She came back over beside Johann. “You were born in Germany, just behind your left foot, and Anna Kasper came from nearby Switzerland. My father lived in both Egypt and Saudi Arabia, here and there. The only other person in your group from that part of the world was Kwame Hassan, a man with very black skin who came from… I’ve forgotten the name of his place, but it was down here somewhere.”
Maria glanced up at Johann. “See, I know enough already about the geography of the Earth. What I don’t know is what’s on the other side of this lake. That seems much more important to me. You promised me long ago, Johann, that you would build us a boat, and that we would go exploring.”
Johann looked down at the beautiful little girl beside him. She’s right, of course, a voice inside him said. Earth geography is completely irrelevant. And you did promise her once, in a weak moment, that the two of you would see what was on the other side of the lake.
But what about the white Beatrice’s insistence that we stay on the island until we receive a sign, another of Johann’s inner voices answered. Her statement was perfectly clear.
That was over seven years ago, the first voice now said. Are you just going to languish here forever? The girl deserves some adventure and excitement. And so do you.
He felt her touch his arm. “Can I, Johann?” she was asking. “Please?”
“I’m sorry, Maria,” he said, “I was thinking about something else. What did you say?”
“I want to go swimming,” she said. “I’m tired of school. And my Beatrice doll needs a bath.”
“All right,” he said after a brief hesitation. “But tomorrow…”
She was gone before Johann finished his sentence. Maria sprinted across the sand and plunged exuberantly into the water.
THREE
OVER THE YEARS Johann had learned the characteristics of virtually all the plant materials available in their island domain. To build the bottom of the boat, he chose the strong but flexible long strips that were part of the tubular connections among the disparate clumps of the strange network bush that grew near the top of the mountain. It was difficult work to cut the tubes from the bush and then remove the strips. Johann’s hand tools, the same ones that Beatrice and he had first discovered in the supply cave years before, were barely adequate for the task. It took him most of a day to liar-vest enough of the strips for the bottom of the boat.
Johann, the strips wrapped in a bundle on the ground beside him, wiped the sweat from his forehead and took a drink of water from the pool created by the two springs at the top of the mountain. It was late afternoon in their world. In two more hours the artificial sunlight coming from far above their heads would abruptly vanish, as it did each night. Below him, down the slope of the mountain covered with green growth, Johann could see Maria playing in the lake with her two aquatic friends, Hansel and Gretel. She had spent most of the morning beside him, chattering away about what they would likely find on their voyage of adventure in the new boat.
Johann hoisted the bundle onto his shoulders and began the climb down the path that ran beside the stream. He had misgivings about setting forth in the boat. It was not for himself that he was concerned—Johann would have readily admitted that he was definitely eager for a break in their routine. But what if he exposed Maria to some kind of danger? He would never forgive himself if he were responsible for something terrible happening to the girl.
He heard the first of the unusual cries when he was several hundred meters from the beach. A few seconds later the cry repeated and Johann stopped to listen. The aquatic creatures often squealed with delight while they were playing with Maria, but this was a different sound, almost certainly a cry of fear or pain, and it frightened Johann.
“Maria,” he called out. “Axe you all right?”
There was no answer. Johann stepped up his pace, emerging from the brush onto the sandy beach at the moment when a cacophony of animal yells exploded in the air. In the middle of the din Johann could hear Maria screaming, “Help, Johann, help.”
He dropped the bundle on the beach and raced into the water. Hansel, Gretel, and Maria were fifty meters offshore. Johann sped toward them with huge. powerful strokes of his long arms. When he reached Maria, the girl draped herself around his neck and wept hysterically Beside them, Gretel was swimming circles around the lifeless, torn body of her mate, Hansel. The animal stopped periodically to emit a mournful wail.
Johann carried Maria back into the shallow water, attempting without success to calm her enough that she could tell him what had happened. Every time Maria tried to speak, she would just cough and tremble, and then start sobbing again.
