by JL Bryan
Marconi's journal focused entirely on his necromantic romance with his dead wife, giving little insight into what else he might have been up to. Those missing pages were killing me.
“There's so much here,” Stacey said, coming up for air from her analysis. She drank green tea while she worked. “I've picked up all kinds of small orbs and drifting cold spots from the library area we're monitoring. I can't say for sure whether they were Piper or Philip or, I guess, 'other.' But you need to see your run-in with Baron von Jerkin and the dark cloud.” She brought up the thermal clip, the red and yellow curves of my body, which always felt a little weird to look at, and the cold blue blob of Gremel, the icy core of him not much larger than a baseball, hovering in front of me.
“Is there another spirit in there?” my recorded voice asked. Was my voice really that annoying? I came off brusque and pushy, I thought, nothing like Stacey's softer Alabama accent that made everything sound like an invitation to cake and tea. “Is it Piper? Or someone else?”
“Hear that?” Stacey asked, pausing it.
“No.”
“Neither did I, the first time I watched this. But let me amplify it a bit... ”
She did, and now I heard it: a throaty growling sound, almost like a wolf.
“More German?” I asked.
“I think so.”
The voice remained throaty and deep, but at the enhanced volume, it was clearly saying a word or two.
“Play it again,” I said, and she did. I listened carefully to make sure I'd heard it right, but it made no sense to me. “Off-hocker?”
“Maybe it's got a sore tooth and thinks it's talking to a cop,” Stacey said. “I schwear, off-hocker, I just went to da dennist.”
“I'm sure it's German,” I began, but then my phone rang. It was time for my chat with Dr. Anderson, who looked like my last chance to shake out any details about the late professor from those who'd known him in life. I almost always go to see witnesses in person, but for this case, two witnesses were hundreds of miles away, in different directions. Anderson was much closer, but I had to handle him gently and quickly to avoid any risk of getting Cherise in trouble at work.
“I have to take this,” I told Stacey while I stepped out into the hall. The pacing area was better out there.
I answered and found myself talking to the professor's assistant, who then brought the professor on the line, since he was clearly way too important to wait those extra couple of seconds while the phone rang on my end.
“Leonid Anderson,” he said, by way of greeting.
I introduced myself quickly. “I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me.”
“I'm afraid I don't have much time to spare, but I wanted to get this in before the weekend. I'm unclear exactly what this is about.”
“I'm a private investigator working with Dr. Marconi's estate,” I said, vaguely, then steamrolled ahead before he could ask for details. “And we only have a couple of questions. First, were you in contact with the professor in the days before he died?”
“I wouldn't say we were in contact. I hadn't heard from him in years before he reached out and said he needed a qualified researcher to straighten out his collection.”
“What kind of qualifications was he looking for?”
“Someone with a dexterity for languages, for one. Romance, Germanic, ancient Greek, Latin, both ancient and medieval Church, ideally. We didn't have anyone floating around who met all of his criteria, but Cherise was extremely well-rounded. Moreover, she had the rigorous self-discipline and the economic need that he was looking for.”
“Economic need?”
“Well, yes. I am sure his concern was partly humanitarian, but he also wanted, as he put it, someone hungry and hardworking. But someone deserving as well.”
“What else did he say about what he wanted?” I tried to keep my tone light and casual, even bored, like I was reading from a list, but it was actually critical for me to get every detail here.
“Well, obviously someone highly intelligent and organized. Someone with a love of history, but that's all of us around here.” He chuckled a little.
“Is that all?”
“Generally, yes.”
“Are you sure there's nothing else?”
“I may have to check my notes and get back to you.” He sounded a little nervous now. “What is this about, again?”
“Did he specify anything else about the person? Beyond economic need and academic qualifications? Such as giving preference to women or minorities?”
“Oh, of course,” Dr. Anderson replied, sounding as if he felt he was back on solid ground here. “Dr. Marconi would naturally have preferred to hire a female, a person of color, or someone who was otherwise a member of a marginalized or minority group. He believed in the importance of affirmative action.”
“Did he say that specifically?” I asked. “That he preferred to hire a female?”
“Yes.”
“Or a minority?”
The professor hesitated. “Yes,” he said, with much less certainty. “Of course, much of this would have gone without saying.”
“Which part was said, and which part was unsaid?” I asked, wincing as I put him on the spot, hoping this wouldn't somehow get Cherise in trouble.
He paused even longer. “If there's been some kind of complaint, I have heard nothing about it.”
“There has been no complaint. It goes to Dr. Marconi's state of mind in his final days, Dr. Anderson. He was a widower who lived alone. Was he hoping for a female employee, or did he give no mention of gender?”
“He preferred a female,” the professor finally said, sighing. “He was elderly. He had difficulty walking. I thought... as you said... he's lonely, but surely too old to... what exactly are you asking about here?”
I decided to go ahead and say what was on my mind. “Are you aware that he left his entire estate to Cherise in his will?” Cherise might get angry at me for revealing this, but I had to gauge the professor's reaction. It was my only chance of knocking loose some crucial detail he was holding back, if any.
