by Damien Love
“Always worth taking a moment for something like this,” the old man said, gesturing ahead. “Remind yourself you’re alive.”
The view was devastating. The world spread out beneath them in jagged ranks of blue-black hills and mountains that rolled away through a thin ocean of fog toward a horizon where earth and fog and cloud all melted together. On distant slopes, mist rose from the darkness of the trees in massive, mysterious columns that glowed strangely where they met scattered shafts of sunlight.
“Course, you need a clear day to really appreciate it.” Alex’s grandfather waved a hand at the vista, then removed his hat, produced a handkerchief, and mopped his face. “In good weather, you can see as far as the Swiss Alps. But even on a day like today it’s quite something. Maybe more so on a day like today. Over there is Freiburg, that’s an interesting town, and down there Feldberg, where they do a lot of skiing, for some reason. Can’t say I’ve ever seen the attraction. Just another way to break an ankle, if you ask me. Oh, and you see that big hill, they call that . . .”
He broke off and looked at his feet.
“Hah. Name escapes me. You’re in the center of it all here, Alex. The Black Forest. This is where all the stories come from. All the tales of big bad wolves and magic mountains that open and swallow people and witches and demons. And wicked old people who eat children. There’s a reason for that. You can feel it when you sit among these trees and look out on a view like this. Remember I told you, there are places on earth where things get thin? Well, this is about the thinnest of all. The Black Forest . . .”
The old man suddenly tensed. “Hold on.” It was barely a whisper. “I hear something.”
The forest suddenly seemed abnormally silent, as if even the birds were holding their breath. A moment later, Alex heard it, too, the soft, steady tramp of footsteps coming nearer.
The old man stood and held his cane ready.
XIV.
THE DEVIL’S PULPIT
Alex saw dim figures through the trees, disappearing in and out of the dappling light. He searched the ground, spotted a rock the size of his fist, and quickly stuck it in his pocket, just in case.
The approaching party gradually became more distinct. They were strangers, three men and two women. Alex saw his grandfather’s stance relax, but the old man remained wary.
“Hallo!” one of the women called out, spotting them.
The group joined them by the hut. They carried backpacks and ropes, and wore bright hiking gear appropriate to the terrain and the weather, taking in Alex’s grandfather’s elegant gray suit and coat with a mixture of surprise and respectful amusement as he greeted them.
“Excuse,” one of the men said, speaking English with a German accent. “We left our reward hidden here.” He bent and reached into a hole in the planking beneath the hut, pulling out a six-pack of beer: “The treasure of the mountain!”
He shared the cans among his friends, offering the last to the old man, who raised it in salute as they drank.
“We have been climbing,” the man said, gesturing behind with his thumb. “At the Kandelfels. You know the story of the pulpit?” He said this last part to Alex, who shook his head.
“So. You are on the witches’ mountain, you know, my lad,” the man went on, winking at Alex’s grandfather. “A place of legends. Now, there are rock crags just up there, the Kandelfels, very wonderful for climbing. And at the very top, there used to be a . . . what is the word . . . a natural outcropping? A great, massive black rock that hung out. They called it die Teufelskanzel—the Devil’s Pulpit! Because the legend says it was where all the witches from this area would gather on their special nights, and the demons and devils would come to them there from the other side, and they would all dance beneath the moon and perform . . . well, whatever wild rituals dancing witches and devils might perform.”
“Please accept our apologies,” another of the men interrupted. He wiped foam from his mustache and grinned. “This is Richard’s favorite story. We have banned him from discussing it with us, and so he bores any strangers he encounters at any opportunity.”
“Silence.” The first man made a mock scowl and raised a finger. “This is the good part: Now, in 1981, you see, the Devil’s Pulpit suddenly disintegrated overnight. Tons and tons of rock—whoosh—it all just came falling down, for no reason. And there were two more very strange things about it. First, this collapse occurred on Walpurgisnacht itself. And second, when they investigated, buried among all the rocks and rubble below, they found a . . . what is the . . . a broomstick! Good, eh?”