At length Johann managed to soothe and comfort her. “There was this horrible thing,” Maria said eventually, “with three eyes and an ugly gray head floating on the water… And long blue wriggly arms with claws on the end. It was churning up the water not far from where we were playing, When it looked at us, Gretel squealed with fright.
“Hansel swam over to protect us. When he jumped out of the water and made a threatening sound, the thing attacked immediately, ripping into Hansel’s skin with its claws. It was awful. Hansel didn’t have a chance.”
Maria started to cry again. Then she abruptly stopped and motioned to Gretel. “Come over here,” she shouted. “We’ll take care of you.” Gretel must have understood Maria’s words and gestures, for the creature started swimming in her direction.
“We can’t leave her out in the lake with that thing, Johann,” Maria said. “We must take her to our big pond, behind the grove.” The girl ran over and hugged Gretel as the animal approached them.
Johann escorted the pair into shallower water. “Stay here with Gretel for a moment,” Johann said softly. He swam out to where Hansel’s body was floating on the surface of the water. Johann rolled the animal over and examined its other side. Hansel had been ripped apart. Chunks of his flesh had been completely torn away, and in other places the attacker’s claws had sliced halfway through his body. Treading water, Johann carefully scanned the lake as far as he could see. At the limit of his vision he saw six or eight tentacles waving in the air, many with fish in their claws. They appeared to be dropping the fish into a large object floating on the water.
“THE DRAGON FAFNER roared and aimed a terrible burst of fire at the man who dared to challenge him. The fearless Siegfried, protected by his magnificent shield, was unharmed. When the fire was no longer a threat, Siegfried stepped out from behind his shield and raised his magic sword Nothung.”
Johann, on his knees behind the marionette theatre, pulled the strings that controlled Siegfried’s right arm. “With quick and powerful strokes our hero struck the dragon. Once, twice, three times. Then, when the dragon was off balance and its vulnerable spot exposed, Siegfried shouted and lunged, plunging Nothung deep into the heart of the loathsome creature.”
With his other hand Johann made the dragon recoil and then crumple into a heap. He waited for the praise and applause that usually followed this part of the story, but he heard nothing from Maria. At length, instead of continuing with the next scene in the show, Johann stuck his head around the corner of the theatre. The girl was crying.
“What’s the matter?” Johann said.
Maria wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. In the reflected torchlight Johann could see that her eyes were swollen again; she had probably been crying during the entire performance.
“What’s the matter, Maria?” Johann repeated.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a sad, little-girl voice. “It’s not your fault, Johann. It’s just that Fafner the dragon reminded me of that nozzler, and I can still see it attacking Hansel as if the whole thing happened only a few minutes ago.”
Johann lifted the marionettes over the back of the theatre and placed them in their boxes. Then he crossed the cave to where Maria was sitting, picking her up in his arms. “What you’re experiencing is normal,” he said gently. “You’ve had what’s called a traumatic experience, and it’s na
tural for you to remember it very clearly. In time, the horror of that attack will fade away. But it may take many more days.”
The girl buried her face in Johann’s neck and held him very tightly. “Can we go down to the pond again and make sure that Gretel is all right?”
“No, Maria,” Johann responded. “It’s past your bedtime and we just checked on Gretel only two hours ago.”
“But what if one of those nozzler things comes out of the lake and attacks her? Gretel is such a gentle creature, Johann. She wouldn’t know how to fight.”
Johann sighed and carried Maria over to her mat against the wall. “I will check on Gretel,” he said. “You brush your teeth and finish getting ready for bed.”
Maria smiled. “Thank you, Johann,” she said.
He bent down beside her. “Darling Maria,” he said, “you can’t continue to worry about Gretel all the time. She is in no danger now. Whatever it was that killed Hansel has gone away.”
She didn’t respond. Johann had made basically the same comments to her every evening since Hansel had been killed. Nevertheless, each morning Maria had been in such a state of frenzy and hysteria that she could not be calmed until she had seen with her own eyes that Gretel was still all right.
Johann slipped on his moccasins and left the cave. He returned about five minutes later. Maria was already on her mat, lying on her back.