The silence on the other end somehow sounded different this time. “He did?” Anderson sounded amazed. “But how? Why? He knew her less than a year. Didn't he have a child at some point?”
“So you can see how there might be questions,” I said.
“All kinds of questions. I knew he was estranged from Vera and what's-his-kid, but... yes, I understand. So this isn't a harassment issue, to be clear?”
“Not at all,” I said. “In light of that, did he say anything to you to indicate he was looking for an heir or maybe...” My mind blanked annoyingly, my brain fuzzy from lack of sleep, particularly the restful kind where no entities feed on your energy while appearing in the guise of dead relatives. “What's the opposite of a mentor again? If he was the mentor, she'd be—”
“The protégé,” he said. “No, he said nothing remotely like that. I can't speak to how he may have seen the relationship in his mind, or how he may have hoped it would develop over time. It sounds as though it worked out quite well for Cherise.”
“Yes, I suppose. And you're sure they had no contact before you introduced them regarding this job? They had never met?”
“If they did, they certainly went to a lot of trouble to hide it from me, and I don't see why they would. My only role was to provide an exchange of contact information. I can't emphasize that enough.”
I didn't like prying into my own client's background, but I wouldn't be a detective if I didn't notice that she'd stood to gain more than anyone from Dr. Marconi's death, as long as it looked like a believable accident.
She hadn't wanted to hire us to investigate the house, either; her sister had pushed relentlessly for it. She claimed she hadn't known the professor was going to leave anything to her, and if they hadn't known each other long, she'd certainly had no reason to expect it.
The Cherise-killed-Marconi hypothesis would mean that Piper was mourning th
e murder of her husband, after all, and Marconi was attacking his own murderer at night by feeding on Cherise. I wasn't sure where Gremel would fit in that scenario, though.
I thanked Dr. Anderson and wrapped up the conversation without my usual bridge-burning move of asking whether he'd heard of any supernatural activities in the house. Cherise had to work with the guy, and I'd already awkwardly blown her cover about the inheritance in my zest to squeeze information out of him.
Then I stepped back in to see Stacey.
“I've got it,” she said, beaming.
“What's that?”
“The thing Baron von Jerkin said. Off-hocker. I ran it through some audio translation apps, and it means a stool. Or to squat. Or to pick up.”
“Okay,” I said. “So he pointed to Cherise's room and told me to... squat?”
“Or to pick up. Maybe like pick up the ghost off of her? Or a stool. Like, hey, pull up a stool and have a look at this.”
“I think we're losing something in translation. Send it to my phone and I'll run it by Cherise.”
“You're the boss, boss.”
Out in the hall again, I looked at the dark doors and considered cutting through the master suite to the library. I wasn't sure how Cherise would feel about seeing me emerge from there, though, so I went the long way, down the front stairs, up the first-floor hall and into the shadowy library.
Chapter Nineteen
Cherise sat at a table in the central library space, the door to the Tomb Room propped open with the same heavy chair. Old volumes were stacked around her. She tapped rapidly at a portable computer, keying information into a database.
“Hi, Cherise?” I said, and she jumped in her chair.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was absorbed in the work. And the work is about Byzantine-era incantations for summoning demons and making pacts with them. Not exactly a witty Victorian romance.”
“Maybe you could put on some background music to lighten the mood.”
“I focus better in silence. What's up? Everything okay? Are you sleeping in the tent again?”
“I'm undecided. The possibility of random trucks barreling onto the grounds makes it less appealing. But it's nice out there. Fresh air.”
“Maybe I should be sleeping outside, too,” Cherise said. “If what you said is true. If something in this house is feeding on me while I sleep.”
“It didn't respond to the ghost trap, which throws doubt on whether we're dealing with either Dr. or Mrs. Marconi, though it's not conclusive. It's possible the dark cloud is some older entity dredged up by Dr. Marconi's interest in the dark arts. One that preys on people. One that can take on the guise of someone else. My tech manager saw her brother. I... saw my father. You said you weren't having a nightmare when we rudely barged in and woke you up. Do you remember what you were dreaming?”
Cherise looked at me a long moment, then shook her head. “Is this what you came to ask me about?”
“No. Sorry. I mean, yes, that would be helpful to know, but I was hoping you could translate some more German for us.”
“Did the talking cold spot have more to say?”
“It did.” I played the clip for her.
“Aufhocker,” she said, frowning.
“Do you know what it means? The translation software just talks about stools and squatting.”
“I wouldn't have known before working here.” She did a quick search of her own database. “This way.”
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, she went straight for the Tomb Room, and I followed her inside.
She'd turned on every lamp, but it did little to dispel the gloom. The shuttered windows kept the sunlight out, kept the rows and rows of cluttered bookshelves above us in shadow. I could imagine spiders and bats nesting in the upper darkness among the disorganized volumes and artifacts.
Cherise reached one area of bookshelves where the old books were neatly organized and labeled by category. Each shelf was only partly filled, with open space to accommodate books yet to be cataloged.
She drew on a pair of white linen gloves and removed an elderly leather volume. Most of these books had no labels on their spines; a few had German words I didn't know, while others had arcane symbols etched into them.