“This is a very true story,” the woman who had first called out said to Alex, widening her eyes. “The experts, of course, came up with rational reasons to explain it away. But still: you will never find me up here after dark!”
“And definitely not tomorrow night,” the man added, finishing his beer as the rest of their group laughed. All but one. Alex noticed that the other woman just looked away. She wore a bobble hat in bumblebee stripes of black and yellow that caught his eye as it moved.
“Tomorrow?” Alex asked.
“Walpurgis Night,” his grandfather said quietly. “I’ll explain later.”
“It’s no game,” the woman in the striped hat blurted out. They all looked at her.
“An older cousin of mine.” She shrugged and made a pensive frown, as if she’d regretted speaking. “She was up here that night. She and her friends only barely escaped the rock fall. I saw her the next day.”
“You’ve never mentioned that, Hannah,” the first man said.
“No. I was just a child. It scared me. She just kept saying the same thing. That they saw something appear that night. An . . . imp. She never spoke of it again. But I believe this”—she gestured weakly—“this is a troubled place. I would never come here alone. I would rather we never came at all.”
“Well, so.” The first woman nodded brightly after a second. She turned, hoisting her backpack, and raised her eyebrows secretly to Alex and his grandfather, rolling her eyes. “We must be going. We will leave you to enjoy the view in peace. Oh, you see that hill?”
She pointed out the distant peak Alex’s grandfather had mentioned a moment earlier, looming in the misted landscape like a marker.
“They call that the Toter Mann. The Dead Man! Strange minds we have here, eh?”
Alex watched them go, vanishing with a final wave through shadows and pale tree trunks. The old man bent to his Gladstone and started uncoiling his rope.
“Was that story true?” Alex asked.
“About the tip of the mountain collapsing in ’81? Yes. Thin place, Alex. The surface breaks easily. Things can fall through the cracks. Or slip out of them. Back when it happened, I always meant to investigate more, but, y’know. Time flies away from you.”
“What’s Walpurgis Night?” Alex asked. “I saw posters about that down at the hotel. Looked like a party.”
“Ha. Yes, well, in a way it is. Walpurgisnacht is the night between the last day of April and the first of May. Tomorrow night,” his grandfather said, searching for a solid spot to anchor his grappling hook.
“It was named after an English saint. St. Walpurga. She came to do holy work in Germany during the eighth century. Interesting stuff. Some legends say that if you speak her name to an angry dog correctly, it will calm the animal. Anyway. Walpurgis Night coincides with a point in the calendar that’s been considered important for thousands of years in many countries—people giving thanks they’ve survived another winter and banishing the last of it to welcome in spring and summer, you know.
“But around these parts, it’s all rather more . . . potent. Some also call it Hexennacht: Witches’ Night. The stories go that Walpurgisnacht was when witches would gather on the mountains for, well, strange celebrations, like the fellow said. A second Halloween, if you like, when ghosts and ghouls run free.
“Jus
t as there are places where things get thin, Alex, there are times when things get thinner, too, when half-remembered old beliefs come bubbling up to the surface. Tomorrow night, in this area, you’ll have both things happening at once: a thin place at a thin time.
“And all of this worries me.” The old man paused to secure his rope around a tree trunk. “The timing of it, the way it all seems centered on the Black Forest. This place, at this time. There are coincidences in the air I don’t like. The story about the mountain disintegrating, the old Shadow Gate legend about a castle falling. Two great unexplained collapses.”
“Could it have been here? The Shadow Gate? Is it connected to the collapse of the Devil’s Pulpit?”
“Hmm? Oh, no. I mean, the Shadow Gate legend dates from, what, five, six hundred years earlier, Alex. And it was supposed to have happened in a castle somewhere.”
“Could that be it, then?” Alex said, trying to fit pieces together. “If there’s a code in the paintings, maybe it tells you where it happened. Where the gate was. Like, I dunno, you . . . follow a path through the locations in the pictures, or where they were painted?”