“Gretel was fine,” Johann said as he started preparing for bed. “She squealed thank you at me when I fed her some fish from the bucket.”
“Thank you, Johann,” Maria replied.
“I was thinking about Siegfried while you were gone,” the girl said a little later in the serious voice that made her seem much older. “He was not afraid of anything. I bet he would have searched the lake, found that nozzler, and killed it with his magic sword.”
Johann recognized the challenge in her tone and understood immediately the thrust of her remarks. He stood beside his mat, cleaning his face with one of their well-worn pieces of fabric. She’s disappointed in me, he thought while he was considering how he should respond. She expects me to be her hero.
“Siegfried might have gone off in search of the nozzler,” Johann said slowly. He sat down beside Maria. “I can’t say one way or the other. But Siegfried was not a real person. He was a make-believe, mythological character, with abilities far beyond those possessed by ordinary human beings.”
The girl propped herself up on an elbow on her mat. “Was Siegfried bigger, stronger, or smarter than you, Johann?” she asked defiantly, fixing him with her gaze. “You told me once, while we were playing together in Potsdam, that almost every real person was smaller than you. Are heroes smaller than you too?”
This is really serious, flashed through his mind. She’s been preparing for this conversation. “Maria,” he said at length, “I’m sorry that you’re so upset. Believe me, I would love to wave my arms, like a magician, and make that nozzler go away.”
She wasn’t impressed. “But Maria,” he continued, “real life is not like the fairy tales and legends in our bedtime stories or marionette shows. In real life, when people try to accomplish heroic deeds, they are sometimes hurt, or even killed. If I were to be killed or disabled, there would be nobody to take care of you.”
She did not back down. “You told me that heroes,” Maria said stubbornly, “protect women and children from the monsters or bad people who terrify them. Heroes are never afraid of anything, and they don’t let themselves get hurt or killed.”
This is amazing, Johann thought. He didn’t know what else he could say to comfort her. He released her hands and stretched out on his own mat. “We can talk about this subject again tomorrow,” he said uncomfortably, “when you may be more willing to listen to what I’m telling you.”
Maria did not reply “By the way,” Johann added several seconds later, “I have not been taking my regular morning swim since Hansel was killed, because I knew that you didn’t want to be left alone. You know how important that swim is to me. Starting tomorrow, I will be swimming again every morning just after dawn.”
IT WAS A terrible night. Johann stayed awake for over an hour, going over all his conversations with Maria since Hansel had been killed. Was there anything else he could do? He felt inept and inadequate. In one internal monologue he entreated Beatrice to reappear and give him some advice on how to handle the situation. Johann even seriously considered Maria’s suggestion that he should hunt and kill the nozzler. At least I would regain my lost stature in her eyes, he thought, before dismissing such a venture as foolhardy.
When Johann finally fell asleep, he was awakened only a few minutes later by a bloodcurdling scream from the mat beside him. His heart pumping furiously and adrenaline pouring into his body; Johann was immediately alert and ready to protect his ward.
The girl had had a nightmare. She crawled over on Johann’s mat and snuggled into his arms, still whimpering from fright. All Maria would say about the dream was that a nozzler had attacked Gretel and her while they were swimming.
Maria managed to fall asleep again quickly but Johann remained awake for another hour. Later, not long before morning, he had a dream so vivid that it took Johann a long time, even after he was awake, to convince himself that it was not real.
Johann had been in a deep green forest in the dream, following a yellow and black bird with a beautiful voice who was leading him to a magic mountain. The top of the magic mountain was hidden behind a barrier of flames. Johann understood in the dream that he needed to wade through the flames to reach the sleeping Brunhild, who would fall madly in love with him as soon as he awakened her with his kiss. But the sleeping woman on the mountaintop was not Brunhild; she was Beatrice, whose kisses after waking stirred Johann’s sexual ardor. In the dream, as he tried to remove her clothes, Beatrice whispered “Not yet,” and pointed off to her right. There, coming up the side of the mountain, was a huge, bizarre monster breathing fire. The monster vaguely resembled a dragon, but instead of hands this creature had hundreds of long blue tentacles with claws on the ends. Most of these tentacles were extended in Johann’s direction. When he felt the first sharp touches on his neck Johann awakened with a shudder.