The one she'd selected had a leather cover that was barely held together by a few dry, meaty strings. She opened it to a page of dense, handwritten text. In German, naturally. Strange horned figures in cloaks and spiky armor adorned the margins of the books.
“Is this another Johann Gremel book?” I asked.
“No. This is the notebook of an occultist who lived in eighteenth-century Vlaardingen. It focuses on classifying spirits and supernatural lore from around central Europe. Including this one.”
She'd turned it to a page with several illustrations, among scattered, sloping text that looked hastily scrawled compared to the front page of the book.
The top of the page was labeled in large, clear letters:
Der Aufhocker.
My eyes flicked quickly among the illustrations. A hooded figure hovered above a drowsy-looking woman, seeming prepared to prey on her. It was featureless, nearly shapeless.
I shivered, looking from the picture to Cherise, thinking of the dark mass that had hovered above her like an oily cloud, feeding on her.
“The aufhocker is a predatory spirit from German folklore,” she said, reading over the text. “It preys on weary travelers walking alone at night. It may appear as a friendly fellow traveler at first, or even a friendly animal. Or it may appear as a sad woman.”
My eyes went to the second illustration, a weeping woman bent over a cane, her tattered cloak gathered around her as she trudged through the rain. It was hard not to think of the Piper apparitions Aria had seen.
Then I took in the third illustration, a shaggy dark creature with bared teeth.
“The aufhocker can also take the form of a dangerous beast, like a bear or wolf. It can assume many shapes, but originally it is a dead thing, risen from the grave. And it leaps upon the living and drains their energy.”
“So it's your basic shapeshifting werewolf vampire zombie ghost,” I said.
“Don't forget 'werebear.' Which probably sounds cuter than it should.” Cherise shook her head. “Let's hear it again.”
“Werebear,” I said.
“I meant the recording.”
“Oh! Sorry.” I replayed the audio clip while she listened closely: Aufhocker. “Why did the translation app talk about squatting and stools?” I asked.
“The aufhocker squats atop its victims as it feeds on them.” She opened another book, a cheaply bound trade paperback that was nearly falling apart with age. Its age was surely measured in decades and not centuries, and it was definitely not made of parchment and leather.
“Hey, I know that guy,” I said, pointing to the cover, which showed a bearded man in a striped stovepipe hat standing in front of Stonehenge. Dr. Weirdman's Wonderful World of the Weird – Europe Edition! “Or at least, his great-nephew.” Ryan Aberdeen had been a client I'd really clicked with, not much older than me but struggling to raise his kids. His uncle—the pictured “Dr. Weirdman”—had left him an old roadside museum of oddities in Tennessee.
Cherise flipped through some pages about Loch Ness and Dracula's castle, finally landing on a black and white photograph of a fairly creepy statue that appeared to be posted in an otherwise normal and pleasant town square full of sprawling trees and little shops.
The statue was of a man with a walking stick stooped under the weight of a hooded figure perched on his shoulders. The hooded figure gripped him tight and rode him like a horse while glaring down at him with an angry, demonic face.
The caption read: “Aufhocker attacks a traveler; seen in the ancient city of Hildesheim, northern Germany.”
“It's hard to believe someone would want to make a statue like that,” Cherise said.
“This is what Gremel was trying to tell us,” I said. “The entity in this house is an auf
hocker. It feeds on the living. It can take on different forms. It's even known for appearing as a sad woman, like we've been seeing.”
“I thought the sad woman was his second wife, Piper.”
“Right. So...” I tried to pace, but the Tomb Room was far too cluttered. I looked among the strangely decorated bones in their dusty cases, the large wolf skull that watched me from one shelf, the Anubis statue, the small coffin-shaped chest studded with onyx and rubies. That would have been interesting to open, if I'd been willing to move the precariously stacked manuscripts and crumbling old books atop it.
I looked at the round black ritual table covered in candle stumps and mountains of wax. The implements I'd drawn out sat atop it: the ivory and gold dagger he'd used to cut himself as a sacrifice to summon his dead wife, the little golden chalice that had caught the blood, the black crystal sphere he'd used to watch for spirits.
Then I looked over at the open book by Gremel, bound in cracked crocodile leather, the page marked with the long snake tail that had dried and flattened over the years. The elaborate formulae he'd offered for calling up the spirits of the dead, depending on their fate.
“Marconi assumed Piper was an ascended spirit, not wandering or fallen,” I said.
“You don't think she was?” Cherise asked. “Who are we to know? I didn't even believe in the afterlife until all of this. Now I don't know what to think.”
“But maybe...”
“Maybe she wasn't up there?”
“If the weeping woman is an aufhocker and can appear as different people... then it's possible Marconi never contacted his dead wife's spirit at all.” I tapped a drawing in the book, showing a man cutting his wrist and bleeding into a cup, a ghostly figure standing over him, barely noticeable until you stared at the picture long enough. “Maybe this ritual doesn't really draw the souls of lost loved ones down from any higher realm, or from anywhere. Maybe it summons this spirit, this aufhocker, and it feeds on the summoner. It even makes you think it's a dead loved one, coming back to visit you. Like my father.”