“Decent thinking, Alex. I had thought something similar.” The old man grunted, still fussing with the rope. “But it’s led me nowhere yet.” He straightened with a puff and slapped his hands.
“Now,” he said. “There’s just a little bit of climbing to do. Need to get down there.” He pointed opposite their bench, where the ground simply dropped away. Alex stepped gingerly over and peered down: an almost vertical cliff of jagged granite.
“Just be careful, it’ll be slippery,” his grandfather said, “but it’s not far down.” The old man crouched at the edge. He had tied the end of the rope around his Gladstone and lowered it before following after, disappearing swiftly from sight.
Alex started to follow, then stopped. He checked his phone again. His scalp tingled when he saw a new message from Kenzie.
Can’t remember.
You need to go to the right I think.
He rubbed his forehead and looked out on the view, trying to shake off thoughts of witches and devils and dead men. It didn’t work. He grabbed the cord and started climbing. A few minutes later he stood catching his breath beside his grandfather, thirty feet below the hut on a wild slope where no path could be seen. The old man led away, threading between trees.
Soon they came to a silent place where the trees stood back to form a ring around a large area entirely covered by broken rock and massive boulders. It was a picture of devastation, a gallery of shattered stone. More smashed rocks formed great cracked steps on the slope stretching upward through the trees toward a towering gray cliff face.
“What’s all this?” Alex said. Granite shards shifted under his feet.
“Where the rocks fell,” his grandfather said. He gazed up toward the serrated peaks above. “The night the mountain collapsed. We’re standing among the pulverized remains of the Devil’s Pulpit, Alex. Ah, let’s not hang around.”
They continued down the wooded slope. It grew so steep that Alex marveled that the trees managed to stay standing. He concentrated on keeping his footing. In places the ground had dissolved to mud.
“Okay, Alex,” his grandfather said, suddenly halting. “It’s time to try to get Harry now.”
Alex swallowed. He felt a heavy weight pressing down on him, did his best to ignore it. They had come to a small clearing. He noticed a rough mounded spot by his feet, covered in leaves and broken branches.
“Okay,” Alex said. He peered past his grandfather into the trees ahead. Some kind of secret lair hidden down there? He dropped his voice. “I’m ready. So what’s the plan? Where’s Harry from here?”
“Hah. Well. That’s the thing.” His grandfather stood pulling at one ear, then offered a curious, apologetic smile. “Ah, you’re . . . Well, you’re standing on him. More or less.”
Alex stared blankly. He searched around his feet, the disturbed ground, the pile of dead branches and leaves.
“Huh?” An underground lair?
His grandfather rubbed at his brow, covering his face for a moment. When he dropped his hand, he looked more tired than Alex had ever seen him. The old man gave a hopeless shrug.
“I, ah . . .” His voice was hoarse. “I had to bury him. Here. The other night.”
Alex stared, uncomprehending.
“They killed him, Alex.”
The words took a long time to travel across the clearing. Alex felt as though the slope tilted steeper, dropping away under his feet. He stumbled, then sat on the damp ground. Still, the world kept lurching downward. He looked up, trying to steady himself. Sunlight glinted among black leaves. Birds cawed to one another not far away, ravens maybe, and his grandfather spoke again.
“They killed him, Alex. Harry’s dead.”
XV.
THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY THIS TIME
“Dead . . . ?” Alex finally whispered.
“Yes.” The old man lowered himself by Alex’s side. Water dripped from his hat brim as he bowed his head and turned up his coat collar. “Afraid so.”
They sat in silence. The sensation that the world was spinning slowed. Alex felt tears spill out, briefly hot among the cold rain on his face. More gathered like acid in his throat. He swallowed and moved his hands in a useless arc.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Didn’t want you worrying.”
There was no answer to that.
“Okay,” Alex said. He noticed he had picked up leaves without realizing and was twisting them between his fingers. He let them drop. “But I don’t understand. Why are we up here, Grandad? What do you want to do? Do you want to try to . . . move him?”
“In a way.” His grandfather looked off down the slope. “That is, I want you to try to move him.”