He did not sleep again. When the artificial daylight first lit the front of the cave, Johann checked the sleeping Maria and then jogged down toward the lake. He plunged into the water and began to swim. Within minutes, as his long body eased through the water, stroke after stroke, Johann felt his frustration and anxiety begin to lessen. Years of competitive swimming had made Johann completely comfortable in the water. After the initial release of pent-up energy; his body moved into an effortless rhythm so natural that it seemed to be totally disconnected from Johann’s volition.
During these periods Johann’s mind sometimes focused on a specific topic, but more often it drifted idly, serving up a potpourri of unrelated thoughts and images. Later, after fifteen to twenty minutes of steady swimming, Johann usually entered a slightly altered state of consciousness, one which a friend of his had once called “exercise nirvana.” A sense of peace, harmony, and communion with the world around him pervaded Johann during this portion of his swim. This feeling of contentment, and the residual sense of well-being that often lasted the rest of the day, were the primary reasons that Johann swam every morning.
Johann was well into the nirvanic phase of his morning swim when he began to feel an unsettling disquiet whose origin be could not pinpoint. When it would not go away, he opened his eyes during his breathing. There was nothing unusual about the island landscape that greeted his eyes on the right side. On the other side, the lake extended to the horizon in an unbroken line. What was disturbing him, then? Johann was miffed at this intrusion into his most peaceful sanctuary and was about to dismiss his disquiet altogether when he happened to look more closely at the water. It was discolored.
Johann stopped swimming and examined the water around him. On an impulse he decided to taste it. The taste seemed familiar, but Johann
could not identify it. Looking around, he could see that the discoloration increased off to his right, away from the island. Johann began swimming in that direction.
Just after Johann positively identified the strange taste as blood, he saw an unusual object about two hundred meters in the distance. The object was bobbing up and down in the small waves of the lake. At first Johann was wary of possible danger, but as he drew closer he became certain, from the object’s lack of movement, that it was not alive.
When he first recognized Kwame’s body Johann could not believe what his eyes were telling him. But what in the world was that thing with Kwame? Johann continued to approach, swimming breaststroke so that he could keep the scene in view. Both surprise and horror swept through him moments later when he realized that Kwame was floating on the water, locked in a death embrace with one of the nozzler creatures who had attacked Hansel.
Kwame’s knife was embedded deep in the frontal underbelly of the nozzler. Both of the creature’s blue tentacles were wrapped around Kwame’s back. One of its vicious claws, which was still affixed to the side of Kwame’s neck, had obviously sliced through the jugular vein. The fight to the death had occurred not many hours earlier, probably sometime during the night. Blood was still oozing out of the many wounds in both Kwame and the nozzler (its blood was bright purple), and there were not yet any signs of rigor mortis in Kwame’s body Johann’s feelings of grief were accompanied by a thousand questions that rushed into his mind. What was Kwame doing here? Johann asked himself: Where did he come from? Where are the others?
Johann swam in an ever-widening circle around the two corpses, searching for clues that might provide answers to his questions. He found nothing. When he returned to Kwame and the nozzler, he carefully inspected the alien creature.
The nozzler’s body was long and thin, approximately as tall as Kwame, and consisted of ten identical middle segments with hard black carapaces that were connected to a broader head-and-chest segment in the front and a fanlike tail at the rear. Three oval, bulbous gray eyes were distributed uniformly in a line along the top of the turquoise-colored head-and-chest segment. The front two of these eyes were placed at an angle that suggested their primary look direction was forward; the third eye was positioned so that its natural field of view was to the rear. Along the sides of this front segment were three symmetrical pairs of attachments, the first pair being the long blue tentacles with the terrifying claws that could reach a full meter in front of the head, the second resembling a pair of circular washboards built against the side of the head next to the middle eye, and the back pair looking like clusters of tiny pearls on either side of the rear of the head.
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