Beneath the Mountain

by Luca D'Andrea

  Max got out of the car without switching off the engine. The wreaths of smoke from the exhaust pipe, tinged red by the headlights, assumed demonic shapes. I pushed Clara toward the back door and opened it for her.

  “Annelise knows everything,” I said to Max.

  “How did that happen?”

  “She read my notes.”

  Max clenched his jaw. “You’re a fool.”

  “We have to go.”

  “To Werner’s?”

  I nodded.

  * * *

  Annelise wasn’t at Welshboden. Werner’s property was shrouded in darkness.

  My father-in-law’s jeep wasn’t there, while mine had its door wide open. The house was empty.

  I felt my eyes fill with tears. I wiped them with the back of my hand.

  I didn’t want Clara to see me in that condition. She was already scared enough.

  “I think you know where they went,” I said, looking straight in front of me.

  Max didn’t reply. He reversed and set off in the direction of the Bletterbach.

  I summoned up my courage, turned and said, “We’re going on an excursion, ten letters.”

  “It’s raining, Papà.”

  “It’ll be a kind of adventure.”

  Clara shook her head slowly. “I want to go home.”

  I reached out my hand and brushed her cheek. “Soon.”

  “I want Mamma.”

  “Soon, sweetheart. Soon.”

  I felt my voice crack.

  “Do you like music, Clara?” Max asked.

  “Yes.”

  He switched on the car radio. A cheerful little tune flooded the inside of the vehicle. It was Louis Armstrong.

  “This is my favorite,” Max said, and sang, “When the Saints go marching in . . .”

  A glimmer of a smile on Clara’s face.

  “Am I out of tune?”

  “A little.”

  “That’s because the volume’s too low,” Max replied. And he started singing again at the top of his voice.

  Clara laughed, raising both her hands to her ears.

  I gave Max a grateful glance and laid my head back against the seat. The painkillers had started to take effect. The migraine had been reduced to a kind of undertow of pain.

  Outside the 4x4, rain and darkness. Inside, Louis Armstrong.

  It was crazy. Totally crazy.

  When we got to the entrance of the Visitors’ Center, we noticed Werner’s jeep parked sideways and the gate wide open.

  Max switched off the engine. The music stopped abruptly.

  “We have two possibilities, as far as I can see,” I said.

  “Three,” Max said. “The third is: we stay here and wait.”

  It was as if I hadn’t heard him. “The cave or . . . there.”

  There where everything had started. The place where Kurt, Evi, and Markus had met their deaths. Where Annelise had been born a second time.

  “Or else we stay here,” Max repeated. “With Clara.”

  I shook my head. There was no time to lose. I opened the door. “Are you coming with us?”

  * * *

  We were soaking wet even before we’d gone the first hundred meters. The rain was coming down as if it wanted to drown the whole world, and us with it. Up until that day, rain had meant something quite different to me. It was a nuisance that an umbrella or a windshield wiper brushed away. That night, I saw it for what it really was. Ice-cold water that oozed darkness and brought not new life, but death. It uprooted plants and killed animals, drowning them in their lairs. It got into clothes and made people lose heat. Heat is life.

  Around us, the gorge of the Bletterbach roared. It wasn’t a single voice, it was a chorus in which one instrument was added to another until it produced a cacophony that was sometimes unbearable. Even the pouring of the rain sounded different depending on the surface on which it was beating. The deep tolling of the chestnut tree, the crystalline one of the red fir tree. The pounding on the rocks.

  Many voices, one message. The Bletterbach was admonishing us not to defy it.

  But nothing could stop me.

  Annelise was there, somewhere (even though I knew perfectly well where), in the deep. She was wounded. If not physically, certainly in her soul. And that wound was my fault.

  Clara was holding my hand, head bowed. She was walking quickly, although the mud had made her trousers heavy and swollen. I would have liked to hold her in my arms, but she had refused. Rather than waste time arguing, I had done as she wanted, vowing that when I noticed signs of her weakening I would persuade her to let me help her.

  Every now and again I heard her singing in a low voice. It was her way of giving herself courage.

  I envied her.

  I had nothing but the guidance of Max, who was in front of me in the mottled darkness.

  I tried to visualize Annelise’s face. The freckles around her nose, the way she bent her neck as she came closer to kiss me. I couldn’t do it. I saw only the pain with which she had uttered her ultimatum. Either her or the story of the killings. I had chosen the dead, and the dead had taken their revenge on me by snatching her away.

  It was a stupid thought. The dead are dead. I remembered some graffiti written on the wall of a bar bathroom in Red Hook. “Life sucks, but death is worse.”

  Evi, Kurt, and Markus weren’t responsible for what was happening.

  I was responsible.

  I had forgotten (or maybe I hadn’t had the courage) to delete the file with my notes. It was my fault that Annelise had found it.

  But what on earth had driven Annelise to switch on my laptop in the dead of night and look through my files? Usually, I was the one who started searching for Christmas presents before I received them, not her. What had induced her to violate my privacy (and to be so determined as to check even the recycle bin)? It had to be something serious.

  Something like . . .

  I stopped.

  Clara knocked into me and almost fell.

  “Salinger?” came Max’s voice.

  He was less than two meters in front of me and yet his silhouette merged with the shadows.

  “It’s OK. It’s just . . .”

  It’s just that when I get drunk, when I get seriously drunk, not after three or four glasses, not even after six or seven, but when the Martians take me and put me on their spaceship and give me a rollercoaster ride, I talk.

  I talk in my sleep.

  “Papà?”

  Clara was still staring down at the ground.

  “My shoes are dirty.”

  “We’ll clean them.”

  “Mamma will be angry.”

  “Mamma will be happy to see us.”

  We had been going for at least another three quarters of an hour before Clara stumbled. I quickly caught her and cleaned her cheeks with a handkerchief that Max gave me. There was no blood and Clara didn’t cry. My brave little girl.

  “Now we have to go up a level,” Max said, pointing to a thicket of holm oaks above which a couple of red firs jutted. “There’s still quite a way to go, Salinger. According to my calculations, we have at least another two hours’ walk. Even more, in this rain. And Clara’s only a child,” he added, giving me a harsh look.

  “Carry on.”

  Max heaved a sigh and started clambering up the slope.

  “Do we have to go up there, too?” Clara asked.

  “It’ll be fun.”

  “Is that where Mamma is?”

  “Yes, it is. But to get there, I need your help, sweetheart.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “I’ll hoist you on my back and you’ll have to hold on tight. Do you think you can do that?”

  * * *

  Two hours later, I had to stop. I was exhausted. I laid Clara down on the felled trunk of a pine, sheltered beneath a group of exceptionally large ferns.

  She was finding it hard to keep her eyes open, and the hair that had escaped from under her hood was stuck to
her face. It broke my heart to see her like that.

  It was six in the morning, but there wasn’t even a hint of sunlight. The rain kept pouring down. And I’d become so accustomed to the thunder that I’d almost stopped hearing it.

  I accepted Max’s thermos. I gave it first to Clara, then took a few sips myself. Sweet tea. It was like medicine.

  The muscles of my back and legs were burning.

  Max checked his watch. “Two minutes’ rest, no more. It’s cold.”

  I collapsed on the ground, heedless of the mud.

  “I haven’t yet thanked you, Max.”

  “For what?”

  I indicated myself and Clara, then the whole of the Bletterbach. “For this.”

  “It’s a search and rescue operation. The stupidest of my entire career.”

  “Call it what you want, but I’m indebted to you.”

  “Make sure you don’t have a heart attack, keep that child warm, and I’ll consider the debt honored.”

  I took Clara and hugged her to my chest. She had fallen asleep.

  “How much longer?” I asked Max.

  “Not much. If there was any sun, you could see the place from here.”

  “We should be able to hear them, then.”

  “With all this noise?” Max shook his head. “Not even if they used a megaphone. Now let’s go. Time’s up.”

  I made to lift Clara, who barely protested, her eyes half-closed, but a terrible spasm in my back caused me to lurch forward.

  “I’ll take the child,” Max said anxiously. “Is that OK with you, Clara?”

  “It’s OK,” she murmured.

  “Do you like my hat?” Max asked her.

  “It’s funny.”

  “And it’s warm.”

  He put it on top of the hood of her coat. In spite of the rain, the lightning, and the crackling of the stones, I let out a laugh. “It suits you to a T, you know, ten letters? Maybe when you’re grown up, you could be a forest ranger, instead of a doctor.”

  “I don’t know if I’d like that.”

  “Why not?” Max asked, setting off again.

  “Because where a doctor works, it doesn’t rain.”

  * * *

  I recognized the clearing even though I’d never been there before. From the forensics photographs, of course, but also from the accounts I’d heard.

  The chestnut tree was more imposing than I had imagined it, and some of the fir trees must have fallen, because the edge of the precipice seemed closer compared with the photographs from ’85.

  Annelise and Werner were under the rocky spur, the very same one under which Kurt and the others had camped. Werner was sitting with his back to the mountain and stroking Annelise’s hair. She was huddled between his legs. He raised a hand by way of greeting. Then he gently shook his daughter.

  Clara slipped out of Max’s arms and threw herself on Annelise, who buried her in kisses.

  “Here again,” Werner said, getting to his feet. His eyes were red.

  He shook hands with Max.

  “We’ve never really left it, have we, Werner?” Max replied.

  “You didn’t tell me anything,” Annelise said, embracing me.

  “I didn’t want . . .”

  Annelise gently detached herself. “What?”

  “I didn’t want you to be hurt.”

  Annelise wiped away a tear. “Papà has told me everything.”

  “What has Ops told you, Mamma?”

  Annelise stroked Clara’s head. “Look how wet you are, sweetheart.”

  “What has Ops told you?”

  “A lovely story,” Annelise replied. “The story of the hunter who saves the princess from the monster.” She looked at Max. “The four hunters,” she corrected herself. “Werner, Günther, Hannes, and Max.”

  “What happened to the monster?”

  “The monster went back where it came from.” She looked me in the eyes. “I have that from a reliable source.”

  “I . . .”

  Annelise brushed my cheek with a kiss. “You’ve been reckless.”

  The mountain was throbbing with electricity.

  I was aware of what Werner had tried to explain to me in words, centuries before. The feeling of hostility in the Bletterbach. Hostility and age. Millions of years of an open-air graveyard in which monstrous creatures had breathed their last.

  I thought of the blood of Kurt, Evi, and Markus.

  I wondered if part of them were still here, in what they called “the deep.” Not on a biological level, of course. Wind, snow, water, and years had wiped out even the smallest DNA trace of Annelise’s parents.

  But something, maybe on a more subtle level, a piece of something that we call the soul, must still be here, and it struck me, thanks to my wife’s kiss, that in spite of the Bletterbach, the thunder and the cold, at that moment the souls of Kurt and Evi were at peace. Thanks to Annelise.

  And to the granddaughter they had never known.

  “How many letters are there in the word ‘end,’ Clara?”

  “Three,” she replied immediately.

  “You know something, sweetheart? I need a hug. Will you give me one?”

  Clara reached out to me, and as I had done an infinite number of times and as I hoped I would do an infinite number of times in the future, I lifted her and hugged her tight. Beneath the odor of the mud and the sweat, I smelled the smell of her skin and closed my eyes.

  That smell was the casket in which all the happy moments of my life were kept. Cold pizza at five in the morning during the shooting of Road Crew. The Fight Club. Mein liebes Fraulein . . . Nebraska playing softly in the background. Annelise saying yes, in Hell’s Kitchen. The nine months of pregnancy. My reflection in the mirror murmuring that strange word: “Papà.” Mike’s opening his eyes wide, speechless for once, when I had told him that I would soon be a father and that he would be . . .

  * * *

  Suddenly, something went click in my mind.

  * * *

  Stunned, I laid Clara on the ground.

  The Bletterbach no longer existed. Nor the rain. There was only that click.

  And the memory of Mike’s dazed expression.

  “January 3, 1985,” I said, in a choked voice. “January 3, Werner. Oh, God. Oh, God.”

  “January 3,” Werner echoed, surprised. “Yes, Annelise’s real date of birth, but . . .”

  I didn’t even listen to him.

  The click was joined by another click and then another. An avalanche running quickly from a to z in a blinding explosion of horror.

  Birthdays and triangles with the point at the top. And a soul that the implacable pressure of time had made as insensitive as rock, rock that, as had happened to the Bletterbach, had been damaged to such a point by hate as to bring into the light the unspeakable buried in the heart of every human being.

  The substance of evil.

  “What did the four of you do?” I murmured.

  Werner was staring at me with eagle eyes that didn’t see. That hadn’t seen for thirty years, so blinded with love for Annelise that they hadn’t realized the obvious. Like those of Günther, hostage to his demons, or his brother Hermann with his sense of guilt and his determination to become someone. Like the eyes of Hannes, blinded with prejudice and then destroyed by the grief of his loss.

  None of them had seen.

  The answer had always been there, in plain sight. For all this time.

  It was like a whiplash.

  Adrenaline.

  I raised my head, snarling. I grabbed a big branch from the chestnut, tore it off, scraping the palms of my hands as I did so, and clutched it like a sledgehammer.

  “Annelise,” I ordered. “Take Clara and get out of here.”

  “Salinger,” Annelise said, “calm down, please.”

  “Go back. Now!”

  I heard Clara whimper.

  I ground my teeth.

  “Jeremiah,” Werner said, “put down that branch.”

 
“Move away, Werner. I don’t want to hurt you. But if you take another step, I will.”

  “God in heaven, son,” he said, incredulous. “What’s happening to you?”

  “Do you have any rope with you?”

  “In my rucksack, yes.”

  “Then use it.”

  Werner gave me a long, stunned look. “Use it?”

  “You have to tie him up.”

  “Tie who up?”

  “Max. The Bletterbach monster. The killer of Evi, Kurt, and Markus.”

  With each of these names I felt my anger increase.

  And the clicks added one to another.

  “That’s madness, Jeremiah,” Werner retorted. “It was Grünwald. He was crazy. You know that, too. He—”

  “Grünwald was protecting them.”

  “From who?”

  “Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae,” I hissed.

  “That’s all a lot of—”

  “Grünwald,” I said, without taking my eyes off Max, who was motionless, “was really convinced that those monsters existed in the Bletterbach. He knew that Evi and Kurt would be coming down here on an excursion and when he heard that a storm was about to break out in this area he thought the underground lakes would overflow and release the Jaekelopterus. He sent the telegram and rushed here. He was crazy, but there was a logic in his madness. Isn’t that so, Chief Krün?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Max replied softly.

  His calm made me furious. “January 3, Max!” I yelled. “Four months before the killings. Four!”

  Was it possible that neither Annelise nor Werner understood?

  It was all so damned simple.

  “You know what my first thought was when Annelise told me she was pregnant? I thought I ought to tell Mike right away. Because Mike and I are friends and we always tell friends our good news. You and Markus were the only people who’d kept in touch with Evi and Kurt. And so you were the only people in Siebenhoch to know about the birth of Annelise. Evi and Kurt were your friends. You knew about the child. But why didn’t you tell Hannes or Werner when you organized the rescue party? It made no sense anymore to keep the secret.”

  Werner turned pale. “What are you saying, Jeremiah?” he stammered.

  He didn’t understand.

  Or maybe he didn’t want to understand.

  Because the consequences of my argument were catastrophic.