“I, uh . . . what?”
“I can’t remember how much we spoke about the golem legends,” the old man said. “Invisibility and all that. Well, one of the other powers it had, according to many stories, was the, ah”—the old man cleared his throat, half burying the rush of words—“abilitytoraisethedead.”
Alex tried to blink away the sting in his eyes.
“We talked about this before,” his grandfather went on, warming slightly to the task of delivering a lesson in strange history. “What powered the golem is a force of life itself. There were tales about trials in the old Prague courts, you see, where the golem would, ah, summon up dead witnesses to appear and give evidence—”
“Wait.” Every inch of Alex’s skin was suddenly crawling in different directions, as though trying to get away. “Hang on. You want me to . . .” He searched for words. Nothing sounded right. “Bring him back? To life? Harry. From being dead. You want me to try to bring him back.”
“Well . . . yes.”
“That’s . . . I can’t do that,” Alex stammered. He had started to protest that the idea was impossible, ridiculous, but these words no longer meant much. Indeed, what horrified him most was that he knew his grandfather was entirely serious. “I thought we were going to rescue him. Break him out of somewhere. I thought you’d want me to . . . I dunno. Smash down walls or blast robots or . . . but this . . . I can’t.”
“Alex, you don’t know what you can do until you try—”
“I’ve been trying! I can’t do anything with it! I’ve lost it. I’ve lost the way to it. Or maybe it just doesn’t want me anymore. I can’t remember how I did any of it. I can’t do it.”
“Maybe not.” His grandfather shrugged and smiled. “I’ll admit, it’s a long shot. But it’s got to be worth a try, hasn’t it? You got something from the tablet not long ago.”
Alex shivered. “That’s another thing,” he said, frowning. “You’ve told me how dangerous it all is. Magic. Forces not to be dabbled with. Old voodoo for another time, you said. Had to be destroy
ed. The whole point of everything you’ve done, everything we’ve done, was to stop your father getting his hands on the golem’s tablet, stop him doing . . . this kind of thing. And now you want me to try to do exactly the same—”
“This is very different.”
“How? How’s it different?”
“It’s just different, that’s all. Anyway, a person has a right to contradict himself. And, Alex, this is Harry.”
“But other people died . . . my dad.” Alex’s throat tightened. “You never tried to bring him back . . . did you?”
“No.” The old man stared into the trees, focused on something else. “I had no chance to try. I had nothing like the tablet then. Maybe it’s for the best I didn’t. And maybe I shouldn’t be asking you now, but—”
“But if I could,” Alex broke in. His mind was racing into new territory. “If I was able to do what you’re asking—I could try to get my dad back, too, couldn’t I?”
“Ah, no, Alex, I don’t think so.” Taking up his cane, the old man began quickly tracing patterns on the ground. “I don’t know much about the whole resurrection game, but from the little I’ve gleaned, it seems three or four days is the optimal time. Four was the magic number for old Lazarus, for example. You know, chap in the Bible. That’s why I didn’t want us to leave it any longer: it’ll be three days for Harry tonight. I mean, he’s hardly been away, ha. Your father has been gone too long. He’s gone, Alex.
“Perhaps I’m just being foolish now. I have no idea what might happen if you manage to succeed with Harry. All the stories about this kind of thing—well, few end well. But Harry knows . . . Harry knew things about what’s going on that we don’t. I have a very bad feeling about it. If there’s even the slightest chance, we have to try. And, anyway: Alex, this is Harry. And it’s my fault he . . .
“Alex.” The old man turned to him with new intensity. “If I could do this instead of you, if I could take it away from you, I would. In a heartbeat. But all this is beyond me, son. I’ve never studied the golem stories the way my father did. The procedures. The rules. The name of God. I never wanted to know. And besides: the golem’s tablet, the power, seems to have formed some particular and peculiar connection with you. You told me your blood had touched the tablet. I think maybe it was that: you . . . woke it, and it latched on. It sought out a master. But this is where we are. I need you to try. Just try.”