “Tell me just one thing, Salinger,” Annelise said. “Is it over?”

  I turned.

  I looked her in the eyes.

  “It’s over.”

  She burst into tears. She hugged me. I looked up at the clouds.

  I could have touched them with my finger.

  * * *

  Two days later, I had a consultation with the same specialist who’d put me back on my feet after the accident of September 15. When I confessed to him that I hadn’t taken the drugs he’d prescribed for me, he was furious.

  I suffered his anger in silence, with my usual hangdog expression, until he calmed down, then I told him I’d decided to resume the treatment I’d actually never begun: that’s what I was there for.

  I had to pull myself together, I told him. So far, I’d gone my own way and it hadn’t worked.

  I had no intention of taking drugs that would make me a happy idiot (and here his face turned red), but now it was time to say farewell to nightmares and panic attacks